Here's some food for thought for today...
- Follow the bouncing berry. Is the cheap price of $2.50 for a pound of California strawberries worth the cost when you know what those berries have been through to get to your table? Besides tasting like cardboard, they're not so great for the environment.
- The food movie you might not get to see. Everyone is still buzzing about Food, Inc. but in the UK, they're having a hard time even finding someone willing to screen Pig Business (trailer included). Seems that Smithfield's legal team had some words with the folks at UK's Channel 4 that caused them to cancel the screening. (Note - Channel 4's documentary channel More 4 has it listed to screen on June 30th - we'll see if it happens.)
- Monsanto opposes labelling of GMO food because they claim labelling laws are based on health and safety issues, but they can't argue that the recent Country of Origin Labelling (COOL) laws were instituted to give US producers an advantage over imported goods and have nothing to do with health and safety.
- Please stop using "food miles" as an indicator of anything! - bananas, coffee and tea (plus lots of other things) are not grown locally, but buying them still helps the economy in poorer nations, especially if we make a point of buying fair trade. (The one comment on this piece makes far more sense that the so-called "expert".)
- "Organic is too expensive" - yeah, but did you know that in the US, until recently, organic farmers did not qualify for the millions of dollars in subsidies that went to soy, corn, cotton and wheat farmers?
- Order me if you dare - the US Senate is getting set to vote on a Federal law making calorie counts on menus mandatory across that country. Can a slew of revamped and healthier menu options be far behind once people are aware of how many calories they're actually eating?
- And for something a bit more lighthearted - breakfast in balloon form.
Actually unless you not buying fair trade, buying imported food may in fact undermine the local economy. There are places where local farmers were doing fine (albeit poor by western standards) growing their own crops and feeding their families before they got told to switch to an export crop (i.e. bananas, coffee, etc.) but then can't sell enough of it to buy the imported food they now have to eat (since they all now grow food for export). Theres plenty of things that may support a countries economy in the short term that are not good for it in the long term.
Yeaahh... it's not quite so cut and dried though. I'm thinking of the "Blood Sweat and Takeaways" situation, where a Western boycott on specific products (ie. Thai rice) could have dire effects on those economies. We need to be thinking about both short-term (keeping people from starving, keeping rural women from turning to prostitution to feed their families) as well as long-term reform (such as fair trade) that would improve the overall economy.