Your food has been on an adventure

I’ve been cleaning out my email inbox here at work and I just came across some facts I collected ages ago (probably totally plagarized off of someone else’s fact collecting) about climate change and food in the UK. The figures are from 2004, but they bear a lot of thinking about:

- For every calorie of carrot flown into the UK from South Africa, we use 66 calories of fuel.

- Of every 100 fruits consumed in the UK, only five will now have been produced domestically.

- One shopping basket of organic products could have travelled 241,000 kilometres and released as much CO2 into the atmosphere as an average four-bedroom house does through cooking meals over eight months.

- In 1998 the UK imported 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat from the Netherlands. In the same year it exported 33,100 tonnes of poultry meat back to the Netherlands.

- In 1997 126 million litres of milk were imported into the UK, while 270 million litres were exported at the same time.

- In 1999 the EU imported 44,000 tonnes of live bovines from Argentina, 11,000 tonnes from Botswana, 40,000 tonnes from Poland and over 70,000 from Brazil. In the same year the EU exported 874,211 tonnes of live bovines to the rest of the world.

Obviously this needs to be taken in context; if, for example, we stopped importing food from developing countries millions of people would be thrown into poverty. Yet I fail to understand who benefits when we export as much as we import, aside from the shipping and oil industries.

 

wtf: lebanon edition

Seriously, I’ve been wanting to go to Lebanon for years and every time I start seriously thinking about a visit there’s more fighting. WTF, people. It’s a gorgeous, amazing country with a fascinating blend of religions and people and art and history.  Why do people constantly feel the need to get their hate on in such a beautiful place?  STOP HATING.  Although, of course, the same can certainly be said of Israel.  I know I sound sort of lighthearted about this, but it’s mostly because the situation is so senseless it offends my sense of humanity more than I can properly write about.

A Shia gunman from Amal, a Hizbollah ally, opened fire yesterday on the funeral of a Sunni civilian in Beirut’s fault-line neighbourhood of Tarik al-Jdeide, killing two. At least 29 people have died in the violence since Thursday, with dozens injured.

Shadia, I’m thinking of you lots.

the need for environmental education in suburban Australia

This is by far the funniest thing I have seen in a long while, and it is too good not to share.

Science news roundup!

To begin at the very beginning: food. As recent criticisms of biofuels have shown, corn makes a better food than industrial product. As Teresa Herrmann points out, this argument extends to so-called biodegradable bioplastics, which fart out loads of methane while decomposing in addition to driving up the global price of food.  Furthermore, it turns out that if you go vegetarian you can once again delight in the glory of citrus year-round (assuming it’s not air-freighted).

In energy news, oooh, look what they’re building in the desert.  It also turns out that making right hand turns instead of left hand ones saves heaps of gas!  I always knew that New York’s no-right-on-red laws were a breach of my native Californian human rights.

Unexpectedly, dinosaur poop is more desirable than a meteor that might date from the beginning of the universe, showing once again that the people can’t be trusted.

And finally, this is the world’s most geeky and useless con game. I mean, it’s cute, but don’t quantum physicists have better things to do with their time?

Finally finally, (and only tangentially related to science, or news) it seems cheeky to cross post the latest xkcd, so I‘m just going to link to it and hope you go look at it.  I hope you found it as excellent as I did.

pictures from the garden

Today when I got home i went out and took some pictures of the glorious flowers that have been coming up in the back garden of my house here in London. I can’t claim any credit for making these gorgeous things come out of the ground, but I’m dedicating myself to enjoying them (and the warm weather which has finally arrived) every possible minute between now and when I leave.

Comparing salt, fat, sugar, and CO2

(This is cross-posted from It’s Getting Hot In Here)

Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, has announced a plan to put ‘carbon labels’ on four categories of its own-brand products: orange juice, potatoes, laundry detergent, and light bulbs.  The labels, which were developed with the Carbon Trust’s carbon labelling program, show the number of grams of carbon which the product is responsible for during production, packaging, distribution, and disposal.

Tesco CEO Terry Leahy has likened the new carbon labeling scheme to a ‘revolution in green consumption’ with the intention of bringing together eco-consciousness and the mass market.  Consumers, in theory, will then be able to make choices about their products’ carbon emissions in the same way they compare calories, salt, sugar, or fat.  

Yet already some consumer groups are pointing out that, without a lot of explanation, shoppers may well find themselves even more confused.  It does seem a conceptual leap between salt, which is consumed directly, and grams of carbon dioxide emissions.

A bigger concern is that the carbon labelling scheme might take the responsibility for carbon dioxide emission away from the producer and put it onto the consumer, thereby reducing the pressure for systematic carbon dioxide reductions in the production process.  It certainly does seem to be a canny way to directly assess Tesco consumers’ concern about climate change.

A dubious eco-champion

Admittedly, there are some bigger questions about how much we can trust Tesco’s own green credentials.  Britain’s biggest retailer, Tesco owns and operates 3,200 supermarkets throughout the world, including Fresh and Wild in California.  It’s estimated that 1 in every 8 pounds spent at a UK retailer is spent in Tesco, and that the company owns more UK real estate than the Queen.

As pointed out by the Guardian, Tesco has been weathering the current credit crunch and downturn in spending by increasing the number of bargains in its stores, including ever-multiplying ‘2 for 1′ deals and goods priced at £1 or less.  Tesco, as much or more than other UK retailers (including the Wal-Mart owned Asda) encourages the overconsumption which has landed rich countries into such an ecological mess, and while it may measure the grams of carbon emitted by a carton of orange juice, what I’d really like to see is how much of the company’s carbon footprint has been exported to China.

Yet, arguably, Tesco’s size makes it a greater ally rather than a greater threat.  Carbon labelling, assuming it expands to the rest of Tesco’s range and is accompanied by consumer education, could prompt a sea-change in the way shoppers think about their products.  It could also encourage the adoption of tools such as full-cost pricing which overcome some of capitalism’s ridiculous ecological shortcomings.  The trick, it seems to me, is to keep a sharp eye on programs like Tesco’s to keep them from being yet another bold example of corporate greenwashing.

(…..although to be perfectly honest I’m HUGELY cynical about the whole thing.)

elections, buffoons, slavery, and survival

I am having a very negative day. First of all, I’m trying my damndest to sit tight and wait for the London Mayoral Election Results, which look grim, which make me ponder whether democracy should in fact be a cultural value, or whether it’s a conspiracy of sad liberals setting themselves up to be run by idiots and facists.  Particularly because I know two people who didn’t vote, one of whom forgot, the other of whom couldn’t be bothered.  I consider these people my friends, and yet on a very basic level I believe that people who don’t vote are only fit to live in a dictatorship.  I despise the complacency of it, the casual disregard for the suffragettes, the taking for granted of rights which people in Zimbabwe and Tibet and Burma and China are suffering for - and dying for - right now.

Also, sat through a nice staff briefing presentation today which was a timely reminder that slavery is still endemic in Brazil.  China too.  Did you know that before?  Well, now you do.  It should piss you off.

Finally, I’m not sure if this continues the crushing negativity or injects an element of hope into the proceedings, I direct you to an NPR story featuring my friend Juan Hoffmaister.  You’ve got to listen to the audio slide show, which rocked my world with its ability to communicate some powerful truths with JuanPa’s usual blend of passion and understatement.

gimme some sugar, google

oh lord in heaven. I think I have food poisoning. The truly pathetic thing is, I spent all evening baking a cake for the CAFOD campaigns team bake-off. It’s in the oven at the moment, I’m just waiting for the timer to go off. But the idea of food…urrrgggghhhhh….whingewhingewhingesplat.

BUT two good things are happening.

1) I can turn my computer into a seismometer.

2) Look what Google made!

2 parts melting permafrost, 1 part water.

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe, because I really liked the original series of New Yorker articles it was based on. The book is fantastic. It’s wonderfully written (although i would have liked more maps and charts), evocative, and although it’s obviously trying to drive home the point that climate change is real, and terrifying, it does so in a subtle way.

The problem is that it’s very slow going. I can only read about 5 or 6 pages before I have to put the book down and clutch my head, pondering the fact that humans may well be totally fucked. Seriously, we’re so doomed. I contempate the death of our civilization for a few minutes before I pick up the book and start again where I left off. Read, pause, think about doom, repeat.

(Do I really think we’re doomed? Not really, or I would be trying to make vast amounts of money and enjoy the last days of hedonism before the sea eats New York. These days I’d say it’s about 50/50 doom/hope.)

Anyway, read the book. It’s really good.

Pennsylvania flexes its political muscles

Okay, first of all we have a tidbit from the LA Times on what to look for in Pennsylvania, which is a pretty succinct guide.  CNN’s political ticker is probably a good place to follow things through the day. 

ukeyouee, I’m looking at you.

And just a couple of things to rant about briefly:

• Barack Obama showing that he really is kind of an elitist prig.  Not that I think that any of the candidates aren’t, but he’s REAAAAAALLY not doing himself any favors.  Even I was kind of miffed by what he said, and I’m a card-carrying member of the educated white bourgeoisie.  Doesn’t he think that the white working class (check out this article for a more thorough investigation of what the ‘white working class’ is, anyway) might have reasons other than plain ol’ stupidity and/or fear for voting against their economic interests?  I think they do.
• Hillary, why are you sticking Osama bin Laden in your ads? (Unless it’s to point out that we still can’t find him.)  Shame on you. Down, FUD, down.
• Finally, McCain, no you do not know what it’s like to not have health care. This makes me livid.  As though someone who has had government provided health care all his life knows the quiet, constant fear that people have when they can’t go to the doctor, when a life threatening illness or even a trip to the hospital can bankrupt you for the rest of your life.  Fuck you fuck you fuck you.  And an extra fuck you for good measure.