This takes my disdain for the biofuels movement to entirely new heights (not to mention weaving a little bit of "blech" into it).
A "trailblazing" Norfolk town has begun heating many of its buildings - including the schools - by burning oil made from melted-down cow and pig carcasses. The strategy is described as "equal or lower in carbon footprint than natural gas".Read the whole story here.
I've never been much of one to indulge in soy products, myself. Whilst vegetarian (and then vegan) and living with an omni partner, though, I did tend to pick up a lot more soy-based substitutes to have around the house. We had a meat-free home and he really enjoyed the subs, perpetually swigging back glasses of chocolate Silk or piling soy meat analogs into sandwiches packed for work.
One thing I've come to like in recent years, though, is tempeh. Unlike the blank slate that is tofu when it comes to preparing it, tempeh has a mild nutty taste (as well as an interesting crumbly sort of texture). It also escapes a lot of the recent criticism and disputes over the possible issues with unfermented soy products that seem to be all over the internet right now. I'll leave that topic for another time...
Strangely, although every supermarket in my city carries tofu and soy dairy substitutes of all kinds, I can only find a good selection of tempeh at the two small health food stores in the city. One of the major supermarkets carries Green Cuisine tempeh burgers (which are decent
enough), but both health food stores carry my favourite: Noble Bean tempeh. At a time when most soy is GMO and most meat analogs in the stores aren't organic (and therefore, almost certainly GMO), it's also a plus for me that the Noble Bean tempeh is organic. I just recently picked up their Sea Veggie Tempeh and pan-fried it with a little bit of garlic and lemon juice and it was amazing. I quartered it to make tempeh burgers with tomatoes, lettuce and diced red onions on Vegenaise and Dijon-smeared multigrain buns. I can't recommend it enough.
I think that I'd like to tackle making tempeh on my own, sometime. The starter required to make it can be ordered online from a number of places and there are tons of instructions available on how to make it. For instance, this PowerPoint presentation and this step-by-step Instructable.
The amazing Tim Buckley is as good a reason as any to get completely off-topic.
Radio Netherlands recently had a blurb on their website about Professor Gary L. Francione and his stance on animals we call "pets". For a more thorough look at it, check out the Opposing Views website, where Prof. Francione has elaborated upon various aspects of it within the context of his abolitionist philosophy.
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Vegan cookbook author Hannah Kaminsky is offering up a chance to win one of two copies of her vegan dessert book My Sweet Vegan. Check it out on her blog before Valentine's Day, which is when the winners will be announced.
In a guest article for the Globe and Mail, "Vegan diet has surprising stick-to-it-iveness", dietitian Leslie Beck discusses the recently published results of a PCRM study on losing weight and reducing bad cholesterol levels by following a strictly plant-based diet. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but within the context of her article, I can't help but feel that a more accurate way of describing what she calls a "vegan" diet would be to call it a "strict vegetarian" diet. Veganism isn't just about what you put into your mouth; it's a way of life wrapped around an ethical belief system that concerns itself with not using or consuming non-human animals.
In the last third or so of the article, she juxtaposes achieving the same the same health benefits as those touted by PCRM, but by following a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet (she mentions "other studies" without actually citing sources). The positive side of the piece is that it drills home that it's not hard to follow a plant-based diet. The negative is that it presents veganism outside of any sort of ethical context, which inevitably waters down the actual meaning of the term.
I'd posted about an interview with food writer Mark Bittman a short while back. In it, he wrote off veganism as a viable option. Since he's making the rounds to promote his book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, he's pretty much all over the place in recent days. In an article about him in New York's Metro, Bittman once again tries to promote his idea of ethical eating (with the added selling bonus of a weight loss plan thrown in for good measure) and takes a shot at veganism:
“Veganism makes sense to me, but I don’t want to go there, and it’s hard for me to recommend it to others,” says Bittman, who still appreciates a nice hunk of prosciutto. “Part of the problem is that vegans haven’t done themselves any favors with the fake meat stuff. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Eat rice and beans. Eat plants.”Who says that vegans are all over fake meat? And don't make a big deal out of what? Animal slaughter? Sheesh. It's one thing for a writer like Bittman to hop on the post-Pollan "happy meat" train, but his insisting on taking cheap shots at veganism just makes his attempt to seem ethical all the more nonsensical.
I got a real kick out of reading this today. The first letter, anyway. (Oh pop culture, how I love you so!)
Every morning, I scan my customized Google news for interesting articles on animal ethics. Today, I read about someone who's freaking out meat lobbyists -- Barack Obama's latest appointment, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein. According to The Center for Consumer Freedom (which is funded by the tobacco, alcohol, fast food restaurant and meat 
industries), he's a "radical animal rights activist". Sunstein, a well respected scholar and legal expert, will be heading the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum (a philosopher and scholar I've come across more than once) co-edited an animal ethics book together in 2004, and Sunstein wrote its introduction. The book explored legal, philosophical and political issues surrounding the idea of animals as property, animal sentience, etc. and contained essays exploring these topics from different perspectives. According to the Center, this book's intro expressed the need to increase regulation of the use of animals in agriculture, entertainment and scientific experiments. According to the Center's conservative spin doctors, this means
using government to get everything PETA and the Humane Society of the United States can't get through gentle pressure or not-so-gentle coercion. Not exactly the kind of thing American ranchers, restaurateurs, hunters, and biomedical researchers (to say nothing of ordinary consumers) would like to hear from their next “regulatory czar.”I find it sort of funny how they equate "radical animal rights activism" with something as moderate as an expression of a need to increase regulation of the use of animals in various industries, which is more in keeping with animal welfarism. The Center cites other stances he's taken, though, including comparing the current treatment of animals in these industries to the mistreatment of humans who'd been deemed lesser persons in the past. Sunstein also had the apparent audacity to argue against greyhound racing, animal testing for cosmetics (which is already regarded as archaic in the mainstream) and meat-eating. They assert that
as the individual about to assume “the most important position that Americans know nothing about,” Sunstein owes the public an honest appraisal of his animal rights goals before taking office. Will the next four years be a dream-come-true for anti-meat, anti-hunting, and anti-everything-else radicals? Time will tell. For now, meat lovers might want to stock their freezers.This is the first I hear of Sunstein and I haven't watched the speech to which the Center links in its article about his appointment, so I don't really know what his politics actually are in terms of animal ethics. He obviously seems to lean towards more compassionate legislation, but I'm not sure just how far he's willing to take it. I'm also unsure of whether this could in fact have any bearing whatsoever on his new position, since it seems to me that there's an obvious difference between creating legislation / regulations and actually enforcing how they're applied, and where the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is concerned, I'm fairly sure that any policies they actually develop will have more to do with the overseeing of the application of existing regulations than anything. One way or another, he seems to be making some people nervous. I'll be keeping a close eye on additional developments, since he's got my attention, too.
UK farmers are rallying to spread the word that food prices are on their way up over yonder, thanks to the European Parliament recently backing legislation to scale back the use of certain pesticides. According to this article in The Telegraph, farmers are saying that 10 per cent of chemicals will have to come off the market in the next few years and that in the UK, this "could halve potato crops, reduce wheat yields by a fifth and cause the loss of the entire carrot crop". There's an article in The Guardian about the predicted possible loss of the entire UK carrot crop. Are we supposed to believe that carrots really cannot be grown without pesticides? I buy organic carrots here in Canada and they're not a whole lot more expensive than conventionally grown carrots. Root vegetables are notorious for leaching metals and chemicals out of the soil (not to mention the contamination coming from pesticides sprayed on the plants above ground), so buying organic is always the safest bet anyway.
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The Fooducate blog had a story on Sara Lee's introducing a new labelling system for its products. In it, they included a link to a short history of food / nutrition labelling (mostly in the US). It's worth having a look, if only to see how ridiculously splintered labelling efforts have become as different companies set their own respective standards for their multitudes of products.
Someone over at the Vegan Freaks forum posted a link to this today. Some of the comments / reviews on the Amazon site are hilarious. At first, I couldn't believe that anyone would market
something like this to little kids, then I remembered that when I was little, we had everything from toy guns to real guns geared towards kids. Not to mention those plastic fast food restaurant sets where you'd get your tray, little plastic fries, plastic burger, plastic shake, et al.. It almost leaves me wondering who's really behind marketing all of this stuff.
The slow food movement's Civil Eats website had a bit a few days ago on Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson's op-ed piece in the New York Times about the damage we're doing to our soil and what it means in terms of our civilization's ability to survive. Jackson's a plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, while Berry is a farmer and writer whose voice has been gaining significance in discussions of sustainable vs. industrial farming these past few years.
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Marion Nestle recently posted on her blog that the Government Accountability Office just produced a report looking at how federal agencies regulate (or, more importantly, fail to regulate) genetically modified crops. Nestle writes that "[t]he report documents long-standing gaps in coordination and direction among the three regulatory agencies involved: FDA, USDA, and EPA". Read the rest here. This comes just in time for Monsanto's recent attempts to have a strain of drought-resistant corn approved in the United States. Two bits says the report gets forgotten in as long as it takes to air pop a handful of kernels.
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Speaking of corn... The Ethicurean had a blurb a few days ago about how Monsanto's profits have doubled this past quarter and how they currently control 25% of the global market for seed corn. Must be nice.
Just after the US elections, a friend and I were sitting having a pint and discussing US politics, as well as the international economic chaos that's been going on over the previous month or two. He adopted the catch phrase "We'll see" and stuck to it for most of the evening. Not a big follower of news in general, aside from listening to sound bites here and there, he had an interesting spin on what had been going on. "It's just the mainstream media making it up to scare people," he said. "The economy is fine. Once Obama is in, everything will start to turn around." I told him that I wasn't so sure and that even with the bailout that the prediction by many economists (as reported in mainstream as well as indie media) was that the US (and along with it, a significant chunk of the world -- including our own country, Canada) was going to wallow in something resembling a depression more than it does a recession for at least the next year or two. "We'll see. I have confidence that Obama will change things," he said. "In fact, I wish we had one of him in Canada."
I cited stories about holiday sales predictions (which are now proving to be true -- retailers in the US experienced the worst sales in decades), about unemployment skyrocketing and all the rest of the stuff that's being discussed online, in newspapers, on the radio and on television. "We'll see," he said. "I feel really good about this. Let's have this discussion again after the inauguration and see how better things look then." With a little over a week to go, I'm thinking that that everyone else -- especially in the United States right now -- holding his or her breath for big change is going to end up a little dizzy and disappointed.
