How To Make Something From Nothing: Feed Salmon

"As long as we are talking about fish farming, we should note that a genetically engineered salmon can produce a pound of fish for every .83 pounds of feed it eats"

From this

Wasting Food

I've posted a few times on the idea that food waste occurs when customers reject food at the supermarket.  Buried in this article is the assertion that half of food waste comes in business channels, but half comes at home because of reasons like these:

Best College Food?

Business Insider has a list of the colleges with the best food.  My alma mater comes in 9th, but my wife's comes in 2nd.  Via Marginal REvolution.

Back in the day I worked in one of the dorms--I don't think the co-eds thought we had great food then. But then, college costs have gone up a bit since 1959.

You Can't Will Yourself to Have Willpower

"You can't will yourself to have willpower" is a thought I had, when thinking about poverty, but it also seems to me to apply to dieting.

My idea is that people have willpower in specific areas, and not in others.  For example, I've little problem in exercising willpower in what I eat, but not in whether I can complete a set of tasks. 

Eggs--Score One for My Mother

My mother used to get very upset in the 50's and 60's.  Not upset at me--I was the apple of her eye.  But upset at the people who were dissing the "perfect food", perfect in her mind, the egg.  On our farm dad did the cows and mom did the hens, so she was far from an unbiased observer as doctors and experts declared that cholesterol was the key to heart attacks, and we should all eat healthy by avoiding cholesterol-rich foods. Hens were her thing, a part of her identity, and she was a hard-headed German-American, so no one could persuade her that government experts knew better.

So today, some years after she died and many years after she gave up her hens comes word that the government is changing its advice.

Mom, you were right and us government types were wrong.

Food Waste--Michael Roberts

Prof. Roberts doesn't blog often but he's good. His latest is a long spiel on the subject of food, especially food waste. Naturally his opinion and mine are reasonably in agreement, though his is longer and with added points: food waste is correlated to the cheapness of food; reducing food waste would increase the supply of food, making it cheaper.

Feeding the World and Burying the Lede

"Bury the lede" is an expression meaning the big news in a story isn't highlighted.  That's my reaction to this NYTimes story, which includes the sentence:

"Feeding the world is no longer a question of growing more food"

Farmers Don't Make Money and Blue Jeans

Ben Smith  had a piece in the NYTimes recently complaining that farmers, specifically small food movement type farmers, can't make money.  He points back to past farmer organizations and  writes:

But none of these demands will be met until we start our own organizations — as in generations past — and shape a vision of a new food economy that ensures that growing good food also means making a good living.

He never deals with the idea that the Grange, the Populists, the National Farmers Union, the American Agriculture Movement, the various cooperatives weren't able to mold the environment to make the country safe for the sort of small family farmer he wants to preserve. 

I may have made this comparison before, but I forget.  :-(  Anyway, in my youth you could buy blue jeans from Sears or Montgomery Ward or buy Levis or Lees from department stores.  That was about it.  Blue jeans were associated, in my mind at least, with sailors coming back from active duty.  (Farmers wore overalls.)  Today you can still buy Lees, Levis, and Sears blue jeans, but also Lands End and LLBean and Carhart and Kmart and so on for many more brands, and that's not getting into the absurdly priced "fashion" blue jeans which go in and out of popularity. And at least the cheaper jeans are cheaper than when I grew up.  That variety is the result of our wealth as a country: we spend on food maybe a third or fourth of what we did when I was a kid, and incomes are much higher; therefore we can afford to indulge our tastes.

I see the same thing happening with food: a mixture of  fast cheap food, better tasting and often better food (even McDonalds food is better tasting and cheaper than the overcooked pot roast my mother made) along with a much greater choice and a much bigger price range.  I don't know what the best restaurants in New York City charged for a meal in 1950, but I'm sure it's gone up many times more than a basic diner meal has.

GMO Q and A

I'm usually, not always but usually, opposing the crunchies and the food movement.  But this assessment of GMO varieties strikes me as solid.  And his recommendation for labeling GMO's, which I disagree with, may in fact end up as the only practical way to go.  After all, if everything we eat in the US is labeled "GMO", then nothing is.

3 Minutes for Food?

Via Marginal Revolution, a USAtoday story on how the universe is gradually slowing down, in the inevitable triumph of entrophy.

Actually, it seems that fast food outlets are having trouble maintaining their speed of "drive-thru" visits.  I don't patronize such lines, so I was struck by the fact that McDonald's fills orders in about 3 minutes (the current figure is 9 seconds slower than it used to be).

Eating on Food Stamps

Rep. Stockman's staffer reports the results of a week on food stamps.

His purchases:

For $21.55 Ferguson purchased at Dollar Tree:
Two boxes of Honeycomb cereal
Three cans of red beans and rice
Jar of peanut butter
Bottle of grape jelly
Loaf of whole wheat bread
Two cans of refried beans
Box of spaghetti
Large can of pasta sauce
Two liters of root beer
Large box of popsicles
24 servings of Wyler’s fruit drink mix
Eight cups of applesauce
Bag of pinto beans
Bag of rice
Bag of cookies

For $6.03 at the Shoppers Food Warehouse next door Ferguson bought a gallon of milk and a box of maple and brown sugar oatmeal.

 The total cost is about 4 dollars less than the $31.50 Dems have been using.  I'm not sure I'd call it "eating well" as Stockman does, but he has the right idea, mostly.  Lots of rice and beans, some pasta and cereals--cheap calories and nutrition. He could have varied it by buying more in bulk over time.  I'd suspect it's a fairly healthy diet, vegetarian, although there's no fresh fruits or vegetables at all. 

Of course, I'd not want to be him when he feeds two young kids this diet for a week.  A stop at St. Elizabeth's might be next.

Support Beef, Vote Obama?

Who knew the President was a steak man?  I thought he was one of those effete liberal crunchies?  Guess that impression was wrong.

Cafeteria in South Building

Turns out USDA has banned deep-fat fryers in its South Building cafeteria. The article seems a bit skeptical on whether the big shots' efforts at getting their employees to eat more healthily will work.

Is There "Pink Slime" in Bologna?

Tyler Cowen linked to an article on Newfoundland's fixation on bologna, which refers to "ham trim" and other "mystery meat", which caused me to wonder.

Blueberries and Innovation, Bipolar USDA

The local Safeway has had blueberries for sale every day for the last year or 18 months, I think. I've seen berries from Chile (now), Mexico (earlier), North Carolina, New Jersey, Michigan, and Maine. And probably other sources. They aren't cheap, but considering the distance they have to travel, it's worth while.

I get the extension RSS feed, and have seen posts on blueberry cultivation in the South. They're reporting the results from experiment stations, and from the field  Extension is, of course, partially funded by USDA.  But there's also this announcement -- USDA is spending $16 million to buy wild blueberries for school lunch and food bank programs.

So on the one hand USDA is promoting the spread of blueberry culture through the US, while on the other hand it's encouraging wild blueberry growers, partially to mitigate downward price pressure.  What's the reason for the downward pressure: I assume it's the development of cultivated blueberries in the US and to the south.

Not sure what the locavores would make of this--wild blueberries are pretty regional.

Snarky Harvard Prof--British Cooking

Chris Blattman quotes from a British research paper showing the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables.  His only addition is this sentence:

"Just imagine the happiness effect if the vegetables had not been cooked by the British."

FAO: Whoops, We Were Off

The UN's Food and Argiculture Organization has revised its estimates from its previous 1 billion down to 870 million.  From their new report:

About 870 million people are estimated to have been undernourished in the period 2010–12. This represents 12.5 percent of the global population, or one in eight people. The vast majority of these – 852 million – live in developing countries, where the prevalence of undernourishment is now estimated at 14.9 percent of the population (Figure, below left). Undernourishment in the world is unacceptably high.The updated figures emerging as a result of improvements in data and the methodology FAO uses to calculate its undernourishment indicator suggest that the number of undernourished people in the world declined more steeply than previously estimated until 2007, although the rate of decline has slowed thereafter(Figure, below left). As a result, the developing world as a whole is much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of reducing by half the percentage of people suffering from chronic hunger by 2015. If the average annual decline of the past 20 years continues through to 2015, the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing country regions would reach 12.5 percent – still above the MDG target, but much closer to it than previously estimated

NYTimes

Had an article on school kids and their problems with the new school lunch rules (more fruits and vegetables, fewer calories).  The complaints seem to go in two directions: not enough food (calories), we're still hungry; and too much food we don't like.

This struck me as a bit optimistic:

But the most effective strategy, several food service directors said, may simply be waiting. Research shows that children must be exposed to vegetables 10 to 12 times before they will eat them on their own, said William J. McCarthy, a professor of public health and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Don't Eat Your Spinach?

Myth: spinach is especially rich in iron.  See this post at Wiredscience.

What was the Mark Twain bit about Error being halfway round the world while Truth is still putting its boots on?

Grow Teff

That's what Idaho is doing, according to this Post article.  It's a grain used for Ethiopian fermented bread.  See this wikipedia article.

[Updated: A quote from the Post:

A combination of factors has spurred the growth of the U.S. teff market. One is scarcity: The Ethiopian government routinely bans its export to protect prices from rising inside the country during lean seasons. Another is a shift in American dietary habits. The rise in Ethio­pian immigrants and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Ethio­pian food have increased demand, as has the surge in vegetarianism (a two-ounce serving of teff has as much protein as an extra-large egg). Yet another is the increased awareness of gluten allergies; gluten-free teff is a welcome alternative to wheat.]