Our Choices, Our Future (for food)

Rachel Laudan is a food historian, author, and visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book Cuisine and Empire, “shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers….By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.”

Her article in Jacobin magazine, A Plea for Culinary Modernism, turns the thinking of Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Marion Nestle, and others of the organic slow food movement, on its head.

The [culinary] Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

She is sharp, insightful, provocative, and always worth listening to.

7 Million Versus Shell, really?

This is a WTF moment for me. Greenpeace UK is protesting Shell drilling for oil in the arctic, and they say nearly seven million people agree with them. Fine. I get that. What boggles me is the irony of the message their photo conveys, which is “We cannot survive without oil.”

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Drilling in the arctic is damn expensive. Shell would not be going there if they didn’t expect to profit from it. If oil’s demand falls, they will not be in the arctic.

Greenpeace should be leading the way by not using oil products.

Instead they use fuel made from oil to take them out to the arctic, climb an oil rig dressed in clothing made from oil, scale the oil rig using safety and climbing gear made from oil, and no doubt use propane to cook their meals and warm themselves while protesting the exploration of a product they show by their actions that they can’t live without.

W.T.F.

50 Shades of Green

Or, Why Does Green Power Provide More Jobs?

The other day we considered the cost of burning coal.

Today, we look at one of the selling points of “green energy.” Pols and others say “green jobs” provide more jobs. The short of it, is that they need more people per kilowatt to do the job than fossil fuel or nuclear power do. At the extreme end of the kilowatt per person spectrum would be cyclists, such as in this video, pedaling to produce the power needed.

Saddle up y’all, I’m going to take a shower.

The Cost of Coal

A recent tweet trumpeted a report that 250,000 Chinese died in 2013 due to smog from coal (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coal-emissions-smog-deaths). The report on the deaths came partly from Greenpeace, of course.

The 5,354 MW Belchatów Power Station in Poland – one of the world’s largest coal fired power stations. Photo credit: Wikipedia

There is little question that coal is dangerous. It is dangerous to mine. Its emissions are a problem; coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Yet coal is cheap, abundant, and the demand for it is vast. As Justin Lin wrote in 2009 on the World Bank’s blog:

There are roughly 1.6 billion people in developing countries–700 million of whom are in Africa and 550 million in South Asia–who lack access to electricity. Because coal is often cheap and abundant, and the need for electricity is so great, coal plants are going to be built with or without our [World Bank] support.

The question that should spring to everyone’s mind is “how many died in China from cold or indoor pollution before the electrification that the coal plant brought with it?” The Manichaeistic, black/white premise of something being all good (e.g., Renewable Energy) or all bad (e.g., Fossil Fuel) is at best, uncritical thinking, and at worst, lying.

Greenpeace, the report’s author, is of course fretting about climate change, and its answer is to turn back the clock. I am a luke-warmer in regards to climate change; I think the climate is much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than the Global Climate Models (GCM) that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest. But even a full-throated supporter of climate change, such as Mark Lynas, sees the need for coal in places such as China and India:

The costs of poverty – which includes millions of preventable deaths of young children, lack of access to water and sanitation, reduced livelihood prospects, large-scale hunger and malnutrition, and so on… are clearly much greater than the direct costs of coal burning, and this equation probably still holds even when the future damages from climate change are factored in. – Mark Lynas, 2014, India’s coal conundrum

To be clear, the possible deaths of people due to the burning of coal are regrettable. Scrubbers would ameliorate the particulates that cause the health problems; as China and India get richer their people will become more vocal in their calls for cleaner air. At the moment, jobs, cleaner drinking water, sanitation, and food on the table appear to be of greater importance.

The Cost of Coal

A recent tweet trumpeted a report that 250,000 Chinese died in 2013 due to smog from coal (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coal-emissions-smog-deaths). The report on the deaths came partly from Greenpeace, of course.

The 5,354 MW Belchatów Power Station in Poland – one of the world’s largest coal fired power stations. Photo credit: Wikipedia

There is little question that coal is dangerous. It is dangerous to mine. Its emissions are a problem; coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Yet coal is cheap, abundant, and the demand for it is vast. As Justin Lin wrote in 2009 on the World Bank’s blog:

There are roughly 1.6 billion people in developing countries–700 million of whom are in Africa and 550 million in South Asia–who lack access to electricity. Because coal is often cheap and abundant, and the need for electricity is so great, coal plants are going to be built with or without our [World Bank] support.

The question that should spring  to everyone’s mind is “how many died in China from cold or indoor pollution before the electrification that the coal plant brought with it?” The Manichaeistic, black/white premise of something being all good (e.g., Renewable Energy) or all bad (e.g., Fossil Fuel) is at best, uncritical thinking, and at worst, lying.

Greenpeace, the report’s author, is of course fretting about climate change, and its answer is to turn back the clock. I am a luke-warmer in regards to climate change; I think the climate is much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than the Global Climate Models (GCM) that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest. But even a full-throated supporter of climate change, such as Mark Lynas, sees the need for coal in places such as China and India:

The costs of poverty – which includes millions of preventable deaths of young children, lack of access to water and sanitation, reduced livelihood prospects, large-scale hunger and malnutrition, and so on… are clearly much greater than the direct costs of coal burning, and this equation probably still holds even when the future damages from climate change are factored in. – Mark Lynas, 2014, India’s coal conundrum

To be clear, the possible deaths of people due to the burning of coal are regrettable. Scrubbers would ameliorate the particulates that cause the health problems; as China and India get richer their people will become more vocal in their calls for cleaner air. At the moment, jobs, cleaner drinking water, sanitation, and food on the table appear to be of greater importance.

The World is…

Over at the Serial Monography site, Jeff Benson (yes, the name is no coincidence) looks for an authentic experience: he wants a Flat White coffee like he had when he discovered it in Bali. He tries one at his local Starbucks…

…by the time I had finished drinking it at home, my enthusiasm had dissolved…Because although Starbucks made the same drink I remembered, they had utterly failed to replicate the experience I had when I first drank a flat white. This is, I admit, an unfair standard to hold a coffee chain to. They’re in the business of selling caffeine and sugar to overworked Americans, not reproducing a Balinese coffeehouse.

As I see it he is touching on at least two maybe three ideas here:

  1. Authenticity. It is one of those ideas that has probably been around since people have been telling stories. No matter what the time or place, [insert place name here] always was more about twenty years before. It’s like Yogi Berra used to say, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
  2. Experience of the moment. It is not just the the act but who was around and where. A can of Safeway Select beer may have been the best beer you ever had in your life, if the place, people and the time was special. If you haven’t eaten for a week, a bowl of oatmeal will be an unforgettable feast.
  3. Globalization. Globalization is often the bugbear of modern life. Trade brings with it the Walmartization/McDonald’sization of a place. Big Macs in Paris. Nike shoes in Zimbabwe.This goes back to Authenticity. Ever since humans learned to trade one thing for another thing (the first trade was probably between the sexes, men hunt and women gather, generally), we have been modifying our environment to make it better for our lives.Without globalization he would not have been able to get a Flat White (an Australian invention) in Bali.

Or maybe it’s none of those things, as Freud might have said, “Sometimes a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee.”

Your thoughts?

The World is…

Over at the Serial Monography site, Jeff Benson (yes, the name is no coincidence) looks for an authentic experience: he wants a Flat White coffee like he had when he discovered it in Bali. He tries one at his local Starbucks…

…by the time I had finished drinking it at home, my enthusiasm had dissolved…Because although Starbucks made the same drink I remembered, they had utterly failed to replicate the experience I had when I first drank a flat white. This is, I admit, an unfair standard to hold a coffee chain to. They’re in the business of selling caffeine and sugar to overworked Americans, not reproducing a Balinese coffeehouse.

As I see it he is touching on at least two maybe three ideas here:

  1. Authenticity. It is one of those ideas that has probably been around since people have been telling stories. No matter what the time or place, [insert place name here] always was more about twenty years before. It’s like Yogi Berra used to say, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
  2. Experience of the moment. It is not just the the act but who was around and where. A can of Safeway Select beer may have been the best beer you ever had in your life, if the place, people and the time was special. If you haven’t eaten for a week, a bowl of oatmeal will be an unforgettable feast.McDonalds Bali
  3. Globalization. Globalization is often the bugbear of modern life. Trade brings with it the Walmartization/McDonald’sization of a place. Big Macs in Paris. Nike shoes in Zimbabwe.This goes back to Authenticity. Ever since humans learned to trade one thing for another thing (the first trade was probably between the sexes, men hunt and women gather, generally), we have been modifying our environment to make it better for our lives.Without globalization he would not have been able to get a Flat White (an Australian invention) in Bali.

Or maybe it’s none of those things, as Freud might have said, “Sometimes a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee.”

Your thoughts?

Well latte duh, latte duh.

For most of humanity’s existence, our kind have worried about getting enough to eat. So we may see it as a good sign that now some of our species are worried about not getting organic milk in their lattes and frappes. “Where oh where shall I ever find a frappe made with organic milk?” one supposes they say. “If only Starbucks made their lattes and frappes with organic milk; it would be so healthy!”

Or as one over-achieving Organitrepreneur put it:

“Consumers are increasingly looking for organic milk. I stopped drinking Starbucks lattes once I found out the health implications of consuming non-organic milk.” Vani Hari, creator of FoodBabe.com.

Caffeine

Though its advantage is far from clear, for the sake of argument, let’s say that organic milk is healthier than conventionally produced milk.

Putting organic milk in coffee is akin to putting lipstick on a sow: the pig is still ugly (and with lipstick, quite silly looking) and the coffee is still full of (natural) chemicals with long and complicated names that should scare the mocha off any chemophobe’s lips.

As I have written before, every day I make coffee, a phenol-laced solution, for my wife and myself. It has “826 volatile chemical substances, 16 of which are known by the state of California to cause cancer.” One cup of this hot, and astoundingly delicious, pick-me-up contains at least 10 milligrams of known carcinogens. Here’s a partial list of the stuff we put in our bodies: caffeic acid, 1,2-dihydroxybenzene, furfural (a heterocyclic aldehyde), benzene-1,4-diol, acrylamide, hydrogen peroxide, 5-caffeoylquinic acid, 3-caffeoylquinic-1,5-lactone, and the all-important 1,3,7-Trimethyl-3,7-dihydro-1H-purine-2,6-dione (caffeine).

If you’re someone who says that you won’t put anything in your mouth that you can’t pronounce, put down that cup. But if you’re someone who knows that dose makes the poison, well, bon appétit!

For more on coffee, its chemistry and physiological effects see the Royal Society of Chemistry’s, “Chemistry in every cup.”

 

Well Latte duh

For most of humanity’s existence, our kind have worried about getting enough to eat. So we may see it as a good sign that now some of our species are worried about not getting organic milk in their lattes and frappes. “Where oh where shall I ever find a frappe made with organic milk?” one supposes they say. “If only Starbucks made their lattes and frappes with organic milk; it would be so healthy!”

Or as  one over-achieving Organitrepreneur put it:

“Consumers are increasingly looking for organic milk. I stopped drinking Starbucks lattes once I found out the health implications of consuming non-organic milk.” Vani Hari, creator of FoodBabe.com.

Caffeine

Though its advantage is far from clear, for the sake of argument, let’s say that organic milk is healthier than conventionally produced milk.

Putting organic milk in coffee is akin to putting lipstick on a sow: the pig is still ugly (and with lipstick, quite silly looking) and the coffee is still full of (natural) chemicals with long and complicated names that should scare the mocha off any chemophobe’s lips.

As I have written before, every day I make coffee, a phenol-laced solution, for my wife and myself.  It has “826 volatile chemical substances, 16 of which are known by the state of California to cause cancer.” One cup of this hot and astoundingly delicious pick-me-up contains at least 10 milligrams of known carcinogens. Here’s a partial list of the stuff we put in our bodies: caffeic acid, 1,2-dihydroxybenzene, furfural (a heterocyclic aldehyde), benzene-1,4-diol, acrylamide, hydrogen peroxide, 5-caffeoylquinic acid, 3-caffeoylquinic-1,5-lactone, and the all-important 1,3,7-Trimethyl-3,7-dihydro-1H-purine-2,6-dione (caffeine).

If you’re someone who says that you won’t put anything in your mouth that you can’t pronounce, put down that cup. But if you’re someone who knows that dose makes the poison, well, bon appétit!