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Tag Archives: Sustainability

The Ethics of Eating Gets Complicated

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by Dwight Furrow in The Ethics of Eating

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in vitro meat, Sustainability

in vitro meatI am swamped with student papers to grade this week so blogging will be light. But here are a couple of interesting and useful articles on the ethics of eating to keep your procrastination on track:

Philosopher Julian Baggini wonders what the moral implications of in vitro meat will be:

If IVM is the greenest, most animal-friendly meat, yet it is even more artificial than a pitiful, intensively reared broiler chicken, then no one can maintain the fantasy that bucolic nature has a monopoly on good, ethical food.

And this article suggests that overfishing and the depletion of fish stocks really is posing a moral dilemma for responsible lovers of Sushi:

It has not always been so in demand, Newfoundland bluefin used to be fed to cats. But now tuna fuels the global appetite for sushi. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that the Pacific bluefin population has declined by 19-33% over the past two decades, mainly to satisfy demand for sushi and sashimi.

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Wine Industry! Get a Clue!

12 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Amuse Bouche, Wine Culture

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Sustainability, wine business

head in the sandSome segments of the wine industry have been, for many years, in the forefront of developing sustainable farming and low-intervention production methods that include minimal use of chemical additives.

But when an ordinary chain restaurant like Panera beats you to the punch, you know you’re losing your edge.

Panera Bread seems to have adopted the credo of healthy eating aficionados everywhere: If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.

The restaurant chain — which has never fared badly health-wise (at least for a fast-food restaurant), is looking to remove all artificial preservatives, colors, sweeteners and flavors from their food by the end of 2016.

So, what does it all mean? Panera has compiled a “No No List” with all the ingredients it will be removing from its menu — and it looks like we’ll be saying goodbye to preservatives like propylene glycol and nitrates as well as high-fructose corn syrup.

When is the wine industry going to start putting ingredient labels on their bottles?

The Wine Curmudgeon covered this issue in some depth yesterday:

Over the next couple of years, Big Wine will add ingredients and nutrition facts to its wine, thanks to the new voluntary program, and reap the benefits. And, as the rest of the wine business holds out for reasons that no one who isn’t in the wine business understands, consumers will start to wonder if wine has something to hide.

I don’t have anything to add except to amplify the call out which should become a chorus soon.

Get your head out of the sand wine industry and join the 21st Century!

Are Family Farms the Answer?

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, The Ethics of Eating

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family farms, Sustainability

family farmCountry singer Willie Nelson recently acknowledged black farmer Philip Barker and the work of Barker’s organization Operation Spring Plant, “which provides resources and training to minority and limited resource farmers, including a program that introduces young people to farming and provides youth leadership training”. Part of their goal is to to help young people “come back to the farm to understand the wealth of the land.”

In the course of Nelson’s essay, he strongly defends the future of small farming, not just as a way of life, but as a means of sustaining our food supply:

Phillip believes the next generation must see a sustainable livelihood from the land, but the wealth he refers to can’t be measured only in dollars. It is measured in the experience of working on the land, tending the soil, and caring for the animals and crops that grow from it. It’s measured in the ability to be independent, to feed himself and his family. It’s measured in the way he and Dorathy sustain and strengthen their community. It’s measured in being rooted to a place and passing something valuable to the next generation.

It seems to me that understanding the real wealth in the land is key to a sustainable future for all of us.

Our greatest challenge is in re-visioning how the majority see “wealth.” The wealth of the land cannot be boiled down to the investors’ return on investment. It cannot be gauged by the commodities it returns to us — in gallons of oil and bushels of corn.

The drive to extract as much value from the land as possible — to maximize production without regard to whether we’re exhausting the soil, to give over our farmland to Wall Street investors, to seize land held by families for generations for corporate profit — bankrupts the land, our food, our nation and our future.

I don’t doubt the value of small farms as a way of life or the vision of sustainability that infuses Nelson’s writing. But I wonder if small farms are capable of feeding the planet. Is large-scale, industrial agriculture necessary for producing the massive amounts of food required for feeding 7 Billion people, many of whom live in regions of the world that lack fertile soil and a climate conducive to productive agriculture?

I don’t know the answer to this question but paeans to the personal virtues of the family farmer often don’t raise this issue. I assume we don’t want to go back to the days when most human beings were subsistence farmers.

The Future of Food (Hopefully)

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture, Food Science

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Dan Barber, future of food, Sustainability

barberI haven’t read Chef Dan Barber’s book yet. It’s entitled The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food and describes his vision of a new way of eating that is both sustainable and more flavorful.

But this Ted Talk makes me want to move it to the top of my list. Barber describes a fish farm so ecologically healthy that it doesn’t need to feed its fish and that gladly loses 20% of its fish stock to birds who feed daily on the overabundant resources created by sound ecological farming practices.

He is a good speaker; it’s worth 20 minutes of your time.

Hope is Always Good

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture

≈ 1 Comment

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agribusiness, Sustainability

good newsWe tend to focus on the negative when it comes to sustainability, food distribution, and food production because the future does pose challenges for us. But we are unlikely to meet those challenges without hope.

Danielle Nierenberg serves up our weekly ration of good news with her 101 hopeful food facts, one of which is that “ Family farming accounts for at least 56 percent of worldwide agricultural production.“

Monsanto still has a lot of work to do.

Sustainability, Locavorism, and Private Virtue

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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food ethics, locavorism, Sustainability

farmers market 2 It is lovely to know the person who grows the kale you’re eating for dinner. Collecting a box of fruits and vegetables sourced from your local CSA guarantees fresh, organic meals everyday. It is romantic to revisit bygone practices like canning or fermenting your own sauerkraut. And those unique, flavorful heirloom tomatoes are a real treat.

Locavorism not only provides us with great food, but issues a double dollop of self-esteem in knowing that one is living ethically and supporting a worthy cause while enjoying artisanal products. But investing too much in all this “virtue” helps us ignore the problems in our food system that locavorism is powerless to solve.

Many people would starve if they depended on their local food supply, because most people do not live near farmers who supply all-season produce in sufficient quantities to feed everyone. Although locavorism touts its improved carbon footprint, it is not at all clear that the low-volume, short-haul shipments of local produce via truck is more energy-efficient than high-volume, long-haul transportation via train and ship that is a substantial part of industrial agricultural transportation.

At any rate, it is largely meat production that is the egregious energy user and most of the emissions involved in food are the result of production, not transportation.

Locavorism gets its cachet from real concerns  about the impact of agribusiness on food security, soil depletion, antibiotic abuse, and genetic diversity of crops, but it is more of a business niche for specialty producers supplying status food to gourmands and fans of organic food, not a solution to the problems of agribusiness.

So should we cancel our CSA accounts and return to shopping at supermarkets? I don’t think so. Locavorism is useful because culture is important for the transmission of norms. It is important that individuals pay attention in their own lives to sustainability issues if a mass movement toward sustainability is to be created. Locavorism is a symbol of that attention, not a solution, but symbols are important for generating expectations and keeping pressure on agribusiness to clean up its act.

But we should be under no illusions that we are doing more than manipulating symbols; and especially be under no illusions that private virtue can somehow substitute for public policy.

Amuse Buche

02 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Amuse Bouche

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French wine, molecular gastronomy, restaurants, Sustainability

News items you might have missed this week, some amusing, some not so much:

  • The variety of sausages in Germany is awesome. Santa Barbara now has its own slice of Germany. I surely will be stopping here on my next trip to the Central Coast.
  • Vegetarians beware. Authentic Parmesan cheese must be made with animal rennet. If I were a vegetarian, I could not live without pesto.
  • Affordable burgundy! Burgundian wines have increased so much in price in recent years that they are out of the price range of most wine lovers. Here is a very useful post naming the wines of Burgundy that are still affordable.
  • Ferran Adria, one of the founders of molecular gastronomy, has a cookbook aimed at the home cook–The Family meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria
  • Here is something distinctly not amusing, but nevertheless important. A comprehensive article on what to do about the decline of the oceans.

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