The Botox apple, if I'm caught eating this I'm probably dead already

While America's food giants introduced us to the Frankenfish salmon earlier this year, they've outdone themselves this time with a genetically modified apple that doesn't brown. The apple is said to have "silencing" enzymes which prevent it from looking old even if it is old. Even the most stupid of us have to realise this isn't a good idea. Would I want to eat a maggot ridden burger just because the maggots are invisible?

Critics are calling it the "Botox apple", despite the fact that botox is probably a more friendly food choice than this particular piece of fruit. According to Associated Press, Okanagan Speciality Fruits who developed the apples said that the company "licensed the non-browning technology from Australian researchers who pioneered it in potatoes."

The company's director Andrew Kimbrell told AP that this technology "appears to benefit apple growers and shippers more than consumers." Umm. Apparently the President of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, Neal Carter, even agrees "Some people won't like it just because of what it is." How bizarre is that? But he also adds that "people will see the process used to get it had very sound science."

I think most of us would rather know when the food we're eating is past it's best. As it stands, Modified Atmospheric Packaging is what's keeping most bagged salad leaves from turning brown when they are in fact well past their best. Bagged salad is one of the huge food hits of the past decade but the process of gassing salad leaves to keep them from browning isn't that far removed from the Frankenapple.

A friend of mine worked at a US plant in the 1990s packing salad into MOP plastic. He thought the trend could never catch on here as allegedly in Ireland we're deeply connected to food and understand that eating this kind of stuff is bad for us. Apparently not. Therefore welcome, the Frankenapple, soon to be seen at your local supermarket. And once the FDA approve it, the Frankensalmon. Roll up folks....

What food says about class in America - this has lessons for us all

I came across this piece written by Lisa Miller for Newsweek. In the testing times that we're currently facing in Ireland the article struck a chord, a big one. Lisa writes grippingly about the contrast between America's penchant for luxury, artisan or organic foods while many people in same country haven't enough to eat. And this is not just confined to the States. Here in Ireland we already have evidence that food poverty is widespread, and in the current outlook, probably set to get worse.




While the phrases "Food Poverty" or "Food Deprivation" might ring bells as something endemic to developing countries, they're right here on our doorstep. While researching our food documentary I've come across increasingly alarming statistics on how much of Ireland suffers from Food Poverty; ranging from those who don't have enough to eat to families who eat poor foodstuffs as they can't afford fresh food.





The definition of food poverty is an “inability to access a nutritionally adequate diet and the impacts this has on health, culture and social participation”. In this country, many low-income families cannot afford to buy even basic foods, and the relative high cost of many nutritious foods, including fresh vegetables, puts them out of reach.



Research has also found that Irish low-income households spend a relatively higher share of their income on food. Despite this, they have a poor diet both in terms of food and nutritional intake. They also tend to shop at local convenience stores, where prices are higher and the variety of food is poor. Often in deprived areas transport is an issue, with poor public transport links leading to households relying on taxis.



Families on low incomes often have a lack of skills and knowledge regarding what a healthy diet is, and are also affected by factors such as food preparation, cooking skills and storage.


The “official” measure of poverty in Ireland found that 15% of the Irish population experience some type of “food deprivation”. 35% of those on low income experience food deprivation and 7% of the low-income population experience “intense” food deprivation.

On top of this, it is low income groups who through poor diet are most likely to suffer obesity and related diseases. 57% of the Irish population is either overweight (39%) or obese (18%) Both the Obesity Report (2005) and the SLAN report (2008) also found that those in the lower social classes are more likely to be overweight or obese. One in five children aged between five and 12 years old are overweight or obese, and the same is found for 12 to 17 year olds (National Teen’s Food Survey 2008).

So while I passionately advocate local food, healthy eating and championing Ireland's food and agri-business sector, I have to be aware that searching for food that chimes with your belief system is a luxury that many cannot afford. With the upcoming budget on December 7th which will inevitably place more people in Ireland under financial pressure, food will be something which simply has to cost less for many families. Research done in early 2010 shows evidence already that many of us are trying to cut our spend on food, shop around and get more for our buck.


So here's Lisa's piece, it's long, but for those of you who are big readers it's very much worth it, and for those of you with little time, just scan the first few paragraphs, she makes a lot of good points and if anything, makes me hope desperately that the food environment in the US is not where Ireland's food future is heading.

Divided We Eat
As more of us indulge our passion for local, organic delicacies, a growing number of Americans don’t have enough nutritious food to eat. How we can bridge the gap.

For breakfast, I usually have a cappuccino—espresso made in an Alessi pot and mixed with organic milk, which has been gently heated and hand-fluffed by my husband. I eat two slices of imported cheese—Dutch Parrano, the label says, “the hippest cheese in New York” (no joke)—on homemade bread with butter. I am what you might call a food snob. My nutritionist neighbor drinks a protein shake while her 5-year-old son eats quinoa porridge sweetened with applesauce and laced with kale flakes. She is what you might call a health nut. On a recent morning, my neighbor’s friend Alexandra Ferguson sipped politically correct Nicaraguan coffee in her comfy kitchen while her two young boys chose from among an assortment of organic cereals. As we sat, the six chickens Ferguson and her husband, Dave, keep for eggs in a backyard coop peered indoors from the stoop. The Fergusons are known as locavores.

Alexandra says she spends hours each day thinking about, shopping for, and preparing food. She is a disciple of Michael Pollan, whose 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma made the locavore movement a national phenomenon, and believes that eating organically and locally contributes not only to the health of her family but to the existential happiness of farm animals and farmers—and, indeed, to the survival of the planet. “Michael Pollan is my new hero, next to Jimmy Carter,” she told me. In some neighborhoods, a lawyer who raises chickens in her backyard might be considered eccentric, but we live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a community that accommodates and celebrates every kind of foodie. Whether you believe in eating for pleasure, for health, for justice, or for some idealized vision of family life, you will find neighbors who reflect your food values. In Park Slope, the contents of a child’s lunchbox can be fodder for a 20-minute conversation.

Over coffee, I cautiously raise a subject that has concerned me of late: less than five miles away, some children don’t have enough to eat; others exist almost exclusively on junk food. Alexandra concedes that her approach is probably out of reach for those people. Though they are not wealthy by Park Slope standards—Alexandra works part time and Dave is employed by the city—the Fergusons spend approximately 20 percent of their income, or $1,000 a month, on food. The average American spends 13 percent, including restaurants and takeout.
And so the conversation turns to the difficulty of sharing their interpretation of the Pollan doctrine with the uninitiated. When they visit Dave’s family in Tennessee, tensions erupt over food choices. One time, Alexandra remembers, she irked her mother-in-law by purchasing a bag of organic apples, even though her mother-in-law had already bought the nonorganic kind at the grocery store. The old apples were perfectly good, her mother-in-law said. Why waste money—and apples?

I can’t convince my brother to spend another dime on food,” adds Dave.
“This is our charity. This is my giving to the world,” says Alexandra, finally, as she packs lunchboxes—organic peanut butter and jelly on grainy bread, a yogurt, and a clementine—for her two boys. “We contribute a lot.”

According to data released last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17 percent of Americans—more than 50 million people—live in households that are “food insecure,” a term that means a family sometimes runs out of money to buy food, or it sometimes runs out of food before it can get more money. Food insecurity is especially high in households headed by a single mother. It is most severe in the South, and in big cities. In New York City, 1.4 million people are food insecure, and 257,000 of them live near me, in Brooklyn. Food insecurity is linked, of course, to other economic measures like housing and employment, so it surprised no one that the biggest surge in food insecurity since the agency established the measure in 1995 occurred between 2007 and 2008, at the start of the economic downturn. (The 2009 numbers, released last week, showed little change.) The proportion of households that qualify as “hungry”—with what the USDA calls “very low food security”—is small, about 6 percent. Reflected against the obsessive concerns of the foodies in my circle, and the glare of attention given to the plight of the poor and hungry abroad, even a fraction of starving children in America seems too high.
Mine seems on some level like a naive complaint. There have always been rich people and poor people in America and, in a capitalist economy, the well-to-do have always had the freedom to indulge themselves as they please.

In hard times, food has always marked a bright border between the haves and the have-nots. In the earliest days of the Depression, as the poor waited on bread lines, the middle and upper classes in America became devoted to fad diets. Followers of the Hollywood 18-Day Diet, writes Harvey Levenstein in his 1993 book Paradox of Plenty, “could live on fewer than six hundred calories a day by limiting each meal to half a grapefruit, melba toast, coffee without cream or sugar, and, at lunch and dinner, some raw vegetables.”

But modern America is a place of extremes, and what you eat for dinner has become the definitive marker of social status; as the distance between rich and poor continues to grow, the freshest, most nutritious foods have become luxury goods that only some can afford. Among the lowest quintile of American families, mean household income has held relatively steady between $10,000 and $13,000 for the past two decades (in inflation-adjusted dollars); among the highest, income has jumped 20 percent to $170,800 over the same period, according to census data. What this means, in practical terms, is that the richest Americans can afford to buy berries out of season at Whole Foods—the upscale grocery chain that recently reported a 58 percent increase in its quarterly profits—while the food insecure often eat what they can: highly caloric, mass-produced foods like pizza and packaged cakes that fill them up quickly. The number of Americans on food stamps has surged by 58.5 percent over the last three years

Corpulence used to signify the prosperity of a few but has now become a marker of poverty. Obesity has risen as the income gap has widened: more than a third of U.S. adults and 17 percent of children are obese, and the problem is acute among the poor. While obesity is a complex problem—genetics, environment, and activity level all play a role—a 2008 study by the USDA found that children and women on food stamps were likelier to be overweight than those who were not. According to studies led by British epidemiologist Kate Pickett, obesity rates are highest in developed countries with the greatest income disparities. America is among the most obese of nations; Japan, with its relatively low income inequality, is the thinnest.

Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, has spent his career showing that Americans’ food choices correlate to social class. He argues that the most nutritious diet—lots of fruits and vegetables, lean meats, fish, and grains—is beyond the reach of the poorest Americans, and it is economic elitism for nutritionists to uphold it as an ideal without broadly addressing issues of affordability. Lower-income families don’t subsist on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education, as some have argued. And though many poor neighborhoods are, indeed, food deserts—meaning that the people who live there don’t have access to a well-stocked supermarket—many are not. Lower-income families choose sugary, fat, and processed foods because they’re cheaper—and because they taste good. In a paper published last spring, Drewnowski showed how the prices of specific foods changed between 2004 and 2008 based on data from Seattle-area supermarkets. While food prices overall rose about 25 percent, the most nutritious foods (red peppers, raw oysters, spinach, mustard greens, romaine lettuce) rose 29 percent, while the least nutritious foods (white sugar, hard candy, jelly beans, and cola) rose just 16 percent.

“In America,” Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He points to an article in The New York Times, written by Pollan, which describes a meal element by element, including “a basket of morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta.” “Pollan,” writes Drewnowski, “is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.”
I finish writing the previous paragraph and go downstairs. There, in the mail, I find the Christmas catalog from the luxury retail store Barneys. HAVE A FOODIE HOLIDAY, its cover reads. Inside, models are covered—literally—with food. A woman in a red $2,000 Lanvin trench has an enormous cabbage on her head. Another, holding a green Proenza Schouler clutch, wears a boiled crab in her bouffant. Most disconcerting is the Munnu diamond pendant ($80,500) worn by a model who seems to have traded her hair for an octopus. Its tentacles dangle past her shoulders, and the girl herself wears the expression of someone who’s stayed too long at the party. Food is no longer trendy or fashionable. It is fashion.

Tiffiney Davis, a single mom, lives about four miles away from me, in subsidized housing, in a gentrifying neighborhood called Red Hook. Steps from her apartment, you can find ample evidence of foodie culture: Fairway, the supermarket where I buy my Dutch cheese, is right there, as is a chic bakery, and a newfangled lobster pound. Davis says she has sometimes worried about having enough food. She works in Manhattan, earning $13 an hour for a corporate catering company (which once had a contract with NEWSWEEK), and she receives food stamps. She spends $100 a week on food for herself and her two kids. Sometimes she stretches her budget by bringing food home from work.

Davis is sheepish about what her family eats for breakfast. Everybody rises at 6, and there’s a mad rush to get the door, so often they eat bodega food. Her daughter, Malaezia, 10, will have egg and cheese on a roll; her son, 13-year-old Tashawn, a muffin and soda. She herself used to pop into at Dunkin’ Donuts for two doughnuts and a latte, but when New York chain restaurants started posting calories on their menus, she stopped. “I try my best to lessen the chemicals and the fattening stuff,” she says, “but it’s hard.”

Time is just part of the problem, Davis explains, as she prepares Sunday dinner in her cheerful kitchen. Tonight she’s making fried chicken wings with bottled barbecue sauce; yellow rice from a box; black beans from a can; broccoli; and carrots, cooked in olive oil and honey. A home-cooked dinner doesn’t happen every night. On weeknights, everyone gets home, exhausted—and then there’s homework. Several nights a week, they get takeout: Chinese, or Domino’s, or McDonald’s. Davis doesn’t buy fruits and vegetables mostly because they’re too expensive, and in the markets where she usually shops, they’re not fresh. “I buy bananas and bring them home and 10 minutes later they’re no good…Whole Foods sells fresh, beautiful tomatoes,” she says. “Here, they’re packaged and full of chemicals anyway. So I mostly buy canned foods.”

In recent weeks the news in New York City has been full with a controversial proposal to ban food-stamp recipients from using their government money to buy soda. Local public-health officials insist they need to be more proactive about slowing obesity; a recent study found that 40 percent of the children in New York City’s kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms were either overweight or obese. (Nationwide, 36 percent of 6- to 11-year-olds are overweight or obese.) Opponents of the proposal call it a “nanny state” measure, another instance of government interference, and worse—of the government telling poor people what to do, as if they can’t make good decisions on their own. “I think it’s really difficult,” says Pickett, the British epidemiologist. “Everybody needs to be able to feel that they have control over what they spend. And everybody should be able to treat themselves now and again. Why shouldn’t a poor child have a birthday party with cake and soda?”

But Davis enthusiastically supports the proposal. A 9-year-old boy in her building recently died of an asthma attack, right in front of his mother. He was obese, she says, but his mom kept feeding him junk. “If these people don’t care at all about calorie counts, then the government should. People would live a lot longer,” she says.

Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, believes that Americans can fight both obesity and food insecurity by being more, well, like the French. Americans take an approach to food and eating that is unlike any other people in history. For one thing, we regard food primarily as (good or bad) nutrition. When asked “What is eating well?” Americans generally answer in the language of daily allowances: they talk about calories and carbs, fats, and sugars. They don’t see eating as a social activity, and they don’t see food—as it has been seen for millennia—as a shared resource, like a loaf of bread passed around the table. When asked “What is eating well?” the French inevitably answer in terms of “conviviality”: togetherness, intimacy, and good tastes unfolding in a predictable way.

Even more idiosyncratic than our obsession with nutrition, says Fischler, is that Americans see food choice as a matter of personal freedom, an inalienable right. Americans want to eat what they want: morels or Big Macs. They want to eat where they want, in the car or alfresco. And they want to eat when they want. With the exception of Thanksgiving, when most of us dine off the same turkey menu, we are food libertarians. In surveys, Fischler has found no single time of day (or night) when Americans predictably sit together and eat. By contrast, 54 percent of the French dine at 12:30 each day. Only 9.5 percent of the French are obese.

When I was a child I was commanded to “eat your eggs. There are starving children in Africa.” And when I was old enough to think for myself, I could easily see that my own eaten or uneaten eggs would not do a single thing to help the children of Africa. This is the Brooklyn conundrum, playing out all over the country. Locally produced food is more delicious than the stuff you get in the supermarket; it’s better for the small farmers and the farm animals; and, as a movement, it’s better for the environment. It’s easy—and probably healthy, if you can afford it—to make that choice as an individual or a family, says the New York University nutritionist Marion Nestle. Bridging the divide is much harder. “Choosing local or organic is something you can actually do. It’s very difficult for people to get involved in policy.”

Locavore activists in New York and other cities are doing what they can to help the poor with access to fresh food. Incentive programs give food-stamp recipients extra credit if they buy groceries at farmers’ markets. Food co-ops and community-garden associations are doing better urban outreach. Municipalities are establishing bus routes between poor neighborhoods and those where well-stocked supermarkets exist.

Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, says these programs are good, but they need to go much, much further. He believes, like Fischler, that the answer lies in seeing food more as a shared resource, like water, than as a consumer product, like shoes. “It’s a nuanced conversation, but I think ‘local’ or ‘organic’ as the shorthand for all things good is way too simplistic,” says Berg. “I think we need a broader conversation about scale, working conditions, and environmental impact. It’s a little too much of people buying easy virtue.”

Even the locavore hero Pollan agrees. “Essentially,” he says, “we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.” He points to Walmart’s recent announcement of a program that will put more locally grown food on its shelves as an indication that big retailers are looking to sell fresh produce in a scalable way. These fruits and vegetables might not be organic, but the goal, says Pollan, is not to be absolutist in one’s food ideology. “I argue for being conscious,” he says, “but perfectionism is an enemy of progress.” Pollan sees a future where, in an effort to fight diabetes and obesity, health-insurance companies are advocates for small and medium-size farmers. He dreams of a broad food-policy conversation in Washington.

“The food movement,” he reminds me, “is still very young.”
Berg believes that part of the answer lies in working with Big Food. The food industry hasn’t been entirely bad: it developed the technology to bring apples to Wisconsin in the middle of winter, after all. It could surely make sustainably produced fruits and vegetables affordable and available. “We need to bring social justice to bigger agriculture as well,” Berg says.

My last stop was at Jabir Suluki’s house in Clinton Hill, about two miles from my home. Suluki has toast for breakfast, with a little cheese on top, melted in the toaster oven. He is not French—he was born and raised in Brooklyn—but he might as well be. Every day, between 5 and 7, he prepares dinner for his mother and himself—and any of his nieces and nephews who happen to drop by. He prepares food with the confidence of a person descended from a long line of home cooks—which he is.

Both Suluki and his mother are diabetic. For them, healthy, regular meals are a necessity—and so he does what he can on $75 a week. “To get good food, you really got to sacrifice a lot. It’s expensive. But I take that sacrifice, because it’s worth it.” Suluki uses his food stamps at the farmers’ market. He sorts through the rotten fruit at the local supermarket. He travels to Queens, when he can get a ride, and buys cheap meat in bulk. He is adamant that it is the responsibility of parents to feed their children good food in moderate portions, and that it’s possible to do so on a fixed income.

For dinner he and his mother ate Salisbury steak made from ground turkey, with a little ground beef thrown in and melted cheese on top “because turkey doesn’t have any taste”; roasted potatoes and green peppers; and frozen green beans, “heated quickly so they still have a crunch.” For dessert, his mother ate two pieces of supermarket coffeecake.

Suluki thinks a lot about food, and the role it plays in the life of his neighbors. He doesn’t have soda in his refrigerator, but he opposes the New York City soda proposal because, in light of the government’s food and farm subsidies—and in light of all the other kinds of unhealthy cheap foods for sale in his supermarket—he sees it as hypocrisy. “You can’t force junk on people and then criticize it at the same time.” Suluki is a community organizer, and sees the web of problems before us—hunger, obesity, health—as something for the community to solve. “We can’t just attack this problem as individuals,” he tells me. “A healthy community produces healthy people.” That’s why, on the weekends, he makes a big pot of rice and beans, and brings it down to the food pantry near his house.

[Suzanne] It's a tale well told Lisa, we've a lot to learn from this in Ireland and get more aware of how food is representative of inequality.

Here's me with some sandwiches, best avoid them, I promise

Irish Independent - Smart Consumer: Do you really know how much salt is in your lunchtime sandwich?
By Suzanne CampbellThursday Nov 18 2010

Ignoring the salt cellar at the dinner table might make some of us feel that we're eating more healthily. But avoiding high blood pressure, heart disease and the consequences of eating salt is more difficult than we think as many of us eat high quantities of it without realising.
New research shows that over a teaspoon and a half of salt is eaten every day by most Irish people, causing health risks that we're completely unaware of.

The recommended intake of salt per day is no more than six grams. But the Food Safety Authority of Ireland has found that Irish adults are eating on average 10 grams of salt a day -- putting us at risk of death from heart disease and stroke.

Frequently we don't even know the salt content of many foods that we eat. Meat, fish and dairy products provide about a third of our daily salt intake, with a further 26% provided by bread and rolls.

Other foods that regularly contain high levels of salt are sauces, biscuits, confectionery and breakfast cereals.

The frustrating thing for consumers is that while we may be aware of the dangers of salt, food manufacturers don't always share the same view -- pizzas, ready-meals and the humble sandwich are some of the biggest culprits for high salt content. Sandwiches and ready-meals can contain between 25% and 50% of your daily recommended intake for salt. And using petrol stations for more than a fuel top-up may find you eating more than you bargained for.

A Topaz mixed sandwich containing cheese, chicken and stuffing has three grams of salt -- half your daily allowance. And if you go for an M&S quick dinner option, their Macaroni Cheese ready-meal has 2.4 grams of salt, more than 40% of your daily allowance. But the top score goes to M&S's 12-inch cheese and pepperoni pizza, which contains nearly six grams of salt, your total salt intake for the day.

Tesco doesn't fare much better, with their Finest range Italian salami and mozzarella sandwich containing 2.6 grams of salt, and many of their ready-meals containing half your daily allowance.
As cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in Ireland, the Irish Heart Foundation point out that reducing our intake of salt to six grams a day would save more lives from what is a widespread disease.

Pat Crowley, a GP in Co Kilkenny, explains how salt can work in the body with dangerous consequences. "When you have salt in your bloodstream, your cells have to increase the volume of blood to balance it, and that's the reason blood pressure rises."
Eating too much salt confuses the normal functioning of cells and affects how our systems are balanced.

"Sodium, chloride and potassium constantly work together so that the function of your cells are normal. If these levels are out of kilter or too high, you can develop an abnormality pretty quickly, leading to heart arrhythmia or more seriously, a heart attack."
Many of Dr Crowley's patients find tracking the salt in their diet quite difficult .

"Food manufacturers have always put salt in food as a preservative, so even if you're not sprinkling it on your food it can still be there in large amounts". Salt labelling doesn't help as it's sometimes labelled 'sodium content'. Sodium amounts are smaller than 'salt' as 1.6grams of sodium equal 4 grams of salt. So thinking a chilled Thai green curry is healthy because it has one gram of sodium on the packet isn't the case -- it actually has 2.5 grams of salt.

Indeed "healthy" food options such as wraps and salads can sometimes contain surprising amounts of salt. M&S's Crayfish and Mayo salad contains two grams of salt and their Hoisin Duck Wrap has nearly the same amount. Salad dressings are often hidden sources of salt, as are mayonnaises, sauces and other additions to "healthy" lunchtime options.

Food manufacturers like adding salt because it ties into what we expect food to taste like. But this can lead to health issues not just confined to cardiac-related problems.

"High sodium intake is also linked to osteoporosis and other conditions, so there's a range of dangers people are unaware of," says Dr Daniel McCartney from the Irish Nutrition and Dietectics Institute and lecturer in human nutrition at DIT. Food labelling can be improved -- not all sandwiches or prepared foods show either sodium or salt content and this is more difficult if you buy your sandwich from a deli counter. "At the moment it's not mandatory to label salt content in food," says McCartney. "Consumers should have the benefit of clear labelling because then they can at least make an informed choice."

One thing very clear from our survey is that food sold in garages not only had some of the highest salt content, but it's often purchased by men who are spending the day in a car -- making them a key risk group for cardiac problems. "Research shows that the more educated and affluent people are, the more knowledgeable they are about healthy eating.

"So unfortunately there are sectors of society unaware of the dangers of salt in their diet and the damage it's causing," says Dr McCartney. Taxing convenience foods, like they do in Denmark, may be one way to drive people away from high-salt foods but it could be difficult to implement.

Dr McCartney has an alternative approach. "Subsidising healthy foods might be a better way to deal with this and would be certainly easier to implement. People could then displace foods that they might have planned to eat with something healthier and cheaper."
- Suzanne Campbell
Irish Independent

Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/health-fitness/smart-consumer-do-you-really-know-how-much-salt-is-in-your-lunchtime-sandwich-2425449.html#ixzz15eETEMlh

Say cheese; iPhone app takes food pictures and counts calories

When you crave a burger you crave a burger. And sometimes not knowing exactly how many calories are in it can be a good thing. But a new iPhone app is about to put an end to all that. It guesses the calories of your meal by taking a picture of it and compares it to a database of about 100,000 foods, counting up the total and delivering the bad news directly to your phone. Yikes.

The app has been developed by Japan's NTT Communications - who else. Strangely while the Japanese are pretty nifty at technology they are also passionate about food. When I lived in Tokyo this came as a big surprise, in addition to the fact that Japanese food is heaven, and not confined to sushi and noodles. Sadly, it was also when I lived in Japan in the late nineties that Japanese girls first adopted the English word "diet". Up to that point there was no Japanese equivalent. The popularity of fast food had led to the idea of weight loss and predictably soon, being super thin became a fashion just like in Europe and the West.

So it's no surprise the app came out of Japan. It seems that all you have to do is point your phone at your plate, shoot and the app compares the food image with it's database. Currently the app is heavy on ramen and Japanese food but they're working to expand the database for food eaten accross the world. Of course they are - can you imagine how popular this is going to be? Expect every 10 year old plus girl in a MacDonald's, grimly photographing her food before she eats a quarter of it and leaves.

We know what basic food choices are bad for us so I'm conflicted on whether the development of this app is a good thing or really damaging to how we eat. At the same time, where people are trying to loose weight or face serious obesity problems, perhaps knowing the calorie count of their food is no bad thing.

The app also offers potential to link to social networks while you're counting calories, and possibly get support for your dieting. On the down side, there's nothing like a few negative responses from Facebook on your eating habits to probably throw users into a stress attack of eating even more junk food, after all, eating bad food is very often emotion related. But online support groups for dieting aren't anything new and don't need an iPhone app to make them function. Many groups offer users support and ideas for exercise plans, alternative food choices and a place to have a bit of a moan or to celebrate your success.

On twitter there are Irish followers using #twiet as a hashtag group to communicate their weight loss adventures, many of these are also food lovers and foodies and anything which connects people with common interests is surely a positive thing. Check out #irishfoodies on twitter and myself at @campbellsuz for continual food news and support for Irish food producers, restaurants and eating. Yes - actual eating, lots of it, rates pretty highly in my book. I won't be getting the new app. I think I know what's in most of what I eat, and when I don't want to know, I don't want to know.

Food producers, farmers, send your stories my way!

Apart from #cheesegate (more to follow) things have been quiet on the food news front this week as the television documentary that developed from our book is in the throes of pre-production. What this basically means is - lots of me banging the phones, hunting around the country for good food stories and looking for farmers, all over again.


This time last year we were publicising the book, and one really nice thing that stemmed from it was the huge amount of consumers, food producers and farmers who approached Philip and myself about questions they had related to food - why are there Israeli potatoes in Irish supermarkets? Why do some organic vegetables have pesticide residues? Why can I barely make a living as a farmer?


These questions have never gone away, and in the spring of next year a new documentary for RTE, presented by Philip and written by myself will investigate what we're eating in Ireland and how our shopping habits directly affect the value of our agri-food sector. We want to examine how what we eat can help Irish food production get us out of the economic mire that we're in.


One central aspect to this is our behaviour as consumers and examining the food that we buy -for example, how many of us are motivated to look for Irish produce on the supermarket shelves. One thing we're really looking for is farmers with good stories about difficulties they have had getting their product to market, and specifically into supermarkets.


This is an area sadly familiar to me, last year I was called as a witness to the Government's Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture to speak on the unfair balance of power which the multiples hold in the Irish food market. While supermarkets are part of the solution to getting a bigger market share for Irish farmers, artisan food producers and manufacturers, they can also be part of the problem. One thing we really want to feature in the documentary is these stories - I know it's difficult for farmers to talk about the hoops that supermarkets sometimes make them jump through to sell their product. Anecdotally the evidence is there - I know that it's much harder to get people to talk about it in reality, yet this is what we're looking for.


I'll keep you posted on news about the documentary as we progress, and it would be great if food producers reading this blog could pass on the word and send people my way who have good stories to tell. For my foreign readers I hope the documentary will be of interest to you when it's broadcast. It's fantastic to have such a spread of people reading this blog from around the world and keeping up with food news here and internationally. It gives me a huge thrill to see readers from Russia to Brazil, from the US to Italy and the UK visiting the blog. It's lovely to have a readerhip of people interested in what's going on in Ireland. It's indicative of how people can be so connected by a love of food and who want to see it farmed and produced properly.


We want to tell the stories at the heart of Irish food so please, anyone that feels they have something to add, get in touch!

Quick Halloween drinks suggestion

So we've had black chicken for Halloween, how about black vodka? Doesn't this look fantastic? Cool, icy and sinister, just the thing for this time of year.

Blavod is a vodka I'm just come across that's produced in the UK. It's made from distilled molasses and coloured with extracts from the Burmese black Catechu tree. Available apparently since 2004, I have yet to find an Irish supplier but you can buy it online from
http://www.drinkshop.com/.

It costs £ 14.79 which I reckon is pretty good value. It's also had some good reviews so is certified not to be pushed to the back of the drinks cabinet the following day.

The best chutney recipe ever

This time last year I vowed never to grow tomatoes again. You have to water them non-stop, re-tie them regularly as they fall over, and at the end of the day all they produce is bucket loads of green unripe fruit.

Despite lots of heartbreaking appeals to the tomato God, by last November winter was really setting in and it was time for to harvest our green, definitely not red, stock of fruit. No matter how many paper bags we put them in, or how many days they sat beside over-ripe bananas, the tomatoes just weren't ripening, then we had a piece of luck.

We found this recipe for Green Tomato Chutney on Caroline Hennessy's brilliant Bibliocook blog. I could lie and say that it was me who stumbled across it but actually it was Philip. Caroline had given our book "Basketcase" a rather nice review on her blog so in turn we decided to nab her chutney recipe and give it a go.

So finally, we had a home for all those green tomatoes. Alongside Bramley apples from the garden, a net of onions, some vinegar and sugar, we had a fabulous chutney. We put jars of it in the basement, and it kept us going all year - delicious on its own on a slice of toast or as an accompaniment to a cheese board. It has a creamy softness without that vinegary tartness that some chutneys have. It tasted fantastic, and unless our friends and family are brilliant liars, the jars dispersed to all and sundry seemed to go down very well.

And so came tomato harvest time again this year. We had three varieties - marmandes, ferlines and a cherry tomato, NONE of which ripened, despite much better sunshine this summer and a lot of care. So we gave in and took the green fruit inside once again, boiled up the tomatoes and apples and set about making the chutney.

After chopping the tomatoes and apples it's dead simple; chuck it all into a few large pots, bring it up to the boil and then leave it on some low heat and wait. The fruit softens and becomes a lovely goey chutney mix. You can probably make this with ripe tomatoes as well, so it's a nice recipe for some comfort winter food that will store well and keep you going all year. After moving house and being without a cooker for over three weeks, it was great to see pots happily simmering on the hob and steam vanishing up the extractor fan, all credit to Smeg who at least seem to at last have delivered us a cooker worth waiting for.

Now all we need is a decent phoneline and some mobile coverage, unless I start doing smoke signals from the top of the hill, we may isolated for a while. Maybe sometimes that's no bad thing...

Green Tomato Chutney

Green tomatoes - 1kg
Apples - 1.5kg, peeled, cored
Ginger - about 2cms, peeled and finely chopped
Fresh chillies - 2, finely chopped
Sultanas - 225g, chopped
Onions - 500g, chopped
Salt - 2 teaspoons
Demerara sugar - 500g
Malt vinegar - 500ml
Mustard seeds, or Dalkey mustard which we used - 1 heaped tablespoon
Put all the ingredients into a large, heavy based pan. Heat gently, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Simmer, stirring regularly, for 2-3 hours until reduced to a thick, rich pulp. When the chutney is ready you should be able to draw a wooden spoon through it and see the base of the pan for a few moments.
Decant into warmed, sterilised jars, - just simply wash them and leave them in the oven for a while to blast them germ-free. Cover and label. Store in a cool dark place, allowing to mature for at least a month before using.
Makes approximately 10 jars.

Black chicken for Halloween, anyone?

Yes it looks scary, but apparently black chicken meat is the next big thing. American chef Rick Moonen recently thrust black chicken into the spotlight after he made it into a mousse for his stint on Top Chef Masters (the US equivalent of Masterchef).

The black chicken he used is a Silkie hen - a variety of small hen which are prized for their fluffy feathers, large tassled Ugg-boot style feet and are much beloved of serious fowl fanciers who bring their beloved Silkies to shows up and down the country. I've often been told that Silkies are great layers and make lovely hens for home use, but I've never seen them on a plate before.

This particular Silkie has bones and flesh that are the shade of onyx; apparently it has a genetic combination that gives it it's unique colour, and it has a rich, gamey flavour to match.

It's a fantastic look for Halloween and I'd love to know if anyone in Ireland produces this Silkie for the pot, please let me know. Apparently the Chinese have for millenia eaten black chicken (which in China is called wu gu ji, or black-boned chicken). For them, putting the dark poultry into a stew or soup is a great remedy for curing colds, cramps, or a headache. This ties in with the Jewish tradition of using chicken soup to cure all sorts of sickness - apparently in the soup's droplets of fat lie unique qualities to boost immunity, so if someone tells you to eat chicken soup next time you're sick they may be on the right track.

So if chicken soup is a superfood, black chicken soup might even be better. Would love to get my hands on some of these black-fleshed Silkies, anyone with info, send it my way!

Have Walmart just discovered It's a Wonderful Life?

Wal-Mart, the worlds biggest food retailer has just announced a programme of investment for sustainable agriculture and to increase the amount of food it buys from small farmers. This has huge implications, including for us here in Ireland. After all, ASDA are owned by Walmart and they are waiting just over the border for the right moment to pounce down here, and possibly buy out Dunnes. To say I'm shocked with this turnaround in policy is an understatement. Did Walmart suddenly discover a DVD of It's a Wonderful Life? Is their CEO about to die and feels he must leave a legacy to the world? Is it some giant PR game? Lets look at the details -

According to today's New York Times...

"The program is intended to put more locally grown food in Wal-Mart stores in the United States, invest in training and infrastructure for small and medium-sized farmers particularly in emerging markets and begin to measure the efficiently of large suppliers in growing and getting their produce to market.

Given that Wal-Mart is the world’s largest grocer, with one of the biggest food supply chains, any changes that it makes would have wide implications. Wal-Mart’s decision five years ago to set sustainability goals that, among other things, increased its reliance on renewable energy and reduced packaging waste among its supplies, sent broad ripples through product manufacturers.

Large companies like Proctor and Gamble redesigned packages that are now also carried by other retailers, while Wal-Mart’s measurements of environmental efficiency among its suppliers helped define how they needed to change.

“No other retailer has the ability to make more of a difference than Wal-Mart,” Wal-Mart’s president and chief executive Michael T. Duke, said at a meeting Thursday morning, according to prepared remarks. “Grocery is more than half of Wal-Mart’s business. Yet only four of our 39 public sustainability goals address food.”

Ok, back to me - it's still sounding too good to be true. Up until now it's been in Walmarts interest to squeeze suppliers on margin until they can barely survive and keep the price of food down. There have been mountains of PhDs written about the devastating effect they have had on everything from farming and the environment to the shape of small towns in America. I'm afraid I'm suspicious about all this but lets face it, their financial commitments are a drop in the ocean to their normal spend and the changes won't be fully met until the end of 2015.

Back to the New York Times -

In the United States, Wal-Mart will double the percentage of locally grown produce, to 9 percent, the company said. Wal-Mart defines local produce as that grown and sold in the same state. Still, the program is far less ambitious than in some other countries — in Canada, for instance, where Wal-Mart expects to buy 30 percent of produce locally by the end of 2013, and, when local produce is available, increase that to 100 percent.

In emerging markets, Wal-Mart has pledged to sell $1 billion of food from small and medium farmers (which it defines as farmers with fewer than 20 hectares or about 50 acres). It will also provide training for the farmers and their laborers on how to choose crops that are in demand as well as the proper application of water and pesticides.

Both in the United States and globally, Wal-Mart will invest more than $1 billion to improve its perishable supply chain. For example, if trucks, trains and distribution centers could help farmers in l Minnesota get crops to Wal-Mart more quickly, the result would be less spoiled food, a longer shelf life, and presumably more profit for both the farmer and for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart said it planned to reduce food waste in emerging-market stores by 15 percent, and in other stores by 10 percent.

As it did in the environmental arena, it will begin creating an agriculture-specific index to figure out how to measure waste and efficiency among produce suppliers. It will be asking its biggest producers to answer questions about water, fertilizer and chemical use. The eventual goal is to include that information in a sustainability rating that customers would see, so they could decide whether to choose one avocado over another based on how much waste it had created. Wal-Mart would also use the information when it decides from whom to buy.

Finally, it announced specific sourcing guidelines, including that sustainably sourced palm oil be used in all its private-label products (the Wal-Mart house brands) and that any beef it sells not contribute to the deforestation of the Amazon because of cattle-ranching expansion.

“When we do this on Wal-Mart’s scale, we can deliver a global food supply that improves health and livelihoods around the world,” Leslie A. Dach, executive vice president for corporate affairs, said, according to prepared remarks.

While the over all goals include Sam’s Club, the warehouse-store wing of Wal-Mart, that division also has goals specific to it: It will increase sales of fair-trade certified produce and flowers by 15 percent, require all seafood suppliers to become certified as sustainable, and reduce food waste in clubs and distribution centers by 11 percent annually.

Environmental and agricultural specialists who had worked with Wal-Mart on the program said a few items stood out.

Beginning to measure how farms produced food, with the sustainability index, was a big step, they said.
“The impact of not just Wal-Mart but the entire food and agricultural sector starting to define what is acceptable practice in their supply chain, and then what is unacceptable practice, will move agricultural producers en masse,” said Marty Matlock, a professor of ecological engineering at the University of Arkansas. “The index represents a real number that will mean improvement on the ground: improving ecosystem health, soil health and food quality.”
“This is huge,” said Michelle Mauthe Harvey, project manager for the corporate partnerships program at Environmental Defense Fund. “Once people are asked those questions, if they haven’t been measuring, they measure more.”
“Knowing what’s embedded in the food before it ever leaves the farm is really significant, because then you can begin to embrace better practices, you can begin to identify opportunities for improvement.”
Ms. Harvey said the investment into infrastructure was also a big step forward.
“The majority of efforts have tended toward some local sourcing, and you had a fairly active effort around organics” among other grocers, Ms. Harvey said, but there was a gap between support for local farmers and how those farmers would find transportation or warehouses for their food.
“Our agricultural system over the last three to four decades, as we’ve moved to reliance on key locations like California and Florida,” she said, “we’ve made it very difficult for local farmers to actually get their food to market.”

Back to me - either way, this is mega news. What's motivating their decision is what's really of interest. Are they afraid that after the recent recall of billions of eggs in the US, swine flu and avian flu that they will eventually poison half of us with factory farmed food and leave the market with no alternative?

The cynical part of me says its all about market share. Walmart/ASDA know customers are getting more copped on about food and don't want something as cheap as chips if it might possibly kill them. So they're getting in there before it's too late. But let's watch this space, I get a large smell of greenwashing from this, Tesco have tried this game before and it doesn't work. Lets just say I'll keep a close eye on their progress and let you all know how its going. Walmart turning into environmental guardian angel? Yeah. Let's see what actually happens.

Red meat - the most intense nutrient-rich food available to human beings

A new take on meat - my piece in today's Irish Independent

With celebrities from Paul McCartney to Star Wars actress Natalie Portman telling us to eat less meat, switching our shopping habits towards a vegetarian diet is one of the pieces of advice dominating the food world right now.

The rise in obesity levels combined with the unsustainable nature of beef production means that consumers are now encouraged to limit the quantity of meat they eat and turn instead to buying more vegetables, fish and meat alternatives.

But a new book by Irish butcher Pat Whelan argues that going back to the old-fashioned staples of our traditional diet; eating plenty of beef, pork and lamb is not only a healthy choice but one essential to our wellbeing. Whelan, who is the fifth generation of his family to be involved in meat production, runs a butcher shop in Clonmel, Co Tipperary and his knowledge of meat from farm to fork has earned him a Rick Stein Food Hero award.

In his book "An Irish Butcher Shop", Whelan argues that one of the reasons consumers find it easy to turn away from meat is a lack of knowledge on how to prepare it and an over reliance on inferior quality meat sold in plastic packaging in supermarkets.
He points out that beef should not be sitting in a pool of its own blood in a plastic box, and that everything about the mass production of meat and the way it's marketed to consumers is contrary to the core benefits and joys of eating it.

He argues that instead of turning away from meat, we should be appreciating its unique benefits -- red meat is the single most intense nutrient-rich food available to human beings. It's a crucial source of iron and trace elements such as zinc and copper, as well as vitamins B12 and B6.
Fat on meat is also something we shouldn't be afraid of -- it is fundamental to the taste and tenderness of the finished product.

Irish beef that is fed on pasture develops a good covering of fat which gives it great flavour. Because it's grass-fed, this makes the meat a high quality, close to organic product. Meat from grass-fed animals has up to four times more omega-3 fatty acids than meat from grain fed animals. It is also the richest known source of CLA or "conjugated linoleic acid"; an exceptional omega-6 fat which has been attributed with antioxidant and anti-cancer properties.
Most of the current opposition to beef consumption is related to cattle "feed lots" -- vast industrial-scale feeding units found typically in the US but now growing in popularity in India and China. Here animals live on a regime rich in maize and cereals which is not their natural diet.
As the appetite for beef grows across the world, we have to produce more cereals (wheat, barley and so on) to make the animal feed that cattle eat.

In many developing countries, feeding cattle (or chicken and pork in large quantities) takes other foods and water resources out of the food chain. Put simply, if everyone across the world adapted to the 'Western Diet', we'd run out of many foodstuffs, and water.

Farm animals also produce more than 10% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions but new approaches to the anti-meat argument such as Simon Fairlie's book -- Meat: A Benign Extravagance has swayed even the hardened environmentalists such as best-selling author George Monbiot back towards eating meat. Fairlie argues that it's specifically feed-lot production of cattle that reduces the world's food supply and that what we should be doing is eating meat but simply less of it.

In Ireland the situation is very different; cattle and sheep roam outdoors and eat grass which is in plentiful supply, so the beef and lamb we eat takes a minimum of inputs and is fairly sustainable.

However, most pigs and poultry in Ireland are farmed in intensive indoor units where the quality of the animals' lives is poor and again they are eating a cereal based diet.
Ireland comes closest to factory farming in these pig and chicken "units"; vast indoor sheds packed densely with animals.

The intensive production of chicken and pork over decades has also affected what we're getting on our plate -- pigs are slaughtered at about seven months old, and unfortunately quality and flavour of modern pork has been affected by the breeding of faster maturing pigs. So the consumer pays the price with an inferior-tasting product.

The bacon and rashers most of us eat have been injected with brine, and can often contain more water than meat content. So while we think mass-produced cheap rashers are good value, if they end up a third of their original size after cooking then it's a bad deal.

You might get better value from an artisan-produced pork that's more expensive raw but yields more meat when cooked. One way to keep both sides happy is to continue to eat meat but put more thought into what we buy.

Pat's book is full of recipes for everything from 'pot-roasted shoulder of lamb' to 'boozy rabbit with prunes'.

His advice is to vary what you buy from the old staples of sirloin, fillet, lamb cutlets, pork chops and rashers. Try new cuts and free-range or artisan products occasionally. The pay-off is in quality, taste and ultimately better value for money.

An Irish Butcher Shop by Pat Whelan, published by Collins Press. Suzanne Campbell's food blog is at www.basketcase theblog.blogspot.com
- Suzanne Campbell
Irish Independent

The worlds first Twitter cookbook

For those of us who sometimes like our food in a hurry, Twitter is one way to share recipes for the tactfully short-handed and poetically brief.

And yes, it is possible to describe a recipe in 140 characters. American amateur cook, Maureen Evans has got pretty good at it - so good, in fact, that she developed the first ever Twitter cookbook.

Released last month, Eat Tweet (Artisan US) compiles more than 1,000 tweeted recipes from Evans' @cookbook account, which she still updates with new creations, like Whisky Apples, Roasted Tomato Sauce or Eggs Berlin: shallots, thyme, lemon, pumpkin and poached eggs. (This sounds really nice actually, I may be making it myself.)

Here's an example of how she works - "3c shallot/⅓c olvoil h@low; +6c zuke 20m@low to tender; +¼t thyme/lem&garlc/s+p. Top 4pce pumpernickel tst; +4poachedegg/basil." For those who might be wary of translating what she calls Twitterese, Evans has posted eighteen decoded recipes on her Huffington Post blog, including Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon.

Thankfully the book also contains a dictionary of terms like tst (toasted), and I have to say this is really needed for people who are mentally challenged and still can't figure out what "c" stands for above. Evan wrote on The Huffington Post site, "The abbreviated form might be a little intimidating at first, but with the aid of the glossary, it will soon become like a second language for you."

Once you start looking at her twitter account (@cookbook) it gets kind of addictive and there's loads of stuff there which sounds mouthwatering, impossible as that sounds in 140 characters with no pictures. I guess some technologies have made our imaginations work harder - I'm not saying twitter-length recipes will take over the world but as a means to impart cooking information quickly or to share recipes there can't be a better tool, all we have to do is learn a little more of Twitterese.

Doh! just realised that "c" is cup. Nobel prize for deciphering abbreviated English landing in my postbox any moment. For food news, recipes, links and an attempt at occasional humour I'm also on twitter - @campbellsuz

Is being a foodie just another kind of elitism?

I rarely publish other material here but this piece from American farmer and local food campaigner Joel Salatin was just too good not to draw attention to. He asks the question - if you're interested in good food, how should you reply when you're labelled an elitist?

His responds to the "elitist" charge with an analysis of why good food is more expensive than commercial, subsidy-aided manufactured produce. His arguments are arresting, and form what's basically a synopsis of the pressures many Irish food producers and farmers are under continually to compete with the food giants of America and Europe.

Joel writes from an American perspective where things are pretty bad for small farmers, it makes me think again how impossible it is to survive in America if you're not one of the food conglomerates, and makes it all the more remarkable that anyone even tries. People like this make us here in Ireland look very lucky indeed. See what you think and let me know your views.

The full piece can be found at http://flavormagazinevirginia.com/foodie-elitism/ here's a synopsis -

Rebel with a cause- food elitism?

Because high-quality local food often carries a higher price tag than food generated by the industrial system, the charge of elitism coming from fans of industrial food is often vitriolic, and embarrassed foodies agonise over it. For all their positive energy surrounding food, I’ve found latent guilt among this group — guilt for paying more for local food when others are starving, guilt for caring about taste when others would happily eat anything. Instead of cowering in self-guilt, let’s confront the issue of prices head on.

Why It’s Worth It

First, it’s better food. It tastes better. It handles better. And it’s safer: Anyone buying chemicalized, drug-infused food is engaging in risky behavior. It’s also nutritionally superior. For those willing to see, scientific data shows fresh foods’ conjugated linoleic acid, vitamins, minerals, brix readings, omega 3–omega 6 ratios, and polyunsaturated fat profiles are empirically superior. Better stuff is worth more.

Second, economies of scale will continue to progress as more people buy local food, which will bring prices down. The collaborative aggregation and distribution networks that have been fine-tuned by mega-food companies can and will be duplicated locally as volume increases and regional food systems get more creative.

Third, eating unprocessed foods is the best way to bring down your grocery bill, regardless of where the food originated. A 10-pound bag of potatoes costs the same as a 1-pound bag of potato chips. Cultivating domestic culinary arts and actually reinhabiting our kitchens—which we’ve remodeled and gadgetised at great cost—can wean all of us away from expensive processed food. A whole pound of our farm’s grass-finished ground beef, which can feed four adults, costs about the same as a Happy Meal. (And guess which one is more healthy?)

Fourth, non-scalable government regulations—which are designed to protect eaters from the dangers inherent in the industrial food complex but are not relevant in a transparent, regional food system—inordinately discriminate against smaller processing businesses like abattoirs, kitchens, and canneries, because the costs of complying with the (inappropriate) paperwork and infrastructure requirements cannot be spread out over a large volume of product. These regulations lead to price prejudice at the community-based scale: Small processors are at a disadvantage because they must pass those costs on to consumers, making their products more expensive than the mass-produced ones. These burdensome regulations also discourage entrepreneurs from entering local food commerce.

Fifth, unlike huge, single-crop or single-animal farms, diversified farms like ours do not receive government subsidies. Nor do the production, processing, and marketing of our food create collateral damage like that caused by factory farming—damage left for taxpayers to fix. Subsidies and government clean-up measures are not included in the price you pay for processed food at the grocery store, but if they were, local food would not seem so expensive in comparison.

Consider the Rhode Island–sized area in the Gulf of Mexico now known as a “dead zone” because nothing can survive in the oxygen-starved water, a result of manure and pesticide runoff. Who pays for the clean up and the reversal efforts? Who pays to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria like MRSA, caused by the overuse of antibiotics in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations)? Who pays to treat people with Type II diabetes, which they get from consuming processed food that is sold cheaply because the corporations making it have received subsidies? Who pays to clean up stinky rural neighborhoods with densely populated poultry and livestock compounds? And what is the value of the land irreversibly damaged by bad farming practices?

Sixth—and this is where I wanted to head with this discussion—plenty of money already exists in our economic system to pay for good food. Can you think of anything people buy that they don’t need? Tobacco products, $100 designer jeans with holes already in the knees, KFC, soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup, Disney vacations, large-screen TVs, jarred baby food? America spends more on veterinary care for pets than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.

I won’t labour the point, but if you took all the money people spend on unnecessary baubles and junk food, it would be enough for everyone to eat like kings. We could all be elitists.
With that money, we could create a world where all the people eat food that is above average. Almost everyone I know who owns a community supported agriculture (CSA) share could afford to purchase an extra one for an impoverished family. And if you had to give up a few $4 lattes to do it? What a pity.

Spare Change?

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think we need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves. Don’t complain about being unable to afford high-quality local food when your grocery cart is full of beer, cigarettes, and People magazine. Most people are more connected to the celebrities in People than the food that will become flesh of their flesh and bone of their bones at the next meal.

The other day I saw precooked bacon in a box at the supermarket—for $30 a pound. Do we really have to buy precooked bacon? If you took the average shopping cart in the checkout line and tossed out all the processed food—everything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce, everything you can’t re-create in your kitchen, and everything that won’t rot—and substituted instead locally sourced, fresh items, you would be dollars ahead and immensely healthier.
We can all do better. If we can find money for movies, ski trips, and recreational cruises, surely we can find the money to purchase integrity food. The fact is that most of us scrounge together enough pennies to fund the passion of our hearts. If we would cultivate a passion for food like the one we’ve cultivated for clothes, cars, and entertainment, perhaps we would ultimately live healthier, happier lives.

Embracing Elitism
To suggest that advocating for such a change makes me an elitist is to disparage positive decision making and behaviour. Indeed, if that’s elitism, I want it. The victim mentality our culture encourages actually induces guilt among people making progress. That’s crazy. We should applaud positive behavior and encourage others to follow suit, not demonize and discourage it. Would it be better to applaud people who buy amalgamated, reconstituted, fumigated, irradiated, genetically modified industrial garbage?

The charge of elitism is both unfair and silly. We foodies are cultural change agents, positive innovators, integrity seekers. So hold your head high and don’t apologize for making noble decisions.

Food that's a little too wild to eat

It's nice to have food in the garden this time of year but perhaps not the Fly Agaric mushroom. Styled by Walt Disney; it's poisonous, psychoactive and great news if you own a head shop, but not if you've a toddler who wanders round the garden in the tutelage of a mentally challenged Labrador. So I need to get rid of it, fast.

Popular as a hallucinogenic it's not famous by accident. Fly Agaric was used popularly to kill flies but its real claim to fame is that vikings were fond of it to jizz themselves up for battle. They reckoned it was too strong to be eaten raw so fed the mushroom to reindeer and then drank the deer's urine to limit the effects.

And in our garden, unfortunately it's not alone, there's a whole nightclub of mushrooms partying on the lawn at the moment, including lots of "magic mushrooms" of different types, we counted over twenty varieties before giving up. From peering into my wildlife book, it looks that we have Orange Peel, Butter Cap, Tawny Grisette, Shaggy ink cap, Sulphur tuft, Bay Bollette, Sickener (no surprise - poisonous), Rose Russula and Chanterelles which are very nice to eat indeed.

While I've gathered and cooked the common white mushroom before, I dithered over whether to cook any of the stuff in the garden - it's simply too hard to identify which is poisonous or not, and some of them looked like death caps. There were a ring of what looked like fairy ring champingnon but again I bottled it when it came to eating them. I know that at this time of year there are mushroom gathering days around the country to help identify what gems you might have in your garden, but without this expert advice I decided not to chance it.

My father who knows a bit about mushrooms looked at me in shock when I told him I was going to cook the fairy ring mushrooms. He's suspicious of anything that grows in a circle, maybe he's right, lots of nasty things grow in circles - like ringworm. His warning worked and I didn't eat them. In fact we gathered the whole lot off the lawn and filled two barrow loads before we gave up for the day. There are literally hundreds still growing, and they will probably continue to appear over the next few months. If it weren't for the baby I would be happy to leave them be.

This is one of the dilemmas with wild food - I'd much rather gather food on my doorstep then have to pay for it elsewhere, but foraging takes knowledge and experience, otherwise you could find yourself in A&E getting your stomach pumped. And in respect of many mushrooms; some foods are just too wild to tolerate inside, or outside your kitchen.

It's not just our banking crisis that's brought Ireland under the gaze of the international media

As a countryside lover it's easy to fall in love with horses, and if you ride or look after these lovely animals its very hard to ignore the huge welfare problem we have in the horse sector in Ireland.

Today the Irish Times published a piece I've written for them on the complex and ugly issue of equine welfare and why no one is willing to take ownership of it. I really hope it brings some pressure to bear on the department of Agriculture to provide emergency funding to the horse charities this Winter or to provide a cull scheme, ideally both.

If the problem is being reported as far away as Switzerland and New Zealand, it's clear we've a crisis on our hands. If we don't sort it out our image of being a horse loving, and great horse producing nation we only have ourselves; the Irish to blame. Please, Government bodies, help us do something about it.


Piece is linked here or read the whole feature below -
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0928/1224279819356.html






The number of starved and abused horses is rising. As winter approaches and charities are forced to turn animals away, is a cull the only way to clean up Ireland's horse welfare mess? Suzanne Campbell reports

IN A STABLE yard in Co Wicklow, a small, emaciated thoroughbred mare stands dejectedly with her head almost touching the straw. Much of her coat has fallen out and her spine and ribs protrude from distended skin resembling the bare timbers of a boat.

“This mare is typical of what we’re seeing at the moment,” says Sharon Newsome, who runs the yard. “She’s starved, but actually she’s a well-bred horse.” In another time the pretty filly would probably have been in training on the Curragh – but not today.

Newsome runs the Irish Horse Welfare Trust (IHWT), a charity under immense pressure to clean up the mess left behind by the Celtic Tiger’s surge in horse ownership. While in the past decade the leisure horse industry flourished, it was racing which really expanded, as hundreds of syndicates of both elite and ordinary folk seized their moment to live the dream. From 2001 to 2006 the number of racehorses in training in Ireland increased by 22 per cent. When the economy collapsed, trainers’ fees weren’t paid and fields full of horses suddenly had no owners. Culling horses may now be the only way to reduce the number of cases of starvation and abuse.

Alongside our banking woes, Ireland’s horse welfare crisis has put us under the gaze of the international media. Earlier this month the Sunday Telegraph joined Swiss Television (Schweizer Fernsehen) and Horse and Hound magazine in airing Ireland’s horse welfare problems. To read in a foreign newspaper that a horse in Dublin “was recently found with its legs bound, sunk to the bottom of a river” is to be presented with an image at odds with the sleek and glossy one that the €1 billion Irish horse industry likes to present.

As winter approaches, welfare groups project that hundreds of abandoned and starving horses will be found countrywide. In the case of the thoroughbred mare rescued by the IHWT, her owner was an elderly man who didn’t want to part with her even when a member of the public called gardaí and asked them to seize the horse.

“The problem is that now we have no room for even seized animals – the bad cruelty cases or starved horses like this one,” says Newsome. “I dread answering the phone or looking at our email because there are so many people desperate to get rid of horses.”



Horse ownership “is like a disease in this country”, says Paddy Wall, one of the writers of a UCD report on the welfare problems currently tarnishing the sector. While in the boom years everyone wanted to be part of the sport of kings, the recession hit horses particularly badly.
Over the past two years many animals went to the sales but came home unsold or went for well below their asking price. This brought them into the ownership of people who could afford to buy a horse for a few hundred euro but not the thousands of euro it takes to keep one over its lifetime.
Since 2007, well-bred racehorses and showjumpers have started to change hands for less than it would cost to feed them for a year. A fit thoroughbred was recently sold out of a training yard in Co Kildare for €200. As this reality hit home, some owners trade them on down the chain to those even less capable of looking after them. Then last winter the crisis truly hit.
“Last year was worse than I could have imagined,” says Newsome. “The bad weather meant there was no grazing and animals were left to starve or set loose on bogs or mountains if the owners didn’t want to be prosecuted. There is no facility where they can go. We’re the only dedicated horse charity in the country, and the few local authority pounds can barely cope.”
ISPCA CENTRES HAVE also seen a huge surge in the number of people contacting them about abandoned horses. “In 2008 we had 408 phone calls about horses, then last year we had 1,100,” says the organisation’s chairwoman, Barbara Bent. “Already this year we’ve had hundreds of rescue cases. We can’t take on any more animals and I don’t know what’s going to happen once the summer grass runs out.”
It is not only to welfare groups that the crisis is evident. The UCD report, published this summer, recognises the problem is “a human one, not a horse one”, as Wall puts it. Welfare issues exist across all sections of the industry, from National Hunt racing to horse fairs. The report identifies over-production of horses, lack of traceability in the system, poor understanding of the costs of horse care, all exacerbated by the effects of the economic crash, as the key factors in bringing horse welfare to crisis point.
“This is not a popular message, but it doesn’t get us past the fact that this is a difficult situation,” says Joe Collins, co-author of the UCD report. “Energy can be spent talking about it, but it’s no substitute for action.”
Prosecuting owners for cruelty doesn’t seem to be the way to get people to buy feed for their animals. The courts can take 18 months or more to turn around a cruelty case, and the fines are small. “The legislation is a hundred years old and the penalties are too small,” says Bent. “Unless we really do something about this problem, Ireland is going to lose its good name as a horse producer – and we need to protect that name.”
Three weeks ago, on a housing estate in Co Wicklow, a welfare officer from the IHWT identified a black and white gelding left to starve in the garden of a boarded-up house. It appeared to have been stabbed in the chest. As it was being removed, the horse’s two teenage owners arrived in a highly emotional state. “You’re not taking this horse, get away from my horse,” they yelled, jostling the three gardaí who had arrived to help out the welfare officer.
It emerged the teenagers had bought the animal for €100 from a 10-year-old boy standing in the middle of a roundabout the week before. It was untrained, and neither of them had any experience to turn it into a riding horse. But the lure of horse-owning status outweighed such practical considerations.
Coaxing by the gardaí and the IHWT officer eventually won out and the two lads relented, admitting they wouldn’t be able to feed the animal. As for the stab wound and other scars on the horse’s flanks, the teenagers were adamant it wasn’t them but that some of “the other lads round here” weren’t as nice to their horses as they were.
The gelding is now awaiting a new home. His story may yet end happily, but that’s not the case for the ponies driven in harness on roads, at high speeds, until they drop dead. The over-supply of horses has diminished their value and, in a world where value brings respect, this can be fatal. The Dublin SPCA reports horses changing hands at Smithfield market for as little as €20, or being swapped for mobile phones. When an animal’s life is so cheap it’s not hard to imagine why a teenager might choose to ride it to death for sport.
At an Oireachtas Agriculture Committee meeting this summer, TDs listened to expert opinion from the horse sector predicting a disastrous winter ahead.
Some witnesses, including RTÉ racing pundit Ted Walsh, explained to the committee that euthanasia can cost up to €300 per horse in Ireland, and that many owners will therefore abandon an animal instead. If a horse has a “clean passport” – meaning that it hasn’t received drugs in its lifetime which make it unfit for human consumption – it can go to a meat factory, where it will be humanely killed. Its meat will then go into the food chain destined for Europe. However, few of the horses affected by the current crisis have passports.
One of the solutions is a cull scheme, involving a once-off amnesty whereby the State would absorb the cost of humanely destroying unwanted animals. As draconian as it sounds, to put a horse down in such a way is better than making it endure a slow death by starvation.
Fine Gael’s agriculture spokesman Andrew Doyle is adamant that a cull is needed to take horses out of the system. “There should be some sort of incentive for people to bring unwanted horses forward rather than being prosecuted later for cruelty,” he says.
Another option would be to look for a derogation from the regulations on horses going into the food chain to permit animals without passports to go the meat-factory route.
“If you do a cull for a year or so, the problem is dealt with and you won’t have to do it againsays Doyle. “It’s in our face now – we’ve a whole load of unwanted animals that no one wants to know about and if we don’t so something quickly the outcome won’t be good.”
The Department of Agriculture acknowledges the current welfare problem but its view on a cull is that it’s “not an appropriate approach as such an initiative would not necessarily result in the slaughter of the target population – ie, those horses that are most vulnerable”.
The department has approved five meat plants around the country for horse slaughter, but these facilities can only take animals with clean passports so they can join the food chain. The average horse starving on a bog or a housing estate is not the type of animal that has a passport.
While the TDs on the Agriculture Committee may call for a cull, will they have the appetite to lobby the department after the political brawl caused by recent legislative moves against dog breeding and stag hunting? Cork TD Christy O’Sullivan (FF), for one, is adamant that a cull is the only route to take.
“I’ve cross-party support on this and I want to see the problem addressed rather than get worse,” he says. “We’re all part of the problem.”
A world away from Leinster House, Sharon Newsome views the possibility of such a scheme with scepticism. “We went to the Minister for Agriculture in October 2009, with industry bodies, and told them that this problem was coming. Then we said this problem is here. Now we have a UCD report backing up the evidence we are seeing on the ground, but what is it going to take to get something done?” she says.
Ireland may be the land of the horse, but the horse welfare mess we’ve created has yet to find an owner

And I thought salmon was naturally that colour

Smart Consumer: The unpalatable truth about the salmon on your plate
By Suzanne Campbell
Thursday September 23 2010



Close your eyes and picture a salmon. Odds are that you think of a gleaming muscular fish leaping up a river in full flood. It's this image which informs our decision making at the fish counter.



We also think of salmon as a healthy food -- rich in omega-3 fish oils and a tasty source of low-fat protein. But a new book by American food writer Paul Greenberg probes into the image of salmon, revealing some uncomfortable truths about Ireland's favourite fish.
More than 99% of the salmon sitting on Irish supermarket counters and in delicatessens is farmed.



Some of it is Irish fish but most of what we eat originates in Scotland or Norway.
Wild salmon is scarce around the world and with the ban on drift netting in Ireland, it's now out of reach for most of us and will only appear on the menus of very good restaurants or in small quantities at specialised fishmongers.



The fact that we are eating almost exclusively farmed salmon doesn't seem to affect our appetites for it. What Greenberg points out is that while salmon has obvious health benefits, questions have to be asked about what eating farmed salmon does to the availability of other fish. The book also shows how our demand for cod, tuna and sea bass led to their shrinking availability.



But for Irish consumers who return to the fish counter again and again for salmon, what does he say about how healthy a choice it really is? Salmon from fish farms are artificially spawned, reared in pens with thousands of other fish all swimming tightly together in circles and fed a diet that contains colorants to make its flesh pink. There's little natural about a farmed salmon except that it's still living in water.



Even less appetising is that farmed salmon are fed pellets made from ground-up wild fish, mixed with soya and cereals -- not quite its natural diet. The pellets also contain a pigment to colour the salmon's flesh; the tone depends on the country the fish is destined for. So you'll find farmed salmon in South America very red in colour, whereas we in Ireland prefer it a soft pink.
Critics of farmed salmon find this 'Dulux colour card' approach enough reason to boycott it, but the fish farming sector claims that the colourant is nothing more than a natural carotenoid pigment named astaxanthin; exactly the same molecule that wild salmon get from eating small shellfish.



Astaxanthin is now made in a laboratory rather than by shellfish, so what are we worried about? Aren't many of the foods that we eat artificially coloured? Or is it just that colouring the flesh of live animals crosses some kind of line?



Of more impact is the colossal amount of other fish species that go into creating the fish pellets farmed salmon eat. Greenberg points out that it takes up to six pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of salmon and that part of the problem with the world's diminishing fish stocks is this hoovering up of other species to feed our insatiable appetite for pink fish.



The farmed salmon currently on our fish counters has also been genetically selected to have a quicker growth rate. Since the Norwegians pioneered farming salmon on a mass scale they've engineered a fish that has double the growth rate of wild salmon. This super salmon matures faster and dominates salmon production across the world, so much so that three billion pounds of farmed salmon are produced globally; three times the amount of wild fish harvested.
While this may be hailed as a breakthrough by fish breeders, this immense salmon production has been at the cost of the nine billion pounds of wild fish that have been caught and ground into pellets to feed them.



Greenberg points out that as humans have been farming salmon since the 15th Century you'd think we'd have got it right by now, but sadly mistakes have been made.
Blood meal from chickens was routinely fed to salmon to provide micro nutrients and only banned after BSE came to light. Fish were also crammed into cages that were too small and sea lice proliferated, affecting other species.



In Ireland, Scotland and Norway, studies found that the presence of salmon farms increased the level of sea lice infestation on sea trout. It also badly affected Irish wild salmon.
But most detrimental to the image of farmed salmon was the extent to which they were found to contain PCBs -- polychlorinated biphenyls, which came to light in a report published in 2004.
PCBs are toxins which have found their way into fish from run-off into rivers of waste from manufacturing plants. They accumulate progressively over time meaning that those at the top of the food chain -- humans -- are exposed to the highest levels.



In the research published in the journal Science, farmed salmon was found to contain higher concentrations of PCBs than its wild counterpart. PCBs were subsequently banned, but not before confidence in farmed salmon had taken a hit. Many Irish fishermen still claim that the waste from salmon cages is not sufficiently washed out to sea and affects the local environment as waste pellets and faeces fall through the nets onto the seabed underneath. The Irish fish farming sector claims it's one of the cleanest in Europe as it is located in strong Atlantic seas which quickly get rid of the waste.



How to spot the best fish over the counter -

Salmon farming will continue to grow all over the world, despite its detractors. If you want to still eat fish with strong health benefits that doesn't wipe out our future choices of seafood, here are some alternatives.

For fish rich in Omega-3 oils, buy anchovies, sardines and mackerel. Mackerel and herring have healthy populations in Irish seas and have plenty of flavour; even when grilled and served with a simple salad.

Ling, blossom and coley are cheap substitutes for cod. They are so close in flavour, texture and appearance to cod that they have been found to be labelled and sold as their more expensive cousin.

If you really want salmon, ask for salmon that's farmed in Ireland at the fish counter of your supermarket or delicatessen. 75% of salmon produced in Ireland is organically certified, so not only is the cereal feed organic, the fish component of the pellets is of a low percentage and comes from monitored fish stocks. The stocking density in organic salmon cages is also less dense.

Buy fish in M&S -- they have been rated the leading retailer for responsible fishing by Greenpeace and only stock tuna caught by the pole and line system which is more sustainable.

Look out for the Bord Bia Seafood Circle mark at the supermarket fish counter or at the fish mongers. These fish sellers are the most educated in terms of the quality and source of the fish that they stock, and can give you the best information about what's fresh, in season and how to cook it.

Suzanne Campbell for The Irish Independent



Four Fish by Paul Greenberg is published by Penguin. Suzanne Campbell's food blog is at www.basketcasetheblog.blogspot.com