A new food labeling system has been established in certain cafeterias, called “Green Light, Red Light, Eat Right”; they are putting green, yellow, and red stickers on foods to encourage healthier eating. Foods with green stickers are deemed healthy, foods with yellow stickers are less healthy, and food with red stickers are unhealthy. While I like the idea of this system, I am skeptical of certain aspects. How do they determine which foods they put each sticker on? There is an inevitable risk in this design. Consumers won’t have to make healthy eating decisions; it is likely they will rely solely on what the cafeteria labels as healthy when selecting food, allowing for bias to be made by the cafeteria. If this system ever becomes well-established in our society, it could be easily tainted by producers buying the “rights” to green stickers.
Category: Uncategorized (Page 9 of 10)
I follow a lot of health/environmental pages on Facebook (my favorite definitely being March Against Monsanto, it’s wonderful) and today I was scrolling and found this recipe for sustainable deodorant. While it’s a short article and I have a few weeks until I can try it (I have quite the supply of coconut oil at home, so I’m pretty pumped, it’s a wonderful butter substitute) it definitely made me think.
When we think about animal products, it’s typically in the form of food. Yet many of our day to day products especially beauty products originate from animals. This combined with the fact that people still use animal testing leads to a lot of harm towards our very own ecosystem. Using plant based materials rather than animal ones even in something as simple as deodorant allows us to solve human problems without ruining other lives.
In the Science section of the New York Times, I found an interesting article, “Testing Future Conditions for the Food Chain”(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/science/testing-future-conditions-for-the-food-chain.html). Scientists have been looking more closely at corn plants, and it’s clear that they have suffered some damage. This comes in the form of streaked, yellowing leaves, which represents not only current possible crop failures, but long-term issues relating to food supply during global warming. Researchers have begun mimicking expected growing conditions in the upcoming decades, using pipes to release pollutants & lamps to mimic droughts/heat waves. They have come up with the alarming conclusion that due to these changed conditions, the crops will be seriously nutrient-deficient. How is it possible to make crops more resilient? Yes, there will be regions of the world that benefit from global warming (in terms of growing crops), but we have failed to consider the effects of the increase in carbon dioxide. In general, it must be realized that the negative effects of climate change will completely outweigh the positive effects. There is no way around that. Researchers are now focusing more on ozone because they believe it will be easier to control. But it’s impossible to completely predict damage to agriculture on a warming planet. The ultimate goal now is to figure out how to make these crops stand up to the changing climate, and that is clearly not an easy task.
Over the past two days, I watched the documentary “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead”. It starts out with Joe Cross, a man who is 100 pounds overweight and struggling with an autoimmune disease. He notices how dependent he has become on medications and how poorly he eats, and realizes that a healthier diet could aid him with both his weight and disease. This jumpstarts his sixty day fast, whee he consumes nothing but juice made from natural fruits and vegetables. Not only does he lose over eighty pounds in that time, but he feels more energy and does not need to take his medications. This inspires him to spread the word of juicing, which leads into the story of Phil Staples.
Cross is traveling around the country sharing his success when he runs into Phil Staples. Staples is a 429 pound truck driver who has been living on fast food and living with the same rare disease as Cross. After years of knowing no one with this condition, it was incredible how the paths of these two men met. Staples tries some of Cross’s juice, and the two men exchange numbers with Cross offering to help Staples at any time. Months later, Cross is home in Australia when he receives a terrifying phone call from Staples, who is “one cheeseburger away from death”. Cross shows Staples the way in terms of regaining his health, and for the first time in years Staples is able to enjoy time with his son and have a regulated healthy diet.
This documentary was striking to me for several reasons. On a personal note, I have also used fruits and vegetables in order to “cure” a disease typically cared for by medications. For the last few years, I have suffered from asthma-like symptoms, which has made my athletic career rather difficult. After going on an inhaler and seeing improvement in my breathing, I wasn’t paticularlly worried about my health. Then my dad happened to hear over the radio that many people are misdiagnosed with asthma when truly they are suffering from too much acid in their diet. This forced me to reevaluate what I was eating and gave me the opportunity to cut out processed food and focus more on fruits and vegetables with some grains mixed in. This plus exercise led me to lose 15 pounds and feel healthier than I have in years. I also had mild stomach problems when I was very young, and I noticed that the foods I was supposed to eat were the same regardless of what health issue I was dealing with. This just shows how important fruits and vegetables are to the human diet and how much healthier and better off the human race would be if we all cut out the bad stuff and focused on foods made by the sun.
Gastropod is a series of podcasts that examines food through the lens of science and history. In Episode 1: The Golden Spoon, they discuss the effects the shape and material of our silverware have on our eating habits: affecting how we eat, what we eat, and what our food tastes like. The evolution of silverware has impacted our lives in significant ways, through the development of new appliances, to transitions in eating customs, to eating fads. Of particular interest to me was the research done on different metals, examining which metals produced the best tactile and aural sensations when reacted with saliva, as well as how they affect the taste of food.
The purpose of this series is to examine food and agriculture, and environmental issues stemming from the two, through questions such as what’s scalable, what’s sustainable, and what’s scientifically reasonable.
Professor Megan Rothenberger is the conservation biologist we have on campus here at Lafayette College. After reading the articles we were assigned for the “Environmental Impacts of Plant Cultivation” section, I immidiately thought of Professor Rothenberger’s primary research focus and how it relates directly to some of what we will be discussing in class. Professor Rothenberger studies the fluctuations of algal blooms within the Raritan Bay. To write this scientific study, Professor Rothenberger and her team have been monitoring water quality and comparing the abundances of different species of microorganisms. The paper is very interesting to read as it shows how some of the same problems that have happened in Ohio and other various areas around the country could ultimately occur in New York–affecting hundreds of thousands of New York City inhabitants. Professor Rothenberger also explains how these fluctuations in microorganisms affect ecosystems as a whole. The article is very scientific, so reading the experimental methods may be a bit confusing; however, if you read the abstract, introduction, and conclusion sections, you will undoubtedly understand Professor Rothenberger’s work and its modern-day significance!
First, PBS Newshour investigates China’s purchase of Smithfield foods in 2013, the largest Chinese takeover of an American company. Interestingly, the Chinese company that bought Smithfield paid 30% more for the company than its market value. Some speculate that the Chinese government had a hand in the deal, seeking to acquire overseas meat suppliers to keep pace with the meat consumption of its growing population. Smithfield constitutes 25% of the pork industry in the U.S., 25% which is now controlled by Shuanghui Foods. This raises concerns of American food security if major food processors are owned by foreign companies.
Second, why does the U.S. chill its eggs? Many countries around the world do not. Eggs do not need to be refrigerated unless they are washed right after coming out of the chicken, which is standard practice in the U.S. We like our eggs clean and this means that they must be refrigerated all the way through the supply chain.
I remember reading this article over the summer, and since it was brought up in class I figured I’d revisit this awful chart of just how controlled America’s food supply is by corporations.
Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting Hershey Park, which reminded me of just how consolidated many food businesses are- for cheap, average quality chocolate, the American (and at this point, any) consumer has the choice between Hershey, Nestle, or Mars, which is controlled by Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Mars, all of which control far more than bars of candy. While marketing has allowed for there to seem like there are thousands of different “brands” it is in fact only ten to twelve massive companies duking it out for the billions of dollars exchanged in the market every day.
This market structure forces the consumer to surrender power in several different ways. First of all, the marketing strategy of creating sub brands makes the consumer think they have economic power at the shelves, when truly they are supporting the same company whether they decide to buy Skittles or Uncle Ben’s rice. Not only does this destroy true competition, but the consumer has no idea of what processes their food went through before ending up in the brightly colored bag or box shouting at them from the shelves. This is detrimental to the health and well being of the consumer, since the same companies are being forked over money to companies to continue to poison the people and the environment.
On a relevant topic to class, it’s shocking how many of these foods are driven by the existence of high fructose corn syrup (and in turn corn). If it weren’t for this thick, sticky product, most of these corporate giants would not have the economic muscles they are able to flex today. Without high fructose corn syrup, sodas, candies, and other products would not be the same, and would most likely be more expensive and therefore not a commodity with the rock-bottom prices the consumer is used to today.
Overall, it’s shocking on both an economic and environmental level how controlled the supermarket is by so few corporations. The patterns of horizontal and vertical integration have followed through on more than agriculture and are invasive to the market we’re used to today.
http://www.ryot.org/food-corporations-chart-all-your-food/756513
I recently watched the documentary “Fed Up” which is popularly described as “the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see”. This documentary contains interviews of multiple children directly affected by obesity as well as food regulation supporters such as Michael Pollan that provide scientific facts on the issue. The film starts out by describing the trends Americans have gone through to get healthy. “Eat less, exercise more” has been the common sense answer to obesity for more than a century. “Fed Up” argues that lack exercise is not and lack of willpower is NOT the root of the obesity epidemic in the United States, and it sets out to prove how the food industry has tricked us and why they deserve the majority of the blame.
A nutritionist that was interviewed in this film explains that it is impossible to exercise our way out of the obesity problem. It is really ironic because soft drink companies like Coca-Cola fund a lot of research on obesity. If this research is funded by the food industry, they can pretty much come up with whatever they want to keep them in business & keep a lot of people blind to this irony. The obesity epidemic cannot be completely caused by genetics; it is not, and has never been, normal for 10 year olds to die of heart attacks. Most experts say that the obesity epidemic has taken place in the last 30 years or so. When people began to catch wind of the dangers of fat-based food, the food industry responded by replacing fat with sugar. Between 1977 and 2000, Americans doubled their daily sugar intake. Processed foods are so easy to modify, and these tiny modifications become marketing claims for food companies. “Reduced fat” oreos, for example, have 10 less calories than regular ones & have the same sugar content. Poor food choices are overwhelming in school cafeterias. School lunches are super unhealthy and most are driven by soda companies. Children have no idea how bad this food is & that instills poor values in their food choices. The problem is, there are no commercials for fruits and vegetables, only junk food. This shapes the whole way kids think about food and what they think that food is. This documentary is very informative, however I do think that there’s a lot about the food industry (like farming) that this film doesn’t really go into that much. Also, I think that the people that should be viewing this documentary probably won’t. Overall, I highly recommend this documentary because it is interesting, informative, and provides some plausible long-term solutions to the obesity epidemic that our society really needs to consider.
A summary/review of “Fed Up” can be found here: http://hamptonroads.com/2014/09/fed-–-what-food-industry-doesn’t-want-us-know
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