Food & Drink

Gordon Ramsay has told British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that fruit and vegetables should be locally-sourced and only on restaurants menus when in season. The chef has suggested to the UK leader that there should be an outlawing out-of-season produce. The BBC reports:

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay says British restaurants should be fined if they serve fruit and vegetables which are not in season.

The TV chef said it was “fundamentally important” for chefs to provide locally-sourced food.

“Fruit and veg should be seasonal,” he said. “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu. I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown.”

BBC Article
BBC Video with interview with Gordon Ramsey

Green Marketing Manifesto author John Grant responds to our post about whether organic and vegan food is environmental. He says:

It’s a bit of an odd statement - what is ‘global warming potential’?… That is nothing to do with the central issues of animal welfare, use of antibiotics and feed additives such as arsenic. Carbon here is a side issue. There are 850 million chicken raised in britain a year; an average of about 14 per person per year. So on average the difference is just under 30kg of carbon dioxide vs your 11 tonne annual footprint.

greenormal: There’s more to life than CO2

Related PSFK Articles
Is Organic Environmental?

An article on the BBC’s Radio 4 site by Tom Heap suggests that ‘good’ food alternatives such as organic or vegetarian could have a bigger environmental impact that having a diet of pork and chicken:

Peter Bradnock of the British Poultry Council says: “Organic poultry meat has about 45% more global warming potential than indoor-reared poultry meat. “If you’re rearing outside, then the bird is using a little more of its feed to keep itself warm, or simply to keep itself cool in hot climates.”.

There is a further hiccup with the vegetarian option: most of those who avoid meat source their protein from dairy foods.

And dairy animals pump out gases and gobble up supplementary feed just like the rest.
If you are avoiding meat for climate reasons, you should be shunning dairy too.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Meat in a low-carbon world

A study by WRAP of 2,138 UK households suggests that Britons dump £9bn of avoidable waste each year - a high percentage of which was food. 60% of dumped food is untouched and and at least £1bn worth of food wasted in the UK is still “in date”. Some key findings:

• Bakery goods made up 19%, by weight, of all avoidable food waste. Vegetables contributed 18%.
• Meat and fish also made up a large proportion - 18% - of the total money wasted on food.
• 5,500 whole chickens were thrown away each day in the UK.
• “Mixed foods” like ready meals made up 21% of the total cost of waste, with 440,000 thrown away each day.
• The two most significantly wasted foods were potatoes and bread.
• 1.3m unopened yoghurt pots are disposed every day

WRAP’S Report

[viaBBC NEWS]

Gothamist points to an article that looks at how cityslickers who are turning their city into farmland. We wrote about Hipster Farmers who were leaving the city to set up farms, but the Times looks at the growth of allotments and the redevelopment of vacant lots into arable land:

John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has worked with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, said that when he first suggested urban farm stands in the early 1990s, city environmental officials dismissed the idea. “ ‘Oh, you could never grow enough stuff with the urban markets,’ ” he said he was told. ‘ “That can’t be done. You have to have farmers.’ ”

But local officials have come around.

Holly Leicht, an associate assistant commissioner at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, helped provide two half-acre parcels of city land last year. One became Hands and Hearts and the other is in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The Red Hook farm began in 2003 when the Parks Department gave the youth group Added Value permission to use an abandoned three-acre asphalt ball field. The group started with two raised beds, built a hoop house where it could start seeds, then laid down an acre of compost two feet deep on top of the asphalt. Last year the young farmers sold more than $25,000 in goods.

Urban agriculture has been an even larger undertaking in other cities, particularly those with weaker real estate markets and a declining population.

NY Times

Within the sustainability arena, energy use and carbon emissions have been in the spotlight for a long time, however the next big trend to hit the agenda is an increasing focus on water. Already most companies’ CSR reports will have a section pointing to their policies or stance on water issues, but in the future you will rarely be able to open your newspaper without seeing some reference to water matters.

So far, water has not been quantified in the same way as carbon, or indeed received anywhere near the same amount of media attention as CO2, but the prediction is that you will soon see people measuring their ‘hydro’ footprint and thinking about the environmental impact of water use. Some investors have even suggested that water will eventually be commoditised and traded as a futures contract in the same way as oil or sugar.

The United Nations estimates that a worrying 1.1 billion people lack access to safe water and that by 2050 that figure will double to more than two billion. Countries like China are already facing an imminent water crisis. The country has long suffered from alternating periods of severe flooding and drought, which combined with high pollution levels and unrealistic policies on water management, means that demand significantly outweighs supply and they simply don’t have the resources to cope.

The water issue should provide a whole new world of opportunities for technology firms and investors. The problem is that water-saving initiatives are expensive to implement, in everything from the treatment of contaminated water supplies to efficient irrigation methods. For consumers, it may also be costly if the added financial burden has to be passed on. However the cost of not taking action will be much higher if we wait until further down the line.
Read the rest of this entry »

PSFK fave author Michael Pollan brings his book In Defense Of Food to life in this lecture he gave to Google staff. It covers his rant against nutrionism and the problem it has created for the American diet.

Residents of Los Angeles have come together to save their beloved taco trucks. Under a new ordinance, trucks would have to follow overly strict rules about where and when they can set up shop. Non compliance would mean fines, misdemeanor charges and possible jail time. There are similar laws in place now that are rarely enforced. The NY Times explains:

This is the kind of city where you can pave over a freeway’s carpool lanes with toll roads, and few will complain. You can propose a 40-story skyrise in the center of Hollywood, and hardly anyone two miles to the west will take notice. You can squander public money, close down the ports and flatten landmarks, and many residents of this sprawling metropolis will simply yawn and move on.

But this is also a food obsessed city with rich Hispanic cultural traditions, and tacos have crossed the miles of road and class divides.

“Taco trucks are iconic here,” said Aaron Sonderleiter, a teacher from the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and one of the petition founders. “You go to one and you see black, people, white people, old people, young people. They really capture a microcosm of L.A.”

Nearly 5,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the new law at saveourtacotrucks.org

NYT: Hungry Angelenos Rally Around the Taco

Hmmm… cupcakes and techies? A combination worth trying out. The bloggers behind Cupcakes Take The Cake will be bringing their sweet talk to the real world at Cupcake Social 2.0, to be held at The Delancey Rooftop Bar in New York. Open to everyone, the event will feature free cupcakes provided by Sugar Sweet Sunshine (which, in our opinion, is the best cupcake bakery in town) as well as an interesting mix of bloggers, developers, and other sweets lovers in the tech industry.
When: Thursday, May 8 7-9PM
The Delancey Rooftop Bar
168 Delancey Street
New York, NY 10002

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