1. Global threat to food supply as water wells dry up, warns top environment expert
“In a major new essay Lester Brown,
head of the Earth Policy
Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world's people, are now
overpumping their underground water tables to the point – known as
"peak water" – where they are not
replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year.”
Water futures trading can’t be far off. I was talking with a
woman who has been doing work in Alice Springs over the last few months where
the aquifer is estimated to have about 400 years of water left at the current
rate of usage. They are developing a water usage reduction program targeting
the top 1000 households identified in a massive survey of use. The greatest
waste was from leaks that were undetectable by the householder except where the
cistern just kept dribbling, and watering of lawns. But of course big users of water are the
Council and government Departments in town and it is to these that they are
next turning. While there is water enough, the quality is getting poorer, more
saline. Interestingly they have no water restrictions at all at present.
Apparently people from States where they have/have had water restrictions have
been taken aback by this. There as a community wide consultation to discuss
mandatory restrictions but voluntary restrictions was all that was agreed to
with a waterwise type programme being rolled out.
Courtesy of Helen Greenwood is this offering about coffee houses from an eastern
perspective. The parallels between them and English coffee houses are striking,
both in what they provided as social meeting spaces for men and also in
government attempts to close them.
3. Margarine v butter: are synthetic spreads
toast?
“And yet, and yet. I'm looking at a tub of Pure Dairy-Free Soya Spread. It contains 14g saturated fat per 100g, compared to butter's 54%. For many consumers, such stats still outweigh taste when it comes to deciding what's on their toast. And what about vegans, and those with lactose intolerance? Margarine can fulfill needs that butter can't. It will never win any taste awards, but there is still a place for margarine on the supermarket shelves – even if there isn't one for it in most food lovers' fridges.”
It must have been in my last year in Sri Lanka – 1961 – when some relatives of mine came back from the US on a visit and brought with them an enormous amount of margarine. It caused a sensation because it wouldn’t go off in the heat, and I recall being highly excited when we were due for a visit there because I knew I could get a thick slice of puffy white bread spread with this extraordinary yellow oily tasty stuff. In Australia we began with butter but switched to margarine like many other households did in the sixties and that continued into my adolescence and early twenties living in communal houses. Now the home fridge has butter (the delicious Pepe Saya’s – the butter, not Pepe), Nuttlex for my vegan niece, sometimes that olive oil spread, and good old imported Sri Lankan ghee without which some dishes just don’t taste right, like smore, the slow pot roast which has to be seared in ghee once done before serving.
4. Beer brewers tap
growing economic clout to fight for clean water
“Whether brewers are creating ales, pilsners, porters, wits
or stouts, one ingredient must go into every batch: clean water,” says Karen
Hobbs, a senior policy analyst at NRDC. “Craft brewers need clean water to make
great beer.”
It’s almost counter intuitive (hey, that was a totally
unconscious pun): beer makers standing up for water, but what a great venture.
Anyone know if local craft brewers are doing anything similar?
CONTACT: NRDC
Brewers for Clean Water, www.nrdc.org/water/brewers-for-clean-water.
5. McDonald’s goes belly up in Bolivia
“After 14 years of presence in the country, and despite all the existing campaigns and having a network, the chain was forced to close the eight restaurants that remained open in the three main cities: La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
No me gusto Big Mac!
http://bit.ly/12iJvhk
6. Hey mom and dad
what’s in that burger?’
‘According to
Oliver, the fatty parts of beef are “washed” in ammonium hydroxide and used in
the filling of the burger. Before this process, according to the presenter, the
food is deemed unfit for human consumption.
Besides the low quality of the meat, the ammonium hydroxide is harmful to health. Oliver calls it “the pink slime process”.’
This story makes a good pair with the one above, and much as I have been known to rail against the man he does good stuff.
Seeing as how my Mum used to make butter from the house cow's milk, I am a massive fan of butter. Most of our family resisted the push towards margarine & i'd rather go without a spread than put it on my bread. Talk about prejudice! But I have to admit I now but the 'spreadable' butter, just because it's so easy, and of course that is a sort of butter-marg hybrid. Also I've recently remembered that mum always used marg when baking cakes & biscuits, cos it was cheaper I guess, and we didn't have enough of the home made stuff due to a good portion of the cream never making it as far as the butter stage. Home made apricot jam and cream on bread, yum!
ReplyDeleteMore seriously, the stuff about over-using aquifers is disturbing. I've been reading about that happening around the world, especially in dry zones. Shocking to hear about Alice tho, you'd think they'd take a hint form the experiences of other states.
Thanks once more for an interesting selection.