Great video from Iceland and Greenpeace – remember this is meant to provoke thought and debate (it’s not a documentary). Read your labels and inform yourself with regard to what the impact of what your eating is…
The clothes you choose to wear and the values underlying can have a huge impact on both the environment and on growers. Inform yourself before you buy your knickers for $1.99.
There is always endless debate about the merits of eating Organic food, does it taste better, should it be more expensive, is it any more nutritious. One thing I have always been clear about is that I eat organic food when possible as I personally do NOT want to be loaded with herbicides and pesticides…
This campaign, for Swedish supermarket chain Coop, reveals what happens in your body when you switch to eating organic food.
We recruited a family that didn’t eat organic food, the Palmbergs. Then we recruited the Swedish Environmental Research Institute IVL. They started by choosing twelve pesticides to look for.
The first week the family ate only conventional food, and urine samples were taken from everyone in the family, every day. Eight of the chosen twelve pesticides showed up in their urine.Then they switched to 100 % organic food for two weeks. New urine samples were taken, and after a few days almost all of the pesticides were gone.
“We were surprised when we realized the number of pesticides we put into our bodies when we eat conventional food. Now we eat a lot more organic food”, Anette Palmberg says.
The Guardian has undertaken a 5 month undercover investigation of the British poultry industry – it’s damning. We need to think about what we’re putting into our mouths as obviously government, regulators and food producers are failing us.
The Guardian’s investigation uncovered a catalogue of alleged hygiene failings in the poultry industry, prompting three leading supermarkets – Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer – to launch their own investigations on Wednesday. Undercover footage, photographic evidence and information from whistleblowers has revealed how strict industry hygiene standards to prevent the contamination of chicken with potentially deadly campylobacter bacteria can be flouted on the factory floor and on farms.
At the last count, campylobacter was present in two-thirds of British fresh chicken sold in the UK. Although the bug is killed by thorough cooking, around 280,000 people a year in the UK are made ill by it, and it is thought that 100 people die. Contamination rates are known to have increased in the past decade.
Seaweed has:
The Japanese have treasured it as a valuable food source for centuries so why have we been so slow to embrace it? I suppose personally it’s a blend of cultural history and personal history. On the cultural side seaweed has been snubbed as the poor mans fertiliser and in years gone by it was harvested and rotted down as a manure for farms. Personally I spent a lot of my childhood messing about on the foreshore and seaweed tends to bloom close to unsavoury areas, so in my mind I think there was an association. I’m the first to admit that this is a crazy notion, however childhood associations are hard to shift and even diving in pristine kelp forests has not shifted my prejudice!
Reading up on the characteristics of seaweeds as a food source has however shaken my anti-seaweed position. I was amazed that it outranks the stalwarts Milk, Spinach & Oranges for various nutritional elements. I’m going to investigate further and report back…