Food

Feeding the family

Hurricane Sandy has highlighted, for a lot of folk, the reality that when natural disasters strike supply chains, you gotta do with what little they may be. Tips on feeding the family, hurricane edition

While technology & politics are two very common themes in these links, an imbalanced intake can cause serious repercussions. To improve the diet, I’ll be sharing a few links in the next few days, some that you may find rather disconcerting, maybe even shocking. Not food porn (the stuff that seems to be fascinating to most people, clicking pictures of “great-looking” meals), but the actual “industry” that food production has become. Begin with watching a documentary called “Food Inc“. What are you going to do about what you eat?

Inflation? or a product of Globalisation?

The Price of Butter! [Yahoo news]

In the last few decades, strong-arm tactics & policies of certain nations, driven by – it is now becoming more apparent – the wolves of private interests in sovereign sheep’s clothing – have resulted in a gradual change.

This change has been primarily in habits, daily acts & choices performed by all people, perhaps by need, availability, affordability, & a host of other reasons.

My view of this change has been that this change, whether conspired or otherwise, has led to some fundamental choices that were never seen by the human race before, on a scale as we see now. A classic example was the number of mouths required to be fed as opposed to the resources required to feed those mouths. New age thinking is that with improved productivity & technology, a lesser effort/ resource is required to achieve the same result.

This has inevitably led to the increase in the number of people moving away from a primary activity of growing food to higher paying, quicker turnaround, lesser effort jobs requiring “skill” – insinuating that these agrarian jobs somehow required no skill – just put some seeds in the ground & within a short time you get food.

This ridiculous situation – of prices of food becoming unaffordable – is probably going to be a more common phenomenon as we move towards food scarcity – ironic considering the amount of food that is wasted every day in every single family.

Food Labelling:

[From an old-ish link from the Sydney Morning Herald] The Australian Government, like others of its ilk, is dragging its feet on food labeling, as this opinion piece reflects. Processors of what passes for food would not like you to read what is actually added into the mixture.

Processed Food.

This morning, as I performed my daily ablutions, a strange thought came to me.

All my thoughts. Could be yours too. Read on.

Yesterday’s excellent dinner. How amazingly tasty! Hogged. Greedily. Enjoyed, perhaps. Overeaten.

A few hours pass. Natures processes at work.

How disgusting the same food, in a processed form! Yech! Don’t even want to think about it. Forget seeing it. Or smelling it.

That, I think, is how our insides are. Smelly. Putrid. Squishy. Every one of us. Irrespective of our size, color, age, sex, or any other classification.

Imagine a bowl that has been used to cook food. You’d definitely clean it before using it again. The insides would get most of the attention, wouldn’t it?

Now think of your body. Compare to how much you spend on the externals! Perfume. Soap. Shampoo. After-shave. Deodorant. Clothing. Accessories.

Wow.