A solution to global nutrition to make your skin crawl

My partner often reminds friends that all chocolate contains acceptable levels of contamination by cockroaches.

Don’t know if it’s true or not, but the reaction is typically one of horror. Yet eating bugs doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

While Indigenous peoples have nourished themselves on invertibrates for millenia, the UN has cottoned on just recently.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is looking at the benefits of using insects for human consumption for the Asia Pacific region.

This may make your skin crawl. But with insects being as rich a source of protein as meat and fish, insects might be a huge nutritional and commercial opportunity.

Scoop has an article, UN: Edible Insects Provide Food for thought. Thanks to Raj Patel’s blog for this one.

And if you are interested in some creeply crawly cuisine, I recommend Bill Mollison’s The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition published by Tagari press.

It contains serving suggestions for weavils, grubs, grasshoppers, termites, acquatic insects and snails.

North African cous-cous, a fermented wheat-cake dish, for example, contains grasshoppers.

Although my partner will never agree with me – she squirms at the thought of anything wriggly – I can’t see any good reasons not to eat invertibrates.

They are abundant. Some insects have more protein than fish or meat. Larvae are even rich in fats and other essential nutrients.

I reckon we need to break down the barriers between food animals and “pests”, as insects are often thought of.

If you can develop a cuisine based around nuisance creatures, it will reduce the need to obliterate them with toxic pesticide regimes.

It seems apt to quote permaculture legend Bill Mollison who said “the problem is the solution”.

Compulsory cooking classes in UK schools

In an attempt to rein in the UK’s burgeoning obesity crisis, the UK government has launched a policy making cooking classes compulsory in schools.

Schools and children’s secretary Ed Balls said the government wanted all 11- to 14-year-olds to be taught how to prepare simple and healthy meals using fresh ingredients.

Ministers hope this will encourage healthy eating and leave children less vulnerable to weight gain, as experts predict up to a million children could be obese within a decade.

This is a great policy no doubt. But I wonder how long Government’s will continue to implement good policy like this at the same time as implementing bad policy, like where fast food and highly processed food continues to be marketed to kids.

A more holistic approach is needed, and perhaps this is only possible where there is more local autonomy.

It would be great to see this kind of approach in Australia. Teaching kids to cook acquaints them with using fresh ingredients rather than highly-processed foods.

This has health benefits but also provides the important environmental lesson that we depend on natural systems.

The more we depend on natural systems, and therefore nuture them, the less we need the giant multinational food companies. These corporations profit from over-feeding us and who have the biggest ecological footprint.

Full article here:

http://www.politics.co.uk/news/opinion-former-index/children-and-family/compulsory-cooking-classes-launch-anti-obesity-drive-$484512.htm

Diet with a little meat uses less land than many veg diets

A new study by Cornell University researchers challenges the widely help assumption that a purely vegetarian diet is the most ecological way to eat.

For want of a better word I was “vegetarian” for a few years but am now a selective omnivore. I respect people who go vego but I also think think vegetarianism isn’t the solution to all our social, ethical or environmental problems. And that’s what this study seems to suggest.

The researchers say a low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But the report added an important caveat to this, that some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency.

“The findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today’s high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers, ” an article in Science Daily reports.

The study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, is the first to examine the land requirements of complete diets. See the article here:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm