The future of food

[Jennie_in_Iowa]

This is not about that documentary by the same name. :-) This is a report from the recent conference run by the Institute of Food Technologists that took place in Chicago.

Food technology: the application of food science to the selection, preservation, processing, packaging, distribution, and use of safe, nutritious, and wholesome food.

I spent last weekend surrounded by food technologists. I was in Chicago, researching an upcoming Dr. Sanjay Gupta special about nutrition and obesity and attending a conference run by the Institute of Food Technologists. The FDA food safety chief was talking about spinach safety. Top execs from General Mills, Kraft and Campbell's were talking about kid-healthy foods. The Army was showing off its new MREs for Afghanistan, and there were sleeping models, a ventriloquist's dummy and a belly dancer. Let's just say that when the IFT puts on a show, it's a big one.

This year, the conference buzzwords were "nutraceuticals" (a combination of the words "nutrition" and "pharmaceutical") and "functional food." IFT spokesman Roger Clemens, also a pharmacy professor at the University of Southern California, predicts that in the not-too-distant future, "functional food" will be a $600 billion market - yes, he said billion with a "b." Even if there's some hyperbole - supermarket food sales as a whole totaled $500 billion last year, according to industry analysts - it's still a big market.

OK, but what are nutraceuticals and functional foods?

In Japan, according to Makoto Shimizu, a professor at the University of Tokyo, more than 650 products are approved as "Food for Specified Health Use," from fighting fatigue to preventing allergies. It's a lot easier to qualify for the label, than it is to get the ingredients approved as medicine in the U.S. But Clemens says the legal and regulatory climate is changing. "Where does food end and the medicine begin?" As the benefits of certain foods are examined more closely, he says, "Maybe the definition will change as to what connotes a drug."

You could find one simple functional food at several exhibitors' tables: vitamin-infused candy. Worthless, a prominent nutrition expert told me, although he didn't want his name used. I'm not sure I agree. Of course it would be healthier to eat a complete diet, full of vegetables, but who has the time? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that barely 1 percent of children and teenagers meet government guidelines for a healthy diet. Neither they nor I were surprised.

If my kids are munching on candy anyway, is it really so bad if it's giving them their RDA at the same time? Is there a healthy food product you would like to see on the shelves?

source

Candy with vitamins. I find that utterly disgusting.
Who has the time to eat healthy? *sigh* why is that even a question that needs asking?

[uprooted_kentuckian]

We have quite a culture these days, huh.

[Canna'isseur]

I call it part of the biggest scam ever. Its basically the pharma ind., healthcare ind.(they don't deserve that title) and the major food companies all working together to milk the people for all their worth. Bad food, and lack of vitamins causes diseases like cancer, which leads to needing 'therapy' like chemo. Chemo most of the time(97% according to their own stats) does nothing but kill people, and suck them dry financially at the same time. They are all in it for the money, and the power brokers behind the scenes get a form of population control as a little bonus.

Of course, these foods will be made with chemicals and other items that cause harmful reactions in your body, but they will be sold under the title as actually being healthy for you. All of this is made possible because people are ignorant, and lazy. They have this silly notion in their head, that its feasible in the future to get fed by a pill, because after all, its all about advancements. Some people will never understand that some things just CANNOT be altered for the better.

[Jennie_in_Iowa]

Hmm... anybody seeing these prices? Another effect from making ethanol out of corn in my opinion.

source

Record-high milk prices are stinging Americans at the dairy case, just as millions of thirsty school children are returning to classes.

The average retail price of a gallon of whole milk has never been higher -- $3.80 a gallon -- according to July Department of Agriculture statistics. Experts blame the price spike -- up 51 cents since February -- on milk shortages in Europe and Australia.

Prices are approaching $5 a gallon in Georgia, where on a sweltering summer day last week, about 100 children and parents toured Mark Cagle's dairy farm north of Atlanta.

Tim and Beth Byington wrangled their two preschool children around the farm, surrounded by mooing Holsteins.

"It's really expensive when you're on a budget," said Beth Byington, who explains that her hands are tied when it comes to the cost of milk. Watch the Byingtons describe their struggle with higher prices »

"We can't do anything, and we have to buy our milk," she said. "So sometimes we cut back on other food -- like buying store brands and other things."

Her husband agrees. "I can't remember a time when it was this high," he said. The farm's black and white dairy herd gives about 400 gallons of milk a day -- a drop in the bucket compared to sprawling corporate-owned facilities that supply most of the nation.

But shoppers at the grocer's dairy case aren't the only consumers feeling the pinch. Starbucks coffee and Papa John's pizza blame their recent price hikes in part on more expensive milk. Cheese and ice cream makers such as Kraft and Ben & Jerry's said they're taking notice.

The cost of dairy products also touches millions of children who depend on America's federal school lunch program, which includes milk as a necessary part of their nutrition. See more about milk prices and school lunches »

"If milk prices do go up in a big way, certainly people who run school meal programs will notice it," said Joanne Guthrie at the USDA. "Just as a family that buys milk regularly would notice it and somehow adapt -- schools would too."

Lunch ladies -- and lunch gentlemen -- whose cafeteria budgets are stressed by higher milk prices may try to offset costs by substituting menu items with less expensive fruits or veggies, say analysts. Uncle Sam won't be adjusting federal school lunch subsidies -- if necessary -- until fall of 2008, at the earliest.

As she accompanied her daughter around the Cagle farm, Margaret O'Neill said she would prefer that her school-age daughter drink milk instead of soda. "It's much healthier," said O'Neill. "If milk's $5 a gallon, it's going to impact your lunches at school but it's still important to at least get something that's nutritious."

What gives? Grocery shoppers in Omaha, Nebraska, may be surprised to know that the blame rests on the other side of the Atlantic -- and the other side of the world. It's all about supply and demand. Decreasing dairy supplies and rising demand for it are forcing prices up.

Supply is down in Australia and Europe, while demand is up in nations with rising standards of living such as China.

"A drought in Australia has reduced their dairy export potential while the European Union has quotas that limit increases in milk production," said professor Michael Hutjens, a dairy industry scholar at the University of Illinois.

Also playing a smaller role in the price spike is higher demand for corn-based ethanol fuel, according to USDA analyst Ephraim Leibtag. Increased demand for corn pushes up costs for cattle feed, which is then added to the price of milk.
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Although farmers such as Cagle are getting more money for their milk, they also are forced to pay higher prices to feed their dairy cows. The Southeast has been plagued for the past few years by droughts which have pushed feed corn prices higher.

"The dairy farmer is not making a significant amount of money because the input costs are so much higher than they were," said Cagle.

[bunkie]

and, sad to say, it's gonna get worse...

Buy Feed Corn, They're About to Stop Making It

The Hidden Agenda Behind Bush's Biofuel Plan

http://www.counterpunch.org/engdahl08132007.html

That bowl of Kellogg's Cornflakes on the breakfast table, or the portion of pasta or corn tortillas, cheese or meat on the table is going to rise in price over the coming months as sure as the sun rises in the East. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the new world food price shock, conveniently timed to accompany our current world oil price shock.

Curiously it's ominously similar in many respects to the early 1970's when prices for oil and food both exploded by several hundred percent in a matter of months. That mid-1970's price explosion led President Nixon to ask his old pal, Arthur Burns, then Chairman of the Fed, to find a way to alter the CPI inflation data to take attention away from the rising prices. The result then was the now-commonplace publication of the absurd "core inflation" CPI numbers--sans oil and food. Stephen Roche was the young Fed economist who was assigned the statistical manipulation job by Burns.

The late American satirist, Mark Twain once quipped, "Buy land: They've stopped making it" Today we can say almost the same about corn or all grains worldwide. The world is in the early months of the greatest sustained rise in grain prices, for all major grains including maize, wheat, rice that we have seen in three decades. Those three crops constitute almost 90 per cent of all grains cultivated in the world.

What's driving this extraordinary change? Here things get pretty interesting. The Bush Administration is making a major public relations push to convince the world it has turned into a "better steward of the environment." The problem is that many have fallen for the hype.

The center of his program, announced in his January State of the Union Address is called '20 in 10', cutting US gasoline use 20 per cent by 2010. The official reason is to "reduce dependency on imported oil," as well as cutting unwanted "greenhouse gas" emissions. That isn't the case, but it makes good PR. Repeat it often enough and maybe most people will believe it. Maybe they won't realize their taxpayer subsidies to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn are also driving the price of their daily bread through the roof.

[B]The heart of the plan is a huge, taxpayer subsidized expansion of use of bio-ethanol for transport fuel. The President's plan requires production of 35 billion gallons (about 133 billion liters) of ethanol a year by 2017. Congress already mandated with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that corn ethanol for fuel must rise from 4 billion gallons in 2006 to 7.5 billion in 2012. To make certain it will happen, farmers and big agribusiness giants like ADM or David Rockefeller get generous taxpayer subsidies to grow corn for fuel instead of food. Currently ethanol producers get a subsidy in the US of 51 cents per gallon ethanol paid to the blender, usually an oil company that blends it with gasoline for sale.

As a result of the beautiful US Government subsidies to produce bio- ethanol fuels, and the new legislative mandate, the US refinery industry is investing big time in building new special ethanol distilleries, similar to oil refineries, except they produce ethanol fuel. The number currently under construction exceeds the total number of oil refineries built in the US over the past 25 years. When finished in the next 2-3 years the demand for corn and other grain to make ethanol for car fuel will double from present levels.[B]

Not just USA bio-ethanol. In March Bush met with Brazil's President to sign a bilateral "Ethanol Pact" to cooperate in R&D of "next generation" bio-fuel technologies like cellulosic ethanol from wood, and joint cooperation in "stimulating" expansion of bio-fuels' use in developing countries, especially in Central America, and creating a "bio-fuels OPEC-like" cartel market with rules that allows formation of a Western Hemisphere ethanol market.

In short, the use of farmland worldwide for bio-ethanol and other bio- fuels_burning the food product rather than using it for human or animal food_is being treated in Washington, Brazil and other major centers, including the EU, as a major new growth industry.

Phony green arguments

Bio-fuel -- gasoline or fuel produced from refining food products -- is being hyped as a solution to the controversial Global Warming problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, bio-fuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under best conditions. Its advocates claim that present first generation bio-fuels "save up to 60per cent of carbon emission." As well, amid rising oil prices at $75 per barrel for Brent marker grades, governments such as Brazil's are frantic to substitute homegrown bio-fuels for imported gasoline. In Brazil today 70 per cent of all cars have "flexi-fuel" engines able to switch from conventional gasoline to 100 per cent bio-fuel or any mix. Bio-fuel production has become one of Brazil's major export industries as well.

The green claims for bio-fuel as a friendly and better fuel than gasoline are at best dubious, if not outright fraudulent. Depending on who runs the tests, ethanol has little if any effect on exhaust- pipe emissions in current car models. It has significant emission, however, of some toxins including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a suspected neurotoxin which has been banned as carcinogenic in California.

Ethanol is not some benign substance as we are led to think from the industry propaganda. It is highly corrosive to pipelines as well as to seals and fuel systems of existing car or other gasoline engines. It requires special new gas pumps. All that conversion costs money.

But the killer-diller about ethanol is that it holds at least 30 per cent less energy per gallon than normal gasoline, translating into a loss in fuel economy per gallon of at least 25 per cent over gasoline for an Ethanol E-85per cent blend. No advocate of the ethanol boondoggle addresses the huge social cost which is beginning to hit the dining room tables across the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Food prices are exploding as corn, soybeans and all cereal grain prices are going through the roof because of the astronomical -- Congress-driven -- demand for corn to burn for bio-fuel.

This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline will have no impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and would even expand fossil fuel use due to increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation to expand acreage of ethanol crops. And according to MIT "natural gas consumption is 66per cent of total corn ethanol production energy," meaning huge new strains on natural gas supply, pushing prices there higher.

The idea that the world can "grow" out of oil dependency with bio- fuels is the PR hype being used to sell what is shaping up to be the mist dangerous threat to the planet's food supply since creation of patented genetically manipulated corn and crops.

US farms become bio-fuel factories...............

[gulfcoastguy]

Some good information about this can be found on the sites greencarcongress.com and wired.com in it's autopia forum. Although I can't comment about the accuracy of the specific figures listed in Bunkie's post in general I agree that corn based ethanol is the wrong approach to take. A more convincing case can be made for biodiesel. It would never replace all petroleum but it could help stretch it out untill practical electric cars can be brought into the market.

[Jennie_in_Iowa]

Yea! Biodesel! My Intentional Community is planning on making biodiesel. We're thinking we'll grow some sort of prolific sugar pumpkin for making it.

[Ohiorganic]

what ever happened to making biodiesel from spent fryer grease? America has an almost inexhaustable supply of that stuff

[bunkie]

if this pork/control stuff gets passed through Congress, we may not have a choice of what we want to grow as farmers...reminds me of the UN Agenda 21, was it? peace, bunkie.

NATIONAL HERITAGE AREAS - FEDERALLY CONTROLLED LAND USE

http://www.newswithviews.com/Morrison/joyce44.htm*
*
There are currently 37 National Heritage Areas in the United States and you can expect many more in the near future. New legislation is moving fast despite protests from groups such as the American Policy Center, the National Policy Center for Public Policy Research and numerous others..............

Why do we need National Heritage Areas? What is their real purpose? Would a national heritage designation supersede local authority?..............

Why did the U.S. sign a Memorandum of Understanding with France regarding National Heritage Areas? Your property would not only have national management, but now it could have global ramifications. The agreement with the Federation de Parcs Naturels Regionaux, a system of forty-five regional nature parks in France was signed in a four day symposium hosted by the Motorcities National Heritage Area in Detroit.

The property owner has no choice but to be included in a designated Heritage Area. He will not have the opportunity to vote for those serving on the coalition that will develop the management plan. He will not be notified he is even living in a heritage area. Once it has been designated, there are no provisions for property owners to opt out.................

Is there a reason to lock up almost the whole state of Illinois farmland into National Heritage Areas? Illinois is one of the breadbasket states. Rural landowners and farmers will not take kindly to having strict preservation controls placed on their farms where they already practice advanced conservation farming methods.........

“National Heritage Areas are the big government advocate’s dream: They give Washington the means of controlling local land-use decisions while creating the means by which politicians can funnel millions of dollars home to their districts,” Ridenour said.

Our federal government is in debt. Most states are in debt. This is not an expenditure that is wanted or needed. This legislation is out of committee and may be voted on any day. Contact your Congressman and Senators and tell them National Heritage Areas are not necessary expenditures. Even if it looks good to bring home more pork, the government has already eaten the little piggy that was to go to market.

[Jennie_in_Iowa]

Ok, I understand your beef with this legislation. But I don't see it as totally bad. In my thinking, this would keep things like hog lots out of these areas, right? And keep farmers from cutting down wooded areas to plant more ethanol producing row crops right?
But, why not just legislate those things as opposed to lumping these areas into an overworked, under staffed, under funded bureaucracy? This legislation is odd. I don't understand what their motivation is or what they hope to accomplish.