Yummy or yucky – all about food

Where does food come from? How is it made?

Easy. You know the answer already, don’t you? Food comes from farms — right?

Wrong!

It’s true that most food comes from farms in the first place, but most of the stuff people eat today has been processed so much in factories that the only way you can know what’s in it is by looking at the list of ingredients. And if you do that, you may get a shock because you won’t know what half the things are.

What do you make of these, for example?

What is this stuff?

• butylated hydroxytoluene (in some chips, salted peanuts, breakfast cereals and many other things)
• calcium disodium ethylene diamine tetra acetate (in salad dressings and some drinks)
• sodium L-ascorbate (a form of vitamin C)

Scary sounding names, and some of these additives may be harmful.

The raw materials for food come from farming. Some of these get eaten raw like lettuces or apples. Most gets processed and packaged up. Farming has a long history but has now got so huge that it has become a serious problem for other life on the planet.

The other big source of food raw materials is from fishing including shellfish. People eat some seafood raw, same as me (YUM!). Everything else is processed. But sadly, fishing — like farming — has got to be such a huge industry that it is natural balances upsetting in the world’s rivers, lakes, seas and oceans.

Let’s have a look at Farming, Fishing and Processing over the next three sections…

What are ingredients?

That means what the food is made of. Many foods have a dozen or more ingredients in them, often things you’d never guess were there.

What are shellfish?

These are animals which live in the sea but which don’t have backbones (unlike fish, you and me). Instead, most of them have a hard armour-like shell. The ones you will probably know are things like crabs and lobsters, scallops and mussels. And then there are other creatures which are neither fish nor shellfish: things like squid and octopus. Penguins love squid and so do many people.

Overfishing

What it all comes down to is that people are taking vast amounts of fish. It’s called overfishing and the main reason for it is that modern fishing boats are enormous and so powerful that they can use giant nets. They also use clever technologies like sonar which allows them to ‘see’ exactly where big fish shoals are so they can grab much more than they should. The total catch made by humans every year is close to 100 million tons of fish!

When and where did farming start?

Farming seems to have started in various different parts of the world. Pigs were probably the first animals to be domesticated 15,000 years ago in Mesopotamia — what is now Iraq. Actual farming of crops began about 11,500 years ago in the countries bordering the east Mediterranean Sea: the Levant. Not long after, other peoples domesticated crops such as rice in China, maize in Mexico and potatoes in Peru and so on.

Sowing seeds in what??

To give their seeds the best possible conditions for growing well, the first farmers invented the plough (also spelled ‘plow’). This device was pulled by an animal and steered by somebody walking behind. The idea was — and still is today — to break up the soil and kill all the other plants (weeds) so that the seeds the farmer planted had no competition.

Orangutans and palm oil

Orangutans are in peril because all their rainforest home is being cut down for yet more plantations of oil palm. Oil from these palms is used in all kinds of things, particularly in food products. Most of Indonesia’s forests have now been cut down and burned for endless oil palm plantations. These tropical rainforests were home for orangutans which are now listed as critically endangered and face extinction. For more on this, go to Orangutan Conservancy

Around 90 million metric tons each year!

Humans now take up to 200,000 tonnes each year of these free-swimming crustaceans upon which so many larger sea creatures depend for their food.

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About additives: Food processing companies usually put additives in their products for one of three reasons:

1. to make them taste better — salt, monosodium glutamate (MSG), sweeteners like aspartame (200 times sweeter than sugar, used in diet colas… and supected by some to be toxic)
2. to make them look better — colourings
3. to make them keep longer — longer sell-by date. These additives are preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilisers and antioxidants

All additives have numbers (E numbers in Europe) so you can find out what they are. Some additives such as tartrazine (E102, a vivid yellow colouring) could trigger allergic reactions in people who suffer from asthma and eczema. It may also cause hyperactivity (you know, screaming and yelling and being ‘naughty’) in certain children.

Over the last few years, people have made quite a fuss about additives in food so many manufacturers now state on their packages that they contain no additives. If some additives are harmful to kids’ health, it seems crazy to use them. The main reason some (like colourings) are used is to try and make a product more attractive than a rival one. To be fair, many are to stop the food going bad which could be far more damaging to people’s health.

Follow these links to find out more about additives:

E-numbers, additives
Food additive information
Aspartame information

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Farming was probably the most important human invention. Before farming, people were much like other animals. They hunted and collected wild fruits and leaves to eat. Farming started when people learned to domesticate wild animals for milk and meat. They also realised that they could grow what they wanted to eat by sowing seeds they collected, choosing those which were bigger, tastier or more nutritious and were easy to harvest. These first farmers meant that other people were freed from looking for food all the time. They could do different things like live in the first cities and specialise in other crafts or trades: making pots, shoes or bricks for building.

So far as we other animals were concerned, this was the start of a major disaster. Because farming was so successful, many more people could survive and populations increased — which meant that more land was needed for growing more food. Today, almost all the farmable land on the planet has now been taken by humans. The forests that once grew on most of the land, together with all the animals that lived in them, have been destroyed by being burned or cut down. This is still happening in the areas where there still are forests — like the Amazon and large parts of Indonesia.. Click here for a short video about forest destruction. Very sad!

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Lots of creatures live off fish — including me and my seabird friends. Until recently, people shared some of the fish with the rest of us because they only had simple ways of catching them: lines and hooks or hand nets. Then came fossil fuels and modern technology which meant people could build powerful boats (called trawlers) and spot fish shoals (using sonar — a way of ‘seeing’ underwater with sound, just as dolphins do). Then they could just sweep them up out of the sea by the millions of tons. Another disaster for us animals who depended on the fish for our food because soon there were none left in some of the once-rich fishing grounds. And people haven’t learned from their mistakes. Having ruined some of the best fishing grounds, they’re now doing the same with the remaining ones. If that wasn’t bad enough, humans are now catching the tiny creatures called krill that the fish and some whales in the great southern oceans depend on to live. Krill eat tiny floating plants (phytoplankton) and are a basic part of the food chain in these oceans.

Modern industrial fishing is on quite a different scale to someone with a net or a rod and line. Here’s why:

• • Over 300,000 small whales, dolphins, porpoises and turtles die from entanglement in fishing nets each year. This is called ‘by-catch’ and includes many small fishes (up to one third of the total catch) which aren’t wanted and are thrown back… but too late for by this time, almost all are dead
  • Longlines can be eighty miles long with thousands of baited hooks. They often catch seabirds like albatrosses. At least 100,000 of these endangered seabirds die every year because of longline fishing.
  • driftnets can be forty miles long
  • trawlnets are large enough to hold twelve Boeing 747 jetliners

Sources: SeaWeb and WWF

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Food processing and its problems

The first food processing humans did (after discovering how to make fire) was preparing and cooking food. Then they discovered that they could process food to stop it going bad – preserve it – for eating in hard times like winter or drought. Here are the main ways people preserve food:

• Drying, especially fruits (an example is grapes. They become raisins or sultanas when dry)
• Salting – meat and fish packed in layers of salt don’t go bad
• Pickling in vinegar or brine (salty water) – onions, gherkins, olives, some fish
• Canning and bottling – fruits, vegetables, meats, soups
• Freezing and freeze-drying – just about everything can be preserved this way

What’s the problem? Today, companies that process food in factories are mostly interested in adding value by making something that tastes good. If it doesn’t, no one will buy it and they won’t make any money. A single raw potato is worth almost nothing, but if you slice it thinly and fry the slices in fat, the crispy chips you get take up lots of space. So you can package them up in a fancy bag and sell them for many times the original value of the potato. And they taste good, of course! Humans love salt, sugar and fat so foods which have a lot of these are really tasty – but not too good for your health. Too much fat in your diet seems to be the cause of many diseases like cancer and heart disease. You’d be surprised to discover that savoury snacks (like chips or crisps) often contain sugar as well as salt and fat. And sweet snacks (biscuits and stuff) usually contain salt as well as sugar and fat. If you eat lots of sugary foods (including some drinks), your body changes the sugars into fat.
There’s another big problem too: bad food…

Why does food go bad? Processed food is easily messed up (contaminated) by microbes that cause food poisoning. You only need a few bits of bad meat to pollute the machinery that makes it into pies or something, and that would then contaminate thousands of them. Obviously manufacturers are very careful because if they poisoned their customers, they wouldn’t make any money.

Poisoning their customers is exactly what tobacco companies do – only the effects take 20 or 30 years rather than a few hours in the case of food poisoning. If cigarettes gave you cancer in a few months, nobody would smoke.

The microbes that do the damage are mostly bacteria. They make poisons (toxins) in the food they affect and it is these – as well as the bacteria themselves – which can make you very ill if you eat bad food.

Microbe facts: More about these killer bugs

• • more than a million people die from food poisoning each year round the world [1]
  • the US Food and Drug Administration reckons that between 24 million and 81 million Americans get sick from food poisoning bugs each year – and 10,000 of them die [1]
  • Campylobacter makes 2 million people sick each year in the US. This bug comes from contaminated chicken and turkey meat. Up to 80 per cent of this type of meat could be contaminated [2]
  • E. coli comes from contaminated ground beef. It makes 73,000 Americans ill each year [2]
  • Salmonella (this is the one everyone’s heard of) kills 600 people and makes 1,400,000 people sick in the US each year. It comes in contaminated meats and eggs [2]
  • Listeria food poisoning is mainly a problem with ready-to-eat foods. In the US, it kills around 500 people each year [2]

1. New Scientist, 17/12/1994, 28.
2. A Rogue’s Gallery of Foodborne Illness Union of Concerned Scientists

Cancer

Cancer is a nasty disease which kills millions of people every year. It starts when something goes wrong with cells in an animal’s body (other animals get cancer too) which makes them start dividing uncontrollably. This makes a mass of new cells called a tumour which just grows and grows. Normal cells divide a few times and then stop. Tumour cells just keep on dividing and growing. They can block or crush other vital organs inside your body causing pain and, eventually, death. Cancerous tumours (also called ‘neoplasms’) can also shed cells into the bloodstream. Doctors call this ‘metastasis’. These cells end up making more tumours in other parts of the body making death virtually certain.Humans spend billions on health services to try and stop cancers. Many people feel that it would be better if everyone did their best to try and prevent cancers growing in the first place rather than attempting to treat them after they’ve started. If kids never started smoking, for example, most of them would live much longer and healthier lives. And when you think about it, there is nothing more important to you than good health. Eating good food is a great way to make sure that your body grows and stays strong and healthy — and so is taking plenty of exercise.

Your body changes

Have you heard about calories? Calories are a measure of the energy which food contains. A kilocalorie (kcal) is 1000 calories and is the commonest unit for measuring how much food energy you eat and how much food energy you use each day. If you eat as many kilocalories as you burn off when you take exercise, then you are eating just right. If you eat more than you burn off, you put on weight: you get fat. Okay, imagine filling the gas tank of a car. But our imaginary car’s gas tank is special: it’s like a balloon and the more gasoline you pump in, the bigger it gets, just as your tummy does when you over-eat. That’s okay if you then drive your car on a long journey so it ‘gets exercise’. The gas tank gets smaller and emptier as all the gasoline energy is burned up. And so it is with people. More about calories: if you look on food packages, they usually tell you how many kilocalories (or kilojoules, shortened to kJ, another common measure – 1 kcal is the same as just over 4 kJ) they contain for a given amount (ounces or grams). So you can roughly get an idea of the amount of energy you’re going to eat. This may not bother you but people who are dieting are very interested in these details.

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They may well be right but at a terrible cost to the environment and, in particular, the world’s remaining forests.

The sustainable farmers say this is nonsense.
But sustainable farming has to be the future because industrial farming does so much damage to the world we all live in and the oil it depends on will run out. So do we really need industrial agriculture to feed all the world’s people? Food MythBuster Anna Lappé says no in this video.

What does ‘sustainable’ mean?

Something that people can carry on doing forever without damaging the environment.

I’ve made another guide all about genetically engineered food and stuff. Take a look to find out what’s going on.

These are arachnids (spiders) not insects, but both are classes of arthropods

Increasingly, no-till agriculture means that energy-guzzling ploughing is going out

According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers in the USA leave their land for good.

Antibiotics have been heavily used in livestock — particularly poultry — to control infections caused by overcrowding and insanitary conditions and because they make animals grow faster

Colistin is the last resort antibiotic treatment for life-threatening infections caused by certain strains of bacteria such as Escherichia coli, common in peoples’ guts. But now, some of these dangerous bacteria have become resistant even to that. This means infections caused by such bacteria can’t be treated. There are several more such bacteria like Clostridium difficile and MRSA which are now also nearly untreatable.

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Farming really has two branches: arable and pastoral.

Arable is where farmers plough the land, sow seeds and grow plants to harvest. You know, stuff like corn, wheat, vegetables, soy beans and so on. Pastoral farming involves animals. I guess you’ll know what they might be: cattle (for meat, cheese and milk), hens or chickens (for meat and eggs), sheep (for meat and wool) and many other animals.

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Can sustainable agriculture feed the world and look after the planet? The answer is Yes as this 2016 report shows. In any case, polluting industrial farming has to change simply because it’s not sustainable.

Anyone who is serious about ‘feeding the world’ has to remember that almost half of all crops grown, as well as loads of fish from the sea, go to feeding animals which will then be killed for humans to eat. In fact, one-third of fish caught in the world’s oceans goes into animal feed, says a 2008 report. These are very inefficient and unsustainable ways to make food and is one reason why many people choose to become vegetarians.

• rearing cattle for meat uses about three fifths of all farmland but yields less than 5 percent of the protein people eat
• to produce 1 kilogram (just over 2 pounds) of beef needs more than 15,000 litres (almost 4,000 US gallons) of water
• 1 kilogram of potatoes needs just 255 litres of water
• 40 percent of wheat, rye, oats, and corn produced around the world is fed to animals plus 250 million tons of soybeans
  nearly four times as much antibiotics are used in intensive livestock farming as are used to treat infections in humans. Result: many dangerous bacteria have become resistant to almost all antibiotics

Source: Worldwatch Institute 2014

And another thing for you to think about: hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. The world already produces more than one and a half times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. (Huffington Post)

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet

-Albert Einstein

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Some people have found that they can farm fish too. This seems like a good idea until you find that they too use poisons on the fish to stop diseases which only start because the fish are kept close together in tanks or floating net cages in the sea.

Of course, not everything that comes out of the sea is a fish. People catch lots of animals like squids (I like those!) and octopuses, shellfish, crabs and lobsters. Some people farm prawns in big open ponds along tropical coasts, once protected by mangrove trees. The ponds for the prawns meant the mangroves were destroyed. This can be very bad because when big storms happen, the coast isn’t protected any more.

I’ve made another guide all about pollution. Take a look to find out what’s going on.

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Salmon farms in the sea (as in British Columbia, Scotland and Norway) can, unless very carefully regulated, cause most wild salmon to die. Nobody intends this to happen. It’s a ‘hidden cost’; an unintended side-effect of another form of intensive industrial farming. The main problem intensive farming causes is sea-lice parasites (creatures that live off other creatures) which infect the wild fish. The lice love fish farms which have lots of food for them – salmon! But they escape through the farm cages into the sea and infect the wild salmon too.

This near extinction of wild salmon means local people who used to make a living catching a few of them lose their jobs. There are other serious worries about contaminated salmon too [1].

It’s strange to think that farming fish could actually make wild fish in the oceans even more scarce than they are already. But it’s happening… Production of a single pound of fish-eating species such as shrimp, salmon, tuna or cod needs 2 to 5 pounds of wild-caught fish for them to eat [2].

1 . “A fishy tale of salmon, dioxins and food safety”, New Scientist vol 181 issue 2430 – 17 January 2004, page 8.
2 . Salmon Farming: background, SeaWeb, .

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Really big storms are called cyclones, hurricanes or typhoons. One of these ripped into the coast of the Indian state of Orissa in October 1999, killing ten thousand people and leaving millions homeless [1]. This coast used to be protected by mangrove trees which can grow in salty water. The trees used to absorb all the violence of storms. But this natural protection was cut down to make way for shrimp farms. India has lost more than half its mangroves over the last 40 years, especially in Orissa state which raises tiger mangrove trees [3]prawns [2]. These shrimps and prawns aren’t to feed the local people: they’re for export to rich countries.

Mangrove trees are remarkable and there are several different types. They have roots that can filter salt and leaves that can get rid of salt too. They even help make new land by trapping mud and sand in their roots. Maybe you’ve seen them in Florida or other tropical places.

1. CARE International
2. New Scientist, 6/11/99, 12: An unnatural disaster
3. Earth Island (source of mangrove tree image) Find out here just how wonderful the mangrove trees and plants really are and why they are among the most threatened habitats in the world

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Most of the food you eat will have been processed in a factory in some way.
A fresh orange is not processed – though unless you eat the peel too (ugh!) you will process it yourself by peeling the skin off. Food processing used to be done at home but now, people have become rather lazy – or just too busy – and prefer to have someone else do it so they can buy and eat right away. This adds to the cost. How many of the foods you eat come from factories, do you think?

Processed or natural?

Here are some examples of foods made — processed — in factories:

And so on. I’ve only mentioned a few of the main sorts of processed food. How many more can you think of?

TIP: Everything is processed if it’s not fresh. Foods you buy in sealed packages like cans are processed.

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Trash, Rubbish, Garbage, Waste

Have you noticed how much garbage your family throws out every day? If you look at what makes up the trash, you’ll find that probably most of it is packaging from processed food or bottled drinks. You should be able to recycle some of this packaging (cans, plastic and glass bottles, aluminium fastfood trays, plastic or paper sacks or bags) but much of it you can’t do anything with. Waste food is more difficult. Food packaging is one reason why people are running out of space to dump trash from big cities and towns.

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When I say ‘food’, I don’t mean a proper balanced food like you’d eat at mealtime. Drinks, whatever they are, are mostly water. But many have sugar in them. Sugar is a nutrient (carbohydrate) but too much sugar is bad: it rots your teeth and makes you fat. Drinks like cola also contain phosphoric acid which damages teeth and bones, especially in girls. Schoolgirls who drink cola are five times as likely to suffer bone fractures as girls who don’t [1]. Some drinks — diet colas and so on — cut out sugar and use artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose. These are not nutrients and so they don’t have any calories (a measure of energy your body gets from the nutrient), unlike sugar — but they may cause other problems.

1. Active Girls Who Drink Colas Are Five Times More Likely to Fracture Bones Harvard School of Public Health, 2000.

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      which
          foods
              are
                 good?

      And
          which
               foods
                   bad?

(By ‘bad’, I don’t mean they will make you sick or anything. Just that you should eat them in moderation. You don’t need any of these to live. Trouble is everybody likes them and, because they are cheap, tasty and easy to eat, people eat far too much of them.)

Click here to find out about vegetarians and vegans

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Eating without meat

The Vegan Society pure vegetarians or ‘vegans’

Some people choose to eat only fruit, vegetables and other plant foods like nuts, cereals, peas and beans. They don’t eat any type of animal food: no meat, fish, eggs, milk, yogurt and so on. They usually choose to avoid all animal foods because they

• know that almost one quarter of all greenhouse gases are created by the livestock industry; from the animals’ waste; from growing crops to be used for animal feed; from clearing and burning tropical forests for ranching
• don’t like the way animals are treated and don’t like the idea of eating bits of their dead bodies
• know that the vegan style of eating means that many more people can be fed if food crops are grown for people to eat directly. With around 7 billion humans (and rising!) all needing to eat, moving towards the vegan way of eating makes perfect sense

The Vegetarian Society vegetarians

Like vegans except that vegetarians usually choose to eat dairy products like cheese and milk (lacto-vegetarians) and may also eat eggs (lacto-ovo-vegetarians). Like vegans, they mostly choose their diet because of worries about killing animals to eat. But unlike vegans, they indirectly support the meat industry they maybe disapprove of, usually without realising it. Why? Take cheese, for example. To make cheese you need milk. To make milk, a cow must have a calf first. The calf is then taken away and fattened for slaughter (if a bull calf). And when the cow has reached the end of her ‘useful’ life, she too will be killed and made into various food products. Her skin may be made into shoes. Some people even claim to be ‘vegetarian’ when they eat fish and chicken.

carnivores and omnivores

Being a penguin, I am a fish-eater and I cannot live without my fish. I have no choice, just as a lion cannot live without killing antelopes and eating their meat. Penguins and lions are carnivores (meat-eaters). Humans are really omnivores which means they can live off either plant or animal food, or both. Some humans like the Inuit of the Arctic eat almost nothing but animals because they have no choice. Other people, like those of the Hunza valley in Pakistan, eat almost nothing but plant food for similar reasons. So humans have a big advantage. They can live off almost any foods: vegetable, animal or mixes of both. And anyone who tells you humans can’t live without eating animals (as some do) is wrong.

Recently, people in richer countries have turned more and more to animal-based foods.There are problems with this:

• • eating a lot of animal food (rich in certain types of ‘bad’ fats) is now known to be bad for health in later life
  • producing cheap meat unfortunately in many cases means animals are treated badly
  • animals kept for meat (mainly cattle and hogs, but also including animals like fish and prawns which live in water) consume, in their short lives, enormous amounts of food and water. If the food – mostly cereals, beans and sea fish – was eaten by people directly, it could feed around ten times more people than eating the animals would
  • animals get fed antibiotic growth-promoters to make them grow faster. Scientists have warned that this is making many antibiotics (which humans need to treat dangerous diseases) useless.
  • factory farms make enormous quantities of waste
  • more and more land is going to be needed if more people want more meat though genetic engineering could help by giving food plants the ability to grow in water which is salty, to withstand pest and disease attacks without chemical sprays and even to grow more rapidly
  • genetic engineering may be used to manipulate farm animals to make them grow faster with bigger muscles (that is, more meat)

To find out more about genetic engineering, have a look at my guide.

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Does everyone have food? If not, why not?

Sadly no. Nearly 1 billion people on our planet — three times more people than live in the United States — are constantly short of food or near starving. This seems doubly wrong when you think that almost the same number have so much food they get to be overweight and even obese. Couldn’t humans divide things up a little more fairly? Seabirds eat what they need. You know why? We can’t afford to get fat! Can you imagine a fat penguin trying to catch a fish? We have to stay sleek and healthy. Humans can get fat and it doesn’t matter (though they might be quite unhappy about it) because they don’t have to hunt their food. They can just get into their cars and drive to the supermarket or takeaway when they feel hungry.

Why are some people hungry? That other billion people — the hungry and starving ones — can’t get enough food to eat because they are so poor. They can’t afford to buy food — or can only afford the very cheapest, low quality stuff no one else wants. If they each had a little piece of land, they could grow their own. But they don’t because most of them live in slums. They can’t get jobs because there are none, so often they have to beg, steal or scavenge the garbage from richer neighbourhoods.

What a miserable life.

Called favelas in Portuguese-speaking Brazil; pueblos jovenes) in other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.

This involves several giant corporations which increasingly own all rights to vital seeds and also make the chemicals farmers have to use to make them grow into plants ready to harvest. fertilisers get made in vast quantities, upsetting natural cycles and using equally vast amounts of fossil fuels.

Machines harvest the food (in most cases) which then has to be stored in silos or refrigerated buildings. Trucks and airplanes then transport the food around the world and it ends up, after processing, on supermarket shelves… where you buy it. This system is very new, it makes lots of money for those who run it and it is very good at producing lots of food. But there are hidden costs … and I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about damage to people’s livelihoods damage to the environment (land, sea, rivers, air, forests) and damage to people’s health.

Let Moophius (a bovine sleuth!) take you and Leo, a rather-simple-minded pig, on an animated tour of industrial farming.

It’s not all gloom though.

Take a look at the video (below) of a farm that produces food in a way that works with nature, not against it. It could be a game-changer!

Fashion!???

We penguins just don’t get the point of it.

We all wear the same feathers all year round. We keep them neat and clean and oil them regularly so we stay sleek and waterproof. Each year we grow new ones as the old ones get worn out and fall off. This is called moulting and all birds do it.

Food and drinks are high on the advertisers list

And it works! Advertisers wouldn’t waste money advertising if it didn’t. So all your life, you get bombarded by ‘messages’ — dozens a day, and not just on TV — trying to get you to buy stuff you don’t need.

Result? Kids everywhere buy food and drink they don’t need — or pester their mums and dads to do it. The food companies even sponsor schools. The idea is not just to sell you stuff now but to make you loyal their ‘brand’. They know that if you start buying a particular brand of cola or hamburger, you’re likely to stay with that… which over the years could mean thousands of $$$ from you flowing into that company.

And there’s another result; a really serious one which I’m sure you can guess...

Find out how food and soft drink companies are targeting you and your friends while you’re in school. Maybe you can make your school an ad-free zone.

Here’s some things you can do to help you and your family to a healthier and, often, cheaper way of eating:

Happy cooking and happy eating! As for me, I’m tired and hungry after all that and I’m off to catch my fish for dinner!

What do you think about food? Have you any good ideas about what we can do to make things better? If you do, please write to me. As long as your message is sensible and friendly, I promise to reply.

If you’ve found my Food Guide useful, please would you be kind enough to make a donation to help run my website. I know you kids don’t have credit cards or anything but perhaps you could persuade either your parents or your school to make a donation. It’s so easy and you can do it here.

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Tiki’s salad dressing

Salad dressing is so easy to make. Just vegetable oil – olive oil is best – and vinegar (wine, malt or cider) or fresh lemon juice. Use about 3 parts oil to 1 part of vinegar or lemon juice. You can add other flavourings like honey, crushed garlic, herbs, tomato puree, soya or Worcester sauce too if you want. Be inventive.

Finally, you do the hokey pokey and shake it all about (in a jar with a tight lid!). And serve… I’ve discovered this stuff is really good on my fish too.

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Eating without meat: vegetarians

The Vegan Society pure vegetarians or ‘vegans’

Some people choose to eat only fruit, vegetables and other plant foods like nuts, cereals, peas and beans. They don’t eat any type of animal food: no meat, fish, eggs, milk, yogurt and so on. They usually choose to avoid all animal foods because they

• know that almost one quarter of all greenhouse gases are created by the livestock industry; from the animals’ waste; from growing crops to be used for animal feed; from clearing and burning tropical forests for ranching
• don’t like the way animals are treated and don’t like the idea of eating bits of their dead bodies
• know that the vegan style of eating means that many more people can be fed if food crops are grown for people to eat directly. With around 7 billion humans (and rising!) all needing to eat, moving towards the vegan way of eating makes perfect sense

The Vegetarian Society vegetarians

like vegans except that vegetarians usually choose to eat dairy products like cheese and milk (lacto-vegetarians) and may also eat eggs (lacto-ovo-vegetarians). Like vegans, they mostly choose their diet because of worries about killing animals to eat. But unlike vegans, they indirectly support the meat industry they maybe cheesedisapprove of, usually without realising it. Why? Take cheese, for example. To make cheese you need milk. To make milk, a cow must have a calf first. The calf is then taken away and fattened for slaughter (if a bull calf). And when the cow has reached the end of her ‘useful’ life, she too will be killed and made into various food products. Her skin may be made into shoes. Some people even claim to be ‘vegetarian’ when they eat fish and chicken.

carnivores and omnivores

Being a penguin, I am a fish-eater and I cannot live without my fish. I have no choice, just as a lion cannot live without killing antelopes and eating their meat. Penguins and lions are carnivores (meat-eaters). Humans are really omnivores which means they can live off either plant or animal food, or both. Some humans like the Inuit of the Arctic eat almost nothing but animals because they have no choice. Other people, like those of the Hunza valley in Pakistan, eat almost nothing but plant food for similar reasons. So humans have a big advantage. They can live off almost any foods: vegetable, animal or mixes of both. And anyone who tells you humans can’t live without eating animals (as some do) is wrong.

Recently, people in richer countries have turned more and more to animal-based foods.There are problems with this:

• • eating a lot of animal food (rich in certain types of ‘bad’ fats) is now known to be bad for health in later life
  • producing cheap meat unfortunately in many cases means animals are treated badly
  • animals kept for meat (mainly cattle and hogs, but also including animals like fish and prawns which live in water) consume, in their short lives, enormous amounts of food and water. If the food – mostly cereals, beans and sea fish – was eaten by people directly, it could feed around ten times more people than eating the animals would
  • animals get fed antibiotic growth-promoters to make them grow faster. Scientists have warned that this is making many antibiotics (which humans need to treat dangerous diseases) useless.
  • factory farms make enormous quantities of waste
  • more and more land is going to be needed if more people want more meat though genetic engineering could help by giving food plants the ability to grow in water which is salty, to withstand pest and disease attacks without chemical sprays and even to grow more rapidly
  • genetic engineering may be used to manipulate farm animals to make them grow faster with bigger muscles (that is, more meat)

To find out more about genetic engineering, have a look at my guide.

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Want to find out more for yourself about food? Here are some of my favourite sites which you might like to visit. Please avoid disappointment and don’t send me more links, no matter how useful you think they are. Lots of people do but I simply don’t have time to deal with them. Sorry!

FishOnline If you are worried (as I am) about declining fish stocks and the welfare of our seas, the Marine Conservation Society FishOnline is a wonderful website. Find out why it’s better to eat, for example, a line-caught mackerel than a roundnose grenadie

PETA Kids – Creating an animal-friendly world

There are loads of places to visit so I’ve just selected a few which I like the best. And please avoid disappointment and don’t send me more links, no matter how useful you think they are. Lots of people do but I simply don’t have time to deal with them. Sorry!