Yummy or yukky? All about foodadmin_tiki2020-12-22T19:34:49+00:00
Yummy or yucky – all about food
Food: why all the fuss?
Like all living things, people need food to live… but how much? And what sort? Why are so many people overweight or obese? Why so many hungry Why are some foods ‘good’ and others ‘bad’? Come with me on a journey through my Food Guide and find out just what food is all about.
“You are what you eat”
What does ‘obese’ mean?
An obese person is someone who has so much fat in their body that it becomes a threat to their health. In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese and 41 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese [World Health Organization figures].
About 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world — one in nine — do not get enough to eat [UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures]. Eyes of Hunger Image: Alex Proimos
Everyone knows that. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. For me, it’s very simple: food is fish. I just love fish (especially eating them!). Your favourite? I wonder what your favourite food is? Let me guess… hamburgers? Ice cream? Candy bars? Well that’s probably more likely than raw carrots or garlic.
So anyway, what exactly is food? Let’s look at what it’s made of. Food (which really includes many types of drinks too — like milk shakes and cola — but not water) is made up of nutrients. These are the things which give you energy or help build up your body as you grow.
Maybe you already know what the most important Big Three nutrients are:
protein proteins which you find in meat, fish, beans and stuff carbohydrate
carbohydrates — sugar is one and you find others in bread, cereals and vegetables fat fat — I guess you know what that is. You find it in fried foods, cheese, butter, margarine and oils Almost all the food you eat has some of the Big Three in it. But there are other things too which you need to eat in much smaller amounts. They are vitamins and minerals. You need small amounts of both.
I’m sure you know about vitamins. There are quite a few and most of them have letters: vitamins A, B, C, D and E.
And minerals? One is salt. Other important ones are calcium and iron.
Anything else? Well yes. Scientists have discovered that all kinds of other things in fresh fruit and vegetables are very useful in helping stay healthy. This is part of the reason why it’s a good idea for people to eat lots of these foods. They contain useful things like flavonoids as well as lots of vitamins. They also have stuff in them that people can’t digest very well called fibre (so do cereals like oats) which turn out to be useful too because they help prevent nasty diseases like cancer.
Flavonoids are a type of phytochemical (meaning a chemical compound found in plants). You can find them in certain fruits such as apples, grapefruit and grapes.. Scientists have found that they may be very useful because, among other things, they help to prevent cancers. Another important class of phytochemicals called isothiocyanates — found in broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts — may help to prevent tumour growth.
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.
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.
About additives: Food processing companies usually put additives in their products for one of three reasons:
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)
to make them look better — colourings
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:
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!
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
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.
Farming is a very efficient way of growing the sort of food people want to eat, in very large amounts. Until early last century, all farming was based on sustainable methods because there was no choice. Today, people in poor countries continue this way of growing food because they cannot afford the machinery and chemicals needed for modern industrial farming. Industrial farming certainly makes loads of food but it damages the land, sea and air. There are alternatives such as organic farming which is sustainable. The problem with organic farming is that the farmers have to be much more skilled. They can’t rely on spraying and ‘instant’ fertilisers and have to plan their crops in a very different way. This means more people have jobs and this type of farming is nature-friendly… but organic food is more expensive. There is a huge argument about this at the moment. Modern industrial farmers say that only they can ‘feed the world’, preferably using genetically engineered crops.
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.
Fascinating food facts
hydroponic growing can produce 100 times more in the same area as traditional methods. And it can use 99 percent less water than outdoor fields more on this
in Peru, the local people keep guinea pigs (called cuyes) to eat
in Australia, kangaroos are farmed for their meat and fur
in South Africa, ostrich farming is big business. They are farmed for their meat (which is much lower in fat than beef) and feathers. Happily, no one farms penguins, although people did once kill us for meat. The only animals that ever eat people are occasional tigers and other humans (cannibals)
insects are getting more popular as both tasty and a good source of protein. Eating insects is perfectly normal in many countries. People eat: crickets, cicadas, grasshoppers, ants, beetle grubs and even scorpions and tarantulas
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.
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.
The real cost of cheap food
Everybody wants cheap food. But now, many people are worried about the real costs of this. Food is grown and made cheaply because many of the real costs get left out. They are ‘externalised’: missed out of the cost calculation. Here are some examples:
Cheap food depends on using huge machines to cultivate and harvest crops, more machines to process them and more again to transport them. These machines use a lot of fuel and all the exhaust gases get dumped — pollution — into the air we all breathe. Small family farms can’t afford to buy expensive machines so they go out of business.
On factory farms, animals are treated not as living creatures, but ‘production units’ because it’s cheaper that way. The pollution from factory farms affects streams, rivers and even the sea and coral reefs.
Then there’s pesticides. These may kill pests but they too can seriously pollute water supplies under the ground: often your drinking water. This water has to be cleaned up before it can be used. That’s expensive to do and should be paid for as part of the cost of ‘cheap’ food. But it isn’t and so people have to pay higher prices for their water supplies — or drink polluted water.
Finally, there’s the thorny problem of subsidy. This is where governments give money to farmers to grow crops. This makes food artificially cheap so that it can be sold cheaply in other parts of the world, undercutting poor or unsupported farmers and driving them out of business. Most rich countries subsidise their farming industries but they like to pretend they don’t. Why? Because subsidising agriculture is supposed to be against the rules of international trade.
Would you believe it?
Farmers in the world’s top 21 food-producing countries received about $486 billion in public support in 2012. Source: Worldwatch Institute
one cow in the rich world gets a subsidy equal to almost twice the annual income of an average Third World farmer.
And where does that money come from? You! You (or your parents) pay taxes and that’s where the subsidies come from.
If the costs of stopping air and water pollution, treating the animals kindly and cleaning up factory farms before they cause pollution were paid as part of the true costs of ‘cheap’ food, it wouldn’t be cheap at all.
For more on factory farms, click the pig image to visit the Food&WaterWatch factory farm facts page.
Visit PETA if you’re concerned about the way some people treat animals.
Industrial farming includes what’s called ‘factory farming’. Animals are cooped up for their short and miserable lives in prison-like buildings. Pigs (hogs), which naturally root around in forests, are kept in huge buildings so they fatten as quickly as possible ready for killing. Cattle, grazers of grass on the open range, are confined in feedlots all their lives. Calves may be kept in crates so they can hardly move. Chickens (hens) love scratching around for food on the forest floor, but are kept for egg-laying in tiny wire cages in huge batteries… The list goes on. Take a look at my stuff about cheap food and the damage industrial farming does.
Then there’s arable farming with its huge machines, pesticides and artificial fertilisers which pollute both directly and indirectly…
So what happens when you add up the real costs of industrial farming? it seems it’s just not worth it. When you add in all the costs of cleaning up pollution, repairing habitats and coping with sickness caused by farming, there’s almost no profit at all.
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
Once, people who lived near lakes, rivers and the sea often depended on fishing for much of their food. Today, most small fishermen who just catch enough fish for themselves with some left over to sell locally, have lost their jobs. Why? Because humans always want more and more of everything. They’ve built big ships which can catch millions of fish in just a few days so there aren’t enough left to breed and make baby fish. No baby fish means no new adult fish… which soon means no fish at all! And because of the pollution from chemicals from farming and factories – which gets into the rivers and then the seas – many fish are either not able to breed or contain so much pollution themselves that they are not good to eat any more. This is very sad because fish are yummy and the oily ones are very healthy for people and penguins to eat… or were.
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.
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, .
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
Even if you buy flour to make your own bread, that flour is processed. First the wheat grains get ground up in a mill and then different parts, like the brown outside of the seed, get separated. Then, if you don’t make your own bread (hardly anyone does this anymore), the flour is mixed with other ingredients and baked in an oven to make the loaf you buy in the shop. That’s an example of simple food processing. Almost every food you buy in a packet, box or tub is processed in some way. This is where some problems can start.
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:
Milk (which is a food) usually gets put in packages after being heated to kill any bugs (pasteurised). Then it’s cooled and taken in big trucks to supermarkets and shops. Milk can be made into cheese too. Skimmed milk has the cream taken off to be sold separately as cream or butter. Some milk gets made into yoghurt
Snack foods like chips. There are hundreds. Most of them are made from potatoes, corn (maize) or other grains with added salt, sugar and fat which makes them taste good
Tinned, frozen or dried (dehydrated) food
Breads, biscuits, crackers
Soda drinks (pop, fizzy) like cola and fruit flavours. Some of these really are foods because they contain “hidden” nutrients like sugar
Meat – animals are killed in special factories called abattoirs (slaughter houses). Almost every scrap of them is used for something. For example, their skins become leather for clothing and shoes, and other stuff that nobody would much like the look of gets made into sausages and pie fillings
Sugar. This is made from crushing either sugar beet or sugar cane
Spreads
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.
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.
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.
“You are what you eat”, goes a well known saying. It’s not quite true but its message really means that if you eat healthy foods, you are most likely to be healthy. If you eat nothing but corn chips, you won’t get to look like a corn cob but you certainly won’t be fit and healthy. This is because your body needs a good mix of foods. So…good foods:
which
foods
are
good?
Good foods
Almost anything fresh is a good start. Better still is fresh organic food.
Oily fish
Vegetables, particularly orange or dark green ones (carrots, chard, broccoli, squashes like pumpkins)
Fruits
Oats and other fibre-rich grains
Pulses (beans, peas, lentils)
Certain vegetable oils which are high in monounsaturates (olive, canola/rapeseed)
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.)
bad foods
Most processed foods — which generally contain sugar, salt and fat
Fatty foods like margarines, butter, cream, most cheeses, fatty meat
Sugar and sugary foods like cakes and candies
Food containing additives and colourings
Sugary or diet soda drinks
Salty foods
Fast food and takeaways
fats (some of which are normally liquid whilst others are solid) vegetable oils which are high in saturates or trans fats)
Click here to find out about vegetarians and 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
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.
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.
The elephant in the room
Sometimes when there’s a problem (represented by the elephant) so huge, people just pretend it’s not there. One of the biggest problems of all is the rapidly increasing number of humans on the planet. How will all these people get to eat? Check out this video — a voyage through time since humans first appeared on planet Earth about 200,000 years ago. Look what happens when farming got going 10,000 years ago…
Called favelas in Portuguese-speaking Brazil; pueblos jovenes) in other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.
Long ago, all people gathered or grew their own food. But gradually most people specialised into other lines of business, exchanging the time they worked for tokens which you call money. With that money, they could buy food. Today in the rich countries, hardly anyone grows their own food any more. Hardly anyone knows how to. So growing and selling food has become a big business.
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!
For the times they are a-changin. People are beginning to see that money isn’t everything if making it damages the planet so badly that the future is bleak. sustainable farmingSo many farmers are beginning to convert their farms to sustainable farming (which is what they were anyway before industrial farming took over).
This was the title of one of the best-known songs by one of the best-known folk singers, Bob Dylan. He was right; they are!
You know all about ads if you have a TV. Companies spend billions… yes, hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to get people (including, especially, kids like you) to buy things they don’t really want and don’t need. Advertising is really all about making people desire things. The ads do this in various ways. One of the most successful is by ‘spinning’ the product in such a way that it becomes cool, trendy and fashionable to have it — whatever it is. This is what designer labels (very well known brands) are all about. And kids fall for it as well as adults! Just check out how many items of clothing or shoes you or your friends have got that carry these ‘must have‘ labels.
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...
Peer pressure
If your friends all eat and drink well-known products, or they wear particular brands of shoes and clothing, it’s very hard not to copy what they do. If you don’t, you’re un-cool. This is called peer pressure and it’s a dream ticket for product advertisers because it gets the message across that it’s cool to buy their product.
The obesity epidemic
More and more kids are getting to be overweight or obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) regards childhood obesity as “one of the most serious global public health challenges for the 21st century.” There are many reasons for this but as you might guess, the relentless advertising of high fat and sugary food and drink is not helping.
Advertising is a $580 billion a year industry
“The average American child age 8 or older spends more than seven hours a day with screen media, watching TV, using the computer, playing video games, and using hand-held devices. Even much younger children, age 2-8, spend nearly two hours a day with screen media. And through virtually all these media, children are exposed to advertising.” Source
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.
It’s fun to eat out or grab a takeaway. Junk food – who needs it? But it can also be fun to create really good food yourself – or help your family do so. It’s a great way to spend time together. I eat my fish raw but most people like their food cooked and hot. This is why you have a kitchen in your house… so use it! It’s cheaper and better for your health if you prepare your own fresh food rather than buy everything processed or ready made. Takeaways can be a great treat but not every day.
Here’s some things you can do to help you and your family to a healthier and, often, cheaper way of eating:
8 things you can do
Buy locally grown food whenever you can
Check for farmers’ markets in your area. Many places in America have CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) schemes you can link up with. Ask your local shops or supermarket to stock locally grown food. They usually try to provide what their customers want. Some farms run a delivery service – vegetable boxes – so you don’t even have to go out. Some mail order companies can supply quality foods (including fresh) which they also deliver. tips for finding veg box scheme near you
If you can afford it, buy organic
Better for you, your family and the planet. And you don’t have to do without many cans of soft drink or takeaway meals to save quite an amount of money.
If you’re thirsty, try drinking water.
It’s free – unless you buy the bottled sort – and it’s the healthiest drink there is. If the water out of the tap tastes bad (chlorine or something), you can get simple filters which remove the bad taste. Or just fill a jug with it and leave it for a day (no lid so the chlorine escapes). Then drink it.
Learn to cook:Watching a cook on TV is no substitute for cooking yourself
If people did as much cooking as there are programmes on TV (and books) telling them how to, they’d never be out of the kitchen!
Be bold when you cook: try different recipes or even invent some yourself.
When you have plenty of fresh veg, make salads
These are easy to prepare – especially if you have a food processor with a grater attachment. Salads are very healthy indeed and yummy (so I’m told) with a delicious dressing — which you can also make yourself. You can use lots of root vegetables like squashes, carrots, rutabaga (swede) and so on, to grate into your salads.
Invite your friends to have a meal with you that you’ve made
It will probably be a new experience for all of you and an opportunity for fun!
Grow your own food
Even if you’ve only got a small space, you can still grow some of your food. What’s more, it’s fun: sowing your seeds, watching your plants grow as you care for them and, finally, harvesting. You can even grow tomatoes (or other plants like capsicums) by the window in your room… wherever there’s good sunshine. Many cities now have local community farms where you can join other people who grow their own. It’s cool!
Cut the meat!
By cutting down on meat-eating or — better still — by becoming vegetarian, you will
Help slow global warming
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.
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.
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
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.
How to find a veg box scheme near you
Copy and paste “veg box delivery” followed by the name of your town/city/state/county/country (choose one, for example “Chicago” if you live in that city) into a search engine. It may surprise you just how many schemes there are.
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
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!
Organic farming
Why ‘organic’? ‘Organic’ is a rather odd name since all food is organic, meaning that it’s made from living things. But it seems to have stuck. Organic farming is called ‘biological farming’ in some countries.Then there’s biodynamic farming… and permaculture. All these slightly different types of farming are sustainable which is the most important thing to remember. Confusing, isn’t it!
What’s so great about organic food? It looks much the same as ordinary food produced by modern farming. But there are differences.
When you buy organic food, you support farming which is sustainable. Because no hazardous chemicals are used, farmers don’t get contaminated and nor do their families
Organic farming is friendly to our planet and the wonderful diversity of living things on it (often called biodiversity)
Organic foods should be free of pesticide (or other synthetic chemical) residues. Nobody knows what the long term effects of eating slightly contaminated food might be. High levels of pesticide residues can kill or poison people. Lower levels of residues may cause cancers such as leukemia in children
There seem to be small but real differences in minor nutrients with organic fruit and vegetables being better
Organic produce does not contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which for some people is very important (see box below)
Many people claim that organic food tastes better
Problems with organic growing: Can organic farming feed the world?
Many studies indicate that yields from organic farms are around 20 percent less for many important food crops. The reasons for this are twofold: lack of nitrogen in the soil and crop rotation. This means that at any one time, about a fifth of farmland is not producing food because it has to be sown with soil-building cover crops and nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants to restore fertility
Organic food is usually more expensive
Organic farmers are missing out on all kinds of useful traits which genetic engineering offers (like disease, pest and drought resistance, greater yields and many more). Why? Because organic regulations ban anything which involves genetic engineering of any type including the precision technique called CRISPR. But this ban seems to be based on conviction rather than on scientific evidence. It doesn’t have to be like this — here’s A co-existence peace plan for GMOs and organics
What is sustainable farming?
Sustainable farming(= sustainable agriculture) is growing food in a way that means you can continue to do it for ever. It does not depend totally upon cheap energy (fossil fuel) which is now used to power huge machines and for making fertilisers and pesticides. Another part of sustainable farming is selling most of the food locally through farmers’ markets, local shops and other community schemes. This avoids using yet more fossil fuels for long-distance transport in trucks, ships and airplanes. And sustainable farming — more or less the same as organic farming — is kind to the land and animals that are part of it.
The nitrogen cycle overwhelmed: fertiliser pollution and dead zones
Artificial nitrogen fertilisers are now readily available thanks to the Haber-Bosch process (invented in Germany in the early 20th century). They are made by reacting nitrogen gas (from the atmosphere, most of which is nitrogen) with hydrogen gas to make ammonia compounds which plants need to grow properly. The hydrogen comes from methane which comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel. And the process itself requires high-pressures and temperatures which uses a lot of energy and that, of course, also comes from fossil fuels.
Today these fertilisers are heavily used throughout the world because they’re cheap, convenient and effective and mean more food can be grown. But there are downsides and they are big ones: pollution of the atmosphere and oceans. When farmers scatter it on their fields, soil microbes convert some of it into nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas which adds to global warming. And because these fertilisers easily dissolve in water, heavy rains can cause a lot of it to run off into lakes, rivers and the sea where it creates dead zones. Find out about these in this video from NASA:
Farmers’ markets
A few hundred years ago, almost everyone either worked on the land or had direct links to it. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Much land was taken from the poor people who worked it and they had to move to the new industrial cities to find a way to make a living. But even by the mid 1800s, more than half Americans still worked on family-owned farms. Today fewer than 2 per cent do — and family farms are in big trouble. But things are beginning to change. Groups are getting together to support small local farmers by organising farmers’ markets. Over 8,000 of these now operate across the USA. Others lend a hand more directly: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a really great way to help local farmers make a decent living as well as linking people to their own direct — and cheaper — source of locally-grown food.
Modern farming
Intensive agriculture is another name people use to describe modern industrial farming. It has been very successful at producing cheap food but there are hidden costs and it depends totally, directly and indirectly, on cheap and plentiful oil and natural gas. It is not sustainable — people won’t be able to keep on doing it — because the oil will run out. And the oil farmers burn to power their machines is damaging the planet by producing greenhouse gases which, in turn, cause climate change. World food production is at risk from farming methods that have degraded soils, over-used aquifers, polluted water and air, and caused the loss of animal and plant species.
“From northern China to the Middle East, from North Africa to the Central Valley of California, a common and unsettling story is unfolding: the effort to produce massive grain and food surpluses that will feed billions and to supply drinking water to the largest knots of humanity on the planet is taxing aquifers beyond their capacity.” Source
Family farms are in big trouble
The same is true in Britain where the pressure has been on to make farms bigger and ‘more competitive’. Family farms are going bust which is very sad. Farmers who own their land and work on it every day tend to look after their property in a kindly way, leaving space for other animals to live there with them. Huge farms owned by companies are run, like factories, just to make a profit. Wildlife and caring for the environment are not on the agenda.
And so it is with your house (or your room in your parents’ house): you care for it because if you don’t, you suffer if it falls down or gets really yukky. If you owned thousands of houses (or rooms) and rented them out to other people, nobody would much care for them.
What was the Industrial Revolution?
The Industrial Revolution started (about 250 years ago) when people realised that they could use fossil fuel (like coal and oil) to power machinery. Previously, machinery was either powered by animals, humans or by wind or water
“Agriculture was responsible for approximately 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. It is the dominant driver of tropical deforestation…” The list goes on. Source: World Resources Institute, 2016
Aquifers are underground water sources: groundwater. Many areas of the United States are experiencing ground-water depletion. For more on this, click here.
Farmers’ markets
A few hundred years ago, almost everyone either worked on the land or had direct links to it. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Much land was taken from the poor people who worked it and they had to move to the new industrial cities to find a way to make a living. But even by the mid 1800s, more than half Americans still worked on family-owned farms. Today fewer than 2 per cent do — and family farms are in big trouble. But things are beginning to change. Groups are getting together to support small local farmers by organising farmers’ markets. Over 8,000 of these now operate across the USA. Others lend a hand more directly: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a really great way to help local farmers make a decent living as well as linking people to their own direct — and cheaper — source of locally-grown food.
Family farms are in big trouble
The same is true in Britain where the pressure has been on to make farms bigger and ‘more competitive’. Family farms are going bust which is very sad. Farmers who own their land and work on it every day tend to look after their property in a kindly way, leaving space for other animals to live there with them. Huge farms owned by companies are run, like factories, just to make a profit. Wildlife and caring for the environment are not on the agenda.
And so it is with your house (or your room in your parents’ house): you care for it because if you don’t, you suffer if it falls down or gets really yukky. If you owned thousands of houses (or rooms) and rented them out to other people, nobody would much care for them.
What was the Industrial Revolution?
The Industrial Revolution started (about 250 years ago) when people realised that they could use fossil fuel (like coal and oil) to power machinery. Previously, machinery was either powered by animals, humans or by wind or water
“Agriculture was responsible for approximately 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. It is the dominant driver of tropical deforestation…” The list goes on. Source: World Resources Institute, 2016
Aquifers are underground water sources: groundwater. Many areas of the United States are experiencing ground-water depletion. For more on this, click here.
The nitrogen cycle overwhelmed: fertiliser pollution and dead zones
Artificial nitrogen fertilisers are now readily available thanks to the Haber-Bosch process (invented in Germany in the early 20th century). They are made by reacting nitrogen gas (from the atmosphere, most of which is nitrogen) with hydrogen gas to make ammonia compounds which plants need to grow properly. The hydrogen comes from methane which comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel. And the process itself requires high-pressures and temperatures which uses a lot of energy and that, of course, also comes from fossil fuels.
Today these fertilisers are heavily used throughout the world because they’re cheap, convenient and effective and mean more food can be grown. But there are downsides and they are big ones: pollution of the atmosphere and oceans. When farmers scatter it on their fields, soil microbes convert some of it into nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas which adds to global warming. And because these fertilisers easily dissolve in water, heavy rains can cause a lot of it to run off into lakes, rivers and the sea where it creates dead zones. Find out about these in this video from NASA: