Debunking the meat/climate change myth. Editor’s note: Eliot Coleman is one of the most revered and influential small-scale farmers in the United States, famous for growing delicious vegetables through the Maine winter with little use of fossil fuel. Eliot sent me the following letter as a response to my recent piece on the greenhouse-gas foorprint of industrial meat. At question is a 2007 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which claimed that 18 percent of global human-induced greenhouse gas emissions stem from meat production. – Tom Philpott The problem is CAFOs, not cows.I am dismayed that so many people have been so easily fooled on the meat eating and climate change issue following the UN report.
The culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate/industrial agriculture. The UN report shows either great ignorance or possibly the influence of the fossil fuel lobby with the intent of confusing the public. Food Outlook, June 2009. While world cereal production is heading towards a modest decline in 2009, it will still be the second highest after last year’s record.
Total cereal utilization will expand in the new season (2009/10), albeit at a slower rate than in 2008/09. Feed utilization is expected to be most hit by the current economic slow down, and register only a modest increase, but growth in industrial use of cereals may also lose steam in the new season. Food cereal consumption is expected to keep up with population growth, at the global and even national levels in most countries.
Overall, the anticipated decline in world cereal production is likely to be offset by a draw down from stocks carried-over from the current season, and as such, supply is foreseen to be sufficient to meet the expected demand. However, in the current economic environment, there is much uncertainty, especially with regard to its effects on demand. . * Jan-May 2009 1/ Rice in milled equivalent ** Jan-May 2009 Source: FAO *Jan-May 2009. Tofu can harm environment more than meat, finds WWF study - Times Online. Originally hailed as wonderful, soya can be bad for your health.
On a crisp winter morning in Belfast, Dr Lorraine Anderson was nearing the end of her doctorate research project. She had spent weeks hunched over a microscope looking at samples of sperm. Anderson was trying to figure out what made some sperm move slower than others. As a specialist in reproductive medicine at Belfast's Royal Maternity Hospital she was particularly interested in why some samples moved so sluggishly that they would have trouble reaching and fertilising an egg. Anderson knew that a sperm's 'motility' was one of the critical factors in fertility. Anderson's 'eureka' moment arrived when a complex analysis of the samples she was working on revealed that the seminal liquid surrounding the slower-moving sperm contained chemicals called isoflavones. These highly active compounds are found in large concentrations in soya.
But this is much easier said than done. No fragment of the bean is wasted. During the oil extraction, the bean also produces a substance called lecithin. In Defense of the Cow: How Eating Meat Could Help Slow Climate Change. Photo via stock.xchng by bouwm019 Should we be eating more beef in order to slow global warming? It sounds counterintuitive, but it may be so: Cattle could be part of the whole ecological equation to solving climate change and restoring healthy, bio-diverse ecosystems. I am a vegetarian, but I maintain there is a place for grass-fed beef on family menus--and pasture-raised cattle in global warming solutions. Cows can help more than harm if they are sustainably raised. What's the Beef About Beef?
When it comes to global warming, a growing number of people are pointing fingers at our meat consumption. This perspective is reflected by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who reported in the Observer: "Diet change [is] important because of the huge greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental problems - including habitat destruction - associated with rearing cattle and other animals.
" Here is why: Photo via stock.xchng by lcumings. Methane Emissions of Beef Cattle on Forages: Efficiency of Grazing Management Systems -- DeRamus et al. 32 (1): 269 -- Journal of Environmental Quality. Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Conventional, Agri-Environmental Scheme, and Organic Irish Suckler-Beef Units -- Casey and Holden 35 (1): 231 -- Journal of Environmental Quality. How To Take CO2 Out of the Sky, Timothy J LaSalle. Curbing the U.S. carbon deficit — PNAS. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of Americawww.pnas.org Author Affiliations Edited by Christopher B. Field, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA, and approved September 15, 2004 (received for review May 21, 2004) Abstract The U.S. emitted ≈1.58 petagrams (Pg) of fossil fuel carbon in 2001, approximately one-quarter of global CO2 production.
As a nation, the U.S. emitted ≈1.58 petagrams (Pg) of fossil fuel carbon in 2001 (1), approximately one-quarter of the global production of CO2. To Swards from Plowshares Land-based sequestration in agricultural soils restores all or part of the soil organic carbon (SOC) lost with plowing and intensive agriculture (6–10). Potential carbon storage in U.S. agricultural soils can be estimated by combining observed sequestration rates through the CRP and no-till agriculture with the extent of agricultural lands in the U.S. Fig. 1. Car Talk Hybrid Solutions Acknowledgments Footnotes. SRM Online Journals - Soil Carbon Sequestration in Grazing Lands: Societal Benefits and Policy Implications.
Effects of native grazers on grassland N cycling in Yellowstone National Park | Ecology | Find Articles at BNET. In Search of..... - TV.com www.tv.com/shows/in-search-of Narrarated by Leonard Nimoy, In search of was a 30 minute syndicated show that covered a wide range of paranormal topics. It pioneered a lot of the methodology that ... Search Engine - Download.com download.cnet.com/s/search-engine search engine free download - GSA Search Engine Ranker, Nomao - The personalized search engine, Zoom Search Engine, and many more programs Google Search - Download.com download.cnet.com/s/google-search google search free download - Google Search, Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Google Search, and many more programs Star Search - Episode Guide - TV.com www.tv.com/shows/star-search-2003/episodes Star Search episode guides on TV.com.
What If Vitamin D Deficiency Is a Cause of Autism? As evidence of widespread vitamin D deficiency grows, some scientists are wondering whether the sunshine vitamin—once only considered important in bone health—may actually play a role in one of neurology's most vexing conditions: autism. The idea, although not yet tested or widely held, comes out of preliminary studies in Sweden and Minnesota. Last summer, Swedish researchers published a study in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology that found the prevalence of autism and related disorders was three to four times higher among Somali immigrants than non-Somalis in Stockholm.
The study reviewed the records of 2,437 children, born between 1988 and 1998 in Stockholm, in response to parents and teachers who had raised concerns about whether children with a Somali background were overrepresented in the total group of children with autism. Few, if any, Somalis had ever seen anything like it. "It has shocked the community," Farah says. Saturated fats: what dietary intake? CR Society Archives :: CRCOMMUNITY :: Responsible Supplementation. Dietary fat intake and subsequent weight change in... [Am J Clin Nutr. 2009] - PubMed result. Frontline: diet wars: interview: gary taubes. Why is it so easy for us to believe that fat is a bad dietary ingredient? The idea is that fat has nine calories per gram, and carbohydrates and protein have four calories per gram, and somehow the theory is that the denser the calories, the more easier it is for us to eat more of them. What happened is in the '50s and '60s, when researchers started fingering fat as a cause of heart disease, the obesity researchers, the obesity community started advocating low-fat diets, which they had never done before.
A low-fat diet is by definition a high-carbohydrate diet. But you had this sort of synchronicity where you had the heart disease people saying, "Give up fat, saturated fat, for heart disease," and the obesity people started saying, "Give up fat because it must be the best diet because fat is the densest calories. " You get this hypothesis that animal fats are the worst kind of fats. That seems reasonable. And we knew that cholesterol was associated-- Yes. Up until about 1980. Yeah. The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs. It's time for another round of The Food Lab.
Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments. [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] I'd like to apologize in advance for the shameless, horrible egg puns that I'm inevitably going to shell out over the course of this story. For the very first installment of The Food Lab, I thought I'd tackle one of the simplest, yet most vexing everyday challenges of the home kitchen: perfectly boiling an egg.
The first few of these fairy tales were easy to banish with some easy tests. What Factors Matter When Boiling Eggs? Age of the Eggs "Old eggs are for boiling, fresh eggs are for frying," is the old chestnut. Lid on, or Off? Turns out, the only factors that really do matter when boiling an egg are time and temperature. The Temperature Timeline of Boiling an Egg. How Eating Grass-Fed Beef Could Help Fight Climate Change. On a farm in coastal Maine, a barn is going up. Right now it's little more than a concrete slab and some wooden beams, but when it's finished, the barn will provide winter shelter for up to six cows and a few head of sheep. None of this would be remarkable if it weren't for the fact that the people building the barn are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post's gardening columnist.
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