Tag Archives: food

cancer-sniffing dogs

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Here’s an article on cancer-sniffing dogs.

The samples come to the dogs — the dogs never go to the patient. At the moment, our dogs would be screening about between a .5- to 1-ml drop of urine [or 1/5 to 1/10 teaspoon], so a very small amount. In the early days, of course, we know whether the samples have come from a patient with cancer or if the patient has another disease or condition, or is in fact healthy.

They come to the dogs at our training facility. They’re put into a carousel, and the dogs go around smelling samples. If they come across a sample that has a cancer smell, they’ll stop and stare at the sample and wait. They won’t move on.

One thing this reminds me of is that the organic compounds in our bodies, our food, and the rest of nature are just incredibly complex. When we try to measure and recreate them, we tend to miss the mark. A vitamin pill is not as good as a salad, baby formula is not as good at breast milk, and food grown with synthetic fertilizers is probably not as nutritious as food grown in healthy soil (although the evidence on this is not entirely conclusive). So it makes sense that when we try to devises a test for a particular compound, we may only be testing for some of what is actually there.

bees

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Here’s a nice example of how diversity is related to resilience. As honeybees are having more problems, farmers are learning to use combinations of other bees, including bumblebees, to get the same pollination effect.

just like in the apple orchards, scientists are finding that between those two kinds of bees, farmers can probably get by without using honeybees. It’s all part of a new strategy of diversification that entomologist Shelby Fleischer affectionately refers to as Plan B.

“I think the key to remember is resilience,” Fleischer says. “So don’t just aim for any one species. Historically, there’s been a lot of emphasis on making honeybees our pollinator, and resilience suggests that we should try and support a community of bees.”

July 2015 in Review

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I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

Lloyds of London is worried about food

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Lloyds of London says we should be worried about the food supply. And yes, they have insurance for that.

Global demand for food is on the rise, driven by unprecedented growth in the world’s population and widespread shifts in consumption patterns as countries develop. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that global agricultural production will need to more than double by 2050 to close the gap between food supply and demand. As this chronic pressure increases, the food system is becoming increasingly vulnerable to acute shocks…

Sudden disruptions to the supply chain could reduce the global food supply and trigger a spike in food prices, leading to substantial knock-on effects for businesses and societies. The food system’s existing vulnerability to systemic shocks is being exacerbated by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation, and heightening political instability…

A shock to the global food supply could trigger significant claims across multiple classes of insurance, including (but not limited to) terrorism and political violence, political risk, business interruption, marine and aviation, agriculture, environmental liability, and product
liability and recall. These losses could be compounded by the potential for a food system shock to last for many years; and the ability of insurers to pay claims quickly is expected to be an important factor in post-shock recovery. More broadly, the insurance industry may also be affected by impacts on investment income and the global regulatory and business environment.

June 2015 in Review

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Negative stories:

Positive stories:

edible forest gardens

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Now this truly is uplifting summer reading. It takes the idea of “perennial polycultures”, which are typical in the tropics, and asks whether they can work in eastern North America. I’ve spent some time in the tropics (Thailand in particular). Some people are worried about whether climate change will affect industrial agriculture in the tropics. But in my experience, people in the developing tropics are surrounded by more food than we are here in the developed temperate zone. Peoples’ yards are overflowing with mangoes, payapas, bananas, coconuts, peppers, eggplants and squashes of various sorts (mostly spicy sorts). Throw in some chickens foraging around, farm ponds full of fish, and bamboo for both food and timber, and you could really get by for awhile if the grocery store suddenly disappeared. Gardening there really doesn’t take much effort – once the plants are established. the effort is keeping the plants under control, if you are inclined to do that. If you don’t they just keep growing and producing food. Such is the amazing gift of solar energy.

It turns out we can grow fruit in the temperate zone too. Persimmons and pawpaws are native American trees, for example, but there are also hardy Asian persimmons and Asian pears, which are tougher than our native pears. There are hardy kiwis and yams that can grow here. There are “invasive” native wildflowers like Jerusalem artichoke that grow 10 foot tall stalks with edible, supposedly potato-like tubers. Not to mention some of our favorite perennials like strawberries and asparagus. The books go into a fair amount of detail on soil science, nutrient cycling, attracting pollinators, and other ecological topics, which is fun.

seafood

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National Geographic has put together an online seafood app. It uses information available elsewhere (Monterey Aquarium, etc.), but what is innovative is that you can easily filter the most sustainable, nutritious and low-mercury species using a tool bar. The only problem being that, if you pick all those options at once, there are only a couple choices left.

The End Of Plenty: The Race To Feed A Crowded World

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Here’s a new entry in the running-out-of-food genre.

I’ve embedded a Fresh Air interview about this book at the bottom of the post. You can find a transcript here. And here’s an excerpt:

And so suddenly, you had an instance where the world began consuming fairly consistently more of these major grains than it was producing, whittling down stockpiles to levels we haven’t seen since the 1970s. So, for example, in the 1970s, we consumed or utilized more grain than we ate only about four years out of the decade. In the drier ’80s, it was about five years. Since 2000, we’ve consumed or utilized more of these feed grains in eight of the first 12 years of the decade. So really, we’re starting to see the demand pressures outstrip our ability to produce food. All this while our yield gains, that have been spectacular since Norman Borlaug introduced the Green Revolution agriculture in the ’50s and ’60s, started to plateau.

So it – just as our demands are starting to rise, we’re starting to plateau in the amount of grain we’re getting per hectare, while things like climate change are really starting to hammer us. So we’re looking at, you know, these major disruptions of our food supply. Now, there was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed, like, 73,000 people in Europe. And yet what – that one made headlines all over the world, but what people didn’t realize was that a third of the wheat and grain and fruit crops were decimated that year.

You know, Russia has had these enormous droughts events where they’ve lost up to a third to half of their crop. Here in the United States, we’ve had 2012-2013, you know, we had the worst drought since the Dust Bowl days – cost us $30 billion. So – and what we’re dealing with is sort of the new normal. You know, the researchers say that now we’re going to have to, because of the increased demand from population growth, increased meat consumption in developing parts of the world, that we’re going to have to double our grain production, our food production, by 2050 to make sure everyone’s reasonably fed. And yet, climate change is just starting to really hammer it down, so we’re in a bit of a pinch.

meeting future food demand

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This article in Water Resources Research says we have a shot at meeting future food demand.

Sustainable options for decreasing food demand and for increasing production include reduction of food losses on both the producer and consumer ends, elimination of unsustainable practices such as prolonged groundwater overdraft, closing of yield gaps with controlled expansions of nutrient application and irrigation, increases in crop yield and pest resistance through advances in biotechnology, and moderate expansion of rain fed cropland. Calculations based on reasonable assumptions suggest that such measures could meet the food needs of an increasing global population while protecting the environment.

April 2015 in Review

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Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.