squid tube with chili, garlic, basil, star anise, and cinnamon

Here's one of those 'jazz' discoveries that comes from playing around with oldish food.

Some squid tubes have been in the freezer for a bit too long.  So, I experimented with them this evening.  I put about 1/2 cup of olive oil into a large pan, heated it to medium high, and then threw in a head of minced garlic, about 3 Tbs of sambal chili paste, one star anise, and a cinnamon stick. Once the mixture was warm and bubbling, I added 2 large squid tubes cut into rings about 1/8" wide stirred them for a few minutes and then turned down the heat to medium, tossed in about 4 Tbs of dried basil, gave the whole concoction a quick stir, and covered the pot.  I stirred it occasionally and kept the mixture from sticking to the bottom of the pot.  As the squid cooked, it provided a bit more liquid.  I kept this on for about 45 min and then removed the spice infused tubes and served them straight.  Not only were they delicious, the entire house smelled great!  I know they'd be good with white rice as well.

I then used the remaining oil and spices to quickly cook some tilapia fillets that I'd cut into 1" chunks.  The flavor wasn't infused as much in the tilapia, but they were good.

Given my emerging realization about issues with all harvested sea food, I'm not sure that this will be  regular item on our menu, but for special occasions...yum.

Revisiting the idea of eating small, herbivorous fishes

In some ways it's obvious: industrial fisheries simply must have an impact on other animals in the ocean given their size and global reach.

I was just reading an article by Ellen Pikitch in The Scientist where she wrote about a study that she was involved in demonstrated that the harvesting of small fish (like sardines) have impacts on sea birds, marine mammals, and other larger predatory fish. The important recommendations from the study included rigorous monitoring of these fisheries and monitoring of their effects on other species that might be influenced by their population status.

What's the lesson for our kitchens?  Well, I'd previously written that we should be specifically eating those small, herbivorous fish because they were sustainably harvested (and have a variety of yummy recipes for them).  If this advice, however, is questioned, perhaps we must be careful about eating too many of them.

Science is a self-correcting process where we have to be open to changing our minds given new evidence.  This might be one of those cases...which, in retrospect, should have been obvious.

Why Data Matter

Please see my newest Huffington Post blog on why data matter.  We now have a real need to work together to ensure that policy decisions are based on evidence!  And, we have a lot of work to do after this election to restore civility.  Read the blog and talk about it at your next dinner party!

some wise words about food choice and climate change

Superstorm Sandy: What if storms like this can be prevented? 

November 1, 2012  by Chiara Cabiglio  http://everyonesharvest.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/superstorm-sandy-what-if-storms-like-this-can-be-prevented/ 

  

Superstorm Sandy has caused at least 157 human deaths as of midday November 1st.  Its impacts include flooding of lower Manhattan and large swaths of New York City's subway system.  News reports had previously predicted that such events might occur only in 2080, based on a 2011 New York State government report. 

  

Reporters and scientists are exploring whether climate change might have intensified Superstorm Sandy.  Hurricanes would occur even in the absence of climate change.  But scientists are connecting Sandy's intensity with the same climate disruption that generated record drought in the summer of 2012, which caused "severe pain" among both crop-growers and livestock farmers.  Similarly, scientists are warning that Sandy could yield "life-threatening" results among poultry flocks on the East Coast. 

  

In fact, while livestock are victims of climate change, they also are largely responsible for it, according to a wide range of sources.  Whatever the role of fossil fuels, at least 20 years and $18 trillion are needed to construct enough renewable energy infrastructure to start reversing climate change –- while one expert group after another say we must start reversing climate change in the next 5 years or it'll be too late. 

  

So the only pragmatic way left to reverse climate change before it's too late, say World Bank environmental advisor Robert Goodland and his colleague Jeff Anhang, is through large-scale reforestation and regeneration of forest to absorb today's excess atmospheric carbon –- combined with replacing at least 25% of today's livestock products with better alternatives (notably, meat substitutes).  That way, lots of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to livestock would be significantly reduced at the same time as new trees would sequester excess atmospheric carbon. 

  

Yet many people still think that sustainability in food is achieved by buying "organic" or "grass-fed" meat.  However, grass-fed cows emit up to 400% more methane than do grain-fed cows, and they take up much more land, so they yield much less forest available to absorb atmospheric carbon.  Anyway, most marketing of "grass-fed" beef is a scam — and that's according to a "grass-fed" producer who touts himself as a rare, honest marketer of grass-fed meat.  Yet that producer can't show his buyers any better certification than can his competitors who he says are scammers. 

  

Indeed, any producer can keep animals on grass all day long –- but then when night falls and it's hard to observe, quickly feed them grain.  There's no practical way to certify that an animal has been 100% grass-fed unless an independent observer would watch each animal 24/7.  But of course it'll never be close to economically possible to do so.  Yet the premium for meat marketed as grass-fed is commonly 200-300%.  So there's an overwhelming incentive for a producer to cheat. 

  

Meanwhile, some people promote Meat Free Mondays.  Yet since that campaign began in 2003, survey data show a sharp drop in the number of Americans consuming less meat –- even though meat consumption has historically fallen during economic downturns.  Meatless Monday's own website provides a reason for such failure:  its framing of the issue is anachronistic, based on World War I deprivation.  In fact, when people are asked to sacrifice something one day, they often crave it more the next day. 

  

Indeed, no consumer product is ever successfully marketed by asking consumers to use it just one day a week.  For example, little to no Pepsi-Cola would be sold by prodding consumers to drink it one day a week, conceding that Coca-Cola remains the drink of choice the rest of the week.  It's been suggested that a campaign would do better by being based on the value of products that are better than meat. 

  

Some people debate whether  Goodland and Anhang's estimate that at least 51% of human-caused greenhouse gas is attributable to livestock may be too high, and prefer to use the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) 18% estimate –- even though the FAO promotes more factory farming, not less, and has partnered with the meat industry to prove it. 

The validity of Goodland and Anhang's conclusion can be grasped simply by considering the estimate by the International Livestock Research Institute –- which normally promotes livestock -– that 45% of land on earth is now used for livestock and feed production.  That so much land is used for livestock and feed production suggests it's correct for Goodland and Anhang to conclude that replacing 25% of today's livestock products with better alternatives would both reduce emissions and allow forest to regenerate on a vast amount of land, which could then absorb excess atmospheric carbon to reduce it to a safe level. This may be the only pragmatic way to reverse climate change in the next 5 years as needed, and avert future superstorms like Hurricane Sandy. 

  

Therefore, the food industry may be the key player in determining whether climate change is reversed or not.  Consumers have the power to create positive change in the food industry by voting with their forks: by replacing meat and dairy products with meat and dairy alternatives, in particular by choosing more grains, legumes, fruit and vegetables. 

  

If we ignore Mother Earth's warning this time, then it could prove utterly catastrophic for us all.  If we want to save ourselves from climate change, then we must consider changing the way we eat, the way our food is produced, and what  food is produced.  Period. 

The necessity of cooking....

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/10/raw-food-not-enough-to-feed-big-.html?ref=em

Science NOW, 22 October 2012

Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains

by Ann Gibbons

Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you're trying to boost your species' brainpower. That's because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"If you eat only raw food, there are not enough hours in the day to get enough calories to build such a large brain," says Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil who is co-author of the report. "We can afford more neurons, thanks to cooking."

Humans have more brain neurons than any other primate—about 86 billion, on average, compared with about 33 billion neurons in gorillas and 28 billion in chimpanzees. While these extra neurons endow us with many benefits, they come at a price—our brains consume 20% of our body's energy when resting, compared with 9% in other primates. So a long-standing riddle has been where did our ancestors get that extra energy to expand their minds as they evolved from animals with brains and bodies the size of chimpanzees?

One answer came in the late 1990s when Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham proposed that the brain began to expand rapidly 1.6 million to 1.8 million years ago in our ancestor, Homo erectus, because this early human learned how to roast meat and tuberous root vegetables over a fire. Cooking, Wrangham argued, effectively predigested the food, making it easier and more efficient for our guts to absorb calories more rapidly. Since then, he and his colleagues have shown in lab studies of rodents and pythons that these animals grow up bigger and faster when they eat cooked meat instead of raw meat—and that it takes less energy to digest cooked meat than raw meat.

In a new test of this cooking hypothesis, Herculano-Houzel and her graduate student, Karina Fonseca-Azevedo, now a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Translational Neuroscience in São Paulo, Brazil, decided to see if a diet of raw food inherently put limits on how large a primate's brain or body could grow. First, they counted the number of neurons in the brains of 13 species of primates (and more than 30 species of mammals). The researchers found two things: One, that brain size is directly linked to the number of neurons in a brain; and two, that that the number of neurons is directly correlated to the amount of energy (or calories) needed to feed a brain.

After adjusting for body mass, they calculated how many hours per day it would take for various primates to eat enough calories of raw food to fuel their brains. They found that it would take 8.8 hours for gorillas; 7.8 hours for orangutans; 7.3 hours for chimps; and 9.3 hours for our species, H. sapiens.

These numbers show that there is an upper limit on how much energy primates can get from an unprocessed raw diet, Herculano-Houzel says. An ape's diet in the wild differs from a modern "raw food diet," in which humans get sufficient calories from processing raw food in blenders and adding protein and other nutrients. In the wild, other apes can't evolve bigger brains unless they reduce their body sizes because they can't get past the limit of how many calories they can consume in 7 hours to 8 hours of feeding per day. But humans, she says, got around that limit by cooking. "The reason we have more neurons than any other animal alive is that cooking allowed this qualitative change—this step increase in brain size," she says. "By cooking, we managed to circumvent the limitation of how much we can eat in a day."

This study shows "that an ape could not achieve a brain as big as in recent humans while maintaining a typical ape diet," Wrangham says.

Paleoanthropologist Robert Martin of The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, agrees that the new paper does "provide the first evidence that metabolic limitations" from a raw food diet impose a limit on how big a primate's brain—or body—can grow. "This could account for small brain sizes of great apes despite their large body sizes." But "the jury is still out" on whether cooking was responsible for the first dramatic burst of brain growth in our lineage, in H. erectus, Martin says, or whether our ancestors began cooking over a fire later, when the brain went through a second major growth spurt about 600,000 years ago. Hearths show up in the archaeological record 800,000 years ago and the regular use of fire for cooking doesn't become widespread until more recently.

But to Herculano-Houzel's mind, our brains would still be the size of an ape's if H. erectus hadn't played with fire: "Gorillas are stuck with this limitation of how much they can eat in a day; orangutans are stuck there; H. erectus would be stuck there if they had not invented cooking," she says. "The more I think about it, the more I bow to my kitchen. It's the reason we are here."

A conversation we need to have...

My friend and colleague, Professor Glen Macdonald, in an OpEd today in the Los Angeles Times about the tenuous basis of climate change denial.

He ends with "The question is no longer whether the climate will change because of increased greenhouse gases. Now we have to ask what we can do about it, and how much we can afford to spend. It's crucial for scientists like me to provide dispassionate estimates of what the climate is doing now and will do in the future. But in the end, we won't be the ones making the decisions about how best to deal with the warming and its consequences. This will require a broad public conversation and a well-informed public."

Good dinner party conversation, 'eh?

shocking human suffering...

I'm reproducing this in full because it's shocking reading that could lead to some heartfelt dinner conversations.  What do you want your future to look like?

* Six million deaths a year by 2030 due to climate, carbon

* Cost to global economy seen at 3.2 percent of GDP by 2030

* Study conducted for governments of 20 developing countries 

By Nina Chestney

LONDON, Sept 26 (Reuters) - More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.

As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.

It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

More than 90 percent of those deaths will occur in developing countries, said the report that calculated the human and economic impact of climate change on 184 countries in 2010 and 2030. It was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of 20 developing countries threatened by climate change.

"A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade," the report said.

It said the effects of climate change had lowered global output by 1.6 percent of world GDP, or by about $1.2 trillion a year, and losses could double to 3.2 percent of global GDP by 2030 if global temperatures are allowed to rise, surpassing 10 percent before 2100.

It estimated the cost of moving the world to a low-carbon economy at about 0.5 percent of GDP this decade.


COUNTING THE COST

Responding to the report, Oxfam International said the costs of political inaction on climate were "staggering".

"The losses to agriculture and fisheries alone could amount to more than $500 billion per year by 2030, heavily focussed in the poorest countries where millions depend on these sectors to make a living," said executive director Jeremy Hobbs.

British economist Nicholas Stern told Reuters earlier this year investment equivalent to 2 percent of global GDP was needed to limit, prevent and adapt to climate change.

His report on the economics of climate change in 2006 said that without any action to tackle climate change, the overall costs and risks of climate change would be equivalent to a cut in per-capita consumption of perhaps up to 20 percent.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Almost 200 nations agreed in 2010 to limit the global average temperature rise to below 2C (3.6 Fahrenheit) to avoid dangerous impacts from climate change.

But climate scientists have warned that the chance of limiting the rise to below 2C is getting smaller as global greenhouse gas emissions rise due to burning fossil fuels.

The world's poorest nations are the most vulnerable as they face increased risk of drought, water shortages, crop failure, poverty and disease. On average, they could see an 11 percent loss in GDP by 2030 due to climate change, DARA said.

"One degree Celsius rise in temperature is associated with 10 percent productivity loss in farming. For us, it means losing about 4 million metric tonnes of food grain, amounting to about $2.5 billion. That is about 2 percent of our GDP," Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said in response to the report.

"Adding up the damages to property and other losses, we are faced with a total loss of about 3-4 percent of GDP."

Even the biggest and most rapidly developing economies will not escape unscathed. The United States and China could see a 2.1 percent reduction in their respective GDPs by 2030, while India could experience a more than 5 percent loss.

The full report is available at: http://daraint.org/ (Editing by Janet Lawrence)