What, you don’t like my not cooking?

September 19, 2006

The only thing that bothers me about this Soil Association press release is that the ‘mums’ are getting the lion’s share of the blame. Surely in 2006 both parents are responsible for feeding the cubs?

18 September 2006 – for immediate release

Soil Association Dinner Lady, Jeanette Orrey and London Parents Group, Merton Parents, call on the “fish and chip” mums to stop the deliveries.

On the day that Jamie Oliver’s school meals show hits our screens, Soil Association school dinner lady, Jeanette Orrey, and London Parents group ‘Merton Parents for better food’ [1], are to meet the Rotherham mums to call for a stop in the lunch time junk food deliveries.

Image of Jamie Oliver in a fatsuit © Jamie Oliver and used entirely without permission

In response to genuine concerns raised by the Rotherham parents, the Soil Association, Merton Parents and local parents are to meet to discuss how all parties can work together to achieve healthy school meals that pupils will eat.

Jeanette Orrey, Soil Association’s School Meals Policy advisor, said,

“We now have a golden opportunity to change the eating habits of the next generation. For some children school meals are the only hot meal of the day. It is vital to feed those children properly. We must all work together, head teachers, catering staff, parents and children to make these new menus work.”

In Merton there has been dramatic improvements in the quality of the school food.  Jackie Schneider, Chair of Merton Parents, said,

“Children who previously claimed to ‘hate all that healthy stuff’ are now wolfing it down, regardless of their backgrounds. The Rotherham mums should stop their lunch time deliveries. Let’s focus on the real issues in the school canteen: how long do kids have to queue? Are the meals made from good quality ingredients, well cooked and tasty? We need to listen to the students concerns if we are going to have any success in increasing healthy food uptake.”

Rotherham Mum, Julie Critchley, said,

“I want my children to eat healthy food. The issues here are about the lunch hour and the food. I am delighted that the Soil Association and Merton Parents want to meet, I want to find out from them how other schools have done it.”

The experience gained by the Soil Association, through the Food for Life campaign [2] and Merton Parents working together with over 750 schools has shown that children, whatever their background will eat healthy food.

For more information please contact:

Emma Noble, Soil Association Food for Life Manager Emma Noble +44 (0)7900 376 462 or Chair of Merton Parents, Jackie Schneider, on +44 (0)779 521 3425
Victoria Record, Soil Association Media Office Co-ordinator on +44 (0)117 9874580

1. Food for Life is the Soil Association’s school meals campaign. In all schools that have radically changed their school meals, following the Food for Life model uptake has nearly doubled

2. Merton Parents Group formed in 2005 and has helped radically reform the meals in Merton

Press Office  T: +44 (0)117 914 2448  ISDN: 0117 314 5040
Soil Association Campaigning for organic food and farming and sustainable forestry
Bristol House, 40-56 Victoria Street, Bristol BS1 6BY T: +44 (0)117 314 5000  F: +44 (0)117 314 5001
www.soilassociation.org
Version 290.1 | Issued18/09/2006

Thank you Peter Redstone for the headsup. I’ll make sure to try the Rocombe Organic ice cream next time I’m in England.

Jamie Oliver’s Junkfood Amnesty project

Image of Jamie Oliver in a fatsuit © Jamie Oliver and used entirely without permission

debra at 14:55 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us

Got a cutting-edge food-related project?

September 18, 2006

A Delhi street kitchen doing booming business

The deadline for the DOORS OF PERCEPTION 9 conference on “JUICE” (FOOD, FUEL, DESIGN) has been extended until September 30, 2006. If you think your project should be included in this event, please put your nose to the grindstone forthwith. Any questions, contact me via the comment below and I’ll get back to you within a day or two.

A] CALL FOR PROJECT CASE STUDIES
Doors of Perception 9 takes place in New Delhi 28 February to 4 March 2006. The theme is “Juice: Food, Fuel, Design”. Doors 9 begins with a two-day Project Leaders Round Table that is limited to 50 participants. This is followed by an open-to-all one day conference at India Habitat Centre, plus a Social Technologies Bazaar, on Saturday 3 March.

For the Project Leaders Round Table, we are looking for sixteen participants whose project raises interesting design issues in relation to:
• Food information systems (food miles, energy use, GMOs);
• Localisation of food systems (Community Supported Agriculture);
• Urban farming (rooftop, vertical…);
• Sustainable packaging and distribution;
• Slow food using high tech;
• New forms of community cooking (meal assembly centres);
• Agritourism;
• Street food.

Your project proposals will be reviewed by: Aditya Dev Sood, Centre for Knowledge Societies; Debra Solomon, culiblog.org; Juha Huuskonen, PixelAche; Amy Franseschini, futurefarmers; John Thackara, Doors of Perception. Send us an email in answer to these six questions:

1. Why? = the main question asked by the project
2. Who are the actors/partners?
3. Where? (the locality or situaton)
4. What are the desired outcomes/results of the project?
5. When (timeframe)?
6. How can the Project Leaders Round Table help? What problem, challenge or dilemma does the project face, that the assembled experts can help you with?

Send your project description email (Subject header: “juice project”) to: editor@doorsofperception.com

B] OPEN PROGRAMME
A one-day conference on Saturday 3 March, in the India Habitat Centre, will address the key issues to do with food, fuel and design. The results of the Round Table will be presented. And a social technologies bazaar will provide participants with a show-and-tell opportunity. Conference participants are invited to the Doors Holi Party the following day.

Bhang ice cream ready for Holi

C] HOW TO WIN A FREE TRIP TO DOORS 9
Doors has teamed up with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Designs of the time (Dott07) to offer travel-included scholarships to Doors 9. The scholarships are for up to eight winning teams in the 2006-2007 RSA Design Directions competition. Dott 07 has set two themes – on food information systems, and sustainable tourism. All you have to do is win. Details at:
http://www.rsadesigndirections.org/dott07.html
http://www.dott07.com/go/education/dott-rsa-design-directions

D] LIMITED EDITION PACKAGE DEAL FOR DOORS 9
For those not eligible to compete in Design Directions, we can offer a limited number of all-in packages comprising flight, registration, accomodation and food for the whole Doors 9 week, for 1,000 euros. To be eligible for this package, we must receive your project proposal by Friday 29 September (which is when our cheap flights expire).

The original Doors 9 call for participation is here.

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Food causes gas, and by gas, I mean greenhouse gas

September 7, 2006

Greenhouse gas emissions linked to the production of a kg (roughly 2 pounds) of food. Meat refers to the “carcass equivalent”, with bones but without processing, packaging, or transportation. Source IFEN 2004 for France

Jean-Marc Jancovici, whose website on climate change with readable, chartful and well-documented articles, estimates that roughly one-third of carbon emissions are a result of just simply getting the grits on the table. Although Jancovici has thoughtfully translated his French texts into English, one has to read them with a French accent to get through the Franglais. But chapeau to the man who does his math and collates all this research into easy to understand facts. Check it, below!

Now check out what happens when one farms organically. Source IFEN 2004 for France

• Jean-marc Jancovici: how much greenhouse gas is on our plate?
• Via John from Doors of Perception via Jean-Marc Jancovici of Manicore

  The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.

  127 calories of energy are used to grow and export one calorie of lettuce from the US to the UK.

  In ‘developed’ countries, CO2 emissions attributed to producing, processing, packaging and distributing the food is about 8 tonnes a year for a family of four.

  Agriculture and food now account for nearly 30 percent of goods transported on Europe’s roads.

  95 percent of the fruit and half the vegetables eaten in the UK are imported.

  There are 52 transport and process stages in one bottle of ketchup.

  In France, 20 percent of money spent by citizens on food is devoted to raw products such as fruit, vegetables, or fresh meat of fish. The rest is used to buy processed food : pasta, canned food, frozen food, biscuits and sweets, drinks, etc.

  These processing industries consume energy and therefore emit greenhouse gases.

  Most processed foods are packaged. Manufacturing the packaging (steel, aluminium, plastics) accounts for 70- 80 percent of the overall emissions of the food industry.

  Processed food is generally bought in supermarkets which consume electricity to keep foods frozen – especially in open display units.

  Most supermarkets sell industrially-grown chickens. The lifecycle of such a bird entails:
  – Emissions linked to the heating of the hen house;
  – Fossil fuels used to manufacture the fertilizers used to grow the grain eaten by the chicken;
  – Fossil fuels burnt by the tractor used to grow the grain eaten by the chicken;
  – Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions that occur when the fertilizers are spread on the field;
  – Fossil fuels required to manufacture chicken food (industrial chickens rarely eat “raw” cereals, but rather processed foods) from the cereals;
  – Emissions linked to the manufacturing of tractors, to the drying of grain, and to the refinery of the diesel oil used by the tractor….

  Eating meat requires intensive agriculture because it is necessary to grow a lot of plants to feed the animals.

  When decaying, nitrogenous fertilizers cause N2O emissions, 300 times more powerful than CO2.

  Ruminants emit methane, which is 23 times more powerful than CO2, because of the fermentation of the plants they eat in their digestive sysem.

  Producing an unprocessed kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of beef (with bones) leads to the emission of three to four kilogrammes (nearly nine pounds) of carbon equivalent.

  Between 65 and 70 percent of the available agricultural land in France is devoted to feeding animals.
  Fruits and vegetables (except for potatoes and vineyards) acount for two percent of the total.

  The amount of meat consumed by an inhabitant of the Earth has increased by 60 percent over the last 40 years while the world population has doubled. Meat production has been multiplied by 3.2

  Every cow in the European Union is subsidised by $2.50 a day.
  One in five people in the world lives on less than $1 a day.

  The US insists that 50 percent of its food aid is processed or bagged.

  Poor diet and physical inactivity account for 35 percent (and rising) of avoidable causes of deaths in the US.

  People in industrialised countries eat between six and seven kilogrammes (about 15 pounds) of food additives every year.

  Supermarkets are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Heating and cooling stores represents, in France, between 1,5 and 2 million tonnes carbon equivalent carbon.

  Supermarkets are usually located in suburbs so we use cars to get there. In the UK, 25 percent of car journeys are to get food.

  In the home, our use of processed foods causes us to use more energy in fridges and freezers, stoves ovens, microwaves.

  In France, the electricity consumption linked to eating (fridges, freezers, dish-washers, stoves and ovens, not to mention small appliances) represents 22 percent of all energy consumed at home,

  25 percent of domestic waste is composed of food waste which, when landfilled, leads to methane emissions.

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