Test-tube meat

Just over the horizon is a new product that can help feed the world while simultaneously reducing the scary-huge carbon footprint of our food.

It's test-tube meat. Or at least right now it's test-tube meat, soon it'll be bioreactor meat once it's scaled-up to industrial production.

Test tube meat can now be grown with less than half the energy of conventional beef production (growing actual cows), and about 4% of the greenhouse gas production. This is a very good thing. Still not as good as being a vegetarian, but better than any current meat product.

Another possible use of artificial meat (needs a better name, don't you think?) is aquaculture. With just a bit of artificial meat in the feed, fish farms can grow great fish with a lower resource demand than conventional fish farming.

And before you think the "yuck" factor is too big for this to work, just remember that we once thought test-tube babies were wierd but now people don't even blink at in vitro fertilization.

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The least sustainable food on earth

What do you think is the least sustainable food on earth? Panda steaks? Spicy Condor wings?

No, food that doesn't get eaten is the worst. Even if lovingly prepared by happy workers using zero-impact methods, if food ends up in the trash then it ain't sustainable.

Where is the worst place for food waste? Restaurants, and diners are beginning to wonder about the problem. What a shame to buy and cook carefully at home, only to see pounds of food thrown away when you splurge on a dinner out.

How bad is the problem? According to a recent study it's bad and getting worse.

US per capita food waste has progressively increased by ~50% since 1974 reaching more than 1400 kcal per person per day

1400 calories per day, that's just a bit less than I eat in one day.

Food waste, the next frontier in food sustainability?

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Politically correct fish and Powell's Law

"...good thing there's no fish..."

Did I hear that right? I'm with a group of seafood experts having dinner, and someone's glad there are no fish on the menu? Asking around the table, the feeling is mostly shared, I'm the only oddball who wants seafood.

This is sustainable seafood gone too far. Something's wrong when some of the world's experts on seafood sustainability don't want seafood on the menu in front of them.

So I'm ready to offer Powell's law:

Enthusiasm for (sea)food should increase with knowledge.

Isn't it obvious? Learning more about your dinner should make dinner better. And for seafood in particular, a bit of knowledge about seafood should make you eager to order fish for dinner.

Otherwise, why bother? Will you listen to a story about sustainable seafood if the message is to eat chicken instead? If learning about bad fishing methods makes you turn past seafood in the menu, will you really make the effort to learn about the impacts of bottom trawling?

Of course it does make sense to smother seafood in guilt if the real reason for explaining catch methods is to scare people away from seafood.

But most sustainable seafood advocates say they want you to choose the best seafood, right after a sermon about how our oceans are in trouble and your appetite is to blame.

Knowledge about fish and how they're caught ought to make you a happier, more enthusiastic seafood consumer. This doesn't mean you have to like every item. Learning the facts about grouper fishing in Southeast Asia may turn you away from grouper caught by dynamiting coral reefs. But enthusiasm should go up when you learn more about seafood or there's no reason to make the effort.

Regarding food correctness used as a weapon Peter Meehan offered these thoughts after getting lectured about buying grain-fed beef:

And I’m left to wonder: Is all this righteousness going in the right direction? Or will the snake eventually eat its own tail? What originally drew me to so many of these better-practice/better-flavor foodstuffs was the joy, the passion behind them. What I’m worried about is that as the food thing gets trendier and trendier, at some point the know-it-alls will scare off the casually interested. Maybe even their fellow foot soldiers. Is that sustainable?

And as Navneet Alang blogs at Scrawled in Wax, food correctness can become a kind of achievement badge:

At times, this is about the the personal political: the small choices we make in consumption and behaviour that mark out a kind of political choice in how we engage with the world. At others, however, it turns into a game of one-upmanship, peer-pressure and self-righteousness, those bugbears that have always been the dark, rotting underbelly of the left. Food becomes another kind of marker of an activist consciousness, in part perhaps, because it is one that can be performed through consumption. There is no better anti-capitalism than the one you can display through purchasing.

The "dark, rotting underbelly of the left?" Food-ism as a way to feel superior? Are things really this bad?

Sarah Palin has an answer, a celebration of salmon slaughter that is unabashedly put forward as a challenge to the left. From SarahPalinUSA (her twitter account): "Tomorrow-"Sarah Palin's Alaska" we slay salmon. A bunch of 'em. (Watch the Left's reaction to that, if harvesting halibut freaked them out!)"

If we're going after Sarah Palin for catching Alaska halibut and salmon in Bristol Bay, then we may have a problem. Since when is it a problem to catch a lot of fish from sustainable fisheries?

So while Sarah Palin is celebrating sustainable fish, compare this blog post from a Greenpeace sustainable tuna campaigner who asks where to find a good vegan dinner in Paris. And ask yourself who's capturing the hearts and minds of the seafood-loving public?

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