Wednesday 31st October, 2007
Today’s Food Consumption Sustainability Index (Rough proportion of eco-labelled food that I ate today): 40%
How often do you stumble across a smell that triggers pleasant childhood memories? For me, about once a year would be a rough estimate. Well, today I was transported back to lazy summer days, cricket, and cicada song by a humble cucumber. This was not just any cucumber, but a 15SEK KRAV-certified organic beauty – sleek, sporty and elegant like a 1963-model Jaguar E-Type Roadster. But unlike that old gas guzzler, this cucumber smelt crisp and juicy, and was my first experience of the much-touted superior taste of organic fruit and vegetables. The fine aroma of my KRAV cucumber not only turned on my taste-buds, it also provided a sound argument in support of the greater nutritional value of organics.
An opinion piece appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday, arguing that it has been scientifically proven that organic food had more nutritional value than “mainstream” foods.
(http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_melchett/2007/10/organics_better_admit_it.html )
In particular, I found this passage about the decline in nutrients found in conventional fruit and vegetables quite alarming:
“you would have to have eaten 10 tomatoes in 1991 to get the same level of copper as you would have got from one tomato in 1940. Between 1940 and 1991, apples lost 66% of their iron, broccoli lost 75% of its calcium, and in news that would dismay Popeye, even spinach lost 60% of its iron”
The article suggests that the natural pesticides that plants produce are inherently linked to the nutrients that are most beneficial for human health, and so when plants are sprayed with pesticides they fail to produce the goodness that we require. This helps explain why my organic cucumber had so much more taste and smell than the water paper that I usually buy.
Meanwhile, I woke up this morning to my first organic breakfast: Organic porridge oats garnished with organic bananas, organic raspberry “fil” (thick, sour milk), and thinned out with organic rice water. This worked out ok, considering all the ingredients bar the bananas were completely unknown to me before today. But it was when I tried to use the “rice milk” to whiten my coffee that things got particularly messy. I mean, I have had soy milk in my coffee before, and I can deal with the curdling. But this rice “milk” had almost no effect on the colour or the taste of the coffee, other than a diluting effect, and as someone who likes to have 1/3 of their coffee as milk, the end result was dispiriting.
I had bought the rice water in a fit of eco-aesthetical self-righteousness. I reasoned to myself that it must be better from a climate perspective to drink organic rice water than organic milk. But now I remember reading about all the methane produced by rice paddies. I don’t know what the scale is like, but I can imagine it is similar to the methane produced by cattle (per litre of “milk” produced). In any case, the system boundaries of this project was technically limited to eco-labels, on the rather broad assumption that one organic product was as good as the next. Ok, this reasoning for reverting to dairy is quite spurious, but then I found this article in The Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2753446.ece that says that organic milk has 90% more antioxidants than conventional milk. And given that organic milk is only 0.05 SEK more expensive, I am content to abandon my short-lived experimenting with vegan white coffee J
Otherwise, the day was spent finishing off old, non-organic lentil soup, tomatoes and mozzarella. Ok, the project seems to have hardly begun you may argue, but it would hardly be very sustainable to throw away my left-overs. In any case, I feel like I have already learnt a lot, and the crisp aroma of that time-machine of a KRAV cucumber will take some beating!
Economic Sustainability Tip of The Day: “Green Choice” KRAV, ecological peanut butter is available at COOP for only 26.50, whereas the conventional “Skippy” peanut butter goes for a hefty 35 SEK for the same-sized jar!
Today’s Food Consumption Sustainability Index (Rough proportion of eco-labelled food that I ate today): 40%
How often do you stumble across a smell that triggers pleasant childhood memories? For me, about once a year would be a rough estimate. Well, today I was transported back to lazy summer days, cricket, and cicada song by a humble cucumber. This was not just any cucumber, but a 15SEK KRAV-certified organic beauty – sleek, sporty and elegant like a 1963-model Jaguar E-Type Roadster. But unlike that old gas guzzler, this cucumber smelt crisp and juicy, and was my first experience of the much-touted superior taste of organic fruit and vegetables. The fine aroma of my KRAV cucumber not only turned on my taste-buds, it also provided a sound argument in support of the greater nutritional value of organics.
An opinion piece appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday, arguing that it has been scientifically proven that organic food had more nutritional value than “mainstream” foods.
(http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_melchett/2007/10/organics_better_admit_it.html )
In particular, I found this passage about the decline in nutrients found in conventional fruit and vegetables quite alarming:
“you would have to have eaten 10 tomatoes in 1991 to get the same level of copper as you would have got from one tomato in 1940. Between 1940 and 1991, apples lost 66% of their iron, broccoli lost 75% of its calcium, and in news that would dismay Popeye, even spinach lost 60% of its iron”
The article suggests that the natural pesticides that plants produce are inherently linked to the nutrients that are most beneficial for human health, and so when plants are sprayed with pesticides they fail to produce the goodness that we require. This helps explain why my organic cucumber had so much more taste and smell than the water paper that I usually buy.
Meanwhile, I woke up this morning to my first organic breakfast: Organic porridge oats garnished with organic bananas, organic raspberry “fil” (thick, sour milk), and thinned out with organic rice water. This worked out ok, considering all the ingredients bar the bananas were completely unknown to me before today. But it was when I tried to use the “rice milk” to whiten my coffee that things got particularly messy. I mean, I have had soy milk in my coffee before, and I can deal with the curdling. But this rice “milk” had almost no effect on the colour or the taste of the coffee, other than a diluting effect, and as someone who likes to have 1/3 of their coffee as milk, the end result was dispiriting.
I had bought the rice water in a fit of eco-aesthetical self-righteousness. I reasoned to myself that it must be better from a climate perspective to drink organic rice water than organic milk. But now I remember reading about all the methane produced by rice paddies. I don’t know what the scale is like, but I can imagine it is similar to the methane produced by cattle (per litre of “milk” produced). In any case, the system boundaries of this project was technically limited to eco-labels, on the rather broad assumption that one organic product was as good as the next. Ok, this reasoning for reverting to dairy is quite spurious, but then I found this article in The Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2753446.ece that says that organic milk has 90% more antioxidants than conventional milk. And given that organic milk is only 0.05 SEK more expensive, I am content to abandon my short-lived experimenting with vegan white coffee J
Otherwise, the day was spent finishing off old, non-organic lentil soup, tomatoes and mozzarella. Ok, the project seems to have hardly begun you may argue, but it would hardly be very sustainable to throw away my left-overs. In any case, I feel like I have already learnt a lot, and the crisp aroma of that time-machine of a KRAV cucumber will take some beating!
Economic Sustainability Tip of The Day: “Green Choice” KRAV, ecological peanut butter is available at COOP for only 26.50, whereas the conventional “Skippy” peanut butter goes for a hefty 35 SEK for the same-sized jar!
1 comment:
before I forget, you might like "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - a bit America-centric, but otherwise fantastic account of where the food in industrial ag comes from - Michael Pollan writes so well about food and organic ag... I have it here in Sweden if you want to borrow
-Autumn
Post a Comment