frogblog

Mother Jones has an icky story about imported Chinese food in the USA involving contamination, salmonella, bateria and pesticides.
At one [poultry] plant, inspectors had found paint from the ceiling “on the table used for edible product,” while workers at another facility wiped down meat-handling areas with dirty cloths. Parts of a third factory, designated for […]

As promised last night.

See also here.

Tonight TVNZ is showing Jamie Oliver’s The Big Food Fight: Jamie’s Fowl Dinners where the English chef as he usually does, hosts a dinner, but this time to demonstrate the reality of how chickens live and die to put food on our plates:
With the help of poultry farmers and experts, Jamie brings together consumers, producers […]

The Guardian’s George Monbiot has a shocking tale of when free trade deals go wrong.
The two players in the story are firstly Senegal, one of the poorest countries on the planet, where the people mostly eat fish. They get 70 percent of their protein from fish:
Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population […]

According to the American National Science Foundation coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, has contaminated the Arctic and is potentially affecting human health and ecosystems in and around Earth’s polar regions.
Detailed measurements from a Greenland ice core showed pollutants from burning coal–the toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead–were much higher than expected.
Luckily […]

I never thought I would be writing this. I confess to liking a drop or two of the good stuff, and thought I had done my bit for the environment by forgoing those pesky corks for plastic plugs.
Chris Higgins of MentalFloss argues the case for the cask:
In the U.S., wine sold in a box used […]

Whitebait season opened everywhere in New Zealand last week except the West Coast, where people still have a week and a half to wait. But it seems many fishers may also be waiting until they have enough to fill a plate. Because, at the same time, the Department of Conservation expressed concern at not finding […]

g.blog was busy over the weekend with Ari joining to report on an innovative new solar glass technology that concentrates different colours of light into a focused border around the edge of the glass:
…part of what makes solar power so expensive is that the light that we collect for it is very unfocused, and so […]

We have more than our share of beneficiary bashers here at frogblog. They just love to point out how all those ‘bludgers’ are bilking them out of their hard earned dollars. This is a deluded viewpoint. While there is no doubt that some benefit abuse occurs, (and will always occur under any system), the vast […]

John Schwenkler from The American Conservative has an interesting article on how green food movements like Locavorism and Slow Food exemplify conservative values.
The production, distribution and preparation of food is an emotive sustainability and health issue. So it’s not surprising that food distributed by small, independent farms fits tidily into Schwenkler’s conservative ethos.
The proposal, […]