whoa, chicken feathers and soybeans!?

What can you make with chicken feathers and soybeans? How about a circuit board. Seriously. This just blows my mind. Supposedly the circuit board is faster than conventional ones also.


And where should all those soybeans and chicken feathers come from? Hopefully, evenutally sustainable ag of course. Currently Tyson was helping with the project... which brings me to a final note, be sure to check out the The Meatrix II: Revolting which was just released.

Local vs. Organic III

Whoa, this topic is (as my friend Andy would say) hot. Here is another article, My Saudi Arabian Breakfast by Chad Heeter, posted late last week discussing the same idea. It describes the "caloric input" that goes into making the "caloric output" you get from your food with our current basic food system - and the subsequent idea that you are in a lot of ways consuming oil (or fossile fuels). So, how much oil do you want to eat? Includes some good shopping tips:

So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

First check out how far it traveled. The further it traveled, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it required. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.

Which gave me a good marketing idea... "Try Brines Farm produce - it's fossil fuel lite.".

Local vs. Organic II

Not to belabor the point but just to be clear the previous post was primarily about forcing people to think a little deeper about where their food comes from. Certainly, you may eat strictly veggies for multiple reasons, e.g. you simply don't want to eat animals as well as you would like to be good to Mother Earth. Just keep in mind whatever you do the best thing you can do bar none is to try and go local when possible. Also, it's admittingly tough to always be on top of where your food comes (although what might help a little is getting politicians to go along with the COOL - country of origin labeling - law that apparently passed and yet now has mostly been delayed til 2008 so they undoubtedly have time to figure out how to kill something people overwhelmingly favor). Anyway, so everything is still largely up to the consumer.

Fortunately it can be fun, as Slow Food conveys as well as the Earth Dinner I plan on hosting in the near future (stay tuned!). Plus, it's fun to search for local producers and users of local produce at things like Local Harvest. If interested in meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs... Check out Eat Well Guide from the always creative Sustainable Table campaign (Don't tell me you haven't watched The Meatrix?).

Local vs. Organic

Finally. A nice insightful, must-read article in slate.com discusses local versus big Organic labeled food sold at a certain posh supermarket chain: their example touching on the embodied energy in local tomatoes compared to certified Organic tomatoes shipped from Chile. This is something I've been grumbling about for a while (the misleading marketing that insinuates they're selling local small farmer products is the double-whammy). In fact, I'd like to take this energy thought a little further... is one more virtuous to eat apples grown and shipped from New Zealand and veggie frozen dinners from China compared to a happily raised turkey (or maybe even cow) from nearby in Pinckney, Michigan at Garden Patch Farm. In terms of embodied energy (arguably a proxy for the resulting global climate change impact) the first two exceed the last, in fact its probably not even close according to my calculations. Thus, an extreme example to think about, one should not make the blanket generalization that it takes less energy to make a veggie meal (or the standard raising grain takes less energy versus beef meme). In a pure local economy this can be true but today it depends on where everything has come from on the globe - the whole system in fact. Transporting alone has huge often hidden energy costs. It's not just what and how it was produced, it's where it's from. As per Eliot Coleman, Authentic food is what should be the ideal. (Hey, I'm currently looking for funding to use GIS to map local foodsheds. Anyone have any funding ideas?) And actually these thoughts can be applied to everything, not just food.

Happy bird named Ralph from gardenpatchfarm.com

Biased and shameless self-promoting plug: the author would like to note that it is always more virtuous to eat produce from Brines Farm. Always.