Dang. Now I'm Hungry.

I don't know about you, but leftover milk, or milk that's past useability, really never appears at our house. But it seems that it does in a lot of houses--in the UK there's 290,000 tonnes of milk wasted each year. All part of that wasted 30-50 percent of food in developed countries.

But over at The Guardian, Rachel Kelly has a few (well, 14) ways to deal with leftover milk. I'm more likely to have made too much rice and be looking for a way to use it that doesn't involve making another stir fry. My favourite use is by making rice pudding.

I brought a rice pudding to one of the Friday lunches we attend at the Centre for Community and Cooperative Based Economies (CCCBE) at the University of Victoria. it was my standard, adjust-for-size recipe:

• a couple or more eggs
• beaten with vanilla, a pinch of salt, some sugar and cinnamon or nutmeg
• some cooked, leftover rice
• a small handful of raisins
• milk sufficient to cover the rice
• remixed and baked at 175C or 350F until a lovely light brown shows up on top and the pudding is set.
• Best served hot with cream over top.

I've eaten this as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and as a snack food, simply because it tastes good and qualifies as comfort food for me (and, nutritionally, isn't too bad either).

But when I presented this for lunch, one of the attendees was confused; a visiting scholar from Iran, this was nothing like the rice pudding he was used to. So the next week, he had his wife create one of her rice puddings. Short grain white rice cooked in milk to create a porridge. Sweetened and spiced with cardamon and cinnamon (among others). Served cold.

And wow! What a difference! Light and flavourful, I was transported to a shady courtyard on a hot summer day. My rice pudding is hearty and filling. This is a cool light treat. Similar ingredients, radically different end result.

This is why I love the whole free trade in recipes thing. There's so much to learn that no one can learn it all. And there are so many great flavours to discover.

 

Monday Multistory

Issues with urban agriculture are going to come increasingly to the fore as conditions worsen and people struggle to maintain their food supply through some very dark times. Over at AgWeek, they're running a story about some of the problems UA is facing in one neighbourhood:

NEW BRIGHTON, Minn. — From the front, nothing about the house in suburban New Brighton appears that different.
 A car sits in the driveway near a flower bed of towering magenta amaranth
 plants. A small pirate flag waves from atop a picnic table, a nod to
the “Peter Pan”-inspired name the women who live here gave the half-acre
 property when they moved in seven years ago.
Behind the one-story house, however, is a different scene.
There, you see sprawling vegetable gardens, berry plants, bee hives and lots
of fowl. A large coop extends from the back deck and houses about 15
laying hens, a dozen quail, a few heritage turkeys, a couple ducks and
one Serama rooster. A basket brimming with vegetables sits on a table
near a garden bed. Next to it is a bowl full of multicolored eggs.
The collection represents a day’s harvest at “Lost Boys Acre,” an
experimental urban farm operated by four women in the quiet residential
neighborhood near Silver Lake Road and Interstate 694.

Let's be frank; a half-acre property isn't all that big, and that is a lot of fowl. New Brighton doesn't have any bylaws regarding urban agriculture practices, so everything the four women are doing at Lost Boys Acre is legit.  But that's a lot of noise for a suburban neighbourhood....
The rest of the article makes it pretty clear that much of what's going on is a simple neighbours dispute (the primary complainants really don't like the four women in the house for reasons that have nothing to do with urban ag), but conflicts like this are going to become more and more frequent. Now, I don't actually expect municipal governments to get in front of this issue (cough Havana cough), but they really should be noticing this on their radar and setting some rules.
this is also aan opportunity to set some rules on acceptable treatment of livestock: cattle not allowed on areas less than two acres, say, or chickens needing so many square metres of space for roaming about. The setting of such limits will be subject to abuse (of course), but once in place can be changed by subsequent administrations. these kinds of bylaws can also provide some guidelines for the ethical treatment of livestock in more rural areas.

Which leads to a story from back where I used to farm; Alberta. The CTV news programme W5 ran some undercover footage of an egg operation about 20 km away from our family farm. The story is typical--120,000 birds in battery housing, dead birds not removed from cages, horrific environment, etc.

Down a quiet road, deep in Alberta farm country, not far from Edmonton, is a massive egg production facility known as Kuku Farms. Housing about 120,000 battery hens, they live out their lives in cramped cages, producing almost an egg a day for a year until they are considered spent and killed.

The video shows row upon row of hens crammed into battery-cages. Nearby are dead birds that appeared to have been there for some of time, birds with missing neck feathers and some with severe urine scalding on their backsides.
A few kilometers away is another barn, Creekside Grove Farms. In this barn about 100,000 chicks spend the first 20 weeks of their lives crammed 50 to a cage, standing on barren wire. These are chicks that will eventually become egg-layers.
The undercover video shows some chicks injured while others clamber over them for access to food and water.
Other chicks can be seen escaping from the crowded cages to end up on the hopper, where they are covered in feces and sometimes mangled by the machinery. Perhaps most disturbingly, sick or injured chicks are seen being killed by a practice called "thumping" -- where a bird is smashed against a hard surface to kill it. On several occasions the video shows birds that survived but are left in a garbage bag along with a pile of already dead chicks

Nobody can defend this-- but heaven knows, someone will.  Egg producers are policed by their own group--who are primarily concerned with whether producers are following the quota rules, rather than the proper treatment of animals. However:

On Monday, Egg Farmers of Canada released the following statement from its chairman, Peter Clarke:
"As a fifth-generation egg farmer and chair of our industry, I have visited hundreds of Canada's more than 1,000 egg farms. I have never seen hens treated in the manner shown. I share in the public's response to the video. The images were unacceptable. However, I object to any perception that this is in any way common, tolerated or representative. It simply is not.

Actually, I don't buy that. After a trip to the University of Alberta experimental farm a few years back, it was clear that standards were developed with producers, not the chicken's, requirements in mind. And the problems with factory farming of chicken  are myriad; from arsenic in the meat to issues of manure disposal. But as reported:

W5 found that the industry group tends to focus more on whether eggs are safe for consumption and whether the farmer has the right number of chickens allotted under the industry's market quota system rather than on the well-being of the animals laying the eggs.
The Mercy for Animals investigator told the program that when she was undercover at Creekside Grove, workers were given 24 hours' advance notice of an inspection and that the facility passed inspection.

Until this is top-of-mind for consumers, Egg Farmers of Canada won't give a damn about how the animals are treated. Only when it impacts the bottom line will it matter.

Over at the Guardian, they have a lovely graphic about how much food is wasted from farm-to-fork. The figures were put out by Tesco, a major food retailer, and funnily enough, they show that 16% of food is wasted or destroyed on the farm and by consumers, but less than 1% is wasted by food retailers. Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on this. The EU reports:

Food waste in industrialized countries is as high as in developing countries:

• In developing countries, over 40% of food losses happen after harvest and during processing;
• In industrialised countries, over 40% occurs at retail and consumer level.

 (emphasis mine).

The Food Waste Phenomenon

Food security issues are becoming quite mainstream. Over at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, there's a report released on the problem of food waste in the global supply chain. IMechE is a UK-based society, so the interest in food security makes sense; food issues are pretty top-of-mind in the UK.
And it makes sense that engineers--particularly mechanical engineers--would be interested in agricultural issues. The past hundred years of progressive industrialization has occupied the time and intellect of a lot of engineers. And systems rationalization is one of those things engineers do. So taking on the problem of waste is right up their alley.
They certainly recognize the problem:

Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach. Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands. [from the IMechE website]

With the projected growth in population to 9 billion over the remains of the century, reducing food waste and improving food handling will be essential. The difficulty will be in providing  technically and culturally suitable solutions.

customer-supplied image on Amazon

Which leads us to the Ugly American problem. The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that has since been widely misunderstood.

The novel takes place in a fictional nation called Sarkhan (an imaginary country in Southeast Asia that somewhat resembles Burma or Thailand, but which is meant to allude to Vietnam) and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed. The book describes the United States' losing struggle against Communism—what was later to be called the battle for hearts and minds in Southeast Asia—because of innate arrogance and the failure to understand the local culture. The title is actually a double entendre, referring both to the physically unattractive hero, Homer Atkins, and to the ugly behavior of the American government employees.

 The "ugly American" of the book title fundamentally refers to the plain-looking engineer Atkins, who lives with the local people, who comes to understand their needs, and who offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. It is argued in the book that the Communists are successful because they practice tactics similar to those of Atkins. [from Wikipedia]

This is a point which has stayed with me since I first read the novel in the mid-sixties: Technology must be appropriate to the culture.  there's no use introducing refrigerated mega-storage to a country that cannot guarantee reliable power. Devising appropriate-level technology is going to be a challenge. Here's hoping these engineers are up to it.

Feeding The World Cheaply

How about using the food we already grow? Reports out of Canada, the EU, and the US indicate that close to half of the food planted never makes it to the fork.
From Science Daily:

The world's population is an estimated seven billion people. An additional one billion can be fed from our current resources, if the food losses could be halved. This can be achieved if the lowest loss percentage achieved in any region could be reached globally.
"There isn't enough clean water everywhere on Earth. Significantly more agricultural land cannot be cleared as well as certain raw material minerals for fertilizers are running low. At the same time, a quarter of the amount of calories in produced food is lost or wasted at different stages of food production chain, which results in unnecessary resources loss," says Matti Kummu, post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University.
The new study is the first to evaluate the impact of food losses and its relationship to resources on a global scale. Annually 27 m3 of clean water, 0.031 hectares of agricultural land and 4.3 kilos of fertilizers per every inhabitant in the world is wasted in food losses.
"Agriculture uses over 90 percent of the fresh water consumed by humans and most of the raw materials used in fertilizers. More efficient food production and the reduction of food losses are very important matters for the environment as well as future food security," Kummu adds.

More Than Enough

So we're facing another global food crisis--this time because of the American drought. Food prices are expected to jump up to 10% by this time next year, millions will starve,and the speculative money men moving in and out of the food system will make out like the bandits they are. One in  six people on the planet are currently food insecure, and we can expect that number to expand appreciably by next year. NECSI is warning about social disruptions, an even wider spread "Arab Spring," and generally its the end of the world.
And yet. And yet. It really is so unnecessary a reaction. Even with the US drought there's more than enough food in the world to feed everyone.  Dana Gunders, over at the National Resources Defense Council, has just released an issue paper on food waste (pdf) in the United States. From her blog:

Food is simply too good to waste. Even the most sustainably farmed food does us no good if the food is never eaten. Getting food to our tables eats up 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80 percent of freshwater consumed in the United States. Yet, 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. That is more than 20 pounds of food per person every month. Not only does this mean that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also 25 percent of all freshwater and huge amounts of unnecessary chemicals, energy, and land. Moreover, almost all of that uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills where it accounts for almost 25 percent of U.S. methane emissions.
Nutrition is also lost in the mix -- food saved by reducing losses by just 15 percent could feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables. Given all the resources demanded for food production, it is critical to make sure that the least amount possible is needlessly squandered on its journey to our plates.

From the NRDC website

The same is true worldwide. Canada is wasting about the same amount of food as the US, according to The Star. And the European Union released a report in 2010 that points up their problems in this area.
And its not something that's easy to do anything about. It may not do farmers or consumers any good, and it certainly does nothing for those of us who are food insecure, but the level of waste is a big profit centre for the food industry.
It is also an untapped resource. Much of what is disposed of in landfills (where it contributes methane to the global climate change problem), is compostable. From farm to garbage, we're tossing away expensive and highly recyclable material. And worse, we pay taxes to get rid of it.
The solutions are pretty straightforward. Composting, of course. But using waste bits to make stock would help. Heck, sending elementary school students out to play for twenty minutes before lunch leads to less waste when they eat their lunch. Schools are well placed to eliminate food waste from the general waste stream. And lowered demand for food will keep prices down. It might impact food industry profits--particularly if we were to make it much more expensive to dispose of food waste. But that's a price I'm willing to pay.