La Cucaracha isn’t just the title of a Mexican revolutionary song (or Spanish for cockroach) anymore. It’s also a meal. A UN meeting is currently debating the merits of edible insects.
Credit: Abfab27
New Scientist this week tells of one of the new horrors found in the industrial food processing industry. It affects those workers in slaughterhouses who work on swine heads (in an area known, and you decide if this is dark comedy or not, as “the head table”).
As the New York Times points out, here and here, biofuels aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The revelation was prompted by an article in Science which breaks it down quite nicely. Here’s the abstract:
It’s not particularly elegant or well written, but this only-occasionally-unintelligible rant from CounterPunch is still worth skimming. It points the finger nicely at the influence corporate agriculture has in America, will continue to have under Clinton and, who’s betting against it?, under whoever the next president of the US is…
My good friends over at here or download the more legible pdf.
I’ll be writing about troubles in Kenya more fully in the future. But this press release from Food and Water Watch caught my eye. It shows how profoundly callous agribusiness can be in the run up to Valentine’s day.
An important part of the arguments I make in the book are about how poor people are denied access to food, even when they’re not being denied access to food.
Take, for instance, the food stamp programme in the United States, where 36 million people went hungry last year. Food stamps are designed to ensure that working families don’t run out of basic foodstuffs. Given the redlining of communities of poor people, supermarkets aren’t going to come in and provide fresh fruit and veg. But processed food giants are only too happy to offer product that can sit on the shelves of corner stores for months before they’re bought.
You can tell that I’m catching up on the posting of things here today. Mainly I’ve just been running around a little too much, but this story, sent in by a reader, left me a little too stunned to know what to do. It’s a stark coda to the Week in Food and agroflation stories.
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