Tag: food

The Push for Bug-Based Diets Continues

Mealworm meatballs, anyone? Or how about a salad with a side of crickets? With the recent changes transpiring in the food industry, it’s highly possible that these will be the food choices you’ll see on restaurant menus in the future.

In Singapore, the movement toward a more insect-inclusive diet is progressing rapidly. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) recently approved the import of insect and insect products for human consumption, set to take effect immediately.1

SFA Approves 16 Insects for Human Consumption

Reports about Singapore planning to add more edible insects and insect products to their food supply actually made news in the last quarter of 2022. It was estimated that by the end of 2023, the SFA would give the green light for 16 types of insects to be approved for human consumption or to be used in animal feed.2

However, the approval was pushed back; it was only on July 8, 2024, when the agency finally gave the go-signal for these insects to be used as food. According to the SFA’s press release:3

“As the insect industry is nascent and insects are a new food item here, [the] SFA has developed the insect regulatory framework, which puts in place guidelines for insects to be approved as food.

With immediate effect, [the] SFA will allow the import of insects and insect products belonging to species that have been assessed to be of low regulatory concern.”

The 16 insect species included in the SFA’s list have different stages of growth — there are adult house crickets (Acheta domesticus) and grasshoppers (Oxya japonica), Superworm beetle mealworms (Zophobas atratus/Zophobas morio) and Whitegrub larvae (Protaetia brevitarsis), and Silk moth pupa and silkworm larvae (Bombyx mori).4

Various insect-containing products are also allowed. “Among the insect products that Singaporean authorities have said can be imported are: insect oil, uncooked pasta with insects as an added ingredient, chocolate and other confectionery containing no more than 20% insect, salted, brined, smoked and dried bee larva, marinated beetle grub, and silkworm pupa,” The Guardian reports.5

Local restaurants are gearing to accommodate these novel products, making notable changes to their menus to attract “more daring” customers. For example, the restaurant House of Seafood is planning a menu with at least 30 insect-infused dishes, which include silkworm- and crispy cricket-garnished sushi and salted egg crab with silkworms.6

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FDA Lets Chemical Companies Decide if Recycled Plastics Are Safe for Food Containers

Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.

Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, has approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website.

Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of 7 to 8 per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.

Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India and other countries.

The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30% recycled “soft plastic packaging.”

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DARPA Funding Project To Turn Plastic Waste into Food for Soldiers

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding research to turn military plastic waste into a variety of different useful products, including food for military personnel.

According to Ars Technica, DARPA first put out a call in 2019 for projects to deal with the large amounts of plastic waste produced by military units when they work in remote locations.

The agency wanted a system that could convert plastic wrappers, water bottles and other plastic waste into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system would have to be compact enough to fit in a Humvee, capable of running on low amounts of energy and use plastic-eating microbes.

DARPA’s goal, according to microbiologist Stephen Techtmann, who works at Michigan Technological University, is not to feed soldiers products made from the plastic, but the microbes themselves that digest and transform it. Techtmann and his team believe the technology will be available soon, and are currently conducting toxicity testing to ensure that plastic-eating microbes are safe for human consumption.

The system being developed by Michigan Tech involves using a small shredder to reduce plastic waste in size, before burning it and subject it to chemical treatment which allows it to be digested by special bacteria. These bacteria were found in compost piles. Many naturally occurring bacteria already have the ability to digest plastics.

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New Zealand Prime Minister laughs as he announces removal of food safety laws so lab-made products can be released onto the market

Last week in New Zealand, Judith Collins, Minister for Science and Technology, and Chris Luxon, Prime Minister, decided to introduce a policy change with a Laurel and Hardy double act on Twitter; it was full of bonhomie and laughter designed to mask a sinister intent.

Laural and Hardy were announcing new biotechnology gene editing laws.

Deregulation of biotechnology will contain provisions that take away our basic human rights of choice. They will change the face of our small island nation forever – yes, forever, Dr, Guy Hatchard says.

According to their vaudeville performance, biotechnology deregulation will enable amazing scientists to mitigate climate change, improve our health, boost our horticulture, and grow our economy. Collins effused “it is so great to be part of this government.”Luxon agreed, calling it “an amazing day.” As he sees it, some laws formulated in 1996 to protect consumers make no sense in 2024 because they prevent incredibly smart biotechnology scientists from releasing their products into the environment without having to go through public scrutiny.

Luxon added, “We’re going to make sure we do it safely, don’t worry about that”(at this point Luxon appeared to be channelling Jacinda Ardern). It would be easy to poke fun, but the consequences are too far-reaching and serious for levity. The 1996 laws do not prevent biotech food products from reaching the market as Luxon implied. Instead, they require that gene-altered ingredients be labelled as such. In other words, Luxon is taking away our right of consumer choice, our right to know what we are eating. In the near future “incredibly smart scientists” will be deciding for us.

Aside from our right to know, there is one other very important reason for the 1996 law. It involves one word “traceability.” If novel gene-altered food substitutes are not labelled, there will be no way for anyone to find out if they are causing illness. Compulsory food labelling has been a fundamental part of our global food safety system since it was first introduced in 1913. Bypassing this principle is a key strategy of biotech marketing for the simple reason that consumers don’t want biotech foods and manufacturers don’t want to face lawsuits. Thus, in one stroke Luxon’s government has taken us back into the 19th century world of food adulteration, in his words: “amazing.”

Watching the video of Luxon and Collins I was forcibly struck by how far out of touch they are with reality. They appeared to me as a pair of simpletons smirking and chuckling with glee as they thought they could pass off iron pyrites as gold. We are still in the shadow of a pandemic era where incredibly “intelligent scientists” (???)were given free rein and funding to develop a deadly virus and then a botched vaccine that killed rather than cured.

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Back to the Future With Price Controls

Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris is demonstrating why monetary debasement has always been a favorite way for government officials to plunder the citizenry. Rather than focusing on the Federal Reserve as the root cause of prices rising across society, she’s blaming rising food prices on grocery-store owners. Consequently, she says that if she is elected president, she’ll get a federal “anti-gouging” law enacted that prevents grocery stores from raising prices.

In other words, she’s going to impose price controls, which inevitably means that we are going to have to deal with shortages of everything in grocery stores that has a price control imposed on it.

Of course, this is what governments have done since the invention of the printing press. Debasing the currency by printing ever-increasing quantities of money and then blaming the resulting rising prices on greedy, rapacious, evil, profit-seeking, capitalist swine has always been the way that government officials plunder the citizenry without having the citizenry figure out what the government is doing to them.

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First Rule of Famine Club

One of the worst things governments can do when things go badly — but always seem to do — is make price controls. Gas on fire.

In case of actual food emergency, police military, thugs, and hungry people, go house to house, warehouse to warehouse, farm to farm — and seize food. People become expert at hiding food.

Farms often are picked over by plagues of locust-people. Farmers stop farming…

Hoarders, speculators, and preppers are different sorts, but they all get blamed as if they are hoarders.

Hoarders who buy everything they can get at last minute are a problem.

Preppers actually REDUCE the problem because they are not starving and stressing the supplies, but preppers get blamed as if they are hoarders.

Speculators, as with preppers, often buy far in advance of the problems and actually part of the SOLUTION. They buy when prices are lower and supplies are common.

Speculators can be fantastic. When prices skyrocket, speculators find a way to get their supplies to market even when they must travel far even to another country. But dirty governments run by dimwits will often call speculators “hoarders” and arrest them and seize their supplies.

Governments who often cause food emergencies always blame farmers, distributors, retailers, for price gouging and hoarding. Government price fixing, seizures, crime from government, and street thugs, causes actual production and distribution to plummet. That’s when the REAL problems start — and potatoes are worth far more than gold.

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The Rockefeller Foundation and the destruction of global agriculture

In their latest report, ‘True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the US Food System’, the Rockefeller Foundation is deeply engaged in a coordinated effort to radically change the way we produce food and how we calculate its true cost. They claim it is part of a global consensus, through the UN, to create “sustainable” agriculture amid the ongoing covid breakdown crisis. Far from being a positive change, it is intended to radically change our access to healthy food and our choice of what we eat. The Foundation, which has just released the second food report in two years, is partnering with the Davos World Economic Forum and big agribusiness to lead the drive. Their new slogan is “True Cost of Food.”

True Cost?

Rajiv Shah, President of the Foundation writes, “We spent the past year working with experts and advocates across the field to measure impact of the US food system. The result is the first US-wide set of metrics that can help us measure the cost of our food more accurately. With this new analysis, governments, advocates, food producers, and individuals are better equipped to transform our food system to be more nourishing, regenerative, and equitable …”

Here is where the words must be looked at more closely. These guys are experts at neuro-linguistic programming (“NLP”). In effect, it reads as if the same Rockefeller Foundation responsible for our industrialised, globalised food chain and the destruction that process has wrought on not only the family farm but also the quality of our global agriculture and diet, is now blaming their creation for huge external costs of our food. However, they write as if the greedy family farmer is to blame, not corporate agribusiness.

Shah states, “This report is a wake-up call. The US food system as it stands is adversely affecting our environment, our health, and our society.” Shah’s Rockefeller study states, “The US food system’s current set-up has led to costly impacts on the health of people, society and the planet. Global warming, reduced biodiversity, water and air pollution, food waste and the high incidence of diet-related illnesses are key unintended consequences of the current production system.” This is ominous.

The study adds, “ The burden of impact of these costs are disproportionately borne by communities that are marginalised and underserved, often communities of colour, many of whom are the backbone as farmers, fishers, ranchers and food workers.”

Using a Dutch group, True Price Foundation, the report calculates that the “true cost” of the US food system is not the $1.1 trillion that Americans spend annually on food, but rather at least $3.2 trillion per year when taking into account its impact on the health of people, livelihoods and the environment. This huge added cost is calculated mainly from health effects including cancer and diabetes and environmental effects such as CO2 emissions of what they call “unsustainable” agriculture. True Cost Foundation has a three-man board including Herman Mulder, a former banker with ABN Amro, one of the world’s leading agribusiness banks; Charles Evers, former Corporate controller and CFO with Unilever NV (1981-2002), one of the world’s leading agribusiness giants; and Jasper de Jong, Partner at Allen & Overy, one of the world’s largest law firms based in London. This is the team behind pricing such abstractions as a tonne of CO2 and other costs for the Rockefeller report. The only point is that CO2 is a harmless essential component of all life and is no cause for a rising global temperature.

Also notable about the Rockefeller report, True Cost of Food, is that the contributors included law school professors, university economists, the World Wildlife Fund (“WWF”), and the True Cost Foundation. No single farmer organisation was included.

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No Farms, No Food

We live in a world where oligarchs accumulate land, use their media assets to denigrate natural foods and invest in fake alternatives. On the other ‘side’, wealthy professionals calling themselves freedom fighters travel the world and the internet insisting we should eat organic and local. Meanwhile, the food security of many of the eight billion-plus of us remains at the mercy of the weather, diseases and insects. Neither side offers a viable solution or much benefit for many beyond themselves.

An increasing realisation of the corruption and greed that drives much of our New Normal is motivating a growing movement for self-sufficiency. Local sourcing of natural-grown foods is coupled with denigration of big agribusiness and industrialised food production. Incoherently, it is also often coupled with claims that those backing the big agribusiness enemy are aiming for depopulation, while the way in which small-scale agriculture will feed the world’s growing population is left unexplained.

From the comfort of big jet planes made in huge factories, it is now possible to gain likes by posting photos of the organic and rather cute livestock we left back home. These can be supplemented with pictures of the Thai rice, Costa Rican coffee and Mexican avocados from our favorite brunch spot. This approach to food and agriculture is a hobby, and a good one. But the world cannot support eight billion such hobbies.

The other side of the agriculture coin has also been doing us harm: an obese population in rich countries with declining life expectancy, fat on industrial corn syrup, seed oils and other unnatural metabolism adulterators, coupled with declining physical activity. Nor are we benefiting from unevidenced claims that diets including meat or raw milk will somehow restart an age of plagues. Or that humans should transform themselves into insectivores.

Regulating independent family farmers out of business, with their generations of knowledge, is not a step forward either but a decimation of rural society and human dignity – of the reason for living in the first place. Replacing them with centralised fake food factories funded by wealthy investors and their pet celebrities will concentrate wealth rather than food security. To survive and thrive – all of us – we need to face the realities of growing and delivering huge quantities of healthy human food.

We feed far more, and live far better, than past Malthusians predicted because we grow more food and store and transport it more effectively than they thought we could. That is not an ‘elitist’ thing, it is quite the opposite. Like the rest of life, we need to continue to progress, but keep that progress in all our hands rather than a greed-driven few – which is the unavoidable challenge of all human progress, and a challenge our agencies are now failing. But in fighting for food freedom, we must still feed over eight billion. This means investing in large-scale farm machinery and supply and food management infrastructure – in large agricultural enterprises.

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Farming To Feed Eight Billion Is A Business, Not A Hobby

We live in a world where oligarchs accumulate land, use their media assets to denigrate natural foods, and invest in fake alternatives. On the other ‘side’, wealthy professionals calling themselves freedom-fighters travel the world and the internet insisting we should eat organic and local. Meanwhile, the food security of many of the eight billion plus of us remains at the mercy of the weather, diseases and insects. Neither side offers a viable solution, or much benefit for many beyond themselves..

An increasing realization of the corruption and greed that drives much of our New Normal is motivating a growing movement for self-sufficiency. Local sourcing of natural-grown foods is coupled with denigration of big agribusiness and industrialized food production. Incoherently, it is also often coupled with claims that those backing the big agribusiness enemy are aiming for depopulation, while the way in which small-scale agriculture will feed the world’s growing population is left unexplained.

From the comfort of big jet planes made in huge factories, it is now possible to gain likes by posting photos of the organic and rather cute livestock we left back home. These can be supplemented with pictures of the Thai rice, Costa Rican coffee and Mexican avocados from our favorite brunch spot. This approach to food and agriculture is a hobby, and a good one. But the world cannot support eight billion such hobbies.

The other side of the Agriculture coin has also been doing us harm; an obese population in rich countries with declining life expectancy, fat on industrial corn syrup, seed oils and other unnatural metabolism adulterators, coupled with declining physical activity. Nor are we gaining by unevidenced claims that diets including meat or raw milk will somehow restart an age of plagues. Or that humans should transform themselves into insectivores.

Regulating independent family farmers out of business, with their generations of knowledge, is not a step forward either but a decimation of rural society and human dignity – of the reason for living in the first place. Replacing them with centralized fake food factories funded by wealthy investors and their pet celebrities will concentrate wealth rather than food security. To survive and thrive – all of us – we need to face the realities of growing and delivering huge quantities of healthy, human food.

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Study Confirms — Trans Fats Policy Killed Millions

For the past six decades, saturated fats and cholesterol have been wrongly vilified as the central culprit of heart disease, stroke and peripheral vascular disease. However, research has demonstrated that it’s actually trans fats and processed vegetable oils found in many processed foods that are the real enemy.

In the decades saturated fats were demonized, the food industry responded by replacing saturated fats with more shelf-stable trans fats and a new market of low-fat (high-sugar) foods was born.

Americans’ health has plummeted ever since, and millions have been prematurely killed by this mistake. Making matters worse, genetically engineered soy oil, which is a major source of trans fat, can oxidize inside your body, thereby causing damage to both your heart and your brain.

One of the first articles published exonerating saturated fats was in 1957 by the late Dr. Fred Kummerow,1 who spent eight decades absorbed in the science of lipids and heart disease. In 2013, Kummerow sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for not withdrawing trans fats from the market.2 It was Kummerow’s lifetime work that revealed the dangers of trans fat and oxidized cholesterol and the relationship to heart disease.

Not surprisingly, trans fat is also linked to dementia as the arterial changes that occur in the heart muscle also occur in the brain, triggering neurological damage. Research has demonstrated the dangers to health and a great financial burden that eating a diet with trans fat has placed on the American public.

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