Food and iTunes

I so look forward to the occasional lunches now where I have time to sit and read the latest Time magazine for an hour - I feel like I'm maybe somewhat up-to-date on world affairs now.

Last week's feature was of particular interest to me - it was about the food industry and sustainable food production. I have been reading up on this the past several years, but until recently it has been a topic considered "way out there", "what the hippie tree huggers are doing", etc. but it's becoming more and more serious now that we have economic issues and as the world's food demand continues to grow.

Most people see "organic" food labels now days. Basically, if something is certified organic by the USDA, it means it was made with no chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics, etc. Some organic producers go far beyond that - the winery we saw in California ran "bio-dymaically" meaning the entire production was in harmony with the ecosystem - zero waste, pests were controlled by natural predators, and almost zero outside watering. The interesting thing about all of this is that 70 years ago, anything grown anywhere would have been certified organic - there was no such thing as non-organic food. And now the pendulum is swinging back again - we're finding that all the stuff we've done to try to increase food production, make food "better" (i.e. genetically modifying), etc. has long-term consequences and in reality may not really be helping solve the food shortage problems of the world.

Time points out the common thinking that producing food the "old fashioned way" - sustainably - just can't keep up with the increased demand for food by the growing world population. Strictly speaking, if you look at the amount of calories produced and the cheaper costs of producing these calories, that is probably true. They go on to say that the calories being produced are of lower quality, and that part of the reason we have the obesity problem is because we're eating more of the "cheap" calories - in reality if we had more of the good stuff, we'd not feel the need to eat as much. And of course the environmental impacts are hard to put a price tag on.

It will be interesting to see where all of this goes. Erin and I have been buying nearly all organic foods for the past couple years, and buy as much as we can at the local food co-op "The Good Food Store" here in Rochester, which tries as much as possible to use locally grown and produced food which reduces the amount of shipping that goes on. I think too that a lot of people think that buying food this way is more expensive, and what we've found is that in some cases it is, and in some it's actually quite a bit cheaper - for example, there we can buy things in bulk (we can even bring and weigh our own containers and avoid the packaging). And in a lot of cases the local produce is the same as or cheaper than what's shipped around to the grocery stores. I'm sure on the whole we spend a bit more, but it hasn't broken the bank.

I have to throw in my regular iTunes rant - I upgraded to 8.2.1 and all of a sudden my main system copy started freezing in the middle of songs. I tried re-installing, running hard drive diagnostics, etc. all to finally find that going back to the previous version fixed it. This is the sort of thing that keeps me leary of upgrades - patches should make stuff better not worse!