I’m leaving town next week for a while and have been squirreling these away, but winter is definitely over. So here is a Smörgåsbord for Food and Faith blog readers. Eat up.
Ice
cream crisis as bees buzz off
The
collapse of US honeybee colonies this year is set to devastate America’s
multi-billion dollar agriculture and food industries. For the first time,
individual businesses have stepped up to give money to try to discover its
cause and eradicate it. London Guardian, England.
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Organic
food may be less expensive
Liana Hoodes works for the National Campaign for
Sustainable Agriculture and has grown food organically in the Hudson Valley
(New York) for well over 20 years. She responded to a recent syndicated news
column that dismissed the value of purchasing organically grown food. Writing
in the Times Herald-Record, Hoodes explained,
“Recent
long-term studies at the Rodale Institute have shown that organic soils are
more resistant to both drought and floods, and yields in most products are
equal or better in organic. The United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization estimates that worldwide average yield of all organic products are
130 percent that of conventional. A recent UNFAO symposium suggests that
organic agriculture may indeed help feed the world, through efficient energy
use, lower inputs, and greater diversity… Given these facts, a true
cost-benefit analysis — where all the costs of our food are taken into account
— may find organic the least expensive alternative.”
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New
international Ecological Footprint Quiz
If
you’ve taken the Quiz before, take it again-the quiz now shows the benefits of
sustainability choices (like purchasing carbon offsets or buying local) that
were not part of the old quiz, and a dramatic rise in humanity’s ecological
overshoot of the Earth’s biological capacity. The quiz also has interactive
features like a floating tally box that displays your carbon, food, housing,
and goods and services footprints as you answer each question.