Take a break from current affairs & politics .....
My bro told me about 2 docu DVDs he rented recently in addition to the usual blockbusters.
I was unimpressed: Supersize Me and Food Inc.
Not all these greenpeace tree-hugging crap again, I thought.
I haven't seen them yet. But a short intro by my bro jolted me.
Supersize Me is a docu by a guy who wants to prove a point to McDonald's by submitting himself to an experiment: one solid month of McDonald's meals (3 x per day x 30 days).
End result: 30 lbs gain & irreparable health damage.
Note the number of tablespoons of sugar equivalent to one upsized Coke drink etc !
I think it's a little extreme. Balanced diet & Mcdonald's once a while should be ok, right ? Was told McDonald USA response when queried in the docu - ' eh, any visit more than once a week is actually extreme oredy' wahlao ! I am shocked.
My bro told me his precocious son 8 yrs old, who used to cry when denied the McDonald's trip after watching this documentary has sworn off McDonald's fast food ...... for now.
Parents with McDonald's craving kids, get that DVD !
The other docu DVD is Food Inc. up for Oscar honors this year (see article below).
My bro is shocked by the ills of large economies of scale in modern industrial food production across all food industries .... from corn as commodity crop mass production to cattle to modern poultry farming.
The scenes of chicken dying in their crap (see para highlighted below) is most disturbing.
sigh.... modern living.
Those interested can google for videos on 'Supersize Me' or 'Food Inc', or even go rent the DVDs.
BTW Kong Hee Fatt Choy feasting now very sobering
__________________________________________________
Food, Inc: saved from the bin
Would you feed your family out-of-date food to ease the landfill crisis? As hard-hitting US documentary Food, Inc gets an Oscar nomination, Cassandra Jardine declares war on waste by shopping online for produce past its sell-by date.
By Cassandra Jardine
Published: 6:00PM GMT 06 Feb 2010
Comments 7 | Comment on this article
You are what you eat: all this out-of-date food cost Cassandra Jardine just £18 from approvedfood.co.uk Photo: JANE MINGAY
My pulse is racing. I have found a new way to save money on food – and help to save the planet in the process. I had thought there was nothing more I could do to cut back on bills and waste as I am already a devotee of markets, pound shops, supermarkets' yellow cut-price stickers and recycled leftovers. But the next logical step has just been delivered to my door: a box full of items that supermarkets cannot sell but are still fit to eat.
According to Approved Food, the leading online seller of clearance produce, the goods would have cost £64.08 in a supermarket, but I have paid only £13.02 (plus £5.25 postage) for this 22-kilo package. Some of the items will be past, or close to, their sell-by dates; others will be surplus to requirements. Until a year or so ago, these goods would have been consigned to the bin but now, for only 99p, I can save eight litres of Heinz Dijon mustard from landfill, where every tonne of food waste generates 6.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
<!-- BEFORE ACI -->
Not only do I now have enough mustard to make salad dressing for the rest of my life, I have contributed to the "war on waste", one of the less controversial wars declared by this Government. Food waste is one of the scandals of our time. The latest statistics from the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme suggest this country bins 20 million tonnes of food every year.
During the Second World War, an era revisited in The Ministry of Food, an exhibition which opens this Friday at the Imperial War Museum in London, nothing was thrown away. Back gardens were turned over to vegetable growing, and every scraping made into something edible. Seventy years on, households put 8.3 million tonnes of once-edible food in bins, or £50 from the average family's monthly shopping bill. Tempted by greed and ''bogof'' deals – buy one, get one free – we buy more than we need, cook more than we can eat, then chuck out far more than we should.
A few individuals are manically frugal, including the man who posted this comment on a recycling website: "When I do boiled potatoes, I use the same water to do some rice and then I put that into cartons and freeze it."
Without becoming obsessive, there must be more we can do to cut back. We can, for one thing, look out for "bogof later" offers. Tesco and Sainsbury's are trialling "buy one now, get one free next time" schemes, in which shoppers can postpone a free second promotional product until a later trip. It's a small gesture, but timely, given the release of Food, Inc, the Oscar-nominated documentary for which Stella McCartney is hosting a glitzy UK premiere this week. Food, Inc aims to do for the food industry what Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. In Britain, we are perhaps more aware than Americans of the less-than-picturesque way food is produced. Writers Felicity Lawrence and Joanna Blythman and television presenters Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have opened eyes. But Food, Inc will induce indigestion.
The film shows animals kept in cramped conditions, fed unsuitable corn-based foods that leave them unable to support their own body-weight, and kept standing in their own manure which can lead to health hazards. It shows overweight people eating an unhealthy diet high in fat, salt and sugar which suits the big corporations that produce it.
"Every purchase is a vote" is the punchline of Food, Inc. So here I am voting to reduce waste – if not my waist – by buying superannuated biscuits and bags of unwanted pistachio nuts from approvedfood.co.uk "It's a crime to send this to landfill," says Dan Cluderay, the software engineer-turned-market store holder who set up the company in 2008. He has 60,000 customers, and in the run-up to Christmas reported year-on-year sales up 500 per cent. Cluderay is about to expand from his football-pitch sized warehouse outside Sheffield into a 12-depot network.
During the 20 minutes for which we talk, Cluderay receives calls from by three different suppliers eager to offload water, tinned peas and sweets. Often they are in despair; Cluderay is not surprised given the way they say they are treated by supermarkets. "A supermarket might order a million of an item, start by taking half a million, and then decide not to take the rest, leaving the suppliers with a lot of marked-up products that they can't sell."
Last week, the Government introduced a code to curb supermarkets' bullying behaviour towards suppliers, who are made to pay fines for the tiniest of transgressions and take the knock if a product is discounted. But Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, has not followed through on promises to get rid of the largely meaningless "best-before" labels that result in 370,000 tons of waste because supermarkets won't take goods with less than 75 per cent of the time before that date left to run.
Best-before and sell-by dates are a convenience for shelf stackers. Unlike "use-by" dates, they do not safeguard the public, yet lead to appalling waste. "Food that cannot be sold has no commercial value," says Tony Lowe, chief executive of Fair Share, which takes food that would otherwise be destroyed and gives it to charities which turn it into meals at drop-in centres.
Lowe, who used to work for Marks & Spencer, cannot understand why supermarkets have been slow to offload their surpluses when it costs less than the cost of destruction to give it to Fair Share. "We use 90 per cent of the food given to us – anything from lobsters to Pot Noodles – and last year we rescued 3,100 tonnes that would have been destroyed. We could do five times that amount – enough to fill 28,000 articulated lorries – if they only gave it to us."
Even if he achieves his aim, there will still be plenty left for the online purveyors of discount foods. At present, having opened my box, I don't think these are the answer to anyone's weekly shop. The range is small and consists largely of foods that I would never normally buy, such as tinned new potatoes. That will start changing very soon, promises Cluderay. "We are about to move to next-day delivery," he says. "That means we can sell fresh fruit and veg."
The next step will be chilled foods. But right now these rescued goods are causing me a new waste problem. What I am going to do with 12 packets of Super Cook Belgian Chocolate Scrolls? I can't now bin them. Would anyone like some Dijon mustard?
My bro told me about 2 docu DVDs he rented recently in addition to the usual blockbusters.
I was unimpressed: Supersize Me and Food Inc.
Not all these greenpeace tree-hugging crap again, I thought.
I haven't seen them yet. But a short intro by my bro jolted me.
Supersize Me is a docu by a guy who wants to prove a point to McDonald's by submitting himself to an experiment: one solid month of McDonald's meals (3 x per day x 30 days).
End result: 30 lbs gain & irreparable health damage.
Note the number of tablespoons of sugar equivalent to one upsized Coke drink etc !
I think it's a little extreme. Balanced diet & Mcdonald's once a while should be ok, right ? Was told McDonald USA response when queried in the docu - ' eh, any visit more than once a week is actually extreme oredy' wahlao ! I am shocked.
My bro told me his precocious son 8 yrs old, who used to cry when denied the McDonald's trip after watching this documentary has sworn off McDonald's fast food ...... for now.
Parents with McDonald's craving kids, get that DVD !
The other docu DVD is Food Inc. up for Oscar honors this year (see article below).
My bro is shocked by the ills of large economies of scale in modern industrial food production across all food industries .... from corn as commodity crop mass production to cattle to modern poultry farming.
The scenes of chicken dying in their crap (see para highlighted below) is most disturbing.
sigh.... modern living.
Those interested can google for videos on 'Supersize Me' or 'Food Inc', or even go rent the DVDs.
BTW Kong Hee Fatt Choy feasting now very sobering
__________________________________________________
Food, Inc: saved from the bin
Would you feed your family out-of-date food to ease the landfill crisis? As hard-hitting US documentary Food, Inc gets an Oscar nomination, Cassandra Jardine declares war on waste by shopping online for produce past its sell-by date.
By Cassandra Jardine
Published: 6:00PM GMT 06 Feb 2010
Comments 7 | Comment on this article
My pulse is racing. I have found a new way to save money on food – and help to save the planet in the process. I had thought there was nothing more I could do to cut back on bills and waste as I am already a devotee of markets, pound shops, supermarkets' yellow cut-price stickers and recycled leftovers. But the next logical step has just been delivered to my door: a box full of items that supermarkets cannot sell but are still fit to eat.
According to Approved Food, the leading online seller of clearance produce, the goods would have cost £64.08 in a supermarket, but I have paid only £13.02 (plus £5.25 postage) for this 22-kilo package. Some of the items will be past, or close to, their sell-by dates; others will be surplus to requirements. Until a year or so ago, these goods would have been consigned to the bin but now, for only 99p, I can save eight litres of Heinz Dijon mustard from landfill, where every tonne of food waste generates 6.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
<!-- BEFORE ACI -->
Not only do I now have enough mustard to make salad dressing for the rest of my life, I have contributed to the "war on waste", one of the less controversial wars declared by this Government. Food waste is one of the scandals of our time. The latest statistics from the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme suggest this country bins 20 million tonnes of food every year.
During the Second World War, an era revisited in The Ministry of Food, an exhibition which opens this Friday at the Imperial War Museum in London, nothing was thrown away. Back gardens were turned over to vegetable growing, and every scraping made into something edible. Seventy years on, households put 8.3 million tonnes of once-edible food in bins, or £50 from the average family's monthly shopping bill. Tempted by greed and ''bogof'' deals – buy one, get one free – we buy more than we need, cook more than we can eat, then chuck out far more than we should.
A few individuals are manically frugal, including the man who posted this comment on a recycling website: "When I do boiled potatoes, I use the same water to do some rice and then I put that into cartons and freeze it."
Without becoming obsessive, there must be more we can do to cut back. We can, for one thing, look out for "bogof later" offers. Tesco and Sainsbury's are trialling "buy one now, get one free next time" schemes, in which shoppers can postpone a free second promotional product until a later trip. It's a small gesture, but timely, given the release of Food, Inc, the Oscar-nominated documentary for which Stella McCartney is hosting a glitzy UK premiere this week. Food, Inc aims to do for the food industry what Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. In Britain, we are perhaps more aware than Americans of the less-than-picturesque way food is produced. Writers Felicity Lawrence and Joanna Blythman and television presenters Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have opened eyes. But Food, Inc will induce indigestion.
The film shows animals kept in cramped conditions, fed unsuitable corn-based foods that leave them unable to support their own body-weight, and kept standing in their own manure which can lead to health hazards. It shows overweight people eating an unhealthy diet high in fat, salt and sugar which suits the big corporations that produce it.
"Every purchase is a vote" is the punchline of Food, Inc. So here I am voting to reduce waste – if not my waist – by buying superannuated biscuits and bags of unwanted pistachio nuts from approvedfood.co.uk "It's a crime to send this to landfill," says Dan Cluderay, the software engineer-turned-market store holder who set up the company in 2008. He has 60,000 customers, and in the run-up to Christmas reported year-on-year sales up 500 per cent. Cluderay is about to expand from his football-pitch sized warehouse outside Sheffield into a 12-depot network.
During the 20 minutes for which we talk, Cluderay receives calls from by three different suppliers eager to offload water, tinned peas and sweets. Often they are in despair; Cluderay is not surprised given the way they say they are treated by supermarkets. "A supermarket might order a million of an item, start by taking half a million, and then decide not to take the rest, leaving the suppliers with a lot of marked-up products that they can't sell."
Last week, the Government introduced a code to curb supermarkets' bullying behaviour towards suppliers, who are made to pay fines for the tiniest of transgressions and take the knock if a product is discounted. But Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, has not followed through on promises to get rid of the largely meaningless "best-before" labels that result in 370,000 tons of waste because supermarkets won't take goods with less than 75 per cent of the time before that date left to run.
Best-before and sell-by dates are a convenience for shelf stackers. Unlike "use-by" dates, they do not safeguard the public, yet lead to appalling waste. "Food that cannot be sold has no commercial value," says Tony Lowe, chief executive of Fair Share, which takes food that would otherwise be destroyed and gives it to charities which turn it into meals at drop-in centres.
Lowe, who used to work for Marks & Spencer, cannot understand why supermarkets have been slow to offload their surpluses when it costs less than the cost of destruction to give it to Fair Share. "We use 90 per cent of the food given to us – anything from lobsters to Pot Noodles – and last year we rescued 3,100 tonnes that would have been destroyed. We could do five times that amount – enough to fill 28,000 articulated lorries – if they only gave it to us."
Even if he achieves his aim, there will still be plenty left for the online purveyors of discount foods. At present, having opened my box, I don't think these are the answer to anyone's weekly shop. The range is small and consists largely of foods that I would never normally buy, such as tinned new potatoes. That will start changing very soon, promises Cluderay. "We are about to move to next-day delivery," he says. "That means we can sell fresh fruit and veg."
The next step will be chilled foods. But right now these rescued goods are causing me a new waste problem. What I am going to do with 12 packets of Super Cook Belgian Chocolate Scrolls? I can't now bin them. Would anyone like some Dijon mustard?
