Friday, August 19, 2011

SEPTEMBER 18th FALL FEAST FUNDRAISER

-HORN OF PLENTY- (click on poster for enlargement)

It is a longstanding tradition of the Denman Island Community Vegan Potluck Series to mark the Fall Equinox with an abundant harvest supper, but this year will be a little different. Horn of Plenty, a special fall feast fundraiser for the drought stricken Horn of Africa- will take the place of our usual September potluck on Sunday, September 18th at 6:00 pm.

Please come on out to celebrate the bounty so many of us are blessed to share, and together we'll make our caring count. All proceeds from Horn of Plenty will benefit the relief efforts of Medicins San Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) in Somalia and the surrounding refugee camps.

MSF is running nine medical-nutritional programs in south-central Somalia, and three large programs in camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Across the Horn of Africa region, MSF nutrition programs are serving more than 260,000 children and pregnant or lactating women.

Between June 6th and July 6th, about 40,000 people arrived in Dadaab, Kenya in search of humanitarian assistance and safety. Dadaab, near the Somali border, is home to more than 380,000 people living in three massive camps: Dagahaley, Ifo and Hagadera.

In Dagahely camp, MSF is the sole provider of medical care for the 130,000 people and currently treating 6,400 childen for malnutrition. In Ifo, MSF provides medical care to the 25,000 refugees gathered on the outskirts.

In Liben, MSF is providing medical care in the six camps where 119,000 refugees are gathered. Here, more than 10,000 children are enrolled in nutritional programs.

Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, MSF does not accept any government funding - all funding comes from private donors. For further information or to donate on line, please visit www.msf.ca.

Denman's dine-out , Horn of Plenty, takes place in the Back Hall at 6:00 pm on Sept. 18th, and seating will be limited. Our Mediterranean-style menu will include entree, dessert, tea or coffee (see details at top of the right hand column on this page). Donations of appropriate organic produce from local islanders welcome! Please call 1209 to make your reservation before September 14th, thankyou.


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

More research indicates the importance of eating lower on the food chain

Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story -from the Harvard Business Review

In recent years, one part of the food business has rivaled organics as the hot growth area: "local" food (defined vaguely as coming from the same state or from less than 100 miles away, for example). It's a market segment that has just about doubled in sales and number of outlets over the last decade. The world's biggest food buyer, Wal-Mart, jumped on the bandwagon last fall and announced that it would double the amount of local food it sells (to 9 percent of all its food sales).
The idea of buying locally is not new, and farmers' markets have been big for years. It's become almost gospel that the food on our plates hastraveled about 1500 miles to get to us.

So it would seem logical that the best way to shrink your food-related carbon footprint associated would be to buy from near by. But it turns out that this assumption is wrong.

Thankfully, a couple scientists took a harder look at the data and published an analysis in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. The abstract for this article is a prime example of clear writing and good lifecycle analysis — which don't usually go together — so check it out. But here's the essence:

  • Food is transported a long way, going about 1,000 miles in delivery and over 4,000 miles across the supply chain.
  • But 83% of the average U.S. household's carbon footprint for food comes from growing and producing it. Transportation is only 11%.
  • Different foods have vastly different greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity, with meat requiring far more energy to produce, and red meat being particularly egregious, requiring 150% more energy than even chicken.

So the journal article adds this up to an obvious conclusion: if you want to reduce your food's carbon footprint, eat less meat. In short, "Shifting less than one day per week's worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food."

As a numbers geek, I love this kind of analysis. Now for the caveats: none of this data should dissuade anyone from eating locally also. The footprint benefits are real, even if dwarfed by food choice. And the benefits to local economies and smaller farms are very important.

But let me repeat: just moving away from meat for one day a week is more effective than buying everything you eat locally. This number will be surprising to most people, but it's partly why the global call for "Meatless Mondays" is gaining steam, with school systems and universities adopting the approach in cities around the world, from Baltimore to Tel Aviv.

As companies keep discovering, it really helps to run the numbers. As I've written about before, Pepsi discovered that the largest chunk of the footprint of its Tropicana orange juice was not in production (squeezing oranges) or in distribution (shipping heavy liquids is fuel-intensive), but in growing the oranges with natural-gas-based fertilizer.

Smart, knowledgeable execs are consistently surprised when good lifecycle data trumps seemingly solid assumptions. So we shouldn't expect consumers to figure out the right choices themselves. Buying local food seems like the obvious choice — until you run the numbers.

We have a lot of work to do, both in companies and in our homes, to tackle climate change. Good data and analysis will let us focus on the quickest paybacks and get the most out of our efforts.