By Gina Munsey •
July 22, 2009
Many people have never heard of teff, but this unique gluten-free grain dates back to the age of the pyramids. Most often ground into flour to make injera, a fermented flat bread, teff has served as a primary food source in Ethiopia and Eritrea since approximately 3000 B.C. Despite its enduring history as an African staple, teff’s presence in America is less than forty years old. In the 1970s, an entrepreneurial farmer observed a parallel between the weather of Idaho’s Snake Valley and Africa’s Great Rift Valley, and began successfully cultivating teff in the United States.
Individual grains of teff are extremely small, just 1/150th of the size of a kernel of wheat. When cooked as a hot cereal, the tiny grains – comparable to the size of a poppy seed — create a deliciously smooth texture. In fact, the taste and consistency of teff porridge is more like cream of wheat than any other gluten-free whole grain I’ve prepared.
When you see teff’s impressive nutritional profile, you’ll see why it provides a compelling case for adding this gluten-free grain to your diet.
by Lester R. Brown
In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.
As noted in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.
While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.
By Heather Dunham •
February 14, 2009
Eco-activists often insist that vegetarianism is the only truly earth-friendly diet for humans. On the other hand, there are many people, honestly trying to live as green as possible, who are not yet ready to take that step completely. Others of us find that we are just not healthy without some animal protein in our diet, and that there is some logic to the argument than humans are biologically omnivorous.
If you are a meat-eater, whatever your personal reasons may be, the problem still remains — the beef industry is a nightmare. From enormous factory farms raising animals in horrific conditions, to growth hormones interfering with our bodies, to mad cow disease resulting from herbivores being fed ground-up brains of their kin, to the ecological devastation… We simply cannot allow ourselves to support this industry by buying its products.
So what is the conscientious carnivore to do?
The ethanol industry isn’t the only group up in arms about pervasive negative reporting on biofuels (see yesterday’s post: Ethanol Industry: Jobs Are Better Than Food?).
Two soybean growers’ groups have suspended $1.5 million in funding from the University of Minnesota, due to research showing that biofuels could worsen global warming:
The study, by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman and others, said that dedicating huge amounts of land to grow corn, soybeans, sugarcane and other food crops for fuel could drastically change the landscape and worsen global warming. Farmers in the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia and other countries will need to clear forests, grasslands and peat lands on a massive scale to grow more of those crops, according to the research, unleashing far more carbon dioxide from natural vegetation than is saved by the lower emissions of the biofuels.
Is anyone really surprised about this finding? Suspension of the funds appears to be only temporary, until the groups have a chance to meet with the Dean of agricultural science. Jim Palmer, the executive director of the two soybean groups, summed up the situation: “The university hurt the farmers’ feelings, OK? That’s probably the best way to say it.”
The ethanol industry seems to be on the warpath against bad press (maybe that’s just my impression), which it’s been continuously mired in over increasing food prices, changing land-use patterns, and the questionable environmental benefits of grain-based fuel. As I mentioned last week (Ethanol Industry Pays Off Subsidies, Boosts U.S. Economy), business is booming, and this has potentially emboldened or intensified the pro-ethanol lobby.
Bob Dinneen, head of the Renewable Fuels Association, had this to say at this year’s National Ethanol Conference (via Autopia):
He calls the food-vs-fuel debate a “fallacy” that assumes “farmers are incapable of supplying the growing needs for food, fiber and fuel.” Besides, he said, biorefiners only need the starch in feedstocks; the protein provided 14 million metric tons of livestock feed last year.
