chemlab menu is saving our health

I'm quite proud that my campaign (look at the twitter thing, on the right)
about testifying to the sh*t that factories call "food" has perhaps
helped, every so little, in the return to real food.

IshitUnot: Guardian
Nestlé removes artificial ingredients from entire confectionary range


Firm claims it is first major confectioner in UK to remove all artificial preservatives, flavours and colours from its products

Caroline Davies

* The Guardian, Friday 2 March 2012

Nestlé, manufacturer of KitKat, Aero and Smarties, has removed artificial colours, flavours and preservatives from its entire confectionery range. Nestlé Crunch is the last of 79 products to become free of artificial ingredients since the company began to replace more than 80 additives with alternatives six years ago, it said.

The company, which was responding to consumer demand, says it is the first big UK confectioner to remove all artificial products. Concentrates of fruit, vegetables and edible plants such as carrot, hibiscus, radish, safflower and lemon are among ingredients used to provide colour. David Rennie, managing director of Nestlé Confectionery UK, described the move as a significant milestone.

"Nestlé is proud to be the only major confectionery company in the UK to announce it is 100% free of artificial preservatives, flavours or colours across its entire portfolio," said Rennie.

American Tent City

In-tents-city in Ten Cities




This is a story about how people have been coping with the stress
of modern life when the money dries up. Do you end it all,
or beg, or work as a slave, stacking shelves?
Or do you see this as an opportunity to take yourself off
the hamster wheel that the Man has you on?

Here's a community with its own society, rules and
social support, in the middle of a desert.

IshitUnot: Yahoo

Slab City: Living Off the Grid in California's Badlands
By JASON MOTLAGH / SLAB CITY | Time.com – Fri, Feb 3, 2012
chicago" Joe Angio and his wife Anna did everything by the book to secure their slice of the American Dream. They earned college degrees, started a small business, bought a house and pair of cars, paid their taxes and credit-card bills on time. But when the economy tanked, so did the dream. Between two jobs they could barely pay their mortgage, reaching a point where they had to choose which creditor to shortchange at the end of the month in order to keep the lights on. With foreclosure no longer a matter of if, but of when, the couple looked on the Internet for the ideal place to lay low, spend less and experiment with solar power to "get more for our buck out of our environment." They bought a used RV and went off the grid. Way off.
Slab City, their home for the past three months, is a squatters' camp deep in the badlands of California's poorest county, where the road ends and the sun reigns, about 190 miles southeast of Los Angeles and hour's drive from the Mexican border. The vast state-owned property gets its name from the concrete slabs spread out across the desert floor, the last remnants of a World War II–era military base. In the decades since it was decommissioned, dropouts and fugitives of all stripes have swelled its winter population to close to a thousand, though no one's really counting. These days, their numbers are growing thanks to a modest influx of recession refugees like the Angios, attracted by do-it-yourself, rent-free living beyond the reach of electricity, running water and the law. And while the complexion of the Slabs, as the place is locally known, may be changing in some ways, the same old rule applies: respect your neighbor, or stay the hell away.
"It's pretty much as close to the Old West as you're gonna get. Most of us don't own guns or none of that garbage, but if we have problems, we take care of [them]," says Ray, 56, a former drug addict turned born-again Christian who has traversed the country six times with a giant wooden cross on his back. Katie Ray, 30, a perennial visitor from Oakland, Calif., calls the place a "postapocalyptic vacation zone." (PHOTOS: After Foreclosure: A Photographer's Requiem for the American Home)
Although Slabbers tend to defy easy characterization, de facto neighborhoods ("Poverty Flats," "Lows") and tribes have emerged. There are Year-Rounders who brave the 120°F summer inferno, and Snowbirds who land from as far as Canada with their souped-up RVs and pensions, soul-searching Gypsy Kids who arrive by train with little more than the ragged clothes on their back, Spaz Kids and their electro-psychedelic outdoor parties, and Scrappers who risk life and limb to collect shrapnel from the gunnery range that flanks the camp, where Navy SEAL teams train year-round (and where rumor has it they prepared for the Osama bin Laden raid). That's to say nothing of the rowdy bikers who pass through, or the meth-addled loners on the outer edges inclined to greet a trespasser with a gunshot. If the Burning Man festival were a permanent settlement instead of a weeklong escape -- remixed with a hard dose of reality -- this might be it.
"The Last Free Place in America" lives up to its nickname. Want to hang out nude in thermal mud baths or skateboard stoned in the bowl of an Olympic-size pool? Go for it. In the mood to construct outlandish pieces of art with scrap metal, dig an SUV-size trench for no particular reason or play 18 holes of golf on a grassless course to the sound of bombs in the distance? This is the place. Yet despite the anything-goes reputation, those who stick around the Slabs long enough insist they are made to feel welcome, provided they have the right attitude. Free meals and entertainment are on offer, capped by Saturday-night concerts at the Range, a clapboard venue that showcases live acts of varying quality. This bohemian aspect was featured in the 2007 film Into the Wild, rare mainstream attention that drew a surge of newcomers to Slab City.
One of them is Sandra "Sandi" Andrews, 61, a nomadic mother of eight without a retirement plan. Her daughter saw the film and figured it was her mom's kind of place. She was right. "When I first got here, I thought this is a whole new planet, there's no place like it," she exclaims. Initial concerns about her safety as a woman alone did not last long. Three years on, she's surrounded by friends and lives on less than $100 a month, supplementing her Social Security check with paintings she sells to tourists that stop by her studio, a converted school bus. Among her neighbors are two widows in their 90s and an 89-year-old who jokes that she'd die as soon as she set foot in a retirement home. "We've all chosen and like Slab City," Andrews says, "so the caring and sharing is always there." (MORE: The Tale of a Lost Mortgage)
Well, it depends on whom you ask too. "Builder Bill" Ammon, 63, a year-round resident who manages the Range, says that when he moved from San Diego to the Slabs back in 1999, the community was more tight-knit. "In those days, you could be poor and be separate from the engine of the world and still be all right," he says, fondly recalling how most everyone talked to one another on their CB radios and exchanged services and goods at regular swap meets to support themselves. "People had skills to offer." These days, he grumbles, a new generation of youngsters is turning up ill equipped for the sobering demands of life off the grid, looking for handouts. No one is left to go hungry, he notes. But if they don't adapt, they are given the cold shoulder, which may help explain the rise in petty theft at the camp. "A kind of segregation has developed here" between young and old, he says.
No one would disagree that the Wild West element has its darker side. Hang around the evening campfires a while and strange stories pour out: disappearances, mysterious drownings in the mud baths, the man who showed up in camp with his finger apparently bitten off, claiming he'd been attacked by a cannibal. The border patrol keeps a visible presence, searching for illegal immigrants that ply the region. When there's serious trouble, though, firemen must drive over from Niland, a derelict town five miles to the west that boasts the closest grocery store and post office. In 40-plus years on the job, Michael Aleksick, 63, the recently retired fire marshal, says he's been repeatedly shot at, stabbed and gotten in too many fistfights to remember, often with people he knows. Crime has worsened. "The crystal-meth influence," he says, "has been huge."
"There's the good, bad and the ugly," says "Shotgun" Vince Neill, 38, a newcomer who got his nickname partly for stopping a man from stealing a friend's solar panels with a blast of rock salt. He first visited the Slabs as a boy and returned this winter with his wife and six children in tow after he lost his audiovisual business and their home in Northern California. Sometimes he worries about his family's safety, but Neill reckons that Slab City's problems are proportionate to any normal city in the country. And he has no regrets about bringing his kids (ages 2 to 18). In this case, math and English lessons are rounded out with training on catching scorpions and rattlesnakes. "They're much happier learning in the great outdoors; it's the best school," he says. Still, Slab City is more of a parking spot than a long-term solution: come summer, the family will head to Los Angeles so he can look for full-time work. (VIDEO: The New Poor of Fresno)
Others, like "Radio" Mike Depraida, 60, keep choosing to return. The native New Yorker was living the fast life as a consultant and photographer but grew weary of the hectic pace and an apartment building where he didn't know his neighbors. A chance visit with friends three years ago got him hooked on the Slabs, and he's since become the perpetually tan guy in a polo shirt who operates a radio station and greets travelers with a gin and tonic at his makeshift tiki bar. The freedom and mix of people keep him coming back, a dearth of single women notwithstanding. "Why are these some of the most intelligent people I've met in my life?" he asks aloud. "I came to the conclusion that if you're smart enough to get out of the rat race, well, then, you're pretty damn bright."
Chicago Joe and Anna are proof positive. They ended up parking their trailer in East Jesus, a renegade open-air art space with Mad Max accents. The view outside their window features a half-buried coach bus and, beyond that, a giant mammoth made of tires; their neighbors include an ex-chef, a documentary filmmaker and a wandering magician cum tattoo artist. What started as an adventure has settled into a routine filled with solar projects and other odd jobs that will keep them busy and fit. Joe's already lost 80 lb. "People back home still think we're crazy for doing what we've done," he says. "It's not for everyone, but this lifestyle has grown on us, tremendously." The couple swear their relationship has also improved because they no longer fight about money. It's not hard to understand why: their living expenses have dropped from about $4,000 to $200 a month. Less than their electricity bill when they owned a house.

Now I know why I cut out the processed cereal

Tweet from MMFlint Michael Moore
RT @imajoebob You are aware that Corn Flakes
were created 2 reduce one's sex drive?
I shudder thinking what was behind Fruit Loops.#Mich175

This stuff is so interesting from a historical perspective.
It was the point when science was colliding with manufacturing
to produce new foods. The point being that Kellogg, and I
think there was a movie or documentary on him, was using
processed food as part of a philosophy of how modern
people should be. But because we're talking about food,
it starts to get creepy. Nowadays, we all know that
companies will sell you old rope as food if they think
you'll eat it and bring marginal returns.

However, I guess it was Victorian ideals of sexless life
that motivated Kellogg. I stopped buying fake cereals
about 20 years ago, after discovering how the flake, or
whatever puffy shape the thing comes in, was devoid of any
nutrients and when they tell you

FORTIFIED WITH 234 VITAMINS

they mean that the food itself has not vitamins after the
processing, so the chemist has to add some to the batch.
It's cruelty toward humans and a rewarding business because
most everybody eats cereal.

try to save your belongings and you might end up with half

[a little duct tape and some glue, please]
As I've mentioned a few times, this blog has a double purpose.

I want to celebrate technological advances, of today, the past
and the future, but I also want to talk sense about
what all this progress is doing to the planet and our lives.

Too many toys means too much garbage, and too much debt.

So, my alter-ego is the one that takes care of stuff so that
it doesn't break, and fixed stuff that does.
Only if I have to look good, do I show my best, and that
was got on discount anyway.

e.g. a new phone is 300 quid, while a two-year old model is 30 pounds.
I'm paying 30.

On the podcast that you can get below, the speaker, Angela Saini
is a tech writer,
so you don't need to see me as a luddite. She writes about tech
for a living, but is frugal and conscious of waste in her personal
life. That's because her family was accustomed to poverty.

So was mine. And all the riches of the West opened up our appetites for
waste and ridiculous spending, and we all lost the skills that generations
of people practiced, like farming, mending, sewing, carpentry.

If the Occupy Wall Street or LSx has taught us anything,
technologically speaking,
it is that people can survive with little more than a tent to their name.

download some ideas:
Four thought http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/fourthought

nature always wins

[a whole new kind of turf burn]

No matter what we do, Mother Nature will ruin our best laid plans.

It's one of my favourite environmental topics.

I really like to see how quickly nature takes over.

In Fukushima, which is unnaturally irradiated, has a golf
course that has already been swallowed up.

I heard about it on Radio 4, but they don't have any pictures.
All i got was the crappy one above.

agri-biz is designed to be destructive

I've always thought that agri-business is the place where farmers and chemists
poison their customers in the hopes of making a larger profit.

I think that encourages immorality.
Also, the trade restrictions on poor countries mean
that, even if they can export, the rich world won't take their products
and they'll, in turn, dump all the First World extra produce on poor countries,
undercutting local producers.

So, as HaJoon Chang says, we have to let poor countries operate the way
that they know how. Let small entrepreneurs thrive in those
countries and you'll see how the whole world will have food.

checkitout:
In agriculture, small is beautifulInvesting in small farmers brings a developmental double whammy, helping to put food into circulation while also boosting the income of some of the poorest people on the planet
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October - World Food Day - is, naturally, themed around food
MDG : Food in Colombia : A Colombian fruit vendor in La Alameda market in Cali
A Colombian fruit vendor arranges strawberries at her stall in La Alameda market in Cali, Valle del Cauca department. Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
Small farmers get a bad press: developing country governments often see them as a throwback, and hanker after the glitter of modernity that surrounds large-scale investment in biofuels or export crops. Aid agencies and donor governments with more money than staff prefer the scale the big farms can offer. But there are at least two good reasons why, when it comes to agriculture, small is still beautiful.
First, investing in small farmers brings a developmental double whammy: it helps put food into circulation and at the same time boosts the income of some of the poorest people on the planet – small farmers. It is an enduring and horrible irony that the people who grow the food are often also the ones who go hungry, because their crops are too paltry, or prices too low, for their harvest to see them through the year. Jobless agribusiness growth won't help those people; boosting small farm output will.
Second, helping small farmers get access to the kinds of things big farmers take for granted – bank loans, technical support, land rights – can have a catalytic effect on their productivity. Forget all those myths about stick-in-the-mud peasants – most small farmers are businesspeople, keen to experiment, manage risk, break into new markets and better themselves.
That goes particularly for female farmers, who in many countries grow most of the food but have least access to such support. Worldwide, providing female farmers with equal rights to land and agricultural support could feed up to 150 million additional people.
Here's one example from dozens in Oxfam's work around the world. Small-farmers supply 67% of the food consumed in Colombia's capital, Bogotá (population: 7 million), but they don't earn a decent price for their produce. Much of the produce sold in urban markets is handled by commercial intermediaries, who buy from individual producers at low prices and then sell high.
So Oxfam teamed up with local NGOs and peasant organisations and tried to find out what the problem was. Government officials told us that the peasant economy was no longer viable and that "the peasants are lazy, they support the armed groups, they take advantage of the drug mafias, and take their cut growing coca". What emerged was the need to change attitudes towards peasant farmers, both among officials and the urban public.
The timing was propitious: in 2004, the office of the mayor of Bogotá had begun to speak openly for the first time about poverty and food security. It had drawn up a draft food supply master plan, but this failed to recognise the potential of small producers. The plan was based on obtaining food supplies for the minimum possible price, but did not consider the needs of producers or the potential for reducing rural poverty. Instead of a minimum price, campaigners suggested a "fair price" principle.
The mayor's office remained sceptical of small farmers' ability to supply food efficiently, so the project organised farmers' markets in strategic locations around the city, including the main square. Officials and shoppers were duly impressed by the level of organisation and capacity on display, but also by the prices. Monitoring showed that the average net increase in prices for farmers were 64% in wholesale markets and 52% in retail, while urban consumers also benefited, paying average prices that were some 15% lower.
Supported by political lobbying and savvy media work, the farmers' markets got the message home. The mayor agreed to revise the city's plan to one based on fair prices, and backed it up with some funding to help small producers supply the city and seats for small farmers on the relevant committees.
Since then, more than 30 municipalities in the area around Bogotá have organised their own local markets; Bogotá's mayor has signed contracts with five other regional governments, pledging to increase rural investment for food production. Oxfam is now trying to replicate the initiative in Medellín and Cali, the two other big mayoral cities in Colombia.
There are hundreds of millions of small farmers who could benefit from schemes like these. When it comes to ending hunger, how food is grown and marketed (and by whom) matters at least as much as growing more of it.

wax on, wacks off

I've always said that my apples should be sent around the world to receive the best
chemical treatment that money can buy.

Since fuel is still very cheap, we can get New Zealand lamb and Fijian bottled water.
Doesn't mean it's right.

checkitout:

AlterNet / By Tara Lohan
Economics of happiness movie
Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse -- And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit -- and points the way to a new path.
... 3. Globalization wastes natural resources. Consumerism is threatening the planet, natural resources are stretched to the breaking point and yet we have an economic system that encourages us to consume more and more, says Norberg-Hodge. Consumer culture is increasingly urban and when rural people move to the city the food they used to grow themselves is now grown on industrial-sized chemical-intensive farms. Food must be trucked to cities, waste must be trucked out. Large dams are needed to provide water and huge centralized power plants must be fueled by coal and uranium mines.
4. Globalization accelerates climate change. Globalization's "success" is often attributed to efficiencies of scale, but mostly it is fueled by deregulation and hidden subsidies that make food from around the globe cost less than food from down the street. With efficiencies of scale, it's really the opposite, says British MP Zac Goldsmith, "Tuna caught off the east coast of America is flown to Japan, processed and flown back to America to be sold to consumers; English apples are flown to South Africa to be waxed, flown back to England to be sold."
Treaties like NAFTA promote international growth through economic trade, which sounds good on paper, except that you end up with countries importing and exporting nearly identical amounts of the same products -- which means we're needlessly shipping goods across the world that we are already producing at home.
... 7. Globalization is built on handouts to big business. "If there is one thing that political parties from the left to the right seem to agree on today, it is the power and value of the free market," says Goldberg. "But the irony is that the majority of really polluting things that happen today wouldn't exist in a genuinely free market -- nuclear power, for example, wouldn't exist without massive state support ... We're about as far away from a free market as it's possible to be."