1. 15 December 2007

    Documentaries

    265 days ago

    I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).

    Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.

    Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.

    These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.

  2. 15 August 2006

    Omelet

    752 days ago

    So I made myself an omelet this morning, according to the instructions of one pineapple girl (with pictures!). It went well, the only caveat being that I had the stove on a bit high and the outside looked more like a croissant than an egg dish, while the inside was a wee bit drippy. Ham, cheddar, and chives in the middle, I skipped the milk. Quite a breakfast.

    The only reason I’m writing about it is to show how pathetic I really am. At 19, this is probably the first thing I’ve ever cooked outside of boxed brownie or cookie mix. I’ve helped cook things before, and one time made a batch of granola, which might just count as cooking. But I’ve never cooked myself a real meal. I blame my family for always cooking for me and prepackaged shit and microwaves for being there when I didn’t have anything else to eat. Dorm food too.

  3. 30 June 2005

    1163 days ago

    Newman's Own Organics

    Treehugger (via) linked to the organic division of Newman’s Own, with a great big photo Newman-O’s. Newman’s makes one of the meanest balsamic vinagrettes out there, but c’mon – organic junk food?

    Coincidentally, my mom came home from the grocery today with a box of the cookies, and they aren’t half bad. And hey – it’s organic, so how can it be unhealthy?

    via Kjell Olsen1163 days ago

  4. 24 June 2005

    1169 days ago

    The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org)

    Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.

    David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

    Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming.

    Stunning column on how fucked the planet is getting. And society. Are we doing anything right these days?

    The Mississippi River’s heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.

    A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

    It’s interesting that eating a fruit or vegetable is more efficient then eating something higher up the food chain, because the higher up you go in the food chain the more energy is wasted. Say Chickens eat carrots, a great percentage of the energy from the carrots is wasted by the chicken daily, unrecoverable to us humans.

    This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

    On hunting for meat, an all too viable idea:

    I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.

    via Kjell Olsen1169 days ago

  5. 20 March 2005

    1265 days ago

    Living on the Cheap | Ask MetaFilter

    Suggestions as to how to obtain food on a budget: cook for yourself with fruits, beans and vegetables – a little meat mixed in.

    via Kjell Olsen1265 days ago

  6. 15 February 2005

    1298 days ago

    What's wrong with McDonald's?

    Lots. But it’s still so good…

    via Kjell Olsen1298 days ago

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