Four years ago, a paper from the Tissue Engineering journal outlined techniques that would allow large-scale meat production in a lab. Today we can view the fruits of their research, as scientists now confirm that they have managed to grow a form of meat in a laboratory for the first time.

Researchers from The Netherlands extracted myoblast cells from the muscle of a live pig; cells that in the right environment would grow into muscle in order to repair damage to tissue, and incubated them in a nutrient-based solution derived from the blood of animal foetuses. The result was what has been described as “a soggy form of pork” which, due to laboratory rules hasn’t been sampled for taste yet. Sufficient “exercising” of said product could however yield a tougher, steak-like consistency.

Gizmag: Scientists grow meat in a lab for the first time

(Thanks Nova!)

I’m confused – This Wired article states that “Researchers can currently grow small amounts of meat in the lab, and have even been able to get heart cells to beat in Petri dishes. Growing muscle cells on an industrial scale is the next step, scientists say.”

Update: Times article that appears to be the source for the above linked Gizmag article

The program is expanding by about 20,000 out-of-work and underemployed people a day, the Post reported, noting the growth has been swift in once-prosperous communities effected by the housing bust.

“It’s time for us to face up to the fact that in this country of plenty, there are hungry people,” Concannon said.

UPI: Food stamp stigma fading fast

(via Cryptogon)

An extract found in the bright yellow curry spice turmeric can kill off cancer cells, scientists have shown.

The chemical – curcumin – has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia.

Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab.

BBC: Curry spice ‘kills cancer cells’

(via Cryptogon)

I thought I’d linked to something about the health effects of curry before, but now I can’t find it.

Peter Schwartz of GBN suggests there’s “a high likelihood” of a global food crisis due to commodity speculation and the potential for a bad rice season.

Schwartz, however, is quick to point out that he’s not stating unequivocally that there will be a food crisis. “Our goal is to do scenarios and look at the uncertainties and the elements that could surprise us … We’re not predicting a food crisis, but (saying) that we are vulnerable to it,” he told INSEAD Knowledge following a lecture on ‘Emerging Strategic Issues and Wildcards’ at Singapore’s Civil Service College.

So how can we better prepare ourselves from unpredictable ‘black swan’ events which would have a major impact? Schwartz believes the answer is to think the unthinkable. That involves considering possibilities that are outlandish, implausible but highly consequential. The Asian tsunami, he says, is a prime example of such a black swan event whose impact could have been reduced somewhat had the right questions been asked.

Insead: Planning for the unthinkable

(via Kristin Wolff)

A blackberry-infested plot of land once farmed by indigent people at the former Multnomah County Poor Farm is being reclaimed to feed the poor again.

Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen is spearheading a campaign to convert one to two acres of county surplus land north of McMenamins Edgefield Manor in Troutdale into a temporary organic farm to combat hunger. Volunteers will harvest enough fresh produce this growing season to feed 240 people for 24 weeks, Cogen estimated.

Cogen will ask fellow members of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners on May 28 to approve $22,000 in county funds to buy materials. But he’s already secured commitments for private donors to repay $15,000 of that, and expects the rest of that sum will be raised privately.

Portland Tribune: Former Poor Farm will help feed county’s poor

From the point of view of this essay, that is, as far as the distinction between markets and antimarkets is concerned, the splitting open of the nutrient cycles had important consequences. Every input to food production which came from outside the farm (not only fertilizers but also insecticides and herbicides) was one more point of entry for antimarkets, and hence, it implied a further loss of control by the food producers. While a century and a half ago farms produced most of what they needed (and hence ran on tight nutrient cycles), today American farms receive up to seventy percent of their inputs (including seed) from the outside. (7) Worse yet, the advent of direct genetic manipulation has allowed large corporations to intensify this dependency.

Although most of the early technical innovations in biotechnology were created by small companies engaged in market relations, antimarket organizations, using the economic power which their large size gives them, readily absorbed these innovators through vertical and horizontal integration. Moreover, these antimarkets were in many cases the same ones which already owned seed and fertilizer/pesticide divisions. Hence, rather than transferring genes for pest-resistance into new crop plants (thus freeing food producers from the need to buy pesticides) these corporations permanently fixed dependence on chemicals into the genetic base of the crops.

Ars Electronica: Markets, Antimarkets and the Fate of the Nutrient Cycles

This is the best case I’ve read for organic farming: a reduction in outside dependencies (ie, resilience).

For those of us trying to make more sustainable choices within our daily lives, the decision to buy local produce appears to be an obvious next step. The transportation sector contributes nearly one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries. It seems logical then that cutting down on the distance between consumers and producers should also have a direct impact on emissions. For this reason the last few years have seen a push for food miles labeling particularly in Europe. However, many critics of food miles feel that this system is at best tokenistic and in some cases does more harm than good.

The food miles debate highlights a clash between differing sustainable development agendas. From an environmental perspective, encouraging consumers to alter their purchasing patterns and limiting transportation emissions can only be a good thing. However, from an economic development point of view, food miles labeling can damage important industries in poor countries.

The article concludes food miles are an inadequate measure of the ecological impact of a particular food and suggests more rigorous analysis including:

* Transportation measurements that include all the distances involved in production and distribution, as well as final food delivery (one item is often harvested in one location, processed in another, packaged elsewhere before being sent to a regional distribution center and finally a retail store);
* Allowances for different means of transportation and fuels;
* Emissions associated with packaging, storage procedures, harvesting techniques and water usage;
* Different emissions factors based on methods of cultivation. For instance, the UK Department for International Development have found that ‘the emissions produced by growing flowers in Kenya and flying them to the UK can be less than a fifth of those grown in heated and lighted greenhouses in Holland’;
* An analysis which includes all greenhouse gases. Most studies incorporate only the carbon emissions associated with particular foods, but other greenhouse gases with varying global warming potentials also play a key role;

World Resources Institute:

(via Appropedia)

Even more important than solving problems is identifying error. This Appropedia article is a work in progress, but is important.

Organics

Food miles

Rejecting Vaccinations

Recycling

Antibacterial Soap

Hybrid Vehicles

Carbon offsets and planting trees

Appropedia: How not to save the world

I think it’s worth pointing out that sustainability is not just about the environment, but about social and economic impacts too. There are non-environmental reasons to support to local food and recycling initiatives, for instance.

See also:

5 Ways People Are Trying to Save the World (That Don’t Work)

Wired’s “environmental heresies” examined

When you’re on a diet, deciding to skip your favorite calorie-laden foods and eat something healthier takes a whole lot of self-control–an ability that seems to come easier to some of us than others. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have uncovered differences in the brains of people who are able to exercise self-control versus those who find it almost impossible.

The key? While everyone uses the same single area of the brain to make these sorts of value-laden decisions, a second brain region modulates the activity of the first region in people with good self-control, allowing them to weigh more abstract factors–healthiness, for example–in addition to basic desires such as taste to make a better overall choice.

These findings not only provide insight into the interplay between self-control and decisionmaking in dieters, but may explain how we make any number of decisions that require some degree of willpower. [...]

The next step, the researchers say, is to come up with ways to engage the DLPFC in the decisions made by people with poor self-control under normal conditions. For instance, Hare says, it might be possible to kick the DLPFC into gear by making the health qualities of foods more salient for people, rather than asking them to make the effort to judge a food’s health benefits on their own. “If we highlight the fact that ice cream is unhealthy just before we offer it,” he notes, “maybe we can reduce its value in advance, give the person a head start to making a better decision.”

Science Daily: Mechanisms Of Self-control Pinpointed In Brain

(via OVO)

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

“The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago,” Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine

“Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well.”

Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.

The Independent: 1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

(via Cryptogon)

Over the years, I’ve often wondered at the unique and sometimes confusing situation of the urban-renter-beginner-permaculturist: trying to figure out how to utilize the ethics and principles of a framework originally conceived to develop areas thousands of acres in size, while often finding oneself without access to an area even hundreds of square feet in size.

While most permaculture teachers will tell you that the ethics and principles of permaculture are not limited to rural broadacre applications, the vast majority of literature on the subject (not to mention course curriculum) displays no uncertain preference for rolling food forested hills, cascading ponds, and just beyond, the beckoning vastness of Zone 5.

(My point of entry into this wonderful world, Permaculture Two, mostly referred to properties that were comparable in acreage to the more notable state parks in the area! Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to reconcile a desire to grow massive amounts of food with reality that I couldn’t dig up the lawn.)

Permaculture for Renters

(via Biohabit)

I’m not talking about eating no meat; I’m talking about cutting back, which in some ways is harder than quitting. Vegetarian recipes and traditions are everywhere. But in the American style of eating — with meat usually at the center of the plate — it can be difficult to eat two ounces of beef and call it dinner.

Cutting back on meat is not an isolated process. Unlike, say, taking up meditation or exercise, it usually has consequences for others. [...]

Forget the protein thing. Roughly simultaneously with your declaration that you’re cutting back on meat, someone will ask “How are you going to get enough protein?” The answer is “by being omnivorous.” Plants have protein, too; in fact, per calorie, many plants have more protein than meat. (For example, a cheeseburger contains 14.57 grams of protein in 286 calories, or about .05 grams of protein per calorie; a serving of spinach has 2.97 grams of protein in 23 calories, or .12 grams of protein per calorie; lentils have .07 grams per calorie.) By eating a variety, you can get all essential amino acids.

You also don’t have to eat the national average of a half-pound of meat a day to get enough protein. On average, Americans eat about twice as much as the 56 grams of daily protein recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture (a guideline that some nutritionists think is too high). For anyone eating a well-balanced diet, protein is probably not an issue.

New York Times: Putting Meat Back in Its Place

Alchemists are often characterized in modern times as bumbling would-be wizards at best, greedy charlatans at worst. They’re portrayed as fumbling hopelessly in cluttered laboratories, unenlightened madmen trying to turn lead into gold. The reality is more complex, of course.

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.” It’s an image memorably realized in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain wherein the thief character takes a dump in a fancy bucket, and Jodorowsky, playing an alchemist, distills those fresh turds into a hefty chunk of golden bling.

Such fantastical processes are well known to dirt-worshipping gardening sage Tim Dundon, the beneficent caretaker of California’s most famous compost pile and the kindly warden of the tropical forest that has fruited from its rich humus. It’s here that Dundon, a scientist-poet in the truest hermetic sense, finds hope and salvation in the transformation of death into life—of rotting organic matter into nutrient-rich soil—that takes place daily in the fecund jungle he maintains on his one-acre yard.

Arthur Magazine: The Sodfather: Californian compost wizard Tim Dundon

With the recession in full swing, many Americans are returning to their roots — literally — cultivating vegetables in their backyards to squeeze every penny out of their food budget.

Industry surveys show double-digit growth in the number of home gardeners this year and mail-order companies report such a tremendous demand that some have run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers.

“People’s home grocery budget got absolutely shredded and now we’ve seen just this dramatic increase in the demand for our vegetable seeds. We’re selling out,” said George Ball, CEO of Burpee Seeds, the largest mail-order seed company in the U.S. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Gardening advocates, who have long struggled to get America grubby, have dubbed the newly planted tracts “recession gardens” and hope to shape the interest into a movement similar to the victory gardens of World War II.

Full Story: AP

(via Cryptogon)

Kicked up a hornet’s nest that connects all my old research with my new food obsession. This is a story that involves food, covert operations, professional disinformation, and aliens.

Remember that sooper-paranoid article about HR 875 that got everyone so spooked in the first place? That was from the Natural Solutions Foundation, written by Linn Cohen-Cole, who may or may not be real.

Natural health advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years now, and the criticism is universally the same: Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles? Just as important, and even more worrying, Why does the NSF refuse to correct ANY of the hundreds of errors in their record?

The answers start with the NSF founders: husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me qualify that carefully. I’m not saying that they’re doing sloppy research, and I’m not saying that they’re being overzealous. I’m saying they are working, for pay, to spread false information and make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.

Full Story: Urban Evolution

That super paranoid article by Linn Cohen-Cole is here.

Q: What can we expect?

A: Pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week. Climate change, dust bowls caused by over-cultivation necessitated by over-population, resource depletion in obscure and irritatingly mission-critical sectors (never mind oil; we’ve only got 60 years of easily exploitable phosphates left — if we run out of phosphates, our agricultural fertilizer base goes away), the great population overshoot (as developing countries transition to the low population growth model of developed countries) leading to happy fun economic side-effects (deflation, house prices crash, stagnation in cutting-edge research sectors due to not enough workers, aging populations), and general bad-tempered overcrowded primate bickering.

Oh, and the unknown unknowns.

Q: Unknown unknowns? Are you talking about Donald Rumsfeld?

A: No, but I’m stealing his term for unprecedented and unpredictable events (sometimes also known as black swans). From the point of view of an observer in 1909, the modern consumer electronics industry (not to mention computing and internetworking) is a black swan, a radical departure from the then-predictable revolutionary enabling technologies (automobiles and aeroplanes). Planes, trains and automobiles were already present, and progressed remarkably well — and a smart mind in 1909 would have predicted this. But antibiotics, communication satellites, and nuclear weapons were another matter. Some of these items were mentioned, in very approximate form, by 1909-era futurists, but for the most part they took the world by surprise.

We’re certainly going to see unknown unknowns in the 21st century. Possible sources of existential surprise include (but are not limited to) biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI, climate change, supply chain/logistics breakthroughs to rival the shipping container, fork lift pallet, bar code, and RFID chip — and politics. But there’ll be other stuff so weird and strange I can’t even guess at it.

Q: Eh? But what’s the big picture?

A: The big picture is that since around 2005, the human species has — for the first time ever — become a predominantly urban species. Prior to that time, the majority of humans lived in rural/agricultural lifestyles. Since then, just over 50% of us now live in cities; the move to urbanization is accelerating. If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.

This is going to affect everything.

It’s going to affect epidemiology. It’s going to affect wealth production. It’s going to affect agriculture (possibly for the better, if it means a global shift towards concentrated high-intensity food production, possibly in vertical farms, and a re-wilding/return to nature of depopulated and underutilized former rural areas). It’s going to affect the design and layout of our power, transport, and information grids. It’s going to affect our demographics (urban populations tend to grow by immigration, and tend to feature lower birth rates than agricultural communities).

There’s a gigantic difference between the sustainability of a year 2109 with 6.5 billion humans living a first world standard of living in creative cities, and a year 2109 with 3.3 billion humans living in cities and 3.2 billion humans still practicing slash’n'burn subsistence farming all over the map.

Q: Space colonization?

A: Forget it.

Full Story: Charlie Stross’s web page

(via Grinding)

I’ve been having trouble getting started growing my own food. Maybe these pages will help me get moving again:

Lazy gardening

Easy to grow plants

I’ve started a new wiki project: Recession Hacking.

From the intro:

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” Barack Obama said during his campaign. And yet, now that he’s elected most of us are waiting for a stimulus plan to save us.

The only problem: the stimulus plan sucks. There is no deus ex machina to save us from this deepening recession. It’s time to take what we have and start to rebuild the economy ourselves.

This wiki is dedicated to compiling tools, tactics, and strategies to both survive and thrive in these troubled times.

My hope to is help build a resource of information not just to save money, but information on creating economic prosperity for individuals and communities.

Also check out Recession Hacking blog and Unsummit – the folks I flat out stole the “recession hacking” meme from.

Full transcript of Dmitry Orlov’s talk (part of Long Now’s longer term thinking seminar series). This is much better than the Thriving in the Age of Collapse and Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century papers I’d read before.

Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own.

These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.

Full Story: Club Orlov

Or read Stewart Brand’s summary reprinted at Grinding.

Somewhat related: My round-up of commentary on Obama’s stimulus bill.

Above: canned silkworm pupas

Steve eats disgusting foods and tells the world about it. What else do you need to know?

Steve Don’t Eat It

(Thanks Surrealestate)

Found this article by Karl Haro von Mogel dismissing the mercury in high fructose corn syrup story via Free Vermont. There are some interesting differences between what it is says and what the mainstream press are writing.

I took a look at the paper, and the first thing that I noticed was that it was not a peer-reviewed study. So this has not passed through the rigors of experimentation, review, re-testing if needed, and publication in a scientific journal.

The Chicago Tribune says:

The study was published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health.

Oddly enough, another critical of the review that von Mogel also calls the paper peer-reviewed.

Moving on:

The ’study’ itself consisted of taking samples of foods that contain high-fructose corn syrup and testing them for levels of mercury. Those foods and the brands that made them were in the report, and they found that some of the foods had detectable levels of mercury in them. What levels? Parts per trillion. These are really low levels. Drinking water has a limit of 2 parts per billion, which means that you can have 100 times as much mercury in drinking water as is in these foods. The tap water you use to make your oatmeal might have more mercury than the oatmeal itself.

Chicago Tribune again:

There is no established safe dose for elemental mercury, the type discovered in corn syrup. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says an average-sized woman should limit her exposure to 5.5 micrograms a day of methylmercury, the kind found in fish. If that same woman regularly ate corn syrup contaminated at the highest level detected in the study—0.57 micrograms per gram—the researchers estimated that she could end up consuming an amount of mercury that is five times higher than the EPA’s safe dose.

This is interesting because it looks like the Tribune is deliberately confusing elemental mercury with methylmercury – two very different things. But it does give us a different look at the numbers – .57 micrograms per gram, rather than the difficult to understand parts per measurement. If I’m not mistaken, 2 ppb is 2 micrograms per liter.

Wikianswers suggests 1.5 to 2 liters of water per day. So the average person probably consumes no more than 4 micrograms of mercury from drinking water per day. That means you’d have to eat 8 grams of HFCS per day to consume the same amount of mercury.

According to Wikipedia the average American consumed 28.4 kg in 2005. Which works out to about 78 grams a day. Which sounds like a hell of a lot – am I doing the math right on that one?

If so, it means the average American could eat ten times as much mercury through HFCS than water (assuming, drastically, they are eating the worst mercury containing products). This of course is on top of water and methylmercury containing fish.

The rest of von Mogel’s article looks at the problem of the lack of controls. A very worthwhile criticism. But the report clearly says they need to do more research, and that points to the real story the FDA were warned about the potential mercury content in HFCS and did nothing. It would be unwise to conclude too much from this study other than the FDA declined to do their job.

Update: Turns out von Mogel was referring to a different paper than was referenced here recently.

In the wake of the mercury in high fructose corn syrup making rounds this week, Johnny Brainwash has some info about the flacks trying to defend the good name of the corn refinement industry, as well as illuminating information about how they operate.

Full Story: dysnomia.us