The 20 Colleges With The Best Campus Food
Sure, college is primarily a place for learning, but no one can learn on an unhappy stomach. These schools go above and beyond to keep their students well-fed. The website Niche put together where to find the best campus food across the nation.
For most – this is the norm:
FORTUNE MAGAZINE: Why WW3 will be fought over food access
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The world has a massive food crisis on its hands. The crisis is so big that organizations like the World Bank and theUnited Nations say there won’t be enough food to feed the global population when it jumps from the current seven billion people to nine billion by 2050.
Some research even suggests a food scarcity crunch as early as 2030 – just 15 years from now. The reasons? Severe weather events like droughts and floods, economic hardships, and political unrest in underdeveloped countries, as well as agribusiness expansion.
While many experts say that producing more food will make the crisis go away, others contend it’s not that simple.
“To address food security, we need a shift in the way we address poverty and inequality in the world,” Stephen Scanlan, a professor of sociology at Ohio University. “There should be a reframing of food as a fundamental human right in a way that governments actually stand by.”
Global food prices increased by four percent between January and April of this year, according to the World Bank, stopping a decline in food prices starting in August 2012. While those figures may please company shareholders, that kind of consolidation and profit puts too much control over food supplies into too few places, according to critics like Scanlan. Beyond the perceived threats from the business world, global food supplies, one analyst argued, are at the mercy of some nations seeking to feed their own populations at the expense of others.
Fast food consumption – blunting children’s brains
The effects of fast food could be much worse than originally thought.
Fast food consumption isn’t merely connected to increases in pant size—it’s tied to significant decreases in test scores among school children, according to a new national study.
Researchers at Ohio State University used data from a nationally representative sample of some 11,700 children to measure how fast food might be affecting their performance in class. The study measured how much fast food the children were eating at age 10, and then compared the consumption levels to test results in reading, math, and science three years later. What they found is that even small increases in the frequency with which the students ate fast food were associated with poorer academic test results. Habitual fast food eaters—those who ate fast food daily—saw “test score gains that were up to about 20 percent lower than those who didn’t eat any fast food.”
The connection held true even after the researchers took into account more than a dozen other factors about the children’s habits and backgrounds that might have contributed to the association between fast food consumption and poorer academic performance, including fitness, broader eating habits, socioeconomic status, and characteristics of both their neighborhood and school.
Vanishing Food Biodiversity – restart locally
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Biodiversity, in relation to our food sources, is all about the thousands of different types of edible foods nature has provided for all human life at this time, and for future generations to come.
Biodiversity is the link between all types of organisms found on the planet. Each particular life form has its link in the Earth’s web of life. Even if the smallest of organisms breaks down, it will threaten the balance of the entire ecosystem. Causes of this severe breakdown in our traditional food systems are debatable. Climate change, the steady decline in the number of farmers, small seed companies being bought out by big corporations – as well as human activity – are just a few of the major reasons suspected. Human beings are thought to be the most dangerous cause of all.
Big corporations that are acquiring most of the seed market, on the entire planet, gives these few companies a dangerously high amount of power over the worlds food supply. These few companies have the power to patent their seed varieties. Once they have a patent on any type of food crop, they can then prevent anyone else from exchanging or saving those seeds. Humans have saved seeds for their next seasons crops since humans first learned to grow their own food. For people all over the planet, especially the poorest of countries, this means the end of a natural way of acquiring crops for the next seasons harvest.
UN Food Program Halts Aid to Syrian Refugees – your lens
The United Nations World Food Program on Monday said it would halt its aid to 1.7 million Syrian refugees on the cusp of winter due to lack of funding.
from the curator: We must witness outcomes of running out of good food & water. Parallels of systemic conflict and intensifying unrest can be directly drawn to a Malthusian catastrophe where poor natural resource (soil & water) management butt-heads with growing population densities that have outpaced depleting production capacity. Only decades from experiencing “significant change” first-hand, even in the ecological bounty of North America where current business as usual agricultural practice will have us all following suit, today’s middle-east and these 1.7 Million Syrian refugees unknowingly define a new world order. Hopefully, in 20 years I’ll be defined as Chicken Little, but most likely not. So, for sake of our kids and their inherited planet – pay attention, pay very close attention.
Food focused —> perspective on the future
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Our future table is likely to be shaped by many factors, from diminishing resources and growing human populations to increased self-awareness of the impact food has on health to cultural phenomena like food fetishism, culinary hedonism and ritual.
For a sense of what we will not be eating, perhaps we can look to the advice of the past 100 years and see where that has gotten us.
In the 1930s, the chemical company DuPont adopted the (paraphrased) slogan “Better living through chemistry,” and in many ways this idea has loomed large over the evolution of food and foodlike substances in the past century: From Crisco to canned cheese, we’ve forsaken real food for convenience. There is no question in my mind that our relationship with food has been severely derailed in recent years, and I think it’s not illogical to draw a connection between this derailment and the rise of modern disease and the decline of natural resources on our planet.
As the average body mass in the developed world has grown consistently over the past century, and the rates of autoimmune diseases, type-2 diabetes and other modern diseases have gone up, our relationship with food seems to have become much more antagonistic. Many of us look at culinary indulgences as corporal sins that must be neutralized through physical penitence. My Saturday pizza binge must be zeroed out with 45 minutes of looping my legs through imaginary figure-eights on an elliptical trainer, plugged deeply into the frenetic chyron of CNN, until a digital ticker tells me that I’ve paid my dues for yesterday’s pleasure.
I remember clearly, 25 years ago when I first visited Spain, being shocked that there were so few grocery stores and so many markets. The fish at the markets came from nearby waters, the produce from the surrounding countryside. On recent visits to Spain I have noticed a much greater proliferation of large, “box” grocery stores and far more fast-food chains. While the markets still appear to be as busy as I recall, the people who patronize them seem to be split into two camps: older women shopping for produce, and everyone else taking photos of food and updating their social media status.
This fetishistic obsession with food is evident in the ever-increasing number of celebrity chefs and food-related television shows, websites and blogs. All of the attention being paid, however, doesn’t seem to be alleviating the real corporal and environmental crises we are experiencing as byproducts of our highly developed modern food systems. In fact, in the past 25 years the rates of obesity in Spain have more than doubled, with childhood obesity and chronic illness also on the rise. Anecdotally, it would appear that the rise of chronic illness has gone hand in hand with the fall of traditional cooking.
What will that mean for us in 35 years? Our bodies and our planet can only sustain so much abuse. Unless we’re resigned to living longer, sicker lives, something’s got to give.
To take a stab at guessing what we might be eating, we need to think about all the things that are affected by how we eat. I often forget that I’m not an individual, but rather part of a complex community — a community of cells, muscle fibers, bacteria, nervous systems and bones. I am also part of a greater community, a family, a circle of friends, a group of colleagues, a neighborhood, a vibrant city, a unique planet. The way I eat has a direct impact on all of these communities, some more explicitly than others, but each community is affected by the choices I make about the food that goes in my mouth.
For as long as we have been social creatures, food has been at the heart of any community. In the most basic of terms, we formed bands, tribes, villages and cities to increase our chances of survival, initially to hunt and gather and later to cultivate and distribute food.
New Analysis Says FDA Farm Antibiotic Reduction Won’t Work | WIRED
A just-published analysis says pharma companies are evading the FDA’s hoped-for curbs on antibiotic use in meat production.
A brand-new analysis of the Food and Drug Administration’s plans to restrict agricultural overuse of antibiotics brings some needed clarity to the subject — and calls into question how effective those plans will be.
The analysis, published by the Pew Charitable Trusts, examines whether the FDA’s request to veterinary pharma companies — to observe voluntary curbs on the antibiotics they sell — is actually going to make much difference in quantities of antibiotics that are used. And concludes: Maybe not.
The background here: For decades, scientists have been demonstrating that antibiotics used in raising meat animals pose a health threat to humans, because the antibiotics cause bacteria in the animals’ systems to become resistant. When the animals are slaughtered and turned into meat, the resistant bacteria remains on the meat; the bacteria may be consumed directly, or may contaminate kitchens — or may contribute resistance DNA into the environment that then is sucked up by other bacteria.
The concern is acute because so many of the antibiotics that are used in meat production are functionally identical to the same drugs that would be used to treat bacterial infections in human medicine. That means that, because of agricultural use, human-use drugs are ineffective when they are needed. What adds to the problem is that agriculture uses so many antibiotics: three to four times what is used in humans in the US each year.
How one local brewer used quality to change an industry
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Samuel Adams stems from a Vienna lager recipe handed down from his father that Koch first brewed in his kitchen in 1984. Since then, the Harvard Business School graduate went from a Boston brewery so small that Koch’s Samuel Adams Boston Lager had to be brewed under contract in Pittsburgh, Portland, Cincinnati and elsewhere — with SABMiller handling some production.
Today, Koch’s Boston Beer Co. has a research-and-development facility, barrel room and tour center in Boston, and two large brewing facilities in Cincinnati (at the old Hudepohl-Schoenling brewer that once employed Koch’s dad) and Breinigsville, Pa. (in an old Stroh brewery). As a result, the company’s beer production has soared from 63,000 barrels in 1989 to nearly 2.9 million in 2013.
However, Boston Beer’s total production was 3.4 million barrels last year, thanks to a diverse group of offerings that were notably absent from Koch’s kitchen 30 years ago. In 2000, Boston Beer launched its Twisted Tea brand of flavored malt beverages that still bolsters the company’s $3 billion business to this day. After stumbling a bit with the Hard Core cider it released in 1995, Boston Beer scored a huge coup when it introduced its Angry Orchard cider line nationwide and became the top-selling cider producer in the country, according to market research firm IRI.
‘After 30 years, I’m very aware of how capable the big brewers are at competing in the marketplace.’Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Co.
Boston Beer is entering a future in which it not only has to fend off large brewers with its own products and acquisitions, but has to remain relevant to craft-beer drinkers who have a tendency to gravitate to the next great beer of the moment. It also has to adapt to a shifting craft-beer landscape in which consolidating distributors, expanding craft brewers and more than 3,000 total U.S. brewers present as many obstacles as opportunities.
Interview:
Not seeing forest for the trees – school lunch nutrition waiver
House Republicans are making a final push this month to give schools a temporary break from healthier school meal standards.
The school meal rules, phased in since 2012 and championed by first lady Michelle Obama, require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains in the lunch line. The standards also limit sodium, sugar and fat.
Some school nutrition directors have lobbied for a break, saying the rules have proven to be costly and restrictive. House Republicans have said they are an overreach, and have pushed a one-year waiver that would allow schools to opt out of the standards if they lost money on meal programs over a six-month period.
The waiver language stalled this summer after the first lady lobbied aggressively against it and the White House issued a veto threat. The food and farm spending bill that contained the provision was pulled from the House floor, a move House Republicans attributed to scheduling issues.
But the waiver has new life this month as lawmakers are expected to pass a catchall spending bill to keep government programs running. Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the school meal spending, has been pushing to include the waiver in the wide-ranging bill.
Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota both said Thursday that there are ongoing negotiations between the House and the Senate over the waiver. A Senate bill approved by a spending committee in May did not include the waiver, but called for further study on sodium and whole grains requirements.
At the time, Hoeven said there was not enough support for the House’s one-year waiver in the Senate, even though he was supportive of it himself. But he said this week that could change as lawmakers negotiate the massive year-end spending bill.
Agricultural Trees for the Green – Holiday Trees could be more local
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A premium balsam fir can be had for $30 to $40 for
6- and 7-foot trees, respectively, while Fraser firs can run slightly higher, according to Wilson. “Christmas trees are a true supply-and-demand item,” he said. “And lately there’s been more of a supply …which has turned the price down a little bit. There’s more growers, and the growers that are there are growing more trees.”
Massachusetts ranked 21st among U.S. states for the number of Christmas trees harvested at 52,188, according to the 2012 federal agriculture census — the latest report available. The state Department of Agricultural Resources’ MassGrown site lists 83 Massachusetts farms where consumers can cut their own.
Lambert’s Rainbow Fruit — which has Dorchester and Westwood locations and satellite lots in Hingham, Braintree and Pembroke — bought its trees from Canada up until this year, when it turned to North Carolina. “Canada is going south,” Bill Lambert said, referring to Sherbrooke, Quebec, growers. “They cut all the tips of the trees and put them in big piles. And they ended up … with two to three feet of snow, and they couldn’t dig them out.” Frazer firs have replaced balsams as the tree of choice locally, according to Lambert. “They hold their needles a little better, they’re a little stronger,” he said.
The average time to grow a 6- to 7-foot Christmas tree is seven years.
“Most growers thought it was a very good growing season,” said Jim Colburn of MerriHill Tree Farm in Merrimac. “In our area, it was a little too warm and dry, but overall I think it was … pretty good.”
