Food

I'd told you before that Paul Collier's essay on whether biotech food could cure world hunger infuriated me; meanwhile, Raj Patel's contribution was the best. Nonetheless, I thought it was careless to use as his benchmark for world hunger the statistic that over a billion people consumed fewer than 1,900 calories a day (not least because most people don't need that many calories a day). I'd let it go, and then yesterday I stumbled upon another inane measure using calories: calories per pound of pesticide as measure of food safety/sustainability. You can't compare the pesticide load of rice with that of strawberries using calories per pound; most people couldn't possibly, but more importantly, wouldn't, consume nearly enough strawberries to equal the amount of calories in a small bowl of rice. That doesn't mean that conventional strawberries aren't laden with toxic chemicals; it just means that the Green Lantern needs to apply some basic critical thinking to its analysis. The other reason this bugs me is because the 'calories per pound' argument is often used in poorly crafted arguments against sustainable agriculture. Of course pig farming is going to yield more calories per pound of land than, say, soy cultivation. That doesn't mean it's more efficient. A more useful, but still incomplete, in and of itself, measure might be gram of protein per acre.

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Speaking of food, here is what I'm thinking for a Thanksgiving Day menu:

Eggplant moussaka
Butternut squash soup with cilantro pesto swirl
Grilled asparagus
Roasted sweet potatoes
Fresh bread (or maybe biscuits) with white bean and artichoke bruschetta
Red wine cookies

It's going to be good. But I can still somehow see at least one of my parents saying 'f* this' and going to the McDonald's two blocks away.