Yeah, I know you don’t have to do #2 right now, dude. But the space ship robots say we’re low on fuel, so …Photo: LIFE/James Vaughan

Astronauts live pretty bizarre lives: chillin’ in zero gravity, drinking Tang, and having their poop freeze-dried and now possibly eaten by bacteria to generate electricity.

At least that’s part of the 2011 space odyssey for the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is launching a $5 million satellite in the first half of 2011 to figure out the feasibility of this space oddity. The satellite will be carrying a crapload payload of a particular type of bacteria (Shewanella MR-1) that shows promise in converting feces into hydrogen, which could then be used to generate electricity in fuel cells on board space ships. The Florida Institute of Technology is behind this experiment bringing together sustainable energy and cosmic flatulence.

If this shatellite‘s bacteria doo-doo a stellar job in space, maybe they could help deflate the emissions associated with space tourism?

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Global Crop Diversity Trust Executive Director Cary Fowler poses with the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault. Also, is that an ice sculpture of a polar bear?Photo: Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust

“People think I must be ‘Dr. Doom,’” Cary Fowler told the audience for the University of Washington’s sixth lecture on food and the environment.

Tall and soft-spoken, Fowler makes an unlikely Dr. Doom. As executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, he’s devoted to the preservation of genetic variety in the world’s food crops, and has an obvious passion for the incredible variety of life.

His melodramatic nickname comes from his involvement in establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, or the “Doomsday Seed Vault,” a sort of international insurance policy for agricultural crops against the dangers of an uncertain future. Like an external hard drive, it stores “backup” copies of seeds for one-third of all crop varieties (600,000 unique ones and growing).

Helping seed the future without a crystal ball

Very few of those seeds are regularly cultivated today. “For all of our technological wizardry, we still rely on a handful of crop varieties, rainfall, and a few inches of top soil,” said Fowler.

“We’re the first generation that can take food for granted,” said Fowler. “But we should be asking, Where did all of this previous abundance come from? Are the conditions still in place to feed a growing world population?”

The food we produce requires certain conditions of water, energy, land, nutrients, and climate, but  those elements are no longer secure, he warned. Seed banks are invaluable resources for plant breeders/farmers who’re trying to raise varieties of crops that, for example, resist certain pests or are well-adapted to a particular microclimate’s moisture levels.

He asked the audience to consider the uplifting projections for climate change in places like South Africa. There, the hottest growing seasons of the past are expected to be colder than even the coolest growing seasons in the not-so-distant future. That’s bad news for food crops that have never faced these conditions, such as one rice variety whose yield drops 10 percent if the temperature rises just one degree Celsius during its nightly flowering period.

This is where the blessings of biodiversity really shine: Other rice varieties flower at different times of day, offering an opportunity to breed rice that can adapt to a changed climate and still feed the many hungry bellies. But only if those genetic varieties aren’t lost to carelessness, floods, power-failures, or war, which has been the fate of some crops at many seed banks around the world.

It’s at the end of the world as we know it

Entrance to the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault, found in the seediest part of NorwayUncertainties like these are precisely the reason Fowler worked to set up the “Doomsday Seed Vault” somewhere far removed from civil war, conflict, and typhoons. Somewhere above the Arctic circle. That’s how Svalbard, Norway, an island town of 1,500 inhabitants, a few polar bears, and a lot of ice came to host the “biggest collection of biodiversity in the world,” according to Fowler.

“I cannot think of a more efficient way of dealing with water, energy, and climate issues than with crop diversity,” Fowler said. Not only efficient, but also cheap: Svalbard Seed Bank operates on a mere $200,000 a year. Dug deep into a frozen mountain, this seed bank is a giant, self-sustaining freezer full of seeds from countries all over the world. At -40 degree Celsius (and Fahrenheit), the seeds inside the vault would last 50 years even in the case of complete mechanical failure. Or Doomsday, if you prefer.

“Plenty of civilizations in the past thought they could dodge the bullet [of food insecurity],” Fowler warned. “We go to those archeological sites now.”

Statements like that are how Fowler got his Dr. Doom moniker. And yet he sees the seed vault as a positive project, a long-term, multinational collaboration involving every country in the world. “You don’t have to know all the answers to engage,” he said. “You don’t have to bear all the weight.”

Maybe all you have to do is have an appreciation for the beauty of 200,000 types of wondrous wheat, and start hanging on to a few seeds.

For Italian ladies wanting to shrink their waste and support their busts, Italian lingerie company Intimissimi is offering to pay them to rack up environmental cred by recycling their old bras. Until the end of November, women can exchange worn-out over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders for three euros (four dollars) of credit toward a new bra. The program is like Cash for Clunkers, but sexier. (And hopefully less clunky for the planet.)

Once the bras are done padding women’s busts, they’ll go on to pad the walls of their pads as soundproof insulating panels. Energy efficiency and bra recycling? Sounds like the perfect fit, and a tad more comfy than the rice-growing or reusable chopstick-holding bras out there.

So far, this risqué program hasn’t made Intimissimi look like a boob either: “Since the program started on Oct. 18, 30 to 40 percent percent of all bras sold in Intimissimi stores have involved the trade-in bonus.”

Take a peek at the Italian commercial advertising the deal, which I’m sure has the, ahem, breast intentions:

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Two and a half years ago I went nearly cold turkey on a Lenten dare to give up meat for 40 days. Much to my surprise, I learned to love being a vegetarian and have mostly eschewed chewing the animal fat ever since. The reason I spurred myself to become vegetarian, however, was because of the industrial treatment of meat in today’s broken globalized food system. I credit Tom Philpott’s reporting: I loved steak and pepperoni pizza, but I found I hated the stinking waste lagoons; the degradation of air, water, and land; and the chemical-inflated livestock even more.

My serious lack of funds for buying sustainable meat sealed my fate: Vegetarian am I!

One sketchy bird: A “Chocolate” heritage breed turkeyPhoto: Porter’s Rare Heritage TurkeysHowever, I now find myself staring down the most celebrated seasonal food holiday on the calendar, and my reasons for skipping out on a sustainably raised bird have flown the coop. I’m a vegetarian for environmental reasons, and darn it, I’m going omnivore this Thanksgiving with a certified organic, heritage breed turkey. Ordered from Tiny’s Organic, the central Washington farm which runs my Community Supported Agriculture program, my turkey was “allowed to forage and exercise and do what turkeys do when they have lots of space.” Taking the “eat it to save it” route for preserving heritage livestock, my roommate and I decided on the “Chocolate” variety, a “very rare breed whose history is ‘sketchy.’” How could we resist a “sketchy” turkey?

I do believe I’m putting my values where my mouth is. However, my brain has gone missing: I offered to undertake roasting my first turkey for a big group of friends. Everyone knows the turkey is everything, and this turkey virgin finds herself in a peck of trouble.

Once I get this spectacular bird, how do I cook it without a plastic bag and one of those red pins that pops out when it’s done?

Celebrity chef Bobby Flay says I should cut up the turkey instead of trying to roast it whole. New York Times writer Kim Severson suggests “dry brining” a heritage bird and avoiding stuffing it. Local Harvest is of the opinion that a high-heat bout in the sauna with a rosemary maple butter massage is just what the turkey doctor ordered. My mom suggested an aluminum foil tent over the turkey breast, but I’ve also heard you can create a tent from parchment paper.

I’d know exactly what to do with this chocolate turkey.Photo: Bisayan ladyIf I don’t need to slow-roast a saline solution-injected, “enhanced” turkey boob, then how many hours should I give myself to prepare and cook this small gobbler (just over 10 pounds)?

Panicked, I also realized my kitchen is woefully unprepared: I don’t even own an actual roasting pan. Or one of those fancy meat thermometers. Will I be fine with one of those big, generic aluminum pans? A shoddy 9×13 inch pan with a baker’s cooling rack on the bottom (gotta get one of those too)?

To whom do I listen? What do I do when this frozen bird shows up on my doorstep? What was this vegetarian thinking?

Help!

“Crunchy horn bits in every bite!”Photo: ThinkGeek

Remember the sloppy public relations job the National Pork Board did in response to canned unicorn, “the new white meat”? Well, this prodded ThinkGeek, the original purveyers of premium Canned Unicorn Meat, to keep hamming up this protein-rich pretend product and release the “real” deal, just in time for Thanksgiving!

Straight from the loving, rainbow-smeared hands of the Sisters at Radiant Farms come six sparkly cuts of sustainably raised and slaughtered unicorn meat. While Ireland isn’t so much local for us Americans, we can rest assured that there is “magic in every bite,” unlike that other bland and decidedly unmagical meat you get from a can. Or the other mythical meat that comes in a test tube.

In this latest recipe, however, “ThinkGeek took the extraordinary step of redefining the formula to eliminate any confusion between ‘The Other White Meat’ and a mythical meat product which happened to be mostly sparkles and magic,” according to the press release.

“We worked hard to create the perfect protein, something that would replace the traditional Thanksgiving meal, but getting enough supply of the original recipe proved… difficult,” said Ty Liotta, head of product development at ThinkGeek.

Hey, we at Grist are always on the look out for ways to spice up the traditional Thanksgiving meal. Canned Unicorn Meat is a clearly more sparklicious way than most holiday hamming the National Pork Board is squealing over. Mmm, taste that daydreamy difference!

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You probably never thought there’d be a rap song trashing single-use plastic bags. Then again, you probably didn’t see the organic dairy rap or the energy audit pop song coming either.

This parody of Jay-Z’s hip hop anthem to New York (“Empire State of Mind“) is aimed at giving plastic bags a bad rap and getting grocery-cart pushers to push their reps to jump on the ban-wagon like Los Angeles recently did.

Let us know if you like the way they work it and try to bag it, bag it up. Or if you no diggity.

Via elephant journal.

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Insert inappropriate joke about guys playing with their sausages here.Photo: Monica

Meat — it’s what for dinner.

Maybe it should also be what’s for therapy, at least for mad men. Psychology researchers at McGill University in Canada recently steaked the claim that the sight of a big, juicy burger and other well-done meats soothes the savage and beastly instincts in men. Anger management issues? No problem, dude, have some bacon.

Here’s how the psychologists figured it out:

The research was conducted with 82 male subjects who were asked to inflict varying degrees of punishment on actors if they made errors while reading scripts. It was presented as a multi-tasking study to the subjects, who are sorting various pictures while the actors read.

The punishment was made by subjecting the script reader to various volumes of sound, the highest levels believed by the subjects to be painful for the reader. The subjects were less likely to attempt to inflict pain on the reader if it was an image of meat they were looking at while the mistake was made.

It was a typical type of test for assessing aggression, the researchers said.

While lead researcher Frank Kachanoff was surprised by the results, he now thinks this fits in with the evolution of man vs. wild. By the time someone sees, say, a happy octopus sausage, that person is usually sitting fat and happy around a meal with relatives and friends, not pulling a Wolfman defending his scrap of a carcass. However, Kachanoff wants to chew over the conclusions with more experimentation, this time seeing if women fit into the sausagefest and including photos of raw and so-raw-it-moos meat, not just the kind hot off the barbie.

Think this is a mis-steak? A carnivorous anomoly? Vegetarians in the study didn’t even register on the researchers’ angry meat-thermometers, but they probably weren’t asking these vegetarians.

This study’s not suggesting we add to the heap of meat already flooding Western diets in a bid to achieve world peace. Though hanging a portrait of pork next to the negotiating table might not hurt. Maybe with a nice, steaming bowl of mashed potatoes?

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We know you tried to block it out of your memory, but the internet is here to remind you anyway: Discovery Communications is launching its “documentary series about the remarkable Governor Palin and her home state of Alaska.”

A preview episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska aired Sunday night on TLC, apparently full of the former Alaska governor showing off how she and the fam can do the outdoorsy thing: hiking on glaciers! fishing with bears! shooting wolves!* (*censored by the FCC). And of course preaching “respect for the elements.” 

We can hardly bear to watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska.However, the self-styled Mama Grizzly has already landed in the cross hairs with environmentalists for not showing enough respect for da bears in this first look at “her Alaska.” The Palins appeared fishing for trouble when their boat angled up next to protected brown bears — and too close for comfort for Alaska Wildlife Alliance director John Toppenberg, who said they crossed a fishing line.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game guidelines [PDF] ask oh-so-bluntly that all visiting anglers refrain from casting within 30 feet of a bear (or about two boat lengths). That is, unless you want to see the end of “Grizzly Man” again, and no one wants that.

Is Sarah Palin being her maverick-y self and breaking all the rules? Or are people just splitting hairs? Take a look for yourself:

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Dinner as usual?Photo: Matt DeTurck

Put down that sandwich. Or if you’re not eating right now, tell the truth: How many crumbs are lodged in your keyboard from previous meals wolfed in front of your monitor?

It’s OK. You’re not alone in eating alone — at least in America. It’s what most of us do: in front of our computers and televisions, or in our cars. But as the preëminent French food sociologist Claude Fischler explained in the fifth lecture of the University of Washington’s food and environment series recently, we represent one extreme end of the social-eating spectrum, and the French another — and in getting there, we’ve also strayed quite far from the ways that humans have consumed food for thousands of years.

The simple act of eating involves more than just you and your food — society is also present, in the customs, in the place, and in your companions (or lack thereof), Fischler told the audience.

Claude Fischler, international man of food mysteryHistorically, humans have eaten together commensally, habitually and ritually, either as equals or as part of a hierarchy. Think Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, with its specific depiction of social order and the ritual breaking of bread and sharing of wine. Commensality is sometimes extremely formal, such as at a Japanese corporate lunch, but just as often is informal, as when an Ethiopian family dips into a central bowl of meats and sauces.

It’s been a useful concept for humanity to have around, serving historical functions such as:

• allocating each person’s share of food
• including or excluding people according to social organization
• showing the pecking order
• structuring time (before lunch versus after dinner)
• forming identity (the lost art of teaching kids to behave while eating)
• weaving social fabric together (such as at wedding or funeral feasts)

Eating alone, on the other hand, has typically been stigmatized and treated suspiciously. What did the person do to be excluded from or punished by his social group? Was she taking more than her fair share of the food? Fischler described the act of eating alone as “negat[ing] humanity” for us social creatures.

From slow food to slow eaters

“In the Western world food has been turned into an exclusively private good,” Fischler said. One that we “have to make choices about, preferably rationally, and we don’t live well with that idea.” Or eat well, apparently.

Fischler and his colleagues surveyed 7,000 people from the United States and five European nations (France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and England) about their attitudes toward food and health. They found a spectrum of attitudes, with the U.S. occupying one extreme end and France, the other.

Here in the good ol’ U.S. of A, our national identity as disparate, atomized individuals is reflected in how we see our food: nothing more than a sum of individual nutrients that can be customized to fit the health needs and tastes of the individual. Americans value choice in their diets above almost all else. They want to build a diet especially for their bodies and what they choose to put in their bodies is always their choice. The American obsession with choice stood out markedly from the other five countries surveyed, and is the case in other studies as well.

On the other hand, the French made clear that “not all eating is eating.” Eating “requires a certain configuration of time, space, and people” to constitute a meal. For example, a Frenchwoman, Fischler recounted, would tell researchers that she hadn’t eaten all day but then state plainly that she bought and consumed a pastry from a baker’s stand. The French also honed in on food’s quality and culinary identity: How does it taste? Where does it come from? How fresh is it?

It’s not just what you’re eating, it’s who you’re eating. Er, with! Who you’re eating with.Photo: More Good FoundationAlong these same lines, the English-speaking countries in the study (U.S. and Britain) distinguished themselves from the continental European nations (France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy) by describing health as the main purpose of eating. For the others, health is a secondary benefit; social pleasures and the joy of life dominate continental Europeans’ discussions about eating. As one Italian put it, “to eat good fish and drink good wine” with friends is the true meaning of eating well. That sounds convivial, even commensal. It also sounds worlds away from the anxiety revealed by middle-aged American women weighing the protein and carbohydrates necessary to eat well.

It’s not surprising that attitudes toward eating differ among countries and cultures. But what are the consequences of those differences?

Food portions are significantly bigger in the U.S. than in France. Yet North Americans spend less than an hour each day eating what’s on their hefty plates, while the French spend more than two hours each day enjoying “food experiences.” France’s obesity rate weighs in much lower than America’s and even other European nations’. American women spend more time multi-tasking while eating and are less likely to remember everything (or time) they ate than do French women. (“If you’re eating constantly, it’s difficult to remember,” Fischler cracked.)

Does this all add up to the mysterious “French Paradox“? Fischler doesn’t think it’s much of a mystery.

“What happened with food in the West is that food became disenchanted,” Fischler said. When we grab food without thinking, without ritual, there is a loss of meaning, he later went on. When food is commodified and processed, it retreats into a black box. “We are what we eat and if we don’t know what we eat …” You can see where he’s going with this.

The value of commensality could, however, be poised for a comeback in this portly, peaked part of the world. Michael Pollan e
xplores the role of culture as a guide to eating in several of his books, when he challenges science as “the only source of authority we have on matters having to do with food in our bodies,” and his most recent feature for the Times magazine was about “a 36-hour dinner party.” The expansion of community kitchens and the re-prioritization of the family dinner offer other optimistic examples at kitchen tables around the country.

Fortunately for folks new to the various facets of the sustainable food movement, the learning curve is pretty gentle and stacked with flavorful rewards. I’ve come to realize, bite by bite, the succulent benefits of eating more fresh vegetables and fruits, which are missing nothing but the synthetic chemicals; of forming a knowledge of — nay! a relationship with — the friendly local people growing my food and brewing my beverages; and now, the deeper joys of more regularly feasting with friends.

All of this can threaten to overpower us imperfect humans at times — What if I eat fast food just this once? Will others judge me? — but another great aspect is that we get a second chance at every meal. Just as I went straight home from Fischler’s lecture to eat a late dinner by myself, I felt a rush of redemption this past weekend when I shared a sumptuous meal with my roommate and my neighbor — which blossomed into over an hour of grace, laughter, and taste. Eat it, French Paradox.

Bomb the Blight artist Tommy Wilson: Ready, aim, inspire!Photo: Bomb the Blight

Roving bands of hopeful Americans are improving the places they live by means of guerrilla warfare: painting bike lane art, planting tulips, and setting up street cafés. It’s community activism for the impatient, and Memphis artist and photographer Tommy Wilson is the latest to join the ranks of those pimping the pavement.

Founder of the brand-new project Bomb the Blight, Wilson is stocking his arsenal (aka his air cannon) with modified “seed bombs”: biodegradable balloons pumped with plant-based paint, native wildflower seeds, fertilizer, organic matter, and a splash of color. The idea is to have community members fire these bombs of public art into areas of urban blight, such as an abandonded lot, where they’ll release explosions of color and lay the groundwork for native blooms next spring. It’s a transformation of ruin porn into nature porn.

Here you can seed da bombs.Photo: Bomb the BlightAlthough Bomb the Blight has only launched in Memphis so far, Wilson has his sights on taking these horticulture wars national: “I want to launch a bomb in every state!”

“By partnering with community groups, civic organizations and elements of government, we will schedule each “engagement” (That sounds better than bombing, don’t you think?) as a community event,” Wilson said on his website. A grassroots group that rips up places plagued by pavement, like Depave in Portland, Ore., would seem like a natural ally.

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