Both the food and clothing industry produce tons of waste, waste which has traditionally been dumped into landfills. One company is taking food waste and mixing it with special bacteria to breakdown the food faster to create entirely new products. Another company is sourcing fabrics to create clothing, therefore diverting
Continue readingTag: food
Things Are Good: Reducing Waste in Food Courts
Poor waste management presents more than just food waste in food courts located in mass or offices. The waste of time, money, and energy plague most of these food operations. In yet another example of how being more efficient with waste saves more than the planet, the CBC took a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Eating Yogurt Helps Reduce Inflammation
Eat more yogurt to help reduce inflammation inside your body. Yummy yogurt is also good for your tummy. Some recent research has concluded that yogurt can help reduce inflammation while also helping those with obesity. Be careful though and check the sugar content of popular yogurt brands since the sugar
Continue readingScripturient: Pollan’s Food fallacies
“Don’t overlook the oily little fishes,” is rule 32 in Michael Pollan’s small book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” (Penguin Books, 2009). I recently acquired a copy. I’ve read Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and have his In Defence of Food on my shelves for summer reading and have two
Continue readingThings Are Good: EU Bans Bee Bashing Pesticides
Neonicotinoids kill bees, specifically their hives, and the EU just expanded their ban on neonicotinoids to help protect the world’s dying bee populations. Back in 2013 the EU banned pesticides with neonicotinoids in them when spraying pesticides on plants and flowers that attracted bees. That meant that the deadly chemicals
Continue readingThings Are Good: Don’t Give up on Desalination
How we manage local water sources drastically alters how we grow crops and get drinking water. Cape Town is currently experience a water crisis that was in the making for decades because of poor water use policies. Desalination plants can help coastal cities provide water to their populace by separating
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Vertical Farms can Help During Disasters
Supporters of vertical farms envision a future that has skyscraper farms beside work places and residences in urban centres. Their thinking is that by growing food where people are will help alleviate pressure on our soil and land use – and they’re right. Indeed, a recent realized spinoff benefit of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Flowers Reduce use of Pesticide Spraying in Farms
Farms in the UK and Switzerland are trying a classic approach to reducing their use of pesticides: flowers. Yes, the flowers provide nutrients for insects that eat crops, but they also provide for predators. The difference in the approach for these experimental farms is how they arrange the flowers so
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: David Suzuki: It’s time to nix neonics
David Suzuki on why it’s time for Canada to ban neonics, a class of widely used neuro-active insecticides that harm not only the pests they’re designed to kill, but also bees and other pollinators we rely on for about one-third of food crops. The post David Suzuki: It’s time to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Mars Terraforming Earth
Mars, the company behind popular chocolate bars like Snickers and Twix has pledged $1 billion dollars to fight climate change. This isn’t a company randomly pledging money to help communities or specific issues address climate change, instead they are focussing on themselves. Mars is the largest chocolate maker on the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Quebec Business Turns Waste into Juice
Juice Loop is a new company in Quebec that is taking food waste and turning it into juice and other products. This was isn’t what’s left on a plate from a restaurant, instead it comes from the supply chain inefficiencies present in how grocery stores run their operations. It’s a
Continue readingScripturient: Cultural appropriation is the new gluten free
Like food fads, political fads wax and wane as the gnat-like attention span of their followers gets diverted by the Next Big Thing. Political Correctness has of late given birth to Cultural Appropriation just like the gluten-free food fad gave rise to lectin-free food fad. All such fads are fuelled
Continue readingThings Are Good: Farming for the Future on the Roofs of Hong Kong
Green roofs are great for collecting water and cooling neighbourhoods, they are also useful for feeding their local communities. In the densely built urban environment of Hong Kong there is a network of green roofs that used for farming. These farms are used to grow crops sold in local stores
Continue readingThe Political Road Map: Why Can’t We Feed Everyone?
If a mother and father fail to feed their children for any long period of time, the government will step in for the sake of the children and take action. When citizens of Canada fail to have access to food, with some living on the streets eating garbage, average people
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to Boost Your Psychological Wellbeing in 2 Weeks
Parents always tell their kids to eat more fruits and veggies, as adults we should do the same. A recent study has found that adding two extra servings of fruits or vegetables to your daily diet can improve your wellbeing in just two weeks. This is an easy way to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Detroit’s Farms May Save the City
Detroit is a city that has been witnessing a lot of change thanks to poor urban planning and bad economics. The past decade has been very rough for the people of Detroit and they are turning to old, but innovative, ways to revive the city. We have seen artists move
Continue readingThings Are Good: Spent Grains From Beer Used to Grow Mushrooms
An enterprising student went on a brewery tour and discovered a lot of food waste. Grain is used when making beer in a similar way that tea is steeped, after the grain has been soaking in the water it is discarded. In some areas that grain gets turned into compost,
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Cities are Turning Food Waste Into…Food
Cities have a problem with food: they waste a lot of it. The current food distribution setup encourages bulk deliveries via trucks which means that when that large amount of food goes bad – a lot of it does all at the same time. Governments have looked into this problem
Continue readingScripturient: A cup of mao jian
The tea bag is an example of remarkable serendipity; an unexpected, simple invention that changed the world. But it was entirely unintended. Tea, from the camelia sinenis tree, is the most popular beverage in the world after water, and the most popular hot beverage period. Before the tea bag appeared,
Continue readingThings Are Good: You Can Now Eat Climate Data
Ice cream is delicious and now you can eat a brand new flavour of it made of climate data. Well, it’s more like existing flavours put together to symbolize data about our climate and how it’s changing. Jonathon Keats is the brain behind the project and he’s mixing the ice
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