Recession y2k9 is making Americans desperate for cheap and convenient ways to feed their tummies. Why resort to transforming your backyard to a poultry farm when WE’VE GOT BAGELS!  Bagels will be here to the end of time like cockroaches, rats, and Larry King, so stop with the chickens and stock up (only on Mondays). They won’t poop in your yard either.

The other day I was thinking about the proposed manned Mars trip and trying to get my head around how to feed a number of astronauts for a 1,000 day trip in a small space craft. The thought was started while reading an article about Cosmic Rays, which are a potential threat to astronauts, but that is entirely another discussion.

Our planet today has a number of problems in being able to feed a growing population, which combined with major droughts in some parts of the world and heavy rains in others, exacerbated or caused by global warming, we are already in a situation of food crisis. If you are reading this blog, you probably don’t personally have a problem, but the problem is nevertheless there.

The first problem, which is the most difficult, is poverty. According to the World Hunger Education Service, almost 1 billion people have incomes of no more than US$1 per day. That doesn’t buy a whole lot of food.

Given the climate conditions, growth of population, finding the ground to plant sufficient crops that are not labour and water intensive is difficult and another issue is lack of certain key needs such as proteins.

One option for this going forward could be to grow food in vats. All kinds of food could be grown in vats and they have been doing this in Science Fiction books for close to 100 years. Now vegetable matter, fungus and yeast are relatvely easy, meat is a different story.

As I continued on my thread, I was thinking about chicken being one of the most popular if not the most popular meat being eaten today. The way they bread chickens in poultry farms for meat or eggs is commonly regarded as cruelty although the farmers will argue that they have little choice.

Tissue engineering is a science that has been around for quite a while. In fact if you have a child today, you already have the option of harvesting the stem cells from your baby’s umbilical cord. Cordbank in New Zealand offers cryogenic storage of your baby’s umbilicus, so that if your child ever got cancer and needed fresh stem cells, they are there and ready. The Stem Cells have your child’s exact DNA, so there are no risks of rejection if they are needed and at this stage they have no age damage. Stem cells have the inherent ability to become pretty much any human organ.

Tissue engineering has the potential to not only save lives, but also to prolong it. In future it could be used to help people recover from brain injuries and perhaps condiions such as Parkinsons Disease. It can help with regenerating heart tissue and much much more.

It can also be used to generate food. Distasteful as it may sound, I’m sure in the future if you were offered fish chunks that were made in a lab in a double blind test with real fish of the same sort, you would struggle to tell whch one was real. This isn’t Sci-Fi, it has already been achieved. One of the motives for this research was the type of space travel I mentioned at the beginning of this blog.

If you could eat nice white chicken meat that was tender and had the same texture you expected, but no chickens were mistreated or battery grown in cramped conditions, i.e. no sentience and no pain. Why wouldn’t you? If you could provide healthy food to millions of people in environments where they otherwise couldn’t get it and would suffer from malnutrition and eventually die a horrible death, why not?

I’m not sure what, if any research in tissue engineering is happening in NZ, but we have the credentials to do it and government support for biotechnology. In the medical world there is plenty happening such as the orthopaedic research at Otago University. If I’m lucky, I could live longer because of this research. I would love to see 120 or 130 years on this planet, and not vegetating in a rest home, wouldn’t you?

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course http://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Articolul de blog http://suciu.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/fariseii-culturii-de-ieri-si-de-azi/ a deschis o discuţie interesantă despre accesul şobolanilor – culturnici la un combinat avicol de lângă Bucureşti.

Crevedia era unul dintre combinatele avicole (poultry farms) unde totul mergea bine, spre deosebire de alte combinate din ţară. Nu am lucrat în sistem, dar ştiu că în alte combinate avicole din ţară existau mortalităţi îngrozitoare. Lipsa de igienă, lipsa de antibiotice… Cumva, managerii din Crevedia depăşiseră acele dificultăţi. Prin intervenţiile acestor tovarăşi care îi vizitau, primeau antibiotice pentru păsări? Întrebarea nu este doar retorică. În fine, cei din restul ţării nu primeau antibioticele pentru păsări. Care era soluţia găsită de managerii din provincie? Atunci când se instala morbiditatea printre bieţii pui, îi tăiau imediat pe toţi. Aşa apăreau în alimentare pungile cu “fraţii Petreuş”. Într-un compartiment de tren am auzit pe vremuri o poveste interesantă despre furtul din combinatele de ouă. Dintr-un combinat pentru producţia de ouă, dipăreau cantităţi importante, în ciuda pazei şi controalelor la poartă extrem de riguroase. Securitatea, neputincioasă. Deşi dispuneau de informatori, ei nu aflau vreo ştire că acele ouă ajungeau la consum în comunităţile umane, mai apropiate sau mai îndepărtate de combinat. Au recurs la camere de supraveghere Siemens, care înregistrau totul pe bandă magnetică. Pe una dintre acele înregistrări s-a dezvăluit misterul. Veneau şobolanii! Erau într-o coordonare exemplară. Se aşezau în şir, dar pe spate, cu lăbuţele în sus. Alţi şobolani de la capătul “productiv” al benzii rulante  vii luau câte un ou şi îl aşezau pe “banda” aceasta. Şobolanii care constituiau banda mutau fiecare ou pe picioruşe de la un şobolan la celălalt  şobolan, până ce “banda” vie  scotea oul din combinat literalmente printr-o gaură de şobolan.  Totul se petrecea  în mare viteză, dar în acelaşi timp atent şi delicat, astfel că nici un ou nu se spărgea. În final, nu ramâneau urme.

Titus Filipas

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the OU Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, April 18, 2008.

RFK JR: CHRIST WAS AN ENVIRONMENTALIST

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Oklahoma (the buckle of the Bible Belt) recently to deliver a talk on “Our Environmental Destiny,” he reminded the standing room only audience that Christ was an environmentalist — and that if Jesus walked among us today, he too might be dismissed as a quack.

In his remarks delivered Friday, April 18th at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, Kennedy used examples from all of the ancient religions to make his point:

“We know our Creator best by studying Creation, which all of the religious texts mandate us to do.” Kennedy said. “If you look at all of the great, central epiphany in every religious tradition in mankind’s history, the revelation always occurs in the wilderness.

“Buddha had to go into the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the middle of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to go onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

“Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man of the wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and dressed in the skins of wild animals. All of Christ’s parables are taken from nature: I am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard Seed; the little swallows the scattering, the seeds on fallow ground…

“He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That’s how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things to them that contradicted everything that they had heard from the literate, sophisticated people of their time. They would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables about the fishes and the birds through their own observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He’s not telling us something new, he’s simply illuminating something that’s very, very old.”

INTO THE WILDERNESS

“The American conservationist John Muir said that the wilderness is God’s temple, that destroying its most beautiful places is tantamount to tearing pages from the Scriptures.”

– Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 1992

Kennedy drew a clear line of distinction between true environmentalism and paganism: “I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God,” he said, “but I do believe that it’s the way that God talks to us most clearly.

“God talks to human beings through many vectors: through each other, through organized religion, through the great books of those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music and poetry – but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace and joy as through Creation. We don’t know Michelangelo by looking at his biography, we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

“The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches us.” Kennedys explained. “It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore that at our peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally, culturally and historically, and spiritually.

“Human beings have other appetites besides money, and if we don’t feed them we’re not going to become the kind of beings that our Creator intended. When we destroy nature we impoverish ourselves, we diminish ourselves and we impoverish our children.

“We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl,” he argued. “We are protecting those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down.”

“I’m not fighting for the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson is 350 years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families that learned the same fishing methods that they’re using today from the Algonquin Indians during the Dutch colonial period. I want my children to be able to touch them when they come to shore to repair their nets or wait out the tides, and in doing that, connect themselves to New York history and understand that they are part of something larger than themselves.

“I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where it’s all Unilever and 400-ton factory trolleys 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no interface with humanity, and where we have no family farmers left in America; where we’ve driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.

“I don’t want a world where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us ultimately to God.”

“A MORAL AFFRONT TO THE NEXT GENERATION”

As Kennedy sees it, preserving our natural environment is every citizen’s moral obligation, because “when we destroy these things, we’re cutting ourselves off from the very things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life.

“And for these people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following the mandate of Christ by liquidating our public assets, what they are really doing is a moral affront to the next generation.

“That’s why we preserve nature.” Kennedy said. “Not for our sake, but for the sake of the future. That obligation is expressed by the term sustainability. All that word means is that God wants us to use the things we’ve been given, to enrich ourselves, to improve our quality of life, to serve others – but we can’t use them up. We can’t sell the farm piece by piece in order to pay for the groceries; we can’t drain the pond to catch the fish. We can’t cut down the mountain to get at the coal. We can live off the interest; we can’t go into the capital that belongs to our children.”

Kennedy launched into an attack on President George W. Bush (“the worst environmental president in history”) and his cronies who “claim to embrace Christianity while violating the manifold mandates of Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and that we are meant to care for nature. They have embraced this Christian heresy of dominion theology.”

He explained how the Bush administration has worked hand-in-glove with multinational corporations to destroy the environment and thereby, the quality and length of our lives.

Kennedy focused on an example which has local impact on Oklahomans — large scale factory farming — saying that the poultry companies are “making themselves billionaires by poisoning the rest of us.”

He also praised the efforts of Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson for his lawsuits against Big Poultry. With Edmondson in attendance, Kennedy said factory farms use their lobbies to gain more than their fair share in influence in state capitols across the nation.

Edmondson, a Democrat, has said that pollution from poultry farms in an issue of national importance. In 2005, he filed a lawsuit in federal court against several poultry companies to stop the alleged pollution their operations have caused in the Illinois River watershed and Lake Tenkiller.

The lawsuit alleges the poultry companies are responsible for the runoff of polluted water from tons of poultry waste that has flowed into state waterways as the result of improper storage.

Kennedy said the large-scale farms injure Americans by “dumping their crap into the Illinois River and the other rivers of the state.”

Kennedy talks with Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson

“CORPORATE CRONY CAPITALISM IS ANTITHETICAL TO DEMOCRACY”

Another important distinction, according to Kennedy:

“Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

“I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat production,” he explained, “which is not only one of the primary threats to the American environment but also one of the primary threats to the American worker. It’s allowing a few monopolies to control our food supply and to put farmers out of business.

“Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent hog farmers in North Carolina, today there are none. They have been replaced completely by 2,200 hog factories, 1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one large corporation. They produce such huge amounts of waste they have to dispose of it illegally, and so they have to corrupt political officials in order to continue operating.

“A few years ago I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau.” Kennedy recalled. “I stand by what I said. It’s the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called “malefactors of great wealth,” who would destroy them from within.

“Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil War in 1863, said, “I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind me and for my country, I fear the bankers more”.

“From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders – Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson – have warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate our political systems and our lives.” Kennedy reminded the assembled crowd.

“Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, the most famous speech he made was warning America against the domination by the military-industrial complex.

“Franklin Roosevelt said that the domination of our nation by large corporations is the definition of fascism. I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if you look up fascism, says, “the domination of government by large corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism” – that’s getting to look pretty familiar, isn’t it?” he asked. 

TEARING THE “CONSERVE” OUT OF CONSERVATIVE

“The problem with letting large corporations dominate our government is that it erodes democracy.” Kennedy explained. “It erodes our capacity to participate in public life, our capacity for dignity, and it allows these entities to squander resources that belong to our children.

“But the thing that we’ve squandered worst of all is our natural heritage: the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands – all these things that make us proud to be American.

“This administration has torn the conserve out of conservatism,” he said.

 ”They claim to like the free market, but what they are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism, socialism for the rich.

“They claim to love property rights, but only when it’s the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor’s property or to destroy the public property.

“They claim to like law and order, but they are the first ones to let the large corporations and their corporate contributors violate the law at public expense.

“They claim to love local control and states’ rights, but it’s only in those instances when they’re taking down the barriers to large corporations.

“This is the revolving door plunder you get,” Kennedy concluded, “when you let corporations run a democracy.

“We’re living today in a science fiction nightmare when my children and most of the children in Oklahoma can no longer safely engage in a seminal primal activity of American youth: which is go fishing their father at the local fishing hole then come and safely eat the fish. All because somebody gave money to a politician.”

Text and photos copyright RFKin2008.com.

RFK JR. ORGANIZES POULTRY SUMMIT

The Waterkeeper Alliance, an international environmental group co-founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is organizing an “Eastern Shore Poultry Summit” Nov. 1 at the Wicomico Civic Center in Salisbury, MD, the Baltimore Sun reported today.

The point of the event is to raise awareness of water pollution that runs off large poultry farms, and try to find solutions, said William J. Gerlach, attorney for the eight-year-old advocacy organization.

Among the speakers at the day-long event will be Kennedy, a co-founder and chairman of the group; Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler; and Bill Satterfield, director of the Delmarva Poultry Institute, a farming trade organization.  “We’d like to start a dialogue among everybody – so we invited the Delmarva Poultry Institute, not just environmental activists,” said Gerlach.  ”Hopefully there will be good discusion and we will build from it.” 

Gerlach said he hopes to encourage Maryland  to issue factory-style water pollution control permits to large poultry farms, increase the enforcement of water pollution laws, and to allow public access to the nutrient management plans that farmers are supposed to follow.

The Sun reported on Oct. 14 that the poultry industry on Maryland’s Eastern Shore produces about a billion pounds of manure a year, and is a significant source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay. But Maryland has been slower than other states, including neighboring Pennsylvania, in requiring factory-style pollution control permits for large poultry businesses. The state is now considering these permits, along with inspections by the state’s environmental enforcement agency and fines of up to $32,500 for allowing manure into streams. (Yes, you read that correctly) But farmers have complained that chicken houses don’t pollute like factories, and that family farms shouldn’t be burdened with excessive regulation.

The Poultry Summit is open to the public, and runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Wicomico Civic Center. The cost is $25. The group held similar “Hog Summits” to address animal waste pollution in North Carolina, Iowa and Pennsylvania from 2002 to 2005.