and dont’ worry worry less about the packaging.

Two relatively new drink packaging ideas worth thinking about:

First, paper bottles, by the multi-national design firm BrandImage.

As far as my research has led, this is not being used in the production of any beverages as yet, but did win an IDEA (International Design Excellence Award). Questions of practicality abound on the web with issues of coatings / linings, compostability, durability, taste effects, et cetera being argued, and with nary and answer in sight from BrandImage or anybody else. Still, an interesting concept to be sure, and something i’d be willing to try out.

For another take on eco-friendly beverage packaging, we turn to Tetra Pak, the 50 year old Swedish company who semi-recently recreated itself as an environmentally sound business. While their packages have always been unusual, they now claim to be 100% recyclable, though with packaging made from layers of plastics, foil and paper, it’s hard to imagine how easy to recycle the material can be.

In any case, the wine maker French Rabbit uses the Tetra Prisma packaging for their product, to reduce shipping weight (and thus, C0₂ emissions).

The packaging has it’s problems, of course, but again, it’s a good direction.

(pollution in food. intellectual property, part four. the economy, part two.)

The Industrial Revolution is important for many reasons, one of primary interest to me: the way in which the centralization of all aspects of [human] life (and the absolute reliance on fossil fuels to do it) has effected our culture. We struggle to imagine it now, but the industrial revolution fundamentally changed the character of everyday life, and the arc of that life.

revolution.

The industrialization of the world has continued much as it began: in an attempt to make everything around us more efficient; to continue where agriculture left off in turning “nature” to “culture.” The first innovations took place in the creation of textiles (just as the first innovations in the Industrial Re-evolution have, interestingly), and were concerned primarily with increasing production capacity. Which is to say, the focus was on quantity, not quality: how much could a single worker make, how quickly, and how easily could the processes be mechanized to facilitate that increase in output.

As this process continued from the late 18th century to the mid 19th, fossil fuels (coal in steam engines, mostly) allowed a rapid increase in both the speed and spread of these technologies. Steam-powerd railways and ships alike allowed for distribution—an almost entirely new concept—of both the machines used to create these new “means of production,” and the fruits of their mechanistic labor. Soon the internal combustion engine was to follow, only increasing the speed and money making possibilities of these ventures.

All of this drove people from the newly mechanized farm villages—where it was once possible to live their whole lives; from growing nearly (if not entirely) all they ate, making everything they used, from clothes to tools, and being educated on the basis of individual apprenticeships—to the city. Certainly large cities had existed before, but only rarely, and only at the centers of enormous empires. In Egypt, in the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan lands, and in Rome; Indeed, Rome was the first city to have a population of 1 million people (if one includes slaves in the tally) at around 300 C.E, a feat that would not again be matched until London of the industrial revolution.

Read more »

about food, and our relationship to it in these united states.

Mark Bittman tell us interesting things about our food.

By the time most food we eat in the U.S of A enters our body it has traveled an average 1500 miles. The farming community throughout the nation has fallen in size over the last 100 years at an exponential rate as agri-culture has turned into agri-business. 2,000,000, people now represent the farming community of the united states: half of one percent of the population of the country (down from 25 percent 100 years ago).

The changes in farming that have led us to this point relied initially on fossil fuels for transportation, later on fossil fuels for fertilization, and soon after on fossil fuels for pesticides. This has amazing and far reaching consequences for every aspect the earth’s ecosystem, from worldwide carbon and nitrogen cycles, to our place in the food web and our place in the global economy. Much of what we eat in the form of packaged foods or fast foods is derived from corn or soy beans. If you eat meat, then those animals were fed primarily (if not exclusively) on processed corn and soy.

The peak of united states oil production occurred 35 years ago, and our primary sources are now the same as the other 2 billion people demanding it worlwide. In the fruit and vegetable trade, US imports are increasingly outpacing US exports as we come to rely further on fossil fuels for our transportation of more of our food.

In the “best case” projections for continued reliance on fossil fuels, hypothetical as they are, this agribusiness process can only last another 100 years at most optimistic.

in the meantime, what can we learn from cuba, and how can we prepare?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnLvP57UWh8