Salmon Virus

This article was about how there is a virus called salmon anemia and that it may be found in our BC fisheries and the salmon fish farms. This is a scary article because we eat a lot of salmon in my family, even if it won't hurt humans it would be sad if we ran out of salmon because they were all dying of because of salmon anemia. But on the other hand no one could really confirm that this is what was happening here because the samples were degraded and the salmon were not confirmed to be from a BC fishery. I would like to think that we are not causing this disease and that the salmon will continue to live in our rivers but it is helpful to read everything we can and make sure that we protect our salmon in any way we can.

Developing nations may be more obese

This article was about how the developing social and economic conditions in some countries may be leading to obesity This was an interesting article, and it proved a number of things that I had previously thought. In Canada and the US poor people are more likely to be obese because healthy food is more expensive and healthy food takes longer to make and it is easier to go to McDonald's. But in developing countries any food is expensive and if you can buy enough to get fat then you must have a lot of money. It's part of the culture to be bigger but it may be bad for their health. It is definitely something to consider when taking into account how to change the health of the world. In developed countries healthy food needs to be cheaper and in developing countries the idea of wealth needs to be shifted so that being overweight is no longer the ideal.

NO CORN DIET

In this day and age it is so hard to avoid corn, I have made a menu of some things that one can eat in a regular day that do not include corn.

Breakfast

Pepperidge Farm Bread and Butter
(this brand and Nature's Own and Sara Lee are all free of corn syrup)
and Kashi cereal and milk

Lunch
A salad for lunch that included lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber but that excluded meat because most meats are corn feed

Dinner
Pasta and Ragu sauce
(Ragu is all free of corn syrup)

Desert
Ice Cream
(Breyers and most Ben and Jerry's are High fructose corn syrup free)

It is best to avoid packaged foods and fast food as a lot of these items include corn in some way.There are some alternatives for your favourite foods that don't include corn syrup, such as chocolate (cadbury) and some lesser known sodas. It is hard to do but it may just be worth it in the end.

Climate Change conference

I wasn't sure what to write before the conference so I decided to wait so that I could write only one post instead of two. The keynote speaker was interesting and I really enjoyed that he had met Rick Mercer. His speech was informative but I thought like with all the sessions that it was a little too short. My first session was with Marc Lee I didn't like that he was from the same company as Seth Klein, it felt like only one side of the argument, when a bunch of different agencies present their side it is easier to believe. After that we went to system change not climate change with Harjap Grewal, I really liked him, he made his workshop interesting and informative. We had time to have a discussion and he actually taught me things I hadn't previously known. Lastly I went to the Mining workshop, it was interesting and really sad but we watched a half hour long movie that was all in Spanish and it was hard to read the subtitles because they went by really fast. Overall the speakers were good but I felt like they didn't have enough time to do everything that they wanted to do. I think that I would really have liked to meet Ben West the Tankers and Pipelines speaker because he does film and poetry two things that I also enjoy. It would also have been nice to go to the Fossil Fuel Extraction in BC workshop because I had no clue what fracking was and I had to look it up, but even that did not really clear it up for me. I would have liked to have heard what she said.I found the lunch strange but when I spoke the my mother she said that raisins in rice was something she grew up with. After lunch we took a tour of the garden which was amazing, they are so inspirational at windomere and I would really love to try some of the things that they do there, like the compost bins in the hallways and the aquaponics system. After the conference I was talking about it for days with my parents, eventually it got on their nerves but I would really like to try the worm compost though my mom would never let it tin the house. On a side note I went to the Library recently and found two books, one was called Urban Agriculture and the other one was a book about bee's that David Suzuki put on his book club list. Of course I had to take them out, even though I haven't had the time yet to read them.

Big Organic

This article was hard to read because it was sideways and I couldn't figure out how to turn it right side up. I find it ridiculous that people can want labels that give a story. I want to know the facts about the food not how the animal lived. I think that a big part of organic is people saying what they think that people want to hear and not necessarily what they believe in. I want to really know where my food is coming from. I don't want the story book version I want to go to a local farm and see how they do it first hand. I think that organic is to overpriced and that a lot of it is not really what we think of as organic. I think that there are a few farmers that are doing it the "right" way and a whole bunch of others who are just pretending that they are. Organic farming is better for the animals but by how much as Michael Pollen says, is there life really any better than those of normally farmed chickens. I find it hard to believe that organic is greater in any large way.

Elixirs of Death

I did not know that insects were lab rats in WWII to see if chemicals were deadly to humans. That is a sobering thought because if the pesticides we use kill insects what do they do to us? Arsenic is deadly to humans but still arsenic spays are used to kill bugs. This seems a little counter intuitive. If we are spraying our food with poison to keep it alive are we really saving it? There is so much propaganda surrounding the DDTs that no one can really know all the facts. There have bee lies spread from the very beginning. Chemicals are very harmful things but because you grow up with them around all the time they seem less deadly. You know you don't want chemicals but when you do have them on your food they don' seem to have any effect. This is because a lot of chemicals are stored in the fats and are passed on , they have few if any obvious signs. There are so many harmful chemicals out there that a lot of people have never heard of but that have serious effects. The chemical Endrin can cause vomiting, convulsions and brain damage. Many of these chemicals are seriously harmful but few people know about them. I was shocked to learn that there were so many types of pesticides and I didn't recognize most of them, I was also not aware of the effects that they could have.

DDT

I think that DDTs are bad and should not be used. It is not a black and white case though. It does kill mosquitoes which carry the malaria virus which is of course a good thing. But it also has a negative effect on the environment and other organisms that have been affected by DDTs. Such as birds who lay eggs with softer shells. I think that it is possible to make another pesticide that does not have a negative harm on the environment. Humans are not the most important organism in the world we have to consider all other living things before we make such radical decisions. If we were to cure malaria instead of getting rid of the mosquitoes we would not hurt anyone and we would no longer have an epidemic. If DDTs live in the mothers milk it is passed down from generation to generation. It accumulates in the species instead of dissipating. It will take a very long time if it ever leaves the system of a species. It might be helpful in Africa where they could use malaria prevention, but it would hurt the species in Africa as much as it would help the humans. DDTs are not necessarily bad but they are not all good either. The risks need to be weighed before anyone takes any action.