CBC Radio's Series: Diet for a Hungry Planet

     Image credit (left to right): Fresh Corn, Ricefields Bali, Your Daily Bread. You can click on the images to view larger sizes of these excellent photos. 
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Diet for a Hungry Planet:  How Our World Eats is a new series I discovered last night while browsing the CBC Web site. 

Diet for a Hungry Planet - Focus on Food

Diet for a Hungry Planet is a program that takes classic story ingredients from The Current and cooks up a fresh new view of how our world eats. Our host is Anna Maria Tremonti.

Episode 1: Few Staples

From food sold for fuel, to food prices fueling a food crisis. Be it corn or wheat or rice, too few staples cause too much concern over who gets to eat, what gets eaten, and how much it should cost. How cash crops have us going for broke, today, on Diet for a Hungry Planet.

Here's the link to the podcast of the fascinating first episode.  It includes discussions  and divergent perspectives from farmers, industry representatives, academics and food industry critics, including Marion Nestle.  Well worth listening to. 

Episode 2, scheduled for next week,  features Michael Pollan, author of  In Defence of Food.

Do you have 2020 vision?

Image credit: My Horizon by ecstaticist 

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" (Alan C. Kay) 

Dietitians of Canada recently published Vision 2020 to help dietitians create "a shared preferred future" for their profession. This document was distributed recently with the Summer 2008 issue of the Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research but is not online.  I've reproduced much of the text of Vision 2020 here for your information (Word version) (PDF version).

So what do you think? Does this document reflect your hopes, dreams and ambitions for Dietetics?

Organic cotton fruits & veggies

 

Crate with Veggies from Under the Nile as seen on roadside scholar

From children's books to baby toys.  You may wonder where I'm going with these  recent posts -- other than to  a more innocent stage in the life cycle.  

Call me idealistic, but I believe books and toys that convey positive food messages plant seeds in young minds...

 

and help nurture a generation that will  choose foods that are healthy for the body and the planet for a lifetime.

See more of Under the Nile's charming farmers' market here. 

Hat-tip to the lovely blog about extraordinary items, Roadside Scholar, for introducing me to these organic cotton toys.

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Posts about more serious topics coming soon. For example, here's a sample of what I've been reading: 

Take A Bite Out of Climate Change
Cool Foods Campaign
The Green Fork

Bread and Jam for Frances

 

I discovered this charming book while I was an undergraduate studying early childhood education and read it  to preschoolers to get them to settle before nap-time.   I can't recall the children's responses but I loved the story.   And twenty-five years later,  I still remember the message and some of the text:

Sometimes children will go on food jags.  Wise and understanding parents allow children to learn for themselves that there really can be too much "bread and jam."

A National License to the Cochrane Library

Image credit: Books by svenwerk

This afternoon while I was using OVID to search for recent articles on "nutrition AND stroke",  I  retrieved several interesting articles on vitamin supplementation and cognitive function recently published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews  (CDSR).  Through my workplace, I have access to many high-quality information resources, including the Cochrane Library.  But I'm in the fortunate minority.  Recently I received an email asking me to encourage people to sign a petition supporting a National License to The Cochrane Library so all Canadians have free access.  Here is the background information and link to the petition.

When you have a question about a medical treatment do you know where to go for reliable, non-promotional information? The Cochrane Collaboration is a not-for-profit international organization that produces summaries of such information. Over 3000 Cochrane reviews about the effects of health care treatments are published in the online Cochrane Library. These reviews are the collaborative effort of thousands of researchers worldwide who believe patients, health professionals and health managers should have access to the summaries of best quality research available.
 
Research abstracts and short plain language summaries of Cochrane reviews are available to everyone for free. However, summaries of results may omit details such as the actual patient group studied, the types of treatment used and the specifics of side effects.
 
Unfortunately in Canada, only citizens of Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia have access to the full Cochrane Library. Many other countries such as Australia, England, Finland, India, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden have purchased a license to The Cochrane Library so that all their citizens have complete free access.
 
The Canadian Cochrane Centre (www.ccnc.cochrane.org) is lobbying federal and provincial governments to support national access to The Cochrane Library.  If you support this initiative or would like more information, please visit our e-petition at http://nlccl.epetitions.net. Let's give all of Canada access at one click!