Food is a tricky. For some people, food choice is an essential component of cultural heritage and national identity. For others, food choice is a statement of philosophical or moral principles. For many, being able to reject food is an unobtainable luxury. One thing is certain: food is so central to the human experience that when we question our food choices, when we are forced (or force others) to change them, when we discover that the choices we make are not what we think they are, it is impossible to separate our food ethics from our social structure. Which is why seemingly trivial revelations–bugs in your coffee, meat made slime, or a fish by any other name–often result in major outrage and structural changes. Eating is simultaneously a deeply personal experience and one in which, for much of the developed world, we are completely detached from the source.
Tag: chickens
So you’ve decided to commit to a more sustainable lifestyle, you’ve built a Pico-farm and are ready to stock it with a flock of happy, egg-laying chickens. Congratulations, you’ve reached the fun part.
Before you go out and buy chickens, you need to ask yourself a few questions: do you want hens only, or do you want a rooster for breeding? Do you want to raise them from chicks or buy adults ready to lay? How big a flock do you want?
Read More “Adventures in Backyard Agriculture: Raising Chickens” »
Several months ago, I began a new personal challenge to live more sustainably. I wanted to do something more substantial and larger in scale than the conventional methods of reducing your environmental impacts, which involve changes in habit, not changes in lifestyle. After many discussions, Bluegrass Blue Crab and myself decided it was time to try our hands at backyard agriculture.
Read More “Adventures in Backyard Agriculture: Building the Pico-farm.” »
The world is rapidly approaching 7 billion people and the challenges of food supply, security, and sustainability will, along with climate change, be the defining issues of the 21st century. While the issues of the wealthiest nations revolve around the quality of our food, the environmental impact or our farming practices, and the value we place on a perceived degree of “naturalness”, the rest of the world is simply concerned with having enough to eat. What we chose to value in our society affects the rest of the world, and perhaps the most visible, and most dramatic difference between the developing and developed world is the ways in which we treat our pets.
The Nicholas School of the Environment is hosting the Flat Grok Video Contest. We are on an unsustainable course. While world populations and consumption grow, resources diminish and global warming threatens our way of life. In his blog The Green Grok, Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, elucidates … Read More “Grok my Flock” »
Happy New Year to all our readers! 2010 was a big year for Southern Fried Science. We added a new blogger, moved to our own server, and launched The Gam. Along the way we’ve won a few awards, hosted the first Ocean of Pseudoscience week, cooked a whole pig, exposed some blatant greenwashing, challenged conventional … Read More “Southern Fried Scientist’s Predictions for 2011” »