Mark Bittman, AKA The Minimalist, has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times this week, about the future of fish. A few key points:

- If current fishing practices continue, many major commercial fish stocks will likely collapse in the next fifty years. Many fish populations have already been seriously depleted.

- Smaller fish species like herring, anchovies and sardines are also in trouble, as they're being caught and made into fish meal for livestock and farmed fish. Using fish meal to feed farmed fish is extremely inefficient - at least three kilos of small fish go to produce one kilo of farmed fish.

- Industrial aquaculture negatively impacts the environment in a number of ways - it destroys shoreline, such as mangrove forests, pollutes water with fish feces, and kills off wild fish species.

- Solutions? Develop a taste for the small fish, so they'll no longer be used as fish feed. So quit eating low-quality farmed salmon and go for some nice mackerel instead. And give fishermen shares in fisheries, but fix the total number of catch per year.

The rush to go green is on for big industry (well, a lot of them). The food industry is no different. Brill is being awarded the 2007 Energy Saver Award by the U.S. Department of Energy's Industrial Technologies Program. The company has saved more than 2.2 million kilowatt hours by upgrading a couple systems at their Tucker, GA plant. The upgrades resulted in about a 50% reduction in energy consumption for that plant.

For those readers who don't follow industrial food manufacturers, Brill one of the largest bakery suppliers in the U.S. I personally am not a big fan, preferring instead to either make my own frosting or get a cake from a high-end bakery that wold not use Brill. There are, however, many people who do enjoy Brill products, or at least the bakeries which use those products. Now the bakeries that use Brill products can be proud to support such an eco-friendly manufacturer.

You can read more about it here. The best part is that the actual award, presented at a 2008 industry even, is made from 100% recycled glass!

[via Modern Baking]

About a year and a half ago, I posted about the work of photographer Michael Harlan Turkell, particularly his Back of the House Project, a great series of 25 very candid black and white photos of restaurants and their staff. Turkell recently dropped Slashfood a line, pointing out his photo blog, as well as what appears to be a new photo series called "mise en place". It had been a while since I checked Turkell's site, so the blog was news to me. It appears he's also been commissioned by New York City restaurant blog Eater to photograph the subjects of their "Gatekeepers" series, which profiles "the very folks that stand between you and some of your favorite impossible-to-get-tables." If you've ever worked in the restaurant industry, or if you're just a lover of food, dining and photography, do yourself a favor and check out Turkell's website as well as his blog.

If, like some of us, you were left wanting by the film adaptation of Fast Food Nation, a new documentary called Our Daily Bread might be more your speed. Created by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Our Daily Bread is composed of long, unblinking scenes shot in industrial greenhouses (above), farms and animal processing plants throughout Europe. There are no interviews or voice-overs and the locations are not identified. The New York Times gives it a glowing review, and also features a related piece with a few quotes from Geyrhalter. Several trailers are available here. For the moment, it appears that screenings of the film in the U.S. are limited to New York City and Chicago. Hopefully that will change soon.

Last Sunday, the Opinion section of the Boston Globe featured a rather passionate piece by Christopher Kimball, founder of Cook's Illustrated. Kimball rails against processed foods, saying that the often expensive and unhealthy products have infiltrated the food industry "like a cancer." The main points of Kimball's piece--trans fats, relentless marketing and the economic impact of obesity in America--won't come as a shock to most of us. Still, Cook's fans should appreciate hearing Kimball speak his mind about something a little more controversial than Dutch process cocoa. (Registration with Boston.com maybe required.)

[Via The Ethicurean]

The Guardian recently featured a piece about the increasing amounts of soy in European and American diets. While many associate soy with centuries-old Eastern traditions, The Guardian article points out that soy products like tofu and soy sauce differ from the soy milk and soy burgers of today in that the older foods have been tempered by fermentation. Several sources in the piece voice concerns about phyto-estrogen levels in unfermented soy products and their possible links to cancer and unusual hormonal development. Some experts warn that the newness of such products is a cause for caution as their longterm effects have yet to be studied in depth.

Last year, a product called Flavor Spray was picked as one of the top five food innovations of the year by Time magazine. At the time, I didn't realize it was going to catch on in such a big way, but now other companies are introducing flavored spray-on products in an astounding variety of flavors. Besides the  root beer or french fry sprays (yes, they're working on a french fry flavor at the moment) from Flavor Spray, there are butter sprays, salad dressing sprays, candy sprays and even pet food sprays. The company that makes the TooTarts Sour Blast candy spray is designing a candy spray, to be released next year, to help "trick" kids into eating their vegetables.

Some spray-able products seem useful, like the butter and salad sprays that would allow for even distribution of flavor over corn on the cob or a big plate of salad. But french fry flavor? Mochaccino flavor?

I can't see the trend for the more exotic and less practical flavors lasting for an extended period of time, unlike the dressings and sprays of olive or canola oil that can be used for cooking. But what do I know - I still uses spices to flavor my foods.

Apparently it is no longer "Cool-2B-Real." Some of you may remember a site by that name, created a few years ago by the National Cattleman's Beef Association as a way to get teen and "tween" age girls to keep eating beef. That age group is rather prone to going vegetarian, says a Time article about the site. As this online petition against the site reminded me, Cool-2B-Real featured a survey with the question "What type of beef do you most like to eat with your friends?"  If I recall correctly, the site also featured a blurb from a young female figure skater that was somehow related to eating beef. I recently went to check up on the site, and to my surprise, I found Zip4Tweens. Using numbers instead of words is obviously still cool, but this kid-geared beef site isn't nearly as bizarre as Cool-2B-Real. There are still plenty of beef recipes and diet-related games, but damn it, it's just not as weird. I think I actually saw some salad recipes on there.

The editors of BevNET, a beverage industry news and review site, launched their BevBlog a few weeks go. So far, the blog features commentary on beverage marketing, such as the redesigned Sprite can and the POM Tea line. Really, most of the posts focus on what the BevNET editors consider failed attempts and near misses in beverage advertising and packaging. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a fun read and I look forward to seeing what it turns into in the future.

McDonald's senor global supply chain manager, Gary Johnson, stressed the importance of establishing traceable beef programs worldwide. Consumers want to know where their food is coming from, he said, and consumer trust is of paramount importance to all businesses, especially those in the food industry. The call for action comes in light of the fact that the British beef industry is still recovering from the massive loss of consumer confidence it suffered following a mad cow outbreak in the mid 1990s. It is also, in part, due to the success of the Australian beef industry in implementing a system to track all beef cows back to their farm of origin. Johnson called for future programs to be modeled on the Australian example.

While there are some farms who take it upon themselves to offer traceable beef, many in the cattle industry oppose these measures, largely on the grounds that it would be too expensive to implement and maintain. If  a national or global plan were in place, however, consumers and businesses would rise to meet the price changes. "Any extra expense to introduce traceability today represents an essential investment in the security of the future safety of the food supply, [Johnson] said."

British supermarket chains, such as Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Waitrose, are rethinking their pork supplier. The Polish pig farms that produced much of the supermarket pork products have been condemned for "'appalling' animal welfare practices."

The farms in question are in Poland and have been run by Animex, a subsidiary of the American company Smithfield Foods, since 2002. An undercover investigation revealed industrial factory farms, conditions where hundreds of pigs were crammed into light-less barns with dead companions rotting underfoot. The investigation also found that "powerful cocktails of drugs," including a cocktail of antibiotics that is banned or considered to be a growth-promoter in other countries. One such drug is Tylbian 20%, a form of the growth promoting drug Tylosin, which was banned by the European Union in 1999. Local residents showed investigators large open-air cesspits of pig waste and farm detritus that included syringes and needles.

Waitrose has already pulled the products supplied by this producer. No wrong-doing has been shown on the part of Smithfield Foods and a Smithfield representative denied knowledge of such conditions, assuring the public that it would investigate thoroughly.