"industry" news and stories

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.

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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]

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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]