Canada and the World Backgrounder articles from March 2002

Canada and the World Backgrounder archives from March 2002

Food on line: at Google.com a search under the word "food" delivers more than 33 million hits, more than one million of them in Canada. This has to be a reflection of how important food is to our daily lives. (Food -- Comment).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... At The Hunger Site (http://www. thehungersite.com/home) there's a map of the world. A different country flashes black every 3.6 seconds to signify someone has died of hunger; three out of four of them being children. But, at this website you...

Harvest failure: around the world, an estimated 815 million people remain undernourished. That's the finding of a 2001 report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. (Food -- Hunger Abroad).(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2002... Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the total amount of food available per person in the world rose by 11%. Also, during the second half of the 1990s, the number of undernourished people worldwide declined by about six million a year. The bad news...

Canadian growth industry: we don't have to go to some drought-stricken corner of Africa to find hunger; it's right here in our own neighbourhoods. (Food -- Hunger At Home).(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2002... Canada's first food bank opened in 1981. Twenty years later there were at least 615 food banks in the country, and more than 2,200 other agencies involved in feeding hungry Canadians in one way or another. Most food banks in Canada are...

You are what you eat -- unfortunately; for something that's so central to our survival, it seems few of us get our intake of food right. (Food -- Diet).(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2002... Ray Audette has a few rather odd ideas about diet that are based on a simple observation. Humans are the result of millions of years of evolution, but agriculture developed only 10,000 years ago. Mr. Audette's argument, in his 2000 book...

Factory food: to encourage students into the chemistry laboratory, teachers used to say the subject was like cooking. These days, it is truer to say cooking is like chemistry; just look at the list of ingredients on the labels of most prepared foods. (Food - Industrialized).(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2002... A recent check of "beef cubes" found that four out of five brands listed salt as the first, that is the largest, ingredient, but "salt cubes" wouldn't grab consumers the way "beef cubes" do. Sugar, artificial sweeteners, caffeine,...

Pharming: the food industry says genetically modified food is perfectly safe; consumers, environmentalists, and many others aren't so sure. (Food - GM Food).(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2002... Traditional plant genetics swaps genes between similar species, so the process is more like natural selection. Genetic engineering allows genes from any plant or organism to be inserted into any other plant or organism, by-passing natural...

Anyone for seconds? In the 1960s, the average Canadian grocery store carried about 300 items, of which two thirds were grown or processed within 150 kilometres of the store. Today, grocery stores carry thousands of items many of which are shipped in from every part of the world where standards of hygiene and inspection are not as high as they are in Canada. (Food -- Safety).(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2002... What's worse than finding a worm in an apple? Finding half a worm. Okay, so it's an old joke; would you rather hear the one about bat droppings? Along with paint chips, gravel, bits of glass, and other non-food items, these have all been found...

Quote ... unquote.(food anecdotes)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... "There is a misperception the world is awash in food." Ismail Serageldin, vice president of the World Bank. "A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing." Samuel Johnson,...