"The need for action is urgent given the time required for investment in research to deliver new technologies to those that need them and for political and social change to take place," says the paper by Beddington.

"Major advances can be achieved with the concerted application of current technologies and the importance of investing in research sooner rather than later to enable the food system to cope with challenges in the coming decades," says the paper led by the population biologist Charles Godfray of Oxford University.

The 21 papers published today in a special open access edition of the philosophical transactions of the royalsociety.org are part of a UK government Foresight study on the future of the global food industry. The final report will be published later this year in advance of the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

Here, in the land of GM corn, 26 per cent obesity and a government which classifies pizza as a "vegetable", scientists have discovered a way to turn bacteria-ridden scraps from the abattoir floor into a substance called "pink slime", which is then sold to unwitting consumers of hamburgers, tacos and other beef-based junk products. The process involves sticking bovine off-cuts in a heated centrifuge, so they separate into a mixture of liquid fat and a putty-coloured paste. That substance is then treated with ammonium hydroxide (a chemical used in household cleaners and home-made bombs) to kill off salmonella and e-coli. Then it's mixed with regular beef and – hey presto! – you have "all natural" mince.

In 2001, it became legal to sell "pink slime" in America. Today, more than half the ground beef sold in America contains the stuff. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which supposedly regulates the food industry, does not require it to be mentioned on ingredient lists. Since its provenance is a cow, they insist, you can call it "beef". If you think that's a bit rum, you're not alone. For years, US foodies have earnestly cited "pink slime" as exhibit A in the list of liberties taken by a rapacious food industry.

Not for nothing, they argue, has the stuff been banned in Europe, where mechanically-separated meat from cows and sheep has been prohibited since the era of BSE.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/nutrition-america-awakens-to-the-sour-taste-of-pink-slime-7593484.html

Who in the world would ever want “pink slime” in their hamburger? Before answering, take note the slime is officially referred to as “lean finely textured beef” or LFTB, that it’s 95% lean, on average—and that without it, you can expect meat to be 5% to 10% more expensive.

These are a few of the points that government officials from five states, the National Meat Association, and plants that produce LFTB—to them, there’s no such thing as “pink slime”—want the public to consider amid the slimy uproar.

Over a month ago, McDonald’s made news with its decision to drop “pink slime” from its hamburger meat after months of campaigning against the substance by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and others. Since then, several national supermarkets have likewise banned LFTB, and plants that produce LFTB—basically, a paste of beef trimmings treated with ammonium hydroxide—have suspended operations, affecting over 600 jobs.

Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2012/03/29/backlash-to-the-pink-slime-backlash/#ixzz1qZ1SnOPK

How do you cook medium rare pink slime?... with ammonium hydroxide and a blow torch...

Household ammonia is dilute ammonium hydroxide, which is also an ingredient of numerous other cleaning agents, including many window cleaning formulas. In addition to use as an ingredient in cleansers with other cleansing ingredients, ammonium hydroxide in water is also sold as a cleaning agent by itself, usually labelled as simply "ammonia". It may be sold plain, lemon-scented (and typically colored yellow), or pine-scented (green). Commonly available ammonia that has had soap added to it is known as "Cloudy ammonia".

In industry, ammonium hydroxide is used as a precursor to some alkyl amines, although anhydrous ammonia is usually preferred. Hexamethylenetetramine forms readily from aqueous ammonia and formaldehyde. Ethylenediamine forms from 1,2-dichloroethane and aqueous ammonia.[5]

In furniture-making, ammonium hydroxide was traditionally used to darken or stain wood containing tannic acid. After being sealed inside a container with the wood, fumes from the ammonium hydroxide react with the tannic acid and iron salts naturally found in wood, creating a rich, dark stained look to the wood. This was commonly used during the arts and crafts movement in furniture- a furniture style which was primarily constructed of oak and stained using these methods.[6]

As a food additive, ammonium hydroxide is used as an antimicrobial. In the United States, ammonium hydroxide is classified by the Food and Drug Administration asgenerally recognized as safe (GRAS).[7] Some fast-food restaurants use beef that has been treated with ammonium hydroxide to make it safe, but McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell restaurants have recently stopped this practice.[8][9]

It is also known to be used by aquarists for the purposes of fishless cycling, but this requires that there are no surfactants or scents, it should be colorless and shouldn't foam when shaken up.

As mission statements go, it takes some beating. Scrawled on a whiteboard are the words: "We will change how the Earth looks from space!" It surpasses "Don't be evil" (the motto of Google, just down the road), and in terms of hubris it trumps even that of Facebook (also just round the corner): "Move fast and break things!"

In this anonymous laboratory on a low-rise industrial estate in Menlo Park, 40km south of San Francisco, there is a whiff of revolution in the air. There is a whiff of madness, too, but after a few hours in the company of the man leading this intriguing Silicon Valley startup, one begins to wonder if it is the rest of the world that is insane.

Professor Patrick Brown could easily be taken for a deranged visionary. He is intense, driven and unfazed by critics and rivals. This 57-year-old ultra-lean, sandal-wearing, marathon-running vegan wants to stop the world eating meat. Not through persuasion or coercion, but by offering us carnivores something better for the same price or less.

The fake meat business has been around for decades, of course, but it has never really taken off. That is because the products out there, usually based on some sort of reconstituted soy or fungal gloop, taste as disgusting as they look. They are usually expensive as well.

But the meat-fakers say they are on the verge of a breakthrough, that there is a real possibility that a new era of fake meat – nutritious, cheap and indistinguishable from the real thing, made either of synthesised animal tissue or derived from plant material – may be upon us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/22/fake-meat-scientific-breakthroughs-research

I'll become vegetarian before eating the stuff... but it's likely they will invent fake vegies as well...

...

And [George Monbiot is] adding that it’s also bad for the environment

Those who claim that “regenerative” or “holistic” ranching mimics nature deceive themselves. It relies on fencing, while in nature wild herbivores roam freely, often across vast distances. It excludes or eradicates predators, which are crucial to the healthy functioning of all living systems. It tends to eliminate tree seedlings, ensuring that the complex mosaics of woody vegetation found in many natural systems – essential to support a wide range of wildlife – are absent 

You thought Monsanto, GM, monocultures and the ripping up of hedgerows was the problem? Nah. It’s fences. And herbivores eating the grass they’re designed to eat. And implicit in this nonsense of course is the greater nonsense that massive veggie monocultures drowned in pesticides and herbicides, are just teaming with wild life, tree seedlings and predators. 

Just as he [George Monbiot] used frank lies to promote the Soros-backed White Helmets as unsung “heroes”, here, in the fake guise of promoting a healthy, organic, back-to-nature solution to the world’s problems, George is promoting the current power system of Big Ag and Big Food monopoly. Just as Avaaz sells us imperial regime change as grass roots activism, George is selling us industrial farming and denatured food as a return to Eden.

Don’t buy what he’s selling. Don’t surrender your sense of the real to this snake oil salesman. Go vegan if you want – that’s a fine personal choice. But not at the expense of the small producers who are already struggling to survive without the subsidies the big guys get. Don’t vote for some future “meat tax” that will drive them out of business, and penalise the poor, just as Big Ag wants. Don’t buy into this soft focus dreamland where our entire livestock herd disappears bloodlessly and completely from our landscape without being killed or culled, and is somehow better for it. Don’t be whispered into campaigning for a new and self-imposed serfdom, in which 7 billion compliant vegans munch their potage or their shrink-wrapped lab-grown Soylent Green, while the 1% quietly eat grass-fed steak and snigger with duping delight.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/06/08/george-monbiot-selling-the-1-agenda-...

to which a geezer (MichaelK)  commented:

So much in the Guardian these days reads like something from a parody of the Guardian written by some wag at Private Eye. It’s as if the average Guardian journalist has desire to live in a society that resembles a Jane Austin novel and they are the clever and witty characters, not the farm workers or the servants of course! Poor, deluded, ignorant, babies.

Modern journalism is very moralistic and the ‘liberal’ journalists role is similar to the religious police in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Guardian’s journalists are moral guardians, continually telling people what they are supposed to think and think properly, morally. We really do seem to have returned to a kind of New Victorian Age where ideas, language and images are increasingly under intense scrutiny in relation to how ‘morally pure’ they are, or, politically correct. Language and texts have become a veritable minefield. Take their bizarre attitude to someone like Germaine Greer or the censorship for his latest cartoon about Israel. It must be weird for Greer to find herself labelled a ‘controversial feminist’ by the lady feminists at the Guardian, the bourgeois pendulum swinging back again to how she was regarded, and attacked, like she was at the beginning of her career.

Monbiot’s article could be about almost anything really, because in reality he’s writing about… virtue and where the virtuous person stands morally in relation to the great moral questions of the day.

Read from top.

Please do not forget that George Monbiot is somehow related to that awful family of "climate change" denialists. See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33148 on how the Off Guardian got conned to publish a rubbish piece by "Sapere Aude". see also:

 http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

see also:  war and peace...

Meanwhile, the sad news:

US celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN's food and travel-focused Parts Unknown television series, has died at the age of 61, the network confirmed in a statement.

Bourdain was found dead in a hotel room in France, where he had been working on an upcoming episode of his program, CNN said.

He took his own life, the network said.

"His love of great adventure, new friends, fine food and drink and the remarkable stories of the world made him a unique storyteller," CNN said.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-08/anthony-bourdain-dies-aged-61-cnn-...