When there is not enough food to go around caused by global climate change, poor stewardship of the planet’s resources, pollution, mismanagement or otherwise, bad things happen. Really bad things happen.

A little 9-year old boy was found who weighed only 8kg, (17.6 lbs) in Honduras. He’s doing better now after months of treatment, but the crime is that Jason was ever in such a situation in the first place. If there is no better reason to care for our planet than Jason and other little boys like him, then what is that reason?

In Honduras, about 30% of all children suffer from malnutrition. Something is wrong with that picture. What are you going to do about it?

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Beer maker, Sapporo Breweries, has decided to put the carbon footprint of making its beers on the labels of their suds. The company estimates grain output, fertilizers, transporatation and the production and recycling of the aluminum can itself.

One 350 milliliter can of Black Label beer represents 161 grams of carbon emission says Sapporo Breweries.

Now a person can get drunk and not care about how much they are harming the environment at the same time. “Well, I may be skunk as a drunk, but I’m not planeting the destroy.”

What do you think? A marketing ploy or environmentally friendly policy? My take – marketing.

Sapporo Breweries needs all the attention it can get in Japan’s drunken beer market. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry wants to push a carbon footprinting system on all products.

What next? A surgeon general warning -

“Warning. Drinking beer may cause global warming.”

Funny or not, these guys in Belarus have modern agriculture techniques when it comes to “harvesting” cucumbers. If you ever tried to do the job yourself then you most likely know that it causes back pains. I can’t imagine it being all that easy crunching, picking cucumbers, then getting up again, all day long. Can you? That’s why Belarus farmers invented the moving bed where ladies can get as many cucumbers they want and forget soaring back.

It may not be the modern you expected, but they ladies get the job done and they all seem to be pretty happy. I wonder how many will go to Belarus during the cucumber harvesting periods for a better view.

via RussianFun

The answer is obviously yes but when looking at these South American guys marching with a freaking huge anaconda on their backs you may be tempted to say it’s not that dangerous. Read on to be amazed.

The most important thing is how they manage to catch such monsters that can weigh up to hundreds of kgs. They need bait. But what? The hunter themselves. It starts to sound dangerous!! They wrap some animal fur on one’s arm and then the hard part starts. They need to get into the hole where the snake “rests”.

Anacondas are big and since they can eat a huge hippopotamus they can easily eat a man, too. Feel like hunting anacondas in their natural habitat anymore?

Images courtesy of Oddity Central

Pretty odd I must say, but a recent study revealed that if Australia is going to farm kangaroos instead of cattle and sheep (to remove 36 million sheep and 7 million cattle by 2020), that could lower the overall greenhouse gases by 3 percent each year. Do you think it’s that simple?

First of all, Australians won’t understand that killing kangaroos for food is good for the environment. It’s more like a matter of taste than a matter of global warming, and my bet is people are not yet prepared to switch to an all-kangaroo diet. Would you eat kangaroo meat just because they produce negligible amounts of methane?

The other problem, which is just as big is the kangaroo-image, over Austsalian peopl. Changing the way people think is not going to be done overnight and certainly not just with ad campaigns because the kangaroo is actually, the national icon.

The study which revealed all these said that “using kangaroos to produce low-emission meat is an option for the Australian rangelands … and could even have global application,” said the study. Do you agree?

Image courtesy of t3rmin4t0r

Oprah just finished a 21-day cleanse. She eliminated caffeine, sugar, alcohol, gluten and animal products from her diet. She gained some awareness:

“What I know for sure is I’ve reached a new level of awareness about food, eating and the whole process of how it gets to my table. I used to say thanks before a meal out of perfunctory habit. Now I consider it true grace to be able to eat anything in a world of increasing food shortages and starving people.

This has been exactly what we intended: enlightening. I will forever be a more cautious and conscious eater. That’s my commitment for now. To stay awakened.”

Question for Oprah – How long is forever? And now that you are a more cautious and conscious eater, what difference will that make to the rest of the world? And, yes, Oprah, you can make a difference to the world other than giving all the studio guests a new car. It am not an Oprah fan, but a fan of everyone in the world having something to eat. I did my own cleanse, too.

There is at least one group of people who are happy about high food prices, the rice growers in Japan. Bread and pasta prices are soaring, but the price of rice has been falling. As a result, the Japanese, for one, are going back to the staple the country grew up on.

Japan’s farm ministry say per-capita rice consumption is up 0.6-percent from last year. What, did they go house to house to see who’s eating more? In response, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is launching a ¥200 million ($2 mil) ad campaign to urge Japanese to eat more rice.

It reminds me of a problem we have here in America. Everybody eats too much, so ad campaigns urge them to, ’supersize it’?

In 1965, Japan had a 73-percent food self-sufficiency which dropped to 39-percent last year, in large part because Japanese were eating more wheat-based products and imports from countries like China. Poisoned dumplings from China and rising prices of bread and pasta have caused the Japanese to eat and make more at home.

Flavoring for rice (furikake and ochazuke) sales are up 30-percent as have sales of ingredients that are mixed with cooked rice. Sales of ingredients for home-cooked meals are also up.

Japan’s government has always wondered what to do with the oversupply of rice produced by its farmers. Instead of giving it away or selling it cheaply to other countries, the bureauwigs just hoped that their own would eat more. Well, they got that wish!

Meanwhile, far too much of the rest of the world is going hungry.

Image courtesy of fumiya

There’s a saying, “give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, feed him for life”. What do they say when monkeys learn how to fish? And, don’t they say things like when cows fly or pigs play the piano?

In Bangkok, the long-tailed macaque monkey can grab fruit from trees or bananaz from tourists, in India, the “cute little” monkeys are considered thieves and pests but in Indonesia, the silver-haired (retired and collecting a pension maybe?) macaque knows how to fish.

Big deal! I mean you get a pole, some string, a hook and some bait, right? Not these little primates. They just reach in and grab the little Nemos.

Though baboons, orangutans, and chimpanzees have been known to fish as well, researchers say this is a “rare and isolated” behavior. Now I wonder, can these monkeys teach us how to fish?

The dude who helped co-draft China’s national energy strategy, Song Yanqin, participated at Asia Clean Energy Forum 2008 and said that “food security comes first in China, more important than fuel”. He went on to explain that China has no plan to sacrifice food for fuel. Biofuels can find another source, dang it. China is hungry. We want to eat first, then think about energy sources and all that.

The debate is indeed far from over as to the effects of using maize, palm oil, sugarcane and jatropha to produce biofuels or what the effect would be on food prices.

One U.S. designer of high-tech alcohol plants said that “food versus fuel is 99-percent noise. Do your homework and get a noise filter. Time magazine is not your key reference document”. Does that mean that main stream media is not the authority on this topic? What about us bloggers?

In any event, China plans to have dinner, then think about it.

What’s your stance on the biofuel vs food price increase issue?

Image by stelzert

All this talk about there not being enough food to go around apparently made one tiger take matters into his own hands, um, paws.

An 11-year old 150kg (330lb) Siberian tiger killed a 40-year old male zoo keeper in Kyoto, Japan.

Officials had to shoot the tiger with a tranquilizer gun and wait for him to konk out before they could get in to get out the man. The zoo keeper was already dead.

Police investigation determined that the zoo keeper lured the tiger out with a chicken in order to clean the cage. But, somehow the tiger got back in.

Seems to me that if the tiger had had enough to eat in the first place, it wouldn’t have been tempted to ‘eat more human.’

Q: So…what did the one alligator say to the alligator after they ate a human?

A: I love these. They are chewy on the outside and crunchy on the inside.

Zoos. We don’t need them.

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