There was a great article in the New York Times about how humans have managed to breed most of the nutrients out of the foods we find in our supermarkets. For the full story follow this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&   The basic argument is that over many generations humans have selectively bred out most of the phytonutrients and opted for such traits as sweetness, starch content etc. The consequences of this are that most fruit and vegetables that you find on supermarket shelves are very poor nutritionally relative to their wild ancestors. What does that have to do with quinoa you might ask?...

Genetically modified crops are now being made to produce crops that produce infertile seeds. So not only are farmers around the world having to buy the specific insecticide and pesticide that goes with their crops but each year are having to repurchase from the agrochemichal giants the seeds to be sown. That might just be OK for rich world farmers, although I doubt it, but for farmers in poor and middle income countries being irrevocably in hoc to an agrochemical giant cannot be sensible. Traditional seeds, before the advent of GM crops, weren’t much better. Via selective breeding pretty much...

For most of humanity’s existence on this planet poverty was an inevitable situation. There simply was not enough food and resources relative to the world’s population, especially when bad harvests struck. But that is no longer the case. Given the huge leaps in productivity seen in the last century humanity produces more than enough food and basic goods to supply every human on the planet with their basic requirements. This is a fundamental change, as scarcity is no longer the issue. Distribution is now the issue. That is why Fairtrade is such a powerful tool in fighting poverty. Many of...

Refined Carbs. They’re buzzwords, and overused ones at that. What ACTUALLY is a refined carb? And why are we all so desperate to avoid them? Well, simply put, they are everyday foodstuffs, such as white bread and white rice or pasta that during the industrial process have been stripped of much of their goodness. For example, the wheat used in white bread has had its fibre-rich outer coating stripped away, and its nutrient-packed inner germ has been squashed to oblivion in the milling process. We end up being left with the starchy endosperm. So when we eat white bread or...