Can't say enough about cans

All hail the mighty can

U.S. Can Manufacturers Institute is celebrating the birthday of the can this year – really.

They get a little weird about it, but they seem sincere.

“The history of the can is literally a history of western civilization,” their Web site proclaims.

There is a lot of money involved, Americans use 130 billion cans a year creating an $8 billion industry, according to the institute.

But then they fly away again.

“Because we have come to rely so much on the convenience and easy familiarity of canned products, almost imperceptibly present in every part of life, we are the 'tin can civilization.' ”

Really.

The history is interesting. 1796 Napoleon’s troops were starving so he started a contest, according to the Web site. A Parisian tried for 15 years before preserving food by partially cooking it and sealing it in bottles with cork stoppers using much the same technique as today’s home preservers. He won the prize in 1810.

The same year, an Englishman won a patent for preserving food in a variety of containers, including iron coated with tin to avoid rust and corrosion, according to the Web site.

Is that a clone in your mouth?

Both sides of the debate over selling meat or milk from animals with clones in their bloodlines is are in a tizzy.

Seems the Food Standards Agency in Britain has confirmed meat from a bull that originated as an embryo of a cloned cow got into the food chain a year ago. That would be against the law because it should have been labeled a "novel food" to be sold legally, reports meatprocess.com
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority have no problem with cloned meat.

Also, the FSA has traced an offspring from the same family line to a dairy but hasn't confirmed its milk is going into the food supply. Let's see, if the dairy is feeding and caring for this cow, where do you think the milk is likely going?

Do you care if that happens around here? How would you know?

A green finale

So I’m looking at a story from The Associated Press about a green trend involving coffins made from banana leaves or woven bamboo. They take up to two years to decompose and give you a chance to do one last green thing for the planet.

Then I start to feel a little weird and almost guilty because my father-in-law recently died and my father is under hospice care. But their problems have had me thinking a lot harder about what I want when it’s my problem.

So a little research takes me to a Sierra Club Web page that starts a story with “Recycle yourself.”

A link there takes me to an ad for the Ecopod from the Natural Burial Company, made from “sturdy paper-mache made from recycled newspapers and covered in handmade paper of mulberry leaves and recycled silk.” Each one has its own silkscreened design –doves on the blue one, a Celtic cross on the green one, and my favorite, an Aztec sun on the red one.

They say theirs is the pick when “providing for someone’s Last Style Statement.”

Kent Casket Industries offers solid pine coffins and caskets “sourced from sustainable forests” with no stains or “highly toxic glue.” For some reason they also tout no animal products or used, but I’m not going there.

For ease of storage, they are shipped packed as flat panels with easy-to-follow assembly instructions. And don’t forget the rope handles.

But I’m not sure about the NatureBoard™eco coffins from Ecocoffins. They’re “made from a cardboard which contains at least 90% recycled material so if you are looking for an environmentally-friendly funeral ours are accepted at native woodland burial sites, woodland burial sites and traditional graveyards and crematoria. We only use natural starch based glues in assembly.”

No, not cardboard. I played in enough refrigerator boxes as a kid.

Making manure green

Not by feeding too much alfalfa.

Dairy cows are big energy users, but a Texas AgriLife researcher will present a paper at the Texas Animal Manure Management Issues forum in Austin that shows they can pay their energy bills and more.

I’m not sure what will be more fun, barhopping on Sixth Street or the conference.

But I digress. Cady Engler, the researcher, looked at electrical, diesel, gasoline and natural gas usage on dairies for milking, waste management, feeding and watering. He didn’t include the energy to grow crops for feed or transporting the milk to market.

He found a wide variation in usage from one type of dairy to another, but the average was about 3.2 kilowatt hours per day per cow.

Turning manure into energy, either with bacteria to make methane or high heat to make hydrogen or both could make up to 25 kilowatt hours per day per cow.

The processes can not only make energy, in the form of heat or electricity, but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manure. They also reduce the volume of “nutrients” left to be disposed of. In ag researcher talk that means there’s less poop to spread on farm fields - up to 80 percent less.

And in places where it rains (that leaves most of the Panhandle out) and there's hills (out again) that would mean less threat of said "nutrients" ending up in a creek, then a river, then a lake, then your house. But you already got that.

From the Ground Up

Lighten up

If you miss the Get Fuzzy comic that the paper deleted, check today's strip out. It's free, but you have to register. These get me through the day... usually.

As we join our fuzzy friends, they are discussing renewable energy. Bucky assures naive Satchel that wrapping a monkey in copper wire, putting it into a metal can and rolling it down stairs will create electricity, just like a battery. A revolution in energy!!!

"100% clean power from 100% filthy monkeys," Bucky declares.

I won't ruin the punch line, but poor Satchel.

From The Ground Up

April Fools food fight

Ben & Jerry's, of natural ice cream with nutty names fame, is letting people in on the joke it created to criticize cloning cows.

The company put up a Web site for CyClone Dairy (motto: Perfect Cows Perfect Milk) last month. Today it posted a video on the site telling the rest of the story.

On the site, there are some pretty funny lines like "old-fashioned dairy the new-fashioned way" and a testimonial from a satisfied-looking woman who says knowing CyClone milk "only comes from perfect cows makes me feel good."

Here's another: "Cows are way cool and so is cloning. Check out these fun facts to find out why." One of the "facts" is that cows can walk up steps but not down because their knees bend a certain way.

I don't know about that, but the fight over cloning is real. The FDA in January 2008 said food from cloned animals is safe, and since then, vendors of bovine semen claim to have sold some of their product from cloned dairy bulls. That means there could be calves out there that would fit right in at the CyClone Dairy.

Cloners say beef or milk from their animals is no different from the standard fare, but the cost of doing the cloning is so great, a cloned animal is not likely to get into the food chain any time soon. Just it's offspring.

Ben & Jerry's wants Congress to institute DNA tracking so consumers will know when someone has been messing with Mother Nature.

Gourmet cuts of beef. Coming Soon!?

From The Ground Up

Welcome to my world and yours

I call this neighborhood From The Ground Up because it's all about where we all live - water, wind, plants, food and all the other topics that spring from thinking about resources like cooking, recycling and generally trying to live leaving a lighter footprint on the Earth.

I'll try to give peeks behind some of the topics I cover for the Amarillo Globe-News like energy, water, agriculture and the environment in general. But there will also be those tidbits floating around that are just interesting because the are.

Some of the stuff may be fun, and some troubling, but hopefully it will all be at least a little informative. Let's start with one end of the spectrum and then let the conversation begin. I want to hear from you so don't be shy.

From the "it doesn't taste like chicken" area of the spectrum, researchers report in the International Journal of Food Science & Technology that sausages made using jumbo squid mantle (head) muscle "performed well in sensory tests."

That could "open up a range of possibilities for product development," according to the report. The only things testers criticized were the color, aroma and texture. Oh yeah, and the possibility of a wretched death. Researchers cited an "unfavorable microbial profile" or a tendency to grow a lot of bacteria while in storage.

They couldn't be satisfied with perfectly acceptable bison/chipotle or chicken/spinach/asiago.
For the tasty details, go to www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Scientists-edge-towards-squid-sausages.