Tag Archives: milan

Scott Pruitt and the White House are still bickering over his pet project: Superfund.

by RosalinShephard Posted on May 11, 2017

“There is such a thing as being too late,” he told an audience at a food summit in Milan, Italy. “When it comes to climate change, the hour is almost upon us.”

The global problems of climate change, poverty, and obesity create an imperative for agricultural innovation, Obama said. This was no small-is-beautiful, back-to-the-land, beauty-of-a-single-carrot speech. Instead, Obama argued for sweeping technological progress.

“The path to the sustainable food future will require unleashing the creative power of our best scientists, and engineers, and entrepreneurs,” he said.

In an onstage conversation with his former food czar, Sam Kass, Obama said people in richer countries should also waste less food and eat less meat. But we can’t rely on getting people to change their habits, Obama said. “No matter what, we are going to see an increase in meat consumption, just by virtue of more Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others moving into middle-income territory,” he said.

The goal, then, is to produce food, including meat, more efficiently.

To put it less Obama-like: Unleash the scientists! Free the entrepreneurs!

Source: 

Scott Pruitt and the White House are still bickering over his pet project: Superfund.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, InsideClimate News, LAI, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scott Pruitt and the White House are still bickering over his pet project: Superfund.

Here’s What the World’s Top Chefs Are Making at the Olympics

by pinfamozkl Posted on August 13, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Amid the never-ending scandal circuit at this year’s Olympics—the doping controversies, the coup and assorted government corruption, the mystifying pollution of seemingly every body of water bigger than a bathtub—it’s easy to forget that good things, too, are happening in Rio de Janeiro.

Tuesday marked the launch of RefettoRio, a zero-waste soup kitchen spearheaded by Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura in the Lapa neighborhood of the Brazilian city. RefettoRio, which gets its name from the Latin word reficere—”to make or to restore”—provides free meals to those in need throughout the course of the Olympic Games. The kicker: The kitchen does so using only surplus food from the Olympic Village.

Sinta um pouco do que foram os preparativos para o primeiro dia do @refettoriogastromotiva! Agora estamos com um sentimento que é misto de dever cumprido associado com os preparativos para o jantar de hoje! #ComidaCulturaDignidade #Gastromotiva #RuadaLapa108 #RefettorioGastromotiva

A photo posted by Gastromotiva (@gastromotiva) on Aug 10, 2016 at 7:10am PDT

Food waste became a prominent issue at the 2012 Olympics in London, when six whistleblowers working in catering posted photos and videos of huge quantities of food being thrown away immediately after preparation. One employee claimed to be tossing out 45 pounds of prawns, 30 pounds of fish fillets, 90 pounds of vegetables, and 45 pounds of meat on a daily basis.

RefettoRio, on the other hand, hopes to take that excess food and turn it into meals for the city’s low-income and refugee communities. It’s a collaboration between Bottura, the Italian head chef of Osteria Francescana, ranked as the top eatery in the world by San Pellegrino’s 2016 World’s 50 Best Restaurants List, and David Hertz, creator of Gastromotiva, a Brazilian public interest organization that aims to empower Brazil’s vulnerable populations through kitchen training. RefettoRio employs local cooks, many of them graduates of Gastromotiva’s training program, alongside international celebrity chefs, including Alain Ducasse, Francis Mallmann, and Rodolfo Guzman. Needless to say, the resulting meals are nothing like reheated soup and ramen noodles: All 5,000 planned meals have three full courses. The photo of chefs plating a course on the restaurant’s opening night above gives you an idea.

The soup kitchen is built on a swath of land granted by the city for the next 10 years. After the end of the Olympics, it will double as a restaurant-school, relying on donations of ugly and past-date produce from local markets and grocery stores.

This isn’t the first time Bottura has tried to elevate wasted food. During ExpoMilan 2015, Bottura created a soup kitchen in an abandoned theater in the Milan suburb of Greco, using only scraps discarded from the world exhibition. More than 60 international chefs came to cook free meals for Milan’s homeless and refugee populations. All told, the refectory served up more than 15 tons of salvaged food, enough for 10,000 meals.

After Rio de Janerio, Bottura plans to roll out soup kitchens in Montreal, Berlin, his hometown of Modena, and New York City, in an initiative called Food for Soul. The Bronx-based project, co-sponsored by Robert De Niro, is slated to begin in 2017. Despite the elite reputation of Bottura and his cohort of fine-dining masterminds, he stresses the inclusive nature of these projects. “Food for Soul is not a charity project: It is a cultural one,” he says.

Read this article:

Here’s What the World’s Top Chefs Are Making at the Olympics

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Prepara, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What the World’s Top Chefs Are Making at the Olympics

Milan wants to pay people to bicycle to work

by ArdenBMYpqhxih Posted on March 1, 2016

Milan wants to pay people to bicycle to work

By on 29 Feb 2016commentsShare

As the Starbucks empire makes humble plans to open its first shop in Italy, the city it’s moving to — Milan — plans to give a different sort of bucks away.

To combat air pollution, Milan officials hope to pay commuters to bike instead of drive to work. The Guardian reports that the system will be based loosely on the French program tested in 2014, which paid employees 25 Euro cents for each kilometer* they biked to work.

Milan’s air needs all the help it can get. Named the “pollution capital of Europe” in 2008, the city continues to struggle with dirty air. In December, Milan instituted a three-day ban on private cars due to heavy smog.

Advertisement

Which raises another point: Who wants to cycle to work on streets clogged with toxic emissions, anyway? Critics of the proposed program point out that a host of factors affect a person’s decision to bicycle to work, like the availability of bike paths, places to park your bike, and showers.

In the French pilot program, 5 percent of 10,000 total commuters ended up switching from driving to biking. This success encouraged copycat initiatives, including one that launched last year in a smaller Italian town, Massarosa. Programs like these are a sign that clean, personal transportation is becoming fashionable. After all, we’re talking about Milan — the world’s renowned arbiter of all things vogue.

Here’s to hoping this program will prompt the penny pinchers among Milan’s 1.25 million residents to step off the gas pedal and onto bike pedals instead.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article used miles instead of kilometers. Grist regrets the error and has sentenced the author to a four hour training session on the metric system.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.Climate on the Mind

A Grist Special Series

Get Grist in your inbox

View original post here: 

Milan wants to pay people to bicycle to work

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Milan wants to pay people to bicycle to work

Animal Rights Activists Make Off With One Hundred Mutant Mice

by Andrew Karolitz Posted on April 23, 2013

Photo: Rick Eh?

Animal rights activists may have good intentions, but on Saturday in Italy, a protest at a scientific lab ruined research on autism, schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. The activists entered labs at the University of Milan, where they released, stole and mixed up labels on mouse and rabbit cages. The scientists say it will take years to recover their work, Nature News reports.

The activist group, called Stop Green Hill (in reference to a questionable dog-breeding facility), had staged a 12-hour demonstration at the university. Then five of them snuck into pharmacology labs:

The lack of signs of a break-in suggests that the activists may have used an illegally acquired electronic card, says pharmacologist Francesca Guidobono-Cavalchini, who works there. They prised open the reinforced doors of the facility on the fourth floor, and two of them chained themselves by the neck to the main double doors such that any attempt to open the doors could have endangered their lives.

Around 800 animals, most of which are genetically modified to serve as model organisms for testing new drugs, live in the lab. The activists brought along food, water and sleeping bags, Nature reports, and said they would not leave until they could collect all of the facility’s animals. In the end, they left with one hundred of the rodents, most of which will likely die shortly after leaving the lab since they are bred to have extremely weak immune systems.

So far, no arrests have been made, but the university will likely press charges. Meanwhile, Nature adds, around 60 scientists organized their own protest against the “bullying tactics” of groups like Stop Green Hill. Here’s the argument for animal testing, from The Society of Toxicology:

Research involving laboratory animals is important to people and to our quality of life. In the past century, most inhabitants of this planet have experienced an unprecedented rise in living standards, life expectancy and personal opportunity, in large part due to the many ways chemicals have been put to work for us.

In the absence of human data, research with experimental animals is the most reliable means of detecting important toxic properties of chemical substances and for estimating risks to human and environmental health.

While animal testing is not ideal, it more often than not is the only way to determine whether a new treatment is safe and effective for use in humans.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Should Dolphins and Whales Have Human Rights? 
Feeding Animals at the National Zoo 

Link: 

Animal Rights Activists Make Off With One Hundred Mutant Mice

Posted in alo, Dolphin, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Animal Rights Activists Make Off With One Hundred Mutant Mice