Tell Food Standards Australia-New Zealand to label nano-ingredients in foods

Concerned about the health risks of nanotechnology and genetic engineering ingredients being used in unlabelled products? So are we!

Food Standards Australia New Zealand is currently conducting a review of Australian food labelling, giving you a fantastic opportunity for you to support strong government action to ensure mandatory labelling of ingredients produced using nanotechnology or genetic engineering, and to ensure that palm oil is labelled.

Please take a few minutes to email Food Standards Australia New Zealand, we have provided some points below that may be useful to you. A short message is fine.

The deadline for commenting is Friday 20 November. Submissions can be emailed to FoodLabellingReview@health.gov.au
Please forward this info to anyone you think may want to know about this inquiry.

Georgia Miller

Friends of the Earth Australi
http://nano.foe.org.au

Over the next few weeks, here at Green Renters we will be taking a look at:

Handmade and homemade gift  giving

Shopping locally and Ethically

Eco friendly Christmas decorations

Christmas wrapping the green way

Dealing with non ‘green’ relatives

Preserving your plants whilst you are away…

Also we will be having a very special giveaway next week!

Stay tuned for more details!

Further to Chris’ article on living in small spaces, I came across the website of David Michael Bruno and his 100 Thing Challenge. In November 2008, David pledged to live for one year with only 100 personal items. All other items had to be thrown away/donated/gifted. If he buys one thing he has to remove another.

I’m an extremely poor de-clutterer like most crafters, so I am somewhat aghast at such a concept but also secretly envious. Crafting (mostly) with a recycled/upcycled ethos means I am constantly sourcing materials from charity shops, other crafters, haberdashery… So I challenged myself last year to craft for a month without buying any materials to add my craft. It was actually quite hard in some respects. In some ways I realised how I had been preferencing the urge to shop over the urge to create. Consumerism seems so much safer than creativity. No risk or making a mistake or being judged for your efforts. I had in the past surrounded myself with vintage and recycled goods as a testament to my aesthetic.

That said, we are moving house soon, so I find myself in a position of having to declutter. It’s another challenge! Argh!

I enjoyed follow the series on the Ready Made blog about going a week without various environmental harms (they’ve done plastic previously and this week attention was turned to processed foods.

The writer, Amy Palanjian plans a week without “anything that is made in a factory/comes in packaging” with some interesting results. Her account provides lovely photographs of each meal served, recipes and a interesting commentary on the experience. I was particularly interested in the issue of time as Palanjian spends a lot of time making initial meals (lessened with the use of leftovers on later days), with a considered response to a right wing newspaper article equating the lack of ‘women in the kitchen’ to women at work.

Palanjian also does quite a bit of detective work, even managing to find several sources of unprocessed chocolate! She also reveals several health benefits she has experienced as a consequence of the new way of eating. She also comments it also turned out to be a week of me deciding to recommit to supporting my local sustainable growers and saving money by cooking everything myself. Inspiration for anyone’s kitchen…

Cadbury removes palm oil

By Sally Glaetzer

The Mercury

August 20, 2009 12:01am

CADBURY has caved in to pressure from outraged chocolate fanatics and pledged to remove palm oil from its Tasmanian-made blocks.

The company had tried to persuade Cadbury lovers its new recipe, replacing some cocoa butter with palm oil, would make its chocolate smoother, The Mercury reports.

But consumers were not convinced and Cadbury has been forced to apologise and revert to the original recipe, after being flooded with complaints.

“We are removing palm oil and returning to a cocoa butter only recipe for Cadbury’s entire moulded block chocolate range, including our flagship Cadbury Dairy Milk brand and product lines such as Old Gold and Dream,” Cadbury Australia managing director Mark Callaghan said yesterday.

“We will soon commence the production of a cocoa butter only recipe at Claremont in the coming weeks.”

Cadbury changed the Dairy Milk recipe earlier this year, at the same time as it downsized its chocolate blocks and changed its packaging. Rather than a money-driven decision, the company insisted it was adding palm oil to make the chocolate softer to bite. The Mercury website was inundated with comments from once-loyal Cadbury fans who vowed never to buy it again.

“Why do Cadbury imagine we would prefer an adulterated, second-rate product?” one reader said.

Hobart chocolate lovers Maggie Abraham and Nina Middleton-Tubb yesterday hailed Cadbury’s backflip as a sign of people power.

“If people can change chocolate, they can change the world,” joked Miss Abraham. Miss Middleton-Tubb said: “It is good that they listened to the fact that people didn’t like it.”

Article from the Herald Sun

Amazing compared to 2004 when Free Range Eggs made up only 9 per cent of the eg market in Australia! Whilst it’s not a complete phase out of cage or barn laid eggs everywhere, it’s a start and certainly evidence that as consumers, we have a lot of power to dictate the world we want to live in by what we buy and what we consume.-Cate

I was excited to read about the town of Ghent in Belgium which started a ‘meat free’ day once a week.

On this day all restaurants serve veggie food only and local officials and residents choose a meat free day in recognition of the impact of meat production on the environment.

A great scheme that should be adopted everywhere!