Posts filed under ‘food’
Sustainability and Environment
In many ways, ‘sustainability’ is the buzz word for a new millennium. As finite resources run low, levels of production and consumption increase. And while trends show that we are making the effort to live greener lives, the problem of pollution has not gone away, with the UK dumping more household waste into landfill than any other EU country. This books defines sustainability, outlines sustainability challenges and explores some possible solutions.
The information in this book comes from a wide range of sources and includes government reports and statistics, newspaper reports, features, magazine articles and surveys, literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
You can read more about this book on the publisher’s website; you can buy it there, or on Amazon.
Editor: Cobi Smith and Lisa Firth
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
ISBN: 978 1 86168 419 6
Published: January 2008
The Cloning Debate
What is cloning? Is it ethical? What impact could it have on society? Recent advances in science have provoked debate about where cloning will take us. This book considers the social and ethical considerations of cloning, including whether cloning humans is acceptable, whether people are willing to eat cloned food and whether we should take advantage of medical therapies associated with cloning.
The information in this book comes from a wide range of sources including government reports and statistics, newspaper features, magazine articles, surveys and literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
You can read more about this book on the publisher’s website; you can buy it there, or on Amazon.
Editors: Lisa Firth and Cobi Smith
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
ISBN: 978 1 86168 410 3
Published: September 2007
Vegetarian and Vegan Diets
Increasingly, people are adopting alternative diets to improve their health or address ethical concerns. Vegetarianism and veganism are diet choices that attract debate, not only about their implications for health, but also about the associated ethical arguments. Vegetarian and Vegan Diets looks at the current debate on the pros and cons of these elimination diets and gives an overview of the related animal welfare issues.
The information in this book comes from a wide range of sources including government reports and statistics, newspaper features, magazine articles, surveys and literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
You can read more about this book on the publisher’s website; you can buy it there, or on Amazon.
Editors: Lisa Firth and Cobi Smith
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
ISBN: 978 1 86168 406 6
Published: September 2007
Problem drinking
People drink alcohol for various reasons – socially, to relax or sometimes just to get through the day. Problem Drinking explores the issues around alcohol dependency and abuse and considers their implications for health and society.
The information comes from a range of sources including government reports and statistics, newspaper reports, features, magazine articles, surveys, and literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
You can read more about this book on the publisher’s website; you can buy it there, or on Amazon.
Editors: Lisa Firth and Cobi Smith
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
Price: £6.95
Cover: Paperback
ISBN: 978 1 86168 409 7
Published: September 2007
You decide what science is funded
If you could choose what kind of scientific research was funded, do you think you would choose the same as what’s funded now?
The Institute of Food Research investigated this question with a competition at Norwich arts venue the Garage, on the 13th of June. The public were invited to an event called ‘you decide what science is funded’, where four scientists pitched their research proposals to a broad audience, who voted on which should get £500,000 funding.
The four research proposals asked: how do chicken eggs get infected with salmonella; how does eating broccoli reduce the risk of cancer; could eating good bacteria reduce allergic reactions; and does eating burnt meat increase the risk of colon cancer?
PhD student Jeff Temblay easily won the competition with his proposal to investigate the impact of good bacteria on allergies.
“As an early stage researcher and someone who had never wrote a grant research proposal before, I didn’t think I’d have much of a chance,” Jeff said.
Despite his modesty going into the competition Jeff had good reason to be confident, because in fact his research had already been funded and the evening’s competition was a hoax, designed to investigate public engagement with science.
Dr Dee Rawsthorne, the Norwich BioScience Institutes’ Outreach Coordinator, was behind the event, which was a pilot study for further research into public understanding of how science is funded.
“It’s given me faith that the public really do understand – even if they don’t understand the technicalities of DNA repair and how cancers work, they do understand the basic ethics behind the way we do scientific research,” she said.
Ethical concerns were raised in response to the fake research presentation by Dr Liz Lund, who proposed a colon cancer research study that involved making healthy volunteers eat lots of burnt meat and little fish or fibre. The volunteers would then have colon biopsies taken for study.
Liz’s ‘red herring’ proposal was the only one that got no votes.
“I think I was relieved, it’s very nice that the audience recognised it was false,” she said.
Read this story on the i10 website.
