fábulas sustentáveis

If it is need to find arguments why we should eat less meat, here there are two good ones: Firstly, current rates of meat consumption in wealthy countries – particularly red meat – are unsustainable under any circumstances, and must be reduced due to the burgeoning health and environmental impacts.  Secondly, industrial feedlot production yields too many negative outcomes on too many fronts to be justifiable. These systems require large quantities of imported feed crops, thereby displacing potential food production: an area the size of France is required for the EU to import its feed requirements. Meanwhile, they depend on extensive use of antibiotics, entail major GHG emissions (both in the production area and in the shipping of inputs and outputs to far-off locations), cause localized environmental degradation due to the huge waste they produce, and often subject animals to stressful and inhumane conditions. Industrial feedlots cannot conceivably be part of the sustainable fo...

I'm amazed how the speech in the first person can make the message so much easier to understand and to encourage other people to do the same. When I talk about my work during the PhD, we often end up talking about recipes. It seems silly to go from a scientific thesis, with so much data and reading put on, to such an ordinarily everydays life issue :) Buy, cook and eat...or decide and plan before each step. I think about this issue also because I usually tend to personalize the examples that I give, which can only be seen as my point of view, of course, and my generalizing conception of reality. But the point is: it makes the theory turn to real. Bea Johnson has this approach as "do it sustainable by yourself" in her life mode. Being part of an experiment about changing consumption habits is better than any graphic or numbers that one can use. She can explains everything very clear and with passion and it is an easier way to spread the message because it is shown...

...a rotina embacia-nos, torna-nos indefinidos, desfocados, fantasmas, máquinas, ao mesmo tempo que nos solidifica em estátuas de sal. A consciência da morte é o que nos desperta dessa morte em que vivemos, que nos diz o que deveríamos ter feito, o que deixámos de fazer, a morte é um despertador, um despetador que nos acorda para a inevitabilidade dos nossos erros. Morreremos em breve, temos de agir, de resistir. Não desistiremos. A solução seria termos todos uma caveira na mesinha-de-cabeceira, como fazem os monges cartuxos, para nos servir de despertador e todos os dias sabermos que temos de acordar, não para viver a rotina fatal do quotidiano, mas a vida apaixonada de alguém que ainda sabe que existem nuvens, céu e beijos. ... Porque viver não tem nada a ver com isso que as pessoas fazem todos os dias, viver é precisamente o oposto, é aquilo que não fazemos todos os dias. in Flores, Afonso Cruz

About 40% of the cereals and legume grains produced every year are used to feed farm animals. Many commentators argue that this is highly resource inefficient as around 70% of the human edible energy produced is lost in this process due to metabolic losses in the animals (Papargyropoulou et al., 2014).  For example, typically 4 kg of cereals and legumes is needed to produce one kg of edible poultry meat (Röös et al., 2014), although the quantity varies by system.  By contrast raising livestock on by-products that humans can’t or don’t want to eat or waste is often considered to be a resource efficient way of producing protein for human consumption, as is raising livestock on biomass from grasslands unsuitable for the production of human edible foods e.g. natural or semi-natural pastures or other marginal grasslands.  This approach of letting the ecological resource capacity be the constraining factor for livestock production, i.e. to restrict livestock production...

Insect oil is a possible new source of the healthy omega-3 fatty acid.  Insects make fatty acids by nature and can live on organic waste.  A team of researchers examines which insects can best be used for oil and what their optimal diet should be. The insects seem to be the next food generation: one can grow them at home, feed them with leftovers, conserve them with few resources and, use them as food to substitute animal protein or, as it seems now, also omega-3 fatty acid found in fish. Great! We just need to start to like to eat them...

A paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications , show the annual catches between 1950 and 2010 were much bigger than thought, but that the decline after the peak year of 1996 was much faster than official figures: Fisheries data assembled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that global marine fisheries catches increased to 86 million tonnes in 1996, then slightly declined.  Here, using a decade-long multinational ‘catch reconstruction’ project covering the Exclusive Economic Zones of the world’s maritime countries and the High Seas from 1950 to 2010, and accounting for all fisheries, we identify catch trajectories differing considerably from the national data submitted to the FAO.  We suggest that catch actually peaked at 130 million tonnes, and has been declining much more strongly since.  This decline in reconstructed catches reflects declines in industrial catches and to a smaller extent declining discards, despite industrial fi...

Here we are in 2016. There is no doubt so I must accept and look back. In 2015 I published the last paper from the PhD thesis, settle down in Lisbon in a new home near by the sea, swam in the other side of the Atlantic; dived in a tropical reef for the first time and saw turtles and a shark (whatever...I still struggle to look cool underwater); went hiking a few days with friends in Gerês; enjoyed the summer in Portugal with friends (I missed the Portuguese late hot summer evenings!); I was offered the best bike I ever had (and for the first time in first hand); I went to Norway and dived in clear water between laminaria, monkfish, scallops and vikings (tough people that are afraid of eating proper fish); work was under control (maybe too much for my expectations); felt again at home in Göteborg (I wish I could live in two places at the same time); running and practice yoga was almost a routine (it is always good to have space to improve :D); had tried freediving; had spent as mu...