In the spirit of festive cheer, and acknowledging it is the best time of year for repeats, Keepfakingit has decided to look back over some of the less serious moments of the past couple of years on our website. Here’s a guaranteed highlight, the Irish Pork Crisis episode of Trash Blanc TV. We still can’t believe we were kicked out of the Ritz when filming this.

This reminder was inspired by @parisreview. An important lesson in life.

Back to the Supply Chain Gang. I reread this Carbon Trust mini-white paper (Carbon footprints in the supply chain) this morning with a view to picking out the Open possibilities, as the term relates to supply chains.

Rather than a polluter pays approach the paper advocates an holistic view on the entire supply chain for two test cases, the Trinity Mirror produced Daily Mirror and three products Walkers Crisps produces. Let’s get some muck behind our ears and look at the spuds.

Walkers was encouraged to “own” the entire supply chain from start to finish. Broken into three stages this chain incorporates:

• Raw material
• Distribution, manufacturing and retailing steps
• Product use and disposal

Crucially using this methodology Walkers is to take responsibility for the carbon in parts of the supply chain that it traditionally doesn’t own, e.g. the production of the actual potatoes.

So:

For each of the products, the full product life-cycle was analyzed, considering emissions from fuel use in raw material production and distribution through manufacturing and product distribution to disposal and recycling…
Suppliers and other supply chain partners were engaged to provide energy data…
The data gathered was used to build a mass balance map of the flows of materials and energy through the supply chain and to build a footprint of the life-cycle emissions for each product. These results were then used to identify opportunities to reduce emissions by changing process flows and by changing the way the supply chain is structured.

The report goes on to list lots of expected insights. In the case of Walkers it presents this rather interesting finding:

A key opportunity relates to the water content of the potatoes. The overall supply chain can save up to 9,200 tonnes of CO2 and £1.2m per annum by changing the way that potatoes are traded; Walkers can reduce the emissions from the potato frying stage by up to 10%.
…By changing the way potatoes are purchased, savings can be made by both parties.

Here’s how:

The Problem for Farmers

• Spuds purchased by weight
• Spuds are stored in artificially humidified warehousing
• This increases water content (thus their weight and saleprice)
• Humidifiers use lots of energy. Energy = CO2

The Problem for Walkers

• Spuds are fried to drive off moisture once sliced
• Extra moisture in spuds increases frying time. Ergo more CO2 used in cooking

You’re seeing where this is going right.

The Solution

• Price spuds by water content. Reward farmers for extra dry spuds
• No commercial incentive for humidifying spuds means < CO2
• < water means < frying means < CO2 = WINWIN

Okay, so that’s a nice little standalone study. Join up the supply chains and look for efficiencies. Easy to do in this case, not so easy once we get exponentially bigger supply chains.
Imagine the pack of salt + vinegar crisps is part of a ready meal. The ready meal is served on a plane. And the flight is part of a package holiday to Lanzarote. How we begin to put all that together so that Thomas Cook can add everything together to find efficiencies. Something it probably hasn’t even countenanced doing yet.

We open up the chain. We expose the information to whoever can use it, or add to it. What next? Can we build a reward economy around creating new efficiencies? Can we introduce a self-learning algorithm to capture these efficiencies and migrate them to similar systems/chains? From a software engineering perspective the answer is undoubtedly yes. How about social engineering?

It strikes me that if some of this were to be done we’d be faced with a problem analogous to those Wikipedia and Flickr have answered so successfully. In Wikipedia’s case it’s giving ownership and trust to its team of non-paid admins, without which it couldn’t function. In Flickr’s case it’s allowing you, I or anybody add descriptive tags, metadata, to each and every photo.

So at last a planet saving use for the social surplus. But how do we engage. Why would a member of Clay Shirky’s gin-soaked masses want to “tag” an Open Supply Chain rather than edit a Wikipedia article or sort a Flicker archive? Figure that one out and we may have a business model here. So answers on a (creative commons attributed) postcard please.

More to come…

Image: some rights reserved by Dom Dada

Nature magazine continued their Darwin season of talks in London tonight with a panel discussion entitled What Price Biodiverstity?.

The top caliber speakers were Professor James Lovelock, independent scientist, author of “Revenge of Gaia”. Michael Meacher, MP (Labour) & former Minister of State for the Environment and Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University. Not a joker amongst them. I’d also add the the quality of questioning from the floor was second to none, quite refreshing at these sorts of things where one can usually expect some variety of rogue element to attempt a hijacking of proceedings.

I only found out only this morning about the talk via @zzgavin on Twitter, and have time but for some brief notes here before getting on with the rest of my evening. The entire discussion took place in the context of one larger and one (debatable) less significant event. Climate change and the recession. But doesn’t (shouldn’t?) every conversation right now take place in that light.

So in no particular order:

Tiskell on the state of the biodiversity conversation: Talking about climate change is [relatively] easy, about biodiversity is much harder. We don’t even have the value system to measure it and the common man on the street simply can’t understand it. They won’t understand what we are losing until there is a cataclismic biodiversity event.

There was general agreement that the global conversation on protecting biodiversity was at least five years behind that of climate change. An example of this, in the UK we have the Stern Report on Climate Change and even a Climate Change Office. We have nothing similar to start combating the threat to biodiversity.

Meacher on our current value systems: These current systems have led to a belief that “only nature that can be made profitable should be preserved”. That’s the dangerous result of putting economic value on biodiversity

Lovelock on carbon trading schemes: Totally disastrous. As a result of carbon trading, less efficient coal stations in east Germany are producing MORE co2. These permits have been either given away of sold too cheap. Why didn’t we charge polluters, not give them credits. Carrots instead of sticks.

Tickell on industry: [they] wants to do the right thing and they will if they are given clear limits in which to operate in. Heads of industry aren’t oblivious, they know there are serious problems in the world but they want to know where they stand. [Political] leadership has to show the way here and TRUST that they can do it and we wasn’t this change.

Tickell on biodiversity in agriculture: Agriculture shouldn’t be a market activity. The market is set up to measure short term gain. It does that but does not record the long term damage industrial agriculture in particular does to land resource. Agreculture should be a community activity, enriching all around it.

Meacher on the subject of biodiversity value: even if we can come up with a bio-diversity index instead of GDP to give us a quantitive measurement of human activity, how do we make this measurement operative. How do we make companies change their business plans to fit this. How do we tie it into government budgets.

He mentioned in fact a sustainability index he had presided over in the Department of the Environment that never got anywhere because nobody had any . Meacher verged between accute peceimism and optimism at times, which struck me as sounding odd coming from a career politician. He was convincing when explaining his belief that we are now on the brink of a new world economic, environmental and cultural order.

Lovelock being the oldest and at times sounding the wisest got to round off the evening. He did so clearly, directly and without hesitation when asked if it were possible for a biodiverse Earth to survive.

Time, he said, is the biggest barrier to halting biodiversity decline and climate change. We are so far down the path that the goals of 2040 and 2050 that our institutions have set will be far too little too late.

I saw this van in a motorway lay-by last weekend -Have whatever pastry you like, so long as it’s from the back of our mega-truck.

The latest episode of TrashBlanc TV is up on TrashBlanc.com covering the current salt crisis in Britain. Some shocking findings.

As you’ll see if you take a look over on TrashBlanc.com right now I was up early this morning visiting what I believe is London’s only annual Potato Fair. I was with four longtime patrons of the event who provided plenty of advice, but the most important piece was “get there early”. They weren’t wrong, by 10.30am I was in a bustling school féte scene straight out of the Archers.

I could write for hours about the great varieties on display, from the bog standard Golden Wonder to the brilliantly named Skerry Blue and my own personal favourite the Sharpe’s Express, but it was the sheer fact that this was taking place in the middle of London that impressed me most. George Monbiot wrote a lighthearted piece recently about his love forapple varieties. Well and good I thought at the time. But attending something like the Potato Fair and seeing the variety of potatoes alone we have in our soil is simply amazing. And it’s also terribly depressing. 95% of these varieties will never hit the shops. Tesco, Lidl and Aldi have no interest in small lots with smaller margins and the vast majority of the population don’t know what they’re missing. Shame.

Here are some photos from my Flickr account.

As you can see the TrashBlanc team are back in action. Likewise big international food crises have kicked navel gazing Irish finance reporters off the front pages of Ireland’s finest journals. It may be fun and games in the TB kitchen but right now a half billion Euro pork industry is going down the shithole in Ireland. And the industry in question has only itself to blame.

The irishtimes.com has a good chronology of events here.

The basic problem: bad chemicals that have found their way into some feed that has come through an agri/bio recycler. The feed of course is centralized and has distributed the contaminated contents to farms throughout Ireland. Any good journalist would ask what else is in the feed? What is being recycled? But maybe the public isn’t quite ready to hear how their sausages are bred and fed right now. Though one can only ask if not now, then when?

It’s time the entire European Union started questioning a system that can turn one incident at one feed/recycling/rendering plant into a continent wide hunt for contaminated Irish Pork.

When one link in the production chain can effect every other downstream link in an entire industry, there’s deep deep problems.

Even if we ignore the gross environmental and sustainability issues at play here, there’s a simple economic argument. Farmers and agri-business throughout the EU and the US are massively subsidized through grants, tax breaks and artificially inflated food prices. This subsidization is directly responsible for the upkeep of agricultural poverty cycles in developing countries. And even with all that in play our farmers have still managed to waste those grants on a system that has utterly failed.

The economies of scale that big-farming claim necessitate centralized feeding and distribution have been been proved utterly false once again. The big supermarkets, Tesco, Carrefour and Asda/Walmart are equally guilty. But it’s our finance and agriculture ministers who we elect us to save us from ourselves and ourthirst for low prices. It’s time they started doing just that.

We covered the appalling Irish Pork Crises on TrashBlanc.com TV on Sunday. Here’s the video and the link.

All your Broc are belong to us

What if your food was made by tiny little people with peasant hats and industrial aprons. Who were forced to work 18 hour days in horrible environments. Would your food be as tasty?

Thanks to Inhabitant.com for the link to Matthew Carden’s 350degrees.com. Check it out.

Midnight on Saturday night and TrashBlanc needed sustenance before hitting GaryVee’s ridiculous wine party. Nowhere better than Torchy’s Tacos. A local mini-chain by all accounts but with more than a dollop of character.

One of the great things about the food in and around SXSW is that it’s traded in US dollars, and when you earn GB pounds that means cheap eats. But Torchy’s sets a new standard in terms of cost:tastiness ratio. TrashBlanc went with the fried avacado on a corn taco. In retrospect we should have had two, this was pretty special.

It took TrashBlanc.com 24 hours in Austin to get our first proper sit-down meal. It was worth it. A hop skip and a quick jump under I-35 from the Austin Convention centre had us at Progress. Nothing super fancy, but some interesting taste marriages going on. Asian/southern/organic/bicycle mix. And it worked. TB went for the El Sol Rojo; Brown rice, black beans, green chile hummus, roasted corn onions guac and carrots. $5.99 and worth every penny.
A great escape from the fried cheese flavours of 6th Street.