Third Eye – Urnablog.com

“Fa Cai” in chinese is a hair-like black moss that is widely consumed during Chinese New Year.  Chinese people like it because of the name “Fa Cai” homonymous with ‘prosperity’. In Chinese sound of “Gong Hee Fat Cai” a greeting at Chinese New Year.   In 2007 Jan, the team from the Chinese University’s department of biochemistry said international research showed that this plant known as Nostoc or black moss in English – not only has no nutritional value but has also been found to contain a toxic amino acid that could affect the normal functions of nerve cells.  Eating black moss could lead to degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia.

To harvest the Fa Cai, a metal harrow with dense meshes is used to turn over the top soil. This tool has a nick name call (???) or “dig till the soil poor” because it removed all the surface plants and severely damage the top soil, which take at least few years to recover.

One quarter hectare of grassland is destroyed to harvest one tael (37.5 g) of Fa Cai. Fa Cai has a function to protect the land from desertification. Without the Fa Cai, the dry lands detiorate rapidly into desert. 

China still has 2.6 million square kilometers (1.05 million square miles) of desert, or nearly 2.5 times the country’s total farmland. More than a quarter of China’s total land area has been classified as desert and the degradation is affecting the lives of more than 400 million people, or 30 % of its population. 

Let’s join hands not to eat Fa Cai and spread the words to your relatives and friends.

You will heard the cry of the people around the coffee shop that flour price increase again in Malaysia, hence the price of roti canai, noodles, cake and bread, etc will follow to increase. The government, the politician only tell you the worldwide price of wheat increase, do they tell you that global crop production drops due to global warming, draught in Australia and Canada causing lower crop production ?

Australia, the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, may export as low as 15 million tons compare with estimated 22.5 million tons. Worldwide wheat production is estimated 2.17 billion bushels, compared to 21 billion bushels seven years ago.

Another reason for wheat crop reduce due to farmers in the US shift their fields from wheat to corn. The price of corn increase 53% due to demand for corn as feedstock and fuel grade ethanol. Will food production be able to cope with food consumption ?

Other than corn, US farmers also switch to Barley as Barley prices in Canada, price gained 41 percent in the past year on increased demand for animal feed and for brewing beer. Severe barley shortages faced in Germany as harvest in Germany diminished by one third due to the long rainless period last summer followed by heavy rains. 1

One day, the world food price is going to be gaining higher and higher than today that poor countries won’t be able to afford them.

Ref

1. http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t53259.html

It takes about a thousand tons of water to produce one ton of grain that we use to fed the cows, produce only 18 pound of meat.  50kg of grain, only produce 1 pound of meat.  This 50 kg of grain can actually feed at least 150 peoples a day.

Meat-eaters consume the equivalent of about 10,000 litres [2642 gallons] of water a day compared to the 1,000-2,000 litres used by people on vegetarian diets.

Another words if you are meat eater, you are about leveling 55 square feet of rain forest for a single meat meal or dumping 2,642 gallons of water down the drain a day.  

Ref :

1 :  John Robbins, The Food Revolution, Conari Press: Boston, 2001, p. 256.