It is Our Responsibility To Know What We Eat

We as consumers enjoy our freedom to spend our money as we see fit. We would like to believe that the market at large provides us with safe and healthy product and that they generally have our best interests at heart. We would also like to believe that an organization with the lofty title The Center For Consumer Freedom is looking after our best interest. Don’t you believe it.

There is truth in their title. They are interested in our ability to consume freely. However, they are not interested in consumer protectionism. Most of their funding comes from the restaurant, food and gaming industry, including Coca-Cola, Wendy’s and Outback Steakhouse. And also Monsanto, which might have something to do with why it thinks that groups against genetic engineering are “anti-choice nannies”.

Basically, restaurants want you to think that eating their crap without knowing what's in it is just awesome, and they know that using a nonprofit group as a front is more effective than getting a guy in a burger costume to crash Congress.

If we want to live a healthy lifestyle, it is up to us to research verifiable studies and to question the motives for ‘consumer groups’. They always have an agenda and at the top of that list is invariably money.

Don’t take the easy way out of research when it comes to your health by believing what this or that group says. Read different sources, use common sense based in solid scientific studies and always, always learn who is behind every claim.

Slow Food University

Think Slow Food is just a fad? Well, you may be wrong.

There’s a university just for you called the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

The nonprofit Slow Food organization founded the university in 2004. Located in Bra, a city in northern Italy, the University of Gastronomic Sciences offers undergraduate and masters degrees for students passionate about food. Their offerings:

• Three-year Undergraduate Degree – gastronomic Sciences
• Tow-year Graduate Degree – Gastronomy and Food Communications
• One-year Masters Degree – Food Culture and Communications
• One-year Masters Degree – Italian Gastronomy and Tourism

The university’s mission is to further the Slow Food movement’s core principles. From renewing farming traditions to preserving historically significant food products, the university focuses on training a new generation of concerned food consumers. Offering courses like ethnobotany, travel and food photography, and the history of agriculture, the university offers students a truly unique educational experience.

You can learn the history and origins of food, the place and the people from which it comes, and the impact it has on the planet. They cover topics like how food is grown, transported, processed, cooked, and eaten.

The university teaches experts in high quality food to become food ambassadors to the world. “Educators and innovators, editors and multimedia broadcasters, marketers of fine products, and managers of consortia, business, and tourism companies”—gastronomes apply what they learned at the university to transform the food world.

Sorry, no online courses.