The idea that organic food is healthier comes from a form of common sense – it seems closer to nature and further from big corporations – rather than any strong evidence. And so it appeals to those who mistrust big corporations and find the myth that natural is good appealing. The organic food industry has, like the alternative medicines industry, shied away from robust research into health benefits (and disbenefits).
Meanwhile many people choose organic food not because they believe it to be healthier, but because they associate it with other good things. It’s almost certainly true that organic food has prompted many people to question where their food comes from and how it’s produced. This is a very good thing: learning about factory farming tipped me over into giving up meat.
Food businesses can take a number of routes to being seen as ethical. Cadbury owned Green & Black’s ethical reputation is entirely based upon being organic (only one of their chocolate bars is Fairtrade). Meanwhile you’ll struggle to find a reference to organic food in the Co-operative’s discussion of food ethics, but all of their own brand chocolate is Fairtrade.
Chocolate is a luxury good and it’s more important to me that those who produce are paid fairly than that they farm organically. But Fairtrade will rarely be the cheapest route to being seeing as ethical; wages are a major cost to any business, even one that pays a pittance. Green & Black’s may feel that being organic has earned them so many ethical brownie points they need do no more.
The over use of pesticides and fertilisers, organic’s primary concern, is an important issue especially in developing countries and the Soil Association has widened its brief to include animal welfare. However, over emphasis on organic food still retards our progress toward sustainable farming methods that will feed the whole world (not just the middle classes resident in the wealthy West) and the reduction of food miles.
It’s probably a little juvenile to make too much of David Cameron’s ‘too many Twits might make a twat,’ excuse for not using Twitter, but hey.
What makes it an interesting admission, is that Cameron is saying Twittering wouldn’t allow him enough time to think and without the time to think he’d most likely come across as a twat (as if!). He then goes on to demonstrate by swearing again: ‘The public are rightly, I think, pissed off – sorry, I can’t say that in the morning.’
I bet that behind closed doors that David Cameron is a terribly foulmouthed so-and-so. Shocking.
Today is a national holiday in Gambia: Freedom Day. It marks the military coup that brought President Yahya Jammeh to power.
In a rather repetitious editorial Gambia’s Daily Observer tells Gambians this celebration is ‘a moral obligation’ and perhaps understantably chooses to concentrate on President Jammeh’s achievements. Understandably, because in July 2006 one of its journalists, Ebrima B. Manneh, was arrested at the newspapers’ offices. He hasn’t been since since. It appears his mistake was to attempt to re-publish a BBC article relating to an attempted coup in March that year that was critical of President Jammeh.
Many other Gambian journalists will spend Freedom Day in prison. Since 1994, at least thirty have been forced to leave the country, many have experienced human rights abuses including unlawful arrest and detention, torture, and unlawful killing.
As a proper Chorltonian, I obviously buy my bread from Barbakan, where I find a large granary costs about the same as the Hovis equivalent sold across the road in Tesco Express. I admit to being a little smug about that; not everybody has such a fine local baker on their doorstep.
But when the nation’s health professionals are working so hard to get us to eat a little healthier, it’s disappointing to learn from this ad that Britain’s favourite baker, presumably by sales, is Warburtons. I’ve always associated Warburtons with the type of bread that should never be toasted, because when you do the butter simply melts to a puddle and then runs off as it were coated with something unpleasant.
To be fair, this problem may be confined to Warburtons white bread. Nevertheless, inspecting labels (e.g. wholemeal Hovis Vs wholemeal Warburtons) I’ve found that equivalent Hovis products (which, unlike Warburtons, claim to be free of artificial colours and preservatives) tend to have a significantly higher wheatgerm or wheatgrain content. Yet Warburtons is often a little more expensive, as if it were a premium brand.
It’s a great shame that so many people choose crap bread when healthier alternatives are so freely available and are often cheaper.
When I wrote about the Salford Star a couple of years ago, I got some odd comments. The BBC’s move north was about to be confirmed, with the Salford Star the closest thing to opposition.
In a nutshell, editor Stephen Kingston reckoned any new jobs would go to outsiders. The city’s regeneration had already forced long time Salfordians out of the area by replacing their homes with new builds they couldn’t afford and the BBC would further displace this indigenous population.
Getting behind Kingston two years ago was Cath (earning less than £11k pa), who reckoned Irlams o’th’ Height to Salford Quays would be an impossible commute (it turns out to be 27 minutes by public transport). Cath’s sneering attitude to aspiration seems to sum up what is wrong with the Salford Star. There is little doubt that it connects to Salfordians, but its message is deeply conservative. It is deeply cynical of change, wants the old industrial jobs back – within easy walking distance – and tells its readers that the world owes them something. It fails to encourage Salfordians to adapt and prosper.
All of which makes the Salford Star’s sneering at Carlos Acosta both terribly predictable and terribly depressing.
With his scally background – Cuban truck driver’s son (youngest of eleven) who skipped school and dreamt of being a footballer – Acosta should be the perfect candidate to inspire Salford’s youth. That Salford can attract the world’s greatest dancer (albeit on Manchester’s coat tails) should be a source of pride. Events like this put a place on the map and inspire outsiders to invest.
And Salford needs to inspire investors. At the moment it is, claims one influential voice, ‘ONE SHOCKING CITY’.
My only previous experience of Ballet was three years ago when I saw the Nutcracker at Manchester Opera House. That was okay, but I wouldn’t have been too sorry if ballet turned out to be a once in a lifetime experience. It didn’t touch me.
Yet I was very keen to catch Carlos Acosta at the Lowry for the Manchester International Festival. He is the Cuban truck driver’s son – youngest of eleven – who skipped school and dreamt of being a footballer, but went on to become the greatest dancer of his generation.
More knowledgeable reviewers have pointed to a lack of spectacle, but from where I was sitting Acosta’s combination of strength and grace was plenty spectacular.
The four dances flew by, each short piece complementing the other. This was dance as mating ritual, with the narcissism of each performance playing to the voyeurism of the audience.
Stopping off for a loaf from Barbakan, it was good to see that what may be the UK’s best baker has come to terms with living opposite a Tesco Express, despite working so hard to keep the nations’ biggest grocer out of Chorlton.
The idea that this small garage forecourt store would make Chorlton less interesting was always very silly. We already have larger branches of The Co-op, Somerfield (shortly to become another Co-op), Cool Trader, Quality Save and, of course, Morrison’s. It’s hard to imagine anyone with a taste for good quality bread giving up on Barbakan because Tesco have Warburton’s on offer across the road.
‘Ahhh! But,’ some eagle-eyed readers may point out. ‘Barbakan are only buying fuel.’
Perhaps, but fuel from Esso who, say Greenpeace, have ‘done more than any other company to stop the world from tackling climate change.’ Surely that’s a greater evil.
We’ve all left the cinema thinking a film was good, okay, rubbish, whatever, but rarely get around to discussing what makes a film good or bad, which is why I’ve always enjoyed studying film at Cornerhouse.
Cornerhouse courses are a chance to discuss the theory of film and so it could be argued that an eight week Cinematography course was a little out place, because while we attempted to focus on the how film photography has evolved and the effect a cinematographer was aiming through the choice of a particular lens, say, it did require a certain amount of technical knowledge.
In Maggie Hoffgen we had one of Cornerhouse’s best course leaders. She makes for an excellent facilitator and always ensures a high level of debate and idea generation. Unfortunately, she is also one of those technophobes who makes the mistake of thinking an inability to work a DVD player is somehow endearing. This wouldn’t be so bad if the support staff could do this for her, but they are completely useless.
Things were to come to head on the last night with an attempt to show some clips of films made in Cinemascope. It’s not at all complicated. A Cinemascope image is about two-and-third times wider than it is high. Our clips appeared to be projected at Academy format, only one-and-a-third times wider than they were high. It all became a little embarrassing when Maggie asked how we felt the use of Cinemascope affected the film and someone asked if she could project it in that format: she and her assistant appeared stumped. While we laughed about it in the bar, Cornerhouse really should make an effort to get this right.
Cornerhouse courses are best when focussed on a particular film genre – like the excellent Shades of Euro Noir – or the film of a particular nation or era. Anything vaguely technical should be avoided.
Bizarrely an Allied London security guard tried to stop me taking this photo of Quay House, over several floors of which Adam Curtis and Felix Barrett have installed their American nightmare with a Daman Albarn soundtrack.
‘Believe it or not this square is private property,’ he said. ‘And they don’t want anyone taking photographs.’
Anyway. You enter It Felt Like a Kiss, a two-and-a-quarter hour experience, as part of a group of eight, gingerly stumbling through total darkness. You leave ‘as you always wanted to be… a free individual, alone in the dark,’ but now you are running. And you will run. They can make you do anything they want you to do.
Inspired by Little Eva’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend, The Crystals sang ‘He hit me, and it felt like a kiss,’ in 1962. For Adam Curtis and Felix Barrett, the song has come to sum up the world’s relationship with the USA since that country began to flex its superpower muscles.
This adventure begins in a lovingly recreated late 1950s American living space. It should be comforting, but already a certain paranoia is creeping in. You have entered the world of Sidney Gottlieb, LSD user and CIA chief scientist who hoped his work would enable America to control the world with mind altering drugs. He may have failed to assassinate Fidel Castro, but his colleague Frank Wisner, who headed up clandestine operations (and was to suffer a total mental collapse), was effective in overthrowing governments, some democratically elected, and replacing them with brutal dictatorships.
Midway through this experience you find yourself in a film club watching a 35 minute chronology of America’s crimes against the world that loves it, after which the pace changes. You’re in a kind of operant conditioning chamber inspired by the work and ideology of psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Here you will do what you want and emerge as they want you to be.
It Felt Like a Kiss shows that America’s most idealistic, believing they were forces for absolute good in a war on evil, turned the dream to nightmare. Unaware of their own vulnerable psychologies they placed too much faith in the untested science that was to corrupt and destroy them. Like so many others, they believed their own evil acts were justified as they were in support of a much greater good.
Moreover, the likes of Gottlieb and Wisner inhabited a secret world – America’s sub-conscious – and so ordinary Americans could continue to believe in the dream. The rest of the world would retain its unrequited love of everything American no matter how badly that country’s foreign policy hurt them.
But how far can we trust Curtis and Barrett?
Explanatory notes handed out as we leave caricature the Black Panthers as cocaine addicted rapists, at onetime intent on ‘seizing power in America through violence,’ but now committed Reaganite Republicans. Those of us fortunate enough to catch Emory Douglas in Manchester a few months ago, know there is another truth. Perhaps the creators of It Felt Like a Kiss are just as capable of manipulation in support of some hidden agenda as those they seek to expose. Perhaps too cynical for their own good, they are only able to condemn absolutely and so have come to believe in their own absolute goodness. [It Felt Like a Kiss is a Manchester International Festival commission and runs until 19 July 2009.]
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Stopping off for a loaf from 
