Little over a week after my first visit to City University in London, my head is full of impressions and I am still trying to gather my thoughts. The two days I spent at City and the meetings I had with my professors were in a way like a dream, with all the issues and ideas that are on the agenda right now in the areas of food and nutrition policy, and with everything that they are involved in from discussions with the private sector to assignments for the international community and the upcoming Rio +20. (I have to admit that my head was spinning already after my first meeting.) All the thoughts I’ve had for the past years about our future challenges related to food with an increasing population, malnutrition and obesity, environmental degradation and climate change, and competition for land, were confirmed in these two days. My professors shared ideas, articles, and contacts at other universities around Europe, in order for me develop some of my own ideas into further research. It is all so exciting and yet I feel completely overwhelmed! I have spent this first part of the weekend trying to structure all my thoughts and narrowing down my dissertation topic, which will be the first step into my area of real expertise. Having such great support feels fantastic! Most inspiring was, however, the enthusiasm that I found in the department. I love meeting people who truly burn for what they do!!

City University’s small campus in London

While I am well aware that the mishandling of food and substandard sanitary conditions of especially meat and water cause hundreds of thousands of deaths among especially small children around the world, I am not particularly picky when it comes to hygene in the preparation of food. I have travelled way too much and eaten too much food directly from nature to not be used to insects in fruits or un-dished cookware in roadside servings. Thus, when the Macedonian Beekeepers’ Association had arranged a three day market in Skopje to promote their products, I didn’t hesitate to pick up some delicious locally, small-scale produced honey. I saw of course that the jars were not labelled properly and unlikely vacuum sealed, but it I didn’t think it really mattered. After all, honey is supposedly the one product in nature that doesn’t spoil. It was also a nice occasion to meet producers and learn a little more about this delicate product. One of the jars that I bought was honey with royal jelly (what the selected queen bee is fed to develop), which according to the vendors at the market is good for our health, strength, and general well-being. As the autumn cold hit me today (and no, it couldn’t have been more untimely), I decided to test how effective the royal jelly honey really is. But when I opened the jar (which was a recycled jar I might add), it turned out that it was broken under the lid and since glass is the one thing that I really don’t want to ingest, I threw it away. So I guess packaging standards do serve their purpose sometimes….

I bought a jar from this stand. The daughter was an excellent interpreter when I chatted with her and her mom, and so when I wanted to take a picture of them, the father asked if I wanted a picture of the three of us instead, which of course I wanted. 

I am now back in DC and as always with the nice jetlag. Nice because I wake up really early in the morning and get an early start of the day. This morning, I woke up before five and so I crawled up under a blanket in my sofa with a cup of coffee and watched the morning news. Nothing new to report of course, but they ran this short campaign clip on CNN against the proposed budget cuts for food safety institutions, and I thought was kind of funny. The sad thing is that even without these budget cuts, there are severe gaps in the U.S. food safety system and in part because of this, I have almost completely stopped eating non-organic meat since I moved here. But of course, these cuts would not exactly make things better!

When A was in New York a few weeks ago, he bought me wonderful coffee from the Puerto Rico Importing Company in East Village, and by accident, I passed by it last Sunday. (Or rather, it is also Jenny’s favorite coffee place so she brought me there.) According to their website, the Company has been in business since 1907 and carries both organic, fair trade, and shade grown coffee. They also have tea, but I haven’t tried it. But if you are ever in NY, do look out for this store!

Jenny with an espresso outside the store and the house blend that A gave me.

Kristin, the Swedish JPO that came after me when I left Chisinau, is here in DC for a few weeks and she we kind enough to bring a real Moldovan classic: the chocolate Meteorit from the chocolate company Bucuria. The chocolate box was a nice surprise in itself, but an even nicer surprise was the production and expiration dates on the box: Jan 27, 2011 and May 27, 2011. When was the last time you had chocolates that lasted for only four months? Or even with an expiration date in the same year as the chocolate was produced?

I just read in Time Magazine that 89.7% of Americans say that they keep a healthy diet, while almost two thirds of the population here is overweight or obese. It makes me wonder if people even know what a healthy diet is these days? Perhaps those home economics classes weren’t that bad after all….