--- On Thu, 12/25/08, Pegi Ficken <[email protected]> wrote:
#yiv2094951935 #yiv1384092099 #yiv611281138 .hmmessage P
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Doing without refrigeration would be an excellent means of effecting population
control. Spoiled food is a superb disease vector.
Really? If so why has the world's population, concentrated primarily in the
Third World where refridgeration is practically non-existent, increase by 1.5
billion people since 1990? In the Third World country that I am most
intimately familiar with, Viet Nam, population has grown by another 16 million
residents in the past 15 years, an increase of 24%.
The fact is that in the Third World residents rely on many low-tech, non-energy
intensive practices to protect themselves from food poisoning that we here in
the "advanced" United States have forgotten about or don't even know about.
Moreover thanks to their constant exposure to many pathogens, and our constant
exposure to innoculations, antiseptics and antibiotics, their digestive systems
appear to be far more robust than ours when it comes to fighting disease.
That's why I have to drink my beer and soda warm while my friends and relatives
get to drink theirs with ice, and why we can't even brush our teeth with tap
water there, and why we have to carry around environmentally damaging bottled
water everywhere we go.
"What is the energy comparison for aseptic milk in single-serve packages versus
refrigeration?"
I never saw any single-serve aseptic packaging on my journeys in the Third
World. That's another American aberration.
The smallest aseptic packaging I encountered was the one-liter box. Also,
because milk is not a regular part of traditional diets after the age of 2 or 3
in Viet Nam, the milk sold in aseptic packaging also represented a very tiny
component of any store stock I saw. Generally it was limited to few boxes for
sale to westerners.
Fruit juices, sodas and beer are not refridgerated. People generally drink
them warm or sometimes with ice in the glass.
I agree with all the concerns raised regarding the environmental implications
of aseptic packaging and the questions regarding its potential to be recycled.
But given the enormous amount of energy that is consumed by refridgeration in
this country, from the factory, to the shipping, to the supermarket shelf, to
the home refridgerator, I would not be so fast to dismiss the idea that Aseptic
may be the better router in terms of energy efficiency and environmental costs.
Over the past two decades we have developed a substantial infrastructure for
recycling in this country that with tweaking may be able to accommodate aseptic
containers.
George Frantz
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