Food Science at Jaco Hotel

The team at the Jaco hotel were talking about google searches and why some two word combinations would be searched more frequently in one order than another. We agreed that there would be examples of two word pairs where the two possible orderings of the words implied very different intents by the searcher. But we could not think of an example.

The Jaco hotel blogger feels compelled to warn you, there is rambling ahead.

Just now though I was thinking about the movie informant, and how they didn't dwell on the fact that a big part of the food chain occurs with poorly understood bacteria in a giant vat converting corn mush into isolated lysine and byproducts. I am thankful I live in Costa Rica and eat frequently at my favorite Jaco hotel restaurant, Eclipse at DoceLunas where they do not have products with isolated lysine created by mysterious bacteria.

Anyway, food science - hmm. Well food science should be, and increasingly is, a criticial look at our production and consumption choices and how they influence not only our health and our economy, but our society. As near as I can tell, food science as studied and practiced today is mostly an amazing reductive processing of two or three crops into everything else. Truly amazing feats of science in the name of feeding the world, once called the "green revolution" should, in this bloggers opinion, while they are to be lauded for their intent and rigor, should be examined with a critical eye.

"Science food," to get back to the hypothetical google search, should not be the end result of "food science." Socially, environmentally, economically sustainable healthy food production and consumpton should be the goal of "food science."

Perhaps there is some way to resolve high yield farming with healthy varied diets, localized production and consumption, and small enterprise stewardship of our environmental resources. Should we really trust agribusiness with the future?

But to get back to my favorite hotel in Jaco, we don't have science food. Ninety percent of what we serve comes from within 100 miles of hour hotel in Jaco and much of our produce and meat is produced by small family farms. Our fish come from the bountiful ocean just a mile to the west of the hotel and a lot of our fruit comes from the five acres of jungle gardens and fruit trees on the property.

So you can't get a brightly colored slurpy like you could at a 7-11, but you can get a delicious guanabana smoothy with a secret flower ingredient or my favorite, a papaya banana smoothy. I am getting hungry! Off to my favorite Jaco hotel, DoceLunas.