Community Development
The Nutrition Initiative
Published May 18, 2009 @ 12:40PM PT
By: Sharon Gruber, in-house nutritionist at Bread for the City.
Every month at Bread for the City, our clients receive three days worth of groceries from our food pantry. Most of these clients are elderly, disabled, or have small children. Their average income is under $7,000 a year.
Most of these clients also receive food stamps, but if your income is low enough to qualify to receive them, food stamps often still aren’t enough to keep food on your table week to week. Our provisions help clients cover that gap.
And recently, our provisions have been doing even more. In my first guest post here on Sustainable Food, I described our still-new Nutrition Initiative:
We know that it’s not enough to help hungry people eat. We must help them eat well.
And indeed, in the past year we’ve totally overhauled our pantry's menu.
Canned goods high in sodium and sugars are out; things like transfats and red meat are also out. Instead we provide fruits canned in their own juices; canned veggies without salt added; brown rice; and even fresh produce in every bag. We also cut out sugary cereals, pastry snacks, and candies (which are donated all-too-often by people with good intentions but maybe not nutritional consciousness). When we can, we offer things like canned tuna and salmon and ground turkey.
We did all this in the midst of skyrocketing food prices. The menu overhaul was really only possible because our food pantry staff have been doing this work for so long, at such a scale, that they're able to eek out those extra bits of savings and efficiency. In general, our clients responded positively: our food pantry coordinator tells me that one woman she’s known for years saw produce in her bag and looked up to say “it’s about time!”
Organic Producers: $50 million, 21 days, apply today!
Published May 13, 2009 @ 01:02PM PT
Available through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, EQIP, so says the Center for Rural Affairs, whose post title I have shamelessly ripped off.
If you're an organic farmer, apply now! If you know an organic farmer, make them apply now!
Helping the Hungry Eat Well
Published May 13, 2009 @ 12:07PM PT
By Sharon Gruber, Bread for the City
Here’s a sad irony that most people still don’t realize (excepting readers of this blog): one third of Americans are obese, and another third are overweight, but many of these people are also hungry. Obesity and poverty go hand in hand in America today. Most of the foods that the poor can readily access and afford are often unhealthy.
Here at Bread for the City, we provide food for tens of thousands of poor residents of our nation’s capital. Our food pantry – the largest in DC – operates as part of a comprehensive array of services, including a medical clinic that provides free primary care. The three dominant illnesses in our clinic are high blood pressure, hypertension, and diabetes – all three attributable to malnutrition.
So even in the face of food deserts, and soaring costs of living, we know that it’s not enough to help hungry people eat. We must help them eat well.
In the past year, Bread for the City has overhauled our food pantry’s menu so that we distribute only healthful foods. Canned goods high in sodium and sugars are out; things like transfats and red meat are also out. Instead we provide fruits canned in their own juices; canned veggies without salt added; brown rice; and even fresh produce in every bag.
Our medical clinic also offers one-on-one nutrition counseling, and I conduct a regular cooking class. Our cooking classes were recently featured in a UPI video news segment about poverty and obesity:
The link between hunger and obesity is actually quite complex, and hard to capture in a few minutes of video. (Frankly, I think you can hear my hesitation to sum it up in a soundbite!)
But I do think this clip gives a good sense of the atmosphere of our cooking class, which is collegial and supportive. I’ve formed strong relationships with many of the people who attend the classes. Mr. Billingsley, the man featured in the clip, is a regular. He’s made great progress. When he first started the class, he warned me that he was something of a picky eater, but he really enjoyed things like avocado, hummus, and miso soup – and now even incorporates a white bean salad into his weekly diet.
One thing I would elaborate upon—and one of the formative principles behind the work that I do at Bread for the City—is that the effect of community modeling on eating habits is pretty substantial.
A person in a community of resources is likely to be in contact with someone who is making healthy food choices and thinking about nutrition (maybe even reading food-related blogs). These social interactions are enriching, validating, and inspiring.
But in lower-income communities, where fresh and nutritious foods are scarce and often too costly, those social interactions are less common. As a result, even though it is possible (though still too difficult) to have a balanced diet on a low budget, many people are discouraged from making the effort.
We designed our cooking classes with this function of community modeling in mind. As such, we’re able to create a peer support network that, hopefully, not only helps individuals eat well but will then percolate outward into their own communities.
Achieving true food security in low-income communities will take a lot more thank cooking classes, of course. Stay tuned for more posts about promising steps forward.
Sharon Gruber is the in-house nutritionist at Bread for the City. She blogs about nutrition and community health at Beyond Bread, Bread for the City's blog.
Update: Links added.
Helping Farmers
Published May 12, 2009 @ 08:30PM PT
And I only mean the title somewhat ironically.
First, there's good news about Pigford Remedy Claims Act, which the Obama administration will finally put some budgetary muscle behind.
The Pigford Act is based on a class action case that successfully proved in court that the federal government farm programs had been systematically discriminating against Black farmers. As Eddie Gehman Kohan writes at Civil Eats, this is a two-fer: doing the right thing and helping a group of farmers who usually have smaller farms.
But then with the other hand, the Obama administration is going to be actively promoting biotech. As Tom Laskawy writes, not only is biotech part and parcel of encouraging the use of toxic pesticides, it costs more while delivering very little:
... But while I’m not willing to overlook Vilsack’s presentation of the false choice of GM seeds as key to food security, I would hope that he’s serious about bringing what he referred to as “agricultural science” front and center. Because if he does, he’ll see that perhaps, at last, the research tide has turned against GM seeds. Most notably the Union of Concerned Scientists just released an analysis of 20 years’ worth of scientific research designed to determine the extent to which GM seeds have improved overall crop yields. The answer? Only one GM crop—Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready corn—has shown ANY yield increase. And it has managed a mere 3-4% total increase over 13 years. That’s it, folks. No huge jumps in productivity. No magic seeds.
... Unlike the US, the UN understands all this, which is why they released a report declaring that organic techniques are ideal for answering the developing world’s agricultural needs. In fact, adopting the basic organic techniques of composting, mulching, and crop rotation could double or even quadruple current yields in Africa. Take that, Monsanto!
Of course, organic practices aren’t patented. There are no license fees or expensive supplies. No flying in compost from Iowa or manure from North Carolina. Just education and investment in “human capital.” ...
And consider the toll of pesticide-based agriculture:
... research by one of the most respected medical institutes in India recently found that farming villages using large amounts of pesticides have significantly higher rates of cancer than villages that use less of the chemicals.
... Singh says he noticed one of the first troubling clues in the late 1980s and early '90s: Peacocks — India's national bird — disappeared from the fields. Over the years, seven people in his family got cancer — and three of them died. People in Jajjal and surrounding villages got cancer, too.
Singh says he saw that many fellow farmers were overusing pesticides and not handling the toxic chemicals safely. ...
Someone promoting pesticide use might zero in on the fact that the farmers were handling these chemicals improperly. They might point out that taking illiterate subsistence farmers out of the equation and modernizing farming, industrializing it, would solve that.
But look, these increases in cancer and other diseases are seen in farm country in the US, where the literacy rate is somewhere around 99 percent and farming is a highly capitalized industry.
It's a question of how fast farmers are being exposed to carcinogens and neurotoxins that by and large don't degrade and are being sprayed on food that the farmers and everyone else eats. This stuff doesn't break down into plain water, it often accumulates in the bodies of the people and animals who eat it.
If high doses of pesticide are bad for you, well, wait a while and you'll get one. Just keep eating. Wait a few generations until all the living things on the planet are saturated in them, and we'll all be getting the exposure rates of these villages in rural India. I hate to think how toxic the fish population will be, and fully expect that my grandkids will end up being raised to think of all fish as poisonous if we keep doing what we're doing.
While it is possible for people to decrease the activity of unhealthful genes through lifestyle changes, even cancer-promoting genes, when you can end up with teenagers and 20-somethings with deadly cancers that weren't seen in their families 100 years ago, there's a problem that goes beyond lifestyle. There's a problem that goes beyond diet.
If we want to really help farmers, lets stop encouraging them to use expensive, unnecessary technology that can give their families cancer. Let's build up their knowledge repertoire and the range of crops they can earn a living by selling. Let's stop paying lip service to the vital work they do and actually incentivize them to have a safe workplace.
Branding Food As Politics
Published May 12, 2009 @ 12:02AM PT
When I was at the Brooklyn Food Conference, one of the things that came up briefly was the importance of branding.
Think about going out of town and needing to buy something. Maybe food, maybe something else. You look for the name of a store or restaurant chain that you know. Say you don't find one you recognize, but you go into a place that looks like they'll have what you need. Do you find yourself looking first for a familiar brand or dish before you'll start evaluating the alternatives?
If you're like most people, including me, the answer is probably yes. And why?
First, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. We have a lot of things on our minds at any given time. The world is full of choices and interesting stimuli; so much of it in fact that our brains use up a good few neurons suppressing much of our conscious awareness of non-essential information.
Go West, Young Slacker
Published May 08, 2009 @ 01:19PM PT
Matt Yglesias on unemployment:
... The great absurdity of the American system is that we tend to treat unemployment as a symptom of laziness as if someone who gets laid off could always just go move west and start up a Homestead Act farm. We know, however, that the nature of the modern business cycle is that events set in motion in 2008 have essentially guaranteed that a much larger proportion of the population will be jobless in 2009 than was jobless in 2007. ...
For indeed, one cannot just get a farm for the asking, save up some seed, get some animals and take it from there. It isn't that 'easy' to provide for yourself.
Which brings up again the point that in a modern society, wage employment at specialized tasks is the only thing that stands between most people and starvation. If no one wants to hire you, or has any use for you, or they won't hire you at a wage you can live on, you're just screwed and there's very little you can do about it in many cases besides resign yourself to a cheap diet of soda and junk that will inevitably make you unhealthy by tucking lots of nutritionless calories into your every meal.
You can't just move west and start a farm. Those days are past.
You can't even necessarily move anywhere. Do you know how much it costs to move from city to city if you want to take more than yourself and a couple pieces of luggage? A lot. And that move means losing whatever social network you'd already built, the cost of which is considerable, if impossible to account for until it's gone.
Solutions like the urban agriculture program in Detroit and other cities, like the Growing Power project that's spreading from its Milwaukee home, are going to therefore be an important part of an economic recovery. Giving people the ability to provide for their basic subsistence by doing necessary, intellectually challenging work (of a type which human beings are very well suited to do), that's a little outside what may be an entirely collapsed local wage economy, this is going to be necessary.
We may need to homestead right here at home, wherever that is, to beat this economy.
Climate Trauma
Published May 08, 2009 @ 04:13AM PT
Gillian Caldwell of 1Sky writes about climate trauma, something affecting people of all ages and levels of activism. She wrote it after the two part interview, the first part of which is at the top of this post.
And climate is traumatic because, for instance ...
Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave a speech at the beginning of his tenure where he said that we could see the end of agriculture in California, as Change.org climate blogger Emily Gertz wrote at the time. As Chu said at the National Clean Energy Summit, the effects of weather and resource wars could affect "hundreds of millions, to billions of people."
A lot of people's lives literally hang in the balance, waiting for Congress to do things like stand up to industry today in order to save them tomorrow. It's unnerving, to say the least, but as Caldwell writes:
... All the polls and marketing specialists tell us that people will tune us out if we shriek about the fact that the sky is falling and that people want to hear about solutions. We do see a path forward -- a way out of this mess we got ourselves into. But in our heart of hearts ,we are fearful that the powers that be in industrial America, the votes in Congress, and the ignorance or economic plight of voters all around us, will stand in our way and we may get nothing at all, or too little to late. Will we add up? ...
As she says, the unholy trinity of "depression, irritability and anger" are ultimately stumbling blocks to getting positive results and engaging the public, probably because they don't want to share this damage.
Why would you want to work on something that just makes you angry all the time? That's a good question. I hope so, anyway, I end up asking it a lot.
My answer comes down to the possible result: a good future.
I'd rather live in a world where the food was good, fresh and healthy, the weather was predictable, industries couldn't make money from wrecking the joint, and when, frankly, we could move on to more interesting problems than this collective death wish we all seem to have.
For instance, is interstellar travel at speeds pictured in movies like Star Wars or Star Trek possible, or would approaching them create so much pressure that it would turn living beings into goo? Can we terraform Mars? Can we build a space elevator? Can we get solar power beamed to us directly from the Moon or from orbit? Can we mine asteroids? Can we figure out a better way to ensure reasonable living standards for all while still rewarding initiative and invention? Can I please have my flying car, already?
But can we sit around working on these things? No, because we still haven't figured out the basic questions, like how to dig ourselves out of the mud of a mean animal existence without destroying everything we touch.
So we have to solve that problem before moving on, though I really wish we could just move on already. Which keeps me going. The dream of a Mars colony someday does rather presume our survival as an advanced species, even if it's a very winding path from here to there.
Anyway, this last video is from a 1Sky contest. Caldwell linked to it in her post, from an interview with a little girl whose parents say they don't really talk to her about global warming. She just heard all of this 'around' somewhere. Wouldn't it be great if she could forget about all this irritating crap unless she was studying history and answer a better question with her life than, "Are we facing the end of agriculture as we know it?"
Ask the Children from Barbara Lucas on Vimeo.
