Distribution
Michelle Obama Linking Food and Health
Published June 20, 2009 @ 03:06PM PT
Via Obamafoodorama, the First Lady talks about food and health outcomes at the White House garden harvest celebration:
Michelle Obama: ... But unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet. In so many of our communities, particularly in poorer and more isolated communities, fresh, healthy food is simply out of reach. With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods, residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries.
These food deserts leave too many families stranded and without enough choices when it comes to nourishing their loved ones. And sadly, this is the case in many large cities and rural communities all across this nation. So we need to do more to address the fact that so many of our citizens live in areas where access to healthy food, and thus a healthy future, is simply out of reach. ...
It's a resonant message, one that people across the country have been coming to independently, as evidenced by the spread of urban rooftop gardening and edible landscaping. (It's even spread beyond our borders, with Britain's Queen Elizabeth joining the kitchen garden movement.)
Even the American Medical Association, staunch opponents of serious health coverage reform otherwise, are saying that we need to reform food policy.
Indeed, money spent on good food policy now is far less expensive than treating diet-related diseases later.
We are what we eat, as much as we ever were. Why not take it seriously?
Sustainability and Hunger
Published June 16, 2009 @ 01:06PM PT
There are things people need to understand about hunger, courtesy of Food First:
... Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world's food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn't even count many other commonly eaten foods - vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide: two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs - enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products. ...
So remember this: we have enough food in the world to make everyone fat. Everyone.
This is a distribution problem, a social justice problem, a profit-sharing problem, an employment security problem, a land access problem ... but there's an abundance of food in the world. The people flogging scarcity and crop yields as our biggest obstacles to feeding the world are at best misinformed, at worst, deliberately lying for personal or political gain.
In the case of politicians, those of them who are generally progressive, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that they've been misled by hyper-slick lobbyists who make a convincing case that their corporations are doing good and really care about the public interest. The large food corporations have even bought out much of the anti-hunger lobby in the US, donating to their causes and sponsoring their DC publicity events, all for the sake of preventing anyone from looking too closely at how their management of food distribution channels actively promotes hunger.
It works really well.
Consider Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent call for support to 'sustainable agriculture'. She outlines seven principles, elaborated here, likely without realizing that the implications of the first, as commonly implemented, can readily undermine the third:
Supper Buffet: Grown in a Raised Bed
Published June 09, 2009 @ 03:42PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Paula Crossfield walks through the first phase of setting up a raised bed roof garden at CivilEats.
- The Ethicurean catches a story on the emerging field of biopesticide research, which aims to protect crops without toxic side effects. Hopefully, this won't go the way of Bt.
- Writing at the Green Fork, Kerry Trueman tells us that farming is all the rage these days. Which dooms me to hopeless uncoolness, as we don't even get enough sun to grow eats on the deck of my yardless apartment.
- Ali Savino at the new blog, Gastronomalies, points to a TED talk about a seed saving program that can save endangered plant species for the bargain basement price of $2800. You can be sure it would cost more than that to create a replacement.
- At LaVidaLocavore, Jill Richardson highlights the massacre of indigenous free trade protestors in Peru, whose complaints about their government's theft of their land for corporate use include biofuel plantations.
Global Land Grab Transparency
Published June 04, 2009 @ 11:59AM PT
Countries with limited agricultural land have been buying up the farm land of poorer countries as a hedge against future need. These contracts are going to start getting more attention:
... GRAIN is launching today a new website that offers the most comprehensive information tool on the global land grab for outsourced food production: http://farmlandgrab.org.
This new site is an improved version of the site initiated by GRAIN last year, which provides an open, up-to-date and easy to search library of over 800 articles, interviews and reports on farm land grabs around the world published since the outbreak of the food crisis in 2008.
The global trend to buy up or lease farmlands abroad as a strategy to secure basic food supplies, or simply to get rich, is not slowing down -- it is getting worse. The scale is becoming more apparent now, with researchers counting some 20 million hectares of good cropland already signed off to foreign investors, or soon to be, worldwide. More countries and corporations are getting involved, from Sri Lanka to Congo or Hyundai to Varun. Farmers' organisations, human rights groups and other social movements are agitating against this obscene approach to feeding their countries, while at least one government – the Ravalomanana regime in Madagascar -- has been brought down because of its involvement in such a deal. ...
The site will have wiki-like features, respect the anonymity of whistleblowing contributors who don't want to be identified, and attempt to bring as much information about these deals as possible into the public domain.
Recent postings to the site include a report on statements by an EU official comparing the trend to a neocolonialism that may harm poorer countries and this one examining farm land outsourcing in Africa, with a focus on Saudi Arabia's purchases.
The Farmers Market Challenge
Published June 02, 2009 @ 02:02PM PT
Julie Flynn of the On Food Stamps blog was kind enough to send in this guest editorial. Enjoy!
For the past three weeks I have been living on a $31 per week food budget as a vegan in an effort to explore the challenges low income Americans face in the quest for healthful, sustainable, and affordable food. I have found that the only real source of organic or local produce in the low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles is the Farmer’s Markets.
When I began this project, I was glad to see that there were indeed Farmer’s Markets in neighborhoods like Watts and South Central, even if the markets were relatively small. I was even happier to see that these Farmer’s Markets had large signs announcing that they gladly accepted EBT/Food Stamp benefits. (I am only shopping at places that accept food stamps.) I had some real success acquiring local, pesticide free produce within my budget at these Farmer’s Markets, but it was by no means a perfect shopping experience.
As this month long project has progressed, I have actually found that going to Farmer’s Markets for my food isn’t all that easy, and it can actually be a pain. Apparently, I am not alone.
According to the California Association of Foodbanks and the California Department of Social Services, the percentage of all food benefits spent at farmers’ markets in California in 2008 was 0.0197%. The percentage of benefits spent at Farmer’s Markets for the first four months of 2009 is 0.0227%.
If these markets are centrally located in low-income neighborhoods, and they accept food stamps, why isn’t anyone going to them?
As someone who is living on a very tight food budget, I can tell you that the way our food system is set up, shopping at a Farmer’s Market simply isn’t worth it for me.
School Lunch: Bad On Purpose
Published May 27, 2009 @ 08:58AM PT
This Los Angeles Times article does a decent job laying out the hurdles schools face in providing healthy meals for students, but I've got a little quibble:
... The U.S. government spends about $11.7 billion a year on school programs that provide lunch for over 30 million children and breakfast for more than 10 million -- but has not updated nutritional standards and meal requirements since 1995.
States have tried to act without waiting for the federal government. As of last August, 18 states had adopted tougher nutritional standards than the U.S. government -- but most lack enforcement power and cannot punish noncompliance, says the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit organization that works to raise community health standards. ...
When I wrote about the garbage in school lunches last week, I linked to a Mother Jones article that tells the story of that mid-1990s standards process, and the railroading of Ellen Haas, nutritional reformer appointed by President Clinton, by food service industry lobbyists and commodity groups:
... Haas soon found herself frozen out by legislators and abandoned by the Clinton administration. Says a key USDA staffer, "We were told by the White House, ‘You have to live with this.'"
Although Congress did set fat limits for school lunches, it created no effective mechanism for reaching those standards -- and no penalty for failing. ...
The crappy food that kids are served at school is not an accident. The crappy food that's advertised to them (and everyone) on television and any other waking moment by people with psychology and marketing PhDs, that's not an accident, either. The proliferation of cheap burgers and nachos, the banishment of carrots and leafy greens to the upscale neighborhoods, this is not an accident either.
Our food system is the way that it is on purpose and it can only get better the same way: on purpose.
As fellow Change.org blogger, Clay Burell, noted on the Education blog, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has a petition going to ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches.
They don't mean fries, cheese pizza and mushy, canned green beans, either. (Good grief, I hated the canned green beans when I was a kid.)
I'm not one to insist that people swear off meat and cheese, but the stuff they serve at most schools ... whatever people can eat, they need fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, food that very obviously came from a recently living plant. For kids, doubly so.
Please ask for more vegetarian and vegan options in school lunches, today.
(Photo credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr.
A Shorter America
Published May 20, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
It's a 2004 article, but this New Yorker piece on the height gap between Americans and Europeans seemed particularly relevant to a time when food banks all around the country are seeing increased turnout and conservatives have been seen complaining about the food being 'wasted' on the poor:
... While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.
The average American man is only five feet nine and a half—less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.
Just in case I still thought this a trivial trend, Komlos put a final bar graph in front of me. It was entitled “Life Expectancy 2000.” Compared with people in thirty-six other industrialized countries, it showed, Americans rank twenty-eighth in average longevity—just above the Irish and the Cypriots (the Japanese top the rankings). “Ask yourself this,” Komlos said, peering at me above his reading glasses. “What is the difference between Western Europe and the U.S. that would work in this direction? It’s not income, since Americans, at least on paper, have been wealthier for more than a century. So what is it?” ...
Immigration, as the article goes on to clarify, isn't it. The once very short Dutch, who are now among the world's tallest, and tall Guatemalan Maya children who are raised in America, tell a different story. Indeed, even wealthy Americans are eating worse, and it shows:
... Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits. “If these snack foods are crowding out fruits and vegetables, then we may not be getting the micronutrients we need,” he says. In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet. ...
People's heights depend on their levels of nutrition and access to healthcare. The United Nations, as the article points out, has been using average heights (which differ very little between most populations) as a proxy for estimating overall health for some time in light of this knowledge. And while there's a maximum likely height, the US is trending away from it. We're feeding nearly everyone poorly now, but especially low income families who can often only afford that fast food.
Do we want future generations of our fellow citizens to be stunted? I would hope not. Think about that next time you hear someone complaining that food stamp benefits are too generous, or that fresh vegetables are wasted on the poor.
Everyone needs access to good nutrition:
... It is almost impossible for the average food stamp recipient, who gets about $270 a month, to eat according to dietary recommendations, O’Neil said.
Methods of stretching dollars, like shopping at a variety of stores for sales, often are not an option for families with limited transportation, she said. ...
When we have the equivalent of a Growing Power in every city, maybe it won't be such a problem. But for now, it's important at the least to change attitudes about how we feed each other. The health of low income families in Louisiana, Detroit, or any other centers of urban and rural poverty, ultimately reflects on all of us as a nation.
