Distribution
Wasting Food
Published May 16, 2009 @ 05:32AM PT
A conservative commentator at the National Review looked at a privately funded soup kitchen that spends its money wisely and concluded that offering gourmet meals to poor people is a waste of food.
As noted at the DailyKos discussion in Calouste's diary, most of the food was made from relatively inexpensive raw ingredients. Garlic is delicious, true, but it doesn't cost $100 an ounce. Indeed, the idea that tasty food had ought to be an expensive preserve of the wealthy is downright pernicious.
When Sharon Gruber from Bread for the City talked about the cooking and nutrition classes she holds for low income families, she made clear that many of the disease of poverty are diseases of malnutrition, even in the unhealthfully overweight. Making sure that people in need of food aid can get fresh, whole foods as ingredients, and also have a few ideas about what to do with them, does a lot to improve quality of life and lower costs of living.
And when it seems as if everyone and their brother has forgotten what food is, we could all stand some reminding, even if we don't qualify for food assistance.
Less meat, less junk, more plants. Eat food. Eat real food. - Mark Bittman
The real waste of food, I think, is the production of what's essentially poison from healthful, raw foods. Food like meat, we don't need that much of. Food like grain actually needs to have a lot done to it to make it unhealthy - with the grain that makes it into most junk food having been husked, de-branned, ground and bleached, it can seem like a wonder that people look at you funny for asking that less be done to it before eating.
So, waste. It's surely unecessary insulin and heart medication, pain medication taken for joints that are needlessly over-compressed, greenhouse gas emissions that didn't have to be and things we never needed at all, like chese puffs.
By contrast, I don't think healthy food eaten in reasonable amounts can ever be considered wasted.
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.
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.
Problems With Georgia's New Food Safety Law
Published May 04, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
After recent food safety scares involving tainted pistachios from California, contaminated spinach from Wisconsin and infected peanuts from Georgia, it seems as though everyone is becoming more concerned with ensuring that what we eat doesn’t make us sick.
This commitment, as well as the recent embarrassment associated with the massive peanut recall at the Blakely, Georgia-based plant of Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), is likely the rational behind the new food safety bill (S.B. 80) (pdf) that Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue signed this past week.
Among other provisions, the new bill establishes food safety regulations that will:
“require hundreds of food processors to alert state inspectors if internal tests show their products are tainted within 24 hours. It also gives Georgia agriculture officials the power to order the manufacturer to conduct more tests.”
While it seems logical to require food processors to report suspected cases of food-borne illnesses in their plants, prior to the passage of this bill, companies in Georgia were not required to do so.
A Sustainable Food Supply, Pt 2
Published April 22, 2009 @ 01:49PM PT
When the G8 agriculture ministers are complaining about protectionism, the irony just floors me. Could there be less reliable critics?
Though while they may be enormous hypocrites, they aren't stupid. No one really wants their local farming to completely go away. As Italy's agriculture minister noted at the recent G8 summit, countries should be self-sufficient in food, and every country with the power to do so tries to ensure that they grow enough to feed themselves.
What if there's a war? What if there's a falling out with a trading partner? What if your nation is landlocked and your supply routes are unstable? What if fuel prices go up and long distance transportation becomes prohibitive?
No matter how unlikely, it would be stupid not to think of these things when you have a whole nation to worry about.
And wealthy nations do worry about these things. It's obvious from their actions, even as they encourage poorer countries to focus solely on exports destined for wealthy consumer markets. Indeed, those who can afford it are buying up farmland in poorer countries as a hedge against future food shortages:
... Food supply scare after last year's food riots has pushed several countries, such as China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, to buy or lease farmland overseas to feed their own people.
Quickly nicknamed "land-grabbing," this phenomenon has drawn sharp criticism for ignoring interests of local population. A leader of major international farmer group, IFAP, has said there was a risk of "second-generation colonialism" in such deals. ...
Though what else is encouraging one country to get on the treadmill of export-dependent agriculture besides to secure food for another consuming country? While export agriculture isn't inherently bad, as it's been practiced, it's often been highly exploitive.
So when Emily Gertz points out that eating local isn't necessarily the most direct way to cut your carbon footprint, she's right. Though as she also touches on, it keeps local farms in business, where their sustainability practices can be influenced more easily by those immediately affected and seasonality can return to our dietary expectations.
And while that might seem like a luxury in some US communities (seems, that is, because buying local food is a great way to boost local economies in the US [pdf],) supporting the development of local food security is vital to poorer nations who are more vulnerable to global supply chain and price disruptions. Instead of growing biotech foods for export, they need to be supported through appropriate research and locality specific soil management advice:
A Sustainable Food Supply, Pt 1
Published April 22, 2009 @ 09:37AM PT
What does that mean, to have a sustainable food supply? It simply means that our production of food today should feed people today, but not restrict the production of food by future generations. And expert after expert insists that this is the way policymakers should prepare to do it, whether alone or with other prescriptions of varying merit:
... taking full advantage of the opportunities for sustainable agriculture created by biotechnology ...
They might make wild claims like these:
... A generation ago, the Green Revolution delivered a jolt to farm productivity through the improved use of irrigation, fertilizer, and crop breeding. Today, we must rely on biotechnology to deliver many of the same benefits in what might usefully be called the Gene Revolution. The genetic enhancement of crops already has brought us large increases in yield. More is on the way, especially if we allow biotechnology to take advantage of all it can offer, from drought tolerance in wheat and maize to biofortification in rice. ...
Yeah, and what'd we get from that Green Revolution just a few decades later? Dying waterways and depleting aquifers. It has trapped farmers in debt, water shortage, and cycles of ever increasing pesticide and fertilizer use as the pests develop resistance and the soil becomes depleted.
Then about those biotech benefits, they have yet to materialize. They don't increase yield. The products' spread can't be controlled, making ever more of the plant genome the private property of companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. Major nutrition gains and drought tolerance would be nice but aren't in evidence.
Meanwhile, high yields, higher nutrition and greater drought tolerance can be realized right now through organic agriculture. Though someone like Joel Salatin isn't going to grow a filthy rich multinational from it, so it has few big league promoters.
As Vandana Shiva explains so well, the real point of genetically modified seed is to make a profit and monopolize food sources, not to make farming sustainable.
(Photo credit: twoblueday on Flickr.)
