Hunger
Light Supper by Hurricane Lamp
Published May 28, 2009 @ 03:59PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Why global warming means more killer storms.
- How gardeners can help food pantries with their surplus produce.
- The bisphenol A in polycarbonate containers "has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans."
- LaVidaLocavore: Dear The USDA, Wendell Berry is relatively harmless. As the food industry is now coming out in favor of safety regulations, it makes the effectiveness of those regulations immediately suspect.
- Civil Eats: Maybe cooptation of language doesn't have to be a one way street. A review of the diary of an urban farmer. Time vs. geography - a chef's meditation on local food.
- The Green Fork: An encouraging update on the success of Farm-To-School programs. The new movie, Fresh, by Ana Joanes, will hopefully make it vastly more difficult for the food industry to convince people that sustainable food advocates want to starve them.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
Hunger Today
Published May 08, 2009 @ 04:45AM PT
For all the problems that are coming, we have plenty here with us today.
In the US, 17 percent of children 5 years and younger don't have enough to eat. In Pennsylvania, not even one of the hardest hit states, that means 439,000 hungry children.
Worldwide, the UN forecasts that the financial crisis may throw a billion people into famine.
If you can help, please remember your local food banks, or the World Food Program. Because whatever the need was last year, it's more this year. Everywhere.
