A Food Manifesto for the Future

It's catching on that as Americans, our diet isn't the healthiest for our bodies but also for the environment, animals, and food production workers. Actually, the article blatantly described it as "wasteful, damaging, and unsustainable".

The article offers ideas (not yet implemented) that would make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring. Some points I would like to highlight are:

• End government subsidies to processed food. We grow more corn for livestock and cars than for humans, and it’s subsidized by more than $3 billion annually; most of it is processed beyond recognition. The story is similar for other crops, including soy: 98 percent of soybean meal becomes livestock feed, while most soybean oil is used in processed foods. Meanwhile, the marketers of the junk food made from these crops receive tax write-offs for the costs of promoting their wares. Total agricultural subsidies in 2009 were around $16 billion, which would pay for a great many of the ideas that follow.
• Begin subsidies to those who produce and sell actual food for direct consumption. Small farmers and their employees need to make living wages. Markets — from super- to farmers’ — should be supported when they open in so-called food deserts and when they focus on real food rather than junk food. And, of course, we should immediately increase subsidies for school lunches so we can feed our youth more real food.
• Tax the marketing and sale of unhealthful foods. Another budget booster. This isn’t nanny-state paternalism but an accepted role of government: public health. If you support seat-belt, tobacco and alcohol laws, sewer systems and traffic lights, you should support legislation curbing the relentless marketing of soda and other foods that are hazardous to our health — including the sacred cheeseburger and fries.
  

Origin: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/a-food-manifesto-for-the-future/?scp=5&sq=food&st=cse

Poor is Priced Out of Healthy Eating

Article in Seattle Pi:

"When you start looking at the nutritious food that you're told we ought to be eating, they cost a lot of money," said Drewnowski, director of the University of Washington's Center for Public Health Nutrition. "It's just amazing how nutritious food is becoming a luxury item and increasingly inaccessible to an ever larger number of people."


origin: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/301574_grocerygap29.html

Farmers Markets

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/18/5-farmers-markets/

While 'Stuff White People Like' (farmers markets being one of them) is meant to be funny and needs to be taken with a grain of salt, if I think about this - it actually really irks me. White people may not "like" farmers markets as much if the produce and products sold were out of their price range, or if they had to travel a great distance, perhaps without the use of a car to get there.

Shopping at farmers markets is an excellent way to support your local economy, but no one can be judged for shopping within their budget, not to mention shopping where there is close proximity to groceries and other household supplies. If I were a single mother of three, shopping at Wal-Mart would make way more sense to me than finding a farmers market and maybe spending more on just fresh produce than what the price of my entire shopping cart would be at a big grocery store. This is all part of the problem. We need to look at systematic ways of addressing these issues.

Global Food Crisis

An article I came across in the New York Times discussed the implications of rising food prices and the threat of mass hunger and political instability in developing countries. It's up to 1st world countries including the United States to take a stand in governmental policies and contribution to food aid initiatives to save millions of lives. At this point, it's not a charitable cause but a responsibility.

Origin: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/opinion/25fri2.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=food&st=cse

Local Seattle Intiatives: Local Food Action Initiative

As a part of Resolution 31019, the Local Food Action Initiative was developed.

Benefits of the Initiative

• Increase support of local and regional agriculture and community gardens and make stronger connections between our rural and urban areas
• Improve public health by providing increased access to healthy, culturally appropriate, and locally and regionally grown foods, especially for low income households
• Reduce climate impacts of our food system
• Improve the security of our local food supply in the event that a major disaster were to occur
• Reduce negative environmental effects relating to the food system including minimizing energy use and reducing food waste
• Create local economic opportunities related to local food production, processing, distribution, and waste management
• Support strategies to connect major institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and jails, to locally grown food
• Build community through developing community gardens, promoting farmers’ markets, involving immigrants, and developing

origin: http://www.seattle.gov/council/conlin/food_initiative.htm

In the "Hierarchy of Food Needs," Nutrition Comes In Last Place

http://www.fatnutritionist.com/index.php/if-only-poor-people-understood-nutrition/

I don't know how scientific this is, but on the surface, it makes sense. Before we ever consider nutrition (Instrumental food), we must have "Enough" food, "Acceptable" food, "Reliable, ongoing access" to food. Of course, when food is "Good-tasting" - that helps too and strikes us more immediately than how nutritious it is.

With these needs in mind, we can see how the problem of access to healthy foods is exacerbated. On a limited income, people will buy as much of whatever they can afford (and hopefully is good-tasting)...

When you look at the economic breakdown, junk-food is often the more immediate winner.

Environmental Impact Based on Various Dietary Patterns

The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a research article conducted by L. Baroni, L. Cenci, M. Tettamanti and M. Berati discussing the impact of different dietary patterns and food productions including conventional farming and organic agriculture has on the environment.

The argument for environmental degradation includes:

• The food shortage and malnutrition problems are primarily related to rapidpopulation growth in the world and to the declining per capita availability of land, water and energy resources. On the other hand, advances in technology have alsoallowed dramatic output increases in modern agriculture. With these improvements, the environmental impact of food production and consumption has also increased.
• In particular, recent studies show that plant-based diets are environmentally better than meat-based diets

The study involves comparing:

• omnivorous diets, based on products derived from conventional farming and non-organic agriculture;
  

• omnivorous diets, based on products derived from organic farming and agriculture;
  

• vegetarian/vegan diets, based on products derived from conventional farming and non-organic agriculture;
  

• vegetarian/vegan diets, based on products derived from organic farming and agriculture.
  

The findings included

1. Beef is the single food with the greatest impact on the
environment

If animals are considered as ‘food production machines’,
these machines turn out to be extremely polluting, to have a
very high consumption and to be very inefficient. When
vegetables are transformed into animal proteins, most of the
proteins and energy contained in the vegetables are wasted;
the vegetables consumed as feed are used by the animals for
their metabolic processes, as well as to build non-edible
tissue like bones, cartilage, offal and faeces.

2. The other high impacting foods are cheese, fish and milk

Origin: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~choucc/environmental_impact_of_various_dietary_patterns.pdf

Food Desert In Delridge Community - and What's Being Done?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSLTZbBhNkk

This news clip captures both "the Problem" and "What's Being Done?"

The Problem - geographic and financial access to healthy foods is often dismal in low-income communities. And what do you know, low-income communities are disproportionately represented by people of color. When you have $7 or less to feed yourself for the day...will you buy calorie-dense foods (that also tend to be unhealthy), or will you buy fresh fruits and vegetables, which are less caloric and more expensive.

What's Being Done? - I'm glad to see these refrigerated sections of convenience stores selling fresh fruits and vegetables. I'm curious to know to what extent these areas are being shopped and how well they are stocked. Part 1 of the solution is increasing geographic access to healthy foods (eliminating 'food deserts'). Part 2 is increasing financial access to healthy foods (and perhaps the way this ought to be done is by taxing junk food and using those funds to subsidize healthy foods). It won't solve the issue completely, but it could be a small win.

Food Deserts In Mississippi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g-X8GNBYCM

This video clip captures one facet of the Problem quite well. 'Food Deserts' - We can't tell people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables if it's not even available to them!

Lettuce Link excursion

In support for the Food, Race, and Politics blog, I volunteered with Lettuce Links & Seattle Works and I learned more about community gardening and food distribution. My volunteer group's responsibilities for the day included removing harmful and venous tomato plants that didn't grow properly and were a threat to the soil. After removing the tomato plants, we planted peas. We learned that the farm supports the neighborhood around us by providing the residents a space for crops, but also most of the fruits and vegetables are donated to local families and food banks.

Here's a brief description of Lettuce Links:
Lettuce Link (an innovative food and gardening program growing and giving since 1988) creates access to fresh, nutritious and organic produce, seeds, and gardening information for families with lower incomes
in Seattle. We work to educate the community about food security and sustainable food production.

Feed Crops Harmful to American farmland

Factory farms also harm American farmland through their consumption of massive quantities of feed crops. Consider this: The average cow eats roughly 30 pounds of food each day. ^viii The beef industry raises more than 30 million cows each year. ^ix Some of those cows feed themselves by grazing on pasture, but the vast majority are raised in feedlots, where they eat corn and soybeans. The result: American cropland is pushed hard to produce an extraordinary amount of grain.

In response to this demand, conventional crop producers have adopted intensive growing practices. These methods increase crop yields, but they also damage the soil and throw natural systems out of balance, primarily due to erosion and loss of fertility.

Crop farming is an ”extractive” process, meaning that as plants grow, they take nutrients from the soil and turn it into plant matter. When the plants are harvested, the nutrients leave the soil’s system. Sustainable practices replenish these nutrients, using compost, manure, or “green manures,” which are plants that naturally deposit nutrients in the soil. Instead of replenishing the soil, intensive practices use chemical fertilizers to supply only what is necessary to grow the next round of crops. Chemical fertilizers are not as effective as natural sources of fertility, and are known to cause long-term depletion of organic matter, soil compaction, and degradation of overall soil quality. ^x In 2005, American farmers used more than 22 million tons of chemical fertilizers. ^xi

Tilling is another aspect of farming that has gone out of balance in industrial practice. When land is plowed, old organic matter is turned under the soil in order to plant a new crop. However, when soil is bare it is most susceptible to erosion. ^xii There are many ways to protect against this. Farmers can leave strips of land untilled, to act as a catch for water-borne erosion. Instead of plowing up and down hills, leaving furrows that carry wet soil straight downhill, they can plow with the contours, making furrows that act as tiny retaining walls. And they can grow cover crops in the off-season, whose plants anchor the soil with their roots.

In the drive to produce ever more grain, however, precautions like these are often not taken. Currently, the average rate of soil erosion on US cropland is seven tons per acre per year. ^xiii This is a serious problem, because erosion causes fertile farmland to lose nutrients and water retention ability. Because the first thing to go is precious topsoil, the soil removed by erosion contains about three times more nutrients and 1.5 to five times more organic matter than that which remains behind. ^xiv The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service writes that erosion is the single greatest threat to soil productivity in the United States.

origin: http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/environment/

Many Low-income Americans Can't Afford To Eat Healthy Foods

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1929356/posts

It's interesting (and upsetting) reading people's attitudes and reactions around this. Many of the comments are not coming from a place of understanding, but rather, a place of judgement and prejudice.

One comment says...

"Go to the grocery store and look at the prices on canned veggies. They’re practically giving that stuff away. Poor people live on cigarettes and junk food."

This just isn't the whole story. And if anyone IS "living on cigarettes and junk food," I think it points to flaws in our food production, distribution and access system more than people exercising personal choice.

Healthcare Spending in the United States Compared to other Countries

origin: http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm

Building Healthy Communities Through Equitable Food Access

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/community/review/vol5_issue3/bell_standish.pdf

This article is fantastic and definitely worth reading! It accurately frames the issue of food access in America and offers some very helpful suggestions for addressing the issues on local, regional and national levels.

Something to chew on...

"Nationally, low-income zip codes have 25 percent fewer chain supermarkets and 30

percent more convenience stores, compared to middle-income zip codes. Predominantly

black zip codes have about half the number of chain supermarkets as predominantly white

zip codes, and predominantly Latino areas have only a third as many. In Los Angeles County,

wealthier communities have 2.3 times as many supermarkets per capita as areas with high

poverty."

There are ways we can address this. Advocate against grocery store redlining, ask for local convenience stores to sell fresh fruits and vegetables. Individuals should be able to use food stamps on fresh, healthy food options at these smaller convenience stores and we can promote linkages between local farmers and low-income consumers. There are promising programs and policies across the country demonstrate that the challenges to increasing access to healthy foods in underserved communities can be overcome.

School Lunches from Around the World

See if you can pick out the American school lunches. Seems we're lagging behind...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/02/02/133403282/u-s-late-to-the-party-on-school-lunch-makeovers

Local Seattle Intiatives: Solid Ground Hunger Action Center

• Apple Corps supports nutrition and physical activity programs, policies and partnerships at Seattle Elementary Schools, creating healthy school environments and communities.
  
  
• Cooking Matters offers FREE cooking classes, taught by volunteer chefs and nutritionists, to help individuals and their families on a limited budget prepare nutritious, low-cost meals.
  
  
• Food Resources provides technical assistance and administrative services to the Seattle Food Committee (a coalition of the 27 Seattle food banks serving those in need with supplemental food bags). Food Resources' staff deliver food to member food banks, develop nutrition resources, and provide assistance with the day-to-day operations of running a food bank.
  
  
• Food Security for Children provides nutritious, age-appropriate foods for infants and children whose families use Seattle food banks, as well as nutrition information and resources for low-income parents of children under five years old at food banks and community centers throughout Seattle. Food Security for Children projects include:
  Baby Boost Information Fairs
  Baby Cupboards
  Toddler Feeding Project
  
  
• Grocery Delivery Project coordinates grocery delivery for seniors and people living with disabilities who are residents of selected Seattle Housing Authority buildings.
  
  
• Lettuce Link helps people learn to grow organic produce, and encourages gardeners to donate their gardens' and fruit trees' bounty to local food banks through the following projects:
  Community Fruit Tree Harvest
  Marra Farm Giving Garden
  P-Patch Growing & Giving

book review: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The latest from novelist Foer is a surprising but characteristically brilliant memoir-investigation, boasting an exhaustively-argued account of one man-child's decade-long struggle with vegetarianism. On the eve of becoming a father, Foer takes all the arguments for and against vegetarianism a neurotic step beyond and, to decide how to feed his coming baby, investigates everything from the intelligence level of our most popular meat providers-cattle, pigs, and poultry-to the specious self-justifications (his own included) for eating some meat products and not others. Foer offers a lighthearted counterpoint to his investigation in doting portraits of his loving grandmother, and her meat-and-potatoes comfort food, leaving him to wrestle with the comparative weight of food's socio-cultural significance and its economic-moral-political meaning. Without pulling any punches-factory farming is given the full expose treatment-Foer combines an array of facts, astutely-written anecdotes, and his furious, inward-spinning energy to make a personal, highly entertaining take on an increasingly visible (and book-selling) moral question; call it, perhaps, An Omnivore's Dilemma.