hunger
sastyk | July 14, 2011Over the years I've written a great deal about SNAP/Food Stamps and other hunger alleviation programs, but I've never written anything specifically about WIC, which I have tended to lump in with other food programs. I've been thinking, however, a lot about WIC lately, because it has come on the budget chopping block in the US - along with other food security programs including the CSFP which serves low income seniors and the emergency food program that provides commodities to emergency food pantries. While Republicans restored funds for military bands, they took them out, as is customary,…
sastyk | March 10, 2011In January of 2007, Aaron Newton, my friend and co-author of A Nation of Farmers came to Albany for four days of intense work on our book. We barely ate, slept or left the house, since we knew it would be the only chance the two of us had to hash everything out. Perhaps the single most intense moment for me, at least, was the conversation Aaron and I had about the central chapter of the book - the one that answered the question "Can we actually feed the 9+ billion people expected to live on this planet without lots of fossil fueled inputs?" This was the question answered by Tuesday's…
mikethemadbiologist | March 6, 2011Sadly, I'm not talking about the desire to learn. A recent survey of teachers (pdf) revealed the following about hunger in the U.S. classroom:
â¢When K-8 public school teachers consider a list of problems they face in the classroom, they rate discipline as the top problem (83 percent), with student hunger falling among the second tier of problems (40 percent), alongside lack of supplies (42 percent):
â¢Similar to 2009, four in ten teachers say that children coming to school hungry because they have not had enough to eat at home is a serious problem at their school (43 percent rate the…
sastyk | March 2, 2011If you want to see it in color, all you have to do is google image up a history of the price of oil and superimpose it on the price of various staple crops. Take a look at oil and then rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. Look closely at 2008, and at the present. I will put up a visual presentation of this material myself later this week, but if you'd like to see it sooner, it is right there to look at, no great challenge.
What we see is fairly simple - and incredibly complicated. The intertwining of markets, of energy and food, tied by biofuel production and national policies, and the fact…
mikethemadbiologist | February 25, 2011Before I get to two videos of Democratic congresswomen talking about abortion and birth control, something that Adam Serwer wrote is very germane:
These videos are striking because they're a reminder of how little of media coverage of political battles over abortion reflects the views of real human beings, as opposed to the reductive, paternalist caricatures that seem to dominate the conversation.
Anyway, here's Democratic congresswoman Jackie Speier:
And Democratic congresswoman ties together the importance of birth control and poverty:
As regular readers know well, one of the things I…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2011There's a lot money to be made providing aid to needy people. And where there's money to be madeextracted, there will be an investment bank, in this case JPMorgan:
In these hard times, some 43 million American families rely on food stamps. To the surprise of many, JPMorgan Chase is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. The bank is contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
The firm is paid per customer. This means that when the number of food stamp recipients goes up, so do JPMorgan profits. Talk about perverse…
sastyk | February 14, 2011This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be followed by any kind of a bust. Farmers were predicting many, many good years - but we all know what happened. Farm incomes dropped by more than 20% during the recession. Just another reminder that busts are part of the boom and bust cycle, no matter how little we like to admit it.
There is no…
sastyk | January 31, 2011From The Onion:
According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world's first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority, a belief still widely held today.
Though historians have repeatedly disproved such claims, theories still persist among many that the Gap Between Rich and Poor was built by the Jews.
"When I stare out across its astounding breadth, I'm often moved to tears," said…
sastyk | January 12, 2011
The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded Pakistani flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues.
On the lists of guests no one ever…
lborkowski | January 7, 2011Earlier this week, riots erupted over food prices in several Algerian cities - according to Reuters, prices for flour and salad oil there have doubled over the past few months. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index is now slightly higher than it was during the last global food crisis in 2008, though the New York Times' William Neuman points out that the absence of inflation adjustments makes a direct comparison tricky. The overall situation isn't as bad as it was in 2008, but whether the world tips over the edge into another full-blown crisis depends largely on upcoming…
mikethemadbiologist | November 25, 2010There's never a good time to be hungry--and, yes, people in the U.S. still experience actual hunger--but Thanksgiving is an especially cruel time. Since everything is closed today anyway, take a couple of minutes to send some help to your local foodbank. Every dollar helps--and they don't just need food, but also funding to pay for facilities. With one in seven Americans receiving food stamps, the need is acute and desperate.
If you're in the Boston area, these people do good work.
Thank you.
sastyk | November 22, 2010I was about to write something about the FAO's recent warning about the food situation, but it turns out I don't have to, since Liz Borkowski at the Pump Handle beat me to it - great link to Raj Patel's piece in the Guardian as well. Definitely worth a read!
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has released a new Food Outlook, and the news isn't great.
Global wheat and rice production have both suffered setbacks this year as Russia has suffered from drought and Pakistan from floods. Poor cassava harvests in Asia are also a concern, given that cassava is the staple food of nearly a…
lborkowski | November 19, 2010The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has released a new Food Outlook, and the news isn't great.
Global wheat and rice production have both suffered setbacks this year as Russia has suffered from drought and Pakistan from floods. Poor cassava harvests in Asia are also a concern, given that cassava is the staple food of nearly a billion people. Tight supply has caused prices to rise for these and other food commodities.
The fear is that we'll face another global food crisis like the one that caused riots in several countries in 2008. The FAO suggests it's not time to panic yet, but a little…
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2010Apparently, if Newt Gingrich is to be believed (and why would anyone do that?), he doesn't understand how food stamps stimulate the economy:
Well, you know, I carry around a bumper sticker that says 2 plus 2 equals 4. So I'd be very curious how a dollar given to somebody becomes a $1.79. And I think if we could get that to work with the U.S. Treasuries, so if people gave the Treasury $1,000, it became $1,790, we could pay off the federal debt and never worry about spending or anything. I mean, I -- you know, somehow, I don't understand how liberal math turns $1 into $1.79.
As I've mentioned…
mikethemadbiologist | October 11, 2010Last week, I showed pictures of what a food stamp budget actually buys. By way of Susie Madrak, we come across this article describing hunger in Philadelphia:
Sherita Parks went shopping in a corner store in Frankford the other day with her too-thin daughter, Joe-anna, 2....
"I only wanted to spend a dollar today, so this is a lot," Parks said. "But she'll eat a slice of cheese for a meal."
On the walk home, Joe-anna, who weighs 20 pounds but should be 26 or more, dawdled on the dirty sidewalks of Torresdale Avenue until Parks pulled her into the tidy, small house owned by Joe-anna's father…
mikethemadbiologist | October 6, 2010The Washington Independent ran pictures taken by Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, showing what a week's worth of food stamps will buy you:
Remember this amount of food includes supplemental funding from the ARRA. Here's what one week looks like when you get rid off the supplemental funding:
Here's what will be lost:
First, I'm not seeing a whole lot of caviar or filet mignon here. Second, how the hell is a child supposed to learn on a diet like this? (I bet teachers unions are behind this somehow...).
sastyk | September 21, 2010_The Pump Handle_ often addresses the same issues that I do, from a public health perspective and is one of my favorite reads. As the UN Convenes to evaluate progress on the Millenium Development Goals - designed to reduce poverty worldwide, Liz Borkowski has done an admirable job of describing exactly what these are and how they work.
At the same time, however, I think both Borkowski and most evaluators don't explore the ways that the Millenium Development Goals simply begin from assumptions that don't allow them to succeed. That's why many of them are simply failing. The most basic one…
mikethemadbiologist | September 18, 2010If you're Jewish, you'll probably be reading this in a few hours, depending on your time zone. What really bugs me about the theopolitical right is their selective choosing of which parts of the Bible they will take 'literally' and which parts they ignore. They typically ignore this bit by my landsman Izzy, which is read every year on Yom Kippur:
To be sure, they seek Me daily,
Eager to learn My ways.
Like a nation that does what is right,
That has not abandoned the laws of its God,
They ask Me for the right path,
They are eager for the nearness of God:
:Why, when we fasted, did You not see…
sastyk | September 15, 2010Ok, that's not quite the headline at the New York Times, but close enough. Yes, the latest Oxfam figures that came out today say that we're back under 1 billion starving people. But yes, those figures were compiled before the Pakistani Floods, and before the 5% rise in food prices driven by the Russian wheat crisis.
The number of hungry people fell to 925 million from its all-time high of 1.02 billion in 2009, with much of the improvement tied to income growth in the Asia-Pacific region as well as a 40 percent decline in food prices from their 2008 peak.
The hunger number remains "…
sastyk | August 16, 2010Busy week here, as Eric attempts to wind up his online teaching class, my parents descend for a week of family projects and fair going, and we deal with the daily realities of a rapidly-onrushing fall, complicated (happily) by a long trip and an early Jewish holiday season. So I give you something I wrote way back in 2007.
The other day I thought I'd try out three "fast, easy, healthy, local" recipes that were sent to me from a green website that shall remain nameless because I'm not trying to give them a hard time - I appreciate what they are trying to do.
Why? Because my job now is to…