Anirvan writes with this story from the Santa Cruz Indymedia Center. Lakeside Organics in Watsonville California is in the business of producing food that kisses the earth. But the company’s not above beating the poor to produce it. Stories like this are more common than one might think. It’s are a reminder that environmentally friendly needn’t mean socially just, and that it’s going to take more than a label to bring about the social changes we so desperately need around our food…
We recently stumped up not-very-much money to subscribe to Vanity Fair, and it’s a subscription we’re likely to keep, especially now that we’re practiced in ignoring the large wodge of adverts for cosmetics and high fashion that fill out the space between articles.
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An argument that I find myself making over and over is that although diet is a very personal thing, it can be understood sociologically. And not only can it be understood this way, you have to understand it this way if you’re to make sense of facts like one which I start the book with: that the closer Mexican teenagers are to the US border, the more likely they are to be overweight.
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America’s going bananas, with two books on the subject out recently with almost, but not quite, identical titles: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel and Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman.
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Update
Thanks to Hande for pointing out that the video is now available to view and download at at the IFAD website and now on Google Video here:
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The Financial Times again distinguishes itself by being the only major newspaper to take the global food price rises at all seriously. On Monday, front page above the fold, an article on the UN’s call for $500m in food aid to avoid famine. Yesterday, on rice rationing in the Philippines. Today, front page again, the announcement that the price of rice, a staple for over 2.5 billion people, rose 30% in a single day.
Frances Moore Lappé has a fine piece in The Nation this week, reminding us of The New Deal. She points out that
The first two economic rights [in the New Deal] assured a “useful” job that paid enough to provide “adequate food and clothing.” The third guaranteed farmers a high enough return for their crops to provide their families with a “decent living.” To begin, [Roosevelt] asked Congress to pass a “cost of food law,” putting a price floor under farmers and a price ceiling on the cost of food necessities for all.
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The BBC have a handy guide to food price inflation with lots of pretty pictures like this one:
and, most interesting, this one:
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