This, I thought, was a very well written article. It’s one thing to read, in PLoS Medicine, that in some US counties, life expectancy is falling. It’s quite another to read what it means in practice. The “$10 Kentucky Fried Chicken Challenge” below is a warning, if ever there were, about quite how ass-backwards we’ve managed to set prices for food, and for everything else.
The Unhealthiest City in the US: Huntington, West Virginia
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In case you thought that the whole baby milk saga was over, WomensENews has a article reminding us that corporations are still encouraging women to switch to infant formula, despite abundant evidence that mothers’ milk is invariably better. Is it a coincidence that, as Molly M. Ginty notes below, “half of the infant formula sold in the U.S. is distributed by the government to low-income mothers”? Read and decide.
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The excellent Tom Philpott has posted a story at Grist Magazine about the move to fix the pollution caused in the United States by Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs) through the simple expedient of moving the production to the Global South. It has worked well with toxic waste (check out this fine report by Al Jazeera on the political economy of toxic waste in Somalia), so I imagine it’ll bring in cash for its pioneers in the meat industry.
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The Indian government is pissing about on climate change, seeming somehow to think that because it wasn’t responsible for it, that it will remain unaffected. The extent to which the Indian Government has got this very wrong is something to which the Indian press is starting, slowly, to wake up, as this article on the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers shows. The consequences of this for food production in Asia are profound, as Lester Brown notes here. With most of the planet’s rice irrigated by glacier melt, what will people eat when the water runs out?
The New York Times recently carried an article on how the world can be saved by potatoes. But I much prefer the seasoned scepticism of Joan Obra, who wrote this article a month or two back, in the Fresno Bee (despite my toe-curling metaphor choice at the end of the article).
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Dan sends in this nugget from South Africa, about the constraints that huge farms face there. By way of background, “one farmer, one bullet” is an Anti-Apartheid slogan that was directed rather pointedly at the large land-owning rural whites, who where the instruments and beneficiaries of Apartheid.
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50 Percent More US Kids Hungry in 2007
By Michael K Sniffen
WASHINGTON (Nov. 17) – Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.
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Yep, it has been nigh on three weeks since I managed to update things here. I’ll try by get through the huge backlog of material I’ve accumulated. But I can’t promise that it won’t happen again.
Things are going to change a little on this site. I’ll not be generating what passes for original thoughts about food politics for the front page, at least not quite as frequently as I used to. Instead, I’m trying to use what little brain and time I have for work on my next book (more about that in a few weeks).
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A reminder, the morning after, that there’s still work to be done…
Starving Ethiopian farmers rue biofuel choice
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