food museum blog

Of Islands, Hunger, and Yes, We Have No Eggs

Haitians are apparently not satisfied eating mudcakes for survival---in Port Au Prince they are rioting, and looting, and demanding the resignation of president Rene Preval in part because global food prices  have risen 40% in the past year, a fact particularly affecting islanders who import most of what they eat. Their staple, rice, is expensively imported more than it should be, thus diminishing local production. Taxes on food, too, appear to be an issue. Food that is on shelves in cities is too costly for the poor to buy. According to today's AP story, about 80% of the people struggle to survive on about $2 per day.

Many of those who marched on the capital chanted "we are hungry!," according to a report from The Canadian Press. Haitian riots followed protests in Egypt and elsewhere, prompting a UN official to state that "food insecurity" is a major threat to world stability.

Meanwhile, speaking of islands, when we recently visited family in the Abacos, Bahamas, we stayed in Hope Town, a place filled with well-off vacationers. Food, and most other domestic goods available at local groceries, was outlandishly expensive when compared to prices for the same items on the Florida coast. Even eggs were not raised locally for sale---people are dependent on small ferry boats for everything, and during a three day period of stormy seas, the hunt for eggs became paramount. Not, mind you, for human survival.  It was Easter weekend, you see.

Early one morning, still in my robe, I walked from our seaside abode onto a small road heading into the lush undergrowth, following the sound of a rooster crowing, hoping  to locate at least one local source of something to eat. After a bit I turned back on reflecting that my inappropriate garb might have caused the rooster's owner to have me arrested by the constabulary ( one guy) for some form of peeping or stalking or other addlepated old dame behavior.

Even the mere threat of " food insecurity" has me pondering( not for the first time,)  where to live,  what to grow, how to harvest enough water for growing, and how to get "off the grid" in time to do all the above.  Perhaps my Jack Russell might be cajoled into trotting along on some kind of power-generating treadmill so that I could maintain my link to the Internets, too.

Real Issues, Please, Not Faux

While the candidates fool around with non issues such as answering old-fashioned 1950's red phones,  who has experience and what kind, and my commander-in-chief mojo is fiercer than yours,-- ( I even heard 46 year-old Barack Obama described as a "callow youth." Please!)--- violence continues and even escalates in many parts of the world, oil prices reach appalling heights, oh--and the world is slowly getting hungry as wheat and other staple grains become  scarce commodities. Amazing.

According to this report from Scotland's Sunday Herald, "More than 73 million people in 78 countries that depend on food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) are facing reduced rations this year. The increasing scarcity of food is the biggest crisis looming for the world'', according to WFP officials.

At the same time, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned that rising prices have triggered a food crisis in 36 countries, all of which will need extra help. The threat of malnutrition is the world's forgotten problem'', says the World Bank as it demands urgent action."

Price rises are due to a surge in demand, worsening droughts, and increasingly, the growing of foods for bio-fuels, instead of for feeding people and animals. The report continues:

"High (wheat) prices have already prompted a string of food protests around the world, with tortilla riots in Mexico, disputes over food rationing in West Bengal and protests over grain prices in Senegal, Mauritania and other parts of Africa. In Yemen, children have marched to highlight their hunger, while in London last week hundreds of pig farmers protested outside Downing Street."

"The US currently grows one-sixth of its grain harvest for cars, which is madness," ( Robin Maynard of the UK Soil Association,) told the Sunday Herald."

Food, Lies and War--Ethiopia

Food aid for hundreds of thousands of people in the eastern Somali-border area of Ethiopia known as Ogaden is being cut off by the government in order to squeeze what they view a rebel forces opposed to the regime. At the same time food as well as money  is being siphoned off and reallocated by members of the Ethiopian military.

According to the NYTimes, ..."food aid is embezzled in two stages. First, soldiers skim sacks of grain, tins of vegetable oil and bricks of high-energy biscuits from food warehouses to sell at local markets.

“The cash is distributed among security officers and regional officers,” a former government administrator from the Ogaden region said in a recent telephone interview on condition of anonymity because he still works with government officials.

Then the remaining food is hauled out to rural areas where the soldiers divert part of it to local gunmen and informers as a reward for helping them fight the rebels. The former administrator said he also knew of specific cases in which army officers stole food from warehouses and gave it to the families of women whom their soldiers had raped, as compensation.

Several Western humanitarian officials estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the donor countries’ food aid to the Ogaden — aid that last year was valued at more than $70 million — routinely disappears this way. To cover their tracks, the soldiers and the government administrators who work with them tell the aid agencies that the food has spoiled, or has been stolen or hijacked by the rebels, humanitarian officials said."

What Does $456 Billion--The Cost of the Iraq War by September-- Buy?

From a photo feature at boston.com:

"According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world's poor for five and a half years."

Stuff Your Mailbox May 12 in the USA

Put some packaged pasta, canned beans and soup ( Campbell's is a sponsor) into your mailbox tomorrow, along with those lovely thank-you notes none of us ever writes anymore.

The National Association of Letter Carriers, an AFL-CIO union started in 1889, is running its 15 annual food drive, said to be the largest in the country. Food gathered in all 50 states will be distributed locally to food banks, shelters, and so on. Apparently the letter carriers collected over 70 million pounds of food in 2006.

Not that one day's pickup and delivery of food will "Stamp Out Hunger," but still, it's something.

The Bard's Bday, and Blight

First of all, to honor the birthday of the Bard, whomever he may be, a little foodish real estate advice from Falstaff (Henry IV, Part I) : "...you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel."

And now, today's serious depressing news portion--not war, no, but pestilence.  African and Asian wheat crops are being laid low by blight.

According to The Guardian, "Scientists say millions of people face starvation following an outbreak of a deadly new strain of crop disease ...Experts believe the disease - Puccinia graminis ( or Ug99)- will spread to Egypt, Turkey, the Middle East and finally India and Pakistan, which would lead to the destruction of the principal source of food for more than a billion people. Some observers warn that the disease could reach Egypt, which is heavily dependent on wheat, before the end of this year.

'This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction,' the international agriculture expert and Nobel prize-winner Norman Borlaug warned this month.

Black stem rust has blighted wheat production in many parts of the world for thousands of years. So pernicious were its effects that the Romans prayed to a stem rust god called Robigus."

We have spent time with the amazingly energetic Norman Borlaug, 93 year-old father of the Green Revolution, and the man who created the World Food Prize. He undoubtedly sees the irony in one aspect of this blight situation. As reported in a more thorough exploration of the subject in the New Scientist, "  ...Ug99 will find agriculture has changed to its liking in the decades stem rust has been away. "Forty years ago most wheat wasn't irrigated and heavily fertilised," says Borlaug. Now, thanks to the Green Revolution he helped bring about, it is. That means modern wheat fields are a damper, denser thicket of stems, where dew can linger till noon - just right for fungus."

(As hideous as this situation is, I could not help but zero in on the Roman god thing. Apparently the Robigalia was  celebrated on April 25, rapidly upcoming. And Robigus was often celebrated along with Flora, goddess of blossoms, in a kind of horticultural/agricultural Ying Yang event.)

Food News From All Over

Herbert Hoover Fed the Belgians --One of the most maligned U.S. Presidents, prior to his Presidency Herbert Hoover was a highly successful engineer and mastermind of a massive and successful effort to bring food to millions of starving Belgians during and in the aftermath of World War I.  A new joint American-Belgian exhibition explores Hoover's accomplishment. The FOOD Museum covers the story here.

It's The Food, Stupid----Heard on the Ed Schultz ( radio) Show, an officer said that whenever the Prez arrives at a base for a speech or a photo op, they bring in masses of high quality food and the troops positioned as the backdrop for the event  grin and cheer and act positively euphoric.  Why? They will be well fed once the hoopla is over and the lights have been taken down.

Red Meat The Culprit-- The Washington Post reported yesterday:  "Younger women who eat red meat regularly appear to face an increased risk for a common form of breast cancer, according to a large, well-known Harvard study of women's health.

The study of more than 90,000 women found the more red meat the women consumed when they were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, the greater their risk for getting breast cancer fueled by hormones in the next 12 years. Those who consumed the most red meat faced nearly twice the risk of those who ate red meat infrequently."

Fanatiques de la malbouffe! Fast Food Fans!   

This wacky webzine from France is an homage to the glorious world of fast food, some of the entries just a tad tongue in cheek.

( Pic of the Double Teen A&W burger from myburger.fr.)

On Wasted $$, Indentured Kids, Fatter People, Healthier Fats, Hungrier People

OK, let's see...In today's news, $160 million is being spent in the U.S. on "attack ads," leading up to the November 7 midterm elections. What a marvelous use of what some would consider a good deal of money.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes reports on the growing issue of child labor in Africa and elsewhere, many of them working in agricultural or food-related businesses.

The article is built around a hungry, 6 year-old new conscript , forced to work in a fishing village in Ghana.

"...the children are indentured servants, leased by their parents to Mr. Takyi for as little as $20 a year.

"Until their servitude ends in three or four years, they are as trapped as the fish in their nets, forced to work up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, in a trade that even adult fishermen here call punishing and, at times, dangerous."

"A 2002 study supervised by the labor organization estimated that nearly 12,000 trafficked children toiled in the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast alone. The children, who had no relatives in the area, cleared fields with machetes, applied pesticides and sliced open cocoa pods for beans."

"The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, estimates that 1.2 million ( children) are sold into servitude every year in an illicit trade that generates as much as $10 billion annually. "

Back in the US, an article by two academics from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, posits that an extra one billion gallons of gasoline is used up each year because cars are transporting "fatter Americans."

And KFC, ( Kentucky Fried Chicken,) is phasing out trans fats by the end of April in most of its US outlets. According to this report in The Guardian,

"KFC previously resisted change - in June, the chain said it had been using the same type of oil for 50 years and did not want to tamper with Colonel Sanders's "finger lickin' good" recipe. But it was hit with a lawsuit from the non-profit Centre for Science in the Public Interest, which maintains that trans fats contribute to 50,000 deaths annually in the US. The class action was in the name of Arthur Hoyte, a retired doctor who said he had eaten KFC's chicken without being warned of the health risks.

The Centre yesterday dropped the case and its executive director, Michael Jacobson, praised KFC: "What are McDonald's and Burger King waiting for now? If KFC, which deep-fries almost everything, can get the artificial trans fat out of its frying oil, anyone can. Colonel Sanders deserves a bucket full of praise."

Remember that $160 million?    

The number of hungry people in the world is increasing by 4 million per year

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization

(Rome, October 30,  2006) Ten years after the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) in Rome, which promised to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015, there are more hungry people in the developing countries today – 820 million – than there were in 1996, according to a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report released today  Noting that promises are no substitute for food, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf today called on world leaders to honor a 10-year-old pledge to halve the number of hungry in the world by 2015.

From the World Hunger Education Service.

(AP photo of KFC employee devouring newly healthified fried foods.)

World Food Day

Today is World Food Day, October 16, a date that probably passes largely unnoticed except in the city of Rome, where some are involved in sessions planned by the Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO)  of the UN, headquartered there. The theme of this year's "day" is "Investing in Agriculture for Food Security.”

It appears that 400 million children around the world are hungry most of the time, many in countries like Chad, Bangladesh and Niger. In the poorest places children often do not even go to school, places where they might receive minimal rations --they are needed to help families survive by working. Others go to school hungry, and do poorly once there. Clearly, the cycle of hunger and illness begins with undernourished mothers giving birth to underweight babies, or babies lacking vital nutrients in the earliest months of life.  ( The more red the site, the hungrier the people.)

The Ethiopian Herald out of Addis Abbaba reported on World Food Day this way:

"Foreign aid for agriculture and rural development has continued to decline, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

In a press release issued yesterday in connection with World Food Day, the UN specialized agency said that from a total of over nine billion USD per year in the early 1980's, foreign aid provided to the agriculture and rural development sector fell to less than five billion USD in the late 1990's.

Meanwhile, an estimated 854 million people around the world remain undernourished, it added.

Only investment in agriculture, together with support for education and health will turn this situation around, FAO said.

Most of the world's farmers are small scale farmers and as a group they are the biggest investors in agriculture, the release said, and added that if they can make a profit with their farming, they can feed their families throughout the year and reinvest in their farms by purchasing fertilizer, better quality seed and basic equipment."

The FAO provides  Food Security Statistics here: http://www.fao.org/es/ess/faostat/foodsecurity/index_en.htm

Starving and Stuffing--This Modern Life

The farmers of Darfur are struggling to stay alive in order to grow food and feed their families against appalling odds--please see the latest exhibit on this from The FOOD Museum. Since 2003, over 400,000 people have died in this part of the Sudan, and over 2.5 million have been displaced.

Meanwhile, a California company called Nutricate, based in Santa Barbara, has come up with a novel way for over-eating-prone Americans to see exactly what they are eating in restaurants.

Each bill or receipt prints out the total calories, and grams of  fat--not broken down into types?-- carbs and protein, in the meal you order. The company states in its website that " 83 % of Americans want to be given nutritional information about the meals consumed away from the home."  The receipt also includes little factoids about exercise, and advice directly keyed to your order. The sample on the website notes that "if you hold the mayo on a turkey sandwich you will save 110 calories and 4 grams of saturated fat."

Foodie is in the 17% minority of people who want to enjoy the meals they eat away from home, free of guilt or fear. But, yes, for those with diabetes or concerned about high cholesterol, perhaps this is a useful tool. The fact that the explanatory nutritional receipt arrives after you have eaten, however, may dilute its effectiveness.

Incidentally, Brett Windecker, a TFM blog reader, let us know about this and has created his own blog "in support of" Nutricate.

                                    Click on receipt to enlarge.

( Photo of Darfur farmer courtesy Practical Action, a UK-based charity at http://www.itdg.org)