Food Politics and American Elections

I find it fascinating how often American election campaigning features the cultural politics of food.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said in an interview with GQ out Monday that one can tell how "manly" a man is by looking at how many toppings he puts on his pizza. He also said a pizza covered in vegetables is a "sissy pizza."
"The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is," said the former Godfather's Pizza CEO.

Cain explained that "the more manly man is not afraid of abundance" before calling into question the manliness of a pizza with vegetables on it.

"A manly man don't want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza," Cain said.[CBS]

Lattes, arugula, organic, wine and sushi are pretty much bad words, conjuring images of elitist effeminate un-American liberals. Fried pork rinds, barbecue, and beer - now that's a presidential meal worthy of a true American leader! See how gender, nationalism and class stereotypes are all mobilized here.

This is not entirely surprising, given how much food is caught up with issues of identity and how symbol-heavy elections (especially American elections) are. There's a long history of wheat and beef being associated with 'civilization', while root vegetables were associated with lower-order humans. (Read more on this here.) The Sociological Images blog has a number of posts demonstrating gendered food in popular culture. Notable examples here, here and here.

Ending Africa's Hunger... by funding Monsanto?

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.
[...]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.

But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution.

The Gates Foundation is focusing on technology, spending about a third of the $1.3 billion on promoting and developing seed biotechnologies, one of the largest recipients of which is everybody's favourite corporation, Monsanto.

However, all is not lost...

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

Read the whole article from The Nation

Previously blogged about here

ACTION ALERT: Keep Terminator Seed out of Canada

Member of Parliament Alex Atamanenko (NDP) has reintroduced his Private Members Bill (C-343) to ban the release, sale, importation and use of Terminator technology.

What is Terminator? Terminator Technology genetically engineers plants to produce sterile seeds at harvest. It was developed by the multinational seed/agrochemical industry and the US government to prevent farmers from re-planting harvested seed and force farmers to buy seed each season instead. Terminator seeds have not yet been field-tested or commercialized. In 2006, Monsanto bought the company (Delta & Pine Land) that owned Terminator. Terminator is sometimes called Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURTs) - the broad term that refers to the use of an external chemical inducer to control the expression of a plant's genetic traits.

Member of Parliament Alex Atamanenko (NDP) has reintroduced his Private Members Bill (C-343) to ban the release, sale, importation and use of Terminator technology.

Actions you can take:
1. Send an instant email at http://www.cban.ca/terminatoraction.
2. Organizations can endorse the call for a ban: go to http://www.banterminator.org/endorse
3. Write a personalized letter. Remember: postage is free to your elected officials! You can use your postal code to search for your MP at http://www.parl.gc.ca (Note: The New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois already support a Ban on Terminator in Canada.) For more information see http://www.cban.ca/terminator
4. Distribute Ban Terminator postcards in your community! To order postcards email btpostcards@usc-canada.org
5. Donate to support the campaign -- the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network implements the Canadian strategy of the International Ban Terminator Campaign http://www.cban.ca/donate
6. Sign up to Ban Terminator news http://www.banterminator.org/subscribe

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K2P 0R5
Phone: 613 241 2267 ext.5
coordinator@cban.ca, www.cban.ca

Learn more about Terminator Technology here

Via Everdale

Early Farmers in the Americas - Farming because they wanted to, not because they had to

This is an interesting article, especially for me, with my interest in indigenous precolumbian agriculture in the Americas.

Three thousand eight hundred years ago, long before U.S. plains rippled with vast rows of corn, Native Americans planted farms with hardy "pioneer" crops, according to new evidence of the first farming in eastern North America.

Because the area appears to have been well stocked with wild food sources, the discovery may rewrite some beliefs about what led people to start farming on the continent, scientists say.

Rather than turning to farming as a matter of survival, the so-called Riverton people may have been exercising "free will" and engaging in a bit of gastronomic innovation, archaeologists say.

This does not surprise me in the least. We always assume 'prehistoric' peoples started farming because they had to, as a survival technique, but we don't ever stop to think that they might be just like us, inventing new things simply because they want to. Did we need the iPod or the car? Was our survival significantly enhanced because of either of them? We grow later to think we can't live without electricity, flush toilets, and the internet, because they make our lives easier or more enjoyable.

Around the world and throughout ancient history, people switched from mainly hunting and gathering to farming as a way to cope with environmental stresses, such as drought—or so the conventional wisdom says.

But the new research "really challenges the whole idea of humans domesticating plants and animals in response to an external stress [and] makes a strong case for almost the polar opposite," said lead study author Bruce Smith, curator of North American archaeology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Before they began farming, the Riverton people lived among bountiful river valleys and lakes, apparently eating a healthy and diverse diet of nuts, white-tailed deer, fish, and shellfish, the study says.
[...]
But that doesn't mean farming didn't give the Riverton culture a practical advantage: In addition to their normal fare, the people may have relied on the crops as a stable source of food—insurance against shortages of wild food sources..

Sometimes not knowing is better

At least when you're talking about these. I am convinced we are seeing end times when slapping peanut butter on bread is too much work for us.


And I thought Bagelfuls, precooked eggs and Lunchables were bad.

Impatient for Spring

March 2, 2009 - Impatient for spring and inspired by Mother Earth News, I planted three kinds of lettuce (obtained at Seedy Saturday). Green oak, red deer tongue, and mystery lettuce (from the seed exchange).

March 21, 2009 - Off to a respectable start:


The first to germinate was the mystery lettuce, followed by the oak leaf. Red deer tongue still hasn't germinated. Bad seeds? Wrong germination temperature? Once the first round germinated, I sprinkled more seeds randomly.

Today:


They are such beautiful babies!


p.s. Can you imagine only having spring once every 30 years?

Great Depression Cooking with Clara

Celebrity cooking is HOT and, lately, so is the Great Depression.

93 year old Clara reminisces about the Depression while showcasing cheap, nourishing food. I love this online cooking show. Maybe it's because I'm a big fan of history, food, frugality, and stories.

Here she makes "Poorman's meal" which is potatoes with hotdogs (her grandkids love it, she says). Clara, peeling potatoes, explains she had to drop out of high school because she couldn't afford socks.


And here's episode 1 where she makes pasta with peas. Enjoy!


More episodes on the Youtube Channel

Sharing Work and Food - Imagine That

Here's an article by Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council, quoted in full because I don't know how to link to it on Facebook.

SHARING WORK AND FOOD CREATES AN UPSIDE TO THE ECONOMIC DOWN

BY Wayne Roberts

Unlike most people, Thomas Homer-Dixon doesn't think today's world economic crisis is very complicated. He thinks it's very complex, which makes for a world of difference in understanding which government anti-recession programs will fail (most of them) and deciding which ones can help.

Homer-Dixon, who chairs a centre for global systems analysis at the University of Waterloo, is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of “complexity theory,” and the author of several international bestsellers, including The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down. He brings a missing dimension to thinking about remedies to the looming economic collapse that that’s so far been excluded from public and media debate. “If ever there was a case of experts not knowing what’s happening, it’s this economic crisis,” he says.

Hang in for the introductory lecture on Chaos Theory 101, and you’ll be able to follow and lead the economics debate in fresh ways.

Homer-Dixon is the first to admit he has no straight-ahead answers to a downturn that’s much more challenging that the Great Depression of the 1930s, to which it’s often unthinkingly compared. “We’ve never seen a collapse on this scale before in an environment of such enormous complexity and such a huge number of unk-unks,” he says, in a reference to the term used during his days working with Pentagon analysts who referred to unknown unknowns.

The way in which a relatively small proportion of mortgage defaults in one country during the fall of 2008 precipitated the collapse of a global economic house of cards expresses a telltale, if seemingly illogical, sign of complex systems in crisis – a very small cause leading to a very huge result, like the final grain of snow or shift of wind that produce a mountain avalanche.

But in Homer-Dixon’s view, that small cause, and even slightly bigger versions of that small cause – the breakdown of integrity in the global financial system, or the inequality that put home purchases beyond the reach of typical families, for example – is only a small part of an overall mix of “cascading failures.” His list of factors converging into a catastrophic perfect storm include intensified inequality, increased global warming, rising resource prices, and the “sheer productivity of capitalism – in many ways the deepest of all causes,” he says, since it produces chronic gluts in desperate search for markets. Together, they overloaded a rigid and “tightly coupled” global financial system that spread uncontrollable wildfires.
“Multiple stresses that reinforced each other” led to “a collapse of assets greater and faster” than anything witnessed during the simpler days of the Great Depression, he says. That’s why simplistic and one-dimensional rhetoric from politicians and pundits about fixing the problem, putting the pieces back together, and managing the crisis betrays a failure to understand what’s going down, he says. “Complex problems require complex solutions. It’s the law of requisite variety. We need a repertoire of responses as complex as the environment. “We must move from management to complex adaptation.”

Just as bodies under stress require core strength in the lower abdomen, economies and societies under shock require sources of core strength, what hip policy experts increasingly refer to as “robustness” and “resilience.” Government policy makers need to focus their view on the prize of supporting resilience in the population. Failure of governments to be on constant alert for the pitfalls of economic giantism or to be on guard for stresses in social resilience “is like not requiring cities to be earthquake-proof,” he says.

“Resilience means helping people to take care of themselves better in tough times,” rather than relying on specialization and expertise, he says, a guideline that puts a community’s ability to feed itself and care for each other at the top of his to-do list.

Here’s how I simplify Homer-Dixon’s analysis, in ways that he may or may not agree with.

When public money is used to keep enterprises afloat, the public has a right to demand that public benefits be spread among the general public. In my opinion, a longstanding (if best-kept secret) of Canadian employment insurance policy should be extended to all public enterprises and bailed-out private enterprises, including car companies and banks. Canada’s federal government allows workers at a company facing lay-offs to opt for everyone sharing the layoff by working a four day week, and everyone sharing the employment insurance by being covered on their one day a week of unemployment. This measure does not cost the employment insurance system a dime, since five people taking a payout for a day is the same as one person taking a payout for a week. It allows a workforce to stay intact for better times, maintains morale among workers and within a community, and protects younger workers with families, a group unlikely to enjoy high seniority.

This simple measure would abolish unemployment overnight, maintain purchasing power in the community, and buy people the time to become more resilient and self-reliant in their own lives, by gardening, cooking from scratch or insulating their walls, for example. It would even give people some time to sleep, the least acknowledged of the crucial determinants of health and well-being.

Only the epidemics of workaholism and every-man-for-himselfishism have kept this obvious low-pain remedy off the agenda for so long.

Having bolstered purchasing power in the community-at-large, the multiplier effect of that purchasing power needs to be captured for public benefit by requiring all government and publicly-bailed-out institutions to purchase local and local-sustainable food, recognizing that the food industry already produces almost as many jobs as the auto industry and can directly employ local people. Since one job for a local farmer commonly leads to five jobs producing farm inputs or off-farm processing, this doable measure is an employment bonanza that also yields major health and environmental benefits. This also fulfils Homer-Dixon’s call for self-reliant and unplugged systems that remove essentials of life from the vagaries of uncontrollable forces.

This depression does not have to hurt. Get beyond the complications into the complexity, and discover what Homer-Dixon calls “the upside to down.”

(adapted from NOW Magazine, February 26-March 4, 2009. Wayne Roberts is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food.)

WW2 Cooking Lessons

Via Treehugger:

Invisible cricket balls, thrifty grandmothers, and unbelievably spoiled and lazy young boys – there’s nothing like a bit of 1940s nostalgia to get you in the sustainability mood. “Two Cooks and a Cabbage” is a war time public information film from the UK’s Ministry of Food, and it's just one of the lessons we can learn from our grandparents.

Lessons learned: Shred the cabbage, add just a little water, cover it with a lid, and save the water for gravy. Or, just get yourself a young girl to cook it for you. Preferably Sally.

Interested in becoming more self-sufficient

but live in an apartment? or don't have time to make that commitment? How about trying self-sufficientish living?

The idea behind self-sufficientish-ism is although many of us would love to live on a farm, grow all our own food, brew pea pod wine, live the 'Good-Life'. Not all of us have the means the space or are perhaps unwilling to give it all up and suffer the highs and lows of going it alone on a smallholding.

Although total self-sufficiency is appealing the thought of giving up the little luxuries in life may not be. I grow a lot of my own food eat wild foods and when I have the money buy organic fruit and vegetables but I still enjoy beer in a pub and like to go to the cinema or eat out occasionally.

Self Sufficientish-ism was created for these reasons. It is for all those who have limited time, space or money but would like to have a go at growing their own food or brewing their own alcohol or want to know which wild foods are good to eat. We also aim to offer advice on a whole host of other subjects from a low-ecological impact perspective.

Benefits include saving money, sustainability, good healthy eating, a chance to play farmer in the city, and it's kinda fun!

You'll find tips like 66 uses for a bread bag, natural pest control, flat dwellers guide to being self-sufficientish, lots of recipes, and how to brew. I want to try making sage and seed bread. mmmm

Via eco worrier

Love Food Hate Waste

My new favourite site: Love Food Hate Waste

Around a third of all the food we buy ends up being thrown away and most of this could have been eaten – it's not just peelings, cores and bones.

90% of us just don't realise how much good food we throw out, yet in the UK we throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year.

It's not just an issue of good food going to waste, or that this costs us as consumers a significant amount of money, but that there are serious environmental implications.
...
The amount of food we throw away is a waste of resources. Just think about all the energy, water and packaging used in food production, transportation and storage. This all goes to waste when we throw away perfectly good food.

I really hate wasting food, and I can't compost at the moment, living in an apartment not yet serviced by the city's green bin collection. I try to eat everything I buy. I freeze leftovers if I know I won't be able to finish them before they go bad. I make stock out of vegetable scraps (keep a bag in the freezer until it is full, then pop it in my crockpot with some water and herbs overnight... mmm). I make muffins out of overripe bananas and not-so-fresh yogurt. But sometimes I just don't know what to DO with my leftover food.

This site has all kinds of great tips. They have a portion planner for those who never know how much to cook, ideas on how to make food stay fresh longer, and all kinds of recipes to help you use up those odds and ends in the fridge.

On Rising Food Prices

Kissinger made a chilling 1970 comment that explains a lot about what's happening now - "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people." Combine it with unchallengeable military power and you control everything, and Kissinger likely said that, too.Global Food Crisis: Hunger Plagues Haiti and the World by Stephen Lendman>

Hugo Chavez is calling the food crisis a "Massacre of the Poor". As Raj Patel puts it: "What gets to me is that even in a good year, 850 million people were going hungry, thousands of whom died. Was that not a massacre too?"

George Monbiot reminds us that despite the problem is not about production, but distribution: "There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people." The rest mainly feeds animals and cars (and landfills).

Go, read those articles.

I know I have been remiss in my blogging, but my real life duties have had to take priority. Yes, I know, you all miss me so much. ;) By early May I should be able to blog again.

I Hate to say I Told You So...

But I told you so. Or to be more accurate, everyone who cares more about people than profit told you so.

From a post in 2005 about biofuels:

Not only inefficient, but "a humanitarian and environmental disaster", says George Monbiot, presenting a chilling vision, in which "most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people." He reminds us that markets respond to profit, not hunger. Those who need food the most are exactly the ones with the least amount of money to buy it, and so the monied person's car will always win out. He reminds us that even today, those who buy meat products have more purchasing power, so grain is fed to animals instead of to starving kids.

In 2006, when I blogged about the Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point, the problem was overproduction and low commodity prices driving smaller farmers out.

"Many Canadian and U.S. farmers are going out of business because crop prices are at their lowest in nearly 100 years," Qualman said in an interview. "Farmers are told overproduction is to blame for the low prices they've been forced to accept in recent years."

However, most North American agribusiness corporations posted record profits in 2004. With only five major companies controlling the global grain market, there is a massive imbalance of power, he said.

Now, here we are in 2008, and the UN's food aid programme is in serious trouble, due to the astronomical increase in the price of food.

What is the problem?

In the three decades to 2005, world food prices fell by about three-quarters in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Economist food prices index. Since then they have risen by 75%, with much of that coming in the past year. Wheat prices have doubled, while maize, soya and oilseeds are at record highs.

Why are food prices rising?

The booming world economy has driven up prices for all commodities. Changes in diets have also played a big part. Meat consumption in many countries has soared, pushing up demand for the grain needed by cattle. Demand for biofuels has also risen strongly. This year, for example, one third of the US maize crop will go to make biofuels*. Moreover, the gradual reform and liberalisation of agricultural subsidy programmes in the US and Europe have reduced the butter and grain mountains of yesteryear by eliminating overproduction.

*Note, because of the high cost of food, the "US, the biggest single food aid contributor, will radically cut the amount it gives away."

Again, I recognize that there are many problems with the food aid system, because it does nothing to help the economic structural problems that are to blame for hunger and malnutrition (food aid can in some cases even harm local food producers, say by undercutting them) but this is certainly not the answer.

Speaking of Starvation, How's that Biofuel Industry?

From an article by George Monbiot from a few months ago:

It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought.

Monbiot says the biofuel trade

should be frozen until second-generation fuels - made from wood or straw or waste - become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.

He goes on to analyze the relative inefficiency of current generation biofuels (corn ethanol for instance), and reminds us:

If there is one blindingly obvious fact about biofuel it’s that it is not a smallholder crop. It is an internationally-traded commodity which travels well and can be stored indefinitely, with no premium for local or organic produce. Already the Indian government is planning 14m hectares of jatropha plantations. In August the first riots took place among the peasant farmers being driven off the land to make way for them.

If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it.

People are starving, but hey, at least the big rich greenwashing countries can look all environmentally friendly without anyone having to, say, drive less. 'Cause that would be a real tragedy.

Heaven and Hell: A Parable

A rabbi was talking with God about Heaven and Hell.

"Come," said God. "Walk with me, and I will show you Hell."

And together they walked into a room of cold, rough stone. In the center of the room, atop a low fire, sat a huge pot of quietly simmering stew. The stew smelled delicious, and made the rabbi's mouth water. A group of people sat in a circle around the pot, and each of them held a curiously long-handled spoon. The spoons were long enough to reach the pot; but the handles were so ungainly that every time someone dipped the bowl of their spoon into the pot and tried to maneuver the bowl to their mouth, the stew would spill. The rabbi could hear the grumblings of their bellies. They were cold, hungry, and miserable.

"And now," God said, "I will show you Heaven."

Together they walked into another room, almost identical to the first. A second pot of stew simmered in the center; another ring of people sat around it; each person was outfitted with one of the frustratingly long spoons. But this time, the people sat with the spoons across their laps or laid on the stone beside them. They talked, quietly and cheerfully with one another. They were warm, well-fed, and happy.

"Lord, I don't understand," said the rabbi. "How was the first room Hell; and this, Heaven?"

God smiled. "It's simple," he said. "You see, they have learned to feed each other."
(Temple Sinai Congregation of Toronto)
Charles K. 8/21/06 source>

I had read this in Craig and Mark Keilbugers Me to We as a Japanese parable, featuring super long chopsticks (similar to this or this version). I thought it was a nice story, especially after this.

Starvation in the Midst of Plenty

All of a sudden I've been getting all kinds of of traffic to my post about eating mud pies in Haiti. I'm not completely sure why, except that the issue was publicized yesterday in this article in the Miami Herald. So maybe people who read the article are doing research.

This recent post from Dying in Haiti juxtaposes the spending of Shaquille O'Neal (for instance $24,300 per month on gasoline) with the incredible poverty in Haiti. One of those mud pies goes for about 5 cents. Rice is too expensive - Two cups costs 60 cents.

The World Food Programme's Hunger - 10 Odd Facts mentions that in addition to the mud pies in Haiti, people have other coping mechanisms to manage their starvation. In Angola, leather furniture has been on the menu, and

in southern Sudan, hungry people eat seeds which, normally toxic, become edible only after a ten day soak, while tree bark has been favoured in North Korea.

Some mothers, who don't have any food, boil stones in the hope that their children will fall to sleep while waiting for their "supper" to cook.

Since the beginning of the 16th century no famine has been due to simply a lack of food. There's always someone keeping the food away from the people who need it.

We have no shortage of food in this world. What we have is fabulously unequal distribution of the stuff.

In Italy, once the population's nutritional requirements are met, there would be enough food left over for all the under-nourished people in Ethiopia.

In France, the "extra" could feed every hungry person in the Democratic Republic of Congo; in the United States, surplus food would fill every empty stomach in Africa.

That means we wouldn't even have to give up any food in our bellies to put more in theirs.

Not that food aid is necessarily the solution. There are many problems with it. Food aid is used strategically, as a political tool on the international stage. As often as not it is simply dumping - rich countries can get rid of all their excess food. Locals can't compete and they must sell their farm produce for lower prices, creating or perpetuating a cycle of poverty.

The problems in Haiti aren't simply a matter of not enough food, but not enough money buy food. A destroyed economy (in large part due to the damaging IMF policies and aid embargo before the coup), odious debt, extreme inequality of income and wealth, and many deep structural challenges - not to mention the disastrous and unethical policies of Canada and the rest of the international community since the coup (which don't forget, we supported).

So maybe all the hits I'm getting signals that a tide is turning. Maybe people are starting to pay attention to Haiti. If so, Canadians check Canada Out of Haiti to see what you can do. Americans try Haiti Action Committee.

And generally, though there's no easy solution to world hunger, I like this list of 10 things you can do from Stuffed and Starved, which recommends among other things, that we:

Transform our tastes...
Demand living wages for all - without the means to eat well, we haven't a chance of living healthily...
Eat agroecologically... farmers aren't disposable and substitutable resources... This is an approach that, above all, sees agriculture as embedded within society.
[...]
Own and provide restitution for the injustices of the past and present.While Bono and his friends have, I'm sure, nothing but good intentions, their demands for aid and support are way off the mark. They propose tinkering with the level of aid given by rich countries. But what poor people of colour have been demanding is not charity, but restitution. Whether for slavery in Africa and the New World, or simply for the innumerable coups and dictators installed to service the needs of consumers in the Global North, damages are due. Not charity, but compensation for incalculable harm done by representatives of 'civilisation'.

Image Credits

Mud Pies: Haitian Staple Food

This is dinner in Cité Soleil, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Do you remember playing in the mud as a child, making scrumptious mud pies? All that playing would make you hungry, so you'd go inside for lunch. Well, in Haiti, the mud pies are lunch.

People eat the mud pies, known as teh, to help quiet their excrutiating hunger pangs. You can watch a one-minute video of the mud pies being made here, although there seems to be some misinterpretation - the commentator opines it is a craving for something in the mud, not hunger, that drives people to eat it. But John Carrol, a doctor working in Haiti, says starvation is the main cause, although Pica, which occurs sometimes with iron deficiency anemia, may also be present.

You can read more about the mud pies on John Carrol's blog, Dying in Haiti or listen to this podcast (around 12 minutes), where Darren Ell interviews him about health in Haiti.

Something else that is very disturbing is the high rate of maternal mortality - 523 women die for every 100,000 who give birth. Most women give birth without a doctor or midwife, many completely alone.



Haiti's history is terribly sad. Christopher Columbus "discovered" it in 1492, and soon after, Europeans completely killed the indigenous population, in one of the worst genocides ever. Then it was repopulated, primarily by African slaves. Most Haitians are descendants of those slaves, who overthrew their French masters in the Haitian Revolution in 1804. Unfortunately this did not end colonial intervention. I recommend A People's History of the United States for more background.

The election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide offered a ray of hope for the poorest in Haiti, that sadly did not last, due to the US-backed coup and kidnapping of Aristide. Canada, too, was and is involved. Haiti continues to experience extreme poverty and repression. You can read about Canada's role here, or check out Znet's Haiti Watch.

Name this Post

Dutch try to grow enviro-friendly meat in lab

Although it is in its early stages, the idea is to replace harvesting meat from livestock with a process that eliminates the need for animal feed, transport, land use and the methane expelled by animals, which all hurt the environment, he said.

The title for this post just writes itself... Unfortunately I can't choose:

1. Eureka! I've discovered meat!
   
2. Petri Pork
   
3. Ham scam
   
4. Mystery meat
   
5. In the flesh
   
6. Free the lab animals! Um. Well... they're not really animals, exactly.
   
7. Mistaken bacon
   
8. Brings new meaning to "going Dutch"
   
9. Fake n Steak
   

Yes, I know it's weird. Just be thankful I didn't post pictures. I could have, you know.

Atkins Gone Wild, or a Vegetarian's Worst Birthday

Welcome to the world of meat cake.

Who knew?

Here's instructions for making a wedding meat cake and a whole gallery of meat cakes.

Almost as good as diet mackerel pudding.

Via Mental Floss.

Chicken Wild Rice Soup, a Yummy & Responsible Recipe

Although soup season is really over, it was so cold and rainy here today I felt the urge for the kind of comfort that comes in a bowl of fragrant steaming soup. So, while it's cooking, let me give you my recipe.

Chicken Rice Soup
2-3 Cups Homemade Vegetable Broth¹
1 cup of leftover chopped organic chicken²
2 carrots and 2 stalks celery, or other vegetables (preferably in-season)
1 small onion
1 clove garlic
1 c cooked brown or wild rice³
parsley, thyme, salt and pepper to season

Chop all the veggies. Then throw everything in a pot and let simmer while you go do something else for 20 minutes. Should make about 2 servings.

Why is this recipe responsible?

1. Vegetable Broth
Save your scraps! I keep a bag in the freezer to which I add my veggie scraps: carrot and potato peels, celery tops, onion skins, etc. When the bag starts getting full, put the scraps into the crockpot and cook overnight, or simmer on the stove for at least an hour. Strain the broth and store in the freezer. This is how people recycled in the old days. It's basically free, full of vitamins, and tastes lovely.

2. Organic Chicken
I think most of us in the West need to reduce our consumption of meat - for many reasons, including our own health, for the health of the Earth, and in solidarity with those for whom meat is a luxury or even an impossibility. However, I eat fish or chicken a couple of times a week. I buy my chicken from this farm where the animals are "organic", treated humanely, and use land that is unsuitable to growing crops. Of course, this meat is a little more expensive than grocery store meat (only slightly since it comes directly from the farmer) so the best thing on a budget is simply to use less of it. Organic chicken in small amounts is healthier, and better for the environment than scary industrial chicken.

3. Rice
Wild rice is nutritious, high in fibre and protein, and has a nice texture that holds up well in soup. It is also native to Canada. On a budget? Bulk brown rice is cheap and also quite good in soup. Because it is dried, it takes up less space and so it can be transported using less resources, and stored without refrigeration, making it a fairly environmentally sound food.