America’s Hungry Children

From a letter to Joe Bageant:

Joe,

Reading the letter “What will America look like in two years“ evoked a memory of what America looked like to me two years ago.

At the checkout of grocery store in the US, I came across a food bin by the door, collecting food for children. For children! My being appalled bemused my American born and reared cousin. As I explained to my cousin, in my sheltered life, living on the two relatively wealthy continents of Europe and Australia, I had only ever seen something like that once before. The bin I had formerly encountered collected food … for dogs.

When I relayed this to my cousin, she pointed out that Americans expect parents to look after their children. I got cranky at this point and snapped, “So you let starve children to teach them to have better parents?” Normally with any contentious issue she would argue the toss or concede the point, but this time she didn’t do either. She said nothing. Her eyes glazed over.

Is that survival in a totalist state?

We anglosphere outsiders tend to shrug off this sort of thing with a sardonic, ‘Only in America.’ A few of us fear we are not that far behind our American cousins.

When people ask me what I thought of America, the phrase ‘bloody awful’ is never far from my lips. I am not anti-American but the image of a place that begrudges feeding it’s children’s saddens me immensely.

Aine
Australia

See Joe’s answer here

Food Related Illnesses in Canada

Professor Rick Holley, a food-safety expert at the University of Manitoba, critisizes the inability of the federal government to track foods that lead to food-born illnesses:

… in the wake of the deadly outbreak of listeria linked to ready-to-eat meats, he said Canada is ill-equipped to track food-related illnesses. The country lacks the surveillance systems that could lead to better detection of food-borne illnesses, he said, raising questions about whether health authorities are doing all they can to prevent sickness and death.

“We are hamstrung in our inability to identify risk,” he said in an interview. “If we can’t identify the risk, we can’t manage it. And if we can’t manage it, we have no control over what’s happening in terms of food-borne illness.”

[...]

Prof. Holley said Canadian officials will be just as unprepared for the next food-borne illness because they are not collecting information on what foods are most likely to make consumers sick.

This is in stark contrast to the United States, which takes a much more active approach to addressing food safety. Through a federal program called FoodNet, the U.S. monitors trends in specific food-borne illnesses, a process that involves tracking the health of 15 per cent of the population, or 45 million people. The program, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, allows health officials to collect data on what foods are making a certain percentage of the population sick every year.

Inspectors at the FDA recently traced a salmonella outbreak that left 1,437 people across the United States and five in Canada sick to a pepper farm in Mexico. In a report released this week, the CDC said jalapeno peppers were a major source of contamination and that tomatoes were a possible source.

Prof. Holley said there is nothing comparable to the FoodNet system in Canada.

“We really can’t get the overall picture,” he said. “We can’t focus on where there is a need for attention.”

The whole article is at the Globe and Mail

We Are In Our Hands

We are in a state of global emergency that not enough people recognize:

Few would doubt that we are living at a time of emergency. The world’s population presently stands at 6.7 billion, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. That figure is projected to rise to 8.5 billion by 2030. It is understood now just how quickly the earth is warming, because of the increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases arising from human activity. If the earth continues to warm at its present rate, we know what our fate will be, and yet we seem set on destroying ourselves. Meanwhile, we are experiencing a fundamental shift in power away from the West; the emergence of China, India and Brazil, with their new wealth and aspirational middle classes, is putting an intolerable strain on the world’s finite resources. As I write the price of oil has reached $128 a barrel. It has never been higher. One need not be a pessimist to predict some kind of Malthusian denouement to the human story if we are unable or unwilling to alter our ways of being: scarcity wars, famine, large-scale environmental degradation.

Likely not a day goes by that I don’t ask myself why there does not yet exist a critical mass of people who are demanding that our governments, local, national and international respond to our state of global emergency.  I believe the answer is complex and thus multi-faceted as well as perhaps still partly hidden.  Perhaps some of us are too comfortable, yet that explains neither the inability of the comfortable to perceive adequately the threat to their comfort and the comfort of their children and grandchildren; nor what is sometimes understood to be the quiescence of those who are far from comfortable yet not powerless.

Just to get started on an answer to that question, for myself, I think that the interests of the very comfortable are fatally aligned with the source of that comfort: global capitalism.  Joel Bakan has written convincingly about the psychopathy of the large scale, usually multi-national and interrelated corporations that advance mercilessly toward the goal of maximum profit with little to no ability to respond to long-term degradation of both the labour force and the environment.  [See The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and The Corporation Film]

Those who are identified with global capitalism by virtue of their own ability to maximize personal profits may well be engaged in folly or their own psychopathy, having convinced themselves that unregulated capitalism will inevitably prove capable of handling any difficulty thrown in its path, despite the facts; or simply because they’ve lost their ability to care about anything but enriching themselves.

What of those who are merely comfortable and increasingly  less so?  And those who are assumed, by many, to be simply too ignorant to know better, or powerless to do anything about it, though their “comfort” has been seriously compromised?

 From that psychological viewpoint used by Bakaan, I wonder if we aren’t all either suffering from some horrible combination of mass post and ongoing trauma, accompanied by combinations of dissociation, numbness, and learned helplessness; if many of us aren’t simply overwhelmed by the fuel crisis, food crisis, global warming crisis and other forms of environmental threat, unwinnable wars all over the world, various forms of oppression caused by totalitarianism or legitimated coercion and resulting inroads into the power of democracy and the rule of law as well as failing economies in the West and just general malaise.  To what should we pay attention?  Whom should we believe about both the proper identification of the sources of our problems and adequate resolutions?  What avenues of power can we access to force our leaders into addressing our problems?  What forms of organization will draw us into effective alliances across lines of gender, race, “class”, ability, ethnicity and nationality?  Can we address all of the emergencies at once or do we need to prioritize them?  If the latter, how do we prioritize such an impressive and pressing batch of emerging issues?

Just asking the questions can be overwhelming and depressing in itself.  It can lead to outright despair when we realize that our means of collective thinking, decision making and action have been seriously eroded by the advances of “post modern” capitalism.  We are more and more forced back upon ourselves.  We no longer live or meet together as communities of people living or working together in the same numbers that we did when we actually had cohesive neighbourhoods and communities; fewer and fewer of us are organized into unions of working people who can identify interests and act together to force the changes we need.  The complexity and amount of information  we need to gather and synthesize in order to craft realistic solutions is unheard of in history.  Post modern life keeps us busier and more distracted than we’ve ever been.

At the same time, we are discovering new ways of organizing and connecting with each other through advancing technologies.  I do believe that we will, inevitably, act on behalf of humanity and the planet and all it holds.  My question is, will we do it in time?  And when I ask that question, yet another question surfaces:  in time for what?  At this point in the questioning, I come to rest on hope and the small contributions each of us makes to the greater good.  And at this point, I wish I believed in a beneficent creator who has the best in mind for each of us and for all.  But I believe that “we” are in our own hands.  And I believe that is the most difficult thing to accept of all the things we face.

The Nuances of Food Production

My friend Rhona McAdam unwinds the complexities of decreased food production for us at iambic café and notes, in part:

The technology that we depend on now to boost agricultural yields is artificial nitrogen, created through heavy use of oil; an estimated 50% of agricultural costs now are tied to producing fertiliser. The commentator drew one scary comment from an interview subject: since its introduction after WW2 artificial nitrogen has allowed the world’s population to increase unchecked, by boosting yields (with less and less nutritious crops). The global population is such that now we have outstripped the yield that could be generated by natural nitrogen cycles, so we are facing the real possibility of not being able to feed the world even now. Which I guess is why the recent Unesco report on world farming was so firm on the use of organic farming practices, which include natural means of soil enrichment.

Rhona is able to explain much that is complex in a way that I can understand it.  This post is highly recommended – short but not very sweet.