Story in the NYT about how the rising price of food is sending organics into the stratosphere. Some organic farmers are returning to planting conventionally, because they can't afford organic agriculture anymore. I was wondering what organic food I'm not willing to pay these kinds of prices for. The only organics we consistently consume are meat and milk, and for now, we'd sooner eat and drink less of both than compromise.But you know, that's not a bad problem to have. In fact, it's a problem that one feels ashamed to have, in light of this Times story about how the same food shortage is critical for the world's poor. Excerpt:
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.
“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”
Christ Almighty. What can we do for these people?
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Should have given links about the food rotting in the ports of Haiti, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23507559/
The process takes so long that once the shipments are through "customs" the food often needs to be burned. I'm reminded of how the Ethiopian drought in the 80s was made worse by local government creating the mass starvation.
It wasn't so much as 'charitied' out of existence. It was Monopolied out of existence.
Believe me, our Big Ag was NOT giving away this food. They were merely undercutting the locals.
But the rest I would agree with. I would say we need to help them develop their own agriculture. One that supports their local way of eating, that works on healthy local food rather than cheap imported products.
That's why I love the idea of the microloans, such organizations as Heifer International and such.
Perhaps learning some square foot, or even container or urban gardening methods in the cities. Clean the air too.
Who knew, a car that used a battery to shock hydrogen out of water would be inefficient, because you will get less energy from burning the hydrogen (attaching oxygen and turning it back into water) than you use to break the hydrogen-oxygen bond in the first place.
Just leave the hydrogen out of it and run the car off the battery...
Perhaps one problem Haiti has is that it is difficult to run a small to mid-sized store because of theft and corruption.
A market vendor packs up all her goods at the end of the day and takes them home for safe-keeping, or maybe buys/makes/harvests her inventory fresh every morning. A large store or government center can hire guards.
The in-between is vulnerable. A Haitian friend told me about his brother-in-law who packed a shipping container with American goods to sell in Haiti, renovated a building and opened up his store - and had it stripped to the walls the first night, half a mile from the police station. "Hey, you lucky you weren't there; they didn't kill YOU" was the police response.
Personally, my feeling is that if you are of a background that has the genes to easily digest milk (i.e. Northern European), and you have kids, you spend the money on milk, at least for the children. Kids have different nutritional requirements from adults, and often cannot eat the large amounts of dark green vegetables necessary to supply the calcium. Plus, they need the fat and the protein. Skimping on milk is *not* what I would do, even with the prices.
But grain? Most of us get way too many carbohydrates anyway. For adults, some dairy (preferably fermented), some meat and eggs, and a lot of vegetables are pretty much all we need. We don't even *need* to grow the amounts of grain we grow in this country - because we really don't need to eat the amount of processed corn products and corn oil in commercial food - or grain-fed animals, for that matter.
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