As feared, Cholera appears to have arrived in Port Au Prince, Haiti. A first confirmed case has now been reported: the 3 year-old child with the disease had not left Port Au Prince. This outbreak is a major threat to millions of people. The report:
So in this series we've learned about different ways that local areas are trying to fight the hunger crisis. So let's get the important stuff out of the way:
If you have the means, please donate to Feeding America by clicking on the box to the right. They help hungry kids through their Backpack Program, the Kid's Cafe, and Magic Summer Lunchbox programs.
Remember that Ameriprise Financial will match your donation two for one through September 30 -- which means that every dollar you donate results in 21 meals to hungry people.
My father knew what it was like to go hungry.
Even before the onset of the Great Depression, his family was intimately familiar with hunger. Mixed-blood Indians living off the rez, in an area where cowards on horseback stalked the countryside in sheets and white hoods, were not the most "employable." Gramps traveled miles every day, on foot, looking for work. Sometimes he'd find something; just as often, he'd come trudging home, late at night, with nothing to show for it but sore feet and an empty stomach. If he was lucky, someone might hire him for 16 hours of backbreaking labor in exchange for a sack of beans, or a little rice - or on a really good day, a whole chicken (that Grandma had to pluck and dress). Most often, the beans or rice were served without salt, pepper, butter, or anything else.
To his dying day, my father hated rice.
The first thing that food banks need is money. So the Donate button is going right here so that you can't miss it.
For every $1 you donate, Feeding America helps provide 7 meals to men, women and children facing hunger in our country.
Ameriprise Financial will make a 2 to 1 match of any donation until the end of September. That means that for every dollar you donate for the next 5 days you are funding 21 meals.
Portland is a city that prides itself on its abundant supply of fresh food. Whether it’s being served in cafes, food carts, stocked on the shelves of grocers, grown on sidewalk garden plots or hanging from neighborhood trees, local and often organic produce is all around us. With all this food, it’s hard to understand why Oregon consistently ranks as one of America’s hungriest states.
Let's go for a walk, see what's going down around town...
Wife of Jim Norris with canned goods, Pie Town, New Mexico (LOC)
"Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural 'poetic' methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce . . . foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today." Eliot Coleman
Ending hunger requires changing our perspective. A government policy of tidbits, such as needed but obscenely low food stamps and school lunch programs, evinces a belief that hunger is a matter of individual failure.
Our government's tunnel vision yields counterproductive solutions, such as legislation to reduce childhood obesity and improve school nutrition that is partially funded by cutting future food stamp benefits. Or, we try to reduce our offensively high poverty rates by creating a supplemental poverty figure that removes on paper 8 million people from poverty by including food stamps in the income calculation.
It would be more productive toward actually ending hunger if we recognized that hunger is a violation of human rights, and interrelated with education, poverty, discrimination, economy, health care, and environment.
We could learn from a city in Brazil that is ending hunger.
I admit it. For a lot of issues the first thing that comes to my mind is how it affects the kids I teach. If I meet a famous journalist or a Member of Congress, someplace in in that conversation I will ask if they will come out and talk to my students. More often than not they are willing.
Nutrition in schools is an important issue. Why? Because a hungry, malnourished child will learn less than if s/he has had breakfast, gets lunch during the day. Because in school we have an opportunity to help establish and/or reinforce patterns of healthy eating. Because we have a responsibility to the young people in our care to care for them, and not just their minds.
One in six Americans do not have enough food. One in four of those are children. Food pantries all over the country are closing because they cannot meet the crushing demand -- their shelves are empty, and they are turning people away.
Diary #2 is up Feeding America #2: nutrition in schools, by teacherken.
Note: this is a cross-post from The Realignment Project.
Introduction:
It is in the very nature of a political alliance that there are tensions between the various constitutive elements. If political interests, experience and tradition, ways of thinking were completely identical, one would expect allied groups to have already merged - an alliance grows out of a shared need to cooperate in cases in which different groups have overlapping but distinct agendas.
The same is true of the "Blue/Green" alliance between environmental and labor groups. On the surface, both groups are united around their support for a "green economy," one in which non-renewable, greenhouse-gas-emitting industries and processes are replaced by renewable, emissions-free alternate forms of energy and production - an economy which labor groups hope involves the creation of many new manufacturing jobs in new "green industries." However, there are conflicts that emerge when the idea of a green economy runs into the reality of class and political economy in the era of globalization, conflicts that illustrate the different interests and goals of the two movements.