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Eating Organic on a Food Stamp Budget
Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
There’s a paradoxical tension between rising public interest in healthy, organic, local food and rising rates of obesity-related illness in the US. To put it simply (and perhaps to oversimplify), there’s not a lot of overlap between populations that eat healthy, organic, local food, and those most afflicted by obesity and its consequences, because it’s hard to be in the former category when you live on dollars a day.
Nutritional value and cost usually have an inverse relationship, the outcome of which is quite obvious. And although there’s a growing number of farmer’s markets that accept EBT cards, most food stamp recipients purchase cheap food in big grocery stores. Rebecca Blood has been thinking about this, and she decided to undertake a one-month challenge with her husband, during which they would buy food strictly within the USDA’s food stamp budget. But it doesn’t stop there — that challenge was recently completed by the governor of Oregon — they planned to eat according to the same food standards they normally keep. Their eating habits fairly well match those of the first population mentioned above, so this is where the real challenge lies. They would keep their CSA box coming, continue shopping at the same groceries, and prepare their meals from scratch at home as always.
They’re blogging their experience (with beautiful food photos), and so far so good. We asked Rebecca about the experience yesterday, and about how her challenge differs from the governor’s. Here’s what she had to say…
(18 May 2007)
WorldChanging is on Day 10 of their series “21 Worldchanging Principles in 21 Days”. See their main website for the most recent entries.
Bitter-sweet Harvest- a beekeeper’s year
Tim Rowe, Zone 5
West Cork bee-keeper Tim Rowe kindly sent me this article he has written highlighting the plight of bees and bee-keepers on account of widespread Colony Collapse Syndrome:
…Last year, though, something went horribly wrong. From February onwards reports began flying round the web about abnormally high deaths amongst over-wintering bees. 30%, steadily rising as more people lifted their crown-boards and peered into eerily silent hives.
Ah, sure, that’s America, what do they expect with their GM crops and monoculture farming? It won’t happen in Europe. But it did happen in Europe – some places in Germany lost 80% of their hives.
And it did happen here. It happened to me. At first I expected reports on the news and forms to fill in from Teagasc and the Department of Agriculture, along with best-practice advice and up-coming seminar dates. How naïve was I?!
When it became clear that no-one was interested in the beekeepers in West Cork, or anywhere else, it seemed, I decided to find out more for myself. So I went around conducting a survey of bees. How many bees did we have? How many have we lost? Why did they die? When the questionnaires started returning with a number in the box marked ‘hives lost,’ a statistician might have said – hmmm, that’s interesting. But when you’re a bee-keeper too and you know that those numbers represent real bees and a lot of care and hard work for the beekeeper over many years, then you also say – that’s very sad.
The results of my little survey in West Cork shows that beekeepers here lost hundreds and hundreds of hives – on average 51% of all our hives died. Many lost everything. Imagine, for a moment, if the same had happened to sheep-farmers. It was even worse for the so-called ‘wild’ bees. The ones who lived in walls and trees. Almost all perished. Along with all their important genetic history. We know why some of the bees died – there are a couple of highly contagious diseases that kill bees relentlessly, predictably. But that doesn’t explain such high losses and it doesn’t explain a simultaneous world-wide collapse in numbers. So scientists are investigating, and I wish them every success and I read their findings with interest and hope.
(17 May 2007)
The May 18 issue of “Science” has an article on The Case of the Empty Hives. (Article is viewable online here.)
