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Groceries Grow Elusive For Many in New York City
With Rents Soaring, Stores Are Being Demolished for Condos
Robin Shulman, Washington Post
NEW YORK — Alicia Rivera has no good supermarket within walking distance of her Brooklyn home. A leg injury keeps her from taking the bus, so every three weeks a friend picks her up and drives her to a different neighborhood to stock up on green peppers, milk, chicken wings, ground beef — as much as she can fit in her kitchen to last until the next shopping trip.
“It’s hard,” Rivera said as she unloaded her haul from the car into a cart. She buys mainly what she can freeze, and that means few fruits and vegetables. “I wish there was a good store close by,” she added.
Many cities, including Washington, have long struggled with the lack of inner-city supermarkets, but Rivera’s plight is different: There had been an Associated Supermarket across Myrtle Avenue from her housing project, but it was recently demolished to make way for a condominium development.
That fate is becoming more common in rapidly changing neighborhoods such as Rivera’s section of Fort Greene. Soaring real estate values are prompting property owners throughout the city to shutter grocery stores and sell to developers, according to city officials, supermarket owners and industry analysts. In the process, another of the essential services that make New York livable is pushed further away, replaced by glittering condos and more banks.
(1X February 2008)
Hat-tip GT
The Great-Granny Diet
Ellen Goodman, Credo Action
I am sitting at the breakfast table taking my medicine. This drug is a cup of coffee formerly identified by its native and urban origins: Sumatra and Peet’s. But now it has been declared good for what might eventually ail me, if what might ail me is Parkinson’s disease or colon cancer. Coffee has also been praised as a prevention for diabetes in Minnesota and cursed as a risk for diabetics in North Carolina, but I am in Massachusetts.
On my place mat is a bowl of Anti-Oxidants Formerly Known As Blueberries. These round little health capsules have been scientifically evaluated as a barrier against mental decline and cancer. Alas, they come from Chile, which is not good for my carbon footprint.
I am pondering an egg, which was once considered a suicidal act, death by cholesterol. Now it is praised for its carotenoids — lutein and zeaxanthin — essential for healthy eyes.
These healthy eyes are needed to read the newspaper stories in front of me full of the latest food health bulletins.
…Now [Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma] solves the omnivore’s dilemma with seven little words wrapped around a head of lettuce on the new book cover: “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.” (Not including the philodendron.) And the word that he’s launching this year is “orthorexia,” an unhealthy fixation with healthy eating.
“What other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?” he asks, recognizing the absurdity of the need for his own advice. Two different forces got us here. The first is “nutritionism,” the idea fostered by science that food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrients. The second and more pernicious force is the $36 billion food-marketing industry that turns food into “food-like substances.”
Remember the French paradox: wine, cheese and low weight? Well, the American paradox, Pollan writes, is “a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.”
His tips for the land of the overweight orthorexics are rather charmingly simple. Among them: Avoid products made with ingredients you can’t read or pronounce. Avoid products making health claims on the package. Yes, eat plants. (But not the sansevieria.) But the best of them is: Don’t Eat Anything Your Great-Grandmother Wouldn’t Recognize As Food.
Frankly, I’m pretty sure my great-grandmother never saw an avocado, let alone a kiwi. But I am all for moving from what conservatives grudgingly call the nanny state to the great-granny state.
Even as we speak, someone working to combine the eating disorder with the great American paradox must be writing the very next best-seller: The Great-Granny Diet. You read it hear first. Meanwhile, the moguls of the agricultural-industrial complex will work up a Great-Granny product line. And we will soon see Great-Granny stickers on all the beleaguered fruit and vegetables that line the market walls.
In the meantime, I plan to begin eating at least one plant that my great- granny knew so well: the good old Theobroma cacao. Rich in flavanols, not to mention polyphenols, this is after all a known treatment for fatigue, coughs and anxieties — and maybe even orthorexia. What was it my great-granny called this plant? Oh yeah, chocolate.
(14 February 2008)
With food, it’s not as simple as ‘buy local’
Toby Van Fleet, Portland Tribune
A few years ago, the people at Portland-based Hot Lips Pizza started tracking where they were getting their food ingredients.
They did it because they wanted to buy local – not only to support local businesses but because they figured buying local would be better for the environment. The food would be transported fewer miles, on fewer trucks, which would mean less spewing of greenhouse gases.
But a funny thing happened on the way to saving the planet: Things got complicated.
Hot Lips co-owner David Yudkin said his employees found it impossible to calculate transportation emissions for the business because of variables that include weight and how a product travels.
For example, olive oil might arrive by boat fromEurope and then could be transported by truck or rail.
“The more we learn, the less clear it is what impact we have,” he said.
Yudkin figured out what people across the sustainability spectrum are figuring out. Food miles (how far food travels to get to your plate) may not be the best way to measure the environmental impact of eating.
Food miles have replaced organic as the soup du jour in an evolving food movement. That movement now is propelled by concerns that range from preserving farmland and nurturing regional economies to food safety issues, rising energy costs, and even, many say, international security.
But with recent awareness about climate change prompting consumers to think about how their own habits may contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, the relationship between food and the environment is getting even more complicated.
…However, some studies like these have been scrutinized and even debunked by local-food advocates for providing incomplete data or for drawing false comparisons.
And in the absence of data, people stick with what seems logical.
“The whole local thing has gone on beyond what real data would show you to be important,” said Peter Spendelow, the president of the nonprofit advocacy organization the Northwest Vegetarian Education and Empowerment Group, which believes that consumers should look at overall environmental impacts such as air and water quality issues and habitat loss.
Aim ‘lower’ for food
Spendelow advocates eating lower on the food chain – fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes as opposed to meat – as the highest priority for those seeking to reduce the carbon footprint of their diet, because it takes much more energy to raise animals for food.
He believes eating organic also should be a higher priority than eating local.
“People think local is small and benign, but that’s not necessarily true,” he said, pointing out that regional agricultural practices are contributing to the haze problem in the Columbia Gorge.
(19 February 2008)
A better report than usually appears in the media. Some things to keep in mind:
- Various parts of the food industry have an interest in clouding the issue (as in the past, the cigarette manufacturers with smoking studies and fossil fuel industries in climate change). Industry has well-paid public relations people to develop a story, and some researchers are not averse to coming up with studies that will support the PR line.
- There are multiple reasons for eating local – community, sustainability, local control. Greenhouse emissions are only a part of the picture.
- It’s true that the “eat local” campaign is a simplification, especially with a system as complicated as that of food and agriculture. There are always exceptions, always complications. Are the people raising the objections doing so to increase our understanding, or are they doing it to cloud the issue and advance their private interests?
- Any public awareness campaign BEGINS with a simple truth and adds on it. The “eat local” campaign has been a tremendous success at getting people interested and involved.
-BA
A Budding Awareness of ‘Green’ Flowers
Picking roses that don’t despoil the land
Francesca Lyman, MSNBC
Charging past clattering trucks, in the loading bays of the warehouse, florist Melissa Feveyear strides into Seattle’s wild and colorful wholesale Flower Market with a sense of purpose. Valentine’s Day looms, so she’s on the hunt for the freshest, most exciting roses. Her curly red head of hair leading the way, she edges past a cart of huge snapdragons, straight to the Rose Room, a big boxy refrigeration chamber where the season’s most beautiful varieties — Charlotte, Freedom, Forever Yours — are tucked away.
Like other florists, she checks the best daily offerings. But she’s on a special mission: Looking for varieties that have been labeled organic, sustainable, or that come from farms with such reputations. For a year she’s filled that niche market, specializing in selling local or sustainably-cultivated fresh flowers arrangements. Before buying her boutique shop in Seattle, Terra Bella of Phinney Ridge Florists, she sold such flowers on the street, out of an Airstream trailer.
It’s not an easy niche to occupy, she admits, since flowers — unless they’re topping a wedding cake, or mixed in a salad — aren’t eaten. Also, she says, most Americans are unaware they can buy organic flowers.
“The U.S. has been slow to get on this bandwagon, compared to Canada and Europe,” says Feveyear, “People are not educated enough about the hidden, but real, hazards to the environment and to workers.”
In their quest to supply ever-more-perfect fresh flowers and ornamental plants, most floriculture-farmers rely on a battery of pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers and preservatives. These chemicals escape into runoff, contaminating nearby fields and streams and can cause disabling health problems for flower workers. Meanwhile, chemical residues even stay on the flowers themselves
(11 February 2008)
