As Cost of Importing Food Soars, Jamaica Turns to the Earth

KINGSTON, Jamaica — The scent of coconut oil and fiery jerk spice blows through kitchens across this green island, but as the country’s food imports have become a billion-dollar threat to finances and health, Jamaica has taken on a bold new strategy: make farming patriotic and ubiquitous, behind homes, hospitals, schools, even prisons.
Across the Caribbean, food imports have become a budget-busting problem, prompting one of the world’s most fertile regions to reclaim its agricultural past. But instead of turning to big agribusinesses, officials are recruiting everyone they can to combat the cost of imports, which have roughly doubled in price over the past decade. In Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas and elsewhere, local farm-to-table production is not a restaurant sales pitch; it is a government motto.
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Eat Less by Altering Your Food Memories

Hunger is affected by how much you think you ate

Why do we eat bad stuff, and too much of it?

Naturally, “because we’re hungry and it tastes good” is an answer, but this just begs the deeper question of what call, exactly, we’re answering when we relent to hunger. Is hunger just the stomach’s empty light, pinging the brain with motivation to refill the tank?  Maybe hunger works more like a balance sheet, telling us how many calories we should seek out, relative to how many we have in the bank. Or perhaps hunger is opportunism, indulged in any case where the expected ‘taste-payoff’ is high enough.

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Feeding the youngest famine victims

(CNN) -- Millions of people are suffering in the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa, but help is on the way thanks to relief groups from around the world.
One of them, Mary's Meals, is focused on the youngest victims of the crisis. Founded by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, a 2010 CNN Hero, the organization is providing food to 24,000 children a day in northern Kenya.
MacFarlane-Barrow recently spoke to CNN's Danielle Berger about his organization's efforts.
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The whole focus and mission of Mary's Meals is about meeting the immediate needs of the hungry child by providing them a meal in a place of education -- so that we draw them into our schools or nurseries in the belief that education can be their ladder out of poverty. On average, we can feed a child for an entire school year for $15.

Infographic of the Day: How the Global Food Market Starves the Poor

How can 1 in 7 people be malnourished in the modern world? A beautifully illustrated video shows the causes.


How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

What's Life Like For the More Than 1 Billion in the World Who Are Hungry? One Woman Decided to Find Out for Herself

This is a very impressive and potentially rewarding journey upon which Ms. Pepper is embarking...

Uvealblues

 

Editor's Note: On March 20, Kenda Swartz Pepper began "21 Days for World Hunger," an experiment to try for 21 days to live like the over 1 billion people around the world who are hungry. Below is her first post, you can scroll to the end for the links to her most recent posts along the way.

1.02 billion people in the world go hungry every day according to theFood and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. That’s 1,020,000,000 people.  I was tempted to round down and write 1 billion people in the world go hungry every day.  It dawned on me that I would be doing a monumental disservice to .02 billion people.  That’s 20,000,000 people.  Children.  Mothers.  Fathers. 20,000,000.  Slightly more than the entire population of Florida.  Ignoring that number would be like disregarding the entire state of Florida.  In some ways, it’s easier for me to focus on the 20,000,000 instead of the total 1.02 billion, because I cannot even conjure a picture in my head of 1.02 billion people.  I have no point of reference.

(..)

In honor of world hunger, I am going to engage in potentially curious behaviors.  I have decided that for the next 21 days I’m going to eat – to the best of my knowledge and ability – like those who are living with hunger. I think I’m most nervous about this Souljourn, because I know it will entail pangs.  If you recall, that scares me.  But again, I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to be starving or malnourished.  I know there is food available if my resolve breaks.  This is an intentional experiment thus creating the confounding factor that I will still likely never have the experience of knowing the real fear of real hunger.  For this, I am grateful.

(..)

Burden not yourself with the suffering of others.
Acknowledge not the presence of anguish in the world.
Ask not the truth.
Fear not the consequences of inaction.
Believe not in the worth of each hungry soul.
Give not of yourself for the common good.
Exist not in the presence of peace.
Want not.
Be Not.
See Not.
Do Not.

Why Not.

-kasp

The Hidden Hunger

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau
The most heartbreaking thing about starving children is their equanimity.

They don’t cry. They don’t smile. They don’t move. They don’t show a flicker of fear, pain or interest. Tiny, wizened zombies, they shut down all nonessential operations to employ every last calorie to stay alive.

We in the West misunderstand starvation — especially the increasing hunger caused by the global economic crisis —
(..)
The World Bank has estimated that United Nations goals for overcoming global poverty have been set back seven years by the global crisis. It calculates that increased malnutrition last year may have caused an additional 44 million children to suffer permanent physical or mental impairment.

Yet one of the great Western misconceptions is that severe malnutrition is simply about not getting enough to eat. Often it’s about not getting the right micronutrients — iron, zinc, vitamin A, iodine — and one of the most cost-effective ways outsiders can combat poverty is to fight this “hidden hunger.”

Malnutrition is not a glamorous field, and so it’s routinely neglected by everybody — donor governments, poor countries and, yes, journalists. But malnutrition is implicated in one-third to one-half of all child deaths each year; the immediate cause may be diarrhea, but lurking behind it is a deficiency of zinc.
(..)
“Lack of iron is the most widespread nutrition deficiency in the world, and yet you can’t really see it,” he added.

In my column last Sunday, I wrote about women dying in childbirth. One reason so many die of hemorrhages is that 42 percent of pregnant women worldwide have anemia, according to the World Health Organization. And here in Guinea-Bissau, 83 percent of youngsters under age 5 suffer from iron deficiency.