Mark Bittman on the Relationship between Food and Poverty

photo of money
Published: November 20, 2014  ~   0

In his November 11, 2014 article Don’t Ask How to Feed the 9 Billion, Mark Bittman writes: “The difference between you and the hungry is not production levels; it’s money. There are no hungry people with money; there isn’t a shortage of food, nor is there a distribution problem. There is an I-don’t-have-the-land-and-resources-to-produce-my-own-food, nor-can-I-afford-to-buy-food problem.”

I find this a really interesting statement, because of course on some level it is true, and it resonates with my own sensibilities about income and autonomy. That said, it is also true that (a) we have been working on poverty for a long time and are nowhere close to everyone having enough money to afford to eat, or eat well, and (b) if everyone could afford to eat well, we might very well have a production problem (which would be a great thing) to solve next.  So I think there is room for work on both poverty eradication and food systems.

 

 

 

Photo credit: epSos.de, CC License

The Trouble with Antibiotics

cows photo by Jamie Dobson
Published: October 14, 2014  ~   0

Abundance Doesn’t Mean Health

sugary cereal photo
Published: February 4, 2014  ~   0

In his recent op-ed in the New York Times, Mark Bittman wrote,

“The budget for food education in the United States pales compared with the marketing budget for junk food, and much of that education is either unconvincing or ignored in the face of the barrage of “fun to eat” ads for the food that is worst for us. (These three charts, gathered in one place by Tom Philpott, pretty much tell the story.) There is, as I’ve complained before, no concerted effort to teach people how to cook, which cannot happen without simultaneously teaching people how to shop for real food.
. . .
In the long run, what’s needed is not a Farm Bill — that tangled mess that’s been stalled in Congress since its expiration in 2012 — but a national food and health policy, one that sets goals first for healthful eating and only then determines how best to produce the food that will allow us to meet those goals. It doesn’t make sense to tell people to eat vegetables and then produce junk; that leads only to bad health in the face of evident abundance. What’s so great about that?”

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Photo credit: KateMonkey. CC License.