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Archive for the ‘Sustainable Living’ Category
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
School lunches are a weird thing – either you love them or you hate them. When I was in high school, they had really good cheeseburgers (which probably wasn’t the best thing to be eating in hindsight). But when I read about information like you’ll see below, it makes the taste of that cheeseburger turn really foul.
The message below is what popped up as something that I should share with my friends and family (and online readers) after I signed an online petition. I hope that you’ll take a minute and read through this information and, if you so choose, sign the online petition linked below.
Do you know what’s less safe for our children than fast-food? Their school lunch!
A recent investigation by USA Today found that the meat sold to U.S. school cafeterias faces less testing and lower safety standards than the meat that’s served in most fast-food restaurants — outlets that aren’t otherwise known for their health consciousness and are as cost-conscious as the most passionate deficit hawk.
That’s right: McDonalds, KFC, and Jack in the Box test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more frequently than the USDA tests beef for U.S. school lunches! And these restaurants have for years refused to buy certain kinds of lower-quality meat and chicken which the USDA continues to accept.
I just signed a petition to ask Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to set better standards for school lunches. I hope you will, too. Please have a look and take action.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/school_lunch_fdn/?r_by=-2078083-S9YA0qx&rc=confemail1
Again, I hope that you are moved to some action on this information. All it takes is a few minutes to sign an online petition, if that. I believe that one of the reasons why we are experiencing an epidemic of obesity in this country is because of the foods we are eating. Yes, food quantities are a problem (we eat too much food), but a worse problem is the quality of the food that we are putting into our bodies. When I think about feeding horrible food to our children in school lunchrooms, it makes me pretty angry. Please take a minute to sign that online petition – we have to fight back against industrial agriculture at some point and the school lunchroom might be the perfect place for action.
Posted in Sustainable Living | No Comments »
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
You can find another e-mail from the people at Food Democracy Now below. This one deals with Thanksgiving and childhood hunger, accordingly. Give it a read and if you are compelled to take some action, then go for it!
Happy Thanksgiving, Friends -
Here at Food Democracy Now! we wanted to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving. We all have a lot to be thankful for this time of year and believe it’s important to take time to honor the incredible work that America’s family farmers do each day, rising early and working late to help put healthy, safe and nutritious food on our tables.
More importantly, we wanted to take a moment to stand up for those that are less fortunate and cannot provide for themselves at this time.
A recent report by the USDA found that 1 in 4 children in America are now on the brink of hunger. This is a sad and sobering statistic: to think that in the “land of opportunity” any child would go hungry, let alone more than 16.7 million.1
Tell your Senator that no child in America should go hungry, that they need to act today.
Fortunately, for America’s needy children Senator Gillibrand (D-NY) recently introduced important legislation to protect and prevent children from going hungry called The Access to Nutritious Meals for Young Children Act (S.2749). If passed, this bill will improve children’s access to healthy meals in child care centers, family child care homes, and Head Start and Early Head Start programs.2
Consider this…
A recent USDA report found that 14.6% of U.S. households, or some 49 million – 1 in 7 Americans – suffered from going hungry at some point in the year 2008, a significant increase from 2007. In 2008 the number of children going hungry in the U.S. reached a record 16.7 million – or 22.5%. That’s 4.3 million more than in 2007.3
Experts believe that the number of Americans experiencing “food insecurity” will climb steadily in 2009 as hard economic times and unemployment continues in the near future.
Help protect those who need it most – our children – by sending this letter to your Senators.
Today, we are also most thankful for you, our community of supporters at Food Democracy Now!. Thank you for joining us and using your voice to create a more just and sustainable food system for future generations that supports us all.
Have a Healthy and Enjoyable Thanksgiving!
Sustainably yours,
Dave Lisa and The Food Democracy Now! Team
If you’d like to see our grassroots work continue, please consider donating as little as $10 to Food Democracy Now! http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/25?akid=46.18844.F285wT&t=1 Thanks for your support!
P.S. We’d also like to take a moment to thanks some of the great organizations that are making sustainable change happen on the ground that we’ve worked with over the past year, including: Farm Aid, Food & Water Watch, Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, National Family Farm Coalition, The Center for Food Safety, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, The Land Institute, Organic Farming Research Foundation, Organic Valley, Organic Consumers Association, the Cornacopia Institute, Pesticide Action Network, Roots of Change, Slow Food, Food, Inc., Food Fight, King Corn, Big River, and all the family farmers and sustainable food advocates we’ve met along the way.
Sources:
1. 1 in 7 Americans Went Hungry in 2008, CBS News, Nov. 16, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/83?akid=46.18844.F285wT&t=1
2. Gillibrand Introduces Legislation To Improve Nutrition For Young Children, Press Release Senator Gillibrand, Nov. 11, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/84?akid=46.18844.F285wT&t=1
3. USDA: Number of Americans going hungry increases, Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2009
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/85?akid=46.18844.F285wT&t=1
Enjoy the rest of your holiday!
Posted in Sustainable Living, Winter & Christmas Time | No Comments »
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Sometimes I buy a book and it takes me forever to read the thing. Not because it’s a bad book, but rather because I sometimes just don’t have the time to sit down and read! That’s what happened to me with The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. I bought this book in October 2008 and it took me about a year to get through it.
However, do not interpret that last sentence as a criticism of this book! No, in fact this is one of the best sustainable living/organic food books that I’ve ever read. Pollan is a master at bringing out the larger issues in our food system. In this book, he manages to achieve that success by following the food from its humble beginnings in the field (or on the industrial farm, as it may be) all the way through when we eat it. The book is a really fascinating look at what happens to our meat and produce before it gets to our tables.
But those with queasy stomachs beware. While Pollan doesn’t talk too much about the gore associated with creating the food that we eat, he talks about it enough to allow the reader to infer just what is going on. From chickens getting their throats sliced and drained of their blood to cows being shot directly between the eyes to kill them, this book will tell you about exactly how our ground beef and chicken cutlets come into being before they hit our dinner tables.
But it’s not all dying animals and blood. In fact, Pollan spends a great deal of time talking about the industrial food system and how we’ve changed the base of our diets from a variety of original sources hundreds of years ago (and even decades ago) to a base of corn. Yes, that’s right – corn. Pollan talks about the ways in which corn is broken down into a whole collection of different components and how those components are used to construct any number of new products. One of the facts that I read in this book that has stuck with me is how we now feed our livestock a corn-based diet at industrial farms and how that diet has changed the very meat of these animals. It all makes sense though, right? If you change what you feed animals that you intend to eat, then you are essentially changing what you intend to eat. There is some discussion about our change to a corn-based system leading to the increasing obesity epidemic in America, too.
Combining Pollan’s natural wit and his great storytelling ability, this book presents the type of information that our society needs to know about in order to create a mass change in our diets. If you’re interested in the slow food movement, local organic farming, or any sustainable living topic in general, then I think that you’ll enjoy this book. Use the link above to read more reviews from Amazon!
Posted in Book, DVD, Movie, & Media Reviews, Sustainable Living | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
Hey, I know that I hoot and holler a lot about our country getting a better, more sustainable food supply. For those of you that are bothered by this, I’m sorry but it’s one of the things that I feel strongly about these days. I really believe that our countrymen have been put in a bad way because of a lousy food supply that is based more on corn than on natural elements. Seriously, take a read of any of Michael Pollan’s books and you’ll understand how incredible this change has been and how it has effected us as a people.
That’s why I joined the Food Democracy mailing list – so I could use whatever voice I have in this world to advocate on behalf of bringing our food system back to basics. Part of that change – and make no mistake about it, this is the change that I voted for – is removing from the government those organizations that have an interest in mass producing quick, low-cost sources of food. With that in mind, this is the latest e-mail that I received from Food Democracy:
Dear Friends,
Speak up to stop Big Ag.
President Obama has found himself with some strange bedfellows lately.
While on the campaign trail in Iowa, Barack Obama boasted, “We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.”1 Despite that promise, it seems that ConAgra’s friends at Monsanto and CropLife are still finding their way into the USDA.
Last month, President Obama nominated two “Big Ag” power brokers–Roger Beachy and Islam Siddiqui–to key agency positions, putting agribusiness executives in charge of our country’s agricultural research and trade policy. Please join us in telling the President that this isn’t the change we voted for. We don’t want Big Ag running the show any more.
Siddiqui’s confirmation hearing is set for next week. Please help us reach our goal of 50,000 signatures to make a real impact.
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/65?akid=35.18844.xoo-6g&t=1
Obama’s first agribusiness selection is Roger Beachy, to be head of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Beachy is the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO. It may sound innocuous, but the Danforth Center is essentially the non-profit arm of GMO seed giant Monsanto; Monsanto’s CEO sits on its board, and the company provides considerable funding for the Center’s operations.2
As the head of the USDA’s new research arm, formerly known as the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CREES), Beachy is responsible for deciding how U.S. research dollars will be spent in agriculture.3 Translation: more research on biotech, less research on how to scale sustainable and organic agriculture.
Unfortunately, Beachy has already started work at the USDA, but the next nominee—Islam Siddiqui—still must be confirmed by the U.S.Senate. Siddiqui, the Vice President of Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, was recently nominated to be the Chief Agricultural Negotiator at the Office of the US Trade Representative.4 Amazingly, when Michele Obama planted her “organic” garden on the White House lawn, Siddiqui’s CropLife MidAmerica sent the First Lady a letter saying that it made them “shudder”.5
During his career, Siddiqui spent over 3 years as a pesticide lobbyist, an Undersecretary at the USDA and a VP at CropLife. In defending Siddiqui, the White House has stated that he played a key role in helping establish the country’s first organic standards.6 What they neglect to mention, though, is that those original organic standards would have allowed irradiation, sewage sludge and GMOs to undermine organic integrity! The standards were so watered down that 230,000 people signed a petition for them to be changed, which they eventually were.7
Fortunately, the organic community stopped Siddiqui and his cronies then, and we need your help now to do it again. If Siddiqui’s nomination is allowed to go through, then agribusiness will continue to control the seeds, the science, and the distribution of global food and agriculture.
Please join Food Democracy Now! and a broad coalition of other groups, in calling on President Obama to keep his campaign promise of closing the revolving door between agribusiness and his administration.
Please click here to add your voice.
http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/65?akid=35.18844.xoo-6g&t=1
Thanks for standing with us and our coalition partners from across the country, including: The Pesticide Action Network (PAN), National Family Farm Coalition, Food & Water Watch, Farmworker’s Association of Florida, Institute of Agriculture & Trade Policy, Greenpeace and the Center for Food Safety in calling for President Obama to live up to his promises to put people’s interests ahead of special interests
As I’ve said in previous entries on this topic, it takes less than a minute to send a brief message to the White House. Please take some time and, if this issue interests you, send a message to the White House. I’m realistic. I know that changes today won’t effect the food supply tomorrow, but I do think that changes in the food supply will help future generations of my family and our country eat more natural foods and thus be healthier people.
Posted in Sustainable Living | No Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
At this point in the election cycle, I hope that every has received their sample ballots for tomorrow’s election. If not, then…well…you might be out of luck! And if you’re a vote-by-mail person like I am, then you should have already sent in your ballot a few days ago. That said, since vote-by-mail folks are in the minority, I wanted to put some comments up about Question #1 (the only question) on tomorrow’s general election ballot.
At its root, this question asks the voters to approve a $400 million bond to preserve open space, certain flood zones, and historic places in New Jersey. Of those dollars, $364 million will be segregated specifically for open space purposes.
The Daily Record recently endorsed a “no” vote on this question. I beg to differ. For what it’s worth, JerseySmarts.com endorses a “yes” vote on Question #1. Why? Good question…
After moving out of Manhattan when I was younger, my family went to Morris County near the Sussex County border (near the Lake Hopatcong area). Now that I’ve been all over the this great state I can confidently say that the area of land near the Morris County/Sussex County border is a really beautiful area of the state. Each year I entertain a lot of guests who are from out of state. We generally have to stick to the Parkway or the Turnpike to get to our various destinations and they see what the country thinks is the stereotypical life in New Jersey: concrete and congestion. However, when I have the opportunity to take these guests to Morris, Hunterdon, Sussex, or Warren counties they wind up bringing home a completely different view of New Jersey.
I’m not suggesting that you vote in favor of this bond issue because of the impression that out of staters get when they visit Northwest New Jersey. No, I’m suggesting that you vote in favor of this bond issue because once this open space is gone, it’s not coming back. I’m suggesting that you vote in favor of this bond issue because even though this state is in a severe financial crisis, the only true way to get out of it is by creating an equitable tax base (in other words, everyone pays taxes, not just everyone except people living in Camden County and Newark). I’m suggesting that you vote in favor of this bond issue because there over-urbanization of Northwest New Jersey needs to stop and it needs to stop now.
Yes, the country is in a tight financial situation. And yes, the state needs to fix its budget and quick. However, let’s not panic ourselves into making a terrible decision. Remember, a rising tide lifts all boats. In other words, when the economy does come back, it’s going to bring increased revenues to the state and to its municipalities. Times are tough now, but this state (and this country) will come booming back like it always does. In the mean time, let’s not open up our precious and depleting green spaces to excessive development just because we can’t see the future for what it will ultimately be – which is prosperous.
In my vote-by-mail ballot, I voted “yes” on Question #1 to authorize the state to issue a $400 million bond. I hope that you do, too.
Posted in Sustainable Living, The State of New Jersey | No Comments »
Monday, October 19th, 2009
As my Mom can tell you, I have boxes upon boxes of plastic storage units that are sitting in both of the sheds in her backyard. About a year ago I was going through them and in the process I pulled out some stuff that, for some unGodly reason, I was “storing.” Among these items were a computer keyboard and some old pens, pencils, and markers.
I brought this stuff back with me to my home near the shore and when I got there, I immediately put the keyboard into a different storage area in my closet and I added the writing implements to a bucket of similar items. I’ve never been one to throw away items that still have some tangible use to them and I think that is a virtue. However, adding those extra pens and pencils to my bucket of pens and pencils got me to thinking about all of the stuff that we all probably have lying around in junk drawers or plastic bins or buckets, etc. How many of us have a bunch of old pens and pencils sitting around, but when we need something to write with we comment that we never have anything to use?
I bring up the brief story about bringing home pens, pencils, and a keyboard to comment on something that I’ve been trying to do for a few years now. When I started going to graduate school at Rutgers (which would be the spring semester of 2004), I realized that it made no sense for me to go out and buy new pens and notebooks and other things that you’d use in the classroom because I had leftovers from both college and high school. Seriously, who needs to go out and buy another notebook when you’ve probably only used 15 – 20 pages out of your last one or if you have sheets of loose leaf paper laying around? It’s insane the amount of resources that we all likely waste by not completely using all of the items that we purchase. Think of how much money you’ve probably spent on writing implements over the years when you had perfectly good ones lying around your home or office.
While these are “sustainable” and “environmentally-friendly” reasons to completely use the items that we purchase, there is another reason – it saves money! Why go out and spend even $2 or $3 on new pens when you have old ones sitting in a drawer? Why go spend $5 to $8 on notebooks when you have old pieces of paper that you can use? I’m currently taking a course in executive communication and the notebook that I’m using is an old black and white marble covered composition notebook from Mead that I purchased when I was in college. In the last ten years or so, I only used about 6 pages in that notebook. Just 6 pages! Talk about a waste…
And as a quick note – I’m not against going out and purchasing new stuff when it is needed. For example, the garbage can that I keep near the desk in my bedroom is broken and needs to be replaced. Sure, it gets the job done, but it’s broken and has a jagged edge. When I get a new garbage can, though, I’ll be sure to put this one in the recycling bin since it is made of plastic.
The pencil that I’m using to take notes during the executive communication class is probably older than some of the people reading this blog. I remember getting it in second or third grade and it has “Happy Thanksgiving” stamped across the side of it with a weird looking turkey and an odd pilgrim on either side. This is one of the pencils that had been sitting in my Mom’s shed for 10 to 15 years doing nothing. Sure, it’s a funny pencil, but it gets the job done and it is a bit of a conversation starter with my classmates (which usually starts with either, “Is that your kid’s pencil?” or “Does that say ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ on it?”).
The next time you think you need to go out and buy a pen or a pencil stop and think about whether or not you have a sufficient writing implement at home or in the office somewhere.
Posted in Sustainable Living | 2 Comments »
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