As Americans, we must remember that food flows into our country. The United States and Europe enjoy the flow of food from the south to the north, thus structure policy to ensure this continues. On the contrary, many countries referred to as “third world” institute trade policies which export their valuable crops. The countries then import many processed foods, but because of currency weaknesses and unfavorable trade policies, the imported food is often to expensive for the people to purchase.

So why are more and more Americans considered hungry? On a relative level, if Americans are having a tough time feeding their families, what does this imply for those living in impoverished countries? America is plnetiful when it comes to food, so why are many Americans claiming they don’t have enough food?

One obvious contributor is the fact that the United States currently has about a 10% unemployment rate. This does not reflect that amount of people who are dependent on others to provide them

Given capitalism’s tendency to produce massive corporations whose technology and power grants them the ability to bottle-up the world’s water supply, a question that will soon be answered is whether water is a commodity, which can be bought and sold, or whether it is a human-right. Although the answer is not entirely one sided, as companies like Nestle attempt to expand their production of water, a balancing act will ensue between privatizers of water and people who believe access to water is an inalienable right.

The idea that “everyone should have water” resonates because it is a moral statement: idyllic, but something worth striving for. To think of water access as a “right” is tough for Americans because of the prevelance of water via kitchen sinks, hallways bubblers, and vending machines. Since day one, most Americans have access to water, an accomplishment when compared to the realities of many other nations.

Water is not an inalienable right. If every world citizen could access water it would be an accomplishment for humankind. But to say that one can and should live a life without thirst is to deny the value of water. In history, the greatest cities were built near water because ports were the centers of trade. Mesopatamia was built near water because it was an energy source, and was also attacked for the same reasons. Thousands of wars have been fought for access to water. Whether it be for drinking, trade, or energy, water has an intrinsic value that will never vaporize.

Many corporations believe privatization is the solution to the conundrum. Since corporations are profit drive, though,  social responsiblity is an inactive variable. Is it possible to make water an inalienable right?

The media blurt out euphemisms to describe the health reform: single-payer, public option, government-run, and other vague terms that achieve nothing more than confusing the audience. When was the last time you heard a health-care reform discussion that began with the question: What can Americans do to end up at the doctor’s less?

For example, what role does health-education play in this current health-care reform? Instead of requiring every American to have health-care, wouldn’t it be more sensible to limit every American to just one McDonalds meal a week? Sure, this seems drastic, but if we all ate healthier there would be less need to go to the doctors.

Another example. How about health-insurance companies pay for their customers to go to the gym. One may balk at this idea, but insurance companies are extremely lucrative properties, and can certainly afford $20 a month. If Americans pay hundreds a month for health insurance, surely we can be completely reimbursed to go to the gym, right?

These solutions may seem fickle, but I don’t think they are. Seriously, what is the point of a “yearly check-up” if the patient is twenty years old, exercises everyday, eats healthy, and doesn’t drink or smoke? There are people who take health personally and don’t need a doctor to tell them how to live the right way.

Is it really the responsibility of the government to keep you healthy? C’mon, lets broaden the scope of personal responsibility!

Other than a full meal, think about what else $5 can buy you. Two gallons of gas, half a pack of cigarettes,3 hours of parking at the UMass garage, and maybe even a toothbrush. Food, a commodity that is demanded by all on daily basis, is too cheap.

Why has this happened? Although consumers look at cheap food as a good thing, it has many consequences that the same consumer does not appreciate.

To begin with, the amount of workers in the agricultural sector has been decreasing steadily since the proliferation of cities in the 1960s. Machinery has replaced human labor because a tractor can do far more work in a day than two hands. Companies can reduce the costs of labor, meaning they can sell their food for less.

The type of worker has also changed. Know how America has been outsourcing many service sector jobs to India? On the farming front, America has imported labor (often illegal)  from Mexico and the Caribbean, resulting in reduced wages for those who work on a farm. Again, reduce the cost of production, and the price which goods are sold at decreases as well.

The most important is that the quality of food is decreasing. That $5 McDonalds meal may fill you up, but imagine your stomachs reaction when it is forced to digest that Grade F beef. Think the supermarket offers better quality beef? Think again, cause it all comes from the same farms.

The beef industry in America is booming. The cows you eat are not the same as they used to be: instead of relying on grass as feed, the vast majority of the beef at supermarkets and restaurants is grown using processsed corn as feed.

In addition to changing the natural diet for cows, farmers have begun forcing cows into jampacked lots. The cows end up standing in the same area for most of the day, rubbing up against each other because there’s nowhere else to go. These cows don’t even stand on much grass anymore because the ground is covered with fecal matter.

Do not overlook these facts. For every other generation of cows on Earth, grass was their preference for food. The grasslands were theirs for roaming, eating, getting in a lay-down, and burping. Now, their digestive systems are adapting to corn while being stuffed into fenced-in lots, like pork in a Congressional bill.

One of the results of these modifications to a cow’s life is the increased outbreak of e-coli, a bacteria that grows in the stomachs of cows before ending up on your plate. This e-coli bacteria can seriously kill you.

A dangerous aspect of e-coli is its potential to go unchecked until it has been eaten by thousands of people. Beef farms are massive, so when e-coli spreads to every cow on the farm, the beef ends up being packaged into thousands of plastic-wrapped containers and shipped throughout enitre regions of the USA. So the e-coli ends up in different packackes, in different stoes, in different locations. Thus, recalling e-coli ridden beef is a tough and sometimes unachievable task.

I smell some lawsuits. Which is right! It is the right of the consumer to know where our food comes from and what conditions our food is being raised in.

In the pursuit of maximized productivity, the beef industry of America has created a health-risk with fatal implications.

Though neither case mentions it, I think that the plummeting value of the dollar means that even those who are employed are making less money because the dollars in their pocket are worth less. These people are not earning less dollars, but the money is worth less. So if $100 dollars use to feed a family for a week, it now takes more than $100 because each dollar buys less than it use to.

The purpose of this entry is to ask the question: What is hunger? If 1 in x-amount of people are hungry, what does this statistic tell us and what qualities define hunger?

Does it mean that people aren’t eating for days straight?  Maybe “hunger” occurs when a person only eats one plentiful meal a day? Does it mean that people aren’t consuming a certain amount of calories?

I looked through the FeedingAmerica website, but was not given the answer to these questions. Many statistics are offered to convince the audience that hunger exists in America, but these statistics lack insight to what classifies someone as “hungry”. For example, what is food insecurity and how are its percentages calculated?

The reason I ask these questions is because of the relative nature of the word “hunger.” What it means to be hungry in Sudan, and what it means to be hungry in South Carolina, are completely different. When the United Nations says that people are going hungry, how does it create a sliding scale to take into consideration the differences in income, access to supermarkets, government-funded food aid, and all the other factors that make hunger unique to citizens in separate countries?

If 1 in 8 Americans are hungry, then it is safe to say that a global hunger crisis is a realistic threat. America is one of the most affluent countries in the world, so if almost 10 percent of our citizens are hungry, then the situation must be much worse on other continents.

Monsanto has a monopoly on the weed-killing market, and many people think their genetically engineered product is more threatening than the weeds the Round Up repels. In a San Francisco federal court hearing, the judge ordered that an “environmental impact statement” be conducted to ensure that “the potential elimination of a farmer’s choice to grow non–genetically engineered crops, or a consumer’s choice not to eat genetically engineered food.”

In response to the San Francisco judge’s disapproval of genetically modified beets, A Sierra Club representative said that, “The ruling is a major consumer victory for preserving the right to grow and eat organic foods in the United States.”

In Europe, the “European Food Safety Authority” approved of genetically modified maize from Monsanto while the European Union’s ministers are reluctant to allow genetically engineered foods into the farmlands.

This situation shows how the courts, corporations, federal agencies, and interest groups are all trying to define consumer desires. For example, although the Sierra Club thinks consumers want to be able to buy organic food, who exactly are they speaking for? I’m sure it is true that some consumers don’t want any genetically modified crops near their organic suppliers, but another percentage of consumers just demand their food be cheap.

Since the word describes various ideas, it is necessary that we analyze its usage in every single context to avoid ambiguity. For example, a farmer who decides not to use pesticides and a politician who wants to limit human emissions of carbon have different definitions for the word sustainable. Though they agree on the words most basic definition, the practical application of the word is very different.

Dean’s Beans is a business that blossomed in the Pioneer Valley and has impacted the lives of coffee farmers from Peru to Papau New Guinea. Founded by Dean Cycon, Dean’s Beans business model emphasizes the social and environmental impact that business has on the world. Listen to this interview to hear what Dean’s response to the question: “When it comes to coffee – or any other product – does it really matter to consumers if the business is socially responsible?”

For Dean, it absolutely matters. That is why his company always buys coffee beans above the “fair-trade” price. Not only does he pay above the “fair” price, but he profit shares with the farming communities to help them improve the standard of living. Dean’s Business model refers to this as People Centered Development, or PCD.

In Ethiopia, Dean provided a no-interest loan, which was repaid with coffee sales,  that helped a community build water wells. The result was that water flowed right from the mountain to the village, saving the women  many hours of walking up a mountain to transport water back to their families.

In Sumatra, coffee farmers were losing profit because weed infestation was ruining their crops. The solution? Dean’s Beans donated one water buffalo to the community. The water buffalo ate all the weeds and provided enough urine and manure to fertilize the entire farm!

In every village that Dean buys coffee from, examples of sustainable development are a reality. Dean doesn’t just talk sustainability, he practices it throughout the world.

As consumers, we must guard against being stooped into believing a product or business practices “sustainability” or “fair-trade” just because it says so on the wrapper.

“Pasta day” was not exciting because the pasta was exceptionally good, it was exciting because every other day of the week, the food was exceptionally bad. As a naive teenager, I never stopped to think about the challenge of feeding 1,500 kids in less than two hours. Not to mention that a meal only cost $1.25, and many kids were allowed to eat for free.

Sharon Barlatier, a lunch director in Queens, is bringing some creativity to her middle school cafeteria. She is not the stereotypical,  unhappy, hairnet-toting  server who slopped the same  mystery meat onto your plate day after day. Sharon loves her job, and she hopes the kids love the meals she creates for them.

Though most parents would rather see their kids schooled outside of Queens, Sharon’s daily enthusiasm is commendable within a  scanty school district .

In another article regrding school lunches, Revolution Foods is offering an alternative method for feeding America’s students. Revolution is experimenting its business plan by selling to charter and private schools first, but what are the chances that public schools will begin to invest in alternative providers of school lunch?

Revolution argues that their meals, which are nutritionally superior to traditional school lunches and cost about 25 cents more, should be made available to low-incomes school districts as well. Since kids consume one to two meals a day at school, should parents be concerned about the nutritional standard of the food being served? Revolution think that abandoning foods that contains high fructose corn syrup andlots of trans fats is an important step in promoting a healthy youth population.

While Congress and Michelle Obama hope to increase federal funding for school lunch, maybe Revolution should be considered as an option in the public realm.

One reason I like this story is because of the anonymity that the journalist maintains throughout the text and video. It is important to present the story in an objective manner so that it is considered “news” as opposed to an opinion piece. The questions the journalists asked were effective because he was able to tell an entire story using only Zuchowski’ and Czajkowski’s words.

Another reason I like this multimedia package is because it takes the audience less than five minutes to view entirely, but they learn a lot about tobacco: why this years crop is destroyed, what a bad crop looks like, where this tobacco goes when it is sold, and how this years crop compares to history (its the worst). It would have been possible for the journalist to research this information and blog about it, but by interviewing Zuchowski, a personal element is added which improves the quality of the story.

I really like the  last picture of Zuchowski sitting on the trailer in front of his barn while he is talking about how he would rather a harvest than relying upon an insurance payment. After seeing the other pictures of him standing in the middle of his farm, the last picture of him sitting in front of this massive barn reinforces this theme of the farmer being unable to overcome nature’s unpredictable patterns. The pictures and the morose tone of Zuchowski arouse the audience’s empathy because we see how weather has affected a farmer, his family, and his community.

There is another podcast at the top of this page that is an extended version of Zuchowski’s interview. I think this is an important part of the package for the audience who wish to know more about this story. This podcast also does a good job of expanding the subject of the story; instead of just talking about tobacco, the extended podcast analyzes the role of weather in affecting other Massachusetts crops.