The availability of healthy food choices and your quality of diet is associated with where you live, according to two studies conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the Center for a Livable Future. Researchers examined healthy food availability and diet quality among Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Md., residents and found that availability of healthy foods was associated with quality of diet and 46 percent of lower-income neighborhoods had a low availability of healthy foods. The results are published in the March 2009 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the December 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“Place of residence plays a larger role in dietary health than previously estimated,” said Manuel Franco, MD, PhD, lead author of the studies and an associate with the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology. “Our findings show that participants who live in neighborhoods with low healthy food availability are at an increased risk of consuming a lower quality diet. We also found that 24 percent of the black participants lived in neighborhoods with a low availability of healthy food compared with 5 percent of white participants.” Read More >
Check out the new book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, which takes a critical look at factory farms while giving readers a pathway to find sustainably and humanely-produced meat, dairy, and eggs. Righteous Porkchop, penned by environmental lawyer and rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman, hit the bookshelves in mid-February and is already receiving wide praise. Nicolette’s background includes working for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the Waterkeeper Alliance, where she had the sobering experience of witnessing the shocking practices and environmental damage posed by confined animal feeding operations. In an interesting twist, Nicolette, an urban, East Coast vegetarian, found herself swept off her feet by a high-profile cattle rancher, Bill Niman, of the famed Niman Ranch in Northern California. Both Nicolette and Bill share a passion for raising animals with kindness, and Bill recently served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
Righteous Porkchop, with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “brims with hope and charts a practical (and even beautiful) path out of the jungle,” says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Published by HarperCollins , the book is available on line at Barns and Noble or Amazon book stores.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack
On Tuesday Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said he would like to see a single food safety agency as opposed to the current system where food safety for the millions of Americans is overseen by two separate agencies, the USDA and the FDA. “We are the only industrial nation to have two systems,” said Secretary Vilsack, whose comments came in response to the recent peanut butter – salmonella outbreak, indicating that a single centralized agency in charge of protecting America’s food would be more successful in preventing food-borne illness.
In the current system, the FDA oversees the food safety for all domestic and imported food sold in interstate commerce, including shell eggs and bottled water, but not meat, poultry, or egg products. The USDA oversees the food safety for all domestic and imported meat and poultry, and related products such as meat or poultry containing stews, pizzas, and frozen foods, along with processed egg products (as soon as the shell is broken, it becomes the USDA’s responsibility). The total burden for food-borne illness is no small matter either, as every year it is estimated there are approximately 76 million food related illnesses, 323,000 hospitalizations, and 5,200 deaths. Read More >
Pelletized grasses can provide a low-tech, renewable heating fuel.
Rather than helping to produce liquid fuel (ethanol) for vehicles, a better future for some of the nation’s farms may be in growing grass for use as a heating fuel, according to Jock Gill, president of Pellet Futures, a bioenergy consultancy.
Gill spoke Saturday in State College, Pa., at the 18th annual conference of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, in a talk entitled “Getting the Miles Out: Relocalizing Energy,” in which he envisioned a “community supported energy” model similar to the increasingly popular community supported agriculture. He advocated a shift away from an energy system that involves centralized control of production, then distribution through a vastly inefficient electrical grid, to a system that is more locally controlled – a more democratic energy system. Read More >
An article published in today’s NewScientist Magazine says cutting back on meet intake could save $20 trillion in the fight against climate change. According to the article, researchers involved say that reducing intake of beef and pork would lead to the creation of a huge new carbon sink, as vegetation would thrive on unused farmland. “The model takes into account farmland that is used to grow extra food to make up for the lost meat, but that requires less area, so some will be abandoned. Millions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would also be saved every year due to reduced emissions from farms,” say the authors of the study.
If the global population shifted to a low-meat diet – defined as 70 grams of beef and 325 grams of chicken and eggs per week – around 15 million square kilometres of farmland would be freed up. Vegetation growing on this land would mop up carbon dioxide. It could alternatively be used to grow bioenergy crops, which would displace fossil fuels.
The every-five-year Census of Agriculture released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows “a continuation in the trend towards more small and very large farms and fewer mid-sized operations.” The comprehensive report noted, between 2002 and 2007, the number of farms with sales of less than $2,500 increased by 74,000, while the number of farms with sales of more than $500,000 grew by 46,000 over the same period.
In addition to looking at farm numbers, operator demographics and economic aspects of farming, the Census of Agriculture delves into numerous other areas, including organic, value-added, and specialty production, all of which are on the rise.
The 2007 Census found that 57 percent of all farmers have internet access, up from 50 percent in 2002. For the first time in 2007, the census also looked at high-speed Internet access. Of those producers accessing the Internet, 58 percent reported having a high-speed connection. Read More >
The world’s farmers must quickly switch to more sustainable and productive farming systems to grow the food needed by a swelling world population and respond to climate change, FAO’s top crops expert told an international farm congress in New Delhi today.
In a keynote speech to 1,000 participants at the IVth World Congress on Conservation Agriculture (CA) in New Delhi, Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division, endorsed CA as an essential part of that change.
“The world has no alternative to pursuing Sustainable Crop Production Intensification to meet the growing food and feed demand, to alleviate poverty and to protect its natural resources. Conservation Agriculture is an essential element of that Intensification,” Pandey said.
Conservation Agriculture is a farming system that does away with regular ploughing and tillage and promotes permanent soil cover and diversified crops rotation to ensure optimal soil health and productivity. Introduced some 25 years ago, it is now practiced on 100 million ha of land across the world. Read the complete article.
This Friday millions of Americans will wear red to highlight women’s risk of dying from heart disease. About ten times as many women die from heart disease as breast cancer in the United States each year, yet an astonishing 90 percent of primary care doctors still don’t know that heart attacks kill more women than men. This year Healthy Monday is urging women to continue wearing red once a week, to help sound the alarm all year long.
“By wearing something red every Monday, women can signal their commitment to their own heart health” says Sid Lerner, Chairman of the Healthy Monday Campaign. “By sharing the reason they’re wearing red with women they meet, that lifesaving information becomes viral. If every Monday a woman tells two friends, and they tell two friends, pretty soon women all over the country will have this crucial information. It’s just like compounding interest, but it’s about saving lives.” Read More >
Interesting reading here! A new article in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, “Health Professionals’ Roles in Animal Agriculture, Climate Change, and Human Health” (subscription required) notes what we eat is rapidly becoming an issue of global concern. “With food shortages, the rise in chronic disease, and global warming, the impact of our dietary choices seems more relevant today than ever,” state the authors. “Globally, a transition is taking place toward greater consumption of foods of animal origin, in lieu of plant-based diets. With this transition comes intensification of animal agriculture that in turn is associated with the emergence of zoonotic infectious diseases, environmental degradation, and the epidemics of chronic disease and obesity.”
The article discusses climate change and environmental degradation, noting animal agriculture accounts for 37%, 65%, and 64% of anthropogenic methane, nitrous oxide, and ammonia emissions, respectively, from ruminant fermentation, livestock waste, fertilizer use and other factors. Read More >
