Tag Archive for: Nutrition

World Hunger: Ten Myths

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Authors: Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins

In troubled times, all of us seek ways to make sense of the world. We grasp for organizing beliefs to help us interpret the endlessly confusing rush of world events. Unfortunately, however, the two of us have come to see that the way people think about hunger is the greatest obstacle to ending it. So in this Backgrounder we encapsulate 40 years of learning and in-depth new research to reframe ten such ways of thinking explored in our latest book World Hunger: 10 Myths. We call them “myths” because they often lead us down blind alleys or simply aren’t true.

Myth one: too little food, too many people

Our response: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third. Even after diverting roughly half of the world’s grain and most soy protein to animal feed and non-food uses, the world still produces enough to provide every human being with nearly 2,900 calories a day. Clearly, our global calorie supply is ample.

Even though the global population more than doubled between 1961 and 2013, the world produces around 50 percent more food for each of us today—of which we now waste about a third.

Increasingly, however, calories and nutrition are diverging as the quality of food in most parts of the world is degrading. Using a calorie-deficiency standard, the UN estimates that today roughly one in nine people is hungry—about 800 million; but adding measures of nutrient deficiencies as well, we estimate that a quarter of the world’s people suffer from nutritional deprivation.

Food scarcity is not the problem, but the scarcity of real democracy protecting people’s access to nutritious food is a huge problem. So, fighting hunger means tackling concentrated political and economic power in order to create new equitable rules. Otherwise hunger will continue no matter how much food we grow.

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Fertile Health: Parallels Between Sustainable Agriculture and Sustainable Medicine

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Author: Didi Pershouse

“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.” –Wendell Berry

In the mornings before work, I jump in the river, and walk barefoot back to my clinic, looking for wild edibles and medicinal plants along the way. I live in my clinic these days. I moved in to save money when gas prices spiked, and the economy collapsed, but it has turned into a delightful low-carbon, über-local health-care experiment. I only pay one heating bill, one phone bill, and one electricity bill. I see patients with my dog by my side while my two boys are at school. Patients walk through my kitchen on their way in and out of my small office, and sometimes, after I’ve been talking to them about the importance of the microbiome, I offer them a taste of real sauerkraut, raw milk or kefir—all brimming with good bacteria. Twice a week I offer sliding-scale, group acupuncture treatments in my living room, where the mammalian comfort of patients taking naps near each other seems to be an added bonus to the healing process. In the evenings, I teach classes on personal and community resiliency, deep self-care, and peer support for community leaders. I have spent the last seven years writing about sustainable medicine, and trying to define (and bring into practice) what a truly sustainable health-care system would look like.

This is not a simple thing. In order for people to be healthy in the long term, nearly every other aspect of life comes into play. When people thrive, you can generally look around and see that the natural environment around them has been well cared for, their relationships are solid, they have abundant, nutrient-dense food to eat, a just society to live in, and they are living in relatively peaceful times. We now also know that we rely heavily on communities of beneficial bacteria in and on our bodies for physical and emotional health, immunity and even proper development.

The microscope, the telescope, and the deep-sea camera have helped us to rediscover that we are part of a vast interdependent web of relationships, and whatever happens in one part of the system affects the whole.   This means that there is no such thing as “human health” apart from the rest of the planet, there is only health. When I use the word “medicine” I mean something much more profound and far reaching than medical care practiced by, and for, humans. The planet itself has become something like a field hospital, with new species limping in each day, and others going extinct.

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The Healing Power of Regenerative Organic Agriculture

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September 20, 2015 marked 25 years since my father, Robert Rodale, was killed in a car accident in Russia. If on that fateful day someone would have asked him what his legacy was to be, I know for a fact he would have answered: “Regenerative organic agriculture.”

To him, organic alone was not enough. He believed we needed a commitment to making things better. But more importantly, he understood that nature inherently makes things better when left to do her work. Nature heals itself, just as our bodies inherently attempt to heal themselves when wounded. We needed, he thought, to get nature on our team to make organic agriculture reach its true power.

A lot of people thought he was crazy. But some thought he was onto something.

After he died, the idea of regenerative agriculture seemed forgotten as the organic movement grew. But lately, there has been a resurgence of support behind the idea of regeneration. Thanks to the work of Tom Newmark, with the Carbon Underground, people are gathering around the tribal fire of regenerative organic agriculture in a way that my father would have only dreamed about. There’s even a growing movement toward regenerative capitalism, an idea proposed by the Capital Institute‘s John Fullerton.

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