2013 Thinking Our Diet ~

 

As we start 2013, many people will be thinking about plans and promises to improve their diets and health. We think a broader collection of farmers, policy-makers, and eaters need new, bigger resolutions for fixing the food system -- real changes with long-term impacts in fields, boardrooms, and on plates all over the world. These are resolutions that the world can't afford to break with nearly one billion still hungry and more than one billion suffering from the effects of being overweight and obese. We have the tools -- let's use them in 2013!
Here are our 13 resolutions to change the food system in 2013:

1. Growing the Cities: Food production doesn't only happen in fields or factories. Nearly one billion people worldwide produce food in cities. In Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, farmers are growing seeds of indigenous vegetables and selling them to rural farmers. At Bell Book & Candle restaurant in New York, customers are served rosemary, cherry tomatoes, romaine, and other produce grown from the restaurant's rooftop garden.

2. Creating Better Access: People's Grocery in Oakland and Fresh Moves in Chicago bring mobile grocery stores to food deserts giving low-income consumers opportunities to make healthy food choices. Instead of chips and soda, they provide customers with affordable organic produce, not typically available in their communities.

3. Eaters Demanding Healthier Food: Food writer Michael Pollan advises not to eat anything that your grandparents wouldn't recognize. Try eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole foods without preservatives and other additives.

4. Cooking More: Home economics classes have declined in schools in the United Kingdom and the U.S. and young people lack basic cooking skills. Top Chefs Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters, and Bill Telepan are working with schools to teach kids how to cook healthy, nutritious foods.

5. Creating Conviviality: According to the Hartman Group, nearly half of all adults in the U.S. eat meals alone. Sharing a meal with family and friends can foster community and conversation. Recent studies suggest that children who eat meals with their families are typically happier and more stable than those who do not.

6. Focus on Vegetables: Nearly two billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies worldwide, leading to poor development. The World Vegetable Center, however, is helping farmers grow high-value, nutrient rich vegetables in Africa and Asia, improving health and increasing incomes.

7. Preventing Waste: Roughly one-third of all food is wasted--in fields, during transport, in storage, and in homes. But there are easy, inexpensive ways to prevent waste. Initiatives like Love Food, Hate Waste offer consumers tips about portion control and recipes for leftovers, while farmers in Bolivia are using solar-powered driers to preserve foods.

8. Engaging Youth: Making farming both intellectually and economically stimulating will help make the food system an attractive career option for youth. Across sub-Saharan Africa, cell phones and the internet are connecting farmers to information about weather and markets; in the U.S., Food Corps is teaching students how to grow and cook food, preparing them for a lifetime of healthy eating.

9. Protecting Workers: Farm and food workers across the world are fighting for better pay and working conditions. In Zimbabwe, the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), protects laborers from abuse. In the U.S., the Coalition of Immokalee Workers successfully persuaded Trader Joe's and Chipotle to pay the premium of a penny-per-pound to Florida tomato pickers.

10. Acknowledging the Importance of Farmers: Farmers aren't just farmers, they're business-women and men, stewards of the land, and educators, sharing knowledge in their communities. Slow Food International works with farmers all over the world, helping recognize their importance to preserve biodiversity and culture.

11. Recognizing the Role of Governments: Nations must implement policies that give everyone access to safe, affordable, healthy food. In Ghana and Brazil, government action, including national school feeding programs and increased support for sustainable agricultural production, greatly reduced the number of hungry people.

12. Changing the Metrics: Governments, NGOs, and funders have focused on increasing production and improving yields, rather than improving nutrition and protecting the environment. Changing the metrics, and focusing more on quality, will improve public and environmental health, and livelihoods.

13. Fixing the Broken Food System: Agriculture can be the solution to some of the world's most pressing challenges--including unemployment, obesity, and climate change. These innovations simply need more research, more investment, and ultimately more funding.
We can do it --- together!

Follow Danielle Nierenberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DaniNierenberg

Christmas Ham ~

The phrase 'Christmas ham' exists in our lexicon for a few reason: 1) this huge main dish defines Christmas dinner for many families around the world, and 2) it is crazy delicious. There is something incredibly satisfying about plunking something as big as a whole, glazed ham down your holiday table and digging in.
Whether ham is a Christmas tradition in your family, or you're giving it a go for the first time, we found some recipes that could make even the most devout Christmas-turkey-eater reconsider. The salty, smoky flavors of ham make sweet, fruity flavors a perfect complement, which means that everything from glazes to wines will taste even more delicious with it. Not to mention the fact that ham invariably produces great leftovers, which you'll want to utilize to their full potential in the obligatory day-after-Christmas brunch. Merry Christmas and happy holidays, ham lovers!

The Simple Truth About Gun Control

We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids. Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan! Most of us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could.

We do live in such a city. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control. We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife.
There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life: deficits and debts and climate change. Gun violence, and the work of eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not one of them. Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President.
The laws differ from place to place. In some jurisdictions, like Scotland, it is essentially impossible to own a gun; in others, like Canada, it is merely very, very difficult. The precise legislation that makes gun-owning hard in a certain sense doesn’t really matter—and that should give hope to all of those who feel that, with several hundred million guns in private hands, there’s no point in trying to make America a gun-sane country.
As I wrote last January, the central insight of the modern study of criminal violence is that all crime—even the horrific violent crimes of assault and rape—is at some level opportunistic. Building a low annoying wall against them is almost as effective as building a high impenetrable one. This is the key concept of Franklin Zimring’s amazing work on crime in New York; everyone said that, given the social pressures, the slum pathologies, the profits to be made in drug dealing, the ascending levels of despair, that there was no hope of changing the ever-growing cycle of violence. The right wing insisted that this generation of predators would give way to a new generation of super-predators.
What the New York Police Department found out, through empirical experience and better organization, was that making crime even a little bit harder made it much, much rarer. This is undeniably true of property crime, and common sense and evidence tells you that this is also true even of crimes committed by crazy people (to use the plain English the subject deserves). Those who hold themselves together enough to be capable of killing anyone are subject to the same rules of opportunity as sane people. Even madmen need opportunities to display their madness, and behave in different ways depending on the possibilities at hand. Demand an extraordinary degree of determination and organization from someone intent on committing a violent act, and the odds that the violent act will take place are radically reduced, in many cases to zero.
Look at the Harvard social scientist David Hemenway’s work on gun violence to see how simple it is; the phrase “more guns = more homicide” tolls through it like a grim bell. The more guns there are in a country, the more gun murders and massacres of children there will be. Even within this gun-crazy country, states with strong gun laws have fewer gun murders (and suicides and accidental killings) than states without them. (Hemenway is also the scientist who has shown that the inflated figure of guns used in self-defense every year, running even to a million or two million, is a pure fantasy, even though it’s still cited by pro-gun enthusiasts. Those hundreds of thousands intruders shot by gun owners left no records in emergency wards or morgues; indeed, left no evidentiary trace behind. This is because they did not exist.) Hemenway has discovered, as he explained in this interview with Harvard Magazine, that what is usually presented as a case of self-defense with guns is, in the real world, almost invariably a story about an escalating quarrel. “How often might you appropriately use a gun in self-defense?” Hemenway asks rhetorically. “Answer: zero to once in a lifetime. How about inappropriately—because you were tired, afraid, or drunk in a confrontational situation? There are lots and lots of chances.”
So don’t listen to those who, seeing twenty dead six- and seven-year-olds in ten minutes, their bodies riddled with bullets designed to rip apart bone and organ, say that this is impossibly hard, or even particularly complex, problem. It’s a very easy one. Summoning the political will to make it happen may be hard. But there’s no doubt or ambiguity about what needs to be done, nor that, if it is done, it will work. One would have to believe that Americans are somehow uniquely evil or depraved to think that the same forces that work on the rest of the planet won’t work here. It’s always hard to summon up political will for change, no matter how beneficial the change may obviously be. Summoning the political will to make automobiles safe was difficult; so was summoning the political will to limit and then effectively ban cigarettes from public places. At some point, we will become a gun-safe, and then a gun-sane, and finally a gun-free society. It’s closer than you think. (I’m grateful to my colleague Jeffrey Toobin for showing so well that the idea that the Second Amendment assures individual possession of guns, so far from being deeply rooted in American law, is in truth a new and bizarre reading, one that would have shocked even Warren Burger.)
Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics eliminate bacterial infections. As I wrote last week, those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as the faith healers would rather watch the children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know what would have saved the lives of Olivia and Jesse.
On gun violence and how to end it, the facts are all in, the evidence is clear, the truth there for all who care to know it—indeed, a global consensus is in place, which, in disbelief and now in disgust, the planet waits for us to us to join. Those who fight against gun control, actively or passively, with a shrug of helplessness, are dooming more kids to horrible deaths and more parents to unspeakable grief just as surely as are those who fight against pediatric medicine or childhood vaccination. It’s really, and inarguably, just as simple as that.
Photograph by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux.

Simple Things ~

In today's world we are inundated with images of Christmas from the media. We are told that it is all about buying expensive gifts for each other. In today's challenging economic times it is a tragedy that parents spend way more than they can afford to try to please their children. The sad truth is that, "money can't buy you love". A holiday is about the time spent together with loved ones. It is about gifts that come from the heart, and it is the about the thousands of years of tradition that mark the holiday ~
It's the simple things that count ! A kind word , phone call and text can really put joy into the season for friends and family !

Mourning ~

It is a Jewish tradition, upon leaving a house of mourning, to offer the following words of prayer: "May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." Today, as we prepare to light our Shabbat candles, we offer this ancient prayer to those who lost loved ones and to all who were affected by the unspeakable tragedy this week in Newtown, Connecticut. Sometimes, the heavy quality of darkness makes it feel more tangible, more true. It's hard to imagine how even just a little light is more resilient, how it can conquer and turn everything around. When lighting Shabbat candles today, let us imagine our candle joining a global flame that can truly uplift you, your family and indeed the whole world. Even if it's hard to imagine, just do it. It's something we have to experience to believe.

Psalm 5 : 11 -12

But let all who take refuge in You be glad; let them ever sing for joy.
Spread Your protection over them, that those who love Your name may rejoice in you.
Surely, LORD, You bless the righteous; You surround them with Your favor as with a shield.
Psalm 5:11-12

Put Gladness in my HEART ~

Thou hast put gladness in my heart - Thou hast made me happy, to wit, in the manner specified in Psalm 4:6. Many had sought happiness in other things; he had sought it in the favor of the Lord, and the Lord had given him a degree of happiness which they had never found in the most prosperous worldly condition. This happiness had its seat in the "heart," and not in any external circumstances. All true happiness must have its seat there, for if the heart is sad, of what avail are the most prosperous external circumstances? More than in the time - More than they have had in the time referred to; or, more than I should have in such circumstances. That their corn and their wine increased - When they were most successful and prosperous in worldly things. This shows that when, in Psalm 4:6, he says that many inquired who would show them any "good," what they aspired after was worldly prosperity, here expressed by an increase of grain and wine. The word rendered "corn" means grain in general; the word rendered "wine" - תירושׁ tı̂yrôsh - means properly "must, new wine," Isaiah 65:8. The reference here is probably to the joy of harvest, when the fruits of the earth were gathered in, an occasion among the Hebrews, as it is among most people, of joy and rejoicing.

My Happy Funny Girl ~

 e.e. cumming's "I carry your heart."

I carry your heart with me ( I carry it in
my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go !
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I  carry your heart ( I carry it in my heart)

 

"Light in the Darkness"

The Feast of Dedication

Hanukkah is the Hebrew word for dedication.
It is not the Jewish alternative to Christmas.
This holiday represents a story all of its own.
It is a story of incredible faithfulness to God and a story of awesome
courage ~
We know it also as a story of re-dedication of a defiled Temple.
Like Christmas it is a time to wonder at the miracles of God.
Hanukkah is a time to rededicate and celebrate.
Most importantly, Hanukkah is not just for Jews.
Yeshua (Jesus) celebrated Hanukkah.
So why shouldn't Christians?
If it was important to Jesus shouldn't it be important to us?
Now it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, and it was winter. And
Jesus walked in the Temple, in Solomon's porch.
John 10: 22~23
Although Hanukkah is not described in great detail in the scriptures it is
probably the most historically documented of all the Jewish holidays.
This holiday is about a dedicated people who refused to compromise.
A remnant of people who refused to give in and go against God 's Word.

"Light in the Darkness" is what this holiday is all about.
This is one reason why every believer should choose to celebrate
Hanukkah.
Every believer in the Messiah should be a
"Light in the Darkness."
The history behind Hanukkah should be known by every Christian and we,
like our Jewish brothers and sisters, should pass this extraordinary story of
faith down to our children.

A day will come when our children and grandchildren will need to know how to stand and not back down ~