Commodity Food
Jun. 2nd, 2024 02:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith‘There was no other option’: the aid packages feeding diabetes and heart disease in the Pacific islands
Increasingly frequent natural disasters leave islanders reliant on processed foods for months on end – with deeply concerning knock-on effects to health.
When twin cyclones Judy and Kevin hammered their way through the 83 tropical islands of Vanuatu in March 2023, the government and NGOs were quick to distribute supplies. The South Pacific country’s crops had been decimated and the need to feed the 300,000-plus population was a priority.
The bags of rice, packets of noodles and tinned tuna that communities depend on for the months after a disaster were welcomed. But unlike native staples such as yams, taro and sweet potato, these emergency foods only serve to worsen the region’s non-communicable diseases (NCDs) problem, according to experts.
Commodity food will kill you. Just ask any Native American or look at health statistics on reservations. Ultraprocessed food will kill you.
And now let me call bullshit on the lack of yams, taro, and sweet potato because all of those vegetables have a long shelf life as whole tubers. (Frex, African yams last 4-6 MONTHS.) We shop stores that import them from freaking Africa. Said stores also carry numerous products made from them, particularly flour that is basically just dried pounded yam or whatever. These foods are easy to grow, cheap, nutritious, filling, and readily available in mass quantities. So if aid agencies aren't providing them, it's either stupidity (it never occurred to them to check what local people eat) or outright racism (white people generally won't buy food favored by people of color).
There's also a very easy way to get fresh foods into a disaster area quickly: use sprouts. You can pack a stupendous amount of, say, alfalfa seeds into a shipment; you can also use a couple dozen other seeds for variety of flavor (e.g. mustard, radish, clover). They produce extremely nutritious fresh food in a few days. All it requires is a jar with a mesh or cloth top and some water (for individuals) or you could send a commercial sprout machine to produce mass quantities. Sprouts are very high in vitamins and fiber but low in calories and have no fat.
What we have here is an opportunity for some Black Owned and Operated charity to dispense yams etc. to communities of color at need ... and make the white folks look really bad. Since climate change is making lots more and worse natural disasters, we better solve this problem fast, or a lot of people will die needlessly because so many places don't have the resources to treat dietary diseases.
Increasingly frequent natural disasters leave islanders reliant on processed foods for months on end – with deeply concerning knock-on effects to health.
When twin cyclones Judy and Kevin hammered their way through the 83 tropical islands of Vanuatu in March 2023, the government and NGOs were quick to distribute supplies. The South Pacific country’s crops had been decimated and the need to feed the 300,000-plus population was a priority.
The bags of rice, packets of noodles and tinned tuna that communities depend on for the months after a disaster were welcomed. But unlike native staples such as yams, taro and sweet potato, these emergency foods only serve to worsen the region’s non-communicable diseases (NCDs) problem, according to experts.
Commodity food will kill you. Just ask any Native American or look at health statistics on reservations. Ultraprocessed food will kill you.
And now let me call bullshit on the lack of yams, taro, and sweet potato because all of those vegetables have a long shelf life as whole tubers. (Frex, African yams last 4-6 MONTHS.) We shop stores that import them from freaking Africa. Said stores also carry numerous products made from them, particularly flour that is basically just dried pounded yam or whatever. These foods are easy to grow, cheap, nutritious, filling, and readily available in mass quantities. So if aid agencies aren't providing them, it's either stupidity (it never occurred to them to check what local people eat) or outright racism (white people generally won't buy food favored by people of color).
There's also a very easy way to get fresh foods into a disaster area quickly: use sprouts. You can pack a stupendous amount of, say, alfalfa seeds into a shipment; you can also use a couple dozen other seeds for variety of flavor (e.g. mustard, radish, clover). They produce extremely nutritious fresh food in a few days. All it requires is a jar with a mesh or cloth top and some water (for individuals) or you could send a commercial sprout machine to produce mass quantities. Sprouts are very high in vitamins and fiber but low in calories and have no fat.
What we have here is an opportunity for some Black Owned and Operated charity to dispense yams etc. to communities of color at need ... and make the white folks look really bad. Since climate change is making lots more and worse natural disasters, we better solve this problem fast, or a lot of people will die needlessly because so many places don't have the resources to treat dietary diseases.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-02 09:08 am (UTC)Sprouts are very high in vitamins and fiber but low in calories and have no fat.
I would also guess that when they're looking at disaster situations their thought is to buy things that are high in calories, including plenty of fat. Diabetes is a problem, but starvation and deficiency illness due to missing major macronutrients, like fat, is a faster problem.
Thoughts
Date: 2024-06-03 05:47 am (UTC)Some thoughts:
* It is not acceptable aid to send food that injures or kills people. Poisoning a person slowly is just as much murder as shooting them quickly.
* If you can't afford to send food that is safe and nutritious, then either reduce your coverage area so that you can, or get out of the aid business. Don't hurt people because you can't be arsed to do it right.
* Climate change is dramatically affecting aid dynamics.
-- It used to be that aid was temporary and then people would go back to their usual (healthier) diet. Sending unhealthy food was still wicked, but less likely to kill them. But now the disasters pile up such that many people rely on commodity food over the long term, which is a lot more lethal. This greatly increases the moral obligation of providers to furnish food that is safe to eat long-term.
-- Because disasters are increasing in frequency and scope, there is less tendency to store food for years. It gets used, often faster than supplies can be scrounged up. If disasters are coming once every 2-3 years then a 5-year shelf life might be prudent. If they're hitting every 2-3 months or weeks then it is not.
* Even if aid organizations don't want to deal with whole yams and their months of shelf life, they could be providing dried yam products, some sort of legume with the rice, etc. to make a healthier diet.
>> I would also guess that when they're looking at disaster situations their thought is to buy things that are high in calories, including plenty of fat.<<
That will absolutely kill people who are stuck eating that food long-term, which is increasingly common and muchly what the article was about.
>> Diabetes is a problem, but starvation and deficiency illness due to missing major macronutrients, like fat, is a faster problem.<<
Commodity food might be keeping people alive at first, but it is increasing the total amount of suffering and shortening their potential lifespan. This fails my ethical standards.
I believe people could do better. It is straightforward to see a bunch of ways how. I think they're either not caring enough or not competent enough to actually do that.
This actually isn't new. . .
Date: 2024-06-02 01:01 pm (UTC)This despite the fact that the growing season is practically all-year round and that they exported food they did not eat.
- Flavia
(bv97045)
Re: This actually isn't new. . .
Date: 2024-06-02 06:51 pm (UTC)When there is little or no local food after a disaster, then people are forced to eat whatever they can find. In that case, feeding them things that will cripple or kill them is evil at best and murder or genocide at worst. Hence why sending commodity food to reservations is an act of genocide.
This also reveals that aid agencies are often more about masturbating the giver's desire to feel needed than they are about helping the receiver to overcome challenges. If I wanted to send food to a disaster area, I would start by checking the local diet to see which of its components could be included in a relief shipment. And are local cooks available or do I need to find someone here who can make those recipes and is willing to travel there? In fact, given climate change, I would be working in advance to analyze the cuisine(s) of the area(s) of service for my organization so that supplies and personnel could be dispatched promptly to serve local needs. Every culture has its own "pantry" set, but there's a ton of overlap between countries within a region. With very little need for customization, one could assemble a "Caribbean" or "Mediterranean" package plan based on the staple foods of a region. Frex, Vanuatu is using a "tropical" base with things like taro and coconut. I'd want to get a world-hunger nutritionist on board to make sure we covered the essentials, but at least I know to look these things the hell up. If someone is sending SAD staples to places with a totally different cuisine, then this homework never even occurred to them.
And if you think the government should be involved in health care? Look at what happens to populations where it already has influence or control -- like Native Americans, veterans, or prison inmates. The effects on diet and health tend to be dire. With disaster aid, even independent charities are impacted by what the government chooses to subsidize. That's a problem.
Re: This actually isn't new. . .
Date: 2024-06-02 08:59 pm (UTC)- Flavia
(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-02 08:25 pm (UTC)Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-02 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-06-03 04:47 am (UTC)https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-monthly-reports
Basically, for one person at my age and gender, the average cost of groceries for one month was $224 in April of this year. That works out to $7.20 per day. (There are places where a fancy Starbucks drink costs that much.)
Combine that with the latest serving/nutrition guidelines on My Plate, and even the menu plan created by nutritionists falls apart for one simple reason: the prices of UN-processed foods like dry lentils or chickpeas, are outstripping the cost of things like chips and Li'l Debbie sugar bombs. I cannot shop locally and meet both the average cost per item and the nutrition guidelines, even when meticulously using a scale to weigh out servings.
Realistically, the grocery store prices are rising steadily, and much faster for less-processed items, especially fresh fruit, and potatoes (white ones) are among the cheapest fresh truck--their price per pound has nearly doubled in the last four years. That unpredictability in price is another reason that fresh goods are not nearly as common. Even so, the issue of spoilage becomes crucial when buying by the truckload, even for white potatoes. I've gotten a bag home and less than three days later they're either sprouting or turning mushy, and that's with the supposedly "improved" shipping post-Covid.
Switching from rice to fufu would be incredibly helpful from all angles: price, shelf-stability, longevity, and nutrition. Switching from white rice to bulghur would be harder to do, even though it's minimally processed wheat kernels. Yet, American relief in particular does not do that. Why? Because the stockpiles of wheat and rice are subsidized, and thus overproduced in America, so to keep those extra bushes of grain off the store shelves, which would naturally push prices down, the food is bundled off as aid.
Here's another problem that everyone is whistling right past: a prediabetic eating a healthy diet will decline more slowly, or even recover toward average, healthy blood sugar levels, while even two weeks on the standard American diet can slam them directly into full blown diabetes. Coming from a very healthy diet to the average American one would not only make the damage more obvious, it's likely to b a more severe decline, leaving the person with no TIME to get around to being seen by a doctor.
One thing that UN aid services do in particular, is to choose foods which are NOT likely to be allergens. Sorghum would be used instead of corn, or millet instead of wheat. That's one of the major reasons for the heavy reliance on rice, in particular. Also, there /are/ regional differences in UN aid meals, but that's not necessarily true for other agencies. We could be comparing kumquats to chestnuts. It's also the reason for the exclusion of soybeans in most aid packets.
The Mormons have what they call "The Bishop's Storehouse." It's dry goods, dehydrated apples or potato flakes, et cetera, but the minimum of the minimum food supply will actually be pretty well balanced IF the family does not turn the wheat berries into flour. That one change is even more important than keeping fat consumption down.
Food insecurity is a problem, but there should also be expectations to gradually resume normal, local diets as quickly as possible. To solve either issue demands large amounts of money per person, and then we're digging at the roots of capitalism and colonialism all over again.
Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-03 06:20 am (UTC)Now consider that any special dietary needs make it cost half again to two or three times as much. Low-salt, low-sugar, high-fiber, halal, kosher, vegan or vegetarian, any kind of allergy or aversion that knocks out one or more type of food -- you are fucked. High physical activity runs up your energy need? Fucked. Your doctor recommends, or your boss demands, some kind of dietary change they're not paying for? Fucked.
>> Combine that with the latest serving/nutrition guidelines on My Plate, and even the menu plan created by nutritionists falls apart for one simple reason: the prices of UN-processed foods like dry lentils or chickpeas, are outstripping the cost of things like chips and Li'l Debbie sugar bombs. I cannot shop locally and meet both the average cost per item and the nutrition guidelines, even when meticulously using a scale to weigh out servings.<<
That's always been a problem. It's because, when the government started providing food stamps, they stole a woman's work that was meant for other purposes altogether and misused it to set the budget. So it never worked. Now, of course, it's worse for a lot of reasons.
>>Realistically, the grocery store prices are rising steadily, and much faster for less-processed items, especially fresh fruit, and potatoes (white ones) are among the cheapest fresh truck--their price per pound has nearly doubled in the last four years.<<
Not to mention that wages have stagnated for years as the 1% cream off all the benefit of people's hard work. So people work harder, longer, for less.
>> Switching from rice to fufu would be incredibly helpful from all angles: price, shelf-stability, longevity, and nutrition. Switching from white rice to bulghur would be harder to do, even though it's minimally processed wheat kernels. <<
Brown rice or other whole grains would also be better.
>>Because the stockpiles of wheat and rice are subsidized, and thus overproduced in America, so to keep those extra bushes of grain off the store shelves, which would naturally push prices down, the food is bundled off as aid.<<
Exactly. If the government meant "half your plate should be vegetables" then it would subsidize spinach instead of sugar. When the words and the actions disagree, believe the actions.
>>Here's another problem that everyone is whistling right past: a prediabetic eating a healthy diet will decline more slowly, or even recover toward average, healthy blood sugar levels, while even two weeks on the standard American diet can slam them directly into full blown diabetes.<<
Very true, especially for pregnant or nursing women.
>> Coming from a very healthy diet to the average American one would not only make the damage more obvious, it's likely to b a more severe decline, leaving the person with no TIME to get around to being seen by a doctor.<<
Then add in the fact that it's impossible to see a doctor "immediately" unless 1) you are an employed middle-aged white male with classic heart attack symptoms, 2) you are spurting blood, or 3) a baby is currently coming out of you. Otherwise the wait is weeks if you are lucky, months or years if you are not. In a disaster? There are often no medics or facilities available at all. Which might make it a good idea to avoid doing things that make people sicker.
>>One thing that UN aid services do in particular, is to choose foods which are NOT likely to be allergens. Sorghum would be used instead of corn, or millet instead of wheat. That's one of the major reasons for the heavy reliance on rice, in particular. Also, there /are/ regional differences in UN aid meals, but that's not necessarily true for other agencies. We could be comparing kumquats to chestnuts. It's also the reason for the exclusion of soybeans in most aid packets.<<
That's encouraging. I've seen relief meals that are designed to be edible by as wide an audience as possible, such as the Humanitarian Daily Ration.
But I know America is worse. There's no requirement that provided food be safe for everyone to eat. So most emergency rations contain lethal allergens such as soy, tree nuts, wheat, etc. and don't have to meet any religious or medical special needs. Finding any shelf-stable food for emergencies is extremely difficult for anyone with special dietary needs. I know; I've researched it because Terramagne does require that higher-wider safety level. Local-America, if you can't eat like a billy goat, do your best to secure your own emergency food supply because shelters will let you starve to death and are not obligated to provide food you can eat safely.
>>The Mormons have what they call "The Bishop's Storehouse." It's dry goods, dehydrated apples or potato flakes, et cetera, but the minimum of the minimum food supply will actually be pretty well balanced IF the family does not turn the wheat berries into flour. That one change is even more important than keeping fat consumption down.<<
It's a great plan. But it relies on multiple factors that are increasingly rare:
* You must be able to afford to buy a lot of extra food.
* You must have room to store a lot of mass, which costs extra in rent/mortgage.
* You have to store a vast amount of potable water if you are storing dry/dehydrated food, in order to render it edible (with the exception of a few snacks like dried fruit).
* Your life must be stable enough that you won't have to move at a moment's notice and leave it all behind.
* And you have to know how to cook it and have the time and equipment to do so, or it's useless.
>> Food insecurity is a problem, but there should also be expectations to gradually resume normal, local diets as quickly as possible. <<
Well, there again I would look at local conditions and cuisine. What is their growing-harvest-storage cycle like? If a tropical place gets peeled by a hurricane, you could plant vegetable seeds and get something fairly fast, even if the whole place is basically a mudflat. But if a storm peels somewhere cold then you are looking at making sprouts in a jar, because the growing season will be very short.
>> To solve either issue demands large amounts of money per person, and then we're digging at the roots of capitalism and colonialism all over again.<<
That's true, but you're also fighting the fact that aid groups are run by people who love to feel needed. They rarely look at ways to repair function enough to put themselves out of work. You see that everywhere. L-America actively forbids refugees from doing all the things that would make them assets instead of liabilities, and that's the norm in local-Earth.
Contrast Terramagne, like the Rutledge thread: here is a place to stay, food, translators, an extra doctor, help finding a job, local guides, etc. And so, very quickly in some cases, the refugees began to find work and contribute to their new community (which admittedly was one in need of more people). Same with T-Maldives only they handed out islands to clusters of soups, Muslim refugees, etc. Note that I started Rutledge based on one person's good plan that other people refused to let work in L-Vermont. It's entirely possible to solve such problems, but a lot of people just damn well don't want to do it.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-03 11:58 am (UTC)If I want something like gelatin for dessert, I have to choose between only two or three options, AND at least one artificial sweetener which is known to cause liver and kidney problems. So finding something "equivalent" to that under-a-dollar four serving packet of gelatin usually requires a trip to a "health food store" or Trader Joes, and is more likely to be around $3 than $2. Remembering the $7.20 daily cap, the problem becomes obvious again, as the price per serving means that there just isn't enough money to allow for the indulgence.
So we're talking only about primary foods used in meals, rather than a collection of portions.
I looked closely at the Humanitarian Daily Ration and they're a major improvement for most people. The problem, again, is carb/calorie density per meal. I can't eat one designated meal portion without going WAAY over the carb limit per meal, which means holding onto and defending half-finished packets, because despite the need to keep carbs per meal down to roughly two slices of bread, I still need the day's total calories. Simply splitting the two main course pouches into three would help tremendously, but add to production costs.
Nowhere could I find an actual nutrition list earlier, so I estimated the carb count of red beans and rice in a "normal" serving-- rice alone, cooked, is so high carb that diabetics are advised to treat 1/3 cup, 1/3 a normal serving size, as the MAX to offer in a meal with other vegetables.
Trying to create a vegan diabetic diet is a juggling act I simply cannot manage, even after years, because of the carb load per serving in most dishes.
Nope,I found another problem. Looking at the links in the Wiki article led to more complete listing of the different menus and this little gem: the HDR contains no animal products or animal by-products, except that minimal amounts of dairy products are permitted.
ALLERGENS.
To find that little gem tucked away is disheartening. I'm allergic to milk. I had a cousin who was so allergic to eggs that she couldn't be vaccinated for most things. Let's play food lottery when there's no clean water, no reasonable way to cook foods that I know are safe, AND add the problem of open, unfinished packets.
When the alternative is between eating something which could literally kill me, or starving, the idea of playing Russian roulette with HDRs still doesn't appeal.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-03 04:29 pm (UTC)Still, you know it's a bad day when the only thing safe to eat is the aid workers themselves.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-03 05:01 pm (UTC)In the middle of a crisis like that, I'd be incredibly frustrated, because the food problem is far too much like the choice between a slow-acting poison or a bout of bubonic plague.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 06:15 am (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 03:26 am (UTC)I brought it up because of aid relief. Every disaster area has people with allergies or other disabilities. Hell, most people now have one or more things that they can't eat safely, and that used to be rare. Most if not all disaster areas also have people with religious or philosophical dietary needs. If you don't account for all those things, then you wind up with food that many people can't eat and people who can't be fed with whatever you have. I consider this a serious problem, although not all disaster responders agree that it is.
>>Remembering the $7.20 daily cap, the problem becomes obvious again, as the price per serving means that there just isn't enough money to allow for the indulgence.<<
You can't even buy a physically healthy diet on that budget, let alone a mentally healthy one.
>>I looked closely at the Humanitarian Daily Ration and they're a major improvement for most people. The problem, again, is carb/calorie density per meal. I can't eat one designated meal portion without going WAAY over the carb limit per meal, which means holding onto and defending half-finished packets, because despite the need to keep carbs per meal down to roughly two slices of bread, I still need the day's total calories. Simply splitting the two main course pouches into three would help tremendously, but add to production costs.<<
The problem there is that there are health concerns with all the macronutrients. A diet high in carbs or sugar is dangerous for diabetics and some digestive conditions. A high-protein diet is great for muscled folks but seriously risky for several health conditions because it's harder on the filter organs. A diet high in fat is bad for heart conditions and a bunch of other stuff. But you cannot push down one without raising another; people have to eat something and get fuel from it. So there's no one-size-fits-all food ration. The best you can do is cut out the worst things like allergens and animal products that cause the most problems for the widest range of people.
>>Trying to create a vegan diabetic diet is a juggling act I simply cannot manage, even after years, because of the carb load per serving in most dishes.<<
It winds up being mostly leaves and stems, because not only do you have to limit sugar and starch, you can't go too high on fat, and too much protein is hard on the body.
>>the HDR contains no animal products or animal by-products, except that minimal amounts of dairy products are permitted.<<
Yeah, I found that too. I consider it an egregious flaw because the "no animal products" part is widely advertised and will falsely make people think it is safe to eat. But most people in the world don't have the Lactase Persistence superpower, that's mostly found in European-descended people. Worldwide, 68% of adults cannot digest lactose and in America it's still 36%. In normal times, this is merely uncomfortable; in a disaster zone without water or health care, a bout of vomiting or diarrhea can kill someone. And that's before getting into actual allergies where a reaction can also be life-threatening. Dairy is a stupid ingredient to use in emergency rations.
The problem is, all the best ingredients get ruled out. Eggs, dairy, meat -- they're hard to preserve, often allergenic, religiously and philosophically complicated. Nuts, wheat, soy -- they're deadly to people with allergies or certain health conditions.
So if I needed to design as close to a universal ration as possible, I would probably start with seeds rather than nuts for vegetable fat, look for the least-allergenic grain and legume for proteins, and maybe a greens powder for nutrients. Come to think of it, I could just hit the lembas research that nerds have done for decades. Because nerds run to allergies, and lembas is meant as a high-nutrient ration, there already exist variations that don't use the problematic ingredients.
>>Let's play food lottery when there's no clean water, no reasonable way to cook foods that I know are safe, AND add the problem of open, unfinished packets.<<
I would want disaster aid to include things that don't need cooking. They might not be the most palatable but would keep people alive. And when it comes to a truly universal fuel, well, there are medical products that have been hacked down to base molecules for use by people with serious conditions who can't eat normal food of any kind. Shelters should be required to stock some of that as emergency rations for people who can't use the standard ones.
In all cases, emergency rations are unsuitable for long-term use or even medium-term use because of the sacrifices that have to made for stability and universality. In a world where the same region already gets slammed over and over again, that means keeping people alive requires setting a limit on how long emergency rations can be used before somebody has to get real food in there. Otherwise there will be a lot of dietary casualties -- primarily children, pregnant or nursing mothers, anyone with special dietary needs, seniors, and people with disaster injuries that affect their diet.
>>When the alternative is between eating something which could literally kill me, or starving, the idea of playing Russian roulette with HDRs still doesn't appeal.<<
Well, you've got various things to consider:
* If one avenue leads to much worse suffering, it is less preferable.
* If you can't avoid suffering, sometimes the least-worst option is simply the shorter duration.
* Consider whether you'd be more upset by an environmental death or being murdered by other humans.
I think about this stuff a lot, because I'm interested in X-risks and S-risks. I know what climate change is doing now and that it will get drastically worse sooner than people think. This shithole is the least-worst it will ever be again on a human timescale. So we have to think about and talk about ways to address those risks. To qualify as a viable solution, an emergency food must feed as close to all possible diners as current science can get, with the gap to be filled by actual medical supplies for the last few percent. I'm not okay with leaving a bunch of people to starve or poisoning them with allergens. That's just evil.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 05:51 am (UTC)Being national or international aid companies, the crusty hearts of midlevel bureaucrats sing for standardized responses. For the agencies to change, it has to be easier and cheaper to do so than it is to maintain the status quo. It's not in their best interests to be any more accurate than the improved MREs talked about upthread.
The problem is that no one, least of all the court of public opinion, seems to be willing to call agencies like the Red Cross out for fraudulent behavior at best. There is very little incentive to change anything, so the problems grow unchecked.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 06:10 am (UTC)That was good, because it let lots of ordinary people help. Volunteering isn't just good for mental and social health in general; it actively lowers the risk of PTSD.
>>Starting with the Haiti quake, the shift was to send money, we don't want material goods.<<
Which puts a means test on compassion, which is disastrous.
>> It may have been heading in that direction thirty years ago, but the massive PR campaign for Haiti was when I could no longer ignore trust the NGOs to actually disperse the goods which had been sent because it was "too much work," or "too expensive to sort and inventory."<<
They kind of had to turn aid into a business, because the government spent those decades criminalizing acts of compassion. By now, children who grew up with that nonsense are children of their own. Unsurprisingly this has gutted volunteerism. What's worse, people are now thrown from one job to another routinely, and one instance of getting fired or laid off creates a permanent drop in volunteerism and other social engagement.
>>Being national or international aid companies, the crusty hearts of midlevel bureaucrats sing for standardized responses. For the agencies to change, it has to be easier and cheaper to do so than it is to maintain the status quo.<<
And we all know how evil bureaucrats can be in pursuit of profit.
>>The problem is that no one, least of all the court of public opinion, seems to be willing to call agencies like the Red Cross out for fraudulent behavior at best. There is very little incentive to change anything, so the problems grow unchecked.<<
There's a limit to how long they can hide it, though, and climate change works against them. When you have large numbers of people relying on aid all the time then the portion of unserved people who are injured or killed by bad food will add up fairly fast. And the more people who go through shelters, they more they're going to notice when a friend or relative is unserved.
How long do you think it'll be before some parent flips their shit over realizing their child is left to starve, and kills one of the aid workers for it?
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 06:59 am (UTC)I suspect that it has happened at least once every five years.
I firmly believe that it will never make even local news.
Why? Because aid workers are routinely kidnapped and/or murdered, but the programs don't spend the money needed for training the workers, employing extra security, or using a minibus to transport workers more safely. Those are all simple solutions, but they do limit what money can be shifted to their "war chest" instead of using it to buy more food, water, or supplies.
The thing is, there IS a scale limit for everything, and the people running these aid agencies don't seem to understand that.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 09:41 am (UTC)Good point.
>> but the programs don't spend the money needed for training the workers, employing extra security, or using a minibus to transport workers more safely. Those are all simple solutions, but they do limit what money can be shifted to their "war chest" instead of using it to buy more food, water, or supplies.<<
That's the kind of thing that runs up logistics costs. With aid groups, they're trying to keep overhead as low as possible to attract donors -- if it's too high, people won't give. But it does get some workers killed.
>>The thing is, there IS a scale limit for everything, and the people running these aid agencies don't seem to understand that.<<
I'm seeing a serious inability to scale in aid groups, and difficulty adapting to other aspects of climate change. And it hasn't even gotten bad yet -- much longer and there will be millions of permanently displaced people every year. Meanwhile, people still won't admit that we have category 6 and 7 hurricanes and are a few mph short of needing category 8. 0_o
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 02:17 pm (UTC)That's relative to food aid for two reasons: first, because food purchases are often SEVERELY affected by transport problems like bottlenecks or delayed customs inspection at ports (for several possible reasons). Second, the relief agencies that think ahead and distribute a small amount of local and familiar seed are rare as hen's teeth, BUT the seed all comes from monopoly interests like Monsato.
So you've got NGOs relying on monopoly sources for the food donated or purchased, and on the transportation from safe zones to the relief zone.
There's a whole generation of adults now who grew up eating GMO foodstuffs, especially corn oil, soybean oil, or "vegetable oil" blends. We cannot determine what percentage of fresh truck is GMO, which means that there's no way to trace back the effects of GMO food on growing bodies, especially. I'm not saying that the companies creating these seeds are heartless capitalist moneybags, but I am saying that demanding more transparency from aid programs won't produce results in certain categories because there are corporate lawyers in their supply chains who aren't required by law to disclose this information.
The seed aid to Africa, in particular, has hidden teeth.
An older article, but focuses on the same points: https://will.illinois.edu/news/story/altruism-or-pr-how-monsanto-plans-to-snag-a-foothold-in-african-seed-market
There have been times when a GMO version of a crop was tested and rejected, but they are a growing percentage of all seeds sown. See: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/monsanto-burkina-cotton/
The problem is ongoing. (This links to a Greenpeace article, so be prepared for some slant.)
https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/50635/monsanto-in-south-africathe-true-cost-of-our-food/
A GMO "drought resistant" corn strain was tested from 2013 to 2016 (specific dates elude me). Guess what's finally being heard in court? https://acbio.org.za/gm-biosafety/landmark-legal-challenge-against-monsanto-bayers-bogus-drought-tolerant-gm-maize-finally-to-be-heard-in-south-african-high-court/
Over and over and over, the point is that megacorporate control over essential resources has knock-on influence at every level, in every step of the process from seed to table. The corporate food network is an enormous hydra. It's integral to relief efforts in the medium- and long-term recovery.
There is no opt-out option for most people, and the poorer they are, the less likely it is that someone with power would notice, side with them against a corporate program, and stick with it through years and years in order to defend individual rights.
Emergency food relief needs to better fit the population it serves, not become a way to shift low-quality crops into people instead of into a compost bin.
We deserve that. We deserve trustworthy, nutritious food in times of catastrophe or personal crisis.
How close are we to those goals?
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 06:00 pm (UTC)All that did was make smaller monopolies. Nobody had a choice of phone carrier until cell phones became so common that their companies started competing for users in the same locale. Even now, many people live where there is only one carrier. The same is true of internet. It's true of water, unless you have a well that still works, which is increasingly rare. It's true of electricity in most places, although a few have a green company competing with a brown one.
And that's before you get into the problem of having no choice if the thing you want a choice over is something that all the companies are doing the same way, like how every health provider gives your information to the government and a bunch of other hostiles. Your "choice" is to have either health care, or privacy, never both. In an age where the government is willing to murder women over abortion disputes, that's a life-threatening problem.
>>That's relative to food aid for two reasons: first, because food purchases are often SEVERELY affected by transport problems like bottlenecks or delayed customs inspection at ports (for several possible reasons).<<
People forget what a weakness supply lines are.
>> Second, the relief agencies that think ahead and distribute a small amount of local and familiar seed are rare as hen's teeth, BUT the seed all comes from monopoly interests like Monsato.<<
Corporate seed is worse than useless in a survival situation for multiple reasons. The inescapable ones are: 1) Corporate seed is designed to depend on a huge amount of supports like fertilizer and pesticides that are unavailable in damaged or even just poor areas. 2) Corporate seed is uniform and has no ability to adapt to challenges. Followed by the one that's social for some seeds but hardwired in others: 3) Corporate seed is illegal to reproduce and some won't grow from saved seed at all, which makes farmers wholly dependent on the corporation for seed every planting season. Hence the farmer suicides in places like India.
What you need is a seed bank that can distribute landrace seeds, hybrid swarms, and grexes to disaster areas. These have robust ability to adapt and something will grow under almost any conditions. Drought resistance? My sunchokes were blazing with glory when dandelions were dying in the heat. If you have tepary beans, thank an Indian! Given T-America's much higher use of landrace and heritage cultivars and breeds, I'm sure they have organizations distributing these during emergencies. Emerald Mountain Glen alone has developed dozens of cultivars. Just in catnip they have Hot Pussy (for sunny dry places), Wet Pussy (for damp places with some shade), and Bubastis Pleasure Barge (with high THC).
>>There's a whole generation of adults now who grew up eating GMO foodstuffs, especially corn oil, soybean oil, or "vegetable oil" blends. <<
Yeah, that's evil; it's human experimentation on mass scale. Also, they've made it impossible to grow some crops organic due to pollution from GMOs. Any respectable gengineer can tell you that it's never ethical to modify any species that has its own mobility -- so for instance, wind-pollinated crops -- in a planetary environment where it might escape.
>>I'm not saying that the companies creating these seeds are heartless capitalist moneybags<<
Oh, me, me, I'll say it! They're creating X-risks by destroying the world's food supply.
>>There is no opt-out option for most people, and the poorer they are, the less likely it is that someone with power would notice, side with them against a corporate program, and stick with it through years and years in order to defend individual rights.<<
And that's why they die.
>> How close are we to those goals? <<
Moving farther all the time. Corporations are deliberately destroying as much as they can of the alternatives, which humanity needs to survive. Cytoplasmic male sterility alone constitutes a threat to human survival.
On the bright side, they haven't killed off all the alternatives yet. It is still possible to find some landrace and other open-pollinated seeds. It's also possible to make your own by throwing together as many nonhybrid, nonGMO seeds as you can get and selecting the best survivors. That means any aid agency could start their own seed bank, although preferably they should serve a single ecoregion so that their seeds will be adapted to the growing conditions in the disaster area.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-06-04 10:40 pm (UTC)A legitimate study says otherwise.(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358045659_Review_of_Home_Garden_as_an_Economic_Approach)
Specific rebuttal using examples of popular, easy to grow vegetables.
https://www.firstflorida.org/about/communications/featured-articles/2023/05/12/cost-savings-of-growing-food-vs.-store-bought-groceries
The personal, HEALTH benefits of interacting with plants, not the difference in nutrition between home grown and commercial foodstuffs.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6334070/
Food security and wellbeing. https://agricultureandfoodsecurity.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2048-7010-2-8#:~:text=The%20most%20fundamental%20social%20benefit,both%20rural%20and%20urban%20locales.
Aha! I may have found the basic argument: CO2, carbon footprint is significantly higher for home grown food in urban area.
https://news.umich.edu/study-finds-that-urban-agriculture-must-be-carefully-planned-to-have-climate-benefits/
Doesn't it seem incredibly convenient to use the "carbon footprint" argument to push sheeple (oops, people) to stick with the grocery supply of foods?
I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-03 11:20 pm (UTC)I have several problems with this approach. Start with the easiest: what to grow in a crisis. How to garden with no experience. That's a hurdle that some people cannot AFFORD to fail at. Spending the amount for a pound of zucchini to buy a packet of zucchini seeds seems like the better investment, but losing the money and not having anything grow is a significant setback, even if there's no crisis at hand.
Second, this advice came from /an aid organization/, which is putting the production of food on the backs of locals, most women or children, and all unpaid. If the advice came from Ysabetwordsmith, or any other private citizen, it would be a message of personal power and community, but from an official source, it's a very different message.
Not being able to track down the precise article means that I won't be any more specific about that.
Very much in the same vein, however, there's a lovely Pro Publica article about the Red Cross response to the Haitian earthquake in 2010.
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/red-cross-spent-25-percent-of-haiti-donations-internally-report-finds
TLDR: The Red Cross spent 25% of the half a BILLION dollars raised specifically for that earthquake on internal costs, "program costs," and fundraising. THEN, if 75% got to the dispersal offices, up to 11% of THAT money was spent on "internal overhead." Combined, that added up to 166.25 MILLION dollars spent by the Red Cross exclusively FOR the Red Cross. How many stick and brick houses could have been built in Haiti, by Haitians, for Haitians, with that much money? Worse, The Red Cross claims that 9 out of 10 dollars are spent directly on relief, which would be 45 million dollars. They're clearly in the ballpark of spending FOUR TIMES that much just on their own expenses (including ads).
Here's a more specific article about the Haiti mismanagement:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/american-red-cross-squandered-aid-haiti-earthquake-report-alleges
It's not just that the food for relief services is PROVEN to be unreliable and downright harmful; the people offering the food are at the same time making statements that imply that the locals have not been doing their utmost to help themselves.
The disparity made me, in a nanosecond, picture Mister Bumble staring at Oliver Twist.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 06:42 am (UTC)This presupposes that such people have room for more than their own immediate needs. This is rarely true. The megafarms are owned by corporations. Smallholders might have a kitchen garden or a homestead, but very few would have three times the space required for their own needs.
The least-worst that can be said of this recommendation is that, if it's supported with aid supplies (e.g. fast-growing seeds and tools) then it would help communities get back to growing their own food as soon as possible. But I would not expect disaster survivors to feed others from their own kitchen garden. If you want to do that, you need to set up community gardens that can be used by people who know how to raise food but don't own a farm.
>>I have several problems with this approach. Start with the easiest: what to grow in a crisis. How to garden with no experience. That's a hurdle that some people cannot AFFORD to fail at. Spending the amount for a pound of zucchini to buy a packet of zucchini seeds seems like the better investment, but losing the money and not having anything grow is a significant setback, even if there's no crisis at hand.<<
LOL no, zucchini will not do that. In fact most squash won't. We often have volunteer acorn squashes sprout at the edge of the yard where I chuck the guts. Those seeds are thrown out and lie on the ground all winter and somehow sprout and grow on their own.
So then, if you want people to raise food immediately after a disaster, you're looking at two categories that hopefully have some overlap: 1) fast-growing foods (e.g. peas, radishes) and easy-to-raise foods (e.g. zucchini). You have to consider local conditions for what can be grown safely and effectively in order for such a program to work. Plus of course, gardening lessons would be advisable if you wish to recruit people who are not already farmers, as for a community garden. Knowing how to raise food is never a wasted skill.
>> Second, this advice came from /an aid organization/, which is putting the production of food on the backs of locals, most women or children, and all unpaid.<<
Yeah, that's a problem.
However, I could monkeywrench it to work. Every disaster makes some people move out, often in large blocks. If you could consolidate a goodly chunk of land by buying out people who wish to leave, then you could have a large and permanent community space for growing local food.
>> If the advice came from Ysabetwordsmith, or any other private citizen, it would be a message of personal power and community, but from an official source, it's a very different message.<<
There's merit in looking at community empowerment after a disaster. It's going to be essential for weathering climate change, so we should think about such things now. Aid organizations may be hostile to it, but well, they can't be everywhere. Learn to grow in the cracks, like dandelions.
>>TLDR: The Red Cross spent 25% of the half a BILLION dollars raised specifically for that earthquake on internal costs, "program costs," and fundraising. THEN, if 75% got to the dispersal offices, up to 11% of THAT money was spent on "internal overhead."<<
I'm not surprised. Logistics eats up a tremendous amount of resources, just tracking what you have and moving it from where it's produced to where it's needed. An efficient army will run 25% or a little less; around 33% is more common; and an inefficient one can go 50% or more. If you see less than 20% then be suspicious.
The best ways to cut percentage are economies of scale and buying on site.
So for instance, if you buy $5 of food, a food pantry buying in bulk could get at least 3-4 times that amount of food wholesale. There are times when this is very useful. But they don't always make wise choices. If I'm making a donation, I'm very likely to make that a bag of rice, a bag of dry beans, and a decent spice kit -- because that kit can let you make "beans and rice" taste like 6 different things.
Buying on site lets you save a ton on shipping and handling. This works brilliantly for food pantries, who can hit a big-box store and buy wholesale. But it doesn't work near as well for disaster aid because everything local is smashed. You have to ship there.
In rendering aid, it's crucial to use a complete problem-solving process. That is, don't just shove things in and walk away. You have to evaluate the effectiveness of the solution. Is it working as intended? Is it leaving parts uncovered? How good are final outcomes? A lot of aid groups suck at this.
>>It's not just that the food for relief services is PROVEN to be unreliable and downright harmful; the people offering the food are at the same time making statements that imply that the locals have not been doing their utmost to help themselves.<<
That's just blaming the victim.
>>The disparity made me, in a nanosecond, picture Mister Bumble staring at Oliver Twist.<<
No shit.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 10:55 pm (UTC)I want to focus on this for a moment. Traditional row growing does NOT work well anywhere but in agribusiness scale. Using French intensive/square foot methods, though, 32 square feet, two 4'*4' beds is ample for one person, including enough to preserve. That means that my dinky apartment patio, 6*6 would have enough room for a 4*4 bed, but grown in pots.
Combining permaculture processes with things like "lazy gardening" and square foot spacing and care tips is putting gardening within my reach as a person with several disabilities. It also feels like an attainable goal.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 06:46 am (UTC)So when the refugees arrived, the Syrians had set up a table in the reception area. It was stacked with dry chickpeas, olive oil, tahini, za'atar, and recipe booklets of Syrian-Vermont cuisine so folks could start stocking a kitchen. Because they knew what it was like to lose everything and they wanted to help others as they had been helped.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 07:29 am (UTC)If you have never had a mild allergic reaction, you are very lucky.
What that FIRST reaction did to me is to make me wary of ALL foods.
Having to choose between starvation and a food containing an allergen is terrible to start with, but the food insecurity, the silent threat and anxiety over "Is this food safe to eat?" are going to make it harder for the person to recover emotionally, and the question, the impossibility of getting a full list of ingredients in a dish, makes trauma and acute stress disorder worse.
There are foods that I can't trust because the label uses the word "spices," for example, or doesn't specify the source of lactic acid. That uncertainty compounds depression and hyper vigilance.
In short, it turns a comforting, bonding resource and its accompanying rituals, into more trauma.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 08:16 am (UTC)Food is bonding. Undermine that and it causes all kinds of problems -- which this society is determined to explore. >_<
>>If you have never had a mild allergic reaction, you are very lucky.
What that FIRST reaction did to me is to make me wary of ALL foods.<<
My actual allergies tend to be skin-contact ones. My food issues are a long list of things that cause my digestion to malfunction in various ways. So while I doubt that my food issues are life-threatening, they are bothersome. I can work around them -- but if I'm stuck with someone else controlling my food supply, it becomes a much worse problem very fast.
So yes, I have to be cautious about food, but left to my own devices I am pretty good at figuring out what I can and cannot eat. The problem there is my body changes randomly what it will and won't digest in some cases. For a while I couldn't eat oranges. Then it was rice. Currently it's peanuts. Go figure. I certainly wouldn't expect to be able to eat out of a shelter.
>>Having to choose between starvation and a food containing an allergen is terrible to start with, but the food insecurity, the silent threat and anxiety over "Is this food safe to eat?" are going to make it harder for the person to recover emotionally, and the question, the impossibility of getting a full list of ingredients in a dish, makes trauma and acute stress disorder worse.<<
Absolutely true. A lot of things that governments and aid groups do are actively contributing to the problems. *chuckle* I came across one reference where the victims firmly told the aid workers to leave because they were making matters worse.
>>There are foods that I can't trust because the label uses the word "spices," for example, or doesn't specify the source of lactic acid. That uncertainty compounds depression and hyper vigilance.<<
I don't think it should be legal to shortchange ingredients, and eventually, they will have to quit doing that just because -- within my lifetime -- it's gone from dietary quirks being extremely rare to being the overwhelming norm. Also of course, if you have a list of 50 ingredients, it won't fit on a tiny package.
>> In short, it turns a comforting, bonding resource and its accompanying rituals, into more trauma. <<
True.
But if you know how food and human bonding work, you can capitalize on that. It's why, if I needed to design a food aid package, I would start by looking at the local cuisine and especially its comfort foods and which ingredients are also on the lists of mood-boosting or soothing foods. I might not be able to fix the disaster, but I know a lot of ways to help people feel less-worse in the aftermath. And applying the right kinds of comfort can lower the risk of PTSD, so that does directly save lives.
Sometimes, an act of caring can stop a problem from getting worse. One time a friend had a house fire. I took her into my closet and said, "Pick some stuff that fits you." I had it to spare, so that's what we did. And by the time we finished, she wasn't so panicky and flailing anymore, because we had solved one little piece of the problem that would make it easier to work on other pieces, since she had enough to get through a week before needing to do laundry.
It's that human element that aid groups nowadays often lack. By turning everything into a system, a business, they've made it more efficient but less effective. And because they're mostly staffed by people who are 1) helpy or 2) just in it for the paycheck, they don't really care. That's a problem.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 02:19 pm (UTC)Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 05:38 pm (UTC)Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 07:05 pm (UTC)There's such a gap between the seed and the shelf in a grocery store that most formal programs don't think to pair with local farmers or backyard gardeners. I've only seen one food bank that used the former lawn for a garden, but that SHOULD be spread around. Even in places like Alaska, having the seeds brought in by representatives of the project will save a huge amount of money.
After the gardens connect to food banks, the next step would be to teach food safety and home preserving methods.
I have one other idea, but it's a spoiler, so I'll send that to you in a pm.
Re: I can't find it--
Date: 2024-06-04 09:30 pm (UTC)The main challenge there is that you've said the timeline is messed up for that thread and you couldn't fix it. Best solution I could think of would be to set it in 2016 or even 2017, put dates on every new installment, and just try to start keeping track of the thread from that point forward.
>> She's a good gardener in two of the three locations, so setting up community gardens in odd-lot spaces, with permissions. <<
Bear in mind that there aren't a lot of crops you can plant that will grow to full harvest in 3 months or less. Some, but not many. They may be relying a lot on perennials and natives that don't require frequent care, and just harvest anything that happens to be ripe when they're home. Or else they're sharing a garden with someone who is local.
>> Then, teach gardening skills, and the gardeners share in the harvests, with any surplus after that going to a local food bank.<<
That would be great.
>>There's such a gap between the seed and the shelf in a grocery store that most formal programs don't think to pair with local farmers or backyard gardeners. <<
Yeah, that's a problem. The garden programs are mostly separate. Then again, most people poor enough to need a food bank don't have a place they could garden anyway.
>>I've only seen one food bank that used the former lawn for a garden, but that SHOULD be spread around.<<
True.
>> Even in places like Alaska, having the seeds brought in by representatives of the project will save a huge amount of money.<<
True of anywhere that has to import food and supplies.
Also, anywhere with a harsh climate really depends on locally grown and adapted plants. Seeds developed in the cool, damp northwest -- which is a lot of companies -- won't grow in the southwest and not even very well in the midwest.
>>After the gardens connect to food banks, the next step would be to teach food safety and home preserving methods.<<
Logical.