sanitas per escam!

"About 11 million deaths a year are linked to poor diet around the globe," reports NPR.

Before you allow your bleeding liberal heart to command you to take your credit card and pay for some stereotypical poor people somewhere, read more.

What's driving this? As a planet we don't eat enough healthy foods including whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables. At the same time, we consume too many sugary drinks, too much salt and too much processed meat.

Have you put that credit card back in your wallet?

Btw, I am no grammar expert; but, leading a sentence with "as a planet we don't eat enough ..." sounds awful!  Sounds as bad as "buy local" or "save the earth." ;)

Mexico, in particular, is an interesting case:

The country ranked 57th on the list. On the one hand, people in Mexico consume a lot of whole grain corn tortillas, he says — and whole grains are beneficial. But on the other hand, "Mexico has one of the highest levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages."

So, ok, more confirmation that sugar is bad for us, and it is awful how we are biologically programmed to enjoy it though.  And, yes, we need to eat healthily.

What if all of us, especially the soon-to-be 9 or 10 billion people, decide to eat healthily--you know, the wonderful mix of whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables?

A recent study published in the journal PLOS One by researchers at the University of Guelph found that there would not be enough fruit and vegetables to go around.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't! ;)

All the more why we need to seriously rethink agricultural production.  Check out this essay in The New Yorker. 

Source

Even the "invisible hand" does not want to pick beans!

Over the summer, when visiting with a student at a fruit farm, I got to taste cherries that were heavenly.  Trees with pears that were a few weeks away from ripening and harvesting made even me, who does not care much for pears, drool.

The student explained how harvesting pears is not an easy job.  Now, do not think that he is puny like I am.  Nope. He is one hell of a well-built fellow.  But, apparently harvesting pears tires him out more than any other farm work.  Of course, his work at the farm is not to pick fruits.  The harvesting is done by a crew of migrant farm labor.  And, yes, the migrant labor is mostly Mexican.

A few months after that summer, the country elected to the White House a demagogue who has vowed to build a "big beautiful wall"; to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants; and to even block remittances to Mexico.

As Newton made us understand, every action has its reactions.  Like this:

[California's farming industry is] calling on congressional representatives to educate the incoming president on the workforce it takes to feed the country, and they’re assuring workers they’ll protect them.

Good luck with educating the demagogue!

Trump’s remarks were felt sharply in California, which produces nearly half the country’s fruits, vegetables and nuts valued at $47 billion annually. Experts say his words resonate nationwide.
Texas, Florida and Georgia are examples of states with large migrant communities dominating home construction, health care, food service industries, said David Zonderman, a labor historian at North Carolina State University.
“California might be ground zero,” he said of immigrant families living in the shadows. “But it’s not a unique California issue.” 

And why is this important?

Roughly 325,000 workers in California do the back-breaking jobs that farmers say nobody else will do, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League farming association, estimates 85 percent of California farmworkers live in the United States illegally.
Farmers for years have scrambled under a shrinking labor pool.
Mexico’s improving economy has slowed the flow of migrant workers.

Meanwhile, the demagogue's promise that Mexico will pay for that big beautiful wall is having another kind of a reaction.

A campaign memo released in April 2016 says the Trump administration will force Mexico to stump up by threatening to block money transfers from undocumented Mexicans living in the United States. This would be “an easy decision for Mexico” according to the memo. Indeed, Mexico received nearly $25bn in remittances in 2015 according to its central bank, equivalent to 2.3% of the country’s GDP. Over 98% of these remittance payments came from the United States.

So, if you are one of those remitters and you don't want to take any chances with a demagogue, then what would do?  You will send as much as you can right away. Yes?

 In November remittances to Mexico totalled nearly $2.4bn, a 25% jump over the previous year. Total remittances for 2016 are expected to reach $27bn, $2bn more than in 2015. And America’s southern neighbours may be pre-empting the Mr Trump administration in other ways. 

Oh well; if we cannot eat fruits and nuts and vegetables anymore, then we can always feast on beef and pork. Oh, wait, that too has immigrant labor--from Somalia.  Didn't the demagogue claim that all Somalis are terrorists?

Halal home, Alabama

The Wall Street Journal of the old days--as in pre-Murdoch era, which was also the pre-9/11 years--used to have wonderful feature articles that typically began in a column above the fold on the front page and then continued on in the inside pages.  It would be about a place or a person or people somewhere, and not always with a business subtext.  In my mind--and I don't think it is my imagination--I even recall Daniel Pearl's columns from back then.

It was those charming essays, that were also well written, and the op-eds, that made me a WSJ subscriber for a few years.  At one time, I was a subscriber to three newspapers: the WSJ, the Los Angeles Times, and the Bakersfield Californian.  After all, those were the very beginnings of the internet years and print ruled.

It is for a similar reason that I continue to subscribe to the Economist.  I love the wide variety of topics that are covered there.  It gets even more exciting and interesting to read the off-beat stories, like this one about a Frank Randle, who is a "farmer-philosopher who confounds expectations about Islam and outsiders in the South."

His clientele expanded to include Muslims throughout southern Alabama and up to Atlanta: professionals and university types from across the Arab world, Africa and South-East Asia. Demand spikes with the births of children and the feast at the end of Ramadan; every year a Malian imam in Tuskegee hand-delivers a religious calendar so Mr Randle can anticipate it.

Who would have imagined that deep down in Alabama is a White American philosopher-farmer who is the go-to-guy for halal mutton!

Some of his customers have become friends. Sitting on his porch—wind-chimes jangling, turkey vultures circling overhead—Mr Randle recalls a banquet on the lawn between his house and the orchard, involving dates, pomegranates and palpitation-inducing shots of coffee, consumed cross-legged and without cutlery. Afterwards his guests prostrated themselves in prayer, he remembers, pointing the way towards Mecca.

This description is way too surreal in contemporary America where beating up on Muslims has become the national favorite past time.  And in the South!

Mr Randle himself has been warned by xenophobes that he is “consorting with the enemy”. “It’s a free country,” he tells them.

Good for him!

Having raised his lambs from birth, Mr Randle isn’t keen to slaughter them himself; in any case, he explains—stooping to return a lost newborn to its mother—state rules forbid him to, though his Muslim guests may do so for their personal consumption. He admires the solemnity and reverence with which they go about it: evidence, he thinks, of a sense of responsibility to the natural world, and of the sanctity of life, which he shares. When employed expertly and painlessly, the halal technique is “the most humane way”, says the farmer-philosopher of Alabama.

After reading that page, I was curious to find out more.  Of course, his business has a web presence.

While we are not certified organic, it is our goal to produce food that we are comfortable serving on our own tables. That means we do not use harmful pesticides on our crops, animal byproducts in our livestock feed, or a program of antibiotics for our livestock. Rather than being certified organic by a government agency, we receive our certification from our customers, who understand how we farm.
We employ sustainable techniques to cultivate a healthy soil, including cover cropping to build organic matter and reduce soil erosion. We use manures for fertilization, rotate crops to reduce disease and pest outbreaks, and control insect pests without damaging beneficial insect populations.

Sounds lovely, right?  And a lovely family picture with the philosopher-farmer sporting a mustache too:

In case you wonder why Randle is not going big time:

After taking in a slice of an old plantation, the farm now encompasses some 230 acres. Mr Randle reckons that is ample: “If you can’t walk over it in a day, you don’t need it.”

People like Randle give me hope. Plenty of hope.

Time to renew the subscription to the Economist!