Author: rickpace1

Chick-fil-A

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There are, apparently, a number of ways to make breaded chicken sandwiches healthier. To this end, Chick-fil-A has been quietly switching out ingredients over the past decade. According to Nation’s Restaurant News it eliminated heart-disease-promoting trans fats in 2006, removed high-fructose corn syrup from its bagels and golden wheat bread, and gradually reduced sodium in some products. Now the 1,700-store chain is working to remove preservatives from its breads and oil.

What’s unusual about the efforts is that Chick-fil-A has largely refrained from publicizing them until now, hoping to avoid ire about any perceived change in flavor. Fast-food companies have had to balance customer loyalty to well-known menu items with growing pressure to offer healthier options. “We didn’t necessarily want the customer to know we’ve tweaked their favorite product,” Jodie Worrell, the chain’s senior nutrition consultant, told NRN.

The Bloomberg News Article

The Most Important Economic Stories of 2013 – in 43 Graphs

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Maybe it’s just me, but the last few years are getting tough to tell apart. Imagine a quiz question:

Name that year where we threw obstacles in the recovery’s way, but kept growing slowly; where Europe avoided both a disaster and a solution to its mess; and where China kept growing over 7 percent, but didn’t rebalance its economy like it said it wants.

You’d be right to guess 2013. You’d also be right to guess 2012, 2011, or 2010.

So, to remind ourselves what did change in the last 12 months, we asked our favorite economists, journalists, and think-tankers for their favorite charts of the year. The stock market went on a tear, the labor market didn’t, and Wall Street and Main Street came to terms with a New Normal. Without further ado, here are 37,000 words worth of charts to tell the most important stories of 2013.

The Atlantic Report

This is wonderous economic analysis!

Manure

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Many organic farmers are hopping mad right now at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and their reason involves perhaps the most under-appreciated part of agriculture: plant food, aka fertilizer. Specifically, the FDA, as part of its overhaul of food safety regulations, wants to limit the use of animal manure.

“We think of it as the best thing in the world,” says organic farmer Jim Crawford, “and they think of it as toxic and nasty and disgusting.”

Every highly productive farmer depends on fertilizer. But organic farmers are practically obsessive about it, because they’ve renounced industrial sources of nutrients.

The NPR Report

The Philippines Disaster and Food Aid

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An NPR Report that tries to relate the Philippines Disaster, Food Aid, and the U.S. Farm Bill.

I say ‘tries to relate’ because the underlying political economy of U.S. food aid appears irrational and driven by commodity politics.

Sadly, once American government went down this path it became extremely difficult to make decisions that are ethically sound for needy local communities around the world.

Food Sovereignty

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“I don’t think we can call ourselves sovereign if we can’t feed ourselves.” This is what Paul “Sugarbear” Smith told me a few years ago when I went to visit him in Oneida Territory, Wisconsin. I think he’s got something here and it’s worth looking into.

What is food sovereignty? The ability to feed your people. Let’s say that. This could be through your own growing and harvesting, or this could be through trade, if you’re happy with it and it’s working out for you. This is where we need to be, but certainly aren’t there now.

A very interesting two part essay by Winona LaDuke

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

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November 19th is the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Ken Burns is asking people to read and recite his short, but eloquent speech….

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Creating a Food Oasis

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We recently worked with the African Alliance to fund a 2014 project that will put African vegetables in a pilot group of Providence markets. The new vegetables will be coupled with cooking demonstrations and family oriented events – impacting neighbors with food and nutrition education coupled with, as Wendell Berry would say, the pleasures of eating.

This CNN report catches the spirit of the project’s intention, as well as hits at some of the dilemmas of current food advocacy in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods (which focuses too much on defining the problem rather than developing solutions).

From the report:

What we need is a Food Oasis Movement.

There is an untapped demand for fresh fruits and vegetables. Unlocking the demand requires understanding that food access is about relationships, not transactions. Also, price matters.

Families won’t respond to the food police nagging them to eat their veggies. Outsiders dropping off a pallet of free food won’t cut it.

Families will respond positively to cooking classes with their friends, celebrations of family kitchen traditions and high-quality produce distributed through trusted sources.

Philadelphia grocer Jeff Brown has opened supermarkets in neighborhoods written off as food deserts. He hires from the neighborhood, adds specialty items the neighbors like and puts health clinics and community meeting rooms inside his stores. His stores make money.

Food Oasis innovators focus on what they can do, not what they can’t.