Russia launches fourth drone attack in five days on Ukrainian food exports

Russia has maintained its bombing campaign against Ukrainian food exports with the fourth drone attack in five days on grain silos and other infrastructure around the port of Izmail along the Danube river.

The governor of the Odesa region, Oleh Kiper, said Thursday’s attack lasted three hours, and the general prosecutor’s office said two truck drivers were hurt and several homes were damaged by blast waves. The Ukrainian military said agricultural facilities were damaged but did not give details.

You Can Get Any Food You Want in America—Except This

Ask anyone to name a Native American food, and chances are, they'll say "frybread." The crisp, oily, disk-shaped doughnut has come to represent Indian culture all over the United States. It originated with the Southwest's Navajo Indians, and South Dakota also proudly named it its state bread in 2005.

But the pastry's origins are less savory: In 1864, the US government forced the Navajos and Mescolero Apaches off their land in Arizona and onto a reservation in remote New Mexico, dragging them on what was soon known as "the Long Walk." Stranded on inhospitable desert, the tribes couldn't farm, and were sent canned goods and rations of white flour, sugar, and lard to eat. Frybread emerged as a survival food. As Native American writer and activist Suzan Shown Harjo once put it, "Frybread was a gift of Western Civilization from the days when Native people were removed from buffalo, elk, deer, salmon, turkey, corn, beans, squash, acorns, wild rice, and other real food."

The cost of privatized food in public institutions

Earlier this year, inmates at the Regina Correctional Centre started and ended a second hunger strike over the quality of prison food. In December 2015, the first hunger strike was sparked in part when inmates were served raw eggs. Issues with equipment, quality and the status of a cooking job skills program were resolved.

Premier Brad Wall remarked in early January that if prisoners did not want to eat prison food, they had best avoid prison. Unsurprisingly, reports of the strike garnered little sympathy.

1 In 7 U.S. Households Struggled To Afford Food Last Year: Report

One in seven U.S. households struggled to afford food last year, according to a new report. Yet, many families in need didn’t take advantage of safety net programs that could help alleviate the issue.

The number of food insecure households has remained “essentially unchanged” since 2012, holding steady at 17.4 million households, a USDA report found. But advocates are concerned about the fact that safety net programs are being underutilized.

Rate Of U.S. 'Food Insecurity' Stubbornly High

WASHINGTON -- Fourteen percent of U.S. households lacked access to enough good food at some point last year, according to the latest annual food insecurity estimate from the federal government.

The change from last year's 14.3 percent is too small to count as statistically significant, but the decline from 14.9 percent in 2011 is good news, say researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Still, despite an improving economy, the rate is much higher than the 11.1 percent seen in 2007, before the onset of the Great Recession.

Food Aid Was Just Cut To Refugees In Jordan. The Impact Could Be Deadly.

Around 200,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan received a text message from the World Food Program this week informing them that their food aid would be cut. The $14 refugees receive monthly from WFP is crucial for their survival.

Without this aid, refugees are now even more vulnerable than before.

UN: ISIS Denies Food Aid, Medicine To Hundreds Of Thousands

GENEVA (AP) -- The Islamic State group has denied food and medicine to hundreds of thousands of people and hidden its fighters among civilians since a U.S.-led coalition began launching airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, a U.N. panel investigating war crimes in Syria reported Friday.

The panel said Syrians and Iraqis are subjected to an Islamic State "rule of terror" from its calculated use of public brutality and indoctrination to ensure the submission of communities under its control, and that the tactics include repeated violations against children and women.

Billions of kilograms of food waste? Now that should have been an election issue!

Suppose they called an election, and not one candidate wasted their breath talking about the 67 billion kilograms of North America food that ends up in landfill, at a yearly cost to Canadian and U.S. taxpayers of $192 billion -- before even getting to impacts that rank food waste as the third-largest source of destructive global warming gases, just behind all the emissions from the U.S. and China.

That just happened in Ontario-wide municipal and in U.S. mid-term elections.

Odd that so much money can be wasted on garbage and so much environmental damage done by garbage, without anyone ranking it high as a hot public policy issue  -- one that, without costing taxpayers an extra dime, could be turned into a $192-billion public policy opportunity to create jobs managing wasted resources, while at the same time preventing incalculable damage from global warming emissions. 

In America, Only The Poor's Eating Habits Aren't Improving

CHICAGO (AP) — Americans' eating habits have improved — except among the poor, evidence of a widening wealth gap when it comes to diet. Yet even among wealthier adults, food choices remain far from ideal, a 12-year study found.

On an index of healthy eating where a perfect score is 110, U.S. adults averaged just 40 points in 1999-2000, climbing steadily to 47 points in 2009-10, the study found.

Eating organic food significantly lowers pesticide exposure

Eating an organic diet for a week can cause pesticide levels to drop by almost 90% in adults, research from RMIT University has found.

The study, led by Dr Liza Oates found particpants' urinary dialkylphosphates (DAPs) measurements were 89% lower when they ate an organic diet for seven days compared to a conventional diet for the same amount of time. DAPs make up 70% to 80% of organophosphate pesticides.

Radical U.N. Report Promotes Democratic Control of Food and an End to Corporate Domination

A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on the “Right to Food” took aim at the entire basis on which food is produced and distributed on a global scale. Reflecting the type of progressive analysis of our food system from experts like Vandana Shiva and Michael Pollan, report author Olivier De Schutter called for an undermining of large agribusinesses and an infusion of democratic control.

Although the report’s recommendations are revolutionary, news of its release went largely unreported in the major U.S. media.

Food Behind Bars Isn’t Fit for Your Dog

Shares in the Philadelphia-based Aramark Holdings Corp., which contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide the food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, went public Thursday. The corporation, acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs, raised $725 million last week from the sale of the stock. It is one more sign that the business of locking up poor people in corporate America is booming.

Aramark, whose website says it provides 1 million meals a day to prisoners, does what corporations are doing throughout the society: It lavishes campaign donations on pliable politicians, who in turn hand out state and federal contracts to political contributors, as well as write laws and regulations to benefit their corporate sponsors at the expense of the poor. Aramark fires unionized workers inside prisons and jails and replaces them with underpaid, nonunionized employees. And it makes sure the food is low enough in both quality and portion to produce huge profits.

Want, waste and wealth: The immorality and inefficiency of capitalist food distribution in Canada

It has been both a disturbing and telling couple of weeks in terms of news developments related to food distribution in Canada.

First, at the end of July, a report by researchers at the University of Toronto showed that nearly four million Canadians face what they, as is now commonplace, somewhat euphemistically describe as "food insecurity"; an academic way of saying that these citizens either are not able to buy enough food for themselves or their families or that they are constantly struggling to do so. In the case of Nunavut, where the situation is at its worst, over 50% of households experienced food insecurity, while in both PEI and New Brunswick it was a quarter or more of households.

US food industry battles against regulation

Why are Americans getting fatter, and who's to blame? It's a question members of the US Congress need to be asking.

Like the war on tobacco decades ago, the US is now fighting a new battle on obesity. On one side are US public health officials advocating for their government to put in place better nutrition policies. But those efforts have met stiff resistance, in part because the $1 trillion US food and beverage industry is fighting regulation with a powerful weapon: its deep pockets.

The Surprising Connection Between Food and Fracking

In a recent Nation piece, the wonderful Elizabeth Royte teased out the direct links between hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the food supply. In short, extracting natural gas from rock formations by bombarding them with chemical-spiked fluid leaves behind fouled water—and that fouled water can make it into the crops and animals we eat.

But there's another, emerging food/fracking connection that few are aware of. US agriculture is highly reliant on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized in a process fueled by natural gas. As more and more of the US natural gas supply comes from fracking, more and more of the nitrogen fertilizer farmers use will come from fracked natural gas. If Big Ag becomes hooked on cheap fracked gas to meet its fertilizer needs, then the fossil fuel industry will have gained a powerful ally in its effort to steamroll regulation and fight back opposition to fracking projects.

Canadians need a national food policy, not a food industry business model

Christmas can bring out the best in us. We're encouraged to think of others and remember the holiday season's humble beginnings. Some invite the lonely to share a meal, while others volunteer at their local food banks.

If the crass commercialism is hard to avoid, at least we can console ourselves by shopping for others. And then there's always a moment when the Dickensian ghost of Christmas future descends upon us, encouraging shifts in behavior.

Conservatives Bravely Defend Kids' Right to Junky Lunch

Call it the tater tot rebellion. In 2010, President Obama signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which modestly increased federal expenditures on school lunches and also overhauled the rules that governed them. No longer would federally subsidized school lunch cafeterias act as a kind of unfettered free-enterprise zone for the food industry's "Dinosaur Shaped Chicken Nuggets" and frozen pizzas. The new rules put limits on calories per meal and mandated that more fruits and vegetables be served. And now, according to media reports (see here and here), students nationwide are organizing strikes and social media campaigns to protest the new rules.

Food Waste: Americans Throw Away Nearly Half Their Food, $165 Billion Annually, Study Says

Aug 21 (Reuters) - Americans throw away nearly half their food every year, waste worth roughly $165 billion annually, according to a study released on Tu esday.

"As a country, we're essentially tossing every other piece of food that crosses our path. That's money and precious resources down the drain," said Dana Gunders, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council's food and agriculture program.