May

Thank goodness we don’t have a caste system in the US. But we are veering toward it each time we don’t alleviate problems with individual rights to healthy, affordable food.

Here’s one way to put our difficulties with eating and affordability into perspective: a PBS television program just last evening that explored a situation that occurs in India every 48 years. At intervals, bamboo trees produce round, green, appetizing fruit that attracts rats. But the rats, which reproduce in abundance when there is a food bonus like that, also strip other plants of food sources that people depend on for their own nutrition. The result is that human parents sometimes have to walk a hundred miles to find rice or other food for their families, who are literally starving because there food sources have been depleted.

Healthy eating, including too much weight gain, is a societal issue, and so we should seek societal as well as personal answers. In Buffalo, co-ops and urban farms are in the mix. Individuals can and do speak up and raise chickens in back yards, and some grow crops on empty lots. Vegetable gardens have been planted outside a community food bank.

Another solution takes into account our current working culture. Just this morning on the Early Show on CBS, the closing interview discussed it. While it would be great, they concluded, if we all sat down to eat together at home, eating out because of work schedules seems inevitable. The thing is, even when cooking and eating at home, when manufacturers use fats and sugars that are unnecessary, consumers as well as community-minded vendors have to take a bigger role in label-reading. Wegmans, for instance, recently did a television spot explaining their twist-tie system for bread. The color of the tie indicates the day that loaves of bread were put on the shelves, and they were willing to share that with the buying public.

Reading the newspaper and supermarket circulars and downloading coupons and Groupons online are a great way to go. As homemakers have known for centuries, comparison works. Making more than one shopping list can help, too. Non-food items and staple goods can cost less at big discount food chains and you can stock up less often, even monthly, on these. Comparing prices on meat and fish in the ads from several markets can help plan the week’s meals.

Ask neighbors and friends for recommendations for favorite farm markets. Two that operate all year round are the Public Market in downtown Rochester and Niagara County Produce on Transit Road near Buffalo. In summer in Buffalo, there are also local markets like the ones on Bidwell Parkway near Elmwood, just off Main Street in Williamsville, in Clarence, and on Main Street in front of the UB campus. It’s a popular way to bring fresh ingredients as well as food specialty vendors closer to buyers. Besides, it’s a way to meet your neighbors, listen to some local music, and enjoy a weekend hour.

The big societal issues like poverty are not completely out of our control. We can work with corporations and manufacturers to incentivize producing food that doesn’t add calories and unhealthy fats. We can purchase goods and services where the policies and benefits are likely to serve the population well.

But there has to be enough mental and emotional energy left, quite literally at the end of the day, for individuals to shop smart. Poverty alone takes it out of you. And in addition, in a democratic system of government, no agency or department should run what amounts to experimental tests on various societal segments to see “what works” to control the decisions of a population. Calibration of results is part of what makes tests like these into experiments. Suppression of this type can quash the will to do better, and it also limits free markets for goods and services. Quashing the will to do better and limiting free markets for goods and services is, by definition, slavery.

But when populations are given even micro-grants by lenders who help them grow their businesses, families prosper. Even just bringing in fresh water to communities worldwide makes a difference. Human beings are meant to become all they can be. A just society should assist the vision of those who work to make the world a safer place by supporting that ideal.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com