On June 2 the California State Assembly failed to pass AB2757, a bill that would give farm workers the same overtime pay that workers in urban areas have had since the 1930s. In the outcome, echoes can still be heard of those old rules. But the vote also makes clear that past certainties are certain no longer.
Author: WHES
The incredible edible “expired” food
I have a confession: I eat expired food. Sometimes it’s barely expired, like the yogurt I put on top of my farm-fresh strawberries. It might be a day or two past its sell-by date, but I give it a sniff and if it smells fine, that’s all I care about. Milk, too. Since we no longer have a teenager in the house, even a half-gallon can last past its date. It’s pretty obvious when milk has gone bad and I’ve found the date usually is meaningless.
Other things I’m even less worried about. That jar of Trader Joe’s grainy brown mustard? It’s been in the refrigerator door for years. I give it a good shake and squirt it on a sandwich. Good as new.
I once had a boss obsessed with those confusing sell-by/use-by/best-by dates. Periodically we’d do a sweep of the office refrigerator, tossing bottles of salad dressing (Have you looked at the list of preservatives in most of those bottles? They will live longer than I will!,) barely-used ketchup and mustards, jams and sauces. The garbage can would be filled with mostly perfectly good food. Oh, sure, we tossed a lot of sad sandwiches in poorly sealed Styrofoam, where good intentions meet poor planning. But mostly we tossed edible food.
Currently, the Food and Drug Administration regulates food labels, but not those dates stamped on everything from milk to capers to canned beans. And it appears that, for the most part, they are random. Manufacturers with a vested interest in having us toss the old and buy the new choose those dates, leading Americans to waste untold money and resources along the way. (Only baby food dates are standardized and regulated.)
A group from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Council is hoping to change that. They want to create a system with two standard labels, a quality-based label and a safety-based one. Here’s how it could work:
‘Under this law, manufacturers will have the option to use a quality-based label. However, if they choose to include a date indicating a food product’s quality they will be required to use the standard phrase “best if used by.” By contrast, for the very small group of foods for which the date may indicate safety, such as deli meats and prepared foods, manufacturers would be required to utilize a separate safety based phrase, “expires on.” In order to determine which foods should bear the safety-based label, the FDA should coordinate with the USDA to publish a list of foods that have a risk of being unsafe if not consumed after a certain date. Setting uniform, national standards for date labels will make it clear to consumers which foods need to be avoided past their dates and which can be safely eaten.
‘The federal law should also explicitly allow for the sale or donation of food after the “best if used by” quality date. State laws in 20 states restrict sale or donation of past-date food, even though the date is generally intended to indicate quality. Since quality is based on taste and is subjective, foods should be allowed to be sold or donated after that date.
‘To ensure Americans are best able to understand these new labels, FDA and USDA should undertake an educational campaign designed to inform consumers about the meaning of the “expires on” and “best if used by” labels. Ultimately, sensible date label reform will reduce consumer confusion, simplify regulatory compliance, and cut food waste across the supply chain and in consumers’ homes.’
What a great, common sense start this would be on our path to reduce food waste! If you want to know more, visit notreallyexpired.com. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go make my sandwich … with expired mustard and some long-past-due pickles!
Jean Blish Siers is the Society of Saint Andrew’s Charlotte Area Gleaning Coordinator. This article first appeared on the Society of Saint Andrew’s website.
Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women: A guide to measurement
Women of reproductive age (WRA) are often nutritionally vulnerable because of the physiological demands of pregnancy and lactation. Requirements for most nutrients are higher for pregnant and lactating women than for adult men. The Minimum Dietary Diversity for WRA (MDD-W) 3 indicator defined and described in this document is a food group diversity indicator that has been shown to reflect one key dimension of diet quality: micronutrient adequacy, summarized across 11 micronutrients.
Is the Grand Bargain a big deal?
A deal to sort out emergency funding at the World Humanitarian Summit meets with a mixed response.
Is world hunger a national security issue?
May 28, 2016
By Chuck Woolery
The most important thing for the public to learn about on World Hunger Day on May 28 is that world hunger is increasingly a national security issue. And it was even before the creation of The Hunger Project (THP). Shortly after THP’s creation, President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 Presidential Commission on World Hunger concluded, “In the final analysis, unless Americans — as citizens of an increasingly interdependent world — place far higher priority on overcoming world hunger, its effects will no longer remain remote or unfamiliar. Nor can we wait until we reach the brink of the precipice; the major actions required do not lend themselves to crisis planning, patchwork management, or emergency financing… The hour is late. Age-old forces of poverty, disease, inequity, and hunger continue to challenge the world. Our humanity demands that we act upon these challenges now...”
Elsewhere in the bipartisan commission report, the links between national security and world hunger were mentioned fourteen times. These commissioners unanimously warned about the future consequences if we ignored such a gross violation of human rights. They stated: “The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats as the growing scarcity of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources, environmental hazards, pollution of the seas, and international terrorism. Calculable or not, however, this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”
They also stated: “The Commission believes that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”
There should be no doubt that the world we have today is a result of our lack of taking this Commission seriously. There have been other Commissions since that have detailed the threats of infectious diseases, terrorism, climate change and the cost and horrific consequences of ignoring global prevention and rapid response efforts.
One of the root causes of the war in Syria was the hunger of farmers driven off their land by three years of draught…possibly linked to climate change. The ultimate human cost and consequences of this festering conflict is now threatening the structural and political stability of the EU itself, and increasing disharmony in many other Western democracies because of the fear of refugees linked to extremists.
Even the most recent reports of Syrians starving in their own cities because of Syrian government forces blocking humanitarian relief efforts is met with limited action.
We cannot expect this and other forms of human suffering due to lack of good nutrition, clean water, sanitation and basic health services to continue without global consequences.
Few people remember that World War I both aided the spread of the “Spanish flu” and was finally ended by it, because more soldiers had died from it than from the war fighting. The hyper Globalization we have today could spread any new or re-emerging infectious disease as fast as an airline flight from Beijing to Los Angeles or Paris to New York.
A new book titled “Eleven” by Paul Hanley asks and answers an urgent question: Can we feed the projected 11 billion people by 2100 without destroying the earth’s ecosystem? He says “yes” but with major shifts required in current human values and priorities. Failing that, it’s hard to imagine our nation, or any American, being healthy and secure with a dysfunctional global ecosystem.
Ending hunger isn’t just the moral or right thing to do. It is a wise and urgent thing to do. The world is changing fast. Can we?
Author Biography: Chuck Woolery is a past Chair of the United Nations Association Council of Organizations
(The views expressed above are the author’s and not necessarily the views of the UNACO or World Hunger Education Service.)
The well-fed dead: Why aid is still missing the point
Pope Francis: Overturning the concept of a ‘just war’
Pope Francis is on a roll. He has already roiled the waters of western thinking on economics and society by touching on the dangers of western capitalism drifting into socially destructive greed. He has now turned his focus to an even grander theme— the place of warfare in human life and the hallowed concept of a “just war.”
Time to think bigger about the refugee crisis
I’ve recently returned from the Middle East and East Africa, where I visited a number of refugee camps — car parks of humanity. I went as an activist and as a European. Because Europeans have come to realize — quite painfully in the past year or two — that the mass exodus from collapsed countries like Syria is not just a Middle Eastern or African problem, it’s a European problem. It’s an American one, too. It affects us all.
Focusing on the future of food: what’s next for global agricultural research
Food security scientists from around the globe gathered in Johannesburg last week with one objective: to work towards the transformation of agriculture as engine for growth in developing regions of the world. The gathering was also an opportunity to examine what farmers need to prosper in the face of social and environmental challenges.
What the Panama Papers mean for global development
The financial secrecy and tax evasion revealed by the Panama Papers has an extraordinary human cost in developing countries and threatens the realisation of the UN’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals.
