Today's photos are of temples in Luang Prabang, Laos that I took in 1972.
You may have been reading about Walmart's new "Great for You" label. I did a bit of digging, expecting to find a cynical ploy. Instead, I came away a fan. Let me explain.
Our biological leash is very short when it comes to food: every human being needs to eat every day, making access to and control of food universal concerns. My own activism has long had a food focus, and two of my books were about our food supply. I worked in the 1970's putting medical and food programs into place in war zones around the world, including Biafra and Bangladesh.
Common sense and the food industry would have us believe that starvation and malnutrition are the result of there not being enough food, which they would solve by the creation of more food. This is the basic argument of the corporations that make genetically engineered food: their assertion, not well-supported by actual results, that if we let them use use viruses and other carriers to shoot new genes into food-producing plants, the result will be more and better food for all.
In the 1970s Frances Moore Lappe and Joe Collins founded the Institute for Food and Development Policy, now called Food First, to debunk the myth that starvation is a function of "crop yield" - the amount of food that can be grown per acre. In those days they were concerned with the imposition of hazardous chemicals onto our system of agriculture and control of the food supply by distant companies - genetic engineering hadn't been invented.
In short, people starve because of income and location and political decisions about wars, competition for resources and considerations like ethnic hatred. The delivery system for food inequality, and subsequently the creators of this injustice, are the mammoth corporations that produce and distribute seeds and food.
Food First Still exists, and is enhanced by Carlo Petrini's Slow Food movement, best realized in Europe. The people I mentioned above and many others continue on into their fourth decade of food justice activism. Cary Fowler, for example, is now a high official at the UN directly responsible for the creation of humanity's ultimate seed bank in the high Norwegian arctic. These people are real heroes for what they started and how long they have kept at it.
The US has a huge and varied food supply. Many people concerned with food look towards supporting local food sources, and methods of growing like the "organic" brand. I want to focus now on Walmart, the largest supermarket in the United States. What they do matters, both because they have the greatest clout with food producers, and because they are in the best position to address problems of access to sufficient, healthy food among poor people - who disproportionately buy their food at Walmart.
Walmart is winning praise for the new Great for You label, even from people I consider to be the very best experts on food and health like NYU nutritionist Marion Nestle. Poor people don't buy much organic or artisanal food because they can't, so the health benefits - real and imagined - of those kinds of food are closed to them. Walmart has taken a significant step towards food justice by creating a label that helps ordinary people to locate food that will help them thrive. And even critics are admitting that the Great for You label is based on sound information, rather than cynical marketing ploys like "natural" food labels.
It's revealing that Walmart's decided to put the green label on eggs. Eggs don't really qualify as great for you if you take into account the cholesterol content. But Walmart recognizes the importance of this readily available, easy to cook concentrated protein. They applied their label based on social criteria, not chemistry alone. That's the basis of food justice.
This new label is not a panacea. Walmart still ruins downtowns, it has questionable labor practices, it is a major market for cheap crap produced under terrible circumstances in China, and its label doesn't take into account how the food is produced and by whom and exactly how nightmarish life is for the chickens laying those eggs.
If we attack this important step because it is not complete and in some respects rudimentary then we're arrogantly proclaiming our right to consign millions of poor people to bad food and worse health, while we cluck our tongues over it, sipping our lattes, reading about it in the Times.........
