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food Archives - ChangingMedia

Mar 28
0

Zoning Laws Outlaw Peanut Butter

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | 6 Comments

I have a friend who raves about the fried peanut butter and jelly you can order at Rocket to Venus in Hampden. I’m sure she’ll get me to try it one day, but I have a hard time believing they have improved on my life-long favorite sandwich.

Because they are cheap, easily assembled and, (in my opinion), delicious, PB & Js are the favorite sandwich of volunteer groups passing out food to homeless people. If you don’t share my personal tastes, peanut butter and jelly could get boring. While everyone deserves variety, sometimes food is food, and when you’re hungry, a solid sandwich can be a big help.

Notice I said “when you’re hungry,” not “when you’re experiencing homelessness.” Most groups that pass out food in public places don’t care if the recipients are homeless, because they know that hunger affects people even after they get housing. That is why volunteers in Raleigh, North Carolina were so surprised last summer when they were told they could not pass out hot breakfast to the line of individuals that has come to expect their presence on weekday mornings. The group, called Love Wins Ministries, arrives weekly with breakfast sandwiches and a vat off coffee, but in August 2013 they were stopped by Raleigh police and threatened with arrest before they could serve.

Raleigh is not the only city letting its hungry residents stay that way. You may remember the less-than- hospitable town of Columbia, South Carolina that was working this winter to outlaw homelessness. As of February 15th, the area has taken further steps to alienate its already marginalized population, by requiring that any group planning to distribute obtain a permit (costing around $120) to serve meals in any public park or open space. This discourages volunteer groups that are not run by a registered nonprofit from providing food. In Rockford, Illinois, both food and shelter have been interrupted at Apostolic Pentecostal Church. Last week, church officials were informed they would be acting outside the law if they continued to use the empty church building as a shelter and warming station for homeless individuals.

Law enforcement in each of these cities and towns cite zoning or permit regulations as the reason for the recent interruptions, but there has to be a way to have a city that can feed its homeless population without it being deemed a fire hazard or an illegal act. Homelessness won’t end with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but if we can’t even serve this simple snack, what hope is there for a large scale, system change to end homelessness? These jurisdictions must find a way to prioritize human needs, and work with groups that are trying to help, not against their efforts.

Hélder Câmara, a 1980’s Brazilian Archbishop once explained, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Today, feeding the poor might earn him handcuffs, not sainthood. As neither a saint nor a communist myself, I still think it is important to ask why so many cities demand people living in poverty navigate legal hurdles in order to obtain a warm bed or a snack – and I wonder how we can improve upon this practice. 

Feb 21
0

No One Cares Which Fork You Use This Week

By | Health, The Global Is Local | 8 Comments

Culinary connoisseurs take cover, the untutored masses are flocking to your places of worship. Stay in, order out, but for the love of all that you hold tastily sacred, do not go to your favorite fancy restaurant, because I will be there and will be using my salad fork to eat my soup.

This is the end of Restaurant Week here in Baltimore, an event that has become a tradition for many foodie cities around the country and even the world (I just found one for Bangalore). The culture of food in our city is a microcosm for the psychological and sociological issues that we wrestle with, as is all food, in all settings. It also brings us together, or at least it can. Imagine if all the countries that excel at making hummus fought about who makes it best instead of all the things they have fought about for hundreds or thousands of years.

The first Restaurant Week took place in New York City as a gimmick during the Democratic National Convention, but it has steadily grown and spread. The premise, for you fellow heathen fork users out there, is that while we may occasionally glance through the massive panes of glass at the sophisticates inside the hottest and most happening eatery, we will not enter and savor a fine meal because of cost and fear of embarrassment. Restaurants participate in RW in an effort to bring us in, to tease us with scintillating samples, and like any good dealer, hook us on the finer things. Not everyone loves it of course, including those who would typically frequent the nicer restaurants since they are crowded and full of people like me. I personally am of two minds about it, and while I partake, I suspect that I am participating in a bourgeois charade and/or missing out on the genuine experience these places have to offer.

It is entirely possible that RW plays into stereotypes about rich and poor by allowing us to act the part of the rich and encourages us to value certain types of cultural experiences as more valid or valuable than others. My sense however, is that this is an event for young, white hipsters, and is not an especially democratizing event. This is not to say that I think Baltimore is not capable of food events that have these qualities, however. One of my favorite things about the farmers market downtown is that the customers there look like the city as a whole. A broad spectrum of ages, races, and religions (I love seeing folks in their Sunday clothes after church at the market) all coming together to buy kale and apples. The Gathering – the monthly food truck events held throughout the summer – also bring together a diverse mix of Baltimorean eaters, at a price point that is affordable by most, and providing street food that is often very good.

Restaurant Week purportedly excels at bringing us in to taste what we are missing, except that they are not necessarily serving the food that we would eat if we came in for a normal meal at $29-$45 for an entree. There is a reason that the prix fixe menus are affordable, and that the servings are small. This is a sample, good enough to bring us back, but not so good as to cause a major hit to their bottom line. For that reason, and despite the fact that I take advantage of the event at least once each year, I wonder if it is really effective at opening up fine dining to all.

Then again, it’s important to note that Restaurant Week’s economic impact is highly skewed toward the local marketplace. Most RW participants in Baltimore and around the country are locally owned and operated, single sites or small restaurant groups, and the money that is spent there by local people is much more likely to stay in community, where it will do the most good. Eating is in many ways a political act, the most demonstrative version of voting with your dollars, as you are also putting your money where your mouth is (and chewing and swallowing). Committing more of those dollars than an average week to local businesses, their employees, and the vendors that serve them is a tasty political action.

Now stand back, I’m going to use my soup spoon as a knife.

Jan 10
0

Resolve Yourself to Good. And Kale.

By | Health, The Global Is Local | One Comment

Hasdai Westbrook, ChangeMonger-in-Chief over here at the ChangeEngine central tower, sent over this link from Psychology Today on resolving to help others vs. helping yourself, noting that I had expressed interest in tying in the tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions in this week’s post.

“Oh, great. Thanks, Hasdai. As if failing at keeping my own resolutions isn’t enough for me, now I have to feel guilty about failing at the goals these folks have for me as well,” I thought to myself. However, as he often does, Hasdai demonstrated his benevolent and thoughtful ChangeMongering with intuition and foresight.

To summarize the main point of the author, setting resolutions aimed at helping others can contribute in multiple and reinforcing ways to the well-being of our communities. These beneficial activities leave their mark both on other people and the environment, and on the people who commit to them, driving positive physiological and psychological feedback loops.

None of this will come as a surprise, especially to readers of ChangeEngine blogs, but how can we ensure these social change resolutions will be successful as we plan our goals for the year. Think how many gym memberships purchased in January go unused; the same goes for our benevolent souls. Here’s a few behavioral change concepts and goal-setting techniques to make sure our do-gooding intentions don’t turn to flab:

1. Make yourself accountable to someone else. This is a strategy employed by the running and socio-economoic empowerment organization Back On My Feet, which has several chapters in Baltimore. The principle is simple: we are far more likely to do something, even (or especially) if it’s hard, if someone is counting on you.

2. Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goals, as Jasmine suggested on Friday. Cities around the country are setting measurable and attainable goals to spur action on ending homelessness. As demonstrated by the recent social media campaign to ensure those suffering homelessness were safe from dangerous cold during the ravages of the polar vortex this week, simple and specific actions by individuals like you and me can create real impact. All the campaign asked was for people to dial a hotline if they saw a homeless person so that that the authorities could offer them shelter. SMART goals can lead to real positive outcomes.

Baltimore Homeless Hotline

3. Use a commitment device. The principle is sound enough – your present self has a goal and doesn’t trust your future self to maintain your current level of enthusiasm and commitment to that goal, so Current Self sets up consequence that will kick in if Future Self doesn’t toe the line. The commitment device  is a little controversial, in that experts such as Freakonomics author Steven Levitt are dubious as to it’s efficacy. As we saw with the federal sequester last year, the prospect of something idiotic happening to you doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t it happen if Future Self is stubborn enough. One of my favorite commitment device stories was of someone who wanted to quit smoking so badly they wrote a $5,000 check to the KKK, and made someone else promise to send it if she smoked. The hatred of giving the KKK money was more compelling than the urge to smoke. As you can see, strategy #1 is essentially a form of commitment device and happens to be very effective.

Now I’m not suggesting you whip out your checkbook and start making a postdated check to your local klavern. Thankfully, organizations and movements such as Back on My Feet utilize the commitment device of accountability to others. They establish healthy practices that are beneficial to all of the participants, and have a multiplicative effect in the community. Maybe I could argue the same for my resolution to eat kale three times per week, but it would be a stretch. A better strategy for my kale aspirations might be to seek out one of the volunteer or cooperative urban farms nearby and commit to a task that would make my presence necessary, and guarantee me — almost incidentally — kale for each week. Thus, my kale supply is assured through my combined guilt complex at abandoning my duties and my satisfaction in contributing to the farm’s success. Oh, and incidentally, I have some free, locally grown and freshly harvested kale, so I had better go reward myself for keeping my commitments!

May 13
0

Started from the Bottom

By | Health | One Comment

For the past nine months I’ve had the pleasure of working with kids through a nutrition education program called Food as Medicine at a local Baltimore middle school. Twice a week, once after school and once in the 6th grade classroom, volunteers help students think critically about the food they eat and teach them how it affects their body. We’ve had such success in the first year the kids are planning to get a salad bar for the school and have already made a commercial promoting healthy choices (soon to be released on YouTube, it’s a rap to the tune of Drake’s “Started from the Bottom“).

As an AmeriCorps VISTA, you live in poverty and fight poverty through program development and capacity-building. If you know me, you know that I hate using the words “poor” or “poverty” because they create a one-dimensional view in peoples’ minds. Being “poor” doesn’t only mean that you don’t have enough money; it means a much more fundamental lack of resources and opportunity. Yes, the middle school I work at in Waverly is Title I, meaning that about 76 percent of students are low-income and 98 percent of them receive free lunches. But it is the lack of access to society’s institutions and opportunities that creates the true detriment to their health and to their success later in life.

School budgets are determined by enrollment, with schools receiving about $5,000 for each child and a little bit more for special education and advanced students. That is the school’s entire budget that goes to food, toilet paper, teacher’s salaries, projectors and everything else. That leaves little extra for programming or even what many people consider basics. So this school of 6th – 8th grade students cannot afford languages, arts, P.E., health or science education. Aside from our program, the students have no other opportunity for after-school clubs or sports.

Ten years ago, all these students were zoned to Roland Park Middle School, which is one of the best in Baltimore but then were re-zoned to Waverly which didn’t even have a building for these kids to go to. The School Board promised the community a school equal to the quality of Roland Park, but instead gave them an old community center that was scheduled to be shut down and no funding to build it up. The community worked very hard for donations and to get the building suitable for children. Now the building looks nice, but the kids are left with no gym, equipment, playground or drinking water. Want to wash that apple you brought to school for snack? You can, but you will get lead all over it.

So it’s no surprise that these kids don’t know how much sugar is in soda or cereal or even chocolate milk. They don’t know that whole milk, Cheetos and fries have a whole bunch of fat in them. They didn’t know that you can die from strokes, heart attacks and diabetes which all are diseases mostly dependent on diet. Thanks to our program, students can identify what are healthy fats, that hydrogenated oils are bad for you and that too much sugar can cause diabetes. They know why vegetables are healthy and not just that they should eat them. Most importantly, they are more willing to try new foods. Before, students only ate things because they tasted good (and they still do) but now they know how to make healthy choices on their own because we told them how to read food labels and what nutrients are essential, and opened their eyes to all the dirty secrets of processed foods.

Luckily, things are looking up for the Waverly community. They worked very hard to get a brand new $30 million building — the first new school building for Baltimore in 15 years. Next year they will actually have a gym, science labs and enough room to fit 900 kids — more than double the enrollment now. With a building that has safe drinking water they can actually get a salad bar and wash their fruit. They will have an actual kitchen that doesn’t just re-heat food but will be equipped with real cooking utensils. They will have a real gym and a real playground to run around in. With more than double the possibility for funding, they will be able to hire science, health and P.E. teachers and finally will have the resources and opportunities to excel in life.

A picture of the after school club, self-named “The Healthy Society,” cooking with Chef Ty from Bon Appetit.
Mar 22
0

When Government Lets Us Down

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

If you have read a few of my posts over the past couple of months, you have probably realized I’m in favor of government; I think it has a place and serves valuable functions. A few of my favorite examples (when done right) are the regulation of pollution, the oversight of food, chemical, and product safety, and police forces committed to protecting our rights.

It is distressing, therefore, when this entity that provides us the space and safety to be here — the government — doesn’t do its job, namely to protect the citizens. Because I spent many hours looking at hopeful and uplifting HIV/AIDS news earlier this month, it was particularly sad to see that the ongoing budget battles will cut funding that provides therapeutic interventions for the most vulnerable AIDS patients in this country — the poor. As we learned last time, HIV/AIDS has a disproportionate impact in Baltimore. Global AIDS funding is being cut as well, despite earlier presidential promises to the contrary. This is unfortunate, since international AIDS funding gets far more bang for the buck, so to speak, and addresses regions where the need is incomprehensible to us here in the U.S.

Just to balance things out, however, there is an initiative taking place in the Oliver neighborhood that is essentially a blitz of Baltimore City services –– filling potholes, installing smoke detectors, offering access to drug rehab services, arresting drug dealers who frequent the area, and removing trash and debris. Whether or not this is what the neighborhood needs to pull out of its perpetual slump is uncertain, and probably a matter of opinion. Clearly, though, the reason for engaging in this effort is at least an attempt to make life better for the residents, which is the role that government ought to provide.

A  couple of updates in the “You Heard It Here First” category:

SARS Redux? recalled the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003 and drew an uncanny parallel to an emerging coronavirus that has been causing an alarming respiratory condition in several patients in the Middle East. Several recent news items have called attention to this condition, confirmed that it has the potential to spread from person to person, and traced the spread from the Arabian Peninsula to the United Kingdom.

Outbreak discussed the nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak linked to contaminated pharmaceutical products made by the New England Compounding Center.  The outbreak is expected to continue to cause illness and death across the 20 states affected. The supply chain that provides us with the medicines we rely upon should remain under close public scrutiny or be expected to fail again.

Next time: Biking in Baltimore: awesome, terrifying, or obvious choice?

Unrelated sidebar: If you are interested in trying your hand at pottery, and possibly discussing health, politics, food, and the environment with yours truly, check out the Mesh Baltimore site this week.

IMAGE CREDIT. Library of Congress Flickr Photostream.
Dec 14
0

B’more Food

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Baltimore is an unusual place. I like unusual, it makes me feel like I’ve chosen somewhere special.

There is something satisfying about being in a place that most people don’t get to experience on a regular basis. If you live in Alaska you probably feel that way, or Liechtenstein, or Tahiti. One of the first signs I saw that I had landed somewhere different was in large block letters, and I wondered where the “LAKE” was that these “TROUT” came from. Read More