I recently mailed a package to my son in India. His birthday was coming and he said he longed for some favorites from home—including meat. I obliged, loading the box with beef jerky and other goodies. When one of your own says he’s hungry, you want to fill him up. It’s a maternal instinct, surely.
But what was I thinking? Read the rest of this entry »
Maleka Khatun sits in the doorway of her home near Kurigam, Bangladesh. Though Khatun said she completed her cooking an hour ago, there was too little left for her after her husband and children had eaten. She feared that this might be her family’s only meal that day. Photo: Oxfam
OK, so you know the global food crisis is affecting millions. But did you know that the crisis affects women even more than men?
That’s the subject of a recent brief by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Helping Women Respond to the Global Food Price Crisis. According to IFPRI,
Higher food prices increase the burden for women, who must stretch the limited food budget even further. Women often end up being the shock absorbers of household food security, reducing their own consumption to leave more food for other household members. In Bangladesh, even before the crisis, almost 60 percent of households reported that women skip meals more often than men.
As food prices rise and staples consume more of the food expenditures, households frequently cut back on both food quantity (caloric intake) and quality (dietary diversity), which provides micronutrients that girls and women particularly need…
Here’s what’s in our fridge at the moment: red leaf lettuce, carrots, garlic scapes, spinach, broccoli, onions, parsley, basil, turnips, and radishes—all grown at a farm down the road in which we have bought a share. It’s part of a movement called community-supported agriculture. And judging by the waiting list of people who would like to join the initiative in our Massachusetts town, supporting small farms is smart way to get food—whether you live in one of the richest countries in the world or one of the poorest. Read the rest of this entry »
Before she left on a field visit to India and Sri Lanka, a colleague dropped off a present at my desk: three red-skinned potatoes in a plastic sack—the remains of the stash she keeps handy for lunch. She didn’t want them to rot while she was away, and being a spud fan I was glad to get them, especially now that I’ve learned that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato—so named by the United Nations at the behest of Peru.
In a year that’s experiencing a frightening global food crisis, choosing to promote this stalwart tuber—people in the Peruvian highlands have been eating them for more than 8,000 years—seems more than serendipitous. It’s imperative. There are lots of reasons why. Read the rest of this entry »
What a week to launch a blog about humanitarian work.
It’s been a week that has seen the death toll from the May 3 cyclone in Myanmar inch upward as Oxfam worries about the outbreak of disease among survivors and the United Nations warns that 2.5 million people are now in urgent need of aid. Read the rest of this entry »
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