Search iEat Green

           

Keep the Soil, Not the Grass; Artists’ Share More Than Fruit; Healthy School Food is Here to Stay; NY Fast-Food Workers Make Political Gains; Nestle Comments to Protect Food Safety

U.S. Pays Farmers Billions To Save The Soil. But It’s Blowing Away – NPR, the Salt

In recent years, dust storms have returned, driven mainly by drought. But, according to rural residents and others, farmers are “making the problem worse by taking land where grass used to grow and plowing it up, exposing vulnerable soil.”

Ironically, most of these grasslands were put there in the first place because of a taxpayer-funded program called the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP. As part of this program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture rents land from farmers across the country and pays them to grow grass, trees and wildflowers in order to protect the soil and also provide habitat for wildlife.

“Ten years ago, there was more land in the CRP than in the entire state of New York. In North Dakota, CRP land covered 5,000 square miles. But CRP agreements only last 10 years, and when farming got more profitable about a decade ago, farmers in North Dakota pulled more than half of that land out of the CRP to grow crops like corn and soybeans. Across the country, farmers decided not to re-enroll 15.8 million acres of farmland in the CRP when those contracts expired between 2007 and 2014.”

Art Group Helps to Map Fresh Fruit as well as History and Culture

“It’s more than just feeding people and thinking of gardening,” David Burns (co-founder of the group Fallen Fruit) says, explaining the thinking behind their fruit tree selections. “We’re also thinking of historic and cultural meaning.”

“For example, he says they plant Hass avocado trees because the Hass was the first fruit patented in California. And the lemon trees in the Stoneview Nature Center‘s lovely rainbow-colored grove hark back to a time in the early 20th century when Mexican-American children were forced to attend segregated schools that were essentially feeder schools to the lemon industry, which used the children as laborers.”

Feeding Young Minds: The Importance of Healthy School Food Continued

“Providing adequate amounts of nutritious food in schools is more important than many realize. “Students who eat regular, healthy meals are less likely to be tired, are more attentive in class, and retain more information,” Sean Patrick Corcoran, associate professor of economics and education policy at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, told The Atlantic.

In fact, well-designed studies have demonstrated that “students at schools that contract with a healthy school lunch vendor score higher” on statewide achievement tests, Michael L. Anderson of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues reported in April. They showed a 4-percentile improvement in test scores above those achieved in schools with less healthy meals.” – NY Times

NYC Law Gives Fast-Food Workers Scheduling Rights

Last month, New York became “the third and largest major U.S. city to guarantee a measure of scheduling smoothness to fast food workers, whose lives are often disrupted by last-minute changes based on their employers’ manpower needs…The legislation also ensures that fast food workers have breaks of at least 11 hours between shifts and are given the option of working additional hours before their employers hire extra workers. San Francisco and Seattle have already enacted similar laws.” -NY Times

Marion Nestle Comments on the Lawsuit Against the FDA to Protect Food Safety

“Federal law requires FDA to ensure that substances used in food are safe, taking into account consumers’ entire diet and all exposure to the chemical and similar chemicals. But any substance designated as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) by FDA or by a food or chemical company can bypass the rigorous pre-market review and approval process applied to food additives. The GRAS exemption was initially created to cover ingredients that are widely known to be safe, such as vegetable oil, but has been applied in recent practice to novel chemicals and is now a loophole that has swallowed the law.”

See full report by the Food and Water Watch on Genetically Modified Food and Public Safety here

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Archives