City to crown developer of South Bronx dump-turned-food-hub ‘Small Business of the Year’

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Posted by Jaime
http://therealdeal.com/blog/2012/07/09/city-to-crown-developer-of-south-bronx-dump-small-business-of-the-year/
Also shared by Mandy and article about te owner of Oakpoint, Steve Smith 
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July 09, 2012 05:45PM

South Bronx developer Steven Smith has taken a bankrupt 28-acre illegal garbage dump and transformed it into a fresh food distribution hub with the potential to bring hundreds of jobs to the area, according to the New York Daily News.

The once empty site in Hunts Point, dubbed Oak Point Property, stretches between the Oak Point railroad yard and the East River. Ten years ago ABB planned a power plant for the parcel, but the project was abandoned and Oak Point Property was forced into bankruptcy, having amassed approximately $60 million in claims. Smith was an engineer with ABB at the time and decided to leave his job, cash out his retirement savings and become a trustee of the property.

Smith pulled the site out of bankruptcy, dissuaded the city from turning it into a jail and saw it through a $6 million environmental clean-up. Eventually he transformed it into a site for use by some of the many food distributors that have headed to the Bronx. In 2010 he sold 12 acres to the food wholesaler Jetro for $25 million. On the remaining land Smith plans an $85 million 300,000-square-foot, three-story distribution center with a rooftop greenhouse that he hopes to open next year. “It was forever going to be a dumping site,” said Smith. “We turned it into a viable piece of property.”

For Smith’s efforts, the city plans to name Oak Point the Bronx Small Business of the Year tomorrow. [NYDN]

Experts Issue a Warning as Food Prices Shoot Up

By ANNIE LOWREY

Published: September 4, 2012

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Posted by Jaime

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/business/experts-issue-a-warning-as-food-prices-shoot-up.html?ref=todayspaper

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Recent drought and other severe weather has resulted in decreased crop yields globally. Directors of UN food and agricultural programs have raised concern over populations disproportionately burdened by increases in food prices.

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WASHINGTON — With the worst drought in half a century withering corn across the Midwest, agricultural experts on Tuesday urged international action to prevent the global spike in food prices from causing global hunger.

The directors of three major United Nations food and agriculture programs sounded the alarm both on the immediate problem of high food prices and the “long-term issue of how we produce, trade and consume food in an age of increasing population, demand and climate change.”

Agricultural production has fallen in a number of major crop exporters this summer. Sweltering heat and a severe drought have damaged the corn crop in the United States. Droughts have also hit Russia and Ukraine, hurting the wheat harvest, as well as Brazil, affecting soybean production.

Low yields have translated into high prices. Last week, the World Bank reported that food prices climbed 10 percent from June to July, with the price of both corn and wheat jumping 25 percent to records. Soybean prices climbed 17 percent over the same period, and rice prices declined moderately, the Washington-based institution said.

“We cannot allow these historic price hikes to turn into a lifetime of perils as families take their children out of school and eat less nutritious food,” Dr. Jim Yong Kim, who became president of the World Bank in July, said in a statement. “Countries must strengthen their targeted programs to ease the pressure on the most vulnerable population.”

To that end, the World Bank and the United Nations food agencies — along with other development and aid groups — have urged countries to prepare for what seems likely to become the third food price shock in five years.

Low-income countries that rely on agricultural imports should invest in safety-net programs for the poor, they recommended. They also urged countries to bolster local production.

Groups including the World Bank and the United Nations have also warned against trade protectionist policies in light of climbing food prices.

“Countries must avoid panic buying and refrain from imposing export restrictions, which, while temporarily helping some consumers at home, are generally inefficient and make life difficult for everyone else,” said the directors of the United Nations programs, José Graziano da Silva of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Kanayo F. Nwanze of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and Ertharin Cousin of the World Food Program, in a statement.

International groups increasingly see inconsistent yields and drastic swings in food prices as a problem driven by climate change — and a global challenge that is not intermittent, but here to stay. Since the food crisis in 2007 and 2008, they have bolstered international cooperation to help foster more stable food supplies and keep the most vulnerable countries prepared.

Oxfam, the international nonprofit, issued a report on Tuesday estimating how extreme weather events might affect food prices in the coming decades — forecasting that the prices of a number of food staples could surge far beyond the projected increases.

“We will all feel the impact as prices spike but the poorest people will be hit hardest because they often spend up to 75 percent of their income on food,” said Heather Coleman, climate change policy adviser for Oxfam America, in a statement.

The United Nations agencies warned that too few countries were producing too large a proportion of staple crops — leaving the world more vulnerable to droughts and floods.

Why Organic Food May Not Be Healthier For You

food for thought

ALLISON AUBREY and DAN CHARLESSeptember 04, 2012 4:00 AM
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Posted by Caryn
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/09/04/160395259/why-organic-food-may-not-be-healthier-for-you?ft=1&f=3
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A shopper surveys the produce at Pacifica Farmers Market in Pacifica, Calif., in 2011.fsdf

Yes, organics is a $29 billion industry and still growing. Something is pulling us toward those organic veggies that are grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.

But if you're thinking that organic produce will help you stay healthier, a new finding may come as a surprise. A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicinefinds scant evidence of health benefits from organic foods.

"There's a definite lack of evidence," says researcher Crystal Smith-Spangler at Stanford University School of Medicine, especially when it comes to studies of people.

She and her colleagues collected 200 peer-reviewed studies that examined differences between organic and conventional food, or the people who eat it.

A few of these studies followed people who were eating either organic or conventional food and looked for evidence that the choice made a difference in their health.

One study, for instance, looked at whether eating organic food while pregnant would influence the likelihood of eczema and other allergic conditions among children, and another looked at whether eating organic meat would influence the risk of a Campylobacter infection, a bacterial food-borne illness. When the researchers looked at the body of evidence, they found no clear benefits. But they say more research is needed.

It's important to note, though, that such studies have a really hard time uncovering subtle effects of our environment, or what we eat, on our health. Too many other powerful influences get in the way. Also, these studies only followed people for a very short time — about two years or less. That's hardly enough time to document any particular health benefit.

Most of the studies included in this collection looked at the food itself — the nutrients that it contained as well as levels of pesticide residues or harmful bacteria.

As you might expect, there was less pesticide contamination on organic produce. But does that matter? The authors of the new study say probably not. They found that the vast majority of conventionally grown food did not exceed allowable limits of pesticide residue set by federal regulations.

Some previous studies have looked at specific organic foods and found that they contain higher levels of important nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. We've reported on one particularly ambitious experiment, which is supposed to go on for a hundred years, comparing plots of organic and conventional tomatoes. After 10 years, the researchers found that tomatoes raised in the organic plots contained significantly higher levels of certain antioxidant compounds.

But this is one study of one vegetable in one field. And when the Stanford researchers looked at their broad array of studies, which included lots of different crops in different situations, they found no such broad pattern.

Here's the basic reason: When it comes to their nutritional quality, vegetables vary enormously, and that's true whether they are organic or conventional. One carrot in the grocery store, for instance, may have two or three times more beta carotene (which gives us vitamin A) than its neighbor. That's due to all kinds of things: differences in the genetic makeup of different varieties, the ripeness of the produce when it was picked, even the weather.

So there really are vegetables that are more nutritious than others, but the dividing line between them isn't whether or not they are organic. "You can't use organic as your sole criteria for judging nutritional quality," says Smith-Spangler.

Of course, people may have other reasons for buying organic food. It's a different style of agriculture. Organic farmers often control pests by growing a greater variety of crops. They increase the fertility of their fields through nitrogen-fixing plants, or by adding compost instead of applying synthetic fertilizer.

That can bring environmental benefits, such as more diverse insect life in the field or less fertilizer runoff into neighboring streams. But such methods also cost money. That's part of what you are buying when you buy organic.

So if you really want to find the most nutritious vegetables, and the organic label won't take you there, what will?

At the moment, unfortunately, there isn't a good guide. But a lot of scientists are working on it.

They're measuring nutrient levels in all kinds of crops, and discovering some surprising things, as The Salt reported last week — such as supernutritiousmicrogreens. They're trying to breed new varieties of crops that yield not a bigger harvest but a more nutrient-rich harvest.

The problem is, farmers still get paid by the pound, not by the vitamin. And consumers buy their food the same way. What this really requires is a whole new food system that can track those extra-nutritious crops from farmer's field to consumer's shopping basket.

Maybe, down the road, you will actually see signs in the supermarket that advertise, for instance, iron-rich beans. Maybe they'd be organic, or maybe not.

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?

By MARK BITTMAN

Published: September 24, 2011

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Posted by roz

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

on the age-old "fast-food is cheaper" argument...(it's not?)

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THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

Daniel Borris for The New York Times

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)

Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.

The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.

“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”

THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.

Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.

Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)

The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”

It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.

Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.

As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.

The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.

As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”

HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”

Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.

A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.

To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival
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Climate Change Threat To World's Poor Is Underestimated, Oxfam Says

Reuters  |  Posted: 09/04/2012 8:01 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/climate-change-worlds-poor_n_1856169.html?utm_hp_ref=green#slide=1212690

Posted by Cara

Oxfam look at climate change and how it will affects the world's poor.

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By Nigel Hunt

LONDON, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Climate change may pose a much more serious threat to the world's poor than existing research has suggested because of spikes in food prices as extreme weather becomes more common, Oxfam said on Wednesday.

More frequent extreme weather events will create shortages, destabilise markets and precipitate price spikes on top of projected structural price rises of about 100 percent for staples such as maize over the next 20 years, the charity said in a report.

Droughts in the U.S. Midwest and Russia this year have helped to propel prices for maize and soybeans to record highs and United Nations food agencies this week said that world leaders must take swift action to ensure that food-price shocks do not turn into a catastrophe that could hurt tens of millions of people.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that the 2007/08 price spike contributed to an 8 percent rise in the number of undernourished people in Africa.

"For vulnerable people, sudden and extreme price hikes can be more devastating than gradual long-term rises to which they may have more chance of adjusting," Oxfam said in a report.

"Though the price spike and coping strategies may be short-term, the impacts are often felt across generations. An increase in malnutrition can cause stunting and reduce developmental potential in young children."

Oxfam added that existing research, which considers the gradual effects of climate change but not extreme weather, significantly underestimates the implications of changing weather patterns.

The charity insisted there is an "urgent need for a full stress test of our fragile and dysfunctional food system" and called for a reversal of decades of underinvestment in small-scale sustainable and resilient agriculture, as well as urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"Climate change could lead to a permanent increase in yield variability and excessive food price volatility, however, which could leave many poor countries with potentially insuperable food security challenges," Oxfam said.