What's a few million of hungry people, more or less?

The N&O ran a McClatchy story yesterday with an upbeat headline:Rise in U.S. hunger slows, but remains high. This indeed sounds like good news, or at least better than having the rate increase.

The headline for the same article on the McClatchy site is: Land of plenty? U.S. hunger rate remains stubbornly high.

Update: Reporter Tony Pugh did have it right after all: the number of people suffering from very low levels of food security was 17.4 million in 2009. The percentage for households with some level of food insecurity was 14.7%, which as I wrote earlier is the figure used in the abstract of the report itself. See table 1a in the report. Thanks to McClatchy Investigative Editor James Asher for the clarification.

New Comment: A good look at table 1a shows that the number of individuals with very low food security went up by 379,000 people from 2008 to 2009. While the report's abstract says that the rate was "essentially unchanged," that's more that all the people in any one of these cities: Honolulu, Wichita, or St. Louis.

Keep in mind that, according to Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, many of the figures for the number of people needing help are low because organizations have a limit to the number they can help and only report those they do help. So, if a soup kitchen was feeding 50 people lunch every day two years ago and was able to feed everyone who asked but now has a line that starts at 8 AM and turns away 100+, the reported number is still 50.

Have you actually seen a starving person in the U.S.? ask some of the mean-spirited comments on the McClatchy site. Probably not, since the nutritional-support programs have largely wiped out the pot-bellied, stick-legged look that used to be seen here. Let's thank another news agency for that. In 1968, the suffering described in CBS Reports: Hunger in America led to a Senate inquiry and $200 million more dollars for food programs.

But the current USDA report says that food-insecure households didn't have enough to eat 7 months a year and usually 1 to 7 days a month. Maybe the thought of children crying themselves to sleep because they are hungry 20 or so nights a year doesn't make you weep. In that case, please think about the long-term damage to their mental and physical development and the resulting low school and work performance.

Some supermarkets welcome, inform food-stamp recipents

Kroger CEO starts helping customers with food stamps, WIC. Dave Dillion, chairman and CEO of Kroger, often visits his stores to talk with customers and see for himself what works and what doesn't, according to a recent AP story. His involvement helps explain why Kroger's earnings are up while earnings for other groceries are down. Dillion noticed that the number of customers using food stamps had doubled, resulting in many new recipients who were unsure about what they could buy. To reduce the frustration and time of having items rejected at checkout, Dillion has brought in new signs to help explain what items are allowed and also trained employees to help customers use the program.

As I report in today's Cook for Good newsletter, the Kroger I visited in Raleigh is starting to roll out better signage, but has quite a ways to go. They have labels for WIC-approved items, but not for food stamps.

Have you seen any effort to identify eligible items in your grocery store? Have you experienced or seen confusion in using the programs? Have you see any stores charging people extra who use WIC or food stamps (SNAP)? These fees are illegal, but I was told by a clerk that there is a 50-cent fee for each use of the food-stamp Electronic Benefits Transfer card. The store management later told me that had never been the case.

Eat a carrot, hurt the economy? Bad reporting, false choices.

I was stunned this morning to see a headline over an AP article saying, Eat a carrot, hurt the economy? Sometimes. The story summarized a study in Lancet, saying that:

In Britain, experts estimated that fixing the country's bad eating habits might prevent nearly 70,000 people from prematurely dying of diet-related health problems like heart disease and cancer. It would also theoretically save the health system 20 billion pounds ($32 billion) every year.

In Brazil, however, the rates of illnesses linked to a poor diet are not as high as in the U.K. So Brazilians would get relatively few health benefits while their economy might lose millions.

Yet even a quick look at the Lancet series on The Health Benefits of Tackling Climate Change finds another conclusion. The first paragraph says making technical and lifestyle changes to combat global warming would not be "socially uncomfortable and economically painful" as is commonly thought, at least from a public-health point of view. In fact,

If properly chosen, action to combat climate change can, of itself, lead to improvements in health.

The series highlights several areas where climate-inspired changes would make people healthier, by reducing household energy emissions, changing urban land transport, and finding low-carbon ways to generate electricity.

But what about those Brazilian ranchers? They would have a greater health benefit than in the UK:

A 30% fall in the adult consumption of saturated fat from animal sources would reduce heart disease in the population by around 15% in the UK and by 16% in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. If the study had used additional health outcomes such as obesity and diet-related cancers, the health gains might have been even more substantial.

The study lists a "key message" as being:

Achieving a substantial cut in greenhouse-gas emissions will depend on reducing the production of food from livestock and on technological improvements in farming.

The full journal article itself, Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: food and agriculture, does address the benefits of raising animals for meat in certain situations:

For example, ruminant livestock in upland and marginal areas can help to maintain and build the carbon-sequestering properties of soil. Where grazing cattle are reared without use of feed inputs or additional fertiliser, and at low stocking densities, carbon sequestering can outweigh methane and nitrous oxide emissions....Further, in many geographical regions (including the uplands in the UK) no form of food production other than livestock rearing is feasible at present. Livestock rearing also has a key cultural and economic role in many parts of the world and is estimated to create livelihoods for a billion of the world's poor people.

False choices. The AP story presents a false limit on the choices involved. Certainly if people worldwide were suddenly told to quit raising animals for food and offered no other way to feed themselves, misery would ensue. But for the most part, the choices are not limited to "raise meat or starve."

Limited consequences. The AP article doesnt' mention other consequences not slowing global warming by all means possible, including the easy and healthy choice of eating less meat. More carbon emissions creates increased human aggression and ever more environmental refugees, already 20 million strong and growing rapidly, "more than those displaced by war and political repression combined" according to a U.N. study. We also hurt or kill other living beings and environmental systems.

So unless you are a subsistence farmer raising livestock on the thin, rocky pastures, go ahead and eat that carrot. Before you pick a burger over beans for lunch, check out these pictures showing the effects of rising sea levels on everything from the property value of beach houses to the displacement of 13 million people in Bangladesh to the very existence of the tiny island country of Tuvalu.

Apron survey comments / men who cook

And the winner is — the apron with the hidden labels. There will be a Cook for Good logo label and a US flag label on the underside of the back behind the neck.

An apology and a defense. As I said in the newsletter today, I wish I'd mentioned up front that this apron is intended to be the first of a series, including a streamlined apron suitable for men and women. One comment took me to task for "reinforcing outdated gender roles." My sincere apologies for any appearance in that direction. It's a shame that so many women have been talked out of the joys and power of cooking from scratch, as documented brilliantly by Laura Shapiro in Something from the Oven. But that joy and power should be available to men as well. Nearly everybody can and should cook.

On the other hand, I was surprised by the survey response that said that selling the apron goes against the original intent of Cook for Good and that the money should just be spent on food. Cook for Good is for people of all income levels. Certainly you should feed your kids before buying an apron, but protecting your other clothes while you cook makes sense. And I always feel like I'm donning a superhero cape when I put on my apron — it's just fun. I hope some of you will choose to support my work by buying the ebook, taking a class, or eventually buying the apron. I don't get funding from any other source. Making a quality product in the U.S., especially with disabled workers, seems to be right in line with my "make a difference" goal.

But what do you think?