James Hamblin flags new research on food and socioeconomic class:
Nutritional disparities between America’s rich and poor are growing, despite efforts to provide higher-quality food to people who most need it. So says a large study just released from the Harvard School of Public Health that examined eating habits of 29,124 Americans over the past decade. Diet quality has improved among people of high socioeconomic status but deteriorated among those at the other end of the spectrum. The gap between the two groups doubled between 2000 and 2010. That will be costly for everyone.
Meanwhile, Danielle Kurzleben responds to a report on hunger in America (pdf):
There are a few big points to draw from this report. One is that even as so many headline numbers — unemployment, GDP growth, stock market index levels — are bouncing back, the number of Americans who report they have trouble eating is holding relatively steady, at levels it first hit during the recession. So even when, for example, Friday’s unemployment report shows the economy added a projected 230,000 jobs, as Bloomberg’s consensus reflects, there are plenty of reasons (17.5 or 6.8 million, depending on how you look at it) not to celebrate.
Another thing to note is that the report mostly doesn’t cover the period after food stamp cuts went into effect. In November 2013, a temporary boost to SNAP expired, and this year, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law $8.7 billion in food stamp cuts, a reduction of around $90 per month for 850,000 households, as MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff reported. (And $8.7 billion is a compromise amount; House Republicans initially wanted much steeper cuts.)
On the agricultural end, there’s some more pessimism. Conor Friedersdorf sees a connection between urban farms and urban inequality:
Successful urban centers are constantly changing, and those changes raise complicated issues. A growing city’s dynamism is core to what makes it attractive and useful. At the same time, cities aren’t just concrete and glass: They’re where people live. There’s a cost to pricing out families and disrupting longstanding communities. Settling on the most fair or desirable housing policies can seem impossible.
But subsidies for urban farming in one of the most dense, geographically constrained, pricey U.S. cities? That’s insanity. “It’s part of the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act, a state law spearheaded by local sustainable land-use advocates and state Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco,” the article explains. “The law encourages would-be urban farmers to turn trash-covered empty parcels into gardens with the assurance they won’t be forced out after putting in a lot of time and money.” …
San Francisco residents tend to self-describe as cosmopolitan liberals. But as a friend in the Bay Area once put it to me, they’re often reactionary conservatives when it comes to development. I am not unsympathetic to their desire to preserve such a fantastic city. But they aren’t doing any favors for those who can’t make rent.
On a more uplifting note, Susanna Bohme welcomes a proposed change to legislation regarding pesticides and labor, which would have a particular impact on the youngest workers:
For the 6 percent of farm workers who are under age eighteen, pesticide exposure is particularly dangerous. Children and adolescents’ growing bodies and age-specific behaviors mean they are at special risk for learning and developmental disabilities, asthma, cancer, genetic damage, and endocrine disorders. Despite these dangers, even young farm workers get short shrift when it comes to federal protections. The law allows children as young as twelve (and under some circumstances, even younger) to work on farms, while most other jobs have a minimum age of fourteen. Farm workers under age sixteen are prohibited from working any job deemed hazardous, including those that involve handling the most harmful pesticides. But they are allowed to handle other chemicals, including some whose active ingredients have been implicated in a high number of poisonings. In other sectors, workers aren’t allowed to enter highly hazardous jobs until they are eighteen; in agriculture that age is sixteen.
The revised Standard tightens the rules by establishing that same age, sixteen, as the minimum for handling any pesticide, not just those with the highest toxicity ratings. The new Standard would also prohibit the use of young people as early entry workers during the post-application interval. This is a meaningful change because, as the proposal notes, in one study of 531 acute poisonings among child farm workers, in cases where the toxicity category of the responsible pesticide was known, “67% of the illnesses were associated with toxicity category III pesticides, which are not currently prohibited under the hazardous order.” On the EPA’s scale of I to IV, with I the most toxic, category III can be plenty dangerous. Again the example of RoundUp is instructive. Currently there are no age restrictions for handling this category III chemical, but a 2008 study found that farmworkers exposed to it are twice as likely to develop Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The Dish 