I heard this on NPR this morning:

Impact Of Childhood Obesity Goes Beyond Health

There’s no food available in many inner-city areas. True. There are limited opportunities for exercise in high-crime neighborhood. True. They spent 2 billion dollars trying to help obesity. True. The problem can be fixed without addressing any of the previous 3 things: True.

The government has the power to make it cheaper to eat a salad than a hamburger. They don’t do it because poor and middle class fat people don’t matter, but mcdonalds, conagra and archer daniels midland do. End of story.

It’s Over

I failed you. Easter, both the cooking and the people, took up all my time, and I didn’t blog shit.

I didn’t even hardly take any pictures.

But guess what, we’re moving forward.

Today on the California Report they were talking about how the new healthcare legislation is going to affect Central Valley farmers. I am sympathetic to all independent farmers, organic or not, but the outcry about their new burden is the wrong outcry. It makes me sick that we, as a nation, stare at the prices on supermarket shelves, nodding approvingly when they go down, squealing like stuck pigs when they go up even fractionally, without a thought to the true cost of that food. The billions of lost tax revenue for government subsidy and environmental cleanup could go to our schools, our bridges, our arts and our sciences: we are getting screwed for Monsanto. We talk about farm laborers, legal or not, like a commodity. We spend millions on fucking dog toys and we can’t acknowledge, as a society, that these human beings are entitled to a living wage and access to health care.

But chicken parts are 79 cents a pound, so it’s ok.

Listening: Radio Paradise: listen, and give them some money!!

Captain Obvious Hired By NY Times

Stop the presses for [this headline in the NY Times today](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/health/policy/10food.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss):

>U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving

Holy crap, I’m amazed.

You can read Captain Obvious’s assessment yourself, but *my* favorite moment was when
>Dr. Tim Jones, state epidemiologist in Tennessee, said that many of the easy improvements in the nation’s food-safety system had been made.
>“You can only tell people so much to wash their cutting boards and wash their hands,” Dr. Jones said. “I think we’re running out of things to do to make dramatic improvements.”

As if **that’s** the problem. How about not processing 40% of anything in one place? So that way, when the company succumbs to profit over civic duty- with a healthy dose of help from the USDA- not everybody in the world has to stop eating pistachios (or peanuts or tomatoes or spinach)?

Listening: Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus” Violator
That’s how I roll.

Si Se Puede!

OMFG, we did it! There is going to be a [kitchen garden on the white house lawn](http://www.kitchengardeners.org/2009/03/white_house_kitchen_garden.html)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m not a naturally positive person, but I try, and try hard to look for the good in things. And as much as I have never been a follower, it fills me with great joy and pride that America finally, again, has a leader.

Listening: Somewhat coincidentally: “Every Breath You Take” The Police Synchronicity