RISING FOOD PRICES

Tragically millions more will starve …

But it’s an opportunity for better

health for others

 

By RALPH DOBRIN

The current steep price rise in staple foods, combined with the steadily increasing cost of oil, will create even more misery and starvation around the globe, while a few  cynical, well-placed leaders and business operators will rake in bigger profits than before. Thousands of square miles of land formerly used to grow grains and legumes for food and fodder are being converted to grow corn for ethanol production as an alternative to gasolene. While pollution is of great concern to humanity, feeding people is of no less importance. With more wisdom and less greed, both issues could readily be solved.

But it seems that the problem of rising food prices is here to stay – at least for a while, and there is little that we as individuals can do about it, except express our concern and anger at obtuse global and regional leadership that has allowed this present situation. However there can be an upside, at least for many people living in the developed world: a general improvement in health.

Many people spend a large chunk of their food budgets on processed items loaded with sugar, salt and other additives. Observe the check-out counter of any supermarket. Carts are laden with a substantial amount of cartoned, packaged or bottled items, manufactured not necessarily for nutrition value but to beguile taste buds into wanting more and more of the same. Soup powders, jam and chocolate sandwich spreads, breakfast concoctions coated with brightly colored sweeteners, soft drinks saturated with sugars and synthetic taste additives, processed meat products, dairy products coming in many flavors, tinned vegetables and a gaudy array of cookies, pretzels, sweets and other seductive gue. The nutritional value of  these items is usually very low but the implications for health can be devastating.

At this very moment millions of people all over Europe, America and other parts of the developed world are battling with serious illnesses such as heart, liver and kidney problems, diabetes and cancer, as a direct result of years of misdirected food shopping. They have paid far more money on unwise choices than had they fed their families with an educated concern for real nutrition; they are now paying with poor health, pain, suffering and disability; and they have palmed these problems onto their children.

Furthermore, other items that command a large part of the food budget are meats and cheeses, which, while not laced with additives, are now known to be a significant factor in the incidence of many serious maladies – if eaten frequently and in large quantities.

With the steep rise in most foodstuffs, which has already begun, and which will probably get worse, many households will be forced to change their food shopping habits.

Logically, the first items to be scratched off the regular shopping list should be all the so-called goodies such as cookies, cakes and wrapped snacks, in addition to all the products processed for rapid preparation and inundated with seductive taste enhancers to encourage repetitive purchase. In order to buy the essential staples such as bread, dairy products, eggs, fruit, vegetables, rice, legumes, pasta, etc, many households will buy far less of goodies and convenience foodstuffs.

A LITTLE EXTRA TIME IN THE KITCHEN

This will probably mean a few minutes more preparation time in the kitchen. Cutting up a few vegetables and putting them in a pot of water to boil takes about three minutes. That’s about two minutes more than it takes to open a can of peas and carrots and heat them. But the taste is incomparably better. And the benefits in terms of additional energy and less illness inestimable. Lower meat and cheese intake will also benefit our general health.

Everyone is said to love their children. But judging by the junk we feed them with, the opposite seems true. It is no secret that today’s younger generation is generally in far worse physical condition than their grandparents, who as youngsters had consumed very few processed foods and who also usually ate less meat.

Those supermarket carts laden with processed items are actually a one-way ticket to the hospital ward in twenty or thirty years for serious heart disease, cancer, glandular problems as well as depleted energy levels and premature aging.

Yet the life expentency of all populations in the developed world has risen dramatically. This is because of two major factors. One is due to the advances made in surgical techniques and life-prolonging (not necessarily life-enhancing) drugs. The other factor is a growing awareness which began more than a generation ago that processed food is usually not fit for human consumption.

The present food crisis could raise this awareness. People will be able to eat just as much as before, but most of their food will be far more wholesome and their food budgets will be lower than before – even with the rise in prices of fruit and vegetables.

The next step for many would be to insist on whole-wheat breads and whole-grain rice instead of the refined varieties. The same goes for cooking oil. Organically grown fruit, vegetables and free-run eggs in more homes would mean a far healthier, more energetic population. National health budgets would be reduced. There would be even more benefits with social, educational and political implications, but we’ll leave all that for another article.

Tragically, millions of people in undeveloped lands, who even before the present food shortages and price rises, were subsisting on near-starvation diets, might now be pushed into even worse straits. We cannot do much for them at the present moment, apart from cash donations to organizations trying to help them. Meanwhile we can take advantage of the situation and drastically reduce our junk food budget in favor of real, wholesome, nutritious food. What a difference that should make for the general health and wellbeing for millions of people.

See also: www.israelandtruth.org

How honest is Bishop Tutu?

Embarrassing questions from

a Sudanese refugee

By Ralph Dobrin

Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureatte, is a stern critic of Israel, who like so many others, ignores Arab aggression whenever Israel defends itself, disregarding Arab culpability for their own plight. But his censure of Israel is always very compelling to those whose knowledge of the Middle East conflict is limited to the half-truths, selective omissions and blatant lies of Arab spokesmen and other gullible media outlets.

When the Bishop addressed a conference in Boston on “Israel Apartheid” most of his audience warmed to his diatribe, but one man was distressed by it because it sounded false.

Simon Deng is a Christian from the Shiluk region of southern Sudan, who has survived slavery and escaped death at the hands of the radical jihadist regime in Khartoum.

Deng finds it hard to understand how a fellow Christian, a “man of God,” who helped bring reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa could lead a conference that uses lies in damning Israel, while disregarding the wholesale murder of millions of Christians in Southern Sudan, as well as the dreadful plight of the people of Darfur and other parts of Africa.

After hearing Bishop Desmond Tutu condemnn Israel, this is what Simon Deng has to say:

”The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families even though I also drove on Israeli
roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools and get the best medical care in the world.

I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language in Israel. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa.

I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer,
they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their own leaders.

Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud. Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist?

When you struggled for freedom, Africans all over Africa joined in. Our support was a key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.

Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans. I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.

So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?”

In a future blog I shall try to get Bishop Tutu’s answer to these questions. While Tutu’s words do carry importance because of his eminent standing as a former freedom fighter and Noble Prize winner, thus promoting the lies of Israel’s enemies, the plight of the Christians in Southern Sudan and the Black Muslims of Darfur, is of far greater importance. It shows the cynicism and cruelty of the whole Jihad enterprise and the weak-kneed hypocrisy of the international community.

For more information: http://www.iheu.org/node/1539