Daniel Vitalis on Honey. What Kind is Best?

Master Herbalist and Alchemist, Daniel Vitalis

suggests it is best to eat organic honey.

Shazzie on Superfoods

Demand for Purple Corn May Soon Explode

http://www.naturalnews.com/026210.html

Purple corn is being classified as a functional food. It is loaded with phenolics and anthocyanin, and has just about the highest antioxidant rating of any food including blueberries. The health benefits of purple corn are pervasive, and it has a normalizing effect on many systems of the body. Purple corn has even been shown able to shrink cancerous tumors. As the healing value of purple corn becomes apparent, researchers have jumped in to document its many benefits, and supplement companies have rolled out purple corn extracts. The only thing missing from all this is someone to put purple corn in the produce sections of the local grocery stores.

The City that Ended Hunger

by Frances Moore Lappe

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=3330

 

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

    “To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”  CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

  

More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget. Above, fresh passion fruit juice and salad as part of a school lunch.

How to Help People the Health Ranger Way (aid to Ecuador homeless)

By Mike Adams, January 31, 2009

The last time I went to Ecuador, I spent some time thinking about how to help people. It didn’t take long to find the simple answers: Just get out there, ask people what they need and get it for them!

So I started filming these events, and today I’ve posted the first of many that you’ll eventually see posted on NaturalNews. You can watch the video here: http://www.naturalnews.com/025487.html

This first video is about Julia Maria, a woman living in a shack on the side of the road, literally sleeping with chickens in shockingly unclean conditions. While we couldn’t put a new roof over her head that day, we did find out what she needed (a mattress, some clothes, some shoes, and some food), we went out and got it, and delivered it to her.

Towards the end of this video, you can hear her asking for a cola, which we try to explain to her isn’t good for her health (we don’t bring people colas).

In the future, we’ll work to bring people fresh produce, but at the time of this filming, our gardens in Ecuador weren’t producing yet, so we got her what we could from the local stores (whole-grain bread and some fresh fruit).

What’s interesting about Ecuador, by the way, is that it’s so easy and affordable to make a difference in someone’s life. This is true anywhere, actually, but in Ecuador, a dollar goes a long way towards improving the life of a fellow human being.

Farmer in Chief, by Michael Pollan

Thursday 09 October 2008

by: Michael Pollan, The New York Times

http://www.truthout.org/101708EA

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Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration – the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact – so easy to overlook these past few years – that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.