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Topic: Sky Rocketing Food Prices!
| Author | Message |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 4/26/2008 4:30:25 PM | show profile Food goes bad after a while -- even rice, pasta and canned goods. Power goes out, and you lose everything in the refrigerator and the freezer. Don't overdo. Canning and drying are great ideas, but who has the time? I work six days a week. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 4/26/2008 6:48:23 PM | show profile notpriveleged, I really do see that increasing food and fuel prices could very likely be an ongoing part of our future. Global oil production has been pretty much stagnant for the past few years, and if/when it gets to the point where we're experiencing annual global conventional oil declines (say a reduction of a percent or two a year), this will become problem number one, energy and food. Even more than now. A few years ago I went a little wacky and got a big sack of wheat berries... JUST IN CASE. These things are supposed to have a very long shelf life. But who am I kidding? Might be good if there was a massive natural disaster and we needed some food to last us a week or so. But I did take a serious organic gardening class last year, have grown a little bit of food here and there, became 98% vegetarian, etc. But I have thought, if suddenly it seemed there was a run on food or a major major disaster, first thing I'd do is be one of those people hoarding and go out to Costco and get some big sacks of flour, etc. etc. Of course, in that event would everyone else be there? Would it be open? Could I even get there? Probably a good idea to prepare as the Mormons do with one year of supplies! |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 4/26/2008 9:49:25 PM | show profile >>Are you a survivalist Reporter? I would love some more of your expert advice if this is the case.<< No, I'm not a survivalist reporter, just a regular one. I keep two earthquake kits, one for the car and one for home, and the food in those has to be cycled through every year, so they say. A friend who made up a massive change-of-millennium kit is finally opening all the cans and finding them spoiled. No expert advice there. You may find some experts in the LDS church -- not survivalists, though, as you appear to want. Mormons stockpile, but for only a year. Two years is nothing, when you think about it (less than two years, if your plan includes the quality of the food). You may save yourself a little money on the purchase, but spend it on the storage. Or, having read about your uber-environmental side, you've probably already cut ice from the lake to use in your icebox!! Panic isn't my MO, though I appreciate the suggestion. I'd rather go the way of making wiser choices. The rice problem, after all, has not been caused by a shortage of rice. |
| Lola la la la Lola | Posted – 4/27/2008 12:32:18 AM | show profile hey loons-I think you're all overreacting. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 4/27/2008 3:55:41 PM | show profile Tangerine, you might want to read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan when you get a chance. It has happened here, has happened all over the world, and certainly can happen again. |
| Queen Kong | Posted – 4/28/2008 12:16:22 AM | show profile > not priveledged Posted ? 4/26/2008 3:39:25 PM Please overlook all typos...geesh I really hate them...so aggravating! < The way to cut down and ultimately avoid typos altogether is to first type your comment on your computer's notepad (in the Mac system it's called TextEdit). The software will alert when a word or usage is questionable. When you're through, cut&paste it to the thread's message window and post it. It takes just as long to compose it in this manner as it does to type it straight onto the message window -- and it gives you an opportunity to re-read and reconsider before you commit. :-) |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 4/28/2008 2:05:04 AM | show profile >>Reporter your ignorance is astounding. No need to reply.<< You don't own the board, and you can't chase people off it by getting personal. Now, if you could address in an educational way whatever you consider to be "ignorance" in my post, it would be nice and helpful to everybody. If your problem is simply that I hold a different opinion from yours, then there's no need for *you* to reply. Ever. We let people air their views here without insulting them or calling them names. |
| chucho | Posted – 4/28/2008 12:05:28 PM | show profile Haiti. Schoolchildren enrollment in Port au-Prince broke a record recently. This is because the kids get one meal a day, which is paid for by Unicef and other ORGs. Parents are sending their kids to school more than ever before because they aren't getting enough nutrition at home because rice prices have gone up 70%. Haiti ised to be able to feed itself . . . until American's NeoLiberal trade policy encourage it to displace its subsidence farming with export-oriented farming. That and a handful of other factors has left Haiti SOL in its ability to fee itself. I would like people here to refelct on this as they feign concern for food in a country that not only can feed itself but supplies 40-50% of the food to world hunger programs (something we can be proud of even if some of this could be considered "dumping" -- it still feeds people). In other words: your concerns are almost nauseatingly self-centered. when Haiti school enrollment is up because parents can't feed their kids at home. Oh, and biofuels is a bad idea. |
| chucho | Posted – 4/28/2008 12:06:29 PM | show profile Oh, and judging by the girth of most Americans, hunger is not something we have to worry about. |
| catlondon | Posted – 4/28/2008 12:48:28 PM | show profile The Washington Post has just started a five-part series on the Global Food Crisis. |
| PluckyPane | Posted – 4/28/2008 2:00:07 PM | show profile hunger is something that we don't worry about, but nutrition sure is. we may have the best processed food around, but if there were ever an earthquake or a natural disaster that shut down the fast food joints, we'd be in bad shape. |
| PluckyPane | Posted – 4/28/2008 2:15:37 PM | show profile http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/business/27spend.html?em&ex=1209528000&en=53ec804c4cb5dda2&ei=5087%0A i forgot to include this link. thanks catlondon for the information about washington post. |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 4/28/2008 3:27:18 PM | show profile I don't understand what your issue is with what I wrote, not priv. The other poster (are you two tight with each other, or what???) was looking for someone they couldn't find ("how do I find ..."), and I suggested ways I've used myself to find people. Plain and simple, straightforward, no overtones, nada. Is the problem that I didn't provide URLs or specific directions? Really, all of this is accessible on the Web. So the answer wasn't as complete as it should have been -- is that grounds for you and your buddy to post insults to me in multiple threads? Why did you single me out of all the posters? All you needed to do was ask for more information! Big Freakin' Deal. |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 4/28/2008 9:52:04 PM | show profile It will last one day, May 1, the traditional May Day on which labor protests are held. Chatter has it that the ILWU will shut down West Coast ports to protest the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and also that truckers nationwide will stop work to protest high fuel prices. This has happened in past years. People still got food and toilet paper, and store shelves did not go bare. |
| reporterwriter | Posted – 4/29/2008 12:20:59 AM | show profile No, you're right -- there's one truckers strike May 1, the port truckers' strike May 1 and a different truckers strike May 5. Truckers themselves are saying the effect may be roughly the same as that from the April 1 independent-truckers strike. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 4/30/2008 12:03:35 AM | show profile It's the fertilizer, stupid! It's the fertilizer, stupid! Actually when I stay stupid I don't mean anyone on this message board, I just can't help going back to that old Clinton camp-ism (the first Clinton that is) since it's just kind of catchy. And the fuel. And the awful Chinese trying to eat more meat like we do (how DARE they). And what does most chemical fertilizer come from? Natural gas. It all comes back to energy....once again. Like I've been sayin' again and again... ********* Shortages Threaten Farmers? Key Tool: Fertilizer By KEITH BRADSHER and ANDREW MARTIN Published: April 30, 2008 XUAN CANH, Vietnam ? Truong Thi Nha stands just four and a half feet tall. Her three grown children tower over her, just as many young people in this village outside Hanoi dwarf their parents. The biggest reason the children are so robust: fertilizer. Ms. Nha, her face weathered beyond its 51 years, said her growth was stunted by a childhood of hunger and malnutrition. Just a few decades ago, crop yields here were far lower and diets much worse. Then the widespread use of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, coupled with market reforms, helped power an agricultural explosion here that had already occurred in other parts of the world. Yields of rice and corn rose, and diets grew richer. Now those gains are threatened in many countries by spot shortages and soaring prices for fertilizer, the most essential ingredient of modern agriculture. ...Fertilizer is plant food, a combination of nutrients added to soil to help plants grow. The three most important are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The latter two have long been available. But nitrogen in a form that plants can absorb is scarce, and the lack of it led to low crop yields for centuries. That limitation ended in the early 20th century with the invention of a procedure, now primarily fueled by natural gas, that draws chemically inert nitrogen from the air and converts it into a usable form. As the use of such fertilizer spread, it was accompanied by improved plant varieties and greater mechanization. From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900. Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, calculates that without nitrogen fertilizer, there would be insufficient food for 40 percent of the world?s population, at least based on today?s diets. Initially, much of the increased production of fertilizer went to grains like wheat and rice that served as the foundation of a basic diet. But recently, with world economic growth at a brisk 5 percent a year, hundreds of millions of people began earning enough money to buy more meat from animals fattened with grains. That occurred at the same time that rising production of biofuels, like ethanol, put new pressure on grain supplies. These factors translated into rising fertilizer demand. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/business/worldbusiness/30fertilizer.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp |
