UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization Calls Food and Hunger a “Crisis Within a Crisis” of COVID-19 Food often suffers from the problem that it can’t get no respect as a public policy issue. But the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has been quick off the mark to produce a flurry of food-related briefings reminding people that food policy must stay front…
Category: Public Health
Four ways COVID-19 will change food systems and food security
It’s too early for precise answers to questions about the coronavirus pandemic’s long-term impacts on the ways food is produced, processed, distributed, eaten, recycled and appreciated. But my experience managing food policy issues in Toronto for one of the world’s leading city-based public health departments gives me some searching questions that can help us prepare for possible outcomes. These open…
Japan’s Earthquake-Tsunami Made Worse by High Risk Technologies Everywhere
Japan’s ordeal upsets and confronts onlookers because of the way tragedies unfolding from the natural disaster of an earthquake and tsunami touched off the unraveling of a more ominous human mistake – construction of a nuclear power plant in a known earthquake zone. Other disasters of recent years – such as tsunamis in Indonesia and Thailand, hurricanes in New Orleans,…
Are We Seeing the End of Supermarkets?
I grew up with the habit of Thursday nights as the time when family shopped together at the local supermarket, and I always assumed, for good or ill, that supermarkets were permanent. It’s now clear that old style super-markets are on their way out. Beginning this month, Wal-Mart Canada kicks off its one-year agenda to add 40 new supercenters to…
Do Food and Health Policy Have Anything to do with the Arizona Murders?
There’s something a tad self-absorbed about the outpouring of media grief and analysis over a shooting rampage that left six dead in Arizona. Analysis is normally reserved for things that have larger numbers attached to them, like the uneventful and painfully slow death from starvation each day of at least 16,000 children (some reputable agencies put the number at 32,000…
Health Council Report Steps Up Criticism of Runaway Medical Spending
Thanks to New Year’s resolutions that haven’t run out of steam yet, my local gym is packed with fresh faces of people who look like they don’t normally look forward to an hour a day of sit-ups, lunges and push-ups, but feel like they have to if they want to lose a few pounds or 20. I do my best…
Corporate Knights’ The Killer Kernel
Wayne was recently interviewed by Toby A. A. Heaps from Corporate Knights Magazine regarding the link between food policy and our health care system. Please read The Killer Kernel.
How to Plug the Legal Loophole that Caused the Gushing Hole in the Gulf
British Petroleum and the U.S. government can’t figure out how to cover up an underwater oil leak that’s spewing tens of thousands of gallons of oil day into the formerly rich fishery off the Gulf coast of Louisiana. But between the two of them, they’ve done a masterful job of covering up a hole in public policy that allows risky…
The Stress of Food Bank Food
I was fully prepared for several days of poor eats when I took part in the Stop Community Food Centre’s Do the Math media stunt earlier this April, when ten well-known Torontonians signed on to stretch a three day ration of food bank grub for as long as possible. But I was shocked by how quickly and completely this poverty…
First Lady Obama Will Have Weightier Impact on Health Debates than Hubby
President Barack Obama’s efforts at reforming the U.S. approach to medical care won’t win many imitators in other countries. Indeed, he’s likely to be upstaged in global health debates by First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity. Lady Obama launched a Let’s Move anti-obesity campaign on February 9, and is already catching up with the UK’s naked chef, Jamie…