Agriculture
Chair: Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
- Max Baucus (D-MT)
- Michael Bennet (D-CO)
- Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
- Bob Casey (D-PA)
- Kent Conrad (D-ND)
- Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
- Tom Harkin (D-IA)
- Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
- Pat Leahy (D-VT)
- Ben Nelson (D-NE)
- Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
- Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
- Thad Cochran (R-MS)
- John Cornyn (R-TX)
- Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
- Mike Johanns (R-NE)
- Dick Lugar (R-IN)
- Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
- Pat Roberts (R-KS)
- John R. Thune (R-SD)
Appropriations
Chair: Daniel Inouye (D-HI) Ag Sub-Committee
Chair: Herb Kohl (D-WI)
- Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
- Dick Durbin (D-IL)
- Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
- Tom Harkin (D-IA)
- Tim Johnson (D-SD)
- Ben Nelson (D-NE)
- Jack Reed (D-RI)
- Robert Bennett (R-UT)
- Christopher Bond (R-MO)
- Sam Brownback (R-KS)
- Thad Cochran (R-MS)
- Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
- Arlen Specter (R-PA)
Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions
- Chris Dodd (D-CT)
Agriculture
Chair: B Collin Peterson (D-MN)
V. Chair: B Tim Holden (D-PA)
B Joe Baca (D-CA)
- John Boccieri (D-OH)
B* Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
- Bobby Bright (D-AL)
B* Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
- Travis Childers (D-MS)
B Jim Costa (D-CA)
- Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
- Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA)
B Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
- Debbie Halvorson (D-IL)
B Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD)
- Steve Kagen (D-WI)
- Larry Kissell (D-NC)
B Frank Kratovil (D-MD)
- Betsy Markey (D-CO)
B Jim Marshall (D-GA)
P Eric Massa (D-NY)
B Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
- Walt Minnick (D-ID)
B Earl Pomeroy (D-ND)
- Mark Schauer (D-MI)
- Kurt Schrader (D-OR)
B David Scott (D-GA)
B Zachary Space (D-OH)
- Timothy Walz (D-MN)
- Frank Lucas (R-OK)
- Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
- K. Michael Conaway (R-TX)
- Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
- Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
- Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Sam Graves (R-MO)
- Timothy Johnson (R-IL)
- Steve King (R-IA)
- Robert Latta (R-OH)
- Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO)
- Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)
- Jerry Moran (R-KS)
- Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
- Phil Roe (R-TN)
- Mike Rogers (R-AL)
- Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
- Adrian Smith (R-NE)
- Glenn Thompson (R-PA) *=House Organic Caucus member B=Blue Dog Democrat
Appropriations
Chair: Dave Obey (D-WI) Ag Sub-Committee
Chair: P Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)
- Sanford Bishop (D-GA)
* Allen Boyd (D-FL)
- Lincoln Davis (D-TN)
*P Sam Farr (D-CA)
*P Maurice D. Hinchey (D-NY)
P Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
P Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
- Jack Kingston (R-GA)
- Rodney Alexander (R-LA)
- Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO)
* Tom Latham (R-IA) *=House Organic Caucus member
P=Congressional Progressive Caucus
Education and Labor
P Chair: George Miller (D-CA)
- Jason Altmire (D-PA)
- Robert Andrews (D-NJ)
- Timothy Bishop (D-NY)
P Yvette Clarke (D-NY)
- Joe Courtney (D-CT)
- Susan Davis (D-CA)
P Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
P Raul Grijalva (D-AZ)
P Phil Hare (D-IL)
- Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX)
P Mazie Hirono (D-HI)
- Rush Holt (D-NJ)
- Dale Kildee (D-MI)
P Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
P Dave Loebsack (D-IA)
- Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY)
P Donald Payne (D-NJ)
- Jared Polis (D-CO)
- Robert Scott (D-VA)
- Joe Sestak (D-PA)
- Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH)
P John Tierney (D-MA)
- Dina Titus (D-NV)
- Paul Tonko (D-NY)
P Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)
- David Wu (D-OR)
- Buck McKeon (R-CA)
- Judy Biggert (R-IL)
- Rob Bishop (R-UT)
- Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
- Michael Castle (R-DE)
- Vernon Ehlers (R-MI)
- Luis F Fortuno (R-PR)
- Brett Guthrie (R-KY)
- Peter Hoekstra (R-MI)
- Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA)
- John Kline (R-MN)
- Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
- Tom McClintock (R-CA)
- Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
- Thomas Petri (R-WI)
- Phil Roe (R-TN)
- Todd Russell Platts (R-PA)
- Tom Price (R-GA)
- Mark Souder (R-IN)
- GT Thompson (R-PA)
- Joe Wilson (R-SC) P=Congressional Progressive Caucus
I've been working on the Cook for Good project for nearly three years, helping people eat healthy, seasonal food for very little money. Starting Saturday, I'm taking the show on the road as the Cook for Good Coast-to-Coast Tour, from Wilmington North Carolina to Portland Oregon for the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference. Then back east to Gainesville Florida and north home to North Carolina. The main goal of the tour is helping people see how easy and affordable it is to cook real, seasonal food from scratch. The main goal of Cook for Good is to help people save money, eat well, and make a difference, including slowing global warming by making more environmentally sound food choices.
If you are homeless, elderly, or disabled, you can use food stamps at some fast food joints in Los Angeles. According to the Restaurant Meals Program FAQ (hat tip to blogger Count), you cannot normally use food stamps for prepared meals but you can if you fall into one of the three eligible categories.
Restaurants in the program include Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, and other pizza places, Subway, El Pollo Loco, Jack in the Box, California Donuts, a number of burger joints, Popeye's Chicken, Church's Chicken, and other fried chicken restaurants, some BBQ restaurants, Denny's, Wendy's, some Chinese restaurants, and really not much else.
Our goal is to provide healthy meals for the homeless, disabled and elderly participants. Especially the homeless because they don't have space to store food or cook.
I understand the idea of allowing those groups to buy hot meals with food stamps. I know it's something that came up in a recent Congressional hearing on nutrition that specifically focused on food stamps in California. But Jack-in-the-Box? As a bleeding heart liberal, I am outraged for ethical reasons, but as a taxpayer, I am outraged as well. The same group that is eligible for food stamps is often eligible for Medicaid. So, great, go give them diabetes so that we can pay for treating it for the rest of their lives.
Here's the second half of this week's House Ag Committee panel on federal nutrition programs. (See part 1 at the link.) If nothing else, I recommend reading through my summary of Jessup's testimony because it is AWESOME.
Panel II:
Guillermo Valenzuela, MD
Arrowhead Regional Medical Center
Webster Wong, MD
Arrowhead Regional Medical Center
Matthew Sharp, Senior Advocate
California Food Policy Advocates, Los Angeles, California
Edie Jessup, Program Development Specialist
Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Project of Central California Center for Health and Human Services, Fresno, California
Mathew Marsom, Director of Public Health Policy and Advocacy
Public Health Institute, Oakland, California
Claudia Page, Co-Director
The Center to Promote HealthCare Access, Oakland, California
The House Ag Committee held a hearing on Federal Nutrition Programs on Monday of this week (January 25, 2010). There were two panels. This diary covers the first panel, which mostly focuses on food stamps (SNAP) and the USDA and other agencies' efforts to increase participation among those who are eligible.
Panel 1 Lisa Pino, Deputy Administrator
USDA's Food and Nutrition Service
Christine Webb-Curtis, Chief
California Department of Social Services, Food Stamp Branch
Nancy Swanson, Director
Human Services Transitional Assistance Department of San Bernardino, CA
Here's to December's first cup of coffee. Is it really almost 2010 already?!
Consumer Reports brings us some disturbing news about store-bought chicken. Two-thirds of fresh, whole broilers "harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter". The amazing thing is that this is actually an improvement over their last survey in 2007.
It's time for the 2009 Holiday Ale Festival here in Portland! The event begins tomorrow and goes on through Sunday, Downtown in Pioneer Courthouse Square. If you come on the right day I might just pour you one myself! The O brings us a Q&A with one of the event's organizers.
Food stamp purchases at New York City's Greenmarkets have increased 125% over the past year.
Now these are some holiday gift ideas I can support! "The sweetest gifts of all come from your own kitchen"...
After massive and high-profile failures in Texas and Indiana, the federal government is warning states not to privatize food stamps. Now if only they would use their power to do more to dissuade same besides simply writing "strongly worded letters"...
Are urban hunting clubs the next step in the local foods movement?
A new video shot by Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife officials confirms the existence of a pack of at least 10 gray wolves in Eastern Oregon.
who shows up at the store almost daily. I think she lives across the street. She always has money & knows how to count, which is more than you can say for some of the children (and a bunch of the adults!) who come in and want to buy something.
So the Lents International Farmers' Market in Portland has commissioned a bus to offer free rides to residents of four low-income housing projects. The Forest Grove Farmers' Market is offering a class on how to shop at the market on a budget.
The manager of the Oregon City Farmers' Market goes door to door in a low-income public housing project, trying to persuade residents to give the market a try. And this fall, a "micro market" will open in Portland's Cully neighborhood, run by market officials from wealthier Hollywood.
It's a long process, and the article goes on to mention some of the early struggles and setbacks encountered thus far, but it's still encouraging to see these efforts and ideas spreading, and that those involved are maintaining their enthusiasm. It's especially important to reach out and disabuse people of the false notion that farmers' markets are some preserve of the elite, and it's great to see that some markets are literally taking that message door-to-door.
Despite the fact that we still have a ways to go, here's one sign that these efforts are already paying off: Oregon Trail (EBT) card usage is up over 100% from last year at many markets in the region, and the article claims that usage is up 1,000% at the Oregon City market alone this year. I'd be interested to see how the opinions of food stamp recipients towards farmers' markets have changed since (pdf)this 2005 OFMA study, which came out just one year after the first Portland farmers' market EBT pilot program launched in 2004. Since then almost two-thirds of Portland-area farmers' markets now have the machines required to accept the cards, and new markets are receiving them every year.
Why are artisan producers so important? Read this article on a local salumi company and you'll begin to understand. From the age, breed, and feed of the pigs to the lack of nitrates to the unique recipes, Knight Salumi produces a product that just cannot be obtained through our corporate food system.
"Three wise men" made a pilgrimage to DC last week: Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Fred Kirschanmann. Here's a Q&A with the trio. I sure hope the politicians who met with them valued their input.
Organics grew 118% (by acreage) worldwide between 2000 and 2007. Organics are still less than 1% of global agriculture, however. 97% of spending on organics occurs in the U.S. and E.U. I think this is probably only looking at CERTIFIED organics - who knows how much uncertified land is managed organically in developing countries by people who never converted to industrial techniques.
Hillary Clinton thinks Indian farmer suicides are due to a need for loans. Well, sort of. If you want to take a really shallow view of it, then yes. But there's a lot more to the story than just that, and I doubt Hillary wants to "go there" because it might involve questioning free trade and industrial agriculture.
Food stamps are getting easier to use at farmers' markets, says the NYT. GOOD. This is a very hot topic near where I live. We had no markets that took food stamps a little over a year ago. Now we have several, and it really wasn't that difficult to set up (so I'm told). Yet, most markets around here STILL don't take food stamps, because those in charge haven't taken the steps to do so (and presumably either haven't thought about it or don't want to).
What's going on in California's Central Valley? Well, it's not good. As the water dried up, so did the paychecks. This article calls Fresno "California's Detroit."
Chronic health effects are increasing in the world such as cancers, hormonal, reproductive, nervous, or immune diseases, even in young people. During regulatory toxicological subchronic tests to prevent these on mammalian health, prior commercialization of chemicals, including pesticides and drugs, or GMOs, some statistically significant findings may be revealed. This discussion is about the need to investigate the relevant criteria to consider those as biologically significant. The sex differences and the non linear dose or time related effects should be considered in contrast to the claims of a Monsanto-supported expert panel about a GMO, the MON 863 Bt maize, but also for pesticides or drugs, in particular to reveal hormone-dependent diseases and first signs of toxicities.
My book just went off to the printer, and the last thing my publisher needed from me before sending it there was a correction on ONE footnote. They'd asked me for it several times. It was a sentence describing a program in Boston where food stamp recipients received vouchers to double the value of the food stamps they spent at a farmers' market. I had documented it with a link to a website, and the link was broken.
It was a link to a Boston Public Health Commission site. I looked all over their website for evidence of this program and found nothing. I emailed them and came up with nothing. In the end, we changed the sentence in the book, documented it with a recent Jane Black article describing a similar program in other cities, and left it at that. That was just a few days ago.
A new city program designed to expanded access to locally grown fruits and vegetables will give people vouchers to double the value of food stamps at 14 farmers' markets in Boston.
The vouchers, dubbed Boston Bounty Bucks, are now available at 14 of the city's roughly 22 farmers' markets. Shoppers will be able to swipe their benefit cards on portable credit card readers at the market to receive up to $20 in vouchers by spending $10 worth of food stamps.
A new program? I swear they did this before. I KNOW I didn't make this up. Even the name Boston Bounty Bucks sounded familiar! Further down the article they admitted that it wasn't entirely new, saying:
Late last summer, a pilot program that involved Boston Bounty Bucks added seven more farmers' markets, but technical hiccups prevented the initiative from fully taking hold, Greene said.
Sort of touching upon an issue brought up by commenter michaelindc here last weekend, comes news that farmers' markets aren't the only place we should focus on expanding access to for people on food assistance. Here in Oregon, CSAs are now approved to accept food stamps. This is fantastic news -
The Siskiyou Sustainable Cooperative, a group of farmers who deliver fresh vegetables and other products to customers weekly on a subscription basis, has won state approval to accept Oregon Trail Cards (food stamps) starting in July.
It was apparently a long and arduous process, but now hopefully this will set a precedent for others who'd like to go down this path. This can only benefit everybody involved.
Noting the higher cost of organic food and its image as "for the wealthy," Powell said bringing low-income consumers into the loop changes that image and economically strengthens local organic growers.
[...]
Powell said the Oregon Trail Card is helping low-income people eat well in hard economic times. "It's an excellent way for children, the elderly and at-risk families to access food that can nourish them and prevent illness and obesity."
Want to make sure your citizens don't participate in food stamps even though they are eligible? It's a dumb idea because food stamps add so much to the economy, but apparently that's what San Diego wants to do. So, in addition to fingerprinting food stamp applicants they also check your home to ensure eligibility.
The San Diego district attorney adopted a policy in 1997 under which applicants for welfare benefits must agree to a "walk through" of their residence while they are present. The inspectors check on whether the applicant has an eligible dependent child and has the amount of assets claimed. They also check on whether a supposedly "absent" parent lives at the residence. If residents refuse to permit a home visit, they can lose their benefits.
So that's how you get the distinguished title of "lowest food stamp participation rate" in the U.S. And a judge ruled that this is legal because they aren't searching for evidence of a crime. Legal, perhaps - but smart? Definitely not. How many kids are going hungry because of this insane policy?
A new restaurant near the University of Texas at Arlington, which uses locally grown, organic ingredients as much as possible, has a no-set-price policy, and asks customers to discreetly pay (in an envelope) afterwards for what they thought the meal was worth. The idea is based upon an existing Salt Lake City non-profit community kitchen's model. Can it work for a commercial establishment? So far, the restaurant is coming up just short, although it's only two months old and the business itself is always a rough one.
The City of Berkeley, CA may soon transform all of its parks and open spaces into habitats for bees, in an effort to reverse the recent global decline of pollinators.
If you're in Kansas, you can vote for the best food in the state from now until March 31. Unfortunately, restaurants must be at least a decade old in order to be considered, so that rules out Lawrence's Local Burger for at least the next 7 years. I'm sure there's something else worth considering in Lawrence, though...
USDA will update its Plant Hardiness Zone Map later this year, for the first time since 1990, to reflect the climate-change induced shifts of planting zones northward.
First off, I want to give a shout-out to Surfing Goat Soaps. After looking at all of the goats on their site, I can say that I'd be proud to support people who treat animals so well with my business. Also, they make a good point that goat's milk is more sustainable than cow's milk. That alone probably won't make me switch what I put in my coffee, but for soap? Great idea.
In similar news, there's also Goodguide, a site that promises to help you find safe, healthy, and green products. I'm skeptical though because the site pre-supposes that you're in a grocery store (and we all know that that's where the best food is NOT).
Way to go, Michelle Obama! She commented on the disgrace of military families on food stamps. No, that is not how our country should treat its best and brightest and their families. Another issue I've heard about recently is that when soldiers and marines go to Iraq, they get combat pay and their boost in pay often makes them ineligible for government nutrition programs (like food stamps). That shouldn't be happening.
