Tag Archives: COVID-19

Drowning and Deep Breaths

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Image: https://www.tga-ins.com/Newsroom/ArticleID/483/How-to-know-if-someone-may-be-drowning-Learn-the-signs

As I close my eyes to contemplate, every attempt to clear my mind brings rushing thoughts. My mind does not join my body in calm. Focus, focus, I tell myself. Why is this so hard? That is how many of my contemplative practices start. I am deeply meditative on my own self, but I never thought to bring my meditation to a global level. Was that even possible? I opened my mind and changed my perspective from the self to the world system. My experiences are like a coin. On one side, I find myself plagued by despair. On the other, I can achieve great calm.

In the hunger contemplative practice, we held an exhale for twenty seconds. My lungs screamed for breath. Every second, I told myself to wait a little longer, a breath would come, and finally, I breathed deeply. But as I breathed in deeply, a thought intruded. Could others? For people severely affected by COVID-19, their breathing is more like drowning. Every unassisted breath they take is never quite sufficient, and they are left with desperate lungs. These unresolved thoughts left me disturbed even after the practice ended.

On the flipside, contemplative practice can bring stillness, quiet, and calm. Our first in-class practice made me realize how tense I was the moment we were asked to relax. Every deep breath felt like releasing a burden off my shoulders. Then we were asked to feel our weight in our seats, to just know we exist. Framing the practice in that way made it much easier to remember that we are living, breathing organisms. We are not cogs in a machine. I learned that I have always stared at the vast sky, where I want to be, but I forget I am walking through a field of roses.

Insight Into Yourself

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I took Pol S 384 with Karen last fall and took the in-class contemplative practices with her, but I didn’t feel the power of it until our first in-class practice this quarter. The whole practice was about a simple question: How are you? But I felt energized and refreshed after that.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the uncertainty of a new learning style, and the stress of being alone in a country away from home made me feel depressed and stressed out. I could not stop worrying about the exacerbating problems of COVID-19 and focus on my study. However, through the practice, I calmed down and started to feel the innermost emotions and energy.

Follow Karen’s guiding questions and her soft, gentle voice, I began to ask myself: who am I? Do I feel good now? How can I live and study normally if the world is normal? Can I keep being healthy and optimistic under such huge anxiety? What if I take a break and accept all the unusual things as the new normal?

After the ten minutes of asking myself and seeking for answers, I was clearer about what I should do and realized that I was trapped in negative thoughts and it’s OK to be not OK. I felt full of power and energy after doing that contemplative practice. I became efficient and positive about life again. In my opinion, contemplative practices give us an opportunity to focus on our thoughts and have some insight into the problem. That’s why I like to do the practice right before our class. It helps me settle down to be prepared for the class. And I especially like the in-class ones, since they make me feel the class is united and we are all together in this extremely hard time.

日落, 海, 波罗的海, 字符, 男子, 女子, 晚上, 太阳, 性质, 海岸, 体质, 暮光之城, 心情

Obesity in U.S and COVID-19

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Across the ocean, France’s chief epidemiologist said that the “US will ‘probably have the most problems’ with coronavirus, partly due to obesity”. Is obesity in the U.S as bad as he says? In fact yes! The U.S is one of the 12 most obese countries in the world with 36.2% in the adult population in 2016 from the CIA when South Korea and Japan, the healthiest countries with a similar economy to the US, are around 4%.

Why do people in the U.S record a much higher number in terms of obesity or being overweight than other wealthy countries around the world? And, how has the food system had an impact on our health?

The U.S was the first to have a vision of food as a pack of nutrients containing molecules arranged in four big families: proteins, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins and minerals. Between 1930 and 1950 the U.S military started to enrich rations with vitamins and nutrients. In fact, as all military innovation, it did not take long to find the same processed food in our supermarket. Also, the U.S had the strongest industrial system of the world, and entrepreneurs saw a new niche market in industrially processed food by using theories of nutritionism to market food as healthier than unprocessed food. However, many issues have arisen with this new industry’s food system such as a range of chronic diseases, cancers, hormonal imbalance, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and many other diseases associated with obesity.

This new model of consumption had and still has a terrible impact on the population, especially on the poorest where most of the time industrialized food is the only things that they can afford. The above graph is perfectly highlighting the correlation between the rise of obesity and the expansion of processed food in the 70s and 80s in the U.S, as well as the differences with countries who do not share this way of food consumption.

Henceforth, the pandemic of COVID-19, which mostly affects persons with a weak immune system, is showing us again how our lack of knowledge in nutritionism combines with the U.S political-economy of industrialized processed food is causing dramatic consequences on our metabolism.

Undocumented farmworkers are left at high risk for COVID-19

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The migrant farmworkers are at high risk of coronavirus outbreak and are unprotected. In the US, 47 to 70 percent of total farmworkers are undocumented. Many undocumented farmworkers are facing the problem of unsanitary and crowded labor camps and transportation. They are not offered with additional training or instructions for disinfection or social distancing by their employers. Moreover, there is no federal guidelines that tell farmers what to do if they don’t have quarantine space for sick workers or where accessible and affordable health care services are. 

     The migrant farmworkers are not treated as essential workers they are by the federal government before this global pandemic. Undocumented farmworkers are excluded from Fair Labor Act of 1938 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1835. Although state level laws have provided more protections for farmworkers, there is not enough guarantee of farmworkers rights under federal laws. Migrant farmworkers are experiencing the hardship of low hour pay, inaccessible health care services, bad living conditions and fear of deportation.       

     As the workers who put food in the markets and an indispensable role of the supply chain in the food system, farmworkers should be protected. I hope the COVID-19 outbreak can let the federal government acknowledge that farmworkers are critical to the U.S. economy and consider legislation to give the rights and protection they deserve. Under the pandemic, the farmworkers need to be provided with protection gears and hygiene products. They also need enough housing for quarantine, affordable testing of coronavirus and medical care services. If the backbone of our agricultural industry becomes affected, there will be shortages and interruptions in our food supply. If farmworkers are sick, who is going to harvest America’s food and what will happen to our food supply?

(Sources of Articles)

Liza Gross, Esther Honig. 2020. Migrant farmworkers feed America, they’re at high risk for a coronavirus outbreak. https://thefern.org/2020/03/migrant-farmworkers-feed-america-and-theyre-at-high-risk-for-a-coronavirus-outbreak/

Danny Hajek. 2020. Farmworkers, seemed essential, don’t feel protected from pandemic. 

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/824358228/farmworkers-deemed-essential-dont-feel-protected-from-pandemic

(Image)

Tim Padgett. Undocumented Migrants: If we’re “essential” workers during COVID-19, why detain us? https://www.wlrn.org/post/undocumented-migrants-if-were-essential-workers-during-covid-19-why-detain-us#stream/0

Uncovering a Crumbling Food System in a Global Pandemic

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Rice paddy in Vietnam shows prominence of staple crop, one of the most desired goods in the Coronavirus pandemic. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-25/vietnam-s-rice-trade-thrown-into-turmoil-on-export-halt-muddle

In the 1970s, the US increased production of agricultural goods drastically to add to their exports. Today, Chuck Abbott’s article, “Agriculture feels impact as pandemic reshapes U.S. diet, rattles producers,” outlines the current state of domestic agriculture and the impacts of the global food system. Since the year began, not only has the country’s ability to export declined, but imports and domestic sales have been affected as well. Families are buying chicken for easy home dinners, but beef is left on shelves with their businesses seeing food waste and closure; rice prices skyrocket because Vietnam plans on shutting down exports. What this illustrates is how fragile the US and global food system has become, and how a wide-reaching pandemic can cause them to crumble.

Widespread cornfield monocrop. https://www.agweb.com/article/proven-nitrogen-source-no-matter-weather

rom an economic perspective, the way food is produced around the world is efficient and makes the most people happy with the least sacrificed. The theory says that you take your most efficient products and make more and more and more. Production goes up, price goes down, consumption goes up, making production increase again. This cycle engenders specialization, bringing everyone the best goods at the best prices as countries trade.

But if consumer taste or world trade changes at the drop of the dime as it has with the current pandemic, will our current food infrastructure of monocrops and extreme meat production collapse? The surplus of domestically produced meat and the scramble for imported goods like grains are telling. As with the web of biodiversity in times of change, the most overly specialized will fail first. These past few months have only revealed how crippled the world has left its built food system. It no longer resembles a resilient web whose manifold connections sustain it for infinity, but a linear chain riddled with disintegrating links.

Tons of Hungry People and Tons of Wasted Food

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It is the age of a global pandemic and for many Americans, it is a time of heightened economic vulnerability. The services of food banks are in increasing demand from both old and new customers as food insecurity explodes as unemployment skyrockets amid the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, experts predict that we will be seeing a stark increase in our already high levels of food waste. In a good year, America would see 40 percent of its food wasted – 63 million tons. 

Source: Getty Images

This is not a good year. This is a year of panic buying and closed down markets and cafeterias, meaning that we can expect to see more than 40 percent of our food go to waste. The interconnected problems of food insecurity and food waste are certainly not new, but with the rise of COVID-19 they have gained higher visibility and have more far reaching impacts than ever before. 

Food waste management stretches from farm to table. With farmers leaving up to half of their crops unharvested due to cosmetic imperfections and American households representing the largest source of food wasted, food and money are lost at every step of the food system. While it may be tempting to think that our individual choices about how we consume don’t matter within the larger food system, it is this type of thinking that yields high volumes of food rotting in refrigerators and leaves misshapen foods in grocery stores to go to waste.

By changing our individual behaviors, we can dramatically decrease the waste we contribute and thereby improve the food system. And instead of allowing imperfect foods to go to waste on farms, we should be supporting infrastructure that enables these foods to be transported to food banks. If we make change now, we will save lives.

 

Got (Too Much) Milk?

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Americans are eating out less, while that may be healthier for an individual’s budget, it’s impacting both the farm industry and the restaurant industry. So much of farm production is for commercial food, meaning that bags of onions, tons of dairy, and thousands of chickens are used to going to restaurants and cafes. But now we are seeing what happens when the restaurants close.  Starbucks is a huge consumer of milk, yet many of their stores have been shuttered by the virus. The tons of gallons of milk that Starbucks normally buys from farms daily, is now only needed every three days. But milk production doesn’t stop just because schools and Starbucks are closed. Cows still needed to be milked several times daily, so the milk was being dumped.

As noted in the article, “Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: The Food Waste of the Pandemic”, most Americans do not know how to make their own onion rings at home. This means that large bags of onion primarily bought by restaurants are not bought by a regular consumer. An onion is easy enough to rebag, but other foods are much harder and more expensive to repackage. A carton of milk for a school kid is not easily repurposed into a gallon for a family. Farms can’t afford to change the packaging of their product, so they dispose of it.  Farmers are dumping their dairy, crushing their eggs, and burying their produce. 

 In this current period of American life, there are so many people who are going without. Thousands of jobs have been lost, and savings rapidly evaporating; so you would think this would be a time of less waste. However, the opposite seems to be true, food banks lack the volunteer strength or the refrigerator space to absorb all the excess produce, dairy, and meat and farms cannot afford to grow and transport produce just for charity. It will be interesting and potentially frightening to see how the new crisis affecting farms will involve. How many farms will go bankrupt? How will this impact the food we find at groceries stores? Will it get more expensive or will the price drop? Covid-19 is revealing insecurities in our food system when we can’t depend on a culture of eating out. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-food.html

 

Will COVID-19 lead to a food crisis?

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COVID-19 has brought light to many things that we might have taken for granted before. Toilet paper definitely falls high on that list.

Many prepared for this quarantine by (excessively) stocking up on goods that would allow them to live comfortably at home for months to come. Most businesses are on lockdown and restrictions have been placed on what feels like everything. Yet, even with all of these limitations, a lot of us may not notice any drastic changes in our diet since our pre-COVID-19 days.

I know that I haven’t. 

This could be attributed to the fact that I live in a developed country. Because although there is no global answer to the “will COVID-19 lead to a food crisis?” question- I will most likely fall on the “no” side of the spectrum, according to the predictions of economic models . 

And who is most vulnerable to experience a crisis like this? 

Developing countries. 

COVID-19’s impact could be more conspicuous in these countries due to their lack of economic capacity. 

The surging global recession is due to the lockdown of businesses and has had negative effects on the poor and their food consumption. Incomes have been affected due to restrictions. This has forced families to readjust their diets in order to make ends meet. They’ve shifted away from buying goods like meat/produce and are instead buying other bulked goods like grains which come at lower prices. 

It is not only the market conditions that could potentially raise food prices, but the hoarding and excessive buying as well. 

Richer countries have been able to respond to the economic fallout by initiating monetary policies to help alleviate the negative impact of COVID-19. Developing countries don’t have the funds to act in the same manner which creates a pressure for them to use their resources accordingly.

I am aware that I live in a place where it can be easy to take things for granted, but it’s moments like these that remind me of why I shouldn’t.

Article: https://www.ifpri.org/blog/will-covid-19-cause-another-food-crisis-early-review

Wasted Bounty: A Tale of Food All Grown Up and Nowhere To Go

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Squash left to rot in the field. Florida City, Fla. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images via Politico

A wedge of purple cabbage is rediscovered at the bottom of the crisper drawer, wilted and slimy. I feel guilty for having forgotten its existence as I toss it into the compost bucket. What a luxurious problem to have – food going to waste. During an already stressful and scary time, the coronavirus pandemic is revealing both weaknesses and potential strengths in our food system, particularly in terms of food insecurity and waste. In a recent article published by the Food & Environment Reporting Network, author Elizabeth Royte discusses a shift in U.S. food waste patterns and rising food insecurity. More people are relying on food banks during this economic crisis, but grocery stores and food producers are selling what would have historically been surplus donated to food banks. School closures and reduced restaurant operations mean broken channels for farmers and falling prices for things like milk and asparagus, resulting in product dumping and produce left to rot in fields.

Is worrying about food waste trivial given everything else going on right now? Perhaps this is an opportunity to strengthen food networks and food justice. We can’t ignore so much wasted bounty at a time when the number of those in need is rising daily. It’s a time to demand higher working and living conditions for those who grow our food. Might we grow from these challenging times and advocate towards living wages and a future of food security? As market channels are disrupted and the future of food supplies are vulnerable, we must find ways of strengthening localized food networks to increase system resilience

There are on-the-ground and top-down efforts underway. Grassroots organizations across the country are working to connect surplus with need. The recent stimulus bill included aid for the USDA to purchase and deliver food to banks. This is not a drill. This is an opportunity for identifying system breakdowns and rebuilding a stronger, healthier food future.

 

 

 

 

Sources

Purdy, Chase. “Asparagus Prices Show How the Coronavirus Is Nipping at the Global Food System.” Quartz, Quartz, 11 Apr. 2020, qz.com/1836376/falling-asparagus-prices-show-coronavirus-impact-on-global-food-system/.

Royte, Elizabeth. “Food Waste–and Food Insecurity–Rising amid Coronavirus Panic.” Food and Environment Reporting Network, Food and Environment Reporting Network, 31 Mar. 2020, thefern.org/2020/03/food-waste-and-food-insecurity-rising-amid-coronavirus-panic/.

Yaffe-bellany, David, and Michael Corkery. “Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-food.html.

The Hoarders, The Hungry, and the Problem with Individualism

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Above: Shoppers Stockpile Supplies in response to Covid-19 Pandemic                                                 Below: People Wait in Line at a San Antonio Food Bank

With the recent lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic and news stories dominated by pictures of empty grocery store shelves it is easy to feel like we will soon run out of food. Beans, medicine, and toilet paper are flying off the shelves and not just paranoid citizens are starting to stockpile, nations have also begun to hold on tighter to their resources.

Meanwhile, now more than ever the world’s hungry are in need. In the United States, food banks are being overwhelmed, and globally the World Food Programme estimates that 5.5 million people in central Sahel alone will be facing severe food insecurity in the coming months. The hoarders and the hungry; an epitome of a global food system that never seems to have enough to go around.

Yet, when you look closer into how that food is being used, there is an even more insidious note. Every year the United States wastes 40% of its food; 63 million tons a year. When 63 million tons of food a year is left to rot in one country alone, it is clear that the global food system doesn’t have a shortage issue, it has a distribution issue; a distribution issue exacerbated by rampant western individualism. People are, and have for a long time, purchased only with their own perceived needs in mind, without thinking about the larger scale implications that these actions have on others around the world. We live on a finite planet, with finite resources. Every meal you throw away is food that could have eased the hunger of someone else. It is time we wake up to the manufactured food crisis we have created, and in compassion, work toward a more equitable food distribution system, that decreases waste by calming the hoarders and feeding the hungry.