My mother loves to bake; from fruit pies to Swedish pastries her two ovens provide the best parts of Holiday meals. Ever since I can remember, one of my favorite recipes of hers has been Beech Bread. Until last week I always thought that this was another one of those recipes passed down from cookbook to cookbook, like the rye bread recipe my great grandfather brought over from the Åland Islands. It turns out, however, that this isn’t the case at all! After college one of my mom’s first jobs was at our local health department. One of her co-workers was a nutritionist who taught local women involved in the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Program recipes for affordable nutritious foods, and this is where her recipe came from. So it turns out that my yummy, moist and rich childhood Beech Bread isn’t a family recipe at all!

As ELCA Advocacy urges support for a strong Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act in 2010 that increases access, expands participation and improves nutrition standards, I thought I would share a recipe that continues to be an important morsel of my life today. Admittedly, the recipe is nearly 30 years old, so I have no idea if it has recently been in use in health department classes or the WIC program, but I do know that it tastes just as good as ever…in fact, I just finished a slice!

BEECH BREAD (a “quick” bread)

3 cups buttermilk or sour milk*

3 cups whole wheat flour

3 cups enriched all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup molasses

1 egg, beaten

*to make sour milk, add 1 Tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice per cup of regular milk. Let sit 5 minutes.

Directions – Combine flours, salt and soda. Mix well. Add buttermilk, molasses and beaten egg to the dry mixture. Blend together well. Let stand in bowl for 20 minutes. Pour batter into 2 greased and floured pans (about 9”x5”x3”). Bake at 375 degrees for 60 – 75 minutes.

Enjoy!

Lana

Last week one of the items of “Top Hunger News” featured on Bread for the World’s blog was this video, recently released by NPR, explaining the unintended impact that giving away free food has had on the local economy in Haiti.

In the aftermath of January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, post-disaster relief is creating a new kind of problem for businesses there. The massive influx of food aid has altered the price of rice, throwing the delicate balance in Haiti’s food supply chain out of whack and threatening to collapse the country’s rice market. – Bread blog

I watched the video and with its implications on my mind, throughout the week had conversations with different people and read more on the topic of food aid, like this article about outside organizations overwhelming Haiti’s local aid economy.

Last week I blogged about Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. The questions and wonderings and conversations I had surrounding food aid were piqued in part by one of the chapters, “Who’s Aiding Whom?” focusing on Nazareth, Ethiopia in 2003. The authors write of Jerman Amente, an Ethiopian farmer and grain trader who “shook with anger” when he saw American food intended for starving Ethiopians pour into the country, while homegrown Ethiopian wheat, corn, beans, peas, and lentils “languished untouched” (86). Kedir Geleto, the manager of a grain-trading operation in Ethiopia, says in the chapter, “American farmers have a market in Ethiopia, but we don’t have a market in Ethiopia…We don’t oppose food aid. When there’s a deficit in the country, of course we need it. But when there’s plenty of food in the country, then it’s unbelievable” (87).

I’m relatively new to this conversation about food aid. While I certainly had a sense that not all aid is equal, and that very well-meaning people with good intentions can actually cause harm, the past few weeks have been the first time I truly gave these ideas more than a passing thought. With just a little digging I found a wealth of opinions and information that help me be better informed and more respectfully critical. Here’s my question: who else is new to the conversation about food aid and what have you been learning? How about veterans? What should we know?

Julie Reishus

As I was doing research for a paper I am writing on gender and development, I ran across an intriguing definition of the word poverty. Through my classes in college and my work at ELCA World Hunger I have done a lot of thinking about big issues related to poverty, but seldom do I sit down and think about what the word actually means. I decided to do some investigating on how others define poverty and here is what I came up with.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions,” “renunciation as a member of a religious order of the right as an individual to own property,” “debility due to malnutrition,” and even a “lack of fertility”! Besides the last part, this definition covers a basic view of what poverty is, not having money or property or enough food to eat.

Next, I looked up a more concrete way of defining poverty. According to the World Bank, the international poverty line, as of 2005 defines poverty as living on less than $1.25 a day. Domestically, the United States Department of Health and Human Services poverty guideline for a four person household in 2009 was an annual income of $22,050 or below. According to the CIA World Factbook, Israel views poverty as living on $7.30 a day or less, and Mexico bases their definition of poverty on the amount of food one has. 

The definition I ran across in my research comes from Charlotte Wrigley-Asante in the Norwegian Journal of Geography. She argues that poverty is more than lack of income, but also incorporates “lack of dignity and autonomy and vulnerability.” She states that poverty is “the uneven distribution of life changes and experiences” and that “poverty is equated with deprivation and lack of social power.” She also includes vulnerability to “risks, shocks and stress and the inability to deal with them without sustaining damaging loss” in her definition of poverty.

Now that I have shared what I found, I want to hear what you think! What is poverty? Lack of money? A specific number? Being deprived of human capabilities? How would you define poverty?

“He smote the bank!” cackles Jean Stapleton, after John Travolta, as the archangel Michael, casually unleashes a bolt of lightning in the movie “Michael.”

Earthquakes, oil spills, floods, droughts—there’s a lot of smiting going on, and a lot of preparing for it, not with sackcloth and ashes but catastrophe scenarios and emergency response plans and drills.

I discovered this last week at a talk on the Great Storm of 1861-1862—the one that turned California’s Central Valley into a 300-mile long puddle; the one that forced the California state government to move to San Francisco; the one that damaged 7/8^ths of all housing and destroyed one out of every eight homes and a third of all taxable property in California.

Sacramento in 1862

This fascinating, safely distant story of a smitten state was followed by an anxiety-generating winter storm scenario that the U.S. Geological Survey is creating. The hypothetical date of this “extreme precipitation event” is January 2011; May 2011 is when the agencies and emergency managers and responders will hold their practice drill. Based on the understanding that California has a “mega storm” every 300 years (and destructive as it was, 1861-62 wasn’t a mega storm), these experts are:

…examining the possibility, cost, and consequences of floods, landslides, coastal erosion and inundation; debris flows; biologic impacts; physical damage such as property loss from wind, flood, and landslide; and lifeline impacts such as bridge scour [when the sand and rocks around a bridge give way, leading to collapse], road closures, and levee failures. Consideration is given to the disruption of water supply and the impacts on ground-water pumping, seawater intrusion and water supply degradation. The scenario is depicting the economic consequences of these damages in terms of repair costs and business interruption, public-health implications, and emergency response.

The USGS guy painted the picture starkly and dramatically. When he finished, the room was silent. Finally the emcee stood to thank the speakers and said, a little shakily, “well, I guess it’s time we all move to the foothills.” We took home delightful reading: “The ShakeOut Earthquake Scenario,” which modeled the aftereffects of a hypothetical 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault as the morning rush hour was ending. That Southern California earthquake drill, involving 5000 emergency responders and 5 million citizens, has already taken place. (Watch this USGS video on the earthquake scenario and  the ARkStorm winter storm project, and check out the Old Testament imagery.)

Appalled and intrigued, I went to the Internet, and discovered I could learn how a New Madrid mega-earthquake would affect the Midwest, where almost no anti-seismic measures are in place. Briefly, five to eight states would be affected; local mutual aid would not work; bridges over the Mississippi could be uncrossable for several hundred miles, for years; transmission of natural gas, oil, and electricity to much of the east coast would be affected for many months, along with the supply of wheat and grains to other parts of the world; there would be significant out-migration. (Question for discussion in this FEMA exercise: what could or would emergency managers in one local jurisdiction like Memphis do when faced with such a catastrophe?)

Or I could choose a scenario for a slow-developing catastrophe like Lake Mead going dry, leaving 22 million people in three states without water. (Discussion question: How can emergency managers in Las Vegas prepare to respond?)

Or I could browse peak gas scenarios, 2012 Armageddon scenarios, global warming scenarios, armchair quarterback analyses of the Black Plague, the Irish Potato Famine, the 1917 Influenza Pandemic, Hurricane Katrina, or Limits to Growth, the 1972 scenario published by the Club of Rome that projected nine different outcomes based on the variables of world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. Only one of those nine is hopeful; the others are so dire, a catastrophe response plan would be pointless.  Recent studies confirm (says Wikipedia) that current “changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book’s predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21^st century.”

Things are not looking good.

It’s tempting to call my efforts to live a sustainable life foolish. To quit trying to support alternative systems and behavior. To chuck  my bicycle for a really big car. But I think I’ll stay the course.

Why? For starters, imagining catastrophe is the first step in trying to mitigate it. The literature of catastrophe helps us grasp the scope of what we face, and discern what part of it is in our control. The silver lining to spending a sunny  afternoon imagining my hometown underwater was learning just how many people are collaborating on the response.

Second, letting go of the idea that everything is in our control is just plain healthy. No amount of clean living and recycling can prevent an earthquake!

Third, there is power in individual and collective action. Martin Luther thought so, too. Asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he said, “Plant an apple tree today.”

Smiting happens. But faith kicks in where reason ends. I’m voting for faith, for the apple tree, for the bicycle helmet. And I’m  spending tomorrow curled up with “A Guide to Emergency Preparedness for Sacramento County.”

Anne Basye,  Sustaining Simplicity

“The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life, it’s so easy to make it complex. The solution may be for a lot of the world’s problems is to turn around and take a forward step, you can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work .” – Yvon Chouinard

On Tuesday evening I was invited to watch the film 180 Degrees South. The film is a modern day reenactment of the epic 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and Conservacion Patagonica) from Ventura, California to the mountaintop of Patagonia, Chile. Although I expected and hoped for the surf movie feel of the film, I did not expect how it made me think further about the interconnections of the environment, hunger, poverty and advocacy.

The film follows writer and photographer Jeff Johnson as he reenacts his hero’s journey, but well, on his own terms. His epic adventure lands him on a sail boat headed south and takes him for a ride to beautiful Easter Island. Through his journey to Patagonia viewers are introduced to issues facing local industries in Chile who are suffering from the effects of urban sprawl, water privatization and industrial pollution. My heart went out to the fisherman who recalled how schools of fish used to practically swim to their shore and their emphasis on respecting the ocean. 180 Degrees South paints a passionate picture of the need for advocacy, the power of a few people and the deep cry of our environment.

It’s 85 minutes well worth your time.

Watch the trailer here.

~Lana

I am a book lover. I am always reading, and usually that means I’m working my way through five or six books at the same time. My dad laughed at me the other day as I explained to him which category each of the eight books sitting on my bedside table falls into: currently reading, haven’t started but up next on the list, or must reread. I have an ever-growing list of books I want to read, and my work at ELCA World Hunger so far has inspired the addition of many new titles.

While my list is long, there’s one book I’m happy I gave priority to and proud to say I recently finished: Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman.

Thurow and Kilman are Wall Street Journal reporters who’ve been writing on Africa, development, and agriculture for decades. Enough is a result of their extensive reporting about global hunger and the forces behind famine. Each chapter is a compelling story and an illuminating piece of the history or current reality of hunger. The book’s coverage is expansive; rather than try to sum it up I’ll include this passage from the preface:

This book tells the story of the squandered promise of the Green Revolution and the neglect that brought hunger and famine into the twenty-first century. It is the story of Africa and the missed opportunities, the wars and megalomania, the folly and the good intentions gone bad that have left its agricultural potential largely unrealized, its people hungrier that ever before, and the entire world aching for more and cheaper food. It is a tale of self-interest and hypocrisy in the United States and Europe, how subsidies and food aid have gone awry, how geopolitics influenced by remnants of colonial-era policies and practices of the old European powers determine that some countries should bloom and others should starve, how markets failed, how warnings went unheeded, how the present crisis is engulfing us.

This is also, in Part II, the story of the new movement to reclaim the revolution’s lost promise and restore its momentum. It follows the trail from Borlaug to Bono, the Irish rock musician haunted by the chorus of the hungry he first heard in Ethiopia in 1984. From Bill Gates and his foundation colleagues, who realized that the medicine they were bringing to Africa was useless in a malnourished body, to Joe Mamlin, an Indiana doctor who became a farmer in Kenya so his AIDS patients would have something to eat. From Eleni Gabre-Madhim, who kept tilting at windmills until she brought a commodities exchange to her native Ethiopia, to Francis Pelekamoyo, whose Bible led his conversion from Malawi’s central banker to humble microlender. From a small town in Ohio to a tiny village in Kenya. From European CEOs to a couple of American sitcom-watching moms to a son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. From British church activists to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to statesmen in Ireland working to ensure that their country’s dark history of famine isn’t repeated elsewhere in the future.

The authors’ hope is to “outrage and inspire.” With this reader they certainly achieved both. I would add that they also inform. The writing is extremely accessible and engaging, and the treatment of the issues is both broad and in-depth. The authors don’t prescribe one political view over another, but do take a critical stance on some powerful groups. I gained a helpful current and historical understanding of complicated issues that was not impossible to digest and not overly simplified. Enough was a hard book to read in the sense that I felt sorrow and anger at many points, but it’s also a hopeful book. I absolutely recommend it to anyone troubled by the 1 billion undernourished people in the world.

Check out this video about one of the stories in the book, and Roger Thurow’s blog.

“At the end of the day, when in doubt, I’ll feed the hungry.” — Dr. Mamlin, page 163

Julie Reishus

The Book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is written by a husband and wife team who are former journalists for the New York Times, and through their travels found an issue that had been missing from the headlines- the ongoing struggle for gender equality around the world, and what this inequality means for women in the global South.

Half the Sky focuses on four issues in which gender discrimination is hurting and killing women around the world. Here is a snapshot of the issues they discuss in detail, along with some statistics from the book about the scope of these issues around the globe.

Human Trafficking: 600,000-800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year and 80% of them are women and girls. They are trafficked mainly for sexual exploitation. Millions more are trafficked within countries each year.

Rape and violence: In most countries between 30-60% of women have experienced sexual or physical violence from a partner. Many women don’t report rape for fear of being stigmatized.

Maternal Mortality: In the global South there is one maternal death per minute. The lifetime risk of maternal death is 1,000 times higher in a poorer country than in a more prosperous country.

Routine discrimination: Between 60 and 101 million women are missing from around the world today. They have died due to unequal care or feticide, and at least another 2 million die from discrimination each year.

In addition to discussing these horrific problems that come along with gender inequality, the authors also provide ways to, as their title states, turn “oppression into opportunity.” The two solutions they focus on the most are educating girls and women and providing them with microloans. By educating girls and women, the authors argue that they can receive the necessary tools to stand against injustice, and are given the opportunity to participate in the economy. By receiving microloans, the book suggests that it gives women more power in society while giving them the chance to get out of poverty.

One helpful tool that Half the Sky provides is ways in which you can get involved in the struggle for global gender equality. The book provides many inspiring success stories of how individuals have overcome oppression, and also provides specific actions anyone can take to make a difference in the lives of women worldwide.

If you are interested in obtaining a study guide for this book, check out The Table!

-Allie Stehlin

Life + Debt, 2001 (86 minutes)

Life and Debt explores the impact of globalization on Jamaica.  The film provides an important perspective for groups who want to engage in fairly deep discussion around the topics of globalization, trade policy, and economic development.  The piece is certainly provocative, as it portrays an important but rather condemning view of the West and the United States and may cause discomfort among some viewers.  I was disturbed by the film (at several levels), and I was also left wondering about the current state of affairs, especially given the recent economic climate.

A discussion guide of the film is available here.  More info on Jamaica and the the work of the ELCA there is available at www.elca.org/jamaica.

In anticipation of National HIV Testing Day this Sunday, an interview with Joseph Rower, a Lutheran PhD student currently conducting HIV and AIDS research…

What exactly are you studying right now and where?

I am a PhD student in the Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus…  The laboratory I work in, and thus my thesis work, focuses on understanding the pharmacology (essentially how the body acts on a drug and how a drug affects the body) of antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV and Hepatitis.

How did you end up working in an HIV and AIDS lab?

I chose this lab because of its emphasis on clinically relevant research.  We do a significant amount of work with humans-including those who are HIV infected and taking medications-and I enjoy being able to make a direct positive impact on someone’s life.  In fact, part of my research will focus on interacting with HIV patients and determining what life is like while taking these drugs, i.e. how their daily routine is affected, what drug-related side effects do they have to manage, and getting a patient’s opinion on what successful treatment or management of HIV truly is.

What are you currently researching?

My research revolves around two drugs-zidovudine (ZDV) and lamivudine (3TC) -which have historically been used here in the US as the backbone of HIV treatment, but due to troubling safety profiles (ZDV commonly causes nausea, and has been shown to contribute muscle degradation and AIDS related dementias) they have been phased out in favor of safer drugs. However, they are still utilized in special settings (i.e. pregnant women, infants, drug resistant patients in the US, and as the standard of care in resource poor countries) and so an understanding of how to best minimize the resulting toxicities while still maintaining efficacy is crucial.  As such, my project focuses on determining what concentrations of the drug are necessary in the body to maintain efficacy while minimizing if not eliminating serious toxicities.

I’m especially interested in these drugs because of their relevancy to the resource poor setting.  ZDV and 3TC are made available to poor patients in African countries at a cost of $1 a day, whereas the newer drugs have yet to be made affordable enough for this setting, and cost up to $1000 for a month’s supply. It is crucial that we fully understand these two drugs so as to benefit those who have no other choice but to be treated with these drugs.

How does your work/research relate to your sense of vocation?

I’ve always felt called to service, starting with volunteering in homeless shelters as a youth, traveling to Mexico with my church youth group to build a house for a family, to taking advantage of the many opportunities offered at CLU by the Community Service Center.  I’ve also always felt blessed to both enjoy and be skilled in the sciences (I can thank my dad for that one).  Growing up, I always knew God was saying, “here is this gift for you, use it well”, and then when my grandfather began suffering from a form of muscular dystrophy that lacks a treatment, I knew that He was saying, “here’s how”.  He made it pretty clear that He gave me the gift of science knowledge and passion to help His children that suffer from disease.  From there doors just kept opening, the latest being this lab…

What has been the most powerful thing you have learned through your research and classes?

Oh man, that is a tough one…I guess on the surface it’s been amazing to dive in and try to fully understand how complex and intricately built the human body is.  Everything has purpose, and is there for a reason, just like every person makes up the body of Christ for a reason and with purpose. It’s just amazing to think about how amazingly detailed and intricate and complicated our body is, and how good our body is at what it does, with so many places that errors and mistakes could be made.

Is there an interesting fact you would like to share?

One of the first lessons I learned when I started in the lab is that everything matters.  Everything.  My work involves quantifying miniscule amounts of drug that successfully stop HIV from replicating inside a human body.  To put that in perspective, it’s like one pebble, out of an entire beach of sand, stopping the ocean from flooding the shoreline.  It really illustrates one of my favorite stories of a man who stumbles upon an enormous stack of starfish left on the beach by a receding tide.  When asked why he was throwing the starfish back into the water, as he couldn’t possibly make a difference to the entire pile of starfish, the man responds that he made a difference to the one starfish he just threw back in.  Just so, every action we make makes a difference in someone’s life, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant.

What keeps you going?

As of December 2008, the World Health Organization reported that 33.4 million individuals were living with HIV.  It’s estimated that 80-90% would be considered resource poor and unable to afford top of the line treatments.  Need I say more?

Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview!

Joseph is a member of St. Philip Lutheran in Littleton, CO, and an alum of California Lutheran University where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Math.

~Lana Lile