What does food cost?

If you have tomatoes and beans in your backyard garden, you probably don't care about the calories in vs. calories out numbers. You'll spend perhaps a calorie or two for 10 calories in return, but nobody is really keeping score.

Historically, early farmers spent about 1 calorie for every 10 they harvested, more or less.

ONE IN >>> TEN OUT.  That's approximately where we started with the early crop cultivation.  Not a bad return for manual labor.

Since then, of course, we've made dramatic advances in science and technology.  You'd expect maybe ONE IN >>> ONE THOUSAND OUT????  Waaaay wrong.  How about TEN THOUSAND????  Nope, still way off.

Today we spend about 10 calories for every 1 calorie we harvest, and that's just for fuel.  It costs more to farm these days than we get in return.

That's TEN IN >>> ONE OUT.

The 10 calorie input is just the fuel we use.  Fuel for the tractors and trucks.

It doesn't count the cost of fertilizers, of irrigation, of seeds, and of labor.
Then there's the impact of soil leaching, forest area loss and impact on water management, chemical runoff, ground water contamination.  Then add the post-harvest processing that virtually all our products suffer, and transportation to the store, all of which adds to the ratio.

It's not news.  We've known for awhile that the real cost for our food was going up. We're getting away with it for now.

We're consuming resources that are becoming progressively more expensive and that won't be replaced, and we're fostering a consumption rate that's increasing exponentially. It's not the first time it has happened, of course.

A disturbing illustration of how it works is the classic bacteria and petri dish.  The bacteria will multiply because there's room and food, right up to the point where they poison themselves in their own deadly waste and die.

Tree huggers have warned us about this stuff.

Now there are dirt huggers doing the same.

Time for change?

Toy Stories

Naya - Managua, Nicaragua

Naya has a few small cook tools but she never
gets bored to play with them. She uses mud and
grass from the garden to pretend to cook some
cakes for her older sister. She says that in the
future she will manage a restaurant and she’s sure
that tourists will love it!
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In our pursuit of perspective, lets take a moment for children and their toys.

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti spent 18 months traveling around the world and photographing children with their favorite toys for his ‘Toy Stories’ series.

Gabriele says it was surprising how much toys can tell about the family of the child, and even though all kids just want to play, they do it in very different ways: “The richest children were more possessive. In poor countries, it was much easier. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”

Go to his website for the whole series: gabrielegalimberti.com

Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi

Chiwa lives in a small hut with her mother, father and
sister.  They don’t have electricity and running water.
Chiwa helps her mother to carry water to their home
from the river.  In the village there are other 50 children
(more or less) and they always play all together outside.
Chiwa has just 3 toys that some volunteers of an NGO
gave to her when she was born. Her favorite is the
dinosaurs because she says that he can protect her from
the dangerous animals.




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Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night – from kidnappers and poisonous animals respectively.

Children reflect their culture and circumstances in so many ways.  Good and not-so-good are written on their faces and in their lives.  It perhaps requires a bit of us to thoughtfully consider what we see here.  The photos are done well and artistically composed.  Underneath, we can see the issues of income inequality, the gap between rich and poor, and how it affects individuals. 




If we knew these children and their families; if they were friends of ours, would we think differently?  Would our children think differently?

If we can, we should go find out.

Jaqueline – Manila, Philippines

Jaqueline has a lot of different toys but her favorite is for
sure Tinker Bell, the little green fairy that her best friend
gave her. Her father is a fashion photographer and almost
every day takes photos of her too. Jaqueline says that she
will be a model in the future.




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When photographer Gabriele Galimberti decided to travel around the world and capture snapshot moments of children with their toys, what he ended up learning was much greater than child's play -- he also gained greater insight into different cultures, parenting styles and social attitudes. Galimberti is a commercial photographer trying his hand at documentary and travel photography. On a recent 18-month trip around the globe, he photographed children from various locales, from Boulder, Colorado to Bail, Indonesia, all posing with their most beloved toys. His simply styled photograph series titled Toy Stories speaks volumes about the varying cultural attitudes children have toward their toys, while also highlighting the universal language of good old fashioned playtime that every child enjoys. - See more at: http://www.inhabitots.com/photographer-gabriele-galimbertis-toy-stories-shows-children-around-the-world-with-their-favorite-toys/#sthash.iUiRa2eU.dpuf

Tangawizi – Keekorok, Kenya

Tangwizi was born in a Maasai village in the south of Kenya
in a small hut made of dung and straw. His bed is made of a
few rags on the ground. He always plays outside with all the
other children of the village but every night he sleeps together
with his unique toy: a little pelouche monkey.




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Julia – Tirana, Albania

Julia was born in Tirana where she lives with her parents
in a small apartment in the center of the city. Her father
works in a gas station and her mother is a housewife.
Both of the parents speak a good Italian because they
learned from the Italian TV, probably the main one in
Albania! They are sure that their child Julia will learn
Italian soon too. She loves dolls and especially Barbie 
but her father recently gave her a small guitar because
he would love her to be a musician.




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Botlhe – Maun, Botswana

Botlhe has a lot of friends, and all of them live really close
by to the small house where she lives with her family in a
residential complex. In the complex, there is one toilet for
every four families. Botlhe has only one toy, the monkey,
but she almost never plays with it because she prefers to
go out with friends and play with them.




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Allenah – El Nido, Philippines

Allenah Lajallab was born and raised in El Nido, a small town north
of Palawan in the Philippines. In El Nido there weren't hospitals and
she was born at home. She has a lot of stuffed animals, and her favorite
is the orange one because she loves the color. She doesn't like the
white stuffed animal as much, because it gets dirty too easily.




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Cun Zi Yi - Chongqing, China

Cun Zi Yi just turned 3, and received a lot of gifts for her birthday.
She plays with everything and can’t choose her favorite toy. Her
parents say that she’s really good at painting, and will be an artist
when she grows up.




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Arafa & Aisha – Bububu, Zanzibar

Arafa and Aisha are twins. They sleep in the same bed,
have the same clothes, go to school together and share
the same toys. They live in a two-room house in which
both of the rooms are bedrooms, and the kitchen and
restroom are outside. The big photo above the closet
is a portrait of the former president of Zanzibar.




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Bethsaida – Port au Prince, Haiti

Bethsaida was born in Port-au-Prince where she had always
lived in a house with her family until, almost 2 years ago, a big
earthquake destroyed it. Her parents are both deaf but fortunately
she’s not. Now they live in a camp site out of the city. The camp
was built by an American NGO which works with deaf, so in
the camps almost 90% of the people can’t hear and talk. All the
toys that Bethsaida has are donated from the NGO. She wants to
be a hairdresser and loves combing her doll to practice, but
unfortunately her brother has cut off half of the hair of the doll.





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Taha – Beirut, Lebanon

Taha was born in Palestine, but now he lives in Beirut where
he's a refugee together with his family. They live in a sort
of shantytown together with a few thousand other people.
Everybody there is from Palestine. To get water and electricity
they need to illegally connect their house to the public service.
Taha has just one toy, the car, and he didn't have any doubt
when I asked him to show me his favorite toy.




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The GAP - Part I - we cannot have both

I work and they get richer. 
You work and they get richer.
We all work harder and the few get richer.
Average income has been flat for decades; the income of the wealthy has increased radically.  (The wealthiest 1% captured 95% of post-financial crisis growth since 2009 while the bottom 90% became poorer.)
We all work harder so they can get richer.
Is that actually what is happening?

In the US, the richest 10% of Americans currently account for about half the nation's wealth.

In 1988, the income of an average American taxpayer was $33,400, adjusted for inflation. Fast forward 20 years, and not much had changed: The average income was still just $33,000 in 2008, according to IRS data. Keep in mind that that's an average, and the rich are getting richer at a tremendous rate during that period.

"In many countries, extreme economic inequality is worrying because of the pernicious impact that wealth concentrations can have on equal political representation. When wealth captures government policymaking, the rules bend to favor the rich, often to the detriment of everyone else. The consequences include the erosion of democratic governance, the pulling apart of social cohesion, and the vanishing of equal opportunities for all. Unless bold political solutions are instituted to curb the influence of wealth on politics, governments will work for the interests of the rich, while economic and political inequalities continue to rise. As US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, ‘We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.’"

OXFAM: Working for the Few 

A few minutes with this particular chart may trigger a turning point in your thinking.  This is TMI for
many folks, and deeply unsettling, particularly if you visualize the people and families.  TMI, meaning
we're inclined to shake it off rather than assimilate and understand.

The subject is called economic inequality or the gap between rich and poor.  There are opinions, but in general, the greater the gap, the greater the nation's difficulty with economic growth, governmental and marketplace corruption, foreign investment, and foreign debt.  The byproduct of the gap can also be measured in human distress and the struggle for survival. 

Source: F. Alvaredo, A. B. Atkinson, T. Piketty and E. Saez,

(2013)  The World Top IncomesDatabase

http://topincomes.gmond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/

Only includes countries with datain 1980 and later than 2008

Note in the table (right) that the percentage of income going to the rich has increased, but it varies among nations.  It suggests the income available to share among the rest is reduced, again with variations. 

The bigger the gap ... so what?  Does it change things?  There are differing opinions among economists regarding the cause and effect analysis.

A summary, "The U.S. economic and social model is associated with substantial levels of social exclusion, including high levels of income inequality, high relative and absolute poverty rates, poor and unequal educational outcomes, poor health outcomes, and high rates of crime and incarceration. At the same time, the available evidence provides little support for the view that U.S.-style labor-market flexibility dramatically improves labor-market outcomes. Despite popular prejudices to the contrary, the U.S. economy consistently affords a lower level of economic mobility than all the continental European countries for which data is available."^[REF]

Income inequality and mortality in 282 metropolitan
areas of the United States.  Mortality is strongly
associated with higher income inequality, but, within
levels of income inequality, not with per capita income.

The bottom line?  When the rich get richer, it has to come from somewhere.

In the short view, wealth comes from labor, innovation, creativity, cooperation, collaboration, risk-taking ...  but as the gap widens, those things become progressively less significant.  The wealthy are disproportionately represented in government policies and marketplace advantages.

I sat with friends (who work much harder than I do) around a home fire on home-made stools in a western African village while they explained to me all the things they were doing, hoping to provide for their families.  They aggressively pursue every opportunity to "do a little business".  In a very good year, they generate around $1500 for their household.  Normally, it's less.  The impediments to their progress, an exclusive upper class and a government that's crooked as a dog's hind leg.

(It's different here in the developed world, of course. 

Isn't it? Of course it is. It must be. It must.)

See The GAP - Part II

It's particularly troubling when the widening gap points to differences in mortality, available nutrition, access to education, to basic healthcare and safe neighborhoods. Historically, such a gap often precedes significant upheaval, both national and international.  At some point, the laborer will no longer work and sacrifice his life and the lives of his children for the benefit of another's opulence and privilege.

Thoughts?  

The top of the economic pyramid is not the moral high ground.  The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

The Adult Mind - Part IV: Hard Change

Here is the first morning after Sweden
changed from driving on the left side
to driving on the right, 1967.  What
a quagmire.  They have no such
difficulty today, of course.

Things change.  Sometimes it's a bit of an upheaval as our norms get realigned.

(This is just for those interested in history and economics; everybody else will be bored.)

Think about slavery; it was the norm for most of human history.  Across continents and cultures and centuries, it was part of everyday life.  Everyone knew that there were those folks who by virtue of birth or race or class would be on the bottom social rung.  Nobody questioned it, really.  It had always been that way and it always would be, of course.

Am I not a man and a brother?
Anti-slavery medallion created in 1787

And it was, until 1787 when a dozen fellows met in London in a print shop and changed it all.  They formed 'The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade' and began to challenge the norm.  Pretty much everybody had it pushed in their face, slavery is wrong; just wrong. 

They told the truth about what it was really like on the slave ships.  They campaigned publicly and petitioned parliamentarians.

Wilberforce!  William Wilberforce introduced the first Bill to abolish the slave trade in 1791.  It was defeated 163 votes to 88. As Wilberforce continued to bring the issue of the slave trade before Parliament, others continued to travel, raise funds, lobby, and to write anti-slavery articles. Wilberforce introduced a new motion to abolish slavery almost every year.  It took several years before they saw progress, but it came.

(as Thomas Princen narrates so well for us in
his book Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order)

Today, we look on slavery as barbaric and wicked, and rightly so, but it was the norm at the time, and good people didn't think about it, for the most part.  It was just a fact of life  ...

Today, we face issues that are similarly significant but unasked questions, at least for now.

For example, our economy presumes and depends on continued growth in literally every corner and every market.

Exponential growth in a finite world ...

The corner shop with a small but steady customer base and a steady throughput of goods is no longer viable.  It hasn't been for decades.  All such businesses are pressed by the growth thinking of corporations like Walmart and Target and Food Lion and Giant.  Their business model requires them to overtake a region's cash flow and channel it through their product sales.  They depend on winning  based on the appeal of their larger stores and pricing margins achievable only by massive throughput.  Family farms face similar difficulties.  Is that bad?  Perhaps; perhaps not.  But it is troublesome.

As an aside:  our growth model is illustrated by the extended cash-flow model that Wall Street employs.  Their documented and discussed intent is to be the holder of debt for a developing country at the GDP level, the maximum amount they can extract from the country's economy.  It compares to payday borrowing; incrementally, you borrow against your next payday until you're giving your whole paycheck to pay what you owe.

The growth and competition model presumes growth can continue unabated, that resources are effectively unlimited, and that it makes sense to airlift flowers from Kenya to Wisconsin to fill a florist's refrigerated display case.

Our growth model is the norm, at least for now.  What are the unasked questions?  

The rest of the story: like slavery, our competitive economy imposes cost on non-participants.  The benefit to some imposes cost on others who hadn't agreed to participate.  In Africa, local markets that serve the community find their prices imposed from Wall Street.  Corn meal in Kenya, locally produced and the staple for existence for more than half the coastal population, doubled in price in 2007/8 due to world market fluctuations.  Wall Street did that, and millions went hungry; tens of thousands died.  The primary cause - foreign participation in their markets.


That's the norm today.  Is it wrong like slavery was wrong.  Of course.  But change will be tumultuous.

Bedtime Stories

This is Indira, age 7, from Kathmandu, Nepal.

Continuing our search for a little legitimate perspective, lets look at sleeping arrangements from around the world.

From a stunning collection by English photographer James Mollison here are children around the world ... and their beds.  His book is titled Where Children Sleep, and it unveils some differences indeed; from girls in thousand dollar dresses in their private mansions to shepherd boys sleeping with goats.

And this is where little Indira sleeps.

“I hope the book gives a glimpse into the lives some children are living in very diverse situations around the world; a chance to reflect on the inequality that exists, and realise just how lucky most of us in the developed world are,” says the author. 

And this is Joey's bedroom.

Joey, age 11, lives in Kentucky.

What's the likelihood we're aware of how fortunate we are in the developed world? 

What is the chance our children understand?

We can see it, but our awareness seems to evaporate immediately.  Can it be part of the way we think and live our own lives?

Children in the developed world often have a private room complete with closet and bed and storage for stuff.


Not so in about 80% of the world.

And this is where he sleeps.

This young fellow is 9 and lives in The Ivory Coast

Most live like this fellow, and the bed is shared with others in the family.



If we knew this child personally along with his family; if they were friends of ours, how might that affect our children?  Would they make different choices?

This is Jasmine (Jazzy), age 4, who lives in Kentucky, USA, and her bedroom.

This fellow is Lamine, age 12.  He lives in Bounkiling village,
in southern Senegal, not far from the Soungrougrou River.

And this young lady is Ahkohxet.  She's 8 years old and lives in
Brazil, probably in the state of Amazonas which occupies the
greater part of the tropical forest zone of the Amazon River basin.  

Risa lives in Tokyo, Japan.                          Nantio lives in Lisamis, Northern Kenya.
Both girls are 15 years old.

Reality check:  Just so you know the samplings offered above by photographer James Mollison are not just selective artistic representations, here are some amateur photos from our travels.  In Nigeria, Sao Tome & Principe, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya, there are few who live like folks in the developed world.  Seven years, 20+ long trips, 10,000+ photographs, and for everyone there, the normal struggles are for clean water, food, shelter, and perhaps electricity.

Click on the photos for more detail, if you like.
Or come see for yourself.

Eye-roll

^ In North Carolina, USA, the Revis family spends around $342 per week. ^

I got a nice email comment from an Australian father; when he mentioned his youngster doing the eye-roll, I laughed.  Apparently, dad was trying to talk thoughtfully about consumerism, and must not have said it in a fashion an 8-year old could receive.  Thus, the eye-roll!

So for a little perspective, lets look at some differences from place to place.  From a delightful photo collection, What the World Eats, published by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, here's a look a some families and the food they buy at the markets and eat each week.  (The authors visited and photographed 30 families in 24 countries.)

^ In Mali, the Natomo family spends around $30 per week.

In western Africa, the children invited me to go with them

to get mangoes.  I thought they meant to a market, but they

took me down the path to a mango tree where they threw

sticks to knock down the fruit.  She's holding one of my
cameras; she and her friends take pictures that I print and
bring back on later trips.

On the fish aisle in Japan

It's not the same everywhere, of course.  Some have grocery stores, some have open-air marketplaces, some have roadside vendors ...

^ In Texas, the Fernandez family spends around $242 per week.

^ In Tingo, Ecuador, the Ayme family spends around $32 per week.

In more difficult areas, a family might subsist on $15 a week total income.  In rural Kenya, a family might subsist primarily on maize meal (corn meal) plus what they might gather or barter.  Good governance and a healthy economy seem to be the key enablers for improvement.

^ In Germany, the Melander family spends around $568 per week.^

It's a broad spectrum along which we find ourselves and everyone else.  We're all deeply thankful that we can provide for our families, of course.  If we want to understand how the world works, it helps to know what life is like for folks like us elsewhere.













Show your kids; in person is best.  Go see, and stay long enough to make some friends.