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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Social impact of disasters
In 1837, the power of Daniel O'Connell's oratory focused the
attention of Europeans on Ireland. They were horrified at what they
saw there. The Irish poor - a third of the population - had no food
except the potatoes they grew, and not enough clothing to cover
themselves. They went hungry for two months of the year, and
half-naked for all the year. Yet this would be their last 'good'
decade before more than a million of them would vanish into
unmarked graves in the 1840s. The idealistic young Baron Eotvos - a
humanitarian and already a much-praised poet - struggled to
understand how Ireland could have been reduced to this state under
English rule, and why English journalists wrote with such bigotry
about the Irish. In Hungary, he was a campaigner for the freedom of
serfs, but conceded that those serfs lived in better conditions and
had more protection than Irish tenants and labourers. The only
protection for the Irish poor came from illegal organizations such
as the Whiteboys.His visit coincided with a pivotal moment in Irish
history, when debate was raging about the introduction of a 'Poor
Law' (with Poor Tax to pay for it) - a charitable-sounding term for
a cruel Act aimed at clearing the land of people who had no other
means of survival. His deeply researched summary of the English
occupation of Ireland - uninfluenced by modern revisionism - makes
compelling, often harrowing reading.
In "Closing the Food Gap," food activist and journalist Mark Winne
poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations
around food: What about those people who are not financially able
to make conscientious choices about where and how to get food? And
in a time of rising rates of both diabetes and obesity, what can we
do to make healthier foods available for everyone?
To address these questions, Winne tells the story of how America's
food gap has widened since the 1960s, when domestic poverty was
"rediscovered," and how communities have responded with a slew of
strategies and methods to narrow the gap, including community
gardens, food banks, and farmers' markets. The story, however, is
not only about hunger in the land of plenty and the organized
efforts to reduce it; it is also about doing that work against a
backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical
expectations. With the popularity of Whole Foods and increasingly
common community-supported agriculture (CSA), wherein subscribers
pay a farm so they can have fresh produce regularly, the demand for
fresh food is rising in one population as fast as rates of obesity
and diabetes are rising in another.
Over the last three decades, Winne has found a way to connect
impoverished communities experiencing these health problems with
the benefits of CSAs and farmers' markets; in "Closing the Food
Gap," he explains how he came to his conclusions. With tragically
comic stories from his many years running a model food
organization, the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, alongside
fascinating profiles of activists and organizations in communities
across the country, Winne addresses head-on the struggles to
improve food access for all of us, regardless of income level.
Using anecdotal evidence and a smart look at both local and
national policies, Winne offers a realistic vision for getting
locally produced, healthy food onto everyone's table.
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