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Food for thought - less for eating

Thursday, April 17, 2008

So they were at it again – this time at least with two of the more abrasive TV interlocutors out of a currently soggy bunch, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. But while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vied for more than a hundred minutes over a range of different issues and some egregious non-issues, as a reporter and a citizen I was disappointed not to hear the word "food" mentioned, not even once. 

I've been waiting for food prices - now rocketing on a global scale - to become central in the national discourse, waiting in fact since last month. That was when the United Nations agency, the World Food Program, reported that because of price inflation plus - in the face of tightening supply - increasingly desperate demand among its 88 million hungry food-aid recipients across 73 countries, it was being forced to make a dramatic emergency cash appeal. It was asking the world's richer nations for an extra $500 million above its normal annual budget of $3 billion.

 

The increased costs the agency now has to meet are exemplified by rice shooting up globally in price by over 70% in a year, and by wheat more than doubling. Food riots have been the inevitable result, in countries from Thailand through Egypt and Ivory Coast to Haiti - and in the last country’s case they caused an admittedly already wobbling Prime Minister, Jacques-Edouard Alexis, to be overthrown.

 

And lest we might think such inflation is essentially a "Third World" problem, let's recall Italy's recent protests over the national staple, pasta – it’s of course made from durum wheat, a variety that's up in price by 73% in a year. The countrywide demonstrations and boycotts played their part in bringing the increasingly insufferable media magnate Silvio Berlusconi back to political power this week.

 

And our own national discourse? Well, both last night’s candidates attempted media-quotable point-scoring about inflation (more against the Republican enemy than off each other) but it was gas prices that were the focus. Anyone managing a household budget, though, is well aware of the interaction of fuel and transportation costs with the cost of food. 

 

Fuel is also, however, playing a newer, more complicated role; gratifyingly some media outlets are stepping up to the plate to explain it. The shift of resources and vast acreages away from food production and into growing grains for ethanol, and similar so-called "bio-fuels", has exacerbated food shortages across the globe. Journalists, depending on which experts they talk to, now report bio-fuels as responsible for anything from 10 to 30 per cent of the world's recent food price hikes.

 

National Public Radio has put itself in the front rank of news organizations tackling this vital topic, and is valiantly devoted daily reports to it all this week.

 

Meanwhile, in the few weeks since the urgent appeal which caught my attention, the WFP has - as inflation ramps up inexorably - seen its shortfall rise by almost half as much again, that is up to $755 million.  

 

 

**DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY FRIDAY ON WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
LISTEN TO THE MEDIA BEAT PODCASTS by clicking HERE

 

 

 

Dateline: WASHINGTON, DC -- It's been encouraging to see, after THE MEDIA BEAT last week highlighted the Nazi origins of the Olympic Flame's international trek as a propaganda boost for the Games' host-country, many others take the issue further - not least here in the nation's capital, where I've been making one of my periodic visits.

 

Among outraged opinion-formers, The Washington Post's punchy Op-Ed writer Anne Applebaum - warned Beijing that "there is a price to be paid for [China's] few weeks at the center of global attention" while the torch makes its now-forlorn way, and she promoted the idea of a US presidential boycott of the Games' opening, with her carefully realistic but direct phrasing: "It will show some of the Chinese people what some of the world thinks of their repressive system -- and quite rightly, too".

 

Guided by such reminders that repressive systems should indeed prick the moral conscience (and frankly, too, because of my distaste for ballyhoo) I turned away from DC's opulent new museum of journalism - neatly if a bit glibly called a "Newseum" - which debuted with a black-tie ceremony catered by the celebrity restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, and was open to the public for free for just its first day, before implementing a regular entry charge of $20.

 

I went instead to the now long-established US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which anatomizes in agonizing detail a repressive system that went all the way to industrialized genocide. I was, unsurprisingly perhaps, silenced by the experience.

 

The permanent exhibit's impact has been summed up by writers better equipped by experience than I to evaluate it - like Philip Gourevitch, journalist and historian of Rwanda's 1994 ethnic massacres, who described the museum as "a chronicle of absolute evil" ... " bearing witness to dehumanization and mass murder".

 

Once I reached what could have been the exhibit's end (the 1940s aftermath of six million dead) I was drawn on to an extra room, which the Museum has devoted to Darfur - a modern-day calamity that of course the US government has officially labeled "genocide", but has nevertheless achieved nothing by way of halting it, any more than any other international effort has.

 

The Museum's solemn eternal flame, small but burning steadily in its Hall of Remembrance (above center) sparked in me mainly sardonic reflection on the 2008 Olympic torch's trans-national zig-zagging. After all, the more fully that global news coverage reports China's policies not just of repressing Tibet, but also of supporting Sudan (as reward for plentiful Sudanese oil) in repressing Darfur, the more acrid will burn the Olympic flame, and the more apt the opponents' coinage "The Genocide Games" will sound.

 

[By the way, next week the Museum opens a special exhibit - click here for a preview - devoted to Adolph Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics, running until just after the Beijing Games are due to start in August.]

 

 

 

Dateline: LONG ISLAND, NY --  Please take a glance at the book-cover to the right of this week’s triptych of pictures (above). It’s for a brand-new publication from the Running Press, titled America At Home.

 

I know only a quick glance is needed, since my page-illustrations are always so small – but it will be enough for you to admire, I earnestly and self-centeredly hope, the particular American home that’s spotlighted there. I trust you’ll agree it’s an elegant dining room, opening out on to a pleasant, if small (and not too overly-groomed) lawn.

 

Okay, it happens to be MY home. The picture is a captured detail from a much-loved whole, the Long Island shingled house that’s been totally refurbished to a design by my talented wife Melissa Bellinelli (the photo must be credited to her, too).

 

The book contains about 250 evocative images of homes in America today, from the humblest to the really wild and extravagant. It’s a collaborative venture between professional photographers and tens of thousands of amateurs, plus many noted writing contributors including Dominique Browning, the legendary former Editor-in-Chief of House and Garden magazine, the critic, essayist and biographer Terry Teachout, novelist Amy Tan and cultural commentator Robert Rodriguez.

 

Pictures were solicited in a nationwide call by the project’s website www.myamericaathome.com and were organized with accompanying text by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, who were previously responsible for the revealing picture books A Day in the Life of America and America 24/7.

 

And how did our family home end up being singled out on the cover? Well, it’s easy and simple. The truth is, anybody may have their home on the cover.

 

In one of smartest promotional moves for a book I’ve seen in a while, you can go to the America at Home website and upload a picture of your own home, and it will be magically converted into a book-jacket that will be mailed to you. You'll have to buy the book, of course.

 

In our case, this customized volume made for a terrific wedding anniversary gift to my wife, who on the Fourth of this month had survived 17 years with me. I recommend it as a present for your cherished home companion, too.