Plenty • June 29, 2007
“All right, when you’re starting your seedlings, you don’t need to go buy those trays, right?” Ashley Atkinson, a bespectacled and freckled 29-year-old, is quickly wrapping a piece of newspaper around a bottle of water, talking to a dozen tables of Detroiters eating through a potluck dinner as she works. “Because what are those trays made out of?”
The room chuckles: “Plastic!”
Plenty • June/July 2007
With her rare mix of storytelling skills and a social conscience, best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver has built a career on the premise that a well-told story can move mountains. Her latest effort, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, tells an entirely new tale: her own. Spun around her family’s move to Virginia and their subsequent decision to eat only foods grown and raised in their county—including their own farm—Animal marries Kingsolver’s narrative gifts with reported essays from her husband, biologist Steven Hopp, and recipes from her then-19-year-old daughter, Camille. Plenty caught up with Kingsolver to talk about the local food movement, taking your dinner seriously, and why eating well is for everyone—not just the elite.
The American Prospect • May 17, 2007
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, with Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp (HarperCollins, 384 pages)
On a spring morning several years ago, I made a final visit to a politicized cooking class for New York City public high school students. During earlier visits, I had watched teachers promulgate a body of then-eccentric ideas about food: the benefits of local and organic produce; the dangers of a diet based on McDonald’s; the environmental destruction wrought by conventional agriculture. During those initial visits, the teens handily dismissed their lessons. One young man, after declaring his love for daily visits to McDonald’s, declared simply, “I’m not going to change what I eat.”
Daily Intelligencer • April 18, 2007
New York State has a new record-low welfare enrollment. There were 541,503 on the dole at the end of February, the lowest number since 1963, as state welfare officials announced neatly in sync with tax day. While the city has been posting similar trends for the last several years, this marks the state’s first big milestone. The state secret? In addition to benefiting from welfare shrinkage in the five boroughs — the city makes up the bulk of the state’s welfare cases — state officials are pointing to $665 million paid out via the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, which is available to working poor filing federal or state taxes, plus a new state credit for low-income, non-custodial parents up-to-date on child support.
The Huffington Post • April 17, 2007
It’s common knowledge that tax day inspires a nationwide grumble, but it’s beginning to be known for bringing annual cheers from the country’s working poor. In recent years, the Earned Income Tax Credit–a stealth antipoverty program with broad bipartisan support–has become one of the country’s most successful efforts to help the poor: Last tax year, the EITC put $41.4 billion into the pockets of workers who earn too little to get by, more than we ever spent on welfare. That work-first hook has made the program a bipartisan favorite, but a closer look suggests that the EITC isn’t the panacea its often touted to be.
City Limits Weekly • April 16, 2007
Harlem— New York City is eyeing a new target for promoting health among Gotham’s poor: supermarkets.
On Friday, the city’s food policy coordinator, Benjamin Thomases, sat in on a briefing about the nuts and bolts of bringing supermarkets into low-income neighborhoods. “We’re definitely looking at the issues of access to healthy food,” said Thomases, who said the city has been meeting with local food industry players, from biggies like Pathmark – whose extremely successful store on 125th Street in Harlem is generally considered a model project – down to the Washington Heights-based National Association of Bodega Owners, to discuss possible strategies.
Daily Intelligencer • April 2, 2007
The Alice Watersization of New York cuisine is continuing apace, and now it’s spreading to decidedly un-haute cuisine. Now that the budget is done, Albany leaders are finalizing a deal to give New York its first statewide Food Policy Council, charged with spreading the local-and-organic movement to corner bodegas and other places where lower-income New Yorkers shop. A Friday announcement by state Agriculture Commissioner Patrick Hooker explained that the new body will coordinate the mind-numbing minutiae involved in favorite sustainable-food efforts like getting New York State apples to the neighborhood deli and ensuring that community-supported agriculture-buying clubs are affordable to the poor.
HuffingtonPost.com • March 30, 2007
Yesterday, New York City’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled specifics on the newest piece of his groundbreaking antipoverty initiative: Paying the poor for behaving well. From a press conference in hardscrabble Brownsville, Brooklyn, Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs explained that, come September, the city will be paying poor families for keeping doctor’s appointments and making sure their kids go to school. Funded with private foundation grants, these “conditional cash transfers” will, among other things, pay $25 for attending elementary school here, $300 for a good test score there; if a family collects every reward, they stand to net $5,000.
City Limits • March 26, 2007
With stringent new work requirements for welfare recipients set to take full effect nationwide in October, local welfare officials are scrambling to help their allies in Washington take advantage of a Democratic Congress and get the feds to alter regulatory changes made when Republicans were the majority party.
Last spring, Congress overhauled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the federal welfare program. Welfare program officials and advocates alike balked at statutory changes, arguing that they actually would thwart state efforts to get people into family-sustaining jobs.
City Limits • March 12, 2007
The Bloomberg administration’s flagship welfare initiative came under attack last week, assailed by advocates for the poor who charged that the $200 million Wellness, Comprehensive Assessment, Rehabilitation and Employment (WeCARE) program is doing little to help the city’s indigent find work and is being left largely unmonitored by the city.
Launched in February 2005, the WeCARE program was heralded by city officials as a new era in welfare, breaking with what many saw as a punitive approach under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Intended to help welfare’s sick and disabled clients either find work or attain federal disability benefits, the program was designed to carefully assess – and try to fix – the problems keeping those clients from working.
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