An elderly woman, whom I will call Mama Solange, walks the narrow, muddy pathway between her home and the neighbors compound in the refugee camp. She takes me for a humanitarian aid worker, or perhaps just for someone new to direct her complaints. Cupping maize in her outstretched hands, she looks at me, shakes her head silently and spits to …
Tag Archives: Food insecurity
Vitamin
Discussing a failed arctic expedition of the late 1700s, Keith Gessen reminds us that the team had wooden boats, wildly inaccurate maps, and “didn’t know what a vitamin was.”[i] Now, four Nobel Prizes later, we are in the 101st Year of the Vitamin. The word, derived from “vital” because vitamins are required for life, yields 104,000,000 Google search …
Monthly Web Round-Up
On July 20th the food crisis in the Horn of Africa was officially declared a famine. In David Keen’s 1994 book The Benefits of Famine he argues that famines are “naturalised” as “disasters”, and that this naturalisation obscures the processes which cause hunger, the “identifiable forces within the province of rational human control” Susan George wrote of in her 1974 …