Last week we were pretty much slapping ourselves on the back here at Spilled Milk.
We put out a few paragraphs about our food system getting bludgeoned to death and scooped a lot of media outlets that did their reporting the following day.
Obviously, I am not subject to a lot of mainstream journalism rules, so my scoop was with a VERY small “s," but I was honestly happiest about seeing literal kitchen table issues on the front pages where they belong: hunger, waste, immigration, climate crisis, economic development, jobs, national security (and more) are all intertwined; we have to have great reporting from real pros on every aspect of this Möbius strip of a crisis with relentless pressure or we won’t adequately galvanize public opinion that results in real change.
Gas goes up a dollar a gallon and the national uproar is (deservedly) bonkers.
It’s also a food issue because of our transport system, mechanized farming systems, etc., so I get it. BUT food prices are up an average of over 13 percent since last year and looking at some recent events scares the shit out of me, not just locally, but globally!
Here is a great article in WaPo about the disappearance or escalating cost of foods around the world. And anyone who shops knows that chicken, beef, butter, milk, cheese, Cheerios, and just about every other food that typically goes into our shopping basket is up at least a dollar over a year ago no matter how you slice it. Food prices are soaring.
So I thought I would point out a couple of other great things I read that I want to share with you.
First up, my friend Kim Severson, the legendary award-winning NYT reporter, has a must-read piece about salvage stores drawing new customers.
If you extend out the ideas she covers, it incorporates everything ideologically from food rescue non-profits all around the country, to the “ugly food” movement that preaches the value of food that doesn’t look perfect, to the f*cked-up system we have for labeling/dating/tossing that encourages waste, thereby exacerbating hunger. As Severson points out:
“In another twist, salvage food stores are drawing environmentally conscious consumers intent on doing what they can to reduce the $161 billion worth of food the Department of Agriculture estimates is dumped every year into landfills.”
But the twists are many and the roadblock of legislation needs changing so we can get healthy nutritious foods into the hands of those that need it most, quickly and efficiently.
Jennifer Oldham in Civil Eats wrote one of the best things I have read in years.
She’s an award-winning investigative reporter who is one of my heroes. Her article is a mind blower. I am sure very few of you know the depths of the problem we are dealing with in the West with what is a 10-year drought. Even fewer know about the water rights issues plaguing many parts of our country, or the ability to sell them! I am overly eager to reference Chinatown, one of my all time favorite films, but I will resist the temptation.
An excerpt to whet your appetite for Oldham’s stunning long read about plans by Renewable Water Resources, a private company, to drill wells in Colorado’s San Luis Valley to provide water to the Denver area:
“If the state engineer’s office, its water court, and federal regulators were to approve RWR’s plan, it would mark the first time that private investors could ship water from an aquifer in one part of the state to a community in another. Yet the potential to profit from piping the scant resource to the rapidly expanding cities east of the Rocky Mountains is increasingly attractive to investors as drought and shortages drive up the price of water and Colorado’s population is expected to double by 2040.”
It’s a scenario that will test Colorado’s ability to balance water use between its agriculture industry—whose 38,900 farms and ranches generate about $47 billion a year in economic impact—and rapid population growth.
To proceed, RWR must purchase water rights from farmers and ranchers, many descendants of families who settled Colorado’s oldest agricultural region in the mid-1800s.
Meanwhile, farmers and ranchers who share the 8,000-square-mile valley with RWR have already been tilling less ground, fallowing land, and using less water-intensive crops in a race to meet a state-mandated 2030 deadline to restore water to shrinking aquifers or face well shutdowns.
Selling their water to RWR, a practice known as “buy and dry,” would force farmers to grow even less and could have cascading effects on a region that reaps the nation’s second-largest potato crop. Such transactions have previously been politically unpopular and discouraged in the state’s water plan, in part because they can devastate local economies and ecosystems.
Wildlife is also suffering as water supplies shrink: Biologists move threatened fish in buckets from creek to creek. Nesting birds on one of three national wildlife refuges in the valley almost ran out of water recently until state and local officials scrambled to find alternative sources.
Next week, we return to our regularly scheduled programming, and I promise something to help ease the tragic pain I feel every day when I read the news, but the answer isn’t to ignore it. PLEASE share this column and others like it with your whole email list, encourage them to get involved and let’s work to solve these problems instead of wishing them away. I believe in our ability to do just that.
I agree. So many recent events have been scaring the sh*t out of me too. Thanks for the info.
To whom much is given, much is required! We're all "given" information on how to be better....let's try.
Thank you Andrew. I appreciate you putting things in front of me that I might not have had time to find myself. I have also shared it to FB.