May 5, 2008
CITYWIDE
The Lost Supermarket: A Breed in Need of Replenishment
Even Kings and Queens are facing their own food crisis.
Kings and Queens Counties, that is.
A continuing decline in the number of neighborhood supermarkets has made it harder for millions of New Yorkers to find fresh and affordable food within walking distance of their homes, according to a recent city study. The dearth of nearby supermarkets is most severe in minority and poor neighborhoods already beset by obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
According to the food workers union, only 550 decently sized supermarkets — each occupying at least 10,000 square feet — remain in the city.
In one corner of southeast Queens, four supermarkets have closed in the last two years. Over a similar period in East Harlem, six small supermarkets have closed, and two more are on the brink, local officials said. In some cases, the old storefronts have been converted to drug stores that stand to make money coming and going — first selling processed foods and sodas, then selling medicines for illnesses that could have been prevented by a better diet.
The supermarket closings — not confined to poor neighborhoods — result from rising rents and slim profit margins, among other causes. They have forced residents to take buses or cabs to the closest supermarkets in some areas. Those with cars can drive, but the price of gasoline is making some think twice about that option. In many places, residents said the lack of competition has led to rising prices in the remaining stores.
The residents of the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, have been without their local supermarket since last year, when it was razed along with a strip of stores and restaurants to make room for new housing and retail developments. What used to be a quick jaunt across the street for Della Dorsett is now a tricky trek, as she maneuvers her electric wheelchair several blocks uphill along Myrtle Avenue, returning home with plastic bags dangling from handles and nestled between her feet.
“I’m tired of going uphill,” she said. “But we have nothing around here now. From Myrtle to St. Edwards and down to Flatbush, not one store.”
The lack of easily available fresh food has prompted city and state officials to convene several task forces to address the public health implications.
The recent study conducted by the Department of City Planning estimated that as many as three million New Yorkers live in what are considered high-need neighborhoods — communities characterized by not enough supermarkets and too many health problems. Within those dense, urban areas, the study estimated that 750,000 people live more than five blocks from a grocery or supermarket.
“Many people in low-income neighborhoods are spending their food budget at discount stores or pharmacies where there is no fresh produce,” said Amanda Burden, the city’s planning director. “In our study, a significant percentage of them reported that in the day before our survey, they had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables. Not one. That really is a health crisis in the city.”
The study, which was released last Friday, found that there is enough need in the city to support another 100 groceries or supermarkets. To spur supermarket growth, officials could consider using city-owned property or economic incentives, or relaxing requirements to make it easier to set up stores in areas zoned for manufacturing, Ms. Burden said.
“We have to determine why the stores are closing and what the barriers are,” Ms. Burden said. “Stimulating the investment of supermarket owners in these communities is essential to the future of the city.”
Jimmy Proscia, the co-manager of a Key Food in Flushing, says the business has gotten a lot harder in the 33 years since he started. Competitors, he said, cut costs by hiring nonunion workers. Big-box stores buy in bulk and further eat into his sales. Some days it looks like everybody is in the food business.
“You got gas stations now selling milk for $2.99,” he said. “Go to the drug store and they’re selling what we have. It’s ridiculous.”
In St. Albans, Queens, several empty supermarkets line the streets. Every day, Desiree Gaylord walks past a shuttered Associated store on Farmers Boulevard and on to her elderly mother’s house.
“Before I go to work, I call to see what she needs,” Ms. Gaylord said. “I’ll buy it somewhere else and bring it to her. I don’t know why they closed that store. It was an asset, especially for the elderly. Now I see them on the bus with the shopping carts.”
She walked down the street, past the corner house where Elizabeth Lopez moved in just last month. Ms. Lopez had been told there were plenty of places to shop in her new neighborhood. What she found were bodegas. By the time she gets home from her job driving a school bus, the closest supermarket is usually closed. So she drives to Brooklyn each week for her groceries.
“My husband hasn’t even seen this house yet because he’s been in Puerto Rico dealing with his relatives,” she said. “He is going to have a fit. He likes his stores close by.”
The residents who live in the high-rises and private homes that ring Bruckner Plaza in the Bronx can relate to that. Their local supermarket, a Key Food on White Plains Road and the Bruckner Expressway, is the only one south of the expressway, tucked into a corner of the outdoor shopping center that also features a Kmart and assorted smaller stores.
Executives at Pick Quick Foods, which owns the supermarket, say that Vornado Realty Trust, which bought the shopping plaza for $165 million last year, wants to double their rent to $50 a square foot. They fear the landlord wants to push them out.
Pick Quick used to own 15 Key Food stores, which are part of a buying cooperative. Now they are down to six. The smaller stores — those under 10,000 square feet — could not make enough of a profit to stay open. Other stores were priced out of their spaces by rent increases.
At stake at the Bronx store are more than 100 jobs, many of them filled by local residents, including teenagers and single mothers. Some of the employees more or less grew up in the business, starting as teenagers with part-time, unionized jobs. The pay and benefits have helped them support their families, and even prosper.
“What does this job mean to me?” said James Hutcherson, the store’s frozen foods manager. “I got a house and a daughter in college. That’s what I got out of this place.”
He is 46, and values his job so much that he takes three buses each day from his house in Queens. Both his father and his uncle worked for the company.
“I’m used to the people around here,” he said. “I’m used to the whole neighborhood.”
He excused himself to help a customer find several bags of ravioli that were on sale. Nearby, Efrain Rosa, 66, carefully read the list of ingredients on some Lean Cuisine meals. He is a diabetic, and he has to watch his diet. Like other older people in the neighborhood, he is worried that if Key Food closes, the shopping choices on his side of Bruckner Boulevard would be severely limited. Getting to the next closest supermarket — a Pathmark on the north side of the boulevard — would add more than a half-mile to the round-trip walk. Other options are not appealing.
“There is a grocery store across from me,” he acknowledged. “But they don’t carry the kind of groceries we want. Of course, their prices are higher too.”
Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents the store’s workers, have made this Key Food in the Bronx the poster child for a citywide campaign to preserve local supermarkets.
“We’re at a point where landlords do not feel any concern that they are taking supermarkets out of communities,” said Pat Purcell, the union’s director of special projects. “They just want to maximize their profit. I get that, up to a point. But food is different. It affects your health.”
Wendi Kopsick, a spokeswoman for Vornado, said she would not comment on the record about the company’s plans to renew Key Food’s lease. But Vornado’s Web site lists the Bronx parcel as available for “proposed retail.”
Whatever plans the company has for the site are bound to face opposition from the local community board, whose members expect to meet with Vornado executives this week. Enrique Vega, the chairman of Community Board 9 in the Bronx, said the board would not allow anything but a supermarket on the site.
“They are in deep trouble if they think they are going to put another type of store there,” Mr. Vega said. “They’ll need a variance or an agreement with the community board, and they are not going to get it. We want a supermarket.”
東京理科２
Not Exactly the Jetsons, but Getting Closer
By DYLAN McCLAIN
Published: January 3, 2008
Robots are still far from being the chatty companions seen in science-fiction movies. But some toy robots are becoming more than just conversation pieces.
Frank O'Connell/The New York Times
I-Sobot, Tomy's new humanoid robot.
According to the NPD Group, a market research firm, sales of robotic and interactive playmates in the United States were $284 million in the 12 months ended in October, up from $213 million in the previous 12 months.
One recent entry is the i-Sobot from Tomy of Japan. Only 6.5 inches tall, the i-Sobot has a list price of $299, making it less expensive than other advanced robots on the market, which often cost more than $1,000.
The i-Sobot has 17 motors to move its limbs, making it surprisingly fluid. According to James Kuffner, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, robots that have 20 or more motors can replicate most human movement.
Like many other toy robots, the i-Sobot has a humanoid shape, which is not accidental, Professor Kuffner said. “A human shape has an appeal,” he said. “A dishwasher will only wash dishes, but a humanoid robot can do more.”
Among the things they do is fight. Professor Kuffner said that in Japan and South Korea, the centers of innovation in toy robots, people often have toy robot battles.
By 2026, he estimates, consumer robots should be able to perform many chores people find hazardous or distasteful. Honda, the carmaker and a leader in robot design and research, has estimated that a robot the size of a typical 12-year-old can do most household tasks, he said.
The obstacles to building a robot of that size have to do with weight and cost. As robots get larger, they need more gears to move, making them heavier and more expensive.
Robots may also start to look more human, adding facial features and delicate hands, but that poses a psychological problem known as the uncanny valley syndrome. That idea, which was introduced in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, refers to the disquieting effect that objects, particularly robots, have on people if they look too human.
“As you get closer to something human, but it is not a human, it is frightening,” Professor Kuffner said. “I have this theory that it goes all the way back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — that you should not play God.”
Professor Kuffner said that despite depictions of malevolent robots in movies like the “Terminator” series, there was nothing to fear. If a robot goes haywire, he said, “we can just take out the batteries.” DYLAN McCLAIN
According to the NPD Group, a market research firm, sales of robotic and interactive playmates in the United States were $284 million in the 12 months ended in October, up from $213 million in the previous 12 months.
One recent entry is the i-Sobot from Tomy of Japan. Only 6.5 inches tall, the i-Sobot has a list price of $299, making it less expensive than other advanced robots on the market, which often cost more than $1,000.
The i-Sobot has 17 motors to move its limbs, making it surprisingly fluid. According to James Kuffner, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, robots that have 20 or more motors can replicate most human movement.
Like many other toy robots, the i-Sobot has a humanoid shape, which is not accidental, Professor Kuffner said. “A human shape has an appeal,” he said. “A dishwasher will only wash dishes, but a humanoid robot can do more.”
Among the things they do is fight. Professor Kuffner said that in Japan and South Korea, the centers of innovation in toy robots, people often have toy robot battles.
By 2026, he estimates, consumer robots should be able to perform many chores people find hazardous or distasteful. Honda, the carmaker and a leader in robot design and research, has estimated that a robot the size of a typical 12-year-old can do most household tasks, he said.
The obstacles to building a robot of that size have to do with weight and cost. As robots get larger, they need more gears to move, making them heavier and more expensive.
Robots may also start to look more human, adding facial features and delicate hands, but that poses a psychological problem known as the uncanny valley syndrome. That idea, which was introduced in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, refers to the disquieting effect that objects, particularly robots, have on people if they look too human.
“As you get closer to something human, but it is not a human, it is frightening,” Professor Kuffner said. “I have this theory that it goes all the way back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — that you should not play God.”
Professor Kuffner said that despite depictions of malevolent robots in movies like the “Terminator” series, there was nothing to fear. If a robot goes haywire, he said, “we can just take out the batteries.” DYLAN McCLAIN
A computer scientist at the University of Melbourne is leading a new international mission to digitally preserve thousands of the world's endangered languages. Linguists estimate that 90% of the world's 6000 languages will die before this century is out. Most of these languages are not written down and so their cultural heritage, which has developed over many centuries, will disappear forever. Also lost will be their unique knowledge of the environment, including medicinal uses of plants,
Steven Bird has recently joined the university from the University of Pennsylvania, where he led a 15-strong R&D team working on language technologies - computer software which can communicate using natural language. Last month he was back in Philadelphia to launch OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community. OLAC is an international network of 25 digital archives in six countries, currently holding over 30,000 items: dictionaries, grammars, field-notes, text collections and recordings. The network is growing rapidly, as more linguists collect and upload their materials. Bird heads up this effort jointly with Dr Gary Simons, Associate Vice President of SIL International, the largest linguistic research organization in the world, active in over 1000 languages
"We live in a unique period in human history," says Bird, "between the onset of the digital era and the mass extinction of the world's languages. It is easy to collect and disseminate vast amounts of linguistic data in the form of audio and video recordings and written documentation. We just have to collect the data once, then it becomes available to all future generations, whether it be scientists, or indigenous people wanting to learn the language of their ancestors. But the window of opportunity is shutting fast."
Unfortunately, digital preservation faces huge obstacles. Most digital media and storage formats are obsolete within five years, and must be continually migrated to current media and formats. A lot of linguistic documentation is stored in Microsoft formats, secret binary formats that cannot be opened (even by Microsoft software) 5-10 years later. "Linguists who follow this practice are just turning endangered languages into endangered data." Nevertheless, Bird is optimistic: "Our new software for creating dictionaries and for transcribing recordings is able to store them with Unicode encodings and with XMLmarkup. These international, open standards will ensure that the zeros and ones in the digital storage can always be decoded. Simply leave these files on the web for a few weeks and they'll be picked up in an internet archive (e.g. www.archive.org) and preserved indefinitely for free. If that's not enough, linguists can contribute data to the Rosetta Project. This OLAC archive has etched 300,000 pages of language documentation for 1500 languages on a nickel disk, a contemporary version of the Rosetta Stone. The size of a CD, the disk can be read using a microscope and has a 2000-year life expectancy, permitting the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures. A copy of the disk has been placed on board the Ariane space mission departing for the comet P/Wirtanen later this month."
Despite these grounds for optimism, more funding is urgently needed. In their recent book entitled Vanishing Voices published by Oxford University Press, Nettle and Romaine observe that: ‘Few people seem to know or care that most of Australia’s 250 languages have already vanished and few are likely to survive over the long term.’ Since 1998, the Australian Research Council has funded just 13 projects on Australian languages. We need a small army of linguists, equipped with digital capture and storage technologies, and able to train indigenous speakers to contribute. We also need funding for digital archives. Today, most archives can't keep up with the pace of new materials arriving on the doorstep. For example, the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive in Canberra has 24,000 hours of recordings which is being digitized at the rate of 100 hours/month. Only 3% of these materials are transcribed, and once speakers of the languages die the materials become uninterpretable.
Australia faces a unique challenge: we are a highly technological nation, with 2,000 languages in our region (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific), languages that are virtually unknown to science. According to data collected by Ethnologue.com, the most comprehensive online database of the world's languages, Australia has more critically endangered languages than all other countries combined:
In other countries, funding is easier to come by. Over the last fifteen years Bird has attracted $17M in research grants from the UK and US governments. Just last year, a British charitable fund has set aside over $50M for a massive language documentation project.
Bird's own fieldwork was conducted in Cameroon, West Africa. Cameroon is a country twice the size of the state of Victoria
with 270 distinct languages. Bird shares with many linguists the excitement of being the first person to investigate an undocumented language. Using specialized hardware and software he created several large electronic databases containing thousands of annotated speech recordings, analyzed the languages, co-authored the first dictionary for one of the languages, and collaborated on the development of 10 new writing systems. One of the languages he left unanalyzed; all the recordings and transcriptions are published on the web, and anyone can try to discover the patterns and unlock the secrets of the language. In relocating to Australia he hopes to work closely with Australian linguists and indigenous scholars on new technologies to support the digital preservation of Australia's linguistic heritage.
Bing Crosbyl
The Country Gir
Mark D. Jordan
The Silence of Sodom
Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism
ISBN: 9780226410418 Published June 2000
The past decade has seen homosexual
scandals in the Catholic Church becoming ever more visible, and the Vatican's
directives on homosexuality becoming ever more forceful, begging the question
Mark Jordan tries to answer here: how can the Catholic Church be at once so
homophobic and so homoerotic? His analysis is a keen and readable study of the
tangled relationship between male homosexuality and modern Catholicism.
New
Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice
'So that's us: processed corn, walking.'
-- Michael Pollan
New
Corn Moon
August moondark kitchen notes
from
Jessica Prentice
29 August
2006
Happy Corn Moon! We have moved
into the lunar cycle known as The Corn Moon in the old Celtic calendar. It is
the time of year when grain is ripening in the fields, readying for harvest.
Throughout much of United States the plant zea
mays is being harvested and Americans
are enjoying plenty of their beloved sweet corn.
I have been able to witness this
abundance of corn in many states as I've been traveling. I've eaten ears of it
raw out in cornfields near Madison, Wisconsin and the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
I've demo'd one of my corn-rich seasonal recipes -- calabacitas --
more times than I can count: at farm festivals, in farmers' markets, in food
coop teaching kitchens, and even on television. And I'm not done yet! I'm
squeezing the most I possibly can out of this corn season. . .
Many people across America are
looking at corn a bit more critically this year than they have before -- thanks
to Michael Pollan turning his probing journalistic eye onto the plant in his
popular new book,The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Of course it's not the plant itself that he is critical of, it is our
relationship to it in our modern society. It is a story that badly needed to be
told.
I have to admit that in the first
few months after the release of The Omnivore's Dilemma,
I developed a mild case of adolescent resentment against the book. Our books
came out within a few weeks of each other's, and his was instantly on the New York Times Bestseller List.
What this meant was that -- as my publisher put it -- Pollan's book
"sucked up all the oxygen" around food issues for a number of months.
His was the book that everyone who was interested in food and sustainability
was reading; excerpts from it were the cover stories in all the alternative
magazines; and he was the person everyone in the media wanted to interview
about food.
In the long run this explosion of
interest is a really great thing -- for all of us who care about transforming
the food system and even for the rest of us writers who have something
important to say about it. The American consciousness is being raised once
again about the many failures of our current approach to feeding ourselves. And
hopefully, people will want to continue to educate themselves about how they
can make choices that will support the transformation that needs to happen, and
will pick up one of the many other wonderful books that are out there on the
subject -- including mine!
But for the past few months of
traveling around promoting MY book, I have to admit that there were times when if one
more person asked me -- as I was trying to get them excited about Full Moon Feast --
whether I had heard of a book called, perhaps "the carnivore's
dilemma" or "the omnivore's delight" or a writer named -- maybe
-- "Michael Pollard," I thought I would scream. The scream would go
something like this: YES OF COURSE I HAVE -- I'VE HEARD ABOUT NOTHING ELSE FOR
MONTHS!!!!! CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT MY BOOK FOR JUST ONE TEENY TINY MINUTE?
But most of that resentment melted
away as I began to actually readPollan's book. It is a
wonderful and important work of journalism that gets down to the nitty-gritty
of the food issues that we're struggling with in this society. Except for the
issue of traditional fats, I agree with Pollan on just about everything. And I
have learned a great deal that is new to me, and gained fresh insights into
many aspects of the food system that I thought I knew well, including corn.
Pollan shines a sharp spotlight on a food system that masquerades as a diverse
horn of plenty, and reveals an insidious monoculture instead.
It is a monoculture of corn.
Corn seems such a sweet, innocent
and appealing symbol of American agrarian life. Steaming hot, dripping with
butter, corn on the cob promises pleasure, and something beyond pleasure too --
a sense of well-being and right-relation, a connectedness to the earth and the
season and the history of this continent and its peoples.
How strange that something so
redolent of everything I do believe in should also reek of everything that
drives me crazy about the state of food in America. How ironic that this most
promiscuous of plants, which cross pollinates readily and easily to produce an
endless array of variations in color and sweetness and starch should be reduced
to a few bioengineered hybrids planted in monocultural fields.
Pollan points out that the
government-subsidized glut of conventional corn has made its way into nearly
every processed food we eat in America. It is the basis for sodas, cereals, and
even for the milk, eggs, and meat products we eat -- which come from animals
fed a diet made up largely of the excess cheap corn we grow in the Midwest.
Pollan discusses isotope tests done on Americans to see what plants are at the
bottom of the food chain we consume. The tests look at the proportion of
carbons in our flesh, and carbon 13 (C-13) is an indicator of a preponderance
of corn. Pollan points out that the people of Mexico have long identified
themselves with corn:
Descendents of the Maya living
in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves as "the corn people."
The phrase is not intended as metaphor. Rather, it's meant to acknowledge their
abiding dependence on this miraculous grass, the staple of their diet for
almost nine thousand years. Forty percent of the calories a Mexican eats in a
day comes directly from corn, most of it in the form of tortillas. So when a
Mexican says "I am maize" or "corn walking," it is simply a
statement of fact: The very substance of the Mexican's body is to a
considerable extent a manifestation of this plant.
Very interestingly, the isotope
tests tell a different story:
One would expect to find a
comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 in the flesh of people whose staple
food of choice is corn -- Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more
wheat than corn -- 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to
11 pounds of corn flour. . . But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and
researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of North
Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in
the North who are the true people of corn. "When you look at the isotope
ratios," Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of
research, told me, "we North Americans look like corn chips with
legs." Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon
diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded
feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege): much of their protein comes from
legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn,
walking.
Ever since reading that, I can't
seem to get the phrase out of my head: "processed corn, walking."
I don't necessarily believe that
human beings need to eat a varied diet, despite the fact that this is virtually
a sacrosanct concept in nutritional circles. A look at healthy traditional
diets will show that the diet was often limited to a few staple foods --
especially in Northern climes that supported a smaller array of plants and
animals. Many pastoralist peoples consumed half of their daily calories or more
in the form of dairy products alone.
But when you look at the plants
that were at the bottom of the food chain in these limited traditional diets
(which is what you do in an isotope test) you begin to see how nature's
biodiversity is at the base of even a very limited traditional diet.
Pasturelands are not a monoculture at all, but an incredible polyculture of
grasses, clovers, weeds, herbs and other plants. Traditionally, hay for winter
animal feed was simply the dried cut form of this same diverse polyculture.
Similarly, the plant life of the oceans that was at the bottom of the food
chain for peoples who depended largely on seafoods for sustenance was also made
up of an amazing array of different species. And hunters who depended on
buffalo or other game were also ultimately drawing their food from an extensive
polyculture of wild plants that wild grazers and browsers feasted on.
So even if traditional diets don't
support the notion that humans need to "eat a variety," I believe
they absolutely do show that our diets should still be built on biodiversity,
and not based to any great extent on any one plant species. How strange that
the American diet, which seems on the surface to be so incredibly varied, is
just hybrid corn dressed up to look like a thousand different foods; and that a
traditional diet such as the Norse one, which looks like milk and meat and then
more milk and meat, would actually be made up of incredible biodiversity at
root.
