Daily Score Blog

By one measure of "food security," the new USDA hunger data released this week puts Oregon right in the middle of the pack. Its rate of food insecurity, is higher than the rest of the Northwest states, but only a little higher than the national average. Yet a closer look at the numbers reveals a more worrisome story.

Oregon's rate of "very low food security" is the second highest in the nation -- only Mississippi does worse -- and is far beyond than anything else in the Northwest. Getting enough to eat is a serious problem for 6.6 percent of Oregon households -- that's roughly 1 in every 15. Here's the official definition of very low food security:

The defining characteristic of very low food security is that, at times during the year, the food intake of household members is reduced and their normal eating patterns are disrupted because the household lacks money and other resources for food.

It's a very troubling figure, though it's consistent with what I remember seeing when I looked at these figures a few years back. (By contrast, the national rate of very low food security is only 4.6 percent -- though it's the highest in the 14 years since we've had consistent measurements. The rest of the Northwest states are clustered below the national average: Montana (4.4), Alaska (4.4), Washington (4.3), and Idaho (3.9).) It's also broadly consistent with Oregon's dire employment situation: the most recent federal figures put the state's unemployment at 11.5 percent, 6th highest in the nation and much higher than anything else in the Northwest.

Let's hope these new figures are enough to put a permanent end to the use of the incredibly grating neologism "funemployment."  

Technical note: the margin of error for some states' hunger rates is fairly high. It's 1.14 for the rate of "very low food security" in Oregon, meaning there's a 90 percent chance that the real rate of hunger in Oregon is between 5.46 and 7.74.

Seattle has a lot of smart solutions focusing on promoting food with a conscience. Whether it’s innovative nonprofits, locally-minded restaurants, or neighborhood farmers’ markets, food is something near and dear to most Seattleites’ hearts. Here are a few of my favorite things:

From Food to Work. I have a not-so-secret crush on FareStart—Seattle’s restaurant-slash-job-placement nonprofit. FareStart offers job training programs for homeless or disadvantaged men and women by offering hands-on food-service training, life-skills training, and job placement assistance—with stylish digs and a delicious menu to boot. Equally cool is their restaurant where lunch is prepared by the program’s students, and a guest chef leads the kitchen every Thursday night. An innovative nonprofit that gives visitors a real taste of its work, FareStart has inspired similar organizations throughout the country.

From Farm to City. Seattle is fortunate to draw food from nearby farms, whether through our abundant farmers’ markets, among them the famous Pike Place Market, or through community-supported agriculture programs and produce delivery and distribution operations. Even eating out, restaurants take pride in crafting their menus around local and seasonal ingredients.

So much for the idea that information is the key to better choices: a recent study on New York City's fast-food labeling law found that providing calorie counts to fast food customers did nothing to improve diets.  From The Oregonian:

The study compared customer orders before and after New York City adopted its pioneering law on posting calories and found a disappointing surprise: People eating at four fast-food chains in poorer neighborhoods of New York where there are high rates of obesity ordered more calories after the labeling law went into effect.

The original journal article reveals an additional tidbit: 

We found that 27.7 percent who saw calorie labeling in New York said the information influenced their choices. However, we did not detect a change in calories purchased after the introduction of calorie labeling.

So over a quarter of the people said that the new calorie labels improved their food choices--yet the researchers found absolutely no evidence to back this up. 

Squirreled away in the new census data is this: the Northwest has more bicycle commuters than farmers. Way more.

Check it out:

The chart shows the number of people whose primary occupation is farmer compared with the number of people whose primary mode of commuting is by bicycle.

Needless to say, this snapshot doesn't include the heap of people who work in the agriculture industry more generally but who aren't actually farmers. (And it doesn't count farm laborers, in particular.) There are not nearly as many folks who work in the bicycle industry.

Yet I think there's some symbolic value to my little comparison. For whatever reason, farmers occupy a quasi-mythic space in our consciousness in a way that cyclists obviously don't. And I wonder if a clearer understanding of how widespread and popular bicycling is might help change the persistently anti-bicycling policies that plague communities across the Northwest and across North America.   

Chuck Wolfe over at Crosscut posted a really useful rundown of planning ideas for Seattle’s next mayor. Among other things, Wolfe urges Seattle’s next leader to consider bigger and bolder ideas when considering land use. The biggest and boldest idea is scrapping traditional zoning in favor of innovation and flexibility.

Growth can bring advantages with it—walkable neighborhoods, aggregated demand for transit, less impact on the climate and environment. So, some of us might be saying “amen” to many of the ideas Wolfe puts forward, including the idea touted by Dan Bertolet: to create an  Office of Sustainable Urbanism. An OSU could be the place where the big ideas and reality meet.

We’ve talked about it before. Americans are plagued by an obesity epidemic and trying to find smart ways to improve health. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shares the results of The Measures Project, an attempt to review all the recent science on community-based strategies to reduce obesity. The report is an important starting point for establishing land use as a kind of preventative medicine—a way to build healthier communities. This makes a lot more sense than treating people once they are already sick because it also improves quality of life and cuts costs.

Some of the findings are familiar to a study I wrote about before. But one of the key recommendations validates one of Sightline’s very favorite solutions of all time—the idea that mixing up the way communities use their land could be a very important way to improve health outcomes.

The report acknowledges that advocates of compact communities haven’t been able to really link up the science of health with the science of things like economics and land use and how they might work together to prevent illness and disease.

According to two news stories today, the contents of my fridge -- a six-pack, open bottles of wine, dregs from last week's farmers' market and leftover stir-fry -- might help power my house some day.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur has invented a system that makes ethanol out of old beer, wine and other waste kitchen products. My favorite part: the still doubles as a fuel pump for your car!

Also in the Bay Area, a pilot program is using leftovers to make electricity. Food scraps from 2,300 restaurants and grocery stores are collected and pumped into tanks at a local wastewater treatment plant, where microbes do their stuff. The decomposing food releases methane, which is used to make electricity. (A catch: Forks, oysters, and plastic bags are big problems.)

But since I don't eat out that much, I was more interested in the beer-to-energy solution.

I like going to my local farmers’ market. Ours is open on Sunday afternoons and has gotten steadily better with more selection of fruits, vegetables, cheeses and now even meats all from local growers. Seattle and Portland have strong farmer’s market traditions and Seattle has the granddaddy of them all Pike Place Market. All really good, hearty and local options. But can everyone access the bounties available at the local farmer’s market? Not eating well can take a toll on our bodies but sometimes eating well comes at a price too.

When it comes to the health question a recent study makes some very strong connections between zoning, proximity to fresh food and obesity. Basically if you live near a farmers market you are more likely to live in a compact community and enjoy a lower body mass index, a standard measure of obesity:

Cities in Cascadia should be feeling pretty good right now. This month the Natural Resources Defense Council released its ranking of Smarter Cities in the US and our area scored well.

For large cities, this region dominated the top three spots with Seattle at No. 1, San Francisco at No. 2, and Portland at No. 3. Cascadia also did well for medium cities, and for small cities Washington's Bellingham landed the top spot and Mountain View, Calif., located outside of SF was just behind it (see highlights of how NW American cities placed below).

This was much more than a feel-good popularity contest. The folks at NRDC attempted a really thoughtful, detailed analysis for the rankings, sifting through more than 600 cities to find those that are leading the nation in their sustainable ways.

The Oregon Employment Department found 51,402 green jobs in the state in 2008, based on a survey of both public and private employers. The construction industry accounted for 17 percent of the state’s green jobs, and the most common occupations were carpenters, farm workers, truck drivers, hazardous materials workers and landscapers. Overall, green jobs made up 3 percent of Oregon’s total employment, or about the same number of people working in the state’s private hospitals. (A study in Washington found 47,194 green jobs, with farm workers, electricians, construction laborers and carpenters topping the list.)

As in Washington, the greatest number of “green” jobs were actually what we’d traditionally think of as blue-collar, but with a sustainable edge. And many pay well, with at least 64 percent earning more than the state’s median wage.

So what sorts of jobs did industries self-report as "green"? Carpenters working on home weatherization, an herbsman at an organic dairy, truck drivers for compost and biomass companies, asbestos removal workers, a crew leader doing riparian restoration, an auto parts dismantler at a salvage yard, sorter at a recycling plant, people who sell solar panels, retail clerk at an organic nursery, technicians monitoring salmon and firefighters removing hazardous fuels.

This helps explain a question we had: How could Oregon, with its smaller population, have produced even more green jobs than Washington? Is the state really that much better at it?

You can review some of the design contest entries here. For the most part these ideas are at the edge of feasibility, but that’s the point of design competitions: to push the limits of what conventional wisdom says is possible.

The conventional wisdom is that food access issues are greatest in urban wastelands where there are high concentrations of low-income families. This, the argument goes, is because grocery stores and supermarkets abandoned the “inner cities” along with the mass exodus of many white middle-class residents. In their place grew up smaller convenience stores focused on selling beer and cigarettes.  And there is lots of good data that make this case. (A National Housing Institute paper on the topic lays this out quite well and we have written about it here at the Daily Score as well.) But could farm country be a food wasteland too?

A recently released study from the Washington State Budget and Policy Center concludes that rural communities face the biggest barriers to healthy food:

Many rural residents in Washington must travel long distances to grocery stores and therefore have less access to affordable fruits and vegetables. By contrast, people who live in more metropolitan areas or in higher income communities are more likely to have access to stores that offer a greater variety of fruits and vegetables.

There's a move afoot to spread urban farming and its healthful benefits to folks without their own plots for planting.  

Will Allen is gaining national attention for Growing Power, a Milwaukee program that's growing food in the city for 10,000 urbanites (including schools and low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood drop off points); trains want-to-be growers in the ways of intensive farming on small plots; turns organic waste into rich soil; and employs local residents, including some from public-housing projects. 

His inspiring efforts were profiled in a great piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. For Allen, it's about more than helping the environment by supporting organic, local foods. For him, it's also a matter of equality. Low-income city 'hoods tend to have limited access to good grocery stores and are dominated by fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, creating what Allen calls a "food desert."

As Allen told the NYT:

“It’s a form of redlining. We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

In Seattle, a gardening twist on Match.com is expanding the reach of the urban-farming movement.

One in which geothermal energy is heating greenhouses that help produce a pesticide-free application for strawberry patches, almond orchards and mint fields. The same hot water helps brew beer, raise tropical fish, melt snow off downtown sidewalks and sell homes in Klamath Falls' Hot Springs neighborhood. And renewable energy is just one plank of a plan to help right the rural area's economy by focusing on more sustainable business lines.

I don't know what Kool-Aid the region's newsrooms were serving this weekend, because it was one of several stories that reexamined iconic Northwest conflicts -- the timber wars and salmon recovery -- and found pretty constructive solutions.

That's not to suggest there hasn't been plenty of real fight to write about. And I'm no fan of self-serving "good news" stories pitched to make someone look good or mask actual problems. But as a journalist, it's also possible to get so bored with old narratives that you fail to see how the world has moved beyond them in interesting ways.

The Oregonian story isn't exactly a good news story anyway. It's about a place where unemployment hit 15 percent. Sure, there's a little positive spin about the "Sustainable Klamath" brand. But the story manages to offer a real - and surprising - portrait of a community that's thinking about its future and making investments so history doesn't repeat itself.

Check out the rest of the Northwest's top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today's news can be found here.

You can read the scoop at the Stranger, but the gist is that the seven-year street food ban in downtown Seattle has been lifted. And the masses rejoiced!

I hail from Portland, and when I moved to Seattle I was perplexed – where were the city lots packed with street food vendors: tricked out RVs, gutted third-wheels, tin shacks on tires? Where were the 3rd and Starks or the 10th and Alders? Even a small town like Walla Walla has half a dozen taco trucks roaming the streets.

Behold: the answer in all its porcine glory: