Monthly Archives: December 2006

Unlike wealthy neighborhoods dotted with banks and health food stores, low-income neighborhoods are often filled with pawnshops, check cashing outlets, payday loan outfits, and stores that rent furniture and appliances. Dollar menus draw many low-income folks into fast-food joints, while convenience store shelves are stocked with cheap solutions like soda, chips and sugary snacks. These […]

People are being urged by Scotland’s new chief scientific adviser to embrace genetically modified (GM) food as an answer to poverty, hunger and toxic pollution. Professor Anne Glover, herself a genetic engineer, is urging consumers to ignore labels like “Frankenstein foods” because they are misleading and damaging. The potential benefits of GM crops are “huge”, […]

Food or rent? That is the daily choice faced by about 1.2 million of New York’s 8.2 million people. Faced with that choice, mostly they pay rent and rely on emergency or charity food to survive, poverty activists say. “It’s a struggle,” said 53-year-old Pierre Simmons, who has a part-time job, as he wrapped up […]

Putting an end to homelessness can be done. Not shelter it, feed it or clothe it. End it. An intractable social problem — created by the economy, drug addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, the justice system, lack of health care — can be solved, [Bill Block] says. King County has an estimated 8,000 homeless people, […]

India’s newly declared war on junk food represents a sharp shift in direction for the government, which until recently had been inclined to believe that it made little sense to focus on the problems of overeating when people were still dying of malnutrition. This week, however, [India’s health minister] Ramadoss declared that the Health Ministry […]