More articles :)
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conuly
One on the "obesity hunger paradox
The Obesity-Hunger Paradox
By SAM DOLNICK
WHEN most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk.
Once, maybe.
But a recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.
Call it the Bronx Paradox.
“Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.”
The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan, according to Andrew G. Rundle, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, an antihunger group, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average, 18.5 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Such studies present a different way to look at hunger: not starving, but “food insecure,” as the researchers call it (the Department of Agriculture in 2006 stopped using the word “hunger” in its reports). This might mean simply being unable to afford the basics, unable to get to the grocery or unable to find fresh produce among the pizza shops, doughnut stores and fried-everything restaurants of East Fordham Road.
Precious, the character at the center of the Academy Award-winning movie by the same name, would probably count as food insecure even though she is severely obese (her home, Harlem, ranks 49th on the survey’s list, with 24.1 percent of residents saying they lacked money for food in the previous year). There she is stealing a family-size bucket of fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant. For breakfast.
That it is greasy chicken, and that she vomits it up in a subsequent scene, points to the problem that experts call a key bridge between hunger and obesity: the scarcity of healthful options in low-income neighborhoods and the unlikelihood that poor, food-insecure people like Precious would choose them.
Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. A 2008 study by the city government showed that 9 of the Bronx’s 12 community districts had too few supermarkets, forcing huge swaths of the borough to rely largely on unhealthful, but cheap, food.
“When you’re just trying to get your calorie intake, you’re going to get what fills your belly,” said Mr. Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” “And that may make you heavier even as you’re really struggling to secure enough food.”
For the center’s survey, Gallup asked more than 530,000 people across the nation a single question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”
The unusually large sample size allowed researchers to zero in on trouble spots like the South Bronx.
New York’s 10th Congressional District, which zigzags across Brooklyn and includes neighborhoods like East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant, ranked sixth in the survey, and Newark ranked ninth, both with about 31 percent of residents showing food hardship. (At the state level, the South is the hungriest: Mississippi tops the list at 26 percent, followed by Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, the Carolinas and Oklahoma. New York ranks 27th, with 17.4 percent; New Jersey is 41st, with 15.5 percent; and Connecticut is 47th, with 14.6 percent.)
The survey, conducted over the past two years, showed that food hardship peaked at 19.5 percent nationwide in the fourth quarter of 2008, as the economic crisis gripped the nation. It dropped to 17.9 percent by the summer of 2009, then rose to 18.5 percent.
Though this was the first year that the center did such a survey, it used a question similar to one the Department of Agriculture has been asking for years. The most recent survey by the agency, from 2008, found that 14.6 percent of Americans had low to very low food security.
Bloomberg administration officials see hunger and obesity as linked problems that can be addressed in part by making healthful food more affordable.
“It’s a subtle, complicated link, but they’re very much linked, so the strategic response needs to be linked in various ways,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “We tackle the challenge on three fronts — providing income supports, increasing healthy options and encouraging nutritious behavior.”
To that end, the city offers a Health Bucks program that encourages people to spend their food stamps at farmers’ markets by giving them an extra $2 coupon for every $5 spent there.
The city has also created initiatives to send carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables to poor neighborhoods, and to draw grocery stores carrying fresh fruit and produce to low-income areas by offering them tax credits and other incentives. The city last month announced the first recipients of those incentives: a Foodtown store that burned down last year will be rebuilt and expanded in the Norwood section of the Bronx, and a Western Beef store near the Tremont subway station will be expanded.
But the Bronx’s hunger and obesity problems are not simply related to the lack of fresh food. Experts point to a swirling combination of factors that are tied to, and exacerbated by, poverty.
Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.”
Indeed, the food insecurity study is hardly the first statistical measure in which the Bronx lands on the top — or, in reality, the bottom. The borough’s 14.1 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the state. It is one of the poorest counties in the nation. And it was recently ranked the unhealthiest of New York’s 62 counties.
“If you look at rates of obesity, diabetes, poor access to grocery stores, poverty rates, unemployment and hunger measures, the Bronx lights up on all of those,” said Triada Stampas of the Food Bank for New York City. “They’re all very much interconnected.”
A dispute among (some?) Christians on using the Koran to convert Muslims
A Dispute on Using the Koran as a Path to Jesus
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
January was an ugly month in Malaysia. At least 10 churches were firebombed or vandalized, as was a Sikh temple. Severed boars’ heads — particularly offensive to Muslims, who are not supposed to eat pork — were found on the grounds of two mosques. The cause of this inter-religious strife was a court battle over whether non-Muslims may use the Arabic word “Allah” to refer to God.
The reports from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, described events that we imagine could never happen in the United States, where free speech is supposed to guard against such conflict. But we have fights over religious language, too, even if the violence rarely rises above name-calling.
On Feb. 3, Ergun Caner, president of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., focused attention on a Southern Baptist controversy when he called Jerry Rankin, the president of the denomination’s International Mission Board, a liar. Dr. Caner has since apologized for his language, but he still maintains that the “Camel Method,” a strategy Dr. Rankin endorses for preaching Christianity to Muslims, is deceitful.
Instead of talking about the Jesus of the New Testament, missionaries using the Camel Method point Muslims to the Koran, where in the third chapter, or sura, an infant named Isa — Arabic for Jesus — is born. Missionaries have found that by starting with the Koran’s Jesus story, they can make inroads with Muslims who reject the Bible out of hand. But according to Dr. Caner, whose attack on Dr. Rankin came in a weekly Southern Baptist podcast, the idea that the Koran can contain the seeds of Christian faith is “an absolute, fundamental deception.”
David Garrison, a missionary who edited a book on the Camel Method by Kevin Greeson, the method’s developer, defends the use of the Koran as a path to Jesus. “You aren’t criticizing Muhammad or any other prophets,” Dr. Garrison said, “just raising Jesus up.”
He explained that after reading the sura in which Maryam, or Mary, gives birth to Isa, a missionary might ask a Muslim, “Do you know of any other prophets born of a virgin?”
And, Dr. Garrison continued: “It says in that passage that Isa would be able to cleanse the leper, even raise the dead. At that point in the conversation with Muslims, we say, ‘Isn’t it interesting that Isa had this tremendous power that God gave to him? Even death was under his power.’
“Then you ask the question, ‘Is there any other prophet that had this kind of power?’ And in Islam, there isn’t.”
“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.
While Dr. Rankin, who said he had received Dr. Caner’s apology, would not offer a specific number of souls won to Christ, he said there was anecdotal evidence that the Camel Method was an important innovation in reaching the Muslim world.
“We have just heard amazing reports all over South Asia, India, Pakistan, North Africa, where people have found a receptivity to the Gospel,” he said.
Christians have long known that there is a Jesus in the Koran, but missionaries have only sporadically made use of that story.
Gabriel Said Reynolds, who teaches Islamic theology at the University of Notre Dame, said that Christians in eighth-century Baghdad defended their faith by pointing to passages in the Koran. “But that was never with an eye toward converting Muslims,” Dr. Reynolds said. “Such a thing would have been unthinkable. It was only a way of gaining legitimacy in intellectual conversations.”
In recent years, however, missiologists — scholars of mission work — have begun urging “insider” evangelism and “contextualization”: placing the Gospel in an indigenous context, to reach those from alien cultures.
“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”
The danger, critics of the Camel Method say, is twofold: exploitation of Muslim culture and infidelity to the Christian message. According to Dr. Caner, missionaries who say the Koran can be a “bridge” to Christianity risk obscuring real differences between the two traditions.
For example, the missionary board recommends that in some cases missionaries use “Allah” to refer to God. As Dr. Garrison explains it, “there is only one God, the God who created the heavens and earth,” so talking about the Christian God as “Allah” is not misleading. But Allah is also the specific god of the Koran, who says things the New Testament God would not. And the Isa of the Koran, while based on the Jesus of the New Testament, is quite different.
“You can ask any Muslim,” said Dr. Caner, a Turkish-American from a Muslim family who became a Christian in high school. “ ‘Do you think that the Allah of the Koran had a son?’ The most important sura in the entire Koran, sura 112, the pre-eminent chapter of the Koran, says explicitly, ‘Allah does not beget, nor is he begotten.’ ”
The missionaries’ use of “Allah” to refer to the Christian God thus strikes Dr. Caner as an error both semantic and theological. In Baptist missionary fashion, he contextualizes his argument with a culturally relevant, if antiquated, example: the song “My Sweet Lord,” by George Harrison.
“There’s the word ‘Lord,’ ” Dr. Caner said. “Do you go, ‘Oh look, he’s a worshipper of God?’ ‘Lord’ is an English term, but is he talking about the same Lord” — the ones Christians worship?”
“Of course not,” Dr. Caner said, since at the time Mr. Harrison wrote the song, he was interested in Hare Krishna theology.
“Is it fair to use the George Harrison song and say he’s talking about the same god?” Dr. Caner asked. “My answer is no.”
An article on that massively bad storm this weekend. I count at least six downed trees just between here and the school! (I think that's the final count, at least.)
Rain and Wind Created a Deadly Storm
By RUSS BUETTNER
The scenes of devastation in the New York area were so widespread that some compared what they saw to the worst of natural disasters. Nearly everyone had a storm-related tale, mixing inconvenience and a sense of wonder at forces that effortlessly ripped trees from the ground, roots and all. And there were stories of loss and tragedy.
By the time the worst of the weekend’s storm was over, at least six people were killed, countless vehicles and homes were smashed, scores of roadways were left impassable and more than 500,000 homes had lost power — many of them to face darkness for days to come.
On Sunday, the storm’s lingering effects — and the recovery it required — became clearer.
Utility companies raced to restore electricity and phone service, residents in some New Jersey communities were forced to evacuate because of rising water levels, and some schools announced they would be closed on Monday.
On Long Island, electricity had been interrupted at about 241,000 homes, but officials said service had been restored to about 60 percent of those on Sunday.
Kevin Law, president of the Long Island Power Authority, called the storm among “the top five or six weather events that have impacted Long Island in the last 40 years.”
And amid all of that, some still tried to find humor in the chaos.
When a large tree hit their car on Saturday afternoon, Anthony and Nancy Amoriello of Scarsdale, N.Y., thought that would be the extent of their storm-related damage. But that evening, they heard a loud thud. They ran to the living room of their small Cape Cod house to find a seven-foot tree limb protruding through the ceiling.
“It reminds me of a large elephant trunk,” said Mrs. Amoriello, 71, as she spread a plastic tarp across her furniture. “At least we can laugh about it.”
In Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Robin Joseph’s family found a silver lining to the tree that damaged the roof of their home. A contractor had recently told them that the tree cast so much shade over their roof that there was not enough light to fuel the solar panels they wanted.
“As soon as we realized our children were O.K., my husband said, ‘O.K., now we can get solar panels,’ ” Ms. Joseph said.
In New York City, Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the city parks department, said more than 1,110 trees that line city streets had fallen or split. Twenty-five crews had been dispatched to investigate reports of trees crashing into 117 homes. Private contractors will be added Monday morning on an emergency basis. Uncounted hundreds more trees and limbs fell in city parks, he said.
“It’s quite bad,” Mr. Benepe said, “one of the worst we’ve seen in a long time. It’s been a very active late winter for us.”
In Teaneck, N.J., two men walking home from religious services at a local synagogue were killed Saturday evening by a large oak tree. Neighbors said the two men, Ovadia Mussaffi and Lawrence Krause, both had young children. The tree fell from Mr. Krause’s yard.
Etti Schaap, 54, who lives across the street, said she heard “a very loud thud” just before 7 p.m. on Saturday. She rushed out to find her next-door neighbor uninjured in his car, which had been damaged by the tree. He told her that he had been backing out of his driveway when the tree came down.
“He saw two people next to him, and then he didn’t see them anymore,” she said. “If they had left five seconds before or five seconds later, it wouldn’t have happened.”
On Long Island, Julia Hughes, 73, of Brooklyn, was struck and killed by a tree as she left a family party in Bay Shore. In Westport, Conn., a woman was killed when a tree limb struck her vehicle. A woman walking in Greenwich, Conn., was killed by a falling tree. And in Hartsdale, in Westchester County, Brendan McGrath, 58, died when a fallen tree crushed his car, which then caught fire. His wife, Mary, also 58, escaped serious injury.
There was no storm-related loss of life reported in New York City, but the damage was evident.
In the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a block of East 13th Street remained closed Sunday afternoon, as residents waited for the city to clear a giant silver maple tree that had come down, crushing four cars. Utility lines littered the street.
Rudy and Danielle Gerestan, a married couple in their late 20s, woke up Sunday to find a utility pole suspended in a sling of tangling wires between their car and another on East 13th Street.
“I’m just lucky it didn’t come down on the car,” Mr. Gerestan said.
Along 104th Street in the Hamilton Beach neighborhood of Queens, nine power lines went down late Saturday. The street remained closed, and several blocks had no electricity. The headquarters of the West Hamilton Beach Fire Department, a volunteer force, was being powered by a generator Sunday.
The area, which is surrounded by water, floods frequently; about six blocks were severely flooded on Sunday, with water up to four feet deep, said Lynell Horry, a lieutenant with the West Hamilton Beach Fire Department.
“It’s been the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Firefighter Alex Razumov, who lives nearby in Lindenwood.
Con Edison reported that 167,000 customers in the city and Westchester County lost power at some point during the storm. By Sunday morning, 138,000 still had no power, with 72,000 of those in Westchester, 32,000 on Staten Island, and a total of 34,000 in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
Connecticut Light and Power reported more than 63,000 customers without power as of 9 p.m. Sunday.
In New Jersey, about 148,000 homes had no electricity. Of those, more than 92,000 were in Bergen County. Residents of about a dozen towns in Bergen and northern Hudson Counties were being advised to boil tap water because the power loss had affected water treatment plants.
The area’s highways and commuter train service had been mostly restored to full service by Sunday afternoon, but not before numerous horror stories unfolded — including a New Jersey Transit train that was stuck for more than six hours on Saturday evening.
Senator Charles E. Schumer said cities and states in the region, already stretched thin by record snowfalls, would need federal help for the cleanup. He asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to dispatch damage assessment teams to the area.
In Scarsdale, Stephen Lambert was not happy thinking about spending thousands of dollars to remove the 70-foot pine tree that had fallen on his driveway. Then he got a call from a neighbor, Tony Grimaldi, saying, “We can do this.”
“I said, ‘All right. You’re on,’ ” recalled Mr. Lambert, 52. “Before we knew it, it was like an old-fashioned barn raising.”
An article on the proposal to allow beekeepers to keep bees in the city
Bees in the City? New York May Let the Hives Come Out of Hiding
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Kathleen Boyer suspects the mailman.
She said she could not think of anyone else in her neighborhood who would have complained about the two beehives she kept under a pine tree in her front yard in Flatbush, Brooklyn, leading the city’s health department to fine her $2,000 last fall.
“I was kind of surprised,” said Mrs. Boyer, an art director with a media company. “People see us in our bee suit and they’d bring their kids to watch us and ask us questions.”
New York City is among the few jurisdictions in the country that deem beekeeping illegal, lumping the honeybee together with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes and other animals considered too dangerous or venomous for city life. But the honeybee’s bad rap — and the days of urban beekeepers being outlaws — may soon be over.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s board will take up the issue of amending the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Health department officials said the change was being considered after research showed that the reports of bee stings in the city were minimal and that honeybees did not pose a public health threat.
The officials were also prodded by beekeepers who, in a petition and at a public hearing last month, argued that their hives promoted sustainable agriculture in the city.
A ban, of course, has not deterred many New Yorkers from setting up hives on rooftops and in yards and community gardens, doing it as a hobby, to pollinate their plants or to earn extra income from honey. Although the exact number of beekeepers in the city is unknown, many openly flout the law. They have their own association, hold beekeeping workshops, sell their honey at farmers’ markets and tend to their hives as unapologetically as others might jaywalk, blaming their legal predicament on people’s ignorance of bees.
“People fear that if there’s a beehive on their rooftop, they’ll be stung,” said Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, which was formed two years ago and has 220 members.
“Honeybees are interested in water, pollen and nectar,” he said. “The real danger is the skewed public perception of the danger of honeybees.”
Still, some beekeepers say their renegade status causes headaches.
Sam Elchert, 22, a Columbia University student who is majoring in writing and philosophy, said it took him months to find a suitable home for his hives, which resemble short wood filing cabinets with movable frames inside. His building’s management turned him down, fearing legal problems because of the hives, he said. A community garden in Brooklyn welcomed the hives, but wanted them tucked away in the bushes where they would not get the sunlight they needed.
A friend of Mr. Elchert’s, who owned a brownstone in Manhattan complete with a backyard, declined to house the hives because his father was a lawyer, Mr. Elchert said. So did Columbia, where officials in charge of dining services and some green roofs said no, though they were supportive.
A teacher hosted the bees on her farm in Connecticut for a couple of months while Mr. Elchert kept up his search for a home for his hives. Finally, in June, a community garden in Harlem agreed, and Mr. Elchert goes there every other week to tend to the hives. He said that an article he read last year about beekeeping introduced him to the hobby, which he finds “oddly relaxing,” he said. He said he had also read about declines in the bee population and wanted to do his part to nurture the insects.
“It is a good cause, and there’s some sense of morality, even if we’re not on the right side of the law,” he said.
But Mr. Elchert admits that so far he has found his hobby more “nerve-racking” than relaxing, and inspects the garden only on weekdays to avoid weekend crowds.
“What if somebody, some cop, sees me?” he said. “It’d cost me $2,000. It’d really ruin my day.”
Busted beekeepers, as it turns out, are not exactly common. In 2009, 53 inspections were conducted in response to calls related to the harboring of bees and wasps, health officials said, and 13 resulted in notices of violation and fines of $200 to $2,000. In 2008, 48 inspections were made and 7 citations were issued.
Beekeepers say that beekeeping is a relatively low-maintenance and inexpensive endeavor — Mr. Elchert said he spent $500 on hives, equipment and about 20,000 bees to start.
Recently, 70 people filled a room in Lower Manhattan for an “Urban Beekeeping 101” workshop held by the New York City Beekeepers Association.
The class seemed more concerned about the challenges of keeping hives in tight, tall spaces than with the legality of beekeeping, asking questions like: “How high should the hives be?” (About five stories.) And “How much space is needed around the hives so that the bees can fly out to pollinate?” (At least 10 feet.)
But some students were worried about their liability should someone be stung, a hazard that leads most beekeepers to wear protective gear when they tend their hives.
“I’m not even allowed on the roof of my building,” said Matt Griffin, 33, a cook from Queens who said he would probably wait for the law to change and figure out “a few issues” before setting up his hives.
Katrinka Moore, 56, a poet and book editor in the financial district, said that if the law changed, she would ask neighboring churches to host her bees.
That would mean an end to life on the run for Mrs. Boyer’s two hives. They are now lodged with a friend — Mrs. Boyer would not say where — but she plans to retrieve them once they are legal.
Mrs. Boyer said that she and her husband, Chico, took up beekeeping last year so that they could teach workshops in Haiti, where Mr. Boyer was born.
The earthquake has delayed the couple’s plans, but their hives are thriving with 80,000 bees that have yielded more than 100 pounds of honey.
“We gave it to friends for Christmas,” Mrs. Boyer said. “They love it. Everybody is asking for more.”
Ms. Moore said that after working in advocacy against gas drilling in upstate New York, she looked to beekeeping for some relief.
She said: “You get honey. You’re also pollinating gardens. It’s such a positive, happy thing to do.”
An article about how most people actually suck at telling if somebody is lying
Which might be because they're not so great at understanding what other people are thinking after all.
Oh, and one on "the social hierarchy of preschoolers"
The Obesity-Hunger Paradox
By SAM DOLNICK
WHEN most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk.
Once, maybe.
But a recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.
Call it the Bronx Paradox.
“Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.”
The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan, according to Andrew G. Rundle, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, an antihunger group, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average, 18.5 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Such studies present a different way to look at hunger: not starving, but “food insecure,” as the researchers call it (the Department of Agriculture in 2006 stopped using the word “hunger” in its reports). This might mean simply being unable to afford the basics, unable to get to the grocery or unable to find fresh produce among the pizza shops, doughnut stores and fried-everything restaurants of East Fordham Road.
Precious, the character at the center of the Academy Award-winning movie by the same name, would probably count as food insecure even though she is severely obese (her home, Harlem, ranks 49th on the survey’s list, with 24.1 percent of residents saying they lacked money for food in the previous year). There she is stealing a family-size bucket of fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant. For breakfast.
That it is greasy chicken, and that she vomits it up in a subsequent scene, points to the problem that experts call a key bridge between hunger and obesity: the scarcity of healthful options in low-income neighborhoods and the unlikelihood that poor, food-insecure people like Precious would choose them.
Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. A 2008 study by the city government showed that 9 of the Bronx’s 12 community districts had too few supermarkets, forcing huge swaths of the borough to rely largely on unhealthful, but cheap, food.
“When you’re just trying to get your calorie intake, you’re going to get what fills your belly,” said Mr. Berg, the author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” “And that may make you heavier even as you’re really struggling to secure enough food.”
For the center’s survey, Gallup asked more than 530,000 people across the nation a single question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”
The unusually large sample size allowed researchers to zero in on trouble spots like the South Bronx.
New York’s 10th Congressional District, which zigzags across Brooklyn and includes neighborhoods like East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant, ranked sixth in the survey, and Newark ranked ninth, both with about 31 percent of residents showing food hardship. (At the state level, the South is the hungriest: Mississippi tops the list at 26 percent, followed by Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, the Carolinas and Oklahoma. New York ranks 27th, with 17.4 percent; New Jersey is 41st, with 15.5 percent; and Connecticut is 47th, with 14.6 percent.)
The survey, conducted over the past two years, showed that food hardship peaked at 19.5 percent nationwide in the fourth quarter of 2008, as the economic crisis gripped the nation. It dropped to 17.9 percent by the summer of 2009, then rose to 18.5 percent.
Though this was the first year that the center did such a survey, it used a question similar to one the Department of Agriculture has been asking for years. The most recent survey by the agency, from 2008, found that 14.6 percent of Americans had low to very low food security.
Bloomberg administration officials see hunger and obesity as linked problems that can be addressed in part by making healthful food more affordable.
“It’s a subtle, complicated link, but they’re very much linked, so the strategic response needs to be linked in various ways,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “We tackle the challenge on three fronts — providing income supports, increasing healthy options and encouraging nutritious behavior.”
To that end, the city offers a Health Bucks program that encourages people to spend their food stamps at farmers’ markets by giving them an extra $2 coupon for every $5 spent there.
The city has also created initiatives to send carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables to poor neighborhoods, and to draw grocery stores carrying fresh fruit and produce to low-income areas by offering them tax credits and other incentives. The city last month announced the first recipients of those incentives: a Foodtown store that burned down last year will be rebuilt and expanded in the Norwood section of the Bronx, and a Western Beef store near the Tremont subway station will be expanded.
But the Bronx’s hunger and obesity problems are not simply related to the lack of fresh food. Experts point to a swirling combination of factors that are tied to, and exacerbated by, poverty.
Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.”
Indeed, the food insecurity study is hardly the first statistical measure in which the Bronx lands on the top — or, in reality, the bottom. The borough’s 14.1 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the state. It is one of the poorest counties in the nation. And it was recently ranked the unhealthiest of New York’s 62 counties.
“If you look at rates of obesity, diabetes, poor access to grocery stores, poverty rates, unemployment and hunger measures, the Bronx lights up on all of those,” said Triada Stampas of the Food Bank for New York City. “They’re all very much interconnected.”
A dispute among (some?) Christians on using the Koran to convert Muslims
A Dispute on Using the Koran as a Path to Jesus
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
January was an ugly month in Malaysia. At least 10 churches were firebombed or vandalized, as was a Sikh temple. Severed boars’ heads — particularly offensive to Muslims, who are not supposed to eat pork — were found on the grounds of two mosques. The cause of this inter-religious strife was a court battle over whether non-Muslims may use the Arabic word “Allah” to refer to God.
The reports from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, described events that we imagine could never happen in the United States, where free speech is supposed to guard against such conflict. But we have fights over religious language, too, even if the violence rarely rises above name-calling.
On Feb. 3, Ergun Caner, president of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., focused attention on a Southern Baptist controversy when he called Jerry Rankin, the president of the denomination’s International Mission Board, a liar. Dr. Caner has since apologized for his language, but he still maintains that the “Camel Method,” a strategy Dr. Rankin endorses for preaching Christianity to Muslims, is deceitful.
Instead of talking about the Jesus of the New Testament, missionaries using the Camel Method point Muslims to the Koran, where in the third chapter, or sura, an infant named Isa — Arabic for Jesus — is born. Missionaries have found that by starting with the Koran’s Jesus story, they can make inroads with Muslims who reject the Bible out of hand. But according to Dr. Caner, whose attack on Dr. Rankin came in a weekly Southern Baptist podcast, the idea that the Koran can contain the seeds of Christian faith is “an absolute, fundamental deception.”
David Garrison, a missionary who edited a book on the Camel Method by Kevin Greeson, the method’s developer, defends the use of the Koran as a path to Jesus. “You aren’t criticizing Muhammad or any other prophets,” Dr. Garrison said, “just raising Jesus up.”
He explained that after reading the sura in which Maryam, or Mary, gives birth to Isa, a missionary might ask a Muslim, “Do you know of any other prophets born of a virgin?”
And, Dr. Garrison continued: “It says in that passage that Isa would be able to cleanse the leper, even raise the dead. At that point in the conversation with Muslims, we say, ‘Isn’t it interesting that Isa had this tremendous power that God gave to him? Even death was under his power.’
“Then you ask the question, ‘Is there any other prophet that had this kind of power?’ And in Islam, there isn’t.”
“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.
While Dr. Rankin, who said he had received Dr. Caner’s apology, would not offer a specific number of souls won to Christ, he said there was anecdotal evidence that the Camel Method was an important innovation in reaching the Muslim world.
“We have just heard amazing reports all over South Asia, India, Pakistan, North Africa, where people have found a receptivity to the Gospel,” he said.
Christians have long known that there is a Jesus in the Koran, but missionaries have only sporadically made use of that story.
Gabriel Said Reynolds, who teaches Islamic theology at the University of Notre Dame, said that Christians in eighth-century Baghdad defended their faith by pointing to passages in the Koran. “But that was never with an eye toward converting Muslims,” Dr. Reynolds said. “Such a thing would have been unthinkable. It was only a way of gaining legitimacy in intellectual conversations.”
In recent years, however, missiologists — scholars of mission work — have begun urging “insider” evangelism and “contextualization”: placing the Gospel in an indigenous context, to reach those from alien cultures.
“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”
The danger, critics of the Camel Method say, is twofold: exploitation of Muslim culture and infidelity to the Christian message. According to Dr. Caner, missionaries who say the Koran can be a “bridge” to Christianity risk obscuring real differences between the two traditions.
For example, the missionary board recommends that in some cases missionaries use “Allah” to refer to God. As Dr. Garrison explains it, “there is only one God, the God who created the heavens and earth,” so talking about the Christian God as “Allah” is not misleading. But Allah is also the specific god of the Koran, who says things the New Testament God would not. And the Isa of the Koran, while based on the Jesus of the New Testament, is quite different.
“You can ask any Muslim,” said Dr. Caner, a Turkish-American from a Muslim family who became a Christian in high school. “ ‘Do you think that the Allah of the Koran had a son?’ The most important sura in the entire Koran, sura 112, the pre-eminent chapter of the Koran, says explicitly, ‘Allah does not beget, nor is he begotten.’ ”
The missionaries’ use of “Allah” to refer to the Christian God thus strikes Dr. Caner as an error both semantic and theological. In Baptist missionary fashion, he contextualizes his argument with a culturally relevant, if antiquated, example: the song “My Sweet Lord,” by George Harrison.
“There’s the word ‘Lord,’ ” Dr. Caner said. “Do you go, ‘Oh look, he’s a worshipper of God?’ ‘Lord’ is an English term, but is he talking about the same Lord” — the ones Christians worship?”
“Of course not,” Dr. Caner said, since at the time Mr. Harrison wrote the song, he was interested in Hare Krishna theology.
“Is it fair to use the George Harrison song and say he’s talking about the same god?” Dr. Caner asked. “My answer is no.”
An article on that massively bad storm this weekend. I count at least six downed trees just between here and the school! (I think that's the final count, at least.)
Rain and Wind Created a Deadly Storm
By RUSS BUETTNER
The scenes of devastation in the New York area were so widespread that some compared what they saw to the worst of natural disasters. Nearly everyone had a storm-related tale, mixing inconvenience and a sense of wonder at forces that effortlessly ripped trees from the ground, roots and all. And there were stories of loss and tragedy.
By the time the worst of the weekend’s storm was over, at least six people were killed, countless vehicles and homes were smashed, scores of roadways were left impassable and more than 500,000 homes had lost power — many of them to face darkness for days to come.
On Sunday, the storm’s lingering effects — and the recovery it required — became clearer.
Utility companies raced to restore electricity and phone service, residents in some New Jersey communities were forced to evacuate because of rising water levels, and some schools announced they would be closed on Monday.
On Long Island, electricity had been interrupted at about 241,000 homes, but officials said service had been restored to about 60 percent of those on Sunday.
Kevin Law, president of the Long Island Power Authority, called the storm among “the top five or six weather events that have impacted Long Island in the last 40 years.”
And amid all of that, some still tried to find humor in the chaos.
When a large tree hit their car on Saturday afternoon, Anthony and Nancy Amoriello of Scarsdale, N.Y., thought that would be the extent of their storm-related damage. But that evening, they heard a loud thud. They ran to the living room of their small Cape Cod house to find a seven-foot tree limb protruding through the ceiling.
“It reminds me of a large elephant trunk,” said Mrs. Amoriello, 71, as she spread a plastic tarp across her furniture. “At least we can laugh about it.”
In Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Robin Joseph’s family found a silver lining to the tree that damaged the roof of their home. A contractor had recently told them that the tree cast so much shade over their roof that there was not enough light to fuel the solar panels they wanted.
“As soon as we realized our children were O.K., my husband said, ‘O.K., now we can get solar panels,’ ” Ms. Joseph said.
In New York City, Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the city parks department, said more than 1,110 trees that line city streets had fallen or split. Twenty-five crews had been dispatched to investigate reports of trees crashing into 117 homes. Private contractors will be added Monday morning on an emergency basis. Uncounted hundreds more trees and limbs fell in city parks, he said.
“It’s quite bad,” Mr. Benepe said, “one of the worst we’ve seen in a long time. It’s been a very active late winter for us.”
In Teaneck, N.J., two men walking home from religious services at a local synagogue were killed Saturday evening by a large oak tree. Neighbors said the two men, Ovadia Mussaffi and Lawrence Krause, both had young children. The tree fell from Mr. Krause’s yard.
Etti Schaap, 54, who lives across the street, said she heard “a very loud thud” just before 7 p.m. on Saturday. She rushed out to find her next-door neighbor uninjured in his car, which had been damaged by the tree. He told her that he had been backing out of his driveway when the tree came down.
“He saw two people next to him, and then he didn’t see them anymore,” she said. “If they had left five seconds before or five seconds later, it wouldn’t have happened.”
On Long Island, Julia Hughes, 73, of Brooklyn, was struck and killed by a tree as she left a family party in Bay Shore. In Westport, Conn., a woman was killed when a tree limb struck her vehicle. A woman walking in Greenwich, Conn., was killed by a falling tree. And in Hartsdale, in Westchester County, Brendan McGrath, 58, died when a fallen tree crushed his car, which then caught fire. His wife, Mary, also 58, escaped serious injury.
There was no storm-related loss of life reported in New York City, but the damage was evident.
In the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a block of East 13th Street remained closed Sunday afternoon, as residents waited for the city to clear a giant silver maple tree that had come down, crushing four cars. Utility lines littered the street.
Rudy and Danielle Gerestan, a married couple in their late 20s, woke up Sunday to find a utility pole suspended in a sling of tangling wires between their car and another on East 13th Street.
“I’m just lucky it didn’t come down on the car,” Mr. Gerestan said.
Along 104th Street in the Hamilton Beach neighborhood of Queens, nine power lines went down late Saturday. The street remained closed, and several blocks had no electricity. The headquarters of the West Hamilton Beach Fire Department, a volunteer force, was being powered by a generator Sunday.
The area, which is surrounded by water, floods frequently; about six blocks were severely flooded on Sunday, with water up to four feet deep, said Lynell Horry, a lieutenant with the West Hamilton Beach Fire Department.
“It’s been the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Firefighter Alex Razumov, who lives nearby in Lindenwood.
Con Edison reported that 167,000 customers in the city and Westchester County lost power at some point during the storm. By Sunday morning, 138,000 still had no power, with 72,000 of those in Westchester, 32,000 on Staten Island, and a total of 34,000 in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
Connecticut Light and Power reported more than 63,000 customers without power as of 9 p.m. Sunday.
In New Jersey, about 148,000 homes had no electricity. Of those, more than 92,000 were in Bergen County. Residents of about a dozen towns in Bergen and northern Hudson Counties were being advised to boil tap water because the power loss had affected water treatment plants.
The area’s highways and commuter train service had been mostly restored to full service by Sunday afternoon, but not before numerous horror stories unfolded — including a New Jersey Transit train that was stuck for more than six hours on Saturday evening.
Senator Charles E. Schumer said cities and states in the region, already stretched thin by record snowfalls, would need federal help for the cleanup. He asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to dispatch damage assessment teams to the area.
In Scarsdale, Stephen Lambert was not happy thinking about spending thousands of dollars to remove the 70-foot pine tree that had fallen on his driveway. Then he got a call from a neighbor, Tony Grimaldi, saying, “We can do this.”
“I said, ‘All right. You’re on,’ ” recalled Mr. Lambert, 52. “Before we knew it, it was like an old-fashioned barn raising.”
An article on the proposal to allow beekeepers to keep bees in the city
Bees in the City? New York May Let the Hives Come Out of Hiding
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Kathleen Boyer suspects the mailman.
She said she could not think of anyone else in her neighborhood who would have complained about the two beehives she kept under a pine tree in her front yard in Flatbush, Brooklyn, leading the city’s health department to fine her $2,000 last fall.
“I was kind of surprised,” said Mrs. Boyer, an art director with a media company. “People see us in our bee suit and they’d bring their kids to watch us and ask us questions.”
New York City is among the few jurisdictions in the country that deem beekeeping illegal, lumping the honeybee together with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes and other animals considered too dangerous or venomous for city life. But the honeybee’s bad rap — and the days of urban beekeepers being outlaws — may soon be over.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s board will take up the issue of amending the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Health department officials said the change was being considered after research showed that the reports of bee stings in the city were minimal and that honeybees did not pose a public health threat.
The officials were also prodded by beekeepers who, in a petition and at a public hearing last month, argued that their hives promoted sustainable agriculture in the city.
A ban, of course, has not deterred many New Yorkers from setting up hives on rooftops and in yards and community gardens, doing it as a hobby, to pollinate their plants or to earn extra income from honey. Although the exact number of beekeepers in the city is unknown, many openly flout the law. They have their own association, hold beekeeping workshops, sell their honey at farmers’ markets and tend to their hives as unapologetically as others might jaywalk, blaming their legal predicament on people’s ignorance of bees.
“People fear that if there’s a beehive on their rooftop, they’ll be stung,” said Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, which was formed two years ago and has 220 members.
“Honeybees are interested in water, pollen and nectar,” he said. “The real danger is the skewed public perception of the danger of honeybees.”
Still, some beekeepers say their renegade status causes headaches.
Sam Elchert, 22, a Columbia University student who is majoring in writing and philosophy, said it took him months to find a suitable home for his hives, which resemble short wood filing cabinets with movable frames inside. His building’s management turned him down, fearing legal problems because of the hives, he said. A community garden in Brooklyn welcomed the hives, but wanted them tucked away in the bushes where they would not get the sunlight they needed.
A friend of Mr. Elchert’s, who owned a brownstone in Manhattan complete with a backyard, declined to house the hives because his father was a lawyer, Mr. Elchert said. So did Columbia, where officials in charge of dining services and some green roofs said no, though they were supportive.
A teacher hosted the bees on her farm in Connecticut for a couple of months while Mr. Elchert kept up his search for a home for his hives. Finally, in June, a community garden in Harlem agreed, and Mr. Elchert goes there every other week to tend to the hives. He said that an article he read last year about beekeeping introduced him to the hobby, which he finds “oddly relaxing,” he said. He said he had also read about declines in the bee population and wanted to do his part to nurture the insects.
“It is a good cause, and there’s some sense of morality, even if we’re not on the right side of the law,” he said.
But Mr. Elchert admits that so far he has found his hobby more “nerve-racking” than relaxing, and inspects the garden only on weekdays to avoid weekend crowds.
“What if somebody, some cop, sees me?” he said. “It’d cost me $2,000. It’d really ruin my day.”
Busted beekeepers, as it turns out, are not exactly common. In 2009, 53 inspections were conducted in response to calls related to the harboring of bees and wasps, health officials said, and 13 resulted in notices of violation and fines of $200 to $2,000. In 2008, 48 inspections were made and 7 citations were issued.
Beekeepers say that beekeeping is a relatively low-maintenance and inexpensive endeavor — Mr. Elchert said he spent $500 on hives, equipment and about 20,000 bees to start.
Recently, 70 people filled a room in Lower Manhattan for an “Urban Beekeeping 101” workshop held by the New York City Beekeepers Association.
The class seemed more concerned about the challenges of keeping hives in tight, tall spaces than with the legality of beekeeping, asking questions like: “How high should the hives be?” (About five stories.) And “How much space is needed around the hives so that the bees can fly out to pollinate?” (At least 10 feet.)
But some students were worried about their liability should someone be stung, a hazard that leads most beekeepers to wear protective gear when they tend their hives.
“I’m not even allowed on the roof of my building,” said Matt Griffin, 33, a cook from Queens who said he would probably wait for the law to change and figure out “a few issues” before setting up his hives.
Katrinka Moore, 56, a poet and book editor in the financial district, said that if the law changed, she would ask neighboring churches to host her bees.
That would mean an end to life on the run for Mrs. Boyer’s two hives. They are now lodged with a friend — Mrs. Boyer would not say where — but she plans to retrieve them once they are legal.
Mrs. Boyer said that she and her husband, Chico, took up beekeeping last year so that they could teach workshops in Haiti, where Mr. Boyer was born.
The earthquake has delayed the couple’s plans, but their hives are thriving with 80,000 bees that have yielded more than 100 pounds of honey.
“We gave it to friends for Christmas,” Mrs. Boyer said. “They love it. Everybody is asking for more.”
Ms. Moore said that after working in advocacy against gas drilling in upstate New York, she looked to beekeeping for some relief.
She said: “You get honey. You’re also pollinating gardens. It’s such a positive, happy thing to do.”
An article about how most people actually suck at telling if somebody is lying
Which might be because they're not so great at understanding what other people are thinking after all.
Oh, and one on "the social hierarchy of preschoolers"
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