Now it is time to reveal the true ignorance of youth. Granted, I doubt that this lack of knowledge is limited to adolescents. Some of the students in my group had trouble identifying all of the countries featured in our global village. They are:
Kenya,
Poland,
Guatemala,
China,
Thailand,
Peru,
and (drum roll please)
the United States!
Needless to say, I was shocked.
I would also like to take a moment to address Mimi's question about grocery prices. I know very little about agricultural policy. However, I imagine that the rise in food prices has to do with government subsidies and fuel costs. Locally grown produce is beneficial because it does not need to be shipped on a plane. Does anyone else know the answer? Feel free to chime in on the comments page.
This post's trivia tidbit is going to take us to distant coffee fields.
Antigone Wanders's Sixth Trivia Tidbit
What color are coffee beans before they are roasted?
And now, the news from the farm:
One of the best parts of the farm is the absence of traditional gender roles. Half of the education volunteers are male, and the majority of the farm hands are female. On Friday I had to suffer for my equality. This weekend we are having a harvest festival. Thousands of visitors are coming to walk through the global village and sample our produce. Another lady farm hand and I had to set up all of the furniture in the global village. We found 6 sandwich boards, 17 tables, and 30 chairs, loaded them onto a pick-up truck, and dropped them off at different sites. My proudest moment came when I had to drive the pick-up truck backwards down a winding, rock-strewn forest path that was as wide as the vehicle.* Moving all of the furniture made me feel very accomplished.
*Thanks is given to my parents for owning homes with ridiculous driveways. At my father's house, I have to back out of a garage and turn 100 degrees so that I can go up a hill with a 35-40 degree incline. As an added challenge, I need to make sure that I do not go over the cliff located across from the garage. At my mom's house, I need to turn around a tree without hitting a second car parked at the back of the driveway, and then back out without hitting the wall or the lines of rocks randomly placed on either side of my path.
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Gap Year Reading List
- Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (Muhammad Yunus)
- Candide (Voltaire)
- Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
- Equus (Peter Shaffer)
- Full Circle: A South American Journey (Luis Sepúlveda) (also known as Patagonia Express)
- Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (J. Maarten Troost)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (JK Rowling)
- Hija de la Fortuna (Isabel Allende)
- Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)
- Life, the Universe and Everything (Douglas Adams)
- Little Pink Slips (Sally Koslow)
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)
- Sexo en Nueva York (Spanish translation of Sex in the City) (Candace Bushnell)
- Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder)
- Symposium (Plato)
- The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
- The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- The Lost Continent (Bill Bryson)
- The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Jeffrey Toobin)
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams)
- The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens)
- The Witches of Eastwick (John Updike)
- Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations One School at a Time (David Oliver Relin and Greg Mortenson)
- Tunnel Vision (Sara Paretsky)
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5 comments:
Grocery prices may be impacted by several factors. The boom in biofuels has increased the demand for crops increasing the prices. Also because many animals are fed cereal crops increase in price of crops subsequently increases milk and meat prices. Additionally as the quality of life in other nations improves, the first thing people who have more money do is improve their diet, which means the global demand increases as countries develop.
Coffee beans come from reddish coffee cherries and the nut it self is tanish i believe before roasting.
Sounds like things are busy there. Hope the Harvest Festival goes well.
Red! P.s. you're such a wonderful writer - keep at it - i'm enjoying your blog tremendously!
No surprise that Haley is excelling at driving in reverse--she's always good at doing things backwards. jk
I have to recuse myself from the coffee bean trivia question--Haley was with us in Mexico when we watched the "Just Coffee" people roast the yellow coffee beans. Or were they red? (psych!)
Rising food prices? True, energy costs can be a significant component, but the recent spikes the WSJ wrote about more likely come from market pressures. In this case, unmet world-wide demand, fueled by both rapid growth in developing countries, and also droughts or other production shortfalls.
U.S. agricultural policy, I think, not directly to blame. Our energy policy contributes indirectly: specifically, our unbalanced focus on ethanol. Because U.S. govt. subsidizes ethanol producers to buy corn for this non-food use, we end up with the perverse situation of corn prices soaring while the price of ethanol drops, due to over-production.
And surprise surprise--who benefits? Big U.S. fuel companies, who can buy ethanol more cheaply and see greater profit margins in selling ethanol-blend gasoline.
(/end conspiracy rant)
The beans are light yellow/green before they're roasted, the cherries are red.
Darn straight you move furniture like a pro!
Love you - sorry this isn't longer but I'm sure we can talk about agricultural policy on THURSDAY NIGHT!
While I support buying local it has been suggested that the effort to distribute food locally is inefficient (think driving the SUV to the farm to buy a few things each week) and more costly than say trucking a trailer of broccoli across the country to a grocery store. But that just means the local food networks need to be improved. The ethanol supports are driving up grain prices considerably but the rising price of fuel is driving up the cost of farm fuel and fertilizer too so until the rise in grain prices the farmers were feeling the squeeze. I think the ethanol policy is unsustainable.
Farm policy has been implicated in contributing to obesity. The foods the US subsidizes are the grains (corn wheat - which indirectly subsidizes a cattle feedlots and poultry and hog operations and high fructose corn syrup) and cotton. We don't subsidize fruits and vegetables directly.
While I support the idea of government being involved with agriculture to solve some of its classic problems, the reality is that our farm programs end up having a lot of bad consequences and overall has been bad for the environment and family farms.
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