16713: Mars And Snickers Showing Poor Taste And Poorer Judgment?

 

Here’s an additional reaction to the Women’s Equality Party advertisement spotlighted in previous posts.

 

Did Mars—manufacturer of Snickers—approve and support the concept? Or does the company have grounds for a copyright infringement lawsuit?

 

Then again, Mars and Snickers once staged a patronizing promotion in 2010 to address hunger in America, as the following CBS News report revealed, ridiculed, and ripped…

 

Feeding America One Snickers at a Time: Mars’ Ridiculous Anti-Hunger Promotion

 

By Melanie Warner

 

Snickers is teaming up with celebs like David Arquette and NASCAR driver Kyle Busch to launch an absurdly ill-conceived promotion aimed at helping alleviate hunger in America -- a problem that isn’t ever going to be solved with candy bars.

 

It’s hard to understand why Mars, which owns Snickers and a dozen other candy brands, chose to adopt hunger as its cause when there are so many other worthy and meaningful charitable endeavors that don’t come with boatloads of irony and contradictions. Maybe they just couldn’t resist the punny appeal of the “Bar Hunger” tagline.

 

The problem with a candy company professing to care about something like hunger is that the people in America who are considered “food insecure” these days (the government stopped using “hungry” in 2006) are also the same people who are eating too many Snickers and other ultra-available, non-nutritious snacks. As cheap, quick, calorie-dense food has become more and more ubiquitous, it has fueled a seemingly contradictory phenomenon in which the Americans who suffer the most from hunger are also the fattest.

 

This strange correlation plays out in places like the South Bronx, where people can’t afford and don’t have easy access to the right kind of food. “Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger told the NYT. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.”

 

How people can eat too many calories and also be hungry is still something of a mystery to nutrition researchers, but the prevailing theory is that diets high in junk food deprive people of nutrients, leading their bodies to crave more food in an attempt to get the nutrition it needs.

 

In other words, the last thing someone who’s overweight and food insecure needs is a Snickers bar.

 

The marketing staff at Snickers seems to be oblivious to this. Working with the non-profit group Feeding America, Snickers says it is giving away 3.5 million meals, which means Mars is donating funds to the organization and then translating that into equivalent meals. As part of the promotion, David Arquette will appear in GQ touting Snicker’s efforts and Kyle Busch now rides a SNICKERS ‘Bar Hunger’ race car.

 

Although [Feeding America] is a worthwhile organization that delivers a decent amount of non-junk food to needy families, Snickers’ Facebook page indicates that the promotion is all about selling more Snickers bars:

 

Every time you eat a Snickers, you can help us bar hunger in America. Just enter your wrapper code and we’ll donate a meal to someone in need. It’s the tastiest way to do some good.

 

Snickers marketing has long been about alleviating hunger of the more trivial sort, that grumbling in your stomach between meals. It should stick to that. When it comes the profound, interrelated problems of obesity and hunger, there’s no way Snickers is going to satisfy.

16712: Parody For Poverty…?

 

Here’s a delayed reaction to the Women’s Equality Party advertisement spotlighted in a previous post.

 

The responsible agency—Quiet Storm in the UK—purports to being an inclusive and culturally competent firm, yet can’t help but wonder about the thinking behind the concept.

 

After all, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” To make light of people experiencing poverty and hunger with candy bar references is insensitive at best—and insipid, inane, and inexcusable at least.

16710: Ripping Off Candy Bar Campaign To Fight Hunger And Poverty Is Nuts.

 

Quiet Storm in the UK is responsible for this Women’s Equality Party advertisement parodying the popular candy bar campaign. Sorry, this concept induces snickers and fails to satisfy.

14684: Pitiful Propaganda Preying On The Poor In Ukraine.

This Ukrainian campaign says a lot about the country’s economy—as citizens can apparently be persuaded to take out loans to purchase fancy perfume and designer shoes.

13903: Poor You.

Exclusion can include the exclusive…?

13742: Poor & Prejudiced Perspective.

Campaign published a lengthy article titled, “How to embrace socioeconomic diversity,” which initially sounded like yet another diversion to avoid embracing racial and ethnic diversity. However, it appears the story is advocating for people of color by positioning them as being in a different socioeconomic class; i.e., non-Whites are not affluent like the majority of White people in the field. Why is there a tendency to embrace such biased presumptions, which typically lead to only searching for minority candidates in low-income communities? Oddly enough, the photograph illustrating the article (depicted above) shows three White men representing a socioeconomic range of citizens. However, there are never tactics that involve recruiting White applicants from impoverished neighborhoods. Then again, a poor White man still has a better chance of landing a job in adland than a wealthy person of color—unless the wealthy person of color is a famous recording artist.

12553: Tackling Inequality Via Transit.

From The New York Times…

Targeting Inequality, This Time on Public Transit

By Kirk Johnson

SEATAC, Wash. — On Sunday, the county transit system for the Seattle metropolitan area began hurtling down a road that few cities have traveled before: pricing tickets based on passengers’ income.

The project, which is being closely watched around the nation, gives discounts on public transportation to people whose household income is no more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level — for instance, $47,700 or less for a family of four under the 2014 guidelines. The problem it addresses is that many commuters from places like SeaTac, an outlying suburb, are too poor to live in Seattle, where prices and rents are soaring in a technology-driven boom. If they are pushed out so far that they cannot afford to get to work or give up on doing so, backers of the project said, Seattle’s economy could choke.

“I would characterize this as a safety valve,” said Dow Constantine, the King County executive and chairman of Sound Transit, a transportation agency serving multiple counties in the region. From 1999 to 2012, Mr. Constantine said, 95 percent of the new households in King County have been either rich or poor, earning more than $125,000 a year or less than $33,000, with hardly anything in between.

“It’s people doing really well, and people making espresso for people who are doing really well,” he said.

At 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, buses, trains and passenger ferries in the county began charging only $1.50 per ride — more than 50 percent off peak fares — to riders like Basro Jama, who lives in Tukwila, just south of Seattle.

Ms. Jama, 27, an immigrant from Somalia who is raising two young children by herself, earns less than $25,000 a year after taxes from her full-time job cleaning office buildings in downtown Seattle at night. She enrolled last week in the first wave of sign-ups for the ORCA Lift reduced-fare program, which transit administrators said could reach perhaps 100,000 people. (ORCA, or “one regional card for all,” is King County Metro Transit’s name for its fare card.)

ORCA Lift is run by King County Metro Transit, but the discount will apply to all passenger public transit in the county, including that of other agencies, like Sound Transit.

The program hinges on smart-card technology, an aggressive outreach effort by King County officials to people like Ms. Jama, and a liberal political establishment that believes the region’s economy is unbalanced and vulnerable in its growing divisions of poverty and wealth. Politicians and voters have raised the minimum wage based on that argument, with an increase to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal level, approved by voters in SeaTac in 2013 and by the Seattle City Council in 2014.

The reality of public transportation in America is that almost all of it is heavily subsidized by government, no matter how rich or poor the riders are. And those budgets, not least in Seattle, have been under severe stress. More than 70 percent of the nation’s transit systems cut service, raised fares or both during the recession and its aftermath, according to the American Public Transportation Association, a trade group. King County Metro Transit has raised fares six times since 2008, including an increase of 25 cents that kicks in on Sunday.

But income-based pricing is logistically complicated, which is partly why it has rarely been tried on any large scale, transportation experts said. San Francisco, which many in Seattle see as a kind of big brother to the south — sometimes to be emulated, other times to be scorned — got there first with a fare program called Muni Lifeline, which started in 2005. But after 10 years, Muni Lifeline remains tiny, with fewer than 20,000 card holders in a system that serves about 350,000 people a day.

Smaller, tentative experiments are underway elsewhere. Greene County, Ohio, near Dayton, recently started a program for low-income riders, with social service agencies buying travel vouchers and distributing them to their clients. In other places, like western Pennsylvania, nonprofit groups have jumped in to provide bus service to the poor.

But at least for the moment, all eyes are on Seattle, transportation experts said.

“What Seattle has done is what others might consider,” said Art Guzzetti, vice president for policy at the American Public Transportation Association. “Everyone is watching.”

The distinctions start with scale and ambition: King County has about two and a half times San Francisco’s population, and in aiming for enrollment numbers San Franciscans could only dream of, it is relying on what transit experts say is the most innovative idea of all: tools honed by the Affordable Care Act. A countywide system of more than 40 health clinics, food banks, community colleges and other sites run by nonprofit groups was put together to enroll residents in health insurance, and those partners were re-enlisted in the last few weeks to start registering people for ORCA Lift.

That is how Ms. Jama got her little blue card. She went to a health clinic here in SeaTac on Tuesday morning to have a doctor look at one of her children. While she was there, a worker for a nonprofit called Global to Local — a member of the ORCA Lift team tasked with connecting residents to health and social services from a kiosk in the lobby — asked Ms. Jama if, by chance, she was a transit rider.

Ms. Jama said yes. She also happened to have a recent pay stub in her pocket, verifying her income. Fifteen minutes later, she had the card in her hand.

Though it works like a regular transit pass, the card will remove only $1.50 for a fare. It is good for two years without the need for users to reconfirm their income. County officials said they did not anticipate big wage increases.

“What’s the trick in it?” Ms. Jama asked softly, glancing down at the card and up at Amy Samudre, the program manager at Global to Local who had processed her application.

“No trick,” Ms. Samudre replied with a little shrug.

The discount ORCA Lift provides might sound trivial to some, but for Ms. Jama, it is clearly not. The $10 or more a week that she will save on commuting represents a raise of almost 2.5 percent in her take-home pay. She said she might use the money for a special treat.

“That’s like taking my kids to McDonald’s,” she said. “Two Happy Meals is $9.”

12103: Comcast Vs. Digital Divide.

Comcast seeks to bridge the digital divide with limited-time complimentary service and an amnesty program for low-income families. Amnesty program? Sounds like Comcast is pardoning poor people. Well, the digital divide is really the poverty divide. But a little sensitivity would be nice—which is admittedly asking a lot of a cable company.

10970: Digital Divide Is Poverty Divide.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

UIC prof will present ‘digital divide’ data to FCC WiFi discussion

By Sandra Guy

A University of Illinois-Chicago expert on the “digital divide” will unveil new research to federal regulators Thursday showing federal stimulus money likely helped poor Chicagoans learn to use the Internet but failed to help them afford speedy Internet access in their homes.

Karen Mossberger, a professor and digital divide guru at UIC, will testify on a panel at the Federal Communications Commission’s Broadband Summit in Washington, D.C.

The summit coincides with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal this week for super-strength Wi-Fi networks to be spread nationwide to give people free and speedy wireless access to the Internet. The proposal would require broadcasters and local TV networks to sell a portion of their airwaves to the government for use as the public WiFi networks.

The free networks would resolve the biggest hurdle that poor Chicagoans face in getting fast Internet access in their homes, said Mossberger, who has co-authored a new book, “Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity.”

“For low-income neighborhoods, the cost of Internet access is a major barrier,” she said.

Indeed, Mossberger will unveil her research on nine poor Chicago neighborhoods that received a combined $7 million “Smart Communities” grant to train residents how to use the Internet.

The stimulus grant was intended to teach residents how to use the Internet to look for jobs, create neighborhood news portals and expand a social media meeting place for teens, among other efforts.

From 2008 to 2011, the neighborhoods saw a jump, to 80 percent on average, of the residents using the Internet, including on smartphones and in public places such as libraries. This was an increase of 15 percentage points more than other Chicago neighborhoods during that period.

But no significant increase occurred in the numbers of residents who had fast Internet access at home. The neighborhoods are Humboldt Park, Pilsen, Englewood, West Englewood, Auburn-Gresham, Chicago Lawn, West Lawn, Gage Park and West Elsdon.

The study results by UIC and the University of Iowa will be posted Wednesday on the website of the Partnership for a Connected Illinois, at broadbandillinois.org. The non-profit group paid for the study.

Mossberger also agreed with the FCC plan’s ability to spur innovations.

“Wireless networks could make whole cities function like computers in open air, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Carlo Ratti and Anthony Townsend have argued,” she said. “Networks can be used to control traffic, mass transit, public safety, smart electrical grids and more.”

Opponents of the FCC plan, including wireless telecom companies that profit by selling WiFi access, argue widespread public access might interfere with existing wireless networks and would require expensive upfront investment in fiber and microwave infrastructure.

Yankee Group analyst Rich Karpinski said Tuesday in a report that “a cash-strapped federal government” could ultimately let wireless companies have extra airwaves, too, where the carriers could reap even more revenues from the new services they could sell.

10828: Toy Deserts R Us…?

From The New York Times…

The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle

By Ginia Bellafante

Earlier this year, at the 109th Annual American International Toy Fair, held at the Javits Convention Center as one of the culture’s most convincing cases for childlessness, a former investment banker named Jill Todd displayed “The Tuneables,” an interactive DVD series she had created through her company, the Music Intelligence Project. The daughter of two musicologists, Ms. Todd developed the project in conjunction with her parents as an instructional system in melody, rhythm and tone — the fundamentals of music leveraged as a means to enhance cognitive function. Nearby, but easily obscured by the acres of primary-color plastic, was a booth for a company called Fat Brain Toys, whose games and puzzles in logic and sequencing came with an impressive lineage, some of them designed by the celebrated inventor Ivan Moscovich, a Holocaust survivor.

Walking into one of the three branches of Toys “R” Us now in the Bronx, you would find nothing from either of these ventures. Just as we are unlikely to unearth dilled artisanal long beans from the farms of northern Vermont, we are unlikely to find these sorts of diversions — small-batch toys aimed at the parent for whom it is never too early to begin LSAT drills — in large retail chains. Instead, they are the provenance of independent toy stores that maintain a presence almost exclusively in the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.

In the 1970s, the receipt of a Fisher Price farm set on Christmas Day would have conferred nothing terribly distinctive about class, having come from a department store and having appeared just as probably under the tree of a white-shoe lawyer as it would have under the tree of a brick layer. But toys, like lettuces or chocolate, have long since become another manifestation of difference. (And this is even before we arrive at an absurdity like the $1,499.99 Etch-a-Sketch encased in Swarovski crystals, currently at F. A. O. Schwarz, something that would appear to have been created as an engagement offering for an 8-year-old Trump to give a 6 ½-year-old Kardashian.)

What finds its way off the shelves of the chains is not what disappears from stores like Boomerang in TriBeCa, or Mary Arnold, the 81-year-old toy store on the Upper East Side. At those stores, the best-selling product of recent years has been something called Magna-Tiles, geometrically shaped magnetic tiles that allow children to imaginatively build virtually anything but what, in my experience, often turns out looking like the Crystal Cathedral in Southern California. Last Christmas, a flood near the factory where the tiles are made in Asia caused a shortage and a rise in price, with boxes of tiles, which usually retail for roughly $1 a tile, going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. By Dec. 12 last year, Ezra Ishayik, the owner of Mary Arnold, told me, he’d sold $20,000 worth of tiles and had run out.

Magna-Tiles are not sold at Toys “R” Us. Uninterested in sharing company with licensed products rendered in offensive colors, manufacturers like these resist the taint of the mass market, selling instead in museum gift shops and small, aesthetically palatable shops that draw from a narrow slice of our demographics. At the same time, as Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst at the investment bank Needham & Company explained it, the market for educational toys is never quite as big as we would like it to be. While a company like Toys “R” Us carries educational toys, over time its commitment to promoting them has eroded, he said.

In many parts of the city, though, beyond Manhattan and the various precincts of brownstone Brooklyn, something like Toys “R” Us is really all that exists. As I learned when I phoned recently, Castle Hill Toys and Games in the Bronx, for instance, doesn’t consider itself much of a toy store at all anymore, having transitioned into a focus on bikes and bike repairs when Toys “R” Us came to be common in the borough.

In the way that we have considered food deserts — those parts of the city in which stores seem to stock primarily the food groups Doritos and Pepsi — we might begin to think, in essence, about toy deserts and the implications of a commercial system in which the least-privileged children are choked off from the recreations most explicitly geared toward creativity and achievement.

It was precisely with this notion in mind that Dawn Harris-Martine — a former New York City schoolteacher who sent two daughters to Hunter College Elementary School, and one of them on to Wharton — expanded her Harlem bookstore six years ago to include toys geared in obvious ways toward intellectual development. Called Grandma’s Place, it originated as a literacy center, with Ms. Harris-Martine teaching both parents and children to read. What she realized, she said, was that many parents didn’t know that play served as a major component of early learning. “As a parent, I had never bought a toy in a five-and-dime,” she said.

The obvious counterpoint to these arguments is that there is no clear proof that toys intended to bolster cognitive abilities actually do so. At the very least, though, they signal to a child a parental investment in ambition and accomplishment, in active absorption over passive observation. It would take a very expansive view of the iCarly Truth or Dare Bear to believe it might do the same thing.

10570: The Truly Disadvantaged Today.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Revisiting the ‘truly disadvantaged’ 25 years later

By Clarence Page

Twenty-five years after sociologist William Julius Wilson’s important study on urban decline and vanishing marriageable men, poverty is still with us. And we’re finding lots of new ways to argue about it.

Back then, Ronald Reagan-era conservatives were blaming urban “areas of concentrated poverty,” single parenthood and welfare dependency. Many liberals mounted soapboxes to blame racism as their convenient one-size-fits-all explanation.

Wilson, then a University of Chicago sociologist who since has moved to Harvard, offered an alternative view in “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,” a short book — 176 pages — that stirred hundreds of follow-up studies and changed the national conversation about poverty.

Wilson blamed the decline on post-World War II industrial America and the evaporation of good-paying jobs. Without the resources that enabled two-parent families to sustain themselves, inner cities were left with a new largely dependent “underclass.”

Memorably, the book introduced such new terms as “marriageable men” to describe the shortage of men who were capable economically and otherwise to make good husbands. Even if you agree with social conservatives, as I do, about the importance of two-parent families, efforts to improve the supply of marriageable men have fallen woefully short of demand.

That message echoed at a conference sponsored by the Century Foundation in Washington, D.C., to revisit Wilson’s book on its 25th anniversary. Wilson’s book offered a center-left counterweight to conservative Charles Murray’s provocative1984 book “Losing Ground,” which argued for ending welfare dependency by ending welfare. Murray didn’t get that wish, but his book stirred a national debate that led to the 1996 welfare reform law that President Bill Clinton signed, after vetoing two other harsher bills passed by a Republican Congress.

The good news: Children on welfare dropped to their lowest level in 30 years after welfare reform was passed, helped by the era’s economic boom. The bad news, Wilson said at the Century forum, is that the “underclass” is still with us, although the word has fallen out of political correctness in many circles.

“There is little wrong with our ‘underclass’ that a little time and a lot of jobs would not cure,” I wrote in a column about Wilson’s then-new book. I have since expanded that view. Culture matters, too, I have realized. It doesn’t do any good to offer some people a job if their values don’t lead them to take it. That concerns Wilson, too. At the conference, he and other policy experts explored the importance of “neighborhood effects” that can undermine values and incentives to, for example, pack up and move to where jobs might be more available.

Wilson credited welfare reform and the robust economy of the 1990s with reducing underclass poverty, but noted that poverty has rebounded since 2000. The dip in the 1990s might prove to be only a “blip” in the long-term decline of concentrated poverty communities, he said.

Black prison incarceration also has increased, putting even more of a chill on black incomes, family life and marriageable men.

“Quite frankly I think that (President Barack) Obama’s programs have prevented poverty, including concentrated poverty, from rapidly rising, considering the terrible economy,” Wilson said. He included Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which earmarked $80 billion for low-income Americans. It included such emergency benefits as an extension of unemployment benefits, a temporary increase in the earned income tax credit and additional funds for food stamps. It also offered $4 billion in job-training and workforce enhancement programs and $2 billion for neighborhood stabilization efforts, Wilson noted.

Taken together, Wilson said, Obama’s programs exceed the spending on low-income Americans by any of the six previous presidents. “Now given all of this action during Obama’s first term,” in terms of addressing problems of concentrated poverty, Wilson concluded in his prepared remarks, “which presidential candidate would you take your chances on …?” Which one, indeed.

Neither side has all the answers in our national poverty debate. But we need to at least talk about it, before we make the matter worse.

10455: Feeding Stereotypes…?

It’s swell that Hilton Garden Inn is partnering with Feeding America, but why do all the media tactics feature a Black child?

10427: Patronizing Plan International.

The main character in this Plan International video from Leo Burnett London declares, “I am a girl. I am the most powerful force for change on the planet. With education and support, I can help myself, my family and my community out of poverty.” Yeah, but landing a job at Leo Burnett would be much more difficult to accomplish, girlfriend.

10384: Gambling Leads To Feuding.

From The New York Times…

Lucrative Gambling Pits Tribe Against Tribe

By Norimitsu Onishi

OROVILLE, Calif. — A pitted gravel road snakes through the forest to the Enterprise Rancheria of the Maidu Indians’ sole piece of tribal land about 15 miles east of here in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Broken trailers and a hot tub rejiggered to irrigate a garden sit in a clearing, the few acres of flat land where a handful of people live in houses in disrepair.

With little accessible space on its 40-acre territory, the 800-member tribe used government grants last year to buy a nearby trailer park that is now home to a dozen families. About half live in old trailers that were used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

To pull itself out of poverty, the tribe applied in 2002 to build an off-reservation casino at a spot with more economic potential, near towns and highways about 35 miles south of here. After the federal government gave its approval last year, the final decision now rests with Gov. Jerry Brown, who is expected to decide on the fate of the Enterprise casino and another tribe’s off-reservation proposal by an Aug. 31 deadline.

But plans for the two casinos are drawing fierce opposition and last-minute lobbying in the state capital from an unexpected source: nearby tribes with casinos that they say will be hurt by the newcomers. Leading the fight against Enterprise is the United Auburn Indian Community, whose casino, Thunder Valley, has become one of America’s most profitable and has brought the formerly destitute tribe unimaginable riches.

“It’s really sad right now in Indian country with the divide between the haves and have-nots,” said Cindy Smith, the secretary of Enterprise’s tribal council. “It’s just a struggle to get on equal footing. And even when you’re on equal footing, you’re really not, because we’re almost two decades behind.”

Since Indian gambling was legalized in the United States in 1988, only five tribes have gotten final clearance to build casinos off their reservations. The intense campaign against Enterprise and the other applicant, the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, comes as the gambling market has grown crowded, especially here in California.

Opposing tribes accuse the newcomers of encroaching on areas to which they have no historical ties. “We have other tribes out there doing what we call reservation shopping,” said Brenda Adams, the treasurer of United Auburn. “We played by the rules. We had to stay on our historical lands. They call it equal footing, but is it? We’d like to have a casino in downtown San Francisco, but that’s not our territory.”

The issue has raised larger issues in Indian communities across the nation about the goals of gambling. A decade ago, tribes were united in their efforts to further Indian gambling, which was supposed to give them the means to become self-sufficient, said Steven Light, co-director of the University of North Dakota’s Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming Law and Policy. But he said that talk of “fairness and justice” has given way in an increasingly competitive market.

A short drive from Sacramento — and about 30 miles from Enterprise’s planned site — Thunder Valley has a 2,700-machine casino, a 300-room hotel, an amphitheater and a golf course. Helicopters fly in high rollers from San Francisco. With 80 percent of its revenues coming directly from gambling, Thunder Valley is so profitable that it has transformed the lives of its owners, the 400-member United Auburn tribe, most of whom received welfare benefits until the casino opened in 2003, said Ms. Adams, 40.

The tribal council has provided housing for members, built group homes for troubled children and connected residential areas to water and sewer systems. All members receive free health care and dental benefits. Children making the honor roll receive hundreds of dollars as incentives. Tribal trips were made to France, Italy and Mexico.

The tribe’s 200 adult members each receive a share of the casino’s revenues, a cut that the local news media has reported as $30,000 a month per member but that industry experts estimate is more. Douglas G. Elmets, a spokesman for the tribe and a former White House spokesman during the Reagan administration, said only that members did not need to work for financial reasons, but that many did in tribal affairs.

Another tribe opposing the off-reservation casinos, the 20 members of the Jackson Rancheria of Miwuk Indians, depended on welfare and gathered firewood to make ends meet before gambling, said Rich Hoffman, the casino’s chief executive. Now, the tribe owns real estate in California and Nevada; Goldman Sachs manages the tribe’s portfolio, which is “in the hundreds of millions” of dollars, Mr. Hoffman said.

Still, he was worried that the good times would not last. With the state eager to get a greater share of gambling revenues, Mr. Hoffman said he believed that other forms of non-Indian gambling, particularly online operations, could become legal. “I don’t think the tribes 20 years from now will still have an oligopoly on gaming,” he said.

Another small tribe, the 60-member Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, has used profits from its Cache Creek casino to buy land and diversify into agriculture. The tribe has hired experts to farm 1,300 acres with a dozen crops. Its wine and olive oil, Séka Hills, is sold in San Francisco. Its new multimillion-dollar olive mill, which other olive oil producers in the area have contracted to use, is scheduled to start operating soon.

The tribe, which used to oppose the off-reservation casinos but is now publicly neutral, has felt the need to diversity beyond gambling. “Too many eggs in one basket is probably not a good thing,” said Marshall McKay, the tribal chairman.

Nationally, most tribes, including those with less profitable casinos, remain in poverty, experts say. So opposition, especially from some of the most profitable tribes, rankles the North Fork tribe, one of California’s biggest tribes with 1,900 members. Of the state’s 104 federally recognized tribes, 61 have casinos in what is the nation’s biggest market for Indian gambling.

“They don’t want to see other Indians prosper, I guess,” said Alvin McDonald, 34, one of a handful of people living on the tribe’s 80-acre tract on the edge of the Sierra National Forest about 200 miles southeast of here.

The tribe is waiting for the governor’s decision on its plans to build a casino on a highway about 35 miles away. Its main opponent, the nearby Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, accuses North Fork of being interlopers from the other side of the Sierra Nevada. The two tribes share many links, including intermarriage.

“That’s what makes it more hurtful,” said Elaine Bethel Fink, 65, the chairwoman of North Fork’s tribal council.

Here in Oroville, in the decade that he has fought for a casino, Art Angle, 70, Enterprise’s vice chairman and a retired logger, has lost friends in the opposing tribes — men with whom he had spent a chunk of his life “logging and partying.”

“They don’t look at me in the same way,” he said.

With the final decision only weeks away, Mr. Angle’s worries were turning inward. “I don’t have any money yet,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years. I may become as bad as them.”

9552: Celebrating Misfortune.

Hunger Celebrates The Holidays, Too…? Feeding America® should ask Santa for a new copywriter.

9298: Stepin Feedit…?

Not too sure about this concept from South Korea—although the explanation states, “People had to feel guilty like stepping on the African child’s hand when they step on the pedal to throw food waste away. This idea led to reduction of food waste and interesting of Donation.” Right. At least they didn’t print an image of the African child curled up inside the receptacle.

From Ads of the World

9195: Bar Hunger? No, Barf Hunger.

Sorry, but this Snickers Bar Hunger cause marketing campaign is odd. The print ad headline reads, “For Millions Of Families, ‘What’s For Dinner?’ Has Become, ‘What Should We Give Up To Afford Dinner?’” Um, how about giving up impulse purchases like Snickers?

9136: Eating Healthy Just For Wealthy…?

From USA TODAY…

The high cost of healthy eating out of reach for many

SEATTLE – A healthy diet is expensive and could make it difficult for Americans to meet new U.S. nutritional guidelines, according to a study published Thursday that says the government should do more to help consumers eat healthier.

An update of what used to be known as a food pyramid in 2010 had called on Americans to eat more foods containing potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D and calcium. But if they did that, the journal Health Affairs said, they would add hundreds more dollars to their annual grocery bill.

Inexpensive ways to add these nutrients to a person’s diet include potatoes and beans for potassium and dietary fiber. But the study found introducing more potassium in a diet is likely to add $380 per year to the average consumer’s food costs, said lead researcher Pablo Monsivais, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.

“We know more than ever about the science of nutrition, and yet we have not yet been able to move the needle on healthful eating,” he said. The government should provide help for meeting the nutritional guidelines in an affordable way.

He criticized some of the marketing for a healthy diet — for example, the image of a plate of salmon, leafy greens and maybe some rice pilaf — and said a meal like that is not affordable for many Americans.

Food-assistance programs are helping people make healthier choices by providing coupons to buy fruits and vegetables, Monsivais said, but some also put stumbling blocks in front of the poor.

He mentioned, as an example, a Washington state policy making it difficult to buy potatoes with food assistance coupons for women with children, even though potatoes are one of the least expensive ways to add potassium to a diet.

The study was based on a random telephone survey of about 2,000 adults in King County, Wash., followed by a printed questionnaire that was returned by about 1,300 people. They note what food they ate, which was analyzed for nutrient content and estimated cost.

People who spend the most on food tend to get the closest to meeting the federal guidelines for potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D and calcium, the study found. Those who spend the least have the lowest intakes of the four recommended nutrients and the highest consumption of saturated fat and added sugar.

Hilary Seligman, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said Monsivais’ research is an interesting addition to the debate about healthy eating and food insecurity, her area of expertise.

A lot of people assume the poor eat cheap food because it tastes good, but they would make better choices if they could afford to, said Seligman, who was not involved in the Health Affairs study.

“Almost 15 percent of households in America say they don’t have enough money to eat the way they want to eat,” Seligman said. Recent estimates show 49 million Americans make food decisions based on cost, she added.

“Right now, a huge chunk of America just isn’t able to adhere to these guidelines,” she said.

But Monsivais may have oversimplified the problem, according to another professor who does research in this area. Parke Wilde, associated professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said it’s not expensive to get all the nutrients a body needs to meet the federal guidelines.

What is expensive, in Wilde’s opinion, are the choices Americans while getting those nutrients.

He said diets get more and more expensive depending on how many rules a person applies to himself, such as eating organic or seeking local sources for food or eating vegetables out of season.

“The longer your list gets, the more expensive your list will be,” he said.

Seligman said her list can get longer than Wilde’s, but not everything is a choice. Adding to the cost of buying healthful food could be how far away from home a person needs to travel to get to a grocery store that sells a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The government also affects food prices through the subsidies offered to farmers growing certain crops, she added.

9126: Movin’ On Up, But Not Out.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Rich minorities live in poorer neighborhoods

The most successful blacks and Hispanics are more likely to have poor neighbors than are whites, according to new analysis of Census data.

The average affluent black and Hispanic household — defined in the study as earning more than $75,000 a year — lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average lower-income white household that makes less than $40,000 a year.

“Separate translates to unequal even for the most successful black and Hispanic minorities,” says sociologist John Logan, director of US2010 Project at Brown University, which studies trends in American society.

“Blacks are segregated and even affluent blacks are pretty segregated,” he said.

“African Americans who really succeeded live in neighborhoods where people around them have not succeeded to the same extent.”

The disparities are strongest in large metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest where segregation has always been high. It’s lowest in more recent booming parts of the Sun Belt.

“White middle-class families have the option to live in a community that matches their own credentials,” Logan says. “If you’re African American and want to live with people like you in social class, you have to live in a community where you are in the minority.”

9032: Food Deserts Need Marketing Too.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Food deserts need more than groceries.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that adding a super­market or two in a poor neighborhood that has long gone without doesn’t radically alter the eating habits of folks who live in those communities.

That’s the finding of a new study of several cities, including Chicago. Over 15 years, researchers looked at the impact of greater supermarket availability and found no real difference in the quality of people’s diets or how often they ate fruits and vegetables.

But that doesn’t mean Chicago and other cities should walk away from their food deserts, as we call large and isolated areas that lack a grocery store.

Chicago should instead redouble its efforts to eradicate food deserts — as Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to do — and help make it easier and more economical for Chicagoans to choose healthy food.

Food deserts, it turns out, are killing us. In Chicago, the Mari Gallagher Research & Consulting group found that food desert residents are more likely to die or suffer prematurely from diet-related diseases, most notably diabetes.

But the answer is not simply to plop down a lone grocery store amid a sea of junk-food options.

“It’s simplistic thinking that if you put fruits and vegetables there, they’ll buy it,” said Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the senior author of the new study, published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. “You have to encourage it, you need advertising, you need support. It’s working with supermarkets to market healthy food rather than junk food.”

It’s important to note that other studies have found a positive correlation between access to grocery stores and good health. A 2006 Chicago study by Gallagher, who has long worked on the food desert issue, found obesity goes down as distance to mainstream grocers is reduced. Another study in 2005 found the greatest improvement in the consumption of fruits and vegetables among shoppers who adopted a new supermarket as their main food store.

But everyone knows it’s hard for a single grocery store to compete with a slew of fast-food restaurants, corner stores and gas stations selling junk food.

Not surprisingly, Popkin’s research found a strong correlation between fast-food consumption and fast-food availability for low-income men.

We’re not comfortable limiting the number of fast-food restaurants in poor neighborhoods or overly restricting what people on food stamps can buy. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean the government should dictate what you eat.