Activism Across America

Cincinnati eaters, pay attention… and that would include, um… everyone in Cincinnati. Your city, on the border of Ohio and Kentucky, has access to a great diversity of local food, what with the southern hilly fields to the south, and the northern flat fields to the north.

There’s a great source for finding out about foods local to Cincinnati: The Cincinnati Locavore blog.

Local foods are great for the local economy, but they’re good for the national economy as well, because local foods cut down on waste, and leave consumers with more money to spend on stuff they actually need, rather than interstate transportation that doesn’t add any value to food (and actually takes a good deal of quality away, through aging and selection of produce varieties that don’t taste great, but deal with shipping well). Local foods keep our economy more diverse and complex, and thus more resilient to bad times.

Local food networks also support farms that are more likely to reject the industrial agriculture model of big monocultures of a very few varieties of produce or livestock. Local food keeps cultural diversity and biological diversity right along with economic diversification.

So, celebrate, Cincinnati. Eat up, and keep it local!

No, it’s not what you typically might think of when it comes to the phrase anti-family, but it’s the best description I can think of to describe the bill that Tennessee’s US Representative Marsha Blackburn has proposed.

H.R. 381 would force substantial cuts in funding to hospitals, early childhood education, and health care for kids. It would also require cuts to programs like WIC, which supports pregnant mothers by giving them access to the adequate nutrition that their unborn children need.

It’s cruel to attack American families, especially at this time, when many Americans find themselves out of work, through no fault of their own, only because their employers couldn’t stay afloat. If you live in Representative Blackburn’s district in Tennessee, please call her office through her congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask her to rescind this bill. We don’t need Marsha Blackburn to kick American families when they’re down.