Gun-toting youths watch over a street in a Rio de Janeiro slum hit hard by drug trafficking, but walk a bit further and this rough area also boasts the largest urban vegetable garden in Latin America.
This success story is unfolding in a favela called Manguinhos in the north of Rio, and thrives as the rest of the country frets over rampant inflation and worries over Russian fertilizer, a major concern for Brazil's powerful agriculture sector.
[...] These days the garden feeds some 800 families a month with produce that is pesticide free and affordable, two features that do not always go hand in hand.
[...] This particular garden is the size of four football fields and every month it produces 2.5 tons of yuca, carrots, onions, cabbage and other vegetables.
[...] The Rio city government has announced plans to expand a garden in the Parque de Madureira area of the city to make it almost four times the size of Manguinhos. Officials said that would make it the world's largest urban garden.
Community gardens are not new, but could play a more important role amid the proliferation of "urban food deserts."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @09:09PM (8 children)
Definitely don't try to show anyone
“Pro-life” blue states and "high tax" red states data conveniently also not being pushed by them ￣\＿(ツ)＿/￣
If data disinfects, here’s a bucket of bleach:
"Texans are 17% more likely to be murdered than Californians."
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend [cloud.gov]
"Texans are also 34% more likely to be raped and 25% more likely to kill themselves than Californians."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm [cdc.gov]
Californians on average live two years, four months and 24 days longer than Texans.
Compared with families in California, those in Texas earn 13% less and pay 3.8 percentage points more in taxes.
Sadly, the uncritical aping of this erroneous economic narrative reflects not only reporters’ gullibility but also their utility for conservative ideologues and corporate lobbyists, who score political points and regulatory concessions by spreading a spurious story line about California’s decline.
Don’t expect facts to change this. Reporters need a plot twist, and conservatives need California to lose.
And that Hoover report’s assertions? Did California’s economy die last year? Did tech investment decelerate? Did it lose Silicon Valley to Texas?
Far from dying last year, California’s tech industry raised more money than any year on record. In 2021, California created 261,000 more jobs than Texas. California attracted $145 billion more venture capital than Texas. Californians attracted $3,911 per person; Texans, only $364.
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article258940938.html [sacbee.com]
Fort Worth, Texas, has the same population as San Francisco and has 1.5x as many murders. Again, a Republican mayor and Republican governor. Nobody ever writes about those places!
San Francisco has the same population as Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, with a Republican mayor and a Republican governor, has had more than three times as many murders this year as San Francisco
https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1527487403061026818 [twitter.com]
Lower taxes in California than red states like Texas, which make up for no wealth income tax with higher taxes and fees on the poor and double property tax for the middle class:
Income Bracket Texas Tax Rate California Tax Rate
0-20% 13% 10.5%
20-40% 10.9% 9.4%
40-60% 9.7% 8.3%
60-80% 8.6% 9.0%
80-95% 7.4% 9.4%
95-99% 5.4% 9.9%
99-100% 3.1% 12.4%
Sources: https://itep.org/whopays/ [itep.org]
Liberal policies, like California’s, keep blue-state residents living longer
It generated headlines in 2015 when the average life expectancy in the U.S. began to fall after decades of meager or no growth.
But it didn’t have to be that way, a team of researchers suggests in a new, peer-reviewed study Tuesday. And, in fact, states like California, which have implemented a broad slate of liberal policies, have kept pace with their Western European counterparts.
The study, co-authored by researchers at six North American universities, found that if all 50 states had all followed the lead of California and other liberal-leaning states on policies ranging from labor, immigration and civil rights to tobacco, gun control and the environment, it could have added between two and three years to the average American life expectancy.
Simply shifting from the most conservative labor laws to the most liberal ones, Montez said, would by itself increase the life expectancy in a state by a whole year.
If every state implemented the most liberal policies in all 16 areas, researchers said, the average American woman would live 2.8 years longer, while the average American man would add 2.1 years to his life. Whereas, if every state were to move to the most conservative end of the spectrum, it would decrease Americans’ average life expectancies by two years. On the country’s current policy trajectory, researchers estimate the U.S. will add about 0.4 years to its average life expectancy.
Liberal policies on the environment (emissions standards, limits on greenhouse gases, solar tax credit, endangered species laws), labor (high minimum wage, paid leave, no “right to work”), access to health care (expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, legal abortion), tobacco (indoor smoking bans, cigarette taxes), gun control (assault weapons ban, background check and registration requirements) and civil rights (ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay laws, bans on discrimination and the death penalty) all resulted in better health outcomes, according to the study. For example, researchers found positive correlation between California’s car emission standards and its high minimum wage, to name a couple, with its longer lifespan, which at an average of 81.3 years, is among the highest in the country.
“When we’re looking for explanations, we need to be looking back historically, to see what are the roots of these troubles that have just been percolating now for 40 years,” Montez said.
Montez and her team saw the alarming numbers in 2015 and wanted to understand the root cause. What they found dated back to the 1980s, when state policies began to splinter down partisan lines. They examined 135 different policies, spanning over a dozen different fields, enacted by states between 1970 and 2014, and assigned states “liberalism” scores from zero — the most conservative — to one, the most liberal. When they compared it against state mortality data from the same timespan, the correlation was undeniable.
“We can take away from the study that state policies and state politics have damaged U.S. life expectancy since the ’80s,” said Jennifer Karas Montez, a Syracuse University sociologist and the study’s lead author. “Some policies are going in a direction that extend life expectancy. Some are going in a direction that shorten it. But on the whole, that the net result is that it’s damaging U.S. life expectancy.”
U.S. should follow California’s lead to improve its health outcomes, researchers say
Meanwhile, the life expectancy in states like California and Hawaii, which has the highest in the nation at 81.6 years, is on par with countries described by researchers as “world leaders:” Canada, Iceland and Sweden.
From 1970 to 2014, California transformed into the most liberal state in the country by the 135 policy markers studied by the researchers. It’s followed closely by Connecticut, which moved the furthest leftward from where it was 50 years ago, and a cluster of other states in the northeastern U.S., then Oregon and Washington.
In the same time, Oklahoma moved furthest to the right, but Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and a host of other southern states still ranked as more conservative, according to the researchers.
It’s those states that moved in a conservative direction, researchers concluded, that held back the overall life expectancy in the U.S.
West Virginia ranked last in 2017, with an average life expectancy of about 74.6 years, which would put it 93rd in the world, right between Lithuania and Mauritius, and behind Honduras, Morocco, Tunisia and Vietnam. Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina rank only slightly better.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/liberal-policies-like-californias-keep-blue-state-residents-living-longer-study-finds/ [mercurynews.com]
Want to live longer, even if you're poor? Then move to a big city in California.
A low-income resident of San Francisco lives so much longer that it's equivalent to San Francisco curing cancer. All these statistics come from a massive new project on life expectancy and inequality that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
California, for instance, has been a national leader on smoking bans. Harvard's David Cutler, a co-author on the study "It's some combination of formal public policies and the effect that comes when you're around fewer people who have behaviors... high numbers of immigrants help explain the beneficial effects of immigrant-heavy areas with high levels of social support.
As the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized.
Meanwhile, life-saving practices that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries — and in a few states, notably California — have yet to take hold in many American hospitals.
Some of the earliest and most important work has come in California
Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a 21 percent decrease in near deaths from maternal bleeding in the first year.
By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands — a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.
California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital.
Launched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care
It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was "at least some chance to alter the outcome."
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during-childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger [npr.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @10:55PM (7 children)
I've got a good feeling about this one. +5,
Spam^W Aristarchus here we come!(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @11:51PM
Not an aristarchus post. Trust me, I know about these things. Spam mod uncalled for. Illegal, even.
.
aristarchus, the realAristarchus. Accept no substitutes.
.
.
(And, no one picking up on the armed kids in the streets, protecting the favela? Guns, y'all! )
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ironrose on Tuesday May 24 2022, @07:06AM (2 children)
Did the math: with the Spam (-10), and two other negatives, we have 6 positive mods, so we only need 6 more, to break even. Or we could ask the admin to do their fucking job, and stop spam modding anything slightly leftist or aristarchus-like. I, for one, an interested in rational discussion, not the ongoing stream of really stupid Runaway type shit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday May 24 2022, @03:58PM
The Spam doesn't count as -10 for determining score. The moderation score takes into account all negative and all positive mods with a -1 or +1. Spam is only a -1 for the post score. So, currently there's 5 negative mods, including the spam mod (-5) and 7 positive mods (+7) which gives the post a score of +2. Not a score of -15 +7 which would be -8, I.E. -1 as you can't go below -1, just like you can't go above +5 for a post.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday May 27 2022, @02:06PM
The moderation was not by an Administrator. ironrose - I know you do not like me, but that doesn't worry me one little bit. But I can say that, as usual, you are just here to stir up trouble, no matter what username you want to use today.
Well that is the first time in quite a few years for you isn't it?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday May 24 2022, @10:59AM (2 children)
Kinda weird, it's definitely spam but also interesting reading.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday May 24 2022, @02:01PM (1 child)
Spam == Repost after Repost on this site. That is an off-topic thread hi-jack.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday May 24 2022, @02:05PM
Yeah, fair enough. Hadn't seen it before now.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @10:47PM (13 children)
Urban gardens are absurd as a means of producing food. A good rule of thumb is two acres of land per person, more if the person eats a lot of meat. A strict vegan diet can get that down to half an acre per person, but then you need to get your nutrition supplements from somewhere else.
A typical suburban home has about a tenth of an acre of land. A house with a spacious yard might have about a third of an acre.
One acre of land that could barely feed a single person, in an urban area, would typically cost about a quarter of a million dollars, at least in the US. Not counting expenses of actually growing the food, of course, just the land. This is why we don't grow food in cities. Also, the land might not be any good for growing crops. Especially if it's polluted, as urban areas often are.
From the article, which says the garden is the size of four football fields, that works out to be about five acres. So this thing doesn't feed 800 people. It feeds about three people, maybe five if they aren't too picky. What the article means is that 800 people ate a salad there at some point.
The only value of urban gardens is that they give people something to do besides commit crimes. Maybe it would be better to find them decent jobs instead.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @10:58PM (1 child)
Brazilians eat a lot less than lard-ass Americans.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @11:09PM
If they want to get their food from urban gardens, they'll be eating less than the residents of Buchenwald as well.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday May 23 2022, @11:07PM (7 children)
With 7 garden boxes (4'x8'), my wife and i have been able to cut our grocery bill. We eat fresh organic food in the summer and fall and eat frozen/canned organic food all
winter/spring/early summer. It doesn't feed us completely, but it helps a lot money wise.
When i retire, i plan to really get into square foot gardening which will increase our harvest even more.
Total solution? No. At least not yet.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @01:05AM (5 children)
The AC is parroting FarmCo propaganda. Intensive hand cultivation can produce yields far in excess of typical monocrop farming. One year I tried really putting some effort into my veggie garden. Tomatoes, capsicum (bell peppers), eggplants, carrots, silver beet, radishes, and beans all growing in about 4 x 6 m. I estimate it provided more than a quarter of everything I ate for the 3 month harvest season, and a lot of beans and tomatoes that went in the freezer for later.
My dad is really into gardening, he's turned most of his backyard into garden beds. Between fresh, canning, and freezing my parents don't buy vegetables at all. They also have about 6 chickens and eat a lot of eggs. Food shopping is meat and dairy.
If you have the space for them I recommend the chickens. They turn food scraps into eggs for you and excellent fertilizer for the garden.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday May 24 2022, @12:12PM (1 child)
> Food shopping is meat and dairy.
don't forget cereals. huge source of calories. the veg is just sauce.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @04:04PM
They make bread too. Forgot the ingredients for that. Occasionally some pasta and cooking oil too. Not much other cereal, breakfast is an egg on toast.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday May 24 2022, @02:14PM
Friend of mine also put serious effort into his veggie garden. Only a few square feet of hydroponics but it still took him most of a year to smoke his way through it.
Mind you it didn't help his food consumption...
(Score: 2) by number11 on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:18PM
Good point. When I was a kid, my family bought almost no vegetables. My folks were into gardening, the garden was maybe 50x300 feet going by memory, certainly less than 1/2 acre, maybe less than 1/4 acre, with 3-4 people consuming. That's not counting the lawns, which produced dandelion greens (my family's primary cooked green). A lot of stuff got frozen. The garden also produced some of the food for (some years) a small flock of chickens and/or some rabbits, so many of the eggs year-round (eggs are easy to preserve, if you don't wash them first) and a bit of the meat.
2 acres per person is ridiculous, unless you're including large animal production like beef. And the word "garden" doesn't encompass that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:50PM
pythons love chickens. one aet two over night and got stuck. it's like hitting a tire ...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @04:18AM
Yeah, GP is overestimating the area needed by a lot.
I have ~8,000 ft^2 of garden (a little under 750m^2). It produces much of what I eat (used to feed my son, before he moved out, too). If I could afford to water, it would easily produce more than I need. I currently dry farm winter and spring (and early summer, if sufficient rain, but not with the drought we've been in for years now); organic and pesticide free. I skipped dry beans, amaranth, and hard corn this year since I have a surplus from previous years. I'm always giving away produce.
I process food with my pressure canner and freeze veggies for use throughout the year, and many things like squash and some root crops are shelf stable for months without any special care. I have a grain mill to make flour, corn meal, and falafel. And, a hand mill for making nixtamal for tamales and tortillas.
I collect seed and replant. And, all the waste material from the harvest goes back into the soil, so it is healthy soil, and doesn't need the petroleum based fertilizer used to goose dead soil into still growing crops. And, not using pesticide means I have a healthy biome of insect predators and birds mostly keeping the crop pest insects under control. Sometimes a type of plant like broccoli or brussels sprouts is too overrun by insects to use, and those just become sacrificial diversion plants to help protect the rest of the crop.
If you are not using mechanical harvesters, you can grow layers of plants, so e.g., corn amaranth, quinoa, etc., create an over-story above plants like beans, melons and squash.
Broccoli (at least in my climate), loves to be an under-story plant too.
Even with nothing growing above tomatoes, peppers, chard, artichokes and kale, I mix things like onions, garlic, beets,leeks, parsley etc. among these.
The garden is surrounded by fruit trees and grape vines.
I used to have a community garden plot. Our garden was a regular victim of mass theft (not just taking produce, but actually digging up the plants) and vandalism. It destroyed our community garden-- everyone eventually gave up. It is good to see the gardeners in TFA being so successful.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Michael on Tuesday May 24 2022, @12:31AM
They might very well be an absurd means of producing _all_ of the food a person eats, (assuming for the moment that urban planning is an immutable law of nature).
But that isn't what the article is about, and it isn't how most people who grow food small scale use their available resources. Relatively small volumes of additional food can make a large difference to health and finances if they're the right ones.
It makes no sense to try to compete with government subsidised (via fossil fuel and agrichemical industry) staples, but if you live in an area where some types of plant-based fresh foods are disproportionately expensive or unavailable, it makes perfect sense to consider alternative sources.
It doesn't have to replace every calorie, amino acid, vitamin, lipid and mineral. It just has to add whatever they aren't getting enough of.
You can't live on lime juice, but if you're a seventeenth century mariner the impact of that small (by weight, calorie content etc) addition to your diet has immense implications for your health. Similar idea in severely deprived urban areas.
Trying to collapse the intersection of multifarious and complicated systems down to a measure as shallow as acres per person is a waste of time. It's not even a first approximation.
And that's just the direct physical and financial benefits, without trying to think about more subtle and diffuse effects on the local economy, public health, social environment etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @04:10AM
You don't need to replace all the good in this fashion. Just about any fruits or vegetables replacing processed foods is a step in the right direction. Square foot gardening is a good place to start as you don't need much space, and can produce a decent amount of food.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday May 24 2022, @11:14AM
You can work around that by eating the vegans afterwards, that means you get to have your cake - well, meat - and eat it too.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @10:52PM (5 children)
I guess it turns out the big city doesn't need flyover country for anything after all! ^_^
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @11:04PM (4 children)
You've hit the nail on your thumb.
For all the smug self-superiority of the urban professional class that loves to look down their noses at those inferior rednecks in the red states (just look at the first post in this article for evidence), the reality is that without advertising executives and diversity consultants, farmers would be just fine, if not better. But without farmers, the smugfolk would all be dead in a week.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @11:57PM (1 child)
Nope, sorry, for all of written human history it's worked only one way. As a burgher, I eat steak, and you, who performed the labor to get me my steak, get potatoes if you're lucky. Or maybe you can eat hay or cake for all I care.
The Jeffersonian republic is a pipe dream.
There has never been a peasant revolt that has resulted in a Jeffersonian republic. You will always be making my food, and you'd better get used to the idea. At least we live in a society where being a redneck hillbilly is a choice, which makes it all the easier to look down on you and be smug in my urban superiority.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:53PM
you THNIK you're eating steak, mua-hahaha. "Revenge of the jefferson steak", movie at 9
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @11:58PM
> ... farmers would be just fine, if not better.
Family farmers, sure. Agribusiness, not so much. The big ag companies need lots of customers or their business goes to hell in a hurry.
It's a system that has evolved and seems to be limping along fairly well. At least around here (Great Lakes area) the store shelves are pretty well stocked and the food pantries have plenty of donations. Trying to pit rural against city is only a smoke screen, disguising all the corruption that is slowly ruining everything (except of course for the successfully corrupt people).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @12:20AM
I don't understand how you can complain about the "urban professional class" looking down on the "inferior rednecks" when it is the "inferior redneck senators and congressmen" who look down on them even more. Why do you let them raise your taxes (assuming you aren't one of the upper crust 1% rednecks), cut your healthcare, and put you on welfare (farming subsidies)? Plus, they tell you to blame it on the "liberal coastal elites" when the people telling you that are "coastal elites" and trust fund babies themselves?
Y'all need to get your shit straightened out, take that chip off your shoulder, realize who put the chip there to begin with, and start supporting political candidates who will do something for you and not against you. It isn't until you realize that the Ivy League uber rich people living in New York and LA or running for national office actually don't have your needs and interests at heart that your road to recovery can begin.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @05:58PM
Please stop feeding the Niggers. It only grows more Niggers who can't feed themselves and cause problems for non-NOCs. (Niggers of Color).