appeal from Sierra Leone for food aid

I have noticed the price of my food going up. we often spend £80 on a weekly shop - which feels a bit embarrassing to admit (there are 3 of us - 1 is very small). But then, fruit is about 70p a piece and i spent £2 on a small packet of green beans. I wish I had time to work on an allotment. I wish we all did. we all should have time for that.

Yet I still come across mouldy tomatoes in the back of my fridge. And when I then read that the world is on the brink of a food crisis - or is already in one, I feel blessed, and guilty, and afraid. I am sitting at my desk with coffee and fruit loaf and grapes. I eat as much as I like. I can feed my son well. I can be sure that his growing brain is getting all in needs to do its best, and that his little body is packed full of energy so that he can charge around the kitchen patting his tummy shouting mummy mummy daddy.

Imagine knowing that your child's diet wasn't varied enough to let your child grow to their best, or that there wasn't enough food for them to be able to stay strong and fight off illness. That is very depressing. Those things can't be completely undone when a food crisis has passed.

And I think about how different people are from other animals - especially in our compassion and instinct to help people who are weaker than us. If some people do not care, then why do some of us care? On nature programmes when a population of animal is in trouble because of drout or an increase in predators, they don't intervene. They leave nature to balance itself. What makes us different? I am reminded of Ishmael (book about humans and life and hope and despair and a gorilla). Didn't he say something harsh about this? I can't remember.

anyway. The people of Sierra Leone may slip back into war if, as predicted, 90% can no longer afford a bag of rice. I have signed the petition asking governements to help prevent the food crisis from getting any worse: http://www.avaaz.org/en/world_food_crisis/9.php?cl=83726228

I wish people had more time to fight for these important things. Instead, like me, they have to get on with their work.

oh

Pod cast - No to ID cards

Tech Weekly: A reformed hacker speaks and ID privacy
This is a podcast fromt The Guardian Website. Haven't listened yet. I mean to.

thought

When the alarm went off in my building a few days ago because I came in through the wrong entrance before the cleaner had arrived, I managed to recall immediately the code to turn off the alarm, even though a day before I had sat at my desk trying for a good few minutes to remember it - writing all sorts of numbers down in different orders to see which was right. How did i manage to remember it so well the next day?

Is there some kind of brain thinig that makes certain kind of stress helpful to remembering?

working too hard?

Article in the Ecologist: http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=1196

I think working too hard also happens because we start to feel that we need a lot more money than we actually do. If all my friends earnt a lot, I might want to catch up and have the same life style. But they don't, really, earn that much. A lot of what I spend is unnecessary. If we were less wasteful and only bought what we needed perhaps we could all work less.

Is there some rule of economics that makes this impossible?

Fig Crisis!

This is in The Guardian. Oh No!

The national fig roll crisis: how will we cope?
Martin Wainwright Monday April 21, 2008 The Guardian :

"It's been so exceptionally hot and dry there that the fig harvest is down by half from previous years," says Christine Welberry of the Food and Drink Federation. The wasps are wilting, while in the background the internet buzzes with frustrated roll seekers.

Magical Thinking

Psychology Today Magazine, Mar/Apr 2008, by Matthew Hutson:

'But that doesn't mean we're good at evaluating sources of contagion. Nemeroff found that people draw the germs of their lovers as less scary-looking than those of enemies, and they say those germs would make them less ill. She also found that undergrads base condom usage on how emotionally safe they feel with a partner more than on objective risk factors for catching STDs.'

This is really true. I had to wash a glass that someone i didn't like much had drunk water from, before i refilled it for myself, but if it had been my friend i wouldn't have bothered washing it.

How odd and irrational.

living wild for a year

The comments about one reporter's way of going about living wild for a year and foraging/ eating road kill, are so extreme. Strange how putting pictures up of how to skin a badger is so disgusting to some people. The badger was already dead! This is where being a vegetarian doesn't make so much sense to me - when it means that you waste food on principle.

I do worry, though, that our countryside could not sustain all of us in this way - and we if we all started doing it, it would be a huge problem for our ecosystem.