Author: kirkwallhellmouth

It’s very comforting to think we’ll be able to solve America’s nutrition crisis by building more grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods and educating low-income families on how to cook healthy, nutritious meals.

But the unfortunate truth is that more grocery stores and nutrition education (while helpful to some people) doesn’t address the larger problem — which is that eating is expensive.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of low-income families is increasing. The report defines low-income working families as “those earning less than twice the federal poverty line.”

In 2011, the low-income threshold for a family of four with two children was $45,622. If you estimate rent at $1000/month, which is quite low for a family of four, that leaves about $33,000 for health care, transportation costs, clothing, and groceries for four people. That’s $687.50 per person per month for every single expense except rent.

Let’s do some more math.

Gala apples are among the cheapest fruit nationally. The USDA lists them at $1.16 a pound at the time I’m writing this article. There are about three apples to a pound, so if you wanted to buy your two kids an apple for each day of the week, you would spend $5.80 just on an afternoon snack for your kids. And let’s keep in mind that apples are relatively low-calorie, which means they aren’t very filling.

Six bucks doesn’t seem like much to someone with a middle class salary, but when you’re working with a weekly budget of under $700 per week for everything you need, including car repairs, gas money, winter clothing for constantly growing children, toilet paper, laundry detergent, electric bills… $5.80 starts to look pretty hefty for a snack that won’t even satisfy.

“I look at this list and can’t help but wonder how she’s supposed to do it. If $11 of apples equals two snacks, but $3 in Ramen will feed her entire family for dinner, how can she possibly pick apples with her limited food stamp budget?” McClay wonders.“And how will she ever afford to fill half of every mealtime plate with fruits and veggies, the amount recommended by the same government that issued her food stamps?”

It’s a good question.

The US government heavily subsidizes some foods, such as corn and soybeans. The result is that processed foods that are heavy in these ingredients end up being cheaper than fresh produce, which is not as heavily subsidized, if it is at all.

There is a serious disconnect between what we should be eating to stay healthy, and what the economic reality is.

Why Judging People for Buying Unhealthy Food Is Classist by 

(via navigatethestream)

So what’s going on with AAW?: an update + masterpost

spookyplantain:

It has been over two months and I have yet to hear back from asexualawarenessweek about the extremely problematic resource they had listed on their site that was basically an Aryan Brotherhood symbol and that was taken down without any word or public apology/statement of accountability (and, as a far lesser priority, the mysterious loss of my position with them as an intern).

I also wanted to say thanks to everyone for spreading this around – this silencing of Black and brown aces needs to end. It is violent. I’ve been sort of everywhere in my write-ups, leaving out links, and often not discussing the original issue which was the blatant anti-Blackness of the material on the site and how pervasive that anti-Blackness is in the entire structure of the ace community, especially ace organizations that represent us to the media and are accessed by vulnerable youth.

Please remember to center that, and center the violence that Black LGBTQ people face as the most targeted of the most targeted LGBTQ group when it comes to hate crime and police brutality.

White supremacy is so prevalent in the LGBTQ and ace communities. This is violence. This affects the safety of Q/TPoC. Our lives matter.

sapphicscience:

i’ve been thinking about all those posts about “we need female heroes who do girly things”/”why is the female hero always such a tomboy” and then the response posts that are like “uhhh actually we don’t really have any really masculine female heroes either” so i was trying to figure it out—what do we have, exactly?

and really what we get is women who eschew “girly” things while still managing to look like society’s ideal woman. they would never touch eyeliner (they’re too busy with Important Things), but their eyeliner is immaculate. they have a huge, varied wardrobe, but wouldn’t be caught dead actually shopping for clothes. and it reminds me of the expectation that women must be effortlessly beautiful. don’t wear makeup or you’ll seem self-absorbed—but god forbid you look like you’re not wearing makeup. it’s interesting to me, that the impossibilities imposed on female characters are the same ones imposed on real women.

If kids can’t socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame themselves. This is the argument advanced in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd. Boyd—full disclosure, a friend of mine—has spent a decade interviewing hundreds of teens about their online lives.

What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.”

It’s true. As a teenager in the early ’80s I could roam pretty widely with my friends, as long as we were back by dark. But over the next three decades, the media began delivering a metronomic diet of horrifying but rare child-abduction stories, and parents shortened the leash on their kids. Politicians warned of incipient waves of youth wilding and superpredators (neither of which emerged). Municipalities crafted anti-loitering laws and curfews to keep young people from congregating alone. New neighborhoods had fewer public spaces. Crime rates plummeted, but moral panic soared. Meanwhile, increased competition to get into college meant well-off parents began heavily scheduling their kids’ after-school lives.

The result, Boyd discovered, is that today’s teens have neither the time nor the freedom to hang out. So their avid migration to social media is a rational response to a crazy situation. They’d rather socialize F2F, so long as it’s unstructured and away from grown-ups. “I don’t care where,” one told Boyd wistfully, “just not home.”

Don’t Blame Social Media if Your Teen Is Unsocial. It’s Your Fault | Wired Opinion | Wired.com (via manyblinkinglights)

tehblackbirdisrunning:

Oh, here is a thing I found out about that everybody in the U.S. who’s a worker should have if you can. The NLRB has a mobile app to help educate the public about worker’s rights.

You may or may not know that Democrats have a majority on the National Labor Relations Board right now. And this majority seems particularly concerned with educating the public about labor law.

You might be asking why labor law would apply to you, since less than 7% of the U.S. population is even in a union anymore and many state governments and the courts seem intent on dismantling the unions we have left.

Guess what? It still does apply to you and may be more important now than ever. You still have the right to organize with your coworkers to challenge and speak out about working conditions (wages, benefits, working conditions, etc.). It can be two of you. It can be ten of you. You have rights. You pretty much always have.

It’s just that most people who’ve never been in a union don’t know much about those rights (myself included, until recently). You don’t have to belong to a union to have these rights.

So if you can, get the app, and check out the NLRB’s website too. They’re trying, y’all.

i appreciate your concern, but at my college we interact a great deal with autism speaks and support it. you shouldn’t focus on what they’re doing wrong, because none of it is terrible, but focus on what they are trying to do for people with all different levels of autism.

amischiefofmice:

gingerautie:

Things you apparently don’t consider terrible:

Posting a video of a mother talking about how she wanted to kill her child while that same child  was in the room listening. 

Supporting the eugenic abortion of autistic people.

Failing to condemn the murders of autistic children.

Supporting the Judge Rotenburg Center, which according the the UN, tortures autistic people.

It is terrible, only 3% of their budget goes towards services, there are no autistic people on their board, they literally support eugenics. They are doing absolutely nothing good. 

This is widely know withing the autistic community and they are pretty universally hated by autistic people. Because they are terrible. They only even bother pretending to care about little white boys.

http://goldenheartedrose.tumblr.com/A$

Read that link. Read it.

And here is the resignation letter of the sole autistic person they had in an important (but still non board) position

http://jerobison.blogspot.ca/2013/11/i-resign-my-roles-at-autism-speaks.html

Here’s a flyer by a major autism advocacy organisation on them

https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Autism_Speaks_Flyer.pdf

OR, if you still don’t give a fuck about what autistic people think or want, (which seems kind of obvious from the content of this ask) here are some links written by non autistic people.

Here’s a post from the CEO of one of the oldest charities in the US for intellectually and developmentally disabled people. 

http://blog.thearc.org/2013/11/16/open-letter-suzanne-wright-co-founder-autism-speaks/

Here’s a post from a major autism parenting magazine

http://www.autismparentingmagazine.com/issue-14-asd-options-living-independently/#.U_-CfPldWMM

And here are some other posts

http://smallbutkindamighty.com/2013/04/02/why-i-dont-support-autism-speaks-which-is-why-i-dont-light-it-up-blue/

http://emmashopebook.com/2013/11/13/whats-wrong-with-autism-speaks/

If you continue to support them now you are in possession of this information, then it is clear that you are not an ally to autistic people, you don’t want to help us, and are probably just doing your charity work for “oh look at me, I’m a good person” points.

If you support autism speaks, you are not supporting autistic people, you are hurting us. And you are doing it knowingly and consciously.

Please spread this, not enough people know.

please dont support autism speaks

Important!!

littleredridingscarf:

Guys the petition to recognize Fibromyalgia as a disability ends this month and it needs 97.5 K signatures still please sign this petition its extremely important. Fibromyalgia is ‘a common syndrome in which a person has long-term, body-wide pain and tenderness in the joints, muscles, tendons, and other soft tissues. Fibromyalgia has also been linked to fatigue, sleep problems, headaches, depression, and anxiety‘