Let's Ask Mainstream Companies to Make Healthier Products!

At our favorite intersection of food and politics, the Times published an article today on how charities such as the American Diabetes Association are rethinking what they expect of the food companies that help raise funds and awareness, while selling products work against healthful aims and "core matters of conscience." For instance, in exchange for using charity logos, some companies achieve endorsing high-calorie foods that may be low in sugar, but high in calories; clearly these products may raise monies for the cause and simultaneously undermine efforts to expose the correlative relationship between diabetes and obesity.

As an increasing number of companies use awareness products to support charity fundraising campaigns, we hope that this will result in education for the companies, too. Perhaps we should be emboldened by these developments and raise our expectations for mainstream corporations: We want genuinely healthier foods, sweets, and consumer products that do no harm to consumers, workers, community economies, and the environment!
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Giving: Green, Awareness & Thanks

As I read my favorite blogs this morning, I observed a prevailing desire to emphasize the positive aspects of the holiday. Today most people in the USA will gather and eat, celebrating family and togetherness, with perhaps a nod to the "discovery" of a gracious Grandmother Earth offering plenty, enough for all. If contemporary wisdom holds, tomorrow most USAmericans with means will shop. Whether one regards this day as the beginning of the Winter Season of Lights or more simply as the celebration of the autumnal harvest, the easy slide from one holiday season to another, literally, pivots on giving.

My meditation on the positive side of this holiday nexus notes that the culture of giving seems to be on the rise. Charities, foundations, even businesses returning profits to causes, everyone wants to harness the spirit of giving. As we become increasingly aware of our global interconnectedness, we have myriad opportunities, then, to consider how what we produce and consume, I mean give, impacts other communities, the environment, and our collective psyche. The general feeling that giving is a social good challenges us to recuperate the relationships implied in the act, by truly giving Thanks, and consciously giving gifts that reflect the Native North American principles of harmony and balance.