{"id":167,"date":"2011-10-16T23:29:29","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T06:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/?p=167"},"modified":"2011-10-17T21:34:20","modified_gmt":"2011-10-18T04:34:20","slug":"oxfam%e2%80%99s-grow-week-cultivating-awareness-about-our-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Oxfam\u2019s GROW Week: Cultivating Awareness about Our Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Global<\/a>I\u2019m curious: How many of you are aware that October 16th<\/sup> is World Food Day? I confess that I hadn\u2019t heard of this occasion before I started learning more about the food system and joined Oxfam\u2019s GROW<\/a> campaign, earlier this year. I\u2019ve never even seen World Food Day<\/a> observed on calendars or in daily planners, despite the fact that this annual observance started 30 years ago by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The date, October 16, was selected because it coincides with the FAO\u2019s \u201cbirthday\u201d; the organization was founded on October 16, 1945, in Quebec, Canada.<\/p>\n

World Food Day is intended to raise awareness about the problems with our global food system and get people thinking about how they can become part of the solution to eradicating hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.\u00a0 This year\u2019s World Food Day theme is the volatility of food prices and its effect on economically disadvantaged people. The exact title of the theme, \u201cFood Prices\u2014From Crisis to Stability\u201d, is intended to get us thinking about the factors that contribute to price volatility and the changes we need to make to stabilize food prices. Between last year and this year, nearly 70 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty thanks to sharp and ongoing increases in food prices.\u00a0 Food price spikes are a major threat to food security\u2014at a price tag we, as a global community, simply cannot afford in the short or long run.<\/p>\n

We need to start talking among ourselves and<\/em> to our government representatives about taking action to stabilize food prices. One aspect of Oxfam\u2019s GROW campaign, launched earlier this year, focuses on food prices and notes that the world\u2019s poor are disproportionately affected by increases in food prices.\u00a0 Oxfam\u2019s latest report, Growing a Better Future (<\/em>Robert Bailey, 2011), provides a good overview of both the contributing factors to volatile prices and the kinds of actions needed to stabilize food prices and the report is a good place to start learning about the issues.<\/p>\n

Oxfam\u2019s World Food Day Challenge: Eat Locally and Play Food Jeopardy<\/strong><\/p>\n

As part of its campaign, Oxfam has also launched GROW week, from October 15 to 22, as a means of observing World Food Day and raising awareness of the GROW campaign.\u00a0 In addition to organizing a variety of community based activities connected to World Food Day, Oxfam is encouraging its members and their friends to sign up for the World Food Day Challenge.\u00a0 The challenge is to host a public or private event that includes a meal prepared with local ingredients and a conversation about the food system.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not sure how to go about starting a party-friendly conversation about food, you might want to check out the Grow Campaign\u2019s web site and download some of their tools<\/a>. They have even created a version of the game Jeopardy in which all of the questions are about food. You can download the questions and answers (or is the answers and the right questions?) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve signed up for Oxfam\u2019s food challenge.\u00a0 In my next post, I\u2019ll share the results of the challenge with you. If any of my readers choose to sign up for the challenge, I\u2019d love to hear about your experiences in the comments section. Until then, I encourage you to learn about what causes food price spikes and share the information with the people in your networks.<\/p>\n

\u00a9Susan Chambers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m curious: How many of you are aware that October 16th is World Food Day? I confess that I hadn\u2019t heard of this occasion before I started learning more about the food system and joined Oxfam\u2019s GROW campaign, earlier this year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sdc-sage-editing.com\/sdc-sagewit\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}