My economics of natural mothering piece is a good read today! And, putting in a couple months supply of basic survival foods may just be the answer for those hoping to weather the current storm. My cooking tutorials using whole grains are some of the high traffic posts on this blog.
Cheers!
Food prices across the world have risen to their highest levels in a decade on the back of tightening supply conditions coupled with robust demand, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The FAO’s food price index, which measures world food commodity prices, has surged by 32.8 percent in the 12 months through September, coming in at a reading of 130 points, a level not seen since 2011. On a month-over-month basis, the index rose 1.2 percent.
Accounting for the bulk of the rise in the index were higher prices of most cereals and vegetable oils.
The FAO vegetable oil price index was up 60 percent in September from a year earlier, and 1.7 percent higher than in August. The cereal price measure was up 27.3 percent over the year last month, and 2 percent from August.
Dairy and sugar prices also rose in September by an over-the-year 15.2 percent and 53.5 percent, respectively, while the meat price index was up 26.3 percent above its year-earlier level.
While much of the inflation story has been focused on surging energy costs and products affected by the semiconductor chip shortage such as used cars, rising food cost signals are increasingly flashing red.
These are the articles where I found my clips for this video.
Continue reading “Safe for Pregnancy?”I suscribe to Midwifery Today and this Facebook Q and A showed up in my email today!
How do you explain the “pain” of labor to your clients?
I describe the pain as pain. Real pain. Not as “waves” or “extreme menstrual cramps.” Like the kind of pain you may have never felt before. I also describe it as productive pain. Breaking a limb or having a chronic medical condition is a type of suffering. I think it’s important to differentiate between the two. Labor pain will end and there’s a tremendous gift at that end. I think it’s a disservice to downplay the intensity of the pain in labor.
—Kerri Jackson Pelz
I tell them it can be a gentle tightening in their bellies that feels like a sweet hug, it can feel like sharp period cramps, it can feel like a bear hug that takes your breath away, it can create pressure in your pelvis and down your thighs, it can sometimes feel like your uterus is turning itself inside out and pulling itself over your whole body! And at the same time, I share that labor pain is unlike almost any other because the sensations are a sign that all is right, that their beautiful, powerful uterine muscle is doing the work to get the baby out and we will be celebrating and supporting that magnificent work. My mom always told me labor was “pain with a purpose and when it is complete you will have a beautiful baby in your hands.”
—Roseanna Azarow Ebert
Here’s the question I had at the end of your film: governments are kind of like the proverbial man with the hammer. What they have is money and government institutions that do things, and so they try to fix problems that those tools can fix. But how do you create family? How do you create community?
I mean the first step is to stop destroying it, to stop kind of deliberately, both intellectually and through public policy, shredding that social fabric, which is what we’ve done for the last 60 years. If you read critical theory dating back to the 1960s, they deliberately say we want to shred social institutions to create instability, so we can then be in a position where we can achieve the revolution.
So in the intellectual lineage of the critical ideologies is a deliberate attempt to undermine institutions like faith, family, local community, self-reliance, et cetera. So the first step is to stop doing that.
And then I think the bigger picture, the thing I’ve thought about since making the film, hadn’t quite gotten there at that time, is the great federal political project for conservatives should be to gain power and strip these ideologies from the federal government, from federal policy, from federal personnel, from federal training, from federal grant making, absolutely strip it. Remove, kind of ruthlessly and relentlessly strip these ideologies from the structures and functions and policies of the federal government.
And then to the greatest extent that we can, redistribute power, money, and authority to the lowest level possible, sometimes to states. So for example, the $1.1 trillion in means-tested benefit spending: divide it by per capita and then block grant it back to the states with no restrictions and let them kind of experiment and go.
Read the whole interview HERE.
