Or even just knocking out 50 push ups in sets of 5-15 and a few squats before a shower. Then 2-3 mins skipping. That’s not going to make anyone an athlete but it’ll keep most ppl ticking over.
I agree. I think soybeans, like a lot of staples, are simply very profitable. If you can commandeer large acreages (as happens in Brazil for example) you’ll make steady profits on an accumulation of small but reliable markups. Food processors can turn a $50 sack of soybeans into $300 worth of brightly-packaged junk food.
The sad part is that the beans themselves probably are “healthy” or at least neutral, at least in modest amounts. It’s when you turn them into TVP or soy flour that the problems start.
I’ve wondered this too. Their diet is absolutely dreadful, and it’s reinforced by amoral advertising and government “advice”. The problems there are complex, but the horrific diet must have some effect on their cognitive function or on childhood development. There’s some evidence from British schools suggesting that kids from low-income familes who are weaned off junk food and fed proper meals instead show behavioural and academic improvements.
It is the sugar. There are several studies showing the link between sugary diets and violence. But you can also argue that low income families follow high sugar diets -cheap way to fill bellies, more available. Low income plus low access to health plus low education = highway to prision/violence/disease.
Me being a bit of a conspiracy theorist, I think it’s a bit more sinister than just ‘poverty’. Junk food - crackers, cakes, chips, coke etc - are actually very expensive, or at least more so than the alternative. A packet of cookies or crisps is 10 pesos. Coke is 30pesos a litre. A bunch of sweet potato tops or moringa leaves is free, as long as you can be bothered to stick a bit of sweet potato or a moringa seed in the ground. Water is 2pesos a litre. People buy these things simply because - as you said earlier - they’re modern and cool. The problem is that governments, instead of condemning the yankee imperialists who control the entire food market in the Philippines and no doubt elsewhere, kowtow to the almighty dollar (if not its originator), refuse to tell people about the dangers of junk food (or possibly don’t know about them), and actually promote agricultural products that perpetuate poverty and malnutrition.
My least-favorite product in the world - as you might have gathered - is rice (or polished rice specifically). It’s fucking awful stuff. It’s devoid of any nutrition and takes up land and water that could be used by far more productive (and less demanding) crops. You can grow 30 tonnes of pretty much anything on an hectare of land presently dedicated to 5 tonnes of rice. Yes, the 5 tonnes of rice has about the same number of calories as the 30 tonnes of corn or breadfruit or pumpkins, but it’s really, really bad for you if you’re eating nothing else. The worst part about rice cultivation is that it destroys the soil, and is incredibly labour-intensive. It therefore guarantees that poor people stay poor, and are exploited by middlemen who have the machinery, the trucks, and the contacts. And I’m pretty certain that’s deliberate.
On that conspiracy, add the cultural disdain for agriculture and farmers and everything related, while big companies manage and own the land available to plant crops -owned by government officials, of course- and funnel the channels of trade and commerce so that the independent farmers can only sell through them on their terms -they set the commodities prices. Same old, same old.
People in favelas/slums have no land to cultivate or the land is not suitable. factory workers in dormitories have no place to plant healthy stuff. Nor does the up and coming family crammed in a multistory building. Living in the cities has deprived people from their link to the land. In the cities, the ones with plots of land do not plant food, they plant gardens and water consuming grass. The people in small villages may have a better diet for being separated from the processed stuff, but then they have less variety, as markets are stagnant. Actually, they are the most in danger of malnutrition from poverty and vulnerable to natural disaster -typhoons in Filipinas, droughts in Guatemala. And in most developing countries, more than half the people live in the cities. Land ownership in those countries is 1% of the people control 90% or more of the land.
And that is how you get say, Venezuela.
Exactly. Exercise makes you feel good, not bad. For motivation I boil it down to this undeniable truth: putting on my running shoes = feeling good. I don’t worry about times or distances or anything like that. The important thing for me is to decide to put on my shoes. After that there is nothing difficult about the actual run. If I’m full of energy, I run faster; if not, I take it easy. There is no such thing as a bad run, since every run makes me feel good. And I leave my running shoes where I will see them every day as a reminder of running and feeling good. But motivating myself is only really a struggle in the very beginning, if I’m coming out of a period of no regular exercise (for me that’s usually because of regular drinking 
).
There is no purgatory in exercising, only in not exercising (and especially in drinking and waking up feeling like shit).
Also, I think a lot of people are embarrassed about being out of shape. The first time I ever went for a run I was worried simply about other people seeing how completely unfit I was. I deliberately went to the park after lunch when there would be very few people. That first time I, predictably, ran about 200 meters before a combination of a stitch, bursting lungs and burning calf muscles all forced me to stop. Being at that level made me feel like a very pathetic excuse for an animal, seeing as I was supposed to be in the prime of my life. But I had figured that life is actually harder, being unfit, so I stuck at it, walking until I had recovered and then running again, until I couldn’t anymore, then walking … But here’s the thing: I felt great, after about 15 minutes of this. And after I’d done the 4km or so I’d planned and arrived home, I felt great. Although, yes, there were moments of pain, painful is not the word I would use to describe the experience. Euphoria would be more accurate. And I felt good all the next day too, aside from intensely sore calf muscles. The next time, about 4 days later, I went to exactly the same place and easily ran past the 200 meter mark where I had stopped the first time. And when inevitably I did stop I found I recovered faster and was ready to start running again much sooner. It wasn’t really very long until I could run half of my circuit without stopping, only a modest 2km, sure, nothing at all for a serious runner, but for me a major achievement. When I could run a couple of kilometers I started to actually enjoy having other people around me exercising, and I started running when the sun was setting, when everyone was out in the park. Also, It’s a bit embarrassing to tell people you went for a run when most of the time you were actually walking. Now I’m a decade older and just don’t give a shit so much but still, I think a lot of people fear the embarrassment, like I did, especially if they are self-conscious about their weight to boot.
Anyone have any ideas where this “exercise is horrible” idea comes from? Somebody must be putting this meme around, but I can’t think of any instances of its appearance in media or whatnot. I hated school sports with a passion (never have and never will watch sport on TV), not specifically because of the sport but mostly because it was either too f-ing hot or cold to be outside. Maybe the fat kids get taunted at school while flopping around on the sports field? Seems a bit unlikely though, since the majority of kids are fat these days.
OTOH I did enjoy running (when we later had the chance to choose our sport) and I know what that “high” feels like. Perhaps the people who hate exercise aren’t actually exercising. I see loads of out-of-shape people at the gym who sit there on the machine, do half a rep, and then fiddle with their phone for 20 minutes. Some of them are cranking away at level 1 on the elliptical for hours at a time. There was one girl with a personal trainer (at NT$2000 a session) who kept complaining 好疼好疼 whenever she was told to lift something. Going in with that sort of attitude must be really, really boring, especially since you’re guaranteed to see no results.
I know Latin America is like this, but in the Philippines (and I believe much of Africa also) it’s a bit different: the land is (mostly) owned by the peasants, but many of them are so uneducated they don’t know what they own or how to cultivate it. The net result is that half the country is “missing” - taken out of circulation by people who can’t or won’t do anything useful with it, but are nevertheless guarding it jealously because they have to divide it up between 16 kids when they die. Those who are cultivating their land grow only the crops they are told to grow using methods they’re told to use (by parents, local know-it-alls, or the government). So you see endless fields of rice and more rice on land that’s completely unsuited to it, all horribly polluted by persistent agrichemicals, or huge plantations of rubber, coconut, banana or oil palm. These are all cash crops, sold for a pittance to middlemen, and the cash is then spent on junk food from US-owned multinationals. The upshot is that 50kg of unhulled rice is exchanged for 15kg of packaged, processed trash. The average farmer is in endless debt anyway because he hasn’t figured out that there’s absolutely no point selling P100,000 worth of rice if it costs you P105,000 to grow it.
According to Wikipedia, “Rice production uses almost a third of Earth’s fresh water”.
[quote]I know Latin America is like this, but in the Philippines (and I believe much of Africa also) it’s a bit different: the land is (mostly) owned by the peasants, but many of them are so uneducated they don’t know what they own or how to cultivate it. The net result is that half the country is “missing” - taken out of circulation by people who can’t or won’t do anything useful with it, but are nevertheless guarding it jealously because they have to divide it up between 16 kids when they die. Those who are cultivating their land grow only the crops they are told to grow using methods they’re told to use (by parents, local know-it-alls, or the government). So you see endless fields of rice and more rice on land that’s completely unsuited to it, all horribly polluted by persistent agrichemicals, or huge plantations of rubber, coconut, banana or oil palm. These are all cash crops, sold for a pittance to middlemen, and the cash is then spent on junk food from US-owned multinationals. The upshot is that 50kg of unhulled rice is exchanged for 15kg of packaged, processed trash. The average farmer is in endless debt anyway because he hasn’t figured out that there’s absolutely no point selling P100,000 worth of rice if it costs you P105,000 to grow it.
[/quote]
This is an interesting point. How did people made it, I mean, population wise, if not by cultivating healthy food? Somewhere down the line the knowledge was lost, the skills and traditions overwhelmed by “government” -menaing elite- educated advice, elites educated abroad, and so on it goes. But also you have to see it is the same pattern in the developed countries: the traditional, varied crops in the US, for example -more than 20 varieties of apples cultivated at the beginning of the 20th century in NY area… lost now-, seeds exchanges -also now regulated, thanks Monsalto-, and freer markets -less influence of middle men for daily use crops or big corporations for extensive/intensive so called agriculture- gone.
In our country, as in much of Latin America, the land belonged to the new royalty, who rented out to peasants. Each revolution promised to give back the land. The peasants then owned the land, planted crop… that had to be sold through official channels and hence ran into debt and lost their lands. Hence, another revolution. Profitable -meaning export oriented- crops were monopolized -at the beginning, there were also small farmers along with Chiquita planting bananas.
Just a matter of controlling the rails and their crops would be lost at the train station because they would not be loaded.
It is a matter now, for instance, with quinoa, and also corn, as prices for export out bid the locals and they go hungry as they cannot buy traditional crops. It is a labor of love now to save the potato varieties in Peru. Somewhere down the line, we have lost the agricultural love to the Earth and know how and instead engage in unhealthy practices that are killing us slowly -with unhealthy diets -or faster and more evidently -chemicals.
Funny how here in Taiwan you see small coops going back to basics, exchanging seeds and info, establishing customer to producer direct channels, and in general, regaining a healthy respect for the land.
As to exercise, it has become such an unfun business, a competitive race to live up to another unhealthy ideal, instead of promoting well being. Like preventive medicine, it is something to be explored and developed, but we are not there yet in mass. What people see know is exercise as a commodity. And once publicity gets its hands on it, it is distorted. Otherwise, there would be no profit to be made out of it.
Interesting discussion. I agree with almost everything… the only problem with sweet potato leaves is that they contain high amounts of oxalates, which can build up over time.
Small projects like that are happening all over. Maca root, that I mentioned a few weeks ago, is the “Ginseng of Latin America.” Maca cultivation is helping small scale farmers in the Peruvian Andes.
There’s a growing demand in the west for nutritional herbs and organic food deliveries. A lot of small businesses are starting up. The key is directly connecting farmers and consumers, like you said.
- I heard lots of good things about Moringa. Some people call it ‘the tree with a thousand uses’ or something similar. Do they grow it here?
If I ever get depressed, I spend 30 minutes on Kickstarter. Tons of projects there.
It’s not going to be easy to change things, but in 2015, if you can think of a problem, someone somewhere has (probably) solved it, and set up a website about it.
I read this and googled slum cultivation vegetables project just to check, and I found a few projects:
http://www.appropedia.org/Bag_gardens
http://journeytoforever.org/garden_con-mexico.html
[spoiler][i]By the middle of the 1990s, forty million Mexicans – nearly half the total population – fell below the poverty line. And of these at least 15 million live in extreme poverty – above all in urban marginal areas like the slums of Mexico City. Some seven years ago ANADEGES, a group of some 20 autonomous NGOs, launched a project to help the people there to develop their own autonomous capacity to produce food organically in small backyards or patios, balconies, rooftops – as a way to partially counteract the poverty being imposed upon them.
The technology had to address four constraints: little or no land, little or no investment in infrastructure, no purchase of chemical inputs, and be light weight for rooftop cultivation.[/i][/spoiler]
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/urban-agriculture-helps-combat-hunger-in-indias-slums/
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/urban-agriculture-helps-combat-hunger-in-indias-slums/
It’s hard to imagine someone not enjoying running if they gave it a legitimate chance. It’s free, it’s super healthy, burns lots of calories, makes you feel fantastic during and the days following, and most importantly it gives you an hour or so of completely undivided time with your own thoughts. The problem I think stems from the fact that there is quite a large barrier to entry. In the beginning, running is hard. Most people can’t run 3 km without being out of breath and likely feeling pain somewhere in their body which makes it incredibly easy to quit. But if they just push past the rough beginning period, I’m sure they would discover what the rest of us runners already know. It’s so much more than exercise. Being a runner is almost a lifestyle in itself. There aren’t many things more enjoyable than a good long run.
Problem with running in most cases/places are safety issues. In our present case, currently, aside from blue trucks, this poisonous air would require exercising with an oxygen tank…
Come on, Taiwan isn’t that bad. I live very close to the Memorial park at city hall and it’s a great place to run. I used to live near Da An park and that was even nicer, or sometimes I’ll drive over the bridge to Neihu and run along side the river towards Dan Shui. Nice fresh air, great scenery, it’s awesome. 
Even if you’re not a runner, are you sure you wouldn’t enjoy a nice bike ride alongside the river from Costco to Dan Shui? You’re going to let “air quality” stop you from enjoying that? This isn’t Shanghai
The benefits of exercise far outweigh the effects of the air pollution.
I can understand why people think it’s hard to exercise. For too many years they have been given the wrong idea about what exercise is and how they should exercise. The best way to start exercising is to find something active that you enjoy. Brent enjoys running but many don’t. I enjoy hiking and biking but I need to add something a little more intense every week. Others enjoy racquetball, badminton or swimming. that’s a big part of getting out there and exercising.
I dunno … I don’t think there was ever a point in history where the average peasant actually had a clue. Otherwise, they would never have listened to people like Mao Tse Tung or Kim Il-Sung dispensing their random pearls of wisdom about farming - they’d already be well-fed and happy, and they’d know bullshit when they heard it.
There was some sort of “golden age” in England somewhere between (roughly) 1850 and 1950, when food was provided in large part from market gardens run by very smart people (businessmen-botanists) using what today would be called pure organic methods and heirloom varieties. No idea if other countries were doing similar things. After that, the whole thing went pear-shaped with the rise of agrochemicals and big ag.
Too right. It’s the same all over - in poor countries and rich countries, there are always a half-dozen gov’t agencies telling people what they are and are not allowed to grow, or eat. The advice dispensed is both cases is usually of Mao and Kim quality, typically because the advice is designed to allow big companies to make profits (and therefore pay taxes) rather than enable good nutrition and good husbandry.
[quote]In our country, as in much of Latin America, the land belonged to the new royalty, who rented out to peasants. Each revolution promised to give back the land. The peasants then owned the land, planted crop… that had to be sold through official channels and hence ran into debt and lost their lands. Hence, another revolution. Profitable -meaning export oriented- crops were monopolized -at the beginning, there were also small farmers along with Chiquita planting bananas.
Just a matter of controlling the rails and their crops would be lost at the train station because they would not be loaded. [/quote]
In the Philippines the government will support export-oriented farming with all sorts of incentives. Farming for local markets is actively discouraged with punitive tax policies (or sabotaged with stupid advice distributed via TV ‘documentaries’). Again, it’s the greenback they want, because that’s what funds the lifestyle of the great and the good.
This is one thing that I never expected to see in Taiwan, and it really is encouraging. Actually, the same thing happens in the Philippines, but information about it never gets beyond specialist trade magazines, and the average farmer still doesn’t realise these projects are making big money. They think it’s just rich people playing gentleman-farmer, but the fact is they’re raking it in.
Yup. I do some work in the industry and it’s drowning in a rising tide of marketing bullshit. I’ve had enough, hence my career shift these last few years.
Well, considering that under Mao or Kim the penalty for not complying was being shot… and if found to plant other stuff rather than what they were told they were shot too,… so not much of an option there. And AFAIK, they did start doing that secretly and trading and basically restarted the economy from the underground.
As I said, we also had that golden age… until the export model was imposed. Why plant beans when you can import them cheaply? Now they eat beans from China. Why is milk so expensive if we have so many cows? (because we export the milk and must balance the profits for selling at the local market) So on and so forth.
And the green -paper, not leaves- goes so far only, never trickles down. What pisses me off is that the farmers cannot sell directly, there are laws against it. So that thing Taiwan has to sell online? Will get farmers locked up. Talk about keeping the system in place.
But back to basics: we can support the small farmers, encourage diversity in food choices, and hopefully include agriculture in the curriculum once more.
I agree red tape is stifling everything, but things are changing quickly. Lots of legal shades of grey. In some countries the local bureaucracy might realize it’s a good idea to lay off small scale farmers doing their own thing. In the current uneasy climate, local police might realize they’ll get a pitchfork thrown at them if they try and enforce all the ill-considered laws from the apparatchiks in the capital. They just don’t have the manpower to do any more than token arrests. Don’t know the situation in Lat Am, but as Taiwan has a famously phlegmatic police force, it’d be the perfect place for these sorts of experiments. Angel list and Air Bnb are examples of ultra-successful businesses that set up quietly and sidestepped local laws.
One example from the Philippines: I had lunch with a successful pair of businessmen a few times in HK. They told me about some famous ‘trash mountain’ in Manila. Can’t remember the name. One of them told me that he approached the Philippine government and offered to fund high tech trash/recycling devices, give the local population some work, get rid of the trash mountain, and beta test a project that could be copied in other countries. The gov flatly told him no.
Well, I meant in those years before they had people following them around with guns but nevertheless had pretty broad public support. OTOH, it’s interesting to read some of Ernesto Guevara’s memoirs because it’s clear that the peasantry in the countries he travelled through were unimpressed by his revolutionary ideas, which basically amounted to getting rid of the bastards running the place (reasonable) and figuring out the practical details later (unreasonable).
Can you elaborate? I know this is true in many countries, but I was under the impression (like HenHaoChi) that food/farming laws in Taiwan are, if not lax, then at least very flexible. I’ve bought products direct from farmers before and seen them advertising online. Do they have to register as retailers or something?
I’d love to see that happen. Where my farm is located the teachers actually tell the kids to burn biomass. In consequence, people spend most of their time obsessively setting fire to stuff. Apart from the sheer madness of destroying valuable organic matter, the place is continually blanketed in smoke. I’m trying to show a few people (people who know me) what compost is. Some of them are really interested. I’d also like to set up a garbage-collection service, but I suspect this will happen:
The one thing the Philippine government categorically does not want is for the Philippines to be successful, and they certainly have a pathological fear of foreigners coming in and doing stuff that they ought to be doing, but won’t. Business funding is only permitted if it’s given to Filipino citizens to [strike]steal or waste on stupid schemes[/strike] invest. Therefore, nobody ever invests anything in the Philippines except on a small enough scale to guard carefully. I imagine this is true of every other country mired in poverty, because it’s really not difficult to provide the basics of civilisation.
That’s the other stupid thing. It’s not just a predatory government. Some of the locals are only to happy to rip off a well meaning westerner, which in turn gets the place a bad rep, which in turn scares away investors. People have tried to con me about twice a year in Taiwan. In Indonesia, they tried twice a week, or even twice a day. And it wasn’t starving families either. I watched them spent their bounty on cock fights and cane alcohol. Unfortunately you have to tip-toe round these subjects, in case the aggressive apologist/PC crowd start lecturing you…
I figure a country loses 1000USD or more for every 10 dollar street rip off.
I haven’t been to the Philipines, but I guess there must be some sort of university town with a chilled out climate, where projects like these are going on.
I get an endless stream of people asking me to “lend” them money, usually with a hard-luck story or some ridiculous “business” idea. What pisses me off is that these people are not poor. They have vast land holdings. I always tell them that I’m interested in trade or join ventures, but I don’t borrow, I don’t lend, and I certainly don’t do charity. None of them have taken me up on the former offer. The old saw about people getting the government they deserve is IMO pretty accurate, but it’s really depressing to see it become entrenched to the point where those who want change (there are plenty of smart, observant locals) are stymied every which way they turn.
Which pales into insignificance compared to the loss of intangibles, like international credibility.
Last time I spoke to a university researcher he asked me for money to “invest” in a copra-trading scheme. 
On the subject of moringa: yes, they grow it here. I’ve seen trees in Tainan, and I have a few myself (moringa oleifera and moringa stenopetala). However, mine refuse to flower, and I heard they don’t in Tainan either. I don’t know why. Possibly too cold for too long. It’s a pity, because the ‘beans’ do taste good. They still provide edible leaves, of course.