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Discusses the increase in homelessness in Colorado Springs, which is a very big issue.

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El Paso County's latest survey of homelessness highlights a tired truth: Far more affordable housing is needed to reduce the number of people camping outdoors, in shelters or on the streets, advocates say.

The latest Point in Time survey found 1,562 people living in El Paso County who are homeless - roughly the same number as in 2018, when a record 1,551 people were counted amid a yearslong rise in homelessness.

In a possible bright spot, the survey found the number of people living unsheltered - living outside in camps, on the streets, in vehicles or in abandoned buildings - dropped 13 percent, from 513 to 444.

Andrew Phelps, the city's homelessness prevention and response coordinator, hailed the significant drop in unsheltered individuals as a sign that "lives are being saved." He has led a push to lower barriers at shelters - specifically, those that prohibit people from entering when they aren't sober.

"This year's Point in Time count illustrates that the city's investment in low barrier shelter beds has had a positive impact," Phelps said. "Small victories like this are something our community should celebrate."

Others said they were unsure what led to the dramatic drop in unsheltered individuals. The count's data showed only a slight increase in people who sought emergency beds compared to 2018, and far more people found transitional housing this year.

The number of families, veterans and youths ages 18 to 24 ticked upward, though the city's chronically homeless population - often people who have been living outside for years - declined slightly.

For several nonprofit leaders in Colorado Springs, the results reinforced longstanding concerns about an affordable housing crisis that is limiting their ability to ensure that shelters don't turn into permanent housing for some.

"Part of the problem is we don't have enough housing - we don't have enough places to support these individuals, especially in the case of veterans," said Jennifer Mariano, program manager for the Pikes Peak Continuum of Care, which coordinates the area's homeless response.

She voiced optimism that multiple planned apartment projects - including Greenway Flats on Springs Rescue Mission's campus and Freedom Springs east of Colorado Springs - would help the situation.

"That should help make a dent," Mariano said. "But that's still not enough to serve folks who need that specialized, additional help."

The survey is held every year in late January and is required for the Continuum of Care to receive millions of dollars in federal grants.

It offers a snapshot of the area's homeless population by focusing on where people slept on a single night of the year - in this case, Jan. 27. It also asks several other questions, including if they have a mental illness, if they struggle with substance abuse and if they're new to El Paso County.

It does not include people who are homeless and doubled-up with family members or friends - often referred to as "couch-surfing." Rather, it focuses solely on people living outside, in shelters or in transitional housing programs, which provide a place to stay for up to two years.

Due to the transient nature of homelessness, the survey routinely undercounts the area's true population. Its accuracy depends on enough volunteers finding people in well-hidden camps, and on those homeless people agreeing to participate. Often, the decision turns on hard-earned trust won by outreach workers.

This year, the survey's organizers went without the help of Blackbird Outreach, a nonprofit that dissolved in 2018 after having become a key means of reaching people in hard-to-find encampments. Still, about 180 volunteers fanned out across the county.

They went to work amid a cold snap that dropped temperatures to 13 degrees the night of Jan. 27. A fast-moving snowstorm also hit just as survey-takers began heading out to count people at the Penrose Library, the Marian House soup kitchen and other known hangouts.

Mariano said she spoke with about 15 people who doubled- and tripled-up in motel rooms to escape the weather - people who, despite living outside, did not meet the federal definition of homelessness, because they spent that night in a motel.

A more detailed report offering a more complete picture of the area's homeless population is expected in couple months, Mariano said.

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El Paso County homeless count levels off after years of increases

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El Paso County's latest survey of homelessness highlights a tired truth: Far more affordable housing is needed to reduce the number of people camping outdoors, in shelters or on the streets, advocates say.

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Photo by Katie Campbell//Flickr

Certifiably Green Denver and local restaurants are partnering to reduce food waste. You can help, too.
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Starting on May 1, Denver got a little greener. That was the day that Certifiably Green Denver- the city's sustainability program that helps businesses green their practices-launched its Food Waste Pilot Program in the Mile High City. This is a monumental step toward reaching the City and County of Denver's climate action goals because the program's focus is on restaurants.

Food waste is one of the largest generators of greenhouse gas emissions and, according to the Denver Department of Public Health & Environment (DDPHE), restaurants generate 25 percent of that waste. The participating eateries- Ale House, Ash'Kara, Bar Dough, the Bindery, Black Eye Coffee, Little Man Ice Cream, Ohana Island Kitchen, Prosperoats, Wooden Spoon, and Uncle-aim to reduce food waste at the source, donate pre-consumer food leftovers, and recycle through composting. ( Root Down and parent company Edible Beats are already active leaders in this sector and are participating on a consulting basis.)

"Working with restaurants on this makes so much sense because chefs already are trained to create their menus using as much of any given ingredient as possible," says Susan Renaud, Community Engagement Administrator for DDPHE's Certifiably Green Denver. "Chefs also are such visible and valuable contributors to our community, and their attention to food waste will help us reach a larger audience."

The hope is that once consumers-who are responsible for 41 percent of food waste-see the steps restaurants are taking, they'll apply the same lessons to their own households. Look for public-facing information at participating restaurants in the form of table tents, check inserts, takeout containers, and neighborhood events. "As a pilot, it's always experimental," Renaud says. "We're taking advantage of as many opportunities as we can find."

The program is part of the City's Food Matters project, a collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Denver and Baltimore were the only two cities chosen by the NRDC in 2018 to target multiple strategies for preventing food waste. In the fall, the Food Waste Pilot Program will launch citywide with the intention of recruiting a wider range of restaurants.
For more on food waste and what you can do, read Callie Sumlin's comprehensive story.
Amanda M. Faison, 5280 Contributor
Freelance writer Amanda M. Faison spent 20 years at 5280 Magazine, 12 of those as Food Editor.

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Denver's Food Waste Pilot Program Has Launched

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Certifiably Green Denver and local restaurants are partnering to reduce food waste. You can help, too. * Starting on May 1, Denver got a little greener. That was the day that Certifiably Green Denver- the city's sustainability program that helps businesses green their practices-launched its Food Waste Pilot Program in the Mile High City.

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This article talks about a Colorado Helium Plant. There are only a few left. Helium is huge in MRI's, computer chips, space travel, and balloons.  He talks about the shortage and how to save the plant.

"Rising on the plains: This Colorado plant is one of a handful in the world to produce helium"

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/02/15/colorado-helium-plant/

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Oil drilling development in the Arctic Refuge

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Oil drilling development in the Arctic Refuge

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Drastically affecting:
-Native Gwich'in population
-Porcupine Caribou
-Declining polar bear population

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Alaska

Take action

Oil Drilling: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Take action

America's wildest place on the edge of destruction

It's no wonder that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is called the crown jewel of our refuge system. The Arctic Refuge is the only refuge where you'll find the spectacle of polar bears denning and massive migrations of caribou thundering through the land each year.

This vast refuge of coastal lands, boreal forests and alpine tundra supports an exceptional array of wildlife from musk oxen and Arctic fox to all three types of North American bear species and hundreds of bird species. It is one of the finest examples of large, intact wilderness left on Earth.

Such an exceptional wild place cannot sustain human activity on an industrial scale, and yet the refuge is threatened by oil and gas development. If fossil fuel interests succeed, one our wildest places will be lost forever.

The refuge is one of the world's last untrammeled wild places. The health of Arctic species like polar bears and caribou depends on the refuge staying wild and intact.

More than 270 species thrive here, including polar bears, caribou and musk oxen.

The Porcupine caribou herd uses the refuge's coastal plain for its annual calving grounds.

Changes to the refuge's Porcupine caribou herd could stress the Gwich'in people who rely on caribou for subsistence.

Some of the most important denning habitat for polar bears in the Alaskan Arctic exists here.

The threat

For decades, oil and gas interests and their friends in Congress have fought to open the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge to oil and gas development. In 2017, they gained significant ground. That year, Congress passed a backdoor provision that allowed the Trump administration to begin the process for leasing vulnerable refuge lands to oil companies.

The Arctic Refuge is now facing a pivotal moment. Oil companies are making plans to conduct damaging seismic testing in the refuge. Meanwhile the government is fast-tracking required environmental reviews.

Oil development would bring roads, airstrips, heavy machinery and noise and pollution. This would damage the refuge's fragile tundra ecosystem and disrupt age-old migration and denning patterns for caribou, polar bear and other animals.

While the threat to the refuge is higher than ever, the fight is not over. We have made great strides building conservation champions in Congress who aim to counteract the latest threats. Many of them wish to permanently protect the refuge through legislation.

What we're doing

1. Going to court

While Congress has been busy greasing the wheels for drilling, the Trump administration has taken illegal actions to fast-track required environmental reviews. We're challenging these wrongful attempts in court.

2. Applying corporate pressure

Should the government get away with fast-tracking the steps for drilling, an important arm of our defense is to pressure oil and gas companies not to develop in the Arctic Refuge.

3. Advocating for permanent protections

We're advancing national legislation to designate the refuge as federally protected wilderness, the government's highest form of land protection. This will end the threat of drilling once and for all.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The Porcupine caribou herd's migration through the Arctic Refuge is one of the largest land migrations on earth.

Florian Schulz

Arctic foxes and other wildlife call the Arctic Refuge home.

Moe Witschard

The Porcupine caribou herd travels to the Arctic Refuge's coastal plain every spring.

Florian Schulz

The Hulahula River drains from the Brooks Range into the Arctic Refuge's coastal plain.

Mason Cummings, TWS

The Brooks Range is a vast expanse of mountains in the heart of the Arctic Refuge.

Mason Cummings, The Wilderness Society

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is roughly the size of South Carolina and contains no roads. It is one of the last true wildernesses in North America.

Ryan Gasper

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Support a bill to protect the fragile Arctic Refuge from drilling plans.

Take action

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Oil Drilling: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

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Alaska Take action Oil Drilling: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Take action It's no wonder that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is called the crown jewel of our refuge system. The Arctic Refuge is the only refuge where you'll find the spectacle of polar bears denning and massive migrations of caribou thundering through the land each year.

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https://collegian.com/2020/02/category-news-extra-meal-swipes-where-do-they-go/
- Talks about how the pricing for meal swipes at CSU works and what happens to unused meal swipes
- February 17, 2020 by Gerson Flores

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A Colorado-based organization is moving nationally with the goal of lowering food waste coming from farmers and grocery stores.

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This article talks about the ways in which our diets have changed and the negative affects these changes have had on public health

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Credit... Illustration by Leo Jung

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I'll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to eat "food." Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren't they? Sorry. But that's how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing - this from the monumental, federally financed Women's Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that "it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health" (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third - a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It's no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you're probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I'm still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and - ahem - journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, distinctly risky if you're a nutritionist and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, "Eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition - much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles - things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies - claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated fat" rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things - who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients - those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health - gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the "macronutrients": protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished. At the end of the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by the fact that Chinese laborers in the Malay states were dying of a disease called beriberi, which didn't seem to afflict Tamils or native Malays. The mystery was solved when someone pointed out that the Chinese ate "polished," or white, rice, while the others ate rice that hadn't been mechanically milled. A few years later, Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered the "essential nutrient" in rice husks that protected against beriberi and called it a "vitamine," the first micronutrient. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn't until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet - including heart disease, cancer and diabetes - a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called "Dietary Goals for the United States." The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee's recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food - the committee had advised Americans to actually "reduce consumption of meat" - was replaced by artful compromise: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can't easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can't put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That's why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 "Dietary Goals" - McGovern's masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel's recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell's and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet - indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these pages (" What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? " by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it's a little more complicated than the official version suggests. In that version, which inspired the most recent Atkins craze, we were told that America got fat when, responding to bad scientific advice, it shifted its diet from fats to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the two nutrients is in order: fat doesn't make you fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this revisionist picture. First, while it is true that Americans post-1977 did begin binging on carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in the American diet declined, we never did in fact cut down on our consumption of fat. Meat consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a bunch more carbs onto our plates, obscuring perhaps, but not replacing, the expanding chunk of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do - that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We're always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It's hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did if McGovern's original food-based recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another case of Snackwell's is just what the doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you're a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce - compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. - are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that's how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they're found in, as we've done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don't work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

What's going on here? We don't know. It could be the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber (or some other component) in a carrot protects the antioxidant molecules from destruction by stomach acids early in the digestive process. Or it could be that we isolated the wrong antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one. Or maybe beta carotene works as an antioxidant only in concert with some other plant chemical or process; under other circumstances, it may behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here's a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you're ingesting when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others are going on to do undetermined things to your body: turning some gene's expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn't do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it may actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever) and that even if it does nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It's also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it's the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn't matter. That's the great thing about eating food as compared with nutrients: you don't need to fathom a carrot's complexity to reap its benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the dangers in taking a nutrient out of the context of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists make a second, related error when they study the food out of the context of the diet. We don't eat just one thing, and when we are eating any one thing, we're not eating another. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they're absorbed. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won't be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable. Some of those compounds in that sprig of thyme may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it to, helping to break down one compound or possibly stimulate production of an enzyme to detoxify another. We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest relationships, like the zero-sum relationship: that if you eat a lot of meat you're probably not eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may explain why populations that eat diets high in meat have higher rates of coronary heart disease and cancer than those that don't. Yet nutritionism encourages us to look elsewhere for the explanation: deep within the meat itself, to the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are baffled when large-population studies, like the Women's Health Initiative, fail to find that reducing fat intake significantly reduces the incidence of heart disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers now hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist T. Colin Campbell argues as much in his recent book, "The China Study.") Or, as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett suggests, it could be the steroid hormones typically present in the milk and meat; these hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk but are often augmented in industrial production) are known to promote certain cancers.

But people worried about their health needn't wait for scientists to settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat. This is of course precisely what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of the lifestyle. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living on the island of Crete in the 1950s, who in many respects lived lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and little meat. But they also did more physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a lot of wild greens - weeds. And, perhaps most important, they consumed far fewer total calories than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based on studies of Seventh Day Adventists, who muddy the nutritional picture by drinking absolutely no alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but unavoidable factors are called, aptly, "confounders." One last example: People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take - which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health - confounding factors that probably account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil comparative studies of different populations, the supposedly more rigorous "prospective" studies of large American populations suffer from their own arguably even more disabling flaws. In these studies - of which the Women's Health Initiative is the best known - a large population is divided into two groups. The intervention group changes its diet in some prescribed manner, while the control group does not. The two groups are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention affects relative rates of chronic disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of extensive, long-term clinical trial is supposed to be the gold standard. It certainly sounds sound. In the case of the Women's Health Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the eating habits and health outcomes of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the beginning of the study) were tracked for eight years. One group of the women were told to reduce their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total calories. The results were announced early last year, producing front-page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: "Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds." And the cloud of nutritional confusion over the country darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study's methods makes you wonder why anyone would take such a finding seriously, let alone order a Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as many newspaper readers no doubt promptly went out and did. Even the beginner student of nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: the focus was on "fat," rather than on any particular food, like meat or dairy. So women could comply simply by switching to lower-fat animal products. Also, no distinctions were made between types of fat: women getting their allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish were lumped together with woman getting their fat from low-fat cheese or chicken breasts or margarine. Why? Because when the study was designed 16 years ago, the whole notion of "good fats" was not yet on the scientific scope. Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and other studies like it, is that we have no idea what these women were really eating because, like most people when asked about their diet, they lied about it. How do we know this? Deduction. Consider: When the study began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day - as the women on the "low-fat" regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, ladies, but I just don't buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who conduct this sort of research conduct it in the knowledge that people lie about their food intake all the time. They even have scientific figures for the magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like the Women's Health Initiative rely on "food-frequency questionnaires," and studies suggest that people on average eat between a fifth and a third more than they claim to on the questionnaires. How do the researchers know that? By comparing what people report on questionnaires with interviews about their dietary intake over the previous 24 hours, thought to be somewhat more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the lie could be much greater, judging by the huge disparity between the total number of food calories produced every day for each American (3,900 calories) and the average number of those calories Americans own up to chomping: 2,000. (Waste accounts for some of the disparity, but nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about how much people actually eat is that the real number lies somewhere between those two figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the Women's Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey, which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some relatively easy questions: "Did you eat chicken or turkey during the last three months?" Having answered yes, I was then asked, "When you ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin?" But the survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, "shortening" (in which category they inexplicably lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn't remember, and in the case of any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes specified haven't been seen in America since the Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is considered "medium," was I really going to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think not. In fact, most of the "medium serving sizes" to which I was asked to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn't under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and health are being decided in America today.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They're apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don't forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg's can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number - or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won't find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer's market; you also won't find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There's no escaping the fact that better food - measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) - costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils - whether certified organic or not - will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

"Eat less" is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. "Calorie restriction" has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called "Hara Hachi Bu": eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the "eat less" message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don't know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what's so good about plants - the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? - but they do agree that they're probably really good for you and certainly can't hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you'll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less "energy dense" than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians ("flexitarians") are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren't a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn't still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals - and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can't possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of "health." Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It's all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn't bordered by your body and that what's good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

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-High retail prices for electricity
- peak demand periods of electricity leading to power outages and shortages.

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Subsequent Events California's Energy Crisis

California's new wholesale power market and customer choice program, which started in March, 1998, worked fairly well for about a year and a half. In the summer of 2000, retail electricity prices in southern California reached all time highs, and generation capacity shortages forced temporary power outages in northern California.

Since then, coverage of California's energy crisis has been reported on television and in newspapers around the country. The complexity of problems, the contrasting views and sometimes conflicting solutions offered by politicians, government officials, and other stakeholders make it difficult to follow what has happened.

To help bring the situation into better focus, the following paragraphs present a broad perspective of the crisis.

Three Major Problems

California's energy crisis can be grouped broadly into three interrelated problems including (1) precipitous increase in wholesale electricity prices, (2) intermittent power shortages during peak demand periods, and (3) the deterioration of the financial stability of California's three major investor-owned utilities (IOUs)Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E).

1. High Wholesale Electricity Prices: The price of wholesale electricity sold on California's newly created California Power Exchange (CalPX) starting escalating around June 2000, reaching unprecedented levels over the remainder of the year. From June 2000 through July 2000 wholesale electricity prices increased on average 270 percent over the same period in 1999.(1) By December 2000 wholesale prices on the CalPX cleared at $376.99 per megawatthour (MWh), over 11 times higher than the average clearing price of $29.71 per mwh in December 1999.(2)

High wholesale prices resulted in a steep, but temporary increase in retail electricity prices in southern California in the summer of 2000. This is what happened. In July 1999, SDG&E's retail price freeze was eliminated as called for in California's industry deregulation plan, and SDG&E customers were exposed to unregulated retail electricity prices (PG&E and SCE's retail customers were, at that time, still protected from high retail prices by rate freezes imposed by the restructuring plan). SDG&E could now pass through the high wholesale prices to retail customers, and by July 2000 residential electricity rates had increased to approximately 16 cents per kilowatthour, up from about 11 cents per kilowatthour in July 1999.(3) To stop the increase in retail prices, the California legislature established a ceiling of 6.5 cents per kilowatthour on the energy component of electric bills for residential, small commercial, and lighting customers of SDG&E.

2. Intermittent Power Shortages: Since 1999, California has experienced a significant increase in emergency conditions that in some instances have necessitated rotating blackouts (a rotating blackout is an involuntary curtailment of electricity usage). Stage 3 emergency notifications, which may necessitate rotating blackouts, have increased from 1 in 2000 to 38 through May 22, 2001 (see graph). Stages 1 and 2 notifications have increased from 91 in 2000 to 127 through May 22, 2001. In some instances Stage 2 requires voluntary curtailment of power usage.

California's Declared Staged Power Emergencies, 1998--May 22, 2001

Stage 1 emergency notice is declared any time that an operating reserve shortfall (less than MORC minimum) is unavoidable or, when in real- time operations, the operating reserve is forecast to be less than minimum after utilizing available resources.

Stage 2 emergency notice is declared any time it is clear that an operating reserve shortfall (less than 5 percent) is unavoidable or, when in real-time operations, the operating reserve is forecast to be less than 5 percent after dispatching all resources available.

Stage 3 emergency notice is declared any time it is clear that an operating reserve shortfall (less than 1.5 percent) is unavoidable or when in real-time operations, the operating reserve is forecast to be less than 1.5 percent after dispatching all resources available.

3. Three investor-owned utilities face severe financial problems: Because of high wholesale power prices and the imposition of retail price caps restricting recovery of these costs, California's three major IOUs are experiencing severe financial problems.

The worst case is PG&E, which on April 6, 2001 filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. PG&E estimated that since June 2000 they have spent $9 billion for wholesale power with no reimbursement for those expenditures (referred to as unrecovered power costs).⁽⁴⁾ SCE is in a similar situation to PG&E with respect to power purchase costs. In November 2000, SCE estimated their unrecovered power purchase costs at $2.6 billion. (5) SDG&E estimated their unrecovered power costs at $447 million by December 2000. (6)

Factors Contributing to the Energy Crisis

Although there is not universal agreement on the causes of California's problems, there is general agreement among industry leaders on a core set of factors contributing to the energy crisis.⁽⁷⁾

1. Investment in new power generation capacity has not kept pace with the increasing demand for electricity. California's generation capability decreased 2 percent from 1990 through 1999, while retail sales increased by 11 percent. Further, no new generation capacity has been constructed in California for over a decade.

2. To meet its demand for power, California relies on about 7 to 11 gigawatts of out-of-state generation capability, of which a significant portion is hydroelectric capacity located in the northwestern United States. Reduced hydroelectric power generation caused by unusually low water levels in the northwest resulted in a reduction of power imports to northern California.

3. During 2000, approximately 10 gigawatts of generation capability was out of operation during some of the high demand times, which contributed to power shortages.

4. Path 15, the high voltage transmission line connecting southern California to northern California, became congested at times, reducing the flow of surplus electricity capacity in southern California to meet shortages in northern California.

5. Exacerbating the power shortages, many independent power generators were reluctant to sell power to PG&E, and SCE because of their financial troubles and the uncertainty of receiving payment for the power sold.

6. Shortcomings of the wholesale electric market rules established under the State's restructuring plan contributed to the increase in wholesale prices. Specifically, under the market rules, PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E were required to buy all of their power through the CalPX. They could not enter into forward long-term contracts for energy. When spot market wholesale prices increased because of power shortages and increasing generation costs, the utilities had no option but to purchase the high-priced power.

7. An increase in natural gas prices and the high costs of meeting California's power plant emissions requirements also contributed to the increase in wholesale electricity prices.

8. The three IOUs paid high wholesale prices for their power, but were unable to recover their costs because retail electricity prices were frozen. This situation, as noted above, resulted in the three IOUs accumulating enormous debts.

Actions Taken to Contain the Energy Crisis

The following actions have been taken by California and Federal Government authorities to help mitigate the energy crisis and to put into place permanent solutions to the problems California has been experiencing since the summer of 2000:

June 28, 2000: The California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) reduced its buy-side price cap to $500 per megawatt for the real-time, ancillary services, and congestion management markets. The CPUC further reduced its price cap to $250 per megawatt on August 1, 2000.

August 3, 2000: The CPUC issued a rate stabilization plan for SDG&E. The plan was designed to provide electricity price relief for some residential and commercial customers served by SDG&E.

August 30, 2000: The California legislature passed a law (AB265) that established rate caps of 6.5 cents per kilowatthour for SDG&E customers. The rate cap was retroactive to June 2000, and it will be effective through 2002.

December 14, 2000: The Secretary of Energy initiated an order requiring certain generators and power marketers to supply electricity to California's power system operator in order to help avert power outages.

December 15, 2000: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ordered remedies for California's wholesale power markets. The order, among other things, eliminated the mandatory requirement that the three IOUs sell and buy all of their power through the CalPX. The FERC also terminated the CalPX's wholesale rate schedule that enabled it to continue to operate. CalPX discontinued operating in January 2001.

January 4, 2001: The CPUC granted PG&E and SCE an interim surcharge to raise rates. The temporary surcharge was in effect for 90 days.

February 1, 2001: Governor Gray Davis signed into law AB 1X authorizing California's Department of Water Resources to purchase power under long-term contracts for sale to PG&E and SCE. This law was passed because, in part, the two utilities were financially strapped and unable to obtain long-term power contracts with power generators. This law is significant in that the State now becomes an active participant in California's power industry.

March 27, 2001: The CPUC approved a 3-cents-per-kilowatt-hour average rate increase in an effort to support the financially strapped PG&E, and SCE.

April 5, 2001: Governor Gray Davis released a plan to resolve the State's energy problems and to protect residents from volatile energy markets. The plan contains numerous elements aimed at increasing power supply, improving energy conservation, and stabilizing the electricity industry in California.

April 9, 2001: Governor Gray Davis announced an agreement with SCE, and Edison International, SCE's parent company. In the agreement, SCE will sell their transmission system to the State of California for $2.76 billion. The sale is designed to help SCE recover from its financial difficulties. It must be approved by the State Legislature to be completed.

April 25, 2001: The FERC announced a plan to bring more stability, better control, and price relief to California's energy market. Among other things the plan gives the California Independent System Operator (California ISO operates the State's transmission system) more control of power plant outages, establishes price mitigation measures based on market principals, and requires new reporting obligations that will allow the FERC to better monitor the energy market in California.

May 14, 2001: The FERC announced regulatory actions to increase reliable energy supplies in California and other Western States. The FERC streamlined regulatory procedures for wholesale power sales and for certification of natural gas projects. It also urged all hydroelectric licensees to assess the potential for increased generation capacity at their respective facilities.

May 15, 2001: In March the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) agreed to raise retail electricity prices to customers of PG&E and SCE. Today, the CPUC released a rate structure indicating exactly which customer classes will have their rates increased and by how much. Overall retail rates will increase an average of 19 percent, but low-income customers, medical baseline customers, and residential customers using power below 130 percent of baseline usage amounts will not have a rate increase.

May 16, 2001: Governor Gray Davis signed Senate Bill 6X creating the California Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority. The California Power Authority will have broad powers to construct, own, and operate electric power facilities, and finance energy conservation projects.

May 22, 2001: Governor Davis signed another emergency bill, Senate Bill 28X, designed to shorten the times for reviewing an application for a new power plant, and re-powering (i.e., upgrading) an existing power plant. The new law also allows new owners to pay emission mitigation fees in lieu of obtaining actual emission offsets when the new owner can show that emission offsets are not available.

May 28, 2001: U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Abraham ordered the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), a 15 State power marketing arm of the U.S. DOE, to complete planning and to seek outside financing for increasing California's transmission capacity. This action aims at reducing power transmission bottlenecks on Path 15, a high-voltage power line connecting northern and southern California (see item 4 under Factors Contributing to the Energy Crisis).

June 19, 2001: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission extended and broadened its price mitigation and market monitoring plan (issued in April 2001). The price mitigation plan will now apply to spot market sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in all 11 States in the Western Systems Coordinating Council. The formula to calculate the market clearing price was changed to reflect the marginal cost of replacing gas used for generation, based on gas prices reported in Gas Daily for three spot market prices in California, adjust operating and maintentance expense upward, and eliminate the emission costs from the calculation (emission costs will be invoiced to the CA ISO and recovered separately). The price mitigation efforts will now apply to all spot market prices. When operating reserves are above 7%, the prices may not exceed 85% of the highest hourly price that was in effect during the most recent Stage 1 reserve deficiency period called by the ISO.

July 18, 2001: The California PUC published for comment a draft rate agreement between the CPUC and the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). The draft agreement contains the mechanism the CPUC will use to set electricity rates to satisfy the DWR's revenue requirements and supports the DWR's power purchase program. The revenue requirements include the costs required to issue and pay off the bonds issued for purchasing power (authorized under AB 1X), costs for DWR's power purchase program, cost of load reduction programs, and operating costs. Comments are to be filed by August 1, 2001.

September 20, 2001: The California PUC issued an interim opinion that suspended retail choice in California. The CPUC estimates that about 5% of the State's peak load of 46,000 MW is currently under direct access contracts, mostly with large industrial customers. Contracts in place will be allowed to continue until their expiration.

October 5, 2001: U.S. District Court Judge Lew approved the California PUC and Southern California Edison's settlement concerning the lawsuit filed by SCE against the PUC in November 2000. SCE claimed the PUC had violated federal law and unconstitutionally took property by its actions in not providing sufficient retail rates for SCE. The settlement is intended to restore SCE's creditworthiness and enable it to begin purchasing power for its retail customers, limit ratepayer's cost of paying off SCE debt, and enable SCE to pay its debt over a reasonable certain period of time.

January 10, 2002: Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed a suit against Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation because its proposed reorganization plan for its utility would be "a violation of California's unfair competition law." Under the plan, PG&E Corporation would acquire the utility's hydroelectric and transmission assets and transfer them into three new California-based companies, and therefore preempt many state laws and PUC jurisdiction.

January 31, 2002: The California PUC issued a proposed rate agreement with the Department of Water Resources so DWR could issue bonds to pay back the General Fund. According to state law, the PUC "may enter into a rate agreement that would irrevocably commit ratepayer revenues to repay any bonds issued by DWR." A final decision is expected on February 21, 2002.

February 21, 2002: The PUC issued two decisions regarding the adoption of a rate agreement between the PUC and the Department of Water Resources and cost recovery of the agency's revenue requirements for purchasing power under ABX 1. In the first decision, the PUC adopted a rate agreement that allows the DWR to issue bonds to repay over $10 billion in debt, including over $6 billion to California's General Fund. In the second decision, the PUC agreed to implement a cost recovery mechanism for DWR's revised revenue requirements for power purchases made on behalf of the state's three largest utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. The revenue requirement for the period covering January 17, 2001 through December 31, 2002 is $9 billion, which is significantly lower than the original requirement. The PUC adopted a 9.295 per kilowatthour charge for PG&E customers, 9.744 cents per kWh for SCE customers, and 7.285 cents per kWh for SDG&E customers. According the PUC revenue requirement order, "these charges shall apply to each DWR-supplied kWh included on bills rendered on or after March 15, 2002."

March 21, 2002: The PUC voted to keep September 20, 2001 as the suspension date for direct access. According to the PUC's decision, customers can renew their contracts or change their electricity providers if they had contracts as of September 20, 2001. The PUC is hoping to impose an exit fee on these customers to provide DWR with more funds to cover the cost of purchasing power. Exit fees will be dealt with in a separate proceeding and order.

As further actions develop, they will be added to this site.

Endnotes
1. California Public Utility Commission, California's Electricity Options and Challenges Report To Governor Gray Davis, August 2, 2000.

2. California Power Exchange website http://www.calpx.com.

3. California Public Utility Commission and Electricity Oversight Board, California's Electricity Options and Challenges, Report to Governor Gray Davis, August 2, 2000.
4. Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Press Release April 6, 2001.
6. Southern California Edison Press Release, November 17, 2000

6. San Diego Gas and Electric Press Release, February 6, 2001.

7. Factors contributing to California's energy crisis have been documented in the following reports: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Order Directing Remedies For California Wholesale Electric Markets, December 15, 2000; California Public Utilities Commission and Electricity Oversight Board, California's Electricity Options and Challenges, Report to Governor Gray Davis, August 2, 2000; Anjali Sheffrin, Director of Market Analysis, California Independent System Operator, What Went Wrong With California Electric Utility Deregulation?, April 19, 2001.

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California's new wholesale power market and customer choice program, which started in March, 1998, worked fairly well for about a year and a half. In the summer of 2000, retail electricity prices in southern California reached all time highs, and generation capacity shortages forced temporary power outages in northern California.

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"Ongoing Power Outage Leaves CSU Buildings in the Dark"

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"Ongoing Power Outage Leaves CSU Buildings in the Dark"

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https://collegian.com/2020/02/category-news-ongoing-power-outage-leaves-csu-buildings-in-the-dark/
- Talks about the recent power outage on CSUs campus
-February 18, 2020 by Ravyn Cullor

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"Food Cluster Reaches for Solid Footing" published Nov. 19, 2014 in the Coloradoan by Josie Sexton.
-Describes the challenges facing local food systems made up of small farmers, their markets, processors and distributors.

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This article talks about what "passive recreation" is.  It is biking, hiking, horseback riding, walking, boating, fishing, and now e-bikes.  Most trails now allow it however some still do not.  It is effective and sustainable.  It does not create any more waste than other ways of going on trails.  Boulder County is trying to legalize it everywhere.

"Boulder County Planning Commission Adopts Resolution to Allow E-bikes on Some County Trails", John Spina, Times-Call Longmont, Feb 19, 2020.

https://www.timescall.com/2020/02/19/boulder-county-planning-commission-adopts-resolution-to-allow-e-bikes-on-some-county-trails/

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Talks about water rights with the Colorado River

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At a seminar on all things Grand Canyon-related, Mateo Robbins presented a brief history of the development of water rights and usage of the Colorado River on Wednesday. The presentation started from the settlement of Anglos in the western United States and took us through the process of allocating water from the Colorado, to where water rights now stand.

In order to understand the importance of water rights to the Colorado River, Robbins impressed upon us the dependence of certain interests on the River. Before settlement of Anglos in the West, the River provided the lifeblood to numerable indigenous tribes. Currently, in addition to providing sustenance to indigenous people, theColorado River provides water to approximately 36 million people, is the host of numerous types of recreation-resulting in a revenue of approximately 26 billion dollars-and generates power through the hydroelectric plants at Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. So how did we get to this point where the Colorado River is considered such a hydrologic powerhouse of electricity, revenue, and water?

In the early 1920s, as California was in a state of rapid development and growth, the state yearned for a solution to its burgeoning agricultural enterprise-a dam on the Colorado to divert water to California's Imperial Valley. In order to get federal assistance in this endeavor, all states contributing to, and benefiting from, the Colorado River watershed needed to come to an agreement on water entitlement. Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico comprised the "Upper Basin" and Nevada, Arizona, and California comprised the "Lower Basin". Delph Carpenter assigned these designations in order to propose an agreement that would divide water rights 50/50 to the Upper and Lower Basins.

The only problem with this creative division of rights was the period of record used to assign the amount of water to be divided. At the beginning of the 20th century, the western United States was experiencing an anomalously wet 20-year period. This wet period led the dividers of rights to believe that the Colorado River would provide 15 million acre-feet (MAF) of water to the Upper and Lower Basins and 1.5 MAF to Mexico. However, as the coming years would show, that 16.5 MAF total-allocatable-water-value was unrealistic in an arid region such as the South-Western US. Because of this hydrologic shortcoming, the division of water remains a contentious issue.

In addition to the growing demand for water to sustain the projected Homo sapiens population, some humans are also demanding water be allocated to the survival of riparian and aquatic species which have been severely affected by the alteration of the Colorado River. The River itself no longer reaches points it used to, such as the Gulf of California. The Colorado River Delta, once a vibrant and diverse biosphere, has now been dry for decades (except one pulse flow, which required a mass purchase of water from Mexican farmers). As well as the flow disturbance, the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams are a hindrance to the natural course of sediment through the Colorado River watershed to the Gulf of California. The pre-dam river hydraulically transported sediment, which shaped microhabitats along the river, sustaining a variety of endemic species. Now that the Colorado no longer receives the bouts of sediment it used to, conditions have been made favorable to invasive species in both flora and fauna, which are changing the riparian ecosystem structure.

Over the years, a bundle of arbitrations known as the Law of the River have attempted to settle the arguments between states and interests in the allocation of the Colorado River's water. The Law of the River is comprised of international treaties with Mexico, interstate compacts, a US Supreme Court decision between California and Arizona, and many other federal statutes and regulations. Just as many attempts at an agreement over water rights have gone on before us, many more will ensue in the coming years as we face uncertainty in climate, water availability, and human population growth.

In order to keep the mood light on Wednesday's seminar, Mateo Robbins likened this uncertainty and water allocations to a hypothetical scenario on our upcoming Grand Canyon rafting trip. Once in the Canyon, after being ensured each party would have a respectable amount of beer, we all come to the sudden understanding that there will be a shortcoming to at least three persons in the trip. The issue at hand now: who holds the senior beer-rights to their previously promised portion of beer? Inevitably one or more people will be disappointed with their lack of ale, and will have to seek some other source of social lubricant.

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A Brief History of Water Rights of the Colorado River

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At a seminar on all things Grand Canyon-related, Mateo Robbins presented a brief history of the development of water rights and usage of the Colorado River on Wednesday. The presentation started from the settlement of Anglos in the western United States and took us through the process of allocating water from the Colorado, to where water rights now stand.

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There's a lot of debate over whether or not it's legal to feed the homeless on the street without a permit or any other legal approval.

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By Kate Brumback, The Associated Press

ATLANTA - When Adele MacLean joined others in an Atlanta park to feed the hungry the Sunday before Thanksgiving, she left with a citation and a summons to appear in court.

The case was dropped when she showed up in court earlier this month, but she and her lawyers say the citation for serving food without a permit was improper and demonstrates callousness toward the homeless. The city and some advocates say feeding people on the streets can hinder long-term solutions and raises sanitation concerns.

"I'm still outraged this is happening," MacLean said after her court appearance Dec. 14. "I'm concerned that the city, whenever they want to crack down on the homeless, they're going to go after anyone that tries to help them."

About 40 cities nationwide had active laws to restrict food sharing as of November 2014, and a few dozen more had attempted such restrictions, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. Interim Director Megan Hustings said she doesn't have updated numbers but that she's heard about more cities considering such regulations.

MacLean, a volunteer with a movement called Food Not Bombs, was cited Nov. 19 by a Georgia State University police officer after her group refused to stop feeding the homeless in a downtown park, and her lawyers say city officers have been distributing a "misleading pamphlet" bearing the city seal that says a permit is required to feed people in public places.

That's simply not true, said Southern Center for Human Rights attorney Gerry Weber, who's representing MacLean. Permits are required for restaurants, food trucks and festival food vendors, not for people sharing food at no charge, he said.

Even though MacLean's case was dropped, it doesn't mean officers will stop telling people they can't feed the homeless, and doesn't eliminate the possibility of future citations, Weber said. The Southern Center is pushing for a clear statement from the city that people have a right to feed the homeless in public places, he said.

Conflict between city government and groups feeding the homeless in public isn't unique to Atlanta.

A Fort Lauderdale, Florida, ordinance requiring permits to feed the homeless in a park is being challenged in federal court by another Food Not Bombs group. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in that case in August but has not ruled yet.

The lawyers in that case argue the ordinances violate the group's right to free speech because group members share food "as an expression of their political message that hunger and poverty can be ended if society's resources are redirected from the military and war."

"I salute genuinely the good will and good nature of all these people. There is no bad guy in this," said Georgia State University police Sgt. Joseph Corrigan, a chaplain who also leads the department's homeless outreach program.

But instead of having feedings that pop up in different places all the time, it's better to connect people with shelters or other established organizations that provide consistent help and services, he said.

Food safety, garbage and the human waste left behind when people are fed in a place with no bathrooms are also concerns, Corrigan said.

Additionally, many homeless people struggle with serious mental illness or addiction, which can make them wary of help, said George Chidi, social impact director for Central Atlanta Progress, a nonprofit community development organization that serves downtown Atlanta. The city has teams whose mission is to reach out, develop trusting relationships and, ultimately, connect the homeless with housing and treatment services. Public feedings can disrupt those efforts, Chidi said.

"We don't want anybody to stop feeding people," he said. "We just want it done in a way that's connected to social services providers ... and not on the street corner because we can't make sure those connections are being made in these street corner feedings."

MacLean doesn't buy those arguments.

"Food is a human right, and you don't force people to do what you want them to do by withholding food," she said.

Some avoid shelters because of strict rules, safety and health concerns or because they aren't able to be in the same place as family or friends, she said.

Hustings said restrictions on public feedings are most commonly enacted or enforced when the homeless population becomes more visible. In Atlanta, advocates say, more people have ended up on the streets after the recent closure of the city's last shelter of last resort.

"Even though the rhetoric will be around providing access to safe food or something that purports to be considering the folks who are homeless and need the food, a lot of times our communities across the country know it's because citizens don't like seeing large gatherings of people who look homeless," Hustings said.

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Cities and volunteers clash over feeding homeless in public

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By Kate Brumback, The Associated Press ATLANTA - When Adele MacLean joined others in an Atlanta park to feed the hungry the Sunday before Thanksgiving, she left with a citation and a summons to appear in court.

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Mainly just statistics on hunger in Colorado with no explanation or details.

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Read facts about hunger and poverty in Colorado. Find out how we define terms like hunger and why nutrition programs matter.

HUNGER & POVERTY IN COLORADO...

Updated: 10/19

(U.S. Census Bureau, More than 1 in 10 Coloradans (10.3%) struggle financially, living below the federal poverty line. This includes more than 1 in 8 kids (13%) with those under the age of 5 most likely to live in poverty.
American Community Survey: Poverty, September 2018)

(Colorado Children's Campaign, Nearly 1 in 8 Colorado kids (12%) may not always know when or where they will get their next meal.
2019 KIDS COUNT in Colorado!, August 2019)

(James Ziliak and Craig Gunderson, 1 in 30 older adults (3.2%) face hunger in Colorado, forcing them to make choices between purchasing groceries or medication.
The State of Senior Hunger in America 2017: An Annual Report, May 2019)

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1 in 12 Coloradans use food stamps, including working families, children, older adults, veterans and those who are disabled.
Colorado Food Assistance Program fact sheet, December 2018)

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Of food stamp recipients in Colorado, almost 3 in 4 (70%) live with children, 1 in 4 (28%) live with an elderly or disabled resident, and almost half (42%) are members of working families. Colorado Food Assistance Program fact sheet, December 2018)

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, A Coloradan, on average, only receives $1.39 per meal in food stamp benefits, making it a challenge to put healthy food on the table for themselves and their family.
Colorado Food Assistance Program fact sheet, December 2018)

(Compared to other state participation rates, Colorado ranks 17th in school breakfast participation for low-income studentsi and 43rd in SNAP/food stamp access among low-income individualsii.
i Food Research and Action Center, School Breakfast Scorecard for 2017-2018 School Year, February 2019; ii U.S. Department of Agriculture, Program Access Index 2017, December 2018)

(U.S. Department of AgricultureWhile Coloradan participation has improved, statewide numbers still remain low in major nutrition assistance programs. For example, only 3 in 5 low-income Coloradans (60%) participate in the food stamp program that helps struggling families and individuals purchase groceries.
, Program Access Index: 2017, December 2018)

IN THE UNITED STATES...

(U.S. Census Bureau,More than 1 in 8 Americans live in poverty (13.1%), struggling to make ends meet. That's more than 41.8 million people. Poverty: 2017 and 2018, November 2019)

(U.S. Department of Agriculture, More than 1 in 9 Americans (11.8%) struggle with hunger, facing times when there is not enough money to buy food. That's more than 15 million households.
Household Food Security in the United States in 2017, September 2018)

(U.S. Department of Agriculture, More than 2 in 3 food stamp participants are children (44%), older adults (12%) or non-elderly adults with disabilities (9%).
Characteristics of SNAP Households, November 2017)

(U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food insecurity is strongly associated with income, with nearly 2 in 5 households (36.8%) that reported inconsistent access to food also had annual incomes below the federal poverty line.
Household Food Security in the United States in 2017, September 2018)

(U.S. Census Bureau,It's estimated that food stamps helped 3.4 million people get above the federal poverty line in 2017.
Income and Poverty in the United States: 2017, September 2018)
What Can You Do?

Find out what we do, access our fact sheets and reports, and sign up for our email updates. If you want to be a part of the solution, join our online action network!

Download these hunger facts and share with others:
Colorado Hunger & Poverty Facts

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The Facts: Hunger in Colorado - Hunger Free Colorado

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Read facts about hunger and poverty in Colorado. Find out how we define terms like hunger and why nutrition programs matter. HUNGER & POVERTY IN COLORADO... Updated: 10/19 Nearly 1 in 11 Coloradans (9.1%) struggle with hunger, not always ... Continue reading →

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CLOSE

Fort Collins leaders want to forge ahead with community oil and gas regulations as Larimer County and state officials continue to craft their own.

In an informal vote at Tuesday's City Council work session, five of seven council members asked city staff to begin drafting industry regulations that could take effect as soon as fall 2021. Council wants the regulations to act as a watchdog for Fort Collins' environment, public health and safety.

Staff had asked council to choose between two options for regulating oil and gas operations in the city: Start drafting the regulations now or maintain the status quo and reassess in a year. The option of drafting regulations now could include a moratorium on new development while the regulations are in-progress. Waiting a year would allow leaders to "wait for the dust to settle" as county and state regulations are finalized and any possible legal challenges come to light, senior city planner Kelly Smith said. It would also mean Fort Collins could wait and see whether any regulatory gaps remain after state rules go on the books.

The majority of council said they want to act now on Senate Bill 181, recently passed Colorado legislation that allows municipal leaders to take oil and gas regulation into their own hands. Municipalities have long been allowed to regulate the industry, but local regulations generally couldn't be any stricter than state-mandated rules until now.

The new era of industry regulation comes after Colorado lawmakers in 2019 enacted a major shakeup of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the key state agency overseeing oil and gas operations.

COGCC, previously charged with fostering oil and gas development while balancing environment, health and safety concerns, is now expected to regulate the industry in a way that preserves environment, health and public safety. (The loss of the word "foster" is key here.) COGCC's reshuffled board is working on new statewide rules that city staff expect will be more stringent than previous regulations, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is in the process of refining its air quality regulations for the oil and gas industry.

The main point of contention for council on Tuesday was whether Fort Collins actually needs oil and gas regulations. There are 10 active wells in city limits, including two that are considered "shut-in" and not currently being used. Staff said an application on the horizon could turn one of the shut-in wells into a producing well. A new well hasn't been drilled within city limits since 1992, and at least 95% of the city's area is off-limits for drilling because of building density and other restrictions.

"A moratorium makes absolutely no sense at all when you haven't had a new well drilled since 1992," said council member Ken Summers, who joined Mayor Wade Troxell in questioning the necessity of city regulations.

But the rest of council said it's important to create safeguards in case Fort Collins sees more drilling interest in the future. Oil and gas regulation is one of council's 2019-20 priorities.

"I'm looking (at staff's presentation to council) and it says, 'New drilling unlikely,' but none of us have a crystal ball to know if that's true," council member Susan Gutowsky said. "So much can change between now and a year."

Fort Collins has a speckled history with oil and gas regulation. Voters petitioned for and approved a citywide hydraulic fracturing moratorium in 2013 that was meant to pause development for five years while the city studied fracking impacts. But the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the measure in 2015 after a Colorado Oil and Gas Association lawsuit protesting Fort Collins' moratorium and other local regulations made it to the state's highest court.

The oil and gas industry is a significant source of air pollution in Colorado because operations produce volatile organic compounds, a precursor to ozone. High ozone levels have bruised Northern Colorado's air quality for years, resulting in federal government repercussions. Industry activity also produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And a growing body of research indicates that living near oil and gas wells can be harmful to your health.

On the other hand, Colorado's existing oil and gas regulations are more stringent than those in other states. The state adopted the first methane emission standards in the country and requires public disclosure of fracking fluid contents and water testing before and after drilling, among many other measures. State data shows Colorado operators have cut emissions of methane and volatile organic compounds as production has grown.

Regardless, as oil and gas wells have proliferated throughout the state and in neighboring Weld County, the industry hasn't found a foothold within Fort Collins' borders. That could be because of Fort Collins' relative lack of underground resources - activity is limited to the Fort Collins Field in the city's northeast corner, where wells produce mostly water, a little oil and virtually no gas. It's also possible the shadow of Fort Collins' failed moratorium deterred new drilling.

Buy Photo

Two pumpjacks are seen on Friday, April 4, 2019, just east of the Hearthfire neighborhood in Fort Collins, Colo. (Photo: Jacy Marmaduke and Timothy Hurst/Coloradoan drone team)

What to know about current oil and gas activity in Fort Collins

Prospect Energy operates the 10 active wells within city limits and several more just north of the city. The wells in city limits include three that produce oil, five that the operator uses to inject water and bring oil to the surface, and two "shut-in" wells that aren't currently operating but could be modified to produce oil and gas, Fort Collins environmental sustainability manager Cassie Archuleta said.

Five of the Prospect Energy wells - four active and one inactive - are located in the proposed Country Club Reserve subdivision, which is expected to include about 150 single-family homes on 80 acres at the southwest corner of Douglas and Turnberry roads.

Prospect Energy is planning to submit an application to "recomplete" one of the shut-in wells on the Country Club Reserve property so it can produce gas. Archuleta said they plan to access gas from a different underground formation through horizontal drilling, an approach they used for another well just outside city limits and are now considering for the rest of their wells in the Fort Collins Field.

Others are reading: Affordable housing is key to lifting people out of homelessness. That's easier said than done.

According to city information provided to council, Prospect Energy might also explore the possibility of accepting compensation to plug and abandon the wells on the Country Club Reserve property.

Fort Collins has an operator agreement with Prospect Energy that expires in 2023. To drill any new wells or recomplete existing ones, Prospect Energy will be subject to the work-in-progress state regulations.

Current COGCC rules require operators to drill new wells at least 500 feet from most structures and 1,000 feet from high-occupancy buildings like schools and hospitals. The city's land use code, updated in 2018, requires builders to build most residential dwellings at least 500 feet away from existing wells. A 750-foot setback applies to multi-family dwellings.

What's next

Council members expressed mixed feedback about the possibility of a moratorium. Several said they'd prefer not to issue a moratorium unless and until an operator shows interest in drilling in city limits.

Troxell said a moratorium, and localized regulations, are an unwise use of staff's time. He said staff should be focusing on other sources of air pollution, including vehicle traffic. Emissions from vehicles, another significant source of ozone, have climbed as Fort Collins has grown in area and population.

"There was no activity within Fort Collins even without a moratorium," Troxell said, "so to me, the moratorium was an exercise as opposed to doing something effectively to help the health and safety of our community."

Council member Julie Pignataro countered that oil and gas regulations would honor the spirit of Fort Collins' environmental goals, including targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% of 2005 levels by 2020, 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

"If we just let things go as is, it kind of makes our Climate Action Plan look like window dressing," Pignataro said.

Colorado weather: How much snow actually fell in Fort Collins during season's first snow?

Now that most of council has signed off, city staff will start drafting regulatory framework ideas, discuss regulations with other communities and plan a public engagement process with residents, operators, property owners and other stakeholders, deputy city manager Jeff Mihelich said. Staff will come back to council with more defined options in six to nine months, he said.

Meanwhile, Larimer County's oil and gas task force is working on the county's first-ever set of oil and gas regulations to adopt as soon as 2020. The county-initiated task force plans to offer county commissioners recommendations this fall. How the county process plays out is especially significant because 211 of 272 active wells in Larimer County are in unincorporated areas and will be subject to the county and state regulations only.

A coalition known as Larimer Alliance for Health, Safety & the Environment has been pushing commissioners to suspend all pending oil and gas applications until the county has adopted robust rules that protect health, safety and the environment. They're hosting an oil-and-gas-related panel at the Fort Collins Senior Center on Monday. The 7 p.m. panel will include comments from Detlev Helmig, a University of Colorado Boulder atmospheric scientist; Marcia Martin, a Longmont City Council member; and Dr. Cory Carroll of Physicians for Social Responsibility Colorado. Berthoud Mayor William Karspeck is moderating.
Editor's note: This story includes a correction. An upcoming application for modifying a "shut-in" well so it can produce gas wouldn't increase the number of active wells in city limits because shut-in wells are still considered active. Jacy Marmaduke covers government accountability for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter @jacymarmaduke.
Read or Share this story: https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2019/10/11/fort-collins-oil-gas-regulations-city-council-stricter-laws/3920684002/

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Fort Collins leaders want stricter oil and gas regulations in city limits

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CLOSE Fort Collins leaders want to forge ahead with community oil and gas regulations as Larimer County and state officials continue to craft their own. In an informal vote at Tuesday's City Council work session, five of seven council members asked city staff to begin drafting industry regulations that could take effect as soon as fall 2021.

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Colorado communities coming together to support solar panels
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/07/06/colorado-solar-co-ops-united-neighbors/

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Water has profoundly shaped Colorado's past and will play a vital role in its future. The resource is essential to the state's agriculture, cities, industries, energy supply, and environment. Furthermore, eighteen other states and parts of Mexico rely on waters from the mountains of Colorado, known as the Headwaters State. Tens of millions of people and billions of dollars of economic activity between California and the Mississippi River depend on water that begins in Colorado's mountains. Scarcity of this vital resource has created controversy and conflict, but water challenges have also led to cooperation and collaboration.

Geography, Weather, and Climate

Weather in Colorado can differ dramatically from year to year. Severe droughts like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the historic dryness of 2012 alternate with destructive deluges, including the Big Thompson Flood of 1976, which killed more than 140 people, and the catastrophic northern Front Range flooding of 2013.

The state's diverse geography ranges from under 3,400 feet above sea level at a low point on the eastern plains to Rocky Mountain summits that soar above 14,000 feet, creating a climate marked by stark regional differences. Clouds tend to pass over the deserts and canyons of western Colorado. They dump their moisture on the high peaks, and the eastern plains lie in the dry rain shadow cast by this mountain wall.

Blizzards bury the Rocky Mountains in winter, creating reservoirs of snowpack. In spring, the snowpack melts, and water runs down from the peaks to the plains and valleys, supporting ecosystems and recreation and allowing cities and farms to thrive. The state's rivers swell with snowmelt in spring and early summer; in the late summer and fall, their flow diminishes as snow melts away. Dams capture spring runoff in reservoirs so the stored water can be distributed during dry months and years, smoothing out natural fluctuations in the water supply. Diversion systems move water from places where precipitation is abundant to where it is scarce, replenishing the state's river basins.

The Continental Divide, which separates waters that flow to the Pacific Ocean from those that enter the Atlantic, splits the state into the Western and Eastern Slopes. Some 80 percent of the state's water originates in Western Slope rivers, but more than 80 percent of Colorado's population lives on the Eastern Slope. This mismatch between water supply and population lies at the heart of many of the state's long-running water conflicts and hard-won compromises.

Four of the most important rivers in the American West begin in the snows of Colorado's Great Divide. The South Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande run down the eastern side of the divide in the Atlantic watershed. The Colorado River runs west to the Pacific, but human engineering redirects a portion of the Colorado's flow across the Continental Divide to the farms and cities of the Front Range.

Water History

From the Ancestral Puebloans who inhabited Mesa Verde until the late 1200s to the Ute, Navajo, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, who lived in the region until white settlement in the nineteenth century, the survival of the first Coloradans depended on efficient use of scarce water supplies. Explorers, mountain men, and mapmakers relied on rivers as avenues for travel that provided shelter, game, and lifesaving stores of water amid the harsh landscape of the High Plains, which Major Stephen Long labeled on an early map as the "Great American Desert." The San Luis People's Ditch, an irrigation channel established in the San Luis Valley in 1852 and based on a water management system of Spanish origin, holds the earliest water right in continuous use in Colorado.

Beginning in 1858, the Colorado Gold Rush helped lay the foundation for the legal system governing Colorado's water, which was essential for mining. To manage water disputes, miners adopted the doctrine of prior appropriation-the principle that the first person to put water to use has the legal right to continue using that same amount of water. Gold prospectors were followed by homesteaders, who launched irrigated agriculture on Colorado's semiarid eastern plains, leading to clashes over the use of water sources. These conflicts resulted in landmark court cases that established a statewide system of water law based on prior appropriation. Colorado water law helped shape the legal landscape of the American West and paved the way for the development of water-scarce lands.

Irrigation ditches transformed drought-plagued prairie into productive cropland and pastureland. Technological innovations allowed farming and ranching to flourish throughout the state, giving rise to an industry that forms a vital part of Colorado's economy. Today, agriculture accounts for approximately 86 percent of all surface and groundwater use in the state. But as population grows, pressure to move water from agriculture to cities increases.

Denver Water, the state's oldest and largest water utility, was established in 1918 to ensure a stable water supply for the growing metropolis. Denver Water and other entities constructed engineering works to dam rivers and divert flow from the Western Slope across the Continental Divide to the Eastern Slope, despite opposition from western Colorado, which wanted water to remain in its rivers to support the area's agriculture and future growth. The impact of these transmountain diversions became a point of contention, and western states battled among themselves over rivers born in the snows of Colorado.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 resulted from negotiations led by Colorado attorney Delph Carpenter. This historic agreement prevented endless and paralyzing litigation by dividing the flow of the most important river in the American Southwest among states in the Colorado River Basin.

The year 1937 was a watershed in Colorado history. A hard-won compromise between the Eastern and Western Slopes cleared the way for the state to develop some of its water resources allocated from the Colorado River Compact. Additionally, the establishment of a framework to manage water through organizations such as the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District set the stage for the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. This monumental diversion system financed and built by the federal government redirected flow from the Colorado River headwaters across the Great Divide to the plains of northeastern Colorado. Other major dams and diversions built by the federal government followed.

Congressman Wayne Aspinall advocated for water development in Colorado at the national level from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Water projects he championed brought benefits as well as controversy. The modern environmental movement in America was born in large part during battles over water projects supported by Representative Aspinall, most notably the Echo Park Dam proposed in Dinosaur National Monument in the 1950s.

The environmental movement gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s as society's changing values led to balancing water development against protecting rivers' ecological health. Federal legislation such as the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act reflected this shift. Also beginning in the 1960s, Colorado passed legislation to manage some of the state's underground water supplies based on their finite quantity and their connection to rivers.

In 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency vetoed Denver Water's proposed Two Forks Dam, forcing Denver and its suburbs to rely largely on conservation to make up for the metropolitan area's water supply shortfall. In the wake of the dam veto, Denver Water began working with the Western Slope to develop mutually acceptable solutions to the water challenges that have divided the state throughout much of its history.

Recent decades have seen increased collaboration between water interests traditionally at odds with each other. In 2013 more than forty partners-including Denver Water, Mesa County and Grand Valley Irrigation Districts; the towns of Breckenridge, Dillon, Frisco, and Silverthorne; and the Colorado River Conservation District-approved the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement. The historic agreement brought together myriad interests under a singular vision for the future of water in the state and marked a turning point in clashes between Denver Water and the Western Slope. Despite the agreement, water conflicts are likely to continue as the state faces increasing demand on a limited resource for which there is no substitute.

Future Water Challenges

Colorado's water use is constrained by interstate agreements such as the Colorado River Compact. But the state's population is projected to double by the middle of the twenty-first century. In addition, scientists warn that Colorado's climate has been heating up in recent decades and will most likely get even warmer. As temperatures rise, evaporation will increase and soil will dry out, reducing the amount of runoff in rivers while the thirst of cities and farms will increase. And snowpack will shrink and melt earlier in the spring, reducing the size of this critical reservoir and changing the timing of the water supply.

Limited supplies will force Coloradans to make difficult choices among the state's municipal, agricultural, energy, recreation, and environmental needs. As of 2015, the widening gap between water supply and demand is being addressed in statewide collaborative efforts. Stakeholders with diverse interests are working together on a state plan that manages Colorado's water supply to support the environment while maintaining vibrant cities, a robust agricultural sector, and productive industries. The state's future depends to a large degree on the success of these efforts.

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Water has profoundly shaped Colorado's past and will play a vital role in its future. The resource is essential to the state's agriculture, cities, industries, energy supply, and environment. Furthermore, eighteen other states and parts of Mexico rely on waters from the mountains of Colorado, known as the Headwaters State.

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How the government is dealing with food insecurity in Chicago land area

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How the government is dealing with food insecurity in Chicago land area

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One out of seven residents faces food insecurity in the Chicago region.

That means making impossible choices: Buy food, or buy medication. Travel to work, or eat a meal today.

On October 24, The Chicago Community Trust convened a select group of donors who are investing in the fight against hunger and food insecurity across the Chicago region.

They gathered around the table for a conversation with community leaders including site director Thelma Jackson Thompson and health & nutrition operations director Leslie Hampton, both of the North Lawndale YMCA; Kate Maehr, executive director and CEO of the Greater Chicago Food Depository; and Anna Lee, the Trust's program officer for basic human needs.

"A lot of our programs are in food deserts, but the irony is that 33% of our children under the age of five are either obese or overweight. Parents are doing the very best they can, but the cheapest food is the stuff that's not good for us. I just enrolled a child that has Type 2 Diabetes and she's four."

Together, the group explored the barriers to food access in our region, and how those vary across unique populations: from children, to older adults, to people with disabilities, to working families. They also took a look at innovative, results-oriented solutions with the potential to reduce food insecurity.

Some of the interlocking pieces of the food security picture:

Distribution: Food pantries & food banks

Who they serve. The Greater Chicago Food Depository serves more than 800,000 people annually. Beyond preconceived notions of who goes hungry, this enormous population includes everyone from students to working families.

"The people we serve are going to work, to school, paying their bills, put gas in the car so they can get to work next week-but there's no food in the kitchen and there's no money in the bank account," said Maehr. "Families are turning to food pantries as a coping strategy."

Why they can't do it all. For every meal that a food pantry or food bank provides in this country, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides 12.

As government services like SNAP have their budgets slashed, it is often suggested that private donations will take up the slack. But the math simply doesn't add up-philanthropic dollars will never be enough to make up the shortfall, leaving vulnerable families squeezed out of the support they need to regain stability.

"We have eight food banks in the state of Illinois, but I'm going to tell you, they are stretched incredibly thin," Maehr said. "Particularly food banks serving rural communities, food banks in parts of the country that have been really hit by job loss: if the SNAP program is constricted, we are going to see a world of hurt and, in particular, families with children are going to see more hurt."

How they're thinking differently. Even as the recession has abated, lines have not gotten shorter at food pantries. This demand "has made us realize that we have to think about this work and how we respond to the need very differently," says Maehr.

She described four strategies that the GCFD is embracing to move the needle on hunger and food insecurity at a systemic level:

Partnerships, to coordinate the work done by multiple organization for greater impact-whether working across the city, or within one neighborhood, like the Healthy Market partnership in North Lawndale with the YMCA.

Intersectionality, reaching beyond the traditional hunger issue area to coordinate with strategists thinking about health to violence prevention to agriculture and food systems.

Workforce development, continuing to link people to opportunity in order to substantially and sustainably impact their ability to thrive.

Policy and advocacy, to help ensure that governmental decision-making is well-informed and works effectively in the best interest of residents.

"We have eight food banks in the state of Illinois, but I'm going to tell you, they are stretched incredibly thin. Particularly food banks serving rural communities: if the SNAP program is constricted, we are going to see a world of hurt and, in particular, families with children are going to see more hurt."

Geography & food deserts

Many neighborhoods in Chicago have been described as "food deserts," signaling a scarcity of fresh and healthy foods available to residents.

At the North Lawndale YMCA, staff has partnered with the GCFD to create a Healthy Market twice a month. Parents picking up their children from the Head Start program can shop for their choice of fresh fruits and vegetables at no cost before heading home.

"They don't have to go anywhere else," Thelma Jackson Thompson explained. "If you're picking up five babies of various ages, you're not going to the grocery store that day. However, if it's the first or third Friday then you can just come upstairs and leave with cereal, leave with fresh fruits and vegetables, and the parents are really, really loving it."

Not only have parents requested that the market be offered weekly, but there is also demand among he children, who enjoy learning about fruits and vegetables that they've never been exposed to before.

For Leslie Hampton, crucial to understanding the market's success is not only its location, but also its affordability. "Our parents are struggling financially and in a lot of cases they are trying to make sure that they pay rent, keep the lights on, feed their children and keep their children healthy," Hampton explained. "The barrier to accessing healthy nutritious food is usually around income, rather than geography. It's not that I don't have something across the street-it's that I live in a household where the income is $8,000 a year and I don't have enough money to go and spend."

"I'm a big proponent of the SNAP program. It works because it's really efficient; there's not a lot of bureaucracy. People get money that they can use to buy food, they buy that food in grocery stores; those grocery stores get that food from producers; that money ultimately flows back to communities and farmers in a really direct way," Hampton said.

"It gives people choice to buy the food that they themselves want. So, there's a component of dignity. That, to me, is a more efficient and effective response than building infrastructure. There may be other reasons to build infrastructure, but I don't think response to hunger is necessarily the reason to build a store."

The Greater Chicago Food Depository and the City of Chicago recently released Forward Together: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Insecurity across the City of Chicago, their collaborative action plan. View the Roadmap

Public health & nutrition

"Chicago has, in addition to food security issues, a serious public health crisis," said Steve Koch, the former deputy mayor of the City of Chicago, who serves on the Trust's Executive Committee. "This isn't just a problem, it's a major epidemic crisis of food-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, things that tend to relate to diet."

Hampton added, "A lot of our programs are in food deserts, but the irony is that 33% of our children under the age of five are either obese or overweight. Parents are doing the very best they can, but the cheapest food is the stuff that's not good for us. It is becoming a big health crisis, especially for some children that are so young."

"I just enrolled a child that has Type 2 Diabetes and she's four," Hampton said.

This complex intersection of food insecurity, health and poverty means that solutions require a multi-faceted approach-like the GCFD's longstanding program in workforce development, linking people who face barriers to employment with career pathways in the food industry. "It's critical to think about connectedness [of human service sectors] as the leading edge of how you can get at this public health crisis that we face," Koch said.

Agriculture & food systems

In a state like Illinois, where agriculture is big business, how does food insecurity persist?

At the GCFD, Maehr explained, "we have struggled, frankly, in thinking about how we connect to a local food system because we're an organization that has to think at scale, so we always measure things in truckloads-and there's not a lot of agriculture in the city of Chicago."

"The barrier to accessing healthy nutritious food is usually around income, rather than geography. It's not that I don't have something across the street-it's that I live in a household where the income is $8,000 a year and I don't have enough money to go and spend."

"That said, there's a lot more that we can do to have conversations proactively with growers in our community," Maehr said. She shared with the group that the GCFD is working to build its commitment to acquiring food locally-"which is good for growers, it's good for our economy, it's good for our environment."

"But that requires us having a different conversation with donors. We have to be honest about the fact that we purchase food. For a lot of years, donors were shocked to hear that. They thought that we were just an organization that moved donated food. So we have to talk about the economic impact differently, and we have to come to different tables and be a part of conversations which have, for a long time, been separate conversations."
Donor Dialogues explore pressing issues in our region and our world, forming learning communities by connecting practitioners and experts with donors who have the passion and leadership to make systemic change. Please contact your relationship manager for more information about upcoming Donor Dialogues. Or, if you are interested in becoming a donor with The Chicago Community Trust, contact Tim Bresnahan for information about the giving solutions we offer.

"A lot of our programs are in food deserts, but the irony is that 33% of our children under the age of five are either obese or overweight. Parents are doing the very best they can, but the cheapest food is the stuff that's not good for us. I just enrolled a child that has Type 2 Diabetes and she's four."

Partnerships, to coordinate the work done by multiple organization for greater impact-whether working across the city, or within one neighborhood, like the Healthy Market partnership in North Lawndale with the YMCA.

Intersectionality, reaching beyond the traditional hunger issue area to coordinate with strategists thinking about health to violence prevention to agriculture and food systems.

Workforce development, continuing to link people to opportunity in order to substantially and sustainably impact their ability to thrive.

Policy and advocacy, to help ensure that governmental decision-making is well-informed and works effectively in the best interest of residents.

"We have eight food banks in the state of Illinois, but I'm going to tell you, they are stretched incredibly thin. Particularly food banks serving rural communities: if the SNAP program is constricted, we are going to see a world of hurt and, in particular, families with children are going to see more hurt."

The Greater Chicago Food Depository and the City of Chicago recently released Forward Together: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Insecurity across the City of Chicago, their collaborative action plan. View the Roadmap

"The barrier to accessing healthy nutritious food is usually around income, rather than geography. It's not that I don't have something across the street-it's that I live in a household where the income is $8,000 a year and I don't have enough money to go and spend."

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To Fight Food Insecurity, Chicago Leaders Work Across Divides

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One out of seven residents faces food insecurity in the Chicago region. That means making impossible choices: Buy food, or buy medication. Travel to work, or eat a meal today. On October 24, The Chicago Community Trust convened a select group of donors who are investing in the fight against hunger and food insecurity across the Chicago region.

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How Music Festivals are Destroying the Earth

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How Music Festivals are Destroying the Earth

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Talks about the waste produced & energy consumed by music festivals

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"Melissa Wdowik: Don't be Fooled by Sugars Sweetness" in the Coloradoan, by Melissa Wdowik, published Feb 16, 2016.
- talks about the need for Americans to limit the amount of sugar intake .

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CSU-Pueblo Signing on to Solar Panel Project

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CSU-Pueblo Signing on to Solar Panel Project

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https://www.denverpost.com/2020/02/08/csu-pueblo-solar-panel-power-project/

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This article talks about why there is so much food waste in America, exactly how much food and money is wasted annually, and what other countries are doing in order to cut down on their own food waste.

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Writing about food waste for The Atlantic back in 2014, Elizabeth Segran gestured at both the shoppers who refuse to buy imperfect-looking fruit as well as the grocers who refuse to stock the shelves with any wonky-looking wares. "Grocery stores routinely trash produce for being the wrong shape or containing minor blemishes," Doug Rauch, the former president of the Trader Joe's Company, told her.

But that assumes such produce even reaches the stores. Quoting workers and experts at a variety of vantage points in the food system, The Guardian 's Suzanne Goldenberg also reports that, "Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the U.S. are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill, because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards."

"In my mind, the desire for perfect produce came about in the 1940s as housewives adapted to widespread refrigeration and new CPG [consumer packaged goods] products," Eve Turow Paul, the author of A Taste of Generation Yum, writes in an email. "Suddenly, you could get a pineapple in Chicago in January. Wonderbread hit shelves a decade before. Perfection and manicured foods came to represent safety and new technology."

It's easy to see how this obsession might become amplified in an era of high foodie-ism and Instagram where a sort of heirloom airbrushing has taken hold. Writing in The Times in 2014, Pete Wells christened the extension of this phenomenon in restaurants as "camera cuisine," where dishes are tailored for the patron as well as a "global club whose members, checking out their phones or laptops, constitute an invisible gallery in the dining room."

Wells relays a story of being "shutter-shamed" after posting a picture of trout that did not meet a certain communal artistic benchmark. The retail version of this experience might be a farmer's market where a bunch of ramps or sheaths of leeks would be shunted aside if they couldn't pass muster on a Nancy Meyers set.

Paul pushes back against the idea that the anointed few seated at the head of the table might be oblivious to the cause of food waste. "Especially in the last year, 'foodies' and chefs have catapulted the issue of food waste into popular conversations," she adds, naming initiatives by chefs and public intellectuals such as Dan Barber and Roy Choi as well as the pu pu platter of coverage of the issue in elite food magazines.

Last year, the Obama administration announced a public-private campaign to halve the more than two million calories that Americans waste annually by the year 2030 by focusing on improving food efficiency, recycling, decoding food labels, and finding ways to deliver food to the one-in-six Americans that are hungry. Meanwhile, start-ups like the Bay Area's Imperfect Produce are starting to deliver ugly but otherwise consumable goods at a discount.

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Why Americans Lead the World in Food Waste

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Writing about food waste for The Atlantic back in 2014, Elizabeth Segran gestured at both the shoppers who refuse to buy imperfect-looking fruit as well as the grocers who refuse to stock the shelves with any wonky-looking wares.

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Hunger in Larimer County
Food Bank for Larimer County

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Occasionally, at Regis University's school cafeteria, there are dishes that sous chef Grant Ruesch calls "monotony breakers."

A recent one? New York Strip steaks.

"I bought the steaks for a really awesome deal. I can't remember, but like $3 a pound," said Ruesch.

"$3.49," someone interjected.

"We ran a steak night special at the college and we sous vide the steaks with some butter and fresh herbs and fresh garlic," Ruesch continued. "We didn't know how it was going to go because it was just something new we were trying. So we're like, 'we'll do 70 steaks to see how it goes.' We sold out in the first 45 minutes."

Grant Ruesch, a sous chef at Regis University, makes notes on produce during a food show at FoodMaven on November 12, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. He recently served New York Strip steaks to college students after finding them for $3.49 a pound. (Seth McConnell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

The screaming-good deal was made possible by FoodMaven, a Colorado Springs startup that has spent the past few years fine tuning the logistics of getting excess and imperfect food to people who will eat it. While that may sound simple, it's not. An incredible amount of uneaten food ends up in landfills each year for a variety of reasons, but a big one is when farmers, ranchers and local food producers can't find a buyer or get the food to that buyer or a needy nonprofit in time.

There's a long-running stat that estimates 40% of food in the U.S. winds up getting tossed. To reduce that figure, local organizations have upped their game by investing in trucks and distribution centers to move unwanted food to charities that serve meals to the needy.

Some grocery stores now include displays of imperfect, "ugly" fruit, which tastes the same as "perfect" fruit despite a funky shape.

And tech companies, like FoodMaven, are focusing on areas from infrastructure to transportation to reduce food waste faster. It's all about making sure vegetables aren't left unharvested on a field because farmers can't find buyers, or that food closing in on its expiration date - which is set by manufacturers and not the U.S. Department of Agriculture - makes it to consumers before time runs out.

And sometimes it's cattle without a buyer at the end of a season, which has happened at Rafter W Ranch located outside of Simla. Ranch operator Lance Wheeler works with Food Maven when he has an oversupply of grass-fed beef. His steers yield about 500 pounds of meat.

"Ground beef and things like that always sell very well. But then there's things that we might have extras of. And FoodMaven's been a great place to move that product through so it just isn't dead inventory sitting in our system," Wheeler said. "This is certainly outside the normal food system, you know, where if it doesn't get used, it gets tossed."

There's a lot of food going uneaten

The 40% statistic of food thrown out by America comes from a 2012 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Growers, grocers and home cooks together tossed $165 billion worth of food. American families, the report said, threw out 25% of the food and beverages they bought.

Another report puts the waste at 31% of food produced, though this USDA's Economic Research Service study from 2014 excludes food lost at the farms. The top three wasted-food groups were meat at 30%, vegetables at 19% and dairy products at 17%.

Either way, there's a lot of food not getting eaten. But trying to get that food to the 14.3 million food-insecure households in the U.S. who don't know when they'll have another meal has helped raise awareness of food waste.

NRDC continues to use the 40% stat today, though the value has risen to $218 billion a year.

There's also a new number: 86% of surveyed adults agree that food waste is a big problem and most agree that their actions can make a difference. The largest share of food waste - 43% - occurs at home, said Andrea Spacht Collins, NRDC Sustainable Food Policy Specialist.

"There are other places along the line where consumers are driving waste, like at restaurants where we have too big of portions and so there's plate leftovers," Spacht Collins said.

But, she added, "It's not just food that we're wasting but we're wasting all of the resources that go into producing that food, whether that's all of the agriculture water that goes to grow our food, the chemicals that are used in producing food, all of the transportation fuel to move food around and to cool it to keep it at temperature."

Ugly fruit, mobile markets and progress

The city of Denver began working with NRDC last spring through its Certifiably Green Denver program to cut waste at eight restaurants in the Highland neighborhood. The restaurants began composting and found new ways to use extra food.

That included baking dog treats from leftover bacon, cheese and oats; ordering less food more frequently so ingredients would be used up; and running more specials. Restaurants saved between $300 to $400 a month and they went from diverting 18% of the food waste from landfills to 70%, said Susan Renaud, who runs the food pilot program.

Grocers are doing much better at using analytics to reduce waste by predicting what to order based on seasonality and weather, said Andy Harig, vice president of sustainability, tax and trade at the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, which represents grocery, restaurant and food marketing trade groups. But it's still a tough business unable to rely on just-in-time deliveries.

"Lots of times there's a sort of a kind of a force majeure aspect to it where you just don't have control," Harig said. "If your local team looks like they're going to go to the state championship for football so you think, 'OK, we're going to have a ton of tailgaters, I gotta order 30 crates of avocados where normally I do two.' And then that team all of a sudden loses in the semifinals."

Imperfect produce is marketed as recipe-ready and sold at a discount as part of King Soopers' parent Kroger's Zero Hunger, Zero Waste program. In the Lafayette King Soopers, banana bread mix is stocked within a few feet of spotted organic bananas. (Dana Coffield, The Colorado Sun)

Store managers have more flexibility to offer a sale. But in other areas, where the solution seems clear, stores have had to figure out new alternatives. Take ugly vegetables, for instance. A number of the Alliance's grocery members have run pilot programs to sell imperfect produce, but those faded after a while, Harig said.

"Part of what (grocers) saw was the more imperfect it was, the harder it was to sell," he said. "They also found they had to retell the story to people, explain that you know it's just as good. They had to keep that sort of educational program constant but even with all of that work a lot of those programs really ran into problems after six or eight weeks. I think you have to have a pretty aware consumer who's willing to come in."

Grocers are doing what they can, like using the crooked vegetables for pre-made salads, or milk and cabbages nearing their sell-by date for coleslaw at the deli counter, he said.

A number of tech startups are also working on issues around food waste. Misfits Market, which recently raised $16.5 million in venture capital, offers a monthly subscription for a box of ugly fruit. Flashfood in Canada and Food Rescue US in Connecticut have mobile apps that quickly connect stores with extra food to nonprofits. Goodr in Atlanta uses blockchain to help businesses track surplus food from pickup to donation.

We Don't Waste, a nonprofit that started in 2009 in Denver, regularly picks up unused food at the Colorado Convention Center, Pepsi Center, Coors Field and other venues. The nonprofit invested in its own delivery trucks and a 11,500-square-foot distribution center to gather food from the source and store it or shuttle it quickly to a user, usually a food bank or shelter.

"When events are produced, for example, a caterer, if you have a party for 250 people, they don't bring out food just for 250. They'll produce for 275. But unfortunately some people don't show up," said Arlan Preblud, We Don't Waste's founder and executive director. "We pick it all up for the donor and don't charge the recipients."

We Don't Waste, a Denver nonprofit since 2009, hosts monthly farmers markets in neighborhood food deserts where there are few to no grocery stores. Shoppers can pick and choose items they want and will actually eat, which should cut down on food waste. The food is provided for free. (Handout)

It's also exploring new ways to get food to people. In August, it partnered with the Denver Department of Safety. It stuffed bags with non-perishable foods for police officers to share with citizens during welfare checks. It also set up mobile food markets after mapping out the city to find food deserts, or neighborhoods without a grocery store, starting with the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea areas.

"We set up a farmers market where people can shop, as opposed to going to some food pantry where they're handed bag and told, 'Take this product home.' They get home and one, they may not even know what the product is, two, they don't use the product, or three, they don't know how to prepare it," Preblud said. "This way, they can shop with dignity. They can take whatever they need at no cost. It's been very successful."

Interestingly, because of its efforts over the years, the organization expects to provide about a third fewer meals this year than last year. That's partly because 2018 was an incredible year, with 11 million meals served. Efficiency is to blame, said Allie Hoffman, We Don't Waste's communications manager.

"More importantly, a lot of our food donors have used the data that we've provided them to cut waste," she said. "As such, many of them have adjusted their operations to be greener and to cut costs associated with waste."

The dilemma: Too much food?

Derrick Hoffman, who runs the 100-acre Hoffman Farms in Greeley with his wife, Hanmei, said the farm had an excellent vegetable-growing season this year. But as on any farm, many vegetables don't look picture perfect, an issue that has hurt small, local growers for years.

That, combined with difficulty finding workers, meant that the farm left 40% of its crops unharvested.

"We literally had nowhere to go with all the stuff we were growing. We had oversaturated our customer base," said Hoffman, who may reduce the growing area on the farm by 20% next year as a result.

Part of the issue is that as a medium-sized farm, he produces too much to rely on farmer's markets, but not enough for grocery stores that want perfectly shaped fruits and vegetables.

"When you sell to another distributor, it has to meet certain requirements. Some of our stuff wouldn't make the grade. 'No, your watermelon is too small,' or 'It's ugly,'" Hoffman said. "What's nice about FoodMaven is they've got a customer base that is not expecting (top) grade. It can be misshapen. It's really helped us as another avenue where we don't have stuff getting wasted."

FoodMaven CEO Ben Deda poses for a portrait during a food show at FoodMaven on November 12, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. FoodMaven takes extra or ugly food that sellers refuse to sell and finds buyers around the state of Colorado. (Seth McConnell, special to The Colorado Sun)

FoodMaven started in 2015 with a social-impact mission. Its goal was to recover $200 billion in lost revenue caused by wasted food - and it's since diverted 2 million tons away from landfills.

To do this, it taps local farms and food producers in need of food distribution. It reaches out to chefs and buyers at hotels, restaurants and institutional kitchens who want to support local farms, but must manage their own costs.

It's also created an online marketplace for buyers to see what's in stock and place an order. The company regularly donates a portion of food to charities.

"The food distribution industry really builds out a model from the '50s where it's about mass distribution, so let's get as much as you can get into the full truckloads, ship it to one point and then big deliveries everywhere," said Ben Deda, who became FoodMaven's CEO in September. "Well, that's hard to do with oversupply. And so you have to be able to be more agile, you have to be able to have a just-in-time system where small orders are picked up and delivered quickly."

Food with impact

At a food showcase earlier this month at the company's distribution hub near Denver's RiNo neighborhood, a variety of overstocked food was on display for buyers to see, touch and taste: Wild coho salmon from Love the Wild in Boulder, at $5 per pound. A 20-pound box of long grain rice from Denver-based Trinidad Benham, $5.19. Grass-fed Angus ribeye from Legacy Meats in Kersey, $7.99 a pound. Portobello mushroom caps from Boulder-based Green Chef, $5 for a 5-pound case.

"It's really hard working with 17 different suppliers, and I've been there. Seventeen different vendors for produce, for meat, for fish, and all the other stuff. This (FoodMaven) kind of consolidates everything," said Ruesch, the sous chef at Regis. "These portobellos are the nicest ones I've seen, much nicer than the ones I get from my produce company. And they're $5 a case, as opposed to maybe like $18 a case."

Sarah Lair and Sean Beattie of Five Eggs Meals chat with Tim Harris of Food Maven about their food needs during a food show at FoodMaven on November 12, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Seth McConnell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Most of FoodMaven's meat and produce for sale is not imperfect or oversupply, but since about 15% is, the company is able to price food at a 30% discount or more, Deda said.

And it's been accelerating growth to reach its goal. It's taken on investors who've put in at least $18.6 million in two years. It opened a distribution center in Denver last year and is expanding to the Dallas area in 2020. It acquired Denver-based Anderson Boneless Beef in January so it would have a local meat-processing center. The purchase meant the company's overall "impact food" sales shrunk to 15% of overall sales. Deda wants to get that number to 50%.

The growth has garnered some critics. In an editorial last April, Colorado rancher Mike Callicrate, an advocate for local farms, wrote in The Colorado Springs Independent that FoodMaven is forcing lower prices on local producers that "will only make it more difficult to re-localize, re-humanize and regenerate healthy food systems in the long run."

Deda said FoodMaven, which now employs 74 people, offers small farms and ranchers access to distribution they didn't have before. The company promotes the local brand in its marketplace and on packaging so buyers know where the meat and produce is coming from.

Dry sweet sopressata, an Italian dry salami, was cured for months in a process that could last indefinitely in a refrigerator. But as it approached a manufacturer's use-by date, it made its way to FoodMaven, which can resell it to chefs who can get a discount and use the sausage so it doesn't go to waste. (Seth McConnell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

"For local suppliers that already have existing distribution and don't have any oversupply or imperfect products, we may not be a good fit," Deda said. "For those that struggle to find distribution or that want to generate additional revenue from product they aren't selling today we can be a great additional outlet."

Sous chef Matt Butler at Colorado College's campus dining system understands lower prices can affect suppliers, but said he returned to FoodMaven as a customer in the past year because he had to get his program's costs under control and keep prices affordable for college students on a budget. ("I can't just go crazy and say this is a $37 hamburger," he said.) He didn't want to cut employee hours either. If he can get chicken for less than what the same local chicken farm charges, he has a fiscal and moral responsibility to do so.

"I tend to use the phrase food morality," said Butler, who works for Colorado College's food service contractor Bon Appétit Management Company. "There's no shortage of homeless people walking by the campus and let's face it, I've got a certain number of employees here that are working poor. It kind of hit me that I have to do as much as I can to do right by not only my employees but by the food we're bringing in."

Colorado College in Colorado Springs gets a report card from FoodMaven each month to show how the school's food ordering has helped reduce food waste. This is the 2019 report so far, as of mid-November 2019. (Provided by FoodMaven)

Saving money with FoodMaven has allowed him to spend more on locally-sourced food, he said. Plus, FoodMaven's distribution system exposed him to new vendors.

"I had a spice guy that was literally right down the street from me that I would have never known about but he popped up on the Mavens," Butler said. "I buy a few of his products and then before you know it, I'm picking up the phone calling him and saying, 'Hey, I'm right down the road.' We're working out a deal."

Employees at the Colorado Springs college liked the sustainability too, he said. Every month, FoodMaven shares the school's impact.

"My team just loves the idea and every month they go, 'Chef, have the numbers come out?' Yes, and we fed this many people, this many dollars went to local purveyors and we kept this much food out of the landfill," said Butler, who now regularly buys 75% of his proteins from FoodMaven. "It became a thing where I actually started posting it in my cafe and the students were like, 'This is awesome.'"

This reporting is made possible by our members. You can directly support independent watchdog journalism in Colorado for as little as $5 a month. Start here: coloradosun.com/join

The latest from The Sun

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America trashes 40% of its food. A Colorado startup is connecting the discards to dinner tables.

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Occasionally, at Regis University's school cafeteria, there are dishes that sous chef Grant Ruesch calls "monotony breakers." A recent one? New York Strip steaks. "I bought the steaks for a really awesome deal. I can't remember, but like $3 a pound," said Ruesch. "$3.49," someone interjected.

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Food and Housing insecurity in Denver Colleges

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Food and Housing insecurity in Denver Colleges

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Many modern day college students are unable to afford housing and food while attending college, especially considering the high costs of Denver housing and schooling.

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Many Denver college students trying to invest in their futures by earning degrees are struggling to afford food and roofs over their heads, according to a new report published this month by the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice at Pennsylvania's Temple University.

More than 3,000 students at Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado Denver and the University of Denver participated in the 2018 study, which found 40% of respondents experienced food insecurity in the 30 days before taking the survey, while 55% faced housing insecurity within the previous year and 18% were homeless during that same timeframe.

"Food and housing insecurity is a significant issue on our campus," said Janine Davidson, MSU Denver's president, in Monday morning testimony to the Making Higher Education Attainable Interim Study Committee at the state Capitol.

The report defines food insecurity as "the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food, or the ability to acquire such food in a socially acceptable manner. The most extreme form is often accompanied with physiological sensations of hunger." Housing insecurity is defined as "a broad set of challenges such as the inability to pay rent or utilities or the need to move frequently."

Food insecurity, housing insecurity, and homelessness are overlapping concerns, with 66% of students at participating Denver colleges facing at least one of these disadvantages in 2018.

MSU Denver has a student food bank and an emergency fund in which students can apply for and potentially receive up to $500 for unexpected expenditures like a car repair that would otherwise burden a young learner into choosing between their education and their bank account. But with Denver being the most expensive city to rent an apartment in the metro area, Davidson said there is only so much her institution can do to help students meet their cost of living.

In comparison to the rates for all survey participants across the country in 2018, respondents at participating Denver colleges have a lower rate of food insecurity, and housing insecurity, but a higher rate of homelessness.

Danielle Holmes, 38, is an MSU Denver student who knows all too well the pitfalls of learning while housing-insecure.

Holmes had a turbulent upbringing, overcoming an abusive childhood in Virginia, where she was caught up in foster care and, later, homeless shelters. Holmes came to Colorado in 2016 in search of a fresh start, enrolling at Front Range Community College as she stayed in a domestic violence shelter in Boulder.

Holmes found low-income housing that cost her $1,000 a month. After graduating FRCC with her associate's degree, Holmes applied to MSU Denver and the University of Northern Colorado, choosing the Denver institution because it provided her an RTD pass.

"My car is 15 years old and constantly needing repairs, so I felt that regardless of my financial situation, I could make it to school at MSU with the pass," Holmes said.

Holmes, who is also raising a special needs daughter, was accepted into a Boulder County initiative to help low-income families with education and career skills called the Family Self-Sufficiency Program. Holmes qualified for a MSU Denver scholarship that provides stipends for students with experience in foster care. She also helped pilot a MSU program called Earn & Learn to pay needy students as they complete an unpaid internship.

"I had to humble myself and ask for help and continually ask," said Holmes, who now serves as student government assembly president. "I got a lot of doors slammed shut, but I was very persistent. I found a scholarship, I found a housing program and now I'm able to do this because I advocated for myself."

Davidson told a group of Colorado legislators that MSU Denver is thinking about how to partner with the city on affordable housing options for their students.

Holmes wants to use her experience to help, too.

The aspiring law school student wants to partner with nonprofit Hunger Free Colorado on Denver's Auraria Campus and see to it that a liaison from Denver Human Services who can help with support such as housing, food, or child support has a known spot on campus.

"I'm not alone," Holmes said. "I speak for many individuals, and what point is there holding my story in? At one point in time, this story was my disadvantage. But today I stand in front of you as class president advantaged because of the trials and tribulations I went through. Now I can understand the needs of our students and advocate what can be beneficial to address those needs."

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Many Denver college students struggle to afford food and roofs over their heads, study finds

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Many Denver college students trying to invest in their futures by earning degrees are struggling to afford food and roofs over their heads, according to a new report published this month by the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice at Pennsylvania's Temple University.

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Money from student’s extra meal swipes will end up going back to CSU.

“Extra Meal Swipes: Where Do They Go?,” Gerson Flores Rojas, The Rocky Mountain Collegian, February 17, 2020

https://collegian.com/2020/02/category-news-extra-meal-swipes-where-do-they-go/

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Your Fort Collins Neighbor is Hungry
Sarah Kane Kyle
August 26, 2016
Coloradoan

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This article talks about the impact on community where grocery stores are lacking

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Kolak said closures and re-openings had virtually no impact in areas on the Chicago's North Side neighborhoods she described as a "food oasis." But in South Side neighborhoods, Kolak and her colleagues found that just one store closure jeopardized the food security of an already low-access area.

Kolak said there was a sign of improvement in a swath of neighborhoods, extending southwest of Hyde Park to the Chatham community, where racial segregation existed but with a different socioeconomic makeup than the surrounding area. However, this area shares boundaries with persistent food desert regions, highlighting the complexities of accessibility.

"We really need to get past this binary, 'White equals good food access; black equals bad food access,'" Kolak said. "The real story is much more complicated."

Now that the study is complete, Kolak and researchers plan to continue to better understand issues of food access and work toward better policies with colleagues at the Chicago Department of Public Health.

"I get the sense that the city is really interested in pushing things forward," she said. "But there's a lot more work to be done."

Kolak's interest in the research began in 2013 while she was working at the Institute of Public Health and Medicine at Northwestern mapping the impact of produce carts on communities, which previously had been illegal in Chicago. Spurred by questions of food access and food insecurity, Kolak brought together geography and health researchers to examine the impact of grocery stores openings and closings for their communities.

Citation: "Urban foodscape trends: Disparities in healthy food access in Chicago, 2007-2014" Kolak et al, Health & Place, July 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2018.06.003

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Food deserts don't benefit from more supermarkets in Chicago, study finds

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Kolak said closures and re-openings had virtually no impact in areas on the Chicago's North Side neighborhoods she described as a "food oasis." But in South Side neighborhoods, Kolak and her colleagues found that just one store closure jeopardized the food security of an already low-access area.

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"Larimer County Planning Commission Recommends Bigger Oil and Gas Setbacks"

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"Larimer County Planning Commission Recommends Bigger Oil and Gas Setbacks"

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https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2020/02/20/larimer-county-planning-commission-backs-new-oil-and-gas-regulations/4796052002/
- Talks about how Larimer county officials are planning to increase setbacks for oil and gas facilities
- February 20, 2020 by Kevin Duggan

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The city water treatment plant now accepts waste from CSU dining halls to trap methane gas to power their plant.

“CSU, Fort Collins divert tons of food-hall slop to trap methane gas,” Bruce Finely, The Denver Post, February 15, 2013

https://www.denverpost.com/2013/02/15/csu-fort-collins-divert-tons-of-food-hall-slop-to-trap-methane-gas/

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California is the largest agricultural state, yet also has the largest amount of food insecure households in the US.

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The sun is just rising over Central Los Angeles, but already dozens of people with empty bags, boxes, and folding carts are lined up at the side entrance of Immanuel Presbyterian Church. Two generations ago, they might have been awake at this hour to begin a long day of farm work. Instead, they - and thousands of others across Los Angeles County - are up and out this early to put food on their plates another way: food pantries.

Though food distribution doesn't start until 9:30 a.m., some people arrive as early as dawn in order to have time to visit two or three more pantries before the day is over. Others come early to ensure they'll go home with the most desirable, but more limited, items - fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat.

Henry Tocay arrives an hour after the pantry, one of more than 800 food distribution sites run by partners of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, opens. By the time he's loaded his two black, reusable grocery bags with canned tomatoes, rice, beans, and juice, the crowd at Immanuel Presbyterian is thinning.

Just 30 minutes ago, the basement, where food distributions start, was bustling with chatter in a mix of Spanish, Tagalog, and English. Now just a few people remain, sipping coffee from styrofoam cups as they wait to for their numbers to be called up to the counter.

Tocay, a soft-spoken 26-year-old, takes his time. He sits on a plastic chair in the basement, where Día de los Muertos decorations still hang, and rearranges the food inside his bags. He comes to the pantry to get food to supplement what his mom, a single mother, buys for him and his three younger brothers. The cereal and juice he gets there saves his mom, an airplane custodian who regularly works 12-hour shifts, from having to "waste money," Tocay says. Instead, she's able to spend more on clothes and school supplies for his brothers.

"Without the pantry it would be pretty different [at home]. There'd be less food," he explains. "I know when I was little, growing up there was less food than what we have right now."

For a while, Tocay's mother was able to get help buying food through CalFresh - what California calls its implementation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a federal program formerly known as food stamps. But once she started working overtime, she made too much money to continue qualifying for the program - though not enough to afford rent, her sons' educations, and food for the whole family.

As Tocay prepares to leave, the pantry is handing out the last of the perishable food it has to offer in the kitchen, mostly potatoes, sausages, and some frozen fruits. The fresh produce, which the pantry only had in limited quantities, is gone.

But in the state of California at large, such fruits and vegetables are abundant - as long as you can afford them.

LA was once the largest agricultural county in the United States. Today, it's the county with the largest population of food insecure people.

Though farming in LA County has dwindled over the past 60 years, agriculture has far from languished in California. It's currently the largest agricultural producing state in the US, and has been for years. Most of its farming is concentrated in the Central Valley, a fertile expanse of land running approximately 450 miles long - America's "salad bowl."

The Immanuel Presbyterian Church, where local nonprofit Hope Net runs a food pantry every Saturday, is located in LA's Koreatown neighborhood, less than three hours from the Central Valley's southernmost point.

The state of California produces the overwhelming majority of the US' carrots, celery, berries, and avocados. It's the country's top producer of dozens of other crops, as well as of milk and cattle, producing 2.2 billion pounds of beef in 2016.

California's not just producing enough to feed the nation, it's growing enough to help feed the rest of the world, yet the state has the largest number of food insecure households in the US.

The tragic irony is that an estimated 4.9 million people living in the state that feeds much of the country and the world are going hungry.

It's a massive and complicated problem, but nonprofits, advocacy groups, and individuals across California are rising to the challenge.

Roof Overhead vs. Food on Your Plate

While LA has a much-talked-about homelessness problem, just 5% of those who usually come to Immanuel Presbyterian Church for food are homeless, Hope Net Executive Director Levi Webb estimates.

Many of the 200 people Hope Net serves during its two-hour weekly distribution have stories like the Tocays' to tell. Some are seniors on a fixed income, but most are people from households where at least one person is working.

"I think that's the most surprising thing for people to learn: that many people are working," says Michael Flood, chief executive officer of the LA Regional Food Bank. "The majority of households that seek food assistance have at least one person working and often more members of the household who are working - some full-time jobs, some putting together a series of part-time jobs."

Nearly 80% of Californians living in poverty are from households with at least one working adult, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. But wages have not kept up with the rising cost of living, especially in LA County, forcing people to decide between putting roofs over their families' heads or food on their plates.

Despite being the world's fifth-largest economy - one spot ahead of the entire United Kingdom - California has the largest number of people in poverty in the US. And for the majority of California's 7.5 million poorest, their biggest expense is housing.

"We have to remember: We don't have a hunger problem, we have a poverty problem," Sue Sigler, executive director of the California Association of Food Banks, says.

"California has such a high cost of living that even a household with two people earning at or well above the minimum wage can find itself struggling to pay bills and also afford adequate food for everyone in the household," she says.

That's where programs like CalFresh, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, and hunger-alleviating nonprofit organizations like food banks come in.

Food banks haven't been around as long as you might think. The first food bank in the US, and reportedly in the world, was established in the late 1960s. Over the next decade, the concept of a "bank" that gave the hungry access to surplus and donated food spread across the country as economic growth slowed and income inequality grew.

Food banks were started as a "stopgap" measure, Flood says. They were meant to carry people through tough times as they transitioned back to being self-reliant. Then, and still today, pantries and other meal service programs help reduce food insecurity among people who are waiting for government benefits to begin, are not eligible for government benefits, are not earning enough to feed their households, or have lost their jobs.

When the economy is weak and unemployment is high, more people fall into these categories and turn to food banks for assistance - but the American economy is currently strong. So strong, in fact, that the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates and plans to continue to hike them up and unemployment is at its lowest since 1969.

Yet LA's food pantries are still seeing long lines and approximately 2 million Angelenos rely on CalFresh to get by.

"The issue today for a lot of individuals and families who need food assistance is more around the cost of living. Housing is so expensive here and has continued to increase and that's put a lot of challenges on families and individuals," Flood says.

The average rent in LA County in 2018 was $2,267. To afford this, someone working 44 hours a week would need to make over $13 per hour - more than minimum wage, $11 in California - and spend their entire income on rent.

Now, 45 years after the LA Regional Food Bank opened, the county has such a large number of hungry that even though the organization helps feed more than 300,000 people a month, hundreds of thousands are still food insecure.

A Stacked System

About a million pounds of food flows in and out of the LA Regional Food Bank's two massive warehouses in Central LA every week. It's the kind of large-scale operation you would expect of a large corporation like Walmart, not a nonprofit.

In its 96,000-square-foot Downtown warehouse, forklift trucks move crates of fresh, local fruit and boxes of the same kind of organic spring mix that retails at Whole Foods for $5.99. Volunteers sort food in refrigerator and freezer rooms that are large enough for a family of four to live in. Of course, there are plenty of the dried and canned goods the term "food bank" likely brings to mind, but the organization has worked closely with local farmers over the past decade to get more fresh produce into the bank.

The food has been donated by supermarkets, retailers, local growers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and individuals. And throughout the day, staff and volunteers from the bank's 650 partners pull into the loading bay and fill their cars, vans, and trucks with donations to cart off to pantries and distribution points.

Some of the food has been rejected by retailers for damaged packaging or being "ugly," some is approaching its expiration date and can no longer be retailed, and some is surplus - food that has been overproduced, which the government has purchased and donated to keep prices in check. But all of it is still perfectly edible.

The fact that there is enough effectively free food to fill the bank's two enormous warehouses, but millions of hungry people in California and across the US is indicative of the fact that America does not have a food production problem.

Curt Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Food Corps, says the issue is "food equity."

The US, with a big helping hand from California, produces more than enough to feed the whole country. It just doesn't make that food equally available to everyone.

"We have a food system of the haves and have nots - a system that makes low-income families and families of color struggle more to access healthy, high quality food on a regular basis," Ellis explains.

Instead of prioritizing healthy food, the system, Ellis says, prioritizes cheap food.

In theory, this should be helpful to low-income families. And in the short term, it is. But in the long-term, cheap meals come at a great cost.

"Low-income people are so often put on this cycle of poverty and hunger and are forced to make the difficult choice of giving their kids the lowest-cost calories they can get and those tend to be some of the least healthy options. And that sets them up for vastly elevated rates of diet-related disease," Ellis says.

What makes things like cereal, bread, and microwavable meals so cheap? Subsidies.

Many of their main ingredients come from commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat, which are heavily subsidized by the US government, enabling them to be produced in abundance and made available at a very low cost. The subsidies enable crops like corn to be produced on a such a large scale that even with all the work needed to process corn into ingredients for a snack like Cheetos - which contains corn in three different forms - the final product is still really cheap.

It's not always the case that low-income earners buy unhealthy foods because they're inexpensive. In fact, data shows that families using SNAP buy nearly the same groceries as non-SNAP households. Both buy a lot of soda and prepared meals, though SNAP households tend to buy slightly more of the latter.

However, that data reflects the spending habits of people who are eligible for SNAP and have access to a grocery store. There are many living in poverty for whom neither is true. And the more difficult it is to access healthy food, the easier it becomes to just serve processed and prepared options, Ellis says.

Eating processed foods and prepared meals cuts down on travel, preparation, and cooking time that low-income people who work long hours or multiple jobs - and there are many - don't have to spare.

"It's easy for people to read the epidemic of obesity and diabetes within this country as one of people making poor choices as individuals, but the reality is that the systems we have set up low-income people in this country in this really brutal cycle," Ellis says.

"When they have sufficient access to food, it's access some of the least healthy food anyone could hope to eat," he says. "We're essentially taking the folks who are already struggling with hunger and food insecurity because they are poor and telling them you're not only going to struggle with living in poverty, but you're also going to struggle with incredibly expensive diet-related diseases."

These cheap but nutritionally lacking foods are also frequently available in convenience stores, which tend to outnumber actual grocery stores in LA's low-income neighborhoods.

Deserts in America's Salad Bowl

"In our community we have more than 130 fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and convenience stores. And that's a policy decision," D'Artagnan Scorza, founder and executive director of the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI), says.

Scorza grew up in Inglewood, a city in southern LA County, at times experiencing food insecurity and homelessness.

"Growing up, I remember there would be nights where all we could afford in my household was two tacos from Jack In The Box for a dollar - that was all I had access to," he says.

The veteran, who later earned his PhD in education, says his personal experience motivated him to return to his community and found SJLI. It was through his work with the youth of Inglewood, which struggles with high rates of incarceration, recidivism, and gang involvement, that Scorza noticed the pressing need to expand the community's access to healthy food.

Though the city is just nine square miles, substantial portions of Inglewood are considered food deserts, neighborhoods that lack access to grocery stores and healthy foods. More than 20% of the city's 111,000 residents live in poverty.

How can food deserts exist in America's "salad bowl"?

Scorza points to a system that incentivizes fast food, food production on an industrial scale, the subsidizing of large producers of commodity crops, and the prioritization of profit over public well-being.

"We might be able to grow millions of pounds of oranges out in the Central Valley or just 100 miles outside of Los Angeles County, but the costs associated with transporting that produce, the cost associated with housing and storing it, and making that produce accessible then makes it unaffordable for many people," Scorza says.

As a result, corporations and large grocers choose not to place grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods where they expect the community won't be able to afford fresh fruits and vegetables. Or they don't stock those stores with quality, fresh produce.

In LA, wealthy neighborhoods have more than twice as many supermarkets per household than low-income neighborhoods, which are often home to communities of color. Similar trends hold true across the US.

The lack of grocery stores in low-income areas means the people who can least afford to take the time and effort to travel to stores that sell fresh, affordable produce must do so, assuming they have access to transportation.

Nicole Steele, a resident of Inglewood, was one of those people.

In 2010, she had grown weary of her long walk to the supermaket, so she came up with a proposal to build school and community gardens in the city to increase her community's access to fresh, healthy foods. That evolved into SJLI's 100 Seeds of Change program, through which the organization turns underused urban spaces, home gardens, and school land into edible gardens.

Today, Steele is SJLI's health equity programs manager and, with her husband Derek, the director of health equity programs, has helped create more than 100 gardens in Inglewood. The gardens, which community members help maintain and can eat from, grow everything from tomatoes and collard greens to rosemary and squash.

"When I think about a desert, I think of something that's barren, Derek Steele says. "Our community ... It's more like a swamp. There is access to food, but it's the type of food that is not conducive to our health."

Over the past eight years, Derek says he's seen a shift within the community. Families who weren't concerned by their lack of access to healthy foods in the past are now "agents of change" who have joined SJLI in calling for greater access to fresh produce and are raising awareness of food injustice within their community.

The fruits and vegetables grown in the gardens are also added, at no cost, to boxes of food the organization sells through its community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. This enables SJLI increase the amount of food that goes into the CSA boxes without increasing the price, but the majority of the produce comes from local farmers and is the same produce sold at farmers markets.

By making the boxes available at a convenient location within the community, SJLI is systematically tearing down barriers to Inglewood's access to healthy food, but in many parts of LA County, those barriers are still firmly in place.

Getting Fresh Food on SNAP

Lynetta, an elegant woman in her 50s, grows vegetables and citrus fruits in her garden, but doesn't produce nearly enough food to feed her family. So she's always one of the first people to arrive at the farmers market on Pico Boulevard on Saturdays, driving about 12 miles - which, in LA traffic, could take up to an hour - to make it there right as the market opens at 8 a.m.

"I do that because although there's a farmers market near my home, the produce is not even close to the quality that I can get here," Lynetta, who chose not to give her last name, explains.

The city of Santa Monica, where the market is located, is one of LA County's wealthiest areas. It has multiple farmers markets - including LA's largest, which sells to the public and several upscale farm-to-table restaurants - and dozens of grocery stores, including specialty and organic stores.

The fresh food options in Lynetta's lower-income neighborhood are vastly different.

"There is a grocery store that I could walk to; however, the produce and other items are just not adequate," she says. "They're not fresh, many times they're limp, or what I'm looking for is not there. I find things that are expired in that store very often."

The Pico Boulevard has the "freshest of food," Lynetta says. It's also one of 23 farmers markets across LA where the nonprofit Hunger Action LA offers its Market Match program, a service Lynetta has used for the past few years.

Lynetta has two degrees and is bilingual, but after leaving her job to care for a family member living with a disability and then re-entering the workforce over the age of 50, the only job she was able to secure is part-time. Having missed out on 20 years of income and now working a part-time job, she requires government assistance to feed her family.

So Lynetta comes every week to shop at the market where she can use her benefits and receives extra money to spend on fresh, local produce from the Market Match program, which matches the value of CalFresh and disability benefits up to $10 and social security benefits up to $5.

The program serves about 60 people every week at the Pico Boulevard market, Hunger Action LA's Market Match Associate George Worthy estimates. Across the county, the program serves approximately 1,000 people a week, most of whom are living with disabilities, seniors on a fixed income, are working and using CalFresh.

Approximately 3.8 million people in California used CalFresh in August 2018, accounting for 10% of all people using SNAP benefits in the US. Throughout the country, more than 38 million people - nearly 12% of the US' population - get assistance from SNAP. The program is open to both citizens and non-citizen who meet the its qualifications, including work requirements.

SNAP is touted by experts as one of the US' most successful poverty reduction initiatives, helping millions of people to lift themselves out of poverty every year. Its positive impact is complicated, multi-fold, and indisputable.

The program does much more than just increase access to food.

In 2017, the average SNAP beneficiary received approximately $126 per month - about $1.40 per meal. In all, the federal government spent about $70 billion on SNAP and other food assistance programs in 2017, but experts say the benefits to the economy far outweigh the expense.

Every dollar of SNAP benefits that a household spends helps generate $1.79's worth of economic activity, government research shows. And a lot of that supports farmers, retailers, food producers, and their employees, who often struggle with food insecurity and low wages themselves.

In fact, about 30% of SNAP benefits in 2017 were spent at farmers markets. In California, where farming is a massive industry that has been criticized for its poor treatment of workers, those dollars can have a major impact.

The Business of Farming

"I can be here on the farm for 10 or 12 hours, seven days a week," Jose Cruz Carranza says. "But I like it."

Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, Carranza has now worked for 20 years on McGrath Family Farm in Camarillo, California - a little over an hour-long drive from LA. The father of four makes a liveable wage working on the small, family-owned organic farm. He also has his own plot on the farm where he grows flowers that he sells at farmers markets for additional income.

"During the weekends, my family and I go to the markets and I feel happiness in my heart to see that people like what we produce for them. That definitely gives me the strength to continue," he says in animated Spanish.

Carranza's story is unique, a more common story among California's farm workers, the majority of whom are immigrants, is the one Carranza tells of life before working on McGrath Family Farm.

For a while, he worked on larger, conventional farms, harvesting strawberries for an hourly wage. He worked long hours to support his kids - but at times it wasn't enough. His family couldn't afford help, which meant that when his kids were young, their mother had to care for them, and could not work full-time.

Though nurturing organic crops requires more work than growing conventionally, Carranza says he's far happier at McGrath Family Farm and has been able to send two of his children to college. But there's a reason Carranza's story isn't every farmer's story: the American food system.

"A lot of small- and mid-sized farmers have a hard time keeping their doors open and finding market for their products locally and they lament about it because especially smaller, family-owned businesses, are in it to feed people," Clare Fox, the executive director of the LA Food Policy Council, says. "It's truly the joy of their lives, but they're competing with these large corporate, conglomerate agricultural businesses and have to just make sales."

The squeeze these farms feel can make it difficult to pay farm workers a livable wage.

"There's such great value to our farm workers. Not everyone is willing to do this hard labor and for me it's exciting to empower our farmers to manage themselves more and be creative," says Havilah McGrath, general manager of McGrath Family Farm. "But it's very hard to be profitable on a small organic farm ... a livable wage is one of those big challenges."

McGrath, who is a sixth-generation farmer, says that even with the "organic boom" and the increased awareness and demand for organic products, it can be tough to stay afloat.

"Larger stores like Whole Foods have taken over the market, and so while it's not really as hard as it was before to access organic food, small farms tend to have a harder time selling their products because they're not growing large quantities to sell wholesale and can't be a vendor to something like Whole Foods," McGrath says.

Additionally, the costs of farming - especially organic farming - on a small scale are high.

Small family farms like the McGraths' make up close to 90% of American farms, yet they don't receive the same support and assured success as commodity crop farmers.

McGrath Family Farm produces a range of fruits and vegetables, including berries, greens, and tomatoes, all of which are considered "specialty crops" - defined as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and flowers.

Farmers of specialty crops, what we typically think of as "healthy food," receive less than 1% of the $20 billion in annual subsidies farmers receive. Most of that money, provided by taxes, goes to corn, rice, tobacco, dairy, and other commodity crop farmers.

The subsidies come in various forms, including disaster relief, which helps farmers whose crops are damaged by uncontrollable factors like weather and crop yield survive, and " deficiency payments," through which the government pays farmers extra when the crop's market price falls. Overproduction or a lack of demand can cause crop prices to drop, but experts also argue that these "deficiency payments," which are doled out to farmers based on the quantity they grow, actually encourage overproduction.

Specialty crop farmers are just as vulnerable to these same variables, yet they receive little to no support.

"Our food system is really broken in many ways," Fox says. "In particular, it's the people who grow our food, who ship it and pack it, who serve it, and deliver it who struggle the most and have higher rates of food insecurity than other workers."

While the farming industry is notorious for underpaying and mistreating workers, when it comes to smaller, family-owned farms, often times the desire to pay a living wage is there - but actually doing so is challenging in the US industrial food system.

The McGrath Family Farm is taking a unique approach to small-scale farming in order to survive. The farm rents out some of its land to other producers. About five acres of McGrath's land is occupied by the Abundant Table, a nonprofit farm focused on promoting sustainability and food justice. Together they have formed a small cooperative, sharing not only land but also people and sales points.

"As an organization, it feels like we're constantly on the periphery of participating in a capital market that is not geared toward supporting businesses like ours," Jeanette Ban, the Abundant Table's field coordinator, says. "In 2018, it's really difficult to be a farmer, and it requires a bit of creativity in that you simply cannot make enough money to support yourself by just selling vegetables."

As a nonprofit, the Abundant Table benefits from grants and donations. And it sells CSA boxes in the area and has a farm store on site. But it has also found innovative ways to support itself by connecting with the community around it and inviting them in. As a result, Ventura County's community has helped the organization succeed through fundraising and other means.

For now, Ban says it gives her hope that the farm continues to thrive in the face of these challenges. But still she has many concerns about the future of farming in the US, among them: the rampant sexual harassment of female farm workers, exposure to pesticides with harmful side effects - and her biggest concern - unsustainably low wages.

Waste Not

The problem with the American food system is that it treats food like any other good, rather than a basic need.

Prices fluctuate based on supply and demand - and supply fluctuates based on a variety of factors, including climate conditions and natural disasters. Subsidies help brace commodity crops farmers' income against these factors, but farmers of speciality crops have fewer protections and support.

Wildfires and poor weather in 2017 reduced California's avocado harvest, but people's love and demand for avocados remained the same, inevitably driving the cost of the surviving avocados up. But the opposite problem - an overabundance of a crop - can also jeopardize farmers' incomes.

Cranberries are generally associated with fall and Thanksgiving, but they are the one crop many farmers will not be giving thanks for this holiday season.

That's because they have far too many of the tart berries - at least 100 million pounds too many. At the start of 2018, cranberry farmers already had enough of the fruit stored from last year's harvest to satisfy all of this year's demand for the fruit, which is only seasonally popular. With this year's harvest on top of that, the farmers are saddled with way more cranberries than the US could possibly eat.

In September, cranberries farmers requested permission to destroy a quarter of this year's crop to reduce the country's cranberry supply to artificially keep prices up - and the US Department of Agriculture approved.

The measure should keep farmers from experiencing a major loss, but the cranberry industry is guaranteed to waste 240 million pounds of the fruit this year, according to New Food Economy. That's enough to satisfy the US demand for cranberries for the next three Thanksgivings.

While that seems like an astounding amount of food to waste, it's just a fraction of what the country wastes annually.

The US does not eat about 40% of the food it produces, according to the National Resources Defense Council.

Food is wasted in the fields, left unpicked and rotting on the vine. It's wasted in the transportation and distribution process, during which it may spoil or be damaged and subsequently rejected by retailers. And it's wasted by stores, restaurants, and individuals that just can't sell, use, or eat what they have before it goes bad.

In total, the US wastes approximately 133 billion pounds of food every year - enough to close the country's meal gap several times over.

That striking paradox is what led Rick Nahmias to found Food Forward, a nonprofit that recovers surplus produce from fruit trees, farmers markets, and wholesalers to distribute to hunger relief agencies in Southern California.

"We see food waste and hunger as two sides of the same coin," Nahmias says.

In 2009, during the Great Recession, Nahmias says he noticed people lining up for food assistance in quantities reminiscent of the Great Depression. Yet he saw unpicked fruits going to waste on trees in his own neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley instead of into the hands of hungry people.

"America is an amazing land of abundance, and I know that sounds like a cliché, but when you look around this country ... at what we have in the way of wealth of resources, of natural beauty, of the ability to have disposable income, I think people become very complacent and they forget what they have literally and symbolically growing in their own backyards," Nahmias says.

In its first year, Food Forward rescued about 100,000 pounds of fruit from backyards and kept them from going to waste. Nine years later, its network of volunteers can recover up to 100,000 pounds of produce in a single day.

The city of LA has also been making an effort to divert surplus food from landfills. Its Zero Waste LA provision, passed last year, requires waste haulers to refer their clients, including grocery stores and wholesalers, to food recovery and relief organizations.

"For the first time, waste hauling companies started talking to food recovery organizations and connecting so that stores, hotels, and restaurants got that information and the ability to donate food," Fox, whose organization helped pass the policy, says.

More than 4 million pounds of produce have been recovered because of the policy, she says. So much food has been rescued, that food banks and pantries aren't even able to fully absorb and distribute it before it spoils.

Time is a major factor in rescuing food waste.

Food Forward has just one large refrigerator in its facility in North Hollywood. Rather than storing food in bulk at its site, the organization focuses on bringing produce to people - instead of making them come to the food - as quickly as possible. This helps to ensure the food's freshness, but also reduces the hurdles food insecure people must overcome to access healthy food.

The organization's joint initiative with SJLI is a perfect example of this.

For the past year, Food Forward and SJLI have joined together once a month to host their Food for Thought: Produce Pickup event at Morningside High School, Scorza's alma mater.

Dozens of volunteers and staff from both organizations take over the school's parking lot for the day where they glean recovered produce and sort it into bags.

"When those students walk out of their classroom on a Friday afternoon, just a few steps over, they can grab one, two, three, bags of this produce and bring it home at no cost," Nahmias says.

One Produce Pickup will typically have 500 bags available for Morningside students and Inglewood families to pick up without having to travel very far. Nahmias says that hosting such events in the neighborhood at the school, a natural gathering point for community members, also helps reduce stigma people might feel about needing food assistance.

Feeding the Next Generation

Schools are a key entry point into and battleground in the fight against food insecurity in the US.

"There are 100,000 school cafeterias in the country, which is to say there are seven times as many school cafeterias as there are McDonald's franchises in America," Ellis, of FoodCorps, points out. "We don't think about our nation's schools as being the largest restaurant chain in the US, but by far they are."

As the main provider of meals for many children, schools have incredible potential to help combat hunger or to perpetuate low-income children's access to nutritionally deficient food.

Approximately 6.5 million children in the US live in food insecure households.

Thanks to widespread initiatives like " breakfast after the bell," which offers all students free breakfast, and free and reduced lunch programs, which support students from low-income families, many - though certainly not all - of these children have access to at least one reliable meal every weekday.

But those meals don't necessarily have to be healthy and, in much of the country, they're not, says Ellis, whose organization works with schools to make sure kids have access to healthy food.

"School meals are the only part of our nation's education system where we expect to make a profit and that has the effect of pushing food quality down and forcing schools to prioritize revenue rather than the nourishment of the kids," Ellis explains.

"We spend money on math because we want kids to learn how to do math and we don't expect a profit, but we expect school food programs to break even at worst and to turn a profit at best," he adds.

Access to healthy, nutritious food is especially important for children. Without crucial nutritional benefits from healthy foods, children are more likely to have trouble focusing in class, get sick, miss school, and fall behind. Those children will become adults who suffer from diet-related diseases and may miss out on work, stall in their careers, leave the workforce earlier, or die younger.

California requires students who qualify for free and reduced meals to be provided at least one meal during school days, but in addition to adopting policies aimed at reducing hunger, Ellis says the state has also been better than most about feeding kids healthy foods.

Driven by nonprofits, California Thursdays, an initiative to get locally grown, fresh produce into schools, is now in about one-third of the schools in the state. And in Oakland and North Monterey counties, Ellis says school district food service directors have made major strides in getting healthy, high-quality food grown just hours away into their schools.

When it comes to access to food, many programs and policies focus on K-12 schools, precisely for the reason that good nutrition is vital to child development, but food insecurity is not a problem that ends after high school.

Around 36% of university students are food insecure. At the University of California, a public university system with 10 campuses across the state, 44% of undergraduate students and 26% of graduate students are food insecure.

Four years ago, Shelly Dieu had never heard of CalFresh and had never worried about where her next meal would come from.

That changed when she got to college.

"For the first time, I had to figure out how to stretch $20 so it lasted the whole week," the LA native and first-generation college student says.

Now, as a geography and environmental studies student in her fourth year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she's a huge proponent of CalFresh, which she personally uses.

Dieu says her eyes were first opened to food insecurity on her campus not through her personal experience with it, but through a class on food and climate change she took her freshman year. After learning about the devastating impact of industrial food system on the environment, she wanted to change her eating habits and encourage those around her to do the same.

That was when she realized how many of her classmates were just getting by.

"If you're already struggling to pay for enough food, how can I say, 'Hey, you should stop eating beef because it's bad for the environment,'" Dieu says.

She applied to be fellow at the UC's Global Food Initiative (GFI), which conducts research and outreach around food insecurity, health, and sustainability. And it was through GFI that Dieu learned she was eligible for CalFresh, which she said changed her life. A big part of Dieu's work as a fellow is now helping other eligible UCLA students sign up for CalFresh benefits.

The issue of food insecurity among college students is slowly gaining wider recognition.

Since 2015, the University of California has earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars to expand hunger alleviation programs and food pantries on its campuses. The LA Regional Food Bank has begun sending mobile food pantry units to community college campuses. Food Forward has also been working to increase access to food on college campuses in the county.

"It's really sad to me that we even have to do that," Nahmias says. "This is the next generation of doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, and they're taking on debt, living in their cars, and they're not frickin' eating."

Nahmias says he is heartened by the interest the students have in being part of the solution though and hopes to see more people rallying to end to food waste and hunger.

And there are many ways to do this.

What You Can Do

"We need more voices and more advocacy," Fox says, particularly around the Federal Farm Bill, which deals with both farming subsidies and SNAP programs. "Calling it the Farm Bill is a bit of a misnomer because 80% of the legislation deals with SNAP and that impacts all kinds of communities."

The bill is renewed every five years and congress is now working on passing a new version of the bill, which expired in October. So far, the proposed changes would increase work requirements for SNAP eligibility, meaning many people could lose that assistance. Fox urges people to advocate for the legislative progress they want to see.

There are other policies currently up for debate that could impact food insecurity in the US as well.

Proposed changes to immigration policy could make it harder for farms to find labor to harvest their crops, leading to more food waste. And policies around climate change - which Sigler, of the California Association of Food Banks, says is her major concern when it comes to both food insecurity and California's farming industry - could also have an impact.

As individuals, organizations like Food Forward and the LA Regional Food Bank welcome volunteers and surplus food.

But Nahmias says there's an even easier way to start addressing the problem: Ask yourself what you're consuming.

"What am I bringing into my home? How am I eating and how am I wasting? How am I sharing it?" Nahmias asks. "If people really were to ask themselves those questions seriously and thoughtfully I think the whole food system could be transformed."

"One of the most beautiful things about food is it's meant to be shared. It's a millennia-old ritual and that's not going to go away," he says.

Dozens of food pantries and hunger relief agencies in LA will host holiday meals this week, meaning thousands of food insecure people in LA County will share in the most food-centric of American traditions this Thursday: Thanksgiving dinner. They, like many other families across the country, will be able to pile their plates high with turkey, potatoes, and cranberry. But on any other given night, they are unlikely to experience such abundance.

But what the collective work of organizations like LA Regional Food Banks, Food Forward, the Abundant Table and SJLI shows is that food insecurity is a problem we can solve.

"We have the resources," Nahmias says. "We just have to think differently about how we use them."
Take Action: Call on Congress to Protect SNAP for Millions of Americans

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Why America's Largest Agricultural State Is Also Its Hungriest

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1. “Eating Disorder Awareness Week: Local teen shares her story”,  Zora Stephenson,  Denver Fox News February 28, 2019.

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2. “Eating disorders often misunderstood“, KUSA Staff, 9 News February 23, 2016

1. https://www.9news.com/article/news/health/eating-disorders-often-misunderstood/52692845

3. “Managing Low Bone Mineral Density in Adolecents with Eating Disorders:A Review of Pathophysiology, Diagnostic Modalities, and Treatment” , Erin Knopf and Philip S. Mehler, Eating Disorders Review, No date.

1. https://eatingdisordersreview.com/managing-low-bone-mineral-density-in-adolescents-with-eating-disorders-a-review-of-pathophysiology-diagnostic-modalities-and-treatment/

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Food. People. Justice
The Original Growing Project Manifesto
The Growing Project

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Effects of Food Insecurity Felt Throughout Hyde Park Community

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In Hyde Park alone, about 33 percent of the neighborhood's population is eligible for some federal nutrition programs.

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"Evolutionary Aspects of a New Eating Disorder: Orthorexia Nervosa in the 21st Century."

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"Fort Collins Staff Crafting Goal for 100% Renewable electricity by 2030"
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Solar Panels on Colorado College Universities

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CSU-Pueblo becoming the first university to be "zero net energy" efficient.
https://www.chieftain.com/news/20200207/csu-pueblo-will-be-first-solar-powered-university

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This article gives tips about ways to save money.  Some examples are turning power down or off, wearing sweaters or blankets, make sure you appliances work well so they are efficient, make sure no air is getting in, use your grill instead of other ways to cook, etc.

"How low can you go? Save money on your energy bill in 2019", Barton J. Palmer, Coloradoan, Feb 8, 2020.

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"The Truth Behind the Cannabis Industry's Energy Problem"

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New waste to energy efforts cause community complaints regarding the smell in Weld County.

“Waste-to-Energy Facility Brings Smelly Complications,” Jacy Marmaduke, Coloradoan, January 15, 2017

https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2017/01/16/waste--energy-facility-brings-smelly-complications/96538924/