The Color of Truth the daily happenings of a community activist

Hipster

Hit up Urth Cafe today with Duyen after work. The environment was nice, but damn...that place is waaayyyy to hipster for me. It boggles me that you have this place...where you're paying $13 for a sandwich, and just two blocks down there's skid row, where people can hardly get enough money to stay alive.

I hope the growing number of hipsters doesn't mean the unloading of the homeless in to another city.

The Right to Breathe

After much organizing, i was able to put together a meeting of several API organizations in Long Beach, to address the health effects of the Ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles, and the freeways. The Ports and the freeways create a toxic air environment for Long Beach community members, and this has led to increased asthma rates, cancer, and even premature births.

One crazy statistic was that for those children who lived a quarter-mile from a freeway, they were 89% more likely to develop asthma as compared to those who lived a mile away. When we were covering this statistic, one of the Executive Directors seemed caught off-guard. She shared with us that she lives very close to a freeway, and her son had asthma.

The quality of our air is not always the top priority in many of our community/nonprofit organizations. Heck, living in Los Angeles, I think I, like so many others, have been so de-sensitized to the reality of our smog, that I don't even consider it day-to-day. Yet, since moving closer to Downtown Los Angeles to live, I have developed allergies. Having done the allergies test, my doctor said everything came back negative, and that I am most likely developing strong allergies because of LA's smog.

But seriously, what do any of us do about it? Having heard of growing concerns in the Pacific Islander and Cambodian communities of Long Beach about environmental health, I took the opportunity to mobilize some of the big community leaders to come to a meeting. This meeting that we had today, started off with some basic information on what the air quality is like, and what effects it has. From there, we moved on to dialoging on how best to move forward.

We have a game plan, and I am so excited to have all these groups step up and make this issue their own.

An Unhealthy Healthy

I ordered a chicken tostada today from Baja Fresh for lunch and it got me thinking. Fast food restaurants work so hard to convince us that the healthier meals that they offer are actually good for us (or at least better than burgers, fries, etc). At the end of the day, they've got it down. We eat these salads from fast food joints, and they end up having just as many calories, fat, carbs, etc as some of the greasy fast food. Yet because of how they advertise, and because for some reason seeing greens and leaves equates to healthy, we are fine with that.

Wouldn't it be great that instead of focusing on this tactic, they would try something as simple as portion control? If Americans were able to control their portions, our damn society wouldn't be eating ourselves to death (obesity, diabetes, other health effects). For some reason we always want more more more for our money, even when you don't NEED to eat that much.

I remember as a kid my parents would always tell me to not waste my food, because "a poor child somewhere else does not have enough to eat." That's true. So instead, why don't we have smaller portions in the first place, and save some of that food for the starving children at the get-go? Think about it.

*Yes, yes a tostada isn't considered one of the "healthy" foods, but the meal itself got me thinking about salads at other fast food places.