Growing Unease

You know that things are looking seriously bad when American observers start advising Americans to hoard food. This is the
country of the footlong sandwich
and the one-pound hamburger with fries and pickles on the side, the land of limitless options and limitless spending, the land of milk and honey where milk used to cost less than $2 per gallon and people rarely spent more than 8 per cent of their monthly income on food. So hoarding for any short term crisis seems so...oh dear, so Third World! But if rice and wheat prices keep moving the way they do, then perhaps that's what people here will have to start doing, loading up the pantry, that is. The era of food complacency is over.

I feel really bad because I know the drill of the economy of shortages - use less of everything, buy things only when you need to, reuse everything as far as possible. But to most people here, those routines are so alien that they will have a hard time adjusting, or maybe the much vaunted American adaptibility will rear its head again. Who knows?

More about the Expat Experience

The most interesting expat blogs come out of the experiences of those who are trying to push themselves out of their comfort zone, even if just a little bit. That is why I like the blogs of those women and men who are trying to get beyond just living in other places because that's where the job is. One of the other expat women in India whose blog I enjoy is Scribbly Katia who combines her daily life in India as mom and wife with that of a writer and an observer of cultures crossing and clashing. Recently, she has an interesting post about children and color perception and socialized biases towards whiteness.

I will probably find other great expat blogs as I browse the internet (already an occupation that takes up at least a couple of hours of my day). These days I am also following the worldwide food crisis that the mass media only started to pick up on towards the middle of last year. The trends are ominous as more and more acreage is given over to growing corn for ethanol, which shrinks the amount of wheat and rice available for the world's population. Droughts and crop failures have added to the crisis. Read about it here, here and here (To read the articles from the New York Times, you may need to create an account). The crisis in the world's financial markets is also driving speculative capital into farmland, making agricultural property prices rise rapidly.

Prices are rising rapidly in the United States too. And this will have an especially hard impact on a people who are used to spending only 15 percent of their income on food. In poorer parts of the world, where people spend anything from 60-80 per cent of their income on food, things will get significantly worse in the short term.

More Blogs from India

Continuing where I left off last time (why do I never get to do two consecutive days of blogging? Ask a certain three year old), another expat blog I visit fairly regularly is that of Esben Agersnap's. A young Danish intern (don't know how much longer he has to go), Esben blogs out of Delhi. He takes the most fabulous pictures of his travels in India and in Europe and often makes me wish that I were in my early twenties again, with all the spirit of adventure of that age.

There is another quite unusual bunch of older American (I think) women living near Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh. Joy blogs about their life among the Tibetan population of that region and her adventures in the Himalayas and - oh, knitting. Since I recently took to knitting, I find her posts on this subject quite interesting as well as informative.