Pinellas managed to fall below the 19% state average (odd to congratulate a county for only having 17% more hungry families), but Hillsborough is way past it. And Sarasota, uh, all I can say is … wow. Things are looking grim on the Suncoast. Check out the previous post for ideas on how to help out.

Last year I lived for a week on just $3 a day for food, the average amount that food stamp clients receive from the USDA to fill the grocery cart. It wasn’t easy, and it couldn’t end quickly enough for my taste. The real story wasn’t my gimmicky experience, though. It’s the large numbers of people who have to eke out three squares a day on the government dole. 26 million people last year. 200,000 people on the Suncoast. And those numbers are going up.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that Florida food stamp usage jumped 19% in the past year, which is over three times the national increase. Much of that comes from families who have dropped into the ranks of the working poor, with jobs that just can’t make ends meet in the current economy. When talking to food banks last December, one volunteer told me that he has people coming in for help who were donating items just a year ago.

Want to help? Donate food, cash, or time to a local food bank. Check America’s Second Harvest to find one near you.

This weekend, the NYT posted a story about the vast amount of food that American’s waste every year, as much as 27% off all food available for consumption. That happens at every step of the distribution pipeline, from factories to your refrigerator, resulting in almost 100 billion pounds of edible food hitting the trash can.

What’s worse is much of that — as much as 98%, according to the article — ends up in landfills, slowly moldering away and manufacturing methane gas. People go hungry, we waste money and the environment suffers. Triple whammy.

Here are some ideas to help cut your wasteful ways:

1. Eat what you buy. When planning tonight’s dinner, try to cook with the oldest food in the house, especially veggies that are past their prime.
2. Compost. For both wasted food and inedible scraps, composting stops overloading landfills and starts putting the valuable energy and nutrients back into the soil. Even better if you’re using the compost to fertilize a backyard vegetable garden.
3. Shop frequently. It might use up a tad more gas, but at least you’ll only be buying what you need for a few days, leaving you a better chance to consume as much as you buy. Goodbye, weekly trip to the grocery.
4. Support reclaimed food charities. Groups like Tampa Bay Harvest work with grocery stores, restaurants and others to pick up unwanted but edible food and get it into the hands of people who need it most. Encourage places you shop to participate, or you can sign up to volunteer. The organization has a great system that pairs volunteers with pick up and delivery routes close to their work and home.
5. Buy less food. The less you have, the less you’ll waste. Maybe it’s time to see the bottom of that vegetable drawer again.

In today’s issue I dug into the World Food Crisis, ending with a prescription for a few little things we can do to limit our impact on the shortage of grains that’s causing hunger and poverty in dozens of countries. One suggestion was to limit your consumption of factory-farmed meat. Meat production has vast environmental impacts, isn’t good for the hapless animals and consumes about 40 percent of all the grain grown in the world. (For more on the Crisis, check out past blog posts.)

Can you avoid factory-meat without turning vegetarian? Sure, but it takes some effort. Buying locally-raised meat, preferably grass-fed, reduces the impact of large-scale production until it’s almost as eco- and hunger-friendly as giving up your steaks and chops. Plus, it tastes better and connects you with your food source.

Numerous local farmers and small ranchers have gotten into the act of providing the Gulf Coast with neighborhood meat. You usually have to buy in bulk — beef is often sold as whole, half or quarter cow — so you’ll need room in the freezer, or an extra cold box in the garage, and you may want to get together with family or friends to split up a big buy.

Here are a few places to try out. I’ll add more as I find them, but f you know of others, drop me a line.

Rosas Farms, 13450 N. Hwy. 301, Citra, FL, 32912, 888-353-9912 or rosasfarms.com — 100% grass-fed beef, boar, buffalo and a lot more, raised on an organic farm jsut south of Gainesville.

Amazin’ Grazin’ Beef, 941-745-5630 — This new operation in Bradenton sells 100% grass-fed beef raised by real-life cowboy Lee Sly. There will also be wild tilapia and acorn finished pork.

Plan It Earth, 15433 County Rd. 39 S., Lithia, 813-784-2727 — Grass-fed, grain finished beef.

The New York Sun reported this week that major retailers like Costco have recently imposed purchase limits on commodity foods like rice, oil and flour. It’s spotty, on a store by store basis, but people are noticing and some consumers (as well as restaurant owners concerned about rapid price hikes from distributors) are hoarding. And worldwide garin reserves are at an almost all-time low, resulting in a supply chain that has very little inventory to draw from. In the Sun article, survival blogger and former Army intelligence officer James Rawles noted that “even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

Maybe Bush will recall troops from Iraq to start baking bread, a la Egypt’s Mubarak.

Rationing food. Hoarding food. Here in the US. Huh.

[Classic photo by Margaret Bourke-White. Look back at the past few weeks of Eat My Florida for more on the World Food Crisis.]

Lately, I’ve focused on biofuels as one of the insidiously evil underlying causes of this food crisis, that just so happens to cause irreparable harm to the environment in the process. Today, The Independent nailed an even bigger culprit — meat.

According to The Independent, almost 40% of all the grain grown in the world is slated for animal feed. Feeding animals is an inefficient process, requiring about 8 kilos of grain to produce every kilo of cow flesh, or 2k for every k of chicken. Meat production uses 6 to 17 times as much land, 5 to 26 times as much water, 6 to 20 times as much fossil fuels and 6 times as much biocides as grain. Just to cap it all off, remember that a single cow produces as much greenhouse gasses every day as an SUV out for a 45 minute cruise. And America is the world’s largest consumer of red meat.

It’s not all our fault — giant developing countries like India, China and Indonesia are consuming more meat than ever before, twice as much as 20 years ago. I guess we can look forward to that leveling off once the people in those countries start contracting diabetes and heart disease at record rates.

If you eat meat — like me –it’s likely that none of this will change your carnivorous ways. But a little extra knowledge about what goes into getting that steak to your plate, and what effects it has on the environment, starving families and world politics, might make you cut back. Just a little. Like me.

• “April 12th’s Saturday Night Live featured three clips of Ashton Kutcher dressed up as a giant chocolate bar with a killer instinct, cute mime clown face and all.” (Thanks Serious Eats)

• “What was supposed to be a temporary financial safety net for imperiled family farmers has become a huge boondoggle for a fraction of wealthy farmers, including landowners who’ve never gotten close enough to a barn to slip on the manure.” (Thanks PBS.org)

• “A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called “Crimson Sky” — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation’s National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets.” (Thanks AP)

• “Planners couldn’t come up with enough organic or sustainably grown food from Georgia to nourish just 600 people over two days.” Hmm, maybe I’ll have to start giving back to my alma mater. (Thanks AJC)

• “Smart owners, of course, have always carefully watched their costs, but when every bill comes with a “gasoline-price surcharge” and fewer people are walking through the door, it’s hocus-pocus time.” (Thanks WP)

• WORLD FOOD CRISIS UPDATE: “Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand, a situation that is fraying old alliances, inspiring new ones and putting pressure on the Agriculture Department, which is being lobbied directly by all sides without managing to satisfy any of them.” (Thanks NYT)

• WORLD FOOD CRISIS UPDATE: “When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels,” said India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, in an interview.” (Thanks WSJ)

• WORLD FOOD CRISIS UPDATE: “As we know in the past, sometimes those questions lead to war,” he said. “We now need to devote 100 percent of our time to these questions.” (Thanks NYT)

• “World Bank President Robert Zoellick on Wednesday called for a new coordinated global response to deal with spiraling food prices exacerbating shortages, hunger and malnutrition around the globe.”

• “Foodstuffs have gone up 41 percent in price since October 2007, pushing many people over the line from poverty into privation or even hunger.”

• “What’s more, worldwide food reserves are at their lowest in 35 years, so prices are likely to stay high for the foreseeable future.”

• The cost of food: Facts and figures.

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Lately, local food and health advocates have stapled a silver lining onto the recession by claiming that higher prices of industrially-produced corn, meat and soy – caused by elevated oil prices, among a bevy of other factors – means that people will be eating more fruits and vegetables from local farms, since those prices have stayed largely stable. That’s good for the environment, public health and the local economy. The NYT had a piece about this today, featuring quotes and wishful thinking from luminaries like Michael Pollan and Alica Waters.

The problem is, prices for local and organic fruits and vegetables are only “bargains” in relation to those industrial products’ increased prices. That’s great for the environmental- and health-conscious middle and upper classes who already seek out better foods. But, mass-produced food is still less expensive and easier to obtain, especially for lower-income families, which means the unhealthiest, most inexpensive commercial foods might see as big a jump in consumption as local and organic products.

Burger King CEO John Chidsey nailed that problem in a Wall Street Journal Q & A last week: “It’s very hard for me to imagine that the economy could ever get so bad that somebody could not afford to go buy a Double Cheeseburger from McDonald’s or a Whopper Jr. from us for $1. If you go to the grocery store, I really challenge you to find something for under $1.”

When I tried the Food Stamp Challenge last year, I experienced those same issues. Making the best out of a small budget and and healthy desires takes precious time that the working poor don’t usually have in abundance. When money is tight, really tight, healthy eating falls quickly to the convenience of a cheap and filling fast food meal.

Right now, the state mandates 3200 calories per day per inmate. Crist (no relation) wants that cut to 2700. That’s despite the fact that a 5′9″ male who weighs 160 pounds and exercises an hour a day requires over 2900 calories.Ya’ think most inmates are 5′9″ and weigh 160?

Besides the money saved, think of the unexpected results of such a change:

• Inmates will be slimmer, healthier and live longer, costing the state more in the long run.
• Prison economies will move from sexual slavery, toilet gin and cigarettes to pudding and fish sticks.
• Instead of being sent out on work gangs and road crews, inmates can be sourced to fashion shoots and couture runway shows — which equals more revenue for the state.
• Keeping inmates hungry is a tried and true way of controlling prison populations.

Although the Department of Corrections used to have prison farms and bought local foods from Florida growers, now the state contracts prison food service to large corporations like Aramark. And, to no one’s surprise, Aramark would like to cut caloric outlay to 2100 calories per inmate, claiming they could save $15 million per year. Why are you aiming so low, Aramark?

While researching prison food for a story I’m working on, a friendly, anonymous source in the department of corrections encouraged me to “ask about the loaf.” The “Management Loaf” is a diabolical tool that prison officials dole out to those lucky inmates who — often in solitary confinement — refuse to cooperate fully with the guards. The prison kitchen takes leftovers and untouched food of all varieties and mashes them together, slaps the resulting concoction (which one prison worker described as “chunky vomit”) in a loaf pan and bakes it into a solid, over-cooked mess of calories. The loaf is usually served cold and prisoners have reported that it causes “gastric distress, cramps, diarrhea, and bloating.”

Slice and serve. Yum.

Perhaps we could call it the Crist Surprise (no relation) and serve it to everyone in the system, regardless of behavior. Maybe next he’ll turn his attention to school lunches!