2021
December
06
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

December 06, 2021
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In this season of cooking and baking, I got talking with staffer Kendra Nordin Beato about food – and sharing a laugh over her recent story about cranberry sauce wars. But something else emerged from our chat – how many food-related stories the Monitor published this year, and why that is so natural to our publication.

Reliable access to food sits at the crux of people’s sense of stability and of opportunity. Ensuring that – or dealing with its absence – is a challenge the entire world shares. That’s why we continually explore, at so many levels, how we rise to meet it.

There’s locally: the East St. Louis grocer who nurtures a neighborhood short of markets, as Tara Adhikari reported. The cooks profiled by Patrik Jonsson who prep for a year to fill the stomachs and hearts of 15,000 people with a fine Thanksgiving meal at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The new attention to the struggles some military families face in putting food on the table, as Anna Mulrine Grobe spotlighted.

There’s globally: Howard LaFranchi reported this fall on the United Nations’ first-ever global food systems summit, which showcased a progress-oriented shift toward reducing massive food waste and loss. Our intern team, in its series on Hunger in America, surfaced efforts to shape better policies. Earlier, our 2017 famine series identified the building of resilience in tackling severe drought in Africa.

And culturally, of course, food is bound tightly to our foundational tales and sense of identity. Take a look at Richard Mertens’ story about a Native American food sovereignty movement, Sara Miller Llana’s look at old root cellars driving Newfoundland’s “grow local” movement, or a mother-daughter bond strengthened by Korean food

We care about tracking progress in bridge-building, in driving innovation. And that’s why we care about food.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A deeper look

Ayman Al-Sahili/Reuters
Migrants on a rubber dinghy are being rescued by the Libyan coast guard in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Libya, Oct. 18, 2021. They were returned to Libya, where militia groups run prisons where migrants are subject to inhumane treatment. The detention centers are funded partly by indirect support from the European Union.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Western monarch butterflies gather at the Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove as they migrate south to avoid cold winter temperatures, in Pismo Beach, California, on Nov. 12, 2021. Thousands cluster together in eucalyptus trees from late October through February.

Difference-maker

Photo courtesy of Irvine Ranch Conservancy
In periods of high fire risk, the Orange County Fire Watch program fields volunteers across backcountry areas. In August, Noma Bates, with binoculars, and Scott MacGillivray survey the Laguna Coast Wilderness horizon.

The Monitor's View

Myawaddy TV via AP
Deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, left, and former President Win Myint, sitt before a special court last May.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

J. David Ake/AP
Lowered to half-staff in honor of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, a Republican from Kansas, flags fly in the breeze at sunrise on the National Mall with the U.S. Capitol in the background on Dec. 6, 2021, in Washington.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us at the start of your week. Tomorrow, I hope you’ll check out Harry Bruinius’ story about a Supreme Court case that illustrates the court’s steady shift on freedom of religion over the past two decades.

More issues

2021
December
06
Monday
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