Skip to footer

Readers write: Food waste, website change, close to home

Letters to the editor for the June 5, 2017 weekly magazine.

|
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue goes though the lunch line to have lunch with students at the Catoctin Elementary School in Leesburg, Va. on May 1, 2017.
  • By Jayne I. Hanlin Monitor reader
  • Carolyn Reilly Monitor reader
  • Geoff Cahoon Monitor reader

Food waste

The May 22 One Week article “Pros, cons of new school food rules” reminded me of a research project I did in graduate school in 1980. Over a 10-day period in the elementary school where I taught, I weighed the amount of waste in each of six food categories. Then, basing my calculations on average amounts of food thrown away, I projected not only the tons of food wasted nationally (both daily and yearly) but the cost as well. Federal regulations may have changed since then, but I imagine this problem of waste persists.

Jayne I. Hanlin

St. Louis

Website change

Regarding the May 29 Upfront column, “How we’re addressing your website concerns”: Excellent “remodeling.” Change is good – good change is even better! Thank you for all of the hard work that goes into the great news you disseminate.

Carolyn Reilly

San Rafael de Coronado, Costa Rica

Close to home

Regarding the April 28 article “To colonize space, start closer to Earth” (CSMonitor.com): I have long felt that development toward a Mars mission would be better served by first industrializing, and making profitable, a larger and larger low-Earth-orbit presence, supported from Earth. 

The real questions for us relate to the economic viability of development at the slow pace that will be forced by the large distances. 

The costs of doing it fast from Earth are prohibitive. How long can we sustain an investment before there is some payback? But this pathway of slowly growing an off-Earth self-supporting human space residential/industrial ecosystem will likely be a faster path, and certainly a more meaningful and sustainable one, than trying to force an all-in-one shot to Mars, paid for by taxes, that risks lives, consumes astronomical financial resources, and establishes nothing.

Geoff Cahoon

Seattle

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Readers write: Food waste, website change, close to home
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Readers-Respond/2017/0603/Readers-write-Food-waste-website-change-close-to-home
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe