Hasta La Gadget!

As I walked up to the banana pileup, I knew I was in trouble.

Sure, those things are an excellent (and affordable) healthy snack, but they are almost universally sourced from producers with serious ethical issues.

Yet I still wanted them. What would Michael Pollan do?!

Sheepishly, I scanned the banana barcode using HowGood, a free app intended to help shoppers make more ethical food purchases. I’d been using the app all week to try to make all the “right” choices at the grocery store.

The app revealed, unsurprisingly, that the bananas did not meet HowGood’s sustainability standards, but there were no other banana options in the store. There were also no other options that met the app’s standards, it turned out, in two other stores where I looked for a better alternative.

Eventually, I bit my lip and bought some verboten bananas.

The app that led to my banana boondoggle was created by brothers Arthur and Alexander Gillett in 2007 with the aim of creating an unbiased, one-stop source of information about food companies’ ethical practices and histories, cutting through the confusing web of product labels, academic studies and Internet hot takes to separate the greenwashers from the genuine foodie heroes.

The app relies on a research team — which includes input from hundreds of scientists, academics, farmers and grocers — that has rated over 200,000 products across 70 different indicators that fit into three broader categories. They include how the products are grown, how they are produced or processed, and how the company operates.

Those ratings are boiled down to one of just four ratings — “good,” “great,” “best” or, if a product is determined not to meet standards in all three categories, no rating whatsoever.

Easy, right? HowGood co-founder and CEO Alexander Gillett admitted to HuffPost that simplicity was the goal.

“For each of the different included inputs, the idea is to take all the complexity of the food system and simplify it so you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in each of these fields or understand the difference in every single input to be able to vote with your dollars,” Gillett said.

The ratings can be accessed using the company’s smartphone app, which debuted three years ago and has been slowly attracting an audience and investors ever since, bringing in a new round of funding in the range of $4 million this year.

Using the app, shoppers like me can scan any product with a barcode or search the HowGood database to quickly view product ratings.

Some grocery stores — about 257 across 26 states — are even working with the startup to display the ratings next to products’ price tags, with more to come, according to Gillett. 

“The shelf labeling is going about as fast as we can do it,” Gillett added, noting that licensing the app’s ratings for the in-store labeling is the startup’s primary source of revenue.

For now, it appears the HowGood rollout hasn’t made much of a dent in the Midwest, where I’m based. The nearest store already sporting HowGood shelf labels was more than an hour’s drive away.

Without shelf labels to rely on, I was left scanning each product that piqued my curiosity, a process that felt time-consuming and grew increasingly frustrating when the app began to time out. Then, in large sections of the first store I visited, my phone lost signal altogether, which rendered the app useless.

At two other stores where my signal was stronger, however, I was able to easily compare ratings on products like different brands of coconut oil (all of them were “great”) and feel-good frozen entrees from the likes of Amy’s and Evol (some of them, surprisingly, better than others).

When my phone had a strong signal, the process was certainly quicker than scrolling through pages of Google search results and looking for insights into company practices.

But what about situations — such as my own personal bananagate — in which shoppers have no highly rated options to choose from? And how reliable are these ratings in the first place? Experts in food ethics admire the effort behind the app but aren’t so sure.

Dan Crossley is the executive director of the U.K.-based Food Ethics Council, a nonprofit group.

Crossley said he feels that tools like HowGood hold a lot of potential to help shoppers make more informed decisions in the grocery aisle, but noted that past attempts at developing these sorts of ratings have come up short because the science behind the ratings often isn’t robust enough to capture the nuances inherent in our food system.

He said he wasn’t sure if HowGood has succeeded where many others have failed. The result could even do more harm than good.

“Well-intentioned simplification can end up resulting in greater confusion,” Crossley added.

Lauren Ornelas, the founder and executive director of the food justice-oriented Food Empowerment Project, was also concerned that the work could be oversimplifying the issue at hand.

In response to concerns about the ways in which most commercial chocolate is sourced, Ornelas’ organization launched its own “chocolate list” and an accompanying app about six years ago that identifies which chocolate brands their group has reviewed and recommends.

Researching that project, Ornelas added, was a huge undertaking for their small organization. And it was a process that revealed many products are neither “good” nor “bad” — most fall in a gray area in between. That gray area, she said, is less evident in the HowGood approach.

“This makes something that’s very complicated seem very simplistic,” Ornelas told HuffPost.

One particular rating in the app also caught Ornelas’ eye: Driscoll’s raspberries were rated “good,” owing to the brand’s high company conduct score — but the company has been the subject of widespread allegations of farmworker abuses and calls for a global boycott of its products.

The surprising rating made Ornelas question who might be weighing in on the app’s product ratings.

“Who is setting this criteria and deciding what’s the best one out there?” Ornelas added. “If you’re claiming to be any type of entity that’s forcing companies to be more transparent, you have the responsibility to be more transparent yourself.”

In response to a question about the Driscoll’s rating, Gillett said that seemingly controversial companies can sometimes rate better than anticipated using their system because the companies are being compared to the rest of the industry — in other words, everyone is being graded on a curve.

“Oftentimes it’s the case where a company has problems in one area and needs improvement but it’s just a well-publicized version of that and the rest of the industry is performing worse,” Gillett explained.

In addition, Gillett said the company welcomes input from users concerning product ratings and considers that input when it is reviewing ratings, a process that automatically begins anytime a product’s ingredients or sourcing change and is also carried out manually on a regular basis.

There’s still plenty of reason to be skeptical of all of this.

Paul Thompson, a philosophy professor at Michigan State University who has been studying food ethics issues for 35 years, admitted that the HowGood app was “doing a pretty fair job of covering the bases” on a wide range of food ethics issues. If it becomes more widely used, he said, it could encourage more food companies to embrace better practices.

But still, Thompson said, a more just food system probably won’t be achieved through an app — or through more “woke” shopping habits in the first place.

“Anyone who seriously thinks that an app is going to make their food decisions for them is not really engaged in food ethics,” Thompson added. “Food justice usually is about building relationships on a local community level. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I still think that a relation mediated by an app is not really a relationship.”

Personally, I share Thompson’s skepticism. The app wasn’t particularly easy to use and I’m unsure how many shoppers would take the time to go to three different stores in search of an ethical banana. I’m even less sure that the number of people making such an effort would hit a critical mass capable of shifting the entire food system.

But would it hurt if some people do? Probably not.

Gillett, for his part, remains optimistic.

“You can really make a difference in peoples’ lives by switching from one product to another and supporting the companies with the best practices,” Gillett added. “We’re empowering people to engage and help move the needle.”

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Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

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A 7-year-old in Georgia got the chance to live out his space dreams, with a little help from virtual reality and Make-A-Wish. 

Zayden Wright of Augusta was born with congenital heart disease and has had four open-heart surgeries and 38 heart catheterizations in his short life. Throughout every ordeal, Zayden has maintained a cheerful attitude, vivid imagination and enthusiasm for all things outer space. 

Make-A-Wish Georgia surprised the little boy with a “trip to space.” The organization partnered with Walk West to make his wish “to go to Saturn in a red rocket ship” possible through VR.

Watch the sweet video above to see Zayden’s awesome experience.

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Far Cry 5 is going to be a little different than you might expect. The new announcement trailer paints a picture of pastoral life that lends itself surprisingly well to the franchise’s familiar trappings: hunting, off-road vehicles, airplanes and gun…

Anyone who didn’t grow up back in the early ’80s doesn’t really understand how awesome it was when video games started hitting the scene. In those days, if we found a quarter in the road, we were in the gas station arcade 60 seconds later. For some of my early childhood no one had video games at home until Pong came out, which was fun for about 5 minutes.

In those early days, every time I went to K-Mart with my parents I ended up in the toy section with these crummy Mattel football games in hand. Little red dashes ran after each other, and I never won a single game. Later, they came out with baseball and basketball versions, and I sucked at those even more. That all said, if you want to relive your childhood memory of mediocre handheld gaming, here you go.

ThinkGeek is offering recreations of these three Mattel retro games for $19.99(USD) each. There are a few differences, like “improved” buttons and sound effects, but for the most part they play just like the originals, so I’m certain I’d still suck at them. I’ll stick with Fallout 4 and Civ 6, thanks.

AUSTIN, Texas ― A woman locked at a family immigrant detention center tried to take her own life this month in what legal advocates described as a desperate effort to free her two kids.  

Samira Hakimi, an Afghan national, has spent the last six months detained with her two young children despite a federal ruling that dictates they should have been released within three weeks. The case reinforces the longstanding concerns of immigrant rights groups that say asylum-seeking families should not be forced into prolonged detention.

“They told us you will only be a couple of days in there,” Hakimi told HuffPost. “I never thought that I would be detained here for such a long time. That I’m detained here because I’m from Afghanistan and that’s all. But I’m human.”

In Afghanistan, the Hakimi family had established a high school and multi-branch private university that used Western curricula, taught in both English and Dari and offered more than half its scholarships to women, according to lawyers representing Hakimi and her husband. 

Since 2013, the Taliban repeatedly threatened the family for its work. To avoid the danger of commuting, the family moved onto the university campus and contracted private security guards that year.

It wasn’t enough for them to feel safe. “We could not go outside,” Hakimi said. “My children could not go to school. We thought they might be kidnapped. This was always in our minds…. They have their lives to live. They should live happy and free from every small thing, going to school and enjoying their lives.”

Last year, they fled Afghanistan with Hakimi’s brother-in-law and his pregnant wife, who were facing similar threats.

In December, the two families crossed into the United States from Mexico through a legal port of entry, where they all asked for asylum. The men were separated and sent to all-male immigrant detention centers, where they remain. Hakimi and her kids, as well as her sister-in-law and her newborn baby, were sent to the South Texas Family Detention Center in the town of Dilley and later transferred to the Karnes County Residential Center outside San Antonio. 

Hakimi passed her “credible fear” interview ― the first step toward applying for asylum. It’s common practice for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to free people who pass these interviews so they can pursue their cases in immigration court, but ICE declined to release her and her children. The agency did not respond to a request for comment explaining why it refuses to release them. Hakimi’s sister-in-law is also still at Karnes with her 10-month-old baby.

Hakimi told HuffPost she had suffered from bouts of clinical depression before being detained. Advocates with RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal services to detained families, say she had attempted suicide in the past and told medical workers at Karnes that her condition had worsened as her case appeared to stall. Neither medicine nor therapy would alleviate the problem, she argued. Her depression stemmed from remaining locked up in the detention center with her children.

As the months dragged on, she lost hope. “Here, no one talks to us,” Hakimi said. “They don’t give us the reason why I’m detained in here. I never thought that I would be detained here for such a long time.”

Her son came to her one day asking her why other families were allowed to leave but not them. “That was really triggering her,” Amy Fisher, RAICES’s policy director, told HuffPost. “She was crying and really depressed. And she went into this thought process, when she was really low, thinking, ‘Well, if I’m no longer here, maybe my children can be free.’” Kids cannot be held without their parents or guardians in family detention. 

After she made an effort to take her own life, she woke up in the medical unit of the detention center and was taken to a nearby hospital, where two members of the detention center staff sat with her continuously.  

“I told them, ‘I’m just crying for my children, please,’” she said in a recording with one of her legal providers. “I’m not sick. But they gave me medicine. And they told me take this every four hours, but I didn’t take it anymore.”

Hakimi told her lawyer she did not know what the medicine was. RAICES is requesting her medical records.  

The suicide attempt at Karnes occurred the same month as an immigrant detainee’s suicide at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Jean Jiménez-Joseph, 27, killed himself after spending nearly three weeks in solitary confinement.

Human rights groups have long criticized mental health services at immigrant detention centers. But Fisher said even adequate therapy wouldn’t resolve the problem Hakimi faces.

“There’s no surprise or coincidence that she attempted suicide within days of a young man committing suicide in another detention center,” Fisher said. “There’s no mental health care that can effectively treat someone who is traumatized in a detained setting.”

The Obama administration had all but abandoned the family detention policy by 2009, but hastily resurrected it in 2014 to dissuade a sudden influx of Central American mothers and children from crossing into the United States. Most of them were seeking refuge from violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee ruled in 2015 that the policy violates a longstanding federal settlement called the Flores Agreement, which requires children to be held in the least restrictive setting possible and to generally be released from detention. To comply with the ruling, most families are released from detention within three weeks.

But Hakimi and her children still have no idea when they’ll be freed. The uncertainty of her case likely played a key role in her deteriorating mental health, according to Luis Zayas, the dean of social work for the University of Texas at Austin. Zayas has interviewed dozens of detainees at Karnes and says clinical depression and high levels of anxiety are common there.

“We see it constantly,” Zayas said. “It’s not necessarily an intrinsic form of depression, based on brain chemicals or a longstanding depression ― it’s what we call ‘reactive.’ It’s related to the environment the person is in, especially over a long period of time.”

Zayas had not interviewed the Afghan woman, but evaluated another woman who attempted suicide at Karnes in 2015. He said he saw parallels in their cases. Both of them had histories of depression and suicidal thoughts prior to entering detention.

Suffering through a period of prolonged confinement can push people back to their worst states of mind, particularly if they have a history of mental illness, according to Zayas. The problem is particularly acute with people in family detention, where the vast majority file claims for asylum or other humanitarian exemptions from deportation. “These families aren’t prepared to be there because they’re not criminals,” Zayas said.

“This is what happens when people get desperate,” Zayas added. “This woman is suffering a mental health crisis. But we know where it’s coming from. We know what we can do to stop it.” 

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the
National
Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
You can also text HELLO to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the
Crisis Text Line.
Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for
Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.

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