An Obama wordle...and a hungry child

This has little to do with food, but I figure there must be one or two of you who are also word geeks, political geeks (oh yeah, everyone is a political geek this week!), or just plain curious. Besides, since breaking my arm, I have been mostly banished from the kitchen because, well, let's just say that when I cut an onion and cry, it's not about the Syn-propanethial-S-oxide.

So I have been reading a lot, watching endless political TV and playing on twitter just a bit. In the process, I have discovered all sorts of time-sucks, er, I mean cool and useful web tools, One of my favorites is Wordle,

Wordle, in case you have missed it, is this marvelous tool that lets you create custom word clouds using a piece of text, an RSS feed, or even someone's del.icio.us tags. It's a great way to get a quick impression of someone's writing, giving you a quick visual of the topics they address and an idea of their style.

A number of websites have started to use them to illustrate various things. One of my favorites is cookthink, which attaches one to its cookthink questionnaires, which uses a wordle of each person's RSS feed to give you a snapshot of the person being interviewed. Some of the wordles there have one or two clear favored topics, like Julie Biuso's champagne, or Carol Fenster's chocolate.(Note to self: bookmark their sites...)

One word that everyone uses a lot? "Favorite." That's good because it means people are writing about food they truly love. The interviews are interesting, too. Check them out if you haven't yet.

But that's not why we're here...

After listening to the last day and a half of disconnected sound bites from President Obama's inaugural speech, I found myself staring at the wordle that accompanied Louisa Chu's cookthink questionnaire and wondering about the big picture of Obama's speech.The wordle...the big picture...wordle...ah ha!

Well, quick as you can say copy/paste, I had a nice little wordle of the top 200 words of the speech.

And the succinct version. Top 42 words:
 
images from wordle.net

Not much in the way of food talk there, although there is a mention of "...the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders..."

climbs onto teeny tiny soapbox

President Obama, we can not afford indifference to suffering inside our borders either.

According to Share our Strength, 1 in 6 American children is at risk of going to bed hungry tonight. One in six! Although I have read that number more than a few times, it still shocks me. And while I like to think that President Obama will do something about it (after Gitmo, Iraq, the financial meltdown, hiring a White House farmer, and a few dozen other things) that's little help for the 12.5 million children who are hungry right now.

jumps down from teeny tiny soapbox

But you can help.

Share our Strength is working with AT&T to raise money that will help feed children. Text "SHARE" to 20222 to donate $5 to Share Our Strength. When you do, AT&T will match your donation up to $100,000. 100% of this donation will go to supporting Share Our Strength's efforts to end childhood hunger in America.

You can also find a local food bank if you prefer to donate food in your community. I have a bag of groceries sitting on the counter for just that purpose.

How about you? What do you think Obama should do about our food supply, agriculture, hunger, and so on? After he gets the salmonella out of the peanut butter, of course. (Darn! That to-do list of his just keeps growing!)