Do Croc Shoes let People Down on Escalators?

Sometimes, if you're the designer of a product and you can't think of a way to make something particularly stylish, you decide to go the opposite way - you try to make something that's clunky and homely-looking, but that kind of flaunts its unattractiveness. If you're lucky, like the Croc shoes you see everywhere these days on kids’ feet, you get a runaway hit. Croc shoes are about protecting your feet - about footwear that are friendly, cheap and safe. Well, that's not what the professional medical magazine injury prevention feels about these lurid looking foam clogs anymore.

Apparently, Croc shoes and escalators don't mix. Crocs are designed with a special nonslip construction; and apparently, this safety feature is what is causing a great many accidents involving children and escalators. In dozens of cases, children wearing crocs often find their shoes getting caught on an escalator step. There are so many of these accidents happening these days to children wearing Croc shoes, there is an entire blog dedicated to it called CrocsAccidents.

Of course, the makers of Cshoes feel that the problem is not with their product but with escalators. They feel escalators have for quite a while now been implicated in injuring children. They feel that the children who've had those accidents would have half them even without Croc shoes. It's just that the shoes are so popular, that any time anything happens that involves them, people like to drag them into the picture. There are tens of millions of crocs worn around the world. There seems no reason to believe that escalators, that have always been involved in accidents that come out of design flaws, should have a special thing for croc shoes. People have been getting their shoelaces caught in escalators forever.

Estimates place it at 25,000 American children under 18: that's how many are injured on escalators every 10 years or so. And that's not including accidents involving strollers. The only way to prevent footwear related injuries on escalators would be for parents to always keep a close eye on their children. Of all the accidents that occur on escalators every year, about 20% are from things like children's clothing and shoelaces getting caught between a step in the wall of the escalator. And these are usually far more dangerous than merely slipping and rolling down an escalator. Whenever you take a child on an escalator, make sure that you keep the child at the center of the escalator and not leaning over one side. You need to keep your child away from the dangerous parts of the machine.

Is Local Food only Good for the Environment? Or could it be better for People Too?

If you get right down to the root of it, that movement that tries to promote the use of local food has always been about trying to help the environment and small-holding farmers. Buy from the supermarket chains, and you usually buy from major agricultural corporations that farm vast tracts of land intensively with genetically-modified seeds, massive quantities of pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizer. And that's not even including the way the farming corporations need to truck produce all over the country expending fuel and polluting the air. Buy local food, and you hand business to local farmers who have small farms that they are able to take care of with personal attention. They don't need to depend on pesticides and fertilizer all that much.

But is local food only good for the planet? What if it were to be better for your health as well? Certainly, that would convince a whole new constituency of the benefits of organic and local food. A grant has been made to a research team at the University of North Carolina; the goal given to them is finding out more information about what impact it has on public health for a community to abandon produce from large-scale farming and to move towards local food that's been grown no more than 100 miles away from anyone's home.

If people were to focus their entire diets on local food, they would, by requirement, need to give up processed foods. That itself would be a very healthy development. Not to mention, if you have to eat nothing but local food, you'll look out for variety as much as you can - and in that quest, you will have nowhere to turn but to new kinds of fruits and vegetables that you wouldn't ever have chosen before. By that measure, the local food movement has to be better for the public health. But what they're looking for in this study is more direct evidence.

The study’s going to take until the year 2013 to really come to any provable conclusions; whatever they find in the end, we will have a better understanding of what happens when we transition to farming practices that are healthier for the environment, that use less toxic material, and that produce fresher produce. The way America eats has a lot to say about our problem with a poor environment and our health problems. Half of all Americans live with at least one chronic disease like high blood pressure or diabetes. This didn't used to be the case before. A study to understand the way America treats its food could have a lot to contribute in helping America overcome its problems with obesity and malnutrition.