Cereal Crimes

Cereal Crimes

Remember when “natural” meant things like blue sky, green grass, and food you could trust to be good for you? No more. Thanks to corporate greed, “natural” foods aren’t necessarily wholesome. Even when applied to granola, the term often...
Occupy the Food System

Occupy the Food System

Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we...
Catering to the Frozen Pizza Lobby

Catering to the Frozen Pizza Lobby

How small-minded is Congress? How tangled-up in a right-wing ideological knot is it? How subservient to corporate lobbyists is it? The answers to these three questions are: pizza, tomato paste, and spuds. At a time when doctors and nutritionists are sounding a...
Vegan Misgivings

Vegan Misgivings

Thanksgiving is upon us. I once loved this holiday above all others — but no more. The day was an excuse for a gathering of the clan, without religious significance or pressure to buy everybody a useless present. It was essentially a festival of food. In my...
The Skinny on Farm Subsidies and Obesity

The Skinny on Farm Subsidies and Obesity

Obesity has reached epic proportions in the United States and its price tag is soaring. With one-third of adults and more than 12 million children and adolescents obese, the direct and indirect medical costs of this scourge total as much as $147 billion a year. The...