Food and Farming
Putting Free Speech Out to Pasture
Hard experience teaches that biotech companies, chemical corporations, and other agribusiness giants have no sense of respect for Mother Nature. Now, Rick Friday has learned they have no sense of humor either. Friday, a lifelong Iowa farmer, also happens to be a...
Say It, Don’t Spray It
A friend of mine is a farmer out in Montana. She's also eight months pregnant with her first child. Recently she looked out her window and saw a worker spraying pesticides on her neighbor's farm. Concerned for the health of her baby, she called the neighbor about the...
The Good Food Movement Needs Science, Too
Perhaps you've heard some organic food advocates say, "We should just roll back the clock and farm the way we used to" — before modern science gave us factory farms and genetically modified ingredients. Others disagree, saying that we'd all starve if we didn't use...
That ‘Natural’ Label Doesn’t Mean Much
Scenario: You're at the store, trying to make healthy yet frugal choices. You see several products labeled "organic" and others labeled "natural." You're trying to buy good food and household products for less, and those organic items seem to cost a bit more. Maybe...
A Sweet Tax
As Americans prepare to meet this year’s April 18 deadline to file our taxes, there's talk of taxes across the Pond, too. Great Britain just passed a tax on sugary drinks. Unlike similar measures in Mexico and Berkeley, California, the British version may lead to soda...
What’s ‘Processed’ Food?
If you've read any nutritional advice lately, you've probably encountered one hard-and-fast rule: Avoid processed foods. But what does "processed" mean? On one level, anything humans do to food — slicing fruit, cooking beans, fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut —...
Eating in the Dark
I'm sick of writing about labeling genetically engineered foods. I'm sick of it because there's really one thing to say, and I've said it before: Americans have a right to know how their food is produced. Period. The fact is that most processed food in the supermarket...
Betting the Farm on Free Trade
From her home in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Karen Feridun is helping stage a growing citizen pushback against the expansion of natural gas extraction. But a far-reaching global deal recently signed halfway around the world may make her job much harder. Feridun got...
Stomping on Our Constitutional Rights
Imagine the outcry by tea party Republicans if state legislators were passing laws banning the use of video cameras in banks to capture images of robbers. Yet those very same tea partiers have been passing laws in various states to ban the recording of inhumane,...
Slurp, Baby, Slurp
As the “lamestream” media, late-night talk show hosts, and Sarah Palin impersonator-in-chief Tina Fey lapped up the former Alaska governor’s first remarks to Donald Trump’s “right-wingin’ bitter-clingin’” supporters, one of her most hilarious lines didn’t get the...
