Food and Farming
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...
A Healthy Way to Build Communities
Mark Winne, an author and anti-hunger activist, often says that the most important word in “community garden” isn't “garden.” I saw this firsthand not long ago. Standing in the sun between several small garden plots all morning, it may not have looked like much was...
This Global Ruling Is Just Not Cool
They say that if you get up in the morning and swallow a live toad, nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. Well, we Americans have just been fed a live toad by the World Trade Organization. Last May, the WTO — an oligarchic, autocratic governing...
Coke’s PR Scam Explodes
If your car's battery terminals are corroded, just open a can of Coca-Cola. Coke will dissolve corrosion, making your battery connections spiffy clean in a jiffy. Ironically, however, Coca-Cola can't seem to clean up its own corrosive corruption structure. By hook or...
The Fishy Science Behind Mutant Salmon
Americans have been eating genetically modified corn, soybeans, and other crops for nearly two decades. But thanks to the Food and Drug Administration, now you might find a salmon with genes spliced from two other fish species on your plate. It’s the first time the...
