Food and Farming
A Big Win for Fast Food Workers
For many Americans, the only connection between Labor Day and labor is that you don't have to do any of the latter as a result of the former. In other words, it's just a day off work — an occasion to barbecue or go out of town for a three-day weekend. But millions of...
Ethanol: A Love Story
It’s a timeless story of teenage romance: pledging love, abandoning reason, rebelling against authority. No, this isn’t the plot of a John Hughes movie. Instead, I’m talking about Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s love affair with ethanol. While Vilsack is tasked...
Summer Spells Hunger for Kids in Small American Towns
Metropolis, Illinois, population 6,465, isn’t much of a metropolis. But when Reverend Orlando McReynolds moved to that small town on the Kentucky border two years ago to become the pastor at the First Missionary Life Center, he found the same thing he left behind in...
Big Ag Spars with the First Amendment
The First Amendment may be inconvenient to some people at times, but it's still the law of the land. Case in point: so-called "ag-gag laws." These are laws in Idaho, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa that prohibit people from taking photos or...
Local Markets Nourish Families and Communities
If anyone's ever looking for me on a Sunday morning, they’d better head to the FreshFarm DuPont Circle Farmers' Market. I can’t resist the tables piled high with bright green lettuces, plump purple eggplants, and juicy peaches. There's fresh goat cheese, a wide...
Rolling Up Some Common Sense with Willie Nelson
With marijuana prohibition finally ending in states and cities across the land — including full legalization in Alaska, Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. — who could be better than my friend Willie Nelson to lead the way for weed quality and...
Monsanto Hits All the Wrong Notes
The Canadian rocker and master storyteller Neil Young says: "Music is a universal language." Yes, and when created by a people's champion like him, music can bring down the high and mighty — just as Joshua's trumpeters brought down the walls of Jericho. Or, in Young's...
Monsanto’s Boot Camp
One reason corporations get away with running roughshod over us is that America's mass-market media has been thoroughly corporatized — both in structure and mindset. Our daily news feed is largely a regurgitation of the corporate line. An upcoming food conference the...
Pope Francis Weighs In on Newfangled Crops
Does genetically engineering crops — creating seeds with the DNA of other species inserted in them, like a tomato with DNA that includes genes from a fish — violate religious principles? People with a vested interest have tried for years to speak on the Vatican’s...
Unhappy Meals
McDonald's is floundering. There's no other way to say it. The global fast food chain has experienced declining U.S. sales for well over a year now. But why? I'd love to gloat that Americans have finally caught on that the Golden Arches peddles terrible food, but that...
