Food and Farming
The Pentagon’s Great Pizza Victory
From the Gatling gun to the nuclear bomb, from hot air balloons to drones, the military has enlisted scientists to develop ever-more effective war technologies. Now comes a long-sought scientific breakthrough that the military brass consider the ultimate advantage for...
The High Price of Cheap Chicken
If you want to buy a fresh, whole chicken at the store, it'll run you about $1.54 per pound. But if I buy it from my local farmer, it costs $5 per pound. I live in an expensive part of the country — California — but even the farm I visited last year in rural New...
Engineering Away Consumer and States Rights
In 79 A.D., a volcanic eruption buried Pompeii in ash. Nearly 2,000 years later, an eruption of hot legislative ash is spewing from Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) is threatening U.S. consumers. Pompeo is the right-wing Congress critter from the Ideological Republic of...
Bacon Is Not a Vegetable
As a vegetarian, I have to walk a fine line. Really, I'm not judging you. But I often find it necessary to establish myself as "not a threat" to meat eaters. I also occasionally bump up against militant vegans. Consider this collision I had the other day with a devout...
Let Them Eat Rice
A recent Scientific American blog post blamed environmentalists for costing poor, malnourished people an estimated 1,424,000 life years in India alone. Why? Because they presumably kept Golden Rice off the market for over a decade when it could have been helping the...
Branding School Lunches as Obamafare
Ah, progress. In the 2012 elections, Republicans cast themselves as budget-balancers by promising to whack welfare programs for the poor, snarling that such people are "takers" and "moochers." Such vindictive sourness didn't play too well with voters, and Republicans...
The High Price of Laziness
I know I shouldn't be, but I am shocked by Americans' laziness. We look for the closest parking spot to the gym so that we don't have to walk those extra few steps. We indulge in watching more cooking shows, yet actually cook less than ever. We invented the...
Cry a River over California’s Drought
As a Californian, I have not gotten too much sympathy from friends and family about our rotten weather this winter. Yes, I said rotten weather. It's been incredibly pleasant— except for a few times when the temperature crept up to 90 — but we've hardly had any rain....
It’s Time for Maryland’s Factory Farms to Pay Their Fair Share
Big chicken-processing companies generate 1.5 billion pounds of fowl waste annually in Delmarva (the Delaware, Maryland, Virginia tri-state area), and it's choking the Chesapeake Bay. Each year, Marylanders pay a small tax that goes toward the Chesapeake Bay...
A Sweet Victory
The Food and Drug Administration recently came out with a sweet surprise. Its proposed new nutrition label will finally give us a bit of key information we need to understand our food: the amount of added sugars. If you look at a nutrition label now, you will see how...
