Food and Farming
Paying for Cheap Chocolate
One Halloween, my husband persuaded our kids to give away most of the candy they'd just collected while trick-or-treating. They were preschoolers and the house we were renting then had previously drawn teens with haunted tours. We'd run out of candy when a stream of...
Walk Softly and Carry a Big Beer
OK, that's it. No more Mr. Nice Guy. The avarice of corporate power is getting personal. I'm talking about beer, the nourishing nectar of a civilized society. Since my teen years, I've done extensive consumer research on the brewer's art, from the full array of ales...
The Outgoing Texas Ag Commissioner’s Red Meat Agenda
In Texas, not all goobers are produced by peanut farmers. A bumper crop of some of our nuttiest goobers comes out of far-right-wing political soil. Check out this blue-ribbon specimen: Todd Staples. Carefully cultivated by corporate agribusiness powers, he's served as...
We Can’t Go On Eating Like This
Once the human race stopped throwing spears and gathering berries, our bodies suffered. Planting seeds and harvesting produce made leisure possible, but it also meant we grew shorter, fatter, sicker, and considerably more overworked. An alien visiting from another...
Hooked on Apples
When it comes to solving big problems, I believe in reaching for the low-hanging fruit first. What's the easy stuff we can get out of the way before working on harder challenges? Right now, many of us can go for the low hanging-fruit in a very literal way: by visiting...
The Nouveau Sodbusters
We know from the childhood song that Old MacDonald had a farm. But e-i-e-i-o — look who's got his farm now. It's outfits like American Farmland, Farmland Partners, and BlackRock. These aren't dirt farmers wearing overalls and muddy boots. They're Wall Street hucksters...
Seeds of Greed
Another Fast Food Stunt
Now here's a dinner I wish I could've attended. I hear it was an elegant evening of fine dining in New York City's chic Tribeca neighborhood. Celebrity chefs prepared a sumptuous spread of international cuisines for this truly unique ballet for the taste buds. The...
The Case for Making Foreign Aid a Two-Way Street
What if I told you there was a lot in Africa that was going right? Now, I don't mean programs that are successfully handing out food aid, treating malaria, or preventing elephant poaching, although I'm sure some of those are succeeding too. I mean intrinsic parts of...
No Appetite for Fixing School Lunch
You can lead a kid to vegetables, but you can't make her eat. Especially if the food doesn't taste good. That's what the government found out in the wake of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. I was active in advocating for school lunch reform at the time. The...
