Food and Farming
Rebranding Trash Fish
For centuries, fishermen around Cape Cod caught…you guessed it: cod. Cod and haddock. The ocean provided a seemingly endless supply of these fish — until a few years ago. These days, there aren't so many cod or haddock left for fishermen to catch. Now, if you go to...
Man Can’t Live on Cabbage Alone
I ran into an acquaintance recently and he told me he'd started seeing a new nutrition expert. "You know what?" he said, "It turns out I'm gluten intolerant." OK. Him and everyone else. I told him I was glad he found an expert who could help him. A week later I saw...
Wonderfully Deceptive Superfood Marketing
The new comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver included a well-deserved riff on the food industry in its first episode. Oliver, who you might know from his work on Comedy Central's fake news program, The Daily Show, went after two well-deserved targets: Pom...
The Unbearable Annoyance of Neighborhood Tattling
I met my friend Rachel because we were both in the same situation: We each had neighbors who inexplicably hated our chickens. Rachel and I each had small flocks of hens, no roosters, and sprawling, fertile, organic vegetable gardens in our yards. And we live in urban...
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...
