Food and Farming

Wisconsin’s Cheesy Innovation
For generations, picture-takers have instructed their subjects to say "cheese." Well, no people say "cheese" better than Wisconsinites, who unabashedly wear cheesehead hats in public, celebrate dozens of cheese festivals, have a Monterey Jack bacterium as the states'...

Higher Hopes for Hemp
Take a moment and look around you. Look up. The sky hasn't fallen, has it? People in Colorado are buying marijuana — legally — and civilization hasn't come crashing to its knees. At this point, we've all seen TV journalists reporting from Colorado dispensaries, noting...

Leasing Out Integrity to Coca-Cola
Irony is dead. It has been garroted by reality. For proof, check out the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness. Sounds like a spa in Arizona where you might enjoy a cleansing regimen of aloe vera smoothies, doesn't it? But, no, it's a hokey "science" front owned...

This Low-Carb Diet Is Good for You and the Planet
2014. A new year. The time to make resolutions. It's when we all join gyms, sign up for dating sites, and start new diets — only to quit them a few weeks later. If you're into resolutions, I've got one for you to consider: In 2014, try a low-carb diet. Not a...

A Toxic Cocktail
Shrimp cocktail makes a great finger food for holiday parties. Right? Only if you have no idea how those crustaceans were produced. Because if you did, you wouldn't want to eat shrimp again. Before I go on, I'll say this: There is good shrimp out there. Monterey Bay...

Coke’s Ploy to Drain Your Wallet When You Dine Out
Coca-Cola is running a stealth advertising campaign. Stealth? Why would a corporation known for its iconic ads like Coke spend big bucks on advertising that it doesn't want consumers to notice? Shhhh. The soft drink giant's campaign is a surreptitious ploy to enlist...

Fast Food Giants Gorge on Subsidies
The fast food industry is notorious for handing out lean paychecks to their burger flippers and fat ones to their CEOs. What's less well-known is that taxpayers are actually subsidizing fast food incomes at both the bottom — and top — of the industry. Take, for...

The Fight for Control over Our Own Dinner Tables
Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and former farm boy, once wrote: "[T]he central problem with modern industrial agriculture... [is] not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste, and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all. More...

Save the Turkeys
It's odd that the most iconic feature of Thanksgiving — the turkey — is likely the most unnatural. It's got competition, of course, from the jellied cranberry sauce that retains the shape of its can and various food products sold in boxes marked "Just Add Water."...
