Food and Farming
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...
Would You Like a Shot of Formaldehyde with That?
The delightfully naughty movie star Mae West liked to joke: "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted." Less delightful are some of the purity claims of such food manufacturing giants as PepsiCo, which has long marketed a line of its Frito-Lay snack foods as "Simply...
Congress Finds the Key to Bipartisanship
You think bipartisan support is rare? Not when there's cuts to poor people in there. The Farm Bill again cuts nutrition assistance And barely got any liberal resistance. More subsidies to support the Big Farmer Gets a signature from Barack Obama.
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...
