Food and Farming
The High Cost of Cheap Shrimp
The Guardian recently revealed shocking results from a six-month investigation of the Thai fishing industry: Much of the shrimp sold in American and British supermarkets were produced with slave labor. While shrimp sold to U.S. consumers hail from a number of...
Jilting My Sugar
A cartoon drawn by Marty Bucella going around Facebook these days depicts an overweight man on a scale with his doctor. "No, it's not water," the doctor says. "You seem to be retaining food." That was me. Yes, it's true, I write about food. And I generally do eat a...
These Chickens Don’t Need to Hedge Their Bets
Upper-class, über-rich Brits pay a price. In exchange for being blessed with wealth and social standing, they're expected to be at least slightly amusing to the general public, offering some combination of doofus, daffy, and scandalous. Crispin Odey fits this bill. He...
Free to Eat Whatever You Want
My neighbor just left to spend the entire summer in Europe. He's the guy with a highly restrictive diet I recently wrote about, with countless food intolerances that his "nutritionist" detected using dubious testing methods. I haven't had the heart to tell him she's a...
Illegal Ingredients
Fast Food Giants Picking Their Workers’ Pockets
No matter how small the haul, a thief is a thief, right? If a poverty-wage fast-food worker sneaks out a couple of burgers to take home to the kids, the bosses yell: "Thief!" But what do you call it when the bosses steal from those same workers? How about outrageous,...
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...
