Food and Farming
Hollow Bee Hives May Threaten Our Lives Too
You may think that your most significant interaction with bees is trying not to get stung. But, in fact, you have bees to thank for nearly one-third of all food crops: almonds, apples, peaches, honey, and watermelons, to name a few. If our bees are in trouble, then...
Big Ag Chokes on Its Own Scam
Amy Meyer was curious. Then she was appalled. Then she was charged with the "crime" of using a cell phone to video what appalled her. Welcome to the Brave New World of "ag-gag" laws being pushed by agribusiness corporations to stop reporters, workers, animal rights...
A Parenting Priority
Any kid can easily rattle off a list of their parents' biggest sins. When I was younger, my gripes included my mom and dad stealing my Halloween candy and not letting me watch R-rated movies. Later on, I was ticked that my parents made me go to school on Senior Ditch...
A Reasonable Food Fight
President Barack Obama wants to revamp Washington's global food aid system. His 2014 budget request would transfer much of the program from the Department of Agriculture to the Agency for International Development and make other changes that the White House predicts...
The Price of Our Fertilizer Addiction
My heart aches for the people of West, Texas, the tiny town where a fertilizer plant recently blew up. Many of the folks who perished in the blast were heroic volunteer firefighters who ran into danger instead of away from it. With 14 dead and 200 injured, and a...
How to Send Less Trash to the Landfill
My new neighbor knocked on my door and introduced herself as the vice president of the local homeowner's association. "How friendly!" I thought. "She's welcoming me to the neighborhood." Then she wrinkled her nose and motioned toward an enclosed bin on my porch,...
Big Ag’s Legal Engineering
As this spring began, another branch in the biotech giant Monsanto's sweep around any meaningful regulation of its products burst into bloom. Monsanto and its fellow "Big Six" pesticide and biotech companies — Syngenta, Dupont, Bayer, BASF, and Dow Chemical — pulled...
A Plateful of Justice
When my father immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the mid-1980s, his first job was washing dishes at a Furr's Fresh Buffet restaurant in New Mexico. It paid the state-mandated minimum wage of $2.90 per hour. My father sent a portion of his scant earnings...
A Dubious Honor
Global pork titan Smithfield has ranked second among food production companies on Fortune magazine's 2013 list of "Most Admired Companies." Before untangling how terribly strange and ironic this is, I'd like to address just what "most admired" means, and how the...
Why I’m a Chick with Chicks
In the span of a few years, I've gone from weird to trendy. Why? I keep chickens — in San Diego. Here's one sign of how times have changed. In 2009, the local newspaper's editorial page excoriated me for trying to change local laws to allow chickens. Last year, the...
