Food and Farming
Eat Your Weeds
You might not be a master gardener, but odds are you grow one of the world's healthiest vegetables in your yard every year. It's a superfood that packs more calcium, iron, magnesium, and Vitamins C, B6, E, and K than an equal amount (by weight) of spinach. And, if you...
Drawing the Line on Big Beer
Millions of Americans will enjoy a beer tonight. The vast majority of them probably won't realize that the wide variety of brands they see in the stores, bars, and restaurants come from just two foreign-based multinational companies that control 80 percent of the U.S....
True Colors are to Dye For
A friend and I once tricked his kids on St. Patrick's Day. Maybe "tricked" is too strong of a word for what we did: The festive green pasta we served was spinach fettuccine, but we didn't admit that it contained traces of the vegetable. The pasta didn't taste at all...
Perturbed by Pesticides
The nastiest looking insect I've ever seen crawled out of a hole near a dead stump in my garden the other day. I was weeding there, and I'm sure I disturbed it. To be honest, I was scared. This thing looked like it could bite me and it would hurt. I briefly considered...
These Laws Make Me Want to Gag
Do you have a right to know where that steak on your plate came from? Should it be legal to photograph chicken farms and dairy cows? Big Agriculture says you don't and it shouldn't. Armies of Big Ag lobbyists are pushing for new state-level laws across the country to...
Lose Your Lawn
Have you taken your hounds fox hunting lately? You haven’t? Well, maybe you’ve gone to visit a friend’s estate in a horse and carriage? You haven’t done that either, have you? Most of the popular trends of 19th century British aristocracy are not the norm in 21st...
Another Side of the Immigration Debate
Until a few years ago, Rosa Acosta had never even seen a flush toilet. She raised her 12 children in a tiny adobe home in rural Jalisco, Mexico. Several of her kids left it to work in the United States. One son, who left at age 12 to earn money as a farmworker in...
A Better Way to Say I Love You
"Why do American companies sell pesticides that are banned in the U.S. to my country?" my Colombian friend Luz asked me. I had no good answer. Yet, this question lies at the core of the bouquet of roses you might give or receive this Valentine's Day. Nearly all roses...
High Time for Hemp
Four years ago, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel to make a powerful symbolic statement about America's food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden. I'm guessing that now, as she begins another four years in the people's...
This Week in OtherWords: January 30, 2013
This week in OtherWords, we're mixing food and politics. Wenonah Hauter skewers the government's lackadaisical regulation of genetically engineered salmon, Jill Richardson calls for a fresh outlook on the relationship between weight and health, Jim Harkness asks...
