Podcast: Play in new window | Download As recently as six weeks ago, the Pollyannas of industrial agriculture were all over the industrial media trumpeting the imminent “huge” corn harvest in the United States. They knew it was going to be huge (see, for example, Bloomberg News on May 24) because more US acres were [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download Is there anything Americans care less about than species extinction? It is as if their house were on fire, but they continue to watch TV because a) they didn’t need that stuff in the garage anyway, and b) it will probably go out by itself before it gets [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download This is how the media deal with stories such as bee-colony collapse disorder. It is as if, on day one, they sight a forest fire approaching the city and begin to air breathless bulletins containing little information and wild speculation bout how bad it might get. On day [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download Once upon a time there was a lowly bean. Unlike other beans, in its natural state it was highly toxic to people and animals. Poor people in Asia discovered somehow — no doubt through desperate trial-and-error — that when fermented, the soy bean was edible. It became part [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download The drumbeat of dire warnings continues about the inevitable and imminent collapse of the world’s food supply before the combined onslaughts of industrial agriculture and climate change. Despite the increasing number of scientific reports documenting ever more ominous conditions and prospects worldwide, the response from the people who [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download Unless you are very, very good at suppressing the gag reflex, you are not going to want to read a new blog put up by a former food industry executive, apparently as an act of contrition for his years of pushing food-like substances on an unwitting public. In [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download It is no longer enough for the seed and chemical company Monsanto to use its rivers of cash to own and operate the United States Congress (in the language of corporations, there is no word for “enough”); it is now using the US Department of State as its [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download When we come to our senses and begin to mete out capital punishment to corporations, Monsanto will surely be the first to mount the scaffold (see Capital Punishment for Corporations: Time to Start). Just in the past week, there emerged two new examples of its abuse of the [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download This summer, the US Department of Agriculture received a report it had commissioned on the rise of infectious bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. The report — not a study, but a survey of existing studies — warned of a “growing public health concern worldwide” as more and [...]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download Farmers across the Midwest and South — those whose crops are not under water or blowing away in a hot, dry wind — are besieged by an enemy straight out of a stupid horror movie: an army of undead weeds that cannot be killed by chemicals. It’s as [...]
