Posts Tagged ‘ food industry ’

Plainview, Texas: Dead Town Waking

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March 4, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download An all-time favorite movie line (The Missouri Breaks), uttered by Jack Nicholson leaning over Marlon Brando, who is starting up from sleep: “Do you know why you woke up? I just cut your throat.” That is the way Plainview, Texas, woke up the other day to some bitter truths, [...]


Soy: It Isn’t So

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December 2, 2011
One of the worst things you could eat is a fresh soybean -- even sauteed, as there have been. But there are lots of soy products that are even worse. (Photo by FotoosVanRobin/Flickr)

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 [...]


If You Eat Food, Do Not Read This

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November 9, 2011
Meet the all-natural ingredient that, when crushed, is used to turn your yogurt red and is described on the label as “Natural Red #4.” (Photo by Stephen Begin/Flickr)

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 [...]


The United States of Monsanto

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November 4, 2011
Genetically mutilated corn (this is not actually how they do it) is more than an insidious product inflicted on the world by Monsanto and others -- it is now an instrument of US foreign policy. Sort of like drones. (Photo by illuminating9_11/Flickr)

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 [...]


Report: Trawlers Scraping Last Life from Oceans

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September 8, 2011
A new study details how factory trawlers such as the Northern Osprey are stripping the deep oceans of fish that cannot replace themselves. (Photo by Dennis Jarvis/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download A perfunctory article deep inside yesterday’s Washington Post paints a horrifying picture of exhausted oceans — described as “more akin to a watery desert” —  being scraped clean of the last traces of marine life by pitiless, gargantuan deep-water trawlers operating beyond the law and beyond sanity.  The story is [...]


USDA Gets Bad News on Superbugs: Shoots Messenger

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August 3, 2011
Confined, crowded and stressed meat animals like these pigs are given 29 million pounds of antibiotics every year in the US, 80 per cent of the available supply, to make sure they grow. As a result, the seven million pounds administered to humans are becoming less effective. (Photo by Victor Sounds/Flickr)

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 [...]


Something Fishy in Your Fish

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July 7, 2011
There is nothing pretty about the fish being imported into the US -- and that's 80 per cent of the fish we eat. (Photo by Beatrice Murch/Flickr)

Globalized industrial fish factories are flooding the markets of the world with dangerously tainted fish laced with toxins and carcinogens banned by law from US food. They are doing this to replace the fish once supplied by industrial fishing fleets that have virtually destroyed the world’s stocks of wild fish; 80 per cent of the [...]


What it Takes to Get Cheap Tomatoes: Slavery

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June 13, 2011
Too good to be good: perfect tomatoes cost more than any civilized nation should be prepared to pay.

Like any compulsive gambler or addict faced with the accumulating consequences of destructive behavior, industrial agriculture responds by doubling down on the destruction; it responds, in other words, out of its illness and error, and will not change in any positive way until it hits bottom (although the behavior becomes much worse as the bottom [...]


Wall Street Bulls Trampling Farmland

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May 26, 2011
The Wall Street Bull is off again, and as always, he's about to run us all off a cliff. [Photo by Sylvain Leprovost/Flickr]

The idiots savant who lead Wall Street stampedes off cliffs have a new sure thing: by which they mean a sure-fire, get-rich-quick scheme; and from which we should infer, take cover. First, the savant part; more and more of them are coming to believe that when you apply arithmetic and logic to the rate at [...]


One Third of World’s Food Destroyed: Culprit Found

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May 24, 2011
The ctitters that are "stealing" our food, busted at last. (Photo by Chris Huggins/Flickr)

A study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, released a week ago, finds that nearly one-third of the world’s food supply — in the United States the figure is 40 per cent — is never consumed because it is wasted. Billions are being spent to develop new chemicals, new genetically altered seeds and [...]


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