Reader Lee writes in to say: I consider myself both a foodie and a lefty, but don’t think the two have anything to do with each other. I get annoyed by lefty types who view their essentially sensualist desire to eat well as some sort of political/social virtue; I get equally annoyed by conservatives who […]
READ ONA lot of folks have written in to ask where they can go for more information on Food Inc.-related subjects. Meat and poultry producers have put up this site, safefoodinc.com as a rebuttal. Then for general reading there’s the Center for Global Food Issues. More as I find out about them!
READ ONMaybe next week you can talk about how to get the hornets back into their nest after you’ve finished kicking it! That would be germane, and the possible honey segues are obvious! You may just have an idea there, Mike. You may just have an idea…
READ ON…is that it is trying to manipulate you. How? With lots of shocking images of industrial food production. They aren’t pretty, but then there’s no shortage of ugly things in the world of industry. Heck, there’s no shortage of ugly things in the world in general — one of them is blogging at you right […]
READ ONThe elephant under the carpet of the organic discussion is and always has been: land. There’s only so much of it on the planet we can grow food on. About a billion and a half sqaure hectares by UN estimates. That’s twice the amount of productive land that was being farmed 100 years ago, though […]
READ ONOne of the things Michael Pollan tries desperately to do in his books (and I presume will attempt in Food Inc.) is to make organic farming appear more efficient than conventional or GMO. This he does through various argumentative tricks, some of which I listed below in the Bad Logic post. The reality is that […]
READ ONReader Dan P. writes in to ask: Joe, I read your post on GMO farming with great interest. Would you mind telling me, other than increasing the yields of a crop we don’t need and tinkering with the building blocks of life, what GMO crop developers have really achieved? Dan, I couldn’t be more pleased […]
READ ONToday is going to be a day of summary and conclusion — mainly because I can’t keep up with the volume of email I’m getting! My hope is not to continue this week’s subject into next (as a main theme anyway), for while the political animals and information junkies out there are yelling “Go on! […]
READ ONNotice I didn’t use the word “corn” in the header, primarily because the data I have is for organic agriculture generally. Organic farming is the hardest of all to summarize since organic practices vary so widely. In fact there’s very little agreement these days as to what “organic” actually means. Originally organic was a holistic […]
READ ONWhich is to say genetically modified farming, the use of genetically engineered corn strains to stave off pests and increase yields. Though again, that’s just the beginning of what GMO corn farming actually is. But we’ll get to that. At this juncture I should once again emphasize that everything I’m about to write applies to […]
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