One of the more tired mantras of industrial agriculture is that there is no alternative to farming with fossil fuels, in industrial monoculture. An important study has recently been released about organic farming, evaluating 293 case studies. Their conclusions? Keep Reading »
So, John Mackey, Chief Executive Officer of Whole Foods Inc is in trouble. This is the John Mackey who has encouraged something of a cult of personality around his attempts to bring goodness back into the food system. This is also the same John Mackey who, under the pseudonym “Rahodeb”, posted a number of taunts trashing his competitor, Wild Oats, while simultaneously praising himself and his haircut. This is the same John Mackey who later offered to buy Wild Oats for near $600 million.
My mate Eric Holt-Gimenez, exec director at FoodFirst, has just published a splendid piece in the International Herald Tribune (original here in which he knocks down the following lies: Keep Reading »
The Telegraph of Calcutta (they seem not to have gone along with the name change to ‘Kolkata’) have an exceptionally powerful story and picture today. It follows up the clash on the struggles between ‘development’ (Tata Industries wants to build a fleet of cheap cars there) and farming in India.
The informative WomensEnews network sends this fine commentary on GlaxoSmithKline’s new drug, Alli. Like Olestra, a fine history of which is online at Wikipedia, this is another attempt to make millions off a drug that fuels body-image insecurity, avoids tackling the root causes and, at the end of the day, doesn’t even work. Sales are assured.
A solid article from the UK’s Independent Newspaper, in full here.
The fight for the world’s food
Population is growing. Supply is falling. Prices are rising. What will be the cost to the planet’s poorest?
It’s either feast or famine here at Stuffed and Starved. Some weeks, nothin. Then four posts all at once today. But it’s exciting times.
Pixar’s new animated film Ratatouille has just come out to rave reviews. It’s a fine romp, with a plot that isn’t as well thought out as director Brad Bird’s previous films The Incredibles – villains are too easily dispatched, the main human character is a bore, and so on. That said, it’s head and shoulders above the other, similar, movie where animated characters go on a quest for food, Over the Hedge, in which the principal, and one of the only, jokes was that wild animals find Pringles as addictive as humans do.
Here’s a list of resources if you’re trying to find a farmers market local to you. If you’ve any suggestions for links that ought to be here, please do let me know.
Australia: Global Trade Watch.
I’ve written a few posts to date on the World Bank, here and here for instance. Well, Paul Wolfowitz inevitably resigned (soon, I’m sure, to begin a stellar career at FEMA), and we’ve a new Wolf in his stead: Robert Zoellick. Another Robert, Weissman, wrote this fine oped on the World Bank’s new boss observing that, unlike predecessors Macnamara (see Vietnam) or Wolfowitz (see Iraq), the new incumbent isn’t a war criminal. But that’s about as good as it gets.
With the release earlier this week of the CIA’s Family Jewels, their own history of infamy , it seems only right to write a little about the CIA. No not the CIA that was involved, with the United Fruit Company, in setting off the civil war in Guatamala (Codename: PBSUCCESS), which killed over 200,000 people.
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