Climate Food and Agriculture
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Time to end the insane practice of lacing chicken feed with arsenic
As a jaded observer of the meat industry, even I’m flummoxed by this fact: It’s standard practice on factory chicken farms to dose those unfortunate birds with arsenic. The idea is that it makes them grow faster — fast growth being the supreme goal of factory animal farming — and helps control a common intestinal […]
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Your healthy alternative food may just be the same crap in different packaging [SLIDESHOW]
Looking to lower your impact? Here’s your cheat sheet. GoodGuide offers greenness and social responsibility ratings, via web or app, for tens of thousands of products, including food, clothing, toys, and cleaning supplies. Obviously, it’s massively useful to be able to look up a brand on your phone and see its health and environment score […]
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When are we going to stop seeing farmers as rubes and hayseeds?
Is this really what farmers look like? Our culture abounds with images of farmers. Sadly, many of them are insulting. Stereotypes tell us that farmers are male, white, uneducated, dirty, backwards-thinking, and talk with a funny accent. Farmers don’t get off the farm much, they like chewing on the ends of long stalks of grass, […]
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How to cook and eat a whole duck [VIDEO]
Nose-to-tail eating sounds like a trend, but it’s really just good practice. Indeed, even before British chef Fergus Henderson made “whole beast” cooking popular, the whole animal was getting used. Slaughterhouses big and small make sure to use every bit of every animal — that’s how they make their money: livers go into dog food, […]
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The Economist dismisses organic ag, while also making the case for it
This isn’t the only way.I’ve been reading The Economist’s “Special Report on Feeding the World” (intro here). So far, it’s typical Economist: compellingly written and impressively broad in scope — but largely uncritical of the status quo. The report doesn’t bring much new to the table, especially to those of us who follow the gloomy […]
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Rooftop garden porn to get you through winter
Winter’s relentless grip will give way, we promise. Come summer, even those of us deeply ensconced within a concrete jungle will kick it in under the shade of glorious greenery. You need a little of that right now, don’t you? Step in, sit down, and take in the warm air of these rooftop oases. Photo: […]
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Despite its Horizon brand, dairy giant Dean Foods really doesn’t get organic
Dean Foods is by far the largest U.S. dairy processor. According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Dean processes 40 percent of fluid milk consumed in the U.S., which it distrubutes in a dizzying array of brands. Its dominance extends to organic milk, too — Dean’s Horizon brand is the largest supplier of organic milk. Dean’s […]
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Growing her own tobacco in Brooklyn [UPDATED]
It is, after all, just a plant.Photo: NancyThe time when having a chicken in your Brooklyn backyard was interesting has long since passed. I mean, heck, everybody has chickens these days, right? Or at least bees. Maybe even red bees. But even in a borough where hipsters regularly tote hoes up to rooftops to tend […]
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Forbes writer: GMO labeling would violate corporate speech rights
Civilization goes on in the Netherlands, despite the menace of mandatory GMO labeling. Photo: GMO CompassIn a blog post on Forbes.com, Glenn Lammi, general counsel for the right-wing, pro-business think tank the Washington Legal Foundation, goes on the attack against Mark Bittman’s recent New York Times op-ed column calling for the labeling of genetically engineered […]
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Male-dominated Big Ag woos women with paternalistic marketing blitz
Marketing campaigns aside, the face of industrial-scale farming is male. Big Ag is big business — and big profits. And when anyone raises questions about the billions of tax dollars lavished on the largest industrial growers of corn, soybeans, and other commodity crops or points out the harm that these perverse incentives do to the […]
