food politics
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Oprah discovers slaughterhouses are more sanitary when sanitized
Oprah sent an “investigative” reporter into a Cargill slaughterhouse, and the resulting video is, frankly, amazing. If you’re the least curious about how cows make the journey from feedlot to your plate, it’s worth watching the whole thing. But why would ag giant Cargill, a company with a record nearly as tainted as the nearly […]
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Walmart, KFC, and others fight over Africa’s new middle class
Despite widespread poverty, Africa's middle class is now bigger than India's ... which hasn't escaped the likes of Walmart, KFC, and Nestle.
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Feeding the world means hogging less grain
How many people can the Earth support? Depends on their level of food consumption. At the U.S. average of 1,763 pounds of grain per person annually for food and feed, the 2-billion-ton annual world harvest would feed just 2.5 billion people.
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Nutritionist Marion Nestle fingers the missing calories in America's big binge
America, ever obsessed with diet and health, is stumped by the problem of obesity. Figuring out what to eat really isn't that hard, says author and food systems researcher Marion Nestle. If this basic human instinct seems more complicated than that, it's the effect of food marketing.
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The meat industry feels the heat as the sustainable-food movement gains force
Once, the meat industry acted with impunity, confident that its lobbying clout could deflect challenges to its practices. Now it's on the defensive.
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The time is ripe for 'Food Forward' TV show
America seems to have an insatiable appetite for food-themed TV shows, but very few explore where the food comes from. A new series hopes to change that, by showcasing the people trying to change how we eat in America.
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Financial-reform bill limits the speculation in ag commodity markets that sparked food crisis
While we mourn the dead climate legislation, it's worth noting that something non-hideous emerged from Congress last week. Buried within the financial reform bill, there's a set of provisions that evidently limit excessive speculation in ag commodity markets -- something that drove more than 100 million people into hunger in 2008.
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The Emerging Politics of Food Scarcity
A dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging in which individual countries, acting in their narrowly defined self-interest, reinforce the trends causing global food security to deteriorate. This began in late 2007 when wheat-exporting countries, like Russia and Argentina, attempted to counter domestic food price rises by limiting or banning exports. Viet Nam banned rice […]
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Prices vs. contracts: Why good CO2 policy needs complex financial markets
Economic theory is predicated on the thesis that if supply and demand are allowed to freely set the price for a given item, rational capital allocation (and a host of other social benefits) will follow. Much of public policy is predicated on the truth of that thsis. But there’s a problem with the thesis: price […]