health
-
Chinese miners and our appetite for cheap crap
As the United States has outsourced its industrial base to China over the last two decades, millions of manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But the trend has also allowed us to shed a lot of unpleasantness: industrial waste, air pollution, etc. The move also eased the burden on our electrical grid. The energy needed to produce […]
-
Farmworker Awareness Week is a chance to recognize the people whose labor means we can eat
This is Farmworker Awareness Week, a time to support the millions of farmworkers whose labor puts food on every American table, and who work and live in some of the worst environmental conditions in our nation.
It's estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the majority. The average annual income for a farmworker in the United States is about $11,000, or about $16,000 for a farmworking family (though pay on the East Coast is lower than the national average). Farmworkers live in overcrowded housing and very few receive health care or unemployment benefits. Here in North Carolina, about half of our farmworkers cannot afford enough food for themselves and their families.
-
NYT op-ed: pesticides wiping out songbirds
When the little bluebird Who has never said a word Starts to sing Spring … It is nature, that is all, Simply telling us to fall in love. — Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It” The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut — “birds do it; bees do it” — has taken on an […]
-
Similarities between the skin cancer and climate change ‘scams’
I was recently reading The New York Times and saw a fantastic ad:
Recent research indicates that the benefits of moderate exposure to sunlight outweigh the hypothetical risks. Surprisingly, there is no compelling scientific evidence that tanning causes melanoma. Scientists have proven, however, that exposure to all forms of ultraviolet light -- both indoors and out -- stimulates the natural production of vitamin D. And research has proven that vitamin D protects against heart disease and many types of cancer, in addition to providing other important health benefits.
If you go to their website, you can read all about it.
The similarities between the "skin cancer" scam and the "global warming" scam are all too clear. First, according to this website, there is actually no evidence linking sun exposure with cancer. Amazing. I thought the epidemiological data nailed that connection decades ago. Boy, was I wrong! This is similar to the fact that there is no evidence linking carbon-dioxide emissions with climate change.
-
Notable quotable
“I’ll retract the rape complaint from the wombat, because he’s pulled out. Apart from speaking Australian now, I’m pretty all right you know. I didn’t hurt my bum at all.” — New Zealander Arthur Cradock, who was subsequently charged with “using a phone for a fictitious purpose”
-
Recent studies: organic ag is just as productive, and better for you
For years, industrial-food enthusiasts such as Norman Borlaug have attacked organic farming on two grounds: 1) it produces essentially the same nutritional results as chemical-intensive farming, and 2) it’s less productive. Both of those criticisms are crumbling. This month, the Organic Center released a “state of science” analysis of peer-reviewed studies comparing the nutritional content […]
-
‘Heart-healthy’ pork from pigs with bad hearts
I live for this sort of stuff: Guys in white lab coats got to tinkering with pig DNA, hoping to conjure up pork rich in “heart-healthy” omega-3 fatty acids. Here’s what they did: A team from the University of Pittsburgh a first transferred the roundworm gene–fat-1–to pig foetal cells. After that, a team from the […]
-
Canada says no to ethanol waste as cow feed, and more
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. Back in January, a high USDA official made a pair of statements that say a lot about how we regulate industrial food production here in the United States. On the one hand, he admitted to a journalist that feeding cows high levels […]
