Posts tagged ‘food’

Michael Pollan on California’s Prop. 37 and Other Local Efforts to Challenge Agrigiants’ Influence

by , posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2012 at 6:30 pm

from Democracy Now!

As California voters prepare to vote on whether to label GMOs in food, we go to Berkeley to discuss Prop 37 and its implications for the broader food system with journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan. Among the nation’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, Pollan is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism. He’s written several books about food, including “The Botany of Desire,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,” and the forthcoming, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.”

From California’s Proposition 37 initiative to New York City’s soda ban, journalist and best-selling author Michael Pollan argues that local efforts hold the key to challenging the agricultural industry’s stranglehold over national food policy. With companies like Monsanto influencing Congress and state legislatures, Pollan warns the United States risks falling into a “two-class food system,” where only those who can afford to live outside the industrial food system can access healthy ways to eat. Among the nation’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, Pollan is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism and author of several best-selling books, including “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

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The Drought and the Coming Food Price Bubble

by , posted on Monday, August 13th, 2012 at 9:05 am

from The Real News Network

TIm A. Wise (Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University): US food reserves at an historic low as biofuels, climate change and speculation exacerbate food crisis.

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And the designated disaster counties in Illinois are…

by , posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2012 at 7:28 pm

sadly too numerous to name. Today the number of Illinois counties designated as drought disaster areas rose to 98 of Illinois’ 102 counties. The four counties not named disaster areas (yet) were:
Cook, DuPage, Will, and my home county of Kane.

You can go look at the usda map for the whole country here. It is massive, with more than 50% of U.S. counties declared disaster areas by today.

As to why this cluster of four counties in Illinois are not included, I can only guess that, because we have been getting some rain over the last week, we are in somewhat less dire straits than the rest of the state. But we are still in drought, per the drought monitor map, which may tell a different story after it updates tomorrow morning. The still-brown grass here tells its own story.

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Urban Agriculture in Burlington VT

by , posted on Friday, July 27th, 2012 at 7:27 pm

from the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics

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