Hannibal Rhoades discusses why Gaia's new film, The Farmer, The Architect and The Scientist
“People are realizing that we can’t rely on the industrial food system much longer. The awakening that’s happening is our greatest opportunity,” says New Mexican farmer and activist Miguel Santistevan. This awakening has sparked the revival of local, sustainable food systems. At its most basic, sustainability connotes a system capable of continuing indefinitely...
The so-called Monsanto Protection Act signed into law earlier this year caused such an outrage that people around the world are planning to protest the biotech company later this month. Now a United States Senator is expected to try and repeal that law after mounting pressure . The notorious ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ rider stuffed into the non-related Senate spending bill...
SEATTLE, Wash. - March Against Monsanto has announced that on May 25, tens of thousands of activists around the world will “ March Against Monsanto .” Currently, marches are being planned on six continents, in 36 countries, totaling events in over 250 cities, and in the US, events are slated to occur simultaneously at 11 a.m. Pacific in 47 states. Tami Monroe Canal, lead...
As a filmmaker, it’s a rare privilege to stumble upon a completely unique story—in the case of my new documentary, Grasp the Nettle , a motley collection of land rights activists , squatting a three-acre piece of land in the heart of suburban London. With my video camera and microphone in hand, I decided to give up my job and flat to move in with a group of outsiders...
A coalition of aid agencies has launched a campaign on food, aid and hunger (the IF campaign ) to run in the UK during 2013. The campaign hopes to attract a similar level of public support to that enjoyed by th
This article is asking you to think for a moment about what lies behind McDonald's clean, bright image. It's got a lot to hide. "At McDonald's we've got time for you" goes the jingle. Why then do they design the service so that you're in and out as soon as possible? Why is it so difficult to relax in a McDonald's? Why do you feel hungry again so soon...
I once saw a turkey carcass in a New York City garbage can. It did not look good. I said to myself, I’m never eating meat again. A few hours later, I ate meat. If you have ever driven between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the 5, you may have seen a disgusting cattle ranch on the east side of the road. It is like an insect swarm of cows. I have driven by this ranch many times...
Patrick Crouch practices the kind of gardening that Detroit has recently become famous for. The typical plot at Earthworks Urban Farm , where he serves as program manager, is cultivated on borrowed land and in close proximity to houses and apartment buildings. These plots provide local food to neighbors through CSAs, and help neighborhood kids get acquainted with agriculture. Activists...
The organic farming industry is booming. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched its federal organic certification program in 2002, the number of organic farms has more than doubled. U.S. organic food sales have also grown from $1 billion in 1990 to $31.5 billion in 2011, according to the Organic Trade Association . To help ensure that consumers get what they generally pay...
In a massive blow to multinational agribiz corporations such as Monsanto , Bayer, and Dow, Peru has officially passed a law banning genetically modified ingredients anywhere within the country for a full decade before coming up for another review. Peru’s Plenary Session of the Congress made the decision 3 years after the decree was written despite previous governmental pushes for GM...
40 percent of the food we produce in the United States goes uneaten. No matter how local or organic it is, if nearly half our edible food is ending up in the garbage, we’re not doing something right. Much of this food gets wasted at home, and I recently blogged about simple strategies we can all use to reduce this waste. About 43 billion pounds of food are thrown away in grocery...
It’s a long drive from Florida to Denver, but Leonel Perez and his colleagues at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) don’t mind. In fact, they arrived in the Mile High City three weeks early for Cultivate , a food, beer, and music festival sponsored by Chipotle Mexican Grill . They were not drawn by a love of burritos. In the days leading up to Cultivate, Perez, Jake...
Rice. It’s just one of the basics, right? Whether eaten on its own, or in products like pastas or cereal, this inexpensive and healthy food is a staple for Asian and Latino communities, as well as the growing number of people looking to avoid gluten. Here’s the bad news (cue Debbie Downer sound effect ): The food most of us think we have more or less locked down is shockingly...
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too...
New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either." Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen...
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) on Thursday introduced an amendment to the farm bill that would give states the power to label genetically modified food. “I personally believe, and I think most Americans believe, that when a mother goes to the store and purchases food for her child, she has the right to know what she is feeding her child,” he said on the...
2011 will likely be remembered in America as the year that the nation's youth finally started to wake up - all that bubbling knowledge of the world's problems, all the discontent and disillusion with our broken system finally burst into a flurry of creative action. Our understandings of the deep, structural flaws in our economy, politics and culture reached new heights of collective awareness...
After years of sweeping the issue under the rug and hoping no one would notice, the FDA has now finally admitted that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic , a cancer-causing toxic chemical that's fatal in high doses. But the real story is where this arsenic comes from: It's added to the chicken feed on purpose! Even worse, the FDA says its own research shows that the arsenic...
For many years now, I have fed my family food from the dumpster. It’s not because I can’t afford to shop at grocery stores like other, normal folks. It’s because supermarkets across the nation toss perfectly good meats, cheeses, eggs, and produce into the trash every single day. So I dumpster dive, which is exactly like it sounds: I jump into dumpsters, pull out...
The last couple of days have been gloomy ones. I kept checking in with the vague and dire reports from the nuclear-power bleeding edge in Japan. For part of the time I was also immersed in a post about truly awful things going on in the U.S. poultry industry. While digging into the industry's routine abuse of farmers and reckless endangering of public health, I was haunted by the thought...
The town of Sedgwick, Maine, currently leads the pack as far as food sovereignty is concerned. Local residents recently voted unanimously at a town hall meeting to pass an ordinance that reinforces its citizens' God-given rights to "produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing," which includes even state- and federally-restricted foods like raw milk. The...
A new study says 3-year-olds who mostly eat processed foods have lower IQs five years later. (So Pop-Tarts and Sunny-D are why we're " falling behind " China in math and science?) The study, cited in The Guardian , examined the diets of 14,000 wee Britlets, based on what their parents reported feeding them. Three is the magic number: Your brain grows the fastest from birth to age 3...
One of the most frequent criticisms leveled against the sustainable agriculture movement is that its proponents want to send farmers back to 19th-century hard labor, with hand weeding and harvesting. Here's an incredibly cool group of eco-minded "farmer-scientists" who aren't in the least afraid of technology -- and in fact believe in "creating industrial processes that are fully in harmony...
Food coloring is the reason glace cherries are red rather than beige and that children's tongues sometimes appear freakishly blue. But man-made dyes may do more than make processed food look vibrant and whimsical. Some blame the additives for triggering behavioral problems in youngsters. Acting on research published in the Lancet, the European Parliament last year began requiring products...
An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which the German agrichemical giant, Bayer racked up about $262 million in sales in 2009. Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds...
The food industry is no longer a free market. In fact, I'd go as far as saying it's becoming the most glaring example of corporate-government fascism in America. Actual monopolies fully control the basic building blocks of the food that makes up the majority of the American diet -- and no one seems to care. Simply put, those who control the corn, wheat, and soybeans control all food, since...