Recent research indicates that organic farming can feed the world, and is actually making a significant difference everywhere. In the United States and Europe, universities are reporting that organically produced food will address the problems of hunger and poverty facing the world’s growing population. This is not a surprising finding for organic farmers and advocates […]

Over on Facebook, I’ve pretty much -with very few exceptions - accepted Friend requests, and sent out a few of my own. Now I have like 13 million friends or something like that. The social meshworks largely represented there are based on ideological affinities like left, Christian pacifist, feminist, etc. Then there […]

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?
That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks […]

In my childhood, around 12, I became enraptured by the pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose Fountainhead hero Howard Roark (played by Gary Cooper in the movie) raped the female lead, and in the book and the film, she ended up enjoying the rape because Howard was such a pure superman.
Apparently, she has become hugely influential, […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28food-t-000.html
The New York Times
February 28, 2010
Food
Field Report: Plow Shares
By CHRISTINE MUHLKE
Published: February 24, 2010
“Who brought their own wheelbarrow?” Rob Jones asked the group of 20-somethings gathered on a muddy North Carolina farm on a chilly January Sunday. Hands shot up and wheelbarrows were pulled from pickups sporting Led Zeppelin and biodiesel bumper stickers, then parked […]

[hat tip to Lou Proyect for tagging this one]

There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life […]

The Man the Hunter theory was largely developed by the South African hunting nut Raymond Dart and by Nazi anthropologists, partly as a misunderstanding of Darwin’s theory of struggle for survival. On archaeological sites, often the only things that survive are weapons and bones, giving the false impression that all these people did was use […]

In the early 1990s, when I was living in northern Ghana, an elderly woman farmer decided that I needed some education. In a rather long lecture, she detailed the devastating effects that the Green Revolution - the first one, which outside experts and donors launched in Africa in the 1960s and 70s - had had […]

Bouncing off an earlier thread, I realized that two superlative books written the past few years on the financial history of our current crisis are available as free pdf’s.
Just throwing mud on the wall here, but combining these two for a study-discussion might be interesting as a kind of long-term discussion. If I’d seen […]

I like cultural crit. Think it should be encouraged.
Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and […]