For years I’ve been asked, “Since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, have things gotten better or worse?” Hoping I don’t sound glib, my response is always the same: “Both.” As food growers, sellers and eaters, we’re moving in two directions at once. The number of hungry people has soared to nearly [...]

Hat tip to Sherry… The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing [...]

It’s been more than a year now since the theme of “green wizardry” became central to the posts here on The Archdruid Report, and I’ve pretty much covered the first two of the three themes I mean to discuss before it becomes time to shift the conversation elsewhere. We’ve discussed organic gardening and its associated [...]

The New York Times July 5, 2011 That Perfect Florida Tomato, Cultivated for Bland Uniformity By DWIGHT GARNER How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit By Barry Estabrook 220 pages. Andrews McMeel. $19.99. Jonathan Lethem has seen the future of agribusiness, and that future is strange. In his novel “Girl in Landscape” (1998), [...]

In regard to the recent press coverage of Food Not Bombs’ public food sharing at Lake Eola, and the city of Orlando’s arrests of those who participate in them, I would like to make a couple of points – some as a matter of fact, some as a matter of theory. First, there seems to [...]

This is an arcane paper I ran across doing a piece for my content-mill employer on Gestalt psychology’s property of invariance in perception. It intrigued me somehow, because I’ve always been fonder of the notion of tropes (a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words) than memes (an idea, behavior or [...]

In the 2008 General Election in the United States, I cast my vote for Barack Obama to become the President of the United States. I stated publicly that it was important to me to vote for Obama for three reasons. First, I wanted to rebuke the race-baiting of the campaign, beginning in the Primaries with [...]

I’ve been engaging in a little debate over at the Oil Drum, on the relative merits and risks of nuclear plants (for generating electric power, that is). My primary pro-nuke “learned friend” has come right out and said openly that in his (I am pretty sure he is male) opinion, Chernobyl and Fukushima are no [...]

a couple of my Durham friends do some cultural crit… Dystopian novels—stories of the future going badly wrong—have apparently now surpassed the vampire and fantasy genres in the young adult fiction market. The books, and the phenomenon of their popularity, have provoked numerous discussions online, in schools, and in the sort of serious, adult magazines [...]

Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed [...]