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Earlier this year, Americans learned what it looks like when a food system reliant on industrial agriculture, near monopolies and exploited laborers breaks down. Just two months into the pandemic, the meat industry in the most powerful nation in the world was buckling.
The palm civet is a small omnivorous mammal of Indonesia and other parts of tropical Asia. Emerging from its forest home onto coffee plantations, it’s able to sense the finest coffee fruits of perfect ripeness. Eating them, it digests the pulp and excretes the beans, adding a musky scent to them from its anal glands.
In the 1990s, Indonesian kopi luwak – civet coffee, made from coffee beans that had passed through a civet’s digestive tract – became a new luxury commodity among wealthy coffee-lovers. Market dynamics being what they are, local producers cashed in on the demand by capturing and caging wild civets, force-feeding them coffee beans and selling the produce as cut-price kopi luwak. Though cheaper, the resulting coffee lacked the quality of the original conferred by the civet’s discerning nose, and came at the expense of ecological and animal welfare.
There is one place that nearly everything that matters in the world today converges: our food and our food system — the complex web of how we grow food, how we produce, distribute, and promote it; what we eat, what we waste, and the policies that perpetuate unimaginable suffering and destruction across the globe that deplete our human, social, economic, and natural capital.
Food is the nexus of most of our world’s health, economic, environmental, climate, social, and even political crises. While this may seem like an exaggeration, it is not. The problem is much worse than we think. After reading Food Fix you will be able to connect the dots of this largely invisible crisis and understand why fixing our foodsystem is central to the health and well-being of our population, our environment, our climate, our economy, and our very survival as aspecies. You will also understand the forces, businesses, and policies driving the catastrophe, and the people, businesses, and governments that are providing hope and a path to fixing our dysfunctional food system.
More than five months have passed since the nation and world have come under the grip of the coronavirus. Today, as Covid-19 continues to surge throughout the U.S., we wait in lines to get into stores, wear face coverings (well, at least most of us), follow floor markers to help ensure social distancing, and shop quickly to get in and out with our groceries.
In Alabama’s Black Belt, where COVID rates are high and hospitals are understaffed, Dr. Marlo Paul and her plant biologist husband, Anthony, are making house calls and providing free herbal remedies from their own farm.
Coca-Cola Co. and academics at its front group Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN) tried to obscure Coke’s central role and funding for the group, according to a new study published today in Public Health Nutrition. Coke and the academics tried to dilute the apparent size of Coke’s $1.5 million contribution as well as the company’s role in creating the GEBN. Coke also maintained an “email family” of public health academics whom Coke used to promote its interests.
The study was based on documents obtained via state public records requests by U.S. Right to Know, an investigative public health and consumer group. Coke created the GEBN to downplay the links between obesity and sugary drinks, as a part of its “war” with the public health community. GEBN went defunct in 2015.
Certain humans have plotted for centuries to kill the Amazon. Photographic evidence confirms that this scheme is now reaching a flaming, thundering crescendo, with tens of thousands of intentional fires and bulldozers tearing through the Amazonian rainforest, destroying acres every second.
With legions of restaurants and bars closed or operating in a very limited capacity, demand for wholesale ingredients from local farmers has plummeted. For this reason (and others related to processing, shipping, and logistics), farmers in Minnesota and beyond are struggling to find markets for their products, many of which come from livestock and seeds purchased long before the term “coronavirus” became standard vocabulary.
Adam Chappell was a slave to pigweed. In 2009, several years prior to the roller coaster rise and fall of commodity prices, he was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go broke or go green proposition. Drowning in a whirlpool of input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dove headfirst into a bootstrap version of innovative farming.
In the latter part of 2016, Ethan Steinberg and two of his friends planned a driving tour across the U.S. to interview farmers. Their goal was to solve a riddle that had been bothering each of them for some time. Why was it, they wondered, that American agriculture basically ignored trees?
