For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
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Last weekend, Kristin Davey received an unexpected shock upon entering her local nursery in Sebastopol, California, north of San Francisco. “The shelves were picked over. The vegetable starts were almost gone. And the seed racks were completely bare,” she said, “I’ve been going to nurseries for 15 years and I have never seen them so empty."
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Tenzing Chime now has one job to do at the vegetable stand where he works, a measure of how much the coronavirus has changed the simplest rituals of neighborhood life. He only touches the cash. Like him, all his co-workers wear masks, plastic eye shields and gloves.
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From the moment in early March when New Hope Network first announced the postponement of Natural Products Expo West— what Forbes.com contributor Douglas Yu referred to as the "Super Bowl of natural CPG"— to mid-March, when UNFI CEO Steve Skinner joined a group of food, retail and distribution leaders at the White House to help ensure that America's grocery shelves stay stocked.
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The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) has sued Happy Egg Co. for false, deceptive and misleading advertising claims related to the use of the term “pasture raised.”
“Surveys confirm that animal welfare practices rank high on the list of consumer concerns,” said Ronnie Cummins, OCA’s co-founder and director. “By falsely claiming that the eggs it sells are ‘pasture raised,’ Happy Egg deceives consumers and diverts consumers’ spending dollars from competitors whose eggs come from farms that meet a true pasture-raised standard. Consumers who purchase Happy Eggs believing that they are supporting a certain animal-welfare standard are being cheated.
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The novel coronavirus has laid bare many societal problems that have accreted over previous decades: chasms of inequality, the use of virtual debt to paper over physical world problems, ecological ignorance, addiction, obesity, fragile supply chains, fractured political governance, all in service of the growth.
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It was just after five am and I was lying in bed, scrolling the news, Facebook, Twitter, everything. I’m not usually awake this early, but we live in different times. Seemingly overnight, our way of life has changed, and a lot of us are feeling anxious for ourselves, our loved ones, and the future.
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From Finland, where organic farms and customers are far apart and neither CSA nor farmers’ markets ever caught on, comes Reko Circles, a system that may come in handy during this Covid-19 crisis!
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Michael Laffoon has a vivid memory of the day he decided to piece his life back together. “I literally woke up in my van and I thought ‘I can’t do this anymore because I’m going to die,’” he says. “It was just an overwhelming feeling that I had come to the end of a chapter.”
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What will life be like after peak oil, in an age of major climate shifts? Hollywood movies often depict it as a bleak, dystopian world where each day is a struggle to survive after every system we depend on has been stripped away. Unfortunately, that version of the story seems to be on track so far.
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