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Kopi luwak comes from coffee beans digested and excreted by the Asian palm civet, also called the civet cat or luwak, and sells for about $600 a pound... When it comes to the civet trade, animal suffering could turn into human tragedy in the blink of an eye. This industry is not just deplorable from an animal welfare perspective but maybe is silently breeding the next pandemic.
Beyond a dense strip of forest, off a narrow single-track road in north west Poland, is what looks to the casual observer to be a man-made fishing lake, or perhaps a small reservoir. But as you approach, an appalling stench and a giant factory-style building begin to suggest otherwise.
Enter Molly and John Chester, the couple behind the Biggest Little Farm, a Hulu documentary that chronicles how they brought new life to a dead farm using regenerative agriculture techniques. When snails swarmed their orchards, they brought in ducks, whose poop was creating toxic algae blooms in a pond on the property, to eat the snails.
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.
A worker coalition in Arkansas and a Washington, D.C.-based environmental nonprofit have asked the government to stop Tyson Foods, one of America’s biggest meat companies, from advertising to the public that its workers are “safer than ever.”
Rhiana Gunn-Wright had asthma growing up. So did many of her neighbors in Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, where pediatric hospitalization rates for asthma were significantly higher than the rate nationwide in the early 2000s. Ms. Gunn-Wright had so many friends with asthma that she assumed it was a “childhood disease” that all young people had.
Factory farming interests, facing potential legal risks for allegedly failing to protect workers from coronavirus-related risks, are among the many business interests now backing efforts to obtain special immunity from legal liability.
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?
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the academic, physical and mental benefits of returning children to school for in-person learning outweigh the potential health risks of COVID-19. To that end, the AAP has issued guidelines for the “safe reopening” of schools. However, many parents wonder whether the guidelines themselves may do far more harm than good in the long term.
There is an erratic progression and presentation of illnesses from COVID-19 from the global perspective. While some countries have leveled off and are lessening restrictions, others like the US continue to spike and have taken the lead in the number of global cases.
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