Tag Archives: food industry

Plainview, Texas: Dead Town Waking

By | |
Comments Off on Plainview, Texas: Dead Town Waking

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Longhorn beef cattle made Texas, as the statue suggests, and are killing Plainview, Texas, where the statue is located. Whose fault is it? (Photo by Brykmantra/Flickr)

Longhorn beef cattle made Texas, as the statue suggests, and are killing Plainview, Texas, where the statue is located. Whose fault is it? (Photo by Brykmantra/Flickr)

An all-time favorite movie line (The Missouri Breaks), uttered by Jack Nicholson leaning over Marlon Brando, who is starting up from sleep: “Do you know why you woke up? I just cut your throat.” That is the way Plainview, Texas, woke up the other day to some bitter truths, and a shortened life. The food industry giant Cargill on February 1 closed the Plainview beef processing plant that employed 2,300 people, ten per cent of the town’s entire population, representing nearly half the town’s families. The exodus from Plainview (Jimmy Dean’s hometown) has begun, and the town will probably soon be a ghost. But who, exactly, cut its throat?

Continue reading →

Soy: It Isn’t So

By | |
2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

One of the worst things you could eat is a fresh soybean -- even sauteed, as these have been. But there are lots of soy products that are even worse. (Photo by FotoosVanRobin/Flickr)

Once upon a time there was a lowly bean. Unlike other beans, in its natural state it was highly toxic to people and animals. Poor people in Asia discovered somehow — no doubt through desperate trial-and-error — that when fermented, the soy bean was edible. It became part of their diet. In the late 20th Century, when the industrialized diet of the West was afflicting its people with heart disease, cancers and diabetes, it was noticed that the spare Asian diet of fish, rice and a little fermented soy bean was not making people sick. Thus began one of the largest and most successful food cons ever perpetrated.
Continue reading →

If You Eat Food, Do Not Read This

By | |
5 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Meet the all-natural ingredient that, when crushed, is used to turn your yogurt red and is described on the label as “Natural Red #4.” (Photo by Stephen Begin/Flickr)

Unless you are very, very good at suppressing the gag reflex, you are not going to want to read a new blog put up by a former food industry executive, apparently as an act of contrition for his years of pushing food-like substances on an unwitting public. In his latest post, Bruce Bradley identifies a few of the things that are not only added to industrial food, but qualify under existing regulations for the label “all natural.” [Hair-trigger gag reflex? DO NOT CONTINUE READING.] Continue reading →

The United States of Monsanto

By | |
2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

It is no longer enough for the seed and chemical company Monsanto to use its rivers of cash to own and operate the United States Congress (in the language of corporations, there is no word for “enough”); it is now using the US Department of State as its global sales force. The objective, apparently, is to replace every plant grown for food on the planet with a genetically mutilated plant sold by Monsanto. With the help of the United States government, the project is well along.
Continue reading →

Report: Trawlers Scraping Last Life from Oceans

By | |
7 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A new study details how factory trawlers such as the Northern Osprey are stripping the deep oceans of fish that cannot replace themselves. (Photo by Dennis Jarvis/Flickr)

A perfunctory article deep inside yesterday’s Washington Post paints a horrifying picture of exhausted oceans — described as “more akin to a watery desert” —  being scraped clean of the last traces of marine life by pitiless, gargantuan deep-water trawlers operating beyond the law and beyond sanity.  The story is based on a new study of the world’s fisheries published in the journal Marine Policy (“Scientists call for end to deep-sea fishing”). (The article upholds the new Standards of Fair and Balanced Journalism set by Fox News by somehow, somewhere finding an academic mooch who sees no problem with that.)

Continue reading →

USDA Gets Bad News on Superbugs: Shoots Messenger

By | |
2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Confined, crowded and stressed meat animals like these pigs are given 29 million pounds of antibiotics every year in the US, 80 per cent of the available supply, to make sure they grow. As a result, the seven million pounds administered to humans are becoming less effective. (Photo by Victor Sounds/Flickr)

This summer, the US Department of Agriculture received a report it had commissioned on the rise of infectious bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. The report —  not a study, but a survey of existing studies — warned of a “growing public health concern worldwide” as more and more people are sickened and killed by infections against which modern medicines are helpless. (Just one of them, MRSA, now kills more people every year than AIDS.) And it was a powerful indictment of industrial agriculture’s role in creating these so-called “superbugs.” So the USDA did just what you would expect the government regulator of industrial agriculture to do: it buried the report.
Continue reading →

Something Fishy in Your Fish

By | |
Comments Off on Something Fishy in Your Fish

There is nothing pretty about the fish being imported into the US -- and that's 80 per cent of the fish we eat. (Photo by Beatrice Murch/Flickr)

Globalized industrial fish factories are flooding the markets of the world with dangerously tainted fish laced with toxins and carcinogens banned by law from US food. They are doing this to replace the fish once supplied by industrial fishing fleets that have virtually destroyed the world’s stocks of wild fish; 80 per cent of the fish consumed in the United States is imported, and half the imported fish comes from fish factories. The tainted fish continues to come in despite ineffective efforts by state and national governments to stop the flow — efforts that, weak as they always were, are now being eviscerated by state and federal budget cuts. The fish factories, meanwhile, are making lots of money. Continue reading →

What it Takes to Get Cheap Tomatoes: Slavery

By | |
4 Comments

Too good to be good: perfect tomatoes cost more than any civilized nation should be prepared to pay. (Photo by Andy Wright/Flickr)

Like any compulsive gambler or addict faced with the accumulating consequences of destructive behavior, industrial agriculture responds by doubling down on the destruction; it responds, in other words, out of its illness and error, and will not change in any positive way until it hits bottom (although the behavior becomes much worse as the bottom nears). A new book illustrates this principle beautifully by focussing on a near-perfect embodiment of all that industrial agriculture has become — the tomato. In its losing struggle to provide perfect-looking, cheap tomatoes to every possible consumer, Big Ag has sunk to new lows of criminal behavior — slavery and genocide.

Continue reading →

Wall Street Bulls Trampling Farmland

By | |
4 Comments

”]The idiots savant who lead Wall Street stampedes off cliffs have a new sure thing: by which they mean a sure-fire, get-rich-quick scheme; and from which we should infer, take cover. First, the savant part; more and more of them are coming to believe that when you apply arithmetic and logic to the rate at which the industrial world is destroying natural resources, you are led to the conclusion that the edifice is going to crash. (Also see “Hedge Fund Guy Says Brace for Impact: Believe it Now?”) The idiot part is, they want to get rich from the crash, as they cling to the pathetic belief that, after the crash, having lots of money is going to be useful. So they are pumping up a new investment bubble — farmland. Continue reading →

One Third of World’s Food Destroyed: Culprit Found

By | |
2 Comments

The critters that are "stealing" our food, busted at last. (Photo by Chris Huggins/Flickr)

A study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, released a week ago, finds that nearly one-third of the world’s food supply — in the United States the figure is 40 per cent — is never consumed because it is wasted. Billions are being spent to develop new chemicals, new genetically altered seeds and new, energy-intensive, unsustainable farming methods that are alleged to increase food production, but the authors of the study expressed surprise that the loss of food, much of which is deliberately thrown away, is drawing no attention. Continue reading →