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POPSFood Critic Murders Baboon: Needed Fodder for His Column?! While admitting there was no good excuse for his action, he nonetheless tries to explain: "I noticed that, when it was alive, I thought about the baboon as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger." Stop. Breathe. I note my first reaction: Excruciating execution for this guy, preferably slowly bleeding to death in front of his buddies, sounds like a good idea. Exhale. Pause. Next reaction: What the heck was he thinking? What sick person would find it perfectly acceptable to write about his urge to explore killing primates in a food column? Is he so disengaged from life and his place in it that he thinks this is witty? Educational? Cool?
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POPSLife Without Bumblebees? It's Not Just Honeybees That Are Mysteriously Dying The decline of bumblebees has received far less attention, though in the public imagination their plight has often been conflated with that of the honeybee. Not only do bumblebees pollinate about 15 percent of our food crops (valued at $3 billion), they also occupy a critical role as native pollinators. Plant pollinator interactions can be so specific and thus the loss of even one species carries with it potentially severe ecological consequences. As E. O. Wilson writes, "If the last pollinator species adapted to a plant is erased … the plant will soon follow." The cause: "the rise of the commercial bumblebee rearing industry in the early 1990s, largely for greenhouse tomato pollination. Captive bees, they say, played a key role in spreading disease, which has led to the decline of several North American species, all of which belong to the same subgenus."
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POPSFood, Inc.: How factory farming affects you (movie trailer on site)
But despite the factory-farm scenes, some of the most thought-provoking moments were these statements that were spoken or flashed on the screen. According to the filmmakers: In 1972, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration conducted 50,000 food safety inspections. In 2006, the FDA conducted only 9,164. In 1996 when it introduced Round-Up Ready soybeans, Monsanto controlled only 2 percent of the U.S. soybean market. Now, over 90 percent of soybeans in the U.S. contain Monsanto's patented gene. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney at Monsanto from 1976 to 1979. After his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion in a case that helped Monsanto enforce its seed patents. 70 percent of processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient. (Genetically modified crops are not labeled in the U.S. even though 90 percent of consumers have said they want labeling.) 1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabe
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POPSWhy Unfettered Capitalism Is Bad for Your Diet These are the companies that are trying to efficiently process tens of thousands of cows per day -- cows that have been lined up in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and fed grain (more efficient than using land to feed them their natural diet of grass), pumped with hormones and antibiotics to keep them from dying, which means a glut on the market of cheap (antibiotic-filled) beef. And these are the companies that are creating the seeds -- those seeds that the farmer can't even save for fear of litigation -- to grow the crops that require the use of their pesticides and which produce a proliferation of fast food. Yes, efficiency is the bottom line in our current agricultural system. Not safety, not health, nor least of all, taste. No, for a corporation that is beholden first to it's shareholders, its all about the quickest way to get to the bottom line.
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