Dignity is a sort of agreement between people. A decision to grant that a person, or body of people, deserve respect. That they possess agency, the capacity and the right to make their own decisions. To determine their own lives. America has agreed, implicitly, that poor people have no dignity. […]
Read MoreReview: Farmageddon
Woman Milking Cow. Albert J. Ewing, Ohio Historical Society Farmageddon is a 2011 documentary now streaming on Netflix. I watched it last night, and will probably watch it again soon because there’s a lot to…err…digest there. I’d suggest watching Food Inc. first, except that unfortunately it is no longer streaming. Food […]
Read MoreQuote of the day
From Jason Foscolo’s blog Food Law: At the NYT, Bittman evokes Mrs. Lovejoy in his support of the Bloomberg Soda Tax. I tend to stay away from policy on this blog, but Bloomberg’s soda ban perfectly crystalizes the absurdities of our food system. We pay farmers to overproduce the raw […]
Read MoreToo far from food
What my brain does when it hears the word “steak” Beatrice Marovich has a fascinating essay at Religion Dispatches called “Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating,” in which she writes about the ethical quandaries of food in the context of secular morality and religious traditions. It’s fascinating to me both […]
Read MoreThe blood footprint
More animal-friendly than a vegetarian? There are all sorts of ways in which people can alter their diets for ethical reasons, but the presumed reason that people become vegetarians out of ethical concern is that they don’t want to cause any animals to die in order to supply their meal. […]
Read MoreThe “E” word applied to food. No, it doesn’t stand for “educated.” Or “empathetic.”
Eric Schlosser lays down the law in the Washington Post: At the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting this year, Bob Stallman, the group’s president, lashed out at “self-appointed food elitists” who are “hell-bent on misleading consumers.” His target was the growing movement that calls for sustainable farming practices and […]
Read MoreTuesday links
New Hampshire Tea Partiers’ opinions of gay marriage range from apathetic to vaguely supportive. I wonder how many of those people are members of the Free State Project. Check out the guy at 42 seconds in. Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota are trying to ban covert photography of factory farm operations. […]
Read MoreWhy should we care where Sarah Palin got her bunny (and how many shots it took)?
The designated Badass Quote of the Day for today over on Dispatches is from Jason Easley at Politics USA: Sarah Palin has become the political equivalent of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. America regrets the one night stand they had with Palin, but now she has broken into our house […]
Read MoreHardcore eggs
Leslie Halleck is a horticulturist and general manager at North Haven Gardens in Dallas who blogs at growLively. Today she comments on the difference between grocery store eggs and the eggs from her backyard chickens: I’m often asked if there is any difference between my fresh backyard eggs and eggs […]
Read MoreWow
That’s all I can say at the moment– just, wow. From Casaubon’s Book, an excerpt from a post entitled “On Sentiment…And Against Sentimentality“: Sentiment officially has no place in agriculture, but I’ve met precious few smaller farmers who don’t have a spot of it. Indeed, I’ve come to suspect that […]
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