Politics of the Plate
A little over a year ago, Lucas Benitez, Greg Asbed, and I committed an act that would surely have gotten us arrested if we had attempted it six months earlier. Traveling in a tired and faded Toyota sedan, we cruised through the chain-link fence and guarded gatepost meant to keep trespassers away from the packing facilities of a major Florida tomato-producing corporation. “The last time we came, the gates were locked and we were turned back by sheriff’s deputies,” Asbed said.
But thanks to nearly two decades of efforts by Benitez, Asbed, and their associates -- founding...
You almost certainly have BPA in your bloodstream -- nine out of ten Americans do, according to government tests. It’s also in some of the places most likely to affect the most vulnerable among us: studies have found BPA in breast milk and amniotic fluid in the umbilical cord.
BPA, or bisphenol-A, is a compound used to make the plastic that lines the inside of food and beverage cans. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stay bound to the containers. Most of the BPA flowing in our veins and arteries enters...
Good riddance to one of the most toxic chemicals in conventional agriculture’s arsenal. Battered by environmentalists and farmworkers and entangled in a lawsuit, Arysta LifeScience, the Japanese company that sells the fumigant methyl iodide, has decided to...
Unlike most of my neighbors in the Boston suburb where I once lived, I never used the services of one of those lawn-care companies that come around with tank trucks to spray customers’ yards. I was philosophically opposed to the practice, and my lawn was remarkably weed free without those questionable chemicals. So why waste the money?
I should have been more concerned. It was very likely that my neighbors’ grass was being treated with 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Commonly known as 2,4-D, the herbicide is frequently found in garden products because...
Advocates for genetically modified crops have never relied on logic to advance their cause. And the same holds true for the government officials who give their blessings to new bioengineered plants. Just look at what has been playing out in the corn industry over the past month or so.
Just before Christmas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture...
Back in the 1970s, I spent a summer as a mate on a lobster boat off Nova Scotia. With cold weather, choppy seas, and the physical drudgery of heaving around traps, the job entailed many less-than-pleasant duties, but my least favorite was dealing with green sea urchins -- which the lobstermen referred to as “whore’s eggs.”
Several dozen of them could fill a trap. Lobsters had the good sense to avoid a small place jam-packed with pincushion-like creatures, so the mate’s job was to reach in with his hand, extract the urchins, and toss them overboard. In addition to being a nuisance,...
“F.D.A. Restricts Use of Antibiotics in Livestock,” read the headlines earlier this week (specifically in the paper of record, the New York Times).
At face value, that seems like terrific news -- a complete reversal of the decision the Food and Drug Administration made just before the holidays. The week before Christmas, the agency reneged on a 35-year-old pledge to forbid farmers from administering low levels of antibiotics to livestock -- not to fight disease, but to increase the healthy...
The Food and Drug Administration has done everything in its power to prevent you from reading this post.
Just before the holidays, the agency charged with protecting Americans’ health reneged on a 35-year-old pledge to order farmers to stop feeding low levels of antibiotics to healthy livestock. These antibiotics have little to do with curing disease. They're used mainly to increase healthy animals’ growth rates.
Since 1976,...
Several years ago, I spent a few days on a boat with a University of Florida sea turtle research team off the Azorean island of Faial. Using a long-handled dip net, the biologists scooped juvenile loggerheads out of the ocean. Once aboard the ship, the turtles, about the size of dinner plates, were measured, weighed, biopsied, tagged with IDs, and, within minutes, released.
At least that’s what happened to all but two of the three dozen loggerheads we caught that day. The exceptions had strands of monofilament fishing line protruding from their mouths. They had become hooked after taking the...
Are the embattled populations of Atlantic cod collapsing or making a comeback?
The answer varies according to whom you ask, and when you ask them.
Fishermen and fisheries officials were taken aback earlier this month by an initial assessment of Gulf of Maine cod populations conducted by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Patricia Fiorelli, a spokeswoman for the New England Fishery Management Council, said in a phone interview following the announcement of the preliminary...
