michael pollan

By Melissa Massello Whether you believe that people with restricted diets are insufferable hipsters or canaries in a coalmine, the rise in food allergies is an alert to major problems in our food chain—and the reality is that no social gathering centered on a meal can ignore the fact that people have different requirements. But […]

By Jeremy L. Caradonna One of the biggest knocks against the organics movement is that it has begun to ape conventional agriculture, adopting the latter’s monocultures, reliance on purchased inputs and industrial processes. “Big Organics” is often derided by advocates of sustainable agriculture. The American food authors Michael Pollan and Julie Guthman, for example, argue […]

Trump has dumped family farmers. That’s right, President Trump, who once claimed he’s “fighting for our farmers,” is passing policies that mostly benefit the big agribusiness corporations—not small farmers, and certainly not rural communities. Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, recently sat down with [see video above] Michael […]

By Melissa Kravitz In the second edition of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Dietary Goals for the United States, published in 1977, Americans were advised to limit their intake of fats, replacing their regular fat sources (meat, butter) with complex carbohydrates and manufactured substitutes (margarine). And just as low-fat, fat-free and “lite” products began […]

It’s well believed that by the year 2050, 9 billion people will call Earth home. With so many mouths to feed, the United Nations says that world food production must double or else people will go hungry. In order to feed Earth’s swelling population, U.S. agriculture and agribusiness interests, notably Monsanto, have insisted that American […]