food
Thinking Big Podcast 3: Green Jobs and America's Role in the World
Commonweal Institute Senior Fellow Patrick O'Heffernan interviews Jason Walsh, National Policy Director of Green For All, and Jim Harkness, President of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, about building a global economy that works for the long-term sustainability of our planet. From the new book from the Progressive Ideas Network, Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era.
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Taking Action on Food
Food seems awfully complicated nowadays. Lurking in it might be mad cow disease, E. coli, botulism, Salmonella, pesticides, and God knows what else. Genetically modified meats and vegetables are gobbled up every day, but nobody really seems to understand their long-term effects. The World Trade Organization and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture are at odds over the rules governing food importation. Even SARS, we learn, may have crossed into the human population from the eating of civets, a delicacy in China, although that is still speculative - like so much else!
National boundaries, species barriers, and biotechnological borders are all crumbling when it comes to food production. Not even our stomachs, evidently, are out of reach of the forces of globalization and human ingenuity.
Americans now routinely eat foods shipped in from other countries and climates, since this is often the cheapest way, or the only way, to get the items we want. Need a tomato in winter? No problem. Need Chilean sea bass rather than catfish? Chicken with lots of white meat? Fungi-resistant melon? No problem.
