Organic food is a $100 billion industry yet so far has been able to consistently raise prices and maintain its health halo without issue.
In 1849, Abraham Lincoln was still 11 years from becoming President but his experience as a deck-hand on a Mississippi flat-boat would make him the first U.S. President to have a patent - No. 6,469 for utilizing inflated cylinders to float grounded vessels through shallow water - "buoying boats over shoals".Also of note: In 1649 the famed French mathematician, physicist and inventor Blaise Pascal obtained a monopoly by royal decree for his computing machine.And Orville and Wilbur Wright received the first airplane patent in the USA, for "new and useful improvements in Flying Machines" (U.S. No. 821,393).
What happened when scientists put African-Americans on a diet from the long-ago "motherland" and African-Africans on an American diet? Nothing good for the Africans.20 African-Americans and 20 South Africans switched diets for two weeks. The African-Africans consumed traditional American food, meat and cheese high in fat content, while African-Americans took on a traditional African diet, which was high in fiber and low in fat, with vegetables, beans, and cornmeal but little meat.
What if everyone ate an American diet?Well, it would mean the developing world finally has parity with the developed world, which has been the entire goal of progressive culture. But now that it is achievable, progressive doomsday prophets who have taken over an alarming chunk of the environmental movement (and there are hundreds of these sites, all of them making money and paying people) are saying that we need to go back in time, when only rich elites had a healthy normal diet and everyone else ate rich or bread or whatever.
Just a few years ago, molecular biologists hoping to alter the genome of their favorite organisms faced an arduous task and likely weeks of genetic tinkering. Today, those scientists can quickly destroy or edit a gene with a new technology called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat)/Cas9.CRISPRs were interesting mainly to microbiologists until 2012 when a team figured out they could combine crRNA and tracrRNA into a single, artificial guide RNA, which they could then use to aim the DNA-slicing enzyme at a sequence of their choosing.The implications were thrilling...Amber Dance at PNAS has the history.
It's hard to imagine that people on food stamps are buying lobsters and crab but Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin want to make sure it happens a lot less: a new bill would require that two thirds of food be from a restricted list like beef, pork, poultry, potatoes, dairy products and foodstuffs available under the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program.
Norm Borlaug, “Father of the Green Revolution,” got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work advocating science to feed the poor. Because of his work, a strain of “miracle rice” 10 times more productive than its predecessors was in fields across Asia, third world grain production has tripled since the 1960s, and India is now a major rice exporter. Borlaug was the prototype for a science-based environmentalist but today, environmentalism is instead a Political Action Committee and their positions have nothing to do with food or helping the poor, and are instead progressive self-identification and creating a First World idyll certain to doom the developing world.
Back in 1982, the Almeida Family was saddened to learn that their beloved pet, Manuela, a young red-footed tortoise, had gone missing. Their house was under renovation at the time, so the family just assumed that the slow-moving animal had slipped out through a gate left open by the construction crew -- disappearing into the forest near their home in Realengo, Brazil. The truth was far more odd. Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Everyone recognizes that the public needs honest answers about genetically-modified foods - oddly corporations are the ones least likely to defend science. Not only will they not defend them, they go even farther and won't do anything more than pay generic public relations firms after the latest bit of fear and doubt hits the media.
Unless you are a hippie growing organic, vegetarian, free-range chickens in Oregon, you probably recognize that nature is out to kill you. But nothing is out to kill you like nature in Australia.But Aussies can find a positive in anything and baby spiders that build streamers of silk which they use to surf the winds as high as 3 kilometers off the ground and then cover buildings and fields get called “Angel Hair.”A home surrounded by spiderwebs as floodwaters rise around Wagga Wagga in 2012. Photo: Reuters
