Group items tagged

Within the bill is a significant shift in the types of farmers who are now benefiting from taxpayer dollars, reflecting a decade of changing eating habits and cultural dispositions among American consumers. Organic farmers, fruit growers and hemp producers all did well in the new bill

An emphasis on locally grown, healthful foods appeals to a broad base of their constituents, members of both major parties said.

hile traditional commodities subsidies were cut by more than 30 percent to $23 billion over 10 years, funding for fruits and vegetables and organic programs increased by more than 50 percent over the same period, to about $3 billion.

scientists have found associations between UPFs and a range of health conditions, including heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, gastrointestinal diseases and depression, as well as earlier death.

That’s concerning, experts say, since ultraprocessed foods have become a major part of people’s diets worldwide. They account for 67 percent of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States

What are ultraprocessed foods, exactly? And how strong is the evidence that they’re harmful? We asked experts to answer these

Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.

“A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans, and that’s obviously not the case.”

Dr. Watling and her team reconstructed a 6,000-year-old environmental history of two geoglyph sites in the Amazon rain forest. To do this, they searched for clues in soil samples in and around the sites. Microscopic plant fossils called phytoliths told them about ancient vegetation. Bits of charcoal revealed evidence of burnings. And a kind of carbon dating gave them a sense of how open the vegetation had been in the past.

Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system. Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent. The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.

Instead of the go-to ingredients previously used in animal protein substitutes — soy, wheat gluten, vegetable starches — Food 2.0 companies are using computer algorithms to analyze hundreds of thousands of plant species to find out what compounds can be stripped out and recombined to create what they say are more delicious and sustainable sources of protein.

Hampton Creek and its rivals say they can come up with better products by relying more on computational science than food science.

But there’s a significant ick factor when it comes to so-called Frankenfoods.

After decades of worsening diets and sharp increases in obesity, Americans’ eating habits have begun changing for the better.

Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago. The number of calories that the average American child takes in daily has fallen even more — by at least 9 percent.

More than a third of American adults are still considered obese, putting them at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Right-wing health obsession comes in many forms. Some men—and it is overwhelmingly men—will evangelize their online followers about the purported benefits of eating only red meat, while other men thump the tub about opposing vaccines. Others proclaim the hazards of seed oils—that is, oils derived from pressed seeds like safflower and rapeseed. 

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has copped to being a seed oils avoider who relies instead on ghee

The broadly conspiracist view that Big Government and Big Agriculture are colluding to poison American citizens is increasingly common among Trump’s highest-profile allies.

The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men

Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.

pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.

IS conflict: Dozens killed in Baghdad car bombings

At least 93 people have been killed in three car bomb attacks in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, police and medics say.

he deadliest killed 64 people and wounded 87 in a market in the mainly Shia Muslim area of Sadr City.

Americans are the the least likely to suffer from "green guilt" about their environmental impact, despite trailing the rest of the world in sustainable behavior, according to a new National Geographic survey.

"In our culture of consumption, we've sort of been indoctrinated to believe that we can buy ourselves out of environmental problems," said Whan, who's based in Toronto, Canada, another country ranked low in the survey."But what people need to realize is that the sheer volume of consumption is relevant as well."

the Greendex report explored environmental attitudes and behaviors among 17,000 consumers in 17 countries through an online survey that asks questions relating to housing, transportation, food, and consumer goods

The army disabled the cellphone networks, so residents scramble to higher ground to capture stray signals from Afghan networks. And Internet cafes were shut, on orders from the Taliban, after complaints that young men were watching pornography and racy movies.

That ban distressed families that use the Internet to communicate with relatives working in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and across the Persian Gulf states.

Journalists face particular risks.

To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all.

Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause.

Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and earthquakes.

to denounce Wikipedia is like denouncing the Enlightenment. Nay more: Wikipedia is the Enlightenment realized, for better or worse.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything. 

Sometimes as I’m walking down the street hitting ‘refresh’, I am made abruptly aware of the intrusion of physical reality, of midsized physical objects in motion, and I wish my body were better protected from them. I wish they would go away. They belong to a sputtering, wheezing world of rusty old buggies and abandoned factories. They have no place in 2011. Of course, their world is not the world, and it never was all that was meant by ‘reality’. Theirs is only the human social world, the world we’ve built up by art and artifice, the world of nature transformed for our vain and largely illusory purposes. If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.

if all Americans decided to actually eat the five servings a day of fruits and vegetables that are recommended, they would discover that American agriculture isn’t set up to meet that need. They grow what they’re paid to grow: corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

Healthy food initiatives threaten profits and are therefore fought or deflected or co-opted at all costs by the producers of hyperprocessed food. This is true even when those costs include producing an increasingly sick population — and a disproportionate number of defenseless children — and an ever-growing portion of our budget spent on paying for diet-related illness. Big Food will continue to pursue profit at the expense of health as long as we let them.

honest members of the political right will say that it’s not enough to prevent new legislation; their goal is to roll back or damage existing laws or programs that benefit people.

The new nutrition standards are the most positive step the Obama administration has taken toward steering childhood nutrition in the right direction, and they’re working; 90 percent of schools meet the new standards, which means tens of millions of kids are eating more fruits and vegetables. Only someone who’s losing money on that deal could object, and even the normally industry-friendly secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is on the right side here.

'Extinct' tree frog rediscovered in India after 137 years

The discovery was made by renowned Indian biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju and a team of scientists, in the jungles of north-eastern India.

The height at which they live is not their only quirk, with females laying their fertilised eggs in tree holes filled with water, only to return after the tadpoles hatch, to feed them with unfertilised eggs. Unlike most frogs, adults also eat vegetation rather than insects and larvae.

ISIS’s Capital Still Hasn’t Been Cut Off

The distance from the Syrian city of Raqqa to Iraq’s Mosul is about 230 miles as the crow flies, and closer to 280 miles if one drives between the two “capitals” controlled by the self-declared Islamic State

As The Guardian reported in mid-November: “Although heavily targeted throughout the campaign, ISIS has kept a supply line between Raqqa and Mosul largely open. The highway, in particular, has been a major conduit for trade and the flow of fighters.”

rape is now rampant in tribal Jharkhand. Boys as young as 10 download pornography from mobile phone shops for as little as 10 rupees (12p). The combination of endless, violent porn videos and alcohol appears to be a lethal trigger for many rapes in India – a country where traditional Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh society strictly forbids not just sex outside marriage but any mixing of the sexes in towns and villages. Arranged marriages are still the norm across all religions. For repressed men to be fed a constant diet of porn on their phones is a recipe for disaster.

Enakshi Ganguly Thukral, a child rights activist for nearly 30 years, told me: “Society is being sexualised, there is sexual content everywhere, in films and music. Rampant, vicious porn is easily available to children. Middle-class families may monitor what their kids watch, but uneducated and illiterate people haven’t a clue about what their kids see on their phones. The vegetable vendor near my house sits glued to his mobile all day. Two young boys with one wire plugged into an ear each, sharing a video. I can assure you they are not watching the news.”

My liberal friends have fought for civil liberties and freedom of expression over the years. As a journalist I support that. But grassroots activists like me are increasingly sick of liberals fighting for freedom to watch violent, sadistic porn. One tired human rights defender said: “It’s hard to stomach glib sermons on the right to freedom to use a potential ‘driver of rape’ [porn] when faced with a wounded, bleeding raped woman or child.”

in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, de Souza and his colleagues describe the mound village and 80 other newly discovered archaeological sites from the years 1250 to 1500.

They predict that the region hides hundreds more undiscovered sites, and that as many as a million people might have carefully managed the rain forest long before Europeans arrived.

Fifty years ago, she said, “prominent scholars thought that little of cultural significance had ever happened in a tropical forest. It was supposed to be too highly vegetated, too moist. And the corollary to those views was that people never cut down the forests; they were supposed to have been sort of ‘noble savages,’ ” she said. “But those views have been overturned,” Piperno continued. “A lot of importance happened in tropical forests, including agricultural origins.”

WeWork locations in New York, where the throw pillows implore busy tenants to “Do what you love.” Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.”

Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.

From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.