Slow Food Nation
Alice Waters : Fast food is killing us--our environment, our politics and our culture. To change who we are as a nation, we must first change how we eat.
Liza Featherstone looks at Wal-Mart's plan to go organic; Anna Lappé does lunch at school; Matthew DeBord reviews food books by Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford.
Alice Waters : Fast food is killing us--our environment, our politics and our culture. To change who we are as a nation, we must first change how we eat.
Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Troy Duster, Elizabeth Ransom, Winona LaDuke, Peter Singer, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, Eliot Coleman & Jim Hightower : How do we fix our dysfunctional relationship with food? Alice Waters leads a forum with Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Peter Singer and others, who suggest, for starters, that we stop buying factory farm products, get involved in farm policy and outlaw the marketing of junk food to kids.
Felicia Mello : The organic label means your food is pesticide-free, but an investigation into California farms reveals that the label means nothing but pain for the workers who produced it.
Eric Schlosser : Low wages, segregation and dangerous working conditions in a North Carolina factory reveal a meatpacking industry where labor laws no longer matter.
Liza Featherstone
:
Wal-Mart is serious about bringing organic food to the masses, but
transportation costs and the retail giant's aggressive competitive ways
could end up hurting small farms and the environment.
Anna Lappé : Ann Cooper, gourmet chef turned healthy school food advocate, talks about becoming a "lunch lady" and what it takes to reform our children's cafeterias.
Randy Fertel
:
A new charter school is embracing "eco-gastronomy"--a holistic
curriculum based around food--hoping "to renew New Orleans one okra
plant and one child at a time."
Mark Winston Griffith
:
Urban restaurateurs, activists and consumers are seeking "food
justice," insisting that healthy food shouldn't be a privilege for
the wealthy and white.
Habiba Alcindor : For black farmers, succeeding financially and bringing healthy food to urban markets remains an uphill battle against a lack of business contacts.
Frances Moore Lappé : Hunger is a violation of basic rights: a right to food, but more important, Bolivian and Brazilian experience suggests, a right to power.
: The alleged British terror plot contrasts with the fruits of Bush's "war on terror": civil war in Iraq, an empowered Iran and Arab hatred. Let us instead seek security through diplomacy.
Eyal Press
:
Israel's war with Hezbollah may have strengthened the hand of the
Israeli right, which has forgotten that peace comes only by negotiating
with those you do not trust.
Joseph Logan : The UN cease-fire in Lebanon demands the impossible: a Lebanese state capable of both disarming Hezbollah and protecting the south from renewed Israeli attacks.
Mike Davis
:
An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest
generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence,
who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and
peace.
Matthew DeBord
:
Three new books by Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford chart
the evolution of American cooking, from haute cuisine to the hot
kitchen of Mario Batali.
Hazel Rowley : "The spell of Africa is upon me," wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in Liberia. Three new books document the enchantment and disenchantment of the continent for its descendants.
Stuart Klawans : World Trade Center's hero is a tough ex-Marine who later re-enlists to fight in Iraq. But his (and Oliver Stone's) redemption narrative is soured by bad faith.
Calvin Trillin
:
Everyone knows what his predecessors liked for dinner. But there's one special dish we'd really like to serve George W. Bush.
Alexander Cockburn
:
The Israeli press has criticized the Lebanon disaster from all
political angles. The American press chooses to cheerlead instead,
while liberal Jewry remains silent.
Katha Pollitt : "Islamo-fascism" looks like an analytic term, but it's really an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more.
Barney Frank : Thanks to an acquiescent Congress, we are now being governed by an Administration that is radically trying to change the nature of our democracy.
He asks citizens "to quiet down for just one minute" so he could have "a chance to think."
Nicholas von Hoffman : As the generation of power brokers over 40 continues to blow off global warming, our dependence on a waning supply of oil will create a miserable future for their children and grandchilden.
Robert Scheer : You'd think Bill Clinton doesn't know the difference between getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls and getting them out of poverty.
Max Blumenthal : Virginia Senator George Allen claimed it was a "mistake" when he called an employee of his Democratic foe a racist name. But the leader of America's top racist group explains Allen's long and cozy history with white supremacists.
David Enders : As people in Southern Lebanon return to claim the dead and clear the rubble from villages ravaged in the recent fighting, it is clear that the battle for hearts and minds is being won by Hezbollah.
Naomi Klein : Unless something changes soon, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopic future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and everyone else is left behind.
The Kitchen Sisters : As chroniclers of the secret, unexpected, below-the-radar places Americans prepare and consume their meals, NPR's Kitchen Sisters discovered their microphone has become a kind of stethoscope, listening to the complicated heart of a nation.
Alberto Morales : Ricardo Mendez Matta and Poli Marichal answer questions about their new film, Ladrones y Mentirosos (Thieves and Liars), which takes a hard look at the price Puerto Ricans are paying for the drug trade.
Stephen Lewis : The United States now spends more in Iraq in a month that the entire world spends on fighting AIDS in a year. Have we reached the point where the terror of AIDS is no match for the war against terror?
Jonathan Blitzer : Despite mounting evidence, Americans remain willfully blind to the government's barbaric treatment of terror suspects. Now, human rights groups and religious organizations are using testimonies from victims to awaken moral revulsion at what is being done in our name.
John Ross : In Mexico City and beyond, tensions are rising between government security forces and thousands of impoverished supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a restive constituency to which political parties and process are increasingly irrelevant.
Jeremy Scahill : A federal appeals court has ruled a wrongful death lawsuit can proceed against Blackwater USA: Families claim the firm cut corners in pursuit of profit in Iraq, leading to the brutal deaths of four employees in Fallujah in 2004.
Our Readers : Letters from around the country describe your favorite food institutions.
Michael Luongo : Organizers had hoped the second World Pride conference in Jerusalem would challenge religious bias against gays. But the unfolding war in Lebanon got in the way.
Sam Schramski : The residents of the District of Columbia go to war and pay taxes, but they have never had a member of Congress to call their own. A measure has been introduced in the House that could change all that--maybe.
GetUplicans deadlock with GetDownocrats.
Cover by Avenging Angels; cover
art by James Montgomery Flagg