Tag - food industry

Book Review: Aid as Obstacle

Aid as Obstacle is a welcome book which extensively documents the bitter reality of actions taken in the name of the world’s poor. Foreign aid is hurting the very people it claims to help. The book explains why foreign aid fails and actually increases poverty. The authors call for a stop to all foreign aid to all...

Plant Patenting: Sowing the Seeds of Destruction

With the breeding and marketing of new “improved” varieties, traditional varieties are being replaced. Farmers and gardeners stop growing them. Field after field is planted with one variety. Where thousands of varieties of wheat once grew, only a few can now be seen. When these traditional plant varieties are lost...

Agricultural Research and Social Conflict

The two scenarios just developed were (1) science as it is – researchers engaged in basic and applied research aimed at the mechanization of the tomato harvest – and (2) science as it could be – researchers engaged in basic and applied research aimed at the improvement of farmworkers' jobs. The first is science in...

Feed, Need, Greed: The Politics of Food in Bite-Size Morsels

The Food and Nutrition Group of the Boston chapter of Science for the People has revised our alternative curriculum for high school students entitled Feed. Need. Greed (first written in 1974). Our goal is to raise the awareness of students and teachers to the "why's" of food production, to the effects of diet on...

Current Opinion: Why Boycott Nestlé?

A nationwide boycott of the Nestle Corporation has been called, because of their aggressive and deceptive promotion and marketing of infant formula in the developing world. Third World mothers are being encouraged to abandon breast feeding in favor of buying such products as Nestle's Lactogen. Intensive advertising...

So Much for the Myths of Hunger

Except perhaps for nuclear war, nothing in our times so threatens a majority of the world's people as do hunger and starvation. The prospects for a reasonably nutritional diet seem increasingly dim for hundreds of millions. Newspaper items predicting mass famine, accompanied by photographs of deformed, starving Asian...

A Review of Eat Your Heart Out: Food Profiteering in America

A few years back, a number of public interest groups in Washington got together to launch a "Food Action Campaign" aimed at alerting citizens to the concentrated power of the food industry and its evils. The Campaign called on a few wellknown people with particular credibility to travel around the country spreading...

In the Land Where Coca Cola Is Queen

This article criticizes Fredrick Stare's book: "Panic in the Pantry" which is a defense of the food industry, along with his motives. It then discusses the AAAS' role in food production/advertising and proposes a better alternative.

Milking Profits Out of Cows

This paper is addressed to people interested in agriculture and agricultural policy in relation to food production problems in the world today. In our opinion, many articles which attempt to discuss food production problems fall into two disjoint categories:

Food Additives or 1 + 1 + 1…Makes Money

Food is the single largest retail industry in the U.S., doing over $125 billion business in sales anually. It is a messy industry, using between 50 and 80% of all packaging materials. It is also an international industry, marketing the products of U.S. knowhow throughout the Third World.