Word: thingness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat - especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories - some 500 more per person...
...transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits - and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades - that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren...
...much about where our food comes from or what it's doing to the planet - after all, as Chipotle's Ells points out, eating is not exactly a "heady intellectual event." But if there's one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it's that very thing: consciousness. Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty...
...very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives - Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others - who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George...
Hayden expressed dismay over the political storm that broke after Panetta briefed Congress about the program, which started under the directorship of George Tenet, was then cancelled and revived again under two subsequent directors. It was "not a very prominent thing when I was director," Hayden said. "When I heard [that Panetta had briefed Congress], I thought, 'What are you talking about? What program is this...