I am proud to be one of the signers of an open letter, published today in The New York Times and Washington Post, calling on the HHS and USDA to listen to the sound recommendations for our nation’s dietary guidelines. You can learn more at www.myplatemyplanet.org and give public comments on the health.gov website. Please […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America Forty-four years ago my mother, Frances Moore Lappé, published “Diet for a Small Planet,” a book that dared to suggest human beings could survive, even thrive, on a plant-centered diet and that doing so would be good for our bodies and the planet. Part meatless cookbook, part treatise […]
Letter to the Editor in the Washington Post The Feb. 25 Food article “Pastures or feedlots? The big beef conundrum,” ignored a central reason well-managed, grass-finished beef is better for us: Much of the beef in this country is finished in feedlots on a diet of chemically grown corn and soy and a daily dose […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America McDonald’s is having a bumpy year. It just installed a new CEO after a mere two-and-a-half-year stint by his predecessor. In January it announced its latest returns — and the news was bad. It included such shareholder downers as a “global comparable sales decrease of 1 percent, reflecting negative […]
Last week, Fortune ran an article with this headline: “Campbell Soup CEO says distrust of ‘Big Food’ a growing problem.” Apparently the CEO of the soup giant explained that a “growing skepticism of large food makers that has resulted from consumers’ changing tastes as a key challenge for her industry.” Yes! That’s right. The diverse […]
There was good news last week about the Gates Foundation dumping about $1 billion worth of stock in Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Whether it was a sign that the Foundation realizes these companies don’t have a rightful place in a portfolio of an organization promoting health and well-being or that their financial analysts are smart on […]
As Mark Bittman says in The New York Times, “The report is not a paradigm shift, but it does contain significant improvements.” Here’s what is most exciting to me about them: For the first time the scientific advisory committee on dietary guidelines did a radical thing: it recommended we eat less sugar and red meat, […]
Today, I discovered a petition on my Facebook timeline to “protect our nation’s food supply” brought to us by the Safe and Affordable Food Coalition. Hmmm… who isn’t for safe and affordable food? Well, would you feel different about the group and the petition if you knew it was funded by the chemical and biotech […]
Great reporting over at Civil Eats today on an important new study looking at pesticide residues in the diets of people consuming organic and non-organic foods. Its described as the “largest study to look at organophosphate exposure in humans.” The study found that people consuming diets of chemically grown produce had higher concentrations of chemicals […]
There’s a great new report out from the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The report shows that the fast food industry could “fully absorb” a minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $15 over four years. “Fully absorb” is technical talk for: the industry can easily pay workers more without […]