Choose Your Poison

Dirty Pictures | Full Documentary | Alexander Shulgin | Ann Shulgin

2025-11-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

https://youtu.be/aZLkAMDO5dI

Explore the mind of Alexander Shulgin, the genius behind MDMA's synthesis, more commonly known as Ecstasy. This riveting documentary dives into the heart of psychedelic research, merging chemistry, neuroscience, and philosophy to question the untapped potentials of the human mind.

2010 American Documentary: Psychedelic Science Unveiled

The film presents an intimate look at Alexander Shulgin's pioneering work, his synthesis of over 200 psychedelic compounds, including MDMA, and his profound influence on psychoactive drug research. The narrative is enriched by contributions from Ann and Ted Shulgin, continuing the family's legacy in exploring psychedelic substances, with additional insights from experts like pharmacologist William Fantegrossi.

Directed by Etienne Sauret, this documentary not only celebrates Shulgin's scientific achievements but also navigates the complexities of his role as a controversial figure in the realm of psychedelic studies. Nominated for the 2010 SXSW Grand Jury Award in Documentary Feature, 'Dirty Pictures' offers a rare glimpse into Shulgin's laboratory and his challenges, underscoring the documentary's deep exploration of science, society, and the quest for understanding the human psyche.

This documentary is a must-watch for anyone fascinated by the intersection of science and consciousness, offering an unparalleled insight into the life and work of one of the most influential figures in psychedelic research.

The controversy surrounding psychedelic scientific research hinges on a delicate balance between groundbreaking potential and societal apprehension. At the heart of this debate is the transformative power of psychedelics to alter human consciousness, offering unprecedented insights into the mind, potential therapeutic applications for mental health conditions, and a deeper understanding of our cognitive processes. However, this exploration comes with challenges, notably the stigma and legal constraints rooted in decades of prohibition and negative public perception.

Director: Etienne Sauret

Stars: Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin, Ted Shulgin, Bob Seager, David Nichols, William Fantegrossi.

Willie Nelson - Are You Sure

2025-10-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

Willie Nelson - Are You Sure

Look around you

Look down the bar from you

At the faces that you see

Are you sure this is where you want to be?

These are your friends

But are they real friends?

Do they love you as much as me?

Are you sure this is where you want to be?

https://youtu.be/Mk4llZw_Zj0

92-year-Old Sprinter’s Muscles Baffle Scientists, Resemble Those In Their 20s

2025-10-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

Her secret, if she has one, is neither a miracle supplement nor a hidden training formula. It is consistency, joy and the refusal to surrender to stillness.

The 92-year-old wonder with muscle cells of sprinters in their 20s

By Olivier Acuña Barba • Published: 24 Aug 2025 •

Emma Maria Mazzenga is 92 years of age but has the muscle cells of someone in their 20s Credit: Federazione Italiana di Atletica Leggera

Emma Maria Mazzenga has the world wondering how she does it, and scientists studying her muscles, nerves, and mitochondria, the cell powerhouse, to gain a better understanding of how she’s able to keep running at 92 and beating her own records.

She’s simply amazing. Emma dislocated her shoulder during a race in Germany a dozen years ago because she threw herself ahead of a competitor to win the race. “The woman next to me was about to overtake me,” Mazzenga said. She was 79 at the time. “Now, Mazzenga, who lives in Padua, Italy, is running out of competition,” wrote the Washington Post in a special report about her. “At 5-foot-1, she’s an elite sprinter with four age-group world records to her name — and very few opponents to race against.” Last year, Mazzenga broke the outdoor 200-metre world record for women over 90 with a time of 51.47 seconds. A month later, she broke her own record by a second.

The US influential news outlet said that Mazzenga seems to possess cardiorespiratory fitness of someone in their 50s, and her muscle mitochondria function as well as a healthy 20-year-old, researchers studying her have said. Marta Colosio, a postdoctoral fellow at Marquette University and the first author of the case study, told the Washington Post she has not found another 90-year-old who can compare to Mazzenga. “She’s ageing, but she can do things that at 91, people can’t do.”

Mazzenga said “all hell broke loose” when the elderly sprinter broke the indoor 200-metre world record for her age group last January with a time of 54.47. “I ended up in the newspapers, something which had never happened before.” Scientists reached out to her, asking to study her. In the lab, researchers used a needle to collect a piece of muscle the size of a pencil eraser from Mazzenga’s quadriceps, recalled Chris Sundberg, a co-lead of the study on Mazzenga and the director of the Integrative Muscle Physiology and Energetics Laboratory at Marquette University. Under a microscope, Mazzenga’s muscle proved to be a mosaic of both the expected and extraordinary. Her fast-twitch muscle fibres, which are associated with speed, resembled those of a healthy 70-year-old. The truly fantastic thing came next. Mazzenga’s slow-twitch muscle fibres, which are associated with endurance activities, looked like those of a 20-year-old, as did the blood flow and nerve pathways to her muscles.

Mazzenga’s advice for other older athletes: Know your limits. Meet with your doctor first to ensure you are fit to run. Then, stay consistent and run multiple times a week. By studying elite older athletes, researchers can learn more about what’s possible as we age, said Sundberg.

https://leadership.ng/92-year-old-sprinters-muscles-baffle-scientists-esemble-those-in-their-20s/

92-year-Old Sprinter’s Muscles Baffle Scientists, Resemble Those In Their 20s

Dr. Dean Ornish Tribute to Swami Satchidananda, July 2014

2022-09-30T20:57:00.004-07:00

Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga,® is one of the most revered Yoga masters of our time.

Regarded by many as an apostle of peace, Swami Satchidananda serves as an example of the teachings of Yoga and its goal of Self-realization.

His teachings included Hatha Yoga, Yoga philosophy, and interfaith ideas.

Dr. Dean Ornish Tribute to Swami Satchidananda, July 2014

Swami Satchidananda

In honor of the 100th birth anniversary of Sri Swami Satchidananda, Dr. Dean Ornish offers a tribute to his mentor and talks about his role in the development of his groundbreaking medical research and program.

https://youtu.be/vQWY136twrE

5 Ways To Improve Your Breathing with James Nestor

2022-09-12T23:17:00.001-07:00

5 Ways To Improve Your Breathing with James Nestor

https://youtu.be/f6yAY1oZUOA

James Nestor believes we're all breathing wrong. Here he breaks down 5 ways to transform your breathing, from increasing your lung capacity to stopping breathing through your mouth. 

Order your copy of his book Breath here: https://amzn.to/34EElbw
 
There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day.

Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

In Breath, journalist James Nestor travels the world to discover the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can:

- jump-start athletic performance
- rejuvenate internal organs
- halt snoring, allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines

None of this should be possible, and yet it is. 

Drawing on thousands of years of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.

You will never breathe the same again.

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Drinking Alcohol is bad for your health

2022-09-02T16:12:00.001-07:00

If you have three or more alcoholic drinks in a week, you’re putting your health at risk, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction. Now the CCSA is proposing an update to Canada's low-risk drinking guidelines. tgam.ca/3cMKuqy

In Defense of Food | Michael Pollan | Talks at Google

2022-08-14T23:01:00.003-07:00

In Defense of Food | Michael Pollan

https://youtu.be/I-t-7lTw6mA

Michael Pollan visits Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters to discuss his book, "In Defense of Food." This talk took place on March 4, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

Consciousness and psychedelics | Peter Sjostedt-H | TEDxTruro

2022-08-14T13:10:00.001-07:00

https://youtu.be/tV8PSevhd_M

Philosopher of mind Peter Sjöstedt-H discusses the hidden impact psychedelics have had on philosophy and asks if such extreme, altered modes of mind could help give us answers to some of the big questions facing the philosophers and scientists of today.

Peter is an Anglo-Scandinavian philosopher of mind and author.

He lives in West Cornwall and is engaged in his PhD with the University of Exeter, where he also teaches philosophy modules and writing skills.

Peter is the inspiration behind the inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

VEGAN SPEECH

2022-07-03T12:01:00.001-07:00

https://youtu.be/Z3u7hXpOm58

Vegetarian fights back against vegan

2022-07-03T11:57:00.002-07:00

https://youtu.be/Qhz4l53hNtU

https://www.youtube.com/c/EarthlingEdChannel

Dr Gabor Maté

2022-06-30T00:18:00.002-07:00

Gabor Maté’s book: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

https://youtu.be/0uRGiP8l6P8

CREDIT: Speaker: Dr Gabor Maté Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsRF... Website: https://drgabormate.com/

Is Coffee Healthy with James Hoffman and Professor Tim Spector

2022-06-24T16:48:00.001-07:00

Is Coffee Healthy with James Hoffman and Professor Tim Spector

https://youtu.be/XO-7irGCaTA

Coffee’s earliest consumption dates back millennia when the tribesmen of Ethiopia used its ground-up berries to help aid concentration during prayer. Arriving in Europe in the 17th century, Coffee quickly began to replace beer and wine as a favourite breakfast drink. In the 20th century, coffee was blamed for high blood pressure and heart attacks, and more recently linked to a rising epidemic of poor sleep. None of this has prevented coffee’s relentless rise. Over 2 billion cups of the stuff are drunk each day.

So, is coffee a guilty treat as many of us suspect? Or is it a health drink feeding your good gut bacteria? In this episode, Jonathan speaks with James Hoffmann and Tim Spector to find out. They discuss how coffee affects your gut bacteria, your hormones and your heart, whether decaffeinated coffee is healthy, and discover some of coffee’s most surprising side effects – which could come in handy if you find yourself in the jungle. James Hoffmann is a leading coffee expert and author of the World Atlas of Coffee and co-founder & chairman of the Square Mile Coffee Roasters. Tim Spector is a co-founder at ZOE and one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. If you want to uncover the right foods for your body, head to joinzoe.com/podcast and get 10% off your personalized nutrition program. Timecodes: 00:00 - Intro 00:09 - Topic introduction 01:51 - Quickfire questions 04:48 - What is coffee and why are we willing to spend money on it? 05:18 - Views on coffee 09:12 - Health properties of coffee 11:49 - How is coffee made? 16:19 - Quantities of caffeine in beverages 18:11 - How important is fermentation for coffee flavor? 19:22 - What does the fermentation stage look like? 22:19 - Fiber & coffee 27:14 - Effects of coffee 28:25 - How much is too much coffee? 30:26 - What time is the best to drink coffee? 35:07 - What is decaf and is it safe? 38:59 - Does James drink decaf? 39:47 - Is decaf as healthy as caffeinated coffee? 41:16 - Does coffee quality matter? 42:31 - James' coffee preference 44:02 - Health side effects of coffee 46:45 - Is it healthy to mix coffee with milk? 49:33 - James' opinion on coffee with milk 51:35 - Summary 53:58 - Instagram question: Does coffee dehydrate you? 54:21 - Goodbyes 54:38 - Outro Episode transcripts are available here: https://joinzoe.com/learn/category/nu... Follow James: https://www.instagram.com/jimseven/ Follow Tim: https://twitter.com/timspector Follow ZOE on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoe/ This podcast was produced by Fascinate Productions.

Lunch, Not Landfill: Longevity Diet Tips From The Blue Zones

2021-09-19T14:00:00.002-07:00

Eating To Break 100: Longevity Diet Tips From The Blue Zones

npr.org

The centenarians living in Blue Zones aren't drinking Ensure or eating chocolate ice cream. Instead, many are drinking wine, and all are eating beans. But living to 100 isn't just about diet.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/04/11/398325030/eating-to-break-100-longevity-diet-tips-from-the-blue-zones

Want to live to be 100?

It's tempting to think that with enough omega-3s, kale and blueberries, you could eat your way there.
But one of the key takeaways from a new book on how to eat and live like "the world's healthiest people" is that longevity is not just about food.

The people who live in the Blue Zones — five regions in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the U.S. researchers have identified as having the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world — they move their bodies a lot.

They have social circles that reinforce healthy behaviors.

They take time to de-stress.

They're part of communities, often religious ones.

And they're committed to their families.

Eat Plants And Prosper: For Longevity, Go Easy On The Meat, Study Says

Nuts For Longevity: Daily Handful Is Linked To Longer Life

But what they put in their mouths, how much and when is worth a close look, too. And that's why Dan Buettner, a National Geographic explorer and author who struck out on a quest in 2000 to find the lifestyle secrets to longevity, has written a follow up to his original book on the subject, The Blue Zones. The new book, called The Blue Zones Solution, is aimed at Americans, and is mostly about eating.

Why should we pay attention to what the people in the relatively isolated Blue Zone communities eat? Because, as Buettner writes, their more traditional diets harken back to an era before we Americans were inundated with greasy fast food and sugar. And to qualify as a Blue Zone, these communities also have to be largely free of afflictions like heart disease, obesity, cancer and diabetes. So clearly they're doing something right.

Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones

David McLain/Courtesy of Blue Zones

Gianluca Colla/Courtesy of Blue Zones

David McLain/Courtesy of Blue Zones

You can get the backstory in this excerpt of the original book, which was published in 2008. But in a nutshell, Buettner in 2004 rounded up a bunch of anthropologists, demographers, epidemiologists and other researchers to travel around the world to study communities with surprisingly high percentages of centenarians. He and the scientists interviewed hundreds of people who'd made it to age 100 about how they lived, then did a lot of number crunching to figure out what they had in common.

For Mind And Body: Study Finds Mediterranean Diet Boosts Both

A year after that book was published, the team announced they'd narrowed it down to five places that met all their criteria. They gave them official Blue Zone status: Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan; Ogliastra Region, Sardinia; Loma Linda, Calif.; and Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica.

In the new book, which was released April 7, Buettner distills the researchers' findings on what all the Blue Zones share when it comes to their diet.

Here's taste:

Stop eating when your stomach is 80 percent full to avoid weight gain.

Eat the smallest meal of the day in the late afternoon or evening.

Eat mostly plants, especially beans.

And eat meat rarely, in small portions of 3 to 4 ounces.

Blue Zoners eat portions this size just five times a month, on average.

Drink alcohol moderately and regularly, i.e. 1-2 glasses a day.

The book also features "top longevity foods" from each Blue Zone, some of which we found pretty intriguing.

For recipes from the Blue Zones with the ingredients above, check out the web site. And for more photos from the Blue Zones, head to National Geographic.

Today is World Obesity Day.

2020-03-04T22:29:00.005-08:00

Today is #WorldObesityDay.

Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.

Most of the World's population live in countries where overweight & obesity kills more people than underweight.

OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE.

bit.ly/387Ssm3

Researchers find a western-style diet can impair brain function

2020-02-21T01:09:00.000-08:00

Researchers find a western-style diet can impair brain function
After a week on a high fat, high added sugar diet, volunteers scored worse on memory tests

Volunteers were given a western-style diet featuring generous amounts of Belgian waffles. Photograph: jopstock/Getty Images

Consuming a western diet for as little as one week can subtly impair brain function and encourage slim and otherwise healthy young people to overeat, scientists claim.

Researchers found that after seven days on a high fat, high added sugar diet, volunteers in their 20s scored worse on memory tests and found junk food more desirable immediately after they had finished a meal.

The finding suggests that a western diet makes it harder for people to regulate their appetite, and points to disruption in a brain region called the hippocampus as the possible cause.

“After a week on a western-style diet, palatable food such as snacks and chocolate becomes more desirable when you are full,” said Richard Stevenson, a professor of psychology at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This will make it harder to resist, leading you to eat more, which in turn generates more damage to the hippocampus and a vicious cycle of overeating.”

Previous work in animals has shown that junk food impairs the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory and appetite control. It is unclear why, but one idea is that the hippocampus normally blocks or weakens memories about food when we are full, so looking at a cake does not flood the mind with memories of how nice cake can be. “When the hippocampus functions less efficiently, you do get this flood of memories, and so food is more appealing,” Stevenson said.

To investigate how the western diet affects humans, the scientists recruited 110 lean and healthy students, aged 20 to 23, who generally ate a good diet. Half were randomly assigned to a control group who ate their normal diet for a week. The other half were put on a high energy western-style diet, which featured a generous intake of Belgian waffles and fast food.

At the start and end of the week, the volunteers ate breakfast in the lab. Before and after the meal, they completed word memory tests and scored a range of high-sugar foods, such as Coco Pops, Frosties and Froot Loops, accordi

ng to how much they wanted and then liked the foods on eating them.

“The more desirable people find the palatable food when full, following the western-style diet, the more impaired they were on the test of hippocampal function,” Stevenson said. The finding suggests that disruption of the hippocampus may underpin both, he added.

Stevenson believes that in time governments will come under pressure to impose restrictions on processed food, much as they did to deter smoking. “Demonstrating that processed foods can lead to subtle cognitive impairments that affect appetite and serve to promote overeating in otherwise healthy young people should be a worrying finding for everyone,” he said. The work is published in Royal Society Open Science.

In the longer term, eating a western-style diet contributes to obesity and diabetes, both of which have been linked to declines in brain performance and the risk of developing dementia. “The new thinking here is the realisation that a western-style diet may be generating initial and fairly subtle cognitive impairments, that undermine the control of appetite which gradually opens the way for all of these other effects down the track,” Stevenson said.

Rachel Batterham, professor of obesity, diabetes and endocrinology at University College London, who was not involved in the study, said it was one of the first to investigate whether the western diet impairs memory and appetite control in humans.

“Understanding the impact of a western diet on brain function is a matter of urgency given the current food climate,” she said. “This research has provided data to support detrimental effects on both memory and appetite control after just one week of an energy-dense diet and may suggest a link between poor diet and impairment of the hippocampus, a key memory and appetite-associated brain region. The mechanisms at work remain to be elucidated and will require further research with the application of more sophisticated neuroimaging methods.”

Ian Sample
@iansample

Guardian Science editor | Author of Massive, shortlisted Royal Society Science Book Prize.

theguardian.com/profile/iansam…

https://twitter.com/iansample
Food for thought: the smart way to better brain health

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/19/researchers-find-a-western-style-diet-can-impair-brain-function

Researchers find a western-style diet can impair brain function

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/19/researchers-find-a-western-style-diet-can-impair-brain-function?CMP=share_btn_tw

"The destination of life is this eternal moment."

— Alan Watts

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

2019-12-13T18:42:00.000-08:00

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine.

By Raj Patel and Jason W Moore

The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone.

It’s the chicken nugget.

Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet’s favourite flesh by 2020.

Future civilizations will find traces of humankind’s 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now call the Anthropocene.

And yet responsibility for the dramatic change in our consumption lies not so much in general human activity, but capitalism.

Although we’re taught to understand it as an economic system, capitalism doesn’t just organise hierarchies of human work.

Capitalism is what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine.

Indeed, the way we understand nature owes a great deal to capitalism.

Every civilisation has had some rendering of the difference between “us” and “them”, but only under capitalism is there a boundary between “society” and “nature” – a violent and tightly policed border with deep roots in colonialism.

First taking shape in the era of Chistopher Columbus, capitalism created a peculiar binary order.

“Nature” became the antonym of “society” in the minds of philosophers, in the policies of European empires, and the calculations of global financial centres.

“Nature” was a place of profit, a vast frontier of free gifts waiting to be accepted by conquerors and capitalists.

This was a dangerous view of nature for all sorts of reasons, not least because it simultaneously degraded human and animal life of every kind.

What we call “cheap nature” included not only forests and fields and streams, but also the vast majority of humankind.

In the centuries between Columbus and the industrial revolution, enslaved and indentured Africans, Asians, indigenous peoples and virtually all women became part of “nature” – and treated cheaply as a result.

When humans can be treated with such little care, it’s not surprising that other animals fare even worse under capitalism, especially the ones we end up paying to eat.

Animals have been at the centre of five centuries of dietary transformation, which sharply accelerated after the second world war.

The creation of the modern world depended on the movement of cattle, sheep, horses, pigs and chickens into the new world, reinforcing the murderous advance of microbes, soldiers and bankers after 1492. ,

Capitalism’s “ecological hoofprint”, to use food scholar Tony Weis’s well-turned phrase, has become radically globalised ever since.

In the half-century after 1961, Weis tells us, per capita meat and egg consumption has doubled, and the number of slaughtered animals leapt eightfold, from eight to 64 billion.

To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from, uncooked meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one. Quite the opposite.

Feed and oilseed crops form part of what Weis terms “the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex”.

Markets for grain made it possible for meat not just to become cheap food, but also to back financial instruments.

Futures contracts in pork bellies, for instance, in turn require the uniformity, homogenisation and industrialisation of the crops they transform.

Raw meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism’s ecology.

Where there’s profit, there’s every incentive to realise it efficiently. Modern meat-production systems can turn a fertile egg and a 4kg bag of feed into a 2kg chicken in five weeks. Turkey production times almost halved between 1970 and 2000, down to 20 weeks from egg to 16kg bird. Other animals have seen similar advances through a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations and global supply chains. The consequences of the sustained rise in meat consumption are a planetary affair too: 14.5% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to industrial agriculture’s bottom line. Nature is merely the pool from which animals are drawn and factory farmed, and the dump into which their, and our, waste disappears. The danger lies in believing the division between nature and society is real, in seeing “factory farming” as an environmental question and “factory production” as a social question. Social questions are environmental questions, and vice versa.

Chickens don’t turn into nuggets by themselves. Capitalists need cheap work. With the European invasion of the new world in 1492, that labour presented itself in the bodies of indigenous people. By the late 16th century, when Spaniards were desperately trying to revive silver production at the great silver mountain of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, they began using the word naturales to refer to indigenous people. Through hard work and prayer, those indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, might find divine redemption through work and perhaps even, one day long in the future, entry into society as equals.

Work was never meant to be fun. Consider the etymology of the French travail and the Spanish trabajo, each a translation of the English noun “work”: their Latin root is trepaliare, “to torture, to inflict suffering or agony.” But the way work works has changed.

For millennia, most humans survived through more or less intimate relations with land and sea. Even those who didn’t were closely connected to the tasks and objects of labour. Human survival depended on holistic, not fragmented, knowledge: fishers, nomads, farmers, healers, cooks and many others experienced and practised their work in a way directly connected to the web of life. Farmers, for instance, had to know soils, weather patterns, seeds – in short, everything from planting to harvest. That didn’t mean work was pleasant – slaves were often treated brutally. Nor did it mean that the relations of work were equitable: guild masters exploited journeymen, lords exploited serfs, men exploited women, the old exploited the young. But work was premised on a holistic sense of production and a connection to wider worlds of life and community.

In the 16th century, that began to shift. The enterprising Dutch or English farmer – and the Madeiran, then Brazilian, sugar planter – was increasingly connected to growing international markets for processed goods, and correspondingly more interested in the relationship between work time and the harvest. International markets pushed local transformations. Land in England was consolidated though enclosure, which concurrently “freed” a growing share of the rural population from the commons that they had tended, supported and survived on. These newly displaced peasants were free to find other work, and free to starve or face imprisonment if they failed.

This history is alive and well in the modern chicken nugget. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the US, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to poultry workers. It’s hard to find staff when, according to one study in Alabama, 86% of employees who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. To fill the gaps in the labour force, some chicken operators use prison labour, paid at 25 cents an hour. In Oklahoma, chicken company executives returned to a colonial fusion of work and faith, setting up an addiction treatment centre in 2007, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery. With judges steering addicts to treatment instead of jail, the recovery programme had a ready supply of workers. At CAAIR, prayer was supplemented with unpaid work on chicken productionlines as part of a recovery therapy. If you worked and prayed hard enough for the duration of your treatment, you’d be allowed to re-enter society.

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty

CAAIR’s recruits were predominantly young and white, but the majority of poultry workers are people of colour. Latinx immigrants are a vital force in US agriculture, and the delivery of their cheap work was made possible by class restructuring on two fronts. One, in the US, was a strong movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms to destroy union power and replace unionised workers with low-wage immigrant labour. The other was the destabilisation of Mexico’s agrarian order after 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labour – unemployed workers displaced by capitalism’s ecology from one side of the US border to the other.
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A line on a map between two states is a powerful abstraction, one that has been used recently by the far right to recruit and spread fear, and for much longer by capitalists in search of ever cheaper and more profitable workers. Under capitalism, national territories, locally owned land and new migrating workers are produced simultaneously.

With migrant workers came elite fears of the itinerant poor. In 17th- and 18th-century England, this panic resulted in harsh laws against vagabondage, and the development of charities to ameliorate the worst effects of enforced destitution. Threats of imprisonment moved the poor into waged work, an act e seen similar advances through a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations and global supply chains. The consequences of the sustained rise in meat consumption are a planetary affair too: 14.5% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to industrial agriculture’s bottom line. Nature is merely the pool from which animals are drawn and factory farmed, and the dump into which their, and our, waste disappears. The danger lies in believing the division between nature and society is real, in seeing “factory farming” as an environmental question and “factory production” as a social question. Social questions are environmental questions, and vice versa.

Chickens don’t turn into nuggets by themselves. Capitalists need cheap work. With the European invasion of the new world in 1492, that labour presented itself in the bodies of indigenous people. By the late 16th century, when Spaniards were desperately trying to revive silver production at the great silver mountain of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, they began using the word naturales to refer to indigenous people. Through hard work and prayer, those indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, might find divine redemption through work and perhaps even, one day long in the future, entry into society as equals.

Work was never meant to be fun. Consider the etymology of the French travail and the Spanish trabajo, each a translation of the English noun “work”: their Latin root is trepaliare, “to torture, to inflict suffering or agony.” But the way work works has changed.

For millennia, most humans survived through more or less intimate relations with land and sea. Even those who didn’t were closely connected to the tasks and objects of labour. Human survival depended on holistic, not fragmented, knowledge: fishers, nomads, farmers, healers, cooks and many others experie ivity that took the intelligence, strength and dexterity of humans and disciplined them to productive labour using another modern invention: a new way of measuring time.

If the practice of labour shapes capitalism’s ecology, its indispensable machine is the mechanical clock. The clock – not money – emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it’s easy to think that working for wages is capitalism’s signature. It’s not: in 13th-century England only a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages have become a decisive way of structuring life, space and nature owes everything to a new model of time.

By the early 14th century, the new temporal model was shaping industrial activity. In textile-manufacturing towns like Ypres, in what is now Belgium, workers found themselves regulated not by the flow of activity or the seasons but by a new kind of time – abstract, linear, repetitive. In Ypres, that work time was measured by the town’s bells, which rang at the beginning and end of each work shift. By the 16th century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds. This abstract time came to shape everything – work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the 16th century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks.

Spain’s conquest of the Americas involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the “lazy” native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism’s ecology. As early as 1553, the Spanish crown began installing “at least one public clock” in its major colonial cities. Other civilisations had their own sophisticated temporal rules, but the new regimes of work displaced indigenous tempos and relationships with the natural world. The Mayan calendar is a complex hierarchy of times and readings from the heavens, offering a rich set of arrangements of humans within the universe. Spanish invaders respected it only to this extent: they synchronised their colonial assaults to sacred moments in the calendar.

As social historian EP Thompson observes in his seminal study Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, the governance of time follows a particular logic: “In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to ‘pass the time’.” The connection of specific activities to larger productive goals didn’t allow for time theft, and the discipline of the clock was enforced by violence across the planet.

Teaching the value and structure of capitalist time to new subjects was a key part of the colonial enterprise. One settler noted in 1859 that Indigenous Australians “now … have the advantage of dating from the ‘Nip Nip,’ or Settlers’ yearly regular shearing time. This seems to supply them with a mode of stating years, which before they had not. Months or moons then satisfied them.” But the regulation of time was also a focus of resistance. Another settler wrote in a diary: “This evening there was a grand Korroberry [sic, for corroboree, an exuberant, possibly spiritual, gathering] – I endeavoured to dissuade them, telling them that it was Sunday – but they said, ‘black fellow no Sunday.’” Why the resistance? Because they knew full well that their labour was the object of theft, that colonists were appropriating their work.

Fights over the regulation of time continue even now. On US poultry lines, there is a federal law limiting the speed at which birds are processed: 140 birds per minute. The industry is lobbying to eliminate the limit, so that it can compete with factories in Brazil and Germany, where the rate is nearer 200 bpm. Worries about higher rates of food contamination and worker injury are being outweighed by the certain profit from more dead chickens.

Capitalism has always experimented with every available kind of labour system simultaneously. A sugar plantation in 1630s Brazil, for example, would be easily recognisable as a modern industrial operation in, say, the Bangladeshi textile industry. Just as autoworkers on the line assemble simplified, interchangeable parts and fast-food workers manufacture standardised burgers, so did African slaves work specialised jobs in a simplified landscape of sugar monoculture.

Behind the modern factory, there has always been a layer-cake of exploitation. Managers of factories were salaried more than the workers, who worked with raw materials acquired through various kinds of peonage and natural resource exploitation, and all of them depended on free domestic labour, usually from women. The global factory depends on a global mine, a global farm, and a global family.

Hence the persistence today of slavery. One UN agency, the International Labour Organization, estimates there are 40 million people in slavery today, the majority of whom are women, many in forced marriages. Wartime work camps in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo supply the rare-earth metals such as tantalum that power the physical infrastructure behind the virtual economy.

But just as management looks to find new ways to generate profit, so workers find ways to resist. Early capitalism’s great commodity frontiers – of sugar, silver, copper, iron, forest products, fishing and even cereal agriculture – were zones of experimentation in strategies of labour control in Europe and its colonies, and always spaces of conflict. Strikes, rebellions, negotiations and resistance characterised the application of capitalist work disciplines. Every resistance by labour was a new reason to bring in machines. Modern work regimes and technologies emerged from the crucible of experiments, strategies and resistances of early modern workers.

Worker unrest in factories and slave rebellions, past and present, are linked not just because they are expressions of resistance, but because they are protests against the ecology of capitalism. Every global factory needs a global farm: industrial, technological and service enterprises rely on the extraction of work and cheap nature to thrive. The apps on your iPhone, designed in Cupertino, California, might have been coded by self-exploiting independent software engineers, and the phone itself assembled in draconian workplaces in China, and run on minerals extracted in inhumane conditions in the Congo. Modern manufacturing relies on layered, simultaneous and different regimes of work. And in response to every act of resistance against it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again.

Hegemony over workers has been aided by cheap food, and the promise of a chicken in every pot. Cheap food has been central to the maintenance of order for millennia. But in the ecology of capitalism, that order has been maintained through planetary transformation.

Since the 15th century, some land has become the exclusive domain of specific kinds of crops and crop systems: fields of monocultures designed to bring in flows of cash. Other areas were reserved to house those humans who had been excommunicated from those lands, to be better placed at the service of capitalists in cities. It was always a socially unstable geography, with low industrial wages supported by lower peasant wages supported by free gifts from nature, women and the colonies. After the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries offered workers the promise of alternatives to exploitation, capitalist fears of urban uprising and communism reached fever pitch. To allay this existential dread, governments and foundations did not address inequality or exploitation. Instead, they funded the development of crops that would grow abundantly enough to provide cheap food and curb urban hunger.

That it was urban, and not rural, hunger that troubled policy makers is vitally important. Food and employment for people in rural areas – where most of the world’s hunger was concentrated – were of little concern. Hunger began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature. It’s here – in the bourgeois concern about that rule and its need for worker quiescence – that we find the origin of what came to be known as the Green Revolution.

The aim was to breed varieties of cereals that might flow freely through urban areas. But the revolution wasn’t simply an agronomic transformation. It required more than magic seeds. In order for farmers to grow the crops, national governments had to subsidise the purchase of crops through agricultural marketing boards, to lay the infrastructure for irrigation, and to suppress political dissent around alternative food systems. The Green Revolution of the early- to mid-20th century was a package of reforms designed to prevent the revolutionary political goal of many peasants’ and landless workers’ movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/08/how-the-chicken-nugget-became-the-true-symbol-of-our-era

Beer School: What is Malt? | The Craft Beer Channel

2019-12-13T15:05:00.001-08:00

Beer School: What is Malt? | The Craft Beer Channel

We may all rave about hops most of the time, but without malt there would be no beer. This week we head to Muntons, one of the UK's leading maltsters to learn more about the grains that go in our beer. We see out how it's harvested and made – as well as what makes great malt and how it's used.

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Twitter – @beerchannel

Remember to drink responsibly(ish)

https://www.patreon.com/craftbeerchannel

Link: https://youtu.be/uXao3n3cj_A

Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us

2019-08-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us

Improving American nutrition would make the biggest impact on our health care.

By Dariush Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman

Mr. Mozaffarian is dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Mr. Glickman was the secretary of agriculture from 1995 to 2001.

Published Aug. 26, 2019 Updated Aug. 27, 2019

Cheeseburgers at a White House picnic in 2018.

CreditAlex Edelman/Getty Images

The Democratic debate on health care has to date centered around who should be covered and who should pay the bill. That debate, which has been going on for decades, has no clear answers and cannot be easily resolved because of two fundamental realities: Health care is expensive, and Americans are sick.

Americans benefit from highly trained personnel, remarkable facilities and access to the newest drugs and technologies. Unless we eliminate some of these benefits, our health care will remain costly. We can trim around the edges — for example, with changes in drug pricing, lower administrative costs, reductions in payments to hospitals and providers, and fewer defensive and unnecessary procedures. These actions may slow the rise in health care spending, but costs will keep rising as the population ages and technology advances.

And Americans are sick — much sicker than many realize. More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease afflicts about 122 million people and causes roughly 840,000 deaths each year, or about 2,300 deaths each day. Three in four adults are overweight or obese. More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy.

Instead of debating who should pay for all this, no one is asking the far more simple and imperative question: What is making us so sick, and how can we reverse this so we need less health care? The answer is staring us in the face, on average three times a day: our food.

Poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the United States, causing more than half a million deaths per year. Just 10 dietary factors are estimated to cause nearly 1,000 deaths every day from heart disease, stroke and diabetes alone. These conditions are dizzyingly expensive. Cardiovascular disease costs $351 billion annually in health care spending and lost productivity, while diabetes costs $327 billion annually. The total economic cost of obesity is estimated at $1.72 trillion per year, or 9.3 percent of gross domestic product.

These human and economic costs are leading drivers of ever-rising health care spending, strangled government budgets, diminished competitiveness of American business and reduced military readiness.

Fortunately, advances in nutrition science and policy now provide a road map for addressing this national nutrition crisis. The “Food Is Medicine” solutions are win-win, promoting better well-being, lower health care costs, greater sustainability, reduced disparities among population groups, improved economic competitiveness and greater national security.

Some simple, measurable improvements can be made in several health and related areas. For example, Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers and hospitals should include nutrition in any electronic health record; update medical training, licensing and continuing education guidelines to put an emphasis on nutrition; offer patient prescription programs for healthy produce; and, for the sickest patients, cover home-delivered, medically tailored meals. Just the last action, for example, can save a net $9,000 in health care costs per patient per year.

Taxes on sugary beverages and junk food would help lower health care costs. Credit Jenny Kane/Associated Press

Taxes on sugary beverages and junk food can be paired with subsidies on protective foods like fruits, nuts, vegetables, beans, plant oils, whole grains, yogurt and fish. Emphasizing protective foods represents an important positive message for the public and food industry that celebrates and rewards good nutrition. Levels of harmful additives like sodium, added sugar and trans fat can be lowered through voluntary industry targets or regulatory safety standards.

Nutrition standards in schools, which have improved the quality of school meals by 41 percent, should be strengthened; the national Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program should be extended beyond elementary schools to middle and high schools; and school garden programs should be expanded. And the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which supports grocery purchases for nearly one in eight Americans, should be leveraged to help improve diet quality and health.

The private sector can also play a key role. Changes in shareholder criteria (e.g., B-Corps, in which a corporation can balance profit versus purpose with high social and environmental standards) and new investor coalitions should financially reward companies for tackling obesity, diabetes and other diet-related illness. Public-private partnerships should emphasize research and development on best agricultural and food-processing practices. All work sites should demand healthy food when negotiating with cafeteria vendors and include incentives for healthy eating in their wellness benefits.

Coordinated federal leadership and funding for research is also essential. This could include, for example, a new National Institute of Nutrition at the National Institutes of Health. Without such an effort, it could take many decades to understand and utilize exciting new areas, including related to food processing, the gut microbiome, allergies and autoimmune disorders, cancer, brain health, treatment of battlefield injuries and effects of nonnutritive sweeteners and personalized nutrition.

Government plays a crucial role. The significant impacts of the food system on well-being, health care spending, the economy and the environment — together with mounting public and industry awareness of these issues — have created an opportunity for government leaders to champion real solutions.

Yet with rare exceptions, the current presidential candidates are not being asked about these critical national issues. Every candidate should have a food platform, and every debate should explore these positions. A new emphasis on the problems and promise of nutrition to improve health and lower health care costs is long overdue for the presidential primary debates and should be prominent in the 2020 general election and the next administration.

Opinion | Christy Harrison

‘It’s the Way We Were All Born Eating’Aug. 26, 2019

Opinion | Joon Yun, David A. Kessler and Dan Glickman

We Need Better Answers on Nutrition Feb. 28, 2019

Dariush Mozaffarian (@Dmozaffarian) is a cardiologist and dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy. Dan Glickman (@DanRGlickman) was the secretary of agriculture from 1995 to 2001.

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Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/opinion/food-nutrition-health-care.html?fbclid=IwAR3kbq1zB8f7FUG4fbVO36H75BjVWMYATLIbFaW0vEmg0vTGxNqypkzkUno

Meat-based Vegetables

2019-07-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

What?!

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

2019-07-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine.

By Raj Patel and Jason W Moore

Sat 18 Aug 2018

The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet’s favourite flesh by 2020. Future civilisations will find traces of humankind’s 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now call the Anthropocene. And yet responsibility for the dramatic change in our consumption lies not so much in general human activity, but capitalism. Although we’re taught to understand it as an economic system, capitalism doesn’t just organise hierarchies of human work. Capitalism is what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. Indeed, the way we understand nature owes a great deal to capitalism.

Every civilisation has had some rendering of the difference between “us” and “them”, but only under capitalism is there a boundary between “society” and “nature” – a violent and tightly policed border with deep roots in colonialism.

First taking shape in the era of Chistopher Columbus, capitalism created a peculiar binary order. “Nature” became the antonym of “society” in the minds of philosophers, in the policies of European empires, and the calculations of global financial centres. “Nature” was a place of profit, a vast frontier of free gifts waiting to be accepted by conquerors and capitalists.

This was a dangerous view of nature for all sorts of reasons, not least because it simultaneously degraded human and animal life of every kind. What we call “cheap nature” included not only forests and fields and streams, but also the vast majority of humankind. In the centuries between Columbus and the industrial revolution, enslaved and indentured Africans, Asians, indigenous peoples and virtually all women became part of “nature” – and treated cheaply as a result. When humans can be treated with such little care, it’s not surprising that other animals fare even worse under capitalism, especially the ones we end up paying to eat.

Animals have been at the centre of five centuries of dietary transformation, which sharply accelerated after the second world war. The creation of the modern world depended on the movement of cattle, sheep, horses, pigs and chickens into the new world, reinforcing the murderous advance of microbes, soldiers and bankers after 1492. Capitalism’s “ecological hoofprint”, to use food scholar Tony Weis’s well-turned phrase, has become radically globalised ever since. In the half-century after 1961, Weis tells us, per capita meat and egg consumption has doubled, and the number of slaughtered animals leapt eightfold, from eight to 64 billion.

To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from, uncooked meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one. Quite the opposite. Feed and oilseed crops form part of what Weis terms “the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex”. Markets for grain made it possible for meat not just to become cheap food, but also to back financial instruments. Futures contracts in pork bellies, for instance, in turn require the uniformity, homogenisation and industrialisation of the crops they transform. Raw meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism’s ecology.

Where there’s profit, there’s every incentive to realise it efficiently. Modern meat-production systems can turn a fertile egg and a 4kg bag of feed into a 2kg chicken in five weeks. Turkey production times almost halved between 1970 and 2000, down to 20 weeks from egg to 16kg bird. Other animals have seen similar advances through a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations and global supply chains. The consequences of the sustained rise in meat consumption are a planetary affair too: 14.5% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to industrial agriculture’s bottom line. Nature is merely the pool from which animals are drawn and factory farmed, and the dump into which their, and our, waste disappears. The danger lies in believing the division between nature and society is real, in seeing “factory farming” as an environmental question and “factory production” as a social question. Social questions are environmental questions, and vice versa.

Chickens don’t turn into nuggets by themselves. Capitalists need cheap work. With the European invasion of the new world in 1492, that labour presented itself in the bodies of indigenous people. By the late 16th century, when Spaniards were desperately trying to revive silver production at the great silver mountain of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, they began using the word naturales to refer to indigenous people. Through hard work and prayer, those indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, might find divine redemption through work and perhaps even, one day long in the future, entry into society as equals.

Work was never meant to be fun. Consider the etymology of the French travail and the Spanish trabajo, each a translation of the English noun “work”: their Latin root is trepaliare, “to torture, to inflict suffering or agony.” But the way work works has changed.

For millennia, most humans survived through more or less intimate relations with land and sea. Even those who didn’t were closely connected to the tasks and objects of labour. Human survival depended on holistic, not fragmented, knowledge: fishers, nomads, farmers, healers, cooks and many others experienced and practised their work in a way directly connected to the web of life. Farmers, for instance, had to know soils, weather patterns, seeds – in short, everything from planting to harvest. That didn’t mean work was pleasant – slaves were often treated brutally. Nor did it mean that the relations of work were equitable: guild masters exploited journeymen, lords exploited serfs, men exploited women, the old exploited the young. But work was premised on a holistic sense of production and a connection to wider worlds of life and community.

In the 16th century, that began to shift. The enterprising Dutch or English farmer – and the Madeiran, then Brazilian, sugar planter – was increasingly connected to growing international markets for processed goods, and correspondingly more interested in the relationship between work time and the harvest. International markets pushed local transformations. Land in England was consolidated though enclosure, which concurrently “freed” a growing share of the rural population from the commons that they had tended, supported and survived on. These newly displaced peasants were free to find other work, and free to starve or face imprisonment if they failed.

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty

CAAIR’s recruits were predominantly young and white, but the majority of poultry workers are people of colour. Latinx immigrants are a vital force in US agriculture, and the delivery of their cheap work was made possible by class restructuring on two fronts. One, in the US, was a strong movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms to destroy union power and replace unionised workers with low-wage immigrant labour. The other was the destabilisation of Mexico’s agrarian order after 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labour – unemployed workers displaced by capitalism’s ecology from one side of the US border to the other.
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A line on a map between two states is a powerful abstraction, one that has been used recently by the far right to recruit and spread fear, and for much longer by capitalists in search of ever cheaper and more profitable workers. Under capitalism, national territories, locally owned land and new migrating workers are produced simultaneously.

With migrant workers came elite fears of the itinerant poor. In 17th- and 18th-century England, this panic resulted in harsh laws against vagabondage, and the development of charities to ameliorate the worst effects of enforced destitution. Threats of imprisonment moved the poor into waged work, an activity that took the intelligence, strength and dexterity of humans and disciplined them to productive labour using another modern invention: a new way of measuring time.

If the practice of labour shapes capitalism’s ecology, its indispensable machine is the mechanical clock. The clock – not money – emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it’s easy to think that working for wages is capitalism’s signature. It’s not: in 13th-century England only a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages have become a decisive way of structuring life, space and nature owes everything to a new model of time.

By the early 14th century, the new temporal model was shaping industrial activity. In textile-manufacturing towns like Ypres, in what is now Belgium, workers found themselves regulated not by the flow of activity or the seasons but by a new kind of time – abstract, linear, repetitive. In Ypres, that work time was measured by the town’s bells, which rang at the beginning and end of each work shift. By the 16th century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds. This abstract time came to shape everything – work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the 16th century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks.

Spain’s conquest of the Americas involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the “lazy” native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism’s ecology. As early as 1553, the Spanish crown began installing “at least one public clock” in its major colonial cities. Other civilisations had their own sophisticated temporal rules, but the new regimes of work displaced indigenous tempos and relationships with the natural world. The Mayan calendar is a complex hierarchy of times and readings from the heavens, offering a rich set of arrangements of humans within the universe. Spanish invaders respected it only to this extent: they synchronised their colonial assaults to sacred moments in the calendar.

As social historian EP Thompson observes in his seminal study Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, the governance of time follows a particular logic: “In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to ‘pass the time’.” The connection of specific activities to larger productive goals didn’t allow for time theft, and the discipline of the clock was enforced by violence across the planet.

Teaching the value and structure of capitalist time to new subjects was a key part of the colonial enterprise. One settler noted in 1859 that Indigenous Australians “now … have the advantage of dating from the ‘Nip Nip,’ or Settlers’ yearly regular shearing time. This seems to supply them with a mode of stating years, which before they had not. Months or moons then satisfied them.” But the regulation of time was also a focus of resistance. Another settler wrote in a diary: “This evening there was a grand Korroberry [sic, for corroboree, an exuberant, possibly spiritual, gathering] – I endeavoured to dissuade them, telling them that it was Sunday – but they said, ‘black fellow no Sunday.’” Why the resistance? Because they knew full well that their labour was the object of theft, that colonists were appropriating their work.

Fights over the regulation of time continue even now. On US poultry lines, there is a federal law limiting the speed at which birds are processed: 140 birds per minute. The industry is lobbying to eliminate the limit, so that it can compete with factories in Brazil and Germany, where the rate is nearer 200 bpm. Worries about higher rates of food contamination and worker injury are being outweighed by the certain profit from more dead chickens.

Capitalism has always experimented with every available kind of labour system simultaneously. A sugar plantation in 1630s Brazil, for example, would be easily recognisable as a modern industrial operation in, say, the Bangladeshi textile industry. Just as autoworkers on the line assemble simplified, interchangeable parts and fast-food workers manufacture standardised burgers, so did African slaves work specialised jobs in a simplified landscape of sugar monoculture.

Behind the modern factory, there has always been a layer-cake of exploitation. Managers of factories were salaried more than the workers, who worked with raw materials acquired through various kinds of peonage and natural resource exploitation, and all of them depended on free domestic labour, usually from women. The global factory depends on a global mine, a global farm, and a global family.

Hence the persistence today of slavery. One UN agency, the International Labour Organization, estimates there are 40 million people in slavery today, the majority of whom are women, many in forced marriages. Wartime work camps in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo supply the rare-earth metals such as tantalum that power the physical infrastructure behind the virtual economy.

But just as management looks to find new ways to generate profit, so workers find ways to resist. Early capitalism’s great commodity frontiers – of sugar, silver, copper, iron, forest products, fishing and even cereal agriculture – were zones of experimentation in strategies of labour control in Europe and its colonies, and always spaces of conflict. Strikes, rebellions, negotiations and resistance characterised the application of capitalist work disciplines. Every resistance by labour was a new reason to bring in machines. Modern work regimes and technologies emerged from the crucible of experiments, strategies and resistances of early modern workers.

Worker unrest in factories and slave rebellions, past and present, are linked not just because they are expressions of resistance, but because they are protests against the ecology of capitalism. Every global factory needs a global farm: industrial, technological and service enterprises rely on the extraction of work and cheap nature to thrive. The apps on your iPhone, designed in Cupertino, California, might have been coded by self-exploiting independent software engineers, and the phone itself assembled in draconian workplaces in China, and run on minerals extracted in inhumane conditions in the Congo. Modern manufacturing relies on layered, simultaneous and different regimes of work. And in response to every act of resistance against it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again.

Hegemony over workers has been aided by cheap food, and the promise of a chicken in every pot. Cheap food has been central to the maintenance of order for millennia. But in the ecology of capitalism, that order has been maintained through planetary transformation.

Since the 15th century, some land has become the exclusive domain of specific kinds of crops and crop systems: fields of monocultures designed to bring in flows of cash. Other areas were reserved to house those humans who had been excommunicated from those lands, to be better placed at the service of capitalists in cities. It was always a socially unstable geography, with low industrial wages supported by lower peasant wages supported by free gifts from nature, women and the colonies. After the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries offered workers the promise of alternatives to exploitation, capitalist fears of urban uprising and communism reached fever pitch. To allay this existential dread, governments and foundations did not address inequality or exploitation. Instead, they funded the development of crops that would grow abundantly enough to provide cheap food and curb urban hunger.

That it was urban, and not rural, hunger that troubled policy makers is vitally important. Food and employment for people in rural areas – where most of the world’s hunger was concentrated – were of little concern. Hunger began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature. It’s here – in the bourgeois concern about that rule and its need for worker quiescence – that we find the origin of what came to be known as the Green Revolution.

‘Cheap food has been central to the maintenance of order for millennia’ … a 99 cent store in New York City. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

If you squint, it’s possible to see the Green Revolution as a success. Globally, grain output and yields (the amount of output per unit area) more than doubled – between 1950 and 1980. India’s wheat yields shot up by 87% between 1960 and 1980, similar to what Americanto what corn farmers experienced in the two decades after 1935. A rising share of all this food was traded on the world market, with global grain exports increasing by 295% during the 1960s and 70s. If these are the metrics of success, then the political commitment to making food cheap through state subsidy and violence worked.

But the prodigious output did not reduce hunger. Wheat production in India soared, but the amount that Indians ate hardly improved. Hunger, particularly in an economy dependent on agriculture, doesn’t end if people remain poor: it doesn’t matter how much grain there is if you can’t afford to buy it. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that from 1990 to 2015, prices of processed food rose far less than those of fresh fruits and vegetables, and that in almost every country today, the poorest part of the population can’t afford to eat five fresh fruits or vegetables a day.
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Although workers in countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) saw an increase in their share of national income after the second world war, that reversed in the 1980s. This was a direct consequence of anti-labour policies that scholars aptly call “wage repression”. Given consistently low wages in the neoliberal era, it makes sense to look at cheap food as cheap not merely relative to wage costs but directly in terms of price. When we do, it emerges as no accident that one foodstuff whose price has fallen dramatically is chicken in Mexico – a direct consequence of Nafta, technology and the US soybean industry.

Nafta originally excluded agricultural goods, but they were included at the insistence of the Mexican government, which wanted to “modernise” its peasantry by moving them from agriculture into urban circuits of industry. The strategy worked: Mexico’s campesino (“peasant farmer”) agricultural economy buckled, as evinced by the El Campo No Aguanta Más (“the countryside can’t take it anymore”) protests that spread throughout the country in 2003. Circuits of migration and pools of labour for US agriculture were the result. But at least the chicken was cheap.

Here we come to an important point about cheap food regimes: they guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well – as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest. Capitalism’s agricultural frontiers continue to press against the world’s peasants, who provide 75% of the food in large parts of the global south. But while the present is bleak, with agricultural frontiers pushing through Amazonia and displacing peasants around the world, in the 21st century a new wrinkle has appeared that will fatally undermine capitalism’s five century-long food regime: climate change.

The imagery of the frontier lends itself to thinking only about land. But the past two centuries have witnessed a very different kind of frontier movement: the enclosure of the atmospheric commons as a dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions. In the 21st century, agriculture and forestry (which includes land clearance for cash cropping) contribute between a quarter and a third of greenhouse gas emissions.

This is inevitable, because they’re profoundly energy- intensive, and have become more so. That’s a big problem, because there are no more atmospheric commons to enclose, and no obvious way to keep the costs of climate change off capitalism’s ledgers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the faltering global farm, whose productivity growth has been slowing, just as it did for English farmers in the middle of the 18th century. Agro-biotechnology’s promise of a new agricultural revolution has so far been worse than empty – failing to deliver a new yield boom, creating superweedsand superbugs that can withstand glyphosate and other poisons, and sustaining the cheap food model that is driving the ongoing state shift in the world’s climate system.

Climate change represents something much more than a closing frontier – it is something akin to an implosion of the cheap-nature model, bringing not the end of easy and cheap natures, but a dramatic reversal. As a growing body of research demonstrates, climate change suppresses agricultural productivity. “Climate” refers to extremely diverse phenomena, including drought, extreme rainfall, heat waves and cold snaps. Soy, the paradigmatic neoliberal crop, has already experienced what agronomists call yield suppression as a result of climate change. How much remains a matter of debate, but many analyses land somewhere in the area of a 3% reduction in growth since the 1980s – a value of $5bn per year from 1981 to 2002.

Worse, climate change promises absolute declines. Each 1C increase in average annual global temperature is accompanied by a greater risk of dramatic effects on global farming. Agricultural yields will decline between 5% and 50% (or more) in the next century, depending on the time frame, crop, location and extent to which carbon continues to be pumped into the air at today’s prodigious rates. World agriculture will absorb two-thirds of all climate change costs by 2050. That means that both the climate and capitalism’s agricultural model are in the midst of an abrupt and irreversible moment of change.

There is little reason to imagine that climate change won’t break the modern food system. Worse, industrial food production is a breeding ground for pandemic disease, and reasoned analysis suggests that the kind of concentrated animal-feeding operations that bring us cheap meat will also bring viruses that could decimate the human population. Again, this is nothing new. Just as early-modern climate change and the plague brought about the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism, so we face a future in which climate change and a vulnerability to big systemic shocks augur a dramatic end for capitalism’s ecology.

'A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

We’re astute enough students of history to see that what follows capitalism might not be better. Around the world, fascism has emerged from liberalism’s soil. Yet precisely as capitalism’s bills come due, communities are both resisting and developing complex and systemic responses at capitalism’s frontiers. Around each of the seven cheap things that make capitalism possible – nature, work, care, food, energy, money and lives – there are movements that are developing alternatives. Whether in a globally reviving labour movement, in the Movement for Black Lives’ demands around food, reparations and local economic sovereignty, or the feminismo campesino y popular (“popular peasant feminism”) developed by the La Via Campesina peasant movement in Latin America to bring together concerns around food, care, nature and work, movements are both fighting and developing intersectional alternatives.
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John Jordan, an activist and co-founder of the UK’s Reclaim the Streets movement, argues that resistance and alternatives are “the twin strands of the DNA of social change”. That change will need resources and space to develop. If we are made by capitalism’s ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practise new ways of producing and caring for one another together – a process of redoing, rethinking and reliving our most basic relations.

Adapted from A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel and Jason W Moore, published by Verso on 22 May, and available to buy at guardianbookshop.com. Patel will be speaking at a launch event for the book in London on 15 May.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/08/how-the-chicken-nugget-became-the-true-symbol-of-our-era

"The World That Food Made" with Raj Patel

2019-06-30T14:30:00.001-07:00

"The World That Food Made" with Raj Patel

November 14, 2018 | Raj Patel, an award-winning writer, activist and academic, connects our modern food system with history and sexism and calls for integrated change to create a more sustainable food system.

Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System. He is currently working on a documentary and book about the future of the food system

Link: https://youtu.be/u9lYVO9HVRo

Vegan Positives

2019-06-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

Alternative meats are finally hitting the mainstream

2019-05-31T01:12:00.004-07:00

Beyond Meats IPO success signals meat alternatives here to stay

Alternative meats are finally hitting the mainstream.

Stephen Johnson
02 May, 2019

Image source: Beyond MeatsTECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Beyond Meats began trading publicly on Thursday under the ticker BYND.

Beyond Meats and Impossible Foods are two alternative meat companies that've been dominating the space in recent years, with investors such as Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Alternative meat companies could significantly help the U.S. food industry cut down on environmentally harmful practices, namely the raising of cattle.

TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Beyond Meats began trading publicly on Thursday under the ticker BYND.

Beyond Meats and Impossible Foods are two alternative meat companies that've been dominating the space in recent years, with investors such as Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Alternative meat companies could significantly help the U.S. food industry cut down on environmentally harmful practices, namely the raising of cattle.

Shares of Beyond Meat soared on Thursday as the plant-based food company began trading publicly for the first time. The stock was trading at $68 (as of 2:30 p.m. E.T. Thursday) — more than three times higher than what the company expected.

The takeaway? Meat alternatives are quickly hitting the mainstream, and they're bringing in big money. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are currently the two biggest names in the meat alternative industry. You can find Beyond Meat hamburgers in restaurants such as Carl's Jr., A and W, Del Taco and T.G.I. Friday's, while Impossible Foods offers meatless burgers in some 7,000 U.S. restaurants, as well as Burger King, which recently released the Impossible Whopper.

In a market test in St. Louis Burger King restaurants, the Impossible Whopper performed so "exceedingly well" that Burger King wants to offer the vegetarian sandwich nationwide. One problem: Impossible Foods currently doesn't have enough supply to meet demand.

The company said in a statement that it "recognizes the inconvenience that this shortage is causing and sincerely apologizes to all customers, particularly those who have come to depend on the additional foot traffic and revenue that the Impossible Burger has generated."

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are doing well, to say the least. But with large food suppliers, such as Tyson and Purdue, also developing meatless food products — don't expect these two names to be the only vendors in the alternative meat space for long.

"There's a sense that there's a movement going on that's much bigger than any one company," Beyond Meats CEO Ethan Brown told Vox in April.

The environmental effects of the meat alternatives industry

Raising animals for the meat that ends up in our restaurants is an extraordinarily resource-intensive process. Globally, livestock farming accounts for 15 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, cattle exact a heavy toll on the environment through the large amounts of food the animals require, the land used to grow that food, and, most importantly, the methane they produce. After all, methane is a greenhouse gas that's 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide.

Of course, there are many other problems with the U.S. food industry, including, to name a few, the antibiotics given to animals (and the consequent antibiotic resistance they build up), the energy consumed in the maintenance and transport of meat products, and the ethics of killing animals for meat — especially in the context of factory farms.

Meat alternative companies could help the nation cut back on all of these environmental stressors. A 2018 study from the University of Michigan — which, to be sure, was commissioned by Beyond Meat — compared the environmental costs of producing meatless and traditional beef burgers, finding that producing meatless burgers takes:

99% less water

93% less land

90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions

Nearly 50% less energy

Link: https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/beyond-meat-ipo

Should ‘ultra-processed’ foods include health warnings?

2019-05-31T00:47:00.000-07:00

Ultra-processed danger
Should ‘ultra-processed’ foods include health warnings?

STEPHEN JOHNSON 30 May, 2019

A growing body of research, including two recent studies, shows how ultra-processed foods can lead to multiple diseases and shorten lifespan.

Ultra-processed foods include soft drinks, packaged snacks, reconstituted meat, pre-prepared frozen meals, and more.

Other research suggests that warning labels on food can affect what people choose to eat.

The U.S. government requires sellers of cigarettes and alcohol to include health warnings on the labels of their products. Should vendors of "ultra-processed foods" be required to do the same?

New research has some saying yes.

This week, the BMJ published a pair of studies that show how diets high in ultra-processed foods are linked to significantly higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, and death.

The findings build upon decades worth of evidence showing that processed foods can be devastating to long-term health.

In the four groups that make up the NOVA food classification system, ultra-processed foods are ranked as the unhealthiest. They include "soft drinks, packaged snacks, reconstituted meat, pre-prepared frozen meals," with ingredients like "sweeteners, colors, preservatives, and food-derived substances like casein, lactose and gluten."

These foods are unhealthy not only because they contain bad ingredients or lack nutrients, but also because they undergo processes like extrusion, molding, and milling.

"The nature of the cause is associated with the physical and chemical changes that happen to the food as a result of this high degree of industrial processing," Mark Lawrence, who co-wrote an editorial on the pair of recent studies, told Australia's ABC News. "It's an independent risk factor irrespective of the presence of, say, sodium or added sugar in the food."

Lawrence said the recent studies, along with the solid body of research on ultra-processed foods, have multiple implications for policy.

"I think the front of pack labelling is the most tangible one at the moment," Lawrence said. "It could be something as simple as, is this an ultra-processed food or not."

Junk food warnings

Would requiring makers of ultra-processed junk foods to include such labels on food be government overreach? Provided that you're okay with the warnings the U.S. government currently puts on tobacco and alcohol, there seems to be little reason why we shouldn't place the same labels on ultra-processed food. In fact, there may even be more reason to include warnings on junk food, as noted by David Katz for Time:

". . . unlike tobacco or alcohol, food is supposed to be good for us. It is supposed to be sustenance, not sabotage. You can't smoke tobacco and avoid tobacco. You can't drink alcohol and avoid alcohol. But you can eat food and avoid junk. There is, in fact, an impressive range of overall nutritional quality in almost every food category — so we could abandon junk food altogether, and quickly learn not to miss it."

There's some reason to think junk-food warning labels would be effective in affecting what people choose to eat. In a 2018 study from the University of Melbourne, researchers found that warning labels — particularly graphic, negative warnings — encouraged people to exercise self-control when selecting meals.

"We can really see a signature of deploying this self-control to resist unhealthy choices," study co-author Stefan Bode of the University of Melbourne told Australia's ABC News. "This is something we're really excited about to follow up and see how this happens."

Link: https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/processed-food-warning

Vapes are full of flavors—and fungi

2019-05-01T04:06:00.001-07:00

THE DICE

HEALTH
Vapes are full of flavors—and fungi

Your lungs could be the ones to suffer.

By Kat Eschner April 24, 2019

The list of health concerns about vaping grows longer.

Deposit Photos

When they first came on the market, industry advocates originally touted vapes—electronic nicotine delivery systems such as a JUUL—as a smoking cessation aid. In the time since, they’ve exploded in popularity among young people, leading to worries that brands like JUUL are contributing to a new and dangerous nicotine addiction epidemic among teens who would never have thought to light up a traditional cigarette. E-cigarettes have public officials concerned, and a new studyfrom Harvard researchers suggests there are two more reasons to worry: the presence of fungi and bacteria in vape juice and e-cigarette cartridges.

In the study, David Christiani and his colleagues tested 75 e-cigarette products in total for two contaminants: endotoxin, which is part of the cell walls of a class of bacteria, and glucan, which is part of the makeup of fungi. Chronic exposure to endotoxin is linked to asthma and reduced lung capacity; while the form of glucan they found is known to cause inflammation, which is a big problem in a sensitive system like your lungs. Both microbial products are found in many places out in the world. The issue here is that they’re in a substance that’s inhaled—and inhaled frequently.

Of the products they tested, of which about half were e-cigarette liquid and half were cartridges, they found endotoxin in 17 products, or 23 percent, of products. Eighty-one percent, or 61 products, contained glucan. Even though Christiani says the concentrations of these two microbial products “are not very high,” knowing they’re present “adds a couple more agents to the already long list of exposures from e-cigarette products,” Christiani says.

00:16
07:30

E-cigarettes work by heating up a nicotine-containing liquid so it vaporizes and can be inhaled by users. This liquid also contains flavorings, from the traditional (mint) to the avant-garde (banana.) The flavors are thought to be one of the reasons that e-cigarettes have become so popular among young people. Nobody really knows what happens to the juice chemically when it’s heated up.. Many compounds break down into dangerous chemicals when heated, and the researchers still don’t know very much about what’s in e-cigarette fluid.

Experts do know that some flavorings are linked to heart and blood vessel damage.) And there is a body of evidence showing that e-cigarettes product harmful carcinogens and other chemicals, as well as exposing users to metal byproducts from the devices themselves. However, because e-cigarettes are loosely regulated, with a huge diversity of products in the marketplace, it’s hard to definitively state what’s in them. It doesn’t help that the e-cigarette industry, like the traditional tobacco industry, has a stake in obscuring the health risks of their addictive (and lucrative) products.

This new study, which looked at brand-new products, also points to the fact that e-cigarette products are getting contaminated with microbes somewhere in the production process. In the case of cartridges, he speculates that the presence of microbial products may be the result of contamination on the cotton wicks that are part of the cartridge. But nobody knows yet, though his team is going to try and find out in further research.

Sanjay Sethi, a professor of medicine who specializes in lung health at the University of Buffalo, says the findings are “interesting, but not surprising.” Sethi was not involved with the study. He would like to see further research elaborating on how the levels of endotoxin and glucan in e-cigarettes stack up against those in traditional cigarettes, which he says would give the results more context. However, he agrees the current study’s findings are another reason for concern about e-cigarettes.

tags:
e-cigarettes
vaping
asthma
lung cancer
lungs
cigarettes
health

Link: https://www.popsci.com/vaping-fungi-bacteria