The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. Michael F. Jacobson. Eric Holt Gimenez: Of Myths and Men: Mark Lynas and the intoxicating Power of Technocracy. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
" Why do certain people and ideas suddenly capture the limelight while others go unnoticed? Others seem never to go away... The recent ascent of environmental writer Mark Lynas to prominence in the debate on genetically modified crops (GMOs) is a lesson in the power of myths. In a broadly-aired speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, Mr. Lynas publicly apologized for once destroying GMO crops while at Greenpeace. The laundry list of what Mark Lynas got wrong about both GMOs and science is extensive, and has been refuted point by point by some of the world's leading agroecologists and biologists (though none have received the extensive media coverage allotted to Mr. But the problem is not Mark Lynas. The Big Three, for example, cling dogmatically to a theory called "Island Biogeography" that relates species richness (biodiversity) to "islands" of suitable habitat.
Won't GMO technologies lift all agricultural boats? Bottoms up, Mr. Search. Calvin Trillin has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published “An Education in Georgia,” an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia.
More than three hundred of Trillin's pieces have appeared in The New Yorker. His work includes comic casuals and a wide variety of nonfiction, but his principal interest has been reporting on America. Between 1967 and 1982 he wrote a series of pieces from various locations within the United States called “U.S. Journal.” He has published two collections from this series, “U.S. After serving in the Army, Trillin joined Time magazine, spending one year in their Atlanta bureau, covering the civil rights struggle. From 1978-1995, Trillin wrote a humor column for The Nation, which became syndicated in 1985. “Calvin Trillin’s Uncle Sam,” Trillin’s first one-man show, was presented at the American Place Theatre in New York in 1988. Trillin lives in Greenwich Village. Frances Moore Lappe: My Best Gift, Ever: I Saw the Solution to World Hunger.
In the late sixties, my life changed forever.
I asked, Why are millions of people going hungry? Every other species seemed to have figured this one out -- how to feed itself and its offspring. So what's up with us? Headlines screamed "scarcity," there's just not enough! But lo and behold, as I added up the figures, one truth jumped out. So over the decades after Diet for a Small Planet came out, I tugged away at layer after layer of "whys," and, finally, I came up with a sound bite I loved, "Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy. " And what does it mean? Simply that, at root, the problem is one of the concentrations of social power so extreme that -- from far-flung fields to the global supermarket -- they deprive people not only of food but of dignity, of confidence in their own proven capacities.
Okay. Actually... in many places -- still mostly invisible. I first asked the most basic questions. And what changed? "We started meeting, talking. "No.