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Author Archives: GDS
Feeding Hungry Indians
News today in the Bombay press about India’s worrisome food imbalance. Too much food. It seems that India’s “buffer stocks” have more than 30 million tons of wheat and rice over what they want or can handle. Having sucked down … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Biotechnology, Food, India, Population
17 Comments
Why We Eat So Much Meat: Beef, Bombs, and Convenience
Why we eat so much meat is a question that keeps coming up, as well it should. The real reason is that…. well to cut to the chase, there are a lot of reasons, big and small, general and specific. … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Food
Tagged beef, distancing, feedlots, fertilizer, food, overproduction
2 Comments
Golden Rice, soon. Or not.
We have a new E.T.A. on Golden Rice. Well, sort of: the institutes in the Philippines that have been conducting field tests since 2008 say they may be able to submit the needed data for regulatory approval by 2013 in … Continue reading
Do Not Read: GM Cotton and Indian Farmer Suicide
More in the news this week about Indian cotton farmers killing themselves. Mainly cotton farmers. Mostly deep in debt. One every 30 minutes. According to some, the underlying cause is the spread of being genetically modified Bt cotton. It has … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Biotechnology, India
Tagged biotechnology, bt botton, cotton, genetically modified, india, suicide
5 Comments
10 Billion People and Paul Ehrlich’s Taxi
When the U.N. announced its global population projection of 10 billion by 2010 a few days ago, it was hard not to think back on Paul Ehrlich. Prof. Ehrlich was the butterfly researcher whose books and TV appearances scared the … Continue reading
Gone are the Days when the Ox Fall Down?
Last year my daughter’s boyfriend sent us a bottle of red wine from a biodynamique winemaker in the Loire Valley, along with a note explaining that “he uses a horse named Joker to plow fields and transport grapes.” A slightly … Continue reading
Baseball Bats and Breast Cancer: The Court Mulls Over Gene Patenting
A few weeks ago in a courtroom in Washington DC, lawyers with the blessing of the US Dept. of Justice (DOJ) argued that gene patents are invalid. The judges of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are now … Continue reading
GM Eggplant and Ayurveda in India
India may be the world’s most closely-watched arena for the spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, but it has allowed only one of these crops so far — cotton. Until recently it looked like its first GM food crop would … Continue reading
Blood type: Bt
A new study by toxicologists and obstetricians looks in the bloodstreams of a sample of Canadians for pesticides associated with genetically modified foods (new acronym alert: PAGMF). They studied pregnant women, their fetuses (actually umbilical cord blood after delivery), and … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Biotechnology, Food
Tagged biotechnology, bt, genetically modified, toxicology
6 Comments
Staph, Lies and Videotape
A new article in Clinical Infectious Diseases reports on an investigation of staph contamination (Staphylococcus aureus) on CAFO beef, pork, chicken and turkey in grocery stores in 5 US cities. Staph was found on 47% of the meat samples, but … Continue reading
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