The Black Death Undermined Feudalism. What Does COVID-19 Mean for Capitalism?

Posted by on Jun 6, 2020 in Articles, Featured, Food | 0 comments You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down stairs, and head out to your car to begin your morning commute. If you had to focus your...
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The Hunger President

Posted by on Apr 28, 2017 in Articles, Featured, Food, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. The quote comes from Stalin. The policy comes from Donald Trump. Trump famously changed his policy on Syria after seeing photographs of a couple Syrian children killed by a chemical attack. It didn’t matter that the Syrian government had already killed thousands of children. In targeting the Assad regime, Trump was moved by the tragedy,...
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Menu for a Hot Planet

Posted by on Sep 25, 2014 in Articles, Featured, Food | 0 comments In many ways the human race hit the skids when we stopped throwing spears and gathering berries. Once we started planting seeds and harvesting the produce, we grew shorter, fatter, sicker, and considerably more overworked. An alien visiting from another planet during that critical transition period to a more settled existence might easily have thought that we were being domesticated by our...
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Going Organic

Posted by on Feb 16, 2014 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Food, Uncategorized | 0 comments Ten years ago I visited Slovenia to do a report on organic farming for the Bay Area-based organization Food First. I was drawn to the former Yugoslav republic because it had recently joined with several neighboring Italian and Austrian provinces to create the world’s first organic bioregion – the Alpe-Adria. Organic farming made a lot of sense for Slovenia since its farms were relatively...
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Eating History

Posted by on Feb 18, 2013 in Articles, Blog, Eastern Europe, Europe, Featured, Food, Russia and Eastern Europe, Uncategorized | 2 comments The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another. That might not have been the intention of the museum founders. But this tension actually captures the ambiguities of East Germany and the ambivalence that many Germans feel today about the erstwhile communist state. The...
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Jeju Island: Paradise with a Dark Side

Posted by on Apr 24, 2012 in Articles, Featured, Food, Korea | 0 comments I’m standing with a social worker beneath the palm trees outside a municipal building in the main city of Jeju Island. We’re talking about a nearby naval base, which the South Korean government is trying to build and a number of islanders are trying to prevent. She’s repeating a familiar refrain about Jeju — that it’s a paradise on Earth, but one with a dark side. The naval base is...
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