Daily Archives: August 11, 2011

2 posts

On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again)

It’s the 10th anniversary of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Have things improved? Here’s her new, wake-up-call afterward. Posted by Barbara Ehrenreich at 7:05am, August 9, 2011. It was at lunch with the editor of Harper’s Magazine that the subject came up: How does anyone actually live “on the wages available to the unskilled”? And then Barbara Ehrenreich said something that altered her life and resulted, improbably enough, in a bestselling book with almost two million copies in print. “Someone,” she commented, “ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism — you know go out there and try it for […]

Monsanto’s New Sweet Corn, Another Unregulated, Unlabeled Frankenfood

Organic Bytes #289 Government regulation of genetically engineered crops, already weak, is increasingly non-existent. The latest example of this new hands-off policy is the commercialization of Monsanto’s first flagship product for the produce aisle: genetically engineered sweet corn, containing the Bt toxin and herbicide-resistant genes. Monsanto’s new sweet corn produces Bt toxin, a genetically modified version of an insecticide from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Until now, Monsanto’s Bt corn and cotton crops have mostly been used in animal feed and highly processed ingredients. Even with this limited exposure, Bt toxin has already been found in the blood of pregnant […]