The Food Chain - What's Eating What Radio

There are 8,570,000 references to factory farming accessible on the internet, and few are favorable. This leads one to ask, "What's all the fuss about factory farming?" Topics include a look at why animals are grown in "factory farms;" whether factory f

Topics include why, to many, animal protein has become environmentally and politically incorrect; the forthcoming competition between animal protein and replica protein; and what consumers can do to shape the outcome of this competition for their food d

An estimated 80 of the world’s population is entomophager, which is to say, bug eating. This leads us to ask…

Topics include the fundamental strategy for successful metropolitan farming; which crops are most appropriate, and most profitable; and a look a successful metropolitan farms. Guest: Michael Olson, Author, MetroFarm, Host, Food Chain Radio

We feed ourselves with the cheap labor of foreign hands. But this leads us to ask, “How expensive is cheap labor?” Topics include how immigration is changing the social fabric of California and the United States, how immigrant labor from La

Guests: The Professor of Agriculture, Tom Burford, Author of Apples of North America

While the heart has reasons that reason does not understand, the heartland has corn– 80 million acres of corn. This leads us to ask, "Should we subsidize corn?" Topics include why our food chain was transformed from one based on grass to

Guests: Open Microphone

The journal Obesity suggests Americans alive today can expect to collectively sacrifice one billion years of life to obesity. This leads us to ask…

When Chairman Mao ordered China to take a great leap forward toward pure communism, 45 to 60 million Chinese were worked, beaten and starved to death. Mao’s great leap leads us to ask…

Guests: Virginia farmer Martha Boneta and Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund President Pete Kennedy

It is the match made in heaven: Plants breathe carbon dioxide and emit oxygen; people breathe oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. Some now say this relationship has gone astray, and so we ask…

They are married with children: She is the chair of the UC Davis Plant Genetics Lab and he teaches at the UC Davis Organic Farm. Their suggestion of a future filled with genetically-engineered organic foods leads us to ask…

In the name of food safety, the federal government has taken total control of what we may feed each other. Sedgewick, Maine, has rebelled and passed the nation’s first “Food Sovereignty” law. This rebellion leads us to ask…

They are spending over $40 million to convince Californians to deny themselves the right to know about genetically-modified organisms in their food. This leads one to ask…

There are mega trillions of them, and they are everywhere– in our hair, on our food, in our mattress. But after we smash one with enough force to knock over a baby elephant, we ask…

Topics include how we treat the toxic in our toxic household and industrial wastes; we do with our treated wastes; and whether foods produced from lands containing treated wastes are safe to eat. Guests: Caroline Snyder, Professor Emeritus at Roches

They turn the grass upon which we would starve into the food upon which we can thrive. And so we ask…

When the U.S. Air Force wanted to determine which of its dining facilities was best, it called on California restaurateur Ted Burke, and made him, for the moment at least, the equivalent of a major general. This leads us to ask… Can an institution

The headline read, “Long Road from Farm to Fork Worsens Outbreaks,” and the story told of how distance exacerbated the recent canteloupe contamination that killed some and sickened many. And so we ask…

Like the Dutch boy with a finger in the dike, grandmother Pamm Larry is trying to stop the flood of genetically modified organisms washing over the land by forcing the labeling of GMO foods. This leads us to ask…

Droughts here, floods there, global-warming everywhere! And so we pause to ask, “Is weather going wild?” And, if so, “How will we grow food?” Topics include whether, or not, weather is going wild; what impact global warming would

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you! And so we pause to ask….

When it comes to organic, they say, “Everybody’s got to play by the rules, whether they sell $1 or $10 million of product.” Their declaration leads us to ask…

In the blink of an historical eye, China went from being the world’s capital of totalitarian socialism to being the world’s capital of free-booting capitalism. This leads us to ask…