The Food Chain - What's Eating What Radio

Former Monsanto exective Michael Taylor is now the nation’s Food Safety Czar. His 1,200 pages of new food safety rules lead us to ask…

Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam. Wait, what’s this… a buffalo in the house? Topics include why buffalo were slaughtered to near extinction; how, in the 1850’s, a Texas rancher and wife saved the great herd from extinction;

A substantial percentage of the minerals, vitamins and protein in our food crops has simply disappeared over the past 50 years. This leads us to ask…

Guests:Patty Lovera, Ass Director, Food & Water Watch

Topics include the inherent vulnerabililty of farms and farmers; how some take advantage of this vulnerabililty to steal the property of others; and whether the stealing can be stopped.

Topics include how some plant and insect pests are becoming resistant to genetically-engineered crops; the impact these super pests are having on farmers ability to grow food; and which will likely win the fight: people or pests? Guests: Steve Smith,

Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow are on a cross country mission in a topsy turvy bus to convince the new President to establish an organic farm at the White House. Their mission leads us to ask….

Addiction, autism, dementia… Oh me!… Fatigue, sleep disorders, ADHD… Oh my! All the mental disorders that now drive the world crazy lead us to ask….

They say bees provide for thirty percent of the food we eat. They also say more than thirty percent of our bee colonies are collapsing. This thirty percent business leads us to ask…

When autumn nights brought cold and darkness, our forebears put away meat for their winter. We now live in a different kind of world, which leads some to ask, “Should we not take the blood out of the blood moon?” Topics include the traditio

Guests: Caroline Cox, Center for Environmental Health; Rebecca Riley, Natural Resources Defense Council (NOTE: Monsanto and National Corn Growers Association refused to participate.)

Like magic bullets, antibiotics kill harmful bacteria and allow us to multiply like, well, mold in a Petri dish! Our magic bullets, however, do not kill all bacteria- some survive as "super bugs." This leads one to ask, "What can stop super bugs?" Topic

Topics include a look at the scientific method of animal feeding studies; how some studies prove GM foods are safe to eat, while others prove GM foods cause severe stomach inflammation and cancerous tumors; and how one should decide whose science to bel

We fear dirty rats, and so endeavor to kill them with poison. Our poison, however, also kills creatures that prey on rats, which means there are ever more rats to poison, which leads us to ask…

Consider Michael Olson's Irrefutable Law of the Food Chain #2: The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in that food. And so we ask, “Who is in charge of food safety?” Topics include the dis

It's the law of the land! The more valuable an object, the more likely someone will counterfeit it. This leads one to ask, "What's in those pills?" Topics include a look why prescription drugs are being counterfeited; the ways in which individuals and

Santayana was thinking of people when he remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But could not the same be said of plants? This thought leads us to ask…

When his goats ate the woodrat houses, instead of blackbrush shrubs, and became high-performace goats, Fred asked…

o stop animal diseases, like avian flu, from sweeping through the nation’s 1.4 million farms, the Federal government has established a National Animal Identification System. NAIS asks all farmers and hobbyists who husband animals to voluntarily reg

Its in the hamburger patty. Its in the hamburger bun. Its in the milkshake. In fact, soy is in many, if not most, of the processed foods we eat. The ubiquity of this bean leads us to ask…

They sneak across the border to work in our fields. After tasting our Great American way, they’re here to stay, by the millions. So we ask…

We paved it over and swept it away as if it were, well, dirty. Then we woke to the fact that soil is where life begins, and where life ends. And so we ask…

The FDA is reclassifying herbs, vitamins, and dietary supplements as “synthetic food preservatives,” which means many of them may be pulled off the market and the rest subjected to extreme regulation. This leads us to ask…

That we know so much about eating the right kinds of food, forget everything we know about the right foods, and go guilt free for the fun foods we find at festivals and amusement parks leads us to ask: Do you count the calories in festival foods?

The good book tells us to take dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the livestock and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. But it does not tell us how, and so we ask: Is it possible to raise animals to eat in ways that s