Bill Farren's Profile

Take corn, the most highly subsidized crop, which received $9.4 billion in 2005 -- nearly as much as all other crops combined. Corn production has more than doubled since the 1970s, and all this artificially cheapened corn is unloaded on the public, largely in the form of tasty but empty-calorie junk foods. Refined corn is the chief source of carbohydrates and calories in most processed foods, particularly snack foods. High-fructose corn syrup is the most widely used caloric sweetener in the United States. And corn meal is widely used as cheap animal feed to fatten factory-raised livestock.

n contrast, healthful foods are grossly underfunded. USDA guidelines advise that fruits and vegetables make up at least one-third of daily intake, but just 5 percent of its food funding supports the fruit and vegetable industries. There is virtually no funding for public education and advertising encouraging fruit and vegetable consumption. At its peak, the "Five-a-day" campaign budget was just $3 million annually -- compared with the $11 billion spent yearly in the United States for fast food and junk food advertising. McDonald's spent $500 million just promoting its "We Love To See You Smile" campaign.

the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking.

Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat.

Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients.

he Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal.

Four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.)

Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient.

if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist.

Today, people still believe that pushing and intimidating teachers
and children will ‘make them accountable’ and ‘teach them a lesson.’

For an Education based
on control, intimidation, and intellectual censorship makes a mockery of our
so-called constitution and democratic values.

Higher education places a high premium on originality, whereas adapting or improving another’s educational materials is rarely understood to be a creative or valuable contribution. Thus, while scholars are expected to build on the work of others in their disciplinary research, teaching is largely treated as a private, highly territorial enterprise.