Science & Society

Egg Labels Are Scrambled Logic

A new survey shows egg carton labels are confusing organic consumers. They don't really know the difference between "pasture-raised" eggs and the “free-range” and “cage-free” kind but a pasture-raised company is banking on the fact that if p ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Feb 13 2019 - 12:33pm

No One Is Really Shocked That Ben & Jerry's Is Anti-Science: It's A Surprise Unilever Is

There's no politics in ice cream but if there were, you can bet Ben  &  Jerry's would be the official ice cream of Mother Jones and Union of Concerned Scientists and other Democrats everywhere. It's over-priced, it has all the correct so ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jun 20 2014 - 9:44am

Feeding The World Of 2050

If the world will have 9 billion people or more by 2050, we'll probably be okay. The scare stories of food riots and mass famine once promoted by 1960s Doomsday Prophet Paul Ehrlich are today only promoted by, well, Paul Ehrlich. Even organic farmers ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jun 22 2014 - 6:30pm

Higher Alcohol Taxes Just Lead To Fewer Price Increases For Cheapest Alcohol

Policy makers may think more sin taxes will cut consumption- but it doesn't really work that way. Supermarkets recognize there are a lot more poor people than rich people and so they don't mark up the same products accordingly. A paper written b ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 23 2014 - 7:30pm

Food Fad News: Low Sugar Is The New Low Fat

Just a few short years ago, sugar growers and packagers had to have felt pretty good. Thanks to a rash of suspect epidemiological claims about high-fructose corn syrup, and then marketing claims and labels touting a lack of HFCS (even pancake syrup, made ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 24 2014 - 1:30pm

Food Fear: How People Exploit Ingredient Concern And How Increasing Familiarity Can Stop It

Scare journalism is big business. Hardly a day goes by without mainstream media promoting "X is harmful to your health" claims based on surveys, epidemiology and suspect methodology. As a result, people are taught to be afraid of Subway bread, b ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 25 2014 - 12:35am

Foreign-Trained Physicians Frustrated At Lack Of Residency Positions

The United States has the world's best medical care. Wealthy people from all over the planet abandon their country's government health plans and journey to the US for elite treatment.  ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 26 2014 - 3:00pm

Scientists Behaving Badly

Its been a bad week for science, particularly for the science related to food production. The notoriously flawed "Seralini Study" about tumors in rats fed GMOs is being republished in another journal after having been retracted. Another paper ha ...

Article - Steve Savage - Jun 26 2014 - 6:09pm

Calling Bee.S. On The Pollinator Apocalypse- Don't Make The Perfect The Enemy Of The Good

Generally speaking, when a politician goes on television and says he is creating a special task force to look at a product, you know what happened; someone wrote about it in the New York Times and someone did a poll and someone else told him it would look ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Jun 27 2014 - 6:56pm

The Upside To Foreign Land Grabs- It Could Feed 300 Million People

The land known as Israel today was once pretty bleak. Mark Twain spoke of the barren landscape and lack of people when it was owned by colonial European powers. Nothing much was there. But then Jews began buying it up. They planted crops and modernized ir ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 26 2014 - 10:12pm