If governments are serious about the obesity epidemic, they need to encourage people to eat real whole foods by any means necessary. It would certainly help stop the spiraling health care costs that many governments(and insurance companies!) pay for.

I'm not sure whether this strategy would work, but since poorer people are now more obese than richer people, it tells me that the price of certain foods has a lot to do with what people consume. So my solution would be to subsidise healthy foods such as brown rice, whole meal bread / pasta, potatoes, corn breads, legumes/beans, and of course vegetables and fruit so much, that they cost almost nothing, while at the same time taxing foods that are clearly associated with obesity and illness. That way people still have a choice to eat unhealthy foods, but they are paying for their healthcare costs upfront, while having easy access to healthful foods.

OK, yes. That's correct. I have no personal experience in grain farming (except corn, but grown to eat on the cob, so that's also different).
I still say the same applies to OVER use of chemical fertilizers and the environment, but perhaps that's much less of an issue with grain crops.

As I said above, I admit that new crop genes paired with new chemicals could produce greater yields on more damaged land. Roundup/roundup ready crops are a prime example of this, as they artificially eliminate competition for the remaining nutrients and root space, leaving it all for the crop. That doesn't eliminate the damage though, it only hides it from the farmer. When they stop working (and they will eventually), we'll have serious trouble.

@newtboy

If you are only growing twice what you can eat yourself, you are describing a large garden, not a farm.

More over, what you class as 'industrial' farming is in fact the entirety of all grain farming. If there is a place in farming for wheat, corn, soy, canola and so on, 99% of it is done on what you class 'industrial' farming.

Your typical family farm is over a thousand acres today. If I go out and start naming the family farms of just friends and family I know, I can come up with 30-40+. They all farm over a thousand acres, they use tractors and combines and they make a fair bit more food than twice what they can eat. They aren't the ultra rich land barons that your 'industrial' moniker would imply either, at most they have a singular hired hand to help out with the work. The ones with children interested in taking over often don't need to hire anyone at all.

If you want to abandon that agricultural production and the methods used you mean raising the cost of production more than 100 times over. I can't even fathom the cost of weeding a thousand acres of wheat by hand, let alone removing grasshoppers from a corn crop that way. I'm sorry, but what works for your garden doesn't scale to grain crops.

Oh, and the conflation of herbicide and pesticide was done by the fear monger crowd. Listing round-up as a chemical that only kills plants and not insects and animals didn't fit their agenda so now everything is supposed to be called a pesticide across the board. Maybe that's just a Canadian thing, but the bottom line is that if you had a crop completely over run with insects you could spray it once a day with stupidly high concentrations of round-up and the water in the sprayer would do about the same damage to the insects as would the round up.


As for the video's other claims, I stand by my characterisation. You can't honestly tell me the video is trying to put forward on open and honest picture of Monsanto's actions and history. For example, the Manhattan Project, here's a transcription for clarity:
"Monsanto head Charles Allen Thomas was called to the pentagon not only asked to join the Manhattan project, but to lead it as it's co-director. Thomas put Monsanto's central research department hard to work building the atomic bomb.Fully aware of the implications of the task the budding empire sealed it's relationship with the inner cicrcles of washington with two fateful days in Japan.
"
- queue clip of nuclear blasts-

I think I stand by my summation.

"[the] world is actually healthier, wealthier, better educated, more tolerant, less violent than it has ever been."

Not in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Jemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, downtown Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland. Not in Greece. And I'm not entirely sure it's a better place for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who left their rural areas to become work nomads. Also not sure about the all the millions of people in Africa whose livelihood gets crushed by subsidised produce/corn from the West. Not sure about all the Indian farmers who are driven into suicide by the monopoly powers of seed suppliers. Not sure about India as a whole, now suffering from the third year in a row of a belated monsoon and horrific drought.

"Democracy means you don't everything you want, when you want it, all the time" ... "and occasionally comprise, and stay principled, but recognise that it's a long march towards progress"

He talks the talk, but even for a center-right guy, he doesn't walk the walk. Principles went out the window in Gitmo. Principles went out the window when the drivers behind the illegal war of aggression in Iraq were not prosecuted in accordance with the Nuremberg Principles. Principles went out the window when carpet surveillance pissed all over the Constitution. Principles went out the window when US military forces aid Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria just because they oppose Assad. Even mentioning principles in the face of the gruesome, drone-driven terror campaigns in at least half a dozen countries makes me want to vomit.

And don't get me started on compromise. If you ban single-payer and drop the public option before negotiations begin, that's not compromise. That's theatre meant to mislead us plebs while you add an additional layer of "market" to an already dysfunctional market, which ends up profiting the insurance companies yet again.

One sample "weird chicken behavior" is psychotically aggressive bantam (miniature) roosters.

Too small and ill equipped (not much spur, etc.) to do any damage to a human, but they *act* like they think they are velociraptors or something. Bring food in, fill their water, get vaguely close to them ... they attack your feet. My dad taught me to put my shoe between their legs and lift/kick them into a wall -- pretty hard. Stuns / dazes them for a minute or so -- long enough to fill their feed or whatever. But stay longer than that and they'll be right back to attacking your feet.


On the female side, hens sometimes choose very bizarre locations to lay their eggs. We had a metal cylindrical feeder thing with a tray at the bottom -- fill cracked corn or whatever into the cylinder (open on top), and it will gravity flow down as they eat some out of the bottom tray. We had one hen that liked to jump in the top of that cylinder (maybe 10 inch diameter) and then lay eggs on top of the food in there. Extremely tight fit, no room to move -- like putting your arm in a Pringles can. Sometimes she got stuck if the surface of the food was too far down.

I've even seen a hen that sat on the surface of a bough in a cedar tree. Enough branch and cedar foliage to hold up the hen's body, but then we found an egg right under her on the ground -- not dense enough material to actually keep the egg from falling through. The egg was broken, but the hen just stubbornly sat in that tree for a day or two, not realizing what had happened.

True story -- the folks who fish in Alaska during the salmon runs are told that if a bear shows up to step back from the river. The bears won't bother them if they step back.

Well, person I was talking to told me that a bear showed up, everyone stepped back.... and the bear went to their catch lines, or whatever they are called, picked them up and ate all the fish. Like eating corn on the cob.

Why go into the river and work for a fish, when they are already caught for you?

Your video, Hair Iron Pops Single Kernel of Corn, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by cricket.

Double post *dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Hair-Iron-Pops-Single-Kernel-of-Corn

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by eric3579. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

I think I'll just keep eating corn tortillas, which don't use lard.

I like your suggestion to use butter for wheat tortillas though... I'll have to give that a go.

Did he start the video saying "corn duct!"?