Bacon, ice cream and potato chips are all foods people seem to crave. Chip maker Lay’s, after all, based its advertising on the phrase, “You can’t eat just one.”
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Bittman opens this food history by quoting four figures: Naomi Klein, John Muir, Rachel Carson, and Malcolm X—four people from different eras but bound by their understanding of the interconnectedness of the world—before walking readers through hundreds of food mistakes throughout human history, from the salinization of Sumerian wheat fields to the sugary backstabbing origin of Heinz ketchup.
He does not mince words: “Agriculture has, over the course of human history, gotten away with murder. With each passing century, it’s gotten better at it, until it became a justification for imperialism and genocide.” Today’s deeply inefficient and fossil-fuel-powered food system is only this century’s attempt to exploit labor and resources. Along with the structural pressures on farmers, the climate crisis is a long-term form of violence on agriculturists, perpetrated by rich countries, that affects the livelihood of the poorest farmers on Earth—and its legacy is set to stretch for decades to come.
Larger number of underpaid workers than at McDonald’s and Walmart combined
Washington, D.C. - In a ground-breaking executive action President Joseph R. Biden will sign this afternoon, more than 700,000 federal government contract workers, mostly women and people of color, are on a path to winning a significant raise to a guaranteed minimum wage of at least $15 an hour. “With today’s executive action, President Biden is leading by example and heeding the demands working people have been making that leaders must respect, protect and pay them,” said
Service Employees International Union International President Mary Kay Henry . “Too often the Black and brown workers, especially women, who keep our government running behind the scenes have been ignored and their work devalued. These courageous workers have been speaking up and making their voices heard. It’s a breath of fresh air to have a president who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with them and we look forward to seeing what else comes from the Biden administration.”