Doug Jones wins big in Alabama, defeating the sexual pervert, Republican Roy Moore
Bipartisan Bill Might Seed the Future of Organic Farming by Civil Eats
“The last Farm Bill cost taxpayers an estimated $489 billion. But less than 1 percent of that funding was spent on agricultural research. And a tiny piece of that 1 percent went specifically to organic agriculture research, via the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI)….In order to move this needle, Pingree in May introduced the Organic Agriculture Research Act of 2017 (H.R. 2436), which proposes more than doubling the program’s funding to $50 million per year through 2023, with the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill.” – Civil Eats
“Support for the legislation has been picking up steam, with more than 50 new co-sponsors (47 Democrats, 4 Republicans) signing on between September and November 2017. Organizations like the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF), the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), and Beyond Pesticides are all lobbying for its passage, and Rodale Institute’s Organic Farmers’ Association included it in the group’s first round of policy positions.” – Civil Eats
How The Food Industry Uses Cavitation, The Ocean’s Most Powerful Punch by NPR
Cavitation, before only a natural phenomena used by miniscule shrimp to attack their prey, is now employed by humans in the food and beverage industry to speed up the processing of products such as yogurt and beer.
“Cavitation is when low pressure in a liquid produces a bubble that rapidly collapses, and heats up to 20,000 Kelvin — hotter than the sun’s surface…Some physicists even theorize that cavitation bubbles could get hot enough to power nuclear fusion.” – NPR 
Hydro Dynamics is one company that has branched out, now offering equipment which utilizes cavitation bubbles for processing pet food and dairy products. Specifically, “to unravel and condense proteins” in low-fat whey drinks in order to effect a richer, fat-like mouthfeel. Yoplait and Valio, have also patented in-house methods of using cavitation to process their dairy products in recent years. Cabarrus, which makes a beer infused with cold brew coffee uses cavitation to extract more flavor from coffee. Apparently, the possibilities are endless!
Mexico and the US for NAFTA: In Sickness and In Health
After the 1980s, a time period when the transition to free trade had already begun, perforated by lifted tariffs and an increase of foreign investments in Mexico, the United States and Canada enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. The agreement was lauded by neoliberalist and advocates alike, claiming that open markets would enable comparative advantage and ultimately, increase the quality and production of goods. In contrast, opponents who counted the value of more than just economic growth, opposed NAFTA; warning that countries (ahem, Mexico!) might lose its cultural and economic independence after all.
Without doubt, NAFTA’s mainstay success has been increasing fortunes for Big Agricultural companies and conglomerate food-retailers, who continue to benefit from the open market and take hold of small towns and villages through strong, pervasive investment. Nafta’s impact has been far more pervasive. Direct United States investment into Mexican food and beverage companies soared to $10.2 billion in 2012 from $2.3 billion before Nafta, and the link to the trade deal is undisputed; the United States Department of Agriculture states, “Many of these investments were initiated following implementation of” Nafta.
Moreover, according to the New York Times, NAFTA has actually “transformed the Mexican diet and food ecosystem to increasingly mirror those of the United States.” The article cites that, in 1980, 7 percent of Mexicans were obese, a figure that tripled to 20.3 percent by 2016, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Diabetes is now Mexico’s top killer, claiming 80,000 lives a year, the World Health Organization has reported.
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