You know you've arrived when you get dissed in the New Yorker in a Critic-At-Large discussion. You'll be hearing more about this, and about Marco Flavio's excellent Cook Here and Now group in the next couple of weeks.

Much more stimulating, and surprising, was a splendid conversation I had with Megan McArdle who writes a fine blog over at The Atlantic Monthly.

The good people at BloggingHeads.tv matched us up because they thought it'd be fun to pit a lefty-global-justice type against a libertarian vegan. Sparks certainly flew, but in a very good natured way.

Better, there were some important points of similarity in our positions. As someone who still thinks that one of the founding texts of libertarianism, Anarchy, State and Utopia is a *very* good read, this shouldn't have come as a big surprise, but that's because the political philosophy of libertarianism has been tarred by people whom Megan refers to, correctly in my view, as wingnuts. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 May, 2008 - 17:30

File under: You Can't Make this Shit Up.

I'm in Seattle at the moment, for the first time since the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. And a friend at the Community Alliance for Global Justice passed on this little nugget.

PepsiCo's Mountain Dew brand is deciding which of three new flavours of soda to unleash on the market: Revolution, Voltage or SuperNova. You, dear consumer, can decide in a process that they've dubbed "DewMocracy". ... read more »

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Posted on 10 May, 2008 - 22:54

Farewell Jean Ziegler, whose tenure as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Food came to an end on April 30. He was an outspoken advocate of the right to food, and his denouncing of biofuels as "a crime against humanity" was every bit as forceful as it needed to be.

They're big shoes for the next Rapporteur to fill, but I have very high hopes for Olivier De Schutter, the Belgian law professor who took up the position on May 1, and has already come out swinging against biofuels, and putting the crisis into context by observing that "we're paying for 20 years of mistakes". ... read more »

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Posted on 3 May, 2008 - 19:35

Here's something to savour amid the nightmare of the food crisis. Faced with the nightmare of high food prices, many working families are recovering ways of eating (victory gardens, for instance) that had almost entirely been forgotten. This is knowledge that the Southern Food Alliance is keen to preserve, and their oral history project is tremendously exciting.

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Posted on 3 May, 2008 - 19:28

So, as part of the article roundup, there are some fine cartoons here and here, and some very good writing about the crisis from Fred Magdoff Monthly Review, and Ian Angus.

But neither article pays much attention to gender, and this is a problem as ... read more »

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Posted on 3 May, 2008 - 19:19

I've been a very delinquent blogger of late, and am likely to be so for the next couple of weeks. Quite unexpectedly, I've been asked to testify in front of the House Financial Services Committee in a couple of weeks time about the food crisis, and the World Bank's role in it. Veterans of this blog will know that I've already said, in print, that the head of the World Bank makes me gag and, on Canadian telly, that the World Bank is full of shit. I'll be reining in my potty mouth and putting together some pointed testimony over the next few days, so I'll be not spending quite as much time here as I'd like. I blame the government. ... read more »

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Posted on 3 May, 2008 - 19:13

Two new books have been greedily devoured, constantly referred to, and highly regarded in my little world of late.

One is Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything Vegetarian.

The other is A Short History of the American Stomach.

... read more »

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Posted on 30 April, 2008 - 02:20

Not for nothing is gender one of the most frequent tags here at Stuffed and Starved. The modern food system is tilted against women, in everything from land ownership to life expectancy because of poor diet to, now, access to the biofuels market. The road ahead is long. ... read more »

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Posted on 29 April, 2008 - 19:29