Once again, apologies for the lengthy intermission between posts here at Stuffed and Starved. I’ve been working my next book, which has taken a little more time and travel than I’d have liked. But the results will, I think, be worth it. My most recent research trip involved going to visit the Zapatistas in Chiapas, which means that your intrepid writer has recently returned from Mexico. There are many stories to share, and if you’re in New York, you can hear me talking about it on WBAI tomorrow morning, or at the Brooklyn Food Conference on Saturday.

If you’re not, here’s the roundup of articles that nicely pull the different strands of what’s happening together. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 37 comments

Posted on 1 May, 2009 - 04:46

New Scientist this week tells of one of the new horrors found in the industrial food processing industry. It affects those workers in slaughterhouses who work on swine heads (in an area known, and you decide if this is dark comedy or not, as "the head table").

In order to remove the brains, which are then canned and exported as a pink pig-food, workers use high pressure jets of compressed air. The process results in "an aerosol of brain matter that workers may inhale." ... read more »

Raj's blog | 10 comments

Posted on 11 February, 2008 - 17:26

It's been a while since we had a post mentioning bird flu, but in the past couple of days, folk've written in with avian influenza news. So it seems appropriate to acknowledge, first, that bird flu is alive and killing people - over 100 in Indonesia (out of 124 cases - those aren't good odds). But it's also spreading dangerously through India, in West Bengal. The Times of India quotes Mamata Banerjee even going so far as to say that it's "man-made" and part of a concerted strategy to destroy the rural economy. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment

Posted on 28 January, 2008 - 18:55