Chicks, Mayonnaise and Personal Responsibility

...able trust companies when it comes to preventing cruelty to animals. Best Foods and Hellmann’s use millions of eggs each year to create their products. Since only female chickens lay eggs, Best Foods and Hellmann’s don’t have any use for the male birds. Their solution is to treat these chicks like garbage: they’re either ground up alive, gassed, or suffocated in plastic bags.1 Nobody wants to see animals suffer, but some of the worst abuses occur...

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Adopt an Indigo Plant in Los Angeles

...easy to grow. All it needs is lots of sunshine, plenty of water, and some food. As an experiment, I’ve germinated a bunch of indigo seeds and want to get the seedlings into as many people’s hands as possible! I hope to spread the wonder about the fact that color can be grown, to raise the consciousness of humanity’s original sources of pigment, and to get people to exercise their thumbs, green or otherwise! The pigment can be extracted from the m...

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Saturday Tweets: Halloween Edition

Just How Much Food Do Cities Squander? https://t.co/Tj7lhYlQdQ via @WIRED — Root Simple (@rootsimple) October 27, 2017 When drivers start going on about a "War on Cars," remind them that cars in the city are a war on our children.#obesity #crashes #pollution pic.twitter.com/hlomv2sMJ1 — Taras Grescoe (@grescoe) October 24, 2017 Pictures Reveal Life Inside Tiny Futuristic Cubes https://t.co/NCmeuJMO2A via @NatGeoPhotos — Root Simple (@rootsimple)...

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Gluten Intolerance . . . Is It All In Your Head?

...lation. That actually makes it one of the most common disorders related to food. But a much larger percentage of people self-diagnose as gluten intolerant who do not have celiac disease. Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and director of the GI Unit at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, kicked the gluten intolerance self-diagnosis trend into overdrive with a 2011 study that showed a large percentage of the population...

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The tale of the worm bin celery

...tale of botanic dumpster diving and another reason why you should let your food plants go to flower when you can. Last year I threw the crown (which is to say, the bottom) of a celery plant in my worm bin. I probably should have chopped it up for the worms’ sake, but I didn’t. Later, sometime in the fall, I rediscovered the celery crown. Instead of rotting in the bin, it had sprouted leaves and looked surprisingly vigorous. So I pulled it out and...

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