Category: Food

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Crops are grown and harvested year round in the valley with migrant farm workers arriving at various parts of the year for peak harvest season of crops like grapes, broccoli and cauliflower.

Coachella Valley Farm Workers

I had been working on making photos about farm workers very slowly over the years and in 2015 l received a Fellowship from The Alicia Patterson Foundation which allowed me to dedicate the time, focus and thought to the work that it deserved.

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Pharming Bad Bacteria

In December 2003, a farm couple in the Netherlands scheduled their six-month-old daughter for surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. But before Eveline van den Heuvel could be admitted to the hospital, a test showed that she was carrying a strain of Staphylococcus aureus

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The Man Who Turned Antibiotics Into Animal Feed

The food industry and the medical community have fought bitterly, and for decades, over the widespread practice of adding antibiotics to livestock feed to make animals grow faster. Banning the practice would be an agricultural disaster, food companies predict—or at least the end of affordable

On The Americana Road Again

As a photographer and writer I have spent nearly 30 years crisscrossing the continental United States in search of unique and typical examples of roadside and Main Street architecture and design. In traveling over 100,000 miles in a long series of marathon automobile trips, I

When the Sea Calls

Douglas Goodale, by the age of 32, had eight years of commercial fishing experience behind him when his job literally took his right arm and very nearly his life. Goodale was working by himself on his 22-foot purple lobster boat, “Barney,” about one mile off

A billboard at the southeast corner of the Hanford Site alerts people to its emergency zone. Photo by APF Fellow Blane Harden

Bad Comedy at America’s Biggest Environmental Mess

HANFORD, Washington — The mulberries happened to be ripe. They caught the eye of a hell-raising physicist by the name of Norm Buske. He picked a quart and rushed home to make what turned out to be high-anxiety jam. The berries grew here along the

Animal Health and Nutrition and Agrichemical Age

Deregulating The Farmer

SAN FRANCISCO–”Organic farming is a fraud. And so is the health food industry. So are the notions that preservatives, pesticides, drugs and plant foods are bad, and ‘natural’ is good,” writes Dick Beeler in his monthly column which appears in the two glossy agriculture magazines,

Meat inspectors on the job.

The Meat Inspector

BOLINAS, Cal.–”OK. You see that discoloration here, that’s caused by pneumonia;’ says Dr. Thomas Harris, DVM, Inspector-in-Charge for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Meat and Poultry Inspection Program. He points at a large pink bovine lung, and slices into it with a butcher knife. Next

Meat is for me after eight months really just a metaphor…"

Guinea Pigs

I know it’s difficult to extrapolate backwards from one’s dinner plate, where you might have had a pork chop looking up at you, or from a supermarket where you might be visiting the meat counter to decide which steak to buy. To extrapolate back to

The Bettmann Archive, Inc.

Antibiotics in Your Meat

(LONG BEACH, CA.) – The storage tanks of Rachelle Laboratories, Inc. stand like grain silos along the Terminal Island Freeway in Long Beach, California. They are filled with hundreds of tons of Chlorachel, a Chlortetracycline animal feed additive which Rachelle markets for livestock and poultry.

©Jerome Wexier from National Audubon Society

Flies vs. Wasps

(FT. MORGAN, CO) — When the insecticide salesman arrived at Fred Diehl’s Dairy in Dodge City, Kansas, it was undeniable that Fred had a problem. During the summer heat his sixty head of registered Holstein milk cows were so harrassed by flies their milk production

cattle

DES and the Cattlemen

(AMARILLO, TX) — During any other year, those in attendance at the Texas Beef Conference would have gathered for a few seminars on grain processing and manure disposal, taken a break for cocktails before sitting down to a barbecue sponsored by the “T-Bone Club”, and

in field

Spoiling the Blueberry Patch

(SHUNGNAK, ALASKA) – The road to the new sewage lagoon runs through a blueberry patch. It’s a small matter. An acre of blueberries was traded for easy access to the lagoon and, coincidentally, to the rest of the blueberries. On a windy day this summer,

Stephen I. Feldman, Rapho/Photo Researchers, Inc.

We Are What We Eat: The Price of Food and the Reasons Why

“I’m tired,” a depressed-looking, middle-aged woman, pushing a shopping basket loaded with groceries through a Farmer Jack supermarket in a Middle West city, said one day not long ago. “The price of food makes me tired.” It should. A one-half gallon carton of white milk,

Sacramento Canals unit

Water, Water

“It is the upper-crust of farmers who are running the show,” says the frail, slowly speaking man, 83 years old, a scarf at his throat to protect against a chill, a cane by the door to help him walk. He is Dr. Paul S. Taylor,

"Are You Sure These Things Will Keep Us Afloat?"

American Farm Policy

(a) Helps (b) Hurts The American Farm In the autumn of 1921, George N. Peek and Hugh S. Johnson, executives with the Moline Plow Company, Moline, Ill., proposed a plan to aid the American farmer. The early 1920s were hard times for farmers. Many had

Lester L Norton

The Man Who Sets Meat Prices

(Chicago) — Every day, Monday through Friday, starting at 7:45 a.m., 12 men, older, white-shirted fellows, take their seats at gray, office-style desks in a converted, 100-year-old townhouse, five minutes from Michigan Avenue. They spend the next eight hours or so on old, black telephones,

Stacking Hay

The Story of an American Farmer

Seven thirty a.m. the sale barn. New Liberty, Iowa. A cold, rainy spring morning. The farmers in their blue and gray and white striped denim pants and jackets, their red, green and yellow billed caps, men of all sizes and appearances stand talking of how

The Marginal Men

The marginal ten, the wretched stragglers for survival on the fringes of farm and city, may already number half a billion. By 1980 they will surpass a billion, by 1990 two billion. Can we imagine any human order surviving with so gross a mass of