The Food Chain is an audience-interactive newstalk radio program that airs live on Saturdays from 9am to 10am Pacific time. The Food Chain, which has been named the Ag/News Show of the Year by California's legislature, is hosted by Michael Olson, author of the Ben Franklin Book of the Year award-winning MetroFarm, a 576-page guide to metropolitan agriculture.
Over 80 million Americans, including over one-third of the nation’s children and adolescents, eat fast food every day. And some eat it multiple times a day! This leads us to ask:
We have been searching for that proverbial fountain of youth for as long as we have been capable of searching. Though we have searched in many places, and spent many fortunes doing so, we still grow old. This leads us to ask:
They say in the United States food travels an average of 1,500 miles from where it is grown to where it is eaten. That leads us to ask:
They say, if we can get to the South Pole of the Moon, we can convert some of the frozen water we find there into rocket fuel that will take us on to the next best place. That leads us to ask:
Community is where everybody works together today to ensure that everybody can eat tomorrow. This thought leads us to ask:
When an outbreak of Ecoli killed three and sickened 200 others a couple of decades ago, those in charge of food safety began discouraging the existence of wildlife on farms. This leads us to ask:
When people moved off the farm into the city, they took their children with them. What children find on the streets of the city does not appear to bode well for their future nor the future of the country. And so we ask:
There are many ways in which industrialization has served to make food cheap. One way is to subvert the growth of natural competitors, like weeds, with weed-killing herbicides, like glyphosate. This leads us to ask:
Topics include whether there is a need for government to stand between a farmer and his or her customers; why animals fed on grass produce nutritionally superior meat than animals fed with industrial foods in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs); an
The label on the package says, “Product of USA.” But the rules say what is in the package could have come from anywhere. This leads us to continue asking:
The label on the package says, “Product of USA.” But the rules say what is in the package could have come from anywhere. This leads us to continue asking:
The label on the package says, “Product of USA.” But the rules say what is in the package could have come from anywhere. This leads us to continue asking:
The label on the package says, “Product of USA.” But the rules say what is in the package could have come from China, Brazil or anywhere. This leads us to ask:
It’s been a very soggy, drought-breaking winter on the California Coast. But Spring finally did arrive, and with it the need to plant some perfect tomato plants in the garden. But that leads me to ask:
The family stash of survival foods includes tiny tins of canned fish that could be stored away for a long time, if the wild food they contain did not taste so good. That leads us to ask:
We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted– even those fresh tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter! It’s time to meet the people who provide us with the food we take for granted, and ask:
We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted– even those fresh tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter! It’s time to meet the people who provide us with the food we take for granted, and ask:
We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted– even those fresh tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter! It’s time to meet the people who provide us with the food we take for granted, and ask:
We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted– even those fresh tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter! It’s time to meet the people who provide us with the food we take for granted, and ask:
The King is dead! Long live the King! The 2023 King salmon season has been cancelled for California and much of Oregon. There will be no commercial or recreational fishing for the King this year.
The moment a food is taken from the ground it begins to lose its life. Though many things can be done to preserve the life in food, the farther it travels from its source, the less life it will have when its consumed. This leads us to ask:
Though situated in the midst of extremely expensive metropolitan real estate, Santa Cruz County agriculture produces nearly $660 million dollars worth of crops every year. This leads us to ask:
It’s becoming very difficult to see that our glass is half-full, when so many of our reservoirs are nearly empty. And so we ask:
Thirty million meals made with geneticallly modified crops are served to our nation’s school children every school day. What is hidden in those lunches leads us to ask:
Mexico is moving to ban U.S. biotech corn for human consumption, which would reduce the economic output of the U.S. by $74 billion, give or take. This economic food fight leads us to ask:
We are at war with the countries that fuel our food chain with fertilizer. This war leads us to ask:
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law Assembly Bill 2183, which gives California’s farmworkers the right to organize a union with a simple check on a card. This leads us to ask:
After learning how to cultivate grain some 10,000 years ago, we learned how to bake it and brew it. Thus began our history as a fermenting people. This history leads us to ask:
Given years of neglect, a prolonged drought, and devilish winds, the forests of the American West, and all that are in them, are poised to explode in flame. This leads us to ask:
To gain total control over legalized cannabis, governments smothered the industry with rules, regulations and taxes. But there is one loophole some are profitably jumping through, and it leads us to ask:
As food technology improves, food becomes something very cheap that is actually very expensive. And we crave it! This leads us to ask:
Some turn up their noses at the industrial ways in which we produce most dairy products and say, “The cow is killing the earth.” This leads us to ask:
Despite losing two recent mega-million dollar decisions at the Supreme Court, the chemical giant Bayer AG vows to fight on for its glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. This fight leads us to ask:
When we eat, we are not just feeding the me, we are also feeding the 100 trillion microorganisms that live with the me. That leads us to ask:
Despite losing two recent mega-million dollar decisions at the Supreme Court, the chemical giant Bayer AG vows to fight on for its glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. This fight leads us to ask:
I happened to be watching a honey bee working over a lemon tree blossom on the 19th of July, when I realized that it was my first honey bee sighting of the year. That sighting leads me to ask:
Hippocrates is said to have said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food.” But the efforts by some to register food as medicine leads us to ask…
Four companies control 95% of the infant formula sold in the United States. When one of their factories was forced to close, mothers panicked and horded. This leads us to ask:
President Joe Biden recently announced that a food shortage is in the near future for the United States, and that it is “gonna be real.” So we ask:
Those who grow our food are fond of saying, “Food grows where water flows.” That they keep saying this leads us to ask:
After weathering nearly three years of the Covid-19 shutdown, it is time for a burnout reset. And so we ask:
Franz Kafka, author of The Trial, once said, “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.” Kafka’s guiding principle leads us to ask:
Fishermen used to rely on good luck to haul in the big catch. But when they began relying on information, instead of luck, they almost caught all the fish in the sea. That leads us to ask:
This just in: The Union Pacific Railway is cutting back its shipments of fertilizer to the nation’s farmers. In other words, the Union Pacific is cutting back its shipment of food to feed you and me. That leads us to ask:
President Joe Biden has warned that Russia?s invasion of the Ukraine will cause food shortages. If such is the case, we must pause to ask:
Wherever we go, chickens go, too! The reason chickens go where we go is that they are one of our best sources of good food. In fact, chickens can take almost nothing and turn it into nature?s perfect food, its egg. And that leads us to ask:
Napolean the Pig was said to have said, ?All animals are created equal, but some are created more equal than others.? If such is indeed the case, we ask:
Over the past century most all of us moved into the city, where we came to rely on others to bring us food to eat. But what if the day comes when others stop bringing us food to eat? That thought leads us to ask:
We are all flower children. In fact, it was our relationship with flowering plants, and their seeds, that allowed us to settle down and become civilized. However, those seeds, and our future with flowering plants, are disappearing. And so we ask:
14 percent of the plastic we use is recycled. That means 86 percent of the plastic we use is not recycled. The thought of all that plastic piling up in a giant tsunami leads us to ask:
As demonstrated by Stalin?s holodomor, and Mao?s great Leap Forward, the most effective way to control people is to control their food. And so we ask: