What Doesn't Kill You

Founder and CEO Matt Jozwiak of Rethink Food, joins to discuss how he works with a variety of partners to re-purpose discarded food into wholesome, culturally appropriate meals for the underserved.Photo Courtesy of Clay Williams.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Prairie Rivers Network has published the results of a 6 year study on the impacts of herbicide drift in Illinois, and its not a good picture. Herbicide drift isn't confined to agricultural fields. They float right into our backyards, schoolyards, parks, and natural spaces. Herbicide drift is having a major impact on trees and naturally occurring plant species, not to mention humans. Kim Erndt-Pitcher, Director of Ecolocgical halth at Prairie Rivers Network explains whats in that report, and why we should all be concerned. It's not just happening in Illinois.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Journalist Keith Schneider reports on some groundbreaking cases in Michigan and in Federal Court addressing the pollution caused by CAFOs and the spreading of manure across famrland that winds up in our water system.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Dr. Thomas Boving, Chair of The Department of Geosciences joins to discuss what and how we can address the contaminations of our waterways, from lakes and streams to groundwater. With agrochemicals, PFAS and other toxic additives, American waterways are challenged like never before. Dr. Boving has worked here and abroad to address challenges to drinking water from a myriad of sources.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Avian Influenza, AKA bird flu is just a few mutations away from becomimg a much bigger deal for humans. With the pandemic just in the rear view mirror, teh news that H5N1 has moved from bird populations to dairy herds to humans should be a red alert. Curiously, the USDA seems relatively unconcerned. Gail Hansen, Public health veterinarian and subject matter expert for government and non-government organizations on public health and animal policy, discusses what could be our next major public health crisis.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

John Rumpler, Clean Water Director of Environment America; Research and Policy Center, explains how protecting our "ephemera" streams has a major impact on our water supply. With last years Supreme Court Ruling excepting "ephemeral" streams from the Clean Water Act, and laying them open to polluters. It will take a concerted effort to restore protected status to these types of streams that in the end, supply nearly 55% of our drinking water.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Erik Kanter, President of Clean Wisconsin joins to explain how republicans are withholding funds for clean up until the legislature passes a bill immunizing polluters from prosecution for polluting the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

New legislation introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ro Khanna would put the kybosh on trading in water futures. Will it succeed? Mary Grant, Director of the Public Water for All initiative at Food and Water Watch joins to discuss this legislation, and other issues affecting our water supplies.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Will Harlan from the Center for Biological Diversity joins to talk about the keystone species horseshoe crabs, a population that is crashing, and for which the Center is seeking endangered species protection. Learn why we need to protect this harmless and ancient creature from human exploitation.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Science writer Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug and Big Chicken, joins to discuss the feeble attempts to rein in antibiotic use in animal agriculture. As the World Health Organization and others blare out the warnings about a post antibiotic medical landscape, American livestock producers can't quite seem to fully wean their herds off prophylactic antibiotics. Incremental progress has been made over the last decade plus, but we are running out of time.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

The Humane League, an advocacy organization seminal to both encouraging the egg industry to improve its conditions for laying hens, but also to hold restaurants accountable when they don't keep their promises to use only cage free eggs. Kelly Myers, Director of Corporate Engagement joins to discuss this sea change, and the new Humane League Eggspose, that busts the bad actors who promise one thing, and do another.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

According to journalist Keith Schneider whose prize winning series Toxic Terrain has explored many of the ills associated with our style of agriculture, "the voluntary conservation practices promoted by federal and state governments, and Big Ag, are the costliest and least effective pollution prevention strategy ever devised. In the Mississippi Basin $30 billion spent since 1997 by the federal and state governments."Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Professors Viveca Morris and Jennifer Jacquet dug into how the livestock industry has co-opted certain university experts to minimize the impact of findings on climate change related to industrialized animal agriculture. Their findings have been published in a new paper detailing just how successful meat companies have been in skewing perceptions of climage change, altering emission targets, and making sure the industry remains the unregulated monster it is. Prepare to be outraged.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Veteran agricultural journalist Tom Philpott joins to talk about what is and isn't in the newest iteration of the Farm Bill. Despite all the extra funds from the Investment Recovery Act, and all the information we now have about climate disruption, and other impacts on agriculture, we seem to be marching toward the same old same old...Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Professor Upmanu Lall, director of the Water Institute at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University gives us the details on how we map, model, and distribute our dwindling groundwater supplies.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Author Austin Frerick joins the show to talk about his new book: Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food System. An awesome journey through the biggest monopolies in the food biz, from grains, to hogs, to coffee, to grocery chains... Meet the unknown players making bank on the food system.Photo Courtesy of Kris Graves.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

For at least 20 years, the burgeoning poultry industry has been spreading the waste litter from their barns across one particular watershed in Oklahoma. Journalist Ben Felder dug into the origins of the lawsuit brought by a long gone state attorney general seeking to bring some accountability to the industry over damage to the local waterways. 20 years later, negotiations on how to manage this by product have broken down, and now new legislation threatens to give industry even wider latitude to pollute at will. Why is industry more important than clean water?Photo Courtesy of Investigate Midwest. Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Accross the farm belt, cancer cases are spiking, and states are getting serious about tracking and providing guidelines for exposure to agro-chem. Journalist Keith Schneider has been digging into this for months and reports.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Straight outta the NY Times, a groundbreaking article by journalists Christopher Flavelle and Somini Sengupta shows the highway between mcNuggets and our diminishing supply of fresh clean water for human consumption. Flavelle joins the show to describe what he and his colleague uncovered as part of an ongoing and important series in the NYT.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

John Rumpler, Clean Water DIrector and lead attorney for Environment America, joins to talk about the long overdue revision of regulations governing wastewater from slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. Decades overdue, public hearings on the subject are being held January 24th and 31st 2024. Learn more about how much toxic waste could be captured if these revised regulations are allowed to pass. Aside from reducing contamination of our drinking water, these revisions would also have an impact on wildlife, recreation, human health, and the ecology of rivers and streams currently unprotected.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Chris Jones, author of The Swine Republic, featured here in June, is back to talk about the remarkable series of conversations he is now having around Iowa and his region about big ag and water pollution. We will also talk about heavily funded mitigation tools that are not mitigating, but are lining some peoples pockets with taxpayer money.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Big Ag and Big Oil are getting in bed together to promote the buildout of bio-digesters to manage animal waste. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing masquerading as a good thing? Reporter Keith Schneider gives some context on this long overdue attention to pollution from the animal agriculture segment.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Professor Sylvia Secchi from University of Iowa joins to talk about how ethanol is a giant giveaway to the ag industry, purporting to be a partial solution to fossil fuel impacts. Instead, the excessive cultivation of corn is having disastrous impacts on soil and water... and guess what? It's anything but fuel efficient. How did we get here???Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Journalist Keith Schneider examines a spate of cancer diagnoses in farm country in Minnesota. On one short stretch of a road in Berne Minnesota, shared by four farming families, 12 people developed cancer, and seven of them died. What linked these people in disease is the contamination of their drinking water with excess nitrates, the chemicals used to encourage bumper crops of corn, soy, and other crops. It has yet to be definitively proven, but the science shows excessive nitrate in drinking water is increasingly connected to cancer clusters such as this one in Minnesota.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Organic food purchasers buy organic and pay the extra for a reason. New regulations being proposed by some members of congress would make it much easier for corporate food businesses to use that premium label to sell product that doesn't actually meet the real benchmarks of organic. Tom Chapman, CEO of the Organic Trade Association, and others have introduced the new Continuous Improvement and Accountability in Organic Standards to counteract these efforts to dilute the organic label.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

The National Family Farm Coalition is advocating for the Farmland For Farmers Act introduced by Senator Cory Booker in July of this year. Agricultural land needs to stay accessible to actual farmers, rather than offer an opportunity to corporate entities to capitalize on high land prices, at the same time driving those prices into a stratosphere no mere mortal can possibly attain. Our food security depends on measures like this. Tune in to see how this fits into the Farm Bill, and its chances at passage.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Western states are home to herds of grazing beasts, and to keep them in the right place, thousands of miles of fencing is required. Conservation Northwest Associate Director Jay Kehne advocates a different path: shock collars for cattle. The cattle stay put, but other wildlife (think deer, elk, and other ruminants) can run free instead of fouling the fence. A big win for wildlife, and for a rancher's bottom line.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Award winning journalist and author, and favorite guest, Tom Philpott returns to talk all things Farm Bill. What will change, what is new, and what is, sigh, same old, same old?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Every day a new article describes the prevalence of PFAS in our water, land, food, and bodies. David Cwiertny, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and in Chemistry at the University of Iowa, takes us through the impacts, the options for remediation, and what to expect from regulatory bodies in the wake of increased knowledge on the ubiquity of "forever" chemicals.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Iowa State University Water Quality expert Chris Jones, @riverraccoon, just published a damning indictment of the governing officials of Iowa and Big Ag in overseeing the disastrous consequences of our profit over people driven agricultural model. Learn how the Department of Natural Resources and a host of other agencies collude in allowing agriculture to extract maximum payment from taxpayers, even as they flush ever increasing quantities of pollutants into the water system.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Tom Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty, was prescient in his 2020 book in a lengthy description of the 1862 floods that inundated Central Valley in a once in a century flood. Now Central Valley is facing an even more catastropic scenario as climate disruption adds fuel to an already volatile area now packed with dairy farms, oil wells, and massive swaths of land planted to almonds, pistachios, tomatoes, and cotton. What will ensue with the predicted flooding caused by potential rapid snowmelt is a desperate scenario indeed.Read Tom's latest piece here.Read an excerpt from his book here.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Vermont farmer Erik Andrus is practicing an ancient form of agro-ecology from Japan. Learn how the old informs the new as Erik describes his approach and how it works.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Bryce Oates, a regular contributor to Civil Eats, Daily Yonder and other pubs has launched a newsletter that comes from a rural perspective. In this episode we talk about the new WOTUS controversy, and all the bluster and drama that plays out in a rule that essentially regulates nothing, but some would like us to believe our food supply is at risk from protecting water supplies.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Science writer and author Maryn McKenna is back to talk about her newest piece for Wired where she considers the implications of Avian flu moving to new territory and infecting new mammals, though not yet infecting people to any great degree. What does this say about our methods for raising animals in confinement, and how do we check the spread of this pathogen and others like it?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Sherri Dugger, Executive Director of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, joins What Doesn't Kill You to discuss a recent meeting in Washington with advocacy groups urging the USDA and Congress to fund actual farms, rather than subsidizing commodities for animal feed and ethanol. Learn how SRAP helps communities organize against CAFO's, and how they transition farmers from the CAFO model of pork production.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Vicky Bond, President of the Humane League, joins to discuss their campaign to transition the egg industry to cage free. Who is walking the walk and who talks the talk but doesn't walk?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Chloe Sorvino, journalist and author of Raw Deal, returns to talk about alt meat and where it's headed. Is it really better?Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Journalist Christina Cooke joins to discuss her lead off piece in a five part series on worker safety in animal agriculture called Injured and Invisible. Today we discuss the plight of workers who have been long left out of OSHA safety regs extended to every other industry.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Forbes's food writer Chloe Sorvino brings the business in her new book about the corruption of the meat industry. Exploitation, price fixing, pollution and bribery all get a turn in the barrel. Should be a fun discussion between a couple of real meat heads!Photo Courtesy of Nick Rice.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

BlueTriton has gobbled up a lot of water companies, including Nestle's water division. They say they are addressing the kinds of problems we saw in Flint. But what exactly does that mean, and what should consumers expect from a giant water company that makes its profit from selling bottled water? Chief sustainability officer Ed Ferguson will try to show us what role his company plays in maintaining water quality and supply.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

Civil Eats reporter and former host of the Farm Report, Lisa Held, was at the conference and can give listeners an informed recap of this long overdue conference. From root causes of hunger, to expanding the role of government in nutrition science, and much more, this conference was based on 5 Pillars of action proposed by the Biden Administration. Learning what those goals are and the proposals to achieve them can help us all understand why America lags in public health, and inform who we vote for in the future.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.

On October 11, the Supreme Court heard a case that will have major implications for animal welfare standards nationwide. The case was brought forward by National Pork Producers Council against the state of California, citing unfair trade practices. Prop 12 guaranteed a better standard of living for pigs, veal calves and egg birds. NPPC et al. says otherwise. Hog farmer Ron Mardesen joins to discuss.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support What Doesn't Kill You by becoming a member!What Doesn't Kill You is Powered by Simplecast.