Browse Topics

The Chain Gang

Consumers foot the bill for the supermarket monopolies. And what a bill! A 1975 government report found that 41% of the increase in food margins in a nine-year period was the result of rising advertising and promotional expenses — money spent not to better our diet but to manipulate us as shoppers.

Selected Poems

A Banana By Any Other Name

The Case Against Brand-Name Vegetables

Four years after the Chiquita campaign had been launched, United had captured nearly a third of the country’s market at prices 10 to 15% higher than other bananas. Through brand name promotion, United had convinced consumers to pay more for Chiquitas than other bananas and to like doing it.

Temple Sweeper

Eight years ago I decided to become a vegetarian. This decision corresponded roughly with a hazily conceptual political activism and very clearly with an infatuation with a male vegetarian. Since then . . . concern for my diet has moved from the realm of “proof of lifestyle” to a central place in my efforts toward well being.

Creating Hunger: The World Food Crisis

The question is not “How can we get them to feed themselves?” How paternalistic! People will feed themselves unless they are prevented from doing so. The fact is that the poor of this world are engaged in feeding us and trying to feed themselves.

Dialogue With My Shell

as a turtle of eternity, to abstract within mySelf is evo­lutional prerogative. from such a featherstance, un­moored and let loose on the seas of cognition, my essen­tial faculties explore the relics of significance lodged within a correspondent synchronicity which has no mercy for distortions.

Peopletalk: Language And Other Expressions

Language, more than anything else, separates man from other animals. It plays a dominant role in shaping our conceptions about the world. Language is a means of transmitting and storing information, generally with words or other symbols.

Woeful Cowboy

I was working with Allen yesterday afternoon when Anne came to door & said to Allen “Ed Wall’s here to see you” — “I didn’t make any appointments” Allen explained to me as he got up.

night

Surviving The Symposium

We’re unsure whether to go. “I don’t want to hear about how we haven’t got much time left,” I lament.