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Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

by CharlenLowman Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I penned my little opus about almond milk last week, I really didn’t intend to insult anyone’s intelligence, provocative headline aside. What I really wanted to do was encourage people to think about what they’re buying when they buy this hot-selling product. My editors chose the title and I went along, because they know more than me about what makes people click. And people clicked! I’m pretty sure that “Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters” is my most-read piece ever at Mother Jones.

It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond. How does an almond’s water footprint stack up to other foods’?

Reactions mostly hovered in a range between mild annoyance and blind rage. One guy dropped by the Facebook page of the farm I helped found, Maverick Farms, to inform me that he planned to keep drinking almond milk—and spilling it, even. To drive his point home, he even looked up the farm’s phone number and repeated his pledge on the answering machine. Thanks for the update!

The oddest response came from Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, who took the opportunity to school me in the art of the “food troll”:

This fool is talking about how almond milk is not as good as just eating almonds. False comparison. I eat tons of almonds. Love em. And I drink almond milk too. Love it. I can have both. You love regular almonds so much? Do you eat more almonds than me? Not a chance. I eat more almonds than you. And still drink almond milk. Case closed on that particular argument I guess.

Still not convinced? Nolan adds the coup de grace: “If I puked up almond milk it probably wouldn’t even taste that bad relative to other kinds of puke.”

Right. Meanwhile, several people thundered that since I dare question the value of almond milk, I must be a tool for Big Dairy. “Were you paid off by the Dairy Farmers of America to write that piece?” one wag wondered on Twitter, adding, helpfully ” PS I’m no hipster and I love my Almond Milk!”

Actually, my piece did not purport to judge almond milk against the standards of dairy milk and find it wanting. “I get why people are switching away from dairy milk, I wrote, since “industrial-scale dairy production is a pretty nasty business.” I did cop to drinking a bit of kefir, a fermented milk product. But my intention wasn’t to promote Big Dairy, but just to point out that almond milk is nutritionally pretty vapid compared to other products. An eight-ounce serving of Helios brand organic kefir contains 16 grams of protein, vs. 1 gram per serving in most almond milk brands. That’s a remarkable difference. But of course, people consume things for all sorts of good reasons, not just protein content.

Now, I didn’t get into much of an ecological analysis in my piece, but there is an interesting one to make here. Back in May, my colleagues Julia Lurie and Alex Park looked at the literature and found that it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a glass of almond milk and 35 gallons to produce a serving of yogurt. Let’s assume that it takes a similar amount of water to make Helios kefir, which is essentially fermented skim milk. On the surface, the almond milk looks a lot easier on the water supply. But if you look at it on a protein basis, almond milk looks like a disaster: it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a gram of almond milk protein—and less than two gallons to produce a gram of kefir protein.

Even though kefir costs more than $4 per quart vs. about $2 for almond milk, it starts to look like quite a bargain on a protein basis.

Almond milk’s dilute nature lies at the heart of the critique made by Slate’s Maria Dolan, the most thoughtful one I’ve seen of the piece. My basic complaint against almond milk is that it’s a watered-down product: you take something that’s quite nutrient-dense and deluge it with water, essentially selling people a few almonds and a lot of water.

I’m thinking about it in the wrong way, counters Dolan. “Is drowning them in water to create almond milk really a bad thing from an environmental perspective?” she asks. “Just as making meat a garnish, not the centerpiece of your meal, thins the environmental impact of eating beef, so consuming almonds sparingly—by diluting them into milk, for instance—reduces their ecological impact.”

But I’m not sure that almond milk works to moderate people’s almond consumption. California’s rapid, and ecologically troubling, expansion of almond production is largely driven by booming exports, mainly to Asia. But US consumption is booming too. According to the Almond Board of California, the US market consumed 394 million pounds of almonds from the 2007-’08 harvest and 605 million pounds in 2012-’13. That’s a 50 percent jump in five years. And as I noted in my post, almond milk sales are surging at an even faster clip. It seems to me that the almond milk craze, whatever else it is, reflects a clever food industry strategy to sell yet more almonds, not a way for consumers to reduce their environmental impact.

The Almond Board also reports that California now provides 84 percent of the globe’s almonds. Given the state’s severe water constraints, and that current levels of production already require 60 percent of managed US honeybees for pollination, often to disastrous effect, we may all have to ease up—not just on the almond milk, but also on almonds themselves. Hell, even ignorant hipsters like me love almonds.

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Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

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Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?

by LoydSunguxadgb Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s a hard-knock life, scouring the landscape for pollen to sustain a beehive. Alight upon the wrong field, and you might encounter fungicides, increasingly used on corn and soybean crops, and shown to harm honeybees at tiny levels. Get hauled in to pollinate California’s vast almond groves, as 60 percent of US honeybees do, and you’ll likely make contact with a group of chemicals called adjuvants—allegedly “inert” pesticide additives that have emerged as a prime suspect for a large bee die-off during this year’s almond bloom.

The hardest-to-avoid menace of all might be the neonicotinoid class of pesticides, widely used not only on big Midwestern crops like corn and soybeans but also on cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, apples, cherries, peaches, oranges, berries, leafy greens, tomatoes, and potatoes. They’re even common in yard and landscaping products. I’ve written before about the growing weight of science linking these lucrative pesticides, marketed by European agrichemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, to declining bee health, including the annual die-offs known as colony collapse disorder, which began in the winter of 2005-’06.

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Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?

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Surprise! Better Health Insurance Saves Lives.

by TrinidadMcCourt Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Does health insurance save lives? Since death is the least frequent outcome of poor medical care, I’ve never believed that mortality is an especially good way of measuring the value of different interventions. Even if an intervention is high value, the odds are good that it will have only a small effect on mortality.

This makes the results of a recent study in Massachusetts all the more impressive. Three researchers studied the effect of Mitt Romney’s universal health care plan and concluded that it’s saved a lot of lives so far. Adrianna McIntyre provides the summary:

Benjamin Sommers, Sharon Long, and Katherine Baicker estimate that overall mortality in Massachusetts declined 2.9 percent relative to control counties between 2007 and 2010; mortality amenable to health care declined 4.5 percent. This translates to one death prevented for every 830 people who gain insurance, and the effects were larger in counties with low income and low pre-reform insurance rates—the counties we would expect to be most favorably impacted by reform.

….If you think the study’s primary findings are impressive, consider their implications: “mortality amenable to health care” does not just magically decline. If fewer people are dying, that is almost certainly because diseases are being better treated, managed, or prevented—because of improved health. It’s hard to come by data on objective measures of health at the state level, but the “improved health” story is consistent with other findings in the paper: individuals had better self-reported health, were more likely to have a usual source of care, received more preventive services, and had fewer cost-related delays in care.

What makes this even more impressive is that the elderly in Massachusetts were already covered by Medicare. These results are strictly for those under the age of 65, who don’t die very often to begin with. Within this group, a reduction of 4.5 percent in mortality amenable to health care (the only kind we care about in this context) is a lot.

The implications for Obamacare are obvious since Obamacare was explicitly modeled on the Massachusetts program—though it’s unlikely that it will produce quite such dramatic mortality improvements since its coverage isn’t as universal as the Massachusetts plan. Still, Obamacare has so far shown that it has a lot in common with Romneycare, so there’s good reason to hope that it will demonstrate mortality improvements as well.

But don’t hold your breath for study results. Given the way research like this works, we probably won’t get them until 2020 or so.

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Surprise! Better Health Insurance Saves Lives.

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Animal Planet’s "Call of the Wildman" Abruptly Canceled in Canada

by huklx2 Posted on April 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Television network Animal Planet Canada has abruptly canceled upcoming episodes of the scandal-tainted reality show Call of the Wildman just days before a new season was scheduled to air, Mother Jones has learned. The show, which follows the antics of the Kentucky animal wrangler known as Turtleman, has come under intense scrutiny after a series of Mother Jones investigative reports exposed mistreatment and neglect of animals—a drugged zebra, dying baby raccoons, a stricken coyote—and possible legal violations by the production. The revelations sparked outrage among fans, gave rise to petitions calling for the show to be canceled, and have led to multiple federal and state investigations.

The Animal Planet Canada team made the programming decision after a meeting on Wednesday to “review our spring programming lineup,” according to a statement emailed to Mother Jones by Jodi Cook, a spokeswoman for Bell Media, the parent company of Animal Planet Canada. Cook suggested that the show was canceled due to a lack of popularity among viewers:

Call of the Wildman has not been resonating with Canadian audiences and the decision was made not to move forward with Season 3 this month as previously announced. We will be replacing that title with content that is more in line with other programming that’s performing well with our Canadian viewers. There are no plans to return Call of the Wildman to our schedule at this time.

The program—touted as a “hit series” in a recent press release from the network—appeared to resonate with fans who visited Animal Planet Canada’s website as recently as last week: “Call of the Wildman is the best show ever. Please, please, please start a new season in 2014. If you don’t, I will never watch animal planet ever again,” read one of several similar comments posted. Another commenter said: “I want new turtle man for 2014. My kids love him and ask everyday when is a new one coming on. Please tell me that it coming on soon.”


Part One: Drugs, Death, and Neglect Behind the Scenes at Animal Planet


Part Two: How a Coyote Suffered (Photo)


Animal Planet Star Was Warned He Was Breaking the Law


Also Read: Our Investigation Into Elephant Abuse at Ringling Bros.

Season three of Call of the Wildman had been scheduled to return to Canadian airwaves on April 7 at 8pm, according to a March 4 press release posted on the company’s website: “Animal Planet’s hit series Call of the Wildman returns for a third ‘snapperlicious’ season with 10 brand-new episodes.” As of late Wednesday, however, that press release had been scrubbed of any reference to the show.

Bell Media did not respond to follow-up questions about the decision, including whether or not Mother Jones’ reporting and the subsequent public outcry had played into dropping the show.

While it’s not unheard of for television schedules to change last-minute, “nobody wants to have that kind of change in a release date that close to anything,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a television and film industry analyst for Rentrak, a media research firm. Given the associated marketing costs, such last-minute changes are likely to be “cause for a bit of a stomach ache on the part of executives.” Amanda Lotz, a media scholar at the University of Michigan, agreed that the move would be financially and logistically undesirable; in this case she speculates that the decision was probably driven by worries about a larger cost: “My suspicion would be that there’s ample concern about the negative publicity” that Animal Planet would face, she said, if it went ahead with the new season.

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Animal Planet’s "Call of the Wildman" Abruptly Canceled in Canada

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Paul Ryan Wants to Block-Grant Food Stamps and Medicaid. That’s a Terrible Idea.

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has lately rebranded himself as an advocate for the poor, albeit with his own makers-versus-takers, Ayn Randian twist. He recently issued a lengthy study of federal anti-poverty programs and over the past year and a half he has embarked on a “listening tour” to hear from low-income Americans. On Tuesday, Ryan issued the House GOP’s 2015 budget proposal, which would make major changes to two of the federal government’s primary anti-poverty programs, food stamps and Medicaid. Using as his model the supposedly successful welfare reform effort of the 1990s, Ryan envisions turning these programs into block grants that are handed over to the states to administer. But his plan to “help families in need lead lives of dignity” is likely to make matters worse for America’s neediest. Here’s why.

In 1996, Congress reengineered the federal program that provided cash assistance to the poorest families. Along with imposing stiff work requirements, Congress turned the old entitlement program, whose budget rose and fell automatically with need, into a block grant with a fixed budget. The grant was then distributed to the states, with few strings attached, under the premise that they were “laboratories of innovation” that would revolutionize the way the government helped the poor.

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Paul Ryan Wants to Block-Grant Food Stamps and Medicaid. That’s a Terrible Idea.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

How big is the midterm penalty for Democrats? Eric McGhee tells us in handy chart form. Given President Obama’s current approval rating, his model says Democrats would have a 75 percent chance of holding the Senate if this were a presidential election year. But in a midterm, Dems have only a 10 percent chance:

Ed Kilgore writes about this a lot, and warns Democrats not to get too mired in fruitless efforts to attack the “enthusiasm gap.” After all, the kind of people affected by enthusiasm are the kind of people who are likely to vote anyway. A loud populist message might thrill them, but it won’t do much to affect turnout among minorities and the young, who typically have more tenuous connections to politics. Instead, Democrats should focus on old-fashioned efforts to get out the vote. Or, more accurately, brand new rocket science efforts to get out the vote:

There’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.

….If that’s accurate, then the most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor. The extraordinary success of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign in boosting African-American turnout for an off-year election will likely be a model.

Messaging matters. But in midterm elections, shoe leather matters more, even if it’s mostly digital shoe leather these days.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

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How Big Banks Rake in Millions on the Backs of California’s Poorest Families

by VirginiGrills Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s expensive to be poor. A new report out from the California Reinvestment Coalition concludes that the big banks are charging some of California’s poorest families hefty ATM fees to access monthly benefits from the state welfare program known as CalWORKs, skimming at least $19 million a year, the group estimates, from this taxpayer-funded program.

The average CalWORKs family is an adult with two children who gets $510 a month worth of benefits, or about $6,120 a year. That’s not enough to live on, not even close, and the benefits are 8 percent lower now than they were in 2011. On top of that, accessing the funds costs them as much as $4 per ATM transaction, fees they really don’t have any alternative but to pay. That’s because California doesn’t ask its vendors to do much by way of accommodating the recipients. A $69 million contract with Xerox to administer an electronic benefit transfer card system has helped make these EBT cards the default way to deliver public assistance, and there’s no state requirement that banks waive ATM fees for people who use them.

In a press release, Andrea Luquetta, author of the report, explained:

For families trying to escape poverty, these fees siphon away money that could be used for school supplies, transportation or medicine. The current system leads too many people to pay fees just to access the very benefits they need to survive. It is a diversion of taxpayer dollars away from their intended use of supporting families. That’s why we’re calling on the state, banks, county offices, and nonprofit partners to work together to address this pressing issue.

The average EBT user pays about $5 a month in fees, but Luquetta says that figure masks the real story, as some people successfully avoid paying the fees while others pay a lot more. “It is typical for someone to pay the fee at least twice in a month in order to withdraw all of the cash in as few transactions as possible. At a Bank of America ATM that will cost $6. And then, of course, there is the challenge of what to do with that cash—load it onto a prepaid credit card? Buy money orders? All of that costs fees as well that we don’t capture. I even know a few people who pay the fee at a Bank of America or Wells Fargo ATM and then turn around and deposit the cash into their account at the same bank,” she said in an email.

In theory, someone receiving CalWORKs benefits could have the money deposited directly into a checking account for free. In fact, most of the beneficiaries don’t have checking accounts, largely because they can’t afford them. More than 96 percent of beneficiaries use the EBT cards. Many welfare recipients are leery of bank accounts, having previously suffered high overdraft fees and other fees charged by banks.

Some of the banks benefiting from the EBT fees have helped play a role in stoking those fears of traditional banking. The largest beneficiary by far of EBT-related ATM fees in California is Bank of America, which hosted 12 percent of the transactions in 2012, earning $3.6 million, according to the coalition. Back in 2004, a California jury hit the bank with a verdict that would have potentially exposed it to $1.2 billion in damages in a class action lawsuit filed by Social Security recipients who’d had their federal retirement or disability benefits seized directly from their accounts to pay excessive overdraft fees—a practice that left many low-income seniors and disabled people in dire straits. Plaintiffs showed that, like many banks at the time, BofA processed checks in a way that often made more of them bounce, thus increasing the fees it could automatically deduct. (A BofA spokeswoman says the bank no longer processes checks that way.)

The Obama administration came to BofA’s defense in the case, which went all the way to the California Supreme Court; the verdict was overturned on appeal. But publicity around the case went a long way in exposing the sorts of problems low-income people encounter when they do business with big banks. Given this history, it’s hard to blame families for not wanting to entrust these institutions with their meager benefit checks. But the banks have figured a way to make them pay anyway.

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How Big Banks Rake in Millions on the Backs of California’s Poorest Families

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Ask and It Is Given – Esther Hicks

by Myrna Posted on February 28, 2014

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Ask and It Is Given

Esther Hicks

Genre: Spirituality

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2004

Publisher: Hay House

Seller: Hay House, Inc.


Ask and It Is Given, by Esther and Jerry Hicks, which presents the teachings of the nonphysical entity Abraham, will help you learn how to manifest your desires so that you’re living the joyous and fulfilling life you deserve. As you read, you’ll come to understand how your relationships, health issues, finances, career concerns, and more are influenced by the Universal laws that govern your time/space reality—and you’ll discover powerful processes that will help you go with the positive flow of life. It’s your birthright to live a life filled with everything that is good—and this book will show you how to make it so in every way!

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Ask and It Is Given – Esther Hicks

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What Pete Seeger Taught Me About Activism

by LoisSteigrad Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was waiting for Pete Seeger along Route 9 in Wappingers Falls, an hour north of New York City, when he pulled up in the strip mall parking lot in his Toyota Highlander. It was 2008, and I was there ostensibly to write for the New York Times about Seeger’s weekly Saturday protests against the Iraq War, which he’d been attending for four years. But the secret reason I went was because I’d recently entered local politics, and had found change difficult to accomplish, and progress sluggish. I wanted to know how a man who’d been castigated, blacklisted, and even stoned (literally, by a mob in Peekskill, New York, in 1949) over five decades of political activism had kept the faith.

From his car trunk, Seeger pulled out his banjo and a few signs, including one on which he had spray-painted “Peace” in orange. As he walked to meet about a dozen other protesters, he bent like the handle of an old water pump to pick up a discarded Burger King coffee cup and a damp brown napkin.

“This is my religion now,” he said, stuffing the trash into his pockets. “You do a little bit wherever you are.”

After Seeger found his way to the other war protesters, they started chatting about the “Patriotism is Patriotic” placard displayed at a pro-war demonstration across the road. “I went over once,” Seeger told his fellows. He’d walked right across the road, where he’d told a man, “‘I’m glad we live in a country where we can disagree with each other without trying to shoot each other.’

“He had to shake my hand,” Seeger concluded. “He didn’t know what to say. I even picked up a little litter over there.”

The singer also told us about a teenager who sometimes attended the anti-war protest, and who was less diplomatic toward the opposition. “If somebody gives us the finger, he shouts, ‘Fuck you,'” Seeger said. “I try to persuade him: ‘You should say, “God bless you. That would confuse them. Blow them a kiss.”” Seeger’s own resistance didn’t wear a scowl, it wore a smile.

As Seeger stood there with his peace sign, I asked him how he overcame the molasses pace of change activists face, not to mention the inevitable setbacks. He responded by tilting his head back and breaking into one of his songs, “Take It From Dr. King,” written after the September 11 attacks.

“Don’t say it can’t be done,” Seeger sang, his Adam’s apple bouncing, hands slapping out the rhythm on his knees. “The battle’s just begun/Take it from Dr. King/You too can learn to sing/So drop the gun.” Then he told me that justice had gained ground during his lifetime, and that change often seemed impossible until it happened: Think about civil rights in this country, he said, or the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union without a fight.

Still, I asked him: “Do you think a dozen people protesting here really makes any difference?”

“I don’t think that big things are as effective as people think they are,” he said. “The last time there was an anti-war demonstration in New York City, I said, ‘Why not have a hundred little ones?'”

As part of the day’s protest, Seeger joined other musician-activists without his name recognition singing tunes such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” the spiritual used to give guidance to escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, and “This Land is Your Land,” written by Seeger’s late friend, Woody Guthrie. At one point he stopped singing and crowed over the noise: “This song was never sold in stores. It’s one more example of a small thing that’s spread.”

He played these songs on the very same banjo he’d used to protest the Vietnam War. Around the instrument’s rim, in a rainbow of Magic Marker colors, he’d written: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

A few hours later, he carried the banjo, like an old musket, back to his car. There, I asked him the most important question I’d brought along with me that day: Given the odds, the political landscape in America—an unnecessary war, growing inequality, a dysfunctional government—how did he manage to stave off bitterness?

“You have to keep your sense of humor,” he replied. “And you have to keep in mind the little victories. And you have to keep articles and share them.” Earlier in the day, he’d been handing out copies of a Philadelphia speech on race recently given by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. “If you write a good article, I’ll copy it,” he told me. “I’ll share it around.”

That made me laugh.

I returned home with a broader perspective, and I’ve tried to hold on to what I learned about activism that day: Be friendly to the opposition, engage locally, laugh, take inspiration from history, stay optimistic, stand with others, share good news, and be grateful for the little victories. It’s more than a prescription for survival while fighting for social change. It’s a prescription for happiness, even in hard times.

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What Pete Seeger Taught Me About Activism

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Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

by JeffreyCole Posted on December 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Well, my switch to Chrome didn’t go well after all. It turned out that the MoJo tech team had an excellent reason for not supporting it: For some reason, when you paste text into our blog software, Chrome copies over every last bit of HTML formatting from the source document. Why? Beats me. But it doesn’t really matter, because Chrome lacked so many handy features that I’ve gotten used to in Opera that I would have given up on it anyway. So I tried Firefox again, and so far it’s been great. It had most of the features Chrome didn’t, and the few it lacked could be easily added via extensions. Performance is fine, and it mostly works well with the MoJo web software.

It doesn’t have a built-in email client, which is one of the Opera features I like best, but that was eliminated in the most recent Opera update anyway. Given all this, there’s really not much reason to stick with a browser that’s supported by nobody and that merely produces shrugs (or worse) when you complain about their site not rendering properly.

But before I make the switch permanently, I have a question for the hive mind. I don’t really recall why I gave up on Firefox a couple of years ago, but my recollection is that it had gotten slow and crash-prone. Anyone have any comments on that? Has it gotten better? Or does it still tend to crash at inopportune moments?

Also: Are there any add-ons that are so fabulous I should check them out immediately?

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Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

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