Deconstructing Dinner
Deconstructing Dinner is a podcast/radio show that broadcast between 2006 through 2011 with a brief return of a handful of episodes in 2014. Almost 200 episodes are available on topics ranging from corporate consolidation, animal welfare, urban food production and the local and good food movements. With host Jon Steinman.
Packaged Foods Exposed II (Nestlé)

The second of an ongoing series that will take a look behind the world's largest packaged food and beverage producers. In the first episode, we took a look at global giant PepsiCo.

The Packaged Foods Exposed series places corporations in a critical light, hoping to provide a more balanced image to the advertising and PR campaigns launched by some of the most influential food corporations on the planet.

In this second episode of the Packaged Foods Exposed series, we take a look at the largest food manufacturer in the world - Nestlé. What products fall under their banner; how has their influence  shaped economic policy, society and culture; how have they affected the environments they operate in; and what relationships do they foster within the countries they are located?

Guests

Karl Flecker - Education Coordinator / Director of the Water Program, Polaris Institute - Polaris is designed to enable citizen movements to re-skill and re-tool themselves to fight for democratic social change in an age of corporate driven globalization. Essentially, the Institute works with citizen movements in developing the kinds of strategies and tactics required to unmask and challenge the corporate power that is the driving force behind governments concerning public policy making on economic, social and environmental issues. Karl Flecker has worked with the institute for 5 years.

Direct download: DD072706.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 12:00pm EDT

Shocking Sugar

Sugar is close to becoming a cultural institution here in North America and is found in a countless number of foods that we consume daily. The media looks to sugar on a rather frequent basis to satisfy the "declining population health" segments of the nightly news. While these segments could arguably not be frequent enough, there is a whole side to sugar rarely touched on.

Like with many crops, fruits and vegetables, sugar production comes with hidden costs. Sugarcane represents the primary crop from which refined sugar originates, and its current methods of cultivation and production are taking a toll on the environment and on the human beings who are part of the process.

Join us as we look past the health concerns of our sugar-driven food system, and look to solutions and alternatives to a commodity that seems to present very little choice for the general public.

Guests

Dr. Jason Clay - Vice-President, Center for Conservation Innovation, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) - Jason has spent more than 20 years working with human rights and environmental organizations. More recently, Jason has been engaged in detailed examinations of the social and environmental impacts of commodity production. Clay was founder and editor of the award-winning Cultural Survival Quarterly, the largest circulation anthropology and human rights publication in the world. Jason studied anthropology and Latin American studies at Harvard University, economics and geography at the London School of Economics, and anthropology and international agriculture at Cornell University where he received his Ph.D. in 1979. Jason sits on the Board of Protected Harvest and is the author of "World Agriculture and the Environment".

Adony Melathopoulos - Research Technician, Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada - Working out of the Beaverlodge Research Farm in Beaverlodge, Alberta, Adony studies ways to manage pests and diseases on Honey Bee farms. Adony graduated from Burnaby's Simon Fraser University and sits on the Communications committee for the Canadian Assocation of Professional Apiculturists (CAPA). Adony recently compiled an article for the Canadian Honey Council's web site titled "Honey as Canada's Sustainable and Ethical Sweetener."

Reykia Fick - Public Education & Outreach, TransFair Canada - TransFair Canada is a national non-profit certification and public education organization promoting Fair Trade Certified to improve the livelihood of developing world farmers and workers.

David Richard - Publisher, Vital Health Publishing - Vital Health publishes authors who can expose health-related problems accurately and with integrity, clarify the issues, and provide workable solutions. David first authored the book "Stevia Rebaudiana: Nature's Sweet Secret" in 1996. David was featured in a New York Times headline story on the food disparagement laws (June 1, 1999), and he also made national news in 1998 when his Stevia book was nearly burned by the FDA in the warehouse of one of his Texas distributors.

Direct download: DD072006.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 12:00pm EDT

Vegan Cattle Ranchers & Oprah

Howard Lyman (aka The Mad Cowboy) is a figure to pay attention to. If converting from a Montana cattle rancher to a strict vegan is not enough of a reason to raise an eyebrow, Lyman has since devoted his life to educating the public on the dangers of animal-based diets.

Lyman has been a fourth-generation family farmer in Montana for almost 40 years. Using personal experience, he denounces chemically based agricultural production methods, calling them unsustainable and ecologically disastrous. His experiences range from working in a large organic dairy to raising registered beef cattle to owning a large factory feedlot. He has farmed thousands of acres of grain and reproduced a herd of over one thousand commercial beef cows. Lyman has raised chickens, pigs, and turkeys, and grown crops such as wheat, barley, oats, corn, alfalfa, and grass.

Howard Lyman was farming at the time when it was either get big or get out. Educated on the modern industrial methods of agriculture, Lyman saw his organic soil go from a living, productive base to a sterile, chemically-saturated, mono-cultural ground.

In 1979, a tumor on his spinal cord caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down. Realizing that the farming methods he used were the problem, he decided to become a voice for the family farmer and the land. That led him to work for the Montana Farmers Union and from there to Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist for the National Farmers Union.

Lyman has made many trips to British Columbia, and this broadcast will feature his speech given at the Taste of Health event hosted by EarthSave Canada in 2002. The recording is courtesy of the Necessary Voices Society.

"The question we must ask ourselves as a culture is whether we want to embrace the change that must come, or resist it. Are we so attached to the dietary fallacies with which we were raised, so afraid to counter the arbitrary laws of eating taught to us in childhood by our misinformed parents, that we cannot alter the course they set us on, even if it leads to our own ruin? Does the prospect of standing apart or encountering ridicule scare us even from saving ourselves?" - Howard Lyman

Direct download: DD070606.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 12:00pm EDT