Department Of Agriculture Quotes

Asking the Department of Agriculture to promote healthy eating was like asking Jack Daniels to promote responsible drinking.

According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame it's counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.

In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.

Awake! arise! the hour is late! Angels are knocking at thy door! They are in haste and cannot wait, And once departed come no more. Awake! arise! the athlete's arm Loses its strength by too much rest; The fallow land, the untilled farm Produces only weeds at best.

We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

Between 6 and 8 percent of pigs die before they are trucked from the factory farm to slaughter. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 123 million pigs were slaughtered in 2006. That means 7 to 10 million died on their own before we could kill them.

In April 2013, Judicial Watch released e-mails proving that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was working hand in hand with the Mexican government to sign up illegal aliens for food stamps.

Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don’t think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.

With the development of chemicals with broad lethal powers, there came a sudden change in the official attitude towards the fire ant. In 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government-inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of birds, livestock and man. A mighty campaign was announced …

Before long, the policy of putting quotas on oranges went from bad to worse. A Navel Orange Administrative Committee created by the Department of Agriculture began setting the policy, and Sunkist, a titan in the orange industry, was given outsized influence over the committee.

To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all. The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations.

With the American people facing an epidemic of obesity andnhardened arteries, the "People's Department" [USDA, United States Department of Agriculture) doesn't regulate fat as much as it grants the [food] industry's every wish. Indeed when it comes to the greatest sources of fat--meant and cheese--the Department of Agriculture has joined industry as a full partner in the most urgent mission of all: cajoling the people to eat more.

since the advent of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1977, consumption data from the United States Department of Agriculture shows that Americans have been doing exactly what they have been told to. Americans have consumed less meat and dairy and replaced their animal fats with vegetable oils. They’ve eaten more grains, fruits, and vegetables. And what has happened? A tsunami of obesity the likes of which the world has never seen.

We need to get beyond our ignorance of the other. We need to move beyond the thinking that white privilege means that all whites live a privileged life. This perspective ignores the reality of class in this country. The plight of poor whites was largely ignored until the last presidential election. According to the 2013 data from the US Department of Agriculture, 40.2 percent of food stamp recipients were white; 25.7 percent, black.4 What’s Their Story? We would do well to hear and learn from the stories of whites, especially those who share the common struggle of poverty and marginalization. In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance shares his story of growing up poor: “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”5 When we understand the details of the other’s story we realize that we have much more in common than we ever imagined.

Bees are efficient foragers. One example is the southeastern blueberry bee, Habropoda laboriosa, a hard working little creature capable of visiting as many as 50,000 blueberry flowers in her short life and pollinating enough of them to produce more than 6,000 ripe blueberries. At market those 6,000 blueberries are worth approximately $20 or more. Not every bee that you see flitting about may be worth $20, but all of them combined keep the world of flowering plants going. The world as we know it would not exist if there were no bees to pollinate the earth’s 250,000 flowering plants.

Right now, I see the country of my birth moving backward. It has dumped the Paris Agreement, it’s close to dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture is in very bad shape. The United States Department of Energy, which funded my lab for more than a decade to study greenhouse gases, has shut down most of its work on climate change, and NASA is under pressure to do the same. I left the United States in 2016 and moved to Norway because I believe that my laboratory will have more support here and because I am worried about the future of science in America.

After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies.

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,—everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity.

The No. 1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson. The No. 2 source in the same Department was Henry Julian Wadleigh, an expert in the Trade Agreements Division, to which he had managed to have himself transferred from the Agriculture Department. He had done so at the request of the Communist Party

Agricultural commodity traders, on the other hand, buy from thousands of individual farmers. That makes the traders’ job harder, but it also provides an opportunity: dealing with so many farmers gives the largest traders valuable information. Long before the concept of ‘big data’ became popular, the agricultural traders were putting it to work, aggregating information from thousands of farmers to get a real-time insight into the state of the markets. Each month, when the US Department of Agriculture published its update on the world’s key crops, the agricultural houses’ traders were able to bet on what it would say with near-certainty that they were right. Within most trading houses, there was a group of traders whose sole job was to speculate profitably with the company’s money – they were known as the proprietary, or ‘prop’, traders.

Perhaps the most obvious political inequality is the violation of the precept one person one vote. Yet until recent times most writers rejected equal universal suffrage. Indeed, persons were not regarded as the proper subjects of representation at all. Often it was interests that were to be represented, with Whig and Tory differing as to whether the interest of the rising middle class should be given a place alongside the landed and ecclesiastical interests. For others it is regions that are to be represented, or forms of culture, as when one speaks of the representation of the agricultural and urban elements of society. At the first sight, these kinds of representation appear unjust. How far they depart from the precept one person one vote is a measure of their abstract injustice, and indicates the strength of the countervailing reasons that must be forthcoming.119

What we need,” I said, “are statistics on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricanes came through Puerto Rico.” There was a stunned silence, as if they were afraid I had stumbled onto something that could turn out to be embarrassing for the Labor Department. “Well, it’s not that easy,” one of the Labor Department economists said. “We don’t have those statistics.” “I’ll bet the Department of Agriculture has them,” I said. “That’s still not the same as if we had them in the Department of Labor,” I was told. “Why can’t we get them from the Department of Agriculture?” I asked. “That’s easier said than done. First of all, we would have to make a request, going all the way up through channels to the Secretary of Labor. Then he would have to seek approval from the Secretary of Agriculture, who would then have to forward the request down the chain of command in the Department of Agriculture, to see if the data are available and can be released.” “Well,” I said, “John F. Kennedy says that a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Let me file the request.” That was 1960. I have yet to receive an official reply to my request.

Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals--companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.

Theobald Smith, yet another of those forgotten heroes of medical history. Smith, born in 1859, was the son of German immigrants (the family name was Schmitt) in upstate New York and grew up speaking German, so was able to follow and appreciate the experiments of Robert Koch more quickly than most of his American contemporaries. He taught himself Koch’s methods for culturing bacteria and was thus able to isolate salmonella in 1885, long before any other American could do so. Daniel Salmon was head of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was primarily an administrator, but the convention of the day was to list the bureau head as lead author on the department’s papers, and that was the name that got attached to the microbe. Smith was also robbed of credit for the discovery of the infectious protozoa Babesia, which is wrongly named for a Romanian bacteriologist, Victor Babeş. In a long and distinguished career, Smith also did important work on yellow fever, diphtheria, African sleeping sickness, and fecal contamination of drinking water, and showed that tuberculosis in humans and in livestock was caused by different microorganisms, proving Koch wrong on two vital points. Koch also believed that TB could not jump from animals to humans, and Smith showed that that was wrong, too. It was thanks to this discovery that pasteurization of milk became a standard practice. Smith was, in short, the most important American bacteriologist during what was the golden age of bacteriology and yet is almost completely forgotten now.

Five Hundred Years of Solitude The rise of modern science and industry brought about the next revolution in human–animal relations. During the Agricultural Revolution humankind silenced animals and plants, and turned the animist grand opera into a dialogue between man and gods. During the Scientific Revolution humankind silenced the gods too. The world was now a one-man show. Humankind stood alone on an empty stage, talking to itself, negotiating with no one and acquiring enormous powers without any obligations. Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases. When an archaic hunter went out to the savannah, he asked the help of the wild bull, and the bull demanded something of the hunter. When an ancient farmer wanted his cows to produce lots of milk, he asked some great heavenly god for help, and the god stipulated his conditions. When the white-coated staff in Nestlé’s Research and Development department want to increase dairy production, they study genetics – and the genes don’t ask for anything in return.

Beans also digest very slowly, providing sustained energy and preventing the blood-sugar roller coaster commonly associated with high-carb and/or processed foods. Many bean varieties also boast folic acid, which benefits the heart, as well as immune-boosting minerals like magnesium, iron, zinc and potassium. Best Sources: Red beans, small red kidney beans and pinto beans rank among the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s top four antioxidant-containing foods. Other beans you may want to add to your rotation: black beans, garbanzo beans and black-eyed peas. Should

HAGGIS The U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits Americans from eating the authentic Scottish dish because it contains sheep lungs, which legally "shall not be saved for use as human food.

By 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced China was the largest recipient of American agricultural exports, more than $26 billion,

Explosive population growth in much of Asia was making it less and less plausible that nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines would ever be able to feed themselves. In Famine—1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? William and Paul Paddock argued that a Time of Famines would soon lay waste the developing world. “The famines are inevitable,” they warned. And “riding alongside [them] will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government[s] will be too weak to control.” The Paddocks derided the naïve hope that “something [would] turn up” to forestall this doom.102 And the Paddocks were not alone in their assessment. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, argued that Famine—1975! “may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age.” The Rockefeller Foundation shared these men’s sense of urgency. But, rather than advocate a triage system (as the Paddocks did), in which the worst-off nations would be denied assistance and left to their Darwinian fate, the foundation looked for new ways to attack the problem. The foundation had first extended its agriculture programs to India in 1956, at the request of the Indian national government. In the ensuing years, Rockefeller partnered with USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Together, they “helped establish five state agriculture universities in India. ” 103 These universities collaborated with their American counterparts on research and training. As it had in Mexico, the foundation thereby contributed to the development, in India, of a community of homegrown agriculturalists with access to the most advanced technologies in the world.

On March 28, 2013, President Barack Obama signed the short-term spending bill HR 933 into law to prevent the government from shutting down. Discreetly slipped inside the bill, however, was an additional rider—section 735, dubbed the Farmer Assurance Provision.   Environmental activists had their own nickname for it: the “Monsanto Protection Act.” Outraged, they argued that the rider—which had been written by Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), in collaboration with Monsanto itself[1]—would provide big agribusiness with immunity from judicial oversight. In effect, it would allow the US Department of Agriculture to approve of the planting of genetically modified crops even if the judiciary had declared them unsafe.

The farmers say ... “What does Wall Street know about farming?” Wall Street knows more than all the farmers put together ever knew, with all that the farmers have forgotten. It employs the ablest of the farmers, and its experts are better even than those of our admirable and little appreciated Department of Agriculture, whose publications Wall Street reads even if the farmer neglects them. –William P. Hamilton, 1925

Here are some tips to help you feed your family a healthy diet; they’ll save you money in the long run: 1. Skim Milk: skim milk has no empty calories, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture; serve that as alternative to whole milk or even 2%. 2. Extra Lean Ground Beef: extra lean ground beef also has no empty calories; regular ground beef gets about one quarter of its calories from fat. 3. Skinless Chicken Breast: A skinless chicken breast has no empty calories. Battered and fried chicken wings get almost 80 percent of their calories from fat. 4. Wheat Bread: Wheat bread, which should be a staple in virtually every home, has no empty calories; a croissant has almost 50 percent empty calories. 5. Junk Drinks: soda pop, beer, wine and distilled spirits all provide no nutritional value for their calories. Money spent here is simply wasted. 6. Toppings: Butter, margarine, cream cheese and whipped toppings are almost completely empty calories. 7. Water: water from the tap in America is generally safe to drink, virtually free and is the healthiest option for most people. 8. Eating at Home: At home, you have the opportunity to influence your family’s eating habits more than when you eat out. If you provide food they love to eat at home, you can save money by eating out less. If it’s healthy food at home,

In 2002, a Cochrane Collaboration review of the evidence concluded that low-fat diets induced no more weight loss than calorie-restricted diets, and in both cases the weight loss achieved “was so small as to be clinically insignificant.” A similar analysis was published in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In this case, the authors identified twenty-eight relevant trials of low-fat diets, of which at least twenty were also calorie-restricted. The overweight subjects consumed, on average, less than seventeen hundred calories a day for an average weight loss of not quite nine pounds over six months.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 16% of men and 13% of women ages 20 to 39 eat pizza every single day.

In the first two years of the Trump administration the numbers just collapsed—compared to the Obama and George W. Bush administrations alike. At the Department of Agriculture, to take just one other example, fines levied on meat and processed food conglomerates for cheating contract farmers and other violations plummeted by 2018 to a tenth of 2013 levels.

Maybe my ex-wife was right about meat. I tried to picture a life of soybean cheeseburgers, chile no carne, and hot dogs made out of seaweed. I’d rather die. All of a sudden I felt love and warmth for the Department of Agriculture.

According to the current U.S. Department of Agriculture database, bananas don’t even make the list of the top-thousand foods with the highest levels of potassium; in fact, they come in at number 1,611, right after Reese’s Pieces.27 You’d have to eat a dozen bananas a day just to get the bare minimum recommended amount of potassium.

DES, or diethylstilbestrol, is a man-made estrogen that was first synthesized in 1938. Soon afterward, a professor of poultry husbandry at the University of California discovered that if you inject DES into male chickens, it chemically castrates them. Instant capons. The males develop female characteristics—plump breasts and succulent meats—desirable assets for one’s dinner. After that, subcutaneous DES implants became pretty much de rigueur in the poultry industry, at least until 1959, when the FDA banned them. Apparently, someone discovered that dogs and males from low-income families in the South were developing signs of feminization after eating cheap chicken parts and wastes from processing plants, which is exactly what happened to Mr. Purcell. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was forced to buy about ten million dollars’ worth of contaminated chicken to get it off the market. But by then DES was also being widely used in beef production, and oddly enough, the FDA did nothing to stop that. Here is a brief recap:

As already noted, the Poultry Products Inspection Regulations of the U.S. Department of Agriculture only states, "Poultry shall be slaughtered in accordance with good commercial practices in a manner that will result in thorough bleeding of the carcasses and assure that breathing has stopped prior to scalding.

terrible.So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the U.S. Agriculture Department on the other side-where they just sit around and so forth.

These are Meyer lemons,” Horace said as we passed the trees. “Named for Frank Nicholas Meyer. Dutch by birth, but an agent of the United States government. He worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Seed and Plant Introduction before the First World War. I thought of him when Jaina Mitra spoke of her microbial survey. Meyer and his cohort were hunters for larger prey. They canvassed the world and sent back living samples of plants thought to be useful to the advancement of the American economy. Meyer worked in China. He sent the first soybean to America. And persimmons! Any persimmon grown in this country today comes from that lineage. And of course, there are these lemons—named for him. Meyer died in China. He drowned in the Yangtze, pushed from a riverboat.

He took delight in boasting, in contrast to most traders who got up early to read all they could from weather reports to daily Department of Agriculture assessments, that he stayed in bed until the last minute before getting to the exchange just as trading started.

THE SPH'S OFFICIAL VISIT (VIJAYA YATRA) TO KAILASA IN LOS ANGELES || E-TOUR || 21 FEB 2021 WORLDWIDE OFFICIAL VISITS (VIJAYA YATRA) OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM, JAGATGURU MAHASANNIDHANAM, HIS DIVINE HOLINESS BHAGAVAN #NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM CONTINUES TODAY WITH THE ETOUR TO KAILASA IN LOS ANGELES, USA. ADHERING TO WHO’S GUIDANCE ON RETAINING OURSELVES TO QUARANTINE AND SOCIAL DISTANCING, KAILASA’S DEPARTMENT OF BROADCASTING FACILITATED THE E-TOUR BRINGING HINDU DIASPORA IN LOS ANGELES CLOSER TO THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM. THE DE FACTO SPIRITUAL EMBASSY, #KAILASA IN LOS ANGELES HEADED BY SRI NITHYA MUKTHANANDA AND MA NITHYA MUKTHIKANANDA RECEIVED THE SPH AT 9.40AM IST. A FEW HUNDRED KAILASIANS PARTICIPATED IN THE E-TOUR VIA KAILASA’S OFFICIAL DIGITAL SPACES. THE E-TOUR WAS TRULY A BLESSED MOMENT FOR EACH AND EVERY KAILASIAN AS IT HAS BEEN 11 YEARS SINCE THE SPH HAD VISITED THE KAILASA IN LOS ANGELES PHYSICALLY. INSPIRING EVERY #HINDU TO RECLAIM THEIR HINDU CENTRIC FREEDOM AND BUILD KAILASA, THE ENLIGHTENED CIVILIZATIONAL NATION, THE SPH REVEALED VARIOUS POWERFUL TRUTHS IN THE 3 HOUR LONG E-TOUR. KAILASA IN LOS ANGELES’S DEPARTMENT OF #RELIGION & WORSHIP RECEIVED SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE ON THE DEITIES IN KAILASA. THE SPH REVEALED THAT WHEN INSTALLING DEITIES ENERGISED BY THE SPH BY A LIVING INCARNATION, THE DEITIES PROTECT THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF THE NATION. THEREFORE, THE DEITIES SHOULD BE PLACED IN SUCH A WAY THAT THEY TOUCH THE LAND (BHU) HE FURTHER REVEALED, “LEARN DISCIPLINE FROM NATURE BEFORE NATURE DISCIPLINES US". THE #SPH BLESSED THE VARIOUS INITIATIVES UNDERTAKEN BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES INCLUDING NITHYANANDA FOOD BANK (ANNAMANDIR) , DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION - KAILASA IN LOS ANGELES. #nithyananda kailaasa kailasa

The leading source of calories that Americans consume is a category called “grain-based desserts,” like pies, cakes, and cookies, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That is our number one “food group.

As a nation, we were told to eat less fat and less saturated fat, which we did, or at least tried to do—saturated-fat consumption steadily declined over the years that followed, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics—and yet, rather than getting leaner, we got fatter. What’s more, the incidence of heart disease has not even diminished, which goes against expectations, if eating less fat or saturated fat makes a difference. This has been documented in numerous studies, the latest of which appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association in November 2009 by Elena Kuklina and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors made much of the fact that the number of Americans with high levels of LDL cholesterol has recently been decreasing, as would be expected in a nation avoiding saturated fat (and spending billions of dollars yearly on cholesterol-lowering drugs), but the number of heart attacks was not decreasing with it.

Take lard, for example, which has long been considered the archetypal example of a killer fat. It was lard that bakeries and fast-food restaurants used in large quantities before they were pressured to replace it with the artificial trans fats that nutritionists have now decided might be a cause of heart disease after all. You can find the fat composition of lard easily enough, as you can for most foods, by going to a U.S. Department of Agriculture website called the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. You’ll find that nearly half the fat in lard (47 percent) is monounsaturated, which is almost universally considered a “good” fat. Monounsaturated fat raises HDL cholesterol and lowers LDL cholesterol (both good things, according to our doctors). Ninety percent of that monounsaturated fat is the same oleic acid that’s in the olive oil so highly touted by champions of the Mediterranean diet. Slightly more than 40 percent of the fat in lard is indeed saturated, but a third of that is the same stearic acid that’s in chocolate and is now also considered a “good fat,” because it will raise our HDL levels but have no effect on LDL (a good thing and a neutral thing). The remaining fat (about 12 percent of the total) is polyunsaturated, which actually lowers LDL cholesterol but has no effect on HDL (also a good thing and a neutral thing).

The standard American diet only rates an eleven out of one hundred. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates, 57 percent of our calories come from processed plant foods, 32 percent from animal products, and only 11 percent from whole grains, fruits, beans, nuts, and vegetables.2804 In other words, on a scale of one to ten, the American diet only rates about a one. Why

The leading source of calories that Americans consume is a category called “grain-based desserts,” like pies, cakes, and cookies, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That is our number one “food group.” If we consume a bunch of grain-based desserts in a Cheesecake Factory binge, our blood glucose levels will surge. And if we do it over and over and over again, as we saw in previous chapters, we will eventually overwhelm our ability to handle all those calories in a safe way. The SAD essentially wages war on our metabolic health, and, given enough time, most of us will lose the war.

In 1995, then-president Bill Clinton got word that the U. S. Department of Agriculture was funding studies on “stress in plants” with taxpayer money. He even made a jibe about it in that year’s State of the Union Address, implying that he thought the study was about plants needing psychotherapy, and promised to cut such wasteful spending.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture's snail-farming bulletin notes that confined snails may form an aggregate, their combined strength and skills resulting in a breakout. I thought of hundreds of snails packed densely into shipping crates, en route to a restaurant where escargots grace the menu and boiling water awaits. With one purpose in mind, they join forces, push up with their muscular heads against the top of the crate, and pop the lid right off, gliding slowly but steadily toward freedom.

Selling & Buying" Everyone is up for sale, because most are looking for nothing but selling and buying … They sell life to buy a wretched living! You see them selling with no shame or dignity, and whenever you encounter a sign of kindness or a smile, you soon discover that it is fake and for marketing purposes only… You see the sons of bitches and their children and grandchildren all busy selling real estate cars bodies and desires fruit and vegetables countries and agricultural lands natural resources (after proxy revolutions) clothes, shoes, and things – both fake and original – cheap gifts and souvenirs in touristy cities iPhones with ugly accessories long and wide lists of all things, big or small, that are supposed to make them happier trendier more attractive and more human… And between one sale and another, they rest and talk about values, the Creator, ethics, religion, what is prohibited and what’s allowed… Between one sale and another buy, you find them discussing dignity and freedom, theorizing the meaning of life, talking about politics and revolutions nature and the environment diseases and chronic illnesses the latest technological advancements about everything expect the fact that all the misfortunes on this planet are because they don’t hesitate to sell anything and everything their hands can reach, in exchange for one moment of superficiality! You see those who chase after and master the game of selling and buying in perfect harmony with the latest trends and styles, yet dwelling inside miserable bodies whose soul and spirit have long departed with no return… Oh, how fortunate are those who learned to adapt with this game of selling and buying… [Original poem published in Arabic on June 29, 2024 at ahewar.org]

The tournament system is kept afloat by an obscure federal organization called the Farm Service Agency. The FSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to make sure that there will always be cheap loans for a new chicken farm when an older one is put out of business. Ron Burnett is a loan officer in Arkansas who has seen how the farm loan program works firsthand and how it has changed over the last few decades. In 1983 Burnett became a loan officer for a small division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture called the Farmers Home Administration. Few people ever heard of the agency, whose nominal goal was to ensure that struggling farmers had access to credit. But from his vantage point in the Arkansas branch of the agency, Burnett watched as it grew and ultimately made taxpayers responsible for billions of dollars in loans for industrial chicken farms.

But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.

Agriculture Department in 2019 quietly cut the number of inspectors in pork plants by more than half. Finding defects—feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders—was mostly left to the companies themselves, much in the way that the FAA relied on Boeing’s own employees to ensure aircraft safety.

So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces: to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the US Department of Agriculture on the other side, where they just sit around and so forth. I don’t know exactly what they do. However, I do know that they do very little useful work.

One thing most people don’t fully comprehend is that the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, is for all intents and purposes run by big agro. Let me put it another way: the USDA is a giddy dystopian wonderland designed for the pleasure of big agribusiness. There are only a handful of American agribusiness corporations, and they essentially dictate what Americans eat because they essentially control the USDA. For example, the USDA created the nutritional pyramid first and foremost to serve agribusiness’s interests—not human physical needs. And thus the meals served to schools and to prisons reflect not what the bodies of growing boys and girls or aging men and women need to thrive and/or survive; rather, these meals, planned and vetted and carefully created by lockstep scads of bureaucratic drones, work to buttress the agribusiness economy—while costing the State (or the corporation running the institution) as little as possible.

We have the money. We've just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians' canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.

PETA itself has been exposed for killing, literally, tens of thousands of animals in its care. Dating back to 1998, according to records provided by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to the Center for Consumer Freedom, the animal rights group kills hundreds of household pets every year in facilities it ironically calls “animal shelters.” In 2014, PETA took in 2,631 animals in Virginia. Thirty-nine were adopted. A shocking 2,324 were killed. The rest were transferred to other facilities. Between 1998 and 2014, according to the records, PETA killed 33,514 household pets.25 In one Norfolk, Virginia, branch of PETA, documents disclosed the organization killed almost all of its animals—that’s according to a report in the reliably liberal Huffington Post, which was accompanied by a graphic entitled “For An Animal Rights Organization, PETA Kills A Lot Of Animals.” No kidding.

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, “ ‘does engage’ in computer network exploitation,” but “does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including ‘cyber’ ” [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its “customers,” a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce:

data from our very own U.S. Department of Agriculture says that over the first thirteen years of commercial use of GMO crops (1996–2008), herbicide use in the United States increased by 383 million pounds.13

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) sets quality standards for meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. The U.S. Department of Commerce (USDC) sets quality standards for fish and seafood.

Those guidelines, according to Dr. Light, did not survive their trip to the office of the Head of the Department of Agriculture. In a 2004 account, she described herself as “shocked” by the changes that were made. Her team placed fruits and vegetables at the base of the pyramid and whole-grain breads and cereals further up. The new guidelines not only switched carbohydrates to the base of the pyramid, it moved processed foods like crackers and corn flakes, which Dr. Light and her team had placed at the top of the pyramid with chocolate, to the base of the pyramid. Even with all the edits, the food pyramid was not released for another 12 years.

Dr. Luise Light is a nutrition expert and led the team at the Department of Agriculture that made the original recommendations for the food pyramid. If you review her original recommendations, they sounds very similar to dietary advice given by nutritionists today: lots of vegetables, more lean sources of protein like fish and nuts, and less dairy and processed foods. Those guidelines, according to Dr. Light, did not survive their trip to the office of the Head of the Department of Agriculture. In a 2004 account, she described herself as “shocked” by the changes that were made. Her team placed fruits and vegetables at the base of the pyramid and whole-grain breads and cereals further up. The new guidelines not only switched carbohydrates to the base of the pyramid, it moved processed foods like crackers and corn flakes, which Dr. Light and her team had placed at the top of the pyramid with chocolate, to the base of the pyramid. Even with all the edits, the food pyramid was not released for another 12 years.

One last precaution: If you see an organic label on seafood, run away. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has no standard or certification for organic seafood. Save your money; there’s no such thing.

Imagine making a nearly life-size sculpture of yourself out of sugar cubes and consuming it over the next 365 days. That’s essentially what many of us are doing. The typical American eats an average of 128 pounds of added sugars each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And it affects our bodies on every level.

I counted ten men, all dressed in some sort of blue uniform, and either they were the Department of Agriculture band, sent out to greet me, or they were the night security guards

I never realized the Department of Agriculture was involved in national security. Do you have, like, undercover cows?

Grain crops, such as wheat and oats, also became more plentiful after World War II, often running to surplus. It isn’t difficult to draw a line between grain surplus and the federal government’s emphasis on grains in the American diet. When the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) started recommending dietary standards in 1946, grains got the lion’s share of daily recommended servings and dairy enjoyed its status as an entire food group. Nuts were nowhere to be found.

federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined.

Every acre of maize or sugar cane requires tractor fuel, fertilisers, pesticides, truck fuel and distillation fuel – all of which are fuel. So the question is: how much fuel does it take to grow fuel? Answer: about the same amount. The US Department of Agriculture estimated in 2002 that each unit of energy put into growing maize ethanol produces 1.34 units of output, but only by counting the energy of dried distillers’ grain, a by-product of the production process that can go into cattle feed.

In 1924, Frank E. Denny, a scientist from the US Department of Agriculture in Los Angeles, demonstrated that kerosene smoke contains minute amounts of a molecule called ethylene and that treating any fruit with pure ethylene gas is enough to enduce ripening.

The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse to see anything in isolation. Everything, as he saw it, existed within a context, outside of which it was unintelligible. Moreover, every problem existed within a context, outside of which it was unsolvable. Agriculture, thus, cannot be understood or its problems solved without respect to context. The same applied even to an individual plant or crop. And this respect for context properly set the standard and determined the methodology of agricultural science: The basis of research was obviously to be investigation directed to the whole existence of a selected crop, namely, “the plant itself in relation to the soil in which it grows, to the conditions of village agriculture under which it is cultivated, and with reference to the economic uses of the product”; in other words research was to be integral, never fragmented. 11 If nothing exists in isolation, then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department. A disease was, thus, a symptom of a larger disorder.

I started by contacting the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Is it legal to keep a cougar?” I asked. It turned out that it was perfectly legal, provided the animal was born in captivity. “Once they are in captivity,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “they no longer fall under the jurisdiction of the Fish and Wildlife Department. They become the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Agriculture.” The bureaucrat’s favorite strategy: Pass a problem on down the line.

Fast forward to today. Americans still have very few options when it comes to trying the lesser-known varieties of charcutería available to the Spanish people. Hope exists, however, that this may be soon rectified, as evidenced by the sweeping acquittal of many Italian cured-meat imports in April 2013.20 For now, anyway, we can travel to Spain and consume to our heart’s content. We can buy what precious little is available in our country. We can make it ourselves. Or we can make a futile attempt at stuffing contraband pork into our suitcases and pray, with the wide-eyed, guilt-laden face of a Colombian drug mule, not to get busted by the Department of Homeland Security. Just know that on this point, dear reader, I can offer a bit of personal advice: Getting caught is an epic fail of disastrous proportions, even if it’s not your fault. Case in point: After a trip to Madrid and the surrounding countryside, my Spanish “family” thought that they’d surprise me with a little package of morcilla secreted away in my suitcase. It was a gesture borne of more heart than brains, as ultimately it truly was a great surprise—especially when I found myself tagged for an agricultural check at a particularly thorough US Customs checkpoint. I simply didn’t understand. I’d filled out my Customs card and done everything right. Yet there I was, unloading my dirty unmentionables on a counter for God, curious passersby, and the TSA to look over and admire. And that’s when I caught a waft of

One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the USDA—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time, he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals Americans eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, and a bank with $ 220 billion in assets. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its DC headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee-colony collapse. There’s a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the USDA do it? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess if the USDA does it. (In this case, it does.)

In 1873, Mrs. Eliza Tibbets, a resident of the struggling three-year-old city of Riverside, California, received two orange tree bud stocks from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the national seed distribution program. The buds were “sports” derived from an orange tree discovered in Bahia, Brazil, and the fruit proved to be thick-skinned, delicious, and conveniently free of seeds.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about one hundred years ago, a single serving of chicken may have contained only sixteen fat calories. Nowadays, one serving of chicken may have more than two hundred calories of fat. The fat content in poultry has ballooned from less than two grams per serving a century ago to up to twenty-three grams today. That’s ten times more fat. Chicken now contains two to three times more calories from fat than from protein, leading nutrition researchers to ask, “Does eating obesity cause obesity in the consumer?”91 As the beef industry is proud of pointing out, even skinless chicken can have more fat, and more artery-clogging saturated fat, than a dozen different cuts of steak.92

October 14, 1954 in Washington, D.C. seemed like a day like any other, until we were dismissed from school early because the teacher said there was a bad storm coming. The sky was turning quite dark as we hurried home. “Grandma, why did the teacher tell us to go straight home?” Grandma was trying to remain her calm self, but I know how much storms terrified her. Argentina has the most severe lightning and tornadoes in the world. She was leaning against the kitchen counter in the corner to steady herself. She always said she would love to go hide in a closet during thunderstorms. “It’s a hurricane they’ve named Hazel. Your mom will be home soon, I hope. She is out getting more food and supplies like candles and batteries in case we lose power and have no light. We’re so lucky to have a gas stove so we can still cook.” Dad came home early from his job with the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland and Mom made it home just before the winds started. Dad chided Mom, and lessened the tension with, “Now don’t be getting any notion of taking a bath, Eva Beat-rice, there is no time for that!” Dad liked to change the pronunciation of her middle name, Beatrice, to Beatrice when he was teasing her. Mom always ran the water and took a bath during every storm. Dad always said, “Someday you’ll be flying through the air in the bathtub and they’ll find you blocks away!

An American killed by his spinach can justifiably blame the FDA, but an American killed by his steak is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. Cheese pizzas are the FDA’s problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the USDA.

people Trump had sent into the Department of Agriculture were white men in their twenties.

133.      For qualifying for the United States Department of Agriculture’s highest grade, the tomato ketchup has to contain no more than 30 fruit fly eggs per 100 grams (3.5 ounces).

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That’s why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab.

The big gorilla of homeowner tax breaks is the deduction for mortgage interest, which reduces income tax revenues by about $100 billion each year. That is, this one tax deduction costs more than the budgets of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, the Interior, and the Treasury combined.

In 2001 Science featured an article, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat,” that argued a low-fat diet is not necessarily healthful and that the public had been misled about the relative merits of fat and starch.16 A few years ago Scientific American declared: “It’s time to end the war on salt: the zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science.”17 About the same time the Department of Agriculture tossed out its iconic food pyramid for a food plate and juggled several of its recommendations.18 Recently the USDA was reported to be poised to recommend that Americans eat less meat—not because it’s better for individuals, but because it may be better for the environment, which indirectly could affect our health too.19

had never heard of heir property before. After much research, I was amazed that the Reels brothers were not alone in their fight and that involuntary land loss from heir property is such an important issue that no one really knows about or talks about. It’s not recognized as “the worst problem you never heard of” or “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture without justification. In Long After We Are Gone, I hope to shine a light on this issue and how certain laws, policies, and loopholes continue to dispossess families of their land.