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Global Villager

An Interview With Pico Iyer

America the notion is still very different from America the nation. What’s touching and almost regenerative is that, whatever is happening in the real America — where the murder rate is worse than Lebanon’s, and there is homelessness and poverty — America is still a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free. One interesting thing is that Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Reebok, pizza, enchiladas — everything that is hip and desirable — are all regarded as American no matter what their true origins.

Great Man Going

In the unfamiliar role of prey, we’ve come to recognize our own demise in the destruction of the environment. In the lifelessness we’ve projected on all other matter, we’ve come to see our own lifelessness.

The Revolution

Goodbye, Farmers

The money saved by corporations from producing food on cheap foreign lands, with cheap labor, and with pesticides banned for use in this country, is not passed along to the consumer. It simply serves to increase the profits of the corporations.

Food First — Beyond The Myth Of Scarcity

Book Excerpt

The world’s hungry people are being thrown into ever more direct competition with the well-fed and the over-fed. The fact that something is grown near your home in abundance, or that your country’s natural and financial resources were consumed in producing it, or even that you yourself toiled to grow it will no longer mean that you will be likely to eat it.

Tarnished Gold

Our Seed Stock Is In Jeopardy, But Do The Seed Companies Care?

Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.

Not Quite Our Sort

“Anything,” I say. “Anything but that.” They were trying to make me eat chicken. As an intelligence agent I had been through the wringer many times — torture, torture, forever torture. But I hate chicken. I detest chicken. I would tell them anything if I had to eat chicken.