Barbie and I don’t have a lot in common. For one thing, I’m biodegradable and she’s not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson’s been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she’s only 8 years old? Is it possible that an anti-oxidant-rich plant-based diet has the power not only to delay the aging process but actually reverse it?

But while eternal tweener Lisa’s the token treehugger in the Simpson household, it’s Bart who’s got the perfect prescription for how to cool Mother Nature’s fevered brow: don’t have a cow. Literally. The less meat you grill, the more you help the planet chill.

Now, before you dismiss me as some kinda free-range Chicken Little, clucking about the catastrophic consequences of our fossil-fueled food chain, you should know that I’m not the only one warning that burgers do more harm than Hummers.

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Oh, you car-crazy, meat-mad Americans, look what you’ve done now! Everybody else wants to live the way you do, wolfing down Whoppers behind the wheel. So they’re ripping up rainforests to grow more grains for cars and cows, and that’s just accelerating global warming, which is worsening the droughts that are ruining crops from Australia to Zimbabwe.

As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, told NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, the current global food crisis wasn’t caused by some sort of temporary setback such as crop failure, but rather “systemic change” due to increased worldwide demand for meat and the fool’s gold rush to produce more biofuels, which Brown cites as the proverbial last straw:

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The secret to Jim Hightower’s success lies in a style of political commentary best described as “pleasantly apoplectic;” he’s mad as hell, but in an ultra-affable way. Who else could stoke a fire in the belly with so many belly laughs?

In our climate change crisis, Hightower’s a natural source of alternative energy. He’s got his own brand of windpower, fueled by blowhards and gasbags, of which the right seems to have an endless supply.

And then there’s the wave power he’s helping to generate with his new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. Swim Against the Current, co-authored by Susan DeMarco, provides heartening proof that citizen activists are turning the tide against the Powers That Be who’ve dragged our democracy through the muck.

If you subscribe to the “Yes-Things-Are-Awful-But-What-Can-I- Do-I’m-Just-One-Person” school of thought, I’m giving you an “F” for fatalism. I’ll change it to an “A” for attitude adjustment after you read this book and get off your apathetic ass and join the ranks of the grassroots greenies and grannies who are the heroes of Hightower’s book.

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While some of us moan and groan about the unmitigated awfulness of industrial agriculture and our craptastic food chain, others are literally sowing the seeds of an agrarian revival. The idealistic young farmers and gardeners fueling this ag-revolt have been christened “The Greenhorns“ by one extraordinary, exuberant young farmer/filmmaker, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, who’s documenting their horticultural heroics in a film by the same name.

America’s got more prisoners than farmers these days, and the average age of the farmers we do have is over sixty years old. Strip mall sprawl has displaced the small family farmers who once nourished our nation. Monocrop madness is sucking the life out of our precious topsoil, poisoning our air and water, and giving us really lousy food, to boot.

But Severine sees salvation in the Greenhorns:

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out our most popular articles of the week on a variety of subjects, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

Helen Keller & Anne Sullivan Surfaces 120 Years Later

Hallelujah For American Idol, Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen

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Nicole:

Google Gives Free Voicemail to San Francisco Homeless

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Turnes 80

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Giulia:

Patrick Swayze’s Cancer Battle

Koby Bryant’s PSA for ASR

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Gina:

Reese’s Empowering Bracelet

“Chop Shop” - Dreams In a Place of Despair

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Kerry:

Bamboo Laptop: Will Apple Be Green with Envy?

The Explosive Truth About Twinkies

I’ve found the perfect pet for my fellow blogger Katie Halper! Like so many folks, Katie’s allergic to cats, and with her wacky whirlwind schedule she can’t afford to be tied down by–or, rather, leashed to–a dog. But she’s awfully fond of pigs. So fond, in fact, that she refuses to eat them. I’ll bet Katie would just love one of these pocket-sized piggies! They’re a brand-new breed with the potential to sway the rest of us swine-eaters, according to Andrew Sullivan:

Is this the pet of the future? I hope so. Pigs are extremely intelligent, as emotionally evolved as dogs, and our society’s brutal treatment of them in hog farms is, quite simply, indefensible. I know: I still eat bacon. And I shouldn’t. But the key to protecting these creatures, and improving their treatment, is seeing them as Churchill did. Maybe breeding them into cute pets will help. We’d never treat dogs the way we treat hogs.

You can see the whole series of mini-pig portraits here, and find out what’s being done to halt the hog farms at factoryfarm.org.

There are simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and then there’s the Twinkie, made from military industrial-complex carbohydrates. It’s got some of the same ingredients as tracer bullets and artillery shells, as I learned from reading Steve Ettlinger’s Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Ettlinger’s book, just out in paperback, documents the 39 ingredients it now takes to make a Twinkie, many of them minerals and chemicals, some derived from crude oil. This petroleum-based pastry is about a million food miles removed from your grandma’s yellow sponge cake, which had a shelf life of maybe two days, max.

Today’s Twinkie, on the other hand, stays frighteningly “fresh” for an unnaturally long time (officially, 25 days, but we all know it’s really more like 25 months.) Real butter turns rancid too fast, so the Twinkie gets its butter-like taste and texture from petrochemical-based ingredients like diacetyl, a close cousin to acetylene welding gas, and butyric acid, a flavor which Ettlinger gleefully informs us is “a natural component of Parmesan cheese, rancid butter, and, unbelievably, vomit and perspiration.”

Twinkie, Deconstructed may amaze and appall you, but the fact is that while a Twinkie is not particularly good for you, it’s not all that bad for you, either. It’s just an amalgam of industrial ingredients and artificial flavors posing as an actual pastry. How did we ever fall for this oily oblong cake with the mystery “cream” filling?

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Is there no end to Michael Pollan’s influence? Now he’s got Rand Waddoup, Wal-Mart’s Senior Sustainability Director, pondering the sorry state of our current food chain. Waddoup posted an entry on Wal-Mart’s corporate blog today entitled “Sustainable Industrialized Food?”:

Having finished Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma just a few nights ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic and in general about food, health, and sustainability. Quoting Michael Pollan from In Defense of Food, “We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.”

So Waddoup, whose big box boss is the number one food retailer in the U.S., wants to know what Wal-Mart can do to make things better:

I know food, in general, is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people, but what do you think should and can be done in the short term to make the industrialized food chain better? What products should Wal-Mart have that they don’t to meet your desires for a more sustainable food assortment? If you could choose one item you would want removed from stores, what would it be?

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by Kerry Trueman

You’d think that Iowa’s corn farmers would be doing cartwheels in their fields after harvesting a bumper crop this season and getting top dollar for it, thanks to the ethanol boom. But " onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201442_pf.html_br_/');">as the Washington Post reports today, corn farmers have reaped an earful of bad pr along with those 420 billion or so ears of corn.

The phrase “corn-fed” sounds like a dis, now, thanks to corn’s starring role as the villain in Michael Pollan’s best selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the documentary King Corn, both of which lay the blame for our corroded food chain on all those amber waves of grain.

The ethanol bandwagon’s hit a pothole, too, now that the downside of ratcheting up corn production for fuel is getting more press. As Jerry Schnoor, a University of Iowa professor of civil and environmental engineering, told the Washington Post, “The environmental constraints are just too great. It’s too much nutrients, too much soil loss, too much pesticides. We don’t have the land.”

Corn fields already cover 14 million acres in Iowa, more than a third of the state’s surface. As the Washington Post notes, “Tens of thousands of acres in Iowa once set aside for conservation were plowed this year for corn. The Iowa landscape is a patchwork of corn and soybean monocultures, with about as much biodiversity as a bachelor’s refrigerator.”

Yes, and with just about as much nutrition. But as long as Americans remain addicted to soda, fast food and the promise of “cheap” fuel, corn will continue to rule. Crunch all you want. They’ll plant more.