American ingenuity is alive and well. Or at least it's alive, as evidenced by such recent US inventions as Bacconaise, Snuggies, and credit default swaps.

If this represents the best we can do, though, we may be in trouble. Because now, more than ever, the world needs...

You may think bats are scary, but what's truly terrifying is the mysterious fungus that's decimating the bat population, according to an article by Stacy Chase in last Sunday's Boston Globe:

At least 1 million bats in the past three years have been wiped out by a puzzling,...

Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals is a thorough, nuanced analysis of the ethical and environmental quandaries posed by America's appetite for animal products. He is intent on fostering more mindful eating, whether we choose to forgo animal-based foods entirely or opt to simply reduce their consumption. Foer...

Eating Animals, the searing indictment of factory farming that Jonathan Safran Foer spent three years painstakingly researching, has got the champions of cheap chuck circling their wagons and denouncing the celebrated novelist's latest work as just another piece of fiction.

Chuck Jolley, writing for the Cattle News Network,...

Millions of Americans will turn out to vote today, and millions more won't. It's pretty weird when you think about it. Not voting is like going to a restaurant with some friends, and then, when the waiter brings you the menu, deciding that you can't be bothered to look at...

There's nothing funny about all those E. coli and salmonella outbreaks that keep popping up and plaguing us like the Undead. But with trick-or-treat season right around the corner, I thought it might be nice to take a brief break from food scares and focus on scary food we can...

Colin Beavan's experiment in low impact living compelled him to reassess just about every aspect of our daily lives: how we get around; how we shop; how we stay cool and keep warm; how we entertain ourselves; and, of course, how we eat. The production/distribution of food products...

Can you become rich just by changing the way you think? There's an entire sub genre of self help books dedicated to this premise, the best known being The Secret. The problem with The Secret -- well, OK, one problem with The Secret (there are others, but that's a...

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Two cornerstones of American culture collided Monday night on CNN:

Larry King and cheap processed meat. Or should I say colluded? After all, they've got a lot in common: both smush together scraps of debatable value and dubious origin and extrude them as suitable...

You can tell fall's in full swing, all the signs are there: the chill in the air, the fiery foliage, the stores stocked with cheap plastic landfill-ready Halloween tchotchkes that are probably chock full of phthalates, bisphenol A, and who knows...

I'm always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality,...

I have a love/hate relationship with Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man. Used to hate him, now I love him. And his wife Michelle, too.

Not in a menage-a-trois-y kinda way, though. I just...

I haven't got much in common with Whitney Houston; I'm not tall or thin, and I can't belt out show-stoppers. Oh, and I'm white. But, like Whitney, I believe that children are our future. We all agree - whatever size, shape or color we may be - that it's in...

Cars and fast food are partners in crime when it comes to undermining America's health. Our favorite mode of transportation deprives us of exercise, while our dependence on quick, cheap convenience foods cheats us of nutrients. We reportedly eat nearly a quarter of our meals in our cars, a practice...

Nora Ephron's effervescent Julie & Julia has evidently sparked a mad dash to snap up Child's epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Butter's back, and margarine's been marginalized. Three cheers for real food! After all, as Joan Gussow says, "I trust cows more than chemists."

Any...

Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong And How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly is the literary equivalent of a turd blossom, the Texan term for a flower that pops up out of a cow patty. James McWilliams,...

Earth Days, the new film that opens this weekend from acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone, is being promoted as a history of the environmental movement in the United States. But it's more of a road trip, really: the road less travelled. The road not taken. The road to hell, blazed...

Reusable shopping bags and compact fluorescent light bulbs are an easy place to start, once you've resolved to curb your carbon footprint. But why not go for some low hanging fruit that you could actually pick? Growing food in your front yard is a...

Give Mother Nature a vacant city lot, and she'll fill it with weeds and wildlife. Then human nature comes along and dumps clumps of consumer goods-gone-bad and construction debris on top of the pigweed and pigeons.

It takes visionaries like Reverend DeVanie Jackson and...

Did you know that energy conservation is the root cause of our obesity epidemic? We may be fossil-fuelish, and we're pretty careless with our kilowatts, too. But there's one unit of energy we're happy to...