KPFA - Against the Grain

Food affects all of us — but while it’s a necessity for our survival, it’s also a vast, sprawling industry spanning the globe, which generates enormous profits as well as significant damage to public health and the environment. Nutritionist and molecular biologist Marion Nestle sheds light on the choices we all must navigate when we enter the grocery store. (Encore presentation.)
Marion Nestle, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters North Point Press, 2025
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The powers of the president of the United States have grown since the Cold War, expanding under both Republicans and Democrats. And many of these presidential powers – such as those laid out in the presidential emergency action documents — are unknown to the US public. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reflects on the imperial presidency, the domestic motivations of US foreign policy, and the US-Israeli war on Iran, as well as the role of money in the politics of the Democratic Party. (Encore presentation.)
Andrew Cockburn, Washington Is Burning: Corruption and Lies in the Age of Trump Verso, 2025
Photo by Ana Lanza on Unsplash
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As mega-fires rage around the world, why have so many people given up on the climate fight? Environmental sociologist Diana Stuart examines how fatalism about the climate emergency has been shaped by the erroneous assumption that, if we exceed 1.5C of global heating, we’ve passed the point of no return.
Diana Stuart, Rejecting Climate Doomism University of Michigan Press, 2026
Photo credit: Matt Palmer
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When we think of world makers, we’re unlikely to picture a flower. Yet flowers completely transformed our planet, giving us rain forests, altering coastlines, producing the food we eat, and enticing our pre-human ancestors to climb down from the trees. And they did that partially through reshaping the formerly adversarial relationship between plants and insects into one of mutual aid and cooperation most of the time. Biologist David George Haskell enumerates our debt to flowers.
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
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