Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Weekend reading: Grass (the green kind)
Courtney White, Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country. Chelsea Green, 2014.
Courtney White, whom I do not know but would like to, describes himself as a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who became a producer of grass-fed beef, thereby catching on to the importance of grass for restoring nutrients to soil, reducing climate change, and feeding the planet. Carbon, he says, is key and we can achieve all this with low-tech methods.
He visits a bunch of “new agrarians” who are managing carbon-conserving agriculture, from farms to rooftops.
We’re all carbon. We live in a carbon universe. We breathe carbon, eat carbon, use carbon products, profit from the carbon cycle, and suffer from the carbon poisoning taking place in our atmosphere…We could, for example, find ways to support the 2 percent of Americans who actively manage the soil portion of the carbon cycle. There are a million ways to help them, starting with the power of the purchasing dollar. Seek out the new agrarians and buy their products. Better yet, get involved yourself.
He writes well, and convincingly.
