That sensitivity has already influenced new products. The fruit combinations in McDonald’s latest smoothies, for instance, reflect taste preferences in minority communities. And when the company started heavily advertising coffee drinks last year,…
32 notes (via so-treu & liquornspice)
The US must stop sexual violence against immigrant farmworkers.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrant farmworker women and girls in the United States face a high risk of sexual violence and sexual harassment in their workplaces because US authorities and employers fail to protect them adequately.
In a new 95-page report, Human Rights Watch documents rape, stalking, unwanted touching, exhibitionism, or vulgar and obscene language by supervisors, employers, and others in positions of power. Most farmworkers interviewed said they had experienced such treatment or knew others who had. And most said they had not reported these or other workplace abuses, fearing reprisals. Those who had filed sexual harassment claims or reported sexual assault to the police had done so with the encouragement and assistance of survivor advocates or attorneys in the face of difficult challenges.
Farmworkers described experiences such as the following:
- A woman in California reported that a supervisor at a lettuce company raped her and later told her that she “should remember it’s because of him that [she has] this job.”
- A woman in New York said that a supervisor, when she picked potatoes and onions, would touch women’s breasts and buttocks. If they tried to resist, he would threaten to call immigration or fire them.
- Four women who had worked together packing cauliflower in California said a supervisor would regularly expose himself and make comments like, “[That woman] needs to be fucked!” When they tried to defend one young woman whom he singled out for particular abuse, he fired all of them.
© 2011 AP Photo
More reasons to relocalize farming and to encourage small-scale agriculture. Women who work on enormous farms are powerless under the men who employ and oppress them, and are invisible to the consumers, who never get to hear the stories behind who picks their tomatoes, lettuce, and cabbage.
Never forget that the local food movement is not only a quest for environmental justice but for social justice and community empowerment.
1,302 notes (via so-treu & humanrightswatch)
10 Healthy Sweet Potato Recipes!
For a humble root vegetable, the sweet potato sure does have a lot going for it. The orange tuber packs 438% of your daily value of infection-fighting vitamin A and, like carrots, sweet potatoes are a major source of skin-protecting beta-carotene. While bananas are often touted as the go-to source of potassium, a medium sweet potato has 28% more potassium than a banana. (The mineral helps your body absorb fluids to replace sweat losses.)
Whether sweet potatoes only enter your kitchen on Thanksgiving or they have a regular spot in your cooking rotation, you could probably use more delicious ways to prepare them. Here are 10 recipes for dishes from fries to soup—each with about 300 calories or less.
Gingered Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup
Chili-Spiced Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Apple and Sweet Potato Hash Browns
i need this in my life..
I need more potatoes in my life <3
4,265 notes (via camirebolledok & womenshealthmag)
Can’t believe I won’t get to call myself a Greeno co-manager anymore :( Greeno, you are my heart and soul
this place is a small student run business in the basement of the dorm next to mine. It fed me for the majority of semester, primarily because the food is better than the dining common but also because I didn’t have to walk down the enormous hill i live on
24 notes (via effyeahumass & carlieuow)
What I feel is not anger, but rather patriotic duty. America is a grand experiment in self-determination, individual liberty, and innovation: an experiment not worth conceding without a fight.
On New Year’s Eve, with almost no mainstream media attention given to it, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, or NDAA, into law. Since I am not an attorney, I will fall back on the ACLU’s analysis of this disastrous new law: “On December 31, 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.”
Think about those words: indefinite military detention without charge or trial.
Obama’s administration, and all future administrations (including a Romney administration), can now use the military to detain individuals, including political dissidents — even American citizens on U.S. soil — without trial or formal charges. Without court involvement or a jury deciding you are actually guilty. And “detain” is really a euphemism for IMPRISON, of course. You won’t be spending the lunch hour in detention. You’ll be in a semi-secret military black site, without access to your attorney, potentially for life.
This is what kings do. This is what bloodthirsty dictators do. This is not what freely elected American presidents are authorized by the Constitution to do.
Moving on: Obama also signed into law something which attacks your First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. No, this is not an Onion article.
You see, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, or Trespass Bill, signed into law by Barack Obama on March 9, 2012, “potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the U.S. a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.” More specifically, peaceful protest within proximity to those protected by the Secret Service, including presidential candidates and the President, may be a federal felony now. (Source.)
Even worse: a former high-ranking NSA official, who spent more than three decades within the spy agency, just came out in a nationally televised interview and asserted that more than 20 trillion (yes, with a T) of American citizens’ communications have been intercepted — mostly without a warrant or judicial review of any kind.
One could say that William Binney, a whistleblowing patriot of the highest order, is now toward the top of the list of people who might experience a “slip in the shower” or “unexpected suicide” within the next few weeks.
Furthermore, the NSA is now building a $2 billion data center in Utah to crunch all of this data. In other words, $2 billion of our taxpayer dollars are going toward spying on American citizens within the U.S. without warrant or court approval. This is not only an outlandish waste of money, it’s illegal.
Also: reporters at ridiculously mainstream publication USA Today are now claiming that Pentagon-sponsored “propaganda contractors” have initiated a widespread character assassination and reputation destroying campaign against them.
This is not the America I learned about in school. I want my country back.
Am I willing to sacrifice my reputation for this? Am I willing to sacrifice my life for this? Sure.
People throughout history have sacrificed far more, for far less.
The next time a TSA agent at the airport gropes your wife in front of you, massages her breasts and places his hand on her genitals, you may want to speak up. You may want to remind yourself that you are an American citizen — with rights and duties vested in you by the Constitution — and not a coward living in some creeper starvation state like North Korea.
Wake up, speak up, and don’t trust the pacifying mainstream media — which has lost more than 50% of its viewers since last year, due to their inability (or unwillingness) to cover these crucial issues. They are complicit in the destruction of your basic civil rights, and your dignity.
65 notes (via socialuprooting)
Hey everyone, remember the nightmare that was SOPA and PIPA? IT’S NOT OVER!
Reports say that lawmakers will vote on the bill as early as Wednesday, April 25th or Thursday, April 26th. It isn’t looking very good. It is of utmost importance that you contact your local representatives to tell them that you do not agree with this bill and they shouldn’t either. Make your voice heard. Don’t let this happen.Want to learn more about CISPA? Check out the EFF’s Cybersecurity Bill FAQ.
Don’t know who your representatives are? Just use this.
It takes maybe five minutes of your time to do this — make the effort. It will certainly be worth it.
GUYS. WE REALLY SHOULD CARE ABOUT THIS. LET’S GET ON THIS SHIT.
ugh
10,455 notes (via so-treu & colourmeclassy)
[Anonymous asked you: I’m in recovery from an eating disorder. A big part of my ED was going vegan. I noticed how much I lost, and it became an addiction. If I go vegan again, I WILL backslide into my ED,…
I agree with you completely, about the soy industry being terrible for people and the environment. There is also a lot of compelling evidence that eating too much unfermented soy products (tofu, soy milk, isolated soy protein, and soy oils) as having negative health effects. It is important to note, however, that over 80% of the world’s soybeans are grown specifically for animal feed and not for human consumption. Choosing to eat meat because you want to protest the soy industry is, in fact, still supporting the soy industry - unless you buy local, pasture-raised, non-factory farmed animal products.
Most soy products for human consumption like tofu, tempeh, soy sauce, and soy milk are organic, meaning they are not made from genetically modified seed and are not linked to those oppressive, monopolizing, evil corporations. Monocropping any single plant is never a good idea, and I’m not saying that huge fields of organic soybeans are great or anything, but when you buy organic soy products you are not supporting Monsanto, which IS something to rejoice about.
Soy protein isolate and soy oils are found mostly in processed foods like candies, crackers, cookies, chips, etc and in processed meat products like breaded chicken nuggets, etc. These are the main foods to be avoided if we want to take down the soy industry. Genetically modified soy is also found in fake meat products like some veggie burgers and fake chicken - however, there are a decent amount of vegetable or mushroom-based veggie burgers to choose from.
In conclusion, I advocate a whole foods, vegan diet, with as little soy product consumption as possible. Going vegan does not mean that one will necessarily start pounding the soy. Nuts, beans, and lentils are a great way to get protein without soy!
334 notes (via adentrodemisojos & ladyatheist)
Sometimes people ask me whether I think animal farming is “wrong”. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. I’m still not really sure.
But what actually matters is some facts:
1) Animals do not HAVE TO BE FARMED. Humans lived for 190,000 years on this earth without farming animals. Pre-colonial inhabitants of the American continent didn’t really farm animals until the Europeans came over (the guinea pig & the turkey were somewhat domesticated). Humans are not “supposed” to farm animals. One culture started doing it, and that culture extended those same dominating relationships to other cultures as its population expanded and they ended up taking over everything and making it SEEM like animal farming is an innate part of life. But it just isn’t.
2) Animal farming is the source of nearly every epidemic disease. When humans live close to farm animals, things get dirtier. There’s a lot of poop sitting around. When poop gets into water, people get sick. Less animal farming equals less epidemic disease. I don’t know about you but this sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
I know that a lot of people make their living off farming animals, and that it is a vital part of many lifeways right now. I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve gotten to this point where we can’t remember how to live without them. I’m not saying that I have the answers, but it doesn’t hurt to remember that it is not inherent to human nature that we dominate another species.
Chunca and Camila, resident cuties at La Casa de Pocha.
These two puppies were delightful. It sounds really sappy to say it, but I felt an extremely strong connection to these dogs, even though I was only with them for three weeks. Being in a foreign country is exhausting. There were times when I was really homesick and my head was pounding from hearing Spanish all day. There were times when I felt very frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t always express myself in the way that I wanted to. When you’re in that situation, coming home to an animal is so soothing. It didn’t matter to them that I wasn’t fluent in Spanish. I could speak in all the English I wanted and they’d still be there, jumping up to greet me and giving me kisses on the cheek.
Gawd I love animals. :)