Tag: food

NASA Astronaut Responds to Online Panic Over “Tentacled” Object on ISS

A tentacled object seen in a viral photo from the International Space Station alarmed some viewers over the last few days.

A photo of a purple, egg-shaped object with what appear to be tentacles protruding led some users to believe it was an extraterrestrial creature hatching in space.

However, NASA astronaut Don Pettit cleared up those rumors by revealing the object was just a potato.

In a post on X, Pettit wrote, “I flew potatoes on Expedition 72 for my space garden, an activity I did in my off-duty time.”

“This is an early purple potato, complete with a spot of hook Velcro to anchor it in my improvised grow light terrarium,” added Pettit.

One user on X responded to Pettit by writing, “I genuinely thought this was some kind of egg hatching.”

Per The New York Post:

An image of a tentacled growth in space has caused an uproar online with freaked-out viewers imploring astronauts to “kill it with fire.”

Viral photos showed the floating, purple egg-shaped object with tendrils exploding out of it like the poster for the 1979 sci-fi horror flick “Alien.”

Thankfully, the real item isn’t as insidious as it seems. In a viral X post, NASA astronaut Don Pettit explained that the anomaly was an “orbiting” potato, dubbed Spudnik-1, that he grew onboard the International Space Station as part of an ongoing interstellar horticulture hobby.

“This is an early purple potato, complete with spot of hook Velcro to anchor it in my improvised grow light terrarium,” the scientist explained.

Horticulture is not the only thing on NASA’s radar lately.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed on Tuesday that the space agency plans to spend nearly $20 billion over the next several years to build a base on the moon.

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GMO Wheat Sprayed With Chemical 166 Times More Toxic Than Glyphosate

A new report from Friends of the Earth raises alarm over the U.S. government’s recent approval of HB4 genetically engineered or GMO wheat, warning that it could pose serious risks to public health, the environment and U.S. farmers’ livelihoods, while offering no proven benefit.

The approval of HB4 wheat marks a critical turning point: after decades of public opposition and trade concerns that kept GMO wheat off U.S. fields, consumers now face the prospect of herbicide-tolerant wheat entering the food system.

However, it is not currently being grown commercially in the U.S.

Friends of the Earth is calling on companies and consumers to reject HB4 GMO wheat before it enters the market.

Developed by the Argentine biotechnology firm Bioceres Crop Solutions, HB4 wheat is engineered to tolerate the toxic herbicide glufosinate ammonium.

Glufosinate is banned in the European Union because it poses risks to human health. It is also linked to negative impacts on soil and ecosystem health.

“GMO wheat poses high risks with no clear benefits. It threatens farmers, consumers, and ecosystems,” said Dana Perls, senior program manager at Friends of the Earth.

“Companies and consumers should reject genetically engineered wheat and support proven, sustainable solutions. Organic farming and traditional breeding protect climate, biodiversity, and food security — without toxic trade-offs.”

The report unpacks the regulatory gaps, health implications, environmental concerns and trade risks at stake.

Key findings include:

We’ve been here before — and it failed

HB4 wheat is not innovation; it is a repetition of a well-documented failure — the chemical-dependent model introduced with Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” crops in the 1990s.

GMO crops have driven massive increases in herbicide use, spawned herbicide-resistant superweeds and trapped farmers on a costly pesticide treadmill.

Glufosinate-tolerant corn and soy are already following the same path. HB4 wheat would extend this failed, toxic system to a global staple food — deepening chemical dependence, increasing costs for farmers and compounding environmental damage.

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How War in Iran Affects Grocery Prices for Everyday Americans

Walmart has essentially eradicated all of the mom & pop grocery stores where I live in western Kentucky. Which, for better or worse, forces virtually the entire city’s population to descend on the store for grocery shopping. As you walk into the store, you will inevitably be bombarded with messages from the intercom to get a flu shot or some other seasonal vaccine. This will be followed by a reminder that soda and potato chips are on sale.

Shopping in the local Walmart presents a fair picture of middle America. The county’s poverty rate is above 17%, homes are unaffordable, drug addiction is rampant, and wages remain stagnant. Among all of these issues, the rising cost of grocery prices make it challenging for many people in the community to afford real, whole foods. The unfortunate alternative is to purchase cheap junk food, go to a local food pantry, or simply go without. The simple reality is that many Americans can no longer keep up with rising costs in the grocery store.

But what does this have to do with war in Iran?

We often hear that Congress has passed a new defense budget, ever again surpassing its previous allocations. The most recent appropriations allocated $838 billion to military services in FY26 and now both President Trump and his domestic allies are calling for an increase to $1.5 trillion. For everyday Americans, that number is frankly unfathomable. But have you ever questioned, how does America pay for war?

Income tax has not always been permanent in America. But to give you the short version of the story, it was created to fund war and then later adopted as a permanent fixture. During times of war, Congress has periodically increased taxes to fund operations. However, politicians can only raise taxes so much before citizens begin caring about where their dollars are going. As a result, we no longer increase taxes for the sole purpose of funding wars.

Instead, we use debt. Because the public would be unwilling to fund wars through taxes, the American government defers to borrowing money. But where does that money come from? There is never enough capital in circulation to fulfill the American bloodlust, so it must be printed.

The American government’s incessant use of debt as a means to pay for wars of choice directly devalues the dollar’s purchasing power by forcing banks to digitally print money. Every dollar borrowed inflates our currency which, in turn, increases prices for everyday goods while working class compensation remains stagnant. It has held true for decades that wages do not and will not keep up with inflation.

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Beyond Oil: How The Iran War Could Send Food Prices Soaring

In the wake of U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, the financial press has reflexively focused on oil. Tanker traffic, Brent crude, and the risk of triple-digit prices dominate the discussion.

But oil is not the only commodity posing a serious long-term risk.

Another deep vulnerability runs through natural gas—and from there into nitrogen fertilizer. If commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz were significantly restricted, the impact would extend beyond fuel markets. It would reach directly into global food production.

That’s because the Gulf region is not just a major energy exporter. It is one of the world’s most important suppliers of nitrogen fertilizer—the foundation of modern agricultural yields.

The Energy Behind the Food System

Nitrogen fertilizer begins with natural gas. Through the Haber-Bosch process, methane is converted into ammonia, which is then upgraded into urea and other nitrogen products. In practical terms, nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas transformed into plant food.

Roughly half of global food production depends on synthetic nitrogen. Without it, crop yields would decline sharply.

Globally, about 180 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizers are consumed each year (measured in nutrient terms). Of that, roughly 55 to 60 million metric tons of urea move through international seaborne trade annually. The Middle East accounts for approximately 40% to 50% of that traded volume.

And nearly all of those exports must transit the Strait of Hormuz.

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‘We’ve Addicted Our Farmers’ to Glyphosate, RFK Jr. Tells Joe Rogan

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called glyphosate a “poison” embedded in America’s food supply, even as he backed President Donald Trump’s executive order expanding its domestic production.

Speaking Feb. 27 on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Kennedy emphasized his decades-long fight against pesticides. “Pesticides are poison. They’re designed to kill all life. It’s not a good thing to have in your food,” he said.

Yet he defended the president’s executive order as a national security measure.

Trump signed the order in February to boost U.S. production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and now faces tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging Roundup exposure caused cancer.

Hours after the order, Kennedy told The New York Times, “Donald Trump’s executive order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply.” Days later, Kennedy posted on X, explaining his position.

On Rogan’s show, Kennedy said industry reports show that 99% of U.S. glyphosate supplies come from China. U.S. Department of Defense officials warned that dependence poses “an extreme national security vulnerability,” he said. A supply disruption “could literally cut off our food supply overnight and cripple the country.”

“The president was dealing with national security,” Kennedy said.

The executive order also grants legal immunity to domestic manufacturers compelled under the Defense Production Act of 1950 to produce glyphosate-related products. The law allows the federal government to require companies to produce materials deemed necessary for national security.

Bayer is the only company manufacturing glyphosate in the U.S.

Kennedy criticized the liability protections. “It’s not something that I was particularly happy with. Let me put it that way mildly,” he said.

He warned that immunity “takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer.”

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They Are Experimenting on Your Dog

You read the labels. You check the ingredients. You avoid seed oils, limit sugar, and side-eye anything with a barcode longer than a haiku. You subscribe to Substacks that dissect institutional capture. You understand, probably better than most, that “the science” can be quietly purchased by the people it is supposed to regulate.

So let me ask you a question that might sting.

What did you feed your dog this morning?

If the answer is a brown pellet from a bag, you are running the same ultraprocessed food experiment on your dog that you have spent the last few years learning to reject for yourself and your family. And you are doing it for entirely understandable reasons, because the same machinery of institutional capture, industry-funded research, and reassuring pseudo-scientific language that once told you margarine was healthier than butter has been quietly operating in veterinary medicine for decades.

I am a practising veterinary surgeon in the UK. I have spent over 30 years in clinical practice, and I am the founding president of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I also lecture on canine nutrition at the University of Glasgow and around the world. I was in Florida last year and San Diego the year before. I am writing a book on ultraprocessed food for dogs, because someone needs to say plainly what the pet food industry would rather you never thought about: your dog has been subjected to the most sustained ultraprocessed feeding experiment in mammalian history, and almost nobody noticed.

The Cleverest Marketing You Never Saw

Here is how it works, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the corruption of nutritional science in human medicine.

The major pet food corporations do not merely sell food. They fund the university departments in the UK and the US where veterinary nutritional science is researched. They endow professorships. They provide free student packs and educational materials to veterinary schools. They sponsor the conferences where vets gather for continuing professional development. They supply the textbooks. They fund the bursaries. They stock the waiting room shelves and put posters on the surgery walls.

They do this so quietly and so comprehensively that most vets do not even realise they have been swimming in industry-sponsored water since the first day of vet school.

The result is predictable. Almost all large-scale nutrition studies published over the past 50 years have been conducted on extruded, grain-based diets produced by the very companies that funded the research. That research became what vets are taught. 

Raw and fresh diets, by contrast, have received almost no industry funding, which means almost no large-scale trials. Vets are then honestly told there is “no evidence” for raw, because nobody with money has paid for that evidence to exist.

It is rather like sponsoring every study on buses and then declaring there is “no evidence” that bicycles work.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association’s Global Nutrition Committee now explicitly warns that most pet nutrition studies are industry-funded and says conflicts of interest should always be declared. RCVS Knowledge, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, which runs the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Network, notes that funding source is one of the strongest predictors of outcome in nutrition trials. JAVMA News has run pieces on corporate influence in veterinary education.

This is in the official documents. It is no longer fringe grumbling.

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How China purchased a prime cut of America’s pork industry

Nathan Halverson takes us inside this major investigation of America’s pork industry.

Smithfield Foods, producer of the iconic holiday ham, was one of America’s flagship food companies, steeped in centuries of U.S. tradition.

The Virginia-based pork company derived its ham from a curing process Native Americans taught settlers five centuries ago. It owned part of Main Street in the bucolic town of Smithfield – including a restaurant, a historic Southern hotel and the company’s nearby headquarters.

C. Larry Pope, its president and CEO, had a fireplace in his sprawling executive office, which looked more like a hunting lodge than the command center for what had become America’s largest pork business.

But in 2013, a Chinese firm bought this quintessential slice of Americana – Main Street and all. The takeover, valued at $7.1 billion, remains the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company.

Naturally, it riled patriots and protectionists. Pope’s mother asked him why he sold to the communists. Pope also had to defend himself in the local newspaper: “These are not Russian communists. They like Americans.”

Some xenophobia was to be expected. Anti-Chinese racism in America goes back nearly as far as, well, holiday ham.

But behind the usual flag waving and Red Scare antics lies a stark new reality: Chinese companies, at the urging of their government, have launched a global buying spree, a new phase in their unprecedented economic experiment. And they’re targeting a resource that climate scientists, economists, the U.S. government, even Wall Street, all forecast will become dangerously scarce in the coming decades: food.

Food is poised to become the oil of the 21st century, with scarcity and demand creating a situation ripe for wars, riots and uprisings.

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Countries, States, and Provinces where Glyphosate has been Banned or Restricted

Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of countries, states, and provinces (or smaller jurisdictions) where glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) has been banned or significantly restricted as of now. This includes both national-level actions and subnational measures.

National-Level Bans or Major Restrictions

Countries that have fully banned or are phasing out glyphosate:

  • Sri Lanka
    • Introduced a nationwide ban in 2015; the ban was lifted and re-instituted at various points. As of now, use requires a permit.
  • Austria
    • Implemented a full ban in 2019.
  • Luxembourg
    • Enacted a full ban in 2020, though it was later challenged in court.
  • Vietnam
    • Banned glyphosate in 2019.
  • Mexico
    • Announced a phase-out with a target ban by January 31, 2024; some sources say it’s now officially banned.
  • Bhutan
    • Reported to have a full ban in place.
  • Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
    • Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates banned glyphosate starting around 2015–2016.
  • Bermuda
    • Blocked new imports in 2015 and banned concentrations above 2% in 2016.
  • St. Vincent and the Grenadines
    • Suspended imports of glyphosate-based herbicides.
  • Costa Rica
    • Banned glyphosate use in protected areas and government-owned land.
  • Malawi and Togo
    • Malawi suspended import permits (2019), and Togo prohibited import, marketing, and use.
  • France, Belgium, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic
    • Enacted significant restrictions such as bans for amateur use, in public spaces, or as pre-harvest treatment. (Examples: France – banned in public green spaces; Belgium – banned for non-professional users; Czech Republic – tight restrictions; Denmark – banned post-emergent use; Italy – banned public area use and pre-harvest desiccation; Germany – set to fully ban by 2024).
  • Colombia
    • Ceased using glyphosate for aerial eradication of coca cultivation in 2015; later lifted.
  • Thailand
    • Initially decided to ban in 2019, but reversed the decision; instead, imposed restricted usage.
  • Canada
    • No national ban—but eight out of ten provinces have restrictions in public spaces; Quebec is attempting broader prohibitions; Vancouver banned glyphosate in public parks.

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O’Keefe Media Group Goes Undercover: Cattle Ranchers and Insiders Expose How Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef Secretly Control America’s Beef Market

The O’Keefe Media Group went undercover at CattleCon in Nashville, Tennessee, and exposed how Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef secretly control America’s beef market.

In November, President Trump said cattle prices were falling while beef prices kept rising and launched an investigation into price manipulation.

Trump directed the DOJ to investigate the meat packing companies who are driving up the prices through illicit collusion, price fixing and price manipulation.

The O’Keefe Media Group went undercover at CattleCon and ranchers spilled the beans on how the “Big Four” control the beef industry.

“Our team spoke directly with ranchers and industry partners, documenting firsthand how the “Big Four” dominate the market and impact pricing,” James O’Keefe said.

“Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef control most of the U.S. beef industry, raising serious questions about who really sets the price. So when you see higher prices at the grocery store, it’s worth asking why,” O’Keefe said.

“This may explain why your steak keeps costing more,” he said.

“They [Big Four] are buying like all the companies in the United States… so they don’t have competition,” one insider said.

“They [Big Four] can knock you out of this industry in two seconds,” another said.

“They [Big Four] closed all the markets — all the markets are theirs in Brazil and now in the U.S.”

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Deranged Dem Rep Calls WHOLE MILK Campaign ‘White Supremacy Dog Whistling’

Democrats have taken their obsession with labeling everything racist to new heights, now targeting the push for whole milk in schools as a secret signal to extremists.

Rep. Maxine Dexter, a Democrat from Oregon, unleashed the claim during a public event, tying the MAHA campaign—Make America Healthy Again—to supposed far-right agendas.

In footage from the event at Wyeast, Dexter stated that the MAHA campaign to drink whole milk is “white supremacy dog whistling.”

This comes just weeks after NYU professor Arthur Caplan sparked outrage by declaring milk racist.

Caplan linked whole milk to fascist regimes and white nationalists, also warning it was a “dog whistle” to the alt-right.

Dexter’s remarks echo that paranoia, showing how leftists continue to twist commonsense health policies into divisive conspiracies.

The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, signed by President Trump, restored nutrient-rich whole milk to school lunches after its removal under Obama-era rules. 

Backed by bipartisan support, including figures like Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. John Fetterman, the law prioritizes kids’ nutrition over outdated low-fat mandates.

Yet Democrats persist in smearing it, revealing their disconnect from everyday American priorities.

Public reaction poured in, with users exposing the lunacy.

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