Recent innovations, such as easy-open tabs on cans, have prompted the Department of Agriculture to issue a 13-page update to its food container inspection regulations. If you have some spare time on your hands, you can have a look by clicking here.

Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

From ABC News:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There’s no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government’s recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist.

The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits left behind by the Bush administration from $4.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. His record-setting budgets flagrantly violate his promise to propose a “net spending cut.”

Obama broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year by signing into law a regressive excise tax increase to expand the SCHIP program, and by proposing a cap-and-trade energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion, a massive cost that Obama himself has said will be passed “on to consumers,” as well as homeowners and motorists. (In 2008, Obama privately admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle that if he was elected, electricity bills would “skyrocket” under his administration, but it didn’t report that.)

He also broke his promise not to raise taxes by backing health-care bills that would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people.  Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

The costly cap-and-trade energy bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”  (Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.   It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests.   By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and by diverting cropland to fuel production away from food production, they have already caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Over and over again, Obama has broken his campaign promise to give the public five days of notice before signing bills into law, including his very first law, the trial-lawyer backed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Obama also repeatedly made false claims about the Supreme Court decision that the Ledbetter law overruled, misstating the facts of that case and how long it gives employees to sue over pay discrimination (the Court did NOT say that employees have to sue even before discovering discrimination).

Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it.  (It repealed welfare reform and contained loads of welfare, pork, and waste, while wiping out jobs in the export sector.)

Obama’s broken promises are part of a larger pattern of dishonesty. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed.

The Washington Examiner explains how the bill will lead to deforestation, and thus increase greenhouse gas emissions in the long run.

The bill, which is loaded with pork for special interests, is backed by Obama, who once admitted that under his cap-and-trade scheme, electricity and utility bills would “skyrocket” and coal-fed power plants would go “bankrupt.”  Treasury Department analysts estimated it could increase taxes on the average American household by $1,761 per year.

The bill also contains environmentally harmful provisions, such as massive ethanol subsidies, which will result in “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

Ryssdal contrasted Brand’s earlier support for the back to the land movement with his current belief that big cities are better for the environment.

“Not only big cities, but big slums … that’s how [poor people in the developing world] are getting out of poverty.  They’re emptying out a lot of the subsistence farms that have been tough on the landscape all over the world, moving into towns for opportunity, building jobs for each other.  They’re also moving up what’s called the energy ladder, toward more and better grid electricity.  By and large the cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

On his support for biotech crops, Brand said,

“Already, the crops we have now, the herbicide-tolerant and the insect-resistant crops … [are] getting what amounts to higher yields. You can raise more food on less land, and all of that is good for ecology in general and the climate particularly.”

Challenged that critics call them Frankenfoods, Brand replied,

“The idea there was that Dr. Frankenstein was doing something against nature, and that somehow the genetically engineered food crops are against nature.  And as a biologist, I’m just baffled by that line of argument because agriculture has been in that sense against nature for 10,000 years. That we’re finally able to do more precise tuning of the crops is a huge gain, not a loss.”

The New York Times notes that “the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.” With that much imprecision built in, if the labels change consumer behavior as much as supporters hope, it’s entirely possible that eco-concsious diets could result in more carbon emissions, not less. A classic case of leaping before you look.

This new religion is a piece of work. It comes complete with a deity (Gaia), clergy (activists), indulgences (carbon credits), and now, dietary restrictions.

For some reason, seven sections of the Code of Federal Regulations (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) deal with the use and maintenance of the scales used to weigh the animals, the people operating them, proper procedure, and finally, weighing the animals again.

Is this really a federal matter? If so, what isn’t?

“Past debates about the use of new technologies for agriculture have tended to adopt an either/or approach, emphasising the merits of particular agricultural systems or technological approaches and the downsides of others. This has been seen most obviously with respect to genetically modifi ed (GM) crops, the use of pesticides and the arguments for and against organic modes of production. These debates have failed to acknowledge that there is no technological panacea for the global challenge of sustainable and secure global food production. There will always be trade-offs and local complexities. This report considers both new crop varieties and appropriate agroecological crop and soil management practices and adopts an inclusive approach.”

Read the whole report here.

“The fight to end hunger is being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops cannot be used in Africa, Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of software giant Microsoft, said on Thursday. Gates said GMO crops, fertilizer and chemicals are important tools — although not the only tools — to help small farms in Africa boost production.”

That’s great news, of course, but not the only good news on the food biotech front.  Today, the UK’s Telegraph reports that a year long investigation into food biotechnology by the Royal Society is expected to conclude in a report issued next week that:

“GM crops should be used in the future to alleviate food shortages. This study is going to move the debate forward. The Government will have to take notice of this. The world is undergoing dramatic change and it won’t be long before people are thinking ‘where is my next meal coming from?’ Where GM has been proved effective at either increasing yields or else resistant to diseases it should be used in the UK. GM crops need to be looked at one by one. They are not the only solution to world hunger but they are part of it.”

And Reuters reports that, even European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has given a modicum of support to food biotech, suggesting that “EU countries should look at scientific evidence rather than emotions, as is now the case, when deciding on authorisations for new biotech products.”  Boel said last Thursday that “For the [EU] farm sector, the imbalance in GMO approval between the European Union and the rest of the world is a clear and present financial threat.”

All in all, I’d count that as a good week.

First, and most importantly, Carafano seems to imply that there is some direct correlation between food production levels and the number of people working in agriculture:

A report prepared for the G8 in April concluded that global food production would need to double by 2050 to keep the world fed. U.S. agriculture will have to be an important part of that increase. Likewise, strong, vibrant rural communities are needed to build sustainable agriculture and protect water, wildlife and other natural resources.

America’s vanishing middle should be of concern to all Americans. Though agricultural workers comprise only about 2 percent of the work force and account for less than 1 percent of GDP, they are at the start of a vast and vital assembly line. American farms are part of a complex industry that processes and distributes food, energy (biofuels) and other products — by some estimates about 20 percent of the economy.

This is a non-sequitur in regard to agricultural production. Fewer people work on farms today because increases in productivity allow fewer workers to produce more. As the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service notes:

American agriculture and rural life underwent a tremendous transformation in the 20th century. Early 20th century agriculture was labor intensive, and it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half of the U.S. population lived. These farms employed close to half of the U.S. workforce, along with 22 million work animals, and produced an average of five different commodities. The agricultural sector of the 21st century, on the other hand, is concentrated on a small number of large, specialized farms in rural areas where less than a fourth of the U.S. population lives. These highly productive and mechanized farms employ a tiny share of U.S. workers and use 5 million tractors in place of the horses and mules of earlier days.

Second, Carafano’s definition of “frontier” seems to rely entirely on population density:

Today, hundreds of counties in the Plains states house fewer than six people per square mile. By 19th-century standards, that was frontier territory.

But Frederick Jackson Turner, whose famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Carafano cites at the beginning of his column, didn’t settle on population density alone as a definition:

What is the frontier? It is not the European frontier — a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about it is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the “settled area” of the census reports.

Much of that “free land” was available in previously unsettled areas, where legal and political institutions were weak, when they were present at all. I would propose such a lack of strong central authority as part of  any sensible definition of “frontier” — a criterion that no part of the U.S. meets today.

Borlaug was attacked by some on the extreme left, such as a writer in The Nation magazine, because he was a staunch defender of new agricultural technologies and genetic engineering to feed the Earth’s burgeoning population.

Speaking of wars on science: a new toy “safety” law, the CPSIA, that is based on junk science, has wiped out countless small toy companies, while giving a special “exemption” to an “industry giant” that imported tainted Chinese toys, and doing nothing to make children safer.

This perverse new law has resulted in tens of thousands of harmless children’s books being removed from the shelves and thrown in the trash (the illustrations in children’s books sometimes had tiny trace quantities of lead, too small to harm any children, who don’t eat books).  It also resulted in thousands of trunkloads of harmless children’s clothing and toys being trashed, and bankrupted many second-hand clothing stores for poor kids.

In the Wall Street Journal today, legal commentator Walter Olson describes some of the havoc the new law has created. The Obama administration has turned a deaf ear to pleas for reform by critics of the new law, perhaps because a key provision of the CPSIA “was added by then-Sen. Barack Obama.” All but 3 Congressmen voted in favor of this foolish law, but some in Congress now regret their votes to pass it.  Most Republicans, and a tiny handful of Democrats, now want to change the law to make it less burdensome and discriminatory, but to no avail.  Congressional leaders like Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) are refusing to make any changes to this perverse law.

I’ll tell you Norman who.  His biographer, Leon Hesser, called him the Man Who Fed the World.  Science reporter Gregg Easterbrook called him the Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity. I’ve called him a Modern Prometheus.  And comedians Penn and Teller said (well, mostly Penn said) that he was the greatest human being who ever lived.

Norman Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder whose work sparked what is now known as the Green Revolution.  He was recognized with countless scientific and humanitarian awards, including, in 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize. Quite tragically, he died of cancer yesterday, at the age of 95.

Borlaug was born on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa in 1914 and developed an interest in applying science and technology to agriculture during the Depression-era dustbowl that desiccated the Great Plains in the first half of the 1930s.  He went off to study forestry and plant pathology — and compete on the wrestling team — at the University of Minnesota in 1933.  He eventually would complete a Master’s and Ph.D. at the U of M, after brief stints with the U.S. Forest Service that periodically interrupted his studies.  After completing his Ph.D. in 1942, Borlaug worked for two years at DuPont, contributing scientific research for the war effort.

In 1944, Borlaug got the opportunity that would come to define the rest of his life, joining a Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program co-funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Mexican government.  At the time, corn still made up the vast majority of Mexico’s cereal production, even though wheat had been introduced hundreds of years earlier by Spanish settlers.  The problem was that wheat varieties adapted to Mexican soil and climatic conditions were susceptible to numerous problematic diseases.  Borlaug’s team bred various domestic and foreign wheat varieties together to generate cultivars that would resist most of these diseases, then crossed those long-stem wheat varieties with a semi-dwarf wheat variety from Japan in order to produce an adapted variety with stems that were short and strong enough to hold up the better producing seed heads.

Perhaps Borlaug’s biggest contribution was the development of an accelerated breeding schedule he called “shuttle breeding,” which let him improve the genetic composition of his wheat lines twice as quickly as with normal breeding.  Despite opposition from fellow plant breeders who insisted this couldn’t be done, Borlaug and his team would grow one generation of plants at the higher elevations around Mexico City during the summer, and then grow a second generation at sea level some 700 miles to the north near the Sonoran coast during the winter.  Not only did shuttle breeding work, by doubling the progress of Borlaug’s breeding schedule, it also had the fortunate, but unintended side effect of producing wheat strains that were not sensitive the amount of light received each day, as nearly all other plant breeds are.

In just four years, Mexico went from importing almost all the wheat its people consumed to being self-sufficient in wheat production. Borlaug continued working in Mexico, but by the 1960s, his reputation had spread around the world.  He was called on first to travel to India and Pakistan to help improve wheat production there. And after a stunning success, he went on to the Philippines and China, where his innovative breeding methods were used to raise yields in the rice varieties consumed by roughly half the world’s population.  By the 1980s, Borlaug teamed up with Japanese billionaire philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa to try to spread the Green Revolution to Africa.  Wherever he went, the combination of better plant varieties, along with agricultural chemicals such as anhydrous ammonia and other inorganic fertilizers, and synthetic herbicides and insecticides, have helped to more than triple wheat yields in less developed countries since the 1950s.

None of this was easy, however. Borlaug and his colleagues met severe resistance from local seed breeders and farmers set in their ways, as well as national and regional governments who didn’t want to see others succeed where their own programs had failed.  Borlaug wrote in the Foreword to my 2004 book, The Frankenfood Myth, that, “As we created what became known as the ‘Green Revolution,’ we confronted bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions. … At the time, Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, ‘Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually, the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Indeed, bureaucratic hassles became much worse, he wrote. ”If our varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are now being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available.”

But, perhaps no critics were tougher on Borlaug than western environmentalists.  As Borlaug moved from Mexico to Asia, doomsayer Paul Ehrlich claimed that Borlaug “doesn’t have any idea of the magnitude of the problems in food production.” He said, “You aren’t going to make any major impact on producing the food that’s needed.” And Ehrlich wasn’t alone.  Today, much of the political left still sees the Green Revolution as a failure, despite it’s obvious successes, because it promoted technological tweaks to address the deficiencies of nature, weakened socialist agrarian reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s by improving rural productivity, and permitted the survival of hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of lives who just end up despoiling the environment.

This failure of the political left, particularly the environmental movement, to acknowledge the usefulness of innovative agricultural technologies led Borlaug to eventually reject the movement he once embraced.  Although he was largely apolitical, one lamentable aspect of Borlaug’s politics was his early belief in the necessity of global population control. But, by the 1990s, Borlaug had a change of heart.  He also became one of the biggest boosters of food biotechnology and one of the biggest critics of those who believe organic agriculture is the only sustainable option. On the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, he said “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”

I came to know Norm — and he always insisted that everyone call him Norm — about ten years ago.  He was an energetic, inquisitive, and thoughtful man, and he always spoke with great passion about his own work and that of the countless others whose innovative research he has helped to spread around the world. I had the honor of spending the better part of a week hosting Norm in Washington in May 2004, when CEI arranged for him to give a “newsmaker” speech at the National Press Club.  And, on the occasion of CEI’s 20th Anniversary, we presented him with our first ever Prometheus Award for Human Achievement. Despite being in the presence of one of my very few heroes, I was struck most by Norm’s sheer humility.  I thought it delightful, for example, that, even at 90 years old, the former wrestler still insisted on carrying his own luggage — and Norm seemed like he’d be willing to deck a guy, however well-meaning, for insinuating that he might be so frail as to need his host to carry it for him.

His beloved wife Margaret, an accomplished basketball star in her younger years, died just over two years ago, also at the age of 95. As I wrote then, “It’s not every spouse who will gladly pick up her family and move it to a foreign land, where they will live in modest conditions. [Borlaug had rejected an offer by DuPont to double his salary if he would pass up the position in Mexico.] But, Margaret was a strong and wise woman, and she gladly moved with Norm and their children to Mexico, where they dedicated their lives to helping others by promoting science, technology, and common sense. Her contributions were thus as important to the Green Revolution as almost any other person’s. So, anyone who values freedom and progress owes both Norm and Margaret a great deal of thanks.”

Today, reflecting on Norm’s death, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s words following the Battle of Britain: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”  Indeed, never was so much owed by so many to a single man.  Norman Borlaug will be sorely missed.

Ronald and Adamchak, who is an organic farmer, reject the dogma that only a narrow-minded organic approach to agriculture can be sustainable.  Instead, they suggest that “a judicious blend” of the best “organic” attitudes regarding soil health and respect for biodiversity on one hand and the best of new technologies and methods such as biotechnology and integrated pest management on the other, is the “key to helping feed the world’s growing population in an ecologically balanced manner.”

Read the Boston Globe column for a quick summary.  But, I very highly recommend the book as well.

In the Idaho-Eastern Oregon growing region, this led to over $7 million worth of potatoes to go unsold. That’s a lot of uneaten meals. Hopefully the USDA will repeal similar aesthetic restrictions on other types of food. It is bad policy to keep perfectly good food off the market because of its shape, especially during times of recession and high food prices.

“The most striking finding of our survey was that the organic ranges scored worst, or joint worst, at three out of the four supermarkets tested — being rated less tasty and satisfying than even the budget ranges at Waitrose, Tesco and Asda at about twice the price. At Sainsbury’s, organic goods came a poor third to Taste the Difference and standard.”

None of this is news to regulars at this site, who’ve read us discuss various comprehensive scientific studies — like this one, this one, and this one — concluding that organic food offers neither greater nutrition nor greater safety than conventionally produced food does.  Although much of the recent press attention to organic foods has centered around the repeated findings that organic foods don’t have any nutritional benefits, it is just as significant that, as I’ve written here before, it is simply not true that buying organic food gets you less exposure to pesticides.  While organic farmers do not use “synthetic” pesticides, they do use a variety of chemicals to control insects and plant diseases — including such potentially dangerous substances as copper sulfate, rotenone, pyrethrum, ryania, and sabadilla. These “organic” pesticides are derived from minerals or plants, are lightly processed, and thus are considered to be “natural” for the purposes of organic agriculture. Yet, ounce for ounce, most are at least as toxic or carcinogenic as many of the newest synthetic chemical pesticides.

Still, it is great to see articles such as this one in major mainstream papers like The Times — no matter how sketchy its taste test methodology may have been.  To be sure, The Times and other influential European newspapers and magazines have published opinion articles discussing the same point.  But, as a British colleague of mine wrote to me:

“The article suffered from all the faults of superficial comparison, in this case of taste as determined ‘blind’ (they said) by just a few people. It does not stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny.

What is more to the point is not the information per se but the fact that The Times saw fit to publish three pages under that headline - and for once the headline does really reflect the tenor of the article’s content.  The mood appears to be changing quite significantly in the UK.”

Pace Bob Dylan, The Times, it sure is a changin’.

So it is strange that Streep acts so ungrateful to Child in an interview with the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph. She berates Child for disagreeing with her on boosting organic foods and criticizing fats, proclaiming that Child was “seduced” by a “front orgnanization for agro-business and petrochemical business.”

Streep apparently still has a grudge against Child for refusing to lend her support to Streep’s fringe enviro group Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits. That group was one of the leading promoters of the discredited scare about the pesticide Alar that was spread on apples.

In a low point for Congressional hearings on science, Streep, despite her lack of any scientific credentials, was invited to testify in 1989 before a Senate Labor and Human Resources subcommittee. She proclaimed: ”We don’t know what’s on our food . . . I no longer want my children to be part of this experiment.”

As Neil Hrab, CEI’s 2003-04 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow, recounted in the American Spectator: “Within weeks of Streep testifying before Congress, Uniroyal, the company that manufactured Alar, began the triage to save its reputation, withdrawing the chemical from the U.S. market. In November of 1989, the EPA ordered a ban on the sale, distribution and use.”

But major scientific bodies would conclude that the Alar scare had been nothing but a bunch of hype. The American Medical Association stated in 1992: “The Alar scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion. When used in the approved, regulated fashion, as it was, Alar does not pose a risk to the public’s health.” Others who condemned the scare included the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Yet in the Telegraph interview, Streep seems oblivious to these facts and to her role in hyping a costly and unnecessary scare. Instead, she bashes Child for daring to question the organic orthodoxy and what many call the “Food Police.”

Streep recalls Child’s turning down a request to help Mothers and Others in its campaign to get supermarkets to carry organic agriculture. “She was very resistant and brushed us off quite brusquely,” Streep says. Also bashing Child’s love of rich fatty foods, Streep rips Child for not making “a connection between the high fat diet of a heavily laden cordon bleu-influenced cusine and cholesterol levels. (I admit I have no idea what “cordon-bleu influenced cuisine” means, but I imagine neither does Streep, who admitted in the same interview that she knew virtually nothing about cooking before she played Child.)

Streep also bashes Child for her involvement with a public health group that also had a long working relationship with CEI in promoting sound science: the American Council on Science and Health.  “I remember being so disappointed that she was in the thrall [of the ACSH],” Streep said. Calling the group a “front organization” for agribusiness and chemical companies, Streep stated, “They seduced Julia into giving them money, so she was on the other side for a while.”

But the only one sucessfully seduced is Streep– into faddish irational fears about conventioanlly grown and fatty foods. Longtime ACSH President Elizabeth Whelan, who knew Child for about 20 years, writes that Child “had two major pet peeves:

•She despised people who demonized specific foods, like butter and sugar.

•She despised activists who terrified people about the safety of their food. ”

Whelan adds: “For Julia, there were no “good foods” or “bad foods” — again, just a variety of foods, all in moderation — including an occasional cordon bleu. Julia, unlike her fictional counterpart, exhibited a constant stream of common sense.”

As for Streep’s charge of ACSH being a “front group” for corporate interests – and similar charges are levied against CEI — Whelan answers that the claim is “absurd — given the organization is funded by a full spectrum of foundations, individuals, and unrestricted grants from corporations.” CEI has a similarly broad-based funding structure.

The cherry on the cake of Streep’s nonsensical rant to the Telegraph is Streep’s claim that “Eventually I think she came around” to Streep’s point of view. But interviews from the last few years before she died show that Child never did “come around” to Streep’s anti-fatty food and anti-food technology extremism.

When asked by Business Week in 2000 what she thought of the low-fat movement, Child replied, “I don’t go for that at all.” She then reiterated the motto of the American Institute of Wine and Food, which she co-founded with winemakers Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff to advance enjoyment of food: “Small helpings No seconds. No snacking. A little bit of everything and have a good time.”

Child also fully endorsed what another bete noir of many enviros — food biotechnology or genetic engineering. In 1999, Child told the Toronto Star: “I think it’s all fascinating. There’s no one-minute answer. The technology’s here. If they can give us a better tomato, I’m for it.”

Perhaps the best epitaph for Julia Child came from Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, upon her death at age 91 in 2004. Lifson wrote in American Thinker:  ”Julia Child, who played a major role in changing the way Americans think about, prepare and eat food, has died at the ripe old age of 91, after a lifetime of urging Americans to go ahead and use butter in their sauces and fry lardons to render some pork fat in which to fry the beginnings of a stew. Take that, health Nazis!”

In the name of cutting greenhouse gases, the House passed a cap-and-trade carbon tax scheme backed by the Obama Administration in June. But the bill won’t significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions even in the U.S. One reason is that the bill was larded up with corporate welfare. 85 percent of its carbon allowances were given away to special interests free of charge, thanks to lobbying that turned the bill into an orgy of corporate welfare.

The bill also contains environmentally-harmful provisions, such as massive ethanol subsidies, which will result in “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and caused famines that have killed countless people in places like Haiti.

Worse, the cap-and-trade tax will cost much, much more than $25 a month — with politically connected businesses like GE profiting at the expense of the taxpayer, as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has chronicled in story after story. Carney calls the bill a “hidden bailout” for GE and other well-connected businesses.

Capping emissions through taxes and regulations isn’t cheap — Obama himself told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade tax to fight global warming, Americans’ electricity bills would “skyrocket,” and coal power plants that now provide much of the nation’s energy would go “bankrupt.” There’s no free lunch (except for the politically-connected businesses that are backing the bill, and will be able to hike consumer prices as a result).

Under the bill, the average household will pay about $248 more a month, say economists, about ten times more than voters said they were unwilling to pay in the Post-ABC News poll. Electricity bills alone will rise by more than $30 a month, utilities will rise by $69 a month, and other consumer goods will also become more expensive, because energy is part of the cost of almost everything we buy.

Even the researchers backing the bill say it will have a tiny effect on global warming by the year 2050 — “much less than one degree.” But it will cost the economy $7.4 trillion, destroying much of our industrial base.

So it’s all pain and no gain, something reinforced by the bill’s poor drafting and politically-motivated giveaways — and the fact that most greenhouse gas emissions occur outside the U.S. and beyond the reach of U.S. cap-and-trade taxes. In fact, the bill could actually increase pollution by driving smokestack industries overseas to places like India and China, where they would avoid not only costly greenhouse gas regulations, but also American law’s restrictions on traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide that were restricted because of their dangerousness long before global warming even became an issue. (China has restrictions on auto emissions, but its restrictions on industrial pollution are minimal and poorly unenforced, leading to vast amounts of smog and acid rain).

Meanwhile, the Administration is undermining alternative energy, which doesn’t give off greenhouse gases. Obama is killing a state-of-the-art nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain after billions of taxpayer dollars had already been spent preparing it for use. Doing that foolishly puts taxpayers on the hook for up to $100 billion in payments to nuclear power plant owners under government contracts. The killing of the facility will make it more difficult to dispose of nuclear waste from existing power plants, and harder to construct new nuclear power plants to generate badly-needed energy.

The Obama Administration is also doing nothing to use federal law to preempt state and local barriers to alternative energy. Wind and solar power continue to be blocked by people who say “Not in My Backyard.” California’s liberal Senators oppose developing solar power in the barren Mohave Desert, where virtually no one lives, wanting to keep it in its pristine state. But if solar panels can’t be put there, where plants and animals are sparse, where on Earth can they be put? The Kennedy family long blocked a wind power facility near Cape Code, worrying that it would interfere with their view of the oceean.

Rather than doing anything constructive about this, the Obama Administration is opposing preemption that would reduce the arbitrary power and prerogatives of local bureaucrats and trial lawyers. For ideological reasons, it issued an “anti-preemption” rule on May 20 that will undercut federal policies like developing alternative energy. The federal government should be using its power under the Commerce Clause to override parochial regulations that interfere with alternative energy projects and refineries.

One of Obama’s own advisers admits that the cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme backed by the “Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats” would “have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. And to get political support in key states, the legislation would abandon the auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits to selected corporations.”

Obama adviser Martin Feldstein notes that “the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices” from capping the amount of carbon dioxide energy users can emit “would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year,” a figure that “would rise significantly” from year to year.

“Some people eat organic foods because they want to support small local farms – but eating organically might mean you’re getting your food from giant corporations or China.”

Penn and Teller note that they have nothing against giant corporations – indeed, they have some good things to say about big businesses. But they do skewer yet another free range sacred cow, and that always makes their show fun to watch.

The episode first aired last night on the Showtime pay-cable network, but you can watch the trailer and get scheduling information here.