Lords Of The Harvest

Once confined to the research laboratory, the genetic engineering of plants is now a big business that is changing the face of modern agriculture. Giant corporations are creating designer crops with strange powers-from cholesterol-reducing soybeans to plants that act as miniature drug factories, churning out everything from vaccines to insulin. They promise great benefits: better health for consumers, more productive agriculture-even an end to world hunger. But the vision has a dark side, one of profit-driven tampering with life and the possible destruction of entire ecosystems. In Lords of the Harvest, Daniel Charles takes us deep inside research labs, farm sheds, and corporate boardrooms to reveal the hidden story behind this agricultural revolution. He tells how a handful of scientists at Monsanto drove biotechnology from the lab into the field, and how the company's opponents are fighting back with every tool available to them, including the cynical manipulation of public fears. A dramatic account of boundless ambition, political intrigue, and the quest for knowledge, Lords of the Harvest is ultimately a story of idealism and of conflicting dreams about the shape of a better world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America’s land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation’s largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America. The soybean’s journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In Asia, the soybean had been bred and cultivated into a nutritious staple food over the course of centuries. Its adoption by Americans was long in coming— the outcome of migration and innovation, changing tastes and habits, and the transformation of food, farming, breeding, marketing, and indeed the bean itself, during the twentieth century. All come in for scrutiny as Roth traces the ups and downs of the soybean’s journey. Along the way, he uncovers surprising developments, including a series of catastrophic explosions at soy-processing plants in the 1930s, the widespread production of tofu in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, the decades-long project to improve the blandness of soybean oil, the creation of new southern soybean varieties named after Confederate generals, the role of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture in popularizing soy foods, and the discovery of soy phytoestrogens in the late 1980s. We also encounter fascinating figures in their own right, such as Yamei Kin, the Chinese American who promoted tofu during World War I, and African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, who played a critical role in the story of synthetic human hormones derived from soy sterols. A thoroughly engaging work of narrative history, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is the first comprehensive account of the soybean in America over the entire course of the twentieth century.

While it is not my intention to begin this book with a riddle for levity's sake, it is my intention to ask you to use your intellect from page one. You see, some murders are prompted by basic emotions that render a killer's motivation most obvious. Other murders are committed out of a need to serve a higher purpose such as personal or ideological loyalty, and/or religious martyrdom. But the Columbus Stocking Strangler murders will never rise to the elegance of such, no matter how much the perpetrators of these atrocities might insist. These graphic slayings of seven elderly white women were executed for a series of reasons that for over almost four decades have gone undecipherable and in the end, were simply part of a much larger puzzle that until now has remained hidden.So let us continue with the riddle.What is another word for Thesaurus?Thought provoking, isn't it?For how do you describe something that in essence exists only to describe everything else, but not itself? I think you would agree with me then, that sometimes there simply isn't a better word or group of words to describe a thing other than the words that originally describes it the best. The word harvest is defined as the process of gathering mature crops from the fields, to be used as provisions for a later time. In like token, reaping is the cutting of mature grains or produce for harvest, typically using a scythe, sickle or reaper. Thus, you have the reason why the title for this book could be nothing other than:LORDS OF THE HARVEST--A TRUE CRIME INVESTIGATIVE MEMOIR.This investigative memoir begins with my introduction to the murders in Columbus, Georgia in 1977, where the word harvest took on another meaning and the tools that were used to harvest these 'matured' victims will not only shock you...but lead you to other horrors, once shrouded in mystery and considered as stand-alone or disconnected serial murders, until my discovery of the key that unlocks them all.

Peasants, Lords, and State: Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region, 1000-1750 compares peasant self-determination in relation to manorial and territorial power structures in Scandinavia and the eastern Alpine region between 1000 and 1750.