"One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy."

That's from Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, who died at the age of 95.

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug's achievement as a "Green Revolution."

Contrary to Ehrlich's predictions, we haven't suffered huge famines. Food is actually more abundant and cheaper than ever in history. The world has truly lost a great man.

Another Myth Debunked: Wal-Mart Makes You Fat

Study shows Wal-Mart reduces obesity.

“We expected the study to show an increase in obesity in communities with a Wal-Mart,” Carden says. “We know that Wal-Mart lowers the cost of food, but we figured it’s not always the best food for you.”

To their surprise, they found the opposite—there was a small but statistically significant reduction in obesity rates in communities with a Wal-Mart, perhaps because the store also sells fresh produce of good quality at a good price.

Broadening the study to big-box stores in general, the effect was even more pronounced. “People actually bought more produce, more fruits and vegetables,” (economist Art) Carden says. “Instead of just eating more, they ate a higher-quality diet—a lower-fat diet than the rest of the population.”

Just because you see a lot of fat people in motorized carts at Wal-Mart doesn't mean the store doesn't offer plenty of healthy alternatives. Wal-Mart offers lots of food that's bad for you, but there's also lots of good food, too. People choose to eat badly.

10 Foods You Should Be Eating But Aren't

Via Brothers Judd blog comes this Men's Health article on 10 foods you don't eat but should. The foods are:

--Beets

--Cabbage

--Guava

--Swiss chard

--Cinnamon

--Purslane

--Pomegranate juice

--Goji berries

--Prunes (disguised as "dried plums")

--Pumpkin seeds

I'd never heard of purslane or Goji berries, but I know I can find most of the rest of these around town. Any luck getting kids to eat them, though?

One Guy We Should Be Celebrating

Gregg Easterbrook has a column about the American Nobel Peace Prize winner who isn't Jimmy Carter.

The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed. Do you know Borlaug's achievement? Would you recognize him if he sat on your lap? Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet is anonymous in the land of his birth.

Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India's food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls' education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.

Basically, Borlaug single-handedly allowed the way of life most Americans enjoy. By inventing a process that increased crop yields exponentially, he created a way for food to stay cheap and easily available for both animals and humans.

I was talking to my dad along these lines just last night. One of the golden oldiest station was playing songs from 1969.

"Bread cost 23 cents a loaf in 1969," said the radio personality (are there disc jockeys anymore?), "and the average American made $5,000 per year."

$5,000? That's $2.60 an hour. So, a loaf of bread cost far more than the average loaf does these days (about $2).

If not for Borlaug's invention, that loaf of bread would be far higher and, rather than having a problem with obesity in this country, we'd have more malnutrition.

It's a pity that Borlaug's accomplishments are ignored by our society. And while I don't completely agree with Easterbrook's assessment, he is correct that it's a shame when body counts, political stunts, and a teenage wizard get far more notice than the accomplishments that have enriched all our lives.

I'll Be Taking the Kids to Burger King More

Burger King announced today that it will start buying eggs and pork from producers who don't use cages or crates.

The company said that it would also favor suppliers of chickens that use gas, or “controlled-atmospheric stunning,” rather than electric shocks to knock birds unconscious before slaughter. It is considered a more humane method, though only a handful of slaughterhouses use it.

The goal for the next few months, Burger King said is for 2 percent of its eggs to be “cage free,” and for 10 percent of its pork to come from farms that allow sows to move around inside pens, rather than being confined to crates. The company said those percentages would rise as more farmers shift to these methods and more competitively priced supplies become available.

The cage-free eggs and crate-free pork will cost more, although it is not clear how much because Burger King is still negotiating prices, Steven Grover, vice president for food safety, quality assurance and regulatory compliance, said. Prices of food at the chain’s restaurants will not be increased as a result.

I don't suspect that price increases will be significant, and I'm pretty sure Burger King's prices are competitive with other fast food chains. Typically, we don't go to any fast food joint because of the prices, anyway.

If this campaign works for Burger King, expect McDonald's and other chains to follow suit.