Food, Agriculture

The goal of the U.S. Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 was to enable the public make better-informed dietary choices through improved labeling on packaged foods.  A requirement of 2010 Affordable Health Care Act extends the concept to chain restaurants, requiring them to disclose similar information on the food they sell.

As anyone who lives on Earth can attest, weather is rarely “average.” However mild or extreme a climate may be, it can be relatively warm one day and cool the next; clouds appear or the sun breaks through; precipitation, if it occurs, tends to do so in bursts. Yet many climate models focus on “average” weather for a particular time and place, something that occurs only rarely in the real world.

Land use in the United States has always been marked by change — forest has become cropland and then returned again; towns have grown in rural areas only to disappear; cities have grown, suburbs have spread.  In the last 25 years, however, change has accelerated in ways that depart from previous trends, even as the stakes have gotten higher — land use can have real effects on climate change, wildlife habitat and now even energy production.