The recurring ads on Facebook pulled at me to watch The Need to Grow , a documentary film about food and farming. As someone connected with these areas professionally and personally, I thought it would be worth a watch. Here is a review. First the good things. The film is nicely shot and well written. The majority of the work builds on themes such as nutritious diets healthy soils, and efficient energy. Those are the central underlying values of the film, and ones that I wholly endorse. However, where the film falls apart is in its approaches to achieve those end points. Two of the "experts" recruited for the film are none other than Jeffrey Smith and Vandana Shiva, two people with little training in science or farming (and no, Vandana Shiva is not a physicist as the film claims). The narrator is actress Rosario Dawson, who early in the film makes the proclamation, "Agriculture is the most destructive human activity on the planet." It is clear where t
This is an extremely important story. Dr. Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant x-ray crystalographer that was the first to figure out the structure of DNA. Her data were shared with Watson and Crick without her knowledge. They won a Nobel Prize, she is barely a footnote. Can we please fix that? Listen to this week's podcast and share her story.
