The world economy has run into a brick wall. Despite countless warnings in recent years about the need to address a looming hunger crisis in poor countries and a looming energy crisis worldwide, world leaders failed to think ahead. The result is a global food crisis. Wheat, corn and rice prices have more than doubled in the past two years, and oil prices have more than tripled since the start of 2004. These food-price increases combined with soaring energy costs ...

The desire to eat meat has posed an ethical question ever since humans achieved reliable crop production: Do we really need to kill animals to live? Today, the hunger for meat is also contributing to the climate-change catastrophe. The gases from all those chickens and pigs and cows, and from the manure lagoons that big farms create, are playing a part in global warming. So the idea of fake meat has never been more alluring. What if you could cut ...

The only time I ever met Henry Ford, he looked at me and probably wondered, "Who is this little s.o.b. fresh out of college?" He wasn't real big on college graduates, and I was one of 50 in the Ford training course in September 1946, working in a huge drafting room at the enormous River Rouge plant near Detroit. One day there was a big commotion at one end of the floor and in walked Henry Ford with Charles Lindbergh. ...

When is a cat a dog? When its Catwoman. Some movies are dead on arrival, and by opening day last weekend it was official: the latest incarnation of Bob Kanes Batman babe was a bad movie. Most critics panned it; their headline writers have had their fun with it: Far from Purrr-fect, Should Be Fixed, Spits Out a Hairball. The film may be the most easily mocked hymn to feline power since Cats came to Broadway. And ...

To get in shape for her October wedding, Dawn-Samantha Cahill, 25, a production coordinator in New York City, tried every exercise routine she could think of. But the upended positions that yoga required made her feel self-conscious. Running on a treadmill was a bore. And lifting weights was just too difficult. Frustrated, Cahill started overeating instead of exercising, and her weight, on a petite, 5-ft. 2-in. frame, ballooned to 212 lb. Cahill was nearly ready to give up, ...

Word leaked out almost as soon as the giant U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane touched down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns ...

Opening a teahouse in Vietnam may seem like taking coal to Newcastle. Yet the lovely views of Hanoi's West Lake from the two-story Ochao are more than matched by French founder Guillaume Le's perspective on reviving an ancient brewing art. "The Vietnam War disrupted tea production and destroyed people's knowledge about what was once a national pride," says Le, whose passion for seeking out the highest-quality specialty teas led him to quit a career as an orthopedist. Sourcing ...

Worldwide production of illicit opium, coca leaf and cannabis is many times the amount currently consumed by drug abusers. Some governments do not have control of the narcotics growing regions, and prospects in several countries are dampened by corruption, even government involvement in the narcotics trade. --From the U.S. State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, February 1985. The compound, hidden deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle, 400 miles southeast of the Colombian capital of Bogota, was called ...

As the founder and chairman of his eponymous computer company, Michael Dell changed the way PCs are made and sold. In the past year, though, rivals have gained on him. So this year he's going for a green advantage: he wants to erase some of the environmental cost of running computers by offering a way to neutralize the carbon dioxide emitted by a PC. Dell, 41, spoke with TIME's Bryan Walsh about climate change, the media and small, shiny objects. ...

Among the army of burger flippers at work across America in the 1960s was a French chef putting his training to use at Howard Johnson's on Queens Boulevard in New York City. I worked for HoJo's from the summer of 1960 to the spring of 1970, doing my American apprenticeship, learning about mass production and marketing. The company had been started in 1925 in Massachusetts by Howard Deering Johnson, and by the mid-1960s its sales exceeded that of Burger King, ...