In June 2022, a premium meal from Daily Harvest—backed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams—sent hundreds to hospitals with liver damage. The culprit? An ingredient that entered America's food supply without FDA oversight. This wasn't a discount brand cutting corners. This was expensive, aspirational wellness food. And it reveals an uncomfortable truth: the price you pay has nothing to do with safety. From Burt's Bees lipstick testing positive for lead to Fenty Beauty containing "forever chemicals," from the FDA allowing 10,000 food additives it's never reviewed to cosmetics companies hiding toxins behind the word "fragrance"—Americans are paying premiums to be poisoned by the brands they trust most. As regulatory loopholes swallow consumer protection and corporate greenwashing reaches epidemic levels (52% of consumers now recognize it), this investigation exposes how the illusion of "premium equals pure" has become America's most dangerous—and profitable—lie.
Tag: investigative journalism
From Robert Charles to ICE: Echoes of State Violence and Resistance in America
The summer heat bore down on New Orleans that July night in 1900 when gunfire first cracked the air. Robert Charles, a Black laborer who had dared to sit on a porch in a white neighborhood, would be dead within four days—his body riddled with bullets, then mutilated by a mob drunk on the kind of rage that newspapers cultivated and police sanctioned. Before he fell, Charles killed several officers in what he surely understood would be his final stand. The city erupted. White mobs roamed the streets hunting Black residents. At least 28 people died, most of them Black civilians guilty of nothing more than existing in the wrong place during a wave of sanctioned terror. The rhetoric that summer was familiar: dangerous criminals, threats to public safety, the necessity of force. Charles was not portrayed as a man defending himself against a violent arrest in a society that offered him no legal protection. He was a monster to be exterminated, and the Black community that harbored him deserved collective punishment. More than a century later, the same language of fear and control echoes through the detention centers and deportation raids of today.