Here is a selection of quotes from current issues of TIME magazine:

• June 4 issue: "How Not to Treat the Guests" (Nathan Thornburgh/Vass) -- an article on guest workers entering the U.S. to work in North Carolina on temporary work visas.

  Garland Fulcher's [of Garland Fulcher Seafood Company] experience proves guest-worker programs don't necessarily keep Mexicans from settling here illegally. More than 10% of the company's 2006 workforce took off to live in the U.S. without returning home to Mexico. "If you want to talk about illegals," says Michelle Noevere, who worked in Garland Fulcher's front office last year, "there's the border, and then there's this foot in the door called a guest-worker program."

  So what's the solution? One clue can be found in the failed amnesty of 1986, widely viewed as the genesis of the current crisis. The moment newly legalized farmworkers realized they had better options, they left for the cities instead of staying in low-paying agriculture jobs. Their exodus from the fields opened the door to an even larger wave of illegal immigration. And that raises the question, Will American agriculture ever pay enough to attract American citizens rather than just illegals? If it did, the newly legalized millions who are currently working in the fields might be inclined to stay there. But paying living wages for farmwork would, of course, require the rest of us to pay a lot more for food, become much more protectionist or both. If the country isn't ready to take those steps, here's an apostasy being whispered by some economists: get rid of large-scale agriculture altogether. England did it and is content to buy the bulk of its food from foreign producers. Less food security, perhaps, but also less need for guest workers. It's a difficult discussion in the U.S., a country that has become addicted to cheap labor. But one thing is certain in North Carolina: the immigration solution of the future isn't even working today.

• June 18 issue: "Corn-powered in Yuma" (Bob Diddlebock/Yuma) -- an article about a small Colorado town preparing to be an alternative-fuel production center. The article closes with this:

  Trent Bushner, a Yuma farmer and county commissioner who grows 1,200 acres of corn on his 3,500-acre spread, says $4 corn brings its own set of problems--higher planting costs, for one, as he busts more sod. But Bushner allows that he can live with that: "Every time we put a gallon of ethanol in our car, that's a gallon of gasoline we're not putting in it that we got from the Middle East." Seems that the view on alternative fuels from down on the farm goes much farther than just over the next ridge.

• June 18 issue: Why Pixar is Better (Richard Corliss/Emeryville) -- an article about Pixar's new release, "Ratatouille" [pronounced rat-a-tooey]

  When he starts work on a movie, Bird [the director] looks for core thoughts. The core here: "Cooks are givers, and rats are takers. In the larger world there are people who are givers and people who are takers. Cooking, feeding people, is a giving act. All art at its best is a giving act that continues to give as long as the art is consumed. As with a cook, you're handing it over to someone to enjoy."

  Toward the end of the movie, Remy whips up his specialty for Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole), a food critic so severe he is known to trembling chefs throughout Paris as the Grim Eater. Ego puts a forkful in his mouth, and in a flash, fond memories--of a loving mother giving him delicious food--play across his face. As Bird describes the moment, "His eyes drift down toward the dish, like, 'Is it this? It is this. I love food again. This is what I was missing.'" A taste of something wonderful can humanize almost any misanthrope, even a critic.

All of these articles can be found at TIME's archives -- www.time.com. Use the title of the article to search.

Journal entry dated 24 July 2007
Category: Eye on a world becoming