Writer Benjamin Lorr spent five years immersing himself into the highly secretive food industry. In the first half, he revealed surprising details from his lengthy investigation, as well as delved into the history of grocery stores. More than a century ago, grocers kept most items behind the counter, but the arrival of such innovations as canning and cardboard boxes led to individual containers and branding. And this, he noted, paved the way for the astonishing number of items we now see on supermarket shelves. While grocery stores have a thin profit margin on food items, Lorr reported that many stores charge distributors and manufacturers "slotting fees" to get their products to appear on their shelves. He interviewed such people as Trader Joe's founder, Joe Coulombe, to understand the unique and "cult-like" customer loyalty to that chain.

Compared to the rest of the world, Americans pay the least amount of their overall income for their groceries. But Lorr learned that this comes at a huge cost to the labor force. There has been much outsourcing to places in the world that have poor working standards, he detailed, and many employees have been shifted to part-time hours. He discovered that drivers are working twice as hard in the trucking industry as they did in the 1970s, but only earning 40% of the (cost-adjusted) wages they would have made then. Further, he learned that some fishermen in the seafood industry are kept in prison-like conditions aboard vessels that stay in the waters for years at a time.

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Founder of the Akashic Knowing School of Wisdom, Lisa Barnett is an internationally respected guide, and transformational teacher. In the latter half, she talked about how to access your Akashic Records as a way to heal emotional scars and clear soul contracts. Everything that a person has ever done or experienced is part of their Akashic Record, including across various lifetimes, she explained, and each soul has their own "record keepers" or guides that can assist. "There are many things [in our Record] that we can go back and review," she outlined, and by doing so, we can grow and learn from them. In the case of adverse events, this review helps to complete the karmic cycle, she added.

She discussed the concept of "soul contracts" in which, before a lifetime, the soul plots out experiences with those close to us as a means to evolve. Sometimes when she conducts an Akashic reading/healing for a client, she works with the record keepers to help "rewrite" a soul contract that is no longer serving a person. During these sessions, the record keepers may show that a specific past life is holding a person back, she said, or there is a gift from another lifetime the client hasn't reclaimed because of some trauma or blockage. Working with her record keepers, Barnett offered readings and healing for callers, clearing out old, stuck energies.

News segment guests: Lauren Weinstein, Steve Kates