Cattle Network: Another surprising, must-read article this week from this beef-industry news site is an interview with Mary Zanoni, executive director of Farm for Life. A former lawyer, Zanoni positively shreds the USDA’s proposed National Animal Identification System from privacy, cost, and accountability standpoints. Her parting words to the thousands of cattlemen reading? “You don’t […]

Dammit. In what is surely going to be another crippling blow to the organic/alternative food industry, the USDA is saying it has traced four cases of E. coli sickness in children to Fresno-based Organic Pastures. No milk has actually tested positive for E. coli, but the state has issued a recall and quarantine order (!) […]

Grist: Tom Philpott joins Pollan in blaming the latest E. coli outbreak on consolidation of production, and says we should keep eating small-farm spinach while we rethink industrial agriculture.
DailyIndia.com: The Supreme Court of India says no to GMOs until further notice, heeding the pleas from petitioners to reconsider a process that could be […]

I used to think of the spinach ripple as that movement up and down Popeye’s arms after he chugged a can of spinach. Sometimes the muscle would ripple up and down his arms, while at other times you would see the Spinach inside his arm. As a kid, it was a funny thing […]

New York Times*: Farmgirl-turned-food-author Nina Planck comes out swinging in this opinion piece on the toxic spinach outbreak titled “Leafy Green Sewage.” She’s the first we’ve seen to point out that this is a new, particularly virulent strain of E. coli that’s adapted to thrive in the acidified stomachs of factory-farm cows. Switch them to […]

The likely culprit in the E. coli outbreak, says our favorite food detective Michael Pollan in the San Jose Mercury News, is our highly centralized, industrial system, which creates the perfect conditions for spreading contamination over a wide area. “If the whole country is washing its lettuce in the same sink, any problem in that […]

Here’s a depressing article for those of us who think our bodies are spotless temples because we virtuously ingest only organic produce and antibiotic-free meat. Writer David Ewing Duncan went on a “journey of chemical self-discovery” and had himself tested for 320 chemicals. He wrote about the results in this eye-opening article for National Geographic […]

I bought these fresh cranberry beans last Tuesday from Dirty Girl Farms (my favorite name of all) because I had never seen such pretty beans before. I also didn’t know what they were or how to cook them, but that’s the beauty of the farmers market — you can just ask.
These are a special heirloom […]

BBC: British researchers have studied over 3 centuries of temperature data from the Central England Temperature record — the longest continous series of temperature measurements in the world — and concluded that recent temperature changes are not part of a natural cycle.
San Francisco Chronicle: The trickle-down effect of tainted spinach: The farm workers who […]

Would you like to go on a Very Ethicurean culinary adventure? Try eating food from the farm, at the farm — it can’t get much more local than that!
Outstanding in the Field North American farm tour is coming to Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, TX, on Sunday, September 24. Farmers Larry Butler and Carol Ann […]

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carol Ness has a thorough, in-depth look at alternative meat-buying in the Bay Area, in which The Ethicurean gets a mention as “a new Web site for conscious eaters.” A number of families are going out of their way to purchase half- and quarter steers direct from local ranchers, along […]

A former roommate had a simple rule about home brewing beer: Drink your mistakes. This was not the easiest rule to live by, but on one occasion he followed his rule and drank most of a 5 gallon batch of pale ale. Another roommate and I helped, a little, but it was […]

San Francisco Chronicle: The Day in Pictures features this incredibly sweet photo, by Russ Dillingham of the Lewiston Sun Journal, of a girl and her pig. [Corn Maven: Knowing the pig will be sold later on makes this photo kind of heartbreaking.]
Monterey County Herald: Originally written for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, olive […]

Telegraph (UK): Best article we’ve seen yet about how Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard program actually works as part of the school’s curriculum. Special guest Eric Schlosser offers some interesting insights.
Time Magazine: Sub-Saharan Africa’s soil has been sucked dry of nutrients. This article says that the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the $150 million […]

On Sunday, Man of La Muncha and I went to the Ballard Farmers’ Market. Each of us had a goal - he wanted to find back fat to pursue his goal of making lard, and I wanted to talk to the foragers and find out more about the found food that they sell.
Once we got to the […]