Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Excellent Q&A with Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl about the politics of food, including Red-State-Blue-State diets.
New York Times: Why it’s hard to pinpoint the source of the E. coli outbreak in spinach and eliminate it from the food supply. Natural Selection Foods, best known for its organic Earthbound Farm brand of salads, is […]

My willingness to cook something used to follow what I called the Burrito Rule.
Basically, I wasn’t going to make anything that would take a lot of time, cost twice as much, and taste half as good as what I could easily buy in a restaurant or store. And burritos, delicious versions of which are all […]

Well, the New York Times is reporting that Natural Selection Foods of San Juan Bautista, CA, is voluntarily recalling its Earthbound Farm brands of prepackaged organic spinach and salad mixes — sold throughout Whole Foods and numerous other chains — as well as prepackaged spinach it processes for lots of other companies, including Dole. At […]

The Center for Consumer Freedom, our favorite purveyor of Big Ag propaganda, is busily shoveling its horse manure again. Which messenger is getting shot this time? Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which has announced a two-year study of U.S. meat production methods under the non-acronym-friendly name National Commission on Industrial Farm Animal […]

New York Times*: The organic milk wars have begun, with Wal-Mart choosing giant Aurora Dairy to make its house line of organic milk. Aurora — which Whole Foods visited and rejected — milks its thousands of cows three times a day instead of the two that most organic dairies do, and feeds them diets […]

The AP, NPR, and many other news outlets are reporting on recent E. Coli outbreaks that have been traced to bagged spinach.
The outbreak has been linked to food-borne illnesses in multiple states and one death. The FDA has issued a warning to all states. It is unknown how widely the infected, bagged spinach […]

Salt Lake Tribune: The global-warming case for eating less meat and dairy.
Reuters: The Center for Food Safety is calling for the USDA to regulate Bayer’s pesky genetically modified rice strain LL Rice 601 as a “plant pest” under the Plant Protection Act. We have already objected to Bayer’s petitioning the USDA to retroactively deregulate it […]

Forbes: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has just announced a new $150 million initiative, called Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), intended to “dramatically increase the productivity of small farms, moving tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty and significantly reducing hunger.” Al Krebs over at Counterpunch thinks Bill’s plan […]

This post has been edited since it was first published. Certain details to which parties objected have been removed, including from the comments section.

“Thank God you’re here! I thought no one was going to show up,” said the sunburned man sitting at the rear of Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco, in a […]

The Economist: Can big agribusiness be weaned “from Uncle Sam’s teat”? The U.S. government spent over $20 billion on farm subsidies last year — more than it spent on foreign aid and almost twice what it spends on subsidising college for poor children.
Fortune: A profile of Chipotle Mexican Grill, which some are calling the fast-food […]

“No animal understands its relationship to the farmer like a cow does.” Chickenman and I are walking Pepper back to the pasture — she hopped the fence in order to be near her calf, Creampuff, who was at a neighbor’s house. All night long they were mooing at each other. When asked why Creampuff ran […]

A Slashdot reader tipped us off that according to FoodNavigator, a European food news website, Bayer Crop Sciences has belatedly petitioned the USDA to approve (”deregulate”) LL Rice 601, its genetically modified rice variety that has caused a commotion in Europe and Asia by cross-contaminating non-GMO rice. Several countries have since banned the import of […]

The Independent (UK): Animal-rights activist and controversial ethicist Peter Singer answers tough questions from readers.
Reuters: The USDA says it’s still too soon to determine how much of a genetically modified rice strain has accidentally entered the world’s food supply, but hey, that it’s probably no big deal. We’re so relieved to hear that from the […]

On Sunday, Man of La Muncha and I headed south to our CSA, Helsing Junction Farm, for their annual Day on the Farm. We’ve been members of this CSA for three years now, but until this weekend we haven’t had the opportunity to actually visit the place where we get the majority of our summer […]

The first time an Armenian cucumber showed up in our CSA box, I had no idea what it was. (It was the one day that we didn’t get a newsletter.) This would be less embarrassing if I weren’t part Armenian, and proud of it, but I know zip about the food.
Since we also got other […]