San Francisco Chronicle: We’ve been meaning to write about how the new humane-treatment-of-animals meat label from the Animal Welfare Institute stacks up against the others, but Chronicle food reporter Carol Ness has beaten us to it. Crushing discovery: The Certified Organic criteria permit debeaking of chickens and tail-docking of pigs.
Grist: Tom Philpott takes readers inside the dismal economics of being a small farmer.
San Francisco Chronicle: A rundown of the exotic subtropical fruits, such as the cherimoya, now in season in Northern California.
The Times: Welcome to the clone wars, England — a brief article describes how little policing there is of whether cloned animals are entering the U.K. food supply.
Mercury News (via AP): Clover Stornetta says no matter what the FDA decides, it will not sell milk from cloned cows.
San Francisco Chronicle: A memorial is planned Sunday for Manka’s Inverness Lodge, the splendid beacon of locavoreanism that burned down over Christmas. Good news: owners Grade and DeLong plan to rebuild, if neighbors let them.
CattleNetwork.com: Cargill, National Beef Packing, and Tyson have all shut down slaughter operations in a “standoff” over profit margins with feedlot operators.
Press release: Whole Foods made Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For list for the 10th time (every year since the list was started). Cynical about the company’s anti-union preference? Well, the worker bees don’t seem to mind: two-thirds of the total Fortune score comes from responses by 400 randomly selected employees.
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