Digest: The scoop on China’s corner-cutting, Mexico goes GM, chocolate label underpinnings

Enjoy your pork!: The FDA and the USDA have jointly decided that “At this time, we have no evidence of harm to humans associated with the processed pork product, and therefore no recall of meat products processed from these animals is being issued.” (USDA.gov)

Droplets Down Under: Good rain brings hope and planting opportunity for Australian farmers enmired in drought, but no certainty for crops. (The Australian)

Flipper flipflopping: The U.S. government has “arbitrarily and capriciously” sought to ease rules for foreign fishermen on so-called dolphin-safe tuna, ruled a U.S. federal appeals court in upholding current standards. (Reuters)

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Pub Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) Brief summary (Pub) News Michigan fights manure tsunami: Michigan has introduced bills to cut down factory farm pollution. Concentrated animal feeding operations in the state spread more than 4 billion pounds of untreated manure on farm fields each year — animal feces and urine laced with hundreds of toxic chemicals and potentially deadly pathogens — because the state Legislature in the 1990s made farms exempt from most environmental laws…. (New York Times) Features The Monopoly game: Tom Philpott on how, like most of the orange juice it produces, the U.S. food system is highly concentrated — and what that seemingly unstoppable trend is doing to small farmers in both the meat and vegetable industries.

The news and blogosphere has been abuzz about contaminated food from China, causing many to ask where their food (and their pets’ food) is coming from and what is in it. Here’s my own story about food from a far away place. Fortunately, the only negative effect was a slight dizziness from seeking out […]

My beloved chocolate, whose place in my heart (and stomach) is eclipsed only by the lovely Noshette of the North, is in grave danger.
I was alerted to very serious situation by The Center for Food Safety, from which I receive regular alerts via email. You can get yourself on their email list by joining their […]

A grad school chum of mine, who practices permaculture on her farm, posted this video on her blog recently—a mere two days after Daisy, one of her three adult pygmy goats, gave birth.
I admit it; I’m easily amused when it comes to animals, especially wee ones. But I dare you not to chuckle—even just a […]

“Mad bee disease”?: About 60 scientists are sharing their early findings regarding “colony collapse disorder” in bees. They’re focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide, particularly the neonicotinoids group banned in France for causing what the French called “mad bee disease.” They’ve set aside for now the possibility that […]

The Ethicurean bloggers are all quite busy right now, what with having babies and surgery and writing novels and working for the Man. Dairy Queen, who usually coordinates the group’s daily news Digest, will be at the 2007 Food and Society Conference all this week in Traverse City, Michigan, and is determined to make the […]

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a new video from Free Range Studios, the awesome Berkeley-based animation team that also brought us The Meatrix series. It’s called “One Earth,” and it explains that if everyone lived like Americans — that is, inordinately wastefully — then we’d actually need five Earths to provide enough resources, […]

Food Bill of Rights and Wrongs: Michael Pollan attempts to reframe the Farm Bill — that “resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation” — as a chance to reform the food system so that it actually benefits the interests of eaters. In his usual clear-eyed, deceptively simple style, he explains in detail how the […]

Bad food — it’s not just for pets anymore: Tainted pet food has been confirmed to have been fed to California hogs, and the hogs have been consumed by humans. Although everyone’s saying the health risk is minimal, due to the hogs’ length of exposure, the FDA has opened a criminal investigation. The Modesto Bee […]

The Food and Farm Bill debate has already seen a wide range of input: farmers (American Farm Bureau, PDF), environmentalists (Environmental Defense), libertarians (Cato Institute), and anti-poverty organizations (Oxfam), to name a few. A while ago I pointed out a letter asking for increased Farm Bill funding that was signed by forty groups […]

Montrealers should be aware that a documentary about large-scale hog producers that was produced in 2002 will be screened this coming Sunday afternoon:
Bacon, the film
Sunday, April 22, 2007 at 4pm
Redpath Museum Auditorium
859 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
French with English subtitles
Admission is free with a donation to the museum
I will be definitely be there, but Noshette may […]

Milking a loophole for all their worth: Some conventional dairy farmers are rushing to convert their herds to organic, before new USDA rules take effect that would require them to feed their cows 100% organic feed during the transition period. Currently, they can feed them an 80-20 mix of organic and nonorganic feed, and with […]