Greetings everyone, and a big shout-out to the 199 people who took the Digest survey (now closed). You provided us with a wealth of information, which I am still processing, and intend .

As citizens, we have a voice in how our tax dollars are spent. (Hypothetically, anyway.) The Environmental Working Group has created a Grow Organics petition that exhorts Congress to “level the playing field for organic farmers and expand access to organic food.”

The Digest trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

Digest - Commentary & Features: Sour on this milk op-ed, defending Rachel Carson, netroots rule

Digest - Blogsnacks: Feminism and slow food, Hillary likes USDA name change, FoodMed reporting

I have made mention several times of my community garden plot, most recently when I made Sorrel Potato Soup from the first growth of sorrel, which is a perennial and returns to the plot each year. I also mentioned that the garden season had a very late start this year due to soil analysis results […]

Food products get recalled practically every day in this country, but I’m posting about this one because I know lots of Ethicurean-ish parents who feed Veggie Booty — a blend of spinach, kale, cabbage, carrots and broccoli, plus puffed rice and corn — to their young’uns as a healthy snack food, and a lot of vegetarians who eat it.

A recent article in the Burlington Free Press about local eating in Vermont covered much familiar ground — a mention of Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book (”Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”), some quotes from nearby locavores, and the inevitable “What about eating [fill in a tropical or exotic food]?” question. Most such articles end up as a […]

The Digest trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

And you thought our puns were bad!
Comic by Randall Monroe of xkcd.com, who sounds like a guy with a very compatible sense of humor: “In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat […]

The dedicated Digest team trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — everything from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

Is it better for the planet to buy local produced food and goods, or to buy whatever used the least energy to produce it — so that apples hand picked in China but shipped across the ocean become somehow less polluting than those grown in Washington State and trucked to Portland, Oregon. Michael Shuman, author of “The Small-Mart Revolution,” rebuts a recent article to this effect.

The dedicated Digest team trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — everything from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

NEWS
Organic, except when it’s too hard: The USDA followed the tried-and-true technique of releasing controversial news on a Friday afternoon with an interim approval to the rule allowing 38 non-organic ingredients to be used in products with the “USDA organic” label. Manufacturers must prove (whatever that means) that the organic equivalents can’t be found […]

It’s been raining for the last couple of weeks along the East Coast of Australia, but it isn’t all good news. New South Wales is enduring land-churning floods. Dams that supply Sydney are at a three-year high of 49.6% capacity, which New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma estimates will add seven and a half months to the supply of drinking water. Which doesn’t mean that we have more water to grow food. The headline on an Australian Associated Press report yesterday was “Murray-Darling irrigators get grim news.”