NEWS

Rice pharming: A team of Japanese researchers has genetically modified rice to produce a vaccine against cholera that will be administered in capsule or pill form (not in a bowl). Putting a vaccine in a grain could help bring the vaccine to areas without refrigeration. We’re surprised that Japan — a nation that reveres rice and is generally opposed to GMOs — is letting researchers tinker with the rice gene. The research is still in preliminary stages, but we wish they’d focus on non-food crops instead of the world’s staple grain. (San Francisco Chronicle)

That wasn’t so hard, was it?: While waiting in limbo for the USDA to admit 38 new, non-organic ingredients to its list of those allowed in organic food, Anheuser-Busch has managed to find organic hops for its organic beers. (Los Angeles Times)

Salmon difference: Hatchery-bred salmon cannot be counted toward the goals of the Endangered Species Act, ruled a district judge, rejecting the idea that if enough salmon can be produced in hatcheries, there is little need to protect wild stocks. (Seattle P-I)

Sniffing around CAFOs: A team of researchers from eight universities kicked off a multiyear emissions measurement project this week. Funded by the EPA, the project will make the most detailed measurements yet of gases such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and nitrous oxide from livestock facilities. (Central Valley Business Times)

The fix is in: Nitrogen-fixing plants like soybeans, clover, and alfalfa are often planted in rotation with other crops because they naturally extract nitrogen from the air and store it in the soil, replenishing what crops such as corn have depleted. A new research paper argues that pesticides and chemical contaminants (like bisphenol A, used in plastic bottles and to line food cans) can interfere with leguminous crops’ ability to fix nitrogen. Thus, runoff from industrial farms can interfere with organic farms attempts to improve soil by planting leguminous crops. (Full article here, via ES&T News)

Bye-bye, birdies: Urban sprawl and industrial agriculture are causing steep declines in the populations of “backyard birds” like the Boreal Chickadee, according to a report from the National Audubon Society. The villains: pesticides that poison birds directly or wipe out insects that they eat, planting from lot line to lot line on farms, and demand for corn-based ethanol, which is leading many farmers to plant corn on land formerly off-limits. (Reuters)

Cadbury pleads guilty in salmonella case, acknowledging it failed to alert authorities promptly (Reuters)

FDA to close labs in Detroit, San Francisco, and five other cities to “increase efficiencies” (Detroit Free Press)

FEATURES & COMMENTARY

Pro-antibiotics: A follow-up to a highly controversial article by veterinarian Hubert J. Karreman, who was brave enough to discuss the “sacred cow” issue of organics —antibiotics (or rather the lack thereof). As he puts it, “The whole antibiotic issue comes down to this: When do you switch to an antibiotic in order to help the cow and/or relieve pain and suffering? The smaller the herd, the longer it goes until it may be too late.” (The New Farm)

‘Chicken killing day’: Dunno how we missed this first-person account by Virginia Phillips about slaughtering poultry, but the Pennsylvania Post-Gazette was brave enough to run the honest, blunt piece in its food section — and caught hell, mostly, for doing so from readers who were “nauseated” and “appalled.” Older letter writers tell a different story.

Time to change the food chain: In the introduction to Time’s special summer feature series called The Food Chains That Link Us All, Mark Kurlansky (author of “Cod” and “Salt”) asserts that “industrial food is out of fashion.” Featuring a well-reported, diverse set of articles about Japanese junk food, bird flu, food aid, and more, plus Carlo Petrini on why we should look to the past. (Time)

No Chinese chicken salad for us … ever again, thanks: Going to China? Consider turning vegetarian for your trip, or at least avoiding the street food. China’s chicken battery farming typically results in large numbers of sick or prematurely expired chickens — 80 percent of which still end up in the food supply, says ChinaDialogue’s “Truth About Dead Chickens” digested with revulsion by Andrew Leonard in his Salon column, How the World Works. Leonard goes on to ponder alternatives to battery farming that won’t eat up land, like “skyscraper farms”; we’re more concerned about how the U.S. government wants to allow chickens raised, slaughtered, and cooked in China to be sold in the United States. Look, we’re not xenophobic, and the U.S. has its own problems on this front, but China seems like the Wild West, or maybe the Middle Ages, around food- and environmental safety.

We know “humane” when we see it: The American Farm Bureau Federation opposes the Farm Animal Stewardship Purchasing Act, H.R. 1726, which would prevent the federal government from buying food from animals not raised humanely. “This legislation assumes that farm animals are not routinely treated humanely, an assumption that is deeply flawed and grossly unfair to America’s family farmers and ranchers,” said AFBF President Bob Stallman. (Note the strategic use of “family farmers” instead of the more accurate “behemoth meatpacking corporations.”) The bill — which has not a piglet’s chance in China of passing — defines “humane” as “adequate space to stand, lie down, move his or her head freely, turn around completely, and fully extend all limbs or wings without touching any part of an enclosure or another animal” and bans starvation to induce molting. Sounds so arbitrary. (Cattle Network)

Insert COOL pun here: House Ag Chair Collin Peterson (D-MN) is confident that country of origin labeling (COOL) will become law in 2008. Big Meat is intensely opposed to the plan, wanting to have the flexibility to make “international burgers” without having to keep track of where the meat came from. (Ah, the E. coli melting pot.) No mention about whether the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) will be part of the deal, as rumored. (Farm News - Iowa)

Meatpacking, the Farm Bill, and Niman Ranch: Lots of people, including us, have a beef with consolidation in the meatpacking industry and would support the proposed restriction being bandied about for the Farm Bill to curb vertical integration (packers and processors owning livestock, and using their own supply to manipulate prices). Turns out it could also affect the biggest player in the small but burgeoning organic meats sector: Niman Ranch, which would have to significantly restructure itself if the provision passed. (Meat & Poultry)

It’s not called the Garden State for nothing: New Jersey, long the target of jokes about chemical plants and toxic waste dumps, is expecting a superb crop of peaches this year from the state’s much-ignored agricultural lands. (American Agriculturalist)

Epitaph for a peach picker: David Masumoto, organic farmer and revered agrarian author, says undocumented workers need some respect from the federal government. ‘Without workers, I’ll have no choice but to farm differently: The politics of undocumented immigrants can change the flavor on my farm.” (The New Farm)

Ethanol ripples: The insatiable demand for corn by ethanol plants (driven by America’s insatiable demand for transportation fuels) is driving up the cost of milk, eggs, pork, beef, and other foods that depended on the previously artificially cheap feed. (Washington Post) Will it make pasture-raised animals and organic produce more competitive? Not until there’s enough supply for organic feed to bring its price down.

Local or organic?: A Seattle radio show invited Sam Fromartz, Jessica Prentice, and others to debate the merits of organic breakfast cereal from South America vs. pesticide-soaked dinosaur kale from your neighborhood farmer’s market. (Puget Sound Public Radio)

Soda companies, food makers, and livestock groups are warning the Senate about biofuels mandate (Des Moines Register)

Canadian groups accuse Norwegian salmon farm company of sea-lice double standard (Canada.com)

Traverse City, MI gets an Edible Schoolyard (Record Eagle)

A roundup of this year’s literary crop about the global-local eating trend (New York Times)