FEATURES
EVOO, Brute?: The trade in adulterated and/or fake olive oil has reached epic proportions. Meanwhile, instead of supporting small growers who make distinctive, premium oils, the "Italian government has consistently encouraged quantity over quality, to the benefit of large companies that sell bulk oil…The government has been so lax in pursuing some oil crimes that it can seem complicit." (The New Yorker) Related: Here’s New Yorker author Tom Mueller talking about the problem on NPR.
Food-safety communication problem: Information from Chinese agricultural research laboratories — which are among the best in the world — rarely, if ever, reaches the 200 million farming households across a vast nation. Agricultural knowledge is passed down from generation to generation, or given out by the representatives from pesticide companies. (Washington Post)
Black market for the white stuff: The Times looks at the demand for and the battle over unpasteurized milk, featuring the usual cast of outlaws (Mark McAfee, Nina Planck, Sally Fallon). Weird fact: Raw milk apparently has very little vitamin D, which is added to most pasteurized milk. (New York Times)
Ivory tower surveys our landscape: A new academic study says that in order to successfully encourage people to adopt ethical consumption activities, it is important to call on their specific identities rather than just targeting them as faceless or "placeless" consumers. Another interesting-sounding study, meanwhile, talks about how community-supported agriculture (CSAs) are "aggressively reasserting the countercultural values and ideals" of the original organic food movement, before it was co-opted by globalization and industrialization. (Thanks, Janet!)
Farmers get shaft again: In New York’s Suffolk County, an acre of farmland that must stay in its natural state now commands as much as $100,000 an acre … way out of reach of actual farmers, but well within that of wealthy developers whose homebuyers want to be surrounded by unspoiled vistas. (New York Times)
Block power: Novella Carpenter, most recently Michael Pollan’s assistant, tells why she harvests local Oakland lettuces for the Black Panthers, including from City Slicker Farms, which Dairy queen just visited Saturday. (Salon) Note: Salon has apparently started an Eat & Drink section, but has not yet developed an RSS feed for it.
Only the big can get bigger: Skyrocketing farmland prices in the Midwest thanks to ethanol bubble are stirring new optimism among established farmers. But for younger and/or small farmers, the higher prices are an insurmountable barrier to expanding and grabbing a piece of the ethanol pie. (New York Times)
A hard cheese to swallow: An excerpt from Sandor Katz’s "The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved" looks at casu marzu, the cheese made from pecorino that’s been left out in the sun until maggots hatch to digest it into creamy stinkiness. (Culinate)
That’s the brakes: One of the UK’s largest transport chains has suspended its UK biodiesel bus trial due to concerns over whether the benefits outweigh the risk to the sustainability of food crop sources. (Green Car Congress)
Put a (real) cork in it: Counterintuitively, enivronmentally responsibly oenophiles should choose natural over plastic corks. The way cork is harvested means forests continue to thrive as they give up their valuable bark. (Reuters)
Foul pot: Marijuana "plantations" on public land use toxic poisons and leave behind garbage dumps. (Recordnet.com)
Fat’s just doing its job: The always excellent Natalie Angier looks at much vilified fat tissue — "To castigate fat for getting too big and to blame it for high blood pressure or a wheezing heart is like a heavy drinker blaming the liver for turning cirrhotic." (New York Times)
Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen tells how to scope out the best ethnic-food restaurants (Washington Post)
Ask Umbra on prioritizing organic purchases (Grist)
BLOGSNACKS
Check it out: OrangeClouds115 reports on the food and ag panel at the Yearly Kos conference, which featured "What to Eat" author Marion Nestle, Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally, and Grist columnist and farmer Tom Philpott. (Daily Kos) Related: Nestle’s finally blogging! We’re proud to be on her blogroll, but we suspect she had some major help getting it up and running. Yay, Kerry!
Please wait while I solve this equation before buying your zucchini: Brian Halweil on the recent New York Times op-ed suggesting that local food isn’t the be-all and end-all of sustainability. (Worldwatch Institute)
Netroots organizing: A top political blog posts a primer on contacting your representatives and senators. (Firedoglake)
Food, Farming, & Food Politics events calendar
August 9th, 2007 at 5:21 am
“Weird fact: Raw milk apparently has very little vitamin D, which is added to most pasteurized milk.”
Not weird at all. Like iodine in salt, vitamin D is added to milk b/c it is a necessary nutrient. The body can synthesize vitamin D - but you need to be in the sun everyday for about 1/2 an hour. So the government decided to add it to milk (assuming that pretty much everybody drinks it) to ensure that people get enough.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Hi Bonnie - Welcome back!
Do you have the reference for that “Lincoln University” done by “New Zealand researchers”? I was v surprised that they NYT ran the op-ed without either naming the senior author of the study or the journal where it was published.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Hi Dr. V: I presume you’re talking about the James McWilliams op-ed Digested earlier, to which a reader supplied a link to a much more substantial version he wrote for the Texas Observer: http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2564.
It does not contain a link to the NZ study, but it does discuss it in a lot more detail. Elsewhere on the Web, Gristmill commenters were having a lively discussion about the article.
Personally, as usual I think a false dichotomy is being set up here. First it was local vs. organic, and now it’s local vs. global. With local, direct food sales making up less than 3% of all food sales in the U.S., do we really need to be making people feel they have to do complicated algebraic formulations about trucking vs. shipping and hand vs. machine harvesting before they buy Farmer Joe’s zucchini over Argentinean? Puhleeze.