On a recent trip to the grocery store, a friend of mine living in the Midwest decided to put in a plug for grass-fed beef. They won’t supply it if we don’t ask for it, right? She approached the man behind the meat counter and asked if they carried it. With a completely straight face, […]

“No grilling, no barbecue: Recalled beef buried in landfill” was the lede story of my local paper in Livingston, Montana, this evening. The Livingston Enterprise led with a large photo of a front end loader burying recalled Hallmark/Westland beef.

News about sustainable, organic, local and ethical food and farming from around the web, as well as about the icky stuff.

Although the big companies (who buy though layers of contractors and middlemen to give themselves plausible deniability) initiated a voluntarily program several years ago to reduce child labor, not much improvement can be found.

… Water dries up fast in food desert : When a community group’s effort to bring a full-service grocery store to their neighborhood failed, they approached the managers of a local convenience stores with survey data showing the need for fresh food.

Wooly bully : Mangalitsa hog farmer/funder Heath in Washington State has quite the rant — inspired by this innocuous, sweetly boosterish NY Times article on small dairies — about why “local” doesn’t always taste better, and how California chefs who buy in-state are almost certainly buying inferior pork than what he raises.

… Can’t buy you love: Monsanto grants a ton of money to ag-study programs (Iowa State even has a Monsanto Auditorium), but only those who research biotechnology are awarded cash — those who are working on organic methods are on their own.

In the aftermath of the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse exposé, henceforth to be known as Downergate, there has been much outrage. Let there now be outraged laughter … assuming your sense of humor is as sick as mine.
I think this animated editorial cartoon about Doreen the Downer Cow, "The Omnivore’s Nightmare" by Mark Fiore, deserves an award. […]

Guest contributor Ali sent us this photo, which she took last fall in Pittsfield, MA. We worked on writing a caption for it, but got worn out after discussing the source of the paper, the type of ink, whether the printers were fairly paid, and what they should have eaten for lunch.
We invite you to […]

Last week marked the largest proportion of climate change naysayers gathered in one place since Dick Cheney walked into an empty room. Volunteers at the entrance to the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, screened people as they presented their ticket.
“Do you believe in global warming?”
“It sure is cold out today. I should have […]

Oh, Monsanto. Just look at you. You’ve got your knit cap pulled down tight over your crew cut, and your stomach is sticking out beneath your skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. You’ve been left back a few grades now — summer school doesn’t always help much, does it? — and so now you are way bigger than everyone else. You don’t have too many friends anymore. It’s tough to be the class behemoth, isn’t it? So you’ve taken to pushing other kids around on the playground and trying to take their milk money. Or, at least, to take away their ability to label their milk as rBGH-free.

This weekend’s big news, as Bonnie has already reported, was the massive recall of beef processed by Chino, CA-based Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing company. There has been much well-deserved coverage of the animal cruelty aspects of this story and a general tip of the mainstream media hat to the debacle’s food-safety implications: downer cattle, as the […]

We’ve just dug out from a mild winter storm here in northern Ohio (only a few inches of snow, but topped with a thick glaze of ice), and I’m finally able to see the ground emerge from that blanket of cold, frozen precipitation. The weather lately has fueled a number of dreams of sunny, tropical […]

Witchhazel is blooming at my house, a sign that spring is nearly here. I’m planning my garden, which will be my second one ever, if it comes to fruition.
I started my first garden by reading piles of books. I spent the winter lingering over every kitchen garden book Amazon had to offer, littering my […]

The USDA’s largest-ever recall is now under way — “approximately 143,383,823 pounds” (give or take a few ounces?) of raw and frozen beef products from the disgraced Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California. That’s almost half the amount of beef and poultry recalled since 1994 in the United States.

In part 1 of "Bake on the wild side," I wrote about how to create a sourdough starter and some of the science behind it. In this post I’ll tell how I used the starter to make loaves of bread.
There are many different ways to turn sourdough starter into bread: some easy, some complicated. […]

Members of the Kansas Legislature have joined the esteemed lawmakers or regulators in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio who want to spare their citizens the challenge of too much information. Specifically, they want to keep consumers ignorant of whether the milk they’re drinking comes from cows not dosed with recombinant bovine growth hormone, rBGH, which is […]