Two health and nutrition awards for the Ethicurean.

Going on a stroll with a friend leads to a two-hour-long skillshare that reverses the usual generational roles: Fuddy-duddy me tries to explain RSS feeds, the point of Facebook (not sure there is one), and things like Digg to the 26-year-old. In turn, she shares knowledge gleaned from botany classes and, she confessed, years of reading seed catalogs at bedtime, about the edible things I’ve been walking past every day.

California legislators, food safety experts, and raw milk advocates met this evening in Sacramento to discuss improving raw milk safety. Legislators passed new language in October that required producers to meet much stricter bacteria standards — legislation strongly opposed by the raw-milk community. The Senate Select Committee is showing strong support for a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points Plan (HACCP) approach.

The breakout indie documentary “King Corn” is being broadcast tonight and for the rest of the week on PBS’s Independent Lens series. Even if you’ve memorized “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and think you know all there is to know about how corn has made us its slave, you’ll still be amused and informed by the film.

Eating ethically is not for the lazy.

To find the friendliest face of the Grand Rapids local food scene, you can’t go wrong by making Marie Catrib’s your first stop. The intentional care of customers and community is what has made this comfortable restaurant one of this city’s favorites and a chilly Midwestern foodie’s dream come true.

It’s time to call your congressperson today and tell them to vote against Section 11305 in the current mess of a Farm Bill. Inserted at the behest of pesticide manufacturers, it is titled “No Discrimination Against Use of Registered Pesticide Products or Classes of Pesticide Products,”

I’ve always been tickled by the pairing of decadence and duty at the Swanton Berry Farm stand at the Berkeley farmers market: sweet, fragrant, addictive strawberries sharing the table with fibrous, disrespected, and most-likely-not-addictive broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. It turns out that this collection makes a lot of agricultural sense, as strawberries are […]

Just finished a major upgrade of the WordPress system that this blog runs on; sorry for the disarray for the last few hours. I have also installed a bunch of new plug-ins in response to reader requests:

You can now e-mail posts to friends, as well as tag them yourself for Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, etc. […]

Although I’m no longer standing at the Farm Bureau-sponsored exhibit, The Great American Farm, at Disney’s Epcot Center, I can’t seem to shake the creepy feeling it gave me. One of the most visible parts of the exhibit are the Look Closer screens, which invite attendees to Look Closer at biotechnology:

Prominently placed next to the […]

Finally, after 3 months of blizzards, winter seems to be showing signs of weakness in Montreal. I’m sure this doesn’t mean that winter is over, even though spring officially began over two weeks ago, but still, today the sun was shining and the snow was melting, and people were out on the […]

Among the dizzying number of Things to Do while at Disney is to visit Epcot Center’s Innoventions plaza. To children, Innoventions looks like a wing at a science museum. To a slightly more cynical eye, it looks a bit like a huge exhibition hall filled with the best marketing efforts of companies like Waste Management, Liberty Mutual, IBM, and the Society of Plastics. One such exhibit, The Great American Farm, is proudly sponsored by the Farm Bureau, and designed to help Americans think more about the connection between agriculture and the food on the table — an admirable, Ethicurean-friendly goal, to be sure.

We’re very pleased to announce that guest contributor Ali Benjamin has accepted our invitation to don an Ethicurean apron. Ali’s a busy bee on the Internets, writing her own blog, The Cleaner Plate Club, as well as contributing to Eat. Drink. Better. She’s a freelance writer and mom in Vermont; for more, check out her […]

There will be no set of Digests for Thursday morning as hoped because I just accidentally deleted it. If I can face reconstructing it, maybe Saturday.
And yes this is the real time.

As the Ethicurean has grown, we have started to get some really off-the-wall e-mails from PR people. I can no longer resist publishing the most head-scratching of them, with the identifying information compassionately removed.