Back in March, I reported that the EPA was proposing to exempt Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) from one of the very, very few pollution reporting requirements that currently apply to them. This week, the issue reared its head again — and it’s uglier than ever.
Right now, under the Community Right-to-Know Act and the Superfund […]

On day two of APHA, I hear about superbugs on meat, why public health providers should care about energy policy, and how maps can make community food systems way cooler.

Schools are now officially allowed to exercise geographic preference — in other words, source locally — in school food programs without fear of getting blasted for being anti-competitive. Allowing schools to show a preference for local foods opens up the possibility of bringing more fresh, local, minimally processed food to school cafeterias across the nation. The first session I attended today at APHA was organized to share lessons from the farm-to-school movement and to explore next steps.

As fall settles in, our Victory Gardens are winding down for the season. Here’s our final roundup for the year.

Greetings from sunny San Diego, home of this year’s annual conference of the American Public Health Association, “Public Health Without Borders.” Thanks to successful lobbying by many of its members, the APHA has begun to include more sessions on the intersection of food, nutrition, and the environment in recent years. It even passed a resolution […]

Caption: The first meal we made on our trip, at the childhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
By Stephanie Pierce
In my most recent guest post I wrote about how my husband and I managed to find honest-to-goodness real food on the road across 31 states this past summer. Our journey was partly about adventure (if it’s […]

One Kansas City-area program had lots of sweet potato plants, while another had people who know how to cook sweet-potato greens. The two got together recently and showed off the culinary possibilities to a gathering of people interested in good food and sustainable agriculture. The result was an array of dishes based on this summer green — and a lot of happy and newly enlightened diners.

Earlier this week, the top honcho at Coca Cola urged the beverage industry to rage, rage against the unfair claims that soda bears any blame for the nation’s rising obesity problem. It is time, claimed Muhtar Kent — who took the helm at the Coca Cola company in July — to return to “responsible discourse” about obesity.

“Homegrown” is a cool new documentary about the Dervaes family, who run a microscopic organic farm in urban Pasadena, California. Their garden takes up less than a tenth of an acre: just 3,900 square feet. From that, they harvest 6,000 pounds of food annually.

The sense of reassurance in the face of hard times — the same reassurance we get when we grow or preserve our own food — resonates throughout Sharon Astyk’s book “Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front.”

Most of Oprah’s Tuesday show was devoted to reporter Lisa Ling’s “How We Treat the Animals We Eat” investigation. Friend o’Ethicurean Kerry Trueman over at Eating Liberally has posted, in her usual wryly witty style, a comprehensive account of both the show and several new developments in the humane-animal-treatment world, including what’s going on with Proposition 2, a ballot measure in California that seeks to increase cage sizes for chickens, pregnant sows, and veal calves.

Ethicurean reader Erica Nofi was so moved by Michael Pollan’s “Farmer in Chief” policy manifesto in last week’s New York Times Magazine food politics issue that she created a T-shirt that visually encapsulates his central message: Let’s go back to growing food with sunlight, not oil.
After reading Pollan’ piece, “I felt so hopeful and inspired […]

My husband and I recently finished a summer-long adventure in which we toured the northern half of the United States. Even though we were living out of our 1998 minivan, we were determined that one part of our lifestyle would not change: how we ate. We covered more than 9,000 miles across 31 states, and managed to shop in a conventional grocery store only a few times.

Going to the Berkeley farmers market yesterday reminded me that I belong to the luckiest damn group of eaters in America.

Never before has a publication with the clout and reach of the New York Times done a “food issue” that was entirely devoted to food politics, not food porn taste. Sure, the presidential candidates, and the rest of the country — even Ethicurean readers — may be far more preooccupied with the imploding economy, and with the war in Iraq, but I think we can safely celebrate that a tipping point has been reached. SOLE food is now on the menu for national discussion.