Archive for January, 2009
Ready, set, go change the food system: A checklist for evaluating the new USDA’s first six months
Above: National Agricultural Library archival image, shot from the Washington Monument in the mid-1920s; US Department of Agriculture greenhouses on the Mall are shown in foreground. The food system
More articles
Digest – News: Salmonella spreading, tomato bribery, Vilsack gets started
More peanuttiness: The FDA has widened its salmonella recall to all peanut products — including peanut butter, paste and meal — manufactured by a Blakeley, GA plant since January 2007. A year too late, the FDA conducted an inspection of the plant and discovered that managers had knowingly shipped
Digest – Opinion & features: Fred Kirschenmann questions, Pat Roberts explained, Wes Jackson expands
Opinion: Peak soiler: Sustainable-ag visionary Fred Kirschenmann urges Secretary Vilsack to ponder a future in which oil will be $300 a barrel, fresh water resources are half what they are as today, and weather is twice as bad. What kind of agriculture should we be designing? And what could we do to
Comments Off • Read more »
Paving over paradise: “The Garden” documents the demise of South Central Farm
By Elise McDonough For more than 10 years, a lush oasis flourished in South Central Los Angeles, surrounded by warehouses and industry. An incredibly beautiful place, the 14-acre community garden known as South Central
PR debacle for HFCS: Care for some mercury with your oatmeal?
That much-debated sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup, is going to need more than a pricey PR campaign to fix this one. After one set of scientists found mercury — yes, everyone's favorite brain-impairing element — in almost half of commercial
Digest – News: Focusing the foodies, DNA Q&A, and MRSA attacks
Good food movement needs focus: The Post's Jane Black reports on a series of pricey charity dinners in Washington, DC organized by Berkeley foodies in honor of the inauguration. Their goal was to propel food-system change into the agenda of the new administration, but some say the movement is too fragmented
Digest – Blogs: MLK on community gardens, Nestle on Salmonella, and the BPA 10-step plan
King of the garden: Martin Luther King may never have seen a community garden, but he no doubt would have approved of them. Tom Philpott reflects on how the community garden movement, and its symbolism as an explicit rejection of the industrial food system, is one realization of King's dream. (Grist) Pontificating
Comments Off • Read more »
Loafing in a cold climate
Winter weather has provided us with a never-ending topic of conversation lately: the storms pummeling the upper Midwest, the guesses as to how much those storms might repeat themselves here in northern Ohio, how
Digest – News: Vilsack updates, Clif Bars recalled, OJ CO2
Tractor tire hits the dirt: After clearing the Senate confirmation process, new USDA chief Tom Vilsack gets to work. (Des Moines Register) Meanwhile, speculation abounds on who may join him at the agency
Comments Off • Read more »
Digest – features and opinion: Bisphenol A back-room dealings, CAFOs on land and sea
The FDA's ass is GRAS: Great investigative piece about the controversy over bisphenol A, the chemical used to line baby bottles and canned food, among hundreds of other uses. Is it a scientific dispute? Not really, it's mainly "a battle to protect a multibillion-dollar market from regulation. In the
Taxing cows to curb climate change
When you fill your car's tank, you pay a gas tax. Someday, when you fill your belly with cheese, milk, or steak, you might have to pay another type of gas tax — one levied on the methane and nitrous oxide emitted by the cows that produced or became your food. Bacteria in a cow's gut help digest what
Political celebrations past and present
On election night in 1992* — the year that Bill Clinton won his first term and Barbara Boxer was first elected to the Senate — I made the flag-adorned chocolate truffles pictured above as part of a celebratory
Comments Off • Read more »
All hail the new Eater in Chief
We may not have gotten the Farmer in Chief we were dreaming for, but I am cautiously hopeful that the 44th president of the United States is going to move us a little closer to a sane food
Digest: “Naturally raised” defined, Niman merging, mo’ meaty news
Department of Agribusiness fails us again: The USDA
Digest: PB woes, black farmers organize, Schillinger takes on Monsanto
You got salmonella in my peanut butter: As the salmonella scare continues with dozens of recalls by the FDA of truly frightening things like Little Debbie® Peanut Butter Toasties, the agency is
Comments Off • Read more »
