Archive for August, 2009
NYC unveils massive new anti-soda campaign
Fattack Ads!: New York City’s public health officials have unveiled a graphic new ad campaign that graphically depicts globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle and urges viewers to consume water, seltzer or low-fat milk instead of soda. The ads are impressive, but with their hefty $277,000 price tag and three years in development, they
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Michelle Obama, Sam Kass tell White House Kitchen Garden’s story
Groundbreaking video: The White House has released a 7-minute video of showing the progress of the first "really-productive, feeding-a-lot-of-people" garden (as White House chef Sam Kass puts it) on White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden during World War II. While the word "organic"
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This space is preserved: Checking out “Canning and Preserving Your Own Harvest”
Come summer, I dream of the carefree days of my childhood, when endless sunshine meant days spent outdoors or trips to the lake or just a general sense of freedom from drudgery. I dream of those, of course, because I now work through the summer and spend a good deal of my free time working in the garden
Indian farmer suicides continue over debt and poor rainfall
Caveat emptor, Africa: Nearly every day, Indian newspapers report more farmer suicides in Andhra Pradesh, an Indian state of 80 million people where 70% of the population depends on agriculture and where small farmers are increasingly in debt. "More than 17,500 farmers a year killed themselves between
Non-GMO Project gets rolling
Organic a 'dirty room' in need of cleaning: An organic and natural-foods industry group has begun a campaign to test products and label those "Non-GMO" that are largely free of biotech ingredients, reports William Neumann in the Times' Business section. Neumann focuses solely on the competitive business
Michael Pollan denounces Whole Foods boycott
Money quote: "Mackey is wrong on health care, but Whole Foods is often right about food, and their support for the farmers matters more to me than the political views of their founder. I haven’t examined the political views of all the retailers who feed me, but I can imagine having a lot of eating
Just say YIMBY: Weed expert Nancy Gift talks about lawns for dinner
By Holly Hickman vs. Recently, a man I know sprayed his front and back lawns with a brand of weed killer he'd bought from the
Pork prevention: What’s behind the NPPC bailout, or how the government keeps filling up Big Meat’s trough
During the Iowa flood disaster in the summer of 2008, I proposed that there are winners and losers in moments of human tragedy — those who pay the costs of dealing with an unsavory situation, and those who are on the receiving end
Update on former South Central Garden farmers
Good Food for Ethicurean ears: While catching up on our podcast listening today, we discovered the August 1 Good Food show had an interview with one of the people who was farming at the now-destroyed South Central Garden in Los Angeles [background
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NPR utters the phrase “big milk”
Consolidation station: NPR's John Burnett shines a spotlight on agribusiness consolidation, the control of the food system by an ever-smaller group of mega-companies. Independent farmers and ranchers are pushing the Obama Administration to take a good, long look at the factors that brought us to where
School lunch reform: A pipe dream or a deluge?
The kids will have their... whole wheat roll?: The momentum is building for big changes to the national school lunch program, reports Kim Severson in the New York Times. Ann Cooper, the chef who famously transformed lunches in the Berkeley school system and has since moved on to Boulder, Colorado, is
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NYT mag on obesity: Don’t punish, politicize
Who paves the road for the responsibility bandwagon?: Were it up to him, Cleveland Clinic heart surgeon Delos Cosgrove would amend the clinic's wellness policy--which already bans the hiring of smokers--to include a ban on the hiring of obese people. His is a hard-line approach linking obesity to personal
Mobile meat processing coming to Puget Sound
Slaughter, Airstream-style: Livestock producers in Washington's Puget Sound region are pinning their hopes on a 45-foot mobile meat processing unit that will travel from farm to farm, eliminating the logistical nightmares (including a several-hour drive) associated with the few mega-slaughterhouses still
New USDA report: 36% of farmers don’t have computers
Farm 2.0? Not so much: A report released Friday by the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) tallies the numbers for farm computer usage for 2009. It finds: Only 64 percent of farms have access to a computer, leaving 36 percent with no computer access. 59 percent of all farms--so nearly
Scientific American editors decry research restrictions on GMOs
Free the seeds. The editors of Scientific American — no group of Luddites — say that it is time for producers of genetically modified (GM) seeds to allow independent research on their products. Currently, the purchase of GM seeds, requires agreement to a contract with the producer that stipulates,
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