Greetings from smoldering-hot Phoenix. (But it’s a dry heat! Right… somehow when it’s a million degrees, that caveat becomes less convincing.) It’s been a full, exhausting day. One highlight for me was playing fly on the wall during a coming-together of folks who participated in the Farm and Food Policy Project, a Kellogg-funded initiative that […]

Here’s a number to knock you out of that mid-day stupor: every year, taxpayers shell out between $7.1 billion and $8.2 billion to subsidize or clean up after our nation’s 9,900 confined animal feeding operations. That’s the finding of “CAFOs Uncovered,” a new report released earlier today by the Union of Concerned Scientists. That amount, […]

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,”

Food & Water Watch did a funny little April Fool stunt for YouTube, involving some high-end "Potomac Springs" bottled water, as part of their Take Back the Tap campaign.

In an excellent 2000 report titled "The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs," researcher Marlene Halverson of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recounts the following stories:
On July 26, 1989, five farm workers in one family died after consecutively entering a 10-foot deep liquid manure pit on their Michigan farm….. The […]

There’s an image that’s stuck with me from the cross-country drive that my dad and I took last summer. It was one of many late-night stints at the wheel, perhaps 11 p.m., and we were hurtling along through the Utah desert. A sign at the last gas station had warned us of a nearly 100-mile […]

Have you ever encountered an idealistic young person with such presence that you thought, Whoa — this one might actually succeed in changing the world!? That’s the way I felt, anyway, on meeting Severine von Tscharner Fleming, who’s making the documentary “The Greenhorns,” about young farmers.

Check out “Keep on Shoppin’ in a Label-Free World” — a SOLE food-centric twist on the the Neil Young song that was written and performed by Dan Sullivan, a senior editor at the Rodale Institute’s NewFarm.org.

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, […]

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.

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 […]

During both World War I and II, the American government mandated that its citizens ration food in order to feed the troops overseas. In order to supplement their rations of meat, oil, sugar, and other precious foods, the American people followed the government’s call to plant War Gardens (in WWI) and, later, Victory Gardens. Home […]

On December 17, 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the government will be implementing a new "Food and Consumer Safety Action Plan".
Apparently, the federal health and agriculture departments want feedback from Canadians on how the government should carry out its proposed food and consumer safety action plan. They have set up a website […]

PETA’s smartest PR move ever may be hiring Free Range Studios, the geniuses behind The Meatrix, to co-produce their latest campaign, "The Road to the Greenhouse."
The go-vegetarian message is a lot more palatable when served up as a mock debate featuring the presidential candidates of both parties reimagined as vegetables  — among them Broccoli […]

On Wednesday, January 16, at 12 p.m., the California state legislature is holding a hearing to consider reversing — or at least amending — AB 1735, the sneaky Oct. 8 change to California’s Food and Agricultural Code that would basically shut down the production of raw-milk in the state. It is absolutely critical that everyone who cares about real food show up.