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Digest – Slightly moldy: Eat-local-backlash scrutinized, buffalo roaming again
These links are still tasty, though their sell-by date is approaching — you may well have already seen them. Standing up for local: Tom Philpott spent last week's Victual Reality column on the "eat-local backlash," and in this accompanying post
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Announcing the netroots ad campaign for Real Food
I'm on the plane, supposedly on vacation as of four hours ago, and yet I can't stop thinking about this Hellman's Mayonnaise campaign for "real" food. It really gets my goat that one company spends as much on advertising
Truthiness and real food: Hellman’s, get your paws off our framing
What does "real food" mean to you? To me, it's this creamy, colloidal beige stuff, made in a giant factory, that's shelf-stable for months at room temperature. I like to stir a good dollop of it into dolphin-sacrificing, mercury-laden tuna and eat it on some Ritz crackers washed down with
What the Australian supermarket takeover means
Wesfarmers has made a takeover bid for the Coles Group, which includes Australia’s second most successful supermarket chain, after Woolworths. This week the National Association of Retail Grocers in Australia, which represents independent grocery groups such
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Digest: Whole Foods in hot water, apple moths eating everything in sight, Tyson goes drug-free (sorta)
[Update: minor typos corrected in Farm Bill items] This is the last Digest ever. From now on, we'll be turning our 256 RSS feeds over to you to read all by yourselves. Kidding! (For now, anyway.) But only 100 of you have taken our
Label Watch: Annie’s Homegrown and the “it’s-too-hard-to-find-organic-ingredients” defense
This post was revised after publication where indicated to clarify material and correct some erroneous assertions, in response to a comment by Annie's CEO John Foraker, below. On Monday the New York Times reported, as plenty
Digest: Tomato pickers get raise, Norman Borlaug to the rescue, Wal-Mart retreats
There's a golf course worth of links coming at ya. Fore! Pennies add up: McDonald's has reached agreement with a Florida farmworkers organization to pay 1 cent more per pound for the tomatoes it buys from state farms. Think that's nothing? It's a 75 percent pay raise for the laborers. Time for Burger
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Digest: Smithfield series, market pressure, more bad PR for Menu Foods
Hogging the issues: Yay for independent media! The Independent Weekly of Research Triangle, NC, had a great cover feature package on Smithfield last week that we missed. The "Big Pig" series examined Smithfield's anti-union labor practices, worker safety, waste management, potential monopoly
In a whopper of a move, Burger King has it slightly more our way
Burger King announced today it will be moving to cage-free eggs and pork from cage-free sows. It is also going to make an effort to buy from poultry suppliers that use gas, known as "controlled atmospheric stunning," instead of electric shocks for slaughtering chickens. The New
Digest: Poisoned pet food, E. coli CSI fails, Puck the trend
Possible pet food culprit: Rat poison has been found in the tainted pet food that killed several animals and sparked a nationwide recall. Frankly, we're surprised they were bothering to poison the rats, instead of grinding them up into pet food. USA
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Digest: Puck goes Ethicurean, watery news, organic ag shortage
Bravo to Wolfgang Puck!: The L.A. restauranteur is taking foie gras, battery eggs, and meat from caged animals off the menu at all of his 14 fine-dining restaurants, 82 casual cafes, and his packaged food business. He'll also only sell seafood from certified sustainable fisheries, and will incorporate
Horizon’s half-and-half attempt at going “beyond organic”
Horizon Organic (the largest organic milk producer in the U.S.) today announced it had published a new set of guidelines governing "Standards of Care" on its company-owned farms. Under fire from the Cornucopia
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Digest: Serious shellfish invasion, butter banned, Monsanto exec fined, slaughter up close
Genghis Clam and his mussel men: After you've watched "The BioDaVersity Code," settle down for an hour or so and read this award-worthy, novella-length feature about how lowly bivalves are invading and conquering lakes in Michigan, Arizona, and the San Francisco
Digest: Mergers, monopolies, thieves, imposters, and rats
Bad seed: A proposed merger between Monsanto (the world's largest seed company) and the nation's largest cottonseed seller could mean bad news for organic cotton growers, says the Center for Food Safety, which is seeking to block the deal. Wired
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Digest: Great cloning Q&A, Annie’s mac-n-cheese debunked, SciAm on Pollan essay
Ask the Weiss man: If you're at all concerned about eating cloned meat and dairy under the organic label, read this excellent Washington Post online Q&A in which excellent biotech reporter Rick
