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 even more organic and local produce. San […]

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 Institute, a family farm watchdog group, and others for keeping cows in feedlots — and even going so far as to fake their […]

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 Bay, choking out all other life. The real problem, of course, is not these […]

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 News
Monopoly’s not just a game: Same merger threatens the livelihood of black and other small […]

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 Weiss takes questions from readers. Make time to read it all, if you can, as Weiss not only clarifies the science, but […]

Article most guaranteed to make you feel inadequate: A 16-year-old Canadian named Luke Hayes-Alexander is not only the dedicated, driven executive chef of his family’s restaurant in Kingston, but he makes his own charcuterie and smoked banana ice cream. If the poor kid weren’t painfully shy, we’d say he’s a TV show ripe for plucking. […]

Bacteria love bagged lettuce: Scientists are now confirming the obvious — that processing, mixing, and bagging leafy greens promotes the spread of bacteria like E. coli, just like it has in the hamburger industry. Others claim the Vegetable Industrial Complex, with its triple baths of chlorinated water, is far more hygienic than homes or restaurants […]

Over the past two Thanksgiving holidays, the Butter Bitch and I have found ourselves in the Oregon wine country, sampling a number of excellent wines and enjoying the scenery.
Our tour of wineries has exposed us to a number of top-flight wines and a few clunkers, reinforced our opinions of much-loved favorites, and occasionally surprised us.
Oregon’s […]

The fine folks at Fork & Bottle are hosting this months’ Wine Blogging Wednesday, in which people drink wine and blog about it. We can get behind that.
This month’s focus is on biodynamic wines. I’m still uncertain what to think about biodynamics, even after the Butter Bitch read and wrote about biodynamics. […]

I’m willing to bet that every conscious eater has a skeleton in his or her cupboard — a fetish for a particular corn-syrup-laced treat or microwaveable fat bomb. After all, we’re not nuns here. So I’ll confess first.
My processed-food addiction is to Goya black bean soup. It’s unbelievably thick and gooey, with whole black beans […]

Damn. John Birdsall, the East Bay Express’s restaurant reviewer, totally busted me on EBX’s blog for prematurely panicking about the disappearance of Hoffman Game Birds from the Bay Area, now that the elderly owner is no longer selling at the Ferry Plaza farmers market. Doing the homework that I should have, Mr. B. called […]

I like vodka. I like vodka gimlets (fresh lime juice plus a splash of Rose’s, up), vodka tonics, Cosmopolitans, Bloody Marys…
To vodka aficionados, therefore, I am a nitwit. Vodka nerds do not dilute their precious spirit with any other tastes, any more than oenophiles drink wine coolers. Remember those from high school? Ick.
So when the […]

Before going to Pensacola this Christmas, I wanted to avoid some of the stress of previous visits having to do with meat. It was easier when I was a vegetarian, and my family eventually got used to thinking about swapping chicken stock for vegetable and so forth. But my “ethical carnivorism” of the past few […]

Ethical restauranteur Jay over at the Linkery blog is having an interesting dialogue with a representative from Sysco about the White Marble Farms pork brand. Jay was the first (and pretty much only) person to comment online about the misleading marketing of this industrial meat product; I subsequently stumbled on it in a San Francisco […]

Back in 1998 Rolling Stone published the first of several articles by Eric Schlosser that would become the 2001 nonfiction bestseller Fast Food Nation. The magazine’s Dec. 14, 2006 issue, the one with Snoop Dogg on the cover, has a riveting feature — titled “Boss Hog” and detailing Smithfield Foods’ hog-farming operations — that […]