Section » Cloning
Digest: Slaughterhouse unionizing, Peter Pan recalled, breeding rare breeds
Slaughterhouse live: An excellent piece by AP writer Roxana Hegeman goes inside the world's largest slaughterhouses, where worker injuries are common and as a result, movements to unionize are once again popular. Interviews with immigrant workers reveal new facets to their plight. Associated
More articles
Digest: Wild birds cleared, USDA censured, protection from transgenic corn
Bird-flu CSI: It's official — comparison between the UK and Hungarian strains of the avian-flu virus reveals the highest genetic match, much more so than the strains found in wild birds. Press release Dept. of About Time: A federal judge
Digest: High-tech future for food, USDA quarantine practices hurt small farm, bird-flu updates
Future of food: Peter Melchett has an excellent op-ed on what England's bird-flu outbreak means for the future of farming — will it be high-tech, dependent on genetic engineering and biosecurity, or low-tech, meaning organic and local? Guardian
Comments Off • Read more »
Digest: Safety vs. cloning, Philpott’s 3rd Farm Bill opus, USDA’s hand slapped on GM crops, crisis in India…
Wednesdays are always a busy day for the Digest, but this one might be a record. Hope you're hungry, people, because there's an 18-course meal's worth of links today. Get thee back into the lab, FDA!: Biotech reporter Denise Caruso has a kick-ass top-notch op-ed about why the FDA's science regarding
Digest: Hog wrangling, Syngenta suing, Bush slashes subsidies for rich farmers
Breathing space: Hog producer Maple Leaf Foods is following Smithfield's lead and phasing out farrowing crates for sows. Not because the science behind them isn't sound, of course, but because consumers are spooked. (CattleNetwork)
USDA says there will be no “organic” cloned meat or dairy
My pesky job caused me to miss some huge breaking news today. The USDA has apparently decided that whatever the FDA might say about meat and dairy from cloned animals being just the same as that from two parents, it's not close enough to be labeled "organic." Sam Fromartz, the author of "Organic, Inc."
Comments Off • Read more »
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
Digest: Packer ban, organic schism, organic cloning, “ethical” foie gras
Meat monopoly busters: A new "packer ban" bill introduced by Senators Charles Grassley and Tom Harkin seeks to prohibit the large meatpackers from buying and raising their own livestock, which leads to price gouging and shutting out small farmers and ranchers. This is really big news, as it would basically
Comments Off • Read more »
Digest: UK to get tough on food miles, heritage pork profiled, missing fruit
No more "organic" imports: Britain's Soil Association is considering withholding the organic label from food that has been imported by air because of the unsustainable "food miles" it has traveled. Guardian (UK) This little piggy was
not milk?
Good news! It's not too late to help keep animal clones from entering our food supply. A few weeks ago, I wrote to encourage readers to write and send an editorial to their local papers about their feelings on this recent "clones-are-just-fine-to-eat;
Comments Off • Read more »
Digest: Greens packaging, clone progeny, Fiji brand
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,
Comments Off • Read more »
Digest: Santa Cruz named state’s healthy-food capital, cloning in practice, foodies make you fat
Santa Cruz beats Marin: A new study found that California has about four times as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as healthier alternatives. In Santa Cruz County, the ratio was fewer than two unhealthy options for every healthy one — the highest proportion of healthy food options
Digest: Locavoreanism gets corporate, world aquaculture, Cooper confab, Food Freedom Day
Cafeterias cozy up to farmers: A pretty good overview on how food-service giants — like Bon Appetit Management, with which we were familiar, and Sodexho and Aramark, which we weren't — are embracing the "eat local" idea, sometimes to the bemusement of their customers (students, corporate employees).
Digest: Ethiopian compost conquest, company potluck, Governator gooses food safety
People and Planet: Somebody tell the Bill Gates Foundation to hold up on foisting a GMO- and fossil-fueled Green Revolution on Africa! A 10-year experimental project has shown that Ethiopian farms using organic compost are producing higher
Comments Off • Read more »
Digest: Humane meat labels compared, Philpott on how few get rich farming, Clover Stornetta says no to clones’ milk
San Francisco Chronicle: We've been meaning to write about how the new humane-treatment-of-animals meat label from the Animal Welfare Institute stacks up against the others, but Chronicle food reporter Carol Ness
Comments Off • Read more »
