California legislators, food safety experts, and raw milk advocates met this evening in Sacramento to discuss improving raw milk safety. Legislators passed new language in October that required producers to meet much stricter bacteria standards — legislation strongly opposed by the raw-milk community. The Senate Select Committee is showing strong support for a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points Plan (HACCP) approach.

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,”

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.

My 6-year-old learned her first curse word recently: crap. I’d take more pride in the fact that she lasted six years without learning the word if it weren’t for this: I’m the one who taught it to her.

The Charlotte Observer is on Day 3 of a stunning six-part investigative series, “The Cruelest Cuts,” on the lives of North Carolina’s 28,000 poultry workers. Editor Rick Thames kicks off the series with a searing editorial that compares these workers, mostly illegal immigrants with few rights, to the South’s most notorious historical underclass. But it is not just the South that profits from this neo-slavery.

“In Defense of Food” does more than merely stick up for the produce section: it mounts a damning attack on this diet, which in Pollan’s assessment is “a radical and at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal.”… This is huge, evolutionarily speaking, writes Pollan: Of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading “the Western Diet,” the shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all…. “The food industry needs theories so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model,” Pollan writes…. And while he for the most part acknowledges when he resorts to the familiar “good nutrient, bad nutrient” jargon, he could have emphasized more in the section on omega-3 fatty acids that, while the food industry is jumping on the bandwagon for this current It nutrient, whole foods like salmon that naturally contain it have far lower levels when fed unnatural diets from, you guessed it, grains…. He doesn’t mention that not only does Ames believe that deficiencies in micronutrient may be behind obesity — positing the very interesting hypothesis that “a body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them” — but like all good nutritionists, he is hard at work on identifying and developing artificial versions of those missing micronutrients.

Editorials and op-eds about sustainable agriculture (or its opposite) from newspapers and websites big and small.

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.

Posts by bloggers at both personal and nonprofit sites that you won’t want to miss.

Part fiction, part documentary, and based in part on interviews conducted with people from all over the country with interesting relationships to food — farmers, food scholars, hunters, waiters, soup-kitchen clients, ad men, immigrant workers, urban foragers, diabetics, and dumpster divers (aka freegans) — Milk ‘n’ Honey interweaves video footage with fragments of interview transcripts, found text, and fictional storylines that offer a kaleidoscope of views on the many ways Americans find, and feel about, the food they eat.

On October 8, 2007, Governor Schwarzenegger approved AB 1735. It will cripple the raw dairy industry in California.

Never fear, I have plenty of corn puns left.

So of course, I decided that’s what I had to bring to this potluck: not only a dish I’d never made before, but a thing I’d barely even tried and was pretty sure I wouldn’t like, plus that most people wouldn’t want to sample….

Are you up for some true grassroots marketing? Let’s claim Real Food for reality-based food communities everywhere.

A round-up of insightful and informative features & blog posts we think Ethicurean readers will enjoy.