Section » Meat and poultry
The lost art of butchery moves to YouTube
Cowpooling director: Very nice piece by friend o'Ethicurean Tamar Adler on meeting a Le Grand, CA, butcher who processes mostly beef and lamb for the people who raised them or their customers. Thankfully, Bill McCann has begun to preserve his dying skills on digital video for the Inertent age. (Civil
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Time to get tray serious: Get involved with a Child Nutrition Act campaign now
School’s out for the summer, but there’s a food fight going on in the cafeteria. In Washington, Congress is turning up the heat on the policies that determine what 30 million children will eat once the lunch
USDA hearings on NAIS
Will they really listen? The Rural Blog reminds us that the USDA is holding "listening sessions" about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The last two will be in Storrs, Connecticut on May 27 and Loveland, Colorado on June 1 (location information and a link to the NAIS comment page at
Digest – News: Smithfield’s flu, organic for the masses, Vilsack reserves judgment
They're not confining everything, apparently: MSM's all over the swine flu (SJ Merc) and U.S. hog prices are tanking (Reuters), but few are talking
Digest – Features and blogs: Free-range response, literary seasonality, the Hamburg wish list
Fighting the Averyian Flu: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University look a little deeper at the NYT pork op-ed and find that the study mentioned was funded by the National Pork Board, which represents conventional producers, and that the Trichinosis "positive" pigs tested seropositive, meaning they have
Digest – Commentary & blogs: Bittman busted for unconscious eating
Snap!-per: Tom Philpott chides Mark Bittman, aka The Minimalist and author of "Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating," for recommending red snapper—one of the most endangered species in U.S. waters. "I believe that influental food writers, especially ones concerned with conscious eating, need to
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Free-range Porky’s, now playing at one Bay Area cinema
San Francisco may have more vegetarians and health-obsessed eaters per capita than any other U.S. city, but it also has a fair number of pork lovers — and to serve them, numerous restaurants cure their own meat, offer whole
Unfair fare: Why prices for meat from small local farms are too high
Editor's note: New York part-time farmer Bob Comis sent us a link to a post on his Stonybrook Farm blog for consideration in the Digest, but we liked it so much we asked him if we could publish an edited version in its entirety. His opinions are going
Marlow & Daughters butcher shop: “This meat is our reputation”
A recent Coolhunting.com video highlights Marlow & Daughters, an old-world
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Digest – Features & Blogs: Convention frenzy, local meat gets scrapped, and Michelle’s big announcement
O-yeah: Michelle Obama tells Oprah that she's planning a veggie garden on the lawn of the White House in order to "use it as a point of education, to talk about health and how delicious it is to eat fresh food, and how you can take that food and make it part of a healthy diet." The President won't be
The slaughter bottleneck in buying local meat
Last fall I wrote a piece for Mother Jones' sustainability issue, on how the lack of small-scale slaughter facilities hampers both local meat production and distribution. It was bumped from that issue, along with all the other food coverage, and finally appears in this month's March/April special package
Digest – News: The California conundrum, Monsanto at large, and tuna testing (not to be tried at home)
A new growth export market - the revolving door: U.S. government agencies are imploring foreign countries to bring their food safety regulations up to the (arguably pretty low) U.S. par, but the buck doesn't stop there: countries like India are being pushed to develop regulations on GM crops, industrial
Digest – News: Flesh-eating bacteria, wallet-eating food companies, and eating, righteously
Makes your skin crawl: As previously reported here, a flesh-eating, antibiotic resistant bacteria is killing 18,000 Americans a year and is carried by 45% of farmers and 49% of pigs in Iowa. Nicholas
Digest – News: Salmon synergy, Whole Foods less whole, rotation’s right
Slammed by synergism: Researchers expose juvenile coho salmon to combinations of commonly-used agricultral pesticides. For two-thirds of the pesticide combinations, they find that the effect of the combination is greater than the sum of the impacts of the individual pesticides (i.e. the combo has synergistic
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Digest – News: Seeds grow, even in prison; allergy nuts; and the return of the pear
Growing hope: U.S. prisons are notoriously bad at rehabilitating inmates and preparing them to return to public life, but San Quentin is trying to change that. How? By providing an organic garden that residents can care for. "It reminds me of being with my grandmother," says one inmate. "It saved my
