My entire adult life — which I date loosely as beginning from my first credit card, at age 17, so half my life ago — I have been a compulsive grocery shopper. You would think I’d lived through a time of famine, or perhaps been raised in a Soviet Bloc country. I remember doing my […]

It sucks when it is 107 degrees in Austin, especially if you’re farming.
I thought I was going to die.  I got there around 7am, and in about an hour it was at that point where the sun was uncomfortably hot on my face and arms.  I fed and watered the chickens, removed fencing, and helped […]

New York Times*: County- and state-fair cooking competitions across America are seeing fewer and fewer jams, canned vegetables, and local fare like apple butter. According to one contest organizer, “Canning is the hardest thing to learn from a book, and the women who really knew how to do it are all gone. The new ones […]

We’ve just given the Ethicurean a little facelift.
If you see funky remnants of the old site (blue and pink) floating around, then you need to clear your browser’s cache. If it looks OK, skip the rest of this paragraph. In Mozilla Firefox for the PC, go to Tools > Options > Privacy > Cache and […]

SFGate.com: Columnist Mark Morford, a frequently entertaining ranter, is so appalled by China’s slaughter of 50,000 dogs over rabies fears — officials walked through the streets clubbing them to death — that his prose is chilly with horror. He regains his composure enough to ask some very hard questions, such as: “Is America really that […]

Ethicurean question of the day: Should omnivores have to kill their own meat?

Vegetarians have long used the question as part of an argument for a green diet. “If you can’t kill it yourself, then you shouldn’t eat it.” Of course, their gamble is that you won’t say, “Why yes, I think I should have to […]

New York Times*: Another look at the dilution of the “organic” label and some of the misleading terms applied to foods.
MLive.com: Michigan expects an increase in organic dairies from 10% to 20% of the state’s total dairies and a number of Northeastern states are seeing a similar increase in organic dairies. The switch […]

I think my friends are starting to get suspicious of me.
That’s what I hated about being a vegetarian: the wariness. “Oh no, here she comes again, trying to make us feel guilty about our food,” or “Great, now we have to make her something without chicken broth in it,” or, “Why won’t she eat meat? […]

San Francisco Chronicle: A Pasadena family of four is raising enough food for 3/4 of their diet on 1/10th of an acre of land (4,356 square feet). Compare that to the 4.8 acres of farmland that are required to feed 4 average Americans. For people who hate math, that means that their garden […]

American University Radio/The Diane Rehm Show: This is an archive edition of the Diane Rehm show (available in Real Audio and Windows Media formats) that features Nina Planck and Michael Jacobson discussing why we should eat “real food” and have a greener diet. Planck is the author of Real Food (I’m reading the book […]

Dallas Morning News: Texas not only has the most organic acreage of any state, they have a newspaper that did a really kickin’ job of researching the USDA organic label and enforcement of the rules. The USDA organic rules are vague and some companies (Whole Foods is one, and good for them!) have taken extra […]

An article about one of Google’s new beta tools, Google Trends, provides a fascinating snapshot of what search writer John Battelle calls “the database of intentions.” Basically, by analyzing billions of search terms input into Google, one can get a picture of what people are most interested in and which topics and issues are gaining […]

AP/Duluth News Tribune: Consumer Co-ops are struggling to stay competitive as larger retailers adopt their organic approach (though not their style).
Minneapolis Star-Tribune: The supermarket struggle can be bewildering (see previous post), but writer Jeremy Iggers distills the choices to values we can probably all agree on:
* It’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to animals.
* Protecting […]

Here is what we are reading as we contemplate France’s hard-headed exit from the World Cup Finals.
Boston Globe: At least one major brewer has decided to test the organic beer market. Local organic beers have been around for a number of years and include: Butte Creek Brewing (California); Fish Brewing (Washington); Peak Organic […]

Washington Post: Anti-GMO activist Jeremey Rifkin’s editorial cautiously welcomes the rise of a new genomic technology — marker-assisted selection (MAS) — that will increase crop yields and pest resistance without relying on splicing in genes from other species. Except GMO crops may have already contaminated non-GMO crops enough to make MAS more difficult.
NPR: Morning Edition […]