Could native foods be the next big thing in eating? Some people, Gary Nabhan in particular, are working to push things in that direction.

In an excellent 2000 report titled "The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs," researcher Marlene Halverson of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recounts the following stories:
On July 26, 1989, five farm workers in one family died after consecutively entering a 10-foot deep liquid manure pit on their Michigan farm….. The […]

There’s an image that’s stuck with me from the cross-country drive that my dad and I took last summer. It was one of many late-night stints at the wheel, perhaps 11 p.m., and we were hurtling along through the Utah desert. A sign at the last gas station had warned us of a nearly 100-mile […]

The March 10 issue of the New Yorker includes a profile of Michelle Obama, the refreshingly candid (and awesomely tall) potential next First Lady.
Back in April, someone who was caucusing for Barack Obama in Iowa told me that the Mister had read Michael Pollan’s April 22 op-ed piece for the New York Times Magazine, "You […]

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

Kaiser’s for-profit side, the Permanente Medical Group, has apparently not gotten the message of what edible items constitute “healthy.”

The USDA’s largest-ever recall is now under way — “approximately 143,383,823 pounds” (give or take a few ounces?) of raw and frozen beef products from the disgraced Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California. That’s almost half the amount of beef and poultry recalled since 1994 in the United States.

Consumers Union, the nonprofit advocacy group that tests products and publishes its results in Consumer Reports, says grass-fed beef is likely better for human and soil health. 
In the magazine’s March 2008 "claim check" column (not yet online), Consumer Reports asks, “Is grass-fed beef better?” The answer:
CR’s take. This beef could have benefits. The limited […]

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

“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.

The current issue of Wired magazine has an infoporn (that’s infographic to non-geeks) I put together, on the cost of a calorie. Believe it or not, it wasn’t my idea.

and that "growing takes proteins; meat can be a tasty treat, like fish or human beings" in this surreal video on the food pyramid from the goth rocker:

Via U.S. Food Policy

Breaking news and developments, such as contaminated-food outbreaks, Farm Bill milestones, and how the farming community is faring around the world.

The USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Service has released its annual summary for its Pesticide Data Program. And it scares me.

Breaking news and developments, such as contaminated-food outbreaks, Farm Bill milestones, and how the farming community is faring around the world.