Section » Avian flu
Digest - News: WSJ says FDA about to approve cloned food
Happy New Year … not: The Wall Street Journal appears to have a scoop that the FDA will rule next week that meat and dairy products from cloned animals are safe to enter the food supply. The article mentions that language to stall this announcement is in
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Digest - News: PA still mulling “rBST-free” labels, USDA admits impotence, will flu make pigs fly?
Organic milk sales to skyrocket in Pennsylvania: That's the only silver lining in the news that as of Feb. 1, Pennsylvanian consumers won't be able to tell the difference between milk from farms that inject their cows with rBST and that from those that don't — unless the governor blocks the move
Digest - Features: The economics of cheap food, beef industry insider critics, fish farming
Feast and famine: It's the end of cheap food as we know it, says the Economist, whose food-price index is now at its highest since it began in 1845, having risen by one-third in the past year. The culprits, it says, are rising incomes in Asia that allow people to buy more grain-fed meat, and U.S. ethanol
Digest - News: Answer to Alice Waters mystery, Farm Bill stalls again, avian flu back in UK
Umbrellas up, chickens — there's a deluge of catch-up links since last weekend's Digesting. O how we hate it when the RSS-feed headlines top 4,000. Alice on the Ameya Preserve: In a Wall Street Journal story titled "Politically Correct Developments: Montana Project Raises Ante for PC Amenities,"
Digest - News: Bayer uncensured, another beef recall (yawn), fishy recommendations
We seem to have settled into a twice-weekly, midweek+weekend routine for the Digest. If you need to snack between our buffets, plenty of
Digest - News: Beef recall blossoms, Monsanto farmers to get cheaper crop insurance, bird flu in Canada
Stop the Topps: Topps Meat has expanded its recall to include 21.7 million pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli. The beef has a "sell by date" or "best if used by date" between September 25, 2007, and September 25, 2008. All recalled products will have
Not so NAIS: Animal-tracking program is solution to wrong problem
Thanks to Marc R. for calling my attention to the Government Accountability Office's recent report on the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). NAIS, which first saw the light of corner offices at the USDA
Digest: Farm aids, cool retailing concept in UK, fake grouper on menus
The age of agri-tourism: Small farms are increasingly diversifying into non-agricultural activities like farm tours, cheese-making classes, and photo safaris. The income from such activities often dwarfs their revenues from crops. New
Digest: “Because we can” not reason to clone, more on antibiotics ban, Monsanto dumped PCBs in UK
The ethics of cloning: Most of the op-eds we've seen about eating meat and dairy from cloned animals have tried to appeal to Americans' personal health fears. This one aims for the heart of animal lovers. Business
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: Bee plague, doomsday seed vault, cloned mice, fish controversy
Hoofbeats of the food apocalypse: A mysterious plague is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops. Affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees, with no sign as to what happened. Fact nugget: There are rent-a-bee services? Reuters Norway
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
Digest: Farm Bill opinions, bird-flu immunity, antibiotics ban brewing
Farm Bill pressure: Those who wanted Americans to realize just how broadly the Farm Bill affects all those who eat or grow food may have done their job a bit too well — it seems everyone has an opinion on what the new bill ought to cover. The latest to weigh in: General policies: A Register editorial
Digest: China chicken, problematic salmon farms, lobster muckraking
Bird-flu vs. mad-cow trading: The U.S. might start importing cooked poultry products from China, which has had several deaths from avian flu; some think it's a bid to get China to drop its ban on U.S. beef, in place since a 2003 case of mad-cow disease. Less than 1% of the chicken Americans eat comes
Digest: Bird flu breakdown, nano no-no, Frankenweeds
Bird-flu biosecurity failure: Forget the wild-bird-acting-alone theory. Bird flu was found last night to have spread through the Bernard Matthews turkey complex in Suffolk, England, and the H5N1 strain of the flu was also linked to the company's processing plant in Hungary, from which meat is sent all
