Section » Contaminated food
Digest – News: Perilous pork, the First Lettuce, food safety plateaus
Free-range throwdown: A New York Times op-ed turns the food-fear spotlight on pastured pork, covering a study that finds that "free-range pork can be more likely than caged pork to carry dangerous bacteria and parasites" including potentially-deadly Trichinosis. The author gets in a few more digs with the good-food community by challenging whether free-range
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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
There are much scarier food safety bills than HR 875 in Congress
If you care about food and farming and you use the Internet, you've probably received this particular e-mail. The title is something like, "BILL WOULD OUTLAW ORGANIC FARMING!!!!" or "MONSANTO'S DREAM BILL!!!!" It appears, inevitably, in all caps. I have upwards of 30 versions in my inbox. Normally, it
Digest – News: Anti-biotics, working for the (corporate) man, and the price of obesity
More squealing from the porkers: The National Pork Producers Council objects to federal legislation introduced Tuesday by Rep. Louise Slaughter (no pun intended, really), the only microbiologist in the U.S. Congress, that would restrict the use of medically-important antibiotics in livestock production.
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
Not milk: The ingredient behind the dairy crisis
I have no idea what it would feel like to be a dairy farmer. I don't run a business that was started by my father or mother or grandparents, or that I built myself; I don't own and manage land that has been in my family for generations. Come to think of it, I've never really had to make a major business
Digest – News: Label libel, Chiquita goes bananas, and another reason to stay off soda
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Digest – Features and blogs: Why go local?
Agriculture next to fall? In his latest blog screed, famed dystopian James Howard Kunstler predicts that agriculture will be the next to fall in the world economic crisis, noting that "if the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote
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Parallel universes: A rice farmer’s point of view on U.S.-European GMO attitudes
By Greg Massa I’m a California rice farmer, but recently in Germany I was a rock star. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Oddly, my celebrity status came from a speech I gave to European farmers about genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
All steriled up: Produce safety guidelines throw sustainability out, keep toxic bathwater
Readers may remember back in November when I announced the first installment of a two-part post on produce safety. It's taken me a few months to get around to it, but here we are: part 2! Photo of a "sterile farm" courtesy of the
Digest – Blogs, etc.: Frogs in the coal mine, what the government’s not telling us
Don't ask, don't tell: Tom Philpott wonders why, after two studies released last month showed detectable levels of mercury in products containing high fructose corn syrup, the FDA by its own admission has no plans to look into the issue. How nice that the agency would rather trust the claims of an industry
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Digest – News: Dairy cows on the moove, Big Corn throwdown, a locavore loses it
Industry pail-out: California's dairy industry announces a plan to cull 300,000 dairy cows, or roughly 1/6th of the state's herd, in an attempt to raise market prices for milk from the $0.97/gallon producers have received recently. Mass sell-offs have happened before, but often the cows were bought by
Digest – Blogs: Sweet analysis, rural internet woes, good food in the city
Never let them see you sweet: Tom Philpott looks into a new Tufts study that finds corn subsidies may have been a boon to the HFCS industry, but they alone don't make bad food cheap. Australia has similar obesity patterns but eats sugar instead. What we need to do, Tom says, is figure out "how to disincentivize
Digest – News: Pharm goats OK’d, farm profits dwindle, and peanuts throw dirt on the FDA
Brave new world: FDA approves the first pharm-animal drug, a blood thinner made from the milk of bioengineered goats. Critics nail FDA for its shoddy approval process and worry about what could happen if the animals escape from the lab and mate with unsuspecting non-GM cohorts. (
Digest – Blogs and opinion: Food pound-gallons (?), friending the FDA, another list for Vilsack
Measuring up: We've all heard the average number of miles that industrial food travels from farm to fork (1500), but is that the best way to weigh the environmental impact of our consumption choices? NY farmer Bob Comis proposes a conceptual shift to "pound-gallons," a clunky-sounding idea that might
