If Slow Food Nation showcased produce at the peak of taste, texture and freshness, a new FDA proposal might just show us what things look like down at the other end of the spectrum.
The FDA recently announced that it will allow spinach and iceberg lettuce to be irradiated — treated with an x-ray-like processing method […]

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

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

Check out “Keep on Shoppin’ in a Label-Free World” — a SOLE food-centric twist on the the Neil Young song that was written and performed by Dan Sullivan, a senior editor at the Rodale Institute’s NewFarm.org.

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

The February 25 issue of The New Yorker has an important article by staff writer Michael Specter about some of the economic, logistical, and moral issues related to our individual contributions to the climate crisis* (our "carbon footprints"). In his exploration of the topic, he covers product labeling for food miles, carbon emissions, offset programs, […]

On a recent trip to the grocery store, a friend of mine living in the Midwest decided to put in a plug for grass-fed beef. They won’t supply it if we don’t ask for it, right? She approached the man behind the meat counter and asked if they carried it. With a completely straight face, […]

Oh, Monsanto. Just look at you. You’ve got your knit cap pulled down tight over your crew cut, and your stomach is sticking out beneath your skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. You’ve been left back a few grades now — summer school doesn’t always help much, does it? — and so now you are way bigger than everyone else. You don’t have too many friends anymore. It’s tough to be the class behemoth, isn’t it? So you’ve taken to pushing other kids around on the playground and trying to take their milk money. Or, at least, to take away their ability to label their milk as rBGH-free.

Members of the Kansas Legislature have joined the esteemed lawmakers or regulators in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio who want to spare their citizens the challenge of too much information. Specifically, they want to keep consumers ignorant of whether the milk they’re drinking comes from cows not dosed with recombinant bovine growth hormone, rBGH, which is […]

Jane Black has a great article in the Washington Post’s food section today, about how the recent tsunami of headlines on contaminated food from China, E. coli outbreaks, and cloned meat has caused an increasing number of people "to become their own food inspectors, using the Internet and their values about health, the environment and […]

As a follow-up to Tom Philpott’s post about genetically modified crops (also known as transgenic or genetically engineered crops), I thought I’d post some data on transgenic crop adoption in the United States. Because products made from transgenic crops are never labeled, it is probably not well known that over 70 percent of […]

On December 17, 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the government will be implementing a new "Food and Consumer Safety Action Plan".
Apparently, the federal health and agriculture departments want feedback from Canadians on how the government should carry out its proposed food and consumer safety action plan. They have set up a website […]

According to Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Campaign for Safe Food and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture released new rules this morning that essentially reverse the ban that was passed late last year on rBGH-free labels for milk. According to the campaign, "Dairy processors [in PA] are again free to use such […]

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

A while back I wrote that the USDA was stealing the term Naturally Grown. Well, they have done so. No need to listen to comments from the people. No need to wait for the rule to be implemented. They just went ahead and stopped the use of Certified Naturally Grown (CNG) on meat labels. I hate saying “I told you so,” I really do, especially since I’m the one, along with all CNG farmers and consumers, who’s taking a beating here…