The Butter Bitch and I have been on hiatus for the past few months, due to our day jobs and ongoing projects. The Seattle Times’ Pacific Northwest Sunday Magazine devotes most of this week’s issue to an overview of Washington’s locavorean movement and the promotion of sustainability in the wine.
The Bounty Around Us looks at […]

Wesfarmers has made a takeover bid for the Coles Group, which includes Australia’s second most successful supermarket chain, after Woolworths. This week the National Association of Retail Grocers in Australia, which represents independent grocery groups such as IGA and Foodworks, released a report showing Coles and Woolworths controlled 79% of the market. By comparison, it […]

The Digest trawls the Web for tasty news, features, op-eds and blog posts — from Farm Bill updates to backyard chickens, transgenic foods, E. coli recalls, and sustainable fish. No extra charge for the puns.

Death, where is thy sting: This excellent update on the search for the cause of colony collapse disorder in bees says that neonicotinoids have probably been ruled out, cell phone signals are laughed at, and most signs are pointing to a biological pathogen or parasite. (Los Angeles Times)

Naming names and kicking ass: The Environmental Working Group will unveil its new 2007 Farm Bill Database of agricultural subsidy recipients at noon tomorrow, June 12. Watch for the link from EWG Prez Ken Cook’s blog, Mulch.

The Associated Press has a sneak peek at the stars of the new data, such as Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass, who got $242,787 from 2003-2005, and former NBA star Scottie Pippen, who received $78,945 in conservation subsidies for land he controls in Arkansas.

Transparency and containers: A new food-tracking technology called HarvestMark aims to let consumers look up produce specially packaged in HarvestMark-tagged containers to learn where the food was grown, when it was picked, and which crew picked and packaged it. While we think these are valuable things to know, we don’t need more packaging, period. (Statesman/AP)

NEWSFEATURES & COMMENTARYON THE BLOGS, ETC.Not-so-clean energy: Biofuel plants in Iowa — many of them recently commissioned — have been violating laws protecting water, land and air with alarming frequency…. Among the violations reported is this doozy: “Siouxland Energy & Livestock in Sioux Center, was cited for releasing contaminated wastewater in an attempt to dilute a manure spill from a neighboring cattle operation.” Since monitoring of water consumption and carbon dioxide emissions is lacking, Iowans do not yet know the full impact of this new industry. (Des Moines Register via http://www.uky.edu/CommInfoStudies/IRJCI/blog.htm”>The Rural Blog): A study of food costs by students at Seattle University found that farmers market produce was slightly less expensive than comparable produce in the grocery store. Students surveyed 15 different items from the Broadway Farmers Market during the project.

The sun was not yet warm enough when, in the company of my chef friend Alice Waters, I entered an elegantly refurbished area of the docks; pretty little coffee shops were serving warm mugs of excellent organic fairtrade coffee; sumptuous bakeries were putting out all sorts of good things, spreading the fragrant aroma of some wonderful kinds of bread…. The former, with long hair and a plaid flannel shirt, held his lovely little blond-haired daughter in his arms and told me, in a conspiratorial tone, that he had to drive two hundred miles to come and sell in that market: he charged incredibly high prices for his squashes, it was “a cinch,” and in just two monthly visits he could earn more than enough to maintain his family and spend hours surfing on the beach…. He replied: There are many cases of organic farming that are not sustainable, because they create a vast monoculture, one that relies on the use of integrated pesticides which greatly reduce the surrounding biodiversity: vast stretches of vineyards in Chile and in Italy, huge plantations of vegetables in California, hectares and hectares of olive groves in Spain…. Social sustainability can be achieved through public intervention, through politics: in Brazil, in those regions where the Workers’ Party con-trols the local government, all food served in public cafeterias must by law be organic and must be produced by small local producers at fair but accessible prices. Agroecology has a scientific basis, but it also has profound political implications, because it is badly in need of public intervention: before an agroecological approach can be established in Latin America, there must be agrarian reform and public intervention in the market to protect small farmers or to guarantee fair prices for producers and consumers.

NEWSFEATURES & COMMENTARYAmen to that: The USDA would be the wrong agency to consolidate all food safety functions, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, calling it “the nation’s booster club for American agricultural products.” Added CSPI food safety director Caroline Smith DeWaal, “During the last few years, the Secretary of Agriculture has spent far more time trying to convince Japan to buy U.S. beef then he has on ensuring that that beef is free of contamination.”

Note: This is the second part of a 2-part series about my visit to Toronto, Ontario. Part One can be found here.
“Pass the peas!”
“Pass the chicken!”
“Pass the matzah!”
One thing about visiting family: You eat A LOT.
Trying to work off some of the unnecessary calories that we had ingested at the uncountable number of family meals […]

To celebrate Passover, a time when the Jews wandered 40 years in the desert searching for the land of milk & honey, Noshette and I wandered 4 hours westward in search of organic milk and wild honey (and some other sustainable foods). Noshette was born and raised in Toronto, so we were going there to […]

“There is always a sleight of hand”?: We missed a big story Sunday — a Times investigation into U.K. farmers markets reveals that not only are some vendors selling produce they didn’t grow, having bought it from wholesalers and slapping on some soil to fool gullible urbanites, but others are selling experimental varieties of, […]

Josh’s Organic Market - Hollywood, Florida
After our 1-nighter in the Gulf Coast of Florida, where we saw a memorable Leon Redbone concert and enjoyed a good meal of local fish and seafood, Noshette of the North and I drove back to the Atlantic coast along the famous “Alligator Alley”, where we saw plenty of gators […]

The idea of “carbon neutrality”, or reducing one’s carbon footprint, has been much in the news lately, what with Al Gore’s Academy Award win for “An Inconvenient Truth” and subsequent reports related to the amount of energy his Tennessee home is reported to consume. While the Gores do have a fairly large house, which […]

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 York Times
Idea ripe for U.S. implementation: The new Farmers’ City Market shop in south-west London aims to bring the farmers market indoors, while […]

Large, chain supermarkets have no smell. Even in the produce aisle, where piping sprays water over cucumbers and lettuces in a vain attempt to make them look dew-kissed, the only scent you might catch is a faint chlorine tang — possibly from the floor, possible from the misters. The apples might as well be made […]

I’ve never been inside a proper slaughterhouse, and I don’t have a burning desire to start taking tours. But the most arresting moment of the trip Sir Loin and I took to Morocco last fall was watching men in Marrakesh shop for chickens.
To see it for yourself, this is what you have to do. Go […]