I’m involved in starting a brand-new CSA that I am really excited about: helping Liz and Dan from Clark Summit in Tomales, CA, get theirs off the ground. Clark Summit should be the poster farm of the sustainable-agriculture movement. They do things right — 100% grassfed beef, including Scottish highland, piglets and chickens running free all over the farm.

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

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.

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

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.

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

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, […]

In the aftermath of the Hallmark/Westland slaughterhouse exposé, henceforth to be known as Downergate, there has been much outrage. Let there now be outraged laughter … assuming your sense of humor is as sick as mine.
I think this animated editorial cartoon about Doreen the Downer Cow, "The Omnivore’s Nightmare" by Mark Fiore, deserves an award. […]

This weekend’s big news, as Bonnie has already reported, was the massive recall of beef processed by Chino, CA-based Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing company. There has been much well-deserved coverage of the animal cruelty aspects of this story and a general tip of the mainstream media hat to the debacle’s food-safety implications: downer cattle, as the […]

The Charlotte Observer is on Day 3 of a stunning six-part investigative series, “The Cruelest Cuts,” on the lives of North Carolina’s 28,000 poultry workers. Editor Rick Thames kicks off the series with a searing editorial that compares these workers, mostly illegal immigrants with few rights, to the South’s most notorious historical underclass. But it is not just the South that profits from this neo-slavery.

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

A line of 7,500 trucks stretching 85 miles. That’s what it would take to haul the nearly 300 million pounds of meat and poultry products that were recalled between January 1, 1994, and November 30, 2007, in 773 separate incidents. These eye-popping numbers come from the appendix of a Congressional Research Service […]

On our recent Pollan Painting weekend, my five-year-old son Frederick and I read with interest about the slaughter technique used at Joel Salatin’s natural poultry operation. Frederick  has some personal knowledge of poultry slaughter but was curious about commercial slaughter operations. A Google image search of “chicken slaughter” inspired him to paint this:

[See his first […]

I am fortunate to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where year-round we can eat foods produced within 100 miles of our homes, feast on a diverse, abundant range of organic fruits and vegetables and ethically-raised animals, and are not too surprised to pass Alice Waters while doing our weekly farmers market shopping.

…Being a close community, they passed me on to their neighbors at Visser Family Farms, where I talked to Kathy Visser and was able to order two legs of lamb for our holiday feast, along with a box of organic Pink Lady apples from their neighbor’s farm.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been in the news a lot lately.
Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle had a front page story about the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. One of the causes is the routine addition of antibiotics to animal feed as "growth promoters" — including some antibiotics used for treatment of humans.
In a New York Times […]