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Digest – News: Salmonella spreading, tomato bribery, Vilsack gets started
More peanuttiness: The FDA has widened its salmonella recall to all peanut products — including peanut butter, paste and meal — manufactured by a Blakeley, GA plant since January 2007. A year too late, the FDA conducted an inspection of the plant and discovered that managers had knowingly shipped contaminated products on multiple occasions and,
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PR debacle for HFCS: Care for some mercury with your oatmeal?
That much-debated sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup, is going to need more than a pricey PR campaign to fix this one. After one set of scientists found mercury — yes, everyone's favorite brain-impairing element — in almost half of commercial
Digest – News: Focusing the foodies, DNA Q&A, and MRSA attacks
Good food movement needs focus: The Post's Jane Black reports on a series of pricey charity dinners in Washington, DC organized by Berkeley foodies in honor of the inauguration. Their goal was to propel food-system change into the agenda of the new administration, but some say the movement is too fragmented
Digest – Blogs: MLK on community gardens, Nestle on Salmonella, and the BPA 10-step plan
King of the garden: Martin Luther King may never have seen a community garden, but he no doubt would have approved of them. Tom Philpott reflects on how the community garden movement, and its symbolism as an explicit rejection of the industrial food system, is one realization of King's dream. (Grist) Pontificating
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Digest – News: Vilsack updates, Clif Bars recalled, OJ CO2
Tractor tire hits the dirt: After clearing the Senate confirmation process, new USDA chief Tom Vilsack gets to work. (Des Moines Register) Meanwhile, speculation abounds on who may join him at the agency
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Political celebrations past and present
On election night in 1992* — the year that Bill Clinton won his first term and Barbara Boxer was first elected to the Senate — I made the flag-adorned chocolate truffles pictured above as part of a celebratory
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All hail the new Eater in Chief
We may not have gotten the Farmer in Chief we were dreaming for, but I am cautiously hopeful that the 44th president of the United States is going to move us a little closer to a sane food
Digest: “Naturally raised” defined, Niman merging, mo’ meaty news
Department of Agribusiness fails us again: The USDA
Digest: PB woes, black farmers organize, Schillinger takes on Monsanto
You got salmonella in my peanut butter: As the salmonella scare continues with dozens of recalls by the FDA of truly frightening things like Little Debbie® Peanut Butter Toasties, the agency is
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Rumors flying about the U.S. Department of Agribusiness as Usual
In the mad scramble preceding Tuesday's droolingly anticipated handover of executive power, there are a lot of politics happening at light speed. And some of them, apparently, are bad news — especially if you're someone who eats food. Yes, that would be you, me, and everyone we know. The rumor mill
Small-scale farmer circa 1931
Comfood list-serv member Shawn posted a link to this National Archives
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Digest – News: Mega-McDonald’s, bathing moo-ties, and CA Senate embraces food
No budget, but an awesome mandate: The California state Senate reforms its agriculture committee - traditionally a buddy of the state's industrial produce contingent - to prioritize issues such as sustainable agriculture, food safety, animal welfare, and food security. Berkeley/Oakland Senator Loni Hancock
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Digest – Features and blogs: COOL is not, GM fuel, and DC local-style
So un-COOL: The USDA releases the final rule on Country of Origin Labeling, the law that requires that many of our main foodstuffs be labeled with (duh) the country where they were made, but it leaves a massive loophole by exempting "processed" foods from the law and defining "processed" broadly to include
Digest: Food’s future heats up, dairy prices tank, and we ask FDA to hold the peanut butter
Incompetence sandwich: 400 people have been sickened nationwide by a Salmonella outbreak linked to King Nut peanut butter, and while the company has quickly responded with a voluntary recall, the FDA has yet to issue a press release telling the public they should avoid the stuff. Are they nuts? (CNN.com) 2100:
Digest – News & opinion: Antibiotics freakout, Gupta as Doc-in-Chief, duelling op-ed duos
Side of spinach, hold the tetracycline: Researchers at the University of Minnesota find that when crops are fertilized with manure from animals routinely fed antibiotics (a common practice in CAFOs to help them survive their living conditions), the antibiotics are absorbed into the crops. This is an
