California legislators, food safety experts, and raw milk advocates met this evening in Sacramento to discuss improving raw milk safety. Legislators passed new language in October that required producers to meet much stricter bacteria standards — legislation strongly opposed by the raw-milk community. The Senate Select Committee is showing strong support for a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points Plan (HACCP) approach.

It’s time to call your congressperson today and tell them to vote against Section 11305 in the current mess of a Farm Bill. Inserted at the behest of pesticide manufacturers, it is titled “No Discrimination Against Use of Registered Pesticide Products or Classes of Pesticide Products,”

In an excellent 2000 report titled "The Price We Pay for Corporate Hogs," researcher Marlene Halverson of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recounts the following stories:
On July 26, 1989, five farm workers in one family died after consecutively entering a 10-foot deep liquid manure pit on their Michigan farm….. The […]

Agribusiness stocks rose sharply today, following the announcement this morning of a new technique that transforms conventionally raised produce into organic, instantly and at almost no cost.

The March 10 issue of the New Yorker includes a profile of Michelle Obama, the refreshingly candid (and awesomely tall) potential next First Lady.
Back in April, someone who was caucusing for Barack Obama in Iowa told me that the Mister had read Michael Pollan’s April 22 op-ed piece for the New York Times Magazine, "You […]

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, […]

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.

The USDA’s largest-ever recall is now under way — “approximately 143,383,823 pounds” (give or take a few ounces?) of raw and frozen beef products from the disgraced Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California. That’s almost half the amount of beef and poultry recalled since 1994 in the United States.

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 […]

The hopes of more than 700 California raw-milk supporters following last week’s seeming victory in Sacramento were dashed today in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. The issue of raw-milk safety and California bacteria standards — instead of being revoked — will now be taken up by a "blue ribbon" commission charged to research and recommend a […]

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 […]

Bills to support raw-milk production and to protect farmers from GMO patent-holders are on their way to the California legislature.

PETA’s smartest PR move ever may be hiring Free Range Studios, the geniuses behind The Meatrix, to co-produce their latest campaign, "The Road to the Greenhouse."
The go-vegetarian message is a lot more palatable when served up as a mock debate featuring the presidential candidates of both parties reimagined as vegetables  — among them Broccoli […]

This is a special edition of the Digest devoted to reactions to the Food and Drug Administration’s determination that clones and their milk are safe for consumption.
Rick Weiss reports on the USDA’s request for a "voluntary moratorium" on selling clones to allow consumers to adjust to the idea (i.e., let them forget about this week’s […]