Time Magazine Takes A Bite Out Of Cheap Food
Usually when the mainstream media talks about the plight of factory farmed animals and their deleterious effect on the environment, they do so in passing. It’s almost a casual afterthought to the story about why eating red meat will kill you faster, if it gets mentioned at all. Enter Times (online) magazine. The article Getting [...]
August 24, 2009
Tags: agriculture, bacon, cows, factory farms, farmers, Health, obesity, policy, waste Posted in: Health, Politics 
One Comment
Patrick Kennedy Responds To Food Safety Query
Back in June I wrote about the new Food Safety Enhancement Act being proposed to congress. While the bill was a huge step forward in many regards, many thought the language was discriminatory against small farms. I encouraged everyone to contact their representatives and voice their concern for a “one-size-fits-all” solution to food safety.
You can [...]
August 14, 2009
Tags: agriculture, farmers, food safety, policy Posted in: Health, Politics 2 Comments
Lab-Grown Meat, The Future Is Soon
Flipping to the resources page of the New Harvest website, a non-profit whose mission is to promote and advance meat substitutes, you find twice as many popular articles on the subject of lab-grown meat as there are technical articles on it. Test-tube meat, in vitro meat, cultured meat or whatever name you call it may [...]
July 20, 2009
Tags: agriculture, bacon, Barack Obama, change, cows, farmers, food event, green, greenhouse gases, innovation Posted in: Fun Food Facts, Science & Technology No Comments
Factory Farmed Animals Hog All The Antibiotics
70% of the antibiotics produced in the US go to animals that are not sick. Amassed together in small spaces, diseases can flourish and rapidly spread to all of the confined animals so the purveyors of Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs) use them as a preventative measure, but also to stimulate growth. Both practices are [...]
July 15, 2009
Tags: agriculture, bacon, Barack Obama, change, farmers, food safety, Health, heroes, policy Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology One Comment
State Of The Food Nation
Food Inc. is out in theaters and is scaring the “bejesus” out of people. Michelle Obama has harvested her garden and made stirring speeches encouraging change in the American diet. Healthcare reforms are being debated in Congress that will effect the way chronic, food-related diseases are treated. There are massive food recalls almost weekly. Our [...]
July 6, 2009
Tags: agriculture, Barack Obama, change, farmers, FDA, food, food safety, Health, nutrition, policy, USDA Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology No Comments
Food Inc., The Reviews Are In
Sorry, there are no theaters within 20 miles of my zipcode that are playing Food Inc. I will have to get it on Netflix when it comes out. In the mean time, I have watched the trailer and read a bunch of the reviews:
There is the short and sweet review by Marion Nestle, who describes [...]
July 1, 2009
Tags: agriculture, change, farmers, food event, Health, marketing, nutrition, policy Posted in: Fun Food Facts, Health, Politics 4 Comments
A Big Food Safety Bill Could Hurt Small Farms
Safety inspections protocol has been trending toward ‘one-size-fits-all’, leaving many to wonder how much longer small farms will survive.
The farmers that do survive continually frustrate inspection officials. The Polyface farm, featured in the Omnivore’s Dilemma and more recently in Food Inc., demonstrates how of a lot the minutia aimed at large-scale processors is out of [...]
June 29, 2009
Tags: farmers, food safety, policy, USDA Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology 4 Comments
Omnivore’s Dilemma Gets Booted And Then Re-Instituted
Food activists and Pollan fans alike were stunned to hear that Washington State University (WSU) had cut the author’s famous Omnivore’s Dilemma from its freshmen “common reading” program. They called foul play and wondered, rather bluntly in many cases, whether the cancellation was due to the school’s (big) agricultural endowments.
WSU officials site budgetary issues, [...]
May 29, 2009
Tags: agriculture, farmers, heroes, Michael Pollan, policy Posted in: Health, Politics No Comments
Behind The Scenes At The Child Nutrition Policy Meeting
From the American News Project in February:
The Committee on Medicine said they are looking to make “evidence based” changes to the National School Lunch Program. Funny how they haven’t paid attention to the evidence for the last thirty years. It might have something to do with the fact there weren’t any scientists at [...]
May 4, 2009
Tags: agriculture, change, farmers, food event, Health, marketing, nutrition, obesity, policy, subsidies Posted in: Health, Politics No Comments
Swine Flu Renamed To Please Pork Producers
Lobbyists’ requests to the World Health Organization to rename the swine flu to something more innocuous were denied the other day. Predictably, the name ’swine flu’ has had people scrambling away from pork products. Egypt has slaughtered its 300,000 pigs in its effort to prevent local outbreak (link).
The name “is jeopardizing and may [...]
April 29, 2009
Tags: agriculture, bacon, education, farmers, food event, Health, marketing, policy Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology No Comments
