All Entries Tagged With: "food"
We’ve Lost Nearly All of Our Wild Foods — What Happened? And What Are We Missing?
Fish are the last wild food that most of us will eat.
A few days from now, a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for an ungodly amount of money — perhaps more than $100,000 – at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. And while the high price of the first bluefin of the year will be extraordinary, the rarity, and thus the prestige and high pricetag of bluefin in general, provides a clue to humans’ dietary history. Once upon a time, wild foods were a regular and beloved part of the American diet. Today, the American epicure might dine on foraged mushrooms and ramps, but for many of us, fish are the last wild food we eat. What happened? And what are we missing?
Georgia Pellegrini, a chef who has worked in elite restaurants in New York and France, decided to answer this question for herself when she set out to hunt her own food. As her new book’s title implies – Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time – she entered into a masculine realm in which she was often the only woman. Pellegrini traveled across the United States and even England, hunting everything from squirrel to elk. As much as she stands out as a woman, she also stands out among the local and sustainable food movement. (An anthropologist recently pointed out that the local food movement “has been reticent to embrace hunting as an integral part of sustainable eating.”)
Full Story Here: We’ve Lost Nearly All of Our Wild Foods — What Happened? And What Are We Missing? | Food | AlterNet.
Can the Oceans Continue to Feed Us?
Washington – Far out on the Pacific Ocean, the world’s industrial fishing fleets pursue one of the last huge wild hunts — for the tuna eaten by millions of people around the world.
Yet tuna still aren’t fished sustainably, something that conservationists and big U.S. tuna companies are trying to fix. This illustrates one part of the pressure on the world’s oceans to feed a growing global population, now 7 billion. It also underscores the difficulties people have in balancing what they take against what must be left in order to have enough supplies of healthy wild fish.
“It’s serious. On a global basis, we’ve pretty much found all the fish we’re going to find,” said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at the advocacy group Oceana. “There’s not a lot of hidden fish out there. And we’re still heading in the wrong direction, taken as a whole.”
Full Story Here: Can the Oceans Continue to Feed Us? | Truthout.
Why Is the State Department Using Our Money to Pimp for Monsanto?
The State Department is using taxpayer money to help force genetically modified crops on other countries.
People in India are up in arms about eggplant. Not just any eggplant — the fight, which is also raging in the Philippines, is over Monsanto’s Bt eggplant. Even as increasing scientific evidence concludes that biotechnology and its arsenal of genetically modified crops may be doing more harm than good, companies like Monsanto are still pushing them hard and they are getting help from the U.S.
The State Department is using taxpayer money to help push the agenda of Monsanto and its friends all across the world. Here’s a recent example: Assistant Secretary of State Jose W. Fernandez, addressing an event of high-level government officials from around the world, agribusiness CEOs, leaders from international organizations, and anti-hunger groups said, “Without agricultural biotechnology, our world would look vastly different. One of our challenges is how to grow more crops on the same land. This is where biotechnology plays a role.”
Full Story Here: Why Is the State Department Using Our Money to Pimp for Monsanto? | Food | AlterNet.
There Is No Biological Reason to Eat Three Meals a Day — So Why Do We Do It?
For most of history, meals were very variable.
We grew up believing in three meals a day.
When we skip meals, eat extra meals or subvert paradigms — spaghetti breakfasts, pancake suppers — we feel naughty, edgy and criminal. “Three meals a day” resonates like a Bible phrase.
But it’s a cultural construct.
People around the world, even in the West, have not always eaten three squares. The three-meals model is a fairly recent convention, which is now being eclipsed as, like everything else, eating becomes a highly personalized matter of choice. What and when and how frequently we eat is driven less and less by the choices of our families, coworkers and others, and more and more by impulse, personal taste and favorite nutrition memes, and marketing schemes such as Taco Bell’s promotion of late-night eating known as “Fourthmeal: the Meal Between Dinner & Breakfast.” Selecting how and when we eat is like loading our iPods.
Full Story Here: There Is No Biological Reason to Eat Three Meals a Day — So Why Do We Do It? | Food | AlterNet.
Tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey floods into the U.S.
A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals. A Food Safety News investigation has documented that millions of pounds of honey banned as unsafe in dozens of countries are being imported and sold here in record quantities. …
Experts interviewed by Food Safety News say some of the largest and most long-established U.S. honey packers are knowingly buying mislabeled, transshipped or possibly altered honey so they can sell it cheaper than those companies who demand safety, quality and rigorously inspected honey.
This is a serious issue because China has a monumental problem with its honey industry. A bee epidemic in China several years ago led beekeepers there to use an antibiotic that the U.S. FDA has banned in food and that has been linked to DNA damage in children. And as FSN observes, though China has a state-of-the-art honey processing industry, its beekeeping has not kept up — resulting, for example, in some Chinese honey being contaminated with lead from the use of improper storage containers.
Full Story Here: Honey laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey floods into the U.S. | Grist.
Food price explosion ‘will devastate the world’s poor’
After a 40% rise in global prices over the past year, droughts and floods threaten to seriously damage this year’s harvest
Food prices will soar by as much as 30% over the next 10 years, the United Nations and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have predicted.
Angel Gurría, secretary-general of the OECD, said that any further increase in global food prices, which have risen by 40% over the past year, will have a “devastating” impact on the world’s poor and is likely to lead to political unrest, famine and starvation. “People are going to be forced either to eat less or find other sources of income.”
The joint UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and OECD report predicted that the cost of cereals is likely to increase by 20% and the price of meat, particularly chicken, may soar by up to 30%.
Full Story Here: Food price explosion ‘will devastate the world’s poor’ | Environment | The Guardian.
Climate shifts ‘hit global wheat yields’
Shifts in the climate over the past three decades have been linked to a 5.5% decline in global wheat production, a study has suggested.
A team of US scientists assessed the impact of changes to rainfall and temperature on four major food crops: wheat, rice, corn and soybeans.
Climate trends in some countries were big enough to wipe out gains from other factors, such as technology, they said.
The findings have been published in the online edition of the journal Science.
Full Story Here: BBC News – Climate shifts ‘hit global wheat yields’.
Food Safety Accountability Act Passes Senate
Last week, the senate passed a piece of legislation that would strengthen the nation’s food safety laws by imposing harsher punishments for companies or individuals that knowingly put tainted food products on the market.
With unanimous consent, members of the upper chamber approved the Food Safety Accountability Act of 2011.
The measure will make it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for any person or company that “knowingly endangers American lives by contaminating the food supply.” The crime is currently just a misdemeanor. Most of those who have been found to be in violation of food safety standards under the current law often do not face any jail time.
“Current statutes do not provide sufficient criminal sanctions for those who knowingly violate our food safety laws. Knowingly distributing adulterated food is already illegal, but it is merely a misdemeanor right now, and the Sentencing Commission has found that it generally does not result in jail time,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said on the senate floor.
Full Story Here: Food Safety Accountability Act Passes Senate | Economy In Crisis.
Foods That Might Be Causing Bad Breath
Many of us love some spice in our meals. Spicy food, curry, spices, hot sauce and other hot food can really add some pizazz to a meal (and your taste buds), but afterwards you may end up with a case of halitosis, heartburn and indigestion. Does that mean lay off the spicy foods all together? No! In fact, according to a recent article, there are dozens of spicy food challenges all over the United States.
This year at the Fiery Food Challenge Awards in Irving, Texas, a Tampa native took first place for her chipotle sauce (reports Tampa Bay Online). Her other entries that were awarded prizes include her Chai Chipotle Cocktail, Chai Chipotle Chup, Chai Curry Chup and Garlic Goodness hot sauce. How do spicy foods lead to bad breath? The immediate effect is that they leave a film of spices on the tongue whose odors are exhaled with every breath. An after-effect could be caused by capsaicin in peppers. Capsaicin is the chemical compound that gives spicy food its “hot” taste and feel.
Full Story Here: Dr. Harold Katz: Foods That Might Be Causing Bad Breath.
Garden as If Your Life Depends On It–Because It Will
The Future of Agriculture
By ELLEN LaCONTE
Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more expensive—or less food.
In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!
In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread—and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it— will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.
Full Story Here: Ellen LaConte: Garden as If Your Life Depends On It–Because It Will.
The Food Speculators
Capitalism and Hunger
By BORIS KAGARLITSKY
About one-sixth of the world’s population — 1 billion people — suffers from malnutrition. Stories about global hunger tend to get ignored by the media even though the number of hungry people has been increasing rapidly in recent years. This problem remains acute even as nations report renewed economic growth and as global food production remains stable.
Liberal economists love to claim that food shortages stem from ineffective state regulations. They argue that the liberalization of food markets is the surest way to achieve abundant food supplies. Alas, three decades of continuous economic liberalization have not led to an abundance of food, but to hunger on a scale never before seen in the history of mankind.
Of course, governments sometimes play a role in creating these problems, but the worst crop failures occur in free markets. Shortages of grain and other products only motivate businesspeople to indulge in profiteering. As prices skyrocket, profiteers — anticipating even higher prices — find it more advantageous to hold on to their goods than to sell them to consumers. And the longer a particular foodstuff can be stored, the faster the price for it soars.
Full Story Here: Boris Kagarlitsky: The Food Speculators.
Japan Finds More Types Of Radiation-Tainted Food
At a bustling Tokyo supermarket Sunday, wary shoppers avoided one particular bin of spinach.
The produce came from Ibaraki prefecture in the northeast, where radiation was found in spinach grown up to 75 miles (120 kilometers) from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Another bin of spinach – labeled as being from Chiba prefecture, west of Tokyo – was sold out.
“It’s a little hard to say this, but I won’t buy vegetables from Fukushima and that area,” said shopper Yukihiro Sato, 75.
Full Story Here: Japan Finds More Types Of Radiation-Tainted Food.
Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture
A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.
There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course — and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.
“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call “organic agriculture,” although important nuances separate the two terms.
Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources
Full Story Here: Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture | Food | AlterNet.
Eco-farming can double food output by poor: U.N.
Many farmers in developing nations can double food production within a decade by shifting to ecological agriculture from use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, a U.N. report showed on Tuesday.
Insect-trapping plants in Kenya and Bangladesh’s use of ducks to eat weeds in rice paddies are among examples of steps taken to increase food for a world population that the United Nations says will be 7 billion this year and 9 billion by 2050.
“Agriculture is at a crossroads,” according to the study by Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, in a drive to depress record food prices and avoid the costly oil-dependent model of industrial farming.
“Agroecology” could also make farms more resilient to the projected impact of climate change including floods, droughts and a rise in sea levels that the report said was already making fresh water near some coasts too salty for use in irrigation.
Full Story Here: Eco-farming can double food output by poor: U.N. | Reuters.
A World Going Hungry
In an era of mass consumption in the West, the developing world is entering its second major hunger crisis in three years, with new figures from the World Bank showing food price hikes have forced 44 million people into economic hardship since last June.
More than one billion people, a sixth of the world’s population, now face chronic hunger and the situation is likely to worsen this year, with experts such as David Nabarro, coordinator of the U.N. Secretary-General’s High- Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, warning food prices are on an “upward trend”.
“Somewhere in the region of two billion households are earning less than two dollars per day and spending somewhere around three quarters of their income on food,” Geneva-based Nabarro told reporters in New York via video-link on Friday.
Full Story Here: A World Going Hungry – IPS ipsnews.net.
World Bank : Rising food prices nearing danger point
World Bank president Robert Zoellick warned leaders of the top global economies Saturday that the world is reaching a danger point where soaring food prices threaten further political instability.
“I mentioned that we are reaching a danger point,” Zoellick said, adding that he had urged G20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs meeting here to “put food first in 2011.”
Zoellick said rising prices would eventually result in increased food supplies but in the intervening couple of years, “there could be an awful lot of turmoil and governments could fall and societies could go into turmoil.”
Full Story Here: Rising food prices nearing danger point: World Bank | The Raw Story.
How can we feed the world and still save the planet?
Underinvestment and market failures have trapped many countries in a vicious cycle of low productivity and exposure to price hikes, says Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food
Food has become subject to one of the sharpest global debates, with rising anxiety about how the world’s growing population is going to feed itself. Increasingly, Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, is establishing himself as one of its key protagonists with an unapologetically radical agenda.
In London this week to give evidence to a UK parliamentary working group on food and agriculture, he explained the challenge he is putting to the donors and the international community.
Chronic underinvestment in agriculture over the last 20 years combined with trade liberalisation has trapped many developing countries in a vicious cycle of low agricultural productivity and dependence on cheap food imports, he argues. The one exacerbates the other as local farmers struggle, and fail, to get a decent price for their produce in competition with imports, which have often benefited from government subsidies
Full Story Here: How can we feed the world and still save the planet? | Madeleine Bunting | Global development | guardian.co.uk.
Latest Food Crisis Brewing for Months
The United Nations, which is trying to reach out to nearly a billion undernourished people, some living in perpetual hunger, is anticipating another food crisis later this year.
And the signs of impending trouble have been there for some time.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned last week that world market prices for rice, wheat, sugar, barley and meat will remain high or register significant rises in 2011 – perhaps replicating the crisis of 2007-2008.
Rob Vos, director of development policy and analysis at the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), told IPS that higher food prices are already affecting many developing countries.
Full Story Here: Latest Food Crisis Brewing for Months – IPS ipsnews.net.
World food prices enter ‘danger territory’ to reach record high
UN food price index rises for sixth month in a row to highest since records began in 1990
Soaring prices of sugar, grain and oilseed drove world food prices to a record in December, surpassing the levels of 2008 when the cost of food sparked riots around the world, and prompting warnings of prices being in “danger territory”.
An index compiled monthly by the United Nations surpassed its previous monthly high – June 2008 – in December to reach the highest level since records began in 1990. Published by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the index tracks the prices of a basket of cereals, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar, and has risen for six consecutive months.
Abdolreza Abbassian, FAO economist, told the Guardian: “We are entering a danger territory.” But he stressed that the situation was not yet as bad as 2008.
Full Story Here: World food prices enter ‘danger territory’ to reach record high | Business | guardian.co.uk.
New Report Refutes Industry Argument that Genetically Modified Salmon will Feed Hungry World Populations
Food & Water Europe released a report today outlining why the genetically engineered (GE) salmon currently being considered by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval as a human food will not alleviate global hunger.
GE Salmon Will Not Feed the World outlines several reasons why this transgenic fish is likely to be more expensive to produce than perceived, as well as problematic for the environment, fishing communities and consumers. The report was released a day after Scottish MP Rob Gibson motioned to petition the Scottish Government to monitor the FDA’s approval process, noting that escapees are likely to occur through time and could easily reach the shores of Scotland, “altering forever the genetic integrity of wild Atlantic salmon and of quality Scottish farmed salmon.”
“The company producing this experimental fish, AquaBounty, is the only one who will be profiting from it, despite misleading claims that this product could be a means to feed growing populations around the world,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Europe.
Since GE salmon can require large amounts of food, display deformities and likely have higher oxygen demands, they can be costly to produce. These projected costs, combined with the various potential human health and ecological concerns associated with GE fish, will not likely add up to a more financially advantageous product for growers or consumers.
Does Your Food Contain Genetically Modified Organisms?
Okay, here’s your chance, with a new way for you to know that your food does not contain genetically modified organisms. The Non-GMO Project, a collection of top suppliers and advocates in the organic industry, and the only no-GMO certifier in North America, has kicked off a GM-free month.
Ruh-roh — October includes Halloween. Since half of the refined sugar in the US is genetically modified, coming from GM sugar beets, finding GM-free candy might be a little hard. Though GM beets are now illegal until further notice, what’s on the shelves today is most likely made from last year’s crops.
The NGP product page lets you see what’s already verified as being GMO-free and what’s under review. You could pass out candy bars made by:
Full Story: Does Your Food Contain Genetically Modified Organisms?.
Peak phosphorus still a threat to food security, despite new report
Researchers investigating a coming peak in world phosphorous production have urged caution on the revising up of estimates of reserves in a new report.
The long-awaited estimates of World Phosphate Reserves & Resources, recently released by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC), suggests the availability of more mega tonnes of phosphate rock in the ground than previously thought.
However, researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology, Sydney, who last year published the controversial peak phosphorus estimate (between 2030 and 2040) in the journal Global Environmental Change, warned that the inflated IFDC figures should be interpreted with great caution.
Full Story: Peak phosphorus still a threat to food security, despite new report | Energy Bulletin.
Chocolate That Cures Acne, Potato Chips That Lower Cholesterol — Here Come the Nutraceuticals to a Store Near You
The food industry sees huge dollar signs in erasing the border between medicine and meals.
Cinnamon is no longer just the spunky spice on cinnamon toast. Turmeric is no longer just the bitter yellow dust that colors curry.
These days, both are hailed as superpowered disease-fighting “nutraceuticals” — part nutrient, part pharmaceutical. Along with many other once-humble substances (think pomegranates, fish oil and flax seeds), they’re key ingredients in “functional foods,” which comprise a booming $30-billion-a-year industry bent on erasing the border between medicine and meals.
When is candy not candy? When are potato chips not potato chips? When are crisp salty discs and dark-chocolate balls not mere hedonistic treats? When they’re functional foods, in this case Corazonas chips and foil-wrapped Frutels — bought in hopes of lowering cholesterol and curing acne.
How Giant Food Corporations Are Giving Kickbacks to Schools to Get Their Products on Kids’ Trays
The reason why kids are served sugary cereals, Pop-Tarts, Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, and flavored milk that has nearly as much sugar as Coke or Mountain Dew.
D.C. Public Schools in the last two years have taken in more than $1 million in corporate rebates — referred to by some as “kickbacks” — paid by giant food manufacturers as an inducement to place their brands on kids’ cafeteria trays at school.
Documents I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that Chartwells, the company hired by D.C. Schools to provide food services at 122 schools across the city, through February of this year had declared $1,076,738 in rebates it received since its contract began in the fall of 2008. That represents 5 percent of the $18.7 million in purchases Chartwells billed the school system during that period. Under federal law, Chartwells is required to credit D.C. schools for any rebates it receives.
Food manufacturers use the rebates as an incentive to entice purchasing agents to buy certain products over others for school meals. Rebates sometimes are referred to as “kickbacks” because powerful food service companies such as Chartwells expect to receive them, much the way grocers expect manufacturers to pay to have their goods displayed prominently on supermarket shelves.
Full Story: How Giant Food Corporations Are Giving Kickbacks to Schools to Get Their Products on Kids’ Trays | Food | AlterNet.
Britain facing food crisis as world’s soil ‘vanishes in 60 years’
British farming soil could run out within 60 years, leading to a catastrophic food crisis and drastically higher prices for consumers, scientists warn.
Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.
Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.
An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”, the Carbon Farming conference heard.
Full Story: Britain facing food crisis as world’s soil ‘vanishes in 60 years’ – Telegraph.
Looks Great, Less Nutritious?
Mother Jones:
Eating all your vegetables was a lot better for you in the ’50s. Store-bought veggies weren’t as pretty back then, but according to USDA data, they were packed with a lot more nutrients than their modern counterparts. The likely reason for the nutritional drop is that hybrid crops are often bred for size and color, not nutrients. Below, the stats for a few crops that have gone to seed.
Full Story: Looks Great, Less Nutritious? | Mother Jones.
Genetically Altered Salmon Set to Move Closer to Your Table
The Food and Drug Administration is seriously considering whether to approve the first genetically engineered animal that people would eat — salmon that can grow at twice the normal rate.
The developer of the salmon has been trying to get approval for a decade. But the company now seems to have submitted most or all of the data the F.D.A. needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment, according to government and biotechnology industry officials. A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.
Some consumer and environmental groups are likely to raise objections to approval. Even within the F.D.A., there has been a debate about whether the salmon should be labeled as genetically engineered (genetically engineered crops are not labeled).
Full Story: Genetically Altered Salmon Set to Move Closer to Your Table – NYTimes.com.
Biologist: Ocean pollution ‘threatening the human food supply’
A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.
“These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean,” said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.
Full Story: Biologist: Ocean pollution ‘threatening the human food supply’ | Raw Story.
Over 50 Lawmakers ask USDA to deny Monsanto GMO alfalfa
* U.S. lawmakers call for continued ban on biotech alfalfa
* Say USDA has “ignored” regulatory authority
* Say U.S. organic dairy industry threatened
* Related sugarbeet court case delayed
(Releads, Adds details, delay in sugarbeet case, Monsanto comments)
KANSAS CITY, June 23 (Reuters) – More than 50 U.S. lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Agriculture Department to keep Monsanto’s biotech alfalfa out of farm fields, despite a Supreme Court ruling this week that cleared the way for limited planting pending environmental reviews.
The lawmakers said the biotech alfalfa presents too great a risk to conventional and organic agriculture to ever allow it.
“We believe that the broad regulatory authority available to you has been ignored, in order to justify deregulation of a biotech crop that has limited utility to anyone except the manufacturer,” the letter addressed to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack said.
Full Story: Over 50 Lawmakers ask USDA to deny Monsanto GMO alfalfa « Food Freedom.
35,000 pounds of beef recalled for E.coli fears
A Southern California meat distributor has recalled some 35,000 pounds of ground-beef that might be contaminated with E. coli.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service said late Tuesday that no illnesses have been reported from the bulk ground beef and ground beef patties sold by South Gate Meat Co.
The affected beef was produced between June 7 and June 21 and shipped to restaurants in and around Los Angeles.
Full Story: 35,000 pounds of beef recalled for E.coli fears – Food safety- msnbc.com.
Stop Global Food Security Act Promoting GMOs
Biotech corporations and mega-charities are promoting the GMO agenda as US foreign policy, and it must be stopped.
The GM clause to food security
The US Global Food Security Act of 2009 (S. 384) sponsored by Richard Lugar (Indiana, Republican), Robert Casey (Pennsylvania, Democrat) and seven other US Senators in February 2009 is [1, 2] “A bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2010 through 2014 to provide assistance to foreign countries to promote food security, to stimulate rural economies, and to improve emergency response to food crises, to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, and for other purposes.”
However, the proposed amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) of 1961 has proven controversial. It would “include research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified technology.”
The bill is supported by the US land grant colleges as well as InterAction (American Council for Voluntary International Action) and its 26 member organizations including WWF, Oxfam, Bread for the World CARE, Save the Children, and ONE [3]. The bill was passed through the Senate foreign Relations Committee on 31 March 2009, and the Senate is expected to vote on it soon in 2010.
Full Story: Stop Global Food Security Act Promoting GMOs « Wake-up Call.
USDA opens public comments on Monsanto’s H1-7 GM beet
No-GMO campaigns won victories recently in Bolivia, Luxembourg, and Japan (at least temporarily), while Bulgaria saw the introduction of a bill to clearly label all genetically modified products and to ban distribution of GM food to children. We’re not so lucky here in the States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has deregulated over 79 GM products – the most recent being a genetically engineered (GE) soybean line developed by Pioneer Hi-Bred International. Now, APHIS seeks public input on deregulating Monsanto’s GE sugar beet known as H1-7.
You know you have something to say. You have until June 28 to do so. At this link, you can read the Notice and submit a comment.
The USDA finds GE beets just fine and safe. It unscientifically refuses to acknowledge crop contamination, mass bee and butterfly die-off from pesticides, and an explosion in obesity, diabetes and food allergies in the US since the introduction of GE foods. When the government says “science-based,’ in plain speak that means profit-based. Some multinational corporation stands to make a fantastic fortune.
Full Story: USDA opens public comments on Monsanto’s H1-7 GM beet « Food Freedom.
Ag Department Cuts Ties with U.S. Food Inspector in China
An investigation of the company’s Chinese operation found at least 10 different facilities in which a conflict of interest was evident.
One of the top American inspectors of organic foods in China has been banned from operating there by the U.S. Agriculture Department after conflicts were discovered, The New York Times reports.
The Nebraska-based Organic Crop Improvement Association, a private contractor for the Agriculture Department, allegedly partnered with a Chinese government agency and used its officials to inspect state-controlled farms. The agents were given the ultimate decision on whether or not a food product would receive the USDA certified label that customers would eventually see in stores.
China, one of the largest exporters of agricultural products to the U.S. at $3 billion worth of goods a year, has 669 certified organic producers. OCIA was responsible for inspecting roughly one-third of those operations, according to The New York Times.
Full Story: Ag Department Cuts Ties with U.S. Food Inspector in China | Economy In Crisis.
No methyl iodide on our food
You may have heard that California, the nation’s largest agricultural producer, is on the verge of approving a potent carcinogenic gas for use on strawberry fields and other food crops. The chemical — methyl iodide — is so toxic that scientists in labs use only small amounts with special protective equipment, yet agricultural applications mean it could be released directly into the air and water.
CREDO members have been working hard to stop methyl iodide in California by submitting over 26,000 public comments in opposition to the state’s approval of the pesticide. But there are steps we can take nationally as well. The ultimate power to regulate pesticides lies with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It originally issued its approval of methyl iodide under George W. Bush’s administration but has the ability to revisit the decision at any time.
Methyl iodide has been subject to ongoing controversy in its approval process. The U.S. EPA approved methyl iodide for agricultural use in 2007, amid criticism from more than 50 prominent scientists[1] that the process was hidden from public view and the research focus was too limited. Even though a report from an independent panel of scientists in California’s review declared that “methyl iodide is a highly toxic chemical and we expect that any anticipated scenario for the agricultural or structural fumigation use of this agent would result in exposures to a large number of the public and thus would have a significant adverse impact on public health,”[2] the state nonetheless proposed that the chemical be approved.
Full Story: No methyl iodide on our food.
How an Ingredient Found in Everything from Chocolate to Chips Is Causing Massive Environmental Destruction
The production of palm oil, the common ingredient in an astounding number of products, is causing deforestation, global warming emissions and a loss of biodiversity.
The aisles of any American grocery store, whether it’s a big-box
behemoth or a cramped urban bodega, are filled with enough packaged
goods to satiate nearly every consumer demand and impulse. But behind
the neatly stocked shelves and cheery in-store commercials lurks a dirty
secret concerning the dramatic and harmful global impact of the
products we buy.
The common ingredient in an astounding number of
products — from laundry detergent and chips to soap, candy and makeup
– is palm oil. Grown primarily in Indonesia, palm farms are causing
alarming rates of deforestation and displacement of indigenous peoples,
and are posing a serious threat to local biodiversity. Far from a
localized problem, the consequences of palm oil production are
international in scope; according
to the World Bank, Indonesia is the third largest greenhouse gas
emitter in the world, with a whopping 80 percent of its emissions being
due to deforestation. And while six million hectares of land in the
country have already been converted to palm plantations, a fight is now
raging to protect the remaining forests, mainly on the islands of Borneo
and Sumatra.
How an Ingredient Found in Everything from Chocolate to Chips Is Causing Massive Environmental Destruction
The production of palm oil, the common ingredient in an astounding number of products, is causing deforestation, global warming emissions and a loss of biodiversity.
The aisles of any American grocery store, whether it’s a big-box behemoth or a cramped urban bodega, are filled with enough packaged goods to satiate nearly every consumer demand and impulse. But behind the neatly stocked shelves and cheery in-store commercials lurks a dirty secret concerning the dramatic and harmful global impact of the products we buy.
The common ingredient in an astounding number of products — from laundry detergent and chips to soap, candy and makeup — is palm oil. Grown primarily in Indonesia, palm farms are causing alarming rates of deforestation and displacement of indigenous peoples, and are posing a serious threat to local biodiversity. Far from a localized problem, the consequences of palm oil production are international in scope; according to the World Bank, Indonesia is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, with a whopping 80 percent of its emissions being due to deforestation. And while six million hectares of land in the country have already been converted to palm plantations, a fight is now raging to protect the remaining forests, mainly on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.
What You’re Eating Could Make or Break Our Planet — 7 Principles of a Climate-Friendly Diet
Click to buy it now
Anna Lappe talks about her new book “Diet for a Hot Planet” and explains how to change our diet so it becomes part of the solution, not the problem.
Anna Lappe’s new book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, may just be the most important book published this year. This past month, rising oceans buried New Moore Island, a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal that India and Bangladesh fought over for nearly 30 years. Closer to home, Massachusetts has suffered “two 50-year storms in the course of two or three weeks,” according to Governor Deval Patrick. That’s a reality check that the climate crisis has already caused tangible effects on our planet, with much more to come. Lappe’s book does not only expose how our current dominant methods of food production, processing, distribution and disposal significantly contribute to climate change; she also tells us how food production can actually mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil.
However, climate-friendly agriculture is a money-loser for currently powerful industries — agrochemicals, oil and meatpackers to name a few. Lappe debunks their spin, putting the lie to claims that people on earth would starve without Big Ag and factory farms. Instead she reveals the truth, based on well-documented science, on how agriculture can be part of the solution.
Full Story: What You’re Eating Could Make or Break Our Planet — 7 Principles of a Climate-Friendly Diet | Food | AlterNet.
Jamie Oliver Shows Kids What Goes Into A Chicken Nugget — Will They Still Eat It?
Jamie Oliver Food Revolution Premiere (VIDEO)
Jamie Oliver’s much anticipated show, ‘Food Revolution’ premiered on Friday, where he attempts to transform the eating habits of the residents of Huntington, West Virginia, the most unhealthy city in America. In this clip, Jamie shows kids how chicken nuggets are actually made with the goal of turning them away from processed foods. Watch their shocking reaction.
Full Story: Jamie Oliver Food Revolution Premiere (VIDEO).
Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food
Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.
Full Story: Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com.
Poop Is the Most Important Indicator of Your Health
Like it or not, our bowels are the ID cards of our bodies, charting our recent histories with terrifying accuracy. So, how do we ensure a healthy gut?
According to a lawsuit filed this month, Ron and Sarah Bowers bought their son a Subway sandwich in Lombard, Illinois on February 27. After eating it, he had agonizing cramps and diarrhea. According to the suit, what the couple really bought was a shit sandwich.
It had been contaminated with Shigella sonnei, a bacteria transmitted via the fecal-oral route and can cause vomiting, dysentery and death. Over 100 people claim to have been sickened at Lombard’s Subway, according to attorney Drew Falkenstein, whose firm has filed suit on behalf of Ron and Sarah Bowers and two other customers.
We don’t want to think about excrement. We don’t want to see it, smell it or touch it. We definitely don’t want to eat it with chicken teriyaki, on toast. Yet intestinal goings-on are in our faces everywhere these days, whether the news is about probiotics and prebiotics appearing in new food products or yet another outbreak of norovirus — the painful gastroenteritis that is spread via fecally contaminated food, water and surfaces and has sickened thousands of cruise-ship passengers in eight unprecedentedly massive outbreaks so far this year.
Full Story: Poop Is the Most Important Indicator of Your Health | Food | AlterNet.
How Safe is Food From China?
This year the Food and Drug Administration has already stopped 260 shipments of foods from China contaminated with bad pesticides, bacteria or filth
ABC investigates the quality and safety of organic foods imported from China, and how organic foods are tracked. This year the Food and Drug Administration has already stopped 260 shipments of foods from China contaminated with bad pesticides, bacteria or filth.
Full Story: How Safe is Food From China? | Economy In Crisis.
ALSO SEE:
China recycles cooking oil… from raw sewage
Lessons Learned from a Vegan Diet
Like just about everyone in America, I was hankering to go on a slimming detox diet after New Year’s. But based on previous experiences with just about every form of cleanse, I knew I wanted a food-based diet. Eliminating everything but organic, natural foods seemed like the clear choice. Mission: Eat exclusively vegan for a month.
This diet wasn’t all that new to me. I was raised vegan—yes, really—and have followed some version of a vegetarian diet for most of my life. But I had been a happy fish-and-poultry eater for a few years and just felt like I needed a break. I yearned for a “cleaner” diet; something that made me feel good rather than too-full after each meal.
The initial motivation of an internal cleanse quickly turned into a mission to experience responsible eating at its finest. Even though I’ve always been a conscious consumer—organic, free-range, pasteurized only, thanks, and NO, don’t you dare put it in a plastic bag!—as I researched vegan cuisine, I was reminded of the personal and political reasons why so many choose to eat this way all the time. Then I watched this “Oprah,” read these books and watched this movie. The mission was so go for launch.
Full Story: Lessons Learned from a Vegan Diet | Sirens Magazine.
Urban Harvesters Scavenge Backyards to Feed the Hungry
The idea is so simple: Trees produce more food than people can eat. Most of the fruit goes to waste. Get the food and donate it to those in need.
Randy Stannard issues a warning to first-time harvesters: Participate in a community fruit-gleaning event, and suddenly, fruit trees will seem to surround you. You’ll notice only the fruit trees in your neighborhood. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them, just waiting for their bounty to be picked. And you won’t feel content until every last edible piece of produce sits in your bucket.
Matt Jurach, a gung-ho harvester, knows this feeling well. Under a bright sun on a warm Saturday morning in February, he role-plays for the rest of the group, explaining how to best approach homeowners who, like his dad, might be protective of their fruit trees. Jurach has volunteered at five fruit-harvesting events in the past year and knows what he’s talking about.
“I’m such a sucker for efficiency,” Jurach explains later. “It kills me to see all the effort people put into a tree and it produces all this fruit, then it falls onto the ground and rots. It’s understandable, because we’re busy people. But when you have a group, we complete the last step.”
Full Story: Urban Harvesters Scavenge Backyards to Feed the Hungry | Food | AlterNet.
Is Goat the New Cow? Why American Foodies and Environmentalists Are Reviving the Old-World Staple
Goat is a great way for people to eat locally grown, humanely raised, tasty foods. And unlike the cattle industries, there aren’t any massive, industrialized goat farms.
It’s a Thursday evening and I am just leaving my little farmers’ market, which occupies a dog-leg corner of a typical Southern California strip mall. It is bounded by a wide boulevard filled with thousands of commuters whose red brake lights and white headlights transform the street into a candy-cane ribbon inching along at rush hour toward the nearby freeway. A man selling gourmet cheese from the side of his refrigerated truck has plenty of goat cheese, some herbed and others plain. All look freshly made and delicious. I’m preparing a meal for Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. The meal will follow Jewish dietary guidelines, known as kashrut.
The foundation of Jewish dietary laws is written in the Torah. It starts with goats, as it is written that one should not boil a baby goat (a kid) in its mother’s milk. From this statement, a complex and extensive food system evolved that prescribes how observant Jews eat. Although I continue to follow these dietary laws, I didn’t think about goats much until recently. A couple of thousand years after my ancestors initiated a goat-inspired religious food diet, I have joined with millions of other people worldwide, to prepare a meal with a goat product.
Full Story: Is Goat the New Cow? Why American Foodies and Environmentalists Are Reviving the Old-World Staple | Food | AlterNet.
The True Cost of Cheap Food
Cheap food causes hunger.
On its face, the statement makes no sense. If food is cheaper it’s more affordable and more people should be able to get an adequate diet. That is true for people who buy food, such as those living in cities. But it is quite obviously not true if you’re the one growing the food. You’re getting less for your crops, less for your work, less for your family to live on. That is as true for Vermont dairy farmers as it is for rice farmers in the Philippines. Dairy farmers today are getting prices for their milk that are well below their costs of production. They are putting less food on their own tables. And they are going out of business at an alarming rate. When the economic dust settles, this will leave us with fewer family farmers producing the dairy products most of us depend on.
This is the central contradiction of cheap food. Low agricultural prices cause hunger in the short term among farmers. And they cause food insecurity in the long term because they reduce both the number of farmers and the money they have to invest in producing more food.
An estimated 70% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend either directly or indirectly on agriculture. Cheap food has made them hungry and kept them in poverty. It has also starved the countryside in the developing world of much-needed agricultural investment. Farmers have nothing to invest if they are losing money on their crops.
Full Story: Resurgence • Article – The True Cost of Cheap Food.
7 Reasons Why You Should Grow Your Own Food
Not that being part of a trend is ever a good reason to start or learn something new, but if it helps you move forward by being part of the “in” crowd, then you really need to plant your own edible garden this year.
That’s right, having your own vegetable garden is now trendy. In fact according to the 2009 Edibles Gardening Trends Research Report conducted by the Garden Writer’s Association (GWA) Foundation, over 41 million U.S. households, or 38 percent planted a vegetable garden in 2009. And, more than 19.5 million households (18 percent) grew an herb garden and 16.5 million households (15 percent) grew fruits during the same period.
The study found that there was a growth in edible gardening from both experienced gardeners and from an influx of new gardeners: 92 percent of respondents had previous experience and 7 percent (7.7 million households) were new edible gardeners.
Full Story: 7 Reasons Why You Should Grow Your Own Food : Planet Green.
“Meat Glue”: EU’s Approval Of Food Additive ‘Thrombin’ Freaks Swedes Out
Swedish consumer groups and politicians are united in alarm over the approval of thrombin, known as “meat glue,” an animal-derived additive that processed food manufacturers can use to combine varying meat products into a single piece of “meat.” Thrombin is an enzyme comprised of a coagulation protein from pig or cow's blood and a fibrous protein called fibrin, but the head of the Swedish Consumer's Association Jan Bertoft calls it “meat make-up.”
The concern is that consumers will be misled to believe that a processed combined meat product is a single piece of meat, and not a “composite meat product,” as products with thrombin will be required to note. “The problem is that it looks like real meat. It is the dishonesty in it that makes us think that it is not okay,” Bertoft explained.
Full Story: “Meat Glue”: EU’s Approval Of Food Additive ‘Thrombin’ Freaks Swedes Out.
Bribes Let Tomato Vendor Sell Tainted Food
Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft’s plants.
The check would soon be in the mail, the broker promised. “We’ll have to deduct it out of your commissions as we move forward,” he said, using a euphemism for bribes.
Days later, federal agents descended on Kraft’s offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry. And because the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato products with high levels of mold or other defects, the case has raised serious questions about how well food manufacturers safeguard the quality of their ingredients.
Full Story: Bribes Let Tomato Vendor Sell Tainted Food | Business | TheLedger.com.
Are Priobiotics Really the Secret to Good Health (Or Just the Latest Crackpot Supplement Fad?)
Proponents claim probiotics can prevent asthma and cure irritable bowel syndrome, colic, yeast infections, acne — even autism. Have the claims of benefit gone too far?
For some Americans, the world’s happiest headline is “You may be entitled to cash.” Luckily for them, that sentence crowns a press release that went out this week which also includes the phrase “You could receive up to $100,” and describes “a $35,000,000 fund,” then boosts its cred with: “A federal court authorized this notice.”
And all because a California woman ate yogurt thinking it would regulate her digestion, but — according to the lawsuit she filed — it didn’t.
A statement released February 16 by the San Diego, California-based law firm Blood, Hurst & O’Reardon announced that the claim period has just opened in a class-action lawsuit against Dannon. Two years in the making, the suit claims the yogurt company “falsely advertised the health benefits of its Activia and DanActive branded products.”
Dannon, which promoted these yogurts as being probiotic and digestion-friendly, has pledged to refund every eligible claimant professing to have bought Activia or DanActive since these products were first introduced in 2006 and 2007. If so many forms are filed as to exhaust the initially-agreed-upon $35 million, the fund goes up another $10 million.
Full Story: Are Priobiotics Really the Secret to Good Health (Or Just the Latest Crackpot Supplement Fad?) | Food | AlterNet.
Does It Really Matter Whether Your Food Was Produced Locally?
Counting food miles can lead to wrong turns: Instead of worrying about how far our food has traveled we should look at the way it’s produced and hauled.
The local wits in Salina, Kansas, like to say the easiest way to for us “eat locally” around here is to heat up a Tony’s® frozen pizza. It’s not just that Tony’s has a large plant on the west side of town. Salina is also surrounded by wheat fields and is home to a large flour mill. Our local pizza, at least theoretically, could be assembled on a local crust.
But our hometown pizza can be considered local only if we ignore the many miles ingredients like tomato sauce, cheese, pork and beef travel to reach the plant. To that should be added the highway or rail miles logged by the cattle and hogs who gave their lives for the pizza; the distances that feed grains and soybean meal traveled to reach the feedlots, dairy farms and hog-confinement facilities where the animals were raised; the trips that tomatoes took to the sauce factory, and the miles that fertilizers and other inputs were hauled to reach the fields where the tomatoes were grown.
We eat lots of high-mileage meals. In 1997, the distance traveled by an average food item from its site of production to the average U.S. grocery store (counting only the delivery distance, not the transportation involved in production) was 980 miles. In the next few years, food imports shot up dramatically; as a result, by 2004, the average food item was traveling 1,230 miles.
Full Story: Does It Really Matter Whether Your Food Was Produced Locally? | Food | AlterNet.
America’s Priciest Steak Houses Still Serving Factory-Farmed Beef
Free range and grass fed at Morton’s, Ruth’s Chris and BLT Steak House? Sadly, that’s a tall order, one that appears too rare for the tastes of these popular dining destinations.
You have to wonder why when considering the health of loyal customers lapping up 10 ounces of beef in one sitting, washing down the seared flesh of a hormone-induced, antibiotic-injected feed lot animal with a glass of bold Cabernet.
Most of the high-priced U.S. haunts of meat connoisseurs cite several excuses for not making the shift to ethically raised, drug-free, grass-fed cattle, which scientists tell us are much healthier animals at market, and healthier food on our plates and in our bodies.
For Morton’s, the rationale in selling Midwest grain-fed prime is widespread availability and consistency of flavor. It’s the wonderful flavor, it says, which has famous athletes and businesspeople seeking out the ritzy restaurants in the towns they visit.
“We have to have a consistent product because we ship all over the world to 76 owned and operated steak houses,” explains Roger Drake, Chief Communications Officer. “Beef is 80 percent of what we sell and we have to have the availability. With organic I know you don’t always have that availability. ”
Full Story America’s Priciest Steak Houses Still Serving Factory-Farmed Beef | Food | AlterNet.
Should Animals Be Genetically Engineered So They Don’t Feel Pain?
The New York Times had a very interesting Op-Ed Friday, which took an unusual approach to the concern that factory farms are inhumane. Adam Shriver, a doctoral student in the philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at Washington University, makes the argument that the key to raising more humane meat isn’t changing the methods by which they are raised, but to genetically engineer them so they feel less pain from their conditions.
We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.
Full Story Should Animals Be Genetically Engineered So They Don’t Feel Pain?.
Good On Target: Retailer Bans Farm-Raised Salmon
It’s hard to overstate the case against farm-raised seafood, so we applaud Target’s recent decision to stop selling factory-fished salmon in its stores. The mass merchandiser has already, “eliminated all farmed salmon from its fresh, frozen and smoked seafood sections at stores nationwide,” replacing it with wild-caught Alaskan fish. By the end of the year, all Target-sold sushi will follow suit.
If you’re wondering what’s wrong with “aquaculture,” here’s a short list, courtesy of the Pure Salmon Campaign. Almost all these problems apply to farm-raised trout, catfish, tilapia, shrimp, etc. as well.
Full Story » Good On Target: Retailer Bans Farm-Raised Salmon » Pensito Review.
Hunger Report 2010
The report shows that hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States, and our network is expanding its reach in response:
* Feeding America is annually providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million children. This is an increase of 46 percent over 2006, when we were feeding 25 million Americans, including 9 million children, each year.
* That means one in eight Americans now rely on Feeding America for food and groceries.
* Feeding America's nationwide network of food banks is feeding 1 million more Americans each week than we did in 2006.
* Thirty-six percent of the households we serve have at least one person working.
* More than one-third of client households report having to choose between food and other basic necessities, such as rent, utilities and medical care.
* The number of children the Feeding America network serves has increased by 50 percent since 2006.
Full Story Hunger Report 2010.
Is Genetically Modified Corn Toxic?
In the United States, we grow and eat corn whose genes have been tweaked to make the plants more resistant to pests and pesticides. Most European countries don’t, largely because the citizenry fears it isn’t safe. But try as scientists might, they haven’t been able to find any good reason why we shouldn’t eat genetically modified (GM) food.
Until now. Maybe. A new analysis of data released by Monsanto pried from Monsanto’s lawyers’ cold dead hands by a tag-team of legal experts at Greenpeace and other groups suggests there may be something to the idea that we shouldn’t be eating maize that’s had its DNA messed with.
The study found that three strains of modded crops — MON 810 and MON 863, which are resistant to pests, and NK 603, which is foritified to withstand weed killer — significantly disrupted the blood chemistry of rats who ate them. According to an article in New Scientist:
With each of the three strains of maize, researchers say they found unusual concentrations of hormones and other compounds in the blood and urine of the tested rats, suggesting each strain impaired kidney and liver function. By the end of the trials, the female rats that were fed MON 863 had elevated blood-sugar levels and raised concentrations of fatty substances called triglycerides. Both are potential precursors of diabetes, according to [lead author Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen in France].
Full Story Is Genetically Modified Corn Toxic? : Discovery News.
High energy biscuits get mixed reviews in Haiti’s Cite Soleil slum
A gentle breeze blew discarded U.N. biscuit wrappings jerkily across the dust in this makeshift camp in the Haitian capital's most notorious slum.
Each gust threatened to topple the shelters of sticks and sheets that are now home to around 100 families left shelterless by the earthquake.
“We want any help we can find,” said Rosemand Bolivar, a grandmother who shares a patch of dirt beneath a faded pink bed sheet with her son, his wife and their three children.
Full Story Reuters AlertNet – High energy biscuits get mixed reviews in Haiti’s Cite Soleil slum.
OPS: more experimenting on whole populations?
Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People?
Sometime around 2050, there are going to be nine billion people roaming this planet—two billion more than there are today. It’s a safe bet that all those folks will want to eat. And that’s… an incredibly daunting prospect. Right now, an estimated one billion people go hungry each day. So add two billion more people, a limited supply of arable land, plus the fact that rising incomes will boost demand for meat and dairy products, plus the fact that many key natural resources (fisheries, say) are already being overexploited… and it’s hard to see the situation getting better. And that’s before we get into the fact that the planet’s heating up, which is expected to wreak havoc on agricultural yields.
Still, not everyone’s convinced that feeding nine billion people—and doing it in a sustainable fashion—is a totally impossible task. A new paper published this week in Science, written by Britain’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington along with nine other experts, outlines a way this could actually be done. The catch? Doing so would require “radical” changes to the current global food system. The paper’s a great synthesis of a wide range of different food issues, and I’ll just pull out the main ideas:
Boosting crop yields: If the supply of farmland is ultimately finite, then boosting yields is the only way we’ll get more food. Now, this subject usually gets tangled up in heated debates about the virtues or evils of genetically modified foods—and the study authors do recommend GM crops as a “potentially valuable technology” that “should neither be privileged nor automatically dismissed.” (Imagining that fancy technology will just solve all these food problems, though, is likely misguided.) But there are plenty of smaller, more mundane yield-boosting approaches, too—right now, there are plenty of small farmers in the developing world that could get more out of their land right now with better training or access to financing. (This is known as the “yield gap.”)
Full Story Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People? | The New Republic.
The tiny, squiggly dividing line between safe and unsafe food
For those who want to know what the big deal is about raw milk, in two words it’s good bacteria, killed off by pasteurization. People drink raw milk because they seek good bacteria. (Raw milk dairies are tested for diseases so this issue should not be confused with diseases.)
For those who are curious about raw milk, you might find this video delightful, and a good place to begin dispelling false assumptions. http://www.moojesus.com/
While people have been taught to believe bacteria is dangerous and so drinking milk with live bacteria in it would be risky, they are not distinguishing between good and bad bacteria and most importantly, not understanding that their own life depends on bacteria which make up 70-80% of their immune system.
Yet many continue to erroneously believe that route to safe food is through sterilizing it.
Full Story The tiny, squiggly dividing line between safe and unsafe food « Food Freedom.
Who Knows Where It’s Been? Me Vida Local II
Not all of them are bad, a few of them are actually a good deal, but in most cases you get what you pay for.
Alternet has an investigation and review of the food selections at the dollar stores. You know, the off brands.
Distributed foods and beverages hailing from unregulated countries abound in dollar stores. Royal Dansk Danish-style butter cookies for $1.29 are made in Indonesia and distributed by a company in Melville, New York. House Mill Honey Rings are produced in Argentina and distributed by outlets in Puerto Rico, Libya and Senegal. Pickles bottled in Turkey are marketed under the Italian name Forelli and distributed by Allied International Corporation, based in Virginia.
Not all of them are bad, a few of them are actually a good deal, but in most cases you get what you pay for.
Of course, the more expensive markets sell lots of foods that seem to be what they’re not. Everything is natural now, like nature intended. Chickens that gladly gave their lives. Potato chips the way they were meant to be. I don’t know if this is Deism, or Theism, or the cosmic recipe book of the Goddess. Maybe I think too much.
Continuing ‘Me Vida Local’, Mangiarelli’s Fruitlands in North Providence has good prices and seasonal produce. I make a kind of pie puttanesca, which is just that I cut up some marked-down fruit and bake it in a frozen pie crust.
Full Story Who Knows Where It’s Been? Me Vida Local II « Kmareka.com.
Dollar Stores: The Last, and Not So Healthy Eating Choice, Before the Food Lines
Dollar stores may be places to nab a bargain but for many they are the only place to buy food — the rock-bottom of the food chain, the last stop before the food pantry.
Dollar stores have proliferated like algae on a pool of stagflation. The 50-year-old Family Dollar chain marked the opening of its 500th store in 1982. By 2004 there were 5,000 Family Dollar outlets throughout America. In a statement for an article published that year in the Baltimore Daily Record, Retail Forward called dollar stores the “hottest and highest growth sectors of retailing.” Currently nearly 20,000 dollar stores of every variety dot the landscape. Just last week, the Family Dollar (which has grown by 1,665 outlets in the past six years) reported a 13 percent increase in its stock.
You can find almost any common household item in dollar stores: flimsy but colorful wrapping paper and Christmas decorations, novelty cosmetics and overstock cleaning agents, exotic knick-knacks and discontinued toys. Shoppers from all walks of life are drawn to these places: some to relax, some to stumble upon a bargain, others to cut a few strategic corners that will enable them to splash out on luxuries elsewhere. But a growing number of people shop at dollar stores because they can’t afford to shop anywhere else — and one of the things they really can’t afford is food.
Full Story Dollar Stores: The Last, and Not So Healthy Eating Choice, Before the Food Lines | Food | AlterNet.
Rage Against the Vegetable Garden: Factory Farming Manifesto Sets Sights on the Edible Schoolyard Program
My father often tells a story of a chicken dinner he once prepared that involved a “whole fryer.” I toddled into the kitchen, perhaps curious as to what Da-da was doing in there. He held the bird that would become our dinner up for to his little daughter to see: pimply skin, strange flipper-looking things and all.
“It looks like a little person!” I cried.
My father was taken aback. Looking down at this shocked little person standing in his kitchen, he wondered how it could be that for every time he had served his little girl fowl, she never realized that it came from the same type of entity depicted as Chicken Little and Foghorn Leghorn.
The thing was, we lived in the city. And though my father's parents had experience farming, my own knowledge of such a place was limited to books and the occasional public school field trip. Sure, trips to historic Gibbs Museum of Pioneer and Dakotah Life in St. Paul, MN were cool, but the experience gave us kids the impression that a “farm” was a relic of the past, an inefficient, hardscrabble life we were all happy to abandon.
Is this the end of food as we know it?
A new film paints an apocalyptic picture of a world reduced to tinned goods. But could it ever happen here, asks Bee Wilson
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, (the film of which is out this weekend), the only food left is in cans. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a father and son scavenge for tinned goods. “Chili, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. The richness of a vanished world.”
Is this a vision of our not-too-distant future? Will we soon be stockpiling canned mandarin segments and clawing one another’s eyes out for the last tin of powdered milk in Tesco? It’s not a nice thought, but it’s one that food campaigners have been begging us to face up to for some time now. In this uncertain world, we can no longer take our food supply for granted. For years, academics such as Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, gave warning that we were “sleepwalking” into a future where our food security was likely to be seriously undermined, whether by natural disasters, rising fuel costs, climate change or the massive pressures placed on the global food system by a rising population. We shrugged it off, setting off in our cars for another wasteful trolley of ready-meals.
Full Story Is this the end of food as we know it? – Telegraph.
The Year Food Was Totally Schizoid: Growing Local Takes Off, As Giant Agribiz Becomes More Dominant
In the battle between Big Ag and Small Food there were notable victories on either side.
As 2009 closes out, the dominant issues in the world of food could be lumped into two competing paradigms that have framed much of the decade. In one corner we have Big Food: factory farms, fast food restaurants, mystery meat, biotechnology and other examples of when the economics of scale are applied to how we feed ourselves. In the other corner is Small Food, whose players include farmers’ markets, ecology-based agriculture and seasonal diets of minimally processed food.
In a victory for small food, 2009 will perhaps be remembered as the year gardening returned to mainstream consciousness. Much credit goes to First Lady Michelle Obama, thanks to the organic veggie patch she planted on the White House lawn. The symbolic gesture created an instant buzz, and many other politicos around the world have followed suit. There are now gardens on the grounds of city halls, governors’ mansions, and other houses of leadership around the world, providing countless opportunities to educate and discuss why gardens are good.
According to the National Gardening Association the number of households with gardens rose from 36 million in 2008 to 43 million in 2009. Michelle Obama’s garden certainly deserves some credit, but so does the recession, which inspired many people to stick their hands in the dirt, not only to save on grocery bills, but to find economical ways to enjoy their leisure time.
The “Slow Money” Movement May Revolutionize the Way You Think About Food
In an economy structured around industrial agriculture, sustaining small farms can be a challenge. ‘Slow money’ economics could be the answer.
The slow food movement that started in Italy two decades ago has gained much attention and popularity, with a blossoming of community supported agriculture (CSA), local organic farms and general awareness of where our food comes from. But money doesn’t grow on trees, and in an economy structured around industrial-scale global agriculture, starting and sustaining small farms and local, sustainable food processing and delivery systems can be a challenge.
About five years ago, veteran financial manager Woody Tasch and his colleagues at the Investors’ Circle began discussing how an intentional and organized influx of investment into localized sustainable food systems could be paired with a general increasing philosophical commitment to slow food principles.
The result is the Slow Money movement, shepherded by the Slow Money Alliance, of which Tasch is executive director. Now 750 members, including individual investors and sustainable farms and food-related businesses, are members of the alliance, and 450 people attended a Slow Money conference in Santa Fe in September.
Full Story The “Slow Money” Movement May Revolutionize the Way You Think About Food | Health and Wellness | AlterNet.
GRAIN publications back call for action on agriculture to address climate change
On December 15th, La Via Campesina and a number of other groups will be leading a day of action in Copenhagen to put agriculture front and centre in the discussions over climate change. Although the official Convention is sure to disappoint, these groups will be carrying a message of hope. What they want the world to know is that, in their on-going struggle for food sovereignty, there is a way out of the climate crisis.
GRAIN couldn’t agree more. Today’s global food system needs an overhaul. According to our calculations, the expansion of the industrial food system is the leading cause of climate change. Through its reliance on fossil fuels, massive exports, market concentration, erosion of soils and expansion of plantations, it generates 44-57% of the total global green house gas (GHG) emissions. This industrial food system is also completely incapable of assuring people’s food and livelihood needs as the world moves further into climate change. Already it has left a billion people without enough food to eat, and hundreds of millions of more people will go hungry in the coming years if the food system is not reorganised.
The most devastating consequence of this industrial food system, however, is that it is destroying other food systems that can turn climate change around and provide for the world’s food needs.
Full Story GRAIN | Other GRAIN publications and collaborations | 2009 | Climate crisis – Copenhagen -.
The War on Soy: Why the ‘Miracle Food’ May Be a Health Risk and Environmental Nightmare
Vegetarians aren’t the only ones who should be concerned; there’s soy in just about everything you eat these days — including hamburgers, mac ‘n cheese and salad dressing.
These days, you can get soy versions of just about any meat — from hot dogs to buffalo wings. If you’re lactose-intolerant you can still enjoy soy ice-cream and soy milk on your cereal. If you’re out for a hike and need a quick boost of energy, you can nibble on soy candy bars.
Soy is a lucrative industry. According to Soyfoods Association of North America, from 1992 to 2008, sales of soy foods have increased from $300 million to $4 billion. From sales numbers to medical endorsements, it would seem that soy has reached a kind of miracle food status.
In 2000 the American Heart Association gave soy the thumbs up and the FDA proclaimed: “Diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol that include 25 grams of soy protein a day may reduce the risk of heart disease.” Over the course of the last decade medical professionals have touted its benefits in fighting not just cardiovascular disease, but cancers, osteoporosis and diabetes.
But soy’s glory days may be coming to an end. New research is questioning its health benefits and even pointing out some potential risks. Although definitive evidence may be many years down the road, the American Heart Association has quietly withdrawn its support. And some groups are waging an all-out war, warning that soy can lead to certain kinds of cancers, lowered testosterone levels, and early-onset puberty in girls.
Full Story The War on Soy: Why the ‘Miracle Food’ May Be a Health Risk and Environmental Nightmare | Water | AlterNet.
If Nothing Else, Save Farming
Modern Life Is Probably Screwed by Peak Oil, But It’s Not Too Late to Avoid Mass Starvation. The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.
By George Monbiot
It’s probably too late to prepare for peak oil, but we can at least try to salvage food production.
I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets(1). Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible(2). The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.
Full Story Monbiot.com » If Nothing Else, Save Farming.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’ Book Will Fundamentally Change the Way You Think About Food
“He is the Michael Pollan of a younger generation: grittier and more daring, more insightful and decisive.”
If ever there was a book that could profoundly affect our lives at the most fundamental level, this one is it. I loved Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels (Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close); they were glorious to read and get lost in. But his new non-fiction kindles something more: it is somewhat of an awakening, and it just might tip us farther into what is being called the next great social movement of our time: eating consciously.
Eating Animals takes a bold and fresh approach to our most important relationship with the world around us — our food. The originality of the thinking and depth of research establishes Foer as a major player in the national discussion of the ethics of eating. He is the Michael Pollan of a younger generation: grittier and more daring, more insightful and decisive. And as we would expect from Foer, the stories he tells explode off the page and into our hearts.
Foer takes us alongside him as he bungles through undercover investigations and into the hidden world of today’s industrial farming. We find out that turkeys have been so genetically modified they are not capable of sexual reproduction. We learn that the chickens on American’s plates have been bred to grow so large so fast that their mere genetics destines them to suffering. We learn that “free range” means next to nothing and why it’s fish and chicken you want to most avoid.
We Can’t Reform Health Care without Reforming Food
If and when health care reform finally passes, we will have successfully ameliorated only half of the crisis. The treatment half. The next step has to be focused upon doing something about the poisoned filth we’ve collectively nicknamed “food.” Without any real changes in how our food is produced, the health care system will continue to bloat and fall apart. Not unlike the insides of an average American body.
Corporate agribusiness has invested nearly $1.2 billion (and growing) on lobbyists — more money than even the defense lobby. Naturally, much of this lobbying has been aimed at deregulating how food is processed and manufactured, as well as how corporate agribusinesses raise and process livestock. It’s an industry that’s entangled in everything from Big Tobacco to human trafficking and illegal immigration.
Most recently, and speaking of poisoned filth, you may have watched as Rick Berman was eviscerated by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC a few weeks ago. In case you missed it, Berman’s Center for Consumer Freedom is financed by corporate agribusiness, among others, and tasked with deceiving the public about everything from high fructose corn syrup to transfat, mercury levels in fish, obesity issues, food labels, and tobacco laws. CCF is all about confusing the public by muddying scientific fact and skewing the debate onto ridiculous tangents to the point where it’s difficult to tell the difference between what’s healthy and what’s crap. It’s Glenn Beck’s rodeo clown strategy applied to food.
Full Story Bob Cesca: We Can’t Reform Health Care without Reforming Food.
CLIMATE CHANGE: Food Supply Hangs in the Balance
- IPS ipsnews.net – Rocketing food prices and hundreds of millions more starving people will be part of humanity’s grim future without concerted action on climate change and new investments in agriculture, experts reported this week.
The current devastating drought in East Africa, where millions of people are on the brink of starvation, is a window on our future, suggests a new study looking at the impacts of climate change.
“Twenty-five million more children will be malnourished in 2050 due to effects of climate change,” such as decreased crop yields, crop failures and higher food prices, concluded the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) study.
“Of all human economic activities, agriculture is by far the most vulnerable to climate change,” warned the report’s author, Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist with IFPRI, a Washington-based group focused on global hunger and poverty issues.
The report, “Quantifying the Costs of Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change”, may be the “most comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate change on agriculture to date”, as IFPRI claims, but researchers concede that there is no current way to quantify all of the future repercussions of changing weather patterns on the food supply
Full Story: CLIMATE CHANGE: Food Supply Hangs in the Balance – IPS ipsnews.net.
GAO audit: Schools slow to get alerts about tainted food
- USATODAY.com - Federal agencies that supply food for 31 million schoolchildren fail to ensure that tainted products are pulled quickly from cafeterias, a federal audit obtained by USA TODAY finds.
The delays raise the risk of children being sickened by contaminated food, according to the audit by Congress’ Government Accountability Office.
In recent recalls, including one this year in which salmonella-infected peanut butter sickened almost 700 people, the government failed to disseminate “timely and complete notification about suspect food products provided to schools through the federal commodities program,” the audit says.
Such alerts sometimes took more than a week to reach schools, “during which time (schools) unknowingly served affected products.”
Full Story: GAO audit: Schools slow to get alerts about tainted food – USATODAY.com.
Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us
Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us - Truthdig – Reports -
By Chris Hedges
Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.
The effects of climate change, especially with widespread droughts in Australia, Africa, California and the Midwest, coupled with the rising cost of fossil fuels, have already blighted the environments of millions. The poor can often no longer afford a balanced diet. Global food prices increased an average of 43 percent since 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund. These increases have been horrific for the approximately 1 billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—who subsist on less than $1 per day. And 162 million of these people survive on less than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as much as 60 percent of their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
via Truthdig – Reports – Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us.
Living Without Abundant Tomatoes
Living Without Abundant Tomatoes - - NYTimes.com 
(Do not miss the chef Peter Hoffman’s concluding point about organic versus . . . not. –MB)
Customers keep going into Applewood, a restaurant in Park Slope, and asking for a tomato martini. The drink, made with onion-infused vodka, muddled tomatoes, basil and olive juice, has always been a summer favorite. But not this year. There just aren’t enough good tomatoes, said chef and co-owner David Shea.
This season, locally grown tomatoes have been hit with late blight, the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 19th century. The contagious fungus has killed tomatoes across the Northeast, yielding almost no organic tomatoes and conventional ones of lesser quality. And as tomatoes have become less available, chefs have been forced to come up with new and creative ways to deal with their loss.
Mr. Shea is taking advantage of the summer’s plentiful peach harvest, and entreating his customers to try a peach-rosemary smash, made with rosemary-infused bourbon, fresh peach syrup, lime juice and Patron Citronge.
via Living Without Abundant Tomatoes – Bitten Blog – NYTimes.com.
Food crisis could force wartime rations and vegetarian diet on Britons
Food crisis could force wartime rations and vegetarian diet on Britons-- Times Online
The British people face wartime rations and a vegetarian diet in the event of a world food shortage, a new official assessment on the UK’s food security suggests today.
Even though the nation is 73 per cent self-sufficient in food production, higher than during the 1950s, the food chain is at risk from global influences such as a worldwide increase in population, climate change bringing extreme weather patterns, higher oil prices and more crops being grown for bio-fuel instead of food.
Supplies in future may also be disrupted by animal disease outbreaks, disruption of power supplies, trade disputes and interruptions for shipping and at ports.
The UK however has one of the highest cereal production capabilities in the world with seven tonnes grown per hectare, compared a world average of 3.3 tonnes per hectare.
via Food crisis could force wartime rations and vegetarian diet on Britons – Times Online.
On Tiny Plots, a New Generation of Farmers Emerges
On Tiny Plots, a New Generation of Farmers Emerges | CommonDreams.org
ROCHESTER, Wash. – Joseph Gabiou walks the fields of Wobbly Cart Farm with a practiced eye. He kicks dirt into place to keep the wind from blowing the protective covering off a row of organic broccoli. The seedlings are vulnerable to the flea beetles that came in the spring, just as longtime farmers in this valley told him they would.
To a new farmer, that’s crucial information. The farm, started five years ago, is young. But so is the 33-year-old Gabiou at a time when the average age of the American farmer is 57, according to the Department of Agriculture. The 2007 agriculture census found that more than one-quarter of all farmers are 65 or older.
Wobbly Cart is also tiny, just 6 acres. Nationwide, the average farm is 449 acres.
But Gabiou and business partner Asha McElfresh, 32, differ from typical farmers in another way. Wobbly Cart, say agriculture specialists, is part of a movement in which young people – most of whom come from cities and suburbs – are taking up what may be the world’s oldest profession: organic farming
via On Tiny Plots, a New Generation of Farmers Emerges | CommonDreams.org.
Government Tightening Food Safety Standards
Government Tightening Food Safety Standards
New food safety standards for eggs, meat, vegetables being adopted by Obama administration
A food safety panel established by President Barack Obama developed the new rules for eggs, poultry, beef, leafy greens, melons and tomatoes as well as for better coordination and communication among the agencies overseeing the nation’s food supply.
The panel was to announce Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department would adopt the standards, which follow a string of breakdowns in food safety.
Earlier this year a massive salmonella outbreak in peanut products sickened hundreds, was suspected of causing nine deaths and led to one of the largest product recalls in U.S. history. In the past month, Nestle Toll House cookie dough and 380,000 pounds of beef produced by the JBS Swift Beef Co. of Greeley, Colo., have been recalled due to connections with outbreaks of E. coli.
via Government Tightening Food Safety Standards – ABC News.
Congress Finally Gets Tough on Food Safety
Congress Finally Gets Tough on Food Safety
Every few months, it seems, a new food-contamination scandal grips the nation, playing out in the same troubling way. Someone dies of a food-borne infection with a scary Latin name. The government recalls a dinner-table staple and traces its contamination to dirty irrigation water or a processing plant. Everything returns to normal until the next case of killer spinach or poisoned peanuts stalks the nation.
Despite the toll – 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations a year – Congress has typically been unwilling to strengthen controls on the growing, manufacturing and handling of food in the face of powerful industry resistance. But as profits and consumer confidence have plummeted with each new outbreak, the political climate has changed – so much so that earlier this week, a House panel reached unusual bipartisan consensus on the most sweeping reform of the food-safety system in at least 50 years.
The bill gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broad new powers to regulate produce at the farm level and review corporate records on activities ranging from food-processing to pathogen-testing. Inspections that now occur an average of once every 10 years would take place as often as once every six months for certain items. Foreign governments whose companies send high-risk products to the U.S., like seafood from China, would be required to certify that those exports comply with U.S. health standards. (See pictures of urban farms.)
via Congress Finally Gets Tough on Food Safety – Yahoo! News.
Film aims to expose dangers in U.S. food industry
Film aims to expose dangers in U.S. food industry
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Bigger-breasted chickens fattened artificially. New strains of deadly E. coli bacteria. A food supply controlled by a handful of corporations.
The documentary “Food, Inc.” opens in the United States on Friday and portrays these purported dangers and changes in the U.S. food industry, asserting harmful effects on public health, the environment, and worker and animal rights.
Big corporations such as biotech food producer Monsanto Co., U.S. meat companies Tyson Food Inc. and Smithfield Foods, and poultry producer Perdue Farms all declined to be interviewed for the film.
But the industry has not stood silent. Trade associations across the $142-billion-a-year U.S. meat industry have banded together to counter the claims. Led by the American Meat Institute, they have created a number of websites, including one called SafeFoodInc.com.
“Each sector of the industry that’s named is doing its part to counter a lot of the misinformation in the movie,” said Lisa Katic, a dietitian and consultant with an unnamed coalition of trade associations representing the food industry.
via Film aims to expose dangers in U.S. food industry | Health | Reuters.
Film Aims to Expose Dangers in US Food Industry
Film Aims to Expose Dangers in US Food Industry
NEW YORK – Bigger-breasted chickens fattened artificially. New strains of deadly E. coli bacteria. A food supply controlled by a handful of corporations.
The documentary “Food, Inc.” opens in the United States on Friday and portrays these purported dangers and changes in the U.S. food industry, asserting harmful effects on public health, the environment, and worker and animal rights.
Big corporations such as biotech food producer Monsanto Co., U.S. meat companies Tyson Food Inc. and Smithfield Foods, and poultry producer Perdue Farms all declined to be interviewed for the film.
But the industry has not stood silent. Trade associations across the $142-billion-a-year U.S. meat industry have banded together to counter the claims. Led by the American Meat Institute, they have created a number of websites, including one called SafeFoodInc.com.
“Each sector of the industry that’s named is doing its part to counter a lot of the misinformation in the movie,” said Lisa Katic, a dietitian and consultant with an unnamed coalition of trade associations representing the food industry.
via Film Aims to Expose Dangers in US Food Industry | CommonDreams.org.
The Politics of Food
The Politics of Food - VIDEO | CommonDreams.org
From industrial agriculture and human health to the recession’s impact on the way we eat, food and politics are not easily separated. In fact they never have been. As lines at food banks swell and restaurants close their doors what control do we have over the food we eat?
Peter Hoffman, chef and owner of Savoy Restaurant and Back Forty, Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and Marja Samsom, chef and owner of the Kitchen Club on why eating local matters, the global food system, and the hidden costs of cheap food.
via The Politics of Food | CommonDreams.org.
Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety
Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety - NYTimes.com
The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.
The pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a “kill step,” to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.
So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”
Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.
via Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety – NYTimes.com.
“Omnivore’s Dilemma” : “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
Democracy NOW: Video – Audio – Transcript – MP3 Download
“The real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.”
“Omnivore’s Dilemma” Author Michael Pollan’s New Advice on Buying Food: “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
Michael Pollan is one of the nation’s leading writers and thinkers in this country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In light of what he calls the processed food industry’s co-option of “sustainability” and its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food that’s advertised.
Americans are planting seeds of hope in recession gardens
Americans are planting seeds of hope in recession gardens
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Formerly plagued by crime, the Highland Gardens community in Hollywood, Florida, has planted 19 gardens in a large city-owned lot. The city gave the community permission to use the lot for gardening because no construction has been scheduled since a $20 million contract for a workforce-housing project fell through in this difficult economy. Fruits, vegetables, and flowers now grow where trash and bullet casings used to be strewn on the ground.
Maria Jackson is credited with coming up with the gardening idea, which has been heralded by area residents as the most positive thing to happen to the neighborhood in decades. Jackson said, “We’re hoping that we’re going to have a big salad party soon.”
The success of the Hollywood garden is mirrored by the success of First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House Kitchen Garden, as well as “recession gardens” that are sprouting up nationwide. The leading American seed store has seen a 25-30% jump in seed and plant sales this year, prompting the CEO to marvel, “I’ve been in the business for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it — even remotely like it.”
via Miami Interfaith Spirituality Examiner: Americans are planting seeds of hope in recession gardens.
5 Reasons You Should Pick-Your-Own This Summer
5 Reasons You Should Pick-Your-Own This Summer
Summer is getting closer, and the days of fresh vegetables and local harvests are near. But this doesn’t mean only those with farms and gardens should feel the amazingness of picking their own crops. You may recall a moment last year when your friend asked, “Are those your blueberries?” when you brought pie to the potluck.
“Uh, no,” you may have replied, “Ummm. Yeah. No. Umm. Zabars.” Well, this summer is different. This summer you can say, “Yes. Those are my blueberries. I picked them, I froze them, and I used them for this pie.” Not just for bragging rights. This is cause for celebration, I think; it’s possible for even the most urban people to can their own jam and harvest their own rhubarb.
Yep. Anyone can farm for a day, and then have a freezer stocked with fresh goods for the rest of the season. And the news gets better. You don’t need to quit your job, move to the country, and plant a blueberry patch. No indeed. You don’t even need an urban garden or a square-foot window box. In fact, for all those people out there without your own gardens and without the desire to tend one ever, you can still have your own fresh food—all you have to do is pick your own.
via 5 Reasons You Should Pick-Your-Own This Summer : Chelsea Green.
Getting Rid Of Your Grocer
Video at link
Getting Rid Of Your Grocer
CBS Evening News: Community Supported Agriculture Lets Customers Buy Produce Straight From The Farm
(CBS) Consumers seeking a healthy lifestyle these days are increasingly cutting out the supermarket and going straight to the farmer for fresh fruits and vegetables. CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports that community-supported agriculture is a growing trend.
On a small farm in Palm Beach County, Fla., it’s harvesting season. They’re picking and packing. Only this bounty isn’t headed for a big warehouse or grocery store.
It’s going from Nancy Roe’s fields straight to Florida kitchens. From field to table. No stops in between.
It’s called community supported agriculture or CSA – part of the “buy local” movement. Customers pay Roe directly, and she sends them a box of fresh produce every week of the growing season.
via Getting Rid Of Your Grocer – CBS News.
We Need Food and Farming Regulation Now!
We Need Food and Farming Regulation Now!
by Will Allen
Taxpayers are demanding that government enforce existing regulations and create more stringent rules to limit the excess and greed in banking, insurance, housing, and on Wall Street. But, in the rush to regulate, we can’t forget to oversee industrial agriculture. It is one of our most polluting and dangerous industries. Like the financial sectors, its practices have not been well regulated for the last thirty years. Let me run down a few of the major problems that have developed because of our poorly regulated U.S. agriculture.
Carbon Foot Print: The U.S. EPA estimated in 2007 that agriculture in the U.S. was responsible for about 18% of our carbon footprint, which is huge because the U.S. is the largest polluter in the world.1 This should include (but doesn’t) the manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers, fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping, electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating, and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other green house gases. Unfortunately, the EPA estimate of 18% still doesn’t include a large portion of the fuel, the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, some of the nitrous oxide, all of the CFCs and bromines, and most of the transport emissions. When they are counted, agriculture’s share of the U.S. carbon footprint will be at least 25 to 30%.
Oftentimes we see all greenhouse gasses as being equivalent to carbon dioxide (CO2). But, methane emissions are 21 times and nitrous oxides 310 times more damaging as greenhouse gasses than CO2. Since agriculture is one of the largest producers of methane and nitrous oxide, the extent of the agricultural impact is staggering. Unless we change our bad habits of food production and long distance delivery, we will not be able to deal with climate change.
via We Need Food and Farming Regulation Now! | CommonDreams.org.
Hunger in America: 1 in 8 Americans Faces Food Insecurity (Everyday Citizen)
Hunger in America: 1 in 8 Americans Faces Food Insecurity
We all sense that there is a big difference between feeling hungry and being afraid of dying due to not having enough nutritious food to eat. Since most of those reading this blog have never experienced the latter, when we hear that some Americans are now experiencing food insecurity, we can mistake that to mean that those Americans are feeling unsure about some future ability to provide food for themselves. But that’s not it. Food insecurity isn’t a mild fear of future grocery shopping challenges. Food insecurity is indeed health and life threatening. The term food insecurity is used to describe real hunger and the immediate dangers that threaten health when people do not have enough to eat.
A household is considered food insecure when its occupants live in hunger or live in danger of starvation. The term food insecurity originated in the mid-1970s during the discussions of international food problems at a time of global food crisis. Then, the focus of attention was primarily on food supply problems – of assuring the availability and to some degree the price stability of basic foodstuffs at the international and national level. Much has changed since the 1970s. The gap between the rich and poor has widened dramatically. Average incomes have declined, even among the middle class. Many of our social outreach programs have been reduced or eliminated. Existing programs don’t reach all the hungry Americans.
via Hunger in America: 1 in 8 Americans Faces Food Insecurity (Everyday Citizen).
What’s Really in Many ‘Healthy’ Foods
The Fine Print: What’s Really in a Lot of ‘Healthy’ Foods
A lot of Americans think they’re eating a healthy diet these days. But it’s easy to be fooled by our assumptions and the ways that food manufacturers play on them.
Take chicken. The average American eats about 90 pounds of it a year, more than twice as much as in the 1970s, part of the switch to lower-fat, lower-cholesterol meat proteins. But roughly one-third of the fresh chicken sold in the U.S. is “plumped” with water, salt and sometimes a seaweed extract called carrageenan that helps it retain the added water. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says chicken processed this way can still be labeled “all natural” or “100% natural” because those are all natural ingredients, even though they aren’t naturally found in chicken.
Producers must mention the added ingredients on the package — but the lettering can be small: just one-third the size of the largest letter in the product’s name. If you’re trying to watch your sodium to cut your risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke, it pays to check the Nutrition Facts label. Untreated chicken has about 45 to 60 mgs of sodium per four-ounce serving. So-called enhanced or “plumped” chicken has between 200 and 400 mgs of sodium per serving, almost as much as a serving of fast-food french fries.
via What’s Really in Many ‘Healthy’ Foods – WSJ.com.
A Tsunami of Hunger Looms on the Horizon
A Tsunami of Hunger Looms on the Horizon – By Nick Turse,
The new working poor, as well as more families with young children, are threatening to overwhelm New York City’s last hunger safety net
A crisis is brewing and Carlos Rodriguez sees it in ever longer lines. “More work boots with plaster or paint on them,” he says. “Guys clearly coming in from the work site.”
A spokesperson for the Food Bank for New York City, Rodriguez has experienced tough times before, but not like this. “It takes a lot of pride for a New York construction worker to stand on the soup kitchen line. That’s something I never saw, even during 9/11, during that recession.”
Here, on a quiet, tree-lined section of 116th Street in Manhattan, it’s possible to see the financial crisis that has the planet in its grip up close and personal. The new working poor, as well as more families with young children, are threatening to overwhelm New York City’s last hunger safety net.
And the hungry lining up on this street today may be only a harbinger of things to come. Behind them, in an increasingly hard-pressed city, a potential tsunami of need threatens to swamp the entire system. The one million-plus needy New Yorkers of today could, according to those experienced in feeding the poor, explode into tomorrow’s three million hungry mouths with nowhere else to turn.
Three million — and right in the heart of the country’s financial capital.
via A Tsunami of Hunger Looms on the Horizon | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.
Australia: Food bowl on brink of $5bn catastrophe
Food bowl on brink of $5bn catastrophe
THE nation’s key food bowl, the Murray Darling Basin, is on the verge of economic collapse as the value of production plunges by at least $5 billion, experts say.
Drought and declining irrigation water have plunged inland Australia’s heartland into crisis with the loss of at least one third of the basin’s $15 billion annual income. Worse is predicted for the coming financial year if the drought continues.
The demise of the economic powerhouse has pushed towns throughout the basin, particularly along the River Murray, into a severe downturn and population decline.
An ABS report last week showed the population throughout the basin is declining, or static at best, with the District Council of Berri and Barmera suffering the largest and fastest recent drop in SA with 130 people moving out between 2007 and 2008.
Authorities warn the problem has become the biggest crisis Australian agriculture has experienced, threatening the nation’s food supply.
Murray Darling Association general manager Ray Najar said the basin’s plight will worsen substantially next financial year if the long-running drought continues and there is no water available for irrigation.
via AdelaideNow… Food bowl on brink of $5bn catastrophe.
Imagine a world without seafood for supper.
No tuna, no salmon. No oysters, no skate. No cod and chips
Imagine a world without seafood for supper. It’s nearer than you think.
As I step off the train at Heysel, in the shadow of the notorious football stadium, the vast art deco structure of the Palais du Centenaire rises like a cathedral. With its four soaring buttresses topped by statues, the Palais forms the centrepiece of the Parc des Expositions in Brussels – a trade-fair complex built in the 1930s to commemorate a century of independence from the Netherlands. This is the temporary home of thousands of fish products from around the world as 23,000 delegates descend from 80 countries for the annual European Seafood Exposition – the world’s largest seafood trade show and a grim reminder of man’s dominion over the oceans.
“If I wanted people to understand the global fishing crisis, I would bring them here,” says Sally Bailey, a marine programme officer with the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the more moderate NGOs combating the exploitation of the seas. Last year, one of the more militant groups – Greenpeace – managed to “close down” five exhibitors trading in critically endangered bluefin tuna, by deploying 80 activists to drape their stands in fishing nets, chain themselves to fixtures and put up banners that read: “Time and tuna are running out”.
Their main target was the Mitsubishi Corporation, the Japanese car manufacturer that is also the world’s largest tuna trader, controlling 60% of the market and accounting for 40% of all bluefin tuna imported into Japan from the Mediterranean. The other companies were Dongwon Industries (Korea), Moon Marine (Taiwan/ Singapore), Azzopardi Fisheries (Malta) and Ricardo Fuentes & Sons (Spain).
via Andrew Purvis on the decline of seafood | Life and style | The Observer.
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
Lester Brown: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.
Key Concepts
- Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
- Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and refugees.
- Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming are placing severe limits on food production.
- Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors, the author argues, a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis.
For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!
via OpEdNews » Lester Brown: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?.
Fresh Food Revolution
Fresh Food Revolution by Mark Hertsgaard
When Michelle Obama began planting an organic garden on the South Lawn of the White House recently, there was no doubt she was sending a message, but the message was more subversive and far-reaching than most American media coverage recognized. On March 20, joined by a class of local fifth graders, the first lady lifted the first shovels of dirt onto a 1,100-square-foot plot that will feature fifty-five kinds of vegetables, including spinach, peppers, arugula, kale, collards and tomatoes (but no beets–the president reportedly does not like beets). Various herbs and berries will also be grown in the garden, which is fully visible to the thousands of tourists and other pedestrians that pass by the White House daily. (There will also be two boxes of bees for pollination.)
Michelle Obama’s stated message was simple and was clearly aimed at her fellow Americans: fresh food tastes better and is better for you, so kids and grown-ups alike should eat lots more of it. “A real, delicious heirloom tomato is one of the sweetest things you’ll ever eat,” she told the 10-year-olds, adding that freshly picked vegetables were what prompted her daughters to try new kinds of foods.
What made Obama’s message so subversive was something she left unsaid: the food most Americans eat nowadays is not fresh, tasty or healthy. The superiority of fresh ingredients may be obvious to Italians, but it is a truth most Americans long ago forgot, if they ever knew it in the first place. Over the past fifty years, the United States has been transformed into a fast food nation, in author Eric Schlosser’s phrase. What the typical American eats is not so much food as it is highly processed food derivatives that have traveled thousands of miles since leaving the farm, losing along the way most of the flavor and nutritional value they once possessed. To disguise such losses, food manufacturers overload products with fats, salts and sweeteners, especially corn syrup–additives that, along with the massive portions typically served in the United States, help explain why nearly one in three Americans is obese.
Now, by publicly championing fresh local food, Michelle Obama clearly hopes to entice Americans away from their junk food past to a healthier, more delicious future. And that is what makes her message so far-reaching. Change America’s eating habits and you can change the world.
via Fresh Food Revolution | CommonDreams.org.
Is Local Food Better?
Is Local Food Better?
Yes, probably-but not in the way many people think.
(Editor’s note: The local-food movement has been gaining momentum in developed countries, and in many developing countries as well, in recent years; in the United States alone, sales of locally grown foods, worth about $4 billion in 2002, could reach as much as $7 billion by 2011. Local food’s claimed benefits are driving health- and environment-conscious consumers to seek alternatives to the industrial agriculture system whose products dominate grocery-store shelves. It is also linked to the localization efforts of people who believe that rising transport costs and reaction to globalization will trigger a shortening of economic links and greater reliance on local and regional economies. This two-part series examines the potential impacts of greater localization of food, beginning with the environmental effects and then, in our July/August issue, the economic implications.)
by Sarah DeWeerdt
In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast-apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar-traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth before reaching the Scandinavian table. In 2005, a researcher in Iowa found that the milk, sugar, and strawberries that go into a carton of strawberry yogurt collectively journeyed 2,211 miles (3,558 kilometers) just to get to the processing plant. As the local-food movement has come of age, this concept of “food miles” (or “-kilometers”)-roughly, the distance food travels from farm to plate-has come to dominate the discussion, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Western Europe.
The concept offers a kind of convenient shorthand for describing a food system that’s centralized, industrialized, and complex almost to the point of absurdity. And, since our food is transported all those miles in ships, trains, trucks, and planes, attention to food miles also links up with broader concerns about the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-based transport.
via Is Local Food Better? | Worldwatch Institute.
Speakers: Changing food industry can help fix other problems
Speakers: Changing food industry can help fix other problems
President Barack Obama will need to confront the nation’s food issues sooner or later because they are key to solving three major problems in the nation — energy independence, the health crisis and climate change, author Michael Pollan said at last night’s Richmond Forum.
Agriculture and modern processing use 20 percent of the total fossil fuel consumed in the nation and produce more greenhouse gas than any other industry, Pollan told an audience at the Landmark Theater.
Pollan and fellow author Marion Nestle discussed the food chain in America and offered guidance on making choices that are healthier for people, the environment, animals and farm workers.
“When we eat from this modern industrial food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases,” said Pollan, who is also the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.
Health-care spending in the U.S. has gone from 5 percent in the 1960s to 17 percent, while the amount Americans spend on food during that same time has decreased, from 18 percent to 10 percent, Pollan said.
via Speakers: Changing food industry can help fix other problems | Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Local, State Agencies Lack Resources to Ensure Food Safety
Local, State Agencies Lack Resources to Ensure Food Safety
Congress Must Fix System, Report Says
Local and state health officials trying to prevent food illness outbreaks are stymied by scarce resources, weak leadership from the federal government and bureaucratic barriers, according to a new study public health experts released yesterday.
While much of the current debate about improving food safety has focused on federal agencies — the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the bulk of food safety work is performed by about 3,000 local and state agencies, which handle everything from inspections of restaurants, food processing plants and grocery stores to detecting outbreaks and removing unsafe products from stores.
But those agencies are struggling, and Congress must reengineer the national system, according to an analysis by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, based on consultations with health experts, consumer groups and food executives nationwide.
via Local, State Agencies Lack Resources to Ensure Food Safety – washingtonpost.com.
Food Rebellions: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis
Food Rebellions: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis
Resistance to the trade and “aid” policies that displace farmers and increase hunger.
The World Food Program describes the current global food crisis as a silent tsunami, with billions of people going hungry. Hunger is, indeed, coming in waves, but not everyone will drown in famine. The recurrent food crises are making a handful of corporations very rich-even as they put the rest of the planet at risk.
Built over half a century, largely with public grain subsidies and foreign aid, the global food-industrial complex is made up of large corporations that sell grain, seed, chemicals, and fertilizer, along with global supermarket chains and food processors.
When these players first came on the scene, world agriculture was different. Forty years ago, the global South had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion. After three “Development Decades,” they were importing $11 billion a year in food. Immediately following de-colonization in the 1960s, Africa exported $1.3 billion in food a year. Today it imports 25 percent of its food.
International trade agreements and pressure from the global North opened up entire continents to cheap, subsidized grain from the North. This put local farmers out of business, devastated local crop diversity, and consolidated control of the world’s food system in the hands of multinational corporations. Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, and Bunge control 90 percent of the world’s grain trade.
via Food Rebellions: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis | CommonDreams.org.
Major Threat Still Lurking
Major Threat Still Lurking
Less than 1 percent of the goods which come into this country are screened by the FDA and other safety agencies
Just because contaminated imports are no longer in the news does not mean they are no longer important to this nation. Well over half of our consumption comes from products made abroad, and many of the countries with whom we have trade relations lack environmental, health, and safety protections that we employ at home.
The single biggest offender in the toxic import business is China. The United States will face recurring problems with Chinese imported goods unless our government does something to stem the tide.
Less than 1 percent of the goods which come into this country are screened by the FDA and other safety agencies. Goods are only subject to “voluntary” screening at the port of origin. These FDA “spot checks” have proven they are not enough of a barrier between consumers and contaminated goods.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
8 Small Ways To Save Big On Food Expenses
It’s pretty gloomy these days with unremitting news about people
losing jobs, homes and the decline of our country’s economic prosperity. For me personally, the threat of unemployment and its consequences added an extra jolt to my awakened sense of what’s important in life and what is not worth losing. With the same humble regard, the gloom makes me contemplate the things I’m ok with losing, and even makes me rethink whether these items and lifestyles are worth the additional money and energy to sustain during any market condition, really. If being frugal and modest means added security and a heightened sense and focus for what’s really important, then why ever deviate from that?
Here are eight easy actions that can save hard earned money and reduce frivolous spending on food items. Consequently, these minor changes will also reduce our individual impact on the environment’s well being. I mean the truth is, without clean air to breathe or clean water, there will be no use for that organic cotton polka dot bikini anyway.
via 8 Small Ways To Save Big On Food Expenses : Planet Green.
What People Think About Emerging Food Technology
What People Think About Emerging Food Technology
People remain cautious about the emergence of new food technologies according to a review of existing research, published by the Food Standards Agency.
The report, which looks at research since 1999, brings together knowledge from the UK and beyond, on public opinion about up-and-coming food technologies, such as nanotechnologies and cloning. The findings will help to shape the FSA’s future work on emerging technologies.
According to the research, GM and animal cloning remain the areas of most concern for people. However, the review also showed that food technologies tended not to be a burning issue for the vast majority of people and often did not generate strong opinions
via What People Think About Emerging Food Technology.
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The oligarchs openly talking about a coup d'état in America?
Multi-millionaire lobbyist Grover Norquist is calling for the impeachment of President Obama. In an interview with the right-wing National Journal - Norquist warned that if President Obama wins re-election and decides to let the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% expire at the end of the year - then Republicans will "have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach [him]."What does that mean? It means that the super rich in America - and their political operatives like Norquist in Washington, DC - have now compared a tiny tax increase on the wealthy to high crimes and treason - the only Constitutional basis Congress can use to impeach a President. It sounds like the oligarchs are now openly talking about a coup d'état in America.-Thom(Do you think will try it? Tell us here.) -
LEGALIZE Democracy
" We the corporations" On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. __________
MOVE to AMEND
a project of the CAMPAIGN TO LEGALIZE Democracy
Help end Corporate personhood
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
