Potlucks bite the dust: ‘Food safety’ shows its true colors

By Steve Green

P.J. Huffstutter is one of the few journalists in the country paying close attention to the rising tide of “food safety” laws. In a recent article, “Raw food raid raises questions over existing milk laws — and the safety of potlucks,” she appreciates how serious – and odd – things are becoming. On top of discussing the recent spate of raw food raids, she also tells us that “concerns over food safety” by Wyoming’s Teton County public health department led “to a ban on public potlucks.”

People respond to the words “food safety” as the government’s sincere concern for health, not noticing that the FDA recently asserted in court that the public has “no generalized right to bodily and physical health.”

What is going on?

To Market, To Market! Farmers Markets Should Make Some Noise During National Farmers Market Week

By Stacy Miller
Farmers Market Coalition

Next week, (August 2-8) is National Farmers Market Week, and the nation’s 4,800 farmers markets have a lot to celebrate!

The USDA started recognizing National Farmers Market Week in 2000, and since then the number of markets listed in the USDA official directory of farmers markets has swelled over 170%. This means opportunities for hundreds of thousands of producers to sell directly to millions of customers wanting fresh food. In turn, these customers support farmers, while tending to their own health, building their local communities and strengthening their regional economies.

Farmers Market week kicks off with meal challenge at Dvoor Farm

By Lois Heyman
My Central Jersey

RARITAN TOWNSHIP — The Dvoor Farm served as a backdrop Thursday for farmers and others who came to participate in a kickoff event of the upcoming state and national Farmers Market Week.

Gov. Chris Christie has proclaimed Sunday through Aug. 7 as Farmers Market Week in New Jersey, and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has designated the following week as National Farmers Market Week.

Raw food raid raises questions over existing milk laws — and the safety of potlucks

By P.J. Huffstutter
Los Angeles Times

Do you have the right to eat anything you want?

That question is at the heart of an increasingly heated war between consumers and government regulators, who are facing off over raw milk and other raw – read unpasteurized, unprocessed, as-pure-as-possible – foods.

The latest salvo in this fight happened June 30, when federal, state and local authorities raided Rawesome Foods, a private food club in Venice that investigators allege broke the law by not having the proper licenses for a food retail business.

GMO beet yield drops in US; Monsanto raises seed price 22 pct

By Rady Ananda

At the World Association of Beet and Cane Growers (WABCG) conference held in Cambridge, UK July 19-21, growers from the US, where 95% of beets are genetically modified, admitted that GMO beets showed reduced yields and cost more to produce than last year.

A June 2010 US Department of Agriculture report shows that yields dropped from 26.8 tons per acre in 2008-09 to 25.7 tpa in 2009-10.  Worsening conditions for farmers, the cost of production went up after Monsanto raised seed prices 22%.

National Farmers Market Week: Cook outside your comfort zone

I ain't afraid of no stinkin' kohlrabi

By Bonnie Azab Powell
Grist

It’s the height of summer, and the tables of farmers markets around the country are overflowing with firm-fleshed, scarlet tomatoes; bunches of fragrant basil; and — depending on where you live — juicy stone fruits, avocados, and more. Such bounty makes it easy to celebrate National Farmers Market Week August 1-7 by visiting a market near you (you can find one via the Eat Well Guide, LocalHarvest, or USDA). And there almost definitely is one near you, as there are now more than 5,000 around the country, up an astonishing 13 percent from the previous year.

I’m lucky enough — or cursed, depending how you see it — to live in Oakland, Calif., where every day I have several farmers markets within 20 miles to choose from, all the way through the winter. And I love them. 

Baby, I like it raw: Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures

Sickly Cat interview of Mark McAfee, Organic Pastures

By John Calvin Byrd
Sickly Cat

Mark McAfee, founder of Organic Pastures an organic dairy farm, sat down with Qiana and John Calvin Byrd to talk raw milk.  In this podcast, Mark demystifies the history of raw milk and discusses the health benefits the FDA denies.  He also explains the difference between pastured and grain fed cows and discusses the dangers of Soy Milk.

Sauerkraut the Original Probiotic Superfood

By Kerri Knox, RN
Natural News

With the advent of refrigeration and airline flights, getting and storing fresh vegetables year round is not something most people have to be concerned about. But before cold storage and long haul shipping was commonplace, vegetables spoiled very quickly and only creative solutions kept vegetables fresh for more than a few days after ripening. Sauerkraut is one solution to this problem that not only keeps vegetables fresh for months on end, but also confers exciting health benefits in the form of probiotics and nutrients that the plant in its natural form doesn’t have.

5 tips for surviving food police raid on farms and private food clubs

By David Gumpert
GRIST

What’s behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years — food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, retail and public health licenses are not required, writes David Gumpert.

Underground diner goes legit—and builds a food ecosystem

Vimala Rajendran

By Tom Philpott
GRIST

When the going gets tough, the tough get cooking. That’s the main lesson I’ve gleaned from my friend Vimala Rajendran, a legendary underground cook in Chapel Hill, N.C., who has recently gone legit by opening Vimala’s Curryblossom Café.

Doing justice to her life story would require the skills of a Salman Rushdie or a Mira Nair: childhood in middle-class suburban Bombay, peeling cardamom at her mother’s knee; youthful marriage to an academic scientist and passage to the United States; a stint as a young housewife and mother, expanding her culinary horizons in cosmopolitan Ann Arbor; survivor of a violent, collapsed marriage in Chapel Hill; sudden status as a penniless single mother of three without job or immigration papers; and then salvation through underground community dinners cooked and served at her home. And through it all, the scent of aromatic spices gently sizzling in ghee and the chop-chop-chop of a knife on a cutting board.

Bees Get Stung by Israel

By Eva Bartlett
IPS

Bees too feel the impact of the Israeli assault. Credit:Eva Bartlett/IPS

GAZA CITY, Jul 19, 2010 (IPS) – Sa’id Hillis, 60, has kept bees since he was a boy. Until the Israeli attacks changed his business.

Sa’id has 20 dunams (a dunam is 1000 square metres) farmland in Sheyjayee, east of Gaza city and roughly 400 metres from the Green Line border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Until 2009 the farm had hundreds of trees, and more than 10,000 chickens. “It was all destroyed during the Israeli attacks,” Hillis says.

The 2008-2009 23-day Israeli war on Gaza destroyed more than 35 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). This included chicken and beef farms, and cultivated land.

Ash still covers Guatemalan coffee farms

Al Jazeerah news video

New study: GM wheat yields 48-56 percent less in field experiments

By Devinder Sharma

A new study out of Switzerland reveals that the performance of GM crops in the glasshouse differed significantly from their performance in the fields. GM field plants had significantly fewer seeds and lower yield than control plants, and were more susceptible to infestation, summarizes Devinder Sharma.

Highly Processed Products Parading as Food

Forget the USDA guidelines; here's the best food pyramid

My Testimony at the June 8, 2010 Hearing on the USDA Proposed Dietary Guidelines

By Alyce Ortuzar, Well Mind Association
Posted at Hartke Is Online

Since the first published U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1980, epidemics of disorders such as diabetes, asthma, cancer, and obesity have characterized Americans today as our sickest generation. The dietary guidelines fail to acknowledge man made products and processes that are highly processed, nutrient deficient, adulterated foods approved under the science-based paradigm this report applauds. The highly processed products parading as food that these guidelines recommend are in fact devoid of the nutrients that make whole foods healthy and bio-available.

Aquaculture: Jellyfish Dominate as Predators Disappear

By Abigail Tucker
Smithsonian Magazine

As the world’s oceans are degraded, will they be dominated by jellyfish? Boneless, bloodless and brainless, they thrive in warming oceans and dead zones, unaffected by CO2, spewing 45,000 eggs a day. A bourgeoning enterprise capitalizes on jelly blooms, as global fisheries collapse from over-harvesting, reports Abigail Tucker.

Northeast Pacific sea nettles. (Image by John Lee)

Ethanol gets skewered by recent CBO assessment

By Tom Philpott
Grist

In its calm and measured way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just delivered a blistering assessment of the environmental value of corn-based ethanol.

The CBO had been charged by Congress to calculate just what the public is getting for its investment in ethanol production: specifically, the $0.45/gallon tax credit that gasoline blenders get for mixing ethanol into the fuel supply. In 2009, 10.8 billion gallons of corn ethanol got used in such a manner, costing the federal Treasury $5.16 billion in reduced tax revenue.

Goldman Sachs’ Food Bubble

By Democracy Now!

While Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million to resolve a civil fraud lawsuit filed by the SEC, Goldman has not been held accountable for many of its other questionable investment practices. A new article in Harper’s Magazine examines the role Goldman played in the food crisis of 2008 when the ranks of the world’s hungry increased by 250 million. We speak to Harper’s contributing editor Frederick Kaufman. (Transcript below)

Land grabs, Geoengineering and Climate Change: Vandana Shiva vs. Gwynne Dyer

By Democracy Now!

Ed. Note: I love this woman; Vandana Shiva is one of the most brilliant activists fighting for the best solutions to many of our problems today. Originally a theoretical physicist, she now campaigns the world for heirloom seeds, organic farming and local food systems instead of the chemical- and oil-intensive large scale industrial farms that destroy the environment, increase global warming and wreck local economies.  She also supports Hands off Mother Earth, a citizen-based organization that resists geoengineering. ~ RA

Revenge of the Weeds

[18 Aug 2010 Ed. Note: Superweeds are discussed in detail at this report by Institute of Science in Society.]

By Robert C. Koehler

Today’s big news stories — the wars, the eco-disasters — all seem to have the same gaping hole in them. This hole is lack of awareness, and its thrum, once you begin to hear it, soon becomes deafening: We can’t go on like this.

We can’t keep playing conquering fool, arrogantly ordering the world to our liking by killing everything that doesn’t fit into it. We can’t keep throwing more of the same at our problems. We can’t keep fighting nature, or one another, and expect somehow to win in the end. We can’t keep buying time at an increasingly horrific price. Time is running out. And petroleum isn’t the only thing we’re addicted to.

“Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds,” the New York Times informed us several months ago.

Gulf Seafood Not Tested for Toxic Dispersants

By Rady Ananda

Anything coming from the Gulf of Mexico is being tested for contamination by oil, but not for contamination by chemical oil dispersants, reports the Palm Beach Post. 

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says a test for dispersants is in the works. Until then, officials are going by the ‘current science’ that dispersants have low potential for harm,” reports ProPublica.

Orwellian Newspeak aside, Corexit is four times more toxic than oil. On May 3rd, the environmental group, Protect the Oceans, reported that “oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61 ppm.”  Bear in mind that both are going into the Gulf, and into the food chain.