¡Join the fight!
"I really love your meat," was a common phrase overheard at last Friday's Fair Food Fight Night. Out of place--or at least inappropriate--at any other venue, these kind words could have been meant for several guests at what was the largest, and best-attended Fight Night yet. The space at the Rau + Barber building was packed with local foodies, chefs, farmers and even the vice-president of a slaughterhouse. The night was filled with good conversation, great food and awkward dancing. Read more...
Earlier this week Food Safety News ran a two-part series on food irradiation. Part one focused on the science behind the process, while part two focused on the foods that could benefit the most from irradiation (beef, spinach, spices). The series did a good job of pointing out the benefits (albeit questionable ones) of the process, but failed to illustrate that large-scale food production is the leading cause of food-borne pathogens to begin with. Read more...
See the full article here.
(As an introductory note, I've been absent because I've been swamped by attempting to get ICARE's website up and running-- wordpress is a great platform to work with, until you decide you'd like to use it as a CMS for an organization... so I'll be back more regularly once I've beaten it into submission-- whenever that is)
So, the West's dairy CAFO operators have the audacity to implicitly compare financial aid to industry with civil rights legislation (note the emphasis on "equal" treatment, etc.), and then, on top of that already offensive notion, add insult to injury by claiming that they're the ones being treated unequally. Read more...
The past few months have featured a number of ethical debates about food, often pitting advocates of sustainable agriculture against vegetarians and vegans. New York Times readers were treated to the clashing opinions of rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman, and animal rights philosopher Gary Steiner.Then there was the Foer v. Pollan fight. Read more...
It goes without saying that access to public records is important for CAFO-fighters, locavore-advocates, and sustainably-minded citizens in general (but, of course, I've said it anyway, so there you have it): CAFO regulation is such a hodge-podge of federal, state and local-level controls that in order to get the full picture of what is going on and who, if anyone, is doing anything to curb CAFO pollution and public health threats, you really have to go to the records-- taking a federal, state, or local agency's or official's word for it is never a good idea. Read more...
The following is reprinted by permission of the author, Melinda Hemmelgarn. Melinda writes the excellent Food Sleuth blog and printed this piece in Blog for Iowa. Read more...
On October 27th, Idaho's Magic Valley-based Times-News blared: "Dairy's Social Impact Studied." The article, not surprisingly, is a joke.
Rather than do his journalistic homework and compare the actual methods and data found in the so-called "study" (which you can access in full here) with the researchers' and industry's glowing spin--dairy was the Magic Valley's economic lifeboat during this economic downturn, uninsured underpaid dairy workers don't overly burden hospitals, and similar familiar tripe--the writer, Joshua Palmer, clearly takes what they have to say for granted. Read more...
