- "Why aren't GMO foods labeled?," asks Mark Bittman, who knocks it out of the park once again. I love this man.
- My other favorite person this week is Bryan Walsh, author of "Foodies Can Eclipse (and Save) the Green Movement" in Time Magazine. (He's also got another one this week, "Why Biofuels Help Push Up World Food Prices." Although my primary opposition to biofuels isn't their impact on food prices. It's that they are inefficient.)
- Probably the single most important thing to know about GMOs: Companies that genetically engineer crops have a lock on what we know about their safety and benefits. He says:
We don't have the complete picture. That's no accident. Multibillion-dollar agricultural corporations, including Monsanto and Syngenta, have restricted independent research on their genetically engineered crops. They have often refused to provide independent scientists with seeds, or they've set restrictive conditions that severely limit research options.
This is legal. Under U.S. law, genetically engineered crops are patentable inventions. Companies have broad power over the use of any patented product, including who can study it and how.
- Hey California! How about some more urban sprawl? We don't need farms, do we?
- Good question: If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't all of Asia have a headache?
- Here's a great idea: make the healthy choice the default in kids meals. If parents want to order an extra-junky meal for their kids, they can choose to.
- Yay! Maryland has a new bill that would ban arsenic compounds from poultry feed. What a really great idea! (And if your response is "What? What kind of idiot would put arsenic compounds in poultry feed???" the answer is, unfortunately, lots of them. And it's legal.)
- Whole Foods as a new 5-step animal welfare rating system. I find this very useful, if you're in a Whole Foods and want to find out exactly how well your very expensive meat was treated. Unfortunately, the vast majority of livestock in the U.S. wouldn't even make it to step 1 on this scale. Can you imagine what the conventional rating scale would look like? "This meat gets a 5! It was raised in crowded, smelly, conditions with other animals and its own feces, and fed poultry litter (i.e. chicken poop), but at least it wasn't beaten."
- Very interesting. It appears that not everyone is happy about Berkeley's nationally famous school lunch program. (Famous for being GOOD, that is.)
- Lester Brown says, "The world is one poor harvest away from chaos."
- Tom Philpott gives us a downright scary look at antibiotic resistance in bacteria
- Thank you Grist for asking why Trader Joes is short-changing farmworker justice. My own family has actually been boycotting Trader Joes for well over a year for exactly that reason.
- For a second helping of Tom Philpott, here's what he says about just how bad is aspartame.
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