groceries
The New York Times reports that more and more people are
buying shares of small farms, mostly on the coasts and around the Great Lakes region, which guarantee them a percentage of the season's harvest. This "community-supported agriculture" model has exploded from fewer than 100 farms in the early 90s to nearly 1,500 in recent years. Helping out is optional, although we're not sure the real farmers would appreciate our constant bitching about being in the sun. (I worked summers hoeing cotton fields in Texas, which is partly why I moved to NYC.)
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government
Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Charlottesville, Virginia attained a certain moderate level of fame when his operation was featured in Michael Pollan's book
The Omnivore's Dilemma. Now he's got a book of his own called
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.
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us poison tractor
China says US Soybeans have quality issues and are putting their consumers at risk, according to the WSJ:
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nutrition
The heirloom tomatoes in your garden may not just be tastier than commercially grown vegetables, but healthier too, according to a study from the American College of Nutrition. The study looked for 13 nutrients in 43 crops grown from 1950 to 1999 and discovered that the vegetables enjoyed by our grandparents were significantly more nutritious than the veggies found on supermarket shelves today.
After rigorous statistical analysis, the researchers found that, on average, all three minerals evaluated have declined; two of five vitamins have declined; and protein content has dropped by 6 percent.
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fast food
An angry reader wrote us yesterday asking if the photos he's been finding in his bag along with his Chipotle veggie burrito were legit. Matt wrote:
Last time I got the pigs out on the plains of super green grass (Grass won't last more than a day under pigs). Today was a lone adult chicken in an otherwise empty commercial coop, perfectly clean bird, on a perfectly clean floor. I know for fact chickens don't get moved from the time they are chicks, until the vacuum machine comes to box them for transport to the slaughter house. So where is all the bird shit and carcasses that succumbed to walking on the ammonia soaked floor?
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dna
From BoingBoing:
For the first time, the USDA has granted preliminary approval for large-scale planting of an engineered food crop that contains human genes.
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Consumerist
Fertilizer prices have shot upwards in the past five years as manufacturers have been unable to keep up with demand. The demand is driven by an increase in biofuel production, and a growing appetite for red meat in developing countries. The end result is that it now costs an extra $1.00 now to get a slice from my the pizza place around the corner from me. [NYT]
