Super duper?
Portland Press Herald - 7/8/2009. By Meredith Goad – Remember when pomegranates seemed really exotic? Now, thanks to their purported health benefits, they are in everything from iced coffee to martinis. And there are scores of other fruits – some familiar, some unpronounceable – joining pomegranate on the shelves. Acai is everywhere, as are goji berries [see photo], noni, mangosteen, blueberries, cranberries and other so-called "super fruits" that contain compounds called antioxidants that may help fight against heart disease, cancer, arthritis and other diseases. |
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Monsanto’s man Taylor returns to FDA in food-czar role
Grist - 7/8/2009.By Tom Philpott – In a Tuesday afternoon press release, the FDA announced that Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto executive, had joined the agency as “senior advisor to the commissioner.” If the title is vague, the portfolio (pasted from the press release) is substantial – a kind of food czar of the Food and Drug Administration. |
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From farm to pharma: how animals ended up living confinement feedlots guzzling antibiotics
Alternet - 7/6/2009.By Will Allen – We are now living in a post fast-food-awareness reality, riding on the wake of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser's books (who rode on the wake of Wendell Berry), films like Food, Inc., renegade farmer heros like Joel Salatin and Eliot Coleman, and the ever-increasing popularity of urban gardening and locavores. But awareness, like anything, has its dark side. Perhaps the hardest thing we post fast-food-aware people face now, is actually doing something – apart from reading the book and watching the movie, that is. |
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Field-to-plate: Vt. college students try farming
Boston Globe - 7/6/2009. By Lisa Rathke, Associated Press – POULTNEY, Vt.—Devin Lyons typically starts his days this summer cooking breakfast with fresh eggs from the farm's chicken coop. Then, depending on the weather, he and a dozen other college students might cut hay in the field using a team of oxen, turn compost or weed vegetable beds. While other college students are in stuffy classrooms, about a dozen are earning credit tending a Vermont farm. For 13 weeks, 12 credits and about $12,500, the Green Mountain College students plow fields with oxen or horses, milk cows, weed crops and grow and make their own food, part of an intensive course in sustainable agriculture using the least amount of fossil fuels. |
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