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Recent Articles

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On Fertile Ground (SoJo) -  The Food Project grows vegetables, relationship, and justice in the suburb and the city.

 

Weeding Out The Skilled Farmer (AlterNet) -  A rancher argues that the industrialization of agriculture imperils farmers and our food security.

 

Beyond The Pale Green (Grist) -  Activists and small-scale farmers are going "beyond organic" to push local foods.

 

Green Genes  (AliterNet) -  GM foods don't taste better, nor are they generally more nutritious. They don't, in fact, reduce pesticide use by much, and any reductions are generally offset by an increase in herbicide use.

 

The Push-Pull of the Food Movement (Conscious Choice)  -  Walk into any U.S. supermarket and you are bombarded with seeming abundance. Yet nearly half the typical 30,000 supermarket items are brought to us by just 10 corporations and an estimated one of every 10 dollars we spend on food is going to just one -- Altria (the former Phillip Morris).

 

Urban Farms: Oasis in the Inner City (Conscious Choice) -  "If the investment were made in urban agriculture," says Ken Dunn, founder of an urban garden group called the Resource Center, "it could bring full employment to a community, great improvements in nutrition and a sense that we've got a mission together where communities are contributing to the wealth of the city."

 

Local Food Challenge (New Farm)  -  Want to find out how much of the food you eat is fresh, local and harvested at juicy ripeness or how much is travel weary from its trek across the continent or around the earth? Take the Local Food Challenge and measure your food foot print.

 

Getting Over Organic (Conscious Choice)  -  But in recent years organic has grown to include paradoxes such as the organic factory farm and the organic TV dinner. And now, there is even organic high-fructose corn syrup. We are not far from organic Coca-Cola.

 

New Farming Buzz: Wild Bees (CSM)  -  Honey bee scarcity prompts promotion of wild bees as prolific pollinators.

 

Forbidden Fruit (Independent)  -  Red, round and tasteless? Not these beauties. Katy Guest enters the murky world of contraband tomatoes and samples the best crop that money can't buy.

 

From Grocery Store To Test Tube: Monitoring The Chemicals We Eat (ENN)  -  "It's always better to reduce your exposure to these synthetic chemical contaminants when you can."

 

Better Backyard Living Without Chemistry  (ENN)  -  We don’t spray for pests. Everything in our yard has to hold its own.

 

GM Food For Thought (AlterNet)  -  Unless you've gone exclusively organic, the odds are you've eaten potatoes that are registered pesticides.

 

Food Fight (EMag)  -  Genetic Engineering vs. Organics: The good, the bad and the ugly.

 

"Free Range," "Cage Free," "Organic": What's The Story?  (ENN) -  As Americans become more critical of what they eat, small farmers and large-scale agribusiness have responded with a bewildering array of choices.

 

The Eat Generation (AlterNet) - A new book chronicles a recent rise in food-borne illness and consumer distrust of food companies such as Monsanto, and describes the downside of an increasingly homogenized food marketplace.

 

Crisis In The Cupboard (MSNBC) - The plentiful food supply we take for granted has come at the expense of agricultural diversity. Now the bugs and blights are taking their revenge.

 

In Search Of The Ripe Stuff (CSM) - Supermarkets today are stocked with choices galore. But some shoppers are questioning dependence on produce from far away.

 

The Futures of Food  (NYTimes)  - To thumb through the pages of Food Technology, the trade magazine for food scientists, is to realize that the dream of liberating food from the farm wasn't killed off by the 60's after all.

 

On Letting Chickens Strut Their Stuff  (BeliefNet) - When a chicken farmer explained the notion of 'chicken dignity,' I understood the moral ambiguities in the animal rights debate.

 

An Out-of-Whack Food Chain  (AlterNet) - In the United States, stuffing and starving are two sides of the same coin.

 

A Matter of Taste  (AlterNet) - Most Americans have no idea where their food comes from.

 

Why Fast Food Costs Too Much  (AlterNet) - The industrial food system produces force-fed, disease-prone animals and people. An estimated 120 million Americans are overweight or obese.

 

Want Drugs With Those Fries?  (Tom Paine) - The mantra for antibiotics is, "The more you use them, the faster you lose them."

 

Food & The City (NewDream) - (pdf file) Few people make the connection to the equally obvious: a city is what it eats.

 

Matters Of Scale (WorldWatch) - WorldWatch points up some sobering costs of the American dietstyle -- with help from John Robbins

 

Seeds of Justice, Seeds of Hope (YES) - In the midst of the toxic atmosphere of Watts, seeds are sprouting, organic gardens are thriving, young people are discovering a vocation, and healthy, whole foods are becoming part of everyday life.

 

Breaking The Diet - ADD Link (AlterNet) - Parents are being told to put their children on drugs that can have harmful side effects without first trying simple diet changes and eliminating toxins that may be causing the problems.

 

How To Feed The World  (CSM) - With the Earth poised for a population spurt, a debate ensues over the future of farming.

 

The Pantry Patrol Reports  (OnEarth) - In many American kitchens, the "waste not, want not" maxim is decidedly passé.

 

Seeds of Domination  (In These Times) - Don't want GMOs in your food? It may already be too late.

 

The Growing Controversy Over Food Irradiation (ENN) - Over the past several years, a series of highly publicized recalls have sent panicky consumers running to the fridge to check for tainted meat.

 

Focus On Food (Living Gently) - FOOD: one of the three essential elements for life, the giver of energy, the gift of the heavens. "Where does it come from How is it made," you ask? Well, here is the recipe...

 

Playing With Our Food (Earth Island) - Most Americans know little if anything about a massive food experiment already underway in our nation’s fields and grocery stores.

 

Thought For Food (Earth Island) - A look at genetically-modified crops, served with a helping of Greenpeace’s True Food Now Shopping list.

 

Who Cares For The People Who Harvest Americas Food? (Life & Times) - The people who harvest crops are some of the poorest and sickest individuals living in California. They work at one of the nation's most hazardous jobs, second only to construction.

 

One Man's Resistance Against Monsanto (AlterNet) - When a Canadian court upheld a lawsuit by the agribiz giant against Percy Schmeiser, it essentially gave Monsanto control of the entire canola crop of Western Canada. Now Schmeiser is fighting back to regain control of his land.

 

Thanks For Bountiful Farms (Daily Breeze) - As you sit down at the table this Thanksgiving and give thanks for all of the good in your life, take the opportunity to thank our farmers. Remember that agriculture is part of our lives, so we must help to protect it.

 

Junk Food Wars (AlterNet) -Tasty meals easily available to pretty much all of us, anytime and everywhere.

 

Urban Agriculture: Feeding The Body, Feeding The Souls (ENN) - A quiet revolution is stirring in our food system. It is not happening so much on the distant farms that still provide us with the majority of our food: It is happening in urban neighborhoods, suburbs, and small towns.

 

Sowing Disaster (The Nation) - How genetically engineered American corn has altered the global landscape.

 

Cream Of The Crop (Grist) - Can partnerships between farmers and environmentalists rescue U.S. agricultural lands from ecological doom?

 

Organic Nation (Onearth) - If "organic" is so simple, why has it taken the U.S. Department of Agriculture ten years and more than 500 pages to define it?

 

Pharm Phresh (AlterNet) - "Pharmers" are working on techniques to deliver the world's drugs through snack foods instead of pills. But will Prozac Puffs do more harm than good?

 

True Cost of Groceries (Adbusters) - The average item we toss in the grocery bag has traveled 1,300 miles from where it was produced.

 

The War On Fat (The Atlantic)  -  No longer merely a matter of vanity, of personal health or of patriotism, today it is a burden on a global scale.

 

Food Fight (AdBusters)  - Big Food is the next Big Tobacco. Obesity now kills 330,000 North Americans a year and will soon pass tobacco as the leading preventable cause of sickness and death.

 

Frankenfood Get Funkier (AlterNet) - The biotech industry is promoting the newest biotech solution to genetic contamination.  But will it be just more fuel for the fire?

 

Farming Without a Factory (AlterNet) - Now some farmers are bucking the factory farming trend and finding ways to make organic, healthy and humane farming work.

 

Farming With The Wild (ENN)  - At present, the challenge of making farming more harmonious with biodiversity conjures more questions than ready answers.

 

Spraying Yourself With Toxic Chemicals Is Not Sexy (Natural Life) - An increasing number of people – including health care practitioners – are beginning to think that there’s nothing sexy, or healthy, about spraying yourself with toxic chemicals.

 

Certified Organic (NewsWeek)  - Here’s a guide to how purer products affect the health of our families and the planet.

 

Cloned Food Products Near Reality (Wash Post) - Milk from cloned cows and meat from the offspring of cloned cows and pigs could show up on grocery shelves as early as next year.

 

GM Wheat Portends Disaster for Great Plains (AlterNet) - Much of the world is certain that it doesn't want GM foods.  And this fact could have devastating economic implication for America farmers.

 

Organic Skin Care to Go Unregulated (AlterNet) - Recent changes in the USDA's National Organic Policy will force health-conscious consumers to read their labels closely.

 

Genetically Modified Outcome  (Tom Paine) - "The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded that there's nothing you can do about it."

 

The Not So Sweet Success of Organic Farming  (Salon) - Pesticide-free, non-genetically modified food is a big, global business now. But, ironically, small farmers are getting the shaft.

 

A World Awash In Hormones  (AlterNet) -  The recent scandal over hormone therapy is just a scratch on the surface compared to the synthetic hormones found in our water supply, food, and consumer goods.

 

Organic Diet For A Small Planet  (Common Dreams) - We can produce the abundance we need without squandering our resources.

 

National Organic Standards: Truth or Fiction?  (AlterNet) - Manufacturers of health and beauty aides are lobbying to weaken organic standards and put pesticides and petrochemicals onto the shelves of your local health food store.

 

Nature's Logic  (Conscious Choice) - By portraying the dark side of industrial food, author Michael Pollan shows us a better way.

 

Not Milk: The USDA, Monsanto and the US Dairy Industry  (AlterNet) - The dairy industry has spent billions of dollars convincing us that milk is healthy, all the while pumping chemicals into cows and the milk itself that makes it deadly.

 

Are Your Beauty Products Killing You? (AlterNet) - A new report linking birth defects and health risks with a chemical used in trendy cosmetics, gives a long overdue wake-up call to the FDA, consumers and the beauty industry.

 

The Truth About Milk  (Rense)  - Everything you know about cow's milk and dairy is probably part of a Dairy industry MYTH.

 

Organic Farming is a Realistic Alternative  (ENN) - It's strange how a movement that began with the best of intentions has managed to generate so much animosity.

GM Crops: A Bitter Harvest?  (Nation) - Corporate attacks on family farm activists have increased dramatically since the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations in 1999.

Scientist Warn GM Crops Are 'Escaping And Going Rouge'  (Rense) - according to researchers who say there is an urgent need to better control the controversial GM crops and their novel genetic machinery.

Trouble on the Farm  (Nation) - Corporate attacks on family farm activists have increased dramatically since the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations in 1999.

Raspberry to Strawberry  (Guardian) - In Britain, it's a dying art. In the US, it is effectively dead. Result: Californian strawberries.

Corporate Phantoms (Guardian) - The web of deceit over GM food has now drawn in the PM's speechwriters.

Asserting Democratic Control of Food and Agriculture (Hope Dance) - How we can challenge corporate control of our Food... and win.

The Worlds Problems on a Plate (Guardian) - Meat production is making the rich ill and the poor hungry.

Frankencorn Threatens Mexico's Ancient Maize (AlterNet) - Agronomists and environmentalists fear that Mexican farmers have now, perhaps unknowingly, spread genetically engineered corn into most of the corn-growing regions of Mexico.

Factory Farms Fancy Secrecy (News for Change) - Agribiz giants try slicing away at public's right-to-know.

Bovine Bioterrorism: The Perfect Pathogen (Veg Source) - Millions of people may be infected, and planet earth will never be the same.

The Food Revolution (Hope Dance) - "There is a huge disconnect in this country from the idea of 'You are what you eat.'

Urban Farming: Connecting the city to the land (Hope Dance) - Urban farms and food gardens may appear to be tiny in their scale, but their potential impact is huge.

The Man Who Would Feed the World (SF Gate) - John Jeavons' farming methods contain lessons for backyard gardeners too.

The Case of Modern Meat (PBS) - Frontline takes a look at the American beef industry.

Genetic Engineers Know Not What They Do (Canberra Times) -  Down what path does genetic engineering take us into the future?

Eating as a Political Act (Hope Dance) - Knowledge wasn't power in the case of this education.

The Good, the Bad, and the Savory (Earth Island) -  Is there slavery in your chocolate?

Dispel the myth that cheap food comes without high cost (Common Dreams) - Earth Day is a perfect time to celebrate the first, true gift of the Earth to us: food. Before we toss our hats into the air, though, we might want to start with an admission.

The Third Generation (CorpWatch) - From golden rice to anti-viral Tomatoes -- Good health or good marketing?

Biotech crops on the dinner table? (CBS) - American farmers will plant more genetically engineered crops this year, including one-third of the corn on U.S. soil, shrugging off international resistance to biotech food.

The End of Styrofoam Strawberry (New Int'l) - The hungry will be fed not by ever-grander schemes, ever-bigger farms, but by smaller farms that are more in touch with the earth.

Starlink Corn Invades Mexico GNN) - Like killer bees in reverse, a controversial genetically - engineered that contains a potentially dangerous human allergen has invaded Mexico:

Agriculture's Next Frontier (Utne ) -  How urban farms could feed the world.

The Future of Food is Sustainable and Organic (Conscious Choice) - After a five-year period, the study determined that the yield of organic apples was comparable to the other systems, a significant finding when you consider the fact that naysayers regularly charge that "organic can't feed the world."

The Aspartame Epidemic (DisInfo) - A worldwide epidemic is raging. The cause is a poisonous chemical sweetener,  aspartame

We're Poisoning Our Children (Common Dreams) - Today's produce is full of toxic residue and our children are most at risk.

Rejection and Acceptance (Alternet) - Concerns are being raised about the inadequate risk assessments that recently led the EPA to renew the registration for genetically modified corn and cotton, at a time when various supermarket chains are trying to eliminate.

Fruits We'll Never Taste (Utne) -  Preserving diversity-in the natural world and human culture-lets us delight in an abundant world.

Revenge of the Guinea Pig (GNN) - What's making us the world's fattest nation? Our high-fat, salty, sugar-laden, processed meat-centered diet. We're junk food junkies, and it's only getting worse.

Frakenfoods - The Truth at Last (Sustain) - Forget all those bland reassurances about the safety of GM foods and crops

Body of Evidence (E Magazine) -  Were humans meant to eat meat?

Irradiated Food Fight (Alternet) - When consumers are asked whether they would buy food that's been treated with radiation to rid it of bacteria such as E. coli most prefer to take their chances on conventional foods.

The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering (Common Dreams) - What the public fears is not the experimental science but the fundamentally irrational decision to let it out of the laboratory into the real world before we truly understand it.

Hopes Edge (Guerrilla News) - Solutions of a small planet on the blink.  An interview with Frances Moore Lappé.

Drugs In Our Food = National Security? (Alternet) -  Of the 26.6 million pounds of antibiotics stuffed down the throats of animals every year, only two million are used for treating specific illnesses.

Washington Pressuring the EU to Drop GMO Labeling (Corp Watch ) - U.S. biotech giant Monsanto says there is no need to label genetically modified foods.

Hemp, Hemp, Hooray! (Alternet) - The DEA has announced it will attempt to ban any hemp product like food and clothing that contains even a ghost of a hint of a trace of THC.

Down on the Farm (Tom Paine) - How aggressive agri-giants are turning poultry farmers into bird babysitters and are shaping the future of agriculture in America

Beef Stew (Alternet) - Mad Cow Disease could be much ado about nothing -- or a terrifying threat to our food supply. It's time for the media to take another look.

Alzheimers: Losing your mind for the sake of a burger (Veg Source) - Meat and dairy may play a significant role in Alzheimer's epidemic.

So You're an environmentalist? Then why are you still eating meat? (Alternet) - Evidence shows a meat-based diet is bad for the environment, aggravates global hunger, brutalizes animals and compromises health. So why aren't more environmentalists vegetarians?

Sowing the Seeds of Insecurity (Rense) - The future of our food supply

America the fat (Alternet) - (obesity) soon surpassing tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death in this country. 

White Poison: The Horrors of Milk (Alternet) - Pus, blood, antibiotics, and carcinogens in milk -- do no body good.

Flouride - a kick in the teeth (Red Pepper) -  "Water fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time." 

The beginning of the end for GE food? (Common Dreams) - As awareness of GE foods reaches levels seen in Europe, the wholesale rejection of what the British have dubbed "Frankenfood" is likely to be duplicated in the US.

Mexican study raises GM concern (Common Dreams) - DNA spreads to wild crops.   

The pesticide wars (Working for Change) - Most people assume public health officials are working diligently to solve these mysterious afflictions. 

The genetically engineered pause that refreshes (Rense) - The future of our food supply

Free drugs from the faucet (Salon) - How did tiny amounts of nearly every drug under the sun get into our drinking water -- and what are they doing to us?            

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