Photo: Chris Metcalf Raise your hand if you serve your kids a bowl of Twinkies for breakfast. Or perhaps they prefer a few cookies instead? According to the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) new report on children's cereals, that's effectively what millions of kids are eating in the morning. Indeed, the amount of sugar in many popular brands of cereals is astonishing: Kellogg's Honey Smacks is 56 percent sugar by weight. One cup of the stuff has more sugar than a Hostess Twinkie, says the report, while "a cup of any of 44 other children's cereals has more sugar than three …

Photo: T.P. MartinsIf you want to understand all that is wrong with our government's environmental safety priorities, you need only look at the sad story of the weed killer atrazine. Despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated its dangers, it remains one of the most commonly used herbicides in the U.S. -- to the tune of 76 million pounds a year. Atrazine is highly volatile -- which means not only can it leach into groundwater through the fields, but it can become airborne and drift into waterways. Much of the Midwest's water supply contains detectable levels of the …

Mark Bittman has provided the ultimate Thanksgiving guide for anyone interested in making our broken food system work again. His exhaustive list of the 25 people or groups for which he is most thankful is a must-read.* It starts with nutritionist and food system reform pioneer Marion Nestle and ends with "anyone who's started a small farm in the last five years, and anyone who's supported one; anyone who cooks, and especially anyone who teaches others to cook." That covers a good portion of Grist readers, I'd like to point out. So good on all of you, too. Heaven knows, …

If the straight-up taxpayer swindle taking place in the supercommittee isn't making you angry, you're probably not paying attention. I'm talking about the attempt by agribusiness and a group of willing farm-state representatives to put billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of industrial farmers during the ongoing super committee Farm Bill negotiations. According to The Hill, the moment of truth is upon us: The supercommittee is indeed poised to rewrite the Farm Bill behind closed doors and with no input from reform-minded congresspeople, let alone the public. Many of us have known this was going on, but the Environmental Working …

Photo: Matthew BurpeeThe most exciting aspect of the new USDA report on the local food and farm economy [PDF] isn't the sizable $4.8 billion in annual sales of local food it says occurred in 2008. It's the fact that, as the AP noted, the local food economy is poised to grow as fast as even the most optimistic estimates. The way things are trending, local food sales in 2011 could pass $7 billion -- a number that local food boosters (as well as the USDA itself [PDF]) threw around a few years back. That figure would represent an impressive 15 …

Four companies currently control 90 percent of all beef processing in the U.S. Photo: Compassion in World FarmingOne of the least-discussed but most promising attempts at food system reform was dealt a serious blow the other day. The USDA itself eviscerated its proposed reform to a set of rules which would have given a government division with a wonky name -- the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA) -- authority to crack down on the way large corporate meatpackers wield power over small and mid-sized ranchers. To say this was a lost opportunity is a vast understatement. After all, …

Photo: Christopher Cotrell Four years ago, a coalition of agribusiness companies and industry groups, including Monsanto, the American Farm Bureau, the Midwest Dairy Council, and the National Pork Producers Council, got together to start the Center for Food Integrity (CFI), a nonprofit organization whose mission is "to build consumer trust and confidence in today's food system." CFI fulfills its mission by performing market research and then concocting spinmeister Frank Luntz-style message testing to come up with ways Big Food can convince Americans to stop worrying and love industrial agriculture. But perhaps it's Big Food that has reason to worry: There's …

It turns out converted rainforest land is neither particularly productive as farmland nor climate smart, since creating it releases huge amounts of carbon sequestered in trees. (Photo by Lawrence Baulc.)

Now that we're surrounded by 7 billion of our closest friends, it's probably a good time to talk about how we're going to feed them. The government, along with corporations like Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, and others who are part of our current industrial agriculture system, will tell you that feeding the world is all about more. More yield from crops, more chemicals, more fertilizer, more genetically engineered seeds. More, more, more!

Of course, it's easy to say that when you're willing, as they are, to ignore the health effects, climate and environmental impacts, resource constraints, and every other real world consequence of large-scale industrial agriculture.

A two-week Food Bill rewrite stacks the deck against good-food advocates.Photo: ccarlsteadLast month, I wrote that prospects for reforming the Farm Bill were dim. My prior assessment is turning out to be outrageously optimistic. Typically, passage of the Farm Bill occurs every five years and involves a lengthy process of hearings, constituent meetings, and (sad but true) many a high-priced meal on the tab of some lobbyist or other -- followed by detailed negotiations between the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. It has also often been seen as an opportunity to -- as one recent action alert put it -- …

Is the company making genetically modified salmon about to become the next Solyndra? According to the U.K.'s Guardian, it's very possible. In the wake of the USDA's announcement of a $500,000 grant to AquaBounty, the developer of Atlantic salmon that have been modified to grow faster on less feed, advocates at the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group opposed to FDA approval, dug deeper into the company's latest financial statement. Grist noted late last month that the company had a net loss of $2.8 million. Now it's also clear that the company faces a fairly serious cash crunch. After …