Soda can ... harm your health.The taxman cometh for soft drinks. Or so it appears these days. We already know they're on the table as a possible funding source for Obama's health care reform. And behind the scenes, the co-author of an influential paper on the potential positive effect of soda taxes, New York City's Health Commissioner Tom Frieden, has just been named to run the Centers for Disease Control. And today David Leonhardt, one of the NYT's top economics writers published a column praising the benefits of taxing soda in particular and calories in general. I even learned that …

Photo: TheTruthAbout..., via FlickrThe Ethicurean probably had it right when it declared yesterday that "local" jumped the shark. The shark in this case (or is it the jumper? I'm never sure which is which) is Frito-Lay and its Big Food brethren, which have embarked on marketing campaigns emphasizing the "local" producers who supply them. The NYT lays it out: Frito-Lay is one of several big companies that, along with some large-scale farming concerns, are embracing a broad interpretation of what eating locally means. This mission creep has the original locavores choking on their yerba mate. But food executives who measure …

USDA chief Tom Vilsack is once again on the verge of stepping in it regarding his pick for food safety czar, i.e. the head of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. Some may recall that back in March the Obama administration nearly appointed Dr. Michael Osterholm to the post only to back off when his views on meat irradation (aka "Zap the Crap") proved too hot to handle. Ironically, Osterholm -- who has ties to the meat industry, biotech heavyweight Monsanto and defense contractor 3M -- is also a legitimate expert on pandemic preparedness, a skill which might've come …

The ethanol lobby may still be reeling in the subsidies, but it doesn't seem to be having any luck dealing with their other obsession, the so-called "blend wall," i.e. the legally prescribed limit to the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into gasoline. The NYT has a nice summary of the mounting scientific and industry backlash against ethanol lobbyist Growth Energy's EPA petition to raise the blend wall from 10% to 15%. The NYT lays out some of the objections this way: Approving E15 would have a huge impact on consumers, said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center …

I know some are still reeling from the recent Obama administration announcement on biofuels and its implication that it remains a bit too much in thrall to the concerns of Big Ag. And Tom Vilsack's continued pimping for Monsanto and other biotech companies seems both unsustainable and uninformed. But a slew of positive decisions have come down from the USDA in recent days that merit attention and suggest that business is very much not as usual at ag's end of the Mall. First up was USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan's announcement of $50 million in funding from the USDA's Environmental …

[Update: While some may think this decision was a win for corn ethanol, House Ag Committee Chair Collin Peterson clearly does not. In fact, he is seriously ticked off about it. According to CongressDaily, Peterson responded to the indirect land use ruling as follows:  "You are going to kill the biofuels industry. You are in bed with the oil industry. I won't support any climate change bill even if you fix it because I don't trust anybody," Peterson told administration witnesses at a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing on the renewable fuel standard's impact on land use. Ouch.] The Obama administration …

I agree with the calls for some amount of caution in the search for a smoking gun in the swine flu pandemic. There's always the danger of over-reaching and turning your target into an object of sympathy. But really, the science IS behind us on this one. The head virologist of the CDC has indeed identified the core strain of this outbreak as one that arose in a North Carolina CAFO.  Meanwhile, another voice, this time Johann Hari of the London Independent (via HuffPo) convincingly touts the idea that our desire for cheap meat is a cause of the current …

What's that you say? Smithfield claims that they are awaiting the results of "additional" tests on the pigs at their Veracruz, Mexico, CAFO -- the facility at the heart of speculation here on Grist and elsewhere as the source of the current swine flu outbreak -- to determine if any pigs are infected. And just in case you were wondering, Smithfield is fully aware of who's "driving" the CAFO/swine flu meme, if their CEO is to be believed (reg req'd): In a letter to employees, [CEO C. Larry] Pope wrote that the results of those independent laboratory tests will be …

H/t to Fair Food Fight for this one. In a Q&A with ScienceInsider, the CDC's chief virologist Ruben Donis confirms what Columbia researchers declared: the current H1N1 swine flu virus is "all swine" in origin, the human and avian components present in the current virus date to the 1998 swine flu outbreak, and that this is not a recent triple reassortment of swine/human/avian, as has been reported: Q: How does it tie to the current outbreak? R.D.: Where does all this talk about avian and human genes come from? I was describing a fully swine virus. For [the] last 10 …

Everything swine and dandy?This intriguing notice posted to the International Society for Infectious Diseases by Columbia University researchers suggests that the current swine flu outbreak may be a "reassortment" (i.e. rearrangement) of existing swine flu viruses and not a swine, avian, and human influenza combo: The preliminary analysis using all the sequences in public databases (NCBI) suggests that all segments are of swine origin. NA and MP seem related to Asian/European swine and the rest to North American swine (H1N2 and H3N2 swine viruses isolated since 1998). There is also interesting substratification between these groups, suggesting a multiple reassortment. We …