When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the web. --------- Nuke disaster hits Japan's food supply Note to planners: Don't plunk highly volatile industrial projects onto rich farmland. Doing so ensures that industrial disasters will quickly cascade into food crises. Tragically, Japan's Fukushima region isn't just a source of nuclear-derived electricity. It's also a major source of milk and vegetables -- and its farmland has already been impacted by the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. From Saturday's The New York Times: As Japan edged forward in its battle to …

Now, what dodgy stuff did Philpott say was on this? In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. --------- Over in China, the nation's burgeoning pork industry has been been busted for churning out meat tainted with an illegal and quite dodgy growth-enhancing chemical, The Washington Post reports. The banned chemical, clenbuterol, is said to "reduce a pig's body fat to a very thin layer and makes butchered skin pinker, giving the appearance of fresher meat for a longer time." When people ingest it from eating the resulting pork, they suffer "symptoms such …

Still trying to keep it positive! One thing that that makes it easier is that spring really has arrived up here in the North Carolina mountains -- it must be 70 degrees, and the arugula we planted a few weeks ago in cold frames is taking off. Evidently, it's spring-time in England, too. I dare you to watch this video and not share the delight of these dairy cows getting their first taste of fresh grass after a long winter being cooped up and eating hay:

Despite a flurry of bad news recently, good things are spouting up.Photo: Judy Merrill-SmithThe last couple of days have been gloomy ones. I kept checking in with the vague and dire reports from the nuclear-power bleeding edge in Japan. For part of the time I was also immersed in a post about truly awful things going on in the U.S. poultry industry. While digging into the industry's routine abuse of farmers and reckless endangering of public health, I was haunted by the thought that these were the folks on whom we're supposed to be counting  to "feed the world" going …

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. --------- Cheap shot: a sale currently in effect at Randall's stores in Texas. The U.S. meat industry offers some of the biggest bargains you can find: stuff like "boneless skinless chicken breasts" for just two bucks a pound; or a "Crispy Chicken Sandwich" for a dollar. But when you dig beneath the marketing jargon and the coupon fliers, you start to see that all that cheap bird flesh has a much heftier price tag than meets the naked eye. In all my writing about the …

Today is National Agriculture Day. Have you hugged your farmer yet? To celebrate this special day, I've dug this column out of the archives, originally published three years ago this spring. It's a tribute to mid-size farms, which don't make nearly as much cash as their industrial-scale brethren and don't get nearly the love lavished on small farms. I argue that reviving the health of mid-sized farms is a critical task if we're going to create a just, fair, and green food system. -------- Most people probably don't think of Carrboro, North Carolina -- a bustling town just outside of …

Carried away: Ezra Klein and Tom Vilsack ride an imaginary "raft of subsidies." This week, an interesting -- and, I think, bizarre -- argument broke out between Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. The topic was whether rural residents deserve what Klein called a "raft of subsidies," when in fact, "we still need cities." Klein's contributions to the debate were widely hailed as "brilliant" and Vilsack's were widely deplored (see here and here); but I was left wondering what precisely the two were arguing about -- and whether either one of them actually knew what …

Wheredja get those jeans?I spend a lot of time shining a light on murky areas of the food system, but what about the industrial-apparel complex? Just as the food we eat has a material basis and a history, so do our clothes. It turns out that I know a lot more about the (grass-fed, local) beef I ate last night than I do about the (non-organic) cotton T-shirt on my back. Recently, a group of apparel-industry companies banded together to launch a tool to help consumers -- and the industry itself -- figure out the environmental impacts of our clothing …

Hold the agrichemicals: Organic ag could keep markets brimming with food. I've written about it once already, but I want to return to The Economist's recent special series about how industrial agriculture is the true and only way to feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit the world by 2050. The framing, I think, is extremely interesting. The widely revered magazine identifies two strains of thought on the food system's future: one serious and one frivolous. The serious one -- made up of "food companies, plant breeders, and international development agencies" -- is "concerned mainly with feeding the world's …