industrial ag
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Ask Umbra on the impacts of and alternatives to milk
If you think milk comes from a benevolent dairy fairy, you’re in for a surprise. Umbra answers a question about dairy cows and milk options that are friendlier to animals, the environment, and your health.
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Corn industry fights back over my depiction of corn's role in the Gulf dead zone
A National Corn Growers Association rep calls one of my posts about the Gulf of Mexico dead zone "snobbish" and the "rantings of an elitist with an anti-corn agenda." In addition to those fighting words, she took a swing at my facts. Too bad she missed.
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Ask Umbra on avoiding 'pink slime' in ground beef and flushing kitty litter
Ask Umbra tackles where to buy slime-free hamburger meat. She also revisits the flushability issue from last week's kitty litter column.
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Norman Borlaug's grandddaughter says hunger is a production problem — and GMOs are the answer
At an agrichemical industry conference held in D.C. recently, Julie Borlaug told the assembled executives what they wanted to hear.
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Two takes on antibiotic use on factory farms
In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related videos from around the Web. The meat industry wants to be viewed through the softening lens of the supermarket meat case: the shrink-wrapped splendor of chops, steaks, and breasts, presented in affordable and bountiful stacks. For the marketing to be effective, the dirty work of getting […]
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Part 1 of interview with local-food economist Ken Meter [PODCAST]
Local food economist Ken Meter(Jerry Carlson/Agri-Energy)Ken Meter, director of Minneapolis-based Crossroads Resource Center, is probably the country’s foremost thinker on the role of food in creating robust local and regional economies. I first encountered him at a Community Food Security Coalition conference in Atlanta in 2005, where he gave a presentation that forever changed the […]
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‘CAFO Reader’ editor Daniel Imhoff on the ills of factory ‘farms’
The CAFO Reader — a new book featuring essays by farmers Wendell Berry, Becky Weed, and Fred Kirschenmann, Republican speech writer Matthew Scully, journalist Michael Pollan, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among many others — gives a full picture of the environmental, social, and ethical implications of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), and includes a […]
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Tainted cereal exposes soggy food-safety system
Photo by Mykl Roventine, FlickrOn June 25, Kellogg’s issued a “voluntary recall” of 28 million boxes of its breakfast cereals, including Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, Corn Pops, and Honey Smacks. The company revealed it had detected an “uncharacteristic off-flavor and smell coming from the liner in the package” of the suspect cereal and warned of […]
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Kick your industrial-beef consumption up a notch with Emeril!
Emeril Lagasse, industrial beef’s new best friend(Red Marble Steaks)Far be it for me to lament the state of food television. Don’t get me wrong — watching a man lurch about a stage kitchen, bellowing canned slogans (“Bam!”), and pandering to the studio audience, destroys my appetite. But people receive pop culture in multiple and unpredictable […]