Grist | Topics | 46 Results

RESULTS		Results 1 – 25 of 46
Page:1 2
Headline	Author	Published	Section
A creepy new use for rBGH Putting cow hormones into fish food makes them balloon	Tom Philpott	20 Aug 2008	Gristmill
Update [2008-8-22 13:20:9 by Tom Philpott]:I was alerted to the rBGH-tilapia news item by this blurb in the Organic Consumers Association news feed on Aug. 19. But when you click on the link provided by OCA, you're taken to a source dated 2003. Unlike reader Mr. Mean, who (very cordially) comments below, I sloppily didn't notice how old this 'news' is. I emailed E. Gordon Grau, the Hawaii-based scientist who performed the study on rBGH and tilapia, to ask him if there w ...
Topics: agriculture, aquaculture, Big Ag, food, health, insanity (all these topics)

Milkin' It More use of growth hormones would boost sustainability of dairy industry, says study		01 Jul 2008	News
Posted at 2:00 PM on 01 Jul 2008 Shooting up cows with artificial growth hormones increases the sustainability of the dairy industry, claims a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Giving rbST to 1 million cows would enable the same amount of milk to be produced using 157,000 fewer cows," says the study, thus easing the impact that giant dairy-cow operatio ...
Topics: agriculture, air pollution, food, health, industrial ag, news, scientific research, water pollution (all these topics)

Amazin' maize Corn tries to look a little too sweet	Meredith Niles	27 Jun 2008	Gristmill
This week's $4.8 billion merger of Corn Products International and Bunge Ltd. probably didn't catch your eye, but with revenues projected to increase 29 percent this year to $4 billion, you might consider paying attention -- for the sake of your belly and the environment. Corn syrup manufacturers are going on the offensive -- and that includes a charm offensive. The Corn Refiners Association -- an industry trade group -- launched a new marketing campaign yester ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

Meat Wagon: Filthy swine U.S. officials dither while antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains creep into our pork supply	Tom Philpott	10 Jun 2008	Gristmill
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.The good news is that people are earnestly trying to figure out if a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria strain is infecting our nation's vast supply of pork.The bad news is, they don't work for a government regulator with the power to do something about it. Rather, they're university researchers and journalists, whose only real power is the public outrage they can generate through th ...
Topics: agriculture, Department of Agriculture, food, Food and Drug Administration, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

All hail Monsanto! When the benevolent seed giant declares it's going to save the world, why be skeptical?	Guest author	06 Jun 2008	Gristmill
This is a guest post from Claire Hope Cummings, an environmental journalist covering food and farming stories for print, broadcast, and online media. She practiced law for for 20 years, including four years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has farmed in California and Vietnam and is the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (2008). ----- Do you worry about where your food comes from? Are you concerned that farmers might ...
Topics: agriculture, Big Ag, business, food, health (all these topics)

Grass-fed milk: better for you So says U.K. study	Tom Philpott	30 May 2008	Gristmill
Another study has confirmed that organic milk, from cows that feed on pasture, delivers significantly more nutrition than feedlot milk. The U.K. Independent reports that grass-fed cows offer '60 per cent higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA9), which has been linked to a reduced risk of cancer.' Omega-3 fatty acids (39 percent higher) and vitamin E (33 percent higher) are also more abundant in milk from grass-fed cows. Unlike in the U.S., U.K. organic standards ...
Topics: agriculture, Department of Agriculture, food, health, organic food (all these topics)

Downer and out? The USDA's new ban won't keep sick cows out of the food supply	Tom Philpott	23 May 2008	Gristmill
Months after the downer-cow scandal of last winter, USDA chief Ed Schafer announced plans to ban all downer cows from the food supply. The rule involves cows that get sick after an initial inspection by veterinarians before slaughter. Under old rules, such cows could be reinspected by vets and then cleared for slaughter if the vet decided they posed no threat. In the press release announcing the proposed new rules, Shafer had this to say: Last year, of the nea ...
Topics: ag policy, agriculture, Department of Agriculture, food, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

The corn identity How Congress is shortchanging our health and sweetening things for the food industry	Bill Chameides	24 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Are we becoming children of the corn, thanks in part to large subsidies and overproduction? Photo: NREL/Warren Gretz At dinner Sunday night, I asked my friend Prasad if he knew about the new farm bill and what it means for average Americans. He didn't. I wasn't surprised. With the election, the war, and rising prices to fret about, not many people are pondering legislation about farms. But they should, because it has huge implications for the country's n ...
Topics: ag policy, ag subsidies, agriculture, food, health, legislation (all these topics)

School-lunch crunch Higher food prices mean crappier cafeteria fare for kids	Tom Philpott	16 Apr 2008	Gristmill
As food prices rise, who gets hit first and hardest? Clearly, urban dwellers in the global south, where people spend upwards of half of their incomes on food. According to the Wall Street Journal, here's the ever-growing list of nations that have experienced food-price riots:Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to ...
Topics: agriculture, education, food, green living, health, parenting (all these topics)

Coke: Still 'it' with the kids Coca-Cola and McD's top brands among teens, study says	Tom Philpott	14 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Photo: Taneli Mielik�inen There has been a lot of great work in the last decade to wake kids up to alternatives to industrial food. Here and there, farm-to-school programs have been launched, soft drinks banished from cafeterias, books like Eric Schlosser's Chew on This have emerged. Yet clearly, much more work needs to be done. Seems that teens are still gulping down Coke and flocking to McDonald's (when they're not heading for Burger King, evidently seen ...
Topics: advertising, agriculture, business, food, health, industrial ag, messaging (all these topics)

Skewed View from the Berkeley Hills Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes	Tom Philpott	04 Apr 2008	Victual Reality
As their grocery bills rise, Americans should take comfort: the price they're paying for industrially produced food in the supermarket is starting to approach that of artisanally produced food at the farmers' market. And that might make more of them choose healthier, less environmentally destructive diets. At least, that's the message of an article in Wedne ...
Topics: ag policy, agriculture, consumerism, economy, food, health, local food, politics (all these topics)

Got food? Farmworker Awareness Week is a chance to recognize the people whose labor means we can eat	Fawn Pattison	31 Mar 2008	Gristmill
This is Farmworker Awareness Week, a time to support the millions of farmworkers whose labor puts food on every American table, and who work and live in some of the worst environmental conditions in our nation. It's estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the ma ...
Topics: agriculture, Big Ag, business, environmental justice, food, grassroots activism, health, toxics (all these topics)

Birds do it; bees do it NYT op-ed: pesticides wiping out songbirds	Tom Philpott	31 Mar 2008	Gristmill
When the little bluebird Who has never said a word Starts to sing Spring ... It is nature, that is all, Simply telling us to fall in love. -- Cole Porter, 'Let's Do It' The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut -- 'birds do it; bees do it' -- has taken on an ominous ring. Evidently, songbirds have followed honeybees by engaging in a massive die-off. (Bats, whose mating rituals evidently didn't capture Porter's fancy, are dying off as well.)According t ...
Topics: agriculture, extinction, food, health, organic food, US EPA (all these topics)

The case for organic builds Recent studies: organic ag is just as productive, and better for you	Tom Philpott	27 Mar 2008	Gristmill
For years, industrial-food enthusiasts such as Norman Borlaug have attacked organic farming on two grounds: 1) it produces essentially the same nutritional results as chemical-intensive farming, and 2) it's less productive.Both of those criticisms are crumbling. This month, the Organic Center released a 'state of science' analysis of peer-reviewed studies comparing the nutritional content of organically and conventionally grown veggies. Organic wins by a substantial mar ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, industrial ag, organic food, scientific research (all these topics)

Savor the irony 'Heart-healthy' pork from pigs with bad hearts	Tom Philpott	26 Mar 2008	Gristmill
I live for this sort of stuff: Guys in white lab coats got to tinkering with pig DNA, hoping to conjure up pork rich in 'heart-healthy' omega-3 fatty acids. Here's what they did: A team from the University of Pittsburgh a first transferred the roundworm gene--fat-1--to pig foetal cells. After that, a team from the University of Missouri cloned those cells and transferred them into 14 pig mothers. Great teamwork, guys. Success! 12 pigs were born. Six of them te ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, insanity, Spain (all these topics)

Meat Wagon: Waste makes haste Canada says no to ethanol waste as cow feed, and more	Tom Philpott	26 Mar 2008	Gristmill
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. Back in January, a high USDA official made a pair of statements that say a lot about how we regulate industrial food production here in the United States. On the one hand, he admitted to a journalist that feeding cows high levels of distillers grains -- a the mush leftover from corn ethanol production -- had probably contributed to a spike in cases of beef tainted with the deadly E. coli 0157 b ...
Topics: agriculture, Arkansas, Big Ag, ethanol, food, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

Got chemical and pesticide residues in your milk? Conventional milk contains toxics, says the USDA	Tom Philpott	13 Mar 2008	Gristmill
The Organic Center acts as a kind of shadow USDA, digesting the latest peer-reviewed research on organic food, translating it into English, and issuing summary reports. Consumers won't want to miss the center's newest one on pesticide residues [PDF]. It contains one of those handy guides on which conventional fruits and veggies convey the most toxic traces to eaters (here's a handy two-pager [PDF] for the fridge), as well as a blunt and important discussion of the pl ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, organic food, toxics (all these topics)

Like calves to the slaughter The beef recall shows yet again that the USDA doesn't protect schoolchildren	Guest author	26 Feb 2008	Gristmill
This is a guest column by frequent Gristmill contributors Ann Cooper and Kate Adamick. Cooper serves as director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District and is author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way America Feeds its Children. Adamick is a New York-based food systems consultant specializing in school food reform and the director of The Orfalea Fund's Cool Food Initiative in Santa Barbara, Calif. ----- The USDA recently took action to for ...
Topics: agriculture, education, food, health (all these topics)

I know why the caged hen squawks U.K. government says organic, free-range eggs have 'significantly' less salmonella	Tom Philpott	21 Feb 2008	Gristmill
The case for sustainably grown food as a healthier and safer alternative to industrial dreck is gaining force.Here's the latest, from Natural Choices UK:A recent [U.K.] government survey shows that organic laying hen farms have a significantly lower level of Salmonella. Salmonella is a bacterium that causes one of the commonest forms of food poisoning worldwide. The study showed that 23.4 per cent of farms with caged hens tested positive for salmonella compared to 4.4 p ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, organic food, United Kingdom (all these topics)

Election '08: Real alternatives for real food? Questions for Obama and Clinton from a Wisconsin farmer	Guest author	19 Feb 2008	Gristmill
The following is a guest essay by Jim Goodman, a farmer in Wonewoc, Wisc., and a Kellogg Foundation Food & Society Policy Fellow. It first appeared in the Capitol Times (Madison, Wisc.). ----- The candidates have come and gone through Wisconsin for the primary season, but I still have some questions for the Democratic candidates, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama. I would like to be enthusiastic about this election, I really would. After the past ...
Topics: ag policy, ag subsidies, agriculture, Barack Obama, biofuels, elections, food, health, Hillary Clinton, local food, politics, presidential race 08, Wisconsin (all these topics)

Still a 'jungle' out there Upton Sinclair on downer cows	Tom Philpott	19 Feb 2008	Gristmill
Regarding the record-breaking meat recall in California, involving an industrial slaughterhouse that used torture to compel downer (i.e, too sick to walk) cows to slaughter, I caught word of a passage from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (published exactly 102 years ago Monday). Forcing downer cows through the kill line and into the food supply has a long and ignominious history. (The practice of mixing meat from downer cows into the food supply, of course, played a heavy r ...
Topics: agriculture, animal welfare, books, food, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

Meat Wagon: Don't have a (downer) cow, man Despite biggest meat recall ever, 37 million pounds of suspect meat made it to schools.	Tom Philpott	18 Feb 2008	Gristmill
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry.In the last edition of Meat Wagon, we mentioned the scandal at an industrial-scale slaughterhouse in California, where workers had been caught on videotape torturing severely sick ("downer") cows. Horrifically enough, the workers were abusing the enfeebled animals in an attempt to get them stagger to slaughter -- where their flesh would be mixed with that of other cows, and sent to market. M ...
Topics: agriculture, animal welfare, education, food, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

Pesticide-free produce, pesticide-free kids Organic food reduces organophosphate exposure in children	Clark Williams-Derry	31 Jan 2008	Gristmill
By now, I think most people understand that organic food is supposed to be healthier for you. But I think there are still some people who feel that the health benefits are a just a bunch of marketing hype. Well, this new study suggests that it ain't just hype -- organic produce really does reduce kids' exposure to some potentially risky pesticides. From the Seattle P-I: The peer-reviewed study found that the urine and saliva of children eating a variety o ...
Topics: agriculture, food, health, organic food, toxics (all these topics)

Eco-Farm: Seeds of ignorance Investigative journalist reveals serious safety concerns about GM food	Tom Philpott	25 Jan 2008	Gristmill
Note: For the next few days I'll be reporting from Eco-Farm, the annual conference held by the Ecological Farming Association of California. At Eco-Farm, some 1,400-1,500 organic farmers, Big Organic marketers, and sundry sustainable-ag enthusiasts pack into a rustic, beautiful seaside conference hall an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco to talk farming amid the dunes. I've been writing about genetically modified food since I first took up food-politics writing ...
Topics: agriculture, food, GMOs, health, industrial ag (all these topics)

Genetically engineered 'supercarrot' New superfood is higher in press-release fluff and poor journalism than your average carrot	Matthew Dillon	24 Jan 2008	Gristmill
The best way to read this post is to begin with a recent press release from Texas A&M on their new Supercarrot. Second, read Wired magazine journalist Alexis Madrigal's coverage of the story. Alexis praises the next generation of biotech crops. He writes that, 'A carrot that increases what's known as the bioavailability of calcium could have a major impact in the marketplace.' Really? You are correct, Alexis: it could have a major impact on a totally ...
Topics: agriculture, food, GMOs, health (all these topics)

Page:1 2		Results 1 – 25 of 46

Stories About: agriculture AND food AND health