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Food Recall: Check Your Pantry

Packaged foods strike back, again. Check your pantry for the following 101 items that are being recalled by the FDA for salmonella in a massive recall.

Why Did the Haitian Earthquake Become a Food Crisis?

Why did the Haitian earthquake become a food crisis? I spent the last nine days in Haiti working with refugees in Haiti and personally trying to better understand the answer to this question.

Is Looking to the Past the Future of Wheat?

Modern wheat is designed for high yields, and to produce flours with consistently high protein contents. In the meantime, flavor has fallen by the wayside.

Is looking to heirloom varieties the solution? I don’t think so.

Sous-Vide Supreme Runs the Gauntlet

Reviews of the newly introduced SousVide Supreme—the $449 home version of the $1,000 machines that the world’s best restaurants have been using for the last decade or so—have been streaming in from all over the internet, and have thus far been overwhelmingly positive. PR machine at work, or is it worth the hype?

Food Debates Rage this Week

Food battles are coming to a head this season. Last night I attended the panel talk “Can ‘Big Food’ Embrace Sustainable Agriculture”, featuring senior representation from Monsanto, General Mills, Dean Foods, Deutsche Bank, the Rainforest Alliance, and Slow Food. This was one of only several great debates held just this week on the food system, including clashes on ethical farms vs. vegetarianism, and on food stamps vs. nutrition standards for the poor.

American Food Safety Actually on the Move?

(Judson Berkey, Zurich, Switzerland) While concepts such as sustainability and local production have a long tradition in Europe, they are relatively new in the U.S. and still trying to find a footing there. What is not new, however, is the concept of food safety. This is a topic with a long and storied history in America. 2009-2010 is proving to be another leap forward; one that may incorporate new sustainable agriculture paradigms.

NYTimes Biotech and Food Crisis Debate – Unanswered Questions

The New York Times is currently hosting an excellent debate entitled Can Biotech Food Cure Hunger? Contributors include Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, Per Pinstrup-Andersen of Cornell, and Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya. Yet there are serious meta-questions about how we even approach this controversy that remain unanswered.

Crunching the Numbers on a Vegan in a Hummer

“A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius,” says Michael Pollan in this recent story from Reuters, in which he calculates the carbon footprint of a Big Mac
Unfortunately, it’s not true. Follow the link above for the real numbers.

Top 5 Moments in Western Food History

1. Neolithic Revolution

The last ice age ended 13,000 years ago, leaving behind a warmer environment full of the flora and fauna we know today and starting the Neolithic Period. This environmental shift fueled a 13,000-year explosion of population, technology, and culture. One plant that prospered in the newly warmed climate was wheat.

“Smart Choices” Moral Hazard

I wrote back in October 2008, almost exactly one year ago, about the development of the Smart Choices program by the food industry. Now, the tsunami of controversy has finally arrived as “smart choices” products appear on the shelves – led by vanguards such as Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, Cocoa Crispies, and more of your favorites. Even to those like me that support industry-led change, actions speak louder than words when it comes to exposing a failure of the private sector, the easy co-opting of nutritionists, and the need for government regulation and consumer education.