The Green Fork is the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. Click here to Find Good Food.

“Pretty hard to be against motherhood, milk and children” This from Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), earlier this week regarding Philadelphia’s Universal Feeding Program, which has been officially canceled.  Tom Laskawy reports on the outcry at Grist (hat tip to Obama Foodorama, who is similarly outraged).
Bush’s farmworker regulations suspended Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is making good [...]

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This September the federal Child Nutrition bills which cover the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, will be up for evaluation and amendment during the reauthorization process. This window of opportunity arises every five years for lawmakers to improve upon child nutrition programs. The nation’s burgeoning childhood obesity epidemic is forcing health leaders and politicians [...]

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Food, Inc. and FRESH both feature Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer profiled in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Pollan himself appears in both films as well. But despite the apparent overlap, the two films are very different.

Each provides a much-needed public service, but where Food, Inc. airs a laundry list of factory farming’s dirty secrets, Fresh makes a beeline past the manure lagoons, veal crates, contaminated food and monoculture madness to land us in truly greener pastures, whether it’s in rural Virginia with Salatin or in urban Milwaukee at McArthur genius Will Allen’s farm, Growing Power.

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Have a great Memorial Day! We’ll be back on Tuesday.
Vilsack on CAFOs, swine flu H1N1 Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack stood up for industrial livestock operations, saying that the “‘vast, vast, vast majority of farmers who are raising livestock are very sensitive’ to the need to be careful about the management of [...]

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Last weekend, before a packed house at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library, Michael Pollan declared the recent surge in activist work and interest in food politics a “movement.” As usual, Pollan had a lot of great things to say that night, but this piece stood out to me. Friends and colleagues and I have been talking [...]

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To help clear the confusion, our friends at Food and Water Watch have supplemented our ongoing effort to collect information about places where you can purchase sustainable seafood. They have provided the Eat Well Guide an additional list of wholesale markets that sell sustainably caught seafood. To find these markets listed go to the advanced search page and check the box for “sustainable seafood” under products.

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Q. What’s the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?
A. A pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW.
Don’t laugh–bird poop’s a precious resource. I dispense pellets of Peruvian seabird guano to my gardening friends as if they were Pez, because, as the Worm’s Way gardening supply catalogue explains, “There is nothing like [...]

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From our friends at Healthy Monday…
“If we went a day without meat we would rediscover vegetables!” These are the words of best-selling author and food activist, Michael Pollan, on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show.
Pollan has lately been championing the virtues of going meatless. On the Earth Day episode of the Oprah Show, he said the easiest [...]

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Organic dairy farmers milked dry As dairy prices tank, the USDA has proposed rules “meant to close” loopholes in organic dairy standards that may give industrial organic producers an unfair advantage over smaller, grass-fed producers. Meanwhile, Farm Aid is helping folks get organized.
Getting cultured BoingBoing co-editor Xeni Jardin guest posts a homemade yogurt how-to [...]

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After a combined 20 years working in other people’s restaurants, Dylan and Heidi Stockman decided they’d had enough. “We were used to scraping by working for other people,” Heidi recalls, “We figured we might as well scrape by working for ourselves.” As avid farmers’ market shoppers, they knew they wanted to sell local, sustainable food, [...]

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