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

An Unappealing Appeal In a ruling certain to discourage communities that don’t want a factory farm as a neighbor,  the Illinois Supreme Court denied an appeal filed by residents who are being sued for $300,000 in damages after their unsuccessful attempts to have environmental issues addressed before construction of a Cargill affiliated pork CAFO.
There’s an [...]

[Read more →]

Meet FLUPSY (Floating Upweller System), the solar and wind powered clam nursery.  This brilliant boat is good for the economy (because it’s increasing the number of clams in Hempstead Bay) and good for the bay (because the clams they’re growing are bivalves and help filter it) and it utilizes only renewable energy.  Love it.  From [...]

[Read more →]

The term “activist designer” may sound kind of funny to those of us who associate designers with swanky showrooms and high-end hedonism. But there’s a growing cadre of designers, architects, and do-it-yourselfers whose clientele is the citizens of the world, instead of the privileged few.
They’re pooling their tremendous talents through a non-profit organization called Project [...]

[Read more →]

It surprised us to learn that despite the many farms on the island and the trees everywhere dripping with citrus, many of the children living on Maui don’t have access to fresh fruits and vegetables and have no idea how they grow or where they come from.

It turns out that despite a long-standing agricultural heritage and the lush environment for growing, over 90% of the food eaten on this island is imported–yet another example of our food system gone topsy turvy.

[Read more →]

Next time you look at a bunch of broccoli, think of those stalks and florets as a bouquet bursting with beneficial compounds. Açai and goji berries may be the darlings of the superfood set, but there’s a reason why the Romans revered broccoli. Ounce for ounce, this offspring of a wild European cabbage packs an incredible array of vitamins, minerals, and fiber.

[Read more →]

3.56 million Quarter Pounders According to Grist’s Tom Philpott, the go-to guy on the mystery meat front, that’s what the 864,000 lb. ground beef recall, the first of 2010, adds up to.  Philpott also wonders whether industry will “grope for techno fixes,” presumably not of the “pink slime” variety.  Never one to miss an opportunity [...]

[Read more →]

(With a click of her mouse, Kerry Trueman, aka Eating Liberally’s kat, corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics)
Kat: New York City’s new initiative to persuade food manufacturers and restaurants to voluntarily reduce the salt in their foods by 25% over the [...]

[Read more →]

In the United States we are blessed to have fresh water that meets many of our needs. If we want to continue to enjoy all the benefits of that water, we have no choice but to take steps to protect and properly treat it. Otherwise we can keep our heads in the sand and wait for someone else to fix the problem. But hey, there’s water on the moon, right? I’ll start packing.

[Read more →]

The thrust of the authors’ argument is that the “efficiency” of industrial ag enables factory farms to produce a given quantity of meat, eggs and/or dairy products with a smaller adverse environmental impact than less-efficient, traditional livestock farms. As you’d expect, there are a number of Major Flaws in their analysis – read quick descriptions of each flaw below; find detailed assessments after the jump.

[Read more →]

Cultivating Contrariness This week, The Atlantic published a hit piece by Caitlin Flanagan on school gardens, which elicited near-immediate responses from Grist’s Tom Philpott, Serious Eats’ Ed Levine and The Atlantic’s own Corby Krummer.
Leasing Land In a questionable scheme to localize food production, land-rich, capital-poor Ethiopia, a major food importer, is leasing large tracts [...]

[Read more →]