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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 to play devil’s advocate, James McWilliams makes the case at Slate that grass-fed beef is not any less likely to harbor the deadly strain.  Hmmph.

East Meets West. In the Garden. In the Schoolyard. Sustainable food juggernaut Alice Waters and film producer John Lyons are embarking on a fundraising venture for a sixth Edible Schoolyard project, to be housed at Brooklyn’s PS 216.  If it happens, ESYNYC will be the most ambitious — and expensive — yet. (Note: although the program has its naysayers, and it’s largely un-replicable model due to its price tag, such models are still valuable as just that — models. I visited the New Orleans Schoolyard in 2008 and wrote about it here).

US Playing Chicken Abroad Europeans have banned US chicken imports for years because of an industry practice of dunking it in a chlorine bath (yum) and Russia, upon whom we’ve been dumping donating chicken parts since the 1990s (not without controversy — these parts came to be called “Bush legs” early on and “came to symbolize the humiliation of a once-great nation reduced to dependence on food handouts”) has followed suit with a ban on the process.

Indiana to Legislate Local Recognizing the enormous positive economic impact such a move could have on her state, Indiana State Senator Sue Errington has proposed a bill that would establish goals toward institutional (schools, prisons, etc) support for organic and locally-grown food.

FAO Prefers Organic The UN Food and Agriculture Organization just put out a new report, the gist of which is that organic agriculture is a more realistic approach to climate change mitigation than carbon accounting, especially because carbon sequestration is not easy to measure (though the report does point out that organic ag stores more carbon in the soil than conventional, among its other ecological benefits).  More on this at IATP’s Think Progress blog.