Or Not Many are disappointed by the results of the World Hunger Summit in Rome this week, where few leaders from wealthier countries showed up, and the leaders who did show up declined to commit to the FAO-recommended $44billion per year, or to pledge to end hunger by 2025.

Avoiding Pesticides? There’s an App for That It’s a new one from the Pesticide Action Network and it’s called What’s on My Food? and unlike the Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, (also a great app) this one breaks down exactly what kinds of chemicals are likely to be on different kinds of foods and explains their implications for personal health. (hat tip to Take Part).

Safety First If you have questions about how to prepare your Thanksgiving dinner safely, tune in to the Consumer Reports Safety blog Tuesday at 1pm eastern for a live chat with food safety expert Urvashi Ranvan.

Academy Award Dreams Food, Inc. is in the running for an Oscar nomination!

Jamie Oliver, Matchmaker The foodist formerly known as the Naked Chef is playing cupid with his new business venture — an online dating site for foodies.

Fishing for Answers As catfish farmers struggle to maintain control of US markets, the state of Alabama has banned untested fish imported from China and Vietnam after catfish from both of those countries were found to contain residues of banned antibiotics.

GM Export Snafus The EU doesn’t want our GMO soy (or anything else) but that’s not stopping traces of it from winding up in the feedbins of European pigs, which is gumming up international trade.

No Pain, No Problem? Scientists are working on genetically engineering animals not to feel pain, so as to assuage meat eaters of animal welfare concerns, which of course would do nothing about the social and environmental problems with factory farms.

Testing, Testing, or Lack Thereof The latest big ground beef recall has been traced to an Ashville, NY’s AFA Foods, which, according to the NY Times, “stopped testing its ingredients years ago under pressure from beef suppliers.” Also. Did the USDA really have to “ban” E. coli???

Giving Thanks, Getting Fair The Student/Farmworker Alliance is launching a National Supermarket Week of Action, encouraging ethical eaters to deliver letters to supermarket managers, asking them to consider workers’ rights.

Processing —> Diabetes? Diets high in processed meats “may increase the risk of developing type-2 diabetes by 40 per cent, according to a new meta-analysis from Norway and the US.” This article suggests that nitrites used in processing may be the culprit.

Ohio passes Issue 2  Will other states follow suit by instating “livestock care standards boards,” blocking groups like HSUS from introducing CAFO rules like California’s Prop 2?  Time will tell.

No Prosecution in Peanut Butter Case  Almost a year later, no charges in the salmonella outbreak that killed 9 people and sickened hundreds, despite evidence that CEO Stewart Parnell and other higher ups at the company knew about the contamination.  Victims of the outbreak are outraged.

Strange Bedfellows Following up on his recent interest in meat reduction, Glenn Beck has seized an unlikely opportunity to partner up with Ingrid Newkirk, CEO of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, not in an effort to combat climate change, but to bash Al Gore.  Warning: this video may induce uncontrollable eye rolling.

Swine Flu Bailout According to NBC, amid some panic over a dearth of vaccines, many Wall St. groups have received the sought-after doses out of turn.  SEIU, which is trying to get the financial institutions to donate theirs, points out that Citibank and Goldman Sachs “have received 1,400 doses between them.”

Swine Flu. At a Hog “Farm.” A commercial hog herd has tested positive for H1N1 in Indiana. The USDA is not disclosing the name of the facility or even the town, “in order to ensure continued high levels of participation in swine surveillance efforts, and because this is not a food safety or public health risk.”

Jeremy Piven Eats Pork, Gets Swine Flu Just kidding, folks. But it seems like everything this guy eats leads him to fall victim to some obscure health problem.  Now, he’s claiming that 12 cups of soy milk a day caused him to grow breasts.

Good Food in the Garden State In Newark, corner stores are getting a makeover and filling up with fresh fruits and vegetables.

One Problem with Bt The New York Times and USA Today both have stories out this week about a new report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the gist of which is that many (around 25%) farmers who grow GMO corn are not playing by rules requiring them to plant 1/5 of their acres with non-Bt corn, to help ensure that insects don’t grow immune to the Bt toxins.

Welcome to Farmville, Pop: 62 million If your experience with the Facebook sensation is anything like mine, it’s been limited to “hiding” notices about friends’ wandering cows, and apparently, we’re missing out on something.  Apparently, online faux farmers outnumber actual farmers 60 to 1.

Iceland says bæbæ to the Golden Arches The collapse of the krona has led McDonald’s to shut down operations throughout the country, as it’s no longer feasible to fly in ingredients.

US says hello to more imported produce? The California drought may force the issue.

Frightfully disgusting The Consumers Union wants the FDA to outlaw the disturbing practice of feeding “poultry litter” (chicken manure, feathers, bedding material and often, random foreign objects like rocks and dead rodents) to cattle.  Should they really have to ask? One last spooky fact: because it’s legal for chickens to be fed meat and other material from cows, this could lead to an upswing in mad cow disease.

An appointment with controversy Environmentalists are up in arms about Obama’s nomination of Islam Siddiqui, as Chief Agriculture Negotiator.  Siddiqui is a former lobbyist and current VP for science and regulatory affairs at Crop Life.  Can you say “conflict of interest?”

Biggest Losers visit WH Garden The remaining contestants on the weight loss reality show hit up the White House garden recently, the WHO Farm reports.  The episode will air Nov. 3.

Taxing carnivores? Pete Singer makes a case for sin tax on meat, though he fails to acknowledge the fact that there are farmers out there practicing more sustainable methods of meat production.

Are you a “fan” of the USDA? True to her word, the increasingly modern Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan will host her second live Facebook chat on November 5 at 3pm.

When I got there, I took a “field trip” out of Des Moines to a number of farms and I was struck by the conflicting feelings that the visual of miles upon miles of corn evoked in me.  On the one hand, a pastoral wholesomeness that rang with my heart, though not with my head.  On the other, the cliche: Children of the Corn.  To be sure, while the Midwestern landscape is bereft of the overstimulation of the city and full of some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, there is also some creepy stuff going on there, namely an unhealthy amount of genetically modified corn and soy, a staggering number of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and a lot of industry influence.

Before flying out, I’d been thinking a lot, as usual, about food production and the controversies that surround it.  Michael Pollan had just been lambasted in Wisconsin by what felt, to me, not unlike the anti-healthcare reform “tea parties” we saw earlier this fall.  Yes, there were real people, real farmers in fact, and yes, they were likely genuinely threatened by Pollan’s message, but the fact that they were reportedly organized by a Madison-based feed company to protest Pollan’s appearance cost them in credibility.

These were not the farmers I’d been hanging out with.

Last spring, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope, seeking to deflect blame after H1N1 appeared to have originated in a Smithfield operation in Mexico, said in an interview that family farmers stood to suffer from the massive hit the pork market took when the outbreak first occurred.  While that may have been true, Smithfield’s strategy of vertical integration has done more to put small producers out of business than have…well, the factory farming practices that almost surely created the breeding grounds for the swine flu.

And yet, industry would have those who follow such things believe that it’s activists who create problems for farmers, and they are eager to pit them against one another.  Talk about “sustainable” agriculture or “swine flu” and you hate farmers.  Ask too many questions about GMOs and you’re a science-hating elitist who doesn’t care about the hungry.  It seems to me that agribusiness has used farmers as human shields to deflect the claims of activists of all stripes — animal welfare, labor, environmental, social justice, etc.

Let me go on record here and now.  I don’t hate farmers. 

I do hate the fact that many of the farmers I met in Iowa raise GMO corn, but visiting with them confirmed what I had long known: that they have reasons for what they do.  One farmer I met cited subsidies and futures as his reason for growing commodity crops.  Indeed, if you were to watch your fellow farmers lose farms and land over the years as you struggled yourself to stay in business, would you dare gamble on growing anything that the government didn’t guarantee you a price for?  Would you plant non-GMOs, knowing that if whatever you plant isn’t Roundup Ready and a neighbor accidentally sprays your field — or their spray just drifts on over — your crop is lost?  For that matter, would you go through the trouble of that risk knowing that your more sustainably-produced product was going straight into a silo with the mountains of GMO corn produced all around you, anyway?

I also hate that so many farmers have found, over the years, that the only way to raise livestock and stay in business is to raise ever-greater numbers of animals in ever-smaller spaces, and deal with manure in unhealthy ways.  I hate that companies like Cargill and Smithfield have managed to trap farmers and their animals between a rock and a hard place, where the farmer incurs all the risk, the animals suffer more and the company makes all the profit.  I hate that traditional methods of raising livestock, along with concerns for animal welfare, workers rights, public health and other social and environmental justice issues have fallen victim to vertical integration and unchecked free market capitalism, in essence, forcing farmers to be complicit in a dangerous system that puts eaters, workers and the environment all at risk.

I know that there are farmers who will find something here to disagree with.  I’m not saying that we all can or should get along, but I did meet several conventional farmers in Iowa with whom I’d love to grab a beer.  I hope they felt the same way.   My guess is, without the twisting of words provided by industry shills, most activists and most farmers would find they have much more in common than either of them do with any multinational corporation, or even with seemingly farmer friendly front groups, like the Farm Bureau.

Speaking of the Farm Bureau, a few states over, in Ohio, an “issue” is on the November ballot which illustrates industry’s attempt to lock environmental and animal rights advocates out of any future conversation about farm policy, in this case, regualations that apply to livestock production.  Issue 2 would allow the governor of Ohio to appoint members to a “Livestock Care Standards Board,” which, if I’m getting this right, would give the group unchecked power over all future decisions on the care of farm animals.  

Proponents of the measure are framing it as a food safety issue, but opponents are calling it a corporate, special interest takeover of the Ohio constitution.  In fact, Ohio ACT (Ohio Against Constitutional Takeover) have put together an analysis of the funding (PDF) behind Ohioans for Livestock Care, less than 8% of which came below the $1,000 mark and over 66% was in chunks of $20,000 or larger.  Far and away, the Ohio Farm Bureau was the largest contributor, but the twelve largest donations all came from either corporations or industry groups.  Not exactly a grassroots effort.

So, who’s scarier?  The people, like Michael Pollan, who would speak out about the problems with our food production, or the people behind a measure to cut them out of the conversation completely?

A COOL Introduction for US Dairy Farmers Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), along with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have introduced the Dairy COOL Act, which would add dairy products to the list of foods required to display Country of Origin Labeling.  As the dairy industry has struggled to survive this year, signs point to a surge in imported dairy as one culprit in flagging prices.

Greening with Greywater California legislators are catching up with eco-minded individuals who’ve until now flouted regulations by installing “laundry to landscape” systems. Alternet is calling the repealing of the $350 fee “A Victory for the ‘Water Underground.’”

Show Me the Money Corpses The NY Times’s Neil MacFarquhar adds his voice to a number of reporters asking perhaps the wrong questions about hunger and population, but if the piece seems to cover the “same old story” of promoting GMOs, be sure to read through to the macabre nugget in the third to last paragraph.

Climate Action Will you be attending one of over 4,000 climate actions around the globe tomorrow, as part of Bill McKibben’s 350.org campaign?

Anti-Monopoly Action This week, La Via Campesina helped organize mobilizations against Monsanto in honor of World Food Day. On that subject, the Times waxes technological on the Department of Justice’s investigation into anticompetitive behavior, suggesting the Dept. begin at the top, with Monsanto.

Swedes Lead on Foodprint Labeling The Swedish National Food Administration has developed new food guidelines and labels that speak to both nutrition and ecological impact.

No Impact Food This week, the Huffington Post Green Page was abuzz with No Impact posts. Our good friend (and consultant) Kerry Trueman moderated a food-focused Q & A with Slow Food USA’s Josh Viertel and Food & Water Watch’s Patty Lovera. Watch the webcast on YouTube (Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4)

Making an Impact (or Not) Huffington Post’s Green Page wants you to participate in No Impact Week — check out Green Page editor Katherine Goldstein’s post about how you can get involved.

Vending Machines Make Good A German farm has embarked on a clever marketing strategy — farm-fresh food in vending machines.  Seriously.

Times on Food NY Times Magazine has a new Food Issue, with a new one from Michael Pollan, a great piece on Jamie Oliver and much, much more.  Enjoy.

RIP Gourmet One of the world’s best food magazines, it was announced this week, will be laid to rest.  Sam Fromartz mourns its passing at Chews Wise.

But You Promised President Obama claimed, in his inaugural speech, that lobbyists would not earn appointments in his cabinet, but since then, has nominated some doozies to key ag positions. Kathy Ozer and Marcia Ishii-Eiteman (of the National Family Farm Coalition and the Pesticide Action Network North America, respectively) react at Civil Eats.

As evidence, Smith cited that grotesquely American innovation, the bacon cheeseburger grilled in a pair of Krispy Kreme donuts instead of a bun. “It seems almost impossible, and it just seems like the stupidest thing, ” he sputtered on Tuesday’s broadcast, adding:

“It’s 1500 calories, I don’t know how many grams of fat it is, they won’t tell us…we’re told the donut burger is a big hit at a fair in West Springfield, Mass, there was a stand right there outside the city’s “Better Living” center…

…I don’t know, man, there are signs of the apocolypse, this may be one of ‘em.”

Bill Maher, meanwhile, declared that “America causes cancer” on last Friday’s Real Time in an interview with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. “We’re just such a dirty society,” he noted:

“…our way of life, the way we live, how dirty we are, the drugs we take, the food we eat, the chemicals we ingest–it’s just a cancerous country”.

Jackson did not dispute Maher’s characterization. She frankly acknowledged that the EPA has not been doing its job to protect the American people:

“We’re still catching up, right? We’re still learning all the things that industrialization has meant to us as a society, all those chemicals…we’re always playing catch-up, we’re cleaning up, we’re not preventing.”

She announced what amounts to a radical departure from the previous administration’s policies. The EPA is now “trying to get in front of chemicals before they can be put into commerce–we have 80,000 chemicals in this country put into commerce. Can we move the bar back towards thinking about what’s going to happen at the end, can we protect children, as well?”

We ingest and absorb all kinds of potentially toxic ingredients every day in our food, in the products we use, in our air and water, and the scariest part is that even the ‘experts’ really don’t know what it’s doing to us. Avoiding suicidally bad-for-you junk foods like the donut- encased cheeseburger may be a no-brainer, but how do well-intentioned parents keep their children from falling under the spell of those golden arches?

It’s an ongoing challenge, as the New York Times’ Pete Wells noted in his latest column, Happy-Meal Me. Wells caved in to his son Dexter’s desire to eat at McDonald’s and bought his son some fries and McNuggets. In so doing, he introduced Dexter to a whole range of obscure chemicals you won’t find in any kitchen:

…mono- and diglycerides, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a number of phosphates, dimethylpolysiloxane. The last one is used as a lubricant, a dry-cleaning solution, an aquarium sealant, a component of the tiles that let spacecraft plunge through the atmosphere without burning up, a treatment for head lice and the thing that makes Silly Putty elastic. McDonald’s adds it to cooking oil to avoid foaming. I can’t find any convincing evidence that it is bad for you.

Is that because the EPA’s tested dimethylpolysiloxane and found it to be safe? Or is it just one of those 80,000 chemicals on which the EPA is “playing catch-up”?

And what if it has been declared safe? After all, the EPA’s just announced that it was mistaken about the supposed safety of the popular weed killer Atrazine, as the New York Times reported yesterday:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to conduct a new study about the potential health risks of atrazine, a widely used weedkiller that recent research suggests may be more dangerous to humans than previously thought.

The chemical industry continues to insist, of course, that atrazine is perfectly safe. Just as the meat industry rushed to assure us in the wake of the New York Times devastating E. Coli exposé that it’s been totally committed to doing everything in its power to ensure that our ground beef supply is safe.

And yet, in what theTimes characterizes as part of an “expanding effort by the meat industry to make its hamburger safe,” Tyson has only just agreed, in the wake of that article, to permit testing of its trimmings for the E. Coli pathogen, thereby enabling Tyson to sell its trimmings to Costco, “one of the few large grinders to test ingredients for the pathogen as they arrive at its plant”.

Clearly, we can’t count on the meat industry–or the chemical industry–to worry about safeguarding anything beyond their own bottom lines. That’s not news. What is news is this: despite the precarious status of the newspaper business, there is still some invaluable investigative reporting being done.

And what may be even more newsworthy is the fact that under the new administration, the EPA apparently has a mandate to actually start protecting us. Stop the presses! What’s next–a Food & Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture that actually provide us with safe, healthy food? Don’t laugh; it could happen–but not if we don’t demand it.

Before I start boring you with stories about my favorite farmers, or statistics about how farmers’ market shoppers “have as many as 10 times more conversations, greetings, and other social interactions than people in supermarkets” (this from World Watch Institute’s 2007 “State of the World” report – hat tip to The Ethicurean’s Marc Rumminger), let’s take a step back.

McWilliams is clearly trying to deepen his argument against local food, which up until now, has centered on the fact that buying it doesn’t always lower our carbon footprint.  This is not a new point, nor is it without merit, but neither is it particularly well-argued.  No locavore worth his/her imported salt is going to argue against the obvious — that is, a local tomato from a hothouse likely carries a larger carbon footprint than a tomato from Florida, even if you’re in Maine.  But McWilliams insists on comparing locally-grown apples to imported oranges. Just because the industrial food complex is better equipped to move food around, doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t build local distribution systems to compete with agribiz.  And just because our local food systems have been decimated over the years doesn’t mean that they have no value and can’t be made to grow again.

It’s hard to believe that such a seemingly intelligent guy doesn’t recognize the specious, hole-ridden nature of his own arguments, but let’s assume he doesn’t. In fact, let’s assume he’s right, that local food is perhaps worse for the environment than its well-traveled counterpart and that people having conversations in the course of gathering their food is not inherently valuable and may be just a fad. What about keeping food safe from bioterrorism? What about knowing the practices by which your food was produced? Being able to trace food-born illness back to its source before dozens of people are crippled or dead and millions in tax dollars are spent tracking it down?

What about supporting local economies?

Amongst many of the people he would call “agro-intellectuals,” James McWilliams is known simply as a “contrarian,,” but not in the positive sense of the word, as someone who thinks independently.  No, he seems to be one of the more garden variety – someone who takes a contrary position simply to raise their own profile.

I first became aware of McWilliams last spring when the New York Times published his provocative but poorly supported op-ed, making the case that pasture-raised pork is more likely to harbor dangerous pathogens than its industrially raised counterparts.  Of course, he neglected to acknowledge that the study he cited was funded by the Pork Board, the industry’s lobbying association, forcing the Times to print a correction, reflected here.  Nor did he mention that the more naturally raised hogs in question tested positive for antibodies against trichinosis, rather than the disease itself – which, in essence, means that the immune systems of the pigs in questions have developed protections against the disease.  But, hey, no need to let a few pesky facts get in the way.  And, in that spirit, McWilliams also declined to point out that industrial animal “husbandry” has likely resulted in other public health issues, most notably (at the time) MRSA bacterial infections.

Then, within weeks of publication, the current swine flu pandemic broke out.

It turned out that the pork op-ed was something of a prelude to another, larger attack on the local/sustainable food movement: his recently published book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, in which he warns the reader of legions of rabid locavores who would build up irresponsible local food systems and disserve global ecology through their uber-local diets.

So. First off, the local food movement, while it has gained a lot of traction in recent years, is no army. Nor do most local food enthusiasts adhere to – or expect anyone else to adhere to – a strict 100 mile diet. In many ways, “local,” as it relates to food, is metaphorical – for many people, the act of questioning where their carrots were grown leads to more questions – about who grew it, who profited it from its sale, what kinds of chemicals were used (or not used) and so forth, thus creating an intimacy — a closeness, if you will, that wasn’t there before.

The book raises some good points, but making your way past the army of straw men he raises and fells throughout, frankly, just isn’t worth the time when there are so many more coherent and informative books on the subject.  I do give him props for his willingness to present a complex argument, something many mainstream reporters haven’t deigned to do. By and large, the mainstream media oversimplifies, as Time magazine’s John Cloud did back in 2006 when he announced that “local” trumped “organic,” as if one had to choose between the two.

However, McWilliams’s reasoning, even when nuanced, lacks freshness, as evidenced by the local hothouse tomato argument mentioned earlier.  These are not new ideas, and the way in which he uses them – as multiple and discrete arguments against an unfairly oversimplified caricature of an emerging social movement – foolishly throws the locally-fed baby out with the proverbial bathwater.

It also disrespects not only those who would question what we’re being fed by agribiz, but also those who would feed us a meal we could trust – namely, the farmers who, against drastically stacked odds, manage to survive in a system ever-increasingly designed to put them out of business and reduce them to mere serfs in a feudal farming system. In one particularly condescending section (I should note that the copy I have is a galley and for all I know, this quote has been changed or edited out completely) McWilliams wrote:

The supply chain is significantly demystified when Local Farmer hands over local peaches from a dusty box with his dirt-encrusted hands. We know where the farms are, we know what the farmers look like, we know when they picked their produce, we think we know how they grew it, and we know that big corporate interests have been left out in the cold, all of which lends our decision to pay extra or make extra trips for locally grown food an air of virtue and a sense of environmental altruism. It just feels right to buy local produce at the farmers’ market, and one reason it feels so good is that we think it is, ipso facto, a small act in the larger drama of saving the planet. It’s at the farmer’s market that we thumb our noses at 1500.  [1,500 being the commonly sited number of miles the "average" food item travels from field -- or confinement lot -- to plate]

It’s been pointed out, even by the staunchest sustainable food advocates, that McWilliams does make one inarguable point: without a doubt, Americans (and increasingly, others around the world) are gulping down meat at an unsustainable pace. Again, this is not a new point – most of the people whose work he denounces have been saying this for years — but it’s a point that deserves to be hammered home repeatedly, even if he argues it weakly.

But McWilliams also presents an awkward and disjointed grouping of facts about meat production. For example, he suggests that pasture-raising cattle for beef is more harmful than confinement, due to desertification caused by “manure, fertilizers, pesticides, and repetitive pounding underfoot,” ignoring the fact that sustainable producers don’t overload pastures, don’t commonly use pesticides or fertilizers and don’t mismanage waste. He also notes that manure siphoned into “lagoons” on CAFOs emits more methane than waste dropped on pasture, but in the next paragraph suggests that pastured cows create more greenhouse gases (because they emit more methane than their grain-fed counterparts).  However, he ignores here the vast amounts of fossil fuels used in the production and shipping of grains for factory farms, as well as those used to produce and ship the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers that go into that grains production. He doesn’t skirt these facts per se, but never factors them into the grassfed v. CAFO equation.

Why not, instead of pointing to enclosed manure lagoons (his temporary solution) as we somehow convince Americans and others in developing nations to drastically cut back their meat consumption, encourage people to support local producers? Why not eat less meat, but pay more for it, while supporting your local economy and improving your personal health? The price of locally produced, pastured meat is often twice that of its industrially-raised counterpart, but in this instance, couldn’t the cost increase act as a healthy inhibiting factor – similar to taxes on cigarettes – that would encourage people to decrease their meat consumption, as he and so many others agree is needed?

In the end, McWilliams comes off as a bitter and snarky outsider. His strategy of outlining his own foray into the local food world, rather than convince the reader that he has been there too but has since become enlightened, instead paints a picture of him, unable to fit in after forgetting to bring his reusable tote to the farmers’ market, cast out of potlucks perhaps, and turning against the entire movement out of spite. One can see him scowling, plotting his revenge (”I know!  I’ll paint them as hypocrites who drive all over town in SUVs in search of this local food!”).  His argument is weakened by his obvious bitterness and cheapened by its lopsidedness.

Adios to Ole? Last weekend, bullfighting aficionados enjoyed what may have been the last corrida in Barcelona as the Catalan Parliment considers a ban on the sport.

A Modern USDA Yesterday, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan hosted a live chat on Facebook, which she ended by suggesting the event was the first of a monthly series, and that there may be blogging in the future as well.  Last week, the USDA also announced the roll out of three new web tools: Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, My Food-a-pedia and the 10 Tips Series.

Much Ado About Dairy, at Home and Abroad In Europe, farmers are burning hay and dumping millions of gallons of milk to protest flailing dairy prices.  Meanwhile, back in the states, a new deal may give $290 million in aid to dairy farmers, while new technology that enables dairy farmers to breed more cows than steers by “sexing” semen stands to offset any benefit of the massive cull of dairy cows earlier this year.

Huffington’s Game Changers After an initial period of nominations, the Huffington Post has compiled a list of the top 10 Green Game Changers, which includes several of our heroes, including Roger Doiron, Annie Leonard and Bill McKibben.  Vote for your favorite, if you can choose…

Astroturf Exposure MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports on the mistruths work of the Center for Consumer Freedom, which is currently targeting ACORN but is also behind such campaigns as Sweet Scam (which insists that high-fructose corn syrup is good for you), Fish Scam (which downplays the risk of mercury contamination in fish) and Trans-Fat Facts (which insists that trans fats can actually help fight cancer).  Maddow promises CCF CEO Rick Berman will appear as a guest next week.

As the Jewish New Year Begins The list of terms surrounding ethical eating continues to grow.  Local, sustainable, pastured, meet eco-kosher.