Uh-Oh Indeed! 15 million pounds of Spaghetti-Os are being recalled after a cooker malfunction left uncooked meat in the mix.  Ewwww!  On a serious note, please forward this information to anyone you know who might use this product (which is marketed to children).  Undercooked canned meat is no laughing matter.

But Wait, There’s More Speaking of which, imported canned meat (from Brazil) tainted with Ivermectin, a veterinary drug, has caused a halt on imports, but the USDA has failed to recall products which made it into the US prior to the ban.  Food & Water Watch is on the case.

Rounding Up Monsanto We missed this back in May, but activists in the Netherlands shut down Monsanto’s main plant there by chaining themselves to the entrance, barring employees from entering.  Most likely to avoid negative publicity, Monsanto did not file any charges.

Gay-friendly Golden Arches in Gay Paree McDonald’s COO Don Thompson is under fire for remarks he made about their new LGBT-friendly ads airing in Europe, the gist of which was that those ads would never fly stateside.

Silver Lining! Eat to Save Seafood If you’re like me, you may have shed some tears over the dead sperm whale in the Gulf, but if you can bring yourself to channel the Walrus and the Carpenter and eat through the tears, do a favor to Gulf-based fishers and foragers and throw your sustainable seafood principles to the wind — Grist’s Bonnie Powell shows us how.

Leveling the Field The USDA announced today a new proposed rule that would provide enhanced protections for livestock and poultry farmers.

Chesapeake v CAFOs Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin (D) and Rep. Elijah Cummings are calling on the Farm Bureau not to block a new bill that would help protect the Bay.

Oh What a Tangled Web The Humane Society and MADD have joined forces to sue the astroturf organization, Center for Consumer Freedom, a long-time front group for industries seeking to stave off meaningful regulations of potentially dangerous products (like booze, high fructose corn syrup and industrially-produced meat), of failing to register as lobbyists.

Don’t worry — there will still be plenty of tips on how to green your fork, and we think you’ll appreciate our expanded focus.  And don’t worry about finding us, either — just meet us back here at greenfork.org and we will whisk you along to our new location.

Looking forward!
The Grace Team

“Beef Throat” Spills It — and You Can, Too  Investigative reporters at The Faster Times are trying to trace organic ground beef, on a tip that some companies may be passing off old dairy cows as beef cattle.  You can help them, check it out.

Presidential Peas  Our good friend Kim O’Donnel was one of several hundred celebrity chefs from around the country to earn an invite to the White House to peruse the organic garden and talk school lunch.  Eat up her account here.

In Which Smelling Fishy is Good  As opposed to smelling oily, at least.  Experts apply the “sniff test” to seafood from the Gulf.

The End of Endosulfan  In the face of new data indicating that its risks are even more grave than previously suspected, he DDT-like pesticide has once again been banned.

The “top kill” didn’t work?  Really?  The “junk shot?”  (And who is coming up with these names, by the way?)  They’re pouring thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants into the Gulf to counter the oil spewing forth?  Those chemicals are highly toxic and possibly creating plumes, increasing danger to coral reefs and other sealife?  The EPA didn’t test them until after BP had started using them?  It took the president how long to issue an apparently toothless moratorium on off-shore drilling?  People are getting haircuts all over the country, for nothing?  It took the EPA how long to finally demand BP switch to a less toxic dispersant?

August???  I mean…it’s crazy, right?

This might sound crazy too, but maybe mushrooms would be a better deal than these chemical dispersants.  That’s right, mushrooms.  I thought it was crazy, too, the first time I heard about it, about 10 or 15 years ago.  In fact, that’s the only thing I remember about that first time I heard about it, and I wish I could remember which of my radical friends had mentioned it to me because I would apologize for not having believed it back then and for not having written about it sooner.

In fact, mushrooms were proven back in the late 1990s to be a useful tool in cleaning toxic soil, even soil contaminated by diesel.  Watch Paul Stamets, leading mycologist, explain in his TED talk:

Stamets himself does not claim that mushrooms are the way forward — in a web page created to answer the questions writers like me (and hopefully, some decision-makers as well) are putting to him, he lays out what he knows and what he doesn’t.  In the former category, the fact that by inoculating diesel-contaminated soil with oyster mushroom spores, he and scientists from Battelle Laboratories managed to cut the toxicity of the soil from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200, over a period of 16 weeks.  In the latter category, major questions remain, like how salt water would affect the process.

What Stamets does call for is increased dissemination of knowledge of mycoremediation, more funding for research, Mycological Response Teams to respond to such environmental disasters as oil spills, and mushroom production centers strategically placed near population centers around the country, the waste from which could also be used as compost, or in times such as these, for remediation.  Also, for people to spread the word.  You can do this by sharing this blog post with your friends via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned email.

Suffice it to say that you can’t clean up a mess that just keeps spilling, and who knows – maybe the dispersants are our best bet in a worst case scenario.  But if we’re taking shots in the dark, maybe we should be funding research toward more eco-friendly solutions to eco disasters.  Mycoremediation probably won’t ever make any money for BP, or even friends of BP, but  it wouldn’t hurt to look into it.  Really.

Organic for the Birds? Word on the street is that birds prefer “conventional” seed, but hamsters like organic food and pesticides are linked to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in small humans.

Untested Catfish US catfish farmers want tighter regulations on catfish imports, of which the FDA only inspects 20% (and 20% of that tests positive for chemicals or drugs currently banned in the US).  The USDA was supposed to begin inspecting catfish imports after the 2008 Farm Bill, but still hasn’t.

Bad (Hot) Dog From the department of You Don’t Say, a new study finds that eating processed meat increases risk of heart disease and diabetes.

GOOD Lunch Oil spill/hotdogs being bad for you/ADHD got you down?  Meatless Monday’s Tami O’Neil reports on positive happenings in school lunchrooms in Baltimore and Oakland at GOOD Magazine.

Soda Tax Fizzles in DC Diabetes may be at an all-time high in the nation’s capital, but if a soda tax is the way to fix that, Washington’s City Council doesn’t think so.

Getting Real US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack talked in Tampa this week about the need  for comprehensive immigration reform from an agricultural perspective.

Big Bounties, Small Surprises Writers at Sojourners Magazine (free registration required) undertook a small scientific study of yields from over 300 farms, organic vs. non, and found that done right, it doesn’t take a lot of land to grow a lot of food.  (Hat tip to Parke Wilde of US Food Policy Blog.)

Retire Ko Ou La When the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture refused their offer of genetically modified seed donations, Monsanto changed up their offer to chemical-doused hybrids (it’s recommended that people who handle plants from these varieties where protective clothing when doing so), but Haitian farmers say they would sooner burn them.

Where Have All the Slaughterhouses Gone? The number of federal and state-inspected slaughterhouses has been shrinking for years (which is one of the challenges facing small livestock producers), and of those who remain, many small meat processors’ fear that new food safety regulations might put them out of business.  The USDA is mapping the gaps.

High Stakes at Portland Pork Cook-off Foodies in Portland, Oregon are serious!  A fistfight broke out after a recent pork cookoff, ostensibly over the winning chef’s use of a hog from Iowa.

Highway to the Safety Zone Yesterday, the USDA’s new rolling food safety project, the USDA Food Safety Discovery Zone, made its debut on the national mall. Maybe it’s coming to your town!

Pinkwashing, too? Environmentalists have been complaining about “greenwashing” (you’re welcome) for years, and now KFC’s new breast cancer awareness campaign has health advocates fired up about “pinkwashing.”  Marion Nestle plays a cameo as the voice of reason.

And CAGE-WASHING? The Animal Welfare Institute takes Perdue to task for misleading consumers. Perdue continues to label their products in ways that sort of acknowledge the problems with their actual production methods, while covering those production methods up with feel-good, made-up terms.

Because Subsidizing Corn Has Worked Wonders The Obama Administration announced Tuesday its plans to fight childhood obesity by increasing food stamp enrollment and subsidizing fruit and vegetable production (ostensibly, encouraging more farmers to ditch unhealthy commodities and opt for growing healthier edibles).  Ag Committee Chairman Colin Petersen doesn’t think it’s going to work.

No Funny Intro “Sweatfield” doesn’t have quite the ring to it that “sweatshop” does, but the new study from Human Rights Watch finds that between 300,000 and 400,000 kids work on farms in the United States, under labor laws that haven’t changed since the 1930s.  Most gross but least shocking?  The Farm Bureau’s “meh” response.

Water, Water, Not Around… New Mexico has never had a lot of water to go around, but what they do have is being used up and tainted by the dairy industry, the nation’s 9th largest.

A Roundup Roundup The herbicide glysophate, known commercially as Roundup, is losing ground to superweeds on farms around the country.  The New York Times reported, then asked the experts, including Michael Pollan and Anna Lappe.

Oil’s No Good for Cows, Either All eyes are on seafood in the Gulf right now, but cattle are at risk of oil coming ashore, too.

Turning the Food Journalism Table Columbia Journalism Review shines a light this week on our good friend and colleague Tom Philpott of Grist, who is usually the one asking the questions.

Local Food Good for Local Economies Who’d have thought?  Iowa State’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture reports that the Midwest could benefit by moving away from commodity crops and toward edible food crops, to the tune of over $800 million in sales and over 9,000 jobs.

A Humane Application The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) has put together an iPhone app for eating humanely.

Thyme is on Your Side Thyme may help stop the spread of MRSA.

Hellman’s Light Got Realer, in February Not sure how we missed this, but back in February, Hellman’s (that’s Best Foods to those on the West Coast) announced plans to use only cage-free eggs in their “light” mayo, and hopes to extend the practice to other products as more cage-free eggs become available.

Roundup Ready Alfalfa Hits the Supreme Court Monsanto has taken a ruling against the deregulation of genetically engineered alfalfa (pending the results of an environmental impact study, which sounds pretty reasonable) to the Supreme Court, which will rule on the case by the end of June.  Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has recused himself from the case because his brother, a judge in San Francisco, issued the initial ruling, but Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who worked as a lawyer for Monsanto back in the 1970s, apparently didn’t feel that was a conflict of interest.

Bring the Heat! No, Don’t! A few friends of ours, including Family Farm Defenders and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, have put together a damning report that outlines industrial agriculture’s role in climate change, calling out industry giants like Dean Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and Monsanto for their (gigantic) contributions to the problem.

Industrial Food vs Military Industry, on the Playground Kate Adamick, a home-cooked school lunch consultant, brings a fresh look at school lunch to The Atlantic.  My favorite quote: “In other words, the industrial food complex is threatening the military industrial complex, and, as a result, the commoditization of our food supply may be forced to take a back seat to the commoditization of our children.”  Oy.

Viva la (Food) Revolucion! IATP’s Food and Society Fellows took a trip down to Cuba awhile back and released a report on their trip last week.  Deb Eschmeyer investigates the state of school food in Havana and don’t miss Roger Doiron’s video on the history of food, both local and imported, in Cuba.

Food Safety Killed vs Local Farmers? Salon ponders the effects of proposed testing regulations on small producers.

Move Over Greenwashing, Enter Hungerwashing In one of the most mind-boggling publicity stunts of all time, KFC will donate the buns they replaced with slabs of fried chicken in their artery-clogging Double Down to food pantries.  In other words, you can feel better about ingesting an entire day’s worth of animal-derived protein (the USDA’s DRI for men ages 19-70 is 56, for women it’s 46, the sandwich contains 53) in one sandwich because hungry folks around the country are getting an extra dose of refined flour.

In Case You Can’t Find a Pepsi Vendor This week, Foursquare, the location-based social networking platform, announced plans to partner with Pepsi.  According to the New York Times, Foursquare’s GPS program would notify Pepsi when a user was in the vicinity of a business where its products were sold and in turn, push discount notifications to the user as part of its “loyalty program.”  Sounds pretty creepy.

Don’t Know Your Farmer A couple of United States senators (hi Saxby Chambliss, John McCain and Pat Roberts) have issued a letter to USDA secretary Tom Vilsack, condemning the agency’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program.

Where’s the Trust? New antitrust rules are on their way for the meat industry.  Will they have teeth?  Stay tuned to find out.

Natural Growth Organics outpaced other sectors of food market growth — again — last year.

Show Them the Money! Still no justice for black farmers who won a class action lawsuit against the USDA back in February.

Land Ho…No A troubling new survey from the Natural Resources Inventory reports that millions of acres of prime farmland were lost over a 25-year span (1982 – 2007).  The losses were felt in every state in the union.

It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since we launched The Green Fork but there it is, 473 blog posts later.  Two years ago today we set out to gild the lily that was the Eat Well Guide by not only steering you toward good food, but insisting upon its importance.  That year, we kicked things off with 20 Ways to Green Your Fork.  Last year, I hurriedly typed out an Earth Day post from the hallway of a hotel in San Jose at the annual W.K. Kellogg conference, gathering quotes from such sustainable food advocates as Michael Pollan, Joan Gussow and Anna Lappe, reporting that it had been a landmark year in the sustainable food movement, which it certainly had.

This year, I set out to throw together a mixed (good and bad) list of people and organizations to watch over the next year.  I solicited my colleagues at Grace for some of their favorites, and I gathered their suggestions, but when I sat down to write the intro to the list, I couldn’t really get into it.

This year I wasn’t riding quite as high as last, even though the White House gardeners built hoop houses this winter, and the USDA launched the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program (also, Mario Batali’s Earth Day menu looks amazing).  Truth be told, I’ve long had reservations about Earth Day.  I feel like it’s been given the Christmas treatment and become completely commercialized.  Privately, I’ve rolled my eyes at Earth Day, saying that it’s too corporate, too precious, too. . .overdone.

(Yes, in launching The Green Fork on Earth Day, we did — purposefully — use Earth Day as a “news hook” to promote our new endeavor, but it’s not like we were opening a gimmicky restaurant chain).

Anyway, I just couldn’t get into the spirit.  So I did some reading about it.

It’s easy for people under 50 to imagine that first Earth Day, 40 years ago today, as a gathering of a bunch of idealistic hippies, but in many ways, things were just as serious then as they are today.  Sure, most people didn’t know how rapidly we were approaching peak oil or the climate tipping point, but they were living under the threat of nuclear war.  There were virtually no environmental regulations, so factories were spewing pollutants willy-nilly into the air and water ways. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had raised major eyebrows over rampant pesticide use with its release in 1962, but the US wouldn’t ban DDT until 1972. Rivers caught fire. Forget the fact that everyone was still driving gas-guzzling V-8s, there was still lead in gasoline.

My friend and colleague Regina Weiss tells me that back then, you couldn’t see stars at night in New York City for all the smog (light pollution was a factor too, but that probably hasn’t changed) but that she can, now, and she thinks about that when she’s walking home at night and it gives her hope that things really are getting better, at least in fits and starts.

You rarely get this impression from movies about that time period — at least, not that the environmental situation was so drastic — but things were serious and it was clear there was change to be made.  To be sure, there were people who’d know this for years and been suffering as modern Cassandras doing activism work on one issue or another, but that first Earth Day (credited to US Senator Gaylord Nelson, who originally called it the National Environment Teach-In) is said to have shown the activists that they all had something in common, thus galvanizing the modern environmental movement.

Anybody who does environmental activism these days can probably attest to a need for such a coming together today.  Go ahead, shake your head at the egregious greenwashing you’ll see this week.  Give a side-eye glance at the government agencies you don’t think are doing enough.  But maybe we can still come together over Earth Day, the way we come together with our families, warts and all, during the holidays.

Maybe Earth Day was the catalyst for the movement, but more likely, it symbolized the critical mass that had been reached around some of these issues — in any case, there’s no doubt that policies started changing soon after.  Nixon passed the Clean Air Act Extension, which gave more teeth to the original CAA, the EPA was formed and required to enforce it and the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.  Gas lost its lead in the ’80s. At some point, the stars came back out in New York.

I really wanted to end this with a mixed bag (The Good, the Bad and the Questionable, I was going to call it, and in addition to the good guys, I was going to list off the greenwashers and the junk scientists and the just plain bad ideas) of “ones to watch” for Earth Day, but I can’t muster the cynicism.

Don’t worry, it always comes back.

Thanks for reading The Green Fork these last two years, we hope you’ve enjoyed the ride even half as much as we have.  In the spirit of coming together, a quick roundup of great efforts to get us out of this mess.  I know I didn’t even scratch the surface here so please, feel free to suggest a few of your own in the comments.

So Many People Doing Such Great Work

Farmer Jane Monsanto may think that all women who live on farms are wives and mothers (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but in fact, there are more women entering into farming than men, by a lot.  Farmer Jane, a new book by Temra Costa, will tell us all about it.  Look for our review soon.

Let’s Move Who knew what the organic garden on the White House Lawn would grow into, and how quickly?  Michelle Obama has claimed her issue, and it is childhood obesity.

Farm Corps This brilliant new program, just announced, will organize volunteers around the country to work in school food systems, helping staff source local food and helping teachers develop good food curricula.

La Via Campesina Anna Lappe gushed about them last year, and with good reason — the international peasant movement has long fought against corporate control of the food supply and this week, organized over 100 actions around the world for the International Day of Peasant’s Struggle.

FEEST I first heard about FEEST — Food Empowerment Education and Sustainability Team — at a W.K. Kellogg gathering last December (The Kellogg Foundation helps fund FEEST).  The Seattle-based, youth-run program runs a weekly organic dinner and a monthly community potluck.

Friends of Family Farmers This Oregon-based group of sustainable agriculture advocates spent the fall and winter organizing community meetings around the state, gathering information for their Agricultural Reclamation Act, and also educating eaters — how brilliant does “InFARMation (and Beer!) sound?

Cooking Up a Story These guys often let us cross-post their amazing videos.  Their site is a great place to get inspired and witness some of the innovative farming methods people are coming up with.

INFORM A green nonprofit here in NYC that does interesting, snappy short videos – The Secret Life of Paper, The Secret Life of Cellphones – next up is The Secret Life of Beef.  Meatless Monday’s Chris Elam calls it “a clear, simple and accessible way to make sense of a complex problem, and how we’re all part of the solution.”

Meatless Monday With cities around the globe jumping on the Monday bandwagon much to the chagrin of the American Meat Institute and for some reason (do I smell industry dollars?) conservative talk show hosts, I’m sure we’ll see more Monday action in the coming year.

Citizens Campaign for the Environment CCE is running a number of great campaigns at the moment, including stop power plants from sucking up aquatic life from rivers to cool their systems, effectively killing billions of fish every year.

Eat Well Guide We couldn’t not promote Eat Well on Earth Day, could we?  The team here has been putting together local food maps for events like South by Southwest and Anna Lappe’s book tour, and as always, there’s more on the way!

* A note to our loyal readers: one day in the near future, we’ll be shutting down shop here at The Green Fork, but don’t panic; we’re actually moving into a bigger place, one where we can cover not just food issues, but water and energy issues as well.  We’re keeping the details close for now, but don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know when it’s time, and we’ll be giving Green Fork readers a sneak peek when we get ready to go public.

On the Move Deb Eschmeyer reports back from the White House Childhood Obesity Summit.  In other Let’s Move news, our food-savvy First Lady toured a community garden run by international refugees in San Diego and called it “a model for the nation, for the world.”

Auditing Our Inspection Process USA Today reports on a federal audit which found major problems with the way government agencies test (or don’t test, as it were) meat for chemical contamination.  If you thought testing was lax on the disease front, you’ve got to read this.

Let Them Eat Low-Carbon New restaurant Otarian, due to open next week in NYC, boasts a strong focus on green eating, but The Village Voice has dug up some dirt on founder Radhika Oswal and her husband, Pankaj Oswal, owner of Burrup Fertilisers.  Apparently, the two are building a $70 million home in Australia, to include a gymnasium and hair salon.  Don’t worry, they’ve banned the construction crew from eating meat.

Hedging their Health Care Bets? A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health reports that many life and health insurance companies have invested heavily in fast food companies.  (hat tip to Meredith Modelewski)

McDonald’s Says No to Cage Free The McDonald’s board is encouraging share holders to vote against requiring the chain to source 5% of their eggs from cage-free producers.

Raising the (Green) Roof in NY There is a movement underfoot — or put more aptly, overhead — to green roofs in NYC and around the state.

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One A new study by the National Research Council suggests that genetically modified crops (when compared to the conventional crops they’ve replaced) provide benefits in the form of increased yields and decreased pesticide use, but that those gains can be and are being compromised by over usage.