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

New York City recently passed a regulation banning bake sales from public schools with the exception of one per month and after 6 PM (when no one is around). So what’s left to sell? Doritos, pop-tarts, bags of cookies and other processed junk-food permitted by the Department of Education. Instead of home-baked items prepared with love, care and admittedly, a bit of sugar, children will be left with the choice of factory-prepared, chemical laden “food-like products” with advertisements plastered all over the packaging.

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While farmers were the star of the show at last Friday’s antitrust hearing in Ankeny, Iowa, the debate over the monopolization of farming is one where all of our interests are squarely at stake.

Anyone who eats and has a brain should be downright terrified that just a few giant businesses control the vast majority of food available to us as consumers. Perhaps that explains why more than 15,000 people submitted comments in anticipation of the hearings – four more of which are scheduled this year as a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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In anticipation of SXSW, Eat Well Guide teamed up with Edible Austin on a free interactive map to sustainable food in the City of Weird. The festival, in its 24th year, began last week with SXSW film and interactive, with SXSW music kicking in this Wednesday, the 17th. If you’re lucky enough to be in Austin, take the time to treat yourself to some amazing sustainably-raised food. There are plenty of choices where you will definitely be able to eat well. You can view the online map here, or download the PDF below. Post widely and share these yummy treasures!

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Last week some of us met with a delegation of Russian agricultural and health officials to talk about sustainable meat production. This group has been touring the country looking at aspects of meat and poultry production in the United States.

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Concerns about the impact on water from biofuels production have been voiced before and are becoming louder. A little more than a year ago, then U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne, stated: “To reach our ethanol production target of 7.5 billion gallons per year by 2012 will require 30 billion gallons of water a year to process, or the amount of the annual water needs of Minneapolis, Minn. And if just 25 percent of the new corn crop requires irrigation, ethanol will demand more water than the combined annual usage of all cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. As we increase ethanol production, we must have a holistic approach that takes into account its impact on water supply.”

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Christina Roberto, M.S. and PhD candidate at Yale University, recently authored a study about the effects of calorie labeling on food choices. The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study found that calorie labeling on menus improved choices, but posting the 2000 calorie a day recommendation as well maximized the effect.

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Just Saying No to GMOs Over 200,000 voiced their opposition to genetically modified alfalfa during the USDA comment period, which ended Wednesday.
Not So Dynamite After All In what he described as perhaps his most important blog post ever, Tom Philpott lays out the problems with synthetic nitrogen.
This Doesn’t Sound Any Better The city of San [...]

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Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the filmmakers who fondly documented their brief stint as Iowa corn farmers in King Corn, explore agribiz’s downstream downside in Big River. In this thirty-minute sequel, Cheney and Ellis revisit their Iowa acre and trace its toxic trail all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

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Peter Gleick is one of the World’s most outspoken critics of bottled water yet, there on his table sat a bottle of Poland Springs water, standard fare for guest lecturers at Columbia University. What better symbol of how, in just a very short time, bottled water has become insidiously ubiquitous in our lives.

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These days, not surprisingly, Monsanto is the subject of a number of growing controversies. A series of “workshops” organized by the USDA and the Department of Justice (part of an investigation into possible antitrust behavior) start later this month, and at least two states – Iowa and Texas – are holding independent investigations in the anticompetitive realm, as well. At a meeting with the Kellogg Foundation back in December, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan called the DOJ investigation “long overdue.”

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