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Those are just two of the diabolically delicious recipes I found in Ghoulish Goodies, a clever collection of Halloween-themed concoctions. Some are sweet, others savory, but they all sound eerily tasty. I spotted this book at a friend’s house last weekend and essentially stole it after leafing through its pages and finding such ingenious Halloween snacks as Cheddar Eyeballs, Candy Corn Pizza, and Bandaged Fingers, to name just a few of the more than seventy inventive recipes featured in Ghoulish Goodies. The recipes have simple ingredients, easy-to-follow instructions and plenty of photos to inspire you.

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Can Local Food Fix the Economy? Wayne Roberts makes a strong case in the affirmative at Alternatives.

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.

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Back in the day (i.e., 30 or 40 years ago), small slaughterhouses existed throughout the U.S.; this was great for small farms since livestock could be processed locally without much hassle or expense. Unfortunately, the transition to factory farming spawned the creation of huge, highly mechanized, corporate-controlled mega-slaughterhouses, which ultimately put most small, independent slaughterhouses out of business.

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The No Impact Experiment is a community based project created by the Huffington Post. It started on Sunday, October 18th, and participants gradually reduce or eliminate everyday behaviors that negatively impact the environment. Each day of the week offers a new theme to try (Friday, for example, focuses on reducing water waste), and each new challenge builds on the ones that preceded it

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Two cornerstones of American culture collided Monday night on CNN:
Larry King and cheap processed meat. Or should I say colluded? After all, they’ve got a lot in common: both smush together scraps of debatable value and dubious origin and extrude them as suitable fodder for our more credulous compatriots. And both have the potential to poison us, whether by tainting our food supply with pathogens or contaminating our national conversation with lackeys and lobbyists.

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The Imperial Stock Ranch, which began in 1871, faces a new and serious challenge to its very survival: how to create new markets for its products to compensate for longstanding existing markets that have declined or shifted overseas. Some bold steps were needed to rethink what to do with the wool from the sheep they raise on their 30,000 acre ranch in Eastern Oregon. Their solution? Direct, value-added marketing to yarn retailers and apparel designers.

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Touché! Last week, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa took his reaction to Time magazine’s recent article “Getting Real About the High Cost of Cheap Food” (frankly, some of the best reporting I’ve seen from Time on food issues) to the Senate floor.  This week, the Center for a Livable Future let loose a fiercely factual [...]

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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?

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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.

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Today’s reading is a guest post from the illustrious Dr. Marion Nestle, originally posted on her Food Politics blog.
I think we need a whole lot more public outrage about unsafe food. Maybe the recent front-page articles in the Washington Post and New York Times will do the trick.
Both tell tragic stories of [...]

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