Growers and Grocers

Happy Food Freedom Day to our Canadian and American readers! You were all in my thoughts, even if I couldn’t find a card that said, “Hooray! You’ve probably earned enough in 2006 to cover your food costs for the year.” Maybe the Valentine’s Day cards pushed them out.
Food Freedom Day—when the average shopper has earned […]

Bill Daley of the Chicago Tribune has written a good, if too short, piece about California olive oil (free registration or bugmenot usage required). He covers the marketing cachet that makes it so popular, the economics of it, a few obvious recipes, and spares little more than a sentence for an explanation of the different […]

Boing Boing readers will have already seen this, but this photo album of farmers and their livestock captivated me. In each, you can see an owner’s pride and affection for the beast that shares the frame. The animals have a beauty and a nobility, but also a surprising alien quality. They are still […]

The Boston Globe offers a small glimpse of the American bison industry. The article notes the irony of saving bison herds by raising them for slaughter (technically, buffalo species come from the Old World, bison from the New), but it’s not so strange: The strategy has worked well for Heritage Foods and their famous turkeys.
Bison’s […]

Tana Butler of the Small Farms blog was lucky enough to attend Eco-Farm 2006, a conference about sustainable agriculture that convened in her home town of Santa Cruz.
She’s started her write-up with the description of the first day’s event, a tour of local farms. I’ll add to this post as she puts up more descriptions. […]

It’s easy for city dwellers to push for more organic and/or sustainable farms. But small farmers who go that route face an uphill climb. The current agricultural environment doesn’t do much to help family farms, and the growers often live close to the financial edge. Unless you’ve worked on a farm, you often don’t know […]

My friend Tim Holmes sent me this snapshot of a Coca-Cola “success story” realized by The Olive Garden’s nationally distributed restaurants. The soft drink giant has since pulled the story, but not before an enterprising web master mirrored it.
The article outlines the problem the chain faced: “Many customers choose tap water not because they enjoy […]

After some eGullet members posted links about recent discoveries that prions—which many finger as the cause of mad cow disease and related kin—could move into normal organ tissue, the thread turned into a discussion of the current state of prion research. As with most eGullet threads, there’s some good insight from experts mixed in with […]