Growers and Grocers

I hate shopping. So when I read this article in USA Today about “destination shopping,” I couldn’t believe it. Shoppers who go to upscale grocery stores as a weekend outing? Crazy.
The tourists—no other word seems appropriate—come for high-end foodstuffs and in-store entertainment: anything from celebrity chefs to bands. The new fun factor draws regional shoppers […]

America’s response to trans fats isn’t sufficient, argues Nina Teicholz in a New York Times op-ed piece. She compares our reaction to the news that trans fats are bad, bad, bad—require producers to mention them on the label—to the Danish response—limit them to two per cent in everything.
The American law doesn’t factor in restaurant […]

America’s agriculture is heading north, according to The National Arbor Day Foundation’s map of plant hardiness zones. If you compare this map to the USDA’s 1990 map, you can see that temperature is moving on up along with the “hardiness zones” for various trees.
Environmental change isn’t just about losing the trees for the […]

The Blog for Rural America shares the news that a federal jury in South Dakota ruled that the three largest American meat packers violated the Packers and Stockyards Act when “their conduct during the period had the purpose or effect of injuring competition in the fed cattle market.”
Tyson, Cargill, and Swift neglected to tell beef […]

Britain’s Food Safety Agency has rebuked natural foods retailer Julian Graves for selling 10-packs of apricot seeds, or noyaux. The retailer was touting the anti-cancer benefits of the almond-like seeds (which live inside the hard brown kernel), but they’ve since pulled the product.
The company forgot that a stone fruit’s seed protects itself with a cyanide-generating […]

Retail megacorporation Wal-Mart has lost a fight to overturn a union in its St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, store.
And so the only Wal-Mart union in North America continues forward. But the article in the Toronto Star foreshadows Wal-Mart’s next step: When workers in Saguenay, Quebec formed a union, Wal-Mart shut down the store. Expect a similar fate in […]

Say it ain’t so, Pierrot! Not only are the French drinking less wine, they are also eating less cheese. A short report in the local news site @mbert info reveals that raw milk cheese consumption is steadily declining in France. Despite France’s approximately 500 types of fromage, cheese is becoming more uniform as consumers purchase […]

Food production giant J.R. Simplot will start offering more low-fat and healthy food, according to this article in the Idaho Statesman. The company rode the McDonald’s star, providing pre-cut French fries for the fast food chain (and, eventually, its competitors) before it moved into other arenas and became a major force in the food industry. […]

Concerned European shoppers have shunned genetically modified foods, but it’s useful to remember that growers have always fiddled with the genetic makeup of plants and animals, selecting for new traits and eventually creating new subspecies or species.
How does the UK’s new Healthy Living tomato, a lycopene-rich variety bred from other tomatoes, differ from a tomato […]

Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows alerts Cookin’ in the Cuse readers to Jim Hightower’s “The Upchuck Rebellion,” his term for the revolt against industrial, highly processed foods. The piece provides an overview of the movement, but also makes the case for it. He contradicts the view that organic food is an extravagance, citing a few examples that prove […]