Growers and Grocers

Food spoilage cuts deeply into any store’s bottom line: When you toss out rotted produce, you toss out money. High-tech companies can earn big bucks for solutions to this persistent problem, which costs businesses $35 billion each year.
Wired News offers a look at some of these new techologies. I’m intrigued by the portable pressure cooker […]

Guess what happens when you let regional authorities police international fishing? That’s right, the international waters get ignored and commercial fishers decimate coral reefs and deep-sea fish stocks.
The World Wildlife Federation recently released a report that took governments and commercial operations to task for failing to regulate deep-sea fishing. They use the word “plundered” to […]

I just got back from a trip to London, and have spent quite a bit of personal blog space praising the vibrant British food scene. Now, just when I thought it was safe to defend British cuisine to the hilt, The Guardian reports that Heinz is planning to launch ready-made baked beans on toast: […]

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” made sense when that Christmas carol was written: Chestnut trees represented a bountiful resource for early America. Then a fungal blight appeared in 1905 and wiped out virtually the entire American Chestnut population.
You can imagine the excitement, then, when volunteers found a stand of healthy American Chestnut trees near […]

A concern for crustacean welfare has prompted Whole Foods to pull soft-shell crabs from its shelves and reconsider other live shellfish, according to this article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If you keep a soft-shell crab out of water for a week, it’s “unpleasant” for the crab. Really? One wonders how they know.
The chain will continue […]

The New York Times profiles Russ Kremer, a Missouri pig farmer. The article demonstrates yet again that well-raised pigs taste better, but it also describes how Kremer and other small pig farmers band together and differentiate themselves to survive in the face of unprofitable pork prices. Industrial operations can charge less for their meat, but […]

Some butchers and farmers in Great Britain are selling “organic” meat illegally, reports James Meikle in Monday’s issue of The Guardian. A TV documentary that will be aired tomorrow evening reveals the problem, showing non-authorized sales of supposedly organic food.
In Great Britain, organic producers must buy a yearly license (approximately $750) and register with the […]

Farmers may start selling their produce directly to institutional food providers such as hospitals and universities, according to this article in the Des Moines Register. The arrangement makes sense: Farmers need customers other than fickle weekend shoppers and the chefs at hospitals want to provide good food for patients and visitors. Even if institutions want […]

Progressive news distribution site Common Dreams reprints an opinion piece by John Stauber about Big Food’s attempts to discredit Eric Schlosser. Schlosser is best-known for his book Fast Food Nation, which taught readers about the impact of fast food on all of American agriculture. Now he and Charles Wilson have released Chew on This, which […]

Ethical eaters in Alabama should check out Grow Alabama, which contracts with area farms to provide locally grown food to state residents.
The company, part distributor and part CSA, has just added meat and dairy products to its metaphorical shelves. Owner Jerry Spencer is doing his best to find ethically raised animals, so Alabama residents should […]