Growers and Grocers

Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press reports that Oregon and California salmon fishermen have seen declining numbers of fish in recent years. Scott Boley, a skipper of a salmon troller, a partner in Fishermen Direct Seafood and a member of the federal panel that selects the fishing season for ocean salmon, returned from three […]

Have you ever seen a whole, fresh peeled coconut (instead of the packaged shreds)? How about mini-iceberg lettuce? Purple or orange cauliflower? Well, if you haven’t, you may be seeing them in your produce department soon. According to the Sacramento Bee’s Michael Marks, these products are on their way. They […]

My local Safeway recently rolled out a new product line called O Organics. Safeway offers the following description of the products:
Taste food the way it should be with O ORGANICS.TM An extraordinary line of organic food from cereals to pastas and everything in between. Every O ORGANICS item is certified organically grown and processed […]

Soy production in the Amazon is gaining attention in the mainstream media lately, in part because of a port built on the Amazon River and also because of studies conducted by Greenpeace.
While previous studies focused on cattle grazing and logging, recent studies are finding that soybean production is now major factor in the […]

The FDA has established strict labeling guidelines for bottled water, but with so many different categories, how helpful are they to consumers? Bottled water is generally defined in the regulations as “water that is intended for human consumption and that is sealed in bottles or other containers with no added ingredients except that it […]

Environmental group Defenders of Wildlife is making news by reporting that mercury levels in many imports of canned tuna exceed federal mercury limits. Canned tuna from Ecuador and Mexico were the worst offenders. Defenders of Wildlife previously targeted the same countries for their failure to follow dolphin-safe tuna practices.
The higher mercury […]

The Sacramento Bee recently published a feature on the Black Mission figs of local farmer Buck Novak. Novak “had quite a stack of them at the Cesar Chavez Plaza market in downtown Sacramento,” despite their rarity in stores and farmer’s markets in the area. The price was $5 a pound, and “he expects […]

I was a water lawyer in a former life (okay, maybe it was just a couple years ago). Through that job, I was able to travel up and down the great State of California and meet not only with the people who run the state’s water system, but also with the farmers who used […]