Tag Archives: food and ag

Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

by Shawanna11 Posted on May 25, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Because I’ve lived in two meccas of smoked meat—Central Texas and North Carolina—people often ask me for tips on barbecue at this time of year. Here’s the thing: barbecuing is long, smoky cooking over low heat. If you want to get the flavor of how to do it, check out the “Fire” chapter of Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked. The chapter ends with Pollan smoking a whole hog overnight in his backyard—a tricky process that takes practice, skill, and lots and lots of time. For me, barbecue is like beer: its making is best left to pros and obsessive amateurs.

Meanwhile, Tom’s Kitchen is devoted to simple home cooking, so you won’t see me devoting a column to proper barbecue anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to have a bit of fun with fire and smoke. What people usually have in mind when they ask me about barbecuing is really what should be called grilling—essentially, roasting over charcoal. (I’ve been told grilling also happens over gas flame, though that concept is foreign to me.) What follows is a dead-simple way to turn a whole chicken into a cookout through the magic of butterflying—cutting out the backbone with a sturdy pair of kitchen shears. Don’t be intimidated. It only takes about 15 seconds and it gets you a moist, evenly cooked bird with a crisp skin.

You can take your butterflied chicken party in many different directions. You could slather it in a barbecue-style sauce before crisping off the skin and serve it with slaw and other traditional ‘cue sides; you could go Mediterranean and marinade it in lemon zest and chopped rosemary and serve with a fresh salsa verde (essentially a parsley pesto); or do as the recipe below suggests, which is to look south to Mexico for inspiration. I hacked the meat up for tacos, and served with tortillas, guacamole, and a charred-tomato sauce.

Grilled Whole Chicken with Charred Tomato Sauce

Prep and marinade bird

2 cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
½ teaspoon powdered hot chile pepper (could be paprika, smoked paprika, or ground chipotle pepper—I used the latter)
½ teaspoon of cumin, ground
A bit of fresh oregano if you have some on hand
½ teaspoon sea salt
Several generous grinds of coarse black pepper
I tablespoon of olive oil
1 4-pound chicken, preferably raised on pasture

Place the first five ingredients, garlic first, into a mortar and pestle. Pound the garlic into a rough paste. Add the oil, and pound a bit more.

Using kitchen shears, carefully cut the backbone out of the chicken (see this Melissa Clark video for an excellent demo), and using your hands, open the chicken outwards and press down down vigorously, flattening it. Now turn it skin-side up and rub the paste all over the skin. Let it sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes and optimally overnight.

Prep the grill

Get some good hardwood charcoal going by whatever method you prefer—I use a chimney. When the coals are white-hot, collect them on one half of the grill basin. The goal is to create a hot side and a cool side. Put the grated grill top, which should be clean, in its place and let it heat up for a minute or two.

Prep the salsa

6 medium-sized, ripe tomatoes
1 clove garlic, crushed and peeled
1 to 2 fresh jalapenos or serrano chiles, roughly chopped
Sea salt to taste

Put the garlic, half of the chopped chiles, and a pinch of salt in a food processor and set aside—you’ll run the blade after adding roasted tomatoes.

Grill time

Place the butterflied chicken, skin side up, on the cool side of the grill, and the tomatoes on the hot side. Cover with the grill lid. Let the tomatoes cook, turning and recovering the grill as needed, until nicely charred all over. Add them to the food processor and whiz until you have a smooth salsa. Check for seasoning—add and process more chile pepper and salt if needed.

Meanwhile, leave the chicken cooking on the cool side, covered, until a meat thermometer plunged into the deepest part of a thigh reads 105 degrees. When it reaches that temperature, you’re ready to crisp off the skin. Simply flip the bird over, skin-side down, onto the hot part of the grill and let it cook there until he skin is crisp and caramelized and the thigh temperature reads 180 degrees.

Let it rest off the grill for 20 minutes before cutting the meat off he bones into taco-ready chunks. Serve with the salsa plenty of hot tortillas.

Link – 

Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

Posted in FF, food processor, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbet is Nearing an End

by Mike Herman Posted on May 25, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Amphibians are disappearing horrifyingly fast worldwide, with a third of species imperiled. But they’re disappearing even faster than believed in the US—and probably worldwide (more on that below)—according to the first ever analysis of the rate of population losses among frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts.

Eastern newt: Patrick Coin at Wikimedia Commons

Even amphibians presumed to be relatively stable and widespread are declining. With species everywhere—from the swamps of Louisiana and Florida to the high mountains of the Sierras and Rockies—all disappearing with mind blowing speed.

Toad mountain harlequin frog: Brian Gratwicke at Flickr

A team of researchers with the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative analyzed the rate of change in the probability of 48 amphibian species occupying ponds and other moist habitats in 34 sites over a period of nine years (see map/figures below).

Gray tree frog: Robert A. Coggeshall at Wikimedia Commons

What they found: overall occupancy by amphibians declined 3.7 percent a year from 2002 to 2011. That seemingly small number adds up to particularly virulent form of extinction hunting down these species within two decades if the rate of decline remains unchanged.

California newt: jkirkhart35 at Wikimedia Commons

Much worse, species Red-listed as threatened or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declined on average 11.6 percent a year.

Yosemite toad: Natalie McNear via Flickr

Surprisingly, declines occurred even in protected lands, like national parks and national wildlife refuges. “The declines of amphibians in these protected areas are particularly worrisome because they suggest that some stressors—such as diseases, contaminants and drought—transcend landscapes,” says lead author Michael Adams.

American bullfrog: Dave Menke at Wikimedia Commons

Amphibians seem to be experiencing the worst declines documented among vertebrates, but all major groups of animals associated with freshwater are having major problems.

From the PLOS ONE paper: (A) Location of monitoring areas. (B) Distribution of species among IUCN categories. (C) Number of years monitored in each time series. (D) Mean annual estimates of probability of site occupancy and number of occupancy estimates (N). Credit: Michael J. Adams, et al. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064347.g001

While the PLOS ONE paper didn’t address causes, another recent study found a multitude of natural and manmade stressors affecting amphibians, including human-induced habitat destruction, environmental contamination, invasive species, and climate change.

“An enormous rate of change has occurred in the last 100 years, and amphibians are not evolving fast enough to keep up with it,” says Andrew Blaustein, author of the 2011 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “With a permeable skin and exposure to both aquatic and terrestrial problems, amphibians face a double whammy. Because of this, mammals, fish and birds have not experienced population impacts as severely as amphibians—at least, not yet.”â&#128;&#139;

Shenandoah salamander: Brian Gratwicke at Wikimedia Commons

“Amphibians have been a constant presence in our planet’s ponds, streams, lakes and rivers for 350 million years or so, surviving countless changes that caused many other groups of animals to go extinct,” says USGS Director Suzette Kimball. “This is why the findings of this study are so noteworthy; they demonstrate that the pressures amphibians now face exceed the ability of many of these survivors to cope.”

I’ve written more about climate-induced amphibian disappearances here, about worrisome trends in reptile numbers here, about problems with herbicides on farms here, and about how pesticide cocktails kill amphibians even in “safe” doses here. And for a long read on the problems with the loss of biodiversity here. Plus one spot of bright news on some incredible and successful efforts to breed super endangered amphibians in captivity here.

View post – 

Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbet is Nearing an End

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbet is Nearing an End

Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbit is Nearing an End

by 4q4cv8v Posted on May 25, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Amphibians are disappearing horrifyingly fast worldwide, with a third of species imperiled. But they’re disappearing even faster than believed in the US—and probably worldwide (more on that below)—according to the first ever analysis of the rate of population losses among frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts.

Eastern newt: Patrick Coin at Wikimedia Commons

Even amphibians presumed to be relatively stable and widespread are declining. With species everywhere—from the swamps of Louisiana and Florida to the high mountains of the Sierras and Rockies—all disappearing with mind blowing speed.

Toad mountain harlequin frog: Brian Gratwicke at Flickr

A team of researchers with the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative analyzed the rate of change in the probability of 48 amphibian species occupying ponds and other moist habitats in 34 sites over a period of nine years (see map/figures below).

Gray tree frog: Robert A. Coggeshall at Wikimedia Commons

What they found: overall occupancy by amphibians declined 3.7 percent a year from 2002 to 2011. That seemingly small number adds up to particularly virulent form of extinction hunting down these species within two decades if the rate of decline remains unchanged.

California newt: jkirkhart35 at Wikimedia Commons

Much worse, species Red-listed as threatened or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declined on average 11.6 percent a year.

Yosemite toad: Natalie McNear via Flickr

Surprisingly, declines occurred even in protected lands, like national parks and national wildlife refuges. “The declines of amphibians in these protected areas are particularly worrisome because they suggest that some stressors—such as diseases, contaminants and drought—transcend landscapes,” says lead author Michael Adams.

American bullfrog: Dave Menke at Wikimedia Commons

Amphibians seem to be experiencing the worst declines documented among vertebrates, but all major groups of animals associated with freshwater are having major problems.

From the PLOS ONE paper: (A) Location of monitoring areas. (B) Distribution of species among IUCN categories. (C) Number of years monitored in each time series. (D) Mean annual estimates of probability of site occupancy and number of occupancy estimates (N). Credit: Michael J. Adams, et al. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064347.g001

While the PLOS ONE paper didn’t address causes, another recent study found a multitude of natural and manmade stressors affecting amphibians, including human-induced habitat destruction, environmental contamination, invasive species, and climate change.

“An enormous rate of change has occurred in the last 100 years, and amphibians are not evolving fast enough to keep up with it,” says Andrew Blaustein, author of the 2011 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “With a permeable skin and exposure to both aquatic and terrestrial problems, amphibians face a double whammy. Because of this, mammals, fish and birds have not experienced population impacts as severely as amphibians—at least, not yet.”â&#128;&#139;

Shenandoah salamander: Brian Gratwicke at Wikimedia Commons

“Amphibians have been a constant presence in our planet’s ponds, streams, lakes and rivers for 350 million years or so, surviving countless changes that caused many other groups of animals to go extinct,” says USGS Director Suzette Kimball. “This is why the findings of this study are so noteworthy; they demonstrate that the pressures amphibians now face exceed the ability of many of these survivors to cope.”

I’ve written more about climate-induced amphibian disappearances here, about problems with herbicides on farms here. And for a long read on the problems with the loss of biodiversity here.

Continue reading: 

Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbit is Nearing an End

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbit is Nearing an End

Eliminating Hunger, One 3-D-Printed Meal at a Time

by yq7izr Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hunger remains a massive problem here on planet Earth. Globally, nearly 870 million people—1 in 8 of us—live with “chronic undernourishment.” Meanwhile, obesity stalks us, too—about 1.4 million people worldwide count as overweight, 500 million of whom are full-on obese.

The scourge of lingering hunger amid rising obesity is notoriously complex and difficult to solve. It raises knotty questions about our shockingly unequal global economic system, about European and US farm policy, about the rise of global agrichemical/GMO firms, about global commodity markets and land grabs.

But what if we could just ignore all of that unpleasantness and hack our way to answers with novel technologies?

For example, what if we could deliver food to the globe’s hungry millions through 3-D printing? Here’s Chris Mims, writing about an engineer whose company “just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer”:

He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store.

While global population is expected to top off at 9 billion, not 12 billion, I guess the idea here is to reduce humanity’s dizzying variety of foodstuffs to a set of “powder and oils,” to be combined at home by a gadget. By stripping raw ingredients of their uniqueness—”a powder is a powder,” as Mims puts it—food can be really, really cheap, and within reach of even the poorest people. This is an intensified version of the the promise of today’s industrial agriculture—produce lots and lots of a few commodities like corn and soy, which can then be processed into a variety of cheap products, from burgers to breakfast cereal. This “universal food synthesizer” represents the apotheosis of the industrial food dream.

And what about obesity? An enterprising engineer is hard at work on that, too—this time Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. From PopSci:

A valve gets surgically implanted in the user’s stomach, and the gadget sends a tube through it into their belly. About 20 minutes after eating, the gadget sucks out some food, and when the user squeezes a bag filled with water, the liquid gets sent back into the stomach instead. Rinse and repeat until up to 30 percent of your meal is gone.

Wait, what? PopSci digs into the Kamen’s website for details on how it works:

The aspiration process is performed about 20 minutes after the entire meal is consumed and takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The process is performed in the privacy of the restroom, and the food is drained directly into the toilet. Because aspiration only removes a third of the food, the body still receives the calories it needs to function. For optimal weight loss, patients should aspirate after each major meal (about 3 times per day) initially. Over time, as patients learn to eat more healthfully, they can reduce the frequency of aspirations. Emphasis mine.

Got that? You eat as much as you want, and then deposit a third of it directly into the toilet, undigested.

Better yet, why not combine these two innovations—3-D-printing optimum amounts of those powders and oils directly into the stomach, using Kamen’s contraption hacked to work in reverse? By the time we’re dining on home-synthesized combos of industrial goo, it’s hard to imagine overeating being a problem, anyway.

Continue at source – 

Eliminating Hunger, One 3-D-Printed Meal at a Time

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Eliminating Hunger, One 3-D-Printed Meal at a Time

You Need Phosphorous to Live—and We’re Running Out

by DorothyUn Posted on May 22, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Western Sahara, a sparsely populated slice of desert on Africa’s northwestern coast, doesn’t get much ink as a potential crisis point in the global food system. You’ve probably never heard of the long-standing independence movement in the Morocco-controlled territory—or that the area harbors vast stores of an element critical to contemporary agriculture.

Morocco, it is thought, holds up to 85 percent (PDF) of the globe’s known phosphate rock reserve—and a lot of it lies in Western Sahara. Morocco’s royal family thus controls what Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the prominent Boston-based global investment firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., called the “most important quasi-monopoly in economic history.”

Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth—including humans—since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or spreading phosphorus-rich manure. Then new mining and refining techniques gave rise to the modern phosphorus fertilizer industry—and farmers, particularly in the rich temperate zones of Europe and North America, quickly became hooked on quick, cheap, and easy phosphorus. Now the rest of the world is scrambling to catch up, and annual phosphorus demand is rising nearly twice as fast as the population.

Continue Reading »

Continue reading: 

You Need Phosphorous to Live—and We’re Running Out

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on You Need Phosphorous to Live—and We’re Running Out

Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

by gwm6zjf3 Posted on May 18, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Nearly two decades after their mid-’90s debut in US farm fields, GMO seeds are looking less and less promising. Do the industry’s products ramp up crop yields? The Union of Concerned Scientists looked at that question in detail for a 2009 study. Short answer: marginally, if at all. Do they lead to reduced pesticide use? No; in fact, the opposite.

And why would they, when the handful of companies that dominate GMO seeds—Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow—are also among the globe’s largest pesticide makers? Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have given rise to an upsurge of herbicide-resistant superweeds and a torrent of herbicides, while insects are showing resistance to its pesticide-containing Bt crops and causing farmers to boost insecticide use. What about wonder crops that would be genetically engineered to withstand drought or require less nitrogen fertilizer? So far, they haven’t panned out—and there’s little evidence they ever will.

Yet despite all of these problems, the US State Department has been essentially acting as of de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry, complete with figures as high-ranking as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mouthing industry talking points as if they were gospel, a new Food & Water Watch analysis of internal documents finds.

The FWW report is based on an analysis of diplomatic cables, written between 2005 and 2009 and released in the big Wikileaks document dump of 2010. FWW sums it up: “a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want, and lobby foreign governments—especially in the developing world—to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops.”

The report brims with examples of the US government promoting the biotech industry abroad. Here are a few:

The State Department encouraged embassies to bring visitors—especially reporters—to the United States, which has “proven to be effective ways of dispelling concerns about biotech crops.” The State Department organized or sponsored 28 junkets from 17 countries between 2005 and 2009. In 2008, when the US embassy was trying to prevent Poland from adopting a ban on biotech livestock feed, the State Department brought a delegation of high-level Polish government agriculture officials to meet with the USDA in Washington, tour Michigan State University and visit the Chicago Board of Trade. The USDA sponsored a trip for El Salvador’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock to visit Pioneer Hi-Bred’s Iowa facilities and to meet with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack that was expected to “pay rich dividends by helping the Minister clearly advocate policy positions in our mutual bilateral interests.”

Another example: this 2009 cable, referenced in the FWW report, shows a State Department functionary casually requesting US taxpayer funds to to combat a popular effort to require labeling of GMO foods in Hong Kong—and boasting about successfully having done so in the past. Why focus on the GMO policy of a quasi-independent city? Hong Kong’s rejection of a mandatory labeling policy “could have influential spillover effects in the region, including Taiwan, mainland China and Southeast Asia,” the functionary writes, adding that her consulate had “intentionally designed anti-labeling programs other embassies and consulates” could use.

The report also shows how the State Department hotly pushed GMOs in low-income African nations—in the face of popular opposition. In a 2009 cable, FWW shows, the US embassy in Nigeria bragged that “U.S. government support in drafting pro-biotech legislation as well as sensitizing key stakeholders through a public outreach program” helped pass and industry-friendly law. Working with USAID—an independent US government agency that operates under the State Department’s authority—the State Department pushed similar efforts in Kenya and Ghana, FWW shows.

Yet, as FWW points out, in so aggressively pushing biotech solutions abroad, State is bucking against the global consensus of ag-development experts as expressed by the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project, convened by the World Bank and the United Nations and completed in 2008, to assess what forms of agriculture would best meet the world’s needs in a time of rapid climate change. The IAASTD took such a skeptical view of deregulated biotech as a panacea for the globe’s food challenges that Croplife America, the industry’s main industry lobbying group, saw fit to denounce it. The US government backed up the biotech lobby on this one—just three of the 61 governments that participated refused to sign the IAASTD: the Bush II-led United States, Canada, and Australia.

So why why are our corps of diplomats behaving as if they answered to Monsanto’s shareholders with regard to ag policy? My guess is GMO seed technology, dominated by Monsanto, as well as our towering crops corn and soy crops (which are at this point almost completely from GM seeds) are two of the few areas of global trade wherein the US still generates a trade surplus. The website of the State Department’s Biotechnology and Textile Trade Policy Division puts it like this:

In 2013, the United States is forecasted to export $145 billion in agricultural products, which is $9.2 billion above fiscal 2012 exports, and have a trade surplus of $30 billion in our agricultural sector.

I guess US presidents, Democratic and Republican alike, are bent on preserving and expanding that surplus. President Obama altered much about US foreign policy when he took over for President Bush in 2009; but he doesn’t seem to have changed a thing when it comes to pushing biotech on the global stage. And the impulse is not confined to the State Department. Back in 2009, when Obama needed to appoint someone to lead agriculture negotiations at the US Trade Office, he went straight to the ag-biotech industry, tapping the vice president for science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, Islam A. Siddiqui, who still holds that post today.

Meanwhile, the State Department operates an Office of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Textile Trade Affairs, which exists in part to “maintain open markets for U.S. products derived from modern biotechnology” and “promote acceptance of this promising technology.” The office’s biotechnology page is larded with language that reads like boilerplate from Monsanto promo material: “Agricultural biotechnology helps farmers increase yields, enabling them to produce more food per acre while reducing the need for chemicals, pesticides, water, and tilling. This provides benefits to the environment as well as to the health and livelihood of farmers.”

Excerpt from:

Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

Posted in alo, Bragg, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, oven, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Taxpayer Dollars Are Helping Monsanto Sell Seeds Abroad

USDA Sticks It to Monsanto and Dow—At Least Temporarily

by 0xo4cdr4 Posted on May 11, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Back in early 2012, the US Department of Agriculture seemed on the verge of approving new genetically modified crops from agrichemical giants Monsanto and Dow. The two agrichemical giants were pushing new corn and soy varieties that would respond to the ever-expanding problem of herbicide-tolerant superweeds by bringing more-toxic herbicides into the mix—and likely ramping up the resistance problem, as I explained at length in a post at the time.

Even some mainstream ag scientists were alarmed at the coming escalation in the war against weeds. Scientists at Penn State—not exactly a hotbed of alternative ag thinking—delivered a damning analysis of the novel crops, which would engineered to withstand not only Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, but also the highly toxic old ones 2,4-D (Dow’s version) and Dicamba (Monsanto’s).

Yet in August, the USDA again signaled that approval would be imminent—and by the end of 2012, people who follow ag regulatory issues were telling me that the USDA would almost certainly approve the crops over Christmas break, timing the decision in an effort to minimize the inevitable uproar.

But then Christmas came and went with no announcement—leading Dow to issue a January press statement about how the unexpected delay meant it could not sell its new product to farmers for the 2013 growing season. Yet the company remained confident about the prospects for approval in time for planting in 2014—it told the trade journal Delta Farm Press it “expects all approvals will be in place for sale in late 2013,” in time for a its novels seeds to be used over a “broad geography” in 2014.

But on Friday, the USDA essentially trampled on those expectations—it announced it was delaying approval of the crops until it could generate full environmental impact statements (known as EIS’s) on them. The move effectively means that the crops won’t be planted in fields next year, either, a Dow spokesperson told Bloomberg News.

Continue Reading »

This article: 

USDA Sticks It to Monsanto and Dow—At Least Temporarily

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on USDA Sticks It to Monsanto and Dow—At Least Temporarily

How Michael Pollan Inspired Zac Efron’s Latest Movie

by Kyung Wilhoite Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At Any Price
Sony Pictures Classics
105 minutes

At Any Price, a bleak family drama set against the backdrop of the Corn Belt, is essentially Death of a Salesman, but with genetically modified superseeds.

The film is co-written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, who the late critic Roger Ebert dubbed the new “director of the decade,” soon after seeing Bahrani’s 2007 film Chop Shop. At Any Price stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron (last seen getting peed on by Nicole Kidman in a Lee Daniels art film last year) as a father and son living their lives of noisy desperation.

Quaid plays Henry Whipple (no, not that Henry Whipple), an adulterous farmer and salesman entrenched in the ruthless, multimillion-dollar rivalry between Iowa’s big-business farmers. Henry becomes the target of a corporate investigation after illegally washing and reselling patented genetically modified seeds. Efron plays Dean, a local stock car racing champion who dreams of ditching the family business and making a name for himself as a NASCAR driver.

The pair’s disenchantment and bitterness result in a wave of betrayal, anger, and violence in their otherwise peaceful Midwestern town. The film is a quietly disturbing little picture, and features some magnificent acting, especially by Quaid.

The film is not (as Bahrani is quick to point out) in any way political, even though the story prominently involves GMOs, a controversial and extremely political topic these days. The origin of this apolitical film, however, is indeed rooted in Bahrani’s very political interests. In a conversation I had with Bahrani and Quaid, the 38-year-old director explained how he went about writing At Any Price:

I was curious where my food was coming from. I was reading authors like Michael Pollan…And I started realizing that farms aren’t romantic places anymore—they’re big businesses. So Michael Pollan and I became email friends, and I asked him to introduce me to George Naylor, who’s a farmer in Iowa who was featured in Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. So I went out and I lived with George for many months, and when I went out there, all the farmers kept telling me, “expand or die, get big or get out.” And I met a seed salesman, and I never knew there was such an occupation as “GMO seed salesman”…And he made me think of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. And I thought combining these things would be a way to tell a human and emotional story…When you have a lot of race cars and infidelity, it’s hard to be an “agenda film.”

(So there you have it: You can thank Michael Pollan for indirectly causing the development of Zac Efron‘s newest movie.)

Bahrani pulled from John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Peter Bogdanovich for narrative and stylistic influences. He also shadowed several Iowa farmers, incorporating their sentiments and commentary into his screenplay. One day, Bahrani noticed that a customer of one of the farmers owned a stock car for figure 8 racing—an observation he used to craft Efron’s character. “I YouTube’d figure 8 racing that night, and I made a point to keep going to Iowa to go see races,” Bahrani says. “I thought it would be a good contrast for the two characters…It had a different pace, and a different energy, and a different adrenaline.”

Dennis Quaid didn’t have time to conduct anything close to this level of research for his role. His learning experiences were all in the midst of production: “We shot it on a real farm,” Quaid says. “I didn’t have a trailer for this; it was my car or the living-room couch of the Hermans, the family whose farm we were shooting on… I spent my time with them, trying to soak up the atmosphere.”

Check out the trailer for this tense and surprising drama:

At Any Price gets a wider release on Friday, May 3. The film is rated R for sexual content including a strong graphic image, and for language. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin co-hosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

Excerpt from: 

How Michael Pollan Inspired Zac Efron’s Latest Movie

Posted in FF, GE, Hoffman, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Michael Pollan Inspired Zac Efron’s Latest Movie

Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

by Isela Harris Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Monday, the European Commission voted to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are a widely used class of chemicals suspected of contributing to a severe global decline in honeybee health.

In the wake of Europe’s decisive action, the US Environmental Protection Agency dithered. Well, it did release a joint report with the US Department of Agriculture on Thursday, generated from a “National Honey Bee Health Stakeholder Conference” the two agencies held last fall. The report fingered no single culprit behind colony collapse disorder (CCD), the name for the steep annual bee die-offs that have been stumping beekeepers since 2006. Instead, it pointed to a “complex set of stressors and pathogens,” including poor nutrition (mainly from loss of flowering weeds due to increased herbicide use), viruses, gut parasites, and, yes, pesticides. But it includes a summary of a presentation by a USDA scientist Jeff Pettis noting that “several studies” have shown that low-level exposure to neonics make bees more vulnerable to the common gut parasite Nosema. (Pettis himself is the co-author of one of those studies.) .

Yet, as Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist Jennifer Sass put it in a Thursday blog post, the joint EPA/USDA report limits itself to “recommendations about best management practices and technical advancements for applying pesticides to reduce dust,” while avoiding “recommendations that would reduce the overall sales and profits for chemical makers.”

Nor does the report express much urgency; it promises an “action plan that will outline major priorities to be addressed in the next 5-10 years.”

Meanwhile, the European Commission’s decisive action came amid what the Guardian called a “fierce behind-the-scenes campaign” to stop it from Syngenta and Bayer, the Europe-based chemical giants that market them. The move was prompted by a January report by the European Food Safety Authority, which identified “high acute risks” for bees from exposure to neonic-treated crops like corn and sunflower. And studies from independent researchers implicating neonics in declining bee health have mounted.

Even before the decision, France, Italy and Slovenia, and Bayer’s home country, Germany, had all suspend use of the chemicals pending more research on bee health. Now neonics will face severe restriction in all 27 European Union countries for two-year period starting Dec. 1, 2013, during which time the Commission will continue its assessment of their impact.

The move trains a harsh light on the EPA, which approved the chemicals based on what its own scientists have called flawed research and is currently reviewing them in light of the threat to bees and other pollinators. Earlier this month, an agency spokesperson told CBS News that the review would take five years—meaning that they’ll continue to be used widely on farmland in the US during that period. As I reported a while back, neonic-treated crops cover between 150 million to 200 million acres of farmland in the US each year—a land mass equivalent to as much as twice the size of the California.

I contacted the EPA to ask whether the EC decision might speed the agency’s timeline on reassessing neonics and their threat to bees. The response, in an emailed statement: “At this time, the data available to the EPA do not support a moratorium.” The time frame for completing the reassessment remains in place, the statement added, with this caveat: “If at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide.”

More here:  

Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, oven, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

You Won’t Believe What’s In Your Turkey Burger

by Aale Thomas Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:


Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?


This Is Your Body on Microbes


Should You Take a Probiotic?


Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants


Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?


Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation


Why You Shouldn’t Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Back in August 2011, the agribusiness giant Cargill recalled a stunning 36 million pounds of ground turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had come from a single processing facility in Arkansas, a failure that eventually sickened 136 people and killed another. The company shut down the plant, tweaked its process (mainly by adding to and “intensifying” its system of spraying meat with antimicrobial fluid), and quickly reopened it. Within a month, the company had to recall another 108,000 pounds of ground turkey from the same plant, because it was infected with the same strain of superbug salmonella.

Have things gotten any cleaner in the world of Big Turkey since those events? Cargill says it has cleaned up its act, but recent research suggests that ground turkey still has an antibiotic-resistant-pathogen problem. The latest evidence comes from Consumer Reports, which has just published the results of testing it did on 257 samples of ground turkey picked up from retailers around the country, produced by a variety of processors, including Cargill. CR contacted Cargill with the results, and got the following response:

“As we’ve publicly stated over the past year and a half, no stone was left unturned in our efforts to determine the originating source of salmonella Heidelberg associated with the ground-turkey recalls, yet to this day we do not know the origin of the bacteria linked to outbreak of illnesses,” said Mike Robach, vice president of corporate food safety and regulatory affairs for Cargill in Minneapolis. He provided a long list of steps that Cargill has taken since the outbreak to make its ground turkey safer.

Even so, the results of Consumer Reports’ tests won’t make you eager to order that next turkey burger: “More than half of the packages of raw ground meat and patties tested positive for fecal bacteria.”

Overall, 90 percent of the samples tested by CR researchers carried at least one of the five bacteria they looked for—and “almost all” of the bacteria strains they found showed resistance to at least one antibiotic. The two fecal-related bacteria strains—enterococcus and E. coli—showed up the most frequently:

Consumer Reports

What’s more, those bacteria tended to be superbugs—that is, resistant to at least one antibiotic:

Consumer Reports

You’ll note from the above charts both good and bad news about salmonella, the source of that 2011 Cargill outbreak. Happily, salmonella was rare in the meat CR tested—just 12 samples contained it, or 5 percent of the total. Unhappily, though, the salmonella they did find tended to be of the superbug variety—eight of those samples carried salmonella resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics. And there’s evidence of lingering problems at that Arkansas plant of Cargill’s—one of the multi-resistant salmonella strains came from there, CR reports.

Consumer Reports also tested samples ground turkey labeled organic, “antibiotic-free,” and “no antibiotics.” (Under USDA code, meat labeled organic must come from animals that were never treated with antibiotics.) The bacterial strains that turned up in these products were much less likely to be antibiotic-resistant.

Consumer Reports

The Consumer Reports study comes on the heels of a troubling analysis of Food & Drug Administration meat-testing data performed by Environmental Working Group. Every year, the FDA randomly selects samples of meat from retailers, tests them for resistant bacteria, and publishes the results in a manner that’s nearly indecipherable (try it yourself—latest report, released in February, here). EWG slogged through the results (report here) and found that 81 percent of ground turkey samples contained traces of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

All of which shines a harsh spotlight on the Food & Drug Administration’s “voluntary” approach to curbing antibiotic use on farms. Between 2003 and 2011, antibiotic use on US livestock farms soared from 20 million pounds per year to 30 million pounds—a jaw-dropping 50 percent leap. These facilities now suck in 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the US. The great bulk of these drugs are used not to treat sick animals, but rather to make them grow faster and keep them alive until slaughter under tight, filthy conditions.

Meanwhile, there’s the US Department of Agriculture’s imminent plan to slash the number of inspectors it places on poultry-industry kill lines (chicken and turkey) while simultaneously allowing those same kill lines to be sped up.

Link to article – 

You Won’t Believe What’s In Your Turkey Burger

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, organic, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on You Won’t Believe What’s In Your Turkey Burger