Dow & Monsanto Team Up on the Mother of All Herbicide Marketing Plans

Tom Philpott, Mother Jones Magazine

During the late December media lull, the USDA didn't satisfy itself with green-lighting Monsanto's useless, PR-centric "drought-tolerant" corn. It also prepped the way for approving a product from Monsanto's rival Dow Agrosciences—one that industrial-scale corn farmers will likely find all too useful. 

Genetically Engineered Crops Will Not Feed the World

The Center for Food Safety Pushes Back Against Gates Foundation “Feed the World” Propaganda

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) pushed back today against longtime biotech crop supporter, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, over its announcement that it has invested nearly $2 billion in a campaign to fund the development of genetically engineered (GE) crops in an attempt to address global hunger.  The Gates Foundation has been widely criticized by food security and public interest groups for promoting GE crops in developing countries rather than investing in organic and sustainable local models of agriculture.

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Factory Farms vs. Video Activists: Who Will Control What We See.

An important article on the right of consumers to know where their food comes from in The Atlantic. 

'Antibiotic-free' Pork has the same rate of antibiotic resistant Bacteria.  (Grist.com)

We really do try to Pollan it up and do the whole “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” bit. But “mostly plants” obviously means “sometimes bacon.” And maybe the farmers’ market wasn’t open, so we bought that bacon at the store. Oh, but it was good bacon! “Raised without antibiotics” bacon! That’s something, right?

Nope, not really, according to a new study from a group of University of Iowa scientists. This group tested 395 samples of pork from 36 stores in Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. Of those, 6.6 percent had creepy, drug-resistant staph bacteria (shorthand: MRSA) on them. And there was no difference, statistically, between the normal pork products and the ones raised with alternative, antibiotic-free methods. 

Protein: The Soy Next

Door (Grist.com)

Like bikes, Birkenstocks, and buying local, soy products are a standard part of today’s stereotypical green lifestyle. But as many in the sustainable food world already know, we should proceed with caution when it comes to consuming processed soy products, as some are much more complicated than they seem.

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How Western Diets Are Making the World Sick

By Claire Thompson 

The increase in abdominal fat has driven the epidemic of diabetes over the last 40 years in the developed world — and that he’s now seeing similar patterns in undeveloped regions that have adapted Western eating patterns.

To start with, it is much harder to find an organic soybean than, say, an organic carrot – only 0.2 percent of the soybean acreage in the U.S. is used to grow organic beans (compared with 13 percent of the carrot acreage). After corn, soy is the second-most-planted field crop in the U.S., and 92 percent of U.S. soybeans are genetically engineered to either withstand large amounts of pesticide or to produce it themselves.

“If you’re buying a non-organic soy product, I can pretty confidently say that [it] will have been grown on a large-scale monoculture farm,” said Charlotte Vallaeys of the Cornucopia Institute, which put out a report [PDF] in 2009 on the social, environmental, and health impacts of soy. “This is something people need to think about when they talk about soy as a good alternative protein source — that soy has to be grown somewhere; something has to fertilize the soil.”

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