| Thursday, March 1, 2007 |  |
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1 Mar 2007 @ 17:06
Michael Pollan, Whole Foods' John Mackey usher Berkeley foodies into 'ecological era'
By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 28 February 2007
topkey Webcast: "The Past, Present and Future of Food" | 2 hours 4 minutes
BERKELEY – Why on earth would 2,000 people turn out on a rainy, blustery evening to hear a conversation between a reporter and a grocer? asked the former of the latter at a sold-out Zellerbach Hall Tuesday night (Feb. 27).
The answer has two parts. The speakers were not just any reporter or grocer, but Michael Pollan, best-selling science writer and UC Berkeley Knight Professor of Journalism, and John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, the world's largest natural-foods grocery chain. And they have been carrying on a dialogue of sorts about the future of organic food ever since the publication last April of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan's investigation into the U.S. food chain. More >
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| Monday, December 18, 2006 | |
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18 Dec 2006 @ 17:57
Lawsuit stirs up guacamole labeling controversy
By Jerry Hirsch
Times Staff Writer
Published November 30, 2006
Peanut butter is made from peanuts, tomato paste is made from tomatoes, and guacamole is made from avocados, right?
Wrong. The guacamole sold by Kraft Foods Inc., one of the bestselling avocado dips in the nation, includes modified food starch, hefty amounts of coconut and soybean oils, and a dose of food coloring. The dip contains precious little avocado, but many customers mistake it for wholly guacamole.
On Wednesday, a Los Angeles woman sued the Northfield, Ill.-based food company, alleging that it committed fraud by calling its dip "guacamole." Her lawyer says suits against other purveyors of "fake guacamole" could be filed soon.
FOR THE RECORD:
Guacamole lawsuit: An article in Thursday's Business section about a lawsuit alleging that Kraft Foods Inc. committed fraud in labeling a dip as guacamole referred to the product as one of the bestselling avocado dips in the nation. In fact, Kraft's product is ranked No. 13 among guacamole dips and has only a 3% dollar share of the guacamole-flavored-dip segment, according to market researcher ACNielsen. —
The suit, which seeks class-action status, highlights the liberty some food companies take in labeling their products.
If consumers read the fine print, they would discover that Kraft Dips Guacamole contains less than 2% avocado. But few of them do. California avocado growers, who account for 95% of the nation's avocado crop, said they didn't know that store-bought guacamole contained little of their produce.
"We have not looked at this issue, but we might follow it now that we are aware of it," said Tom Bellamore, the top lawyer at the California Avocado Commission in Irvine.
Kraft and other food companies said they weren't deceiving customers by skimping on the avocado. A Kraft spokeswoman said most people understood that guacamole was part of the company's line of flavored dips.
"We think customers understand that it isn't made from avocado," said Claire Regan, Kraft Foods' vice president of corporate affairs. "All of the ingredients are listed on the label for consumers to reference." More >
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| Wednesday, November 22, 2006 | |
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22 Nov 2006 @ 23:42
This is a topic I have recently learned about from my friend Jock Doubleday. I rarely see a doctor and have no children so this health concern has alluded me. Though my 86 year old mother, who gets a flu shot yearly, did complain of a myriad of symptoms this year after she received her vaccine.
This article is from the Organic Consumers website.
Americans Surprised, Concerned that 90% of Flu Shots Contain Mercury
* Health Officials' Aggressive Flu Shot Campaign May Disregard Safety, According to Survey of 9,000 Americans
*74 Percent of Respondents Unaware Flu Shots Contain Mercury, 78 Percent Disagree with CDC About Vaccinating Pregnant Women and Children
PRNewswire, Nov 13, 2006
Straight to the Source
PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- As health officials step up their effort to vaccinate Americans against the flu, a new survey suggests serious concerns over the toxin mercury, an ingredient in over 90 percent of this season's flu shot supply. PutChildrenFirst.org, a parent-led organization advocating vaccine safety, commissioned a survey of over 9,000 Americans to learn their plans for getting flu shots, their knowledge of its ingredients, and who they hold responsible for making sure vaccines are safe.
The survey revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans were unaware that most flu shots contain mercury and that they would refuse a shot with mercury.
"More than 75 percent of Americans feel a mercury-containing flu shot should not be given to a pregnant woman or a child, despite recommendations from medical authorities to do just that," said Lisa Handley, a founding parent of PutChildrenFirst.org. Her own son, Jamison, had an adverse reaction to a flu shot containing mercury in 2003. "I know firsthand how life-changing a flu shot with mercury can be, since our son began his regression into autism after his flu shot." More >
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| Friday, November 3, 2006 | |
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3 Nov 2006 @ 16:15
Seafood, other ocean life threatened by overfishing, pollution
The Associated Press
Published: November 2, 2006
WASHINGTON: Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few decades.
If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
"Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems," said the lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are — beyond anything we suspected," Worm said.
While the study focused on the oceans, concerns have been expressed by ecologists about threats to fish in the Great Lakes and other lakes, rivers and freshwaters, too.
Worm and an international team spent four years analyzing 32 controlled experiments, other studies from 48 marine protected areas and global catch data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's database of all fish and invertebrates worldwide from 1950 to 2003.
The scientists also looked at a 1,000-year time series for 12 coastal regions, drawing on data from archives, fishery records, sediment cores and archaeological data.
"At this point 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed — that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating," Worm said. "If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime — by 2048."
"It looks grim and the projection of the trend into the future looks even grimmer," he said. "But it's not too late to turn this around. It can be done, but it must be done soon. We need a shift from single species management to ecosystem management. It just requires a big chunk of political will to do it."
The researchers called for new marine reserves, better management to prevent overfishing and tighter controls on pollution.
In the 48 areas worldwide that have been protected to improve marine biodiversity, they found, "diversity of species recovered dramatically, and with it the ecosystem's productivity and stability."
While seafood forms a crucial concern in their study, the researchers were analyzing overall biodiversity of the oceans. The more species in the oceans, the better each can handle exploitation.
"Even bugs and weeds make clear, measurable contributions to ecosystems," said co-author J. Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.
The National Fisheries Institute, a trade association for the seafood industry, does not share the researchers alarm.
"Fish stocks naturally fluctuate in population," the institute said in a statement. "By developing new technologies that capture target species more efficiently and result in less impact on other species or the environment, we are helping to ensure our industry does not adversely affect surrounding ecosystems or damage native species.
Joshua Reichert, head of the private Pew Charitable Trusts' environment program, pointed out that worldwide fishing provides $80 billion (€62.6 billion)in revenue and 200 million people depend on it for their livelihoods. For more than 1 billion people, many of whom are poor, fish is their main source of protein, he said.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's National Center for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis.
___
Associated Press Writer John Heilprin contributed to this report. More >
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| Monday, October 30, 2006 | |
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30 Oct 2006 @ 19:32
Stonyfield's Response to Business Week Organic Myth Article
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30 Oct 2006 @ 19:28
The Organic Myth
Pastoral ideals are getting trampled as organic food goes mass market
Next time you're in the supermarket, stop and take a look at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. With its contented cow and green fields, the yellow container evokes a bucolic existence, telegraphing what we've come to expect from organic food: pure, pesticide-free, locally produced ingredients grown on a small family farm.
So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield's organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. "It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house," he says. "But once you're in organic, you have to source globally."
Hirshberg's dilemma is that of the entire organic food business. Just as mainstream consumers are growing hungry for untainted food that also nourishes their social conscience, it is getting harder and harder to find organic ingredients. There simply aren't enough organic cows in the U.S., never mind the organic grain to feed them, to go around. Nor are there sufficient organic strawberries, sugar, or apple pulp -- some of the other ingredients that go into the world's best-selling organic yogurt.
Now companies from Wal-Mart (WMT ) to General Mills (GIS ) to Kellogg (K ) are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits. Hirshberg himself is under the gun because he has sold an 85% stake in Stonyfield to the French food giant Groupe Danone. To retain management control, he has to keep Stonyfield growing at double-digit rates. Yet faced with a supply crunch, he has drastically cut the percentage of organic products in his line. He also has scaled back annual sales growth, from almost 40% to 20%. "They're all mad at me," he says.
As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil -- places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers' wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.
Everyone agrees on the basic definition of organic: food grown without the assistance of man-made chemicals. Four years ago, under pressure from critics fretting that the term "organic" was being misused, the U.S. Agriculture Dept. issued rules. To be certified as organic, companies must eschew most pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, bioengineering, and radiation. But for purists, the philosophy also requires farmers to treat their people and livestock with respect and, ideally, to sell small batches of what they produce locally so as to avoid burning fossil fuels to transport them. The USDA rules don't fully address these concerns.
Hence the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals. It simply isn't clear that organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale. For Hirshberg, who set out to "change the way Kraft (KFT ), Monsanto (MON ), and everybody else does business," the movement is shedding its innocence. "Organic is growing up."
Certainly, life has changed since 1983, when Hirshberg teamed up with a back-to-the-land advocate named Samuel Kaymen to sell small batches of full-fat plain organic yogurt. Kaymen had founded Stonyfield Farm to feed his six kids and, as he puts it, "escape the dominant culture." Hirshberg, then 29, had been devoted to the environment for years, stung by memories of technicolor dyes streaming downriver from his father's New Hampshire shoe factories. He wrote a book on how to build water-pumping windmills and, between 1979 and 1983, ran the New Alchemy Institute, an alternative-living research center on Cape Cod. He was a believer.
But producing yogurt amid the rudimentary conditions of the original Stonyfield Farm was a recipe for nightmares, not nirvana. Meg, an organic farmer who married Hirshberg in 1986, remembers the farm as cold and crowded, with a road so perilous that suppliers often refused to come up. "I call it the bad old days," she says. Adds her mother, Doris Cadoux, who propped up the business for years: "Every time Gary would come to me for money, Meg would call to say 'Mama, don't do it."'
READ MORE More >
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| Wednesday, October 4, 2006 | |
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4 Oct 2006 @ 20:04
Positive Proof of Global Warming More >
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| Tuesday, October 3, 2006 | |
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3 Oct 2006 @ 17:04
Sign Sign everywhere a sign
Sign Sign everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign
And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he'd tell you to your face, man you're some kinda sinner
(c) Five Man Electrical Band
Well, this time the shoe is on the other foot. My foot.
Living in the serenity and sanctity of Matilija Canyon for almost seven years now (not a long time for the residents who have called this home for decades, accepting fire and flood as part of their relationship with nature) I have been fortunate to experience life in various locations throughout the canyon. In 1999 I moved from Los Angeles, up canyon, close to the Dent House. For five years I studied the terrain, cultivated gardens, became familiar with seasons and learned of the pre-European Chumash culture and their continued devotion to this land. Since then, I have lived briefly, for one year, in the center portion of the canyon and now for the last six months given the responsibility and honor of stewarding and caregiving one of the most pristine and historical environments in the Ojai Valley.
Though a "nature lover" and preserver during childhood, (in Junior High I was asked by my science instructor to join the environmental club. After school we planned eco-fairs for the campus and took field trips to places such as the landfill in the Santa Monica mountains) since moving to Ojai, I have become more immersed in the theories, methods and lifestyle of sustainability. At times failing and also celebrating my successes in sustaining land, livlihood and relationship. Ojai has become for me an important "real time" social experiment, as I experience myself and others balance nature, commerce, diversity and, at times, culture clash.
The sign(s) posted on the roadside demarcate an area of the land, once public yet since 1988 rezoned as private, which fall within my stewardship. For at least three generations the families of Ojai, and visitors, have come here to take refuge during the hot summer months and take advantage of the swimming. Unfortunately, in my brief role as conservator, take advantage IS what some seem to do. Not one to enjoy policing, micro-managing, or outright harassing others, the last few months of summer left me in a quandry. How do I respect the lineage of Ojai who has enjoyed this river oasis while also protecting the land (and safety of the people) from pollution, broken glass, inebriated clumsiness, spray paint and gang activity?
More >
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