Grist food editor, farmer, and North Carolina resident Tom Philpott wrote yesterday on the Farm Bureau's reaction to a recent blog entry by an EPA intern on the connection between meat-eating and environmental destruction.
Quoting The Hill:
"The Farm Bureau is none too happy with the EPA today for publishing a blog post urging Americans to give up meat. The post in question was written by an EPA intern and recounts her decision to stop eating meat. The author, Nicole Reising, cites the "environmental effects of meat production" and urges readers to stop eating meat."
You can read more here.
In a Huffington Post article titled "US Senate, Bill Gates Give Planet a Middle Finger for Earth Day," Jill Richardson, the founder of La Vida Locavore writes that:
"A broad coalition including Bill Gates, Tim Geithner, the US State Department, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the World Bank, and others have a plan to help the world's hungry by working in opposition to the recommendations of scientists worldwide, including the findings of a report commissioned by the World Bank and the UN. Ironically, they chose Earth Day to deliver this flaming bag of poop on Africa's doorstep.
"Back in 2008, the World Bank and the UN commissioned IAASTD report issued its findings: Go organic. The report...examined how we can best use the most current science to feed our world. The over 400 scientists involved agreed that an agroecological approach...is the best way to feed the world, provide employment in the agricultural sector, and care for the earth. They specifically rejected biotechnology...as the solution to global hunger....
"The U.S. government...is calling for a second Green Revolution. The first Green Revolution relied on toxic chemicals like DDT and traditionally bred hybrid seeds to increase crop yields in the developing world, notably in Mexico and India. In the decades since, we've seen a simultaneous rise in per capita food production and a rise in hunger....
"Yet, today the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing, discussing plans to deliver biotechnology, fertilizer, and other hallmarks of industrial ag to Africa. USAID head Rajiv Shah went so far as to refer to USAID efforts to expand biotechnology around the world as "sustainable." (This is far from true, as shown by the Union of Concerned Scientists' report Failure to Yield....
You can read the complete article here.
WASHINGTON — A call was made by the Institute of Medicine (I.O.M.) on April 20 to force food processors to gradually cut the salt some say are “hidden inside their products,” and it will be considered by the Food and Drug Administration, the agency said....
Each day, Americans consume approximately 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, more than double what they need for good health and high enough to increase risk of high blood pressure, strokes and other problems. Most of that sodium is inside common processed foods and restaurant meals, sources claim....
The I.O.M. is an independent agency chartered by Congress to advise the federal government and it is the most recent in a string of health groups to pressure the F.D.A. in recent years to reduce salt.
If the salt in processed and restaurant food were cut in half over 10 years, ultimately 150,000 lives a year could be saved, the American Medical Associ has said....
More at MeatPoultry.com, "the business journal for meat and poultry processors."
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