Good Food is Everybody's Business
Since we’ve just come off Easter and the sugar high that follows, it’s time to remember that “Sugar Is Toxic” and choose our sweeteners carefully. This handy-dandy decision map will help you choose the right sweetener for your food – assuming that you really need it sweeter!
Skeptics have often misrepresented a biologically-based agriculture as if it is nothing but the substitution of purchased organic inputs for purchased chemical inputs. Despite the popular assumption that it sprang full born from the delusions of 60s hippies, it has a more extensive, and scientifically respectable, provenance.
This Earth Day, take the planet out to lunch! We’re planning on sunshine here in Puget Sound!
Our food system is definitely bottoms up! Animal agriculture consumes 80% of all antibiotics used in the US and yet our meat is covered with infectious bacteria. Multiple studies across the US and Canada show that our meat is contaminated with a variety of infections bacteria, some of which is resistant to multiple antibiotic types.
Are you a seed saver and/or food grower? A new, one-person seed company has just been announced and it offers some fascinating items. The company is called Fertile Valley Seeds and it is Carol Deppe’s way of offering her innovative seed breeding work to gardeners, especially those in the Northwest. Her crop breeding techniques are in the public domain, rather than owned by a profit-making corporation
Tom Philpott at Grist clarifies a proposed decision by the USDA to allow Monsanto to fund the EIS studies on its own products. Even small companies separate the check signing function from the payment authorization function to insure no one is pocketing company funds. Allowing the industry to produce its own environmental assessments is tantamount to handing over the checkbook to someone who can make payments without any oversight.
One of the true signs of spring is fresh LOCAL asparagus! We’ve lost touch with the seasonality of food thanks to our ability to buy vegetables like asparagus year ’round in most supermarkets. While not all of us can run out to the garden and snip off a few asparagus shoots as the water is coming to a boil, buying locally grown is as close as we can get.
We’re coming up on the #2 candy event of the year – Easter (Halloween is #1) – and consumers are expected to buy more than 120 million pounds of candy for the holiday. Approximately 70% of US candy dollars spent on chocolate during Easter week, that represents about 71 million pounds of chocolate candy. What better time to hear from Dr. Robert Lustig as he explains why sugar is a “chronic toxin” – a poison that will make you sick if you eat it for long enough?
