Good Food is Everybody's Business
A new report put out by the University of California has found that beverage companies are not labeling soft drinks with the true amounts of total sugar and the ratio of fructose to glucose. Table sugar is 50/50 fructose to glucose. Results showed that the total sugar content of the beverages ranged from 85 to 128% of that listed on the label.
Maria Rodale, a “third-generation insider” in the organic food industry, recently spoke at the 3rd Annual Organic Summit held on October 13 in Boston. She too addressed the same issue about consumer confusion, and she added advice about how the organic movement could work together to solve the problem.
Groups as disparate as Consumer Reports and the National Workgroup for Safe Markets have been studying the amount of bisphenol A (BPA) that could be consumed from eating canned food and drinks. The results have been both surprising and disturbing.
We have a case of “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” or do we? The USDA is both promoting and advocating against eating foods containing large amounts of saturated fats – cheese, in this case.
San Francisco has become the first major U.S. city to pass a law that cracks down on the popular practice of giving away free toys with unhealthy restaurant meals for children. McDonald’s is “extremely disappointed.”
Marion Nestle, author of the critically acclaimed Food Politics, argues that ensuring safe food involves more than washing hands or cooking food to higher temperatures. It involves politics. When it comes to food safety, billions of dollars are at stake, and industry, government, and consumers collide over issues of values, economics, and political power—and not always in the public interest.
French Beans and Food Scares explores the cultural economies of two “non-traditional” commodity trades between Africa and Europe–one anglophone, the other francophone–in order to show not only why they differ but also how both have felt the fall-out of the wealthy world’s food scares. In a voyage that begins in the mid-19th century and ends in the early 21st, passing by way of Paris, London, Burkina Faso and Zambia, Freidberg illuminates the daily work of exporters, importers and other invisible intermediaries in the global fresh food economy.
In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America.Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines.
