Washington State University alum and former WSU regent, Bill Marler, has offered to foot the bill to bring author Michael Pollan to the school’s campus. WSU said it will take Marler’s offer to pay the speaking fee for the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma’ and will reinstate the school’s Common Reading Program. According to WSU, the [...]

Baltimore’s former health commissioner, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, is making news as the new deputy director of the FDA, serving under the new commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg. Hamburg and Sharfstein have pledged to reform the food safety system and encourage scientific exchange and better communication to the public.
In the New England Journal of Medicine, [...]

It isn’t easy being a land grant university these days, especially when your Ag School depends so heavily on industry money for support. Sadly, fear of losing funding from their biggest money stream is limiting the types of research many scientists are undertaking at agriculture schools across the country. Now there are accusations that the [...]

The blogosphere has been buzzing following Wednesday’s New York Times story about local foods “making it big.” As unlikely as it may sound on first blush, Lay’s, the nation’s leading producer of potato chips, has jumped on the local foods bandwagon with a new marketing campaign aiming to highlight their chips as locally produced food.
Critics [...]

I have to admit it took me by surprise to read that Oprah Winfrey teamed up with KFC Tuesday to help promote the fast food giant’s new Kentucky Grilled Chicken. The Oprah Winfrey Show is giving away meal coupons good for two pieces of grilled chicken, two individual sides and a biscuit. It’s all part [...]

The ongoing outbreak of Swine Flu / novel influenza A (H1N1) highlights one of the many serious public health risks that industrial food animal production (IFAP) poses on a global scale. It is known that pigs are “mixing vessels” for influenza viruses (for swine, avian and human flu), and it is believed that the last [...]

The blogosphere is abuzz today over the just-announced Biofuels Interagency Working Group, which throws a lifeline to the troubled ethanol industry. The group, headed by the secretaries of the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, has been given the charge by President Obama to make biofuels friendlier to the environment [...]

In this media-saturated world, where news is updated around the clock on TV and on the Web, it shouldn’t be surprising that conflicting and sometimes downright incorrect information is reported. This is especially true of such a huge emerging story as the swine flu outbreak (oh, right, we’re supposed to be calling it the [...]