New TV Show (hopefully) - Food Forward

Grist.org recently posted an article about a new TV show in the works called Food Forward. As the show's website describes, "Food Forward is a series of thirteen, 30-minute episodes exploring new ideas of food in America as told by the people who are living them. Each episode will focus on a different theme--school lunch reform, urban agriculture, commercial fishing, grass-fed beef, soil science--and spotlight the real people who are creating viable alternatives to how we grow food and feed ourselves."

The show's producers, San Francisco-based food journalist Stett Holbrook and documentary filmmakers Todd Dayton and Greg Roden, are in the process of raising money to shoot the pilot episode of Food Forward, and will host a fundraising dinner in San Francisco to help support the production of the show.

See trailer below, which is quite beautiful at parts and features an urban farmer, a school-food reformer, a Santa Cruz fisherman, and a grass-fed beef rancher.

NY Times Article - Europe Struggles With Question of Food From Cloned Animals

By James Kanter
July 29, 2010

"Many Europeans recoil at the very idea of cloning animals, but a handful of breeders in Switzerland, Britain and possibly other countries have imported semen and embryos from cloned animals or their progeny from the United States, seeking to create more consistently plump and productive livestock. And although no vendor has publicly acknowledged it, meat or dairy products originating from such techniques are believed to be already on supermarket shelves...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/business/global/30cloning.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=busln

TakePart Post - Majority of Americans Worry About Safety of Nation's Food Suppply

July 28, 2010

"According to a recent NPR survey, Americans are worried about food safety. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said they were concerned about the contamination of food in the nation's supply chain, and 51 percent said they were most concerned about eating tainted meat. That compares with roughly a quarter of respondents who were most concerned about seafood, and 23 percent who were worried about bad produce. Only about 4 percent of the people surveyed for NPR were concerned about spoiled or tainted dairy products...."

http://www.takepart.com/news/2010/07/28/majority-of-americans-worry-about-safety-of-nations-food-supply

Epicurious Recipe - Three Way Garlic Pasta with Beans and Peppers

Use whole wheat pasta!

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/photo/Three-Way-Garlic-Pasta-with-Beans-and-Peppers-106271

Take Part Post - 100 Days of Eating "Real Food": One Family's Story

July 27, 2010

"No Goldfish. No Froot Loops. No store-bought ketchup or Chick-fil-A runs. Those are some of the new rules that one North Carolina family has instituted as it goes cold turkey on a whole foods diet for 100 days. And despite the increased food bill and the major overhaul of their cooking habits, the Leake family seems pretty pleased with the results...."

See full post here, which includes links to the family's blog chronicling their 100-day challenge, a site which also features "10 Reasons to Cut Out Processed Food" and "Real Food Defined (AKA 'The Rules')."

Farm Sanctuary Campaign - Truth Behind Labels

"A growing number of meat, milk and egg product labels suggest that the animals they came from were treated “humanely.” Our Truth Behind Labels Campaign educates the public about what these labels really mean when it comes to animal welfare and exposes misleading marketing schemes that give people a false sense of compassion."

Click here to read report summary, which is extremely informative and hopefully influential in changing people's choices when shopping for meat and dairy.

Food Safety News Article - Food Posters on Display at National Ag Library

By Helena Bottemiller
July 27, 2010

"When Beans Were Bullets, an exhibit of food and agriculture posters from World Wars I and II is on display at USDA's National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland through August 30. The featured posters--which delve into a wide variety of issues, ranging from food rationing to food safety--examine the evolution of poster styles, propaganda messages, and advertising history during the two time periods...."

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/07/world-war-era-food-posters-on-display-at-national-ag-library/

NY Times Article - Unsafe at Any Meal

By Eric Schlosser
July 24, 2010

"Every day, about 200,000 Americans are sickened by contaminated food. Every year, about 325,000 are hospitalized by a food-borne illness. And the number who are killed annually by something they ate is roughly the same as the number of Americans who’ve been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. Those estimates, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggest the scale of the problem. But they fail to convey the human toll. The elderly and people with compromised immune systems face an elevated risk from food-borne pathogens like listeria, campylobacter and salmonella. By far the most vulnerable group, however, are children under the age of 4. Our food will never be perfectly safe — and yet if the Senate fails to pass the food safety legislation now awaiting a vote, tens of thousands of American children will become needlessly and sometimes fatally ill...."

Click here to read Schlosser's full op-ed piece, which I highly recommend.

Cookbook - "The Conscious Cook"

This past week I took on another two recipes from one of my veggie cookbooks. I received Tal Ronnen's The Conscious Cook as a gift (thanks, Grandma!) and for a long time I avoided it because I found many of its recipes to be too advanced (for my level of cooking), and its ingredients too hard to find (for my local grocery sources). Well, after making the Mediterranean Chickpea Wrap and the Tempeh Creole Over Brown Rice, I found that the end results were well worth the recipes' complexity. Both were extremely flavorful, rich, and hearty - which I think speaks to the author's goal for all of his recipes: to make vegan meals that don't make the eater miss meat or dairy.

In fact, Ronnen's introduction to his cookbook is addressed to "meat-eaters," inviting them to "experience (and love) food in a whole new way" and to "get away from the microwave and spend some time enjoying the creativity of putting together beautiful, flavorful, unexpected dishes." I can relate both to this approach to cooking and to his approach to vegetarianism: he doesn't like sprouts, and when he became a vegetarian he "didn't abandon his taste buds. [He] took them with [him]." That is clear from the two dishes I made. We'll see if I can tackle some of the others from this book.

Food Safety News Article - Survey Shows Consumer Attitudes Toward Food

By Laurel Curran
July 23, 2010

"In early July the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation released its 2010 Food & Health Survey: Consumer Attitudes Toward Food Safety, Nutrition and Health (pdf). This is the foundation's fifth annual study gaining additional insight into the attitudes, opinions, and beliefs of American consumers. Looking at the results of this year's survey alongside those from past years makes for an interesting comparison when weighed with the current economic and consumer trends.  This study asked Americans questions with regard to a number of different areas including health, weight, caffeine, food additives, food safety, food handling, purchasing influences, and food labeling...."

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/07/food-safety-health-survey-sheds-light-on-opinion-of-american-consumer/