Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Know Your Dietary Fats

The Mayo Clinic (see link to the right) explains good and bad fats. Check out their website for all sorts of good health information. How much coffee is too much? Find out there.

Food Related News Update - 3-16-11

Shopping Carts at Winn Dixie going Antibacterial!?

Not completely food related, but check out these young kids shoveling up horse manure compost to raise money for field trips.

Should the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Education be in charge of the school lunch program? The Ag. Commissioner thinks he should be in charge.

Consumers beware! The headline on this one says it all - Retailers Turn to Old Tricks to Disguise Rising Commodity Prices.

This one is about Orange Juice prices rising even though the crop size was larger than expected. What gives? Gas prices. Since the packaging, processing, and transportation require petroleum, which we all know is going up, so does the cost of the juice.

The Home Shopping Network is going to get cheesier thanks to a deal with Kraft. Expect to see more Kraft products in recipes while they sell pots and pans. Kraft, by the way, owns way more than cheese. See the Good Green link below.

Without bees and other pollinators we would all be hungry right now. Unfortunately, all kinds of things are causing their populations to decline, according to the UN. Quick fact from the article - of the 100 plants that provide 90% of the world's food - 70 are pollinated by bees!

The Grist, in typical Grist fashion, reviews the Economist magazine's recent Special Report on Feeding the World.

The NY Times opines on the industrial vs. organic agriculture debate. The comments on the NY Times website are so much more intellectual than the Democrat's!

The skinny on reduced-fat peanut butter, again in typical Grist fashion.

Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Articles of Interest

Link to article on new USDA Dietary Guidelines (article has link to actual USDA publication too!).



This article shows how food products that we consider natural and wholesome are owned by the same companies we find unnatural and unwholesome. It also links to GoodGuide, which ranks a companies green-ness and tells you who the parent company is.



This article takes a look at how we streotype farmers as dumb hicks on the back forty, when actually, there's a lot a farmer needs to know to be successful.



All of the above are from The Grist, so I hope you can handle the obvious sarcasm in their writing. The info is still good and pertinent since it's consumer education.



Now, on to the NY Times. The next two articles were sent to me by Will Sheftall, Leon County Extension Agent. The first article takes a look at the young farmer movement. WooHoo!! The second doesn't totally connect to food, as it relates to education, the middle class, economic recovery, and the replacement of people by technological advances, but it makes you think that farming probably won't be outsourced or done by a robot so we might as well teach people how to be farmers. Maybe those interested should get degrees in biology, chemistry, entymology, etc.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Recent Supermarket Articles of Interest

I saw these articles and thought I would put them on the blog.

This one is titled "7 Supermarket Traps" but I only saw 6!?

This one compared prices for different supermarkets. Guess who was the cheapest? You got it, Walmart! The supermarkets were in South Florida, but I thought it was interesting what the shoppers had to say.

And this one is about a supermarket called Eataly in Manhattan that is modeled after an Eataly in Italy! Both of them sound pretty fancy.

Enjoy.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Acres USA Magazine

Another wealth of information - this one is geared towards farmers, but farmers of all scales can learn something from reading the articles in this magazine.

Check them out at www.acresusa.com.

Cornucopia Institute

I've just learned of the Cornucopia Institute and they are a wealth of information for consumers. Check them out at www.cornucopia.org.

Food System Guide




It's been awhile, I know, but here is what we gathered regarding local food system resources. Now the term local here is defined as 100 miles from Leon County.
If anyone sees that we are missing a resource, please let us know.
Oh yeah, click on the image and then it will let you zoom in. And if anyone can tell me how in the world to either inbed a file or make that image more viewable, please let me know.