GE Ingredients: Just Label It, Already

January 19, 2012 Mother Nature Network A campaign designed to remind us that everyone has a right to know if foods are created with genetically engineered ingredients also serves another purpose: It's an easy way to nudge the FDA to act on the food label issue. According to Just Label It, 93 percent of Americans want to see genetically engineered foods labeled. I’m ...

Good Friday Food Links

(New York Times) Shocking: The F.D.A., citing lack of evidence, declined to ban the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) from food and drink packaging. It’ll be more shocking if the agency, which has a long, rich history of inaction when it comes to animal antibiotics, decides to ban the practice of routinely feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals, a decision that it’s bei...

Social Media Turns Up Heat On Food Industry

(Chicago Tribune) Americans enjoy the cheapest food supply in the world, spending the smallest share of their income on groceries of any country. But as activist groups continue to pull back the curtain on the techniques that make this cheap food possible, Americans are raising their eyebrows and voicing their concerns to surprisingly powerful effect. This week, Bee...

Consumer Groups Demand GMO Labeling, Question Food Safety

(Reuters) Critics of genetically modified crops are making new demands for government mandated labeling to identify foods on grocer shelves that contain ingredients from transgenic corn, soybeans and other crops. Labeling drives are underway on both state and federal levels, and on Tuesday several U.S. consumer groups released a survey and results of a petition drive t...

Food As Nature Made Them

(Prevention.com) Walk down the aisles of your local supermarket and you'll find floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with food boasting nutritional benefits: whole grains in cereals, omega-3s in eggs, lycopene—that powerful antioxidant—in ketchup. But there are other ingredients hiding in these products, and most of us don't even know they're there. They're called genetica...

Push To Label Genetically Modified Food Gains Traction

(St. Louis Post Dispatch) Thousands of products in the typical American grocery store, from cereals to corn chips, contain genetically modified ingredients. But the average shopper wouldn't know it from their labels. Many companies in the food and biotechnology industry, including Creve Coeur-based Monsanto Co., want to keep it that way. But they'll have to fend off a ...

GreenSpace: Labeling the Modified Foods

(Inquirer GreenSpace Columnist) Ninety percent of the corn, canola, soybeans, and sugar beets grown in the United States today have been fiddled with. Genes have been inserted that will help the crops grow better, resist the onslaughts of insects, or not be harmed by slatherings of herbicide intended to kill weeds. These genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are ...

‘Label It Now’ Will Have You Thinking Organic

(Miami Herald) The organic movement in recent memory has made it more important to understand what went into your food and where it came from. If the authors of "Label It Now: What You Need to Know About Genetically Engineered Foods" had their way, the entire food industry would have that same transparency. The e-book bills itself as the first consumer guide to genetic...

Modified Crops Tap a Wellspring of Protest

February 12, 2012 New York Times SILENT in flannel shirts and ponytails, farmers from Saskatchewan and South Dakota, Mississippi and Massachusetts lined the walls of a packed federal courtroom in Manhattan last week, as their lawyers told a judge that they were no longer able to keep genetically modified crops from their fields. The hearing is part of a debate that i...

The Dylan Ratigan Show: What’s Really in Your Food

(MSNBC) The Food and Drug Administration responded to concerns of drug-resistant bacteria on Wednesday, calling on drug companies to limit the use of antibiotics in feed for farm animals. Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Stonyfield Farm, joined The Dylan Ratigan Show, warning about other hidden ingredients in your food that come from genetic engineering. Click here to watch...

Just Label Genetically Engineered Food

January 18, 2012 Inside Scoop San Francisco With the FDA poised to approve genetically engineered (GE) salmon, the first-ever GE animal is ready to be introduced to the marketplace. At the same time, California legislators are taking preemptive action to protect consumers from being blindsided when it hits the market. Tomorrow, the State Assembly will vote on AB 88 �...

Stonyfield CEO Steps Down To Focus On Advocacy Work

January 13, 2012 The Chicago Tribune Organic yogurt giant Gary Hirshberg stepped down as Stonyfield CEO Thursday to focus on advocacy work for sustainable food. Perhaps best known, by face, as the guy who wanted to bring organic to WalMart in the movie "Food Inc," Hirshberg chose Walt Freese (former Ben & Jerry's chief) to serve as CEO of the company while he main...

Environmental Outlook: Labels for Genetically Modified Foods

January 3, 2012 The Diane Rehm Show Click here to read the full transcript for Environmental Outlook: Labels for Genetically Modified Foods...

No Turkeys Here

November 23, 2011 The New York Times Opinionator There are days when it seems — both in and out of the food world — that Everything Is Going Wrong. That makes it easy enough to complain, and I’m not alone in doing so routinely. Nothing tastes the way it used to. Even pricey restaurants have lost their glow. Quality is shot. People die from eating melons. The domin...

The Right To Know What You Are Eating

November 22, 2011 SF Gate An unprecedented agricultural experiment is being conducted at America's dinner tables. While none of the processed food we ate 20 years ago contained genetically engineered ingredients, now 75 percent of it does - even though the long-term human health and environmental impacts are unknown. The Food and Drug Administration doesn't require labe...

FDA Suit Wants Labels On Genetically Modified Foods

October 3, 2011 USA Today Americans are mostly clueless about whether the food they buy has been genetically altered. But in a nation increasingly concerned about food ingredients, there's a new push for that to change Today, a coalition of 300 companies, organizations and doctors will announce that it has filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration t...

Group Seeks Labels On Genetically Altered Food

October 3, 2011 USA Today Americans are mostly clueless about whether the food they buy has been genetically altered. But in a nation increasingly concerned about food ingredients, there's a new push for that to change Today, a coalition of 300 companies, organizations and doctors will announce that it has filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration t...

Is That Corn Genetically Altered? Don’t Ask the FDA

(CNBC.com) Last year $2.4 billion worth of products were sold with a label saying they do not contain ingredients from genetically modified organisms, but the claim wasn't backed by any government regulatory agency. Instead, it came from the Non-GMO Project, a nonprofit organization that offers third-party verification that food products are not genetically modified. ...

Mark Bittman – Live From the Cutting Room Floor

(New York Times) I was a guest on “Up w/Chris Hayes” Saturday, talking, it seemed, about everything: a bit of an ambitious agenda. When I go back, the conversation will continue. Meanwhile, since the initial topic was “pink slime,” about which I wrote last week, I used my pre-air time in the studio to outline the issues I thought were worth mentioning. We didn�...

Battle Brewing Over Labeling Genetically Engineered Food

(The New York Times) GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — On a recent sunny morning at the Big Y grocery here, Cynthia LaPier parked her cart in the cereal aisle. With a glance over her shoulder and a quick check of the ingredients, she plastered several boxes with hand-designed stickers from a roll in her purse. “Warning,” they read. “May Contain GMO’s (Genetically Modifi...