Bees have had it hard for the past few years. Ever since 2006, entomologists and other scientists in the U.S., Europe and Asia have been trying to figure out what’s causing wholesale deaths of of once-healthy hives—an epidemic that’s wiped out from 20% to 60% of colonies in the affected areas. Now, according to a paper published in the …
Food
Food: Why the Debate Over GM Salmon Misses the Point
Will the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a genetically modified salmon for sale in supermarkets around the country? Bet on it. Members of a federal advisory group in Maryland heard testimony on Sunday and Monday from scientists, environmentalists and businesspeople on the safety of AquaAdvantage salmon, a new brand that would …
Can the World Meet its Promise to Halve Hunger by 2015?
A new report released by Oxfam this week has some good news and some bad news for the state of world hunger. The good news: last year, the FAO recorded the first significant dent in world hunger in 15 years, with a decrease from a record 1.02 billion people going hungry in 2009 after the global food crisis down to 925 million this …
Chocolate Potentially Made Safe From Climate Change:YIPEEE!!!!
An environmental breakthrough has never sounded so….delicious. Today, candy giant Mars Inc, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and IBM announced that they have mapped a preliminary genome sequence for the cacao plant, which produces the crucial ingredient for making chocolate, and placed it in the public domain.
How To Feed The World By Going Veggie
I don’t eat bacon cheeseburgers. About three years ago I gave up red meat and pork. I am American, and brother do I love bacon cheeseburgers. But I decided that as part of the imperfect project of trying to live a decent, moral life, I could no longer chow down on bacon cheeseburgers. I could not put my preference for the taste of a …
Climate Change: How Extreme Heat May Affect Your Food
Hot enough for you? If you live in one of the more than 15 states that were suffering under a heat advisory or excessive heat warning on Tuesday, I’m going to guess the answer is yes, God, please make it all stop. The oppressively high temperatures that gripped much of the U.S. during June—the hottest month on record worldwide, …
Cloned Food Feeds Controversy in Britain
A furor erupted in Britain this week after The New York Times reported that an unnamed British dairy farmer had sold milk from a cow produced from a cloned parent. Britain’s food watchdog, The Food Standards Agency, launched an immediate investigation and announced yesterday that it had found that, in fact, meat from the offspring of a …
Talking Meat and Antibiotics
I had the chance to go on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC yesterday afternoon to talk about the renewed push to regulate antibiotics used for growth promotion in farm animals. With the Food and Drug Administration now urging meat producers to limit the amount of drugs they give their animals—over concern about the rise in antibiotic …
How Safe is Gulf Seafood?
Meat and Antibiotics: Getting Our Animals Off Drugs
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—gingerly, gingerly—took a step on Monday towards addressing one of the most fundamental but unknown threats to public health: the overuse of antibiotics in animal food and water. The FDA said in a new policy document that the uses of antibiotics for agriculture should be limited to treated sick …