Green Eats

This week’s News Roundup is dedicated to the Triangle. With all the attention our little corner of North Carolina has been getting in the past week it almost feels as though the entire country has focused on our food and agriculture scene. Check out some of these articles and blog posts, and then go visit some of the restaurants and farms that are helping to make the Triangle a nationally recognized hotbed of sustainable eating and farming.

• Durham, a Tobacco Town, Turns to Local Food – NYTimes
• The Triangle: The South’s Locavore Gem – Civil Eats
• Fresh Direction: A Farm-to-Table Restaurant – NYTimes Magazine
• The Triangle: A Locavore’s Oasis – Examiner.com

The weather this weekend is going to be gorgeous, but if you find yourself inside with a few minutes to spare, catch up on some of things that have been happening in the sustainable agriculture world:

• Farmers Praise Wal-Mart Heritage Ag Program – FoodSafetyNews.com
• CFSA Exec. Dir. Roland McReynolds details important progress on the “Food Safety” bill
• Do It Yourself Mushrooms – NYTimes
• USDA Inspector General: meat supply routinely tainted with harmful residues – Grist.com

• USDA Inspector General finds Bush Administration ignored organic laws – Organic Consumers Association
• UNC nourishes sustainable local food business – Sustainable Grub
• CFSA Action Alert – S. 510, Food Safety Modernization Act – CFSA
• Is raw, unpasteurized milk safe? – Seattle Times

New York (CNN) — Two people have died and 28 people have fallen ill with matching strains of E. coli after an outbreak in ground beef, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Sixteen
of those people are in hospitals and three have developed kidney
failure as a result of the contamination, the CDC said late Monday.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture
announced last week that Fairbank Farms in Ashville, New York, was
recalling more than half a million pounds of fresh ground beef products
that may be contaminated with a strain of E. coli, a potentially deadly
species of bacteria.

(read more…)

Industrial agriculture strikes again! Its hard to believe that we would have these sorts of outbreaks if our food production was done on a local scale – all the benefits (jobs, profits) as well as the costs (outbreaks) would be small-scale.

Happy Wednesday! I'm busy doing all the reading for my class that I neglected to do this weekend so in lieu of a more substantial post, I bring you some of the more interesting sustainable agriculture tidbits I've come across this week:

• Free range egg claims don't add up in Australia – via Eat at Joe's!
• Mark Bittman on food labeling and sugar.
• Slow Food Triangle hosts an "Eat-In" potluck at George Watts Elementary in Durham.
• "In dark times, back to the garden" – Grist (with an appearance by Michelle Obama!)