By Steph Larsen

When we talk about local food, it means more than just proximity to a farm. We associate supporting “local food” with supporting specific values — such as family ownership, local control, small scale, environmental stewardship, community, and ecological diversity. These values are what motivate people to buy their food directly from the farmer who grows it.

The sustainable local-food system we are trying to build relies on an abundance of small, diverse, sustainable family farmers scattered all across the United States. For this kind of farm to exist, sustainable must mean more than environmental sustainability — it must also include economic viability. Farming is a dangerous and risky business, and it becomes a whole lot less attractive when a farmer knows that he or she is one fall from the hay loft away from losing their land.

We hear frequently about the need for new and younger farmers, but there are many barriers to attracting young people to farm in a way that will foster sustainable local food systems. One of them, however, looms bigger than the rest:

Access to affordable, dependable health care.

In order to attract more farmers to grow food for a sustainable food system, we need meaningful health care reform that addresses the needs of farmers, rural communities, and small business owners. The stark reality of health care costs for farmers, who often must purchase insurance as individuals and pay more for it as a result, is enough to make anyone waiver in their desire to start a farm.

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Angry Buzz: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a series of articles on the sticky state of the honey industry. Start with the two-part report on honey, which introduces readers to honey laundering and continues to meaningless label claims. Think domestic honey means produced in the U.S.? That organic means organic? Think again. The honey may originate from a country that uses banned pesticides and stop in a second country for boiling, filtration, dilution, and relabeling, but be labeled as U.S. honey if further processing occurs in the United States. Despite loud calls from some within (and many outside) the industry for better standards, there is considerable friction between U.S. producers and importers, including an attempt to create a second National Honey Board that focuses only on domestic honey production; producers claim the problem is “consumer ignorance.” Oh, and then there’s the whole colony collapse thing. Sweet! (All from Seattle Post-Intelligencer; see links above.)

The hive mind: Following the honey series, the P-I editorial staff summarizes the problem and gives what we think is solid advice: “Buy directly from local producers who explain their methods.” They are talking about honey, but the principle applies to much, much more. (Seattle P-I)

Bittman on Pollan, and us: Salon reviews Mark Bittman’s new book and gives us the rundown on how to live and eat conscientiously. Recipes included. (Salon)

The never-ending story: A Louisiana institute warns that Chinese-produced catfish, which have already been found to be contaminated with antibiotics, may be contaminated with melamine as well. Sigh. (Daily World)

Life at the head table: Pork processing workers who were diagnosed with Progressive Inflammatory Neuropathy from - yes - breathing in pulverized pig brains have still not recovered and are protesting mistreatment by their employers. (News Blaze)

Earlier this week, Bill Marler, the attorney who’s earned oodles suing food companies for selling products contaminated with E. coli and other pathogens (his wife’s car even sports an ECOLI license plate), published his list of top 10 food safety challenges for 2009. Most of these items made me nod my head vigorously. Improved communication, yes! Zoonotic diseases and country of origin labeling — yes, yes!

But I kept coming back to the #2 item. This item, second only to the globalization of our food supply, was “local food.” Under this heading, Marler targets:

Outbreaks linked to local food and/or farmer’s markets. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups and food co-ops need to demonstrate knowledge and practice of food safety, and be inspected. In addition to produce and meats/fish, prepared items are currently unsupervised.

Now it’s possible that some Ethicureans are growling at the mere mention of Marler’s name. It’s true, he has come out in opposition to raw milk, one of the sacred cows (pun intended, but with a groan) of the local-foods movement. And yeah, Marler — who, for the record, shops locally and grows some of his own food — has gone after small, local producers with the same gusto with which he takes on fast-food chains and large-scale meat processors.

But the truth is, I really like the guy. I like him because he’s witty; I like him because he’s passionate. I like him because in two sentences, he effectively framed for me — better than anyone else had, ever before — what’s wrong with the meat industry telling consumers they simply need to cook the pathogens out of their food:

The Meat Industry believes that it is the consumer’s responsibility to get cow shit out of its product. Seriously, can you think of one consumer product that the manufacturer expects you to fix it, AFTER they make it, and BEFORE you use it.

(The logic: so simple, so beautiful. Read his post on that topic here.)

Mostly I like him because I believe the man is perhaps our best hope of bringing real change to the meat industry. Sure, I can blog my brains out about industrial meat, and CAFOs, and downer cows  — “Hey, dirty meat industry! I’m so mad I’m gonna’ blog about you in between a post on swiss chard and one on cauliflower! Take that!” But the meat industry? It doesn’t notice me. Not one bit. For them, I am no more worthy of attention than a downer cow on the slaughter line at Westland Hallmark would be.

Bill Marler, on the other hand, speaks their language. To paraphrase John Travolta-as-Jan-Schlictmann, money is how companies apologize for their wrongdoing. When it comes to unsanitary processes and tainted product, Marler can make these companies very sorry indeed.

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Whoever first made sausages was a genius. They took pieces of meat that they perhaps weren’t going to use right away, or at all, and combined them with spices and/or herbs, finally stuffing them into another part of the animal that might not otherwise get used. The result? Delicious.

After thinking about making sausages for almost a year, I finally did it. And it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

I’ve been wanting to make sausages since I bought a quarter of a pig from my CSA (several months ago) and especially since my wife bought me copy of Michael Ruhlman’s “Charcuterie.” The clincher was when, in celebration of getting married, my mother-in-law gave me a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer and some other family friends got me some of the attachments that go with it, most notably the meat grinder and sausage stuffer.

I had been slightly intimidated by the notion of making my own sausages, but in the end, all it really involves is combining some spices and herbs with freshly ground pork and then stuffing it into casings. What could go wrong? Even if I screwed up the stuffing process, I’d still have great tasting sausage that I can make into patties or cook with at will, mixing it into sauces, etc.

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Stinks to high heaven: A large California fertilizer supplier has been selling organic fertilizer, brewed from fish and chicken feathers, that it was secretly spiking with ammonium sulfate, a synthetic fertilizer banned from organic farms. The state knew and did nothing. (Sacramento Bee) Why? Maybe because, as nutritionist and super-pundit Marion Nestle says over at HuffPo, “Cheating is the Achilles’ heel of organics. The entire organic certification system is based on trust. If trust goes, the organic industry collapses like a house of cards.”

E tu, Soil Association?: The UK’s organic farmers have asked for permission to take a “holiday” from strict organic standards (including organic feed) for economic reasons. Since when did anyone ask for a vacation from ethics? (Times Online)

Obama Clause: Kim Severson tells the sad story of how, “from the moment it was clear that Barack Obama was going to be president, people who have dedicated their lives to changing how America eats thought they had found their St. Nicholas.” People like Iowa activist Dave Murphy and pig farmer and porkpreneur Paul Willis (right), who gathered 50,000 signatures begging for a reform-minded Secretary of Agriculture only to get a lump of coal former Iowa gov Tom Vilsack instead. Because sustainable ag dreams aside, there’s nothing indicating that Obama really wants to remake how food is grown and sold. (New York Times) (Boston Globe has a similar piece)

A billion begging bellies: Despite the second record harvest in a row, a billion people will go hungry worldwide next year, according to the United Nations, because people are becoming too destitute to buy what’s produced. (The Independent)

Mexico COOLs imports: Mexico last week suspended meat imports from 30 large processing plants in 14 U.S. states in what some thought was retaliation for U.S. country-of-origin labeling (COOL) laws. (Associated Press) As of today the ban had been lifted on roughly half. (Dow Jones)

FDA is for report card: Weeks after its own advisory board accused the FDA of failing to consider research about the dangers of bisphenol-A, found in many plastic food containers, the agency has agreed to reconsider the issue. (New York Times)

Bay of pigs: Administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay covered up for years that their effort was failing in order to preserve the flow of federal and state money to the project. The cleanup, which had its 25th anniversary this month, seems doomed to miss its second official deadline for achieving major reductions in pollution by 2010. Shameful. (Washington Post via Slow Cook)

Antibiotics for breakfast: The FDA has obtained an injunction against a Missouri animal feed mill to stop producing medicated animal feed. Not because it’s illegal to routinely include drugs to prevent disease in food-producing animals, oh no, but because the company was lax about its drug handling practices. (FDA.gov)

Cargill donates $500,000 to Second Harvest for hunger relief (Meatpoultry.com)

FDA warns Coke over Diet Coke Plus nutrition claims (Reuters)

Bad harvest, low demand threaten Pacific fishermen (AP)

6 on trial for selling melamine in China (AP)

WHO dunnit: Several campaigns like the WHO Farm and Eat the View are petitioning Obama to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn, with support from writer Michael Pollan and Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters. Shame on NPR reporter Brian Reed, however, for turning to Big Ag pimp Alex Avery, now apparently “director of research” at the “Center for Global Food Issues,” as an authority on anything but the ass his head is jammed up. (NPR) Says Avery, “I think the idea to put an organic farm on the White House lawn is as shallow a stunt as is the intellectual rigor of the organic movement as a whole.” Read this previous post dissecting an instance of Avery’s own scholarly rigor.

Stats we hope will annoy Avery: The Rodale Institute has released a new report asking whether organic agriculture can indeed “feed the world”? The short answer: Yup. Caveat: the report relies heavily on meta-analysis of previous studies. But we relish nuggets like this one: “In the developing world, organic yields vastly surpass yields from conventional agriculture by ratios of nearly 1.6 to 4.00. Worldwide across all foodstuffs, organic ratios outperform conventional agriculture by 1:3.” (Rodale Institute press release; report PDF; MeatPoultry.com coverage)

Think outside the big box: FoE Kerry Trueman interviews the Ethicurean’s Elanor on whether Wal-Mart can ever be a force for good, and if it’s OK to shop there if it’s the only way you can get your hands on organic stuff. (Huffington Post)

Thou shalt worship other gods than Pollan: Tom Philpott asserts that “intellectual life, like agriculture, needs biodiversity to thrive” and reminds us that there are other formidable foodpol writers besides Michael Pollan. Tom’s posting reviews of the year’s standout books, starting with Vandana Shiva’s “Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis.” (Gristmill)

Pasture-ization: Bay Area dairyman extraordinaire Albert Straus opines on why his and other Marin organic dairies are fighting the USDA’s proposed grazing rules, aka “the access to pasture” requirements. (San Francisco Chronicle) We confess we’re so confused by this we might as well lie down in said pasture and give up. See battle in comment section of Elanor’s previous post on the topic for more.

From gardens to garages: Advertisements for Bay Area subdivisions around the turn of the 20th century offered some practical suggestions for how potential homeowners might make use of the larger-than-average properties — “84 rabbits. And 150 laying hens. And about 75 feet of parsnips and lima beans.” These weren’t Victory Gardens, they were just … normal. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Food for oil: Food-poor but cash-rich countries are snapping up rights to farmland in developing countries. Take Libya, which under a proposed agreement with Kiev, would lease 247,000 acres to grow wheat that would be shipped back to Libya. In exchange, Ukraine gets access to Libyan oil fields. (Chicago Tribune)

Coal calling: Lawyer Bill Marler, aka the E. Coli Avenger, posts his 2008 Food Safety Naughty or Nice List. Naughty: Nebraska Beef, China, etc. Nice: …the Ethicurean? Considering we don’t always see eye to eye with Mr. Bill (cough raw milk cough cough), that’s mighty nice of him. (Marler Blog)

Beverly Hills doctor powered SUV using patients’ fat (Forbes.com via U.S. Food Policy)

American Farm Bureau says the biggest trend this year was local foods (Brownfield Network)

Though I’ve been lucky to “borrow” my friends’ back yard for a garden this year, during the winter I still crave growing something green and edible. But in an apartment with insufficient amounts of direct sunlight, I sometimes find it difficult to grow much of anything.

I know I’m not alone in having that problem, and for those people who don’t have access to community gardens to exercise their green thumbs, indoor gardening can seem more of a hassle than it’s worth. But R. J. Ruppenthal, in his new book “Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting” (Chelsea Green, 2008), offers hope for pavement-bound urban dwellers. By applying just a couple of his ideas, he claims, anyone can grow up to 10 or 20 percent of their own fresh food indoors, in limited paved spaces, or in small yards.

As garden guides go, “Fresh Food From Small Spaces” is a good introduction to many useful small-scale techniques, complete with an appendix of resources for tools, equipment, seeds, and further information. It covers a lot of ground (so to speak), and even though much of what I read was familiar to me, I still picked up a number of good tips to incorporate into my own gardening. For those who already garden, this may not be a book to add to your collection, as it doesn’t sink deep roots into most topics. However, those urban dwellers who are just now looking for ways to grow some of their own food will find many possibilities here for starting your own at-home food production.

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Above the din of the enthusiastic multitude of Green Festival attendees in San Francisco, renowned author, ethnobotanist, food preservationist, and historian Gary Paul Nabhan gave a whirlwind tour of topics with global, regional, and personal scope.

Nabhan started with a big-picture perspective. The current and future food crises, he said, are closely linked with the energy and water crises. At the same time that we are depleting our planet’s non-renewable fossil fuel supply, we are also draining ancient water sources much faster than they can be refilled. Nabhan called this “fossil water” to highlight that some groundwater sources, like the Ogallala aquifer in the American southern plains, were slowly filled across the span of many millennia.

One of the causes of this is agribusiness’s focus on forcing crops into places where they don’t belong. Importing a water-hungry plant into an arid climate leads to a reliance on artificial irrigation, and often other imported inputs like chemical fertilizers. As our water and energy supplies diminish, he said, it is time to start choosing plants and animals that are place-appropriate.

To do that, we need to reconnect with local knowledge by listening to the biological wisdom of place-based heritage, and to the cultural wisdom in local and traditional farming, fishing, foraging, and ranching practices. In other words, learn lessons from nature and look to the past to guide our future. (more…)

Eaters unite: A fairly universal ‘harumph’ erupted from the sustainable-food community after the announcement of Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, as Obama’s USDA pick. As usual, Michael Pollan articulates why the community is pretty cynical but still holding out just a little bit of hope. (NPR)

Food another casualty of the Madoff scandal: The newly opened Fair Food Foundation, poised to give out $20 million per year in grants for sustainable, fair, nutritious food projects, was forced to cease its grantmaking operations this week after the major donor announced that its funds were managed by Bernard Madoff, Ponzi scheme celebrity of the century. (Fair Food Foundation, New York Times)

Hungry at feast time: A new survey released by the New York City Food Bank finds that a full half - that’s right, half - of New Yorkers report that they struggle to pay for groceries, a 26% increase since February. In San Francisco, the line for a Methodist church’s annual Christmas grocery giveaway stretched for blocks. And in the nation’s most productive fruit and vegetable region, California’s Central Valley, food is nowhere to be found thanks to a major drought. (New York Observer) (SF Chronicle) (AP)

New CAFO exemption smells like shit - and ammonia: As expected, the EPA publishes its final rule exempting large-scale animal feeding operations from having to report their toxic emissions to the public. Getting in just under the wire, researchers in Delaware report that the state’s poultry farms sent 94 times more ammonia into the air than was reported by all factories statewide last year. (Federal Register) (Delaware News Journal)

D’ough! Eating out is fattening: Purdue researcher James Binkley says that table-service restaurant meals typically provide more calories than fast food, and both are more caloric than home-cooked meals. Way to go, Mom! (Journal of Agricultural Economics, US Food Policy)

Bad for Beneficial Bugs: Growing too much corn (for fuel or food) harms insects that benefit other aspects of agriculture. (Michigan State U., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences-PDF)

Going buzz-erk: The work of beekeepers on California’s Central Coast would be much easier if they could keep their colonies alive. (MetroActive)

Ocean farms inherently flawed: So says University of Hawaii professor Neil Frazer in an essay in Conservation Biology. (U. of Hawaii, Conservation Biology)

Non-American diet aids breast cancer patients: That’s the diet high in fruits, vegetables and fiber, naturally. (U.C. Davis, Journal of Clinical Oncology).

Glass half full (hopefully of rBGH-free, organic, grassfed, family-farmed milk): Obama ran a rural campaign based on an agenda that included many policies that we can support — like regulating CAFOs — and the job of the cabinet is to implement to president’s agenda.  Our job is to stay on their asses until they do. (Blog for Rural America)

Vilsack’s silver lining: Everyone in the sustainable food community pretty much agrees we could have done way better, but on the upside, at least all the hubbub has shone a spotlight on the post of Secretary of USDA. (Gristmill) (More Grist on Vilsack here)

Smart food for schools: The Institute of Medicine issued a preliminary study on school meal patterns to see if kids’ eating actually matches up with the dietary guidelines. They’re welcoming feedback on their approach to the issue; should you have any to offer, you can do so through a link on Parke Wilde’s blog. (U.S. Food Policy)

Soft drink tax fizzling?: Marion Nestle takes a look at New York’s proposed “fat tax” on soft drinks and finds it not as effective a policy tool as one might expect. (What to Eat)

Gifts for the true foodie: Jonathan Bloom suggests gift items to reduce food waste. (Wasted Food)

We’ve reported before on a disturbing disease that’s been plaguing large-scale organic dairies: Absencia Grassosis. Sounds pretty nasty, doesn’t it? Loosely translated, it means lack of grass. Industrial-organic companies including Aurora (supplier of organic milk to Safeway and other private-label brands) and Horizon (owned by dairy giant Dean Foods) have already fallen ill with it. If it’s allowed to fester and spread, it could seriously hobble the strength of the organic label - because last time I checked, organic consumers expected that their milk came from cows that actually munched on healthy pasture, not just gazed at it from inside a giant feedlot.

Unfortunately, Absencia Grassosis has received scant attention from the agency best positioned to provide the antidote to the disease: the USDA. Charged with safeguarding and enforcing the standards behind the organic label — which include the requirement that organic dairies give their cows access to pasture — USDA has sidestepped its responsibilities for years. While the agency did actually investigate Aurora for non-compliance with the organic standards and found it responsible for 14 separate violations, it didn’t de-certify or even fine the dairy. Instead, it issued a consent agreement whose message was, in essence, “no worries about all those corners you’ve been cutting - just try to avoid them next time.”

One of the USDA’s excuses for such lousy policing was that it claimed it didn’t know what “access to pasture” meant, so it couldn’t enforce it. That changed in October: After more than 85,000 letters [PDF] from organic groups and consumers, USDA published a draft rule spelling it out. And surprisingly, the rule was really strong. So strong, in fact, that it could be torched by Aurora and co. unless we work quickly to get it fixed up and finalized.

The deadline for comments on the “pasture rule” is fast approaching: those of us who care about the integrity of the organic label have to weigh in by Dec. 23rd. But this one’s a little tricky. A circular firing squad of sorts has congregated on this patch of certified organic pasture, with the Big Organic dairy and meat industry aiming at one aspect, certain organic farming groups at another, and one organic watchdog group firing sporadically into the air. It’s pretty easy to slip on all this grassroots spin. So before you head over to the Organic Farming Research Foundation’s website to shoot off an email to the USDA telling them to keep the rule but make a few reasonable changes, here’s some background to chew on.

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By Barry Foy

When it comes to Christmas cheer, St. Nick has nothing on the big biotech and pharmaceutical firms this year, with the release of an unprecedented number of holiday-related products expected over the next few weeks. Given the sector’s legendary lack of sentimentality, this nod toward tradition has industry observers scratching their heads.

Some of the new items promise to be more popular with consumers than others. Analysts don’t expect sales of PseudoPharm’s genetically engineered pear tree, for example, whose fruit emits a pheromonal scent nearly irresistible to partridges, to match those of the novel strain of mistletoe developed by Zurich-based Euro-BeelzeBio, which perfumes the surrounding air with Impalis®, the company’s popular erectile dysfunction remedy.

The common domestic turkey has been the focus of much of this Yule-based R&D. Two inventions in particular are at the epicenter of the excitement: England’s Entropis Ltd. credits extensive research among the London poor with laying the groundwork for TimsTom®, a turkey whose pharmaceutically enhanced flesh helps combat lameness in young boys; and, thanks to an innovative set of enzymatic modifications, Atlanta-based Necro/gen’s Stodge-Ready® bird will be able to process a specialized diet of bread, onions, celery, and sage and store it internally, making this the first self-stuffing Christmas turkey. A Thanksgiving version is slated for late 2009.

(Necro/gen researchers are currently at work on a “Taste-Terminator®” turkey gene, designed to render the cooked bird entirely flavorless immediately upon cooling, making it useless for leftovers.)

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The New York Times’ Caucus blog is reporting that President-Elect Obama has settled on former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as his Secretary of Agriculture.

While just a few weeks ago I wrote that Vilsack didn’t seem like the most horrible choice for AgSec, compared to some of the other names being floated (Hello, Dennis Wolfe and Collin Petersen!), that was before a Don Quixote of an Iowa activist named Dave Murphy launched a petition to plead with Obama’s transition team to consider six potential reformers for the position instead. Signed by some of the biggest names in the sustainable food world — Wendell Berry, Bill Niman, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Alice Waters, etc. — the FoodDemocracyNow.org petition today passed 54,000 signatures, thanks to publicity from the New York Times, Daily Kos, BoingBoing, and others.

Well, tough cookies. That’s not how politics works, apparently. (Right about now our favorite guest poster Steph Larsen is saying “I told you so.” But nicely.)

Read my previous post for more about Vilsack, which drew heavily on this in-depth look from The Center for Rural Affairs about Vilsack’s stances on subsidies, meat producer consolidation, and genetically modified foods. Our main concern about him is that he did nothing to stop the proliferation of or regulate CAFOs in Iowa as governor, and his pro-GMO background and ties to the biotech industry. The Organic Consumers Association has a list of his biotech shenanigans.

Well, we dared to dream. Thanks for all those who signed the petition, blogged it, and passed it on. And a big round of applause for Dave Murphy, who got this whole petition party started and tilted tirelessly at Washington’s windmills like a madman with a laptop for a lance day and night for the past week. Jill Richardson has a great post up about Dave over at her blog, La Vida Locavore.

Next time, we’ll have to get organized faster.

Editor’s note: Please welcome our newest addition to the Ethicurean “team,” Stephanie Pierce, who’s written for us quite a lot as a guest contributor. A native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Stephanie will soon be moving from Grand Rapids, MI, to begin a yearlong kitchen/garden internship at the Yestermorrow Design/Build school in Vermont. Read more about her food obsessions on her Ethicurean bio.

Statistics-heavy research confirms that money spent on a local business stays in the local area. Here’s a real-world example of that commonsense idea in action: Making Thyme Kitchen, a prep kitchen business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has a customer who is also a small vegetable producer. He brings a big batch of basil to Making Thyme for their use. Making Thyme buys the basil and makes pesto pasta with it, which they sell to Green Life Market, a small grocer a couple streets over. A woman buys the pasta, later learning that it’s made from the basil her own children grew. What’s not to love?!

This kind of interconnection and local patronage forms the backbone of Making Thyme Kitchen. One of its two guiding principals is to source as much food locally as possible. The second is that the owners never make anything that they wouldn’t eat themselves.

Making Thyme in some ways resembles the “make-n-takes”  that began popping up across the country a few years ago, giving time-crunched people a place to assemble several meals using pre-chopped ingredients, with recipes ready to follow and staff to help in the cooking. Making Thyme’s model is different in that they create a menu package that changes monthly, make all the food, and either deliver it to customer’s homes or have it ready in their retail store for pick-up. It’s more of a “Community Supported Kitchen” model like the one pioneered by Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley. And while many of the make-n-takes that have popped up in this region have started disappearing, Making Thyme is growing. (more…)

Heavy metal blowout: The FDA has recommended that the Bush Administration revise its consumer guidance on fish, changes that would encourage women and children to eat more fish despite growing concerns about mercury contamination (not to mention, um, the absolute unsustainability of our current seafood-consumption practices). The FDA argues that the nutrient content of fish outweighs the mercury concerns. Scientists say the FDA is oxygen-deprived. (Chicago Tribune)

Second shoe drops for neighbors of factory farms: As predicted, the EPA on Friday exempted livestock operations from publicly reporting emissions of methane, ammonia, and other toxic gases that are released in high concentrations when thousands of animals live together in a confined space. In a shockingly candid admission of its own incapacity, an EPA spokesman stated that the exemption was necessary because “there’s no way our responders can deal with that.” Looks like CAFO neighbors are on their own. (Washington Post; for background, see our posts here and here)

Cheap coronaries: The Cancer Project, a cancer prevention group affiliated with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, reports that dollar “value meals” at fast food restaurants may not be such a bargain when you look at the potential health costs. Jack in the Box’s Junior Bacon Cheeseburger will give you the highest heart attack potential for your money, packing 23 grams of fat (8 grams saturated) for just a buck. (New York Times)

Maybe we should all eat closer to home?: Japan halt beef imports from a Wisconsin plant after a package couldn’t be shown to be from an animal under 20 months of age. (Brownfield) Meanwhile, the U.S. stops imports of pork from Ireland that might be related to the dioxin contamination there. (Brownfield)

The pork-PCB saga continues: Scientists determine that dioxin levels in Irish pig feed were more than 5,000 times the legal EU limit. (The dioxins have been traced to fuel used by the feed manufacturer, theaptly named Robert Hogg; rumors are that the fuel was smuggled in from Northern Ireland.) (The Sunday Times) Up to 100,000 Irish pigs may be destroyed (Guardian), but there’s a compensation deal coming for the pork industry, however (Irish Times).

Much worse than PCBs: Manila reports Ebola virus in pigs. (PhilStar.com)

O, probably not: Andy Martin argues that the FTC should re-evaluate whether squelching the Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger is worth its while. (New York Times)

Sucrose Anonymous: New research suggests that sugar could be addictive. Previous studies on rats have shown that eating sugar causes a behavioral pattern of increased intake and signs of withdrawal when it’s taken away: both clinical signs of addiction. (Science Blog)