Feds can’t ID the source or destination of our food.

The Department of Health and Human Services has found that most food manufacturers and distributors have no idea where their ingredients came from, or where their products go: Investigators successfully traced the source for only 5 of the 40 products, the report stated. Three of the traced products were egg cartons whose supply chain included …

The White House is planning a victory garden.

Michelle Obama will plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. With eleven hundred square feet of organic garden, there will be lots of room for the planned lettuce, sugar snap peas, spinach, broccoli, spinach, onions, chard, kale, collards, fennel, rhubarb, carrots, and an assortment of spices. It’ll be fertilized with compost from the …

The false hope of vitamin supplements.

In the New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope looks at the (possible) false hope of vitamin supplements. Vitamins are essential—we’d quickly die without them. But it’s looking increasingly likely that vitamin supplements—vitamins in pill form—are significantly less effective than vitamins that occur naturally, in food. Vitamins may be what allow our bodies to avoid the sorts …

A new study says mercury is commonly found in corn syrup.

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minnesota-based nonprofit, recently conducted a study of off-the-shelf corn syrup and found that almost half of the samples that they tested contain mercury. One third of the HFCS-bearing packaged food and drinks that they tested contained the poison. The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda is apparently common …

Sen. Deeds on local food and energy.

See, now this is why I like Creigh Deeds. From Hank Bostwick’s interview with Sen. Creigh Deeds at the Star City Harbinger: SCH: Do you see a growing trend toward regional and local production of both energy and food? DEEDS: Absolutely . . . one of the most important recent works of nonfiction is The …

I’m with Bush on the food bill.

Unusually, I’ve got to support President Bush’s position on the farm bill, and oppose the supermajority in the House and the Senate who support it. The farm bill is, functionally, the food bill, and that’s how I think of it. It substantially dictates what we eat, because it has such a strong influence in what …