There are food elitists, and then there is Mark Bittman of The New York Times. He raised some eyebrows with his recent call for the government to further regulate what can be bought with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, … Continue reading →

We’ve been saying for some time that organic activists who would take affordable food out of grocery stores and restaurants fail to acknowledge the reasons behind modern agricultural practices. New research from Wageningen University in the Netherlands backs us up. … Continue reading →

Big news earlier this week: McDonald’s reacted to years of pressure from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS, which by the way gives only one percent of its budget to hands-on pet shelters) by agreeing to require its … Continue reading →

It’s been a few years since America’s pork producers suffered a sustained deluge of failed lawsuits from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance, but that doesn’t mean that the group hasn’t been busy making life difficult for the families that … Continue reading →

The IFC comedy Portlandia premiered last January. A sketch comedy about the “wheat-germy, hippie-ish environs of Portland, Ore.,” the show would be amiss without featuring some of the latest “foodie” trends. A two-and-a-half-minute trailer shows a couple attempting to order chicken—only to pummel the waitress with questions. Is … Continue reading →

Last week, we looked at New York Times columnist Mark Bittman’s argument that “It’d be even better, really, if most of came from within a few hundred miles of where we live.” We were skeptical that Bittman’s “locavore” ethics were good for consumers or...

We’ve long been skeptical of the health halo of “organic” foods. We’ve seen overwhelming evidence that the claims that “organic is better for you” or better for the environment to be questionable, and it’s not like organic food is immune to the same contamination...

“According to the latest study” is a powerful phrase. Newspapers, bloggers, and others rely on a steady stream of studies and reports to generate new content. The problem, of course, is that the “latest study” rarely represents a scientific consensus, let alone a scientific fact. More often than not,...

Whenever you pick up the newspaper and read a scary story about chemicals in everyday items that are supposedly killing us, there’s a good chance the group behind the narrative is the worrywarts at the Environmental Working Group. In telling consumers to worry about the monster hiding under...

Slowly but surely, the marketing-induced “health halo” surrounding organic food is starting to disappear. One of the more common misperceptions is that organic food is more nutritious than “conventional” food. But according to a massive review of data from the UK’s Food Standards Agency, there’s no scientific...