Would you like some fish oil with your yogurt? Yoplait and other yogurts now contain added omega-3 oil. Just 29 servings gets your child his/her daily dose of this heart-healthy nutrient. Omega-3 yogurt will dent your wallet more than it will grow their brains. Maybe it’s best to just eat some fish.

Food Prices and Land Use: Via Food Law Prof Blog. Ross Clark maintains our food shortage could be cured by better use of the world’s land.

Living Green: A great article in the Austin-American Statesperson. Are you up to the challenge of buying less, buying used and environmentally friendly cleaners, cosmetics and other products?

The Price of Food: A comparison of retail and farm gate prices for fruit, vegetable, grain and livestock products between May 2007 and May 2008. Looks like peanut butter will be a bargain protein source!

Take a Green Roof Safari. From Ecogeeks. Going to Europe this fall? Take a tour of green roof projects in Germany or Switzerland. More information on green roofs can be found at greenroof.com

I think that it is important, amidst all the brouhaha over genetically modified food, to remember that even if a child is eating homegrown vegetables and all natural meats, eating habits are what will really make a difference in the child’s life. In today’s world, where childhood obesity is, to use the popular vernacular, an epidemic, parents need to stop worrying so much about the pros and cons of cloned cattle and start questioning that second serving of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia that little Jimmy is having after dinner.

The blame for childhood obesity, of course, cannot be place completely on the shoulders of the parents of obese children; society is at fault to some extent here. If a child is brought up to be skewed away from looking at the long term benefits of eating a serving of broccoli with dinner, he will be driven in the opposite direction: to seek and crave sugar. It is here that parents needs to come in and help “un-skew” the judgment of their child. While childhood obesity may be genetic to some extent, healthy eating and exercise habits can make all the difference.

A recent article in TIME magazine poses the questions:

How do you effectively control another person’s eating behavior? How do you motivate someone–especially a young, impulsive, pleasure-driven someone–to make smart food choices, to get up off the couch, to turn off the television? And how do you accomplish that without making that young person feel deprived, coerced or–worse yet–judged and found wanting?

Lead by example. (More on the importance of this in the blog Life in Your Years.) Eat healthy, home-cooked meals, and if that isn’t a possibility then do your best to avoid fast food. Take your child out to play in a park or a pool. If your child is a teenager, get Dad to work up an excercise routine with him. For mothers and daughters, the all-female gym, Curves, is instituting a bring-your-daughter-to-the-gym policy. Above all, please don’t let your child adopt the TV as an older sibling/added parent. If you lay down ground rules on food and activity, they will listen.

And why not make it fun? Christine at Our Bodies Our Blog took a stab at it, and found some suggestions for us too.

If you have something special that you do with/for your kids to keep them moving or eating healthy, please comment and share!

Since April, there have been 613 people identified as infected with Salmonella St. Paul in this country. For the most part, consumers have embraced the warnings and precautions put out by the FDA. (btw, Barfblog has an excellent collection of posts on this subject, including suggestions for ensuring safety of farmer’s market tomatoes).

From 1998-2005 there were 831 illnesses reported from unpasturized (raw) milk and cheese. Considering the number of people eating tomatoes vs. consuming raw milk, the per-consumer illness rate has got to be much higher for milk. Yet, government intervention in raw milk sales is not met with nearly the same attitude as seen in the case of tomatoes. Why?

For one thing, milk is probably the most emotion-charged food there is. It is so closely associated with children and wholesomeness that is it literally a “sacred cow” when it comes to safety, adulteration, regulation, hormones, antibiotics…. I’ve seen more conflicting statistics quoted about raw milk than almost any other food topic I’ve researched. (What’s that saying about lies, damned lies and statistics?). It’s hard to find a balanced piece of reporting on this topic, but there was one in the Seattle PI recently.

Raw milk advocates abound, and have some valid, or at least interesting points. For one thing, it DOES taste better (IMHO). There are claims of it being less of an allergen, easier to digest, and more healthful in a number of ways. There are a number of sites promoting raw milk. Sadly, most of them seem so fanatical, that I find it hard have faith in their statements and facts. If any of you know of good, sound, science-based raw milk sites or references, please let me know!

So, I’m not going to give you a pat yes or no answer on raw milk. If you choose to go raw, I will advise you to at least be sure of the following:

• purchase from a state-certified dairy (this is one reason I hate to see states outlaw raw milk-it turns it into an unregulated black-market item)
• be absolutely certain the milk is chilled immediately (this is not just stuck in the refrigerator, it is chilled in the equivalent of a circulating ice bath)
• drink your raw milk before it is a week old (the sooner the better). This means a week from when it was milked, NOT purchased!
• Be sure your dairy is testing routinely for coliform and other bacterial contaminants
• visit the dairy, if possible, before you trust their product. i.e. know your producer

I grew up on the raw milk produced by my family’s traditional dairy farm. We drank the milk from our bulk milk tank; it was not pasteurized until it got to the processing plant. BUT, I’m not even tempted to buy raw milk now. The primary reason is that without pasteurization, I am completely reliant on the producer to ensure that my milk is safe. In addition, the raw milk I grew up on was consumed within 24-48 hours of milking. I find it extremely difficult to trust raw milk from a dairy shelf in the health food store. I do know some local, certified raw milk dairies from which I would be comfortable purchasing. They all have waiting lists for customers.

Hello readers…yesterday amidst the parties, networking, and actually working for clients, I had a chance to attend an educational session. And I’m so glad I did for two reasons: I learned something, which one always hopes to, but rarely does at these conferences; but more importantly, had a reminder of how blessed I am to live the life I have. The panel, “Biotech Crops in Center of Origin: The Case of Corn and Mexico” was organized by Monsanto (please suspend your cynicism and keep reading) and the Mexican Confederation of Corn Peasants (CNPAMM).

A little background. Mexico is the center of origin for corn, which most of the world refers to as maize. Over thousands of years it has evolved from teosinte shown at the left in this photo (thank you John Doebley, Univ. of Wisconsin), to the familiar corn on the right. This was done by plant breeding, or crop “manipulation” by man. The point being that had farmers not “interfered with” mother nature, this food staple for Mexico, where one billion corn tortillas are consumed each day (that’s an average of 10 per person) we’d be noshing on something other than nachos during the Super Bowl. Because Mexico is the center of origin for this crop that has cultural and religious associations for the populace, there has been tension about the introduction of biotech corn to the region, particularly in the state of Oaxaca. Corn, in case you didn’t know, is a very promiscuous plant whose pollen is prone to mix with other corns, whether they’re interested or not. For those who want to preserve the many different land races (or varieties) of native corn, this is a problem.

OK, history lesson over and back to the present. The session opened with a presentation in Spanish, by Carlos Salazar, Secretary General of CNPAMM. CNPAMM is part of CNC, the National Confederation of Mexican Peasants, with more than 2 million members. Fortunately, a translator was at hand. He shared with the audience a video that interviewed the peasant farmers and showed them planting and growing their crops. It was a poignant illustration that despite the profound advancements that have been made in agriculture, many have been left behind. These smallholder farmers are using the same “technology” that their ancestors used to grow teosinte. They (or their children) plant the corn by hand, one seed at a time. They use yoked animals to pull a plow to work the fields. Everything is done by hand, including harvest where each corn is pulled from the stalk one at a time, and placed in a basket on the back of the worker as he or she walks the field. They then sell the corn for a peso, but it costs them two pesos to buy the corn if they need more. Their stories were moving, telling of the difficulty of raising a family, the disruption of the community as their children leave for the greener pastures of the north (the U.S.), and the desire to have a better life and more education for their children. These are the people that outside interests are trying to “protect” from the incursion of the fruits of today’s modern plant breeding: genetically modified corn varieties that have been improved to resist insects, survive drought, and yield more corn per acre. As I looked at the earnest expressions on sun ravaged faces, sharing smiles that reflected a lack of the dental care we take for granted, I was counting my blessings.

The video set the stage for the purpose of the panel which was to tell the international gathering about a project to both conserve native species, as well as find opportunities to support the farmers and find value opportunities for the native germplasms. I’ve been watching the evolution and acceptance of biotech crops since 2000, and to me, this program is a reflection of the growing maturity of an industry. When the biotech crops were first introduced, it was all speed ahead and touting of the tremendous benefits the crops offer to farmers. Developed by scientists, to whom it was incomprehensible that anyone could object to crops that could be grown with less labor, fewer pesticides, improved yield, less fuel use, and built-in insect resistance, industry was stunned when groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth launched massive campaigns to stop the introduction of these crops. Industry has slowly and painfully come to understand that societal concerns must be addressed to help the ultimate user of the crops, the consumer, better understand this radical transformation of crop production. The maize program, discussed at great detail and in earnest by the panel members, shows the evolution of corporate seed developers to recognize this learning and develop socially responsible programs to address the needs of two different kinds of farmers, the smallholder who wants to both preserve a culturally important crop, but still find a way to benefit from newer seeds, and what the group called professional farmers, who have access to modern machinery, the best seeds, and who grow on the large scale necessary to feed a country that is required to import substantial amounts of corn from other countries to feed its people.

It was a wonderful, but sparsely attended session. The program could be a model for others to study as they work to introduce other crop varieties that have important cultural associations that merit preserving, balanced with a need to continue as man has done for centuries, to improve the crop making it more sustainable to meet changing needs.

A full description of the panel and participants can be found here.

Here I am (second from left) at last night’s international food and ag reception.  My new friends are from Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. Click for the full size!

In honor of our blogger-on-the-road, Lisa, we’re going geeky with this week’s Earthlinks.

Should Biotech companies Blog? Are blogs by biotech companies a good idea from a corporate standpoint? Maybe if more companies had open blogs, there might actually be some real communication.

Animal Research, Giving the Gift of Life: a guest post on noted Ethicist Terry Etherton’s blog, by Barb Glenn, (a wonderful woman and friend from the Bio Industry Organization) .

Guaranteed Tender Steak: from Feedstuffs Foodlink. Technology to the rescue–University of Nebraska scientists have developed a method of identifying tender beef while it is in the processing plant.

Plants have Social Lives: also from Feedstuffs Foodlink. Plant behavior is more complex than you think. If plants are sentient, does that affect how we should grow, harvest and eat them?

Kudzu-A Potential Biofuel: from Ecogeek. The “plant that ate the South” may be the answer to Suzanne’s biofuel headache.

And as always, one slightly less serious link to end:

Make your own icecream drumsticks:  Does this make icecream count as “local food”?

When BIO has a party, BIO has a party! Last night at the conference here in San Diego, the state of Georgia hosted a fabulous welcome reception for thousands of us lucky conventioneers. It was on the U.S.S. Midway, “the longest-serving carrier in the history of the U.S. Navy,” and now a museum. This was my first visit to an actual aircraft carrier — it is enormous! 

We arrived at dusk and ascended stairs to enter the cavernous body of the ship — food and beverage stations everywhere, people trying out the flight simulators and admiring the historic aircraft on display. But it was such a beautiful night I headed up to the flight deck where you really encounter the stunning size of this ship. There were at least a half dozen different full size planes sitting around to admire. I ran in to a friend who gave me an informal tour, and our walk to the front of the ship took forever, since it is 1001 feet long, which I think is close to 2/3 of a mile; and it’s 248 feet wide.

The party seemed to have a Polynesian theme with 20 foot tall colorfully lit “heads” and figures interspersed along the deck. And there were also hula dancers. Not sure their connection is to the ship and its history (maybe it was mainly based in the Pacific?) but it certainly made for a festive evening. And midwaythrough the evening (get it?) the city skyline was illuminated with a fireworks display. They were a small distraction from the beautiful full moon. I love fireworks, and my ship guide who happens to be a member of the pyrotechnics society, was positively giddy and we both were snapping photos of the spectacle. The evening drew to a close and this very tired girl with sore feet gladly hopped on the shuttle bus to head back to the hotel to close out another day at BIO2008. Tomorrow I hope to tell you about some of the advances in ag I’m learning about here, and how researchers are working to develop better and more nutritious foods.

With floods causing untold amounts of damage to the well-being and property of native Iowans, farmers and wholesalers will also feel the blowback of this natural disaster. The Associated Press is reporting that corn and soybean prices have skyrocketed from the crisis:

CORN KEEPS CLIMBING: Corn prices pushed closer to $8 a bushel Tuesday after the U.S. Department of Agriculture said 12 percent of Midwest crops were in poor to very poor condition because of devastating floods.

SOYBEANS APPROACH RECORD: Midwest flooding has also inundated soybean fields, lifting prices near the all-time high of $15.96 a bushel.

And while Midwestern farmers must struggle to rebuild, their consumers are getting hit with more than just a steep price at the produce section. An editorial in the Dallas Morning News illustrates how vulnerable our fuel prices have become as a result of the country’s reliance on corn-based ethanol:

“Is it more important for people to eat or drive?”

The catastrophic Midwestern floods, and their likely effect on the U.S. corn harvest in a year of worldwide food shortages, makes the question relevant.

The reason? With the Corn Belt suffering big weather-related crop losses and global demand for U.S. grain rising, it becomes hard to justify putting corn into gas tanks via ethanol, rather than into people’s stomachs.

Add all of the taxpayer money we sink into ethanol and this flood has become a heavy burden for more than just Iowans. Has the way we approach food and fuel in this country left us vulnerable to the unpredictable acts of Mother Nature? That’s not counting the random shelf-pulls of the veggies that are near and dear to us. So far corn and tomatoes are off the menu. What’s next?

Hello from your faithless correspondent!  Things have been so busy here I’ve neglected you…will try to be better from here forward — most of my “work” obligations are now (thankfully) behind me, so I want to share with you my experiences from the conference. 

First, this is truly a global conference; in past years as many as one third of the attendees have come from outside the U.S.  And boy is that evident when you visit the exhibition floor which opened yesterday.  Once I figure out how to post pictures to this thing, I’ll share with you images of the colorful and elaborate booths from the trade show.  This is a real opportunity for countries to showcase their commitment to biotechnology.  And it has always struck me as ironic that some European countries who are so reluctant to voice support for biotech crops (that’s GMO crops to some of you) spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a strong presence at the conference to lure biotech companies to their countries because they want the economic revenue and clean, well paying jobs that come with biotech research and production facilities.  Go figure.

One of the largest country pavilions (this is no standard 10×10 booth) is for China.  Wow.  For anyone who hasn’t already realized that China is emerging as a global economic power, hello!  They are very serious about biotechnology, particularly for agricultural purposes.  They have a few billion people to feed and recognize that with biotech they can increase yields by making the crops more productive, but what is becoming even more important, adapting crops to deal with fluctuating climate conditions such as drought. 

I have to sign off as I’m headed to a session on biotech and sustainability.  This is a hot topic and I look forward to learning more about how biotech crops are uniquely suited to help with growing food in a sustainable manner.  More later!

Get ready to challenge your preconceptions.

Milk-fed veal is arguably the most hard-to-defend meat production system in this country from an animal rights point of view. Most veal is produced from male dairy calves, which are a byproduct of sorts, of the necessity of having a cow calve yearly in order to produce milk. As all dairy calves are, they are removed from the cow shortly after birth and grown using specialized production practices, to produce the very tender, pale meat most US consumers associate with veal.

Serious Eats recently posted about Azulana, which produces pastured raised veal. Most beef calves in this country are raised on pasture with the cows until weaning. Pasture-raised veal basically consists of harvesting these these animals at weaning, rather than growing them out to mature beef. Veal raised in this way is classified as “red veal”, because of the stronger flavor of the meat that results from the rumination process necessary to digest grass.

It turns out, that until sometime in the 1950s, most veal sold in this country was produced this way. Pastured veal would have to be among the most “natural” of meats, because the animals are grown with minimal intervention, no supplemental feeding, no confinement, on a diet of milk and grass.