When their butcher announced his retirement in 2008, the Jeffries family decided to build their own on-site butcher shop, complete with a traditional brine curing room as well as smoker to produce custom artisan cuts and sausages. Rather than mortgaging off a piece of their farm to finance the project, Walter turned to an innovative new online fundraising tool called Kickstarter.
Save A Family Farm In Just 10 Minutes
Imagine this. You’re a farmer. You home school your many children and keep to a peaceful country life. You specialize in making the highest quality raw milk cheese from grass-fed cows. Every morning you walk out into a gray morning and watch the sunrise over the swaying fields of lush, green grasses while you go about your daily farm chores. You don’t own a gun. You’ve never even fired one. You are a law-abiding person, and you’ve never so much as gotten a parking ticket.
Throw Out The USDA Food Pyramid?
YES! Not only did this month’s journal Nutrition question the validity of the new 2010 USDA dietary guidelines, but the story was picked up by the popular magazine SELF!
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the tide really was turning?
Save Small-Scale Slaughterhouses
I’ve alluded to it before. I’m not sure that I’ve actually highlighted the problem in its own post. Of course, now it’s threatening to deteriorate into a full-scale crisis. What am I talking about? U.S. government regulations designed for large-scale meat slaughtering. Rather than scaling down the regs to accommodate small-scale or artisan processors, the regs just put a whole lot of small-scale slaughterhouses out of business. Now the USDA has proposed changes in the works that will make it even harder to be a small-scale processor.
In other words, if these proposed regulations pass, your beloved grass-fed beef farmer will most likely have to send his cattle to an inhumane, nasty, industrial slaughterhouse before passing the meat on to you.
Supreme Court Hears Case Against Monsanto & GMOs
Today the United States Supreme Court is hearing the case of Monsanto vs. Geertson Seed Farms, which began in the lower courts back in 2006. A coalition of alfalfa farmers (conventional and organic), with the help of the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the USDA’s approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered “Roundup Ready” alfalfa. The plant, like Roundup Ready soybeans and other crops, had been engineered to withstand repeated spraying of Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. Farmers and environmental advocates warned about the unintended spread of Monsanto’s patented variety of alfalfa, given that alfalfa is pollinated by bees that can fly many miles distance.
Court after court sided with CFS against the USDA. The history of this case is actually quite encouraging.
The Cause of the Dairy Crisis — Fake Food
It’s been in all the papers, on all the major media network news: The U.S. dairy industry is in trouble. Farmers are pouring milk down drains and slaughtering their cows for beef. Why? Ostensibly, it’s because a surplus of milk has prices at an all time low. But why is the demand for milk fallen off a cliff? Is it really that the average consumer is buying less of it? Nope. Turns out it’s because of a new fake food hitting the market: milk protein concentrates (MPCs).
Food Scare Of The Week
I’m sick of hearing about peanut recalls. Aren’t you? Well, it turns out that nothing in this bright world of ours is safe from contamination — not even potatoes. The culprit? A wiley little bacteria called listeria. You know, the same pathogen they use to frighten us into cooking all our food. Everything must be cooked, say the food scientists. Nothing consumed raw. No raw milk. No raw vegetables. No soft cheeses. No sushi or smoked salmon.