Do You Know About Bioregional Eating?

Eating bioregionally is gaining in popularity. Here’s what you need to know, including how it differs from the locavore moment. Growing local has its merits, but a growing movement suggests perhaps we need to let the region dictate what we grow locally. (Photo: Arina P Habich/Shutterstock) There’s a growing trend in sustainable food that sort […]

5 Studies That Link Science Behind the Benefits of Organic

Benefits to Public Health A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health concluded that eating an organic diet can contribute to human well-being. The research was led by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences-based Dr. Jan Johansson, who reviewed current research on the effect of organic agriculture and crops on […]

Farmers’ Markets Are Good for Communities…Right?

Vegetables at the Dane County Farmers’ Market. Photo courtesy of Bill Lubing. Farmers’ markets practically glow with wholesome virtue: Shop here, they promise, and you can help build a sustainable, healthy food system! But without the data to buttress those claims, it’s hard to know whether farmers’ markets are actually meeting those goals or how […]

The Difference Between Heirlooms, Hybrids, and GMOs

Know Your Produce – Perfect Produce Is Unnatural There is nothing quite like the taste of a fresh fruit or vegetable straight from the garden. To the eye of the gardener, this vegetable picked ripe off of the vine is perfect. They nurtured it, carefully tended to it, and then finally, get to enjoy the […]

Farmacology: What Business Can Learn from Sustainable Farming

Medical and business communities can take surprising lessons from farming and improve employee well-being and productivity. Frustrated that conventional medicine had little to offer many of her patients, Daphne Miller, a practicing physician and professor of family medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, decided to take a look at how human health […]

What is Permaculture?

` This is a very hard question to answer concisely. Put 10 permaculturalists in a room and you’ll come out with 20 definitions of permaculture. Here are a few. The word permaculture was coined in the mid-1970′s by David Holmgren, a systems ecologist and Bill Mollisonand, a researcher, author, teacher and naturalist, as a combination […]

8 Foods Even The Experts Won’t Eat

Food scientists are shedding light on items loaded with toxins and chemicals–and simple swaps for a cleaner diet and supersized health. Experts from different areas of specialty explain why they won’t eat these eight foods. Clean eating means choosing fruits, vegetables, and meats that are raised, grown, and sold with minimal processing. Often they’re organic, […]

Top Five Reasons to Label GMO Food

October has been designated Non-GMO Month, the month to focus on why we need to regulate genetically modified organisms (GMOs) closely. To further understand what GMOs are, go to www.nongmoproject.org.  Here are my five top reasons for why we must label GMO food! 1) The research proving the safety of GMOs is flawed. First, the […]

Superlettuce!

Extreme weather calls for extreme crops. It’s hot. By 9 a.m., a dusty desert film radiates hazy stillness over thirsty fields of produce. The air is dry as static, and temperatures are well on their way to a blistering peak of 103 degrees in the desert town of El Centro, California, 13 miles from the […]

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food

The present-day sweet corn we serve in summer bears little resemblance to its wild ancestor – a grassy plant called teosinte. A bushy plant with short spikes of grain instead of ears, teosinte has only 5 to 12 kernels in each spike and the kernels are encased in shells so hard you’d need a hammer […]

Russia Bans GMO Corn Following French Study, Many Scientists Skeptical

Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s federal service in control of protecting consumers’ rights and well-being has suspended the import of genetically modified corn made by Monsanto, following a report by the University of Caen in France. Gilles-Eric Seralini, the French scientist behind the two-year long study, says rats whose diet consisted of Monsanto’s genetically modified NK603 corn,  or […]

Getting The Dirt On What’s Really Organic

With consumption of organic food throughout the United States on the rise and potential legislative measures, such as California’s Prop 37 and private retailer Whole Foods instituting a third-party organic certification system, consumers are more interested in what their food and other products contain than ever before. Idaho news station KTVB recently investigated the cost of local organic foods […]