Yes, Chipotle serves Niman Ranch. Yes, it's owned by McDonald's. No, antibiotics do not make pork less juicy. Yes, the Houston Chron needs to work on its food science. (via eGullet, of course).

Clarify 1/2lb. butter, heat until foamy, throw in a handful of sage leaves, remove from heat. enjoy.

UK organic dairy farmers shafted [via agBioView].

The soup thickens
The microbial soup, that is: A. I. Culley, et al., "High diversity of unknown picorna-like viruses in the sea," Nature 424 (28 August 2003): 1054-7. Free access via Nature's ocean genomics web focus.

Trying to go from one innocuous sporting event to another last night, I inadvertently subjected myself to a few unbearable seconds of William Kristol on an intervening channel. The diminutive douchebag actually said,
"I think the arabs are rejoicing at our liberation of Iraq."

Yeah, asshole, they're psyched -- really fucking psyched.

kim jong ilmatic
in case you haven't seen it.

Blackout!
Clearly, we need to give a shitload of taxpayer dollars to utility monopolies to improve the grid.

The Julie/Julia Project goes out with a bang:

With all the solemn apprehension the occasion warranted, I loosed my brand-new boning knife from its casing.� "Now I will Bone the Duck," I said.

"Good luck," Eric replied, before running away to hid under his desk.

I removed the bird from its wrappings.� I made the first incision, a deep cut down the back bone....

Here's the disappointing bit.� It was a total fucking breeze.� I could bone ducks every day for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian has, uh, flashed out their Julia Child website.

[Via Jason Perlow/eGullet].

Failsafe
Identity segregation in action.

What if the farmers whose future is to be decided in Cancun showed up at the meeting?

radical.

find out more at via campesina and U.N.O.R.C.A.

8/27: "There is a direct link between government agricultural policies in the U.S. and rural misery in Mexico."
[NYT | Oxfam report | IFPRI essays]

drink more.

Also from the August NBt, Hepeng Jia reports on problems implementing GM labelling in China, where nothing is labelled more than a year after the deadline, and suggests, again, that the law is simply a de facto trade barrier (and intended as such).
Sakamoto, et al. (909-13) create trangenic dwarf rice plants by targeted overexpression of gibberellin 2-oxidase.

From Transgenic Research 12, August 2003:
Halina M. Zbikowska (379-389) summarizes recent work on trangenic fish;
David Tepfer et al. (425-37) demonstrate DNA transfer from six species of plants to a soil bacterium;
Elizabeth A. Maga and a shitload of coauthors from Pangene and UC Davis (485-496) discover a more efficient way to produce transgenic livestock.

The desert of the real
The irony at the heart of Michael R. Taylor's commentary in Nature Biotechnology, discussed just below, is this, as he writes:

biotechnology will fulfill its full potential in a society only if it is freely chosen by that society. The United States should be on the side of empowering choice.

Indeed it (we?) should. But the logic of late capitalism requires the annihilation of the liberal democratic idealogy that is alleged to nurture it. We have to force people to eat food they don't want to maintain our system of agricultural subsidies, Monsanto's growth, our trade deficit, etc.

Slavoj Zizek discussed this in a great interview with Doug Henwood:

In years to come, the global capitalist 'system' will have to curtail democracy... The system will be more and more obliged to break its own rules.

This erosion of democracy is based on arguments from "neutral knowledge," "matters of security," and so on.

My eternal trump card is torture -- can you even imagine the topic of torture being considered legitimate 2-3 years ago?

[paraphrased from the audio]. There is an increasingly obvious disjuncture between what "the system" claims it stands for, and what it actually stands for. In Iraq -- regardless of the pieties raining down from Washington -- it is clear, and it always has been, that democracy would be disastrous for the national interests of the U.S.

Likewise, the maintenance of our agricultural false consciousness requires that we deny consumers the choice we claim to be giving them -- even requires, in Indra Vasil's astonishing demand below, that we abolish the very regulatory system that is the allegedly infallible guarantor of the desireability of the food that no one wants. "Neutral knowledge" no longer suffices.

Zizek thinks this might be a good thing, but I am not so sure. The WTO (which the US and EU are cynically trying to eviscerate even in the midst of their "disputes") is simply being replaced with even more punishing bilateral agreements -- see this entry and this one.

Norman C. Ellstrand considers the limitations of APHIS's current biopharming rules in Plant Physiology 132, August 2003, pp. 1770-74.

Meanwhile, Indra K. Vasil writes

By crying wolf much too often, the opponents of transgenic crops have not only lost their credibility, but also the right to be taken seriously. This indictment of the anti-biotechnology lobby may seem harsh, but it is entirely deserved. Time has come to gradually relax and eventually suspend the regulation of transgenic crops.

Nature Biotechnology 21, August 2003, pp�849-51

Before his little sermon to the choir he should have read Michael R. Taylor in the same issue:

It's fine to support and promote agricultural biotechnology on its scientific merits, but the public reaction to biotechnology�in America, Europe, and Africa�has only a little to do with science. Good science makes biotechnology possible and contributes to answering some of the questions people have, but no amount of science or science education will suffice to achieve public acceptance....

if biotechnology is to achieve its full potential in the world, the United States needs to step back from its aggressive advocacy stance and develop a food biotechnology agenda that recognizes that people won't accept food biotechnology under pressure.

Smartest commentary I've ever seen in Nature Biotechnology. How sad that something so obvious has come to sound so revelatory.

S.D.'s Amendment E ruled unconstitutional. Anti-corporate farm law violates commerce clause.

8/22: analysis

Gene Flow: What Does It Mean for Biodiversity and Centers of Origin:
Mexico City, September 29-30.

The Guardian has started a blog called kickAAS to rid the world of agricultural subsidies. [via MeFi]. Of course, the Times is weighing in too.

"Ending the practice of using antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock reduces human health risks without harming animal health or farmers, according to a World Health Organization report" [ScienceNOW].

Fait accompli [Des Moines Register via Cropchoice:]

Kendall Lamkey, a plant breeder at Iowa State University, said organic-corn growers like Laura Krouse face a tough problem. The genes of genetically modified corn have already become mixed into the general corn gene pool because of cross-pollination, he said.

Meanwhile, Pew posts an issue brief on gene flow.

Bruce Coles at Saut� Wednesday has some food for thought to go with your bacon.

Fish in a barrel, or blogging about blogging
I have at times considered changing my motto to mastering the obvious since 2002, but it turns out other people have a better title to it. A friend just sent me this SARS "debate" between Michael Fumento and some guy from Tenn. Fumento is one of those fake "debunkers" who comes up with something obvious that our quisling press corps hasn't written about (largely because... it's obvious), then writes an article about what a genius he is for figuring out that something is the opposite of conventional wisdom. No shit, douchebag.

That said, you have to pity him his interactions with "the blogosphere", which apparently does have trouble mastering the obvious at mind-numbing length -- in this case, the obvious fact that SARS is so not a big deal. The scariest thing about the whole meaningless exchange was this comment, left at the blog in question:

It seems to me that Internet blogging is essentially the new wave of journalism. The cost and access bar has been dramatically lowered and the competition of ideas is in full flow and will only expand. Mr. Fumento is harboring the illusion that he is important because of the distribution of old media. On the contrary, you are more important because you are read by the early adopters of this new form of journalistic information delivery. We early adopters are more influential in the long run than the myriad readers of old media. Just watch the evolution of ideas that will follow from the blogs -- the place that truth and reason win out.

This guy has been spending too much time jerking off to back issues of Wired.

8/21: If you don't understand how preposterously stupid this is, Mr. Fumento has taken the trouble to explain that blogging is like karaoke. Also, check out his spectacular hate mail; it's hard to choose, but I think my favorite is:

Your commentary created in me an anger gut wrenching and almost visceral in its force.

[Post edited for clarity, which was allegedly lacking! I had to remove links to two amazingly dumb blogs (1, 2) that I wanted to share, plus a tbogg post on the former.]

It's a good thing we don't serve Kool Aid at our Slow Food meetings:

Also this month, see a video of our international leader, Carlo Petrini speak about the movement's latest goals. Hope to see you there!

Or do we?

The OTA's consumer site has a bunch of info on organic food in schools.

LA Times on CSAs:

The top 2% of California's 2,100 organic growers generate half the organic produce sales, estimated at $450 million a year. Big growers also dominate distribution channels and shelf space at supermarkets and organic-food superstores.

[via ABE]

no shit

Consumers are willing to pay substantial premiums for non-GM foods (vegetable oil and salmon) in order to avoid GM counterparts. These premiums may exceed 50% of the discounted prices of GM foods.

More on the escaped atlantic salmon in Washinton state [tidepool has more].

Chron:

"During last month's briefing in Dallas, contractors asked Army Corps officials whether KBR, by virtue of being in Iraq and being already engaged in related tasks, had a conflict of interest that should prevent it from bidding. The government's reply, provided in a transcript of the session, said officials had considered the issue but were not obliged to release their decision.

'They don't transcribe the chuckles' that followed the exchange, the source said. "

This guy is the lamest car thief ever.

Holy shit, Tom nailed it.

What quagmire? npr's Anne Garrels reported (audio) that so much copper has been looted from the Iraqi grid that it has affected world prices. It will only take 2 years and $2 billion to fix.

GRAIN reprints an article by Barry Commoner from Harper's in which he noticed that the HGP only identified 1/3 of the genes it would theoretically require to generate the number of proteins in the body. He claims that this disproves the "central dogma." That may be a little overwrought, but he nevertheless explains why genetic engineering is more complicated than you might think:

Scientists and journalists somehow failed to notice what had happened. The project's scientific reports offered little to explain the shortfall in the gene count. One of the possible explanations for why the gene count was "so discordant with our predictions" was described in Science as follows: "nearly 40% of human genes are alternatively spliced." Properly understood, this modest, if esoteric, account fulfills Crick's dire prophecy: it "shakes the whole intellectual basis of molecular biology" and undermines the scientific validity of its application to genetic engineering. Alternative splicing is a startling departure from the orderly design of the Central Dogma, in which a single gene encodes the amino acid sequence of a single protein. In alternative splicing, the gene's original nucleotide sequence is split into fragments that are then recombined in different ways to encode a multiplicity of proteins, each of them different in their amino acid sequence from each other and from the sequence that the original gene, if left intact, would encode. Alternative splicing can have an extraordinary impact on the gene/protein ratio. The current record for the number of different proteins produced from a single gene by alternative splicing is held by the fruit fly, in which one gene generates up to 38,016 variant protein molecules.

See this article too.

Verlyn Klinkenborg in the Times: "Biological complexity and diversity sound like abstractions, until you see a patch of prairie beside the monotony of a soybean field, a whole county of soybean fields"

APHIS revises permitting system for industrial biotech plants.

Fidei Defensor
I don't know what episcopalians think their church stands for, but in fact it is the right of english kings to tell the pope to fuck off. Not to pick on the poor loyalists, who are really the least of our problems, but that's the fact. I mean they already have women, which is way more of a problem, theologically.

GAP blows the whistle [pdf] on the USDA:

The key findings of the investigative report include:

The American public's exposure to E. coli o157:H7 began at least two years before ConAgra's tainted meat recall in June of 2002.

The USDA's records system is fundamentally flawed and is designed to avoid knowing the source of tainted beef.

ConAgra slickly took advantage of the government's noninterference policy of "Don't Look, Don't Tell."

The USDA engages in persistent, ugly retaliation against anyone who attempted to expose its dereliction of duty: To inform the public of tainted meat coming into the stream of commerce. The USDA aided and abetted ConAgra in blaming its problems on a small, family-owned meat processor in Montana

A regulatory double standard has comprised the integrity of the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) food safety program. HACCP was designed as an early warning system on finding deadly contaminants in food. The USDA used HACCP to protect ConAgra, not the consumer.

The facts demonstrating ConAgra's strong-arm tactics against a small producer perpetuate a longstanding USDA pattern where the messenger is blamed and chosen as the fall guy.

Meanwhile another E. Coli recall, while FSIS wastes time worrying about terrorists.

I'm falling behind -- in particular there are some interesting articles in the August issues of Nature Biotechnology and Transgenic Research that I will have to tell you about later.

In the meantime, though, I want to again note the problems with the concept of organic food. Margaret Webb Pressler describes its industrial massification in this Post article, and Michael Pollan saved me some work by saying this in March:

The way we spend our food dollars is one of the most important votes we cast, and the choice we consumers are increasingly going to be faced with is not organic or conventional, but local or organic. I come down on the side of local. When you buy local, you're voting for a short, highly legible food chain -- one that supports all three legs of the original vision. This shorter food chain brings the consumer and producer together, and the producer gets to tell her story. Organic label or not, it had better be a good story: clean food, grown without pesticides, the animals being treated humanely. Another reason to buy local is that farms produce more than food -- they produce a kind of landscape too, which your food dollars help to conserve.

[both via the excellent ABE]