Alternet Michael Pollan Until very recently, food was invisible as a political issue. Something is stirring. Pollan reviews five books that address the heart of the food movement. Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin, Polyface All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? by Joel Berg, Seven Stories Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, Little, Brown Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities by Carlo Petrini, with a foreword by Alice Waters -- Chelsea Green 
The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society by Janet A. Flammang -- University of Illinois Press 1. Food Made Visible It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.

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An interesting history of industrial hemp production on American farms, specifically in Wisconsin, as the pressure to lift the prohibition on hemp production in the United States ramps-up.

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Natural Foods Merchandiser Unsavory practices in meat processing have captured the public spotlight in recent months. The Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc. stunned audiences across the country with scenes depicting the dark recesses of the food-processing business. More recently, articles in Time, The New York Times and other media outlets have generated a firestorm of public discussion on meat-processing practices. Meat production is a margin business. The profit margin on an animal that takes two years to raise is measured in pennies per pound. And that profit depends largely upon the processor's ability to find an outlet for hides, bones and offal, as well as every cut of meat. The conventional food system has steadily increased profit-margin pressure on producers and processors alike.

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Editorial Source: Capital Press In the fabled balcony scene, Juliet asks Romeo to reject his name. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Oh, fair Juliet, a name is everything when you're trying to sell a product or protect a brand, be it roses, yogurt or organic ginger cookies. That sums up the arguments of two advocacy groups who say words have meaning and convey images and, in separate complaints, want federal agencies to protect their franchises. The National Milk Producers Federation has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on the misappropriation of dairy terminology on imitation milk products.

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By John Kinsman What is the latest taxpayer-subsidized economic stimulus scheme? Why, manure digesters on factory farms, of course! At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack unveiled plans to promote manure digesters as a way to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. The trick is that you have to be a factory farm to qualify. In his State of the State address in January, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced his latest round of tax credits for factory farm expansion, including a whopping $6.6 million for two manure digesters in Dane County catering to just a handful of mega-dairies. Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk has also been pushing for $1 million in her budget for these digesters. The real tragedy is that manure digesters actually make global warming worse while "solving" a manure problem that would not even exist if cows were allowed to graze on pasture rather than being confined indoors.

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