Tag Archives: GMO Food

Weekly Round Up, 9.21.12

Healthy School Lunch Fights Obesity

Here are some of the best food stories we came across this week:

  • Billionaire Philanthropists Fund Massive Nutrition Science Initiative – 38-year-old hedge fund manager John Arnold, with his wife Laura, put $5 million in seed money towards the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), whose lofty goals are to perform scientifically valid studies to discover what truly causes obesity and thus reduce the U.S. obesity rate from its current 35% to 15%, and reduce diabetes incidence from 8% to 2%, all by 2020. Continue reading →

Weekly Round Up, 5.4.12

Now That's a Fish Counter

Here are some of the best food stories we came across this week:

    • Greenpeace Releases Its Fish Counter Scorecard – For the first time since the inception of Greenpeace’s Carting Away the Oceans ratings, two retailers actually received a “good” score for sustainable seafood practices: Safeway and Whole Foods Market. In last place was BI-LO/Winn-Dixie.
    • USDA Ending Pathogen Testing for Produce Via Budget Cuts – The Microbiological Data Program that tests about 15,000 fruits and vegetables for E. coli and other dangerous pathogens will probably end in the fiscal year 2013. The Senate Appropriations Committee decided not to fund the $5 million program, which provides close to 90% of all bacterial pathogen data about produce.
    • Californians Poised to Vote on Prop to Label All GMO Food – The Right-to-Know campaign has gathered enough signatures on its petitions to get a prop on the Nov. 6, 2012, ballot that would require manufacturers to label all foods containing GMO ingredients sold in California.
    • Anti-Bottled Water WeTap App Finds Closest Water Fountains – As part of a commitment to stop landfills from overflowing with water bottles, Evelyn Wendel created an app that allows users to bookmark drinking fountains using GPS and Google Maps, rate the quality of the faucets, and share the news with other users.
    • Study Details Which Countries Consume the Most Meat – The Economist reported that overall worldwide consumption of meat is on the rise. Surprisingly, the country that eats the most is not the U.S. (which came in second). Luxembourg leads the globe, at 136.5kg per person. India was last, at 3.2kg each.

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments below, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter for links like these all week long.

Image courtesy of HarshLight.

Weekly Round Up 4.27.12

Corn

Here are some of the best food stories we came across this week:

  • Dow’s GMO “Agent Orange Corn” Seeks USDA Approval – Dow AgroSciences is seeking approval for it’s “Enlist” corn, which has been genetically modified to be resistant to 2,4-D, an ingredient used in Agent Orange and a Dow herbicide — this corn would allow farmers to spray the herbicide without harming corn crops. More than 365,000 missives against approval have been submitted to the USDA by numerous groups.

New App ‘Honest Label Foods’ Flags Allergies, GMOs

In the trove of the app world, there’s a new tool we’re really excited about. With a scan of a bar code, Honest Label Foods pulls up all available nutritional information of a food product—with definitions for those head-scratchers like butylated hydroxytoluene—and flags any ingredients you’ve filed as personal dietary restrictions or allergies. This alone makes shopping quicker, but the app goes further than that. It’s looking to be the police of our food system.

In collaboration with the Organic Consumers Association and the Non-GMO Project, the app’s founders are working to gather even more useful data, data not so easy to find anywhere, like each ingredient’s country of origin, any pesticides used and whether a product contains anything genetically modified. Are you downloading yet?