"organic food" news and stories

Call it: Chef's gone wild.

Top chefs in Los Angeles are livid over changes in business at the famed Wednesday Santa Monica Farmer's Market. Seems they can't get to the produce they need for their own restaurants anymore. Produce companies catering to restaurants and markets elsewhere lock up the deals in advance, according to a piece in the Los Angeles Times this weekend.

"Look at all of these trucks," fumed one chef quoted in the piece. "This isn't a farmer's market anymore. It's some kind of boutique wholesale operation.

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These days, more than ever, issues of food and the environment overlap one another. Our friends over at Green Daily have been busy this week, blogging about all sorts of green food issues. Here's some of what they had to say.

The Lazio region of Italy is adding organic fruit to local vending machines. They are doing this to make healthy food more accessible and to fight against childhood obesity. I wish that vending machines in this country dispensed organic fruit.

Bluefin tuna is overfished and so several countries have agreed to limit fishing in the Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans. This means less tuna for sushi bars and so some chefs in Japan are experimenting with other options, including raw horsemeat sushi.

Taking your own reusable bags to the grocery store is the thing to do these days. Check out clerks have mostly adapted to this practice and often ask me for my bags before I can even offer them. However, one woman had her bags refused and Patricia asks Green Daily readers if anyone else has had this experience.

Dalene tries to answer the question: Where to find local, organic, farm fresh food year round?

After a visit to a chicken farm, Jamie Oliver was horrified by the treatment of the chickens. He is now working to improve living conditions for chickens and is asking people in the UK to pony up the extra money it costs to buy a free range bird.

Organic maple syrup comes from trees that are pesticide-free for life. The number of taps allowed in those trees is also limited so as not to oversap the trees. Looking for places to buy organic syrup? Check out Laura's post!

The 100 foot diet challenge means preparing meals that are grown or raised within 100 feet of your home and use as few store bought ingredients as possible. Oh to have a backyard and the space in which to grow some food!

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I don't eat as healthy as I should (the entire bag of Dove milk chocolate I ate last night is proof of that), but I'm always looking at ways to make my diet a lot better.

Cooking Light has picked five healthy food trends that you might want to follow. I've heard of most of them, though Flexitarianism is a new term to me, even though I would say many American's follow this without even know it. It's when a person eats a diet that's mostly grains, vegetables, and fruit, with a little meat, fish, poultry, and dairy mixed in too. Functional Foods are foods that are enriched with more nutrients, such as orange juice with calcium. We know what Organic Food, Locally Grown Foods, and Vegetarianism represent, but are you familiar with Slow Food? I first heard this term a few years ago (and there have been books written about it and it's a growing movement). It's choosing locally grown food, cooking it in traditional ways and then eating it with family, something that a lot of families don't do nowadays. Whenever I hear the term I think "food that's not cooked in a microwave," though I doubt that's the real definition.

If UK's Soil Association has its way, there might be a ban on organic foods imported into the UK. At the very least, the Soil Association would want those foods that are allowed in the UK to be stripped of their "organic" label.

The concern arises because the organic foods are brought into Britain via carbon-emitting flights. The demand for organic foods is rising much faster than UK farmers' ability to supply it. However, increasing the number of flights into the UK with organic foods from elsewhere means that there will be an increase in greenhouse warming.

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Not all organic food is created equal, this an important fact to keep in mind when shopping for healthy food. In an effort to prevent food manufacturers from fraudulently marketing incorrectly labeled food, the USDA has implemented a set of labeling rules to clarify the levels of food purity. They are still somewhat confusing if the consumer is not completely aware of the guidelines for the various levels. The following rules are for foods containing more than one ingredient, such as cereal:

• 100% Organic- means that every ingredient in the product was raised and harvested in an organic environment as approved and certified by the USDA.
• Organic- means that 70 to 95 percent of all the ingredients have been raised in a USDA approved manner
• Any product containing ingredients with less than a 70 percent organic content can separately list each ingredient that falls into the USDA organic category, but the product may not display a label claiming the product as organic.

For foods containing one ingredient, such as milk, eggs or fruit, an official USDA Organic label is displayed on the package or the fruit.

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