A list of food policy blogs at blogs.com

I was asked by blogs.com from Six Apart to compile a list of 10 food policy blogs.

In this list, [Parke] looked beyond the excellent sites that already appeared in a recent list at Culinate, which included Ethicurean, Green Fork, ChewsWise, Food Politics, Politics of the Plate, Grist, Civil Eats, and Obama Foodorama. Parke’s list adds some more blogs from within what might loosely be called the “good food movement,” but it emphasizes other selections that he reads to maintain diversity in his information stream.

Food Law Prof Blog
For legal news and insight, a member of the Law Professor Blog Network. More legal blogging comes from the Agricultural Law blog.

Amber Waves
The dry but substantial electronic magazine from USDA’s Economic Research Service, with accompanying RSS feed, is enough like a blog to make this list. In the same vein, one could mention Choices electronic magazine from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

La Vida Locavore
A thick stream of news and policy commentary from a local food perspective.

Blogriculture
By the staff of Capital News agriculture newspaper.

Farm Policy
A thorough summary of daily agricultural news coverage, with excerpts and little editorial commentary.

Fooducate
Practical food shopping advice. No pills. No industry affiliation.

Center for a Livable Future Blog
Focusing on industrialized food production systems.

Marler Blog
Commentary on food poisoning outbreaks and litigation.

TEFAP Alliance Blog
News about food assistance programs and the anti-hunger movement.

Daily Bread
The food business blog at Slate’s site, The Big Money.

10 U.S. food policy destinations

For people who want to know where their food comes from, Google Maps offers a profound passport to the landscape you choose to view, in place of the pastoral image that an interested party wants you to view. For most of these locations, you can explore even more using the street view feature.

10. The world's largest pork slaughterhouse, the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, NC, where workers are voting this month on a collective contract after years of company resistance to union organizing. For what it's worth, the Rolling Stone magazine doesn't think so highly of Smithfield.


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9. Center-pivot irrigated fields drawing from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being depleted by municipal and agricultural use.


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8. Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia.


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7. The largest urban community farm in the United States, 14 acres in South Central Los Angeles, topic of the documentary movie, now bulldozed this year.


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6. Phosphate strip mines and accompanying retention lagoons in the Bone Valley in Florida, generator of mountains upon mountains of slightly radioactive phosphogypsum waste that nobody knows how to dispose safely, source of 75% of phosphate used in U.S. agriculture, and hence an essential engine of agricultural industrialization.


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5. The Canada / U.S. border between Montana and Saskatchewan. What makes this view fascinating is that this border was drawn along a line of latitude, not according to the landscape, so there is no fundamental natural difference in the land on the two sides of the border. Use the left and right scroll key to range for hundreds of miles in either direction and absorb a deep lesson in how policy influences the way land is used.


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4. Farmland conversion to suburban style housing developments in eastern Pennsylvania, near the farm where my grandfather grew up and where my wife and I were married outdoors, with cows mooing nearby. Am I understanding this image correctly? Perhaps Google Maps has updated its street database more quickly than its satellite images, so that this image superimposes the names of the environmentally foolhardy cul-de-sac style subdivision streets over the slightly older satellite image of (on the left) the construction sites and (on the right) the farms that once were there?


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3. Pineapple countryside in Hawaii, just because it's pretty.


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2. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in North Carolina.


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1. In the Iowa heartland, the little 1-mile distance indicator ruler from Google Maps is redundant.


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Please contribute your own additions to this list in the comments section.

Facebook, targeted ads, and body image

Like many, I am undecided about the role of advertising business models in free web software. The price is right, but is that all that matters? I like Gmail, but it bothers me to see targeted ads based on things I wrote in my non-public correspondence. I have never become addicted to wasting time on Facebook, using a page there mainly as a point of contact for distant friends and colleagues (and as a place to post an RSS feed for U.S. Food Policy). Facebook is good for those uses, but the ads there also seem crude and manipulative. Today, Rachel Beckman in the Washington Post puts the nail in the coffin. The lead sentence is, "My Facebook page called me fat." She describes targeted weight loss ads that prey on women's body image insecurities, based on demographic profile information known to Facebook from their participation in the social networking site.

Northeast Food and Farm Network

A social networking site with a sustainable agriculture focus in the Northeast.

More fun with Google Trends

The Google engine seems to attribute a late November 2006 spike in searches for "turkey" to the following Nov. 29 headline: "Pope seeks 'brotherhood' in Turkey."


Any other theories?

The internet and food policy advocacy

In yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bob Condor offered U.S. Food Policy's coverage of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) as an example of using the internet to organize communities in support of public interest food policy positions. Condor's jumping off point was a description of the Chicago-based public interest marketing organization Sustain, which supports family and organic farming in the Midwest:

There are many perspectives about whether the Internet is dividing us or uniting people and communities.

Food activists tend to fall on the side of communitybuilding.

"It used to take days or even weeks to get the word out about an issue or rally," one organic food activist told me several years ago. "Our new weapon is e-mail. We can mobilize people in hours now. It's powerful -- and, believe me, we need it."

That activist, Chicagobased Jim Slama, and his green public relations and marketing firm, Sustain (sustainusa.org), were central figures in convincing U.S. consumers to send more than 275,000 e-mails and postings to the Department of Agriculture in 2000 to take exception to the proposed National Organic Standards.

Before then, organic certification was more in the hands of food activists who wanted to discourage the use of pesticides and other chemicals in plants. The private National Organic Standards Board was adamant that the proposed rules would allow irradiated and/or genetically engineered foods to qualify as organic, plus sewage sludge would be acceptable for watering any "organic"-label food.

Yuck.

But those 275,000 comments worked, thanks in large part to Slama and other activists spreading the word about an extended public comment period. The USDA couldn't neglect the number of comments (and prospective voters) no matter how many lobbyists might be knocking on their doors. By 2001, the final organic rule was passed after reinstating prohibitions on irradiation, genetically modified seed and that nasty sewage sludge.

Sustain's project on family farming, FamilyFarmed.org, was recently chosen at the NetSquared conference as one of 21 public interest projects for future funding and mentoring from leading social networking experts in Silicon Valley.