Happy Meals aren’t so happy anymore in Santa Clara County, California. Beginning this month it will now be illegal for restaurants to include a toy with a kid’s meal that contains “excessive calories, sodium, sugar or fat.” Obviously those hardest hit by the measure will be fast food chains who for years have offered children [...]

For the 4th year in a row, our nation’s honeybee numbers have drastically dropped. The phenomenon, called colony collapse disorder (CCD), has taken the lives of billions of honeybees across the globe. It has farmers and scientists worried, and it should have us worried too. That’s because estimates are that “a third of everything we [...]

When budget cuts are the norm and deficits are abounding, libraries are usually viewed as the most expendable public services. But Baltimore, Maryland is proving that libraries are worth more than their weight in books. A new city program there is aiming to make healthier food more readily available to residents living in “food deserts” [...]

When it comes to breast cancer, it seems that no product is safe from the branding of the pink ribbon. It’s been emblazened on t-shirts, hats, lighters, tissue boxes, martini glasses, tote bags, and now … buckets of chicken? KFC, partnered with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, will donate 50 cents of every [...]

In an effort to appeal to a younger and edgier audience, the Food Network announced today that starting May 31st it will replace its Fine Living Network with new programming called the Cooking Channel. The channel hopes to compete with networks, like Bravo and TLC, by incorporating more niche cooking shows, more diverse hosts and [...]

Earlier this week McDonald’s announced that it was voting against a proposal, introduced by the Humane Society of the United States, to “require that 5 percent of the eggs purchased for the chain’s restaurants in the United States be the cage-free variety.” The company’s board of directors claim that there is not enough scientific evidence [...]

School lunches have been receiving a lot of attention lately due in part to First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to fight the rising trend of childhood obesity, legislation reauthorizing of the Child Nutrition Act, a midwest teacher under the alias of Mrs. Q who is eating school lunch every day through 2010 (and blogging about [...]

Organizations that help people when they’re down and out are great. Organizations that show people how to help themselves are even better, and a soup kitchen in California is doing just that. By teaching culinary skills, Dorothy’s Place is not only giving its homeless clientele a way to cook for themselves, it is also providing [...]

Convenience foods in the forms of microwave dinners and boxed macaroni & cheese have been in our supermarkets for quite a while. But many are balking at the increasing popularity of pre-sliced and pre-chopped produce. Some call the pre-cut and plastic wrapped vegetables just plain “lazy” and the unnecessary packaging bad for the environment. Others [...]

As if we didn’t have enough evidence of how broken our food system already is, The Washington Post reported today about the increasing number of cases of “food fraud” in the U.S.
“Food fraud” comes in all shapes and sizes; from cow’s milk cheese masquerading as “goat’s milk cheese,” to cheap crab labeled as the [...]