Three of the four plants that manufacture the ammonium hydroxide-treated beef have stopped production for 60 days after the recent public outcry. But a new website attempts (we think without success) to debunk your fears. more ›

The USDA will allow school districts to choose meats without "pink slime." more ›

The American Meat institute insists that the ammonium-treated meat is perfectly fine. Chicago butcher and meat authority Rob Levitt won't touch it. more ›

We're not talking about Green City - we're talking about corporate buyers. In collaboration with the USDA, Chicago-based FamilyFarmed has created a program that helps small farmers break into big markets. more ›

According to the USDA, pork no longer has to be cooked until it's dry and dead. The previous guidelines, which called for pork to be blasted until it was 160 degrees, white and dry (ok, the last two are our personal descriptors) have been revised, and the Tribune reports that 145 degrees is the new accepted temperature. As chefs have been saying for years, pink pork is safe to eat. This won't change our personal habits (we already cook pork pink) but at least maybe we'll be able to use the built-in alarm on our meat thermometer, which is rigged to conform to USDA guidelines. more ›

A few weeks back, we got a chance to have a long chat with Ann Wright, Deputy Under Secretary of Agriculture for Marketing and Regulatory Programs. Wright was speaking at the Family Farmed Expo, promoting a new USDA initiative, "Know your Farmer, Know your Food" that works to promote local and regional innovations in American agriculture. Wright was an advocate for organic and sustainable agriculture and an agriculture advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid before she was appointed to her current post, and has been at the USDA for almost two years. We talked with Wright about what the federal government can do to promote sustainable agriculture, the USDA's sometimes-troubled history with small farms and her belief that large-scale change in the way we farm and eat has already begun. more ›

The proliferation of labels and modifiers on eggs and meat has become fairly epic over the past ten years. We've puzzled over all the phrases in the supermarket, wondering exactly what they mean. Even for nutrition freaks, following the combinations and permutations of free range, free roaming and cage free has become difficult - and it threatens to make genuinely concerned eaters become cynics. Turns out, those labels often do mean something, thought it might be less than you think. Free range, for instance, without doing more research on an individual company, is a fairly useless label. more ›

Earlier in the week, an Alabama law firm announced that it was suing Taco Bell for not having enough beef in its beef. The story quickly went viral, running around the interwebs faster than the Taco Bell chihuahua chasing after a blond girl. Taco Bell issued a response (more of a denial) which we posted. Today, Taco Bell has responded in force, taking out full page ads in major newspapers all over America. The ads read "Thank you for Suing Us" and deny that there is any problem. more ›

Ahh, the paranoia continues. First, it was those insidious “the government is trying to tell you what to eat” TV ads that sadly continue to run even after the election. Now it is the Trib’s Steve Chapman railing on soda taxes and the San Francisco anti-Happy Meal ordinance. You can hear the chorus now, "I'll give you my Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Big Gulp, when you take it from my cold dead hands." more ›

From the inbox: Irv & Shelly's Fresh Picks, the popular service that provides farm-fresh foods to customers via CSAs and weekly produce boxes, has been awarded an $81,000 grant by the United States Department of Agriculture's Small Business Innovation Research Grant Program to "increase the fair trade supply of local food." more ›

The USDA released its annual report on Household Food Security (which is a sanitized way of saying "hunger") yesterday and the results were sobering. An estimated 17 million households, or 14.6 percent of the population, has experienced "food insecurity" at one point in the past twelve months. These figures are the highest since the USDA started tracking numbers in 1995. more ›

Most of us have little time, or desire, to scrutinize food labels. Not to mention doing so can perplex even the most astute shopper. But the ability to quickly interpret a food label, and weed out key information, is requisite to healthy eating. So leave your calculator at home, enter your grocery store armed with patience and a satisfied belly, and consider these key points to efficient label reading. more ›

The USDA has set up a series of "listening sessions" in preparation for reauthorizing the 2009 Child Nutrition Act. The Act, among other things, helps determine school food policy and resources granted to lunch programs. A listening session scheduled tomorrow afternoon from 1-4 p.m. at the department's Food and Nutrition Services Office (77 W. Jackson, 20th floor, room 1331) is your opportunity to let your voice be heard — we're assuming it's the USDA doing the listening — and make your opinions on how our children are fed during school hours known. You'll also be helping out the Healthy Schools Campaign. RSVP here. [The Stew] more ›

According to USDA inspections at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine, violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act resulted in the deaths of rabbits and dogs. According to the Tribune:

Three inspection reports of Loyola's biomedical research from 2006 and 2007 obtained by an animal rights group under the Freedom of Information Act revealed poor veterinary care, inadequately trained personnel and sloppy record keeping. Rabbits died from bacterial infections, and dogs died after they were not sufficiently monitored after surgery, the agency found. more ›

Today's a big day for pest control: The USDA, the Illinois Department of Agriculture and the City announced today that we're the first state to eradicate the Asian longhorned beetle. Go us! more ›