The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) today announced that the District of Columbia Superior Court rejected Smithfield’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit OCA brought against the pork producer in May 2020 under the District of Columbia Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA).
“We are pleased that the court agrees that Smithfield, a producer of industrial factory farm pork, should be held accountable for claims the company makes about the safety of its products and production practices,” said OCA International Director Ronnie Cummins.
In its ruling, the court rejected Smithfield’s argument that no reasonable consumer would rely on the company’s claims that its products are the “safest” possible, that Smithfield is “Leading the industry on food safety.” and that its COVID-19 response “complement[s] the extensive safety measures” used by the company. The court held that such claims plausibly lead reasonable consumers to believe the products are “produced without the use of potentially carcinogenic drugs, have lower-than-average rates of Salmonella contamination, and are not contaminated with particularly dangerous disease strains.”
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I’m one of those “farmers and ranchers for a Green New Deal,” and like a lot of them, my involvement started with soil. I began market gardening in 1994, five years before my wife and I purchased the old tobacco farm where we’ve been doing organic farming ever since.
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COVID-19 has magnified global food insecurity and is driving unhealthy eating and worsening malnutrition, food experts say. They have called for deliberate global investment in food as medicine on the back of growing diet-related illnesses.
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Earlier this year, Americans learned what it looks like when a food system reliant on industrial agriculture, near monopolies and exploited laborers breaks down. Just two months into the pandemic, the meat industry in the most powerful nation in the world was buckling.
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The palm civet is a small omnivorous mammal of Indonesia and other parts of tropical Asia. Emerging from its forest home onto coffee plantations, it’s able to sense the finest coffee fruits of perfect ripeness. Eating them, it digests the pulp and excretes the beans, adding a musky scent to them from its anal glands.
In the 1990s, Indonesian kopi luwak – civet coffee, made from coffee beans that had passed through a civet’s digestive tract – became a new luxury commodity among wealthy coffee-lovers. Market dynamics being what they are, local producers cashed in on the demand by capturing and caging wild civets, force-feeding them coffee beans and selling the produce as cut-price kopi luwak. Though cheaper, the resulting coffee lacked the quality of the original conferred by the civet’s discerning nose, and came at the expense of ecological and animal welfare.
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There is one place that nearly everything that matters in the world today converges: our food and our food system — the complex web of how we grow food, how we produce, distribute, and promote it; what we eat, what we waste, and the policies that perpetuate unimaginable suffering and destruction across the globe that deplete our human, social, economic, and natural capital.
Food is the nexus of most of our world’s health, economic, environmental, climate, social, and even political crises. While this may seem like an exaggeration, it is not. The problem is much worse than we think. After reading Food Fix you will be able to connect the dots of this largely invisible crisis and understand why fixing our foodsystem is central to the health and well-being of our population, our environment, our climate, our economy, and our very survival as aspecies. You will also understand the forces, businesses, and policies driving the catastrophe, and the people, businesses, and governments that are providing hope and a path to fixing our dysfunctional food system.
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More than five months have passed since the nation and world have come under the grip of the coronavirus. Today, as Covid-19 continues to surge throughout the U.S., we wait in lines to get into stores, wear face coverings (well, at least most of us), follow floor markers to help ensure social distancing, and shop quickly to get in and out with our groceries.
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In Alabama’s Black Belt, where COVID rates are high and hospitals are understaffed, Dr. Marlo Paul and her plant biologist husband, Anthony, are making house calls and providing free herbal remedies from their own farm.
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Coca-Cola Co. and academics at its front group Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN) tried to obscure Coke’s central role and funding for the group, according to a new study published today in Public Health Nutrition. Coke and the academics tried to dilute the apparent size of Coke’s $1.5 million contribution as well as the company’s role in creating the GEBN. Coke also maintained an “email family” of public health academics whom Coke used to promote its interests.
The study was based on documents obtained via state public records requests by U.S. Right to Know, an investigative public health and consumer group. Coke created the GEBN to downplay the links between obesity and sugary drinks, as a part of its “war” with the public health community. GEBN went defunct in 2015.
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Certain humans have plotted for centuries to kill the Amazon. Photographic evidence confirms that this scheme is now reaching a flaming, thundering crescendo, with tens of thousands of intentional fires and bulldozers tearing through the Amazonian rainforest, destroying acres every second.
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