Discussions of what we do and don’t know about the relationship between health and diet.
Farm Tech and Fake Food What Will We Eat and Where Will It Comes From? An annoying part of many contemporary conversations is the endless quibbling over terms. Should we call it lab grown meat, cultured tissue, clean meat, or something else? Exactly what is Regenerative Farming, and how does it differ from organic? Does...
How Should We Compare Meat Alternatives to Meat? First, a confession: I have never eaten an Impossible Burger, though my brother has. He reported it to be made of a bland, somewhat meaty substance that tasted innocuous enough when dressed up with plenty of sauce, cheese, and veggies. This may not sound delicious, but it...
Omega 3s: Good News and Bad Headlines “Higher levels of omega-3 acids in the blood increases life expectancy by almost five years,” reads a headline from SciTech Daily. Reporting on the same study, that bastion of moderation The Daily Mail says, “Not eating oily fish regularly can shorten life expectancy more than smoking, study reveals.” The...
A recent article in Foreign Policy praising industrial caught my attention. (Big Agriculture Is Best by Ted Norhaus and Dan Blaustei-Rejto.) What I noticed was not the list of points about scales of efficiency, which are common enough. Instead, what I’ve been thinking about since reading it is how it frames this argument in relation to...
By Garth Brown Over the past couple years the company Beyond Meat, maker of fake burgers and sausage, has managed to attract the sort of breathless, credulous coverage that’s usually reserved for tech startups and royal marriages. The spin is always that if enough people simply decide to replace meat with a combination of ground...
By Garth Brown It’s likely you didn’t notice - a few other important topics have been in the news - but a statement by the USDA last month signals the end of one of the sneakiest, snakiest, slimiest labelling practices around. I am talking about the great nitrate hoax, a tricky way brands have for years cloaked...
The Definitive Guide to Pastured Turkey Why You Need This Guide There’s a lot of stress and uncertainty when it comes to cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. This is only heightened when it’s a high-quality, pastured turkey, rather than a bargain bin bird grabbed from the supermarket meat case. But it does not have to be...
By Garth Brown Can you guess what Panorama Grass-Fed Meats, Niman Ranch, Coleman Natural, Sonoma Red and now Pasturebird have in common? Given their names it would be natural to assume they’re all plucky upstarts trying to provide an alternative to industrial agriculture, and some of them were precisely this at one point. But what...
By Garth Brown This is the third post in a series. It should stand on its own, but for the full context read here and here. The recent history of farming cannot be separated from the recent history of advances in agricultural technology. In the narrowest sense that has always been the case. Tilling with wooden tools allows...
By Garth Brown There’s been a recent advance in genetic manipulation that has big implications for livestock. The process is reasonably straightforward, but a theoretical example can help to explain it. Imagine two rams. The first, who we’ll call Lord Ramsington, comes in pretty high in the ranks of sheep, at least from a farmer’s perspective. He’s...