Category: Food

Cottage Food Laws

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Not only can cottage food laws free entrepreneurs from Kafkaesque government inspections, using their own kitchens to bake means they no longer have to rent out commercial kitchens, which can be expensive and not available in every city.

Take Patricia Kline of ipies.

“The biggest barrier to starting a food business is finding and keeping a commercial kitchen,” she remarked.  “And once you do have a kitchen, you have to compete with other food producers who also want to use the space.”  In the middle of her busiest season, Kline once lost her spot at four different commercial kitchens.

But thanks to the cottage food law, she can instead use her own kitchen at her apartment in San Francisco, slashing her costs.  She’s also gained “flexibility in baking:”  “The law has enabled me to take advantage of last minute orders.”

The Forbes Article

Sounds like with some sensible health safeguards home food enterprises can be safe, and very low cost economic development.

Nutrition Labels

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Choosing healthier foods at the grocery store may soon be a little easier.

The Food and Drug Administration is proposing several changes to the nutrition labels you see on packaged foods and beverages. If approved, the new labels would place a bigger emphasis on total calories, added sugars and certain nutrients, such as Vitamin D and potassium.

The FDA is also proposing changes to serving size requirements in an effort to more accurately reflect what people usually eat or drink. For example, if you buy a 20-ounce soda, you’re probably not going to stop drinking at the 8-ounce mark. The new rules would require that entire soda bottle to be one serving size — making calorie counting simpler.

The CNN Article

It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond ?

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Final-Crop-Map_1

California, supplier of nearly half of all US fruits, veggies, and nuts, is on track to experience the driest year in the past half millennium. Farms use about 80 percent of the state’s “developed water,” or water that’s moved from its natural source to other areas via pipes and aqueducts.

As the maps above show, much of California’s agriculture is concentrated in the parts of the state that the drought has hit the hardest. For example: Monterey County, which is currently enduring an “exceptional drought,” according to the US Drought Monitor, grew nearly half of America’s lettuce and broccoli in 2012.

The Mother Jones Article

Bread

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For the last half-century or so, says Jones, wheat has been bred for industrial mills, where it is ground and separated into its three components: flour, germ, and bran. Usually, the flour gets turned into white bread, while the germ and bran—which contain all of wheat’s healthy fats and fiber, and much of the vitamins—go to other uses, including supplements and livestock feed. In most of what we now know as “whole wheat” bread, some—but not all—of the bran and germ are mixed back in.

For Jones, these are inferior products—both in nutrition and taste terms. So he has been working with farmers in the Pacific Northwest to develop wheat varieties that can be milled into flour that’s suitable for being baked directly into bread. And it falls to McDowell—who took over the role of the lab’s baker from Jones himself last year—to show the world that 100 percent whole-wheat bread isn’t just edible, but delicious.

According to Jones and McDowell, low-quality industrial white flours and fast-rising commercial yeasts, along with additives like vital wheat gluten—a wheat product added to give bread structure despite superfast rises—have generated a backlash against bread in the form of the “gluten-free” craze. While people with celiac disease genuinely can’t process the gluten in wheat, they argue, most people actually can. The problem is that most industrial bakeries only allow bread to rise for a matter of minutes—not nearly long enough to let the yeast and bacteria digest all the gluten in the flour, let alone the extra dose in the additives. The result can lead to all kinds of problems in our gut.

The Article (with recipes/methods)

GMO Free Farming in Illinois

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But where does non-GMO food come from? After all, 90 percent of America’s corn and soybeans are genetically modified, and producers of eggs, milk and meat rely on those crops to feed their animals. Soy oil and corn starch are used throughout the industry. Can big food companies really avoid GMOs?

Looking for the answer, I ended up at one of the first links in the non-GMO supply chain: a corn processing facility just north of the small town of Cerro Gordo, in west-central Illinois.

The NPR Report