Baby on Vegan Diet Dies

Murder convictions upheld against vegans in baby's death

By Bill Rankin 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday unanimously upheld murder convictions against an Atlanta couple who allowed their 6-week-old baby to starve to death.

Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas, both vegans, were convicted in 2007 by a Fulton County jury. Living in the Darlington Apartments, they chose to have their son, Crown Shakur, born in a bathtub with no medical aid.

When they took the infant to nearby Piedmont Hospital on April 24, 2005, the baby was emaciated, weighing 3 1/2 pounds. He died of extreme malnourishment. Police said his diet consisted of only soy milk and apple juice.    Read More

This is certainly a tragic case but hopefully because of the death of this baby more people will realize the importance of a balanced diet.  

Moms On The Farm

Moms Day Out On The Farm
By Alex Hoffman
Published: July 13, 2010, 5:02 PM
Keloland.com

HARTFORD, SD - Whether you are shopping for yourself or feeding a family, people are spending more time studying food labels.

On Tuesday, a group of moms went beyond the packaging and got a firsthand look at where it all comes from.

Surrounded by miles of rolling hills, the farm is normally a quiet oasis. But Tuesday, this land north of Hartford became an outdoor classroom.

Women are taking a break from work and families to find out exactly what it takes to get food from the field to the fridge.

"I think it'd be fun for them to see where it all starts from instead of just going to the grocery store and saying, 'Well, that’s where chicken comes from,' or 'That’s where pork comes from,'” hog farmer Dennis Steineke said.

Most of these women have very little experience being on a farm and say they're excited to learn what it's all about.

"It's good to learn about how farming works and how we get our meat and how the animals are taken from the farm to how we get them in the grocery store,” participant Jackie Studenski said.
Read More

This is a terrific program sponsored by Ag United. I’ve mentioned on this blog many times the importance of showing consumers what we do. There are those in our industry that talk about being advocates and there are those that actually do something. If you ever get the chance to host a tour of your farm or ranch jump on it. Thanks to Ag United and these South Dakota producers for hosting this tour.

Report Backs Non-Conventional Practices

National council report backs sustainable food
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Wednesday, June 30, 2010

(06-30) 04:00 PDT Washington - -- The prestigious National Research Council threw its considerable heft behind the sustainable food movement Tuesday with a 570-page report that endorses the new food and farm practices that began in the Bay Area and have taken the nation by storm.

There are now twice as many farmers - 30,000 to 40,000 - selling local meat and produce in farmers' markets than there are growing cotton, a major industrial crop, said August Schumacher, an author of the report and a former undersecretary of agriculture in the George H.W. Bush administration.

"This is not just San Francisco, Boston and New York," Schumacher said of what has been called alternative agriculture but is fast going mainstream - everything from the locavore, organic and "slow food" movements to animal welfare advocacy. "It's Kansas City. It's Boise, Idaho. It's Abingdon, Va."

External costs

While the industrial farm model has generated astonishing efficiency gains and lowered the cost of food, the report found, it has imposed enormous external costs on the environment, human health, animal welfare and workers that are not included in the price of food.

Julia Kornegay, the chair of the committee that wrote the report and chair of the department of horticulture science at North Carolina State University, said the industrial farm system has become increasingly fragile and prone to outside shocks such as a sudden increase in oil or feed prices, water shortages or concerns about food safety.

Produced by a dozen academic and industry leaders and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the report squares off against a growing backlash by proponents of industrial agriculture to what they see as a utopian and romanticized vision of pastoral life that would take food production back to the 19th century and starve the world.

"A post-materialist fantasy," is what Robert Paarlberg, a member of the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the National Research Council and a leading food policy academic, has called the new food movement.

Paarlberg says the new food movement is playing out on Africa's small, impoverished farms, where most of the continent's people earn $1 a day, where 80 percent of the labor is done by women and children, where animals forage, insecticides and herbicides are unaffordable and food imports are the only barrier to starvation. Read More


Here is what this article says, America’s farmers and ranchers had done an incredible job of feeding our country and others at the most affordable price in the world, BUT, that needs to be changed. Their claims that food production is too vulnerable to things like high oil prices are an extremely narrow point of view. That doesn’t justify families having to pay much higher food prices all the time. When inputs go up, so do prices. No type of farming will prevent that.

Here’s another thing that seems apparent. The people that were studying this issue went into it with the pre-conceived bias that the current food production system is bad and needs changed. You can tell this by the broad statements made such as the environment needs to be protected. I don’t know anyone that’s involved in agriculture that doesn’t care about the soil and water that generate their livelihood. I get tired of hearing people say that I don’t care about things like that. I don’t care what type of production system you use, if you don’t care about things like that you will be out of business very quickly.

A well-fed society neglects it’s agriculture. Those words have never been more true than they are today.

Consumer Investigates Her Food

Is organic food really better?

By Elizabeth Meryment

From: The Sunday Telegraph

May 02, 2010 12:12AM



SO you buy organic over conventional produce? I set out to investigate and uncovered some surprising facts.



A couple of years ago I was making a quiche when a weird thing happened. I was cracking egg after egg into a bowl when I noticed these were not ordinary eggs. I took a second look at the packet and saw that I’d accidentally bought the biodynamic, organic, free-range eggs that cost top dollar at my greengrocer.



The amazing thing was the eggs had such rich, golden yolks that the quiche wasn’t its usual yellow colour but a bright pumpkin-orange. And the finished dish tasted incredible. Even my three-year-old noticed the difference. “Look, Mummy, it’s orange!” she cried when I offered her a slice.I try to buy these organic eggs every time I shop, but the price is usually prohibitive. Yet whenever I’m cooking with eggs I can’t help but wonder about the benefit of organic over non-organic food.



While some in the health industry claim that organic food has properties that give it an almost healing quality, is this actually true? And if so, should we feel guilty whenever we select a conventionally grown apple or carrot over the more expensive organic option?



Speak to advocates of organic farming and they will tell you that yes, their produce is almost always better than that which is produced conventionally – that is, using pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers.



“There are some very good studies that show that on balance organic food has higher levels of nutrition,” says Andre Leu, chair of the Organic Federation of Australia. “The data we have from Australia and around the world tends to be consistent. The number one reason people buy organic is for health reasons and concern about the use of pesticides.



Associate Professor Samir Samman, from the School of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Sydney, says there is little evidence to suggest that organic food is nutritionally better than conventional food, especially in relation to fresh fruit and vegetables.



In a yet-to-be released major study that has been accepted for publication in the international scientific journal Critical Reviews In Food Science And Nutrition, Professor Samman and his team “surveyed the international literature and critically evaluated the results” – and they aren’t heartening for the organics industry.



“Our review showed [that] when all the published articles on this topic are considered, organic food is reported to contain more vitamin C and phosphorous than conventionally produced food,” Professor Samman says. “[But] when the articles are scrutinised for scientific quality, and only the better-quality articles are considered, only phosphorous remained significantly higher in organic food as compared with conventional foods."



"Phosphorous is not in any way a limiting nutrient in the diet. The presence of higher amounts in organic food has probably little significance. We conclude from the analysis that the nutrient composition differs very little between foods that are produced by organic and conventional methods." Read More



Throwing wild accusations around about the food some family farmers and ranchers produce helps no one. For me personally, I never trust anyone whose main marketing plan to sell something is to degrade the competition. I think if you have a good product to sell it’s not necessary. In food production, the choices we can provide to the consumer are almost hard to believe. It’s a fantastic accomplishment that needs to be celebrated. Instead we have some farmers and ranchers who feel the need to destroy the family down the road that uses a different production method. There is no perfect system, all of them have positives and negatives associated with them.

Baltimore Schools Feed Kids Unbalanced School Lunch

Baltimore schools adopt Meatless Monday
October 1, 2009 by Ken Anderson

The Baltimore City Public Schools system is the first school system in the U.S. to adopt Meatless Monday.

Meatless Monday is a campaign that encourages people to cut meat from their diet one day a week. Baltimore school officials say they hope their Meatless Mondays will help students understand there are other options than just “meat and potatoes” for every meal.

In conjunction with Meatless Monday, the Baltimore school system is working with local farmers to provide it with fresh produce. It has also introduced what it calls “a teaching farm” and has plans to establish a garden at each of the systems’ more than 200 schools.

Among those praising the Baltimore schools’ effort is controversial Cal-Berkely author Michael Pollan, a frequent critic of modern production agriculture. In his words, “If Baltimore can pull this off, it will be a sign that the effort is worth making.” Link

So rather than teach kids how to properly eat a balanced diet every day, they are going to encourage a radical fad diet that encourages ignoring an entire food group. School officials stated that they want students to understand that there are other options. Apparently it’s to show that there are options other than a balanced diet. This was obviously a political decision that’s being forced on students. As a parent, I want my kids to eat a diet in which they get the proper servings from all of the food groups.