Are companies with a vested interest in the outcome of environmental assessment studies qualified to conduct those studies themselves? A pilot project announced by an agency at the United States Department of Agriculture is preparing to give for-profit corporations the ability to do just that.
Earlier this month, the USDA’s
Continue Reading Who Should Conduct Biotech Crop Assessments?
Pretend you’re an inspector for the Hawaiian Department of Agriculture and you’ve just arrived to examine several pallets full of produce — bagged spinach, for example.
You know that the ideal temperature for transporting spinach, a particularly fragile green, is 32° F. You also know this spinach has been sitting
Continue Reading RFID Knows Where a Product Is and What It's Doing
Calling it a modest step with enormous implications, San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar urged the city’s other supervisors to place new restrictions on the use of toys to promote fast food meals to children.
While city residents lined up in the basement of City Hall to cast their own ballots
Continue Reading SF Sets Nutritional Standards for Meals with Toys
San Francisco’s efforts to restrict the use of toys to promote fast food for children has been pushed back a couple of weeks. Why? Depends upon whom you talk to.
The city’s 11-member board of supervisors moved Tuesday to postpone a vote on the controversial measure until Nov. 2.
Continue Reading SF Fast Food Toy Ban Too Hot for Pre-Election Vote
In a move industry insiders say could mark the beginning of a national trend, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed new legislation requiring nearly all of the more than one million food handlers in the state of California to be certified in safe food handling procedures.
The new law, Senate Bill 602
Continue Reading California Food Handlers Must Get Safety Training
It’s becoming an increasingly familiar sight in large cities around the country: specialty chefs selling artisan and exotic foods from mobile food carts and trucks on the cities’ streets.
Some cities, such as Portland, Ore., where as many as 500 carts work the streets to feed hungry residents, have
Continue Reading People Love Street Vendors, City Oversight Varies
New regulations for controlling the spread of a form of Salmonella, whose mode of transmission still isn’t entirely understood, kicked into effect last Friday. The new regulations, the FDA insists, could reduce the number of illnesses by as many as 79,000 people, and deaths by up to 30 individuals, each
Continue Reading Egg Producers Implement New Salmonella Controls
Part II in a II-part series on Linda Rivera’s battle with E. coli O157:H7.
Once a week, Jeanine Iyala loads her two kids into the car and makes the roughly 60-mile round trip from Pleasanton to San Francisco to visit her step-mother at Davies Medical Center. Traveling any distance with
Continue Reading An E. coli Patient’s Will to Live, Part II
Part I in a II-part series on Linda Rivera’s battle with E. coli O157:H7.
It’s one of those glorious, fogless summer days in San Francisco when the winds whisk the skies clear and everyone is outside basking in sunlight. From Linda Rivera’s hospital room at Davies Medical Center, you can
Continue Reading Linda Rivera: An E. coli Patient’s Will to Live
Do inexpensive plastic toys lure children–or their parents–into making unhealthy food choices? A leading consumer advocacy group believes they do and is threatening to sue fast food giant McDonald’s if the company doesn’t end its practice of using toys to promote its products.
The Center for Science in the Public
