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ABC News/Disney had to pay BPI $177 MILLION for faulty reporting. That does not include what ABC's insurance company had to pay the company.

In a footnote on page 1 and again on page 8 of its third quarter earnings release The Walt Disney Company makes note of a $177 million charge affecting its earnings. That charge comes from ABC News settling a defamation lawsuit over its reporting of so-called pink slime. Beef Products Inc. (BPI) sued ABC News and correspondent Jim Avila for $1.9 billion dollars over what it claimed were “false and misleading and defamatory” statements about its product known as Lean Finely Textured Beef. After 5 years of pre-trial, the case went before a South Dakota judge in early June. It...

To get protesters to leave the Local Butcher Shop alone, the Berkeley meat market’s owners agreed to promote an animal rights message. Now, in the upper left corner of one of the store’s front windows, there’s a 15-inch-by-15-inch sign. In white letters on a black background, it reads: “Attention: Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust, no matter how it’s done.” In exchange for putting up the sign, Direct Action Everywhere, an animal rights group, agreed to protest at the store only twice a year.

Do you choose “organic” produce because it’s healthier and locally grown? Think again. A new report on how the U.S. Department of Agriculture actually markets the organic label without any standard of certification, doesn’t do any field-testing and, through its bureaucracy grew exponentially during the Obama administration, is driving up imports from China, Turkey and other countries with disastrous safety records.

Most of us don’t spend our days plowing fields or wrangling cattle. We’re part of the 99 percent of Americans who eat food, but don’t produce it. Because of our intimate relationship with food, and because it's so crucial to our health and the environment, people should be very concerned about how it’s produced. But we don’t always get it right. Next time you’re at the grocery store, consider these 10 modern myths about the most ancient occupation.

A 2009 study conducted by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited some alarming facts about Chinese farm-raised seafood.

Ten people in Alaska were recently infected with what is now a relatively rare parasitic worm that they got from eating walrus meat, according to a new report.

Almost 2 billion people now rely on imported food, new research shows. The study, conducted by scientists at Aalto University in the Netherlands, is one of the first to analyze the connections between resource scarcity, population growth and food imports. It was published this week in the journal Earth's Future. "Although this has been a topic of global discussion for a long time, previous research has not been able to demonstrate a clear connection between resource scarcity and food imports," postdoctoral researcher Miina Porkka said in a news release. "We performed a global analysis focusing on regions where water availability...

For several years anti-abortion advocates have been warning that a new technology for enhancing flavors such as sweetness and saltiness uses aborted fetal cells in the process. The biotech company using this novel process, Senomyx, has signed contracts with Pepsi, Ajinomoto Co. (the maker of aspartame and meat glue), Nestlé and other food and beverage companies over the past several years. The primary goal for many of these processed food companies is to make foods and beverages tasty while reducing sugar and salt content. While Senomyx refuses to disclose the details of the process, its patent applications indicate that part...

'I've lived here 50 years and no, we've never had anything like this,' deputy mayor says Another winter blizzard is hitting Churchill, where people are already desperate for groceries that have been delayed since the last blizzard two weeks ago. "A lot of families are suffering because they have young children and they need milk," said local resident Lana Bilenduke. No bread or vegetables are for sale at the local store and meat is scarce, she said. "Everyone's in a crisis until we get our groceries in." The northern Manitoba town is in the midst of near-zero visibility, wind gusts...

And it pretty much tastes like chicken, according to people who were offered samples Tuesday in San Francisco, before a planned big reveal on Wednesday by Memphis Meats Inc. Scientists, startups and animal-welfare activists believe the new product could help to revolutionize the roughly $200 billion U.S. meat industry. Their goal: Replace billions of cattle, hogs and chickens with animal meat they say can be grown more efficiently and humanely in stainless steel bioreactor tanks. Startups including Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, have been pursuing the concept. They call it “clean meat,” a spin on “clean...

According to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration statement released Friday, Evanger’s, a family-owned and -operated cat and dog food business, decided to voluntarily recall five lots of the product – all of the Hunk of Beef products that were manufactured that same week. The products were distributed to retail locations and sold online in these states: Washington, California, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Hunk of Beef is Evanger’s best-selling food. Pets nationwide consume more than one million cans of the product each year, the company said in a...

Call it the first sign of the aporkalypse: The nation could be facing a bacon shortage, with stocks of the salty strips at their lowest since 1957 due to a surge in demand (bacon ice cream, anyone?). Recent data from the USDA shows that 2016 inventory for frozen pork belly, which puts the B in your BLT, is down 35.6 million pounds from 2015 levels.

Jam and jelly maker Smucker's is planning a $340 million manufacturing operation in Longmont that could bring as many as 500 jobs to the area.

Could your rice be made out of PLASTIC? Shocking footage of 'an underground food factory' sparks fears of fake grains Video shows a worker producing white granules out of plastic Many people in China claimed the man was making fake rice Fears of toxic grains have spread on Chinese social media However, other claimed the final product was for industrial use By Tracy You and Julian Luk For Mailonline Published: 18:29 GMT, 9 November 2016 | Updated: 08:21 GMT, 10 November 2016 A video of workers feeding plastic into a machine to produce white, rice-like granules has sparked fears on...

(dpa) - There was once a Hereford cow that ate "100 per cent grass" in the green, green meadows of Ireland. Its demise was painless. Its meat was dry-aged for three weeks to give it lots of flavour. You can also check every detail of its history by using a smartphone to scan the QR codes affixed to its package at the newly opened Meat Market store, a top-tier meat emporium in Hamburg, Germany. And it's eye-poppingly expensive. "Lots of people have had enough with the mistreatment of livestock and scandals in the meat industry, like when horsemeat is passed...

Food scientists at Cornell University have produced a strain of broccoli that thrives in hot environments, which may make it possible for states with stiflingly hot summers to grow the vegetable. California, where cool coastal fog is perfect for growing standard broccoli, currently produces more than 90 percent of the broccoli grown in the United States. If California were to disappear, what would the American diet be like? Expensive and grainy. California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95...

Just in time for the holidays, an industrywide shortage of canned whipped topping, such as Reddi-wip, appears to be looming after a fatal explosion at a Florida nitrous oxide plant in late August stunted the supply chain. Conagra Brands, the Chicago-based food manufacturer that makes Reddi-wip, confirmed Monday that its supply of nitrous oxide — a propellant for aerosol toppings — was affected by the blast. Spokeswoman Lanie Friedman said stores still have the product in stock, but supplies may be limited in the peak holiday season, when consumers are indulging in pies, hot chocolate and other desserts that call...

Here’s an excerpt from the Wheat Belly Cookbook about modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat, what I call the “Frankengrain” because of the extensive and bizarre changes introduced into this grass by geneticists and agribusiness. (Even though a cookbook, I tried to make the Wheat Belly Cookbook a standalone book that discusses the background on why and how the Wheat Belly lifestyle yields such unexpected and extravagant health and weight loss successes. For this reason, the first 90 pages of the cookbook reiterate many of the Wheat Belly basic concepts.)From the Wheat Belly Cookbook: Wheat encapsulates a fundamental dilemma of our technological...

TOKYO -- The glass eel trade is coming under international scrutiny. Already, cultured eels account for more than 99% of the world's supplies. But the farming of these eels is totally reliant on elvers born in the wild. Although techniques to create artificial breeders to allow for the full cultivation of eels have been established, commercial production, as in the case of tuna, remains impossible. A big problem is that much of the glass eel trade essentially takes place in the dark. In Japan, the Fisheries Agency calculates the volume of the country's eel catches by subtracting the amount of...