Free Republic

Thirteen years after Morgan Spurlock’s hit documentary Super Size Me put the fast-food industry on blast and the filmmaker on the map as one of the modern era’s best-known documentarians, Spurlock is back with a sequel. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! will have its world premiere on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival (screening details for those in Toronto for the fest can be found here). Whereas in the original film, the Oscar-nominated Spurlock attempted to eat only McDonald’s food products for a 30-day period, Super Size Me 2 finds the filmmaker opening up his own fast-food establishment,...

Citrus costs could rise if Hurricane Irma, which is deemed a category 5, makes landfall in certain regions of Florida, as the state heads toward harvest season for oranges, but other vegetables could also see prices spike. Depending on where Irma makes landfall, produce prices will fluctuate, said Giacomo Santangelo, an economics professor at Fordham University in New York and Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J. Florida is the main producer of oranges in the U.S., although California and Texas also grow them. "We can expect the prices of citrus fruits such as oranges, limes, tangelos and grapefruit to...

The anti-whaling organisation Sea Shepherd will not contest the Southern Ocean against Japanese whalers this season, Captain Paul Watson has announced, accusing “hostile governments” in the US, Australia and New Zealand of acting “in league with Japan” against the protest vessel. Sea Shepherd has been obstructing Japanese whaling vessels in the Southern Ocean each year since 2005, but Watson said the cost of sending vessels south, Japan’s increased use of military technology to track them, and new anti-terrorism laws passed specifically to thwart Sea Shepherd’s activities made physically tracking the ships impossible.

The price of Rat meat goes up in Thailand I rarely copy a news story but a story about eating rats I can't pass up. This story from PDN about the price of rat meat in Phitsanulok. Before you think that's it's only poor farmers eating rats, the cost of rat meat is double that of chicken and pork. This lady says it costs 250 baht a kilogram for a big rodent, not that i'm noting to buy a whole kilo of it! Still I've eaten rat meat and although I prefer fried frog, fried rat isn't too bad...

Full headline: Would you eat a burger made from INSECTS? Mealworm-based food line set to hit grocery stores in Switzerland next week Switzerland's second-largest supermarket chain, Coop, announced it would begin selling an insect burger, and insect balls, based on protein-rich mealworm. ... Swiss food safety laws were changed last May to allow for the sale of food items containing three types of insects: crickets, grasshoppers and mealworms, which are the larval form of the mealworm beetle. These insects, long used in animal feed, must be bred under strict supervision for four generations before they are considered appropriate for human...

You may want to rethink having that bowl of corn flakes for breakfast. New research by experts at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles show that cereal is making people obese. Published in the journal of Nature Communications, the paper states that chemical ingredients commonly used in breakfast cereals are having distressing effects on our bodies. Looking at the effects of three different chemicals commonly ingested or exposed to humans, they found that each one was damaging the hormones needed to communicate between our brains and our stomach. When all three were combined, the damage was worse. One of the...

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream had to figure it would be one of the last firms in America to come under attack from the liberal misinformation complex. It has created flavors to honor Democrat politicians, contributed to Democrat campaigns and positioned itself well to the left on social and employment issues. It has cultivated an image of the “good capitalist,” which can create jobs, lead in its field and do it all in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. But when there became a bigger fish to fry, all the loyalty the company thought it had earned suddenly dried up....

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.