Free Republic

French fries may soon be bullied out of school cafeterias if the government gets its way, but Big Tater isn’t backing down. Rallying around school food service professionals and members of Congress, the spud industry is pushing back against a U.S. Department of Agriculture proposal to limit starchy vegetables in school meals to just one cup per week. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins picked potatoes as a child. “The rule simply goes too far,” she said during an Oct. 5 luncheon hosted by the National Potato Council. “It makes no sense whatsoever.” While the Obama administration points its finger at...

First they came for the donuts, and few dared to defend partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Then they came for the soft drinks, declaring high-fructose corn syrup verboten. Now they’re after lima beans, peas, and corn, moving us ever closer to a national diet of tofu and kale. “They,” in this latest case of dietary despotism, is the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). As required by Congress, the agency recently proposed stricter nutrition standards for school-based breakfast and lunch programs. More than 98,000 elementary and secondary schools will be affected—at a cost exceeding $3.4...

When the FDA answered FTCLDF (Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund) in the interstate shipment of raw milk suit, they stated four fully repugnant things. That you have no right to, nor does your child have a right to any particular food, you have no right to bodily or physical health, that you have no right to contract, and that they are “rationally” fulfilling their public health mission. It appears that they forgot to include that you have no right to privacy or free association along with no right of contract. With the recent actions against Rawesome, sting operations against...

BANGOR, Maine — A local woman saw a young couple opening water bottles and dumping out the contents in front of Shaw’s grocery store on Saturday and pulled out her iPhone and videoed the two brazenly committing the common food stamp scam. She then went into the store at around 1:30 p.m. to report what she saw and police were called to investigate the fraud. The Bangor couple, a 23-year-old man and a 17-year-old female who turned 18 on Sunday, told the investigating officer that they had purchased two cases of water with funding provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance...

NEW YORK—American consumers can expect bigger grocery bills in 2012, even as commodity prices are forecast to fall. (snip) In a recent report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said grocery-store prices will likely rise 3% to 4% in 2012, on par with this year, even though ingredient costs may fall. The biggest increases would likely be in the first half of next year, but prices would most likely ease later in 2012, said USDA economist Richard Volpe.

The proliferation of superweeds --weeds that have mutated to develop resistance to popular herbicides like Monsanto's Roundup formula --continues to rise. But the individual plants' overall size and strength is also increasing. According to a series of new studies published in the journal Weed Science, farmers are having more trouble than ever dealing with out-of-control superweeds in their fields, some of which grow up to three inches a day in size, and are so strong and thick that they are destroying farm equipment.The studies reveal that there are currently at least 21 different weed species known to be resistant to...

Well that didn’t take long. Yesterday, in a post discussing a New York Times op-ed that called for heavy taxation on “unhealthy” foods, I asked, “How long before some starry-eyed but angry-faced Democrat proposes legislation to force ‘healthy food’ advertising?” Now The Daily Caller reports that food producers could face government regulations requiring “healthy” composition profiles for foods marketed to children two to seventeen years old.If enacted, new regulatory criteria will reclassify many foods which the FDA presently considers healthy as off limits for advertising to children. In the present formulations, eighty-eight of the top 100 most-consumed foods will be...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's watchdog arm plans to look closely at whether the food-service-management companies running many school cafeterias are passing along all the discounts and rebates they receive from their suppliers to the districts that hire them. The audit will begin in August, said Alison Decker, a lawyer in the USDA's office of inspector general. It was triggered in part by a settlement between the New York state attorney general and Sodexo, one of several large companies in the business of running school cafeterias. Last July, Sodexo, a French company with its U.S. headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., agreed...

An advocate for America's fighting men and women finds it disturbing that U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) activists want to impose homosexual indoctrination training government-wide, including in the military. The Washington Times recently reported that USDA officials have asked the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees all federal employee policies, to impose its sensitivity training program on all federal departments. The program favors pro-homosexual political positions, and it calls opposition to homosexual marriage "heterosexism" and compares it to racism.

Tony the Tiger, some NASCAR drivers and cookie-selling Girl Scouts will be out of a job unless grocery manufacturers agree to reinvent a vast array of their products to satisfy the Obama administration’s food police. Either retool the recipes to contain certain levels of sugar, sodium and fats, or no more advertising and marketing to tots and teenagers, say several federal regulatory agencies. The same goes for restaurants. It’s not just the usual suspected foods that are being targeted, such a thin mint cookies sold by scouts or M&Ms and Snickers, which sponsor cars in the Sprint Cup, but pretty...

AUSTIN, TX - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to issue its new proposed rule for mandatory animal traceability very shortly. While USDA already has traceability requirements as part of existing animal disease control programs, the proposed framework goes much further to require animal tagging and tracing even absent any active disease threat. The framework has raised significant concerns among family farm and ranch advocates, who criticize the agency for failing to provide a coherent, factual explanation for the new program’s necessity. “USDA brags about the success of past programs, but has abandoned the principles that made them...

And with that budget hit, the so-called “food safety” law can’t be implemented—and no money to approve Frankenfish! This is huge! Last week the House of Representatives passed the agriculture funding bill for fiscal year 2012, and the bill included a gigantic cut in FDA’s budget. This is particularly significant because they were tasked with implementing most of the provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act that Congress passed last year. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost of implementing the Food Safety act would be $1.4 billion over five years. The whopping $285 million budget cut makes it...

U.S. Department of Agriculture activists want to impose their intense brand of homosexual sensitivity training government-wide, including a discussion that compares “heterosexism” — believing marriage can only can be between one man and one woman — to racism. If accepted by the Obama administration, that move could mean more sessions for military service members already undergoing gay-sensitivity indoctrination. Critics fear additional gay-oriented training would be an unnecessary added burden for combat troops and encourage some to leave. USDA officials have asked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees all federal worker policies, to impose its gay-awareness programs on all...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) makes and guarantees loans to approved socially disadvantaged applicants to buy and operate family-size farms and ranches. A socially disadvantaged (SDA) farmer, rancher, or agricultural producer is one of a group whose members have been subjected to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of his or her identity as a member of the group without regard to his or her individual qualities. SDA groups are women, African Americans, American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/webapp?area=home&subject=fmlp&topic=sfl

(CNSNews.com) – Senate Republicans are moving to repeal all subsidies, mandates and tariffs on ethanol, the corn-based fuel additive. A vote is expected Tuesday afternoon on Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) amendment repealing the ethanol subsidy. In addition, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) announced that he will introduce an amendment to repeal the renewable fuels standard that requires ethanol to be blended with gasoline.

(CNSNews.com) – The Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it has awarded $17.4 million for pilot projects that will begin exploring how to establish a market for greenhouse gas (GHG) credits, a key component of a cap and trade system, to help reduce carbon and other emissions that apparently contribute to global warming.Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the projects were the “foundational work” for establishing an American carbon market.“This is really sort of foundational work that’s being done,” Vilsack told reporters on a conference call on Wednesday.The $17.4 million in funding is part of the Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) program,...

Senator Snowe said a proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) limiting total servings of starchy vegetables (potatoes, corn, green peas, and lima beans) to one cup per week and eliminating these vegetables from breakfast meals is not grounded in scientific data and does not make economic sense. In letters to First Lady Michelle Obama, founder of the Let’s Move campaign, and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, Senator Snowe urged reevaluation of the nutritional and economic impacts of this proposal. Senator Snowe recently joined her colleagues in calling on President Obama to resolve a discrepancy within the Administration regarding...

When his wife unveiled the USDA's new nutritional plate yesterday, there definitely wasn't a space for chili dogs. But that didn't stop Barack Obama wolfing down two in Toledo today - with fries and an extra bowl of chili on the side.

The USDA is once again inserting itself underneath the Constitutional sneeze-guard of the Tenth Amendment. In a publicity rich media event, Michelle Obama and the USDA introduced a new dietary guideline graphic: an illustration of a plate, divided into four basic food groups. It’s a replacement for the Food Pyramid; which was a replacement for the original USDA nutritional guidelines called: “the four basic food groups” (illustrated with a pie chart).

As of this coming Thursday, the food pyramid -- that symbol of healthy eating -- is going to go the way of the real pyramids and becoming a thing of the past. This week, the Obama administration will be unveiling a new graphic to tell American consumers what quantities of grains, fruits and vegetables, protein and dairy they should eat to maintain a healthy diet. The pyramid is to be replace by a plate, with four different-colored sections indicating how much of each food group the United States Department of Agriculture recommends and is a "crucial element of the administration's...