Ref links: food news

How rural farmers, an unemployed chef and a protestor named Heather are getting 1,000 dinners served at Occupy Wall Street every night.

Age-adjusted mortality rates for coronary heart disease (CHD) have declined steadily in the United States since the 1960s (1). Multiple factors likely have contributed to this decline in CHD deaths, including greater control of risk factors, resulting in declining incidence of CHD, and improved treatment (2). Greater control of risk factors and declining incidence can reduce CHD prevalence, whereas improved treatment that results in lower mortality rates and more persons living with CHD can increase prevalence

Brett Richards of Vinton was crowned as the 2011 Iowa Farm Bureau Cookout Contest winner with his Poor Man’s Prime Rib recipe. Richards beat out 36 other grillers, representing counties from around the state, to win the 48th annual competition. The Iowa Farm Bureau-sponsored contest featured 37 outdoor chefs using their best grilling, roasting and smoking techniques.

When she was growing up in Miami, grilling was a year-round adventure for Lourdes Castro. Now residing in New York City, she lives for grilling season. Taking the fear out of grilling, she focuses on the traditional flavors of Latin America with 90 recipes in her third cookbook, "Latin Grilling" (Ten Speed Press, $22). Guiding readers step by step, her meticulous menus and timelines ensure anyone can host an Andean barbecue or Cuban cookout with ease.

Ask any farmer or backyard gardener about fresh corn and they’ll tell you the best way to cook it: Put a pot of water on to boil before you run out to the garden, pick the corn, shuck it on the way back to the house, and plunge it directly into the boiling water.

This is the conundrum: We're smack-dab in the middle of grilling season, and we want to cook animal flesh over an open flame outdoors. This need is embedded in the male DNA, just as the wood-smoke molecules at the OC Fair are enmeshed in the fabric of your clothing. But the grilling life brings questions about the best ways to stay healthy and safe.

David Allison is a renowned scientist who runs an obesity research center at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He has a 108-page resume and was honored at the White House. But even though study after study have shown soda to be a significant contributor to America's staggering obesity crisis, he says there is too little "solid evidence."

The ugly battle over whether government should concern itself with waistlines played out most publicly between the first lady and a former vice presidential candidate. Michelle Obama rolled out her plan for more fruit and less fat, sugar and salt in school lunches. Sarah Palin fired back that the first lady doesn’t believe in dessert. Obama encouraged breastfeeding babies to reduce childhood obesity, and Palin joked that the price of milk must be too high.

To Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, it seemed like a sensible way to attack a major public health problem. To the soft drink industry, giant food companies, makers of snacks and candy, supermarkets, and antihunger groups, it seemed like an attack at the grocery checkout counter.

Food and retail giants Cargill and Wal-Mart (WMT.N) said they were looking for Asia Pacific trade ministers on Friday to recommit to open markets as a way to boost food security

First it was heat and drought in Russia. Then it was heat and too much rain in parts of the American Corn Belt. Extreme weather this year has sent grain prices soaring, jolting commodities markets and setting off fears of tight supplies that could eventually hit consumers’ wallets.

Rising corn prices are already affecting everything from the cost of tortillas in Mexico City to the cost of producing eggs in the United States.

Americans drank more wine than the French for the first time in history last year — a milestone many veterans once thought unreachable.

The 2010 edition of the dietary guidelines appeared on January 31. Since then, FoodNavigator-USA, an online daily newsletter for the food industry, says it has been gathering reactions and taking a look at how the guidelines are likely to affect food and beverage companies. Here are its reports.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the Washington-based non-profit dedicated to preventive medicine and a vegan diet, sued the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services today, claiming the agencies have too many conflicts of interest to issue clear and science-based dietary guidelines.

Marketing tactic by Kraft to get consumers to buy Kraft products.

Jewel-Osco stores in Palatine and across the Chicago area are making it easier for consumers to get a healthy start to the new year with the recent launch of “nutrition iQ®,” an exclusive in-store food labeling program designed to help customers make better-informed food choices right at the grocery store shelf.

Whole Foods Market harbors the same hopes for its chickens that many parents do for their kids: That they'll get plenty of fresh air, live at home until they reach maturity and avoid gaining weight so fast that they can't walk.

The image of American agriculture has suffered a few punches in recent years, but "Big Ag" has a secret weapon it hopes will soften the blows: women.

At the annual convention of American Agri-Women, being held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel this week, a new project is being unveiled that organizers hope will help boost consumers' opinions of American farming. The effort, loosely dubbed "Common Ground," will attempt to put a more feminine, friendly and empathetic face on large-scale agriculture by using women farmers to appeal to suburban and urban grocery shoppers — most of whom are women themselves.