Food Related Bits in the News and in Blogland

The slow food movement's Civil Eats website had a bit a few days ago on Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson's op-ed piece in the New York Times about the damage we're doing to our soil and what it means in terms of our civilization's ability to survive. Jackson's a plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, while Berry is a farmer and writer whose voice has been gaining significance in discussions of sustainable vs. industrial farming these past few years.
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Marion Nestle recently posted on her blog that the Government Accountability Office just produced a report looking at how federal agencies regulate (or, more importantly, fail to regulate) genetically modified crops. Nestle writes that "[t]he report documents long-standing gaps in coordination and direction among the three regulatory agencies involved: FDA, USDA, and EPA". Read the rest here. This comes just in time for Monsanto's recent attempts to have a strain of drought-resistant corn approved in the United States. Two bits says the report gets forgotten in as long as it takes to air pop a handful of kernels.
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Speaking of corn... The Ethicurean had a blurb a few days ago about how Monsanto's profits have doubled this past quarter and how they currently control 25% of the global market for seed corn. Must be nice.