Daily Food & Ag Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of agricultural and food issues, including the GMO debate, conventional and organic farming, regulations, new breeding technologies and sustainability. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Viewpoint: Why you should exercise skepticism about the ‘food as medicine’ trend
Predictions are that the “food as medicine” movement will gain traction in 2025. Even though nutrition is one important contributor ...
Kenyan lower court bans importation of genetically modified (GM) foods
Controversy surrounding the promotion of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) [March 7] took a full circle after the Court of Appeal ...
Will RFK, Jr. import European science-deficient food and agriculture policy to the U.S.?
President Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to announce April tariffs on all imported food, framing the move as a boon to U.S ...
Girl Scout 25-cookie “study” by crack science organization Moms Across America alleging ‘dangerous’ level of pesticide residues sparks class action tort case
The Girl Scouts have been sued by consumers over the alleged presence of "heavy metals" and pesticides in its popular ...
E-taste—What can we expect with the advent of virtual reality ‘bio-integrated gustatory interfaces’
Virtual reality can, in its own imperfect ways, transport a user into distant experiences. With a headset on, an everyday ...
‘Digital-twin technology’ could revolutionize agriculture. Here’s what happened when it was adopted on one Texas farm
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction — but with enough data, new agricultural models really are able to predict the ...
Egg industry scrambling: Today’s Neros fiddle as the bird flu crisis deepens while politicians and ideologues ignore solutions to the crisis
A bulldozer belches a black cloud of exhaust as the engine revs. A mound of dead chickens flops into a ...
The dangerous downside of ‘clean eating’
In 1997, physician Steven Bratman coined the term “orthorexia” (orthos, “right” and orexia, “appetite,” translating to “righteous eating”) in response to ...
A dangerous Wild West: Weight loss and muscle-building supplement industry is an unregulated mess
In this episode of KQED’s Forum, STRIPED’s Dr. S. Bryn Austin, Nicholas Florko (The Atlantic), and Marily Oppezzo (Stanford) explore the ...
Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs are upending the food industry. Here’s what we can expect going forward
The use of anti-obesity medications (AOMs), led by glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists like Ozempic (semaglutide), has skyrocketed over the past ...
Agriculture and technology inflection point: Are our creaky and faltering century old food systems poised for revival?
The fundamental flaw in our initial wave of agricultural technology wasn’t just a lack of tools, it was a mismatch ...
Gene edited crops inch closer to acceptance as outlined in the European Commission’s new blueprint for the future
New research and innovation partnerships, faster risk assessment and innovation-friendly regulations are all on the table as the European Commission ...
Viewpoint: As American farmers increasingly rely on technological innovation, a threatening patent fight looms
During his first term, President Donald Trump prioritized American farmers with policies to protect them from unfair foreign competition...But a ...
A new generation of sustainable crops that redeploy soil microbes to advance sustainable farming is on the horizon
A biological mechanism that makes plant roots more attractive to soil microbes has been discovered by scientists in the UK ...
Agricultural chemicals in the crosshairs as tariff wars heat up
Price discrepancies for agricultural chemicals are decreasing, according to Farmers Business Network (FBN) 2025 Ag Chemical Price Transparency Report. The 2025 ...
Putting your money where your ideals are? Claims that consumers care about food, farming and sustainability are mostly suspect
Sustainability has dominated the food and beverage conversation for the past two decades, with consumers increasingly concerned about the damaging ...
Doomsday seed bank vault: How the US government protects our food and farming future
In 1958 the U.S. Department of Agriculture established the first federal seed bank in Fort Collins to preserve valuable seeds for our ...
Reciprocal US-EU food war: Agricultural chemicals in the crosshairs as tariffs begin rolling out
The European Union is looking to halt imports of certain produce grown using pesticides currently banned from use here, the FT ...
Viewpoint: Litigation industry intensifies its lobbying in Iowa to stoke fear about the alleged dangers of glyphosate
I want to refute some dangerous misinformation being propagated around a bill in the Iowa Legislature. There is a concerted ...
What would our diet consist of if we restricted our eating to American-produced food
The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system ...
Don’t waste your money on Vitamin C, D, zinc, elderberry and echinacea supplements—they are a $70 billion-a-year lie
[A] new study was published last week in JAMA Network Open and included more than 15,000 participants. It found that ...
Viewpoint: Here’s why almost all international agricultural biotechnology regulatory structures are a scientific mess, and what reforms are needed
Inappropriate and often politicized regulations in many countries have limited the global benefits of agricultural biotechnology. The Cartagena Protocol on ...
Requiem for junk food? RFK, Jr. proposes banning the use of SNAP food stamps on non-essential junk foods but delivering won’t be easy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed health and human services secretary, and Brooke Rollins, the new agriculture secretary, have both ...
Viewpoint: The v-Fluence attack file—How the Environmental Working Group undermines science, destroys careers and harms the environment
Just before Christmas Day, 2024, three months after a mendacious, coordinated activist onslaught, the communications consultancy, v- Fluence, began the ...
Viewpoint: 50 years after Asilomar set a fractured framework for regulating agricultural genetic enginnering, it’s time to embrace the technology’s full potential
Fifty years ago, scientists developed a regulatory framework for the safe use of recombinant DNA that focused on potential biosafety ...
‘We’re running out of options’: After killing 166 million birds didn’t slow bird flu, what’s next?
When the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus made its first appearance at a U.S. poultry farm in February 2022, roughly 29,000 turkeys at ...
CRISPR gene-edited foods: Three-quarters of Americans surveyed are oblivous to the latest innovations though the most informed view the technology positively
Consumer opposition to genetic modification and genetically modified (GM) foods is well documented in many studies. Whether consumer perceptions and ...
