NYTimes, Pathogens in Our Pork, on the appearance of MRSA in our food supply:

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

Attempts to change this have been blocked by agribusiness, as you can only pack animals into crowded, unsanitary conditions if you pump them full of antibiotics.

I'm quite late with this one, but here's Michael Pollan's Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief (written pre-election). One excerpt can't capture 10 pages of goodness, but I was struck by this bit:

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope -- thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy -- for trucking food as well as pumping water -- is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the "Garden State" next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, "Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient."

• Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots? Michael Pollan delves into the answer and implications (sorry, this one's a couple weeks old).
• I'm a computer guy, and let's face it, most of us spend too much time at our desks. Hence, this T-Nation article: (De)-Constructing Computer Guy.
• Dusty Rhodes linked to this Mark Sisson piece, Is There Any Safe Meat?, and that started me exploring Mark's site. Lots of interesting stuff on there. For example, I had previously posted some soy links, so was interested to read Sisson's take: 10 Things to Know about Tofu. I also really appreciated this nugget from his recent wine & chocolate post: Like chocolate and coffee, wine is one of those "marginally nutritious" issues that is endlessly debatable and ultimately not a huge factor in health, in the sense that there is probably some benefit to be gained from reasonable consumption thanks to the antioxidants, but don't expect any miracles. It's important to put these sensational stories in perspective...

From The New Yorker, Deal Sweeteners:

What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same [distilling better ethanol from sugarcane rather than corn]? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best.

Interesting. And, like so many interesting things involving politics and special interests, depressing.