What Is a Specialty Crop?

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You need to be eating more Specialty Crops. What's a "specialty crop"? This week's podcast is a wonderful conversation with Politico Senior Food and Ag Reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich!




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Food Babe Visits My University

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It was 6:30 pm in the lab and I was just thinking about the last things I'd need to get done before I could go home.  Typical night.  Usually I'm riding home about 7 pm, but an email popped up asking me if I was going to go watch the Food Babe.  A click on a link would take me to the note on a UF Dean for Students Good Food Revolution Events website.  Vani Hari would be spreading her corrupt message of bogus science and abject food terrorism here at the University of Florida. Oh joy. There's something that dies inside when you are a faculty member that works hard to teach about food, farming and science, and your own university brings in a crackpot to unravel all of the information you have brought to students. She might have started from honest roots.  Her story says she was duped by an organic yogurt stand (join the club) into buying taro toppings that were filled with artificial, non-organic colors.  She realized that she could use social m...
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Shame on Pediatrics. Rejecting Scientist's Comments

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 A lot has been said about the journal Pediatrics December 2023 Clinical Report on "Using GMOs on Children". The poor scholarship and citation bias are alarming, and the bias against safe technology is clear.  When I wrote to editor-in-chief Dr. Lewis First, he indicated that I was invited to submit a response to the article that would be posted below the article on its website. I submitted my response, and it was not published on the site. My guess is that it illuminated the bankruptcies of the article in a manner that ran counter to the authors', editor's and journal's narrative.  So I'll publish my comment here.  Dear Pediatrics Readership,  The article by Abrams et al. represents a stunning example of how misinformation spreads- even through a credible conduit. Pediatrics is a respected journal, so when a paper implies a technology is dangerous, physicians and the general public take note. That’s good. But if the message runs counter to the scientific con...
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Glyphosate, A.I. and Spreading Disinformation

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 Here's a great example of how bad reporting and the war on glyphosate play hand-in-hand.  I don't know anything about the reporter, Stacey Scott at Gillett News (Gillett is a town of 32,000 in Wyoming), but the headline she/it (they use A.I. generated graphics, Stacey Scott might be an A.I. too-- no Twitter or online presence) generated has the potential to misinform.  The Agriculture Department?  You mean the USDA?   No. You mean some other major government regulatory agency? No. Some respected international agency?  No. Then who "warns" ?  It was the government of Amritsar.  What? Yes. Amritsar, a relatively small town/region by India standards. It's a major metropolitan hub in the northwest, not far from the Pakistan border. They have some agriculture there, mostly rice, palm oil, sugar cane and maize, apparently a lot of Basmati rice which is exported from small-holder farms. According to Scott's article, glyphosate is "a chemical known ...
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