All the news that's fit to eat
E-Book Promises Help for Busy Families By Eileen Ecklund In a culture awash with sugary sodas, fast food meals, and other junk foods, making sure your kids learn to enjoy good, healthy, real food can seem like an impossible task. Before you throw your hands up in despair, check out “Bite This! Your Family Can [...]
Notes From a Freshman Beekeeper By Heidi Lewis Who is a bee’s favorite singer? Sting. Favorite band? The Bee Gees. Why do bees hum? Because they don’t know the words—OK, OK, enough of the second-grade jokes. It’s just that the bee situation could use a little levity: It appears that this winter may have been [...]
Beekeepers Report Huge Losses Over Winter By Eileen Ecklund Spring is in the air. Across the country, trees and other plants are bursting into flower, and bees are busy pollinating them. But this year the buzzing may seem a bit muted: fewer honeybees than ever made it through the winter, in a disappointing resurgence of [...]
Why Farmers Need to Be Activists By Tanya Tolchin Courtesy of Food Politic, Journal of Food News and Culture Many small family farms switch into gear in late winter and early spring to get the farm season on track. On our farm we are busy ordering seeds, building new hoop houses, fixing fences, tuning up [...]
by Chris Mittelstaedt, Founder & CEO, The FruitGuys The FruitGuys supports California’s Prop 37, the “Right to Know” GMO (genetically modified organism) labeling initiative. This issue is important to Americans everywhere, not just in California. YES ON 37—WHY? We believe in transparency. Labeling GMO products and allowing consumers and companies to choose whether or not [...]
“Organic” Label May Not Tell the Whole Story By Mary Risley, reprinted with permission from Tante Marie’s Cooking School Aren’t you getting tired of all the talk about organics? Recently, the media was full of news about a report by Stanford University analyzing 237 studies that said there were not necessarily any more nutrients in [...]
Small Farms Left Out of Farm Bill By Charlene Oldham When the first “farm bill” was created in the late 1930s to help family farms, horses and hand plows were as common on farms as Model As and mechanized tractors. Today the $300 billion farm bill up for revision in Congress is a complex web [...]
Organics Study Buried Key Findings By Dave Lawrence In September, a research team led by Dena Bravata and Crystal Smith-Spangler of Stanford University published a paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine that set the media ablaze with its contrarian punch line: organically grown foods are no healthier than their conventionally grown counterparts. The press [...]
California Passage of Prop 37 Would Inform Consumers By Charlene Oldham Food labels can be a consumer conundrum for health-conscious shoppers trying to steer clear of sugar, saturated fat, and foods packed with preservatives. If you buy your groceries in California, you may soon have one more label to interpret. Should California’s Proposition 37 pass [...]
By Heidi Lewis In agriculture, weather is more than a conversation starter—rain, sun, wind, and frost are collectively the Numero Uno topic for farmers. This year for Midwest farmers, weather is more about the Walk than the Talk. The Midwest fruit belt region in general, including southwest Michigan, where The FruitGuys buys a lot of [...]
By Heidi Lewis The apple season cycle begins in summer with special varieties appearing across the country: the Gravenstein out West (an endangered heirloom variety), Ginger Gold apples back East, and Paula Reds in the Midwest, to name just a few. The season goes the year around with its peak in fall, the high noon [...]
The Weight of the Nation is a Must See By Pia Hinckle America today: one-third of our adult population is obese; another third is overweight. That’s 75 percent of our more than 311 million citizens. Already about 17 percent of our children and teens are obese. If our waistlines keep growing, the Centers for Disease [...]
Company Pulls Methyl Iodide From U.S. Market By Heidi Lewis Raise a glass of strawberry lemonade to the defeat of the fumigant methyl iodide! A lengthy campaign by environmentalists, farmers, scientists, doctors, and farm workers to stop the use of fumigants in strawberry production has ended with a significant victory for the environment. On March [...]
Winter Farm Conferences By Heidi Lewis The Monterey Peninsula is one of the most beautiful spots in the world, but it wasn’t just the sparkly ocean breeze dancing through the pines that brought a near sell-out crowd to this year’s Eco Farm Conference held February 1-4. It was the exchange of important ideas and sharing [...]
By Cassidy Campbell Mueller of Riverdog Farm in Guinda, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop I bet you’ve heard it before, the big 4 letters so important to farmers, food processors, and eaters: USDA, or the United States Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for the federal government’s policies on agriculture and food. You would [...]
By Pia Hinckle While damage varied from state to state and even within the same county, Tropical Storm Irene hit many farms from North Carolina to Vermont hard. Growers reported everything from flooded fields and broken trees to collapsed sheds and damaged fruit. Unrepaired roads, washed out bridges and power outages still occurring in some [...]
High Line gets high marks By Pia Hinckle New York has become a leader in urban green renewal. On a visit in June, I found that most of Broadway is now a bicycle path, Times Square is a pedestrian mall, and on the West Side, an abandoned elevated train track has become a garden. The [...]
House cuts will hurt farmers By Judith Redmond, courtesy of Capay Valley Farm Shop On June 17th, the House of Representatives passed its proposal for fiscal year 2012 agriculture spending. In the agricultural ‘discretionary’ budget, the House voted to cut nearly $3 billion from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the FDA. Combined with [...]
New Federal Dietary Guidelines Released Every five years the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture update their guidelines for healthy eating. The 2010 dietary guidelines, released at the end of January 2011, offer more of the same advice as past ones: drink water instead of soda, cut back on [...]
Obituary Jack LaLanne was a typical teenager. He ate fast food and candy, loved soda pop, had acne, and didn’t exercise much. But at age 15 his mother took him to hear a lecture by health food pioneer Paul Bragg. Bragg asked LaLanne what he had eaten in the last 24 hours. After hearing “cakes, [...]
On January 4, 2011, President Obama signed into law the $1.4 billion Food Safety and Modernization Act, the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food industry in 70 years. The law will give the Food and Drug Administration sweeping new powers to order food recalls, increase inspections and recordkeeping, and institute new food safety protocols [...]
The U.S. Senate passed The Food Safety and Modernization Act (S. 510) on November 30th, the most sweeping overhaul of food safety regulations of the century, spurred by food-borne illness outbreaks during the past decade. If it becomes law, the Food & Drug Administration’s power and oversight of food and farm production would increase nationally [...]
West Coast customers – enjoy locally produced heirloom fruit, farm crafted specialty foods and a special “Do It Yourself” Slow Food project in this unique monthly offering. SlowFood Victory Garden Crate Learn more and order at www.fruitguys.com/slowfood. The FruitGuys have partnered with Slow Food San Francisco in a fundraising project to benefit the Schoolyard Gardens [...]
Introducing Preservation Harvest – produce that makes a difference. Buying plums can help save a farm and make healthier land. Learn more at www.preservationharvest.com. West Coast customers, get a box of 25 refreshing Black Amber Plums from our crop farmed in Exeter, California. They have a smooth, crème colored inner flesh and tart purple skin. Put [...]
The Light Brown Apple Moth is an indigenous pest considered harmless to crops in New Zealand, Hawaii, Australia, and the UK, all countries that are free to export fruits and vegetables to U.S. markets while California farms currently face quarantines if it is found, a practice panelists at a recent forum called unfair to small [...]
We hope you can join us at this event. Founder/CEO Chris Mittelstaedt will participate in a panel discussion of the Light Brown Apple Moth and other issues at the the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on June 14th. Moth Spray Controversy Update: Business, Farmers and Consumers in Partnership The Commonwealth Club Caroline Cox, Research Director, [...]
Chairman Florz, vice Chair Maldonado and esteemed members of the Senate Committee on Food and Agriculture – thank you for taking the time to hear testimony today about the light brown apple moth and the implications of the quarantine program. My name is Chris Mittelstaedt and I am the founder and CEO of The FruitGuys. I founded [...]
In March, California held senate hearings on the status of the state’s eradication program for the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM). FruitGuys founder and CEO Chris Mittelstaedt testified in defense of small family farmers whose farms have been hurt by the current California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) practice to quarantine farms and sale [...]
What could be a more evocative image for our future than a child’s palm full of seeds? A shipment of seeds from The Natural Gardening Company in Petaluma, CA arrived at The FruitGuys last week prompting a good deal of spring fever and joy as we sorted the seeds into little envelopes bound for the elementary [...]
Small companies can do it. Take the example of family owned Lapham Company, a property management company in Oakland. They’ve made workplace wellness a central part of their company. Literally. The owners, Jon and Jeri Shahoian, remodeled their Oakland offices and put a large family style kitchen in its center. The whole office gathers there [...]
Plans to spray the Bay Area with a synthetic pheromone based pesticide was halted on June 19, 2008. A federal quarantine area now stretches over 12 counties and within this area the Calfornia Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) plans to utilize a variety of methods to eradicate the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) including [...]
The FruitGuys are part of this years fast-growing businesses in the US according to Inc.com.
KTVU Fox News featured a segment on us this fall. Watch it here.
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