First the bacon shake. Now pork donuts from Dunkin’. In China, anyway.

EPA pushed this through quietly last Friday. My guess is no gas stations outside of the Corn Belt will sell this stuff.

Cool!

Recently, I was asked to talk about food hub distribution models as part of a video about Common Market, a food hub serving the Philadelphia area.  This opportunity gave me the chance to discuss the challenges we face in connecting farmers in rural areas with consumers in urban communities, and how food hub models can help us redefine the way food gets to our tables.

A food hub model like the one being used in Philadelphia can work to everyone’s advantage, using the community as a whole to make the system viable.  By leveraging the buying power of schools, hospitals, elderly care centers and corner markets to create consistent demand, you can then harness the growing power of local farms to create consistent supply.

[Note that a Dem on the committee tried to allow the filmmaker to film the hearing…]

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Josh Fox was led away in handcuffs from a House Science Committee hearing Wednesday morning after refusing to pack up his camera.

Fox was led out by Capitol Police shortly after 10 a.m., before the hearing could be gaveled into order. The “Gasland” director was attempting to film the hearing looking into EPA’s investigation of potential water contamination from natural gas drilling in Pavillion, Wyo.

Well, that’s interesting.

I’m holding a bowl of dirt up to my nose, in hopes of getting high on the fumes of my backyard compost pile. The microbe that I’m after today is M. vaccae, a living creature that acts like a mind-altering drug once it enters the human body. It has been shown to boost the levels of serotonin and norepinephrine circulating in the systems of both humans and mice. In other words, it works in much the same manner as antidepressant pills. And yes, it is possible to dose yourself by simply breathing in the smell of good dirt.

A drug used to keep pigs lean and boost their growth is jeopardizing the nation’s exports of what once was known as “the other white meat.” 

The drug, ractopamine hydrochloride, is fed to pigs and other animals right up until slaughter and minute traces have been found in meat. The European Union, China, Taiwan and many others have banned its use, citing concerns about its effect on human health, limiting U.S. meat exports to key markets.

Although few Americans outside of the livestock industry have ever heard of ractopamine, the feed additive is controversial. Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of pigs in the United States, it has sickened or killed more of them than any other livestock drug on the market, an investigation of Food and Drug Administration records shows. Cattle and turkeys have also suffered high numbers of illnesses from the drug.

The Daily Mail in Britain tends to be terrific for news of the weird — who can forget its exposé on the girl who ate nothing but chicken McNuggets for 15 years? — and terrible for science reporting. Case in point: Their latest story on how the world is about to enter a mini-ice age.

A fishing boat on the Thames River in front of Coryton oil refinery on Jan. 22. (Matthew Lloyd/Boomberg)

The piece cites recent research from the UK Met Office on how solar activity is set to decrease in the coming years — which, in turn, will cool the planet. That’s technically true, but the decrease in solar activity won’tbe enough to counteract the warming effects of all the greenhouse-gas pollution we’re putting into the air. How do we know? Just ask the UK Met Office. In a post refuting the Daily Mail, the climate research center notesthat greenhouse gases are on pace to warm the planet 2.5°C over the next 90 years. At most, the decrease in solar activity is expected to cool the planet by about 0.13°C. The math here is simple: 2.5°C minus 0.13°C equals 2.37°C. That’s not an ice age. That’s the Earth getting hotter.

That’s awful.

Federal, state, and local authorities say a Dallas meat-packing company is under criminal investigation for possibly illegally dumping pig blood into a creek that leads to the Trinity River.