Please invest in Our Daily Planet today, by making a one time or monthly contribution.
We do not charge our readers a subscription fee for our content. We want to continue to grow our readership, particularly among millennials and public servants. Voluntary contributions from readers will help us employ interns and freelance journalists, expand our content, and reach a larger audience.
If you make a contribution of $150 or more, you will become an official “Friend of the Planet” and receive a Friend of the Planet T-shirt or water bottle. You can also submit opinion essays to us for our consideration for posting on our new “Bright Ideas” op-ed page.
Food
Food waste is a huge drain on the environment. CBS News reported on an innovative program in a school district in Elkhart, Indiana that is working with a local non-profit to collect leftover food from school cafeterias and use it to make meals for needy school children to take home on the weekends. The nonprofit […]
Continue Reading 146 words
We’ve written before about the growing popularity of plant-based proteins and how the companies making products such as the Beyond Meat Burger and the Impossible Burger are quickly growing and paving the path to their IPOs. While the popularity of these items is growing with the American public and interests have been piqued, they’ve still […]
Continue Reading 219 words
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) every year analyzes test data from the Agriculture Department to identify which fruits and vegetables are most and least contaminated with pesticide residue to produce a list they call the Dirty Dozen. This year’s list had a surprise entrant — kale — “more than 92 percent of conventionally grown kale samples had at least two or more pesticide residues. Some samples contained residues from as many as 18 different pesticides.”
Continue Reading 524 wordsStay in the know, empower yourself to be a #FriendOfThePlanet, sign up to receive ODP in your inbox each morning!
Plant-based proteins continue to surge in popularity and more and more restaurants and grocery chains are offering a wide range of brands like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. In fact, as Forbes reported, globally, meat substitute sales on average rose 9.3% between 2012 and 2017, more than three times the average rate of processed meat […]
Continue Reading 455 words
For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has determined that genetically engineered (GE) AquaAdvantage salmon are safe to eat — that their genetic modifications are safe for the fish and thus for humans too. The FDA also found that the claims about the rapid growth of the fish are also true and also will not cause harm to humans.
Continue Reading 593 words
A new study by the non-profit Oceana found that more than one in five fish they tested from supermarkets and restaurants is mislabeled. It is a typical bait and switch, according to Beth Lowell of Oceana, who said “The consumer thinks that they’re getting a high-priced fish and instead they’re getting the cheaper alternative … they’re being ripped off.”
Continue Reading 450 words
As climate change continues to warm our planet, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that governments around the world must take increased precaution to ensure food safety–something that has not received enough political attention. U.N. agencies and the African Union recently met in Ethiopia at an international food safety conference and made the following statement: […]
Continue Reading 445 words
1. 2. 3. 4. Janelle Shane is a research scientist in optics and recently conducted a very funny Valentines’s Day experiment. As she explained in her Tumblr post, “I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find, and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, […]
Continue Reading 173 words
The state of Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality starting in December first published an interactive map that shows where it is unsafe to swim and where fishers should not eat their catches, according to an Associated Press story in nola.com. The map provides information on 58 lakes, bayous and waterways and even covers almost 1,200 miles of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico that are under state jurisdiction. And the map is a very much needed tool because it turns out there are some serious contamination issues in Louisiana.
Continue Reading 450 wordsOur world is drowning in plastic yet we’re so dependent on it, that despite the urgency to avoid it, we don’t have very many alternatives. For food packaging especially, plastic is king and Americans are using a lot of plastic every day probably without realizing it. While biodegradable plastic does exist, it’s often far more expensive, […]
Continue Reading 418 words
If you thought those frozen chicken nuggets from Perdue and Tysons Foods tasted terrible, there could be a reason why — they had bits of rubber and wood and unlabelled other products like milk (an allergen) in them. Consumers found pieces of “soft, blue rubber” inside the food and contacted Tysons; similarly, consumers found wood […]
Continue Reading 529 words
We wrote yesterday about the Planetary Health Diet which was created by scientists to help people eat more consciously and help address climate change. But food experts at Whole Foods and the National Restaurant Association have some other sustainable food trend predictions for 2019. Some notable trendy foods include: Oat milk which has been popular […]
Continue Reading 345 words