“Organic” is tough enough to understand even if everyone is following the USDA’s rules. But not everyone is, according to that agency’s inspector general.  Read More →

DAILYBREAD.jpg I’m worried this will keep me distracted for hours or even days. But then, it will also be highly useful to me on nearly a daily basis from now on. The USDA has created a ” Food Environment Atlas ,” which is basically a Google Map that users can manipulate to find out all kinds of things about America’s food system at both macro and micro levels, based on government data that can be mixed and matched with... 

Nearly a fifth of all Americans reported lacking the money to buy enough food last year, and one in eight is on food stamps, according to a uniquely huge study by the Food Research and Action Center . The survey reached about 650,000 people in every congressional district and Washington, D.C. The hunger situation improved during the year, thanks both to easing prices and a rise in the use of food stamps, but the situation remains dire. “Indeed,... 

The Cato@Liberty blog today bemoans something it has decided is a meaningful milestone: that the federal government last week added its 2,000 th subsidy program (and then its 2,001 st ). There is one such program “for every year that has passed since Emperor Augustus held sway in Rome,” writes blogger Chris Edwards. “We’ve gone from bread and circuses to food stamps, the National Endowment for the Arts, and 1,999 other hand-out...