Ah, the crock pot. I for one am happy that it's back in vogue—and just made for cold weather. Slow cookers are perfect for making soups, stews, beans, and for tenderizing less expensive cuts of meat. Check out this round-up of 30 crock pot recipes just perfect for any ...read more
If you're looking for gifts that give back this year, these toys definitely need to be on Santa's radar. From educational toys that teach science and engineering concepts (that kids will actually love) to classic dolls and toys that give back to under-served communities, these ...read more
I'm cooking up all the Thanksgiving recipes in my house this year, and while my immediate family is blessed not to have any food allergies or sensitivities, some of my guests do. My daughter's best friend has egg, dairy, and peanut allergies, my mother-in-law is a vegetarian, ...read more
Endometriosis is a painful and often devastating condition that can cause infertility when a woman's uterine tissue grows outside the uterus. Scientists have never been sure why some women have the condition and others don't, but a new study has discovered a potential link: ...read more
We may scoff and laugh at how silly they past fashions seem (Bustles? Really?), but 2013 fashion trends will likely seem just as ridiculous in a couple of decades—not to mention hazardous. In fact, we now know that styles touted as 2013 fashion trends are seriously bad for your ...read more
Would you stock shelves and schlep boxes of lettuce if it meant taking home cheap organic food? Well, that's what actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, her husband Peter Sarsgaard, and her brother Jake Gyllenhaal do at a food co-op in New York. A food cooperative, or food co-op for short, is ...read more
As the weather gets colder, you may find some unwanted house guests trying to take advantage of your central heating. Follow our natural tips for keeping your house pest-free this winter.How To Deter Winter Pests Without ChemicalsAnts try to come indoors when the weather changes, ...read more
Whether you're the foodie who loves to keep up with the latest and greatest information or looking for the perfect holiday gift for a foodie on your list, these new books should definitely be on your radar!7 New, Must-Read Books For Foodies50 Foods: The Essentials of Good ...read more
Canadian beekeepers in Elmwood, Ontario, have lost upwards of 37 million bees just weeks after GMO corn was planted nearby. The massive die-off represents a mere fraction of those that have been lost since the mysterious colony collapse disorder, or CCD, began affecting bees all ...read more
In a relaunch it claims has been the works for some time, Kraft announced that it will remove artificial yellow coloring from five of its character-based macaroni and cheese lines starting in January 2014. The petroleum-based artificial colors yellow #5 and #6 will be replaced ...read more
Being a member of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the Rocky Mountains meant eating a lot of beets! Luckily, I discovered that they're much more delicious—and versatile—than one might think. Don't believe me? Check out these easy beet recipes and you can even enjoy ...read more
Do you ever walk down the aisles at the grocery store, or see an ad on TV and think... "Seriously? Who buys this stuff?" Maybe it's just me. Point and giggle with me at these five pointless processed foods you can easily make at home.Uncrustables This doesn't even make sense to ...read more
Earlier this month, the Associated Press released an article reporting an alarming increase in the rates of cancer and birth defects in Argentina since 1996, when the country welcomed Monsanto to its farm belt. Doctors in rural provinces in Argentina report cancer rates two to ...read more
With Halloween right around the corner and Thanksgiving hot on its heels, it's likely you'll have plenty of pumpkin seeds on your hands very soon! Here are 14 clever ways to eat them in all sorts of ways. Bonus tip: You can supplement these pumpkin seed recipes with winter ...read more
The FDA has sent an open letter to U.S. veterinarians requesting samples and information relating to a troubling string of illnesses and deaths in dogs and cats. The pet illnesses have been linked to tainted "jerky treats" made in China as far back as 2007. The agency is ...read more
Cold and flu season is looming. It can be tempting to reach for the bleach and other harsh chemicals in an attempt to keep everyone healthy. But why make things worse by polluting your indoor air? Use our handy guide to disinfect every room of your house, ...read more
Men interested in having children should watch what they eat. A new study links consumption of processed meats—including bacon, hamburgers, and hot dogs—to lower sperm counts. The study, from the Harvard School of Public Health, showed a correlation between the amount of ...read more
In yet another demonstration of the revolving door between industry and politics, former Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln has been hired to promote the agenda of Monsanto, among other corporations. After losing her re-election campaign in 2011, Lincoln, a Democrat, announced the ...read more
Nearly 300 people in 18 states have been hospitalized in the latest salmonella outbreak to strike in the U.S., This time, the culprit is salmonella-tainted chicken.Unfortunately, it's exactly the sort of scenario some food safety advocates and lawmakers warned of when the ...read more
Epidemiologist Edward Archer from the University of South Carolina has published a study that refutes more than 40 years of U.S. nutritional data obtained through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES. NHANES is a survey that asks Americans about ...read more
In a report prompted by the horse meat scandal in Europe, the UK's National Audit Office demonstrated how difficult it has become to trace food fraud. Using a single ready-to-eat pizza as an example, the investigation found 35 ingredients from 60 different countries—even though ...read more
Since the 1940s, nearly 70 percent of the chickens and turkeys raised for meat in the U.S., as well as some hogs, were fed food laced with arsenic, a known carcinogen. Now, the FDA has banned 98 out of 101 arsenic-based drugs for food animals. For more than four years, the ...read more
Mainstream media has been using National Park and Monument closures as examples of the fallout of the government shutdown because they make nice photo ops, but if the shutdown persist for much longer, more serious problems may emerge—many related to the safety of our food ...read more
My little darling started preschool this fall and it seems like we have been fighting off colds and infections ever since. Back to school germs are expected, but you don't have to suffer in vaine. Here are some things you can do to help build your child's immune system (and your ...read more
Want to know if your spouse is thinking of having an affair? Organic food in the grocery cart could be one of the tell-tale signs of cheating. A survey from a UK website showed that men and women who were cheating or considering having an extramarital affair were more likely to ...read more
McDonald's has announced that all of its U.S. restaurants will switch to paper coffee cups, eliminating polystyrene or Styrofoam cups. Polystyrene is heavily regulated in parts of California, and Mayor Bloomberg has sought to ban it from restaurants in New York City, which may ...read more
Bettina Siegel, of the blog The Lunch Tray, is once again at the center of the discussion about better quality food in U.S. school lunches. This time she's questioning whether Chinese chicken should be allowed in U.S. school lunches. A former lawyer and mother of two in the ...read more
You are what you eat, so they say, and D'Artagnan, a company known for its heritage breed turkeys, chickens, and other meats, are taking that maxim to its extremes. The company is raising French, heritage chickens on table scraps from some of New York's finest 4-star ...read more
A new study by celebrity doctor Dean Ornish suggests that easy lifestyle changes can actually reverse the aging process. Ornish conducted the study with Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009 for her work on telomeres,the parts of the chromosome that ...read more
Eight percent of American children suffer from peanut allergies, tree nut allergies, dairy allergies, egg allergies, and allergies to other foods. According to a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the care and treatment of these ailments costs nearly $25 billion a ...read more
Chipotle has released its second short film/ad as part of its Cultivate Foundation and Food With Integrity project. The viral video encourages consumers to think long and hard about where their food comes from.In the first Chipotle film, veteran farmer advocate and president of ...read more
Walmart announced this week that it will no longer sell cosmetics or cleaning products containing 10 specific toxic chemicals. “Walmart’s decision to banish cosmetics and cleaners made with toxic chemicals will revolutionize the marketplace and help all of us live better by ...read more
Back to school means new shoes, No. 2 pencils, and—especially for young kids—a seemingly endless battle against colds, eye infections, and the flu. Lots of parents try to take a stand against germs with hand sanitizer, and some schools even put it on the supplies list. While ...read more
September 16 is National Guacamole Day (don't ask me why I know that) and in case you need a reason to celebrate, it turns out that avocados are one of the healthiest fruits out there—maybe even the perfect food.When I was pregnant with my daughter, I craved guacamole and ate it ...read more
Weight loss research continues to point the fact that it really is just a game of calories in vs. calories out (despite the fact that calories aren't that accurate). But a couple of weight loss researchers from Colorado—the thinnest state in the U.S. with the lowest obesity ...read more
Horse meat in your burgers, melamine in your powdered milk...It seems like we're hearing more and more stories of products masquarading to be other foods. But which foods are most vulnerable to this sort of food fraud?Markus Lipp, senior director of food standards at US ...read more
It turns out that King Calorie, ruler of diets and dieters everywhere, might actually be a fraud. And what we all thought was solid scientific data, a case of the emperor's new clothes.The unit of measure we called a calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature ...read more
NuVal, a nutritional scoring system developed by nutrition and medical experts, recently released a slideshow of ten "new and improved" foods that had improved their nutritional score—but are any of these "improved" foods really healthy?The NuVal system rates foods on a scale ...read more
Farmer (and former attorney) Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farms sees farm-to-table partnerships between farmers and restaurants as a growing niche and a profitable one for young farmers—if they know what they're doing. That's why she started Farmer University, a yearlong ...read more
Target has announced that they are rolling out a new food collection aimed at healthy eating. Forty percent of the line will be organic and perhaps more interestingly, all of the products will be GMO-free by 2014. The Simply Balanced line that began appearing on store shelves in ...read more
It honestly amazes me the lengths to which big food manufacturers will go to convince us that the highly processed dreck they're serving us is "natural." But even more amazing are the ways our brain tricks us into believing them. The latest example? Turns out food manufacturers ...read more
You're probably familiar with the idea of greenwashing—when companies use deceptive labels and marketing to make consumers think their products are environmentally friendly, when they really aren't. But a new term has popped up on the interwebs, "genewashing" and it refers to ...read more
Sometimes green cleaning is all about getting back to basics: vinegar, salt, lemons, baking soda, and a good rag will get a lot of the work done. But sometimes you can look to technology to help get the job done, too. Check out these five futuristic gadgets and eco-friendly green ...read more
Coca-Cola and national women's blogging conference BlogHer have come under fire from bloggers for naming Coke as BlogHer ‘13's "wellness sponsor."In its ninth year, BlogHer is one of the nation's largest blogging conferences focused on content created by and for women and has ...read more
Who are you going to trust when it comes to facts about GMOs—researchers, activists, or the people who actually make them? Wait... Is this a trick question?A new website, GMOAnswers.com, has been launched by the Council for Biotechnology Information, promising to answer any ...read more
I've written before about kids making an impact on their food communities through documenting the poor quality of their school lunches or taking the CEO of McDonalds to task over unhealthy choices, and a 9-year-old getting suspended for photographing school lunches. But the ...read more
A new study out in the Nutrition Journal takes a look at where the average American is spending her daily calories, and the results were somewhat surprising.Americans spend one trillion dollars a year on food (yup, that's trillion with a "T"), and half of those food dollars are ...read more
There is a LOT of information swirling around out there about GMOs—genetically modified organisms—but where do you start? We've rounded up seven infographics that distill this information down into bite-sized pictures especially for all you visual learners out there. Take a look ...read more
An influential committee of British MPs has issued a report urging people in Great Britain to eat less meat less in order to help ease the food crises in the developing world and keep a lid on rampant price inflation that has plagued the UK, seeing the cost of staple foods rise ...read more
Dr. Theirry Vrain spend a long and illustrious career as the man: a soil biologist who helped engineer genetically modified organisms and advocated on behalf of biotech companies. But after he retired, he had the time to really study agriculture from many different angles and ...read more