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Chinese consumers are responding to a powerful new marketing tactic that plays to a widespread fear of food contamination - the promise of safe groceries sold online. Pledging produce direct from the farm, vendors have found food is becoming one of the fastest-growing segments of Internet retailing as they cash in on scares from cadmium-tainted rice to recycled cooking oil. The trend is adding momentum to a Chinese online retail boom driven by a rapidly expanding middle class, with companies such as COFCO Ltd and Shunfeng Express betting that a decent slice of a 1.3 billion population will pay for...

For the second time in less than a year, Minnesota authorities are prosecuting Alvin Schlangen for unauthorized delivery of farm produce. Schlangen offers members of the private buying club, Freedom Farms Co-op, the benefit of his volunteer delivery service. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) demands that the Stearns County District Attorney stop the deliveries by bringing charges against Schlagen. Schlagen's customers, many of whom have no other convenient means of getting food to their homes, are irate at the MDA. “A lot of those on Schlagen's route are house-bound or handicapped,” said Elisabeth Berry. “More to the point, though,...

First published on FrontPage Magazine. By Enza Ferreri “Beware! Halal food funds terrorists.” Stickers with this slogan were sold in July by a candidate of the Australian political party One Nation, and condemned by the country’s Multicultural Affairs Minister Glen Elmes as “offensive, grotesque and designed to inflame hatred.” He added: “People are encouraged to put the stickers on food products in supermarkets, which isn’t just racial discrimination, it’s also vandalism.” What the sticker says, though, is apparently taking place in the USA and Canada where Campbell’s Soup and other companies have paid the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North...

I know the restaurant biz very well, I can give you a very good prediction on what would happen if employees at McDonalds must be paid $15 an hour; The first thing that will happen is all the low skilled, non management people will be fired and replaced by line cooks with 3 plus years experience and newly graduated culinary students. If an owner has too pay twice the regular wage, he is only going to hire much more experienced people for obvious reasons. One of the highest costs in the restaurant business is training employees, especially fast food, most...

HO CHI MINH CITY (Reuters) - Tycoon Henry Nguyen mopped floors, flipped burgers and even cleaned toilets over a 10-year campaign to convince McDonald's Corp to let him bring Big Macs and Happy Meals to communist Vietnam. McDonald's is making a late entry into this market, where Yum Brands Inc already has dozens of Pizza Hut and KFC outlets and Burger King Worldwide Inc has 15 restaurants. Even Starbucks Corp debuted in Ho Chi Minh City in February and opened its second branch last week. Capitalism has taken root in a country that many Americans associate more with an unpopular...

Foreign brands of baby milk formula are hugely sought after Continue reading the main story Related Stories Recall over NZ dairy botulism fears China's Yili in baby milk recall China 'tainted milk' kills three China has banned all imports of milk powder from New Zealand, after its main dairy exporter, Fonterra, found in some of its products a strain of bacteria that can cause botulism. China relies on New Zealand for almost all its imports of milk powder. Imports are highly prized in China after a tainted milk formula scandal in 2008 killed six babies and made some 300,000 infants...

There are two topics that you don’t discuss in Singapore: the weather and politics, because both generally remain the same. Food, on the other hand, is a subject that unifies the people of this small island like nothing else can. Eating out here can range from horrifically expensive - S$300 for a steak if you go to a celebrity chef restaurant - to terrific value, such as S$3 for a bowl of delicious noodles, eaten out of a plastic bowl while sitting under strip lighting. Yet it is the traditional and inexpensive food sold at hawker centres that sparks an...

First, Michelle Obama called for healthier school lunches -- and kids complained that the first lady's menus left them hungry. Now, the United States Department of Agriculture has green-lighted a pilot program to serve trendy Greek yogurt in school cafeterias in New York, Idaho, Arizona, and Tennessee. If all goes well this fall, Greek yogurt may became a staple in Washington's $11 billion school lunch program in some 100,000 schools. In one sense, it's an example of America's growing European Union-style nanny state -- not to mention crony capitalism and insider influence. Two of the biggest cheerleaders of Greek yogurt...

Congress is considering a major farm bill, S. 954, along with a House companion bill. The bill would eliminate $5 billion a year in direct subsidies from corn, wheat, and other crops while expanding crop insurance. The Senate bill would cut $400 million a year in food stamps and the House would cut $2 billion a year. The legislation would also maintain limits on sugar sales and imports. 80% of the farm bill is about food stamps. There has been mention of proceeding without foodstamps in the farm bill, but Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, has...

“I can fight the bugs, I can fight the lack of rain, but when the guy comes with a clipboard what are you going to do?”, asks farmer who’s shutting down his business, thanks to the Obama FDA: Bessemer called it quits out of frustration with pending federal food safety regulations that likely will require farmers to very specifically track their produce and how it is handled from seed to sale, among other things. The new rules are part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, sweeping changes within the Food and Drug Administration aimed at making our food system safer...