Although you, as a taxpayer, pay for reports by the Congressional Research Service, Congress does not allow you to read them. Fortunately, somebody leaked these reports of interest to environmental journalists.
Do consumers have a right to know where their food comes from? What if there is a federal law decreeing that they have that right? Not anymore. None of that matters. International trade treaties — nowadays often negotiated in secret — trump United States law aimed at protecting consumers.
"It's now harder to find out where your beef or pork was born, raised and slaughtered. After more than a decade of wrangling, Congress repealed a labeling law last month that required retailers to include the animal's country of origin on packages of red meat. It's a major victory for the meat industry, which had fought the law in Congress and the courts since the early 2000s."
"The largest ape to roam Earth died out 100,000 years ago because it failed to tuck into savannah grass after climate change hit its preferred diet of forest fruit, scientists suggest."
"Alaska Inuit hunter John Goodwin for decades has hunted oogruk, the bearded seal, a marine mammal prized for its meat, oil and hide.
The largest of Alaska's ice seals uses sea ice to rest and birth pups, and after the long winter, when ice breaks into floes, there's a window of opportunity for Goodwin to leave his home in Kotzebue and motor his boat between ice panels, shoot seals and butcher them before they migrate north through the Bering Strait.
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) finalized a new rule Monday that will require all producers of raw ground beef to keep records of where the meat has come from."
"In the U.S., even chicken that has passed all federal food safety requirements still can make people sick."
"Food companies are mounting an aggressive year-end push to head off mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods."
"Labels on Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice and four of its brand siblings will begin carrying early next year an increasingly familiar certification — the butterfly seal conferred by the Non-GMO Project, a nonprofit group that verifies products as being free of genetically engineered ingredients."
"MUSTAFABAD, India — Khushboo Kushwaha has a few years before she will have to squat in front of a filthy, smoking open stove three times a day to cook meals for her family, as her older sister and cousins do now.
Khushboo is 11, and the girls in her home usually take up cooking duties as teenagers. But the smoke that billows from the wood and dried dung they burn, stinging the older girls’ eyes and throats, already affects her.
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