Whole Foods is crowded with shoppers filling online orders

Regular patrons of Whole Foods are being angered and driven away by scores of the retailer's gig-economy employees referred to as Prime Now shoppers. While parent company Amazon continues to push for speedy deliveries, Whole Foods is increasingly losing its reputation as a high-end and (relatively) relaxing place to buy groceries. Read more at The Wall Street Journal…

We mapped how food gets from farms to your home 

The first comprehensive high-resolution map of the U.S. food supply chain is here; it encompasses grains, fruits and vegetables, animal feed and processed food items. Eight databases were merged to show where U.S. food hubs lie (largely California's Los Angeles and Fresno counties) and which routes food products travel the most (internally within the state of California, but one of the largest links is from Niagara County to Erie County in New York). Read more at The Conversation…

The elusive goal of no-till organic

Organic farmers rely on tillage to control weeds in place of harmful herbicides, but now some experts argue that the organic agriculture movement must give up the till entirely in order to successfully scale up and feed the growing population. One potential solution being explored is using cover crop residue as a weed-suppressing mulch, and then using conventional no-till planting equipment to plant seeds and transplants in the decaying crop residue. Read more at Modern Farmer…

More than 1.5M Americans are allergic to sesame, but food companies don't have to list it on their ingredients

Sesame can be sneakily hidden in many an ingredient list, which means packaged products are a dangerous game of Russian roulette for the over 1.5 million Americans who suffer from a sesame allergy. While moves are being made in states like Illinois to correct this oversight, the Federal Drug Administration has been slow to gather information on adverse events linked to sesame and has not issued federal mandates for corporations in terms of listing sesame on labels as of yet. Read more at New Food Economy…

The future of lab-grown meat is one scientific breakthrough away

The lab-grown meat industry is poised to disrupt conventional animal agriculture for good, but one key missing part of the puzzle is a high-efficiency and scalable bioreactor that mimics what happens inside a live animal to produce cells. Until this innovation is achieved, cell-cultured meat products will remain scarce and at their current extraordinarily high price point. Read more at Quartz…