>> Kombucha withdrawals. I had a friend tell me drinking kombucha can cure hangovers. Now I find out the stuff’s just the hair of the dog! If your favorite store’s no longer selling kombucha, it’s because the FDA found popular Kombucha brands contained too much alcohol — more than the 0.5 percent allowable without a government warning.
>> Coke wants Honest Tea to get less honest. Coke has a a 40% minority investment in the fair trade, organic tea company Honest Tea — and now Coke wants the do-gooder tea people to take the “no high-fructose corn syrup” bit off product packaging, since the phrase makes the rest of Coke products look bad. From The New York Times:
A Coke spokesman, Scott Williamson, said the company would not comment publicly on its differences with Honest Tea. He did note that the smaller company’s “decisions were made on their understanding of their customers” and that Coke maintained that “sugar is sugar is sugar.”
A few business experts — including Gary Hirshberg, who sold 80 percent Stonyfield Organic yogurt to Danone a few years back — weigh in on the squabble. Earlier: Interview with Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg: ‘Everybody can win.’
>> Crazy chicken. If the anti-foaming agent used in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets — and also in Silly Putty — isn’t enough to stop you from eating the factory-farmed stuff, then perhaps the fact that an arsenic-based additive called roxarsone is commonly used in animal feed will get you to poison yourself less.
Unfortunately, cage-free chickens don’t necessarily mean arsenic-free chickens. Two kids in Utah got their elevated levels of arsenic by eating eggs from backyard chickens fed arsenic-laced chicken feed. And at least one USDA Certified Organic chicken feed brand contained detectable levels of arsenic — despite the fact that arsenic’s prohibited in certified organic feed.
>> And in completely unrelated news, Greenpeace founder Jim Bohlen dies at 84. I finally I learned how Greenpeace began: With an impulsive comment that got quoted in the papers.
Photo by @joefoodie
Thanks for posting the NY Times item on Coke & Honest Tea. It, and all the commentary, is really interesting, including the theory’s posed that a) Coke wants to eventually shutter Honest tea (companies buy and kill competing brands on a regular basis) & b) that the whole HFCS debate is really a ploy to avoid Coke’s potential legal liabilities.
By the way, over on the Freaknomics portion of the NY Times blog there are two good recent items on Fair Trade and whether organic farming can cut global warming (hint: it can).
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/author/james-mcwilliams/
In both cases the economist/blogger, James McWilliams, reaches the wrong conclusions (ignorance can do that) but I believe the readers set the record straight.
Comment by Rodney North — July 9, 2010 @ 2:41 pm