Media Blog

  • Let's Be Honest With Ourselves

    Let’s be honest. If you haven’t seen stories in the media recently about an increased interest in ferreting out seafood fraud you’ve been living under a rock. Busts for short-weighted fish, mislabeled species and tariff violations are up and just about every wanna be Woodward and Bernstein is reporting on it- the pescatarian perp walk is almost becoming common place.

    Published: 03/11/2010 - 14:37     Comments: 0     Read More

  • Is Turnabout Fair Play?

    Greenpeace

    The master manipulators at Greenpeace have been unfurling banners and vandalizing property for years in the name of raising their profile in the media and raising funds from their supporters.

    Published: 12/16/2009 - 14:52     Comments: 0     Read More

  • Watch Your Language

    This morning the CBS Early Show did a short segment with Dr. Jennifer Ashton that mentioned seafood and eating fish while pregnant. While Ashton came pretty close to getting the FDA advice on seafood consumption basically right, she did something that Doctors often do-- lump "tuna" in with higher mercury fish like Shark and Tile Fish. She said:
    Published: 12/16/2009 - 12:12     Comments: 0     Read More

  • What You Won't Hear About the Latest CDC Report on Mercury

    Over the past few days, we've been seeing sporadic reports about a study that was published by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that measured the amount of mercury found in the bodies of most Americans.
    Published: 12/15/2009 - 16:20     Comments: 0     Read More

  • When Perspective Is The Proverbial Needle In A Hay Stack

    Just a quick note for you all this morning.  For starters if you are not familiar with Arthur Allen let's make one thing clear right off the bat-he is no hack. He has a track record of being fair and getting both sides and siding with ground truth science in his journalistic deliberations.
    Published: 12/08/2009 - 09:06     Comments: 0     Read More

  • What do U.S. catfish farmers and Vietnam have to do with soy from Illinois?

    Let's start from the beginning. Vietnam represents an important market for U.S. soybeans.  U.S. soybean and soybean meal exports to Vietnam totaled nearly $100 million in 2008 and are on the rise. U.S. exports of soybean meal climbed from just 17,469 metric tons in 2004 to almost 115,000 metric tons in 2008, a 558% increase.
    Published: 12/08/2009 - 08:25     Comments: 0     Read More

  • What do U.S. catfish farmers and Vietnam have to do with soy from Iowa?

    Let's start from the beginning. Vietnam represents an important market for U.S. soybeans.  U.S. soybean and soybean meal exports to Vietnam totaled nearly $100 million in 2008 and are on the rise. U.S. exports of soybean meal climbed from just 17,469 metric tons in 2004 to almost 115,000 metric tons in 2008, a 558% increase.
    Published: 12/07/2009 - 17:29     Comments: 0     Read More

  • Why Do Catfish Farmers Have Beef With Montana?

    In case you didn't know anti-competition lobbyists representing American catfish farmers are working hard to have a Vietnamese fish called pangasius banned from this country and that spells trouble for Montana cattlemen. Despite the fact that pangasius has been safely imported for years and has caused a grand total of zero illnesses, the bottom-feeding special interest lobby has cooked up a food safety scare story and is shopping it to USDA and anyone in Washington who will listen.
    Published: 12/04/2009 - 14:54     Comments: 0     Read More

  • Getting The Story Right

    On Thursday CNN ran a story about imported shrimp from Thailand that was really just a rehash of an old AFL-CIO report about suspected labor abuses. There was nothing new about the report or about the package CNN produced so the first question is, where is the new in this news?
    Published: 12/04/2009 - 14:36     Comments: 0     Read More

  • Faux Food Safety Scare At The Heart Of Lobbying Effort

    At the same time the Obama Administration is working to curb the influence of narrow special interests, American catfish producers are busy telling fish tales to Congress to get their competition regulated out of existence. They've dreamt up a faux food safety scare and they're shopping it to any reporter or regulator who will listen. It's a piece of fiction that's fat with anecdotal exaggerations and thin on facts. But this isn't the first time the anti-competition catfish lobby has stooped to these types of tactics.
    Published: 12/01/2009 - 11:57     Comments: 0     Read More