Today in Organic: December 10, 2009

• "The phrase 'farm fresh' was ruined in the American grocery store years ago. The American restaurant business is perfectly capable of ruining 'farm-to-table,'" New York restaurant consultant Clark Wolf tells the Washington Post in an article that looks at the difficulty of serving sustainable food in restaurants.

• "Are school lunches less safe than fast food?" asks GOOD writer Nikhil Swaminathan. (Answer: quite possibly.) The meat served in school lunches is provided by the lowest bidder, while many fast food chains adopted pretty strict requirements after an E. coli outbreak in 1993.

• Micheal Pollan's 112-page "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual" will be published later this month. Entertainment Weekly says the book has "the tone of a parental lecture," and gives it a B.

• A new report from The Organic Center finds that the use of GMO crops led to the rise of herbicide-resistant "superweeds," which in turn are prompting conventional farmers to douse their fields in more herbicides. Read about it at Eco Salon.

• Architect Michelle Kaufman looks at some new designs for urban agriculture in a Civil Eats post.

• Slate has a new article that takes a contrarian position and challenges conventional wisdom. Wait, that's every Slate article! This time they find that people who eat organic produce and buy green products are more likely to cheat and steal.