Today in Organic: December 9, 2009

• "Could industrially raised meat be illegal?" asks NYTimes.com blogger Mark Bittman, observing that the "1976 Toxic Substances Control Act authorizes strict regulatory action on substances if there’s a reasonable basis to conclude that there's 'an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.'" I wouldn't bet on a meat ban anytime soon though.

• NPR checks in on what they're calling the "ethical omnivore movement," interviewing Will Allen, Humane Farm Animal Care Director Adele Douglass, and former meat producer Mark Newman. 

• GOOD produces an infographic showing how many of each fruit or vegetable, laid end to end, would equal the distance travelled for local and conventional food. (They also convert the measurements to miles, for those of us who don't think of distances in units of cauliflower.)

• "If the motivation is to truly make our diets more earth-friendly, then perhaps we need a new mantra: Buy frozen." So say a pair of ecological economists and a food system researcher in a New York Times Op-Ed. They ran the numbers on salmon, comparing organic to conventional and wild to farm-raised, and found that the most important environmental factor was whether the fish was bought frozen or fresh.

• Writing for Civil Eats, farmer Jim Goodman says President Obama's campaign was full of empty promises, and he goes down the list of former agribusiness execs that now hold posts in the Obama administration.