Food

"WASHINGTON -- From the beginning, Michelle Obama's kitchen garden has been an overachiever, churning out more peppers, parsley and eggplant than expected, and generating interest that -- yes, really -- crosses oceans."

"May is the month we see strawberries explode in the market. There are strawberry festivals in every corner of the nation celebrating the juicy ruby beauties, and Strawberry Queens crowned galore. Those traditional harvest time festivals make us think our strawberries are mostly grown on the farm just down the road. But in fact, one state — California — supplies 80 percent of America's strawberries, and the percentage is growing."

"Melinda Olson has given her 12-year-old son raw milk for years. When he walked away virtually unscathed from a serious bike accident last year, she credited his healthy diet of raw milk dairy products. Matthew Caldwell fed his 2-year-old son, Owen, raw milk in the spring of 2010. The boy was hospitalized for 13 days, victim of an E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak traced to raw milk producer Mike Hartmann."

Maryland is set to ban the arsenic-containing drug Roxarsone in chicken feed. Maryland is a major chicken producer, and that puts it ahead of most other states as well as the federal government. It is all the more remarkable, given that 'Big Chicken' is a major force in Maryland politics.

"At his family farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Lee Richardson raises thousands of chickens from fuzzy hatchlings to the juicy broilers stacked at grocery stores far and wide. Like a lot of farmwork, this seems simple, but it's not.

"As the battle wages on over the safety of feeding antibiotics to livestock for growth promotion, a new report reveals yet another source of unregulated antibiotics in American animal feed--spent ethanol grain."

"On her 14th birthday, Kayla Boner got her driver's permit and then went home complaining of stomach-bug symptoms that landed her in the hospital two days later. Antibiotics didn't work. Kayla's condition deteriorated. Her kidneys failed. She had a seizure and went on a ventilator. Soon after, her brain activity ceased. Just 11 days after her symptoms surfaced, Kayla's distraught parents decided not to keep her on life support."

"A new study of fetal exposure to BPA, a plastic additive found in some food packaging, shows that the chemical altered the mammary gland development in monkeys. The researchers reported that the changes they observed in the monkeys reinforce concerns that BPA - bisphenol A - could contribute to breast cancer in women."

"Federal officials have been quick to reassure the public that there is no health threat from the mad cow disease discovered in the carcass of a Tulare County dairy cow. But there is a lot they don't know about the type of infection in that carcass -- including how the cow got the disease, how long it was ill, and the risk to the public if that strain gets into the food supply."