Tom Philpott

Last December, a group called Restaurant Opportunities Centers United came out with a new kind of restaurant guide—one that ranks eateries not on the deliciousness of their food, but the way they treat their workers. It was about damned time, because restaurant employees form a vast part of our nation's workforce, and they largely get treated like dirt. We welcomed it here at Mother Jones—Jaeah Lee mashed up its findings with quality rankings from Zagat and Yelp, and I weighed in with anecdotes from my own youthful stint as a line cook.

Now the ROC guide is back, updated, and freshly heralded by Mark Bittman. (Hat tip, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan.) For a broader look at conditions face by the workers who feed us—the people who work in restaurants, farms, slaughterhouses, supermarkets, etc—see this post from Mother Jones' Maddie Oatman on an important new study.

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You know how sometimes you get into a high-stakes conversation and you think of the perfect things to say after it's over? Well, here's a factoid I wish I had dropped during last week's interview with Terry Gross on her NPR show Fresh Air: "The number of chickens produced  annually in the United States has increased by more than 1,400 percent since 1950 while the number of farms producing those birds has dropped by 98 percent."

Those startling numbers and many more appear in a new report from a group called Georgians for Pastured Poultry, an alliance that includes pastured-based poultry farms, chefs, the Sierra Club, and an environmental law firm called GreenLaw. (Hat tip to the excellent Maryn McKenna.) The report reads like the black book of industrial chicken farming—a kind of dossier of the ills of rounding up billions (yes, billions) of birds into tight spaces and fattening them as quickly as possible.

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In Austin, where I grew up and where I'm spending time now, summer arrives with the subtlety of a two-by-four to the back of a head. You wake up one day, and suddenly its 95 degrees and humid—and not getting cooler until October. It's barely June, and we've already crossed that threshold.

But I've noticed an important compensation for the brutal heat: Peak-season summer produce arrives early, too. In the high country of western North Carolina, where I've lived for years, we don't start harvesting green beans, garlic, and squash until July, and tomatoes don't come in until August. On a recent Saturday visit to Austin's excellent inner-city Boggy Creek Farm, I was surprised to find all of that and more on display.

So I grabbed a bunch of it and did what I have done so often at Maverick Farms with similarly excellent produce: minimally cooked it and tossed it into a pasta, goosing it with chickpeas, walnuts, and Parmesan for a little extra flavor and protein.

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A sign at a pro-labeling rally in San Francisco in February.

In November, California voters will decide on a ballot initiative that would require labeling of all foods containing ingredients from genetically modified crops. The initiative made it to the ballot after almost 1 million Californians signed a petition in favor of it—nearly double the 504,760 signatures needed under the state's proposition rules. The campaign that organized the push to get the measure on the ballot focused on possible health effects of GMO foods.

This news will not likely be applauded by my friends over at Croplife America, the main trade group of the GM seed/agrichemical industry. The big GMO crops—corn, soy, sugar beets, and cotton—are processed into sweeteners, fats, and additives used widely by the food industry. Everything from high fructose corn syrup-sweetened Coke to soybean oil-containing Hellman's mayo would have to bear a label reading something like "Contains GMO ingredients."

That would send a shockwave through the food industry—one that could ultimately be felt on the industrial-scale US farms that have been devoting their land to GMO crops for years, and the companies that profit from selling them patented seeds and matching herbicides. The reason isn't just that California represents an imposing chunk of the US food market. It's also that a food-labeling law that starts in California is unlikely to stay in California.

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