Ever wonder why McDonald's food in commercials looks like food, but McDonald's food in real life looks like a cat got sick? It's because food stylists, photographers, and retouchers spend HOURS making the food in ads look edible.

Domino’s doesn’t want to tell you how many calories are in that Bacon Cheeseburger Feast pizza, so they’re pulling out the Teen Talk Barbie defense: “Math is hard!” According to the company, there are 34 million ways to customize a Domino's pizza, all of which result in a meal that tastes like wet cardboard. With so many permutations, Domino’s argues, how could they POSSIBLY post calorie counts?

Proposed FDA rules would require food chains to reveal some info about what, exactly, they're selling us. But Domino’s says they couldn’t possibly comply, because freedom! So much freedom to put whatever crap you want on your terrible pizza! Freedom and math are not compatible, guys.

A still from a new video about antibiotics in farm animals from FixFood. Click or scroll down to watch.

Despite a high-profile lawsuit, a recent court order, and a much-hyped set of voluntary rules, it’s still not clear that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to do anything of substance to stop meat producers from using antibiotics on a massive -- and massively destructive -- scale. It has been three decades since the FDA first identified the use of these drugs in livestock production as a problem. But they’re still mulling it over, apparently. Thinking long and hard.

While they think, 80 percent of all the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are being used on animals to spur growth and compensate for crowded, dirty conditions. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria or “superbugs” continue to show up in food and cause infections in tens of thousands of people every year (99,000 people died of hospital-acquired infections in 2002, the most recent year for which data are available).

It’s no coincidence then that Meat Without Drugs, the campaign launched today by Consumers Union, doesn’t target the FDA or any government agency, for that matter. Instead, the advocacy group, which has been pushing for a ban on antibiotics in agriculture since the late 1970s, is targeting grocery stores.

To farm bill or not to farm bill, that is the question. Or that's been the question occupying the Senate for the last week. The problem, as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition explains, is that while there is a complete farm bill draft awaiting a final vote in the Senate, senators have filed almost 300 amendments, several of them unrelated to the bill itself.

There isn’t enough time to consider all these amendments, so farm-state senators have worked furiously to pull off a deal involving votes on a package of amendments followed by a vote on the complete bill. It will all culminate today, in what's called a vote-o-rama: votes on 73 amendments in quick succession. (Here’s the guide to amendments to watch we published last week on Grist -- although several of the most reform-minded did not make the cut, nor did the amendment to ban battery cages in egg production. The GMO labeling amendment led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will get a vote, however.) While this process will only get the bill through the Senate (the House is another story completely), it looks like it’s the best hope we have this year.

The Dirty Dozen list includes the produce with the most pesticide residue. Click to download the full guide.

Every year, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) releases a new version of its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides just as I start gearing up to fill my gullet with watermelon, peaches, and tomatoes.

That’s right, it’s peak produce season, and -- unless you eat everything 100 percent organic all the time -- pesticide residue is a valid concern. What's more, not all conventionally grown fruits and vegetables pose the same risk. The EWG site ranks 45 foods and pulls out the best and worst on the list. “The Dirty Dozen” are the foods most likely to be coated with pesticide residue (peaches happen to be No. 4 on the list, while apples have earned the No. 1 spot for several years running). “The Clean 15” are the foods (including onions, corn, and avocados) that are safest for consumers.

Of course, as I’ve written before, this list doesn’t necessarily correspond to the amount of pesticides used to grow the food. Many of the crops on the Clean 15 list still require a hefty dose of toxic chemicals, which still have an impact on the soil, groundwater, and wildlife around them -- not to mention the people who work on farms and live in the surrounding communities. Those chemicals just don’t make it to your plate as readily, for a variety of reasons.

Click for a visual foraging tour with Tama Matsuoka Wong. (Photo by Rachel Nuwer.)

Plucking seemingly random weeds out of the dirt and sticking them in your mouth may be disconcerting to most city dwellers, but that’s exactly what a group of New Yorkers traveled to New Jersey to do recently.

Squinting in the sun on a patch of meadow, we watched as our fearless guide, Tama Matsuoka Wong, author of the new cookbook and guide Foraged Flavor, expertly scavenged delectable weed after delectable weed. From dainty yellow wood sorrel to aromatic garlic mustard, we smelled the newly picked shoots, and then gingerly took a nibble. Our taste buds were rewarded by flavors that were bright, fresh, and alive. And by the time we'd made our way past the meadow and into the forest, we were like a pack of hungry rabbits, chewing away at whatever tasty morsel Wong handed us.

Tama Matsuoka Wong doesn’t just frolic in her New Jersey forest, she eats it. A group of New Yorkers recently visited this delicious patch of land to learn about how a weed becomes a delicacy and to celebrate Wong's new book Foraged Flavor. Read the whole story here.

Sarah Rich, author of Urban Farms.

A former editor at Dwell and co-founder of the Foodprint Project, Sarah Rich thinks and writes about food as a key component of today's urban landscape. So when she and photographer Matthew Benson traveled the country recently documenting 16 public and private food-producing operations for their new book, Urban Farms, it was no surprise that the final product turned out to be an intelligent, inspiring work of art.

We spoke with Rich about the new book, the difference between a farm and a garden, and how urban farmers are moving beyond the trend factor.

Q. Why did you write Urban Farms? What was the ultimate goal?

A. There’s a lot of debate about urban farming as a solution that will feed cities in the future, but I was more interested in looking at it from an anthropological angle. I wanted to write about the other things urban farming can do for a city -- whether that’s creating green jobs, community building, environmental restoration, land-use planning, or any number of other things. While farms are essentially food-growing operations, they serve so many other functions in an urban environment.

Photo by Chris Johnson.

What are fish thinking when they change genders?

When Burt's Bees invited me to this press event, they probably didn't expect Isabella Rossellini to be the one asking questions, much less that one. Or for her to go on and note that gender assignation is largely a human construct. And to then express curiosity about what the process is like from the fish's perspective.

Sitting next to Rossellini, holding my notebook, I'm not really sure how to answer. After a pause, undeterred, she explains that fish are less interesting to play than insects because "sometimes they spawn, but that is it."

Luckily for her, we were there to talk about insects -- namely, bees -- and sitting with people who could answer the trickier questions she raised: for example, how scientists test for neonicotinoids, a pesticide that may impact bee navigation. ("Do they take the hives? … Do they feed them?" The answers were unknown.)

Rossellini has created an unusual niche for herself. Her series for the Sundance Channel, Green Porno, introduced Americans to the exotic, alarming mating rituals of flies, snails, and praying mantises -- with herself starring as each of the creatures. She enjoys the roles primarily because of the eccentricities of behavior, because of the tiny nuanced details that she likes to try and get right. And, clearly, because it is a topic about which she's deeply curious and fascinated to learn.

Dead salmon in British Columbia (these ones died from natural causes). (Photo by Carol Browne.)

Last month a virus broke out in an open water salmon farm in British Columbia that has the region’s fish farm owners scrambling to mitigate their losses. Called infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN), the rabies-like virus was found among salmon in floating net pens belonging to Mainstream Canada, the biggest producer in the region. As a result, the B.C. farm culled over 500,000 fish infected with IHN, which spreads rapidly and can kill up to 100 percent of a fish farm’s population. And this is just the latest disease scandal to hit the province’s salmon farming industry.

Critics of the industry say that the farms should have seen this coming. Their own alarm bells have been ringing ever since Rick Routledge, a professor at Simon Fraser University, claimed that wild sockeye tested by his lab in 2011 showed that another more serious virus, one that causes infectious salmon anemia (ISA), was present in B.C. waters. The government seized his samples and declared through their own testing that the virus was not present (since a verified case of the disease would be treated like other serious outbreaks such as mad cow disease under international convention, this would be devastating to the industry. In 2007, ISA caused a $2 billion loss to the Chilean salmon farming industry, and was found to be imported on Atlantic salmon eggs shipped from Norway).

Diseases like these are suspected by First Nations, activists, and fishing groups to be one cause of the drastic declines among some wild salmon populations that the province has witnessed in recent years. Home to some of the biggest wild salmon runs in the world, B.C.’s provincial government has also welcomed the salmon farming industry eagerly over the years, allowing 100 farms to be established in its waters. But activists charge that the open water pens are often located directly on the migration routes of wild salmon, where, as in the case of Chile, exotic diseases imported with the Atlantic salmon could multiply and spread into surrounding waters.