Food | featured news

Bacon lovers can relax. They'll find all they want on supermarket shelves in the coming months, though their pocketbooks may take a hit. The economics of the current drought are likely to nose up prices for bacon and other pork products next year, by as much as 10 percent. But U.S. agricultural economists are dismissing reports of a global bacon shortage that lent sizzle to headlines and Twitter feeds last week. Simply put, the talk of scarcity is hogwash.

Campbell Soup Co. is closing two US plants and cutting more than 700 jobs as it looks to trim costs amid declining canned soup consumption. The world's largest soup maker said Thursday that it will close a plant in Sacramento, Calif., that has about 700 full-time workers.

A suburban Denver man who was diagnosed with "popcorn lung," possibly from inhaling the artificial butter smell of the microwave popcorn he regularly ate, has won a $7.2 million verdict against various food companies.

Consumer Reports is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to set standards for how much arsenic can be allowed in rice after finding the potential toxin in almost every rice product it tested. FDA is running its own tests and says it would be premature to set standards or to urge consumers to change their eating habits. Rice producers say there's no documented evidence of health harm from arsenic in rice grown in the United States.

Kids with higher levels of the widely used substance BPA in their bodies are more likely to be obese, according to the first large-scale, nationally representative study to link an environmental chemical with obesity in children and teens.

Beef Products Inc. sued ABC News, Inc. for defamation Thursday over its coverage of a meat product that critics dub "pink slime," claiming the network damaged the company by misleading consumers into believing it is unhealthy and unsafe....

UnitedHealth Group, the health insurance company, will replace Kraft Foods in the Dow Jones industrial average, the most widely known barometer of the American stock market... The change takes effect Sept. 24. S&P Dow Jones Indices, which manages the average, said it was dropping Kraft because it is about to become a much smaller company after spinning off its North American grocery business.

Thanks to new research released this week by Stanford University, consumers now know that all of those sweet, red pieces of fruit – no matter how naturally or conventionally they were grown, and no matter how they are labeled – carry the exact same nutritional value. Forget: "Paper or plastic?" The question now: Will this revelation take a bite out of the $31 billion organic food industry?

David Frum says the drought is driving up world food prices, and history suggests that is likely to produce unrest within poor nations. Prediction: 2013 will be a year of serious global crisis. That crisis is predictable, and in fact has already begun. It will inescapably confront the next president of the United States. Yet this emerging crisis got not a mention at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. We'll see if the Democrats do better.

A New Jersey produce company recalled a number of products distributed in the Northeast that contained fresh-cut mangoes Saturday because of potential salmonella contamination.