Do you know where your food comes from—or where it's going? If you’re a food distributor or manufacturer, the answer is probably not.

That’s the conclusion of a report presented today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) inspector general, Daniel Levinson, at a House hearing on food safety. Federal law requires food manufacturers and distributors to keep records on their goods' stops along the production chain, such as the processors and packers that handle them. They're also supposed to track who transports them and what stores they end up in to make it easier for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to trace the origin of food-borne illnesses. But 59 percent of manufacturers and distributors couldn’t provide Levinson's investigators with all of that information, and 25 percent were clueless about the requirement, Levinson told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies.

Pres. Obama has tapped Kathleen Merrigan, an academic and former congressional aide who helped write federal organic food-labeling rules, to be deputy agriculture secretary. The White House announced the pick yesterday, drawing cheers from food-safety advocates, who have pushed for more stringent labeling regs.

"Merrigan will bring an excellent perspective to a number of troublesome labeling issues now before the agency," Jean Halloran, Consumers Union's director of food policy initiatives, said in a statement. Among the matters that need to be addressed, she said: loopholes in the current "grass fed" standard, lack of uniformity in meat marketing claims, defining "raised without antibiotics" label claims, and weaknesses in the current definition of "naturally raised."

As if biodiversity wasn’t under siege already from encroaching human populations and climate change, it is literally under attack, according to a new study showing that most of the last half-century's conflicts were in the most ecologically rich—and threatened—parts of the planet.

One hundred eighteen of 146 of the wars fought between 1950 and 2000 occurred in biodiversity hot spots, according to the study in Conservation Biology. There are 34 of those hot spots—defined as areas with at least half of all known plant species and at least 42 percent of terrestrial vertebrates—on the globe, based on criteria established in 1988 to prioritize conservation goals.

Men have more willpower than women when it comes to resisting food, a small new study suggests.

"We didn’t expect such striking differences between males and females," study co-author Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, tells ScientificAmerican.com. "Men were able to inhibit their desire for food . . . and women weren’t able to do so."

Scientists had 13 women and 10 men who had fasted overnight look at, smell and taste – but not dig into — goodies like pizza, burgers and cake. They then told the subjects to practice "cognitive inhibition" (read: to try to convince themselves they weren't really hungry) and measured their brain activity using positron emission tomography (PET) scanning. (PET scans measure increases in blood flow linked to brain activity.)

Policymakers may not intend to keep us trim when they're pondering how to manage fisheries and other wild food resources. But a new study indicates that our current food-harvesting practices are making the stuff we eat smaller—very quickly.

The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that plants and animals being harvested aggressively around the world from the wild (rather than from farms) are changing more than two and a half times faster than would be expected under natural conditions.

"Two and a half times is pretty big," says Stephan Munch, an assistant professor of fisheries ecology at Stony Brook University in Long Island, N.Y.

Scientists have long assumed that humans can—and do—affect the plants and animals that live around us (with pollution and by introducing invasive species). But this new work, which analyzed data from dozens of other studies, found that our intense food-gathering practices have substantially changed the size and breeding schedule of at least 29 species in as few as 20 years.

Foods containing a widely used additive may increase the growth of lung cancers or cause new tumors to develop, new research suggests.

Tumors were more plentiful in mice with lung cancer fed a diet containing 0.5 to 1 percent inorganic phosphates (equivalent to the 40 mg. that humans on average consume daily) for a month according to a study in next month's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The tumors' mass increased by 14 percent in the mice fed the most phosphates.

Inorganic phosphates are chemicals added to a variety of processed foods including cheese, meat, beverages and bakery products to increase water retention and improve their texture. The additives may disrupt the regulation of cell growth in the lungs, causing tumors to develop, says Myung-Haing Cho, a veterinarian at Seoul National University who co-authored the study.

We recently asked, is keeping kosher good for the environment? We tried to answer the question by running the carbon footprint numbers based on what you substituted for forbidden foods like pork and shellfish.

Now, the New York Times Magazine offers its own spin on the question. An emerging movement among kosher-keeping Jews infuses modern-day ethics into the practice, taking care that workers at processing plants and the animals themselves are well cared for. In a widely reported story, immigration authorities in May raided the country's largest independent kosher manufacturer, Agriprocessors, arresting nearly 400 workers, and last month, Iowa's attorney general slapped the company with more than 9,000 criminal misdemeanor charges, including child-labor violations. At that time, company spokesman Chaim Abrahams said the workers "lied about their age" to Agriprocessors. "We look forward to our day in court,” he said in a statement then.

Get ready for even more fine print to squint at in stores: By the end of this month, foods will come with labels that tell you what country they hail from. A new law mandating such labeling takes effect Sept. 30 — six years after Congress passed it. 

The measure —  backed by farmers eager to compete with foreign producers and food safety advocates —  requires meat, poultry and produce to contain labels listing their country of origin.

The effective date was delayed by industry protests that it would cost too much. Companies will spend an estimated $2.5 billion next year to fulfill the requirement, plus an annual $499 million to maintain it afterwards, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently estimated. (The labeling guidelines can be found here.)

Until recently, food inspectors have mostly used high-energy systems similar to those used to scan luggage at airports to carefully examine food. The problem: these are able to detect, say, a pebble in a package of corn but they lack the resolution to pick out a grain of sand in a bag of flour. But the European Union–funded MODULINSPEX project may have the answer. In a quest to make sure that food is all that's in our dinner, researchers there have developed low-energy x-ray detection and sorting systems that create highly detailed images of food products and packaged goods. The system can be used to check seals on food wrappers, locate packaging defects, and find foreign particles of any size in any kind of food, from maggots in apples to grains of sand in bread. The use of low-energy x-rays had previously been too slow for food inspectors to use because it took too long for them to get high-resolution images. By attaching a computer chip to the crystal that detects the x-rays in a low-energy system, MODULINSPEX researchers built a detector capable of taking 300 images per second, enough to capture a detailed image of products moving on a conveyor belt at 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) per second. These low-energy x-ray images have a resolution of 0.004 inch (0.1 millimeter, or 16 times better than existing high-energy systems), making it possible to detect objects as small and fine as a herring bone. The consortium of companies involved in the MODULINSPEX project has already sold three of their systems to companies in Spain, the U.K. and Denmark since November.

Until recently, food inspectors have mostly used high-energy systems similar to those used to scan luggage at airports to carefully examine food. The problem: these are able to detect, say, a pebble in a package of corn but they lack the resolution to pick out a grain of sand in a bag of flour. But the European Union–funded MODULINSPEX project may have the answer. In a quest to make sure that food is all that's in our dinner, researchers there have developed low-energy x-ray detection and sorting systems that create highly detailed images of food products and packaged goods. The system can be used to check seals on food wrappers, locate packaging defects, and find foreign particles of any size in any kind of food, from maggots in apples to grains of sand in bread. The use of low-energy x-rays had previously been too slow for food inspectors to use because it took too long for them to get high-resolution images. By attaching a computer chip to the crystal that detects the x-rays in a low-energy system, MODULINSPEX researchers built a detector capable of taking 300 images per second, enough to capture a detailed image of products moving on a conveyor belt at 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) per second. These low-energy x-ray images have a resolution of 0.004 inch (0.1 millimeter, or 16 times better than existing high-energy systems), making it possible to detect objects as small and fine as a herring bone. The consortium of companies involved in the MODULINSPEX project has already sold three of their systems to companies in Spain, the U.K. and Denmark since November.