I collect items about cannabis edibles and just realized nothing new has come in for a for a long time.  Not much is happening with these products since President Trump reclassified marijuana as a Class III (less dangerous) drug. 

The FDA regulates cannabis edibles but has not said anything new about them for the last two years (since July 2024).

On the reclassification

• DOJ, DEA Reschedule Medical Cannabis Products: The rescheduling follows a 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump, which called on the U.S. Attorney General to “take all necessary steps to complete the rulemaking process related to rescheduling marijuana.” READ MORE

International regulation

• France bans CBD edibles, European agency agrees on ‘reproductive toxicant’ classification: France has banned CBD edibles and convinced the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) that CBD should be treated as a reproductive toxicant, adding pressure on an “already fragile and highly uncertain” market…. Read more

New CBD edibles

• Señorita Debuts 1777 Hemp THC Spirit: With notes of agave, lime and dragon fruit, 1777 comes in a 750 ml bottle and includes 10 mg of hemp-derived THC per 1.5-oz. serving. READ MORE
• Grön Brings Chocolate Bars to New Jersey: Grön brings to New Jersey a collection of five chocolate bars, each built around a clear, effect-based experience. READ MORE

New CBD drinks

• High Rise Beverage Co. Expands Infusions Lineup: The brand’s Raspberry and Orange THC infusions, available in 750 ml bottles, join the original Citrus flavor. READ MORE
• Twofold Introduces THC Spirits: Twofold is presented in a 750 ml bottle and designed for structured cocktail use. READ MORE

Oops: Psilocin edibles

• The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) warns consumers not to eat TRE House brand Magic Mushroom gummies, chocolate bars and syrup. These products contain synthetic psychedelic compounds that may cause severe illness, hospitalization or even death. TRE House products were found to contain an analogue of psilocin, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) schedule I drug. All of the products contain 4-Acetoxy-DET (4-Acetoxy-N,N-diethyltryptamine) while most also contain 4-Acetoxy-DMT (4-Acetoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine). Both are illegal psychedelics.

Comment

To put it mildly, these products are not tightly regulated.  They may contain more or less of the active ingredient than what is on the label.  Be careful with them.  And keep them away from kids and pets.

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Farm Action has produced a riveting new report: Taylor Farms: How One Company’s Reach Became a National Risk.

Many, but by no means all, Cyclospora cases have been traced back to a Taylor farm in Mexico.

• The CDC’s page on this.

• The FDA’s page on this.
• Bill Marler’s count of state case reports: 31,521

From the Farm Action report:

What you can do:

• Buy directly from local farms whenever possible through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture programs, farm stands, and direct online sales.
• Ask grocery stores, restaurants, schools, and institutions where their produce comes from and encourage them to source from local and regional farms.
• Advocate for public policies that strengthen competition, transparency, and market access for independent farmers.

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As anyone familiar with my work will know, I have made a career out of commenting on government dietary advice.  The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are particularly entertaining as quintessential examples of food politics in action, the latest ones in particular.

To summarize: They offered two excellent messages–Eat Real Food, and limit ultra-processed foods–but undermined them with unsubstantiated advice (double the protein), inconsistencies (eat more sources of saturated fat, but limit it to 10% of calories), omissions (salt, mentioned but no guideline), and errors (no, beef tallow is not a source of essential fatty acids).

And now the latest: The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has sued to have the guidelines withdrawn and not used.

Guidelines Violated Federal Law Requiring Transparency, Balance, and Evidence…A “Secret Panel” of food-industry insiders handpicked by the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture illegally influenced the recommendations in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, argues a lawsuit the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Aug. 19, 2026…“The government allowed the meat and dairy industries to ghostwrite the Dietary Guidelines,” said Physicians Committee President Neal D. Barnard, MD. “They put money in industry’s pocket and cholesterol in Americans’ arteries.”

PCRM is a Washington, DC-based group “dedicated to saving and improving human and animal lives through plant-based diets and ethical and effective scientific research.”

It particularly objects to the way the new guidelines and pyramid food guide prioritize meat and dairy foods.

Its lawsuit focuses on the unusually hasty and non-FACA [Federal Advisory Committee Act] process:

Instead of issuing Dietary Guidelines based on an internal review of the DGAC Report as had been the longstanding practice, Defendants, without any oversight or public  input, hastily assembled a handpicked panel of meat, dairy, and fad diet industry insiders (“Secret Panel”) for the purpose of attacking the FACA-compliant
DGAC Report and creating a substantially altered report entitled The Scientific Foundation for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030….Although Defendants had previously vowed to “toss out the people who were writing the guidelines with conflicts of interest,” Defendants assembled a Secret Panel that was rife with conflicts of interest…Defendants then published Dietary Guidelines tha…embrace saturated fats, halve the recommended fruit and vegetable servings, remove daily alcohol intake limits, and promote fad diets.

PCRM says the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines pose dangers to

• Children, whose school food programs must adhere to the Dietary Guidelines
• Individuals with medical conditions who might follow the baseless medical advice incorporated into the Dietary Guidelines
• Americans who are at risk for diet-related diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and might follow the scientifically unfounded Dietary Guidelines, which are designed to promote fatty, high-cholesterol products of industries with which the Dietary Guidelines’ authors are affiliated.

I can’t wait to see what happens with this one.  Stay tuned.

This, from the New York Times on August 21.

Here’s the headline:

A sales growth of ONLY 2.6% dropped Walmart’s stock by 9%.

OK, Walmart isn’t all about food, but it has larger food sales than any other place by a wide margin.

As I keep saying, I’m not against profit.

But the idea that 2.6% growth is insufficient to please stockholders explains everything about what’s wrong with our food system.

People and pets can only eat so much.  All food-selling enterprises cannot continue to grow infinitely.

I’ think a good argument can be made that the bad things food companies do to employees, customers, animals, and the environment result directly from stockholder pressures to grow sales and profits, quarter after quarter.

System change, anyone?

Chin Jou.  Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food.  University of North Carolina Press, 2026.  344 pages.

I have been a fan of Chin Jou’s work for a long time and did a blurb for her latest book:

Captive Consumers is a tough, uncompromising, and utterly compelling analysis of the ways America’s mass incarceration system uses food as punishment, and must become more humane.

From the publisher:

Using a wealth of sources from untapped historical records to prison newspapers, Jou excavates the voices of the incarcerated and shows that prison food dehumanizes the imprisoned, compounds racial and class inequalities, and induces more violence—ultimately making carceral institutions more dangerous. But this compelling book also illuminates how people behind bars have reasserted their identities, resourcefulness, and humanity through self-prepared food even as prison food services profit from lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts that reward cost-cutting over care. If US corrections systems continue to perpetuate physical and psychological violence through food, Jou argues, Americans will suffer not just wasted tax dollars but the cost of bringing traumatized, ailing, and hungry formerly incarcerated people back into society.

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I. DOJ, FDA take raw pet food company to court.  This one comes from Phyllis Entis of eFoodAlert.  She writes: “I thought this might interest you. Last Friday, the DOJ filed a Complaint against Arrow Reliance Inc. (Darwin’s Natural Pet Products) and its owner, Gary Tashjian.”

The Complaint seeks to block Darwin’s from selling adulterated drugs; it argues that Darwin’s raw pet foods are adulterated because they:

• Bear or contains a poisonous or deleterious substance, such as Salmonella, which may render the food injurious to health. Contain Salmonella and/or STEC.
• FDA previously issued warning letters to Darwin’s about this problem.
• Continue to test positive for pathogens.
• Are introduced into interstate commerce.

What’s amazing about this is that the current administration’s Department of Justice is taking on pet food.  If only it would do that for our food too!

II.  Concentration in pet food [from Pet Food Industry]. Two companies, Mars Petcare and Nestlé Purina PetCare, together account for approximately 78% of the top 10’s nearly $66 billion in combined annual revenue.

III.Recalls in the pet space reveal common prevention blind spots [from Pet Food Industry].   Industry experts say most recalls trace back to overlooked process changes, thin supplier oversight and mock recall exercises that stop short of testing a company’s full response.  Read more

In the pet food, supplements and treats space, recalls tied to undeclared allergens, foreign material and Salmonella contamination have made headlines throughout 2026…Roger Hancock of Recall InfoLink said the numbers back up what he’s seen for years. Over the past two decades, more than 3,900 pet food and animal feed recalls have occurred, averaging around 15 a month, he said.

Why do these keep happening?  Companies are not careful enough about developing food safety plans and monitoring that they are working.

Companies often tend to collect a lot of information but don’t do anything with it…citing environmental test results, cleaning records and third-party audit findings as examples.

IV,  Three Illnesses Now Reported in the Oma’s Pride Raw Dog Food Salmonella Recall. People or Dogs? The Notice Does Not Say [From Bill Marler’s Blog].

FDA has re-posted the company announcement…Here is the reason for recall: FDA received a consumer complaint, then collected and analyzed a sample of the product, and it tested positive for Salmonella. And here is the illness information, in its entirety: “Three illnesses have been reported to date in association with the complaint.”

That is the whole disclosure. Three illnesses. The notice does not say whether they were people or dogs.

…The agency’s own Center for Veterinary Medicine screened more than a thousand pet food samples over two years and found raw pet food far more likely than any other kind to carry Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes — 38 of 196 raw samples positive for one or both. FDA’s advice ever since has been blunt: the single best way to avoid these infections is not to feed a raw diet.

…If someone in your house has been sick, or your dog has, call the doctor or the veterinarian and say the words “raw pet food” out loud…It is also, on this record, the only way anyone will ever learn whether those three illnesses walked on two legs or four.

Comment

I write frequently about pet food because it is part of the human food system.  If something is wrong with it, something is wrong with the system that produces our food too.  Food, no matter who or what it is for, should be produced safely.  It’s hard to do that with raw foods; they require extra-special efforts to prevent contamination with pathogens.

Addition, August 21

I’ve just discovered Pet Food Safety News, via Mollie Morrissette’s discussion of Darwin’s long history of safety problems.

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I was interested to see this report.  Here’s why this matters:

As can be seen, concentration across all six sectors remains high. Five of them – seeds, pesticides, machinery, animal pharma and pig genetics – meet the definition of an oligopoly, in which four companies control more than 40% of a market. So too does the global market for phosphate fertilisers. While the world grapples with the climate and biodiversity crises, rising hunger levels, geopolitical conflict and another looming food crisis, a handful of large companies continue to hold enormous power over our food system.

And here’s a quick summary:

Comment

What ever happened to trust-busting?  Bring it back!

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The Government Accountability Office reports: Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Workers, Including Many Employed by Large Employers, Continue to Rely on Medicaid and SNAP.

To learn more about the working adults who used these programs in 2024, we analyzed employment data from 11 states and Census data.

We found:

• About two-thirds worked full time
• Most worked for private sector employers
• Workers were largely in transportation, restaurants and food prep, and retail sales jobs
• Some employers in selected states had thousands of beneficiaries on their payrolls

This is one of the findings:

According to GAO’s analysis of state-level data for September 2025, the employers with the most nondisabled, nonelderly Medicaid enrollees or SNAP beneficiaries varied across the 11 states that provided data. However, 46 companies (about one-third of the total companies across all 11 states) were among the top 25 employers of Medicaid enrollees or SNAP beneficiaries in at least two states. Seventeen of these 46 companies were among the 50 largest Fortune 500 companies by number of employees.

Here is an example of some actual data:

Comment

What this report tells us is that the richest food companies in the United States are paying such low wages that their employees must rely on government assistance to get by.  This means that we taxpayers are subsidizing rich corporations and enabling them to continue to profit at the expense of their workers.  I didn’t see much written about this report when it appeared.  It deserves wide circulation.