Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

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This week your “organic” milk may not be, boxed mac n’cheese contains banned chemicals, and sugar in pregnancy linked to allergies.

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Links of the week

• Flacking for GMOs: How the Biotech Industry Cultivates Positive Media—and Discourages Criticism – I often hear fellow scientists mock critics of GMO and food biotech in the same breath as anti-vaccine advocates and climate change deniers. This is unfortunate, because there are plenty of valid reasons to be critical of industrial food technologies and most of them are ignored by the media who focus almost exclusively on the food safety issues (there really are none innate to GMO technology itself). Why does this misdirection happen? Follow the money. (Progressive)
• The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese – In case you need another reason to stop eating crap, boxed mac n’ cheeses (yes, all of them) are filled with banned toxic chemicals. Boxes of powdered cheese don’t even taste good, spend your empty calories on something actually worth it. (NY Times)
• A GRAIN OF WHEAT – A beautiful essay by Hank Shaw on the value of a real grains. My personal favorite article from this week’s list. (Hunter, Angler, Gardner, Cook)
• Amish farmers square off against Big Organic in milk battle – Your “organic” milk might not actually be organic, which is a real bummer since the USDA Organics label has traditionally been very reliable. As a shopper I would avoid organic labels from big ticket stores like Costco or Walmart until this gets less suspicious. (Washington Post)
• The 10 ways recipes are undermining your cooking – LOVE it. This really gets to the core of why recipes are such a problem for new cooks, and why teaching real cooking skills like we do in Foodist Kitchen is a much better approach. (The Guardian)
• A leading happiness researcher says we’re giving our kids bad advice about how to succeed in life – It isn’t just kids who need to learn this. It’s the same advice I give to most of my (adult) coaching clients. Culturally we have a lot of this stuff backwards. (Quartz)
• Scans suggest food is a form of escape from self-critical thoughts – This research is specifically about people with bulimia, but I’d be willing to bet the pattern of experiential avoidance leading to overeating works more generally for a much bigger population. (ScienceDaily)
• Sugar intake during pregnancy is associated with allergy and allergic asthma in children – This is kind of amazing when you think about it. (ScienceDaily)
• A US senator is worried that “snortable chocolate” is basically “cocaine on training wheels” – Just WOW. (Quartz)
• Roasted Corn & Chicken Salad with Avocado – All my favorite summer flavors. (Foraged Dish)