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Caught between the gritty political realities of needing cash and being linked to a political leader who has repeatedly denounced money's influence in Washington while raising record sums, former campaign aides to President Obama appeared to side with the money.

That had opened officials now heading Organizing for Action — which was formed from the Obama for America campaign committee to promote the president's second-term agenda — to charges of hypocrisy.

Criticism for their refusal to swear off taking cash from corporations, lobbyists and overseas donors may have had the intended effect: On Thursday, the new OFA announced it wouldn't take such boodle.

But if the former Obama campaign officials running OFA have decided to be the change they wish to see in the world (or at least to look like it), some government watchdog groups aren't buying it.

The Sunlight Foundation's Lisa Rosenberg wrote a blog post titled "OFA — A Dark Money Group by Any Other Name," and called the group "a tiger that can't change its stripes."

She was responding to Jim Messina, Obama's 2012 campaign manager who now runs OFA, who notified those on the organization's blast email list:

"Organizing for Action's mission is to put power back into the hands of the American people. That's why we won't accept a single dollar from corporations, PACs, foreign donors or lobbyists. This is your movement, not theirs."

Rising consumer demand for local foods has changed the job description for ranchers like Doniga Markegard.

Markegard, co-owner of Markegard Family Grass-Fed in San Gregorio, Calif., loves working with cattle, but she's not fond of the hours of phone calls and emails it can take to sell directly to a customer.

"What I want to be doing is the part I love — working with the animals and raising my kids on the ranch," says Markegard. "But I also need to be marketing our product, going to markets and talking with customers. There are a lot of administrative aspects to running a small family ranch, and they are time-consuming."

Now a San Francisco startup is looking to act as the middleman, handling the logistics of gathering and delivering local goods to consumers' doorsteps so small farmers like Markegard don't have to.

Good Eggs began a year ago as a place where local food producers could sell their foods directly to consumers online, says CEO Rob Spiro. But producers needed more.

"We kept hearing the same thing from the producers," Spiro tells The Salt. " 'This is great,' they told us, 'but as I become more successful, I'm becoming a full-time distributor.' "

So Spiro and his business partners decided to step in. "What we need is a last-mile delivery system for our producers," says Spiro.

The problem is that whether you live in San Francisco or Des Moines, Dallas or Wichita, the modern food system is based on economies of scale: To keep food inexpensive and delivered predictably, regardless of the season, you need mass production and the mass movement of goods from large-scale farm to national distributor to superstore.

But similar networks for moving locally produced foods to market are sorely lacking, according to a 2010 report from the USDA's Economic Research Service.

To that end, Good Eggs acquired three trucks and a warehouse and, as of last Thursday, it will now deliver fresh local fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood and prepared foods right to consumers' doors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. It plans to create a similar food hub in Brooklyn this spring.

The Good Eggs system works like this: Consumers order from a wide variety of locally made, artisanal products online — from baby food to cheese, oranges to muffins. Items are then baked or harvested fresh to order and sent to the Good Eggs' warehouse, where each individual order is put together manually.

The idea is to keep costs down by using an Amazon warehouse model of efficient distribution — except nothing is stored there. The warehouse is used instead for aggregating goods on delivery days. By bringing all the products together in one location and distributing them together, Good Eggs hopes to relieve producers of the logistical headache of direct sales, while earning them higher profit margins than they get from grocery stores.

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China's citizens do not report as much as $2.34 trillion of what they make every year, hiding "gray income" that would represent nearly 20 percent of the country's GDP, Chinese economics scholar Wang Xiaolu says, in a report from the news site Global Voices.

Wang, of Beijing's National Economic Research Institute, told an audience last week (page is in Chinese) that the figure means the gap between rich and poor Chinese is wider than is commonly believed.

Speaking at the Chinese Museum of Finance, Wang renewed an argument he made in an attention-grabbing study of China's income gap in 2010. That work, which relied partly on informal surveying of Chinese wage-earners, drew criticism from the official National Bureau of Statistics. It also sparked a government push to bring "gray income" into the daylight — an effort that met with little success.

China's non-reported income is believed to have many origins, from bribes for corrupt officials and under-the-table deals between merchants to monetary gifts bestowed upon doctors and nurses.

As we recently reported, the pervasive covering-up of revenue made efforts to list China's richest citizens difficult, with the magazine Hurun Report concluding that "valuing the wealth of China's richest is as much an art as it is a science."

A swarm of locusts that has devastated crops in Egypt made its way into neighboring Israel this week. And with Passover just around the corner, many news outlets couldn't resist noting the shades of the biblical tale of Exodus, when the insects were one of 10 plagues that descended upon pharaoh and his people.

But while Israeli farmers now fret over what the insects might do to their fields, others in Israel have proposed a culinary approach to the infestation: Why not eat the buggers up?

It's a tidy approach to a looming environmental catastrophe, but there's just one catch: The rabbis don't agree on whether the critters are kosher.

Among the chief promoters of locust cuisine is Israeli celebrity chef Moshe Basson, who appeared on a morning news program Wednesday to offer advice on whipping up concoctions with the insects.

"They taste something between sunflower seeds and baby shrimps; they actually don't taste like much," Basson told the U.K.'s The Guardian. "I like them, but they're desired not because they are delicious but because they are rare."

Basson is known for his biblically inspired dishes. A few years ago, his restaurant The Eucalyptus served up fried locusts as dessert in a well-publicized dinner aimed at reviving ancient local kosher food traditions.

Others have also chimed in to promote the palate experimentation for Passover: "As the only kosher insect, they are perfect for the hostess who hasn't yet decided on an interesting appetizer for the Passover Seder meal," Allison Kaplan Sommer writes in Haaretz.

Recipe ideas for dishes like honey-spiced locusts soon popped up on blogs. And in an op-ed for The Times of Israel, Rabbi Natan Slifkin, who studies the intersection of Judaism and the animal world, offered an ecologically minded argument:

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