China's been dealing with a lot of pressure lately: dirty air, a river full of dead pigs, new pledges to go green ... To cope, there's apparently been an uptick in stress-eating. The country is now producing 80 billion pairs of disposable wooden chopsticks a year, nearly 60 pairs for each person in the country, according to Bai Guangxin, chair of Jilin Forestry Industry Group. That's way up from the estimated 57 billion pairs produced annually between 2004 and 2009. At this rate, China is destroying nearly 1.5 percent of its forests each year just in the name of chopsticks.

From The Huffington Post:

The consequences of China's chopstick production -- deforestation, for one -- have prompted action from some environmental groups. ...

Bai pointed out during [a] meeting Friday that the Chinese government has also begun taking action by introducing policies limiting manufacturing of disposable chopsticks.

Excellent infographicker Dorothy Gambrell recently broke down falling American food costs and some changing tastes for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Beef prices and consumption are both way down, while fresh fruit prices decreased less than any other category. Overall, though, it looks like food is getting a lot cheaper! And that's true, ish, but it's not the whole picture.

Over the past century, food costs as a percentage of income have been dropping like overripe fruit that you forgot to pick off the tree. But those lower prices aren't exactly adding up for the poor. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic finds that poor families are still spending the same percentage on food that they did 30 years ago, while middle-income and richer folks are paying significantly less.

Overall, the falling burden of food costs is good news for lower- and middle-class families. It means they can devote more money to things like health care and education and energy and homes, which are getting expensive faster than their wages are rising. But we shouldn't rule out the possibility that those accelerating costs are putting pressure on poor families to spend less on food.

In other words, we can't rule out that the lowest-income households only spend one-sixth of their money on food, not only because real food prices are falling, but also because they're forced to consume less, as mortgages and gas prices eat into the budget.

Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, chief of U.S. Pacific Command, doesn't look like your usual proponent of climate action. Spencer Ackerman writes at Wired that Locklear "is no smelly hippie," but the guy does believe there will be terrible security threats on a warming planet, which might make him a smelly hippie in the eyes of many American military boosters.

Everyone wants him to be worried about North Korean nukes and Chinese missiles, but in an interview with The Boston Globe, Locklear said that societal upheaval due to climate change “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen ... that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

Good news, soda lovers and Bloomberg haters!

Reuters reports that New York State Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling threw out New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's pet ban, calling it "arbitrary and capricious," in response to lawsuits brought by the American Beverage Association and other unapologetic sugar peddlers business groups.

Women might make up more than half the Earth's human population, but we often bear the brunt of the same sorts of policies and destructive ways of thinking that are responsible for global climate change.

Do those things seem unrelated? Well, they're not, which is why International Women's Day is a perfect time to remember that the systems that degrade the planet are also the ones that oppress women.

Eve Ensler, the artist and activist behind The Vagina Monologues, connected the dots between abusing the planet and abusing women last month in this interview with Grist, where she called out the global economy's destructive "pressing rape mentality, which has to do with the powerful getting what they want at the expense of the person they’re taking it from, without an awareness of reciprocity or mutuality."

From former Prime Minister of Norway and Director-General of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland, writing at Fast Co.Exist:

Conflict and environmental degradation compound the problem in many contexts, leaving women even more vulnerable to violence. Soldiers and militias commonly use rape as a weapon of war. As climate change affects the availability of water, food and firewood, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, women have to travel longer distances to fetch supplies, putting them at greater risk of molestation, harassment, rape and beatings.

There's great news this week for everyone except the people producing tons of unsustainable palm oil: Customers are jumping ship right and left, swearing off of the processed food grease that has become the top cause of deforestation in Southeast Asia.

Dunkin' Donuts has agreed to phase out the palm oil it stuffs into its sweet, fatty pastry rings. The move came under pressure from the green-minded comptroller of New York state, Tom DiNapoli, who leveraged the state's investment in Dunkin' to bring about the change, 350.org-divestment-campaign style.

From the New York Times' City Room blog:

The comptroller is best known for his role overseeing the state’s pension fund, not for pushing for breakfast-food reform. But in this case, the goals are one and the same: as of last week, the pension fund owned 51,400 shares of Dunkin’ Brands Group worth about $2 million, and Mr. DiNapoli seeks to prod companies in which the fund invests to embrace sustainable practices ...

“Consumers may not realize that many of the foods and cosmetics they eat and use contain palm oil that has been harvested in ways that are severely detrimental to the environment,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement. “Shareholder value is enhanced when companies take steps to address the risks associated with environmental practices that promote climate change.”

Out of the pure goodness of its big corporate heart, Whole Foods wants you to know if there are any GMOs in your $8 kombucha and $30 take-out salad.

Several states are kicking around proposals to require labels on genetically modified foods, but the (w)holier-than-thou natural foods giant waits for no government! It will wait for its suppliers, though. Whole Foods announced today that, by 2018, it will require genetically modified foods be labeled as such.

"We are as excited about this announcement as we are dedicated to supporting transparency and our customers’ right to know what’s in their food," read the statement from Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb and COO A.C. Gallo. "By 2018, we will require our supplier partners to label products containing GMO ingredients, and we will work in collaboration with them as they transition to sourcing non-GMO ingredients or to clearly labeling products with ingredients containing GMOs."

Here's Robb reading more Whole Foods PR off a teleprompter. (Also, when I think Whole Foods offices I think earth tones, not hot pink, but that's not a judgment.)

Recently, the city of Almeria in arid southern Spain has transformed itself into prime farmland by building more than 150 square miles of plastic-sheeting-encased greenhouses. That means there's more out-of-season, non-native foods for local Spaniards -- and more out-of-season, non-native plastic foods for local Spaniard sea creatures.

Only about 1,000 sperm whales live in the Mediterranean sea. When one recently beached itself and died on the coast, scientists determined the cause quickly. (Any guesses?)

“[I]t had a real greenhouse inside its stomach. We did not expect it, but it did not surprise us," marine biologist Renaud de Stephanis told Agence France-Presse. “It was as if it had a rock inside its intestine, nothing could get through. There was so much plastic that it finally exploded."

When it died, the whale had eaten about 37 pounds of plastic, including a lot of the plastic sheeting from those greenhouses, two flower pots, an ice cream tub, and some mattress chunks.

The Eastern Seaboard is still limping toward recovery post-Superstorm Sandy. Just as the government was really getting rolling distributing $60 billion in federal aid that was authorized in January, that amount was chopped by 5 percent thanks to sequestration.

And now comes news that some of that rebuilding money is being spent not-so-wisely. While San Francisco is trying to make a “managed retreat” from rising seas, the tri-state area seems to be more in favor of a “whatevs, fuck it” approach. ProPublica reports:

A WNYC and ProPublica analysis of federal data shows at least 10,500 home and business owners have been approved for $766 million in SBA [Small Business Administration] disaster loans to rebuild in areas that the government now says could flood again in the next big storm. The data, which shows loans approved through mid-February, was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Nearly all of America's cities contain brownfields -- contaminated, abandoned sites that can be as big as old rail yards or as small as former dry cleaners. The EPA estimates that there are more than 450,000 brownfield sites nationwide.

Greening all those brownfields is no easy task, and the EPA's Brownfields Program still has a long way to go. But a new bill introduced in Congress could help.

The BUILD Act -- BUILD stands for Brownfields Utilization, Investment, and Local Development -- would make brownfields cleanup grants available to a wider variety of groups and local governments, and would generally smooth the way for communities to redevelop these properties. The bill specifically calls for extra assistance for disadvantaged and rural communities.

The legislation is sponsored by a motley bipartisan crew of senators: Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), and Tom Udall (D-N.M.). That's right: Republicans are working with Democrats to support the EPA's efforts to clean up cities. Even in these mad, sequestery times, there appears to be a bit of sanity on Capitol Hill.