Jonathan Rosenthal. What work do you do? I am the top banana at Oké USA, a new fair-trade fruit company owned by farmers, fair-trade organizations, and nonprofits. What does your organization do? Oké USA is a new model of fair trade that links farmers, fair-trade organizations, and eaters. Farmers get a fair price, a fair share, and a fair say; eaters get a delicious banana at a fair price. We guarantee farmers a living wage, even when international prices are inhumanely low. Farmers own half of our main parent company, AgroFair, and get a share of profits. Oké bananas are …

If the fossil fuels don't getcha, the genetics will. Photo: iStockphoto In the United States, the clearest signs of climate change so far have been stern words from Al Gore and a few hotter-than-normal summers. In Greenland, by contrast, global warming has sparked a revolution -- at least, when it comes to agriculture. A recent article in the German magazine Der Spiegel explores the dramatic new opportunities arising for the island's farmers. The article opens with a man tending his potato patch amid the roar of "an iceberg breaking apart, with pieces of it tumbling into the foaming sea." It's …

Very few people are actually passionate about industrial food. Sure, people will buy rock-hard and flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket without thinking much about it, but they won't get mad because, say, there's a farmers' market down the road where someone's selling flavorful heirloom tomatoes grown without chemicals. Alex Avery of the Hudson Institute -- funded lavishly by right-wing foundations and agribiz giants -- is a different breed altogether. Indeed, it's as though Monsanto conjured him up in a test-tube: the fellow seems to have a congenital hatred of organic food -- and a burning desire to make you hate …

In a bid to move "tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty" and "significantly" reduce hunger, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has teamed with the Rockefeller Foundation to launch a new "Green Revolution" in Africa. These high-profile foundations have committed a combined $150 million toward fulfilling their admirable goals. But a look at the original Green Revolution, and its dubious record in Africa, raises serious questions about the wisdom of their effort. Bill Gates. Photo: Jemal Countess/WireImage The Green Revolution started in 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation sent a team of scientists to Mexico to develop higher-yield …

It's the 1970s in Berkeley, California, and things are getting raunchy in the kitchen of Chez Panisse, where the cooks are busy revolutionizing high-end U.S. restaurant food -- among other activities: As dealers started showing up at the back door with regularity, [one cook] and some of his acquaintances got into increasingly harder stuff. "We were doing opium stuffing," he says. "You stick it up your ass. Just a quarter of a gram, a little ball, and you bypass the alimentary canal. You don't get nauseous -- you just absorb it." That choice nugget comes from David Kamp's new book …

China is positioning itself to take the lead in world rose production. Government leaders hope investing in the flower industry will bring capital and jobs to southwestern China, and florists in the U.S. see it as an opportunity to obtain cheaper products, thereby increasing profits. Workers in the burgeoning rose industry are mostly young women, earning an average of $25 per month, which the NYT article at least points out. Missing from the piece, though, is any thought to the health, labor, and environmental effects of the flower industry, or to how China's flower project could engage with fairer standards. …

Crying not for Argentina but for lost patent fees, Monsanto's legal hacks are in European courts suing to block millions of tons of Argentine soybean meal from docking on the continent. Bean there, sprayed that. Photo: iStockphoto Monsanto says that much of the meal crossing the Atlantic to feed Europe's cows and pigs contains traces of its genetically modified Roundup Ready Soybeans. Known as RR, the soybeans are tweaked to withstand the company's Roundup herbicide. This resistance lets farmers blanket entire fields with the chemical mixture rather than surgically applying it to kill off weeds. Monsanto holds a patent for …

Kathy Webb stands in front of a group of 20 people in the dining room of her Asian restaurant, talking about locally grown food. As she describes how nearly all the ingredients in the five-course dinner she's about to serve -- from the tomatoes and herbs in the salad to the berries in the dessert -- are from Arkansas, she educates her listeners while whetting their appetites. Webb, a newly elected state legislator and owner of Lilly's Dim Sum, Then Some in Little Rock, says a connection to food is something Americans have lacked over the last several decades. "When …

For the ninth time since 1995, California's Salinas Valley -- the "nation's salad bowl" -- has been implicated in an E. coli scare involving salad greens. Avoid E. coli, buy L. coli. Photo: iStockphoto As I write this, no definitive explanation has emerged for the latest outbreak, this one involving pre-washed, bagged spinach. But while the feds haven't yet figured out how the spinach supply became tainted, they have pointed to a specific company: Natural Selection Foods, the nation's largest pre-bagged spinach distributor, which runs a major processing plant in San Juan Bautista, near Salinas Valley. The company sells spinach …

Sometimes Dave's remarks border on mustacheism. I suspect it is more envy than malice, and I am not saying that just because I have a mustache. I finally got around to reading the article Dave posted about and have decided to use the Gristmill bully pulpit rather than bury my thoughts (that grew into a diatribe) in the comments, thus boring to tears a wider audience. Sorry you can't read said article without a paying for it. I don't care much for newspapers. This piece was an example of why. If Friedman's column were a blog, he would be learning …