Latest Articles

USDA to unveil “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative

Vast potential: a farm grows in Brooklyn. Photo: Added ValueAs I prepare for five days of announcements next week, when USDA plans to unveil its new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative, the buzz across my desk is about the potential for urban agriculture. EPA reminds that brownfield moneys can be used to convert […]

The fight to save childhood

Boys will be boys … online or off.School started this week. We have two fourth-graders and a second-grader. Ken has the misfortune to be driving a carpool that involves four boys and two schools and takes about an hour round-trip. I am biking to work every day now, because we’re cutting back to just the […]

Food reform. Health reform. How about income reform?

Where the deals are.First came the news that anti-reformer Sen. Blanche Lincoln has taken over the Senate Agriculture Committee. Now, from the US Census Bureau we get even more bad news for those hoping for serious reform of our food system: the Census Bureau announced to day that middle class income is diving. Real median […]

An open letter to the dean who promoted Froot Loops as a “smart choice”

Editor’s note: Several of the nation’s largest food manufacturers recently rolled out a new label called “Smart Choices.” Controversy erupted when processed junk like Froot Loops and Fudgsicles made the cut. In a Sept. 4 New York Times article, Eileen T. Kennedy, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University […]

Farmer Gene Logsdon on the promise of a home ‘pancake patch’

Gene Logsdon on his farm.Gene Logsdon is one of the clearest and most original voices of rural America. He’s a farmer in Ohio not far from his boyhood home, and is a writer to boot; he’s published more than two dozen books; some of which include Living at Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream […]

A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the […]

Jackson goes for gold

EPA chief Lisa Jackson will be in the Windy City on Friday to deliver the keynote address to the Chicago Summit on Sport and Sustainability. A review of the summit’s agenda and list of speakers suggests the event will be narrowly tailored to efforts that city is undertaking in its bid for the 2016 Olympics. […]

Large Florida grower steps up for farm workers

Eat a slice of fresh tomato from the supermarket or at a restaurant this winter, and chances are it will have come from a field in south-central Florida, site of 90 percent of U.S. winter tomato production. And this year, there’s a fighting chance that the worker who picked it might have made something close […]

Sure Obama got off to a good start, but what has the green FDR done lately?

The Washington Post has yet another dubious spin on Obama today, “Environmental Groups Wait to See Definitive Action From Obama“: The abrupt resignation Saturday of White House “green jobs” adviser Van Jones has focused new attention on one of the Obama administration’s top priorities: the environment. While Jones was criticized as a left-wing zealot, the […]

NOAA: El Niño expected to strengthen and last through the Northern Hemisphere winter

  NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center released its monthly El Niño/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion: A weak El Niño continued during August 2009, as sea surface temperature (SST) remained above-average across the equatorial Pacific Ocean (Fig. 1). Consistent with this warmth, the latest weekly values of the Niño-region SST indices were between +0.7°C […]