Skip to content
Grist home
Support nonprofit news today

Articles by Dave Murphy

Dave Murphy is the founder and director of Food Democracy Now!, a sixth generation Iowan, and an advocate for sustainable agriculture.

Featured Article

Reform is necessary to ensure the survival of future generations of farmers. (Photo by Danilo.)

This week, President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about “jobs and economic security” in rural America. According to the White House, his bus tour is not a campaign trip, but veteran political observers would disagree. For farmers and rural advocates, this tour is really about something much larger than electioneering or a new jobs program: It’s about the survival of rural America.

While the plight of urban decay has been widely publicized in the mainstream press, similar issues facing our country cousins (myself included) — lack of well-paying jobs, rural brain drain, food deserts, poverty, and lack of access to quality health care — have either been ignored or largely misunderstood by policy-makers and the press. Today, more rural Americans are on food stamps and face bleaker economic prospects than their urban counterparts, despite the romantic image of small-town life often portrayed in the media.

For the past 50 years, rural America has seen its b... Read more

All Articles

  • Johnny, Can You Spell Salmonella?

    How is it that a country can put a man on the moon, but can’t seem to feed it’s children school lunches that are safer than those eaten at McDonald’s or Jack in the Box? In the past 10 years more than 23,000 school children have become sick as a result of hundreds of food […]

  • Boycotting Whole Foods won’t help

    The health care reform debate has provoked any number of crazy opinions, including the far-right fantasies of death panels or that Medicare isn’t a government-funded program. Two weeks ago, Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey added his own musings to the list with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal condemning “Obamacare” and any […]

  • Food safety in the 21st century

    Just when America thought it was safe to go back into the grocery store, another food outbreak wakes us up to the fact that there is something seriously wrong with its food safety system. This time it’s Nestle Toll House cookie dough with E.coli, a treat that nearly every kid in America reaches for a […]

  • Stand up for rural America while you still can

    The assault on rural America continues unabated. For the past six months dairy farmers across the country have suffered a historic drop in milk prices while operating costs remain high. Since December 2008, the price that farmers are paid for the milk they produce has plunged over 50 percent, the largest single drop since the […]