Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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Food and pleasure
I'm too lazy to find any actual poll numbers on this, so I could be wrong, but my strong guess is that most U.S. consumers involved in the recent growth of organic food are choosing organic for health reasons. One might even think of the organic boomlet as a subspecies of the general American health mania -- the same one that sent customers herding toward fat-free and low-carb food.
If this is true, we wouldn't expect consumers to particularly care about how far the food has traveled or what size farm it was grown on. They see "organic" as another health label; if it has any specific content to them at all (as opposed to vaguely healthful connotations), they probably associate it with lack of pesticides, and pesticide-free is pesticide-free, whether from an industrial farm in Chile or Farmer Bob's family farm down the road.
How can we get U.S. consumers to care about the broader food system? There are two basic ways.
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Insight
An interesting, elegiac piece on the Honda Insight, which was the most fuel efficient car on the road when it was introduced in 1999 and has remained so ever since. Production will cease when it is replaced in two years with a new hybrid subcompact from Honda.
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Can green biz bring environmental and civil rights communities together?
The folks at the Greenlining Institute sent along an issue brief they just produced, about how green business represents a chance for the environmental and civil-rights communities to partner with each other. It's somewhat schematic, but interesting, so I've reprinted it below. Lemme know what you think.
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On AB 32 …
... Schwarzenegger and the business lobby are playing a perilous game of chicken with state Dems. Let's hope they don't collectively blow it.
