Skip to content
Grist home
All donations doubled!

A message from   

Help us raise $10,000 by MIDNIGHT

This #GivingTuesday, support climate news that leads to action. Donate to Grist, the only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice.

All donations DOUBLED.

Support climate news that leads to action. Donate to Grist while all donations are DOUBLED.

Donate now Not Now

Articles by Elizabeth Hewitt

Elizabeth Hewitt is a freelance journalist based between Vermont's green mountains and Istanbul's crowded streets. More of her work is online at emhewitt.com.

Featured Article

It was after 6 p.m. and approaching 0 degrees Fahrenheit on a March evening when Doug Turner started the second milking of the day of his 42 cows at the family farm in Waitsfield, Vt. In a work-worn orange hoodie and flannel-lined jeans, the third-generation farmer started from the southeast corner of the barn, attaching one of his three milking machines to the swollen udder of a black and white cow.

“This one’s my oldest,” Turner told me, patting Bianca, a Holstein approaching her 13th birthday.

The milk flowed out of the barn, through a steel hose, to the tank in Turner’s cramped, old-fashioned milk house. Every other day, a milk truck from Organic Valley picks up this dairy and brings it to a processing facility — the closest ones are in Connecticut or New York — where it is pasteurized, homogenized, packaged, and dispatched to the grocery shelf.

All told, the average American gallon of milk travels 320 miles from udder to grocery store shelf, a journey that often crosses state borders. That seems like a long way to go, given that milk is produced in all 50 states.  

But farmers don’t have much control over where their milk goes, or how... Read more