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Articles by Tom Laskawy

A 17-year veteran of both traditional and online media, Tom Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. Tom's long and winding road to food politics writing passed through New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Florence, Italy, and Philadelphia (which has a vibrant progressive food politics and sustainable agriculture scene, thank you very much). In addition to Grist, his writing has appeared online in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He is on record as believing that wrecking the planet is a bad idea. Follow him on Twitter.

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  • Supreme Court’s ruling on Monsanto’s GE alfalfa: Who won?

    Updated 2:20 pm Pacific, June 21 The sustainable agriculture world is abuzz today with news of the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding an earlier lawsuit, brought by alfalfa farmers, that sought to stop any planting of Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa seed. While the press coverage heralds the ruling as a decisive victory for Monsanto, […]

    Tom Laskawy Technology

  • Agreed: All processed food is not created equal

    At last, Ezra Klein returns to food! And he levels a legitimate criticism at the food movement: One of the really difficult things about getting people to eat better is convincing them that it’s not just a way for others to impose class-based lifestyle preferences on one another. But when you’re down on processed foods […]

    Tom Laskawy Food and Agriculture

  • One super-toxic chemical down, thousands more to go

    Last week, and capping at least a decades-long battle by consumer advocates, the EPA announced a ban on the pesticide endosulfan — one of the last legal organochlorine pesticides, a notorious group of which DDT is a member. Horrifically toxic (possibly more toxic to humans than DDT) and banned in the European Union since 2007, […]

    Tom Laskawy Food and Agriculture

  • Rumor watch: Obama has a ‘secret’ plan to redirect the Mississippi River

    Photo credit: the White House/Peter Souza Annie Lowery of the Washington Independent picked up this exchange between Anderson Cooper and historian Doug Brinkley: [W]hen President Obama comes to Florida and Alabama and Mississippi … that is holding BP responsible for the Natural Resource Damage Act, for the Oil Spill Response Act. And, by that, I […]

    Tom Laskawy Politics