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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Battle for the soul of organic dairy farmers goes on behind the scenes
There is a battle going on in the White House for the very soul of the organic dairy movement — and possibly over the future of small family-operated dairy farms — and you don’t even know it. I’d like to think that I’m overstating things but no. At issue is an obscure rule in the […]
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And the winner of the USDA food safety sweepstakes is …
Dr. Elisabeth Hagen! No, you’re not expected to know who she is. Suffice it to say that, as anticipated, USDA Chief Tom Vilsack turned to an under-the-radar choice for Under Secretary of Food Safety. Hagen, currently the USDA’s Chief Medical Officer, will, if confirmed, take charge of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which […]
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Did Jamie Oliver meet his match in ‘America’s Fattest City’?
When last we saw British superstar chef-turned-food-system-reformer Jamie Oliver, he was in the midst of teaching “the fattest city in America” how to cook. How did it go? Well, thanks to the miracle that is reality television, we’ll find out one episode at a time. The series — Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution — doesn’t premiere […]
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Lesson for schools: sweetened junk shouldn’t count as food
Sugar in school: give the people what they want? Reporter Ed Bruske spent a week working in a Washington, D.C. public school lunchroom. His series of articles (1, 2, 3) that resulted are fantastic reading for anyone following the ongoing debate regarding school lunches and the challenges for enacting real reform. Today’s entry looked at […]
