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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Sustainable ag meets the MSM — and wins!
TIME Magazine‘s current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled, chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the second part of that sentence isn’t news to Grist readers. But the first part of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn’t have expected to read the following positively Philpottian (if not […]
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[UPDATED] Sen. Bernie Sanders cries “monopoly” in a collapsing milk market
Got milk monopoly? UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive. In a NYT article last Saturday, describing the considerable resistance anti-trust chief Christine Varney is already experiencing in her attempt to toughen enforcement, came this nugget: At the request of some lawmakers, notably Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, Ms. Varney is examining whether small agricultural […]
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USDA may get Dennis Wolff for food safety post because Gov. Ed Rendell doesn’t want him anymore
Wolff at the Dickinson College farm in Pennsylvania.Here’s a little rumor-mongering for fun, if not profit. Yes, as Tom Philpott reported, Dennis Wolff is for sure heading the list of candidates for the top food safety post at the USDA. But that’s not the fun part. The fun part involves the reason Dennis Wolff is […]
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Solving obesity all depends on what you mean by the word “solve”
Ezra Klein, WaPo blogger and now food columnist, has, of late, been particularly dour regarding attempts to address obesity. His “Gut Check” piece today on the limited policy tools available to fight the obesity epidemic confirms it: Over the past 50 years, however, some privileged humans have been faced with a largely novel problem: the […]
