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Articles by Tom Philpott

Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.

All Articles

  • Greenpeace: your boots are made for climate change

    These boots are made for … trampling the rainforest? A lot of eco-minded folks these days generally know where their food comes from. They’d never walk into a supermarket and plunk an anonymous ribeye into their cart. They understand the tremendous greenhouse-gas footprint of beef; if they consume it at all, they do so sparingly, […]

    Tom Philpott Culture

  • Monsanto dropped a cool $2 million on lobbying in Q1 2009

    Jolly gene giantSource: ETC Group Monsanto dominates the global market for GMO seeds like Microsoft dominates the operating-system software market.  You don’t skirt around antitrust enforcement like that without having good friends in Washinton. And to make friends, you’ve got have guys in suits working the Hill and the agencies. La Vida Locavore’s ever-enterprising Jill […]

    Tom Philpott Politics

  • Nicholas Kristof on African hunger

    Nicholas KristofNicholas Kristof, the much-celebrated columnist for The New York Times, is essentially a Victorian-style moralist. In a typical column, he alights on some harsh scene–a slum in an Indian megopolis, a dirt-poor village in Cambodia–and delivers a heart-wrenching report. He then prescribes an extremely narrow “solution” to the problem he has uncovered–one that typically […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system

    In a recent New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten published a lucid, entertaining essay on the financial collapse. Titled “The Death of Kings,” it focuses on the hedge-fund managers, stock gurus, and private-equity wizards who reaped billions from the credit bubble.Is Big Ag running the food system into the ground the same way Wall Street wrecked the […]

    Tom Philpott Technology