All donations DOUBLED

Articles by Tom Philpott

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

All Articles

  • NPR: Industrial ag and India’s ‘cancer train’

    Spraying pesticides: how green a revolution? Last month, NPR’s excellent Dan Zwerdling filed two reports (here and here) on the ecological and economic upshots of industrial agriculture in India. Starting in the 1960s, U.S. agronomists–backed by U.S. foundation cash and blessed by the Indian government–introduced farmers in India’s then-fertile Punjab region to the glories of […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Drought, fish, and our fruit-and-veg problem

    High and dryIn the United States, when people say “eat your veggies,” they are essentially urging you to take a bite out of California — or, more to the point, take a a big swig of its increasingly scarce water supply. How much do we rely on California for fruits and veg? With its rich […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Another symptom of swine flu: instant amnesia

    Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist Swine flu: how very two weeks ago. Sure, H1N1 transmission is “still on the upswing” in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe’s population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week. But the disease is turning […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Uncomfortable facts about the swine flu outbreak

    You’re testing my patienceDon’t associate U.S. pork with the swine flu outbreak — you can’t catch it through pork. Plus, no pigs on U.S. CAFOs are infected with it. That’s message the industry and the USDA are straining  to get across, anyway. Except … you can catch swine flu from pork, according to the World […]

    Tom Philpott Food