Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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Making environmental sense of the financial storm now raging
Interpreting reports currently coming out of Wall Street is like tracking a vast hurricane as it rages its way through the Gulf and toward a population center: Conditions are way too chaotic to make confident predictions, but preparing for the worst probably isn’t a bad idea. As recently as a year ago, no one could […]
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The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science
In 2002, a most unlikely book came out: an oversized, lushly produced, coffee-table tome on the ills of mass-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture. Grandly titled Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the book contained stark photos of highly mechanized, monocrop farming, along with pungent, probing essays by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and other seminal thinkers of […]
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The oil market can’t save us from climate change
Oil prices have plunged by a third since June. What happened? Damned if I know. This is an extremely murky market. Information about supply is notoriously patchy. As for demand, people are writing dissertations about the mentality of mega-fund managers who plunge into securities like oil futures one day, only to bail en masse another. […]
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Finding nirvana in the coffee capital of the United States
In “Mad Flavor,” the author describes his occasional forays from the farm in search of exceptional culinary experiences from small artisanal producers. —– While covering Slow Food Nation recently, I stayed in an unremarkable hotel located in a relatively uninteresting part of San Francisco’s Soma neighborhood. But I was as happy as a clam — […]
