Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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The NYT gets its hands dirty
In Italy and France, people don’t love small farms just for the delicious food they produce. They also prize them for their looks — small-scale diversified agriculture is pleasing to the senses. So city dwellers often head out to the country on the weekend and hang out on farms, and support them with their tourist […]
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A response to my critics
Last week’s Victual Reality column startled a lot of sustainable-food advocates, particularly folks not immersed in the details of U.S. farm policy. Subsidies, I argued, do not cause the ravages of industrial agriculture; rather, subsidies are a symptom of a food policy gone wrong. Moreover, I continued, gutting subsidies won’t end the ubiquity of cheap […]
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Another study shows organic ag outpacing conventional
Apologists for industrial food production often level what they see as a devastating charge against organic agriculture: that it could never "feed the world." The claim goes like this: industrial ag produces higher yields, and as global population grows, we’re going to have to squeeze as much food as possible out of the earth, by […]
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Don’t let Big Meat slaughter the packer ban
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared briefly Friday. I pulled it down because of a misunderstanding involving a leaked document. I’ve deleted references to the document in this post, but hope to be able to post about it soon. In the debate over the Senate ag committee’s farm bill version, a key facet […]
