Articles by Tom Philpott

As India modernizes, farmers and public health pay the price.

India's current burst of free-market reform and official attempts at "modernization" are by no means the area's first.

As Mike Davis shows in his luminous Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), the subcontinent's 19th century British rulers imposed an economic agenda literally ripped wholesale from the pages of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), that bible of free-market dogmatists.

Davis lays out in devastating detail (first chapter available for free here) how in the 1870s, high-living colonial administrators dismantled the old Indian system for handling droughts, replacing it with one in which the price of grain floated freely based on global supply and demand. Thus, when a drought struck a grain-producing region in India, the grain price surged. The only buyers who could then afford it happened to reside in merry olde England.

The subcontinent's railroad system, paid for by taxes imposed on the Indians, very efficiently carried grain being produced in the non-drought areas to ports for shipment to the mother country. Its cutting-edge telegraph infrastructure, also financed by colonial taxes, transmitted price hikes rapidly. Famine thus rippled throughout India, including in non-drought-stricken areas.

Tens of millions perished in a series of famines in late 19th century India; before, when drought struck a certain area, food would move in from luckier areas and famines were rare. Davis claims the English took advantage of these not-so-natural disasters to consolidate its grip on the subcontinent. It was all very efficient, really.

Today in India, modernization is bringing new food-related woes: growing despair among farmers and surging diabetes rates.

Lessons on how to live from the NYT food section

Lots of people in this lamentable world are up to no good. In a diabolic cubicle somewhere, someone is busily conjuring up next-generation bomb technology. Somewhere else, a cynic is figuring out where to tap the next huge store of crude oil, to be sold at great profit by an oil company that won't be responsible for the carbon it releases.

Right now, someone is mindlessly sidling up to a car-dealership counter, about to pay big bucks for a monstrous SUV -- perhaps a hokey E85 one. Or plotting some unspeakable -- and no doubt quite profitable -- betrayal.

Then there's the folks who get up and go to work and do ... what all day? Those mid-level types in giant corporate and government cube farms, not the ones making or executing the evil decisions, but the ones who sit around all day pecking at their keyboards -- what is it that they do, again?

Seems insane to me, this vast effort and energy spent going to and fro, all to such ambiguous end.

The obsessives portrayed in Wednesday's New York Times Dining in/Dining Out section -- New York espresso nerds and a mad-genuis Catalan chef -- seem much more benign to me. Perhaps we have something to learn from them.

How Mexico’s iconic flatbread went industrial and lost its flavor

In a spectacle similar to the one conjured up by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, a Mexican judiciary panel handed the nation’s presidency to Felipe Calderón last week. Even The New York Times, in its circumspect way, acknowledged that the new president-elect’s narrow victory over leftist rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador involved seemingly illegal […]

A brazen move from an agency shot through with industry players.

Cows that feed solely on pasture perform a valuable service: they transform what's inedible to us -- grass -- into a rich source of protein and other nutrients. And when such cows are raised in moderate numbers, they can actually improve the health and biodiversity of grasslands. Moreover, cows evolved to eat grass, so the pasture model is clearly the most animal-friendly way to create beef.

To me, the grass-fed concept exemplifies responsible agrarianism: it's energy efficient (it relies on no vast, petroleum-guzzling corn fields), it enhances rather than degrades the ecosystems it relies on, and it forces us to eat mindfully and in season.

If we insisted on raising all of our beef on ample pasture, every American would be able to savor the privilege of eating beef only, say, every couple of weeks -- and less during the grazing season, when cows are fattening up.

Which sounds about right to me.

Leave it to the USDA -- that hothouse of food-industry flackery -- to attempt to screw it all up.