Climate Culture

Colleges and universities are learning what it takes to go green

The dawn of the new school year has brought with it a corps of fresh-faced ideas and initiatives aimed at making colleges and universities cleaner and greener. And, like any freshman class, they are all beaming with potential: Most will succeed, a handful will excel, and a few will end up disappointing their parents. Campuses […]

In Da Strauss

Levi Strauss will debut organic-cotton jeans Good old-fashioned Levi’s jeans will become new-fashioned in November, when the company debuts Eco jeans. The denim dungarees will be organic cotton, naturally dyed, and U.S.-made — and, like all too many eco-products, woefully expensive, with a hefty $250 price tag (printed on recycled paper with soy ink). Spent […]

Go and Cinema More

New climate-change documentary focuses on people of faith If An Inconvenient Truth didn’t exactly bring evangelicals to the multiplex in droves, The Great Warming just may. Religious leaders hope the documentary, to be screened in September and distributed in October along with voter guides and eco-sermons, will mobilize religious groups around climate change — just […]

Umbra on motivating teenagers

Dear Umbra, I’m an officer for my high school’s chapter of the National Honor Society, and we stress academic importance and help our community by doing service projects. I’m trying to get a service project going in support of the environment. Greenhouse-gas emissions and alternative fuels are some things I tried to bring up at […]

From Vixens to Vodka

If you’re going to starve yourself skinny, why not go vegan? Call us crazy, but maybe a bevy of bone-thin women swaying listlessly on stage is not the best advertisement for a vegan diet (our first thought: woah, somebody needs a hamburger!). Memo to Vegan Vixens: show Americans they can be fat and lazy and […]

Meet the eco-model who’s changing the face of fashion

SUMMER SAYS GIVE Watch a video of Summer Rayne Oakes telling you to donate to Grist. It’s a strange scene: a sexy fashion model in skintight jeans, belly showing, telling a bunch of teenagers, “I studied sewage sludge and absolutely loved it!” Twenty-two-year-old Summer Rayne Oakes then confesses a fondness for bugs. From behind their […]

Umbra on greener golfing

Dear Umbra, I am getting an early start on my Christmas shopping this year, and always try to find sustainable gifts whenever possible. My father is an avid golfer. I have been pleased to see that the golf community’s efforts to be more ecologically sensitive have been making news lately. I would like to treat […]

From Cooling to Cooing

Burn, baby, burn The Nevada desert is hot. So, coincidentally, is the planet. Enter Cooling Man, an online carbon calculator for this week’s Burning Man arts festival (which features such sweet creations as the electric cupcake-mobile.) “We think Cooling Man is pretty cool,” says one overbaked burner. And of course, by “overbaked,” we mean “sunburned.” […]

A cornucopia of new books tells us where our food comes from

One summer evening when I lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I was snipping basil from the potted herb garden that I kept on the stoop in front of my brownstone apartment. Kids were playing on the sidewalk, their high-spirited shouts echoing through the dense, humid air. I absently popped a basil leaf in my mouth, […]

The Nation comes out with its first food issue.

"Edible Media" is a biweekly look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.

The left has always had an uneasy relationship with pleasure -- and thus with food. For every freewheeling beatnik or free-loving hippie, there must be 10 dour left-wingers who see personal pleasure as an obscene indulgence in a world wracked by war, hunger, oppression, and environmental ruin.

Yet one of the most powerful critiques of consumer capitalism is that it drains life of vivid pleasure and offers instead "pleasure." A handmade dark-chocolate custard becomes a dull, corn-sweetened "chocolate" shake. Peddling boundless diversity and freedom, mass-market consumerism delivers regimentation, sameness, and mediocrity. As Michael Pollan showed in Omnivore's Dilemma, the dizzying variety arrayed on U.S. supermarket shelves boils down to endless combinations of two ingredients: corn and soybeans.

By treating pleasure and food as beneath responsible discussion, the left cedes too much to the hucksters who run the show. Rather than deride pleasure as a vice of the rich, the left should try to revive it as a principle for all.

That's why I was happy when the left-liberal weekly The Nation came out with its first issue devoted to food this week.