Food and Agriculture

Fruits of old: Chicago gears up for an urban heirloom fruit orchard

Urban orchards are the new staple of second-wave urban agriculture. Now Chicago is upping the ante with one geared entirely toward heirloom varieties of fruit.

Lori Rotenberk Cities

Melon madness: How my food waste obsession took over my weekend

What do you do when someone brings a dozen melons to a family holiday getaway? If you're worried about preventing food waste, you get creative. Very creative.

Molly Watson Food

Global food prices spike 10% in July, thanks largely to drought

Seventy-eight percent of the U.S. corn crop is in fair or worse condition.

Philip Bump Climate & Energy

If they ban your super-sized soda, would you switch to diet?

Even as New York's soda ban gets close to becoming a reality, several loopholes have public health advocates worried.

Tom Laskawy Food

McDonald’s tried to make ‘onion nuggets’ happen

Given the kind of stuff that gets the fast-food green light, it’s hard to believe that there are even more concepts that end up on the cutting room floor. But there are, and the McDonald’s Corporation’s archives manager Mike Bullington knows about all of them. The most shocking item in his collection of fast-food memorabilia, at […]

Jess Zimmerman Food

If you like to cook, this new use for a plastic bottle will honestly change your life

Watch -- just watch! -- what this genius lady does with an egg and a plastic bottle.

Sarah Laskow Food

Counting the harvest: How numbers can save urban gardens

In 2010, just 67 New York gardens yielded 87,000 pounds of food. Some experts believe data like this is crucial to ensuring the urban agriculture movement takes root.

Christopher Weber Cities

They’re genetically modifying goats to create human breast milk substitute

You know that human breast milk is very important for babies’ development. (If you don’t know this, go ostentatiously bottle-feed a baby doll near a farmers market! It will be fun, I promise.) But for various reasons, sometimes new moms can’t breastfeed — they need medication that shows up in breast milk, for instance, or […]

Sarah Miller Food

Your meat-eating days are almost over, water experts say

With water shortages looming and global population rising, burgers will soon be a luxury we can't afford, say water experts.