Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Is your all-you-can-eat shrimp killing the mangroves?

    Kennedy Warne, author of Let Them Eat Shrimp, discusses the connection between shrimp farming and the disappearance of some of the most biologically productive ecosystems on Earth.

    Twilight Greenaway Food

  • Organic food is not always sustainable food

    Good food, as we've come to know it in that last few years, has a few characteristics: It's local. It's grown using responsible, land-loving techniques, like crop rotations and polycultures. And it's organic, raised without chemical fertilizers and poison pesticides. At one point, “organic” was shorthand for all of that, because the same people who cared enough to grow their vegetables with manure cared about environmental sustainability and tended to be local.

    But now “organic” can be shorthand only for adherence to a certain set of rules that outlaw certain concentrations of certain types of fertilizers and pesticides, and as the New York Times points out, it sometimes doesn't mean much else.

    Sarah Laskow Agriculture

  • Doe, a deer, a sustainable protein source to last all winter

    I am not a hunter. I don’t (and will not) own a gun and, though I’ve toyed with the idea of bow hunting in the past, my aim really stinks. Even so, the deer population where I live does need to be thinned, since we’ve taken their natural predators away. And I sure do appreciate […]

    Steph Larsen Food

  • Will the Butterball raid yield any real results?

    If turkey were beer, Butterball would have the brand power of Budweiser, Miller, and Coors combined. From six plants, the company produces 1 billion pounds of turkey each year and exports the meat to over 50 countries. Given this dominance, the Butterball brand has been a priceless asset to the company — until Thursday morning. […]

    Erik Marcus Agriculture

  • Can the 2012 Farm Bill protect the Ogallala Aquifer?

    Kansas wheat.Photo: Brian McGuirkMy father farmed in Kansas and envied those lucky farmers in the wetter states to the east of us, who could grow 200-bushel corn and other lucrative crops like soy beans and sugar beets. He had to satisfy himself with wheat, a drought-tolerant crop first brought to the States from a place […]

    Julene Bair Agriculture

  • Scrooged: FDA gives up on antibiotic restrictions in livestock

    The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled a Scrooge move just before Christmas. The agency published an entry in the Federal Register declaring that it will end its attempt at mandatory restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. The agency isn’t advertising the shift, though: This news would have remained a secret if […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Fast food chains give up ‘pink slime’ meat product

    McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Burger King just stopped using a product popularly known as "pink slime" in their burger meat. The "slime" comes from the tiny bits of beef in leftover fatty trimming. Those bits are doused with ammonia in order to kill E. coli and are then made into human food. Or “human” “food.” […]

    Sarah Laskow Food

  • The bad food news of 2011

    We continue digesting this year’s food politics coverage below — only this time we take account of the things that didn’t go so well. (Tired of bad news? See the year’s good food news instead.) 1.  Food prices have gone up, and more people need help feeding their families The fact that 46 million people […]

    Twilight Greenaway Agriculture

  • Pepsi spends $3 million a year so laws don’t come between corn syrup and your kids

    Ironically-named food hero Marion Nestle just calculated that PepsiCo, which pumps enough high fructose corn syrup into the American public to turn out one Ghostbusters-size Stay Puft marshmallow man every 18 hours (I made that up; you get the idea), spends $3 million a year lobbying Congress. So what is Pepsi doing dumping all that […]

    Christopher Mims Agriculture

  • Critical List: Funding for climate research drops; USDA approves drought-resistant corn

    The federal budget crisis is turning climate denialism into a vicious cycle: Skepticism contributes to lower funding, which means less research, which means less information, which means more skepticism. The USDA approved a drought-resistant corn, developed by Monsanto. Congress is cutting a federal program that helps low-income people with heating costs by about 25 percent. […]

    Sarah Laskow Agriculture