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  • Guerilla Grafters make ornamental plants bear fruit

    Duck and cover, it's a drive-by fruiting! Guerilla Grafters stick fruit-bearing limbs onto San Francisco's ornamental trees, making city streets into food-producing mini-orchards. (Grafting has been standard practice with fruit trees since basically forever, so there's nothing Frankenfoody about this.) It's not technically legal — the city discourages planting fruit trees, because of worries that […]

  • New Agtivist: Kandace Vallejo is working for food access in the heart of Texas

    Kandace Vallejo.Construction workers may not be the most obvious constituency for a preacher of the locavore gospel. Yet in the airy stretches of Austin’s Pecan Springs neighborhood, Kandace Vallejo is making inroads from her perch in a bright blue building set on two acres. As membership programs coordinator at the Workers Defense Project (WDP), a […]

  • Ietef Vita: Rapping the righteousness of wheatgrass juice

    Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the […]

  • The good food news of 2011

    2011 was a big year for food politics. In case you dozed off anywhere along the way, I’ve collected the year’s most important stories below. (Want something lighter? See my Sustainable Food Trends story from last week. Want something heavier? Here’s the bad food news.) 1. Urban farming is flourishing. An urban farm in Chicago.Photo: […]

  • Whole Foods is a little confused about Chanukah

    Oh, Whole Foods. Haven't you heard of seasonal eating? (Via Marjorie Ingall, who took this photo in New York, a city where you can buy a knish at a roadside stand but where Whole Foods apparently still doesn't know what Jews eat.)

  • Chef’s diary: Holiday traditions

    For some folks, this season is about peace and good tidings. For others, it’s just about the presents. In my family, the holidays were, and still are, all about the food. There are many items that must be on the table at my house, or it simply isn’t Christmas. Among these are the wild rice […]

  • Where to put the tangerine? A holiday tale

    Photo: Mike Chaput Our Christmas gifts were mostly practical ones: pencils, socks, toothbrushes, and that sort of thing. But each kid also received a favorite edible — olives for one brother, sweet and sour salt plums for the other, chocolate covered cherries for my sister and me. There was always the special item, too — […]

  • The Big Apple takes a bite out of childhood obesity

    New York City appears to have won a skirmish in its war on childhood obesity. According to a new report out from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), between 2006 and 2011, the obesity rate among children ages 5-14 in New York City dropped by over 5 percent. Obesity is, of course, not so much […]

  • Oh, SNAP! Grow gardens with food stamps

    A few years ago, back when she still had a job in the natural-foods industry, “my kids only got the best in terms of food,” said Corbyn Hightower, a mother of three who now lives outside Sacramento. Then, she said, “we lost everything, and we really started having to compromise.” Hightower signed up for the […]

  • Ryan Gosling believes in treating chicks right

    It may be time for a Chicken-Loving Ryan Gosling Tumblr — "Hey girl, I just wanted to know how you like your eggs in the morning, because I like mine organic and cage-free." Perhaps because his name gives him an affinity with all fowl, but more likely because he is a decent and animal-loving person, […]