Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • 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

  • 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 […]

    Jess Zimmerman Agriculture

  • 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 […]

    Tracie McMillan Food

  • 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 […]

    Andrew Leonard Food

  • 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: […]

    Twilight Greenaway Food

  • 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.)

    Jess Zimmerman Food

  • 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 […]

    Kurt Michael Friese Food

  • 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 — […]

    Deborah Madison Food

  • 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 […]

    Tom Laskawy Food