Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Sorry Mrs. O, but jumping jacks aren’t enough

    At a recent summit on childhood obesity, the first lady announced a shift in her well-known Let’s Move campaign — away from food reform and toward an increased focus on exercise. Instead of “forcing [children] to eat their vegetables,” she told her audience, “it’s getting them to go out there and have fun.” Yes, you […]

    Michele Simon Food

  • Whippersnappers unite: Young farmers work to change 2012 Farm Bill

    A group of young farmers visiting Sen. Olympia Snowe’s office in Maine.Across the U.S., young people are heeding the call for a more just, sustainable, and healthy food system, and are heading to the fields to build it themselves. They are working on farms and starting their own small-scale farm businesses from scratch. But, as […]

    Lindsey Lusher Shute Agriculture

  • The bugs that ate Monsanto

    The corn rootworm.Photo: Jimmy SmithNow that 94 percent of the soy and 70 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. are genetically modified, Monsanto — one of the companies that dominates the GMO seed market  — might look to some like it’s winning. But if we look a little closer, I’d say they’re holding […]

    Tom Laskawy Agriculture

  • 2011: Sustainable food trends

    A good year-end trend list should do two things simultaneously: confirm the conscientious reader’s suspicions while providing a few surprise nuggets. Sustainable food is a vast category with many opportunities for interpretation, so what I offer up here is an entirely subjective list of favorites. In other words: These are just a few of the […]

    Twilight Greenaway Food

  • Your mom was right: Don’t eat raw cookie dough

    I know, I know, it's so good. But a study of a 2009 E. coli outbreak, led by CDC researchers and state health officials, has traced the contamination back to prepackaged raw cookie dough. Turns out ready-to-bake is not the same as ready-to-not-bake-and-get-right-to-the-eating. Ugh, god, what are we supposed to scarf when we get dumped […]

    Jess Zimmerman Food

  • Food Studies: Creating historical records for the future

    Anna Zeide is embarking on a project to record the daily interactions of everyday people with the food they consume.

    Anna Zeide Food

  • Sea change: Asian Americans and seafood in the gulf [Part 1]

    Editor’s note: This is the first half of a feature story from Hyphen Magazine’s Survival Issue. Some say that Asian America began in Louisiana. In the late 1700s, Filipino sailors escaped Spanish galleons and started shrimping the hot, humid Gulf Coast, where the weather reminded them of Southeast Asia and the water teemed with oysters, […]

    Nina Kahori Fallenbaum Food

  • Slaughterhouse rules: Inside a halal butchershop [VIDEO]

    New York City: A lot of unusual things happen beneath the surface here. You don’t notice most of them until someone points them out. Madani Halal slaughterhouse is a great example; it’s down a backstreet in a little-known neighborhood in Queens. Every day, folks line up around the corner to choose their own live chicken […]

    Daniel Klein Food

  • Hacking the Farm Bill

    A slide from the winning entry. Rebecca Klein wasn’t expecting a lot when she signed up to attend last week’s Farm Bill Hackathon. This public health expert from the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University had never heard of a hackathon — a gathering of computer programmers who lock themselves in a […]

    Twilight Greenaway Agriculture

  • New Agtivist: Edith Floyd is making a Detroit urban farm, empty lot by empty lot

    Photo: Patrick CrouchEdith Floyd is the real deal. With little in the way of funding or organizational infrastructure, she runs Growing Joy Community Garden on the northeast side of Detroit. Not many folks bother to venture out to her neighborhood, but Edith has been inspiring me for years. I caught up with her on a […]

    Patrick Crouch Agriculture