Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • 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

  • Cereal offenders: How do we get the sugar out of breakfast?

    Photo: Chris Metcalf Raise your hand if you serve your kids a bowl of Twinkies for breakfast. Or perhaps they prefer a few cookies instead? According to the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) new report on children’s cereals, that’s effectively what millions of kids are eating in the morning. Indeed, the amount of sugar in many […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • ‘Organic water’ is a thing now

    A German brand of bottled water called BioKristall has gotten the official go-ahead to market itself as organic water. That's right, not a single pesticide was used to keep away the insects that feed on water crops, and it didn't need any chemical fertilizer either. Thank goodness SOMEBODY cares about our health. Okay, now all […]

    Jess Zimmerman Agriculture

  • Potato chip advertising is a perfect metaphor for income inequality, says science

    A study just published in Gastronomica proves that appealing to our tribal identifications is hardly the sole domain of liquor and cigarettes. The authors use "the language of food to examine the representation of socioeconomic class identity in contemporary America by comparing the advertising language on expensive bags of potato chips with that on inexpensive […]

    Christopher Mims Agriculture

  • Eating rice raises risk of arsenic exposure

    Sometimes it just feels like we should give up eating, particularly if "we" are "pregnant women." A new study links rice consumption with higher levels of arsenic in the bloodstream, which can increase the risks of infant mortality and low birth weight. Most arsenic exposure comes from water, and the study found that 10 percent […]

    Sarah Laskow Food

  • Sow seeds, not greed: Farmers gather on Wall Street

    Photo: Eddie CrimminsIt’s been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan — around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don’t cross paths much these days. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the […]

    Kerry Trueman Food

  • Hungary destroys 1,000 acres of Monsanto maize

    Genetically modified seeds are banned in Hungary. So when government regulators found that 1,000 acres of maize had been planted with genetically modified seeds, they just plowed the suckers under. You stick it to the Monsanto, Hungary! Leaving aside the fact that this sort of sweep-the-checkers-off-the-board move is always kind of badass, this is also […]

    Jess Zimmerman Food

  • Amazon deforestation decreasing … but not for long

    Despite reports of localized deforestation and violence against rainforest activists, a study on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon found that the number of square kilometers disappearing each year has hit a record low. But politics has a way of screwing up progress like this, and Brazilian politicians are voting today to weaken the forest code […]

    Sarah Laskow Agriculture

  • Small farmers crave horse power

    Photo: Donn HewesAsk any 5-year-old: Few tools symbolize the farm like a trundling tractor. In fact, you’d have to reach further back in time to find an equally enduring symbol: the horse. And while there’s little doubt that tractors have revolutionized farm labor and made farms much more efficient than they were in past centuries, […]

    Ariana Reguzzoni Agriculture