Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • Oh man alive you will not believe what’s in the McRib

    McDonald's McRib sandwich has kind of a cult following, like Phish if they were only around for like a month every year instead of seemingly forever. And like Phish, it is jam-packed with synthetic ingredients. (I kid, I kid. I'm sure all of Phish's enhancement is purely herbal.) For instance, one of the bun ingredients […]

    Jess Zimmerman Food

  • The life of a seaweed gatherer [VIDEO]

    Most of the seaweed we get these days is farmed. But way up in northern Maine, Larch Hanson is still harvesting it wild in its many varieties on the rugged coast. This video isn’t about the details of that process, however. It’s about the essence of life for Larch, who rises at dawn to cut […]

    Daniel Klein Food

  • Food Studies: Deconstructing Big Food

    Photo: Krystian OlszanskiFood Studies features the voices of volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here. I’m in a food systems class this semester that is focused on the complex way that food moves from farm to plate (which […]

    Megan Moore Food

  • Food Studies: Post-communist pork, the Goat Whisperer, and other stories from the field

    Mangalica pigs in Hungary. Food Studies features the voices of volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here. Over the past few months I’ve visited food producers, large and small, all over Europe. I’ve been behind the scenes on […]

    Kathryn Tomajan Food

  • The raw milk martyr

    Schmidt in January 2010, after winning his court case.For nearly a month now, Canadian rancher Michael Schmidt has been engaged in a hunger strike. For over 17 years, Schmidt has been crusading for the right to distribute raw milk to a few hundred Ontario consumers who own shares in his herd of cows. He says […]

    David Gumpert Food

  • Farming with a smaller footprint: Why it matters

    Conservation is an important part of federal farm funding — the laws that shape what, where, and how we grow our food. And yet, if the negotiations around the 2012 Farm Bill go as predicted, funding for conservation is in grave danger. Why does conservation on farms matter? Well, for starters, most large-scale agriculture is […]

    Stephanie Ogburn Agriculture

  • Chow-to: Quench your thirst with a shrub

    Photo: holytoastr“Drinking vinegar” does not, at its core, sound like the most tempting libation. But that’s what a shrub is: a series of ingredients cooked down and preserved in vinegar, then strained into a syrup, and used for a multitude of purposes. Conceived in several parts of the world (derived from the same notion as […]

    Steven Wade Food

  • High BPA levels in pregnant moms may change their daughters’ behavior

    It's not just hippie paranoia that should keep pregnant women from eating too much BPA-laced canned food. A new study found that 3-year-old girls were more likely to show symptoms of depression and anxiety if their mothers had tested higher for BPA levels during pregnancy. (There didn’t seem to be a correlation for boys.) The […]

    Sarah Laskow Food

  • Scare trade: Halloween candy you can feel good about

    Photo: Nina HaleFor most of us, Halloween has a strong association with candy. When you’re little, you get to dress up and run around your neighborhood collecting it for free. When you’re a bit older, you get to dress up, get drunk, and buy it steeply discounted on Nov. 1. And when you’re a parent, […]

    Claire Thompson Food

  • Students and campus food workers unite for Food Day

    Northwestern University dining hall workers celebrating new contract as part of the students’ living wage campaign.“They took our knives and gave us scissors to open bags of frozen food. I want my knives back so I can cook again.” That’s what a kitchen worker at a prominent university told me recently at one of a […]

    Chris Bohner Food