Climate Food and Agriculture
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Here’s why you can’t afford food anymore
Food prices jumped 3.9 percent in February, the largest one-month increase since November 1974. It’s turtles all the way down: Grocery prices are up, wholesale food prices are up, prices for staples like corn and grain are up. Here’s a few things you won’t be affording in the future: Bacon. The retail price for bacon […]
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Forget the gloom — new ways of living and organizing our economy are flourishing
Despite a flurry of bad news recently, good things are spouting up.Photo: Judy Merrill-SmithThe last couple of days have been gloomy ones. I kept checking in with the vague and dire reports from the nuclear-power bleeding edge in Japan. For part of the time I was also immersed in a post about truly awful things […]
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Breakfast is not so gr-r-reat when your only option is Frosted Flakes
Breakfast cub: Tony the Tiger says start your kid’s day with big bowls of sweetened corn.Photo: Jim BarkerOne in four children goes without breakfast each morning, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a tragedy to be sure — but are Kellogg’s breakfast products the solution? Last week, Kellogg announced its new project called Share […]
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Poultry industry smothers immigrant farmers and abuses antibiotics
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Cheap shot: a sale currently in effect at Randall’s stores in Texas. The U.S. meat industry offers some of the biggest bargains you can find: stuff like “boneless skinless chicken breasts” for just two bucks a pound; or a […]
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To make local food more accessible, time to revive mid-sized farms
Today is National Agriculture Day. Have you hugged your farmer yet? To celebrate this special day, I’ve dug this column out of the archives, originally published three years ago this spring. It’s a tribute to mid-size farms, which don’t make nearly as much cash as their industrial-scale brethren and don’t get nearly the love lavished […]
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Maine towns reject one-size-fits-all regulation, declare ‘food sovereignty’
Photo: Chewonki Semester SchoolIn 2009, Maine farmer Heather Retberg learned that new regulations prohibited her from bringing her chickens to a neighbor’s approved slaughtering facility. She’d have to invest some $30,000 she didn’t have to build her own facility. So Retberg shifted her focus to raw dairy instead, selling directly to local neighbors. When she […]
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How two 15-year-old Girl Scouts (and Grist readers) changed Kellogg’s
It’ll take some willpower, but don’t have “samoa” until they stop harming the planet.Photo: Laura TaylorWhen Kellogg’s announced this week that it is moving to limit the deforestation caused by the palm oil it uses to make Frosted Flakes, Keebler cookies, Rice Krispies, and Girl Scout cookies, it represented an enormous achievement for two 15-year-old […]
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I’ve got a good food story to tell: yours [VIDEO]
The Perennial Plate has been creating weekly videos about real food in Minnesota for the past year. Today, we released our 52nd video: a trailer for our upcoming project. This spring, I will be travelling across the country for six months, documenting stories about good food in America. Each week we will be filming, editing, and releasing […]
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Another week, another attempt to shield factory farms from public scrutiny
Above: Last spring, a Humane Society of the United States investigtor, posing as an employee, got a camera into an egg factory to film conditions there. If Iowa lawmakers have their way, such muckraking will be illegal. ——— It’s not just Florida. In what appears to be a growing movement, industrial farmers have convinced Iowa […]
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I’m a rural resident. Where’s my subsidy check?
The view from Washington, D.C., of the rural Midwest: quaint scenery on the way to the West Coast. Photo: Scorpions and CentaursI’ve spent the majority of my life living in cities, albeit mostly small ones in Wisconsin that New Yorkers might not call metropolitan. Before I moved to Lyons, Neb., I lived in Washington, D.C. […]
