Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • It’s the ‘burbs, stupid: on the Ezra Klein/Tom Vilsack dustup

    Carried away: Ezra Klein and Tom Vilsack ride an imaginary “raft of subsidies.” This week, an interesting — and, I think, bizarre — argument broke out between Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. The topic was whether rural residents deserve what Klein called a “raft of subsidies,” when in fact, […]

    Tom Philpott Agriculture

  • Our favorite hipster farmer band names [SLIDESHOW]

    We here at Grist love us some Twitter. So it should come as no surprise that when we recently tweeted about the rise in farming hipsters, the hashtag meme #hipsterfarmerbands was born like a lamb in spring. From Pjörk to Pretty Girls Make Grains, we raked in some fantastic faux farmer band names. All of […]

    Grist staff Agriculture

  • Debunking the stubborn myth that only industrial ag can ‘feed the world’

    Hold the agrichemicals: Organic ag could keep markets brimming with food. I’ve written about it once already, but I want to return to The Economist’s recent special series about how industrial agriculture is the true and only way to feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit the world by 2050. The framing, I think, […]

    Tom Philpott Agriculture

  • How to save the world’s oysters — and eat them, too

    Consider the oyster — carefully. Photo: Wally GobetzCross-posted from Cool Green Science. The headlines were enough to make you throw away your shucking knife: “More than 85 percent of [oyster] reefs have been lost due to overfishing, according to a new study,” said The Independent. Foodie bloggers panicked over the news — was it suddenly […]

    Robert Lalasz Agriculture

  • Why world food prices may keep climbing

    Click for a larger version.In February, world food prices reached the highest level on record. Soaring food prices are already a source of spreading hunger and political unrest, and it appears likely that they will climb further in the months ahead. As a result of an extraordinarily tight grain situation, this year’s harvest will be […]

    Lester Brown Food

  • Teaching kids to make ice cream — with snow [VIDEO]

    This video has a lot going for it: cute kids, a grass-fed dairy farm, backyard chickens, and — most compelling of all — a recipe for ice cream. But there’s an added gimmick: this isn’t ordinary ice cream — it was made with snow, not some fancy kitchen device. So watch the video and, while […]

    Daniel Klein Food

  • The real scandal of ‘reduced-fat Skippy peanut butter spread’ isn’t the salmonella

    Just say no.Photo: Bill CorCorrected: See below. —— Skippy, a brand owned by European food giant Unilever, has issued a recall of its “reduced fat” peanut butter products. Evidently, they have become tainted with salmonella — an unhappy echo of the widespread 2009 salmonella outbreak from salmonella-tainted “peanut paste.” But the real scandal with Skippy® […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Finally, the USDA names names in its dietary guidelines

    The USDA says to eat more of this stuff.Every five years, the USDA formulates new dietary guidelines — advice for Americans on what to eat. And every five years, the guidelines are greeted with a chorus of derision. Critics like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle have long argued that the agency backs away from directly […]

    Parke Wilde Food

  • USDA chief flatters industrial ag while Obama honors its greatest critic, Wendell Berry

    A year and a half ago, I complained that President Obama’s food and ag policy was “giving me whiplash,” because the administration seemed to keep zigzagging between progressive change and the agrichemical status quo.   Since then, a definite pattern has emerged: The administration puts real policy power behind the status quo — see, for […]

    Tom Philpott Agriculture

  • Florida lawmaker wants to make farm photos illegal

    If we just don’t look at what’s going on inside factory farms, everything will be fine. Right? Along with mountains of oranges, tomatoes, and sugar, Florida’s branch of Big Ag Inc. is a reliable producer of bad news. Whether it’s the fight over proto-slavery conditions for its tomato workers, the push to perfect genetically modified […]

    Tom Laskawy Agriculture