Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • Fruit and veggies as you’ve never seen them before

    The Inside Insides blog has posted animated MRI scans of fruits and vegetables such as corn, durian, bananas, mushrooms, and broccoli. The results are beautiful in an otherworldly way and strangely hypnotic — spiraling Fibonacci series of seeds and ghostly vacancies. Here’s a still from the corn animation — click through to see the whirling […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food

  • Chefs and parents plot a lunch revolution at one D.C. public school

    A group of chefs and parents plan to turn Tyler Elementary’s kitchen-cum-makeshift-office into a place to cook actual food.(Ed Bruske photos) A group of prominent Washington, D.C.-area restaurant chefs has volunteered to introduce a novel concept in school-food service to one Capitol Hill elementary school: collaborating with parents to take over kitchen operations on a nonprofit basis, […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • How trains replaced solar-powered transport and gave rise to the Farm Belt

    Greens like me tend to fetishize trains. And for good reason. Why risk your life in a private, energy-intensive pod, negotiating traffic and the dubious decisions of hundreds of other drivers, when you could be comfortably reading on a subway? Who would endure the indignities of the airport for a short flight, if a high-speed […]

    Tom Philpott Climate & Energy

  • Help kickstart a documentary on Haiti’s agricultural rebirth

    Since 1981 the United States has followed a policy until the last year or so … that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so thank goodness they can leap directly into the industrial era. It […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food

  • Two takes on antibiotic use on factory farms

    In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related videos from around the Web. The meat industry wants to be viewed through the softening lens of the supermarket meat case: the shrink-wrapped splendor of chops, steaks, and breasts, presented in affordable and bountiful stacks. For the marketing to be effective, the dirty work of getting […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Part 1 of interview with local-food economist Ken Meter [PODCAST]

    Local food economist Ken Meter(Jerry Carlson/Agri-Energy)Ken Meter, director of Minneapolis-based Crossroads Resource Center, is probably the country’s foremost thinker on the role of food in creating robust local and regional economies. I first encountered him at a Community Food Security Coalition conference in Atlanta in 2005, where he gave a presentation that forever changed the […]

    Tom Philpott Cities

  • Ethanol gets skewered by recent CBO assessment

    In its calm and measured way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just delivered a blistering assessment of the environmental value of corn-based ethanol. The CBO had been charged by Congress to calculate just what the public is getting for its investment in ethanol production: specifically, the $0.45/gallon tax credit that gasoline blenders get for mixing […]

    Tom Philpott Climate & Energy

  • Urbivore’s Dilemma, Week 6: How I turned vegetables into a time machine

    This week’s bounty.(Jennifer Prediger photos) Welcome to week 6 of my adventures as a veggie box subscriber, which I’m chronicling in this Urbivore’s Dilemma series. This week I had an epiphany about my Community Supported Agriculture membership. I think I may have found a way to slow down time with vegetables! The vegetables in this […]

    Jennifer Prediger Food

  • Chicagoans get new roots and second chances from Growing Home farm

    January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. The real estate market dealt Melvin Price a double whammy. The 45-year-old builder and carpenter had been making a living in Chicago for years before […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Food

  • Vintage soda ads: Can you spot the fake?

    We ran across one of these old ads pushing pop for tots on Facebook and shook our heads disbelievingly, before learning it was a fake. But the sweetened beverage industry has stooped equally low in the past, all the way down to toddler eye level. Can you guess which one is a modern mock-up? The […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food