Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • Saving a community garden in D.C.

    I never thought I’d be involved in a fight to save a city park, but here I am. The Marines are progressing with plans to move and expand their facility in Washington, D.C. They are looking at one option of taking over Virginia Avenue Park where I happen to participate in a community garden. A […]

    Samuel Fromartz Food

  • DC’s Common Good City Farm: ‘Museum farm’ or real deal?

    Neighbors used to avoid this area in the LeDroit Park neighborhood of Washington, DC, the site of an abandoned school, before Common Good City Farm grew there.(Photos ©Michael Hanson) “You got any more arugula?” A middle-aged man has just walked up to the street side of the chain-link fence. He peers through the gaps in […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Food

  • Mapping the farm with my ears

    (Steph Larsen photos)Ever since taking a cartography class in graduate school, I’ve had a penchant for maps. Full of information, they elegantly highlight places and ideas that we may have missed otherwise. As a visual person, I can appreciate the splashes of color and clean designs. But not all maps are visual. We can create […]

    Steph Larsen Food

  • Farmworkers dare Americans to ‘Take Our Jobs!’

    Job opportunities for agricultural workers occupations should be abundant because large numbers of workers leave these jobs due to their low wages and physical demands. -Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition Tired of being vilified as stealing jobs from unemployed American citizens, and hoping to spark realistic discussion of immigration reform, United […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food

  • Keeping up with Jones Valley Urban 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. In fall 2001, Edwin Marty and Page Allison drove across the country, back home, to start a farm. That might be when the Breaking Through […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Food

  • Acid rain is back, and thanks to farming, worse than ever

    When you gargoyle with acid rain, you’ll get that grin wiped right off your face.(Nino Barbieri via Wikimedia)Policy makers, environmentalists — even Republicans — like to congratulate themselves on the “victory” over acid rain. As this American success story is usually told, acid rain’s effects were addressed by a 1990 update to the Clean Air […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • They shoot unicorns, don’t they?

    Grist reader Scott Hess sent in this photo in response to today’s post about Big Pork threatening legal action over the marketing copy for Canned Unicorn Meat. It immediately made me think of a concept my friends at Boing Boing long ago pioneered: a “unicorn chaser” — a mind-cleansing antidote to stories of a gross, […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food

  • Dispatch from the U.S. Social Forum

    SocialForumists taking to the streets of Detroit. (Tom Philpott) DETROIT, MICH. — As the economy falters, another war lurches into chaos, and our nation’s gravest environmental calamity plays out in slow motion at the rate of at least one Exxon Valdez spill per week in the Gulf, a kind of sour despair has taken root […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Big Pork squeals over unicorn-meat marketing. Yes, unicorn meat.

    We’ll have a rainbow roast, please!(ThinkGeek.com)One has to feel sorry for Big Pork. First there was that nasty swine flu that put everyone off pork chops, even though the industry managed to get the name changed to H1N1. Profits are down for producers like Smithfield. Despite America’s love affair with all things bacon, pork consumption […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food

  • ‘Lunch Line’ goes behind the counters

    Lunch Line has been getting some good buzz — “required viewing!!!” screamed a review by author Tracie McMillan for the Atlantic Food Channel. Filmmakers Michael Graziano and Ernie Park were originally inspired by the Organic School Project, a now-defunct school garden project in Chicago, and had intended to focus the film on it. Once they […]

    Tom Laskawy Food