Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Culinary boot camp whips ‘lunch ladies’ into cooking shape

    School cafeteria workers, a.k.a “lunch ladies,” rank somewhere below custodial staff in the school pecking order, yet they’re expected to perform miracles in the kitchen, turning pennies into full-blown meals. As part of my Cafeteria Confidential reporting, I recently went to Colorado to observe a “culinary boot camp” in which food-service directors and workers from around […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • Vietnamese gardeners in New Orleans offer much food for thought

    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. East New Orleans is lush and crumbling. Sometimes it feels like the built environment — the convenience stores, sugar factories, distant oil refineries, houses, brick […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Food

  • Rejoice! Grist cracks “Top Ten Ethanol Enemies” list

    The writing life can be a rocky one. You slog it out in the trenches daily, trying to make a living and a difference. Progress can be slow, or nonexistent. And then you get an honor! And your dim worldview brightens. Such was my delight yesterday, when news came via Twitter and the Corn Corps […]

    Tom Philpott Climate & Energy

  • Getting into a jam in Nebraska

    (Steph Larsen photos) “You live in the middle of nowhere!” This was the exclamation, repeated at regular intervals, we heard when an old high-school friend of mine came to visit. For folks from the city — even Nebraskans — visiting our house can feel like entering another world. There’s no traffic to speak of, and […]

    Steph Larsen Food

  • What Is Our "Right" to Opt Out of the Industrial Food System?

    Slavery. Women prohibited from voting. No home schooling allowed. No interracial marriage. These were all official government policy at one time in America’s history, and have since been rejected by the courts. Now, the courts should break with another major taboo: restrictions on our access to food, most notably, raw milk. That’s the argument being […]

    David Gumpert Food

  • ‘Scary Disease Girl’ Maryn McKenna on antibiotic-resistant staph [PODCAST]

    “Scary Disease Girl”: Maryn McKennaMaryn McKenna is arguably the premier U.S. public health journalist. Not many on the beat can boast a bio like this: Maryn McKenna’s newsroom nickname is Scary Disease Girl, and she earned it. She has reported from inside a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a village on Thailand’s […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • ‘Top Chef’ flunks school-food math

    First Lady Michelle Obama and assistant chef Sam Kass in the White House garden. (White House photo)Bravo’s new season of “Top Chef,” set in D.C. and billed as “from the White House to your house,” debuts tomorrow with a big wet kiss for Michelle Obama and her campaign to end childhood obesity. Even the White […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • Agreed: All processed food is not created equal

    At last, Ezra Klein returns to food! And he levels a legitimate criticism at the food movement: One of the really difficult things about getting people to eat better is convincing them that it’s not just a way for others to impose class-based lifestyle preferences on one another. But when you’re down on processed foods […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • One super-toxic chemical down, thousands more to go

    Last week, and capping at least a decades-long battle by consumer advocates, the EPA announced a ban on the pesticide endosulfan — one of the last legal organochlorine pesticides, a notorious group of which DDT is a member. Horrifically toxic (possibly more toxic to humans than DDT) and banned in the European Union since 2007, […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • New safety guidelines for poultry producers won’t change much

    (USDA photo) If you’ve ever fallen ill with a case of food poisoning, Big Food would like you to know that it’s probably your fault. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued new safety compliance guidelines for the poultry industry. They’re notable for several reasons: they drastically reduce the allowable levels of […]

    Eric Burkett Food