Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • 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 and Agriculture

  • ‘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 and Agriculture

  • 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 and Agriculture

  • 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 and Agriculture

  • 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 and Agriculture

  • Should I have accepted a government farm hand-out?

    These granaries once stored this farm’s corn. No more. (Steph Larsen)Experience is the best teacher, but there’s been a big gap in my experience I couldn’t fill. I’ve worked in food and agriculture policy for a good number of years now, yet I had never once tried to apply for any of the programs for […]

    Steph Larsen Food and Agriculture

  • Quarter water, man!: Eating cheap in the inner city [VIDEO]

    With an antic spirit and some NSFW language, Bronx denizens Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam document food culture in New York City’s “bodegas” — corner stores in which fresh food is scarce and pricy, but processed fare is plentiful and stunningly cheap. In some areas, bodegas are the only source of food. Penn and Kam […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Oil spill threatens to smother Gulf Coast food cultures

    Normally this Louisiana boat would be trawling for shrimp, not oil(Photo courtesy Juanita Constible via Flickr) With more than 20 million gallons of oil already let loose in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen, gator hunters and even farmers are waking up to the fact that the diversity of foods they depend upon for their livelihoods […]

    Gary Nabhan Food and Agriculture

  • How the agrichemical industry turns failure into market opportunity

    It’s always blue skies for the agrichemical industry Monsanto rolled out seeds genetically engineered to withstand its Roundup herbicide back in the mid-1990s. Today, Roundup Ready crops blanket U.S. farmland. According to USDA figures, 90 percent of soybeans and 60 percent of corn and cotton planted in the United States contain the Roundup-resistant gene. Back-of-the […]

    Tom Philpott Food and Agriculture