Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: How foods that don’t occur in nature end up on your kid’s plate

    Ed Bruske recently spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School in the District of Columbia observing how food is prepared. This is the second of a six-part series of posts about what he saw. Read parts 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook. And check out the rest […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • Tales from a D.C. school kitchen: What does ‘fresh-cooked’ really mean?

    Ed Bruske recently spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School in the District of Columbia observing how food is prepared. This is the first of a six-part series of posts about what he saw. Read parts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook. And check out the rest […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • Drought drives Middle Eastern pepper farmers out of business, threatens prized heirloom chiles

    Editor’s note: This marks the launch of Climate Change and Food Culture, a series of posts by Gary Nabhan about how climate change threatens to stamp out some of the globe’s most celebrated foodstuffs, and along with them the farming and cooking cultures that created them. ————- Dazzling diversity under threat: a woman sells peppers […]

    Gary Nabhan Climate & Energy

  • Anti–school garden campaigner Caitlin Flanagan, on Colbert back in ’06

    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Caitlin Flanagan www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy Okay, this post means nothing in the grand scheme of things. I really should have my nose buried in a report on consolidation in the agriculture sector, or be working on a real article. But ever […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Everyone wants a piece of Belize

    One day in December, the residents of the seaside village of Punta Gorda in Belize looked out to the horizon and saw something unexpected: Jamaican fishing boats. They had arrived, unannounced and without permits, to fish in Belize’s diverse waters. Many of Punta Gorda’s local fishermen still work the shallow waters inside the Belize Barrier […]

    Andrew Sharpless Food

  • Thoughts on The Atlantic’s attack on school gardens

    Hands-on education at Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard. Photo: Edible SchoolyardFor several years starting in the early ’90s, I worked as a remedial math and writing teacher at Austin Community College. At that time–and, for all I know, now–the Texas public education system was mercilessly stratified: high-income districts lavished resources on schools, while their counterparts in low-income […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • ‘Water’ author Stephen Solomon talks resource intelligence

    Author Stephen Solomon recently suggested we need an “Al Gore of water” — a public champion to raise the profile of water scarcity threats and opportunities, as Gore has done for climate change. Solomon, an economics journalist, makes a bid for that role himself with his new book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Climate & Energy

  • Russ Parsons on launching a civil, inclusive food-system debate

    Can we all just get along? Image: Tom Twigg for GristIn a recent article, the LA Times foodie pundit Russ Parsons attempted to start a “more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation” on the food system. He argues the debate has congealed into a tedious battle between “hard-line aggies” who are “convinced that […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • New report calls for atrazine review

    An important new report on atrazine was published yesterday and it’s about time. Pesticide Action Network and Land Stewardship Project have brought together the science and farming communities to make a strong statement about the need for a new review of the herbicide atrazine and to outline alternatives for its use. I’ve followed the atrazine […]

    Erik Hoffner Food

  • Lessons on the food system from the ammonia-hamburger fiasco

    In case you missed it last week, The New York Times ran an excellent article on a South Dakota company called Beef Products Inc., which makes a hamburger filler product that ends up in 70 percent of burgers in the United States. To make a long story short: Beef Products buys the cheapest, least desirable […]

    Tom Philpott Food