Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • Thoughts on the legacy of Norman Borlaug

    Norman Borlaug (Photo courtesy FAO)In the early 1940s, Mexico was a fraught region for U.S. geopolitical strategists. Not so long before — 1939 — a revolutionary government had nationalized the Mexican oil supply, dealing a sharp blow to U.S. oil interests, especially the Rockefeller family’s dominant Standard Oil. Meanwhile, as war raged in Europe, there […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • An open letter to the dean who promoted Froot Loops as a “smart choice”

    Editor’s note: Several of the nation’s largest food manufacturers recently rolled out a new label called “Smart Choices.” Controversy erupted when processed junk like Froot Loops and Fudgsicles made the cut. In a Sept. 4 New York Times article, Eileen T. Kennedy, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University […]

    Hank Herrera Food

  • Farmer Gene Logsdon on the promise of a home ‘pancake patch’

    Gene Logsdon on his farm.Gene Logsdon is one of the clearest and most original voices of rural America. He’s a farmer in Ohio not far from his boyhood home, and is a writer to boot; he’s published more than two dozen books; some of which include Living at Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream […]

    Makenna Goodman Food

  • Large Florida grower steps up for farm workers

    Eat a slice of fresh tomato from the supermarket or at a restaurant this winter, and chances are it will have come from a field in south-central Florida, site of 90 percent of U.S. winter tomato production. And this year, there’s a fighting chance that the worker who picked it might have made something close […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Nationwide “eat-ins” show way to a revived National School Lunch Program

    Chowing down for better school lunches in Iowa City.Photo: Kurt Michael FrieseAll across the country this past Labor Day, folks gathered for picnics. That’s no surprise, of course. After all, it was a holiday, and the weather was grand across nearly the whole continent. But there was something unique about one group of picnics; 307 […]

    Kurt Michael Friese Food

  • Growing hope and fighting hunger on the Gaza Strip

    Gaza gardeners, with harvest.Photo: Grassroots InternationalThis is the time of year when gardeners start to reap their rewards–fruits and vegetables that make for a healthy feast. But for the people of Gaza, gardens produce a serving of self-sufficiency, too. Urban gardens usually bring to mind savvy urbanites indulging in an organic lifestyle–witness Michelle Obama and […]

    Nikhil Aziz Food

  • James McWilliams’ over-hyped and undercooked anti-locavore polemic

    Cows on pasture: potential solution, or menace to society? What is just food? One might answer: food produced without causing undue ecological damage, food grown under production systems that allow workers and farmers to earn livable wages, food that’s healthy, accessible, and affordable to everyone who eats. To James E. McWilliams, author of the new […]

    Stephanie Ogburn Food

  • From Big Ag’s climate problem to Whole Foods’ latest snafu, tasty morsels from around the Web

     When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web. —————- Get ’em while they’re hot.  • I’ve been writing a lot recently about how industrial agriculture is screwing up the climate (see here and here). I keep forgetting to add: a warmed-up climate will almost surely […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • California’s ag crisis and our concentrated food system

    Not  many “green shoots” in the Central Valley. California’s severe drought–which could well be related to climate change–isn’t just menacing Los Angeles. The drought has helped tip the state’s Central Valley, epicenter of U.S. fruit and vegetable production, into a severe crisis, The Wall Street Journal reports. Hammered by dry weather, the weak economy, and […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • ‘Time’ was right about cheap food–but forgot farmworkers

    The widely read recent Time cover story “Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food” is a useful complement to current discussions about our food system. It offers further evidence of the mainstreaming of ideas and practices that were considered radical or irrelevant a mere decade ago. But the author errs by avoiding any […]

    Sean Sellers Food