Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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The localization of agriculture
In the United States, there has been a surge of interest in eating fresh local foods, corresponding with mounting concerns about the climate effects of consuming food from distant places and about the obesity and other health problems associated with junk food diets. This is reflected in the rise in urban gardening, school gardening, and […]
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Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?
Writer George Monbiot’s recent Peak Oil article entitled “If Nothing Else, Save Farming” included this comment: There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. I read this and immediately tweeted the question […]
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Monterey Bay Sustainable Seafood Card–Not Worth the Paper It's Printed On?
My wife brought home tuna for dinner the other night. My fifteen-year-old daughter, member of her school’s environment club, 4-H, and a consummate organic gardener, whipped out her Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood card to see how tuna ranked. Yay! There it was on the Best Choices card. In fact, the card had six variations of […]
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Grist Exclusive: Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?
Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm. Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own […]
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Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen: That a novel […]
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Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving
Paul Bakus in a ruined pumpkin patch.Photo: Wonk Room Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. Our increasingly extreme climate is devastating American agriculture. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, strengthened by global warming, caused $1.6 billion in agriculture damage in Louisiana alone. Now it appears that a Thanksgiving mainstay — pumpkin pie — is next on the global […]
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A tasting of four meatless “turkeys” for the holiday table
Can such a “turkey” make your holiday feast soar?Photo courtesy of Jason HoustonGiven the ire I provoked in last year’s turkey column, it’s high time that this Grist columnist acknowledges that: A. Meat-centric holidays such as Thanksgiving can be challenging for vegetarians and evoke all kinds of emotions — including, but not limited to, extreme […]
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Gourmet’s conscience, Gopnik on cookbooks, and other tasty morsels
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. • For years, Barry Estabrook reported on food politics for Gourmet Magazine and its Web site. In a sense, he played the role of the conscience of the foodie set–at the […]
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The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!)
It’s always sunny in this Philadelphia community garden.Photo courtesy Tony the Misfit via Flickr Do you dream of an organic garden, but don’t have a yard? A flock of chicks, perhaps, but don’t have a yard? Home-grown food, and lower grocery bills (but, alas, no yard!)? Dream no more, because you can have it, and […]
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Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link
“Since last spring and the onset of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak in humans, USDA has consistently asked that the media stop calling this “novel” pandemic virus “swine flu.” By continuing to mislabel the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus that is affecting human populations around the world, the media is causing undue and undeserved […]
