Food and Agriculture

How I got drafted into James McWilliams’ anti-locavore diatribe

It’s happened a lot lately. Someone will send me the latest political diatribe that quotes my work. “What do you think of this guy?” they will ask. There’s also a recent growth industry in academic essays in support of food movement icon, Michael Pollan. These essays pay tribute to him mostly by attacking my work […]

E. Melanie DuPuis Food

UPDATED: The cruelty of industrial egg-riculture — plus a tasty recipe for your local pastured eggs

Consider the egg. Photo: Kurt Michael Friese UPDATE: The owner of the hatchery in the video mentioned below has spoken out, says there were violations of procedure but makes no apologies. He calls “instantaneous Euthanasia” “Standard industry practice.” Read the story here. Iowa is the number-one producer of eggs in the country, with more than […]

Kurt Michael Friese Food

NYC warns residents: “Don’t Drink Yourself Fat”

While the evidence continues to mount that taxes alone aren’t enough to significantly reduce junk food consumption, the political prospects for passing a federal soda tax appears to be dim. Well, New York City has decided that if they can’t tax your soda, they’ll go after your appetite instead. …New York City’s public health officials […]

Tom Laskawy Food

The way we eat is trashing the fragile conditions that make human life possible

In the ongoing debate about whether sustainable agriculture can “feed the world,” it’s important not to lose sight of what industrial agriculture is doing to ecosystems–both in specific areas and on a grand scale. Producing and distributing lots and lots of calories, leveraged by fossil fuel and synthetic fertilizers and poisons, may solve certain short-term […]

Tom Philpott Food

Palm oil, healthy rainforests, and your kitchen

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. Just get rid of all this annoying rainforest stuff, and you can have all cookie shortening you want.Hi there,I keep hearing that the […]

Lou Bendrick Food

Tell USDA to add urban farming to the Ag Census! Deadline is Friday.

If you care about eating healthy food, you are probably already hard at work to build a better food supply for yourself. You already know that raising food in our cities will be increasingly important. Yet getting political support for this requires making a convincing case, and this means having compelling numbers. The federal Census […]

Ken Meter Food

Beat the August heat with an easy veggie supper

The sweet sizzle of summer. Photo: April McGreger Try as I might, I cannot hate on August. I half-heartedly complain in solidarity with the masses about the stifling heat and humidity, as well as my scratchy, ragweed-irritated eyes. But in truth, this is the time of year I long for. August means watermelons, okra, fresh […]

April McGreger Food

Sustainable ag meets the MSM — and wins!

TIME Magazine‘s current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled, chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the second part of that sentence isn’t news to Grist readers. But the first part of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn’t have expected to read the following positively Philpottian (if not […]

Tom Laskawy Food

Let’s (re)do school lunch

Are corndogs a vegetable? There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people’s minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, […]