Climate Food and Agriculture

All Stories

  • A debate about soil, organics, and nutrition

    Inert medium for turning agrichemichals into food, or a teeming, diverse ecosystem? “The whole problem of health–in soil, plant, animal, and man–is one great subject.” — Albert Howard, The Soil and Health Ezra Klein and I are engaged in a little debate over the value of organic food. I’m honestly a little surprised to be […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Will Allen talks about growing the ‘Good Food’ movement

    This weekend I caught up with Will Allen who was keynoting the always excellent Northeast Organic Farming Association’s Annual Conference in Amherst, MA. He’s founder and CEO of Growing Power, the country’s premier grassroots urban gardening program, and also a MacArthur Genius Award Winner and former pro-basketball player. Growing Power demonstrates growing methods through on-site […]

    Erik Hoffner Food

  • Cargill, the National School Lunch Program, and antibiotic-resistant salmonella

     In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ———- Is antibiotic-resistant-salmonella-tainted beef what’s for dinner? Standard j-school-style journalism takes a lot of lumps these days–and justifiably so. To maintain an illusion of “objectivity,” traditional reporters write like above-the-fray observers merely recording “the facts”–as if choosing which facts to […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Canada set to close important asset: its prison farms

    In February 2009, Canada’s Public Safety Minister and the country’s Correctional Service announced a planned closure of all six of the prison farms owned by the people of Canada and operated by CORCAN – the branch of the Correctional Service that operates the farm rehabilitation programs which also provide employment training to inmates. The excellent […]

    Erik Hoffner Food

  • More thoughts on cooking, Pollan, and Julia Child

    Tool of oppression–or liberation? In his recent essay on cooking, which I commented on here, Michael Pollan basically argues that people need to cook–that they give up more than they gain from fleeing the kitchen. And he suggests that the current generation is really the first to shun cooking. Yet things might not be quite […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • The thread on which civilization hangs

    “Number one is that it [industrial agriculture] destroys soil. Absolutely and completely. The soil is the only thread upon which civilization can exist, and it’s such a narrow strip around the globe if a person could ever realize that our existence depends on literally inches of active aerobic microbial life on terra firma, we might […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Debunking the meat/climate change myth

    Editor’s note: Eliot Coleman is one of the most revered and influential small-scale farmers in the United States, famous for growing delicious vegetables through the Maine winter with little use of fossil fuel. Eliot sent me the following letter as a response to my recent piece on the greenhouse-gas foorprint of industrial meat. At question […]

    Eliot Coleman Climate & Energy

  • What’s the dish on farm-raised catfish?

    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. ————- What’s up, cat?Dear Lou,My wife and I enjoy fish and like to eat a variety of types of fish. Living in Minnesota […]

    Lou Bendrick Food

  • From Whole (junk) Foods to Julia/Julie hype, 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. —————- • “Everything I’ve written is straw,” Thomas Aquinas is supposed to have lamented from his deathbed. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey seems to have come to a similar conclusion about the supermarket chain he founded decades […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Cargill plant recalls nearly a million pounds of tainted beef

    Not-so-total recall: Cargill’s got nearly a million pounds of tainted beef circulating.  In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Remember a couple of weeks ago, when news emerged that a Colorado grocery chain had churned out 466,000 pounds of beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella, sent it […]

    Tom Philpott Food