Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Worldwatch gets $1.3 million Gates grant to look at sustainable ag in Africa

    The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been roundly criticized in sustainable-ag circles for throwing its considerable girth behind a “New Green Revolution for Africa.” According to critics (including me), the “green revolution” approach promotes high-tech, expensive solutions to Africa’s agriculture woes — ones more suited to the interests of a few agribusiness giants than […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Urban Gardens

    San Francisco to get more urban gardens.  Thanks, Gavin. And here’s a how-to that I look forward to reading.

    Adam Browning Food

  • Cobbling together a delicious and easy summer dessert

    Life’s a big container of cherries.All photos by April McGreger I’m bored by chocoholics. Don’t get me wrong; I very much appreciate good chocolate. But after attending four cookouts in the past month without a fruit-based dessert in sight I have had enough. Had the scent of perfectly ripe peaches somehow escaped my hosts? Are […]

    April McGreger Food

  • Rethinking food production for a world of 8 billion

    In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on […]

    Lester Brown Food

  • New book looks at economic devastation in an Iowa meat-packing town

    An Iowa house, no longer neededPhoto: McMorrIt’s become axiomatic that to peer deep into our reliance on fossil energy is to gaze upon human wreckage: bombed-out Baghdad slums, desolated Nigerian townships, or Appalachian communities eviscerated by the removal of mountaintops. The food system has its own war zones, its own spaces of suffering and despair. […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Must-read: urban farmer Will Allen in the NYT Magazine

    Will makes soil–and you can, too.Source: The New York TimesAnyone who wants to understand the paradoxes and promise of urban agriculture must read the luminous profile of Growing Power’s Will Allen by Elizabeth Royte, online now and forthcoming in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I could gush about the elegance of Allen’s farming system or […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • As GOP politicians take the school-lunch debate to new lows, perk up with berry ice cream

    Stick a spork in it: Is this really the best we can do?Photo: bookgrlA few years ago I was asked to serve on the Wellness Committee that was being formed by the Iowa City School District, under a federal mandate to improve the health of school children. Having made lunch every morning for my kids […]

    Kurt Michael Friese Food

  • California is new front line of BPA fight

    The following is a guest post submitted by Elisa Odabashian, Director, West Coast Office and State Campaigns, and Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Director of Technical Policy, Consumers Union. It’s the stuff of a good Hollywood movie-a potentially toxic chemical lurking in the bodies of most unwitting Americans; a decade of mounting but scuttled scientific evidence; government […]

    Grist staff Food

  • The oil intensity of food

    Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. […]

    Lester Brown Climate & Energy

  • Food Inc. Director Robert Kenner speaks on the ills of the food system

    Food Inc. director Robert KennerRobert Kenner never set out to make a terrifying film when he started Food, Inc. But along the way, he found the food industry to be stunningly secretive–and what it’s hiding to be downright scary. The film shines a bright light on the handful of corporations that, behind a cloak of […]

    Hamida Kinge Food