Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Monsanto targets public radio to spread false biotech messages

    Editor’s note: This post originally focused on NPR; but we’ve since found that the Monsanto ads run on Marketplace, produced by American Public Media, which isn’t directly affiliated with NPR. We regret the confusion. —————- Monsanto’s ad blitzFor years my alarm has been set to public radio so I can lie in bed for five […]

    Meredith Niles Food

  • Drought, fish, and our fruit-and-veg problem

    High and dryIn the United States, when people say “eat your veggies,” they are essentially urging you to take a bite out of California — or, more to the point, take a a big swig of its increasingly scarce water supply. How much do we rely on California for fruits and veg? With its rich […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Another symptom of swine flu: instant amnesia

    Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist Swine flu: how very two weeks ago. Sure, H1N1 transmission is “still on the upswing” in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe’s population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week. But the disease is turning […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Resistance grows to increasing the amount of ethanol in gasoline

    The ethanol lobby may still be reeling in the subsidies, but it doesn’t seem to be having any luck dealing with their other obsession, the so-called “blend wall,” i.e. the legally prescribed limit to the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into gasoline. The NYT has a nice summary of the mounting scientific and […]

    Tom Laskawy Climate & Energy

  • Uncomfortable facts about the swine flu outbreak

    You’re testing my patienceDon’t associate U.S. pork with the swine flu outbreak — you can’t catch it through pork. Plus, no pigs on U.S. CAFOs are infected with it. That’s message the industry and the USDA are straining  to get across, anyway. Except … you can catch swine flu from pork, according to the World […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • In the lush dirt of Iowa, community grows alongside veggies

    ZJ Farms: Everyone’s a farmhandI had the pleasure the other day of visiting ZJ Farms, the anchor of Local Harvest CSA, which is one of the biggest in the area. Farmer (and pillar of the local food scene hereabouts) Susan Jutz has been running this organic farm for all the years I’ve been buying food […]

    Kurt Michael Friese Food

  • A terrific NYT piece on Smithfield and the globalization of pork

    On Wednesday, The New York Times ran a terrific, long article — one that reporters had clearly worked on for a long time — on Smithfield Foods’ rapid transformation of hog farming in Eastern Europe. The article documents how the Virginia-based pork giant has squashed small-scale hog farming in Romania and Poland, just as it […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Smithfield: don’t worry, we’re testing our Mexican hogs for swine flu

    For a lobbyist working the Hill on behalf of an industry, the gold standard is self-regulation. No need to send in inspectors — we’ll test our process to ensure that it doesn’t pollute. Trust us! Astonishingly, pork giant Smithfield Foods has evidently managed to arrange just such a testing regime with regard to its hog-rearing […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Barack gives biofuels the big thumbs up

    [Update: While some may think this decision was a win for corn ethanol, House Ag Committee Chair Collin Peterson clearly does not. In fact, he is seriously ticked off about it. According to CongressDaily, Peterson responded to the indirect land use ruling as follows:  “You are going to kill the biofuels industry. You are in […]

    Tom Laskawy Climate & Energy

  • Sludge, farmer’s friend or toxic slime?

    Should what we put down our sewers ultimately wind up back on our plates?Marc Samsom via Flickr Urine, feces, menstrual blood, hair, fingernails, vomit, dead skin cells. Industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, soaps, shampoos, solvents, pesticides, household cleansers, hospital waste. Sewage sludge, the viscous brown gunk left over when wastewater is treated, is more than just poop: […]

    Catherine Price Food