Climate Food and Agriculture
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As ‘Food Inc.’ nears open, Eric Schlosser appears on Colbert
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Eric Schlosser colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Keyboard Cat Steven Cobert is a brilliant comedian. Eric Schlosser may be our best investigative journalist after Seymour Hersh. Together, Colbert and Schlosser create … a typically random and zany Colbert interview. But they do give […]
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Food industry and longer commutes are making us fat
Recently I wrote about a study that looked across a few decades of data about housing and health. And we have written more than once about the relationship between the environment, location, health and price as it relates to food. Certainly there are systems issues that conspire against us when we try to make the […]
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Europeans demand investigation of the CAFO/swine flu link
Swine flu continues Maroon lagoon: Take a dip in a hog-waste cesspool? spreading across the globe, killing people–even (gasp) Americans. (Eleven have died in New York City alone.) Ho-hum. As I predicted a few weeks ago, the flu scare has skulked off the front pages and into the realms of historical amnesia, that vast American […]
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NPR: Organic ag rises in India
Wouldn’t a bit of atrazine liven up this scene?India is a major player on the global stage–hub of the information-technology market, the world’s second most populous nation, and a nuclear power to boot. It would be a global-scale calamity if India’s food security became compromised–and that is exactly what’s happening, as NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling showed […]
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Would you like some GMOs in your coffee?
One cube or two? Jill Richardson made a good catch on the GMO crop front the other day. She dug up an article from a Boulder, CO newspaper that detailed the debate over local sugarbeet farmers’ request to plant GM seeds within the city limits. The farmers claim that without GM sugar beets, they’ll be […]
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King Corn, meet Big Oil
Drilling for oil in a corn field: will Big Oil squeeze out King Corn?Back in March, Tom Philpott flagged some moves from Shell Oil and Valero Energy (the largest U.S. oil refiner) that indicated Big Oil was falling for biofuels. Now, the NYT shows Tom had it right with a piece detailing the increasing amount […]
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Nicholas Kristof on African hunger
Nicholas KristofNicholas Kristof, the much-celebrated columnist for The New York Times, is essentially a Victorian-style moralist. In a typical column, he alights on some harsh scene–a slum in an Indian megopolis, a dirt-poor village in Cambodia–and delivers a heart-wrenching report. He then prescribes an extremely narrow “solution” to the problem he has uncovered–one that typically […]
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Can the Internet help small farms act big?
Wired Science has a good piece on the potential for tech startups to play a “disruptive” role in commercial food distribution. The post looks at several web services that are trying to replicate the restaurant supply chain system dominated by produce distribution giant Sysco and its ubiquitous trucks via a network of small farmers, iPhones […]
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Biotech industry group alights on La Gloria to test backyard pigs
Hogs in a CAFO. The good news is that bloggers and other hysterics aren’t the only ones taking seriously La Gloria, Mexico, as the possible origin of the swine flu pandemic. From an extremely interesting AP article: Scientists are returning next week to La Gloria, a pig-farming village in the Veracruz mountains where Mexico’s earliest […]
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UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Too hot for freshmen? EVEN MORE UPDATES: Now that the NYT has weighed in, I guess it’s fair to say this story broke through to the mainstream. I’ll spare you all the assurances from WSU that this Bill Marler-funded resolution proves that the driving issue really was financial. In my view, Marler graciously provided a […]
