Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Lay’s: the locavore’s junk food?

    Coming soon to farmers markets nationwide? A couple of years ago, a student group formed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to reform the campus’ dining halls. Calling the group FLO Food (FLO=fair, local, organic), the students wanted flavorsome, freshly cooked food — and preferably not from abused animals or exploited workers. […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • A farmer speaks: no to GMO wheat

    Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG) issued a press release proclaiming that 75 percent of its member farmers support the rollout of genetically modified wheat seeds. According to NAWG, wheat farmers are clamoring to follow their corn and soy counterparts toward a biotech-dominated future. Todd Leake, a wheat farmer […]

    Todd Leake Food

  • 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