Climate Food and Agriculture
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Locavores are ruining food and free range pork will kill us
Get thee to a CAFO!Photo: pubwvjIn a recent op-ed, in The New York Times gravely informed its readers that free-range pork is deadly stuff. Despite evidence that incidence of trichinosis is very rare in the US–about 40 cases a year, and mostly caused by eating wild game (usually bear)-James E. McWilliams says that pork laced […]
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Is ethanol’s Congressional free ride coming to an end?
The Congressional Budget Office just released a paper looking critically at the relationship between ethanol, food prices and carbon emissions. But it gets better. The CBO blogged about it!Bedtime for corn ethanol?Photo: Big Grey Mare Most ethanol in the United States is produced from domestically grown corn, and the rapid rise in the fuel’s production […]
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Food writers and the state of the oceans
Yesterday, I criticized New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman, a writer I admire, for calling for red snapper in a recipe, without noting that red snapper is severely overfished. Today, Bittman responded. Below find Mark’s response, with mine underneath. In short, this was a screw-up, and for that I apologize, and thankful for the […]
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Researchers: Food industry looks to tobacco for inspiration
Apparently, Big Oil isn’t the only industry that has cast an admiring gaze at Big Tobacco’s track record of avoiding regulation and accountability for decades. Over on Yale Environment 360, there’s an interesting interview with Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, on parralels between the […]
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Don’t throw out the biochar baby with the bathwater
When penning his stinging rebuke of biochar and all who support it, George Monbiot not only threw out the baby with the bath water but blew up the bathroom just to ensure no one ever considered bathing again. Admittedly he got in a few good blows but the rest just blows hot air. Biochar is […]
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NYC’s attack on salt misses the forest for the trees
Diet dilemmas Photo: George D Thompson In his most recent column the NYT’s John Tierney — a conservative political columnist turned “skeptical” science columnist — objects to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to reduce New Yorkers’ salt intake. He compares the proposed new policy to a mandatory experiment in which residents are unwitting (and possibly […]
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Bittman takes a bite out of the ocean
Endangered species for sale Photo: MaRonin47 I’m a big fan of Mark Bittman. I’ve been reading him since his Cook’s Illustrated days in the early ’90s; I consider his weekly “Minimalist” column in The New York Times invaluable; and several of his cookbooks sit, stained and dogeared, on my shelf. Bittman made a career by […]
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Did Obama screw up ag subsidy reform?
Over the weekend, the NYT detailed the trials and tribulations of the Obama administration’s attempts to trim farm subsidy payments of a certain size: Among the audacious proposals in President Obama’s budget was a plan to save more than $9.7 billion over a decade by putting strict limits on farm subsidies that are disbursed regardless […]
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Catching up on food news after two weeks in the fog of travel, speechifying, and redesign
After two weeks in the fog of travel, speechifying, movie screenings, and redesign, I’ve missed commenting on a bunch of important stuff. I’ve emerged extremely energized by the potential of our new food “kingdom” — a place to dive deep into all sorts of issues relating the food we eat to the health of the […]
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Heirloom tomato debate
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that George Will keeps repeating his half truths to deny the degraded state of the climate, but what exactly Scientific American was thinking with this article about how heirloom tomatoes are “hardly diverse and are no more “natural” than grocery-store varieties” is a mystery to me. Except that sacred cows make the best hamburger, […]
