Climate Food and Agriculture
All Stories
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Schlosser: Food industry abuses workers as matter of course
Of all the panels I attended at Slow Food Nation’s series, the most powerful for me was the one convened by Eric Schlosser on creating a “new, fair food system.” It featured labor-rights advocates from California and Florida — the poles of industrial fruit-and-veg production in the U.S. Working conditions get little play in sustainable-agriculture […]
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What I saw at the Iowa State Fair, the nation’s most popular annual food event
In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape. —– Get your deep-fried Twinkies! My roommate at college (one of those snooty, Northeastern Ivy-league institutions) was from rural […]
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Merrily pretending I belong amid the glamorous U.S. food scene
An interviewer once saw fit to lump Vladimir Nabokov with his illustrious contemporaries Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett. Nabokov replied that the comparison made him feel like a “thief between two Christs.” Well, I know myself (more or less), and I know I’m no Vladimir Nabokov. But his statement does describe how I felt […]
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The 12 (annotated) principles for a healthy food and agriculture system
Being based in Northern California, I am lucky to be located at the epicenter of the sustainable agriculture and Slow Food movements in the U.S.; it means very tasty cuisine all year round. I was intrigued by the recent 12 principles for a healthy food and agricultural system disseminated by some of the luminaries in […]
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Prepare for a bunch of recaps and videos
I’m just getting myself together after an incredibly packed four days at Slow Food Nation, which wrapped up Monday in San Francisco. Grist was lucky enough to partner with big-time indy movie studio Participant (maker of Syriana, Fast Food Nation, An Inconvenient Truth, and other worthy films) to conduct a bunch of video interviews at […]
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Wendell Berry’s statement of facts
Poet, essayist, novelist and “local-ist” Wendell Berry kicked off the final panel of the Slow Food Nation “Food for Thought” series on Saturday by reading a short statement describing the current food crisis. For too long, humans have been spared, mainly by the cheapness of the fossil fuels, from the universal necessity of local adaptation. […]
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Slow foodies unveil declaration of sustainability
Copies of the Slow Food Declaration at San Francisco City Hall. Some of the leading voices in the movement for a sustainable agriculture system stood together Thursday to unveil the “Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture,” a 12-point set of principles for reorienting American food away from corporate farms and long-haul delivery to local producers […]
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New York teenagers identify weak link in seafood chain
For anyone who missed it there was a good post in the blog two weeks ago on how to choose sustainable seafood. However, this article from The New York Times (hat tip CC) suggests that about one out of every four fish you eat isn’t the kind of fish you thought it was. It could […]
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Sandwiched between the two political conventions, a slice of food politics from San Francisco
Starting Friday, I’ll be reporting from Slow Food Nation, a big, multifaceted food confab in San Francisco. What exactly is it? I’ll let you know when I figure it out. The event features both Slow Food royalty (Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini) and Slow Food critics (like Brahm Ahmadi of Oakland’s People’s Grocery, who […]
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Colleges forgo cafeteria trays to save water and energy
Colleges around the country are ditching cafeteria trays to lower water and energy use and to prevent wasted food. “If a college is looking to go ‘green,’ they need to start looking in the dining facility,” said Sodexo spokeswoman Monica Zimmer; the food-service company expects 230 of the 600 colleges it serves to stop using […]
