Climate Food and Agriculture

On kids, zucchini, and an experiment with pizza soup

A few weeks ago, when I made zucchini blueberry bread with my friends’ kids, it was revealed that one of them didn’t care much for zucchini in its non-dessert incarnations, seeing as how it was a vegetable and all. So I challenged myself to invent some kid-friendly zucchini dishes to see if I could get […]

More than half of U.S. families bought packaged meat last year. Gross

The phrase "luncheon meat in pouches" strikes me as singularly unappetizing — industrially grown meat, lashed with God-knows-what chemicals, and stuffed into plastic. Even as an industrial-food-scarfing child, the slippery wetness and sketchy pink color of such food always struck me as just wrong (not that it stopped me from digging in). Can’t be easy […]

Songbird endangered in France hunted as a culinary delicacy

Ortolan is a French delicacy: a tiny songbird, roasted whole and swallowed in one bite, bones and all. Ortolan hunting has been banned in France since 1998 to protect the species, but the birds have a high price on the black market, and as many as 30,000 a year are fattened up and sold by […]

Mercury moves from coal plant to fish dinner as fast as its name implies

A Scientificblogging post explains that it only takes three years for mercury emitted by coal-fired plants to travel up the food chain into fish that we eat:

"Before this study, no one had directly linked atmospheric deposition (mercury emissions) and mercury in fish," says study co-author Vincent St. Louis of the University of Alberta.

The experiment filled a major gap in scientists' understanding of how mercury moves from the atmosphere through forests, soils, lakes and into the fish that people eat.

It's immediate value is that it provides undeniable proof of a direct link, said St. Louis, who specializes in what is called whole-ecosystem experimentation.

He said it should spur policy-makers to enact regulations for more rapid reductions in mercury emissions by industry.

Pesticides up to no good, says new research

A decrease in pesticide availability led to an associated decrease in suicide rates in Sri Lanka, researchers publishing in the International Journal of Epidemiology have concluded. In 1995 and 1998, restrictions were put into place on importation and sales of highly toxic pesticides in Sri Lanka; in 2005, the country’s suicide rate was half what […]

Mercury contamination in fish declines when emissions go down

Mercury contamination of waterways and marine life doesn’t have to be an ongoing problem — all we have to do is limit industrial mercury emissions. Easy! After a seven-year experiment in a Canada lake, researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that mercury concentrations in fish would decline relatively quickly […]

PETA VP argues vegetarianism is the best way to help the planet

This is a guest essay from Bruce Friedrich, vice president for campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It was written in response to Alex Roth's essay "PETA's dogma is all bark and no bite." Friedrich has been an environmental activist for more than 20 years.

In 1987, I read Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé and -- primarily for human rights and environmental reasons -- went vegan. Two decades later, I still believe that -- even leaving aside all the animal welfare issues -- a vegan diet is the only reasonable diet for people in the developed world who care about the environment or global poverty.

Over the past 20 years, the environmental argument against growing crops to be fed to animals -- so that humans can eat the animals -- has grown substantially. Just this past November, the environmental problems associated with eating chickens, pigs, and other animals were the subject of a 408-page United Nations scientific report titled Livestock's Long Shadow.

The U.N. report found that the meat industry contributes to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity." The report concludes that the meat industry is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Umbra on meat eating and global warming

Dear Umbra, I see that PETA’s latest campaign says that meat eating is the No. 1 cause of global warming, not SUVs. This statement may be manipulative and political, but — is it true? J.Helena, Mont. Dearest J., I’ll bite. Shallow digging on one People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals site quickly uncovered their […]

On PETA’s latest campaign

Just ’cause I love poking the hornet’s nest, I thought I’d weigh in on this brouhaha about PETA, vegetarianism, and environmentalism. As I see it, there are three core questions: 1. Should citizens of conscience become vegetarians? To me, the answer to this question is pretty obviously yes. I don’t see how it can be […]

The subjects of PETA and vegetarianism …

… have clearly driven you people insane.