Climate Food and Agriculture

On summer’s end and salad dressing

It’s mid-August and the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts is filled with crops that are making their final push to ripeness and fruition. On a warm day, the air feels like it is practically vibrating with all that energy. As I drive to the Hampshire College campus for the annual Northeast Organic Farmers’ Association conference, […]

The vexed question of exactly how far our food travels.

Update [2007-8-24 9:4:33 by Tom Philpott]: Now this is really getting vexed. As Gristmill blogger JMG comments below, the Department of Energy did not exist in 1969. (Jimmy Carter started it in ’77.) Hmmm. Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center, mentioned below the fold, emailed me with his source on the 1969 study: a paper […]

Umbra on community-supported agriculture

Umbra, Please illuminate CSAs for us, how they work, and how your readers can join one. Thanks! (And by the way, that photo of a peach in your recent column is an apricot.) Bobbe Santa Fe, N.M. Dearest Bobbe, Alas for stone-fruit misidentification. Hopefully corrected by the time this question hits the screen, but still. […]

Scientists try to reduce methane emissions by tweaking cow diets

Did you know that cows belch every 40 seconds? I did not. A recent article in The Christian Science Monitor states this fun fact, and goes on to explain how scientists are trying to manipulate bovine diets to reduce the amount of methane that they emit:

If buying locally isn’t the answer, then what is?

Is long-distance better than local? Photo: Sheila Steele Attention farmers’ market shoppers: Put that heirloom tomato down and rush to the nearest supermarket. By seeking local food, you’re wantonly spewing carbon into the atmosphere. That’s the message of a budding backlash against the eat-local movement. The Economist fired a shotgun-style opening salvo last December, peppering […]

In which the author finds his dream neighorhood restaurant

In Mad Flavor, the author describes his occasional forays from the farm in search of exceptional culinary experiences from small artisanal producers. Recently, Mad Flavor was on the ground in Chicago — the author’s ancestral home city — a veritable garden of delightful food. I’ve long dreamed of a very particular neighborhood cafe/restaurant. It would […]

Evian Is Just Evil Misspelled

Hatin’ on plastic water bottles is all the rage Forget SUVs and Styrofoam: hip-to-the-times green folk are directing their ire at plastic water bottles. In the last few months, the energy-intensiveness of bottled water — 1.5 million barrels of oil go into making the bottles for the U.S. market each year, and oodles more to […]

Umbra on organic pork

Dear Umbra, Commercial pork production is a nasty, polluting operation and inhumane to the animals. What makes organic pork different? Simply what they are fed, or does it involve more humane and less polluting production operations? Related, I have been purchasing free-range, organic chicken for several years now. However, recently the free-range, organic chicken breasts […]

High CO2 crops could be low on nutrition

One of the silver linings of climate change, some have argued, is that high carbon dioxide levels will mean increased crop yields, which will, in turn, be good for combating global hunger (the logic, I suppose, being that if we're frying fifty years from now, at least we won't be hot and hungry). But some underpublicized studies, reported this month in Nature, cast a long shadow on this sunny assertion. (Sorry! It looks like the the article is subscription only, so I'll be as descriptive as possible.)

In the 1980s, Bruce Kimball, a soil physicist with the USDA in Arizona, began conducting scientific experiments simulating a high-CO2 environment (using a system called "free air carbon dioxide enrichment," or FACE). He found that crop yields were elevated -- plants imbibing large quantities of CO2 had more starch and more sugar in their leaves than those on a normal carbon diet. But because they also took up less nitrogen from the soil, they made less protein.

Yolk, yolk, yolk …

From the NYT: The toy industry had its Tickle Me Elmo, the automakers the Prius and technology its iPhone. Now, the food world has its latest have-to-have-it product: the cage-free egg. What the cluck, you ask? According to the story, dozens of vendors — ranging from universities to hotel chains, Whole Foods to Burger King […]