Climate Food and Agriculture

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  • Also amusing

    The Daily Show on cloned meat:

    David Roberts Food

  • The perils of cooking with greenhouse gas.

    The BBC has issued a pretty clear-eyed report on food production and climate change, the podcast of which you can download here. The report makes no brief for sustainable ag, but it does cogently question industrial ag’s ability to “feed the world” as climate change saps water tables and population continues to grow.

    Tom Philpott Climate & Energy

  • Now’s the time to discover the myriad pleasures of growing food

    “A natural diet lies right at one’s feet.” — Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution It’s springtime here on my mountain farm, and that means an explosion of activity. We’re starting seeds in one greenhouse, and finishing construction on another. Fields are being tilled, and we’re putting in the very first sugar-snap peas and spring onions. […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Biofuels force the choice on us

    Lester Brown says the diversion is already happening:

    Adam Browning Climate & Energy

  • Appropriate technology?

    Here's an interesting article about a rabbi who converted a bus into a wood-fired matzo bakery ...

    Roz Cummins Food

  • Don’t Make Me Pull This Cargill Over

    Amazon soy export plant shut down in win for environmentalists Greens did a victory dance this weekend as Brazil forced U.S. agribiz giant Cargill to close a soy export terminal in the country’s Amazon region. The facility has long been the focus of a targeted Greenpeace campaign protesting rapid deforestation of the tropical rainforest — […]

    Grist staff Food

  • A ‘Maoist insurgency’ in a global information-technology hub?

    Did you know that India, hub of the global information economy and destination of untold numbers of outsourced U.S. jobs, is in the grips of a Maoist insurgency? A recent Reuters article referred (a bit casually) to: the Maoist insurgency that has spread to about half of India’s 29 states and has been described by […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • I’m Hot, Sticky Sweet

    Vermont’s maple-syrup industry braces for climate change Will warmer winters stop the flow of Vermont maple syrup? That’s the question of the day in the Green Mountain State, where folks worry that climate change will make the $200 million industry — which provides 32 percent of U.S. syrup output — dry up. “I’ve always been, […]

    Grist staff Climate & Energy

  • Turnip Out is Fair Play

    FDA issues voluntary produce-safety guidelines If you’ve shied away from spinach since last year’s widespread E. coli outbreak, this should give you comfort: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued voluntary guidelines this week to help keep fresh-cut produce safe. What, the “voluntary” part gives you pause? Pshaw. Pointing out that voluntary guidelines for production […]

    Grist staff Food

  • Colorado’s inmates-as-farmworkers plan says plenty about our food culture

    Last summer, the Colorado General Assembly passed some of the nation’s most rigorous anti-immigrant policy laws. Debate was fierce — but only because some GOP lawmakers fumed that the Democratic-engineered crackdown wasn’t draconian enough. How times have changed. Essentially, the state’s political elite — backed editorially by The Denver Post — took aim at its […]

    Tom Philpott Food