Climate Food and Agriculture

Popping your (organic) cherry

Hello again, fair, broke readers. Sorry to tease you with my column intro and then leave you hungering for more for all these weeks. Your resident brokeass took an unexpected journey to Utah to steal swag from well-heeled, earth-friendly-ish corporations and stalk eco-savvy celebs — and then returned and promptly got sick. So, the long-awaited […]

Is anyone still taking this stuff seriously?

President Bush’s recent pledge to raise the Renewable Fuel Standard to 35 billion gallons by 2017 dropped with a bit of a thud. David Roberts made a pretty good case that all the recent hype around ethanol may soon prove quaint: that, in essence, the ethanol craze will eventually likely crumble under its weighty political, […]

It’s only natural

About twice a day, an email from a mystery man/unflagging anti-ethanol crusader named Ray Wallace appears in my inbox, chock full of excerpts from the latest ethanol slams and, on lucky days, choice quotes from politicos and the like sounding less-than-smart about the whole business. I'm not sure how I got on his listserv, and I can't quite say how you can (but if you'd really like to, let me know and we can probably work something out).

Anyhow (I'm getting to my point), I mention Ray so as to credit him for alerting me to this quote, contained in today's edition:

Where farm subsidies came from, and why they’re still here

Note: This is the second of a three-column series on the 2007 farm bill. The first article is available here; the third here. Last week, I argued that it makes sense for society to support farming. Everybody needs to eat, and most would prefer to do so without devastating the environment or exploiting labor. Well, […]

The Airspeed Velocity of an Uneaten Swallow

Food imported by air may lose organic certification in Britain Foods imported into Britain by airplane may not qualify as organic if the country’s main certification body has its druthers. On Friday, the Soil Association announced it will spend a year considering a proposal to factor flight distance into its organic standards. While it will […]

Lettuce Eat Veggies

An occasional meat-eater faces the brutal truth Upon reading about the history of vegetarianism in the new tome The Bloodless Revolution, food writer and occasional meat-eater Tom Philpott wonders: will the consumption of sentient animals one day be widely denounced as immoral? It’s not inconceivable, he says — but for now, Americans eat a stunning […]

David James Duncan rows through a wheat field to save salmon — and we’ve got pictures

Photo: Frederic Ohlinger “The miracle meal after the Sermon on the Mount was both loaves and fishes,” says author and storyteller David James Duncan. “Not one or the other. Both.” It’s a sentiment that helps to explain why Duncan and a variety of compatriots were photographed in 13 colorful dories, rowing and casting lines — […]

Maverick chef Ann Cooper aims to spark a nationwide school-lunch revolution

Even the most intractable pathology can disappear, sometimes relatively quickly. A sign above a water fountain proclaiming “no coloreds” would cause any American to flinch today. Just half a century ago throughout the South, such abominations formed a banal part of the built landscape. Ann Cooper puts a fresh spin on school lunches.Photo: Chronicle/Craig LeeI […]

Thoughts from a small farm during the midwinter lull

Before I became a farmer three growing seasons ago, I lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., and reveled in the array of top-flight local produce available from mid-spring to late fall. Long about January, though, a kind of local-food withdrawal would set in. Frosty, with a chance of failure. Photo: iStockphoto By this time of year, the […]

The latest beneficiary of biofuel subsidies: industrial feedlot operators.

So far, a huge amount of the government’s lavish support for biofuel has ended up on the bottom line of Archer Daniels Midland, the king of industrially produced, environmentally ruinous corn. Now another type of model corporate citizen is in line for a cut of the action: huge-scale confined-animal feedlot operation (CAFO) players like Tyson […]