Climate Food and Agriculture

Elizabeth Grossman reviews The Empty Ocean by Richard Ellis

"It's a fire alarm," says Richard Ellis about his new book, The Empty Ocean, which joins a chorus of recent publications documenting the precipitous decline of world fisheries and the dire state of the marine environment. That alarm should make you think long and hard about your lunchtime tuna sandwich or the sashimi you order at your favorite Japanese restaurant.

Seasick

Once the fourth largest inland sea in the world, Central Asia’s Aral Sea is drying up rapidly and is likely to all but disappear in as few as 15 years, according to a new study by Moscow’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. Since the 1960s, the sea has been depleted by the damming of the main […]

Chef’s Salud

Across the Atlantic, another fracas is brewing over genetically modified foods. Yesterday protesters hit the streets in Sacramento, Calif., to rally against GM technology, one day before the start of a large international agricultural conference that is bringing together agriculture ministers from more than 100 countries and reps from biotechnology and agribusiness corporations. Family farmers, […]

Ali Macalady reviews Safe Food by Marion Nestle and The Pleasures of Slow Food by Corby Kummer

In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation -- an expose of America's increasingly consolidated and industrialized food system, and how that system contributes to a whole range of societal ills, from obesity and resistance to antibiotics to urban sprawl, habitat destruction, and poor labor conditions. The book was a smashing success -- 66 weeks and running on the New York Times bestseller list -- and it captured the nation's attention in a way no book about food has since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the 1906 classic about the Chicago meatpacking industry.

Have a Cow, Man

The state of South Dakota is leading the nation in the Partners for Fish and Wildlife project, a federal conservation program designed to help farmers and ranchers reduce their negative impact on native prairie ecosystems. Conversion of wild grasslands to croplands is a major environmental problem in South Dakota and other prairies states. Under the […]

Look, Mom, No Tofu

A Bunch of Pinkos

Angry consumers have taken three huge supermarket chains to court for failing to give customers the skinny on the salmon sold at the fish counter. Albertsons, Safeway, and Kroger (which owns QFC and Fred Meyer) are accused of deception, unfair business practices, breach of warranty, and negligent misrepresentation for failing to accurately label farm-raised salmon […]

Starting from scratch with chickens and eggs

Chicks and balances. Photo: USDA. It’s very provoking, as Humpty Dumpty once told Alice, to be called an egg. After all, a name must mean something. “My name,” he told her, “means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, […]

Fishy Business

For the second time this year, congressional Republicans have used behind-the-scenes trickery to weaken organic-labeling standards. Powerful Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, tacked a measure onto the recently passed $79 million war-spending bill that directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to come up with a plan for certifying and labeling […]

Aroma, but No Therapy

You don’t know smelly until you’ve been in the vicinity of a massive factory farm, or, as they say in the biz, a “concentrated animal-feeding operation.” State and local air-quality officials fear that the stench and, more importantly, the accompanying air pollution from such facilities won’t get under control anytime soon because the U.S. EPA […]