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agriculture

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    ‘Nation’ misses golden opportunity to highlight workers’ voices

    The food movement is slowly waking up to the fact that it has long treated the workers who plant and pick our food as if they were invisible. So it was with great anticipation that I read The Nation’s food issue, sure that a magazine with such a solid commitment to worker dignity would drive […]

    Sean Sellers Food

  • USDA’s $65 million drop in the bucket

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so fired up about local food economies that it’s coughing up $65 million for a new program called “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.” My first reaction: $65 million?!  That’s all?! At 3:45 central time a top USDA official is speaking at the event I’m at in Chicago. I […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • If JBS-Pilgrim’s deal goes through, four mega-firms will dominate the meat landscape

    In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. —— Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Brazilian firm JBS–the globe’s largest beef processor–was on the verge of buying U.S. chicken giant Pilgrim’s Pride. Although the companies have since remained mum on the tie-up, rumors of […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Pollan says health-care reform will fail unless we change the way we eat

    Michael PollanNPR’s Guy Raz: What if health care is overhauled and it doesn’t change the American diet in any way? Michael Pollan: We’ll go broke. If we don’t get a handle on these health care costs, the new system or the old system, we’ll go broke. And that’s why I think that really food is […]

    Grist staff Technology

  • Large Florida grower steps up for farm workers

    Eat a slice of fresh tomato from the supermarket or at a restaurant this winter, and chances are it will have come from a field in south-central Florida, site of 90 percent of U.S. winter tomato production. And this year, there’s a fighting chance that the worker who picked it might have made something close […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • The way we eat is trashing the fragile conditions that make human life possible

    In the ongoing debate about whether sustainable agriculture can “feed the world,” it’s important not to lose sight of what industrial agriculture is doing to ecosystems–both in specific areas and on a grand scale. Producing and distributing lots and lots of calories, leveraged by fossil fuel and synthetic fertilizers and poisons, may solve certain short-term […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • A tasting of five organic olive oils

    Yummy, with a chance of drizzles.Homer (the Greek scribe, not the cartoon dork) is supposed to have declared extra-virgin olive oil “liquid gold.” If by that he meant something to treat as if precious, things have changed considerably three millennia later and half a world away from the Mediterranean. TV cooking gurus evoke Homer’s gold […]

    Tom Philpott Culture

  • Tell USDA to add urban farming to the Ag Census! Deadline is Friday.

    If you care about eating healthy food, you are probably already hard at work to build a better food supply for yourself.  You already know that raising food in our cities will be increasingly important.  Yet getting political support for this requires making a convincing case, and this means having compelling numbers.  The federal Census […]

    Ken Meter Food

  • Sustainable ag meets the MSM — and wins!

    TIME Magazine‘s current cover story wants you to know that our fossil-fueled, chemically intensive industrial food system is destined to fail. Granted, the second part of that sentence isn’t news to Grist readers. But the first part of that sentence is news. Personally, I wouldn’t have expected to read the following positively Philpottian (if not […]

    Tom Laskawy Food