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agriculture

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    What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system

    In a recent New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten published a lucid, entertaining essay on the financial collapse. Titled “The Death of Kings,” it focuses on the hedge-fund managers, stock gurus, and private-equity wizards who reaped billions from the credit bubble.Is Big Ag running the food system into the ground the same way Wall Street wrecked the […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Can the Internet help small farms act big?

    Wired Science has a good piece on the potential for tech startups to play a “disruptive” role in commercial food distribution. The post looks at several web services that are trying to replicate the restaurant supply chain system dominated by produce distribution giant Sysco and its ubiquitous trucks via a network of small farmers, iPhones […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’

    Too hot for freshmen? EVEN MORE UPDATES: Now that the NYT has weighed in, I guess it’s fair to say this story broke through to the mainstream. I’ll spare you all the assurances from WSU that this Bill Marler-funded resolution proves that the driving issue really was financial. In my view, Marler graciously provided a […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Tax junk food, but also subidize veggies

    Soda can … harm your health.The taxman cometh for soft drinks. Or so it appears these days. We already know they’re on the table as a possible funding source for Obama’s health care reform. And behind the scenes, the co-author of an influential paper on the potential positive effect of soda taxes, New York City’s […]

    Tom Laskawy Politics

  • From bee collapse to good cheap wine, tasty morsels from around the web

    Can we pleazzzzze ban insecticides? When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web. Way to bee, manOver on Salon, Julia Scott’s got a strong piece on that stubbornly persistent mystery, bee-colony collapse. Since 2006, the nation’s conventionally kept honey bees have been undergoing large annual […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Big Food’s ‘local’ push: what’s it really about?

    Photo: TheTruthAbout…, via FlickrThe Ethicurean probably had it right when it declared yesterday that “local” jumped the shark. The shark in this case (or is it the jumper? I’m never sure which is which) is Frito-Lay and its Big Food brethren, which have embarked on marketing campaigns emphasizing the “local” producers who supply them. The […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Close friend of Big Meat may be put in charge of food safety

    USDA chief Tom Vilsack is once again on the verge of stepping in it regarding his pick for food safety czar, i.e. the head of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Some may recall that back in March the Obama administration nearly appointed Dr. Michael Osterholm to the post only to back off when […]

    Tom Laskawy Politics

  • Another symptom of swine flu: instant amnesia

    Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist Swine flu: how very two weeks ago. Sure, H1N1 transmission is “still on the upswing” in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe’s population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week. But the disease is turning […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Resistance grows to increasing the amount of ethanol in gasoline

    The ethanol lobby may still be reeling in the subsidies, but it doesn’t seem to be having any luck dealing with their other obsession, the so-called “blend wall,” i.e. the legally prescribed limit to the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into gasoline. The NYT has a nice summary of the mounting scientific and […]

    Tom Laskawy Climate & Energy