Big Ag

Music to the ears of us corn hataz

From the WSJ energy blog: Is the anti-ethanol crusade beginning to gather steam among mainstream Western publications? Two weeks after The Economist confessed, in a stunned-sounding editorial that it found itself in agreement with Fidel Castro’s vehement critique of foods-as-fuels, Foreign Affairs magazine has also jumped on board. In the magazine’s May edition, two professors […]

Following U.S. consumerism through the fields of China and Brazil

In what surely counts as one of the greatest feats in the history of global trade, the United States has essentially outsourced its manufacturing base to China in little more than a decade. It all starts with shuttered factories. Photo: iStockphoto But in doing so, the U.S. has helped unleash new trends in global agriculture […]

We need to rethink all food based biofuels

The lion's share of biofuel bashing on Grist deals with corn ethanol, because we Americans primarily use gasoline for our cars and ethanol runs fine in them, with few modifications. However, our pals in Europe drive a lot of diesel cars and the biofuel crisis over there revolves primarily around biodiesel. I think it is time we recognize that their problem is also our problem. A comment from Pcarbo alerted me to Monbiot's latest take on biofuels. He has now gone so far as to propose a ...

... moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuel from palm oil or sugar cane.

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.

Rising costs affect consumers

One of the side effects of the rapid increase in ethanol consumption in the U.S. is that corn -- the main feedstock for ethanol -- has gotten much more expensive. Just take a look at the futures markets: the July 2007 corn contract started climbing last fall, which was about the time people started to realize just how quickly demand for corn-based ethanol was growing.

Obviously, rising costs trickle down to consumers in all sorts of ways. If corn prices stay high, meat, poultry, and dairy products will all get more expensive, since the animals are fed lots of corn. But more directly, stuff that's made from corn -- such as the corn flour, corn sweeteners, and corn oils that are used in all sorts of processed foods -- will get pricier too. (Sorry, donut fiends.)

So wait, does this mean that there's an upside to the rapid rise in corn prices? If junk food gets more expensive, will we eat more healthfully?

Not likely.

Why bother filing an EIS for a biodiversity-destroying project?

Ag giant Cargill was forced to close a soy export terminal in the Brazilian Amazon this weekend, marking a major victory for greens, who have argued for years that the plant was built illegally and became a significant cause of rainforest depletion.

The terminal spurred a major leap in soy production -- millions of acres of rainforest were turned over to soy bean fields -- which is used principally to supply European livestock farms. Ironically, it was closed not because of the destruction, but because they never submitted an EIS. Mmm, soy.

My address to the Southern Appalachian Youth on Food conference

One crop to rule them all. Photo: USDA Tucked into the rolling hills of North Carolina’s Swannanoa Valley, Warren Wilson College is essentially surrounded by a farm. The school’s 800 students not only tend the 275-acre farm — which includes pastured livestock and vegetables — they also provide the labor to run the campus. They […]

How a cookbook renaissance heated up the sustainable-food movement

In the postmodern United States, a cultural critic laments, “The pleasures of the table are rarely appreciated at face value.”      Speak truth to flour. A near-hysterical concern with health has replaced common sense, he continues, leading to all manner of dubious decisions: “Americans blithely drink sodas filled with artificial flavors and sweeteners, yet paste warning […]

That’s it for me and industrial meat

The other day I went to Costco with my older boy — during the Super Bowl, for stealth. It took a bit of persuading to get him there, so I told him about the ladies who stand around and hand out food samples. Everything was going fine. A mozzarella ball, yum. A little square of […]