food politics
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Michael Pollan chronicles rise of the food movement(s)
(Watershed Media)In what is ostensibly a five-book review for the June 10 New York Review of Books, journalist Michael Pollan has an epic essay charting the emergence and character of the food movement. Or, as he puts it, “movements.” They are unified, for now at least, by little more than the recognition that industrial food […]
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CJR puts Philpott in the hot seat
(Bart Nagel Photography)Grist Food Editor and indefatigable reporter Tom Philpott recently spent some quality time on the other side of the tape recorder, for an in-depth Columbia Journalism Review interview about class and the U.S. food system. In the piece, titled “Food Fighter,” Philpott fields the de rigeur “is organic too expensive” question with aplomb […]
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Blanche Lincoln’s dismal school-lunch bill
Blanche Lincoln, chair of the Senate Ag Committee. Tight purse strings for kids and conservation; loose ones for large-scale farmers. Remember when Obama rolled out his proposal for increasing the school-lunch budget, and lots of folks, including me, groaned that it wasn’t nearly enough? In his budget proposal earlier this year, Obama called for an […]
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How the global food market starves the poor [video]
To understand the complexities of the international food market — and how traders in Chicago can cause Africans to starve — you could get a Ph.D. in economics, or read a 400-page report from the World Bank. Or you watch this superb nine minute video, directed by Denis van Waerebeke. Though ostensibly created for a […]
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Pig Business: Who owns your food owns you
Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess? That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the […]
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Still another critic of real food – this time in the NYT
In Sunday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd. […]
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Antibiotic-resistant salmonella, school lunches, and Cargill’s dodgy California beef plant
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Oh, dear. This case of salmonella poisoning seems to be resisting treatments. • The USDA reports that a notorious California beef-packing plant run by agribusiness giant Cargill has yet again had to recall ground beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella–or, […]
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Jonathan Safran Foer on his book ‘Eating Animals’
If you’re a meat eater, don’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. Unless, that is, you are a meat eater curious about the health of your body, the planet, or the animals you consume. The acclaimed author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer, has been an on-again, off-again […]
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I drink raw milk (sold illegally on the underground market)
From Joel Salatin’s foreword to The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David Gumpert. I drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market. I grew up on raw milk from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter, and […]
