industrial ag
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If JBS gobbles up Smithfield, three companies will own U.S. meat market
(Grist illo; Carlossg/Flickr) A typical supermarket’s meat counter displays a landscape of easy bounty: shrink-wrapped chops, cutlets, steaks, roasts, loins, burger meat, and more, almost all of it priced to move. But the dizzying variety cloaks a disturbing uniformity. As the chart below shows, the great bulk of the meat consumed in the United States […]
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Why eaters alone can’t transform the food system
Farmer Morse Pitts’ stall at the Greenmarket.(Windfall Farm blog)In the cover piece of the newest American Prospect, Heather Rogers skillfully makes a point I’ve been flogging for years: that public policy, not consumer choice, is the villain propping up the industrial food system and constraining the growth of organic farming. Rogers, author of the new […]
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‘Scary Disease Girl’ Maryn McKenna on antibiotic-resistant staph [PODCAST]
“Scary Disease Girl”: Maryn McKennaMaryn McKenna is arguably the premier U.S. public health journalist. Not many on the beat can boast a bio like this: Maryn McKenna’s newsroom nickname is Scary Disease Girl, and she earned it. She has reported from inside a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a village on Thailand’s […]
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Florida’s poisoned farmworkers, chefs schooled, Big Food’s raking it in
When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web. Get ’em while they’re hot. The fruits of industrial agricultureIn the Atlantic, Barry Estabrook has a great, infuriating short piece showing an instance in which agribusiness has shown “utter disregard for the environment and for the welfare […]
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How the agrichemical industry turns failure into market opportunity
It’s always blue skies for the agrichemical industry Monsanto rolled out seeds genetically engineered to withstand its Roundup herbicide back in the mid-1990s. Today, Roundup Ready crops blanket U.S. farmland. According to USDA figures, 90 percent of soybeans and 60 percent of corn and cotton planted in the United States contain the Roundup-resistant gene. Back-of-the […]
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Tell California lawmakers to say ‘no’ to cancer-causing fumigant
Farm workers harvest strawberries in California. Photo: Holgerhubbs, under a Creative Commons licence. To grow strawberries on an industrial scale, you’ve got to sterilize the soil ahead of planting with harsh chemical fumigants. For years, growers have relied on a highly toxic, ozone-destroying fumigant called methyl bromide. The stuff is so awful that it was […]
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King Corn subjects Washington to ad blitz
The debate around the farm bill, and its generous support for corn production, is already heating up. Long-enshrined subsidies for ethanol production stand on the verge of being phased out. The EPA is mulling whether the nation’s auto fleet can handle more ethanol to be blended into the gasoline supply. In other words, the exalted […]
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Fun with herbicides!
“The herbicide business used to be good before Roundup nearly wiped it out. Now it is getting fun again.”— Dan Dyer, an executive at agrichemical/GMO seed giant Syngenta, on the rise of “superweeds” engendered by the broad use of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” GMO crops.
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Agribiz giant ADM gets taste of Hugo Chavez’s wrath
Longtime Grist readers might recall reading here about a Mexico-based transnational company called Gruma. I’ve written two articles (in 2006 and 2007) about how, after Mexico’s privatization bonanza in the early ’90s, this well-connected company managed to industrialize one of the world’s greatest foodstuffs, the tortilla, strip it of its flavor and much of its […]
