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livestock

  • While antibiotic-resistant bugs flourish, a House subcommittee buries its head

    In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. As the fruits of three decades of financial-market deregulation and lax oversight ripen on Wall Street, now is a fitting time to mull over our government’s efforts to regulate the food industry. Let’s think specifically about its actions regarding antibiotics […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Smithfield, Pilgrim’s Pride, and other meat giants get credit-crunched

    As I’ve written so many times before, a very few companies essentially control U.S. meat production. Their business model is crude, but for years has been effective: You place lots of animals in a tight space (or "contract" with farmers to do so), stuff them with corn and soy (made cheap chronic overproduction mandated by […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • GAO: EPA has seriously botched CAFO oversight

    Is the EPA leadership incompetent or malicious? The agency’s steady stream of oversights, lapses, and rotten decisions — which I tried to come to grips with here —  demands a reckoning. The answer appears to be a kind of toxic mix of the two: a malicious desire to please industry interests over public ones, leavened […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Small-scale slaughterhouses are vital to the health of local food economies

    In “Dispatches From the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape. —– A trailer load of chickens. Photos: Ariane Lotti In the cold and dark that is 5:30 a.m. in […]

    Ariane Lotti Food

  • What’s so eco about all those eco-meat labels?

    In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices, and other diet-related quandaries. Free range: more sizzle than steak? Hi, Something I’ve been pondering a lot lately is the whole “free-range” meat market. After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I have a lot of doubts as to […]

    Lou Bendrick Food

  • Consumers demand market rejection of food from cloned animals

    Consumer market rejection seems to be the ongoing theme of U.S. food politics in the waning days of Bush’s inept Food and Drug Administration. Given FDA’s repeated failure to protect our nation’s food supply or to respond quickly and appropriately to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, consumers have turned to food companies and demanded that they […]

    Lisa J. Bunin Technology

  • The worst job in America

    Many posts on Grist detail the negative environmental impacts of factory farming and the meat and dairy industries overall. Bottom line: There is probably no personal act more effective at benefiting the environment than reducing meat consumption. But a true environmentalist must also take a hard look at the social dimensions of sustainability; again, the […]

    Jason D Scorse Culture

  • The natural foods giant stumbles into an E. coli outbreak

    In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. Suddenly, Whole Foods can’t get a break. Its share price has plunged about 70 percent since the end of 2005. Its marketing execs are scrambling to shed the company’s reputation for premium-priced offerings — a market position they once reveled in. The […]

    Tom Philpott Technology

  • Another reason to fear the factory farm

    Superbugs. An alarming story in this week’s The New Yorker focuses on man-made new diseases that cannot be eradicated with conventional antibiotics, even inside hospitals. The writer quotes Michael Pollan to explain the connection to your local meat factory: “Seventy per cent of the antibiotics administered in America end up in agriculture,” Michael Pollan, a […]

    Kit Stolz Food