Climate Food and Agriculture

The Counter
Amelia K. Bates / Grist
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Climate + Food and Agriculture

EDITOR’S NOTE

Grist has acquired the archive and brand assets of The Counter, a decorated nonprofit food and agriculture publication that we long admired, but that sadly ceased publishing in May of 2022.

The Counter had hit on a rich vein to report on, and we’re excited to not only ensure the work of the staffers and contractors of that publication is available for posterity, but to build on it. So we’re relaunching The Counter as a food and agriculture vertical within Grist, continuing their smart and provocative reporting on food systems, specifically where it intersects with climate and environmental issues. We’ve also hired two amazing new reporters to make our plan a reality.

Being back on the food and agriculture beat in a big way is critical to Grist’s mission to lead the conversation, highlight climate solutions, and uncover environmental injustices. What we eat and how it’s produced is one of the easiest entry points into the wider climate conversation. And from this point of view, climate change literally transforms into a kitchen table issue.

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Featured

Grist / Eva Marie Uzcategui / The Washington Post via Getty Images; Joe Raedle / Getty Images; Getty Images
Grist / Eva Marie Uzcategui / The Washington Post via Getty Images; Joe Raedle / Getty Images; Getty Images

The people who feed America are going hungry

Climate change is escalating a national crisis, leaving farmworkers with empty plates and mounting costs.

Ayurella Horn-Muller Staff Writer

Latest Articles

  • Sea change: Asian Americans and seafood in the gulf [Part 1]

    Editor’s note: This is the first half of a feature story from Hyphen Magazine’s Survival Issue. Some say that Asian America began in Louisiana. In the late 1700s, Filipino sailors escaped Spanish galleons and started shrimping the hot, humid Gulf Coast, where the weather reminded them of Southeast Asia and the water teemed with oysters, […]

    Nina Kahori Fallenbaum Food

  • Slaughterhouse rules: Inside a halal butchershop [VIDEO]

    New York City: A lot of unusual things happen beneath the surface here. You don’t notice most of them until someone points them out. Madani Halal slaughterhouse is a great example; it’s down a backstreet in a little-known neighborhood in Queens. Every day, folks line up around the corner to choose their own live chicken […]

    Daniel Klein Food

  • Hacking the Farm Bill

    A slide from the winning entry. Rebecca Klein wasn’t expecting a lot when she signed up to attend last week’s Farm Bill Hackathon. This public health expert from the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University had never heard of a hackathon — a gathering of computer programmers who lock themselves in a […]

    Twilight Greenaway Agriculture

  • New Agtivist: Edith Floyd is making a Detroit urban farm, empty lot by empty lot

    Photo: Patrick CrouchEdith Floyd is the real deal. With little in the way of funding or organizational infrastructure, she runs Growing Joy Community Garden on the northeast side of Detroit. Not many folks bother to venture out to her neighborhood, but Edith has been inspiring me for years. I caught up with her on a […]

    Patrick Crouch Agriculture

  • Cereal offenders: How do we get the sugar out of breakfast?

    Photo: Chris Metcalf Raise your hand if you serve your kids a bowl of Twinkies for breakfast. Or perhaps they prefer a few cookies instead? According to the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) new report on children’s cereals, that’s effectively what millions of kids are eating in the morning. Indeed, the amount of sugar in many […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • ‘Organic water’ is a thing now

    A German brand of bottled water called BioKristall has gotten the official go-ahead to market itself as organic water. That's right, not a single pesticide was used to keep away the insects that feed on water crops, and it didn't need any chemical fertilizer either. Thank goodness SOMEBODY cares about our health. Okay, now all […]

    Jess Zimmerman Agriculture

  • Potato chip advertising is a perfect metaphor for income inequality, says science

    A study just published in Gastronomica proves that appealing to our tribal identifications is hardly the sole domain of liquor and cigarettes. The authors use "the language of food to examine the representation of socioeconomic class identity in contemporary America by comparing the advertising language on expensive bags of potato chips with that on inexpensive […]

    Christopher Mims Agriculture

  • Eating rice raises risk of arsenic exposure

    Sometimes it just feels like we should give up eating, particularly if "we" are "pregnant women." A new study links rice consumption with higher levels of arsenic in the bloodstream, which can increase the risks of infant mortality and low birth weight. Most arsenic exposure comes from water, and the study found that 10 percent […]

    Sarah Laskow Food

  • Sow seeds, not greed: Farmers gather on Wall Street

    Photo: Eddie CrimminsIt’s been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan — around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don’t cross paths much these days. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the […]

    Kerry Trueman Food

  • Hungary destroys 1,000 acres of Monsanto maize

    Genetically modified seeds are banned in Hungary. So when government regulators found that 1,000 acres of maize had been planted with genetically modified seeds, they just plowed the suckers under. You stick it to the Monsanto, Hungary! Leaving aside the fact that this sort of sweep-the-checkers-off-the-board move is always kind of badass, this is also […]

    Jess Zimmerman Food