Climate Food and Agriculture
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.
Featured
The people who feed America are going hungry
Climate change is escalating a national crisis, leaving farmworkers with empty plates and mounting costs.
Latest Articles
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Fast food's vomit-worthy hall of gimmicks [SLIDESHOW]
Using extra meat as the "buns." Adding an extra sandwich or two. Making anything a "footlong." What results from these tricks of the fast food world aren't examples of food; they're freak sideshows, novelties, gimmicks of a cheap'n'easy system of producti
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Fruit and veggies as you’ve never seen them before
The Inside Insides blog has posted animated MRI scans of fruits and vegetables such as corn, durian, bananas, mushrooms, and broccoli. The results are beautiful in an otherworldly way and strangely hypnotic — spiraling Fibonacci series of seeds and ghostly vacancies. Here’s a still from the corn animation — click through to see the whirling […]
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Chefs and parents plot a lunch revolution at one D.C. public school
A group of chefs and parents plan to turn Tyler Elementary’s kitchen-cum-makeshift-office into a place to cook actual food.(Ed Bruske photos) A group of prominent Washington, D.C.-area restaurant chefs has volunteered to introduce a novel concept in school-food service to one Capitol Hill elementary school: collaborating with parents to take over kitchen operations on a nonprofit basis, […]
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How trains replaced solar-powered transport and gave rise to the Farm Belt
Greens like me tend to fetishize trains. And for good reason. Why risk your life in a private, energy-intensive pod, negotiating traffic and the dubious decisions of hundreds of other drivers, when you could be comfortably reading on a subway? Who would endure the indignities of the airport for a short flight, if a high-speed […]
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Help kickstart a documentary on Haiti’s agricultural rebirth
Since 1981 the United States has followed a policy until the last year or so … that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so thank goodness they can leap directly into the industrial era. It […]
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Two takes on antibiotic use on factory farms
In “Chewing the Scenery,” we round up interesting food-related videos from around the Web. The meat industry wants to be viewed through the softening lens of the supermarket meat case: the shrink-wrapped splendor of chops, steaks, and breasts, presented in affordable and bountiful stacks. For the marketing to be effective, the dirty work of getting […]
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Part 1 of interview with local-food economist Ken Meter [PODCAST]
Local food economist Ken Meter(Jerry Carlson/Agri-Energy)Ken Meter, director of Minneapolis-based Crossroads Resource Center, is probably the country’s foremost thinker on the role of food in creating robust local and regional economies. I first encountered him at a Community Food Security Coalition conference in Atlanta in 2005, where he gave a presentation that forever changed the […]
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Ethanol gets skewered by recent CBO assessment
In its calm and measured way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just delivered a blistering assessment of the environmental value of corn-based ethanol. The CBO had been charged by Congress to calculate just what the public is getting for its investment in ethanol production: specifically, the $0.45/gallon tax credit that gasoline blenders get for mixing […]
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Urbivore’s Dilemma, Week 6: How I turned vegetables into a time machine
This week’s bounty.(Jennifer Prediger photos) Welcome to week 6 of my adventures as a veggie box subscriber, which I’m chronicling in this Urbivore’s Dilemma series. This week I had an epiphany about my Community Supported Agriculture membership. I think I may have found a way to slow down time with vegetables! The vegetables in this […]
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Chicagoans get new roots and second chances from Growing Home farm
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. The real estate market dealt Melvin Price a double whammy. The 45-year-old builder and carpenter had been making a living in Chicago for years before […]
