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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Vintage soda ads: Can you spot the fake?
We ran across one of these old ads pushing pop for tots on Facebook and shook our heads disbelievingly, before learning it was a fake. But the sweetened beverage industry has stooped equally low in the past, all the way down to toddler eye level. Can you guess which one is a modern mock-up? The […]
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‘CAFO Reader’ editor Daniel Imhoff on the ills of factory ‘farms’
The CAFO Reader — a new book featuring essays by farmers Wendell Berry, Becky Weed, and Fred Kirschenmann, Republican speech writer Matthew Scully, journalist Michael Pollan, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among many others — gives a full picture of the environmental, social, and ethical implications of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), and includes a […]
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Whistle while you work
How does my garden grow? Quite well, but with lots of weeds to pull!(Steph Larsen) Living in a place where I can grow things makes me want to burst out in song. And I’m not alone — there’s a long and storied tradition in many cultures of making music while we work. Long before […]
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Kick your industrial-beef consumption up a notch with Emeril!
Emeril Lagasse, industrial beef’s new best friend(Red Marble Steaks)Far be it for me to lament the state of food television. Don’t get me wrong — watching a man lurch about a stage kitchen, bellowing canned slogans (“Bam!”), and pandering to the studio audience, destroys my appetite. But people receive pop culture in multiple and unpredictable […]
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Urbivore’s Dilemma, Week 5: Getting by with a little help from my friends
Raspberries, currants, snap peas, lettuce, mint, and fennel showed up this week.(Jennifer Prediger) It’s Week Five of CSA living, which I’m keeping a journal of here in this Urbivore’s Dilemma series. This week’s CSA share gave me a taste of the plenitude of summer with raspberries, currants, snap peas, lettuce, mint, and fennel. I had […]
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Stephen Colbert’s going on a hot, sweaty field trip
A few weeks ago, to inspire realistic discussion of immigration reform, the United Farm Workers launched a tongue-in-cheek campaign called Take Our Jobs — a website where American citizens can sign up for work in the field. Experienced farm workers were standing by to train legal residents and place them on farms in California, Florida, […]
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Oil found in Gulf food chain, salmon nastiness, Mexico woes, U.N. lauds sustainable ag
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.BP oil infiltrates the Gulf’s food chain The inevitable has happened. From a McLatchy article: University scientists have spotted the first indications oil is entering the Gulf seafood chain — in crab larvae — […]
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Brooklyn’s Eagle Street is poster child for urban farming
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. Karen Turner, 25, wants to farm 100 acres in Texas. Her family has lived on 10 acres in San Antonio since she was a child. […]
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Latest podcast: How cancer-causing methyl iodide snuck past the EPA and onto farm fields
In the waning days of the Bush Administration, the EPA executed what will likely go down as the single most egregious decision in its less-than-stellar history: Ignoring strong warnings from independent scientists, it approved use of a pesticide so carcinogenic that scientists had previously used it to induce cancer in tissue samples. The chemical, a […]
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Organic farmers better at pest control, study says
Such large-scale pesticide application may actually reduce yields, a new study finds.Dovetailing nicely with Grist contributor and would-be farmer Steph Larsen’s account of her battle with the hated corn borer, a new study from Washington State University suggests organic growing techniques offer better pest control and larger plants. But first, let’s be clear: The debate […]
