All donations doubled!

Climate Food and Agriculture

The Counter
Amelia K. Bates / Grist
Special Series

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.

READ MORE

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

  • Being prepared — to grow your own meat

    (Steph Larsen photos)Everyone knows the Boy Scouts’ motto: Be Prepared. While my immediate inclination is to ask “For what?”, it’s as good a command as any to live by.  One at which I failed miserably last week. I came home from work and went out to the sheep paddocks to make sure they looked healthy […]

    Steph Larsen Food

  • Sustainable seafood takes center stage at Seattle dinner theater

    Servers and stowaways at Bounty!Photo: Amani Ellen LoutfyAt Seattle’s Café Nordo, the wait staff quotes Jack London, the soup is served from fish tanks, and there’s enough alcohol to ease the pain of the BP oil spill momentarily. Nordo’s odd coupling of an oceanic musical production, “Bounty! An Epic Adventure in Seafood,” with a five-course […]

    Darby Minow Smith Food

  • California poised to approve deadly pesticide for strawberry crop

    The continuing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico helps one see other regulatory controversies in a different light. Take, for example, the battle in California over the use of the pesticide methyl iodide, a chemical so toxic, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “that even chemists are reluctant to handle it.” Methyl iodide, which according […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Louisianans take a break from oil-spill angst to celebrate local seafood

    Seafood abounds at the Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival.Photos: Emily PetersonThe sixth annual Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival, held this past weekend, had the usual fixings one would expect at a South Louisiana festival: fried seafood, a solid lineup of live local music, and plenty of cold beer to beat the high humidity and 90-degree temperatures. One […]

    Emily Peterson Climate & Energy

  • Leaving biodiesel Shangri-La for a farm amidst suburbia

    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. By David Hanson A grease bus breaking down in Berkeley is like having a Mac glitch at Steve Jobs’ house during the Apple Chirstmas party. […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Food

  • Thoughts on Pollan’s food-movement essay

    I want to add a few thoughts on the significance of Michael Pollan’s recent essay in The New York Review of Books to Bonnie Powell’s summary.  Pollan posits the existence of a social movement geared to transforming the food system. He emphasizes that it’s loose, internally conflicted, and nascent — but all the same, “one […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • ‘Farmers Market Desserts’ lets fruit, not sugar, be the star

    Photos courtesy of Leo Gong/Chronicle Books Summer fruits from the farmers market are the supermodels of the produce world. Just like Heidi Klum doesn’t need makeup to be beautiful, a super-fresh White Lady peach or Seascape strawberry doesn’t need extra sweetening or seasoning to shine. But given the right recipe—one designed expressly for fruit and […]

    Bonnie Azab Powell Food

  • DC rejects soda tax but funds better school food

    The Washington, D.C. city council yesterday agreed to fully fund a recently approved “Healthy Schools” initiative — providing more money for school food, as well as funding local produce in school meals and establishing grants to expand school gardens and increase physical education — but not with a controversial “soda tax” as had been proposed. Rather, […]

    Ed Bruske Food

  • Endocrine disruptors really do suck

    U.S. manufacturers and agribusiness are addicted to endocrine disruptors — dangerous chemicals that alter the natural function of the body’s hormones. They are frequently used in plastics, in pesticides, and in personal care products and act in the human body as a “false” version of estrogen. They appear to be linked to a variety of […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • I eat weeds

    Flowers or weeds? Depends on what you’re in the mood for.(Steph Larsen photos) The first edible plant to poke its head out of the ground at my farm early this spring wasn’t lettuce, arugula, broccoli, or any other hardy plant widely seen at early farmers markets. It was stinging nettles. As a child, I nicknamed […]

    Steph Larsen Food