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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Homeless learn to farm in Santa Cruz
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 day began in the parking lot of a real estate office off Hwy 17 south of San Jose. We parked Lewis Lewis there after […]
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Organic Valley lays down the law on raw milk
Organic Valley started up in 1988 with a vision of being a different kind of milk cooperative, one that helped save small family dairies via promoting organic dairy products. “It was an idealistic, mission-oriented place in those days, spreading the gospel about the benefits of organic dairy and founded on the premise of economic-justice for […]
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Prices vs. contracts: Why good CO2 policy needs complex financial markets
Economic theory is predicated on the thesis that if supply and demand are allowed to freely set the price for a given item, rational capital allocation (and a host of other social benefits) will follow. Much of public policy is predicated on the truth of that thsis. But there’s a problem with the thesis: price […]
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A video smorgasbord of sustainable-food speakers
How we let our biology end up in the hands of Nestlé and Unilever and General Foods, we can leave to cultural historians to figure out, But we know now that in order to take back the ownership and responsibility for our health, and the biological integrity of our oceans and our land, we have […]
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A taste test of greener milks
Full Circle’s ultra-pasteurized offering, versus small-farm Blue Hill’s raw milk: Which mooved tasters the most?(Photos by Jason Houston) Putting aside for a moment the dietary arguments against drinking cow’s milk — we’re not calves, it’s liquid meat, it’s snot-producing, so hard to digest, etc. — conventional milk deserves vilification for many reasons. Conventional dairy’s ethically […]
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Michael Pollan chronicles rise of the food movement(s)
(Watershed Media)In what is ostensibly a five-book review for the June 10 New York Review of Books, journalist Michael Pollan has an epic essay charting the emergence and character of the food movement. Or, as he puts it, “movements.” They are unified, for now at least, by little more than the recognition that industrial food […]
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Lessons from Berkeley schools: The truth about kids and vegetables
Typical breakfast in a DC public school(Ed Bruske photos)The conclusion of Cafeteria Confidential: Berkeley, in which Ed Bruske reports on his recent week-long, firsthand look at how Berkeley, Calif., schools part ways from the typical school diet of frozen, industrially processed convenience foods. Cross-posted from The Slow Cook. Might as well say it straight up: […]
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Order up: Readers’ fave sandwich shops [PHOTOS]
(Jess Steinitz photo)We asked readers to nominate their favorite sustainable, locally owned sandwich shops — the ones sourcing their ingredients directly from nearby farms and turning them into “consistently and mind-blowingly good sandwiches,” as Grist’s Tom Philpott put it. Dozens of you shared your suggestions in the comments, but only two — Jess Steinitz and […]
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Passive-aggressive cakes spill onto Gulf coast
skooksie via Flickr Creative Commons Some crude feelings about BP’s half-baked efforts are starting to wash up in the cake window of New Orleans grocery store Breaux Mart, likely to be followed by a boom in sales. I wonder how much oil this recipe calls for? via Cake Wrecks —————————————————————————————————————————————————– Like what you see? Sign […]
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Feeling sheepish: An exercise in small-town networking
Sheep ready to be unloaded into their new pen from the borrowed livestock rack.(Steph Larsen photos)My first experience working directly with cows on a daily basis was not a particularly good one. It was 7 years ago on an organic dairy farm in England, and while most of the 99 Ayrshires were docile, the well-placed […]
