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.

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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

  • Antibiotic-resistant salmonella, school lunches, and Cargill’s dodgy California beef plant

    In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Oh, dear. This case of salmonella poisoning seems to be resisting treatments.  • The USDA reports that a notorious California beef-packing plant run by agribusiness giant Cargill has yet again had to recall ground beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella–or, […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Can delicious crepes create a buckwheat revival?

    Just add Paris: buckwheat crepes in their glory.April McGregerMy love for buckwheat first blossomed in the Soba-ya shops of Japan. Years later, that love was rekindled on the sidewalks of Paris eating Galletes de Sarrasin, or Breton-style savory buckwheat crepes, washed down with hard apple cider in stoneware cups. I found the deep, pleasantly bitter, […]

    April McGreger Food

  • In a Minnesota project, free-range chickens spell broad-based economic development

    Ecomomic splendor in the grass. I just completed a profile of one of the most exciting food production ideas I have seen in a long time.  Hillside Farmers Co-op. in Northfield, Minnesota, initiated by Latino immigrants, raises free-range chickens on scattered small, one-quarter acre sites.  This makes it a great model for urban farmers as […]

    Ken Meter Food

  • Are the oceans the future of food?

    If the the future of food is hazy right now due to overconsumption, globalization, and climate change, the future of seafood is even murkier. The global fish catch topped out sometime in the 1990s, leaving many fish populations more or less permanently overstressed. Aquaculture has grown to satisfy rising global demand – but fish farms […]

    John McQuaid Food

  • A quarter-century later, lessons from the world’s deadliest agrichemical disaster

    Today is the 25th anniversary of the Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. The number of people affected, injured, and killed has been the subject of debate. But it seems clear that a half a million were exposed to some degree to MIC and other chemicals released and approximately […]

    Chris Bedford Food

  • The localization of agriculture

    In the United States, there has been a surge of interest in eating fresh local foods, corresponding with mounting concerns about the climate effects of consuming food from distant places and about the obesity and other health problems associated with junk food diets. This is reflected in the rise in urban gardening, school gardening, and […]

    Lester Brown Food

  • Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?

    Writer George Monbiot’s recent Peak Oil article entitled “If Nothing Else, Save Farming” included this comment: There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. I read this and immediately tweeted the question […]

    Tom Laskawy Climate & Energy

  • Monterey Bay Sustainable Seafood Card–Not Worth the Paper It's Printed On?

    My wife brought home tuna for dinner the other night. My fifteen-year-old daughter, member of her school’s environment club, 4-H, and a consummate organic gardener, whipped out her Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood card to see how tuna ranked. Yay! There it was on the Best Choices card. In fact, the card had six variations of […]

    Biodiversivist Food

  • Grist Exclusive: Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?

    Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm. Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.

    In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen: That a novel […]

    Tom Philpott Food