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Climate Food and Agriculture

Amelia K. Bates / Grist
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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.

Latest Articles

  • Taras Grescoe on factory salmon farming

      An endangered chum salmon attempts to jump a small dam on the Deschutes River in Washington. While researching my post on Cheesecake Factory, I came upon contradictory information on how many pounds of wild fish it takes to create a pound of farmed salmon. Industry sources like this one paint a (relatively)  rosy picture: […]

  • Why the Cheesecake Factory really is gross

    Down on the farm: most salmon consumed in the U.S. comes from aquacultureIn a post on his group blog, the Internet Food Association, Washington Post blogger and food-politics columnist Ezra Klein poses the philosophical question, “Is the Cheesecake Factory Gross?” The context is a bet involving the highly regarded cookbook writer Michael Ruhlman, who recently […]

  • E. coli and Campylobacteriosis: Why Obama’s USDA food-safety pick is so important

    Side of E. coli with that burger?In Meat Wagon, we look at the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. —————————– As I reported Friday, a man with a Big Ag background has emerged as the frontrunner for a still-empty USDA post called “undersecretary of food safety.” The holder of this position oversees the […]

  • Privatize the seas? If only solving overfishing were so easy

    School of hard knocksIn this month’s Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook writes that privatizing the seas through use of individualized transferrable quotas (ITQs) is the solution to the grave problem of overfishing. Recently, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco came out strongly (PDF) in favor of ITQs (which the agency is calling “catch shares”), and has committed her agency […]

  • Worldwatch gets $1.3 million Gates grant to look at sustainable ag in Africa

    The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been roundly criticized in sustainable-ag circles for throwing its considerable girth behind a “New Green Revolution for Africa.” According to critics (including me), the “green revolution” approach promotes high-tech, expensive solutions to Africa’s agriculture woes — ones more suited to the interests of a few agribusiness giants than […]

  • Urban Gardens

    San Francisco to get more urban gardens.  Thanks, Gavin. And here’s a how-to that I look forward to reading.

  • Cobbling together a delicious and easy summer dessert

    Life’s a big container of cherries.All photos by April McGreger I’m bored by chocoholics. Don’t get me wrong; I very much appreciate good chocolate. But after attending four cookouts in the past month without a fruit-based dessert in sight I have had enough. Had the scent of perfectly ripe peaches somehow escaped my hosts? Are […]

  • Rethinking food production for a world of 8 billion

    In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on […]

  • New book looks at economic devastation in an Iowa meat-packing town

    An Iowa house, no longer neededPhoto: McMorrIt’s become axiomatic that to peer deep into our reliance on fossil energy is to gaze upon human wreckage: bombed-out Baghdad slums, desolated Nigerian townships, or Appalachian communities eviscerated by the removal of mountaintops. The food system has its own war zones, its own spaces of suffering and despair. […]

  • Must-read: urban farmer Will Allen in the NYT Magazine

    Will makes soil–and you can, too.Source: The New York TimesAnyone who wants to understand the paradoxes and promise of urban agriculture must read the luminous profile of Growing Power’s Will Allen by Elizabeth Royte, online now and forthcoming in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I could gush about the elegance of Allen’s farming system or […]