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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

  • Will chocolate replace coffee as the foodie’s bean of obsession?

    In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. —– Dear Grist: So what’s the deal with this “bean to bar” thing I hear about with chocolate? People are calling chocolate the […]

  • Why factory farming must be stopped

    This is sobering: single concentrated animal feedlots that create more waste than a large U.S. city. There is only one word for this: insane. If you’re going to eat meat, don’t support industrial meat operations.

  • Gates Foundation wants to boost local agriculture in developing nations

    Local agriculture in developing nations will get a boost under an initiative unveiled Wednesday by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and United Nations World Food Program. Under the Purchase for Progress initiative, the WFP will supplement food aid with surplus crops bought at competitive prices from poor farmers. WFP currently purchases 80 percent of […]

  • A visit to Alemany Farm in San Francisco

    I drove right past Alemany Farm three times before I finally found it. That’s because I wasn’t looking up. The mostly volunteer venture that grows organic food (and green jobs) for low-income communities is located on a hillside, the rows and rows of green leafy goodness like rungs on a ladder leading skyward. Once I […]

  • Thoughts on an ‘urban farm tour’ in Carrboro, N.C.

    The Farm Tour culminates at Carrboro Community Garden. Photo: Maciek Kryzystoforski What’s a farm? I don’t want to get buried in technical definitions, but I’ll take a stab at an informal one: a substantial piece of productive land. When I step out my front door in Carrboro, N.C. — where I spend part of my […]

  • GAO: EPA has seriously botched CAFO oversight

    Is the EPA leadership incompetent or malicious? The agency’s steady stream of oversights, lapses, and rotten decisions — which I tried to come to grips with here —  demands a reckoning. The answer appears to be a kind of toxic mix of the two: a malicious desire to please industry interests over public ones, leavened […]

  • EPA slipping up on pollution control from factory farms, report says

    The U.S. EPA has failed to control pollution from factory farms and has also been sluggish in determining risks to human health from huge concentrated animal-feeding operations, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. In recent years, the GAO said, consolidation in the livestock industry has spawned more and more factory farms […]

  • Milwaukee’s Growing Power founder snags a much-deserved MacArthur

    Fifteen years ago, a former professional basketball player named Will Allen made a most unlikely career move: he decided to launch a farm in a low-income neighborhood in Milwaukee. His farmhands would be un- or ill-employed neighborhood teens. Will Allen. At the time, brutal economic conditions were pushing the nation’s few remaining African-American farmers into […]

  • Michael Pollan and Monanto’s Hugh Grant square off at Google.org forum

    What do you get when industrial agriculture’s most famous critic crosses swords with industrial agriculture’s (arguably) most powerful executive? Michael Pollan and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant squared off at a forum put on recently by google.org (video below the fold.) The topic of the discussion: how to “feed the world” as population expands over the […]

  • EPA not likely to set standard for perchlorate in drinking water

    The U.S. EPA is expected to decide as soon as Monday whether or not to set a standard restricting the amount of perchlorate allowed in the nation’s drinking water, but so far, such a standard looks unlikely. Perchlorate is a chemical found mainly in rocket fuel and fireworks that has been associated with thyroid dysfunction […]