Freight Fright

Organic farmers in Africa fear for their livelihoods as U.K. frets over food miles Small-scale organic farmers in Kenya and other African countries are waiting anxiously to find out whether the U.K.’s main organic certifier, the Soil Association, will withdraw organic certification from food items that are flown in from far-flung regions. Concerned that the […]

Are Those Bisphenol Genes You’re Wearing?

New study confirms that bisphenol A can mess with animal genetics Know what time it is? It’s time to check in on bisphenol A, the chemical in many plastics that gets creepier by the day. Despite continuing claims by the chemical industry that products containing the compound — which can include baby bottles, water bottles, […]

It’s a thing

Tom Konrad ponders the ethanol situation and wonders: what if, instead of feeding most of our corn to cows, and then growing a bunch of grass to make cellulosic ethanol, we use all the cow corn for ethanol and feed the grass to the cows? Gimmicky hook, but quite a fact-filled, educational article.

How many are there in your state?

Via Modeshift, check out the Factory Farm Map, which shows the location of factory farms in the U.S. by state and by county. Here in Washington we have a relatively low eight. Sorry to all you folks in Iowa, where there are 3,876. That’s a lot!

An oasis amid slaughterhouses and monoculture

When you make the three-hour drive from Des Moines to Sioux City (pop. 100,000), the heart of Woodbury County, nothing you see raises your hopes for a good dinner. All along the way, lush farmland lies smothered by what seems like one big blanket, alternately colored light and dark green: corn and soy. At a […]

Grist’s own Tom Philpott and his farm get written up

Grist’s own Tom Philpott is apparently too humble to draw attention to the media adulation with which he is being showered. It’s a task I’m happy to take up. The Winston-Salem Journal has a fantastic long piece on Maverick Farms, the small organic farm Tom runs with his co-conspirators. As the piece describes in detail, […]

Umbra on feeding birds

Dearest Umbra, Every winter I take pleasure in putting out birdseed to feed the backyard wildlife. I purchase the easily available, run-of-the-mill, found-at-my-local-hardware-store type of seed. My question is, in the big picture … am I doing more harm than good? If the feed I am using is grown conventionally, am I doing a greater […]

15 Green Chefs

Savor our list of eco-conscious chefs, then dish on your own favorites in the comments section at the bottom of the page. Photo: David Sifry via Flickr Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Berkeley, Calif., U.S. Thirty years ago, the words “imported from France” signified the height of status and taste on U.S. restaurant menus. Today, the […]

Philpott on the ground in corn country

In my very first article for Grist a year and a half ago, I declared with confidence that “If you’re going to talk about poverty, food, and the environment in the United States, you might as well start in the Corn Belt.” Trouble is, I had never actually been in corn country, at least not […]

The worst good news/bad news tale ever told

The bad news is that we're doing it by eating the fish that are eating the concentrated mercury in the food chain, further concentrating it in ... us. Mad as hatters we are!

This could also have been titled, "Another reason that coal is the enemy of the human race (or at least those members of it that like to eat)."