Food | Grist

Shocking developments on the farm

Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors? 6
Posted 5 hours, 13 minutes ago By Tom Laskawy Tom Laskawy muses on the potential for electric tractors in the coming age of Peak Oil.
Organic farming has a major part to play in a low-carbon world

Soil carbon—a blind spot in the debate on carbon 2
Posted 9 hours, 37 minutes ago By Emma Hockridge COP15 looks like it may well be a cop out. The world was disappointed when it became clear Barack Obama would not get climate protection legislation through the U.S. Senate, endangering any meaningful global agreement. But a much earlier cop out came when agriculture failed to make it onto the agenda at all.
GoodGuide scanner makes healthy food shopping point and click 1
Posted 2 days, 7 hours ago By Todd Woody Thanks to a new barcode scanner app, grocery shoppers can aim their iPhones at 63,000 different food products for details on the health, environmental, and social "performance" of the products and their makers.
Citizen Martha

Martha Stewart blisters meat industry in Thanksgiving show 7
Posted 5 days, 10 hours ago By Tom Philpott Martha Stewart arrays her considerable popular appeal against factory meat farming by featuring Food Inc. director Robert Kenner and anti-meat polemicist Jonathan Safran Foer on her Thanksgiving show.
Oh, SNAP!

More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar 1
Posted 6 days, 6 hours ago By Tom Laskawy The NYT's Cityroom blog offers some hopeful news on getting more healthy food into low-income neighborhoods.
Infrastructurally unsound

Grist Exclusive: Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers? 10
Posted 1 week, 3 days ago By Tom Laskawy For years, small-scale poultry farmers have had trouble processing their birds for market. Grist has learned that Whole Foods is looking to solve just that problem. But will the retail giant's effort squeeze the very farmers it's designed to help?
thanks for nothing

Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving 4
Posted 1 week, 4 days ago By Brad Johnson Our increasingly extreme climate is devastating American agriculture. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, strengthened by global warming, caused $1.6 billion in agriculture damage in Louisiana alone. Now it appears that a Thanksgiving mainstay -- pumpkin pie -- is next on the global boiling hit list.
Tuna Blues

So long and thanks for all the fish 47
Posted 1 week, 6 days ago By Tom Laskawy There was some hope recently that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, the organization charged with managing the Atlantic tuna fishery, would listen to its own scientists and ban commercial Atlantic bluefin tuna fishing so that the species might survive. Nope.
You might need a drink after you read this

Winemakers face climate change with dread 3
Posted 1 week, 6 days ago By Agence France-Presse With the Copenhagen climate change summit looming, the world of wine convened on Spain's Rioja region for a conference in which global warming emerged as the industry's top concern.
A Farmer Speaks

The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!) 1
Posted 2 weeks, 4 days ago By Makenna Goodman In Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting, author R. J. Ruppenthal makes sense of this seemingly counter-intuitive idea -- that farming has to be done outside, with a red barn and rolling fields of wheat. Because, it doesn't! It is possible to grow your own food indoors, in cramped spaces, and without access to land.