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Headline	Author	Published	Section
Archer Daniels Midland: The Exxon of corn? ADM is doing for soil what Exxon has done to air.	Tom Philpott	02 Feb 2006	Gristmill
Amid all the hoopla over President Bush's State of the Union address, Archer Daniels Midland's quarterly report (PDF), released Tuesday, got little attention outside of Wall Street -- where it drew cheers, sending ADM's share price to an all-time high. At the company's conference call with analysts, the Wall Street Journal reports, John M. McMillin of Prudential Securities 'likened [Archer Daniels Midland] to Exxon Mobil Corp., which just announced its own record-brea ...
Topics: agriculture, Big Ag, business, food, industrial ag (all these topics)

Down on the farm Why the global food system isn't kind to local farmers	Tom Philpott	25 Jan 2006	Gristmill
Recently, I've come across two articles that pungently demonstrate the place of small-scale farmers in a global economy geared toward long-distance trade. The first, a Salon-published excerpt from Charles Fishman's recent book The Wal-Mart Effect, explores what the U.S. love affair with $5/pound salmon means for Chile. (Prepare to click through a few ads to get to the story.) The other, a NY Times piece, depicts high-level hand-wringing in China over rural 'land grabs ...
Topics: aquaculture, Chile, fishing, food, Wal-Mart (all these topics)

Gardeners: Man the green barricades in LA Why greens should join forces with gardeners to face down the bull dozers in LA.	Tom Philpott	17 Jan 2006	Gristmill
Even though I abandoned Brooklyn for the Appalachians, I'm no sentimental pastoralist. I'm a long-term disciple of the great urban theorist (and champion of cities) Jane Jacobs. Human history since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been a history of cities. Cities are the future; as David Owen's superb article 'Green Manhattan' (PDF) shows, they may be our only hope. The trick is to create agricultural systems within and just outside of cities, minimizing the ...
Topics: agriculture, food, gardening, Los Angeles, placemaking (all these topics)

Trans-fat riddle How can junk-food makers label goods laden with partically hydrogenated oil	Tom Philpott	13 Jan 2006	Gristmill
Long a staple of industrial food processors, partially hydrogenated oils are widely known to have health-ruining effects. After decades of looking the other way as study after study emerged documenting this phenomenon, the FDA is finally making moves to at least encourage consumers to avoid them. The industry is already retrenching, removing the vile stuff from popular junk-food products, often heralded by a '0 Grams Trans Fat' label on the package. Restaurant chains ...
Topics: food, Food and Drug Administration, health (all these topics)

Brutal logic: Why GM soy looks set to swamp Europe GM seed manufacturers create conditions that will force their acceptance	Tom Philpott	11 Jan 2006	Gristmill
This post first appeared on Bitter Greens Journal. Maverick Farms, where I work, lies on a dirt road halfway up a steep hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Twenty years ago all the land around here was agricultural. Each family generally had a couple of milk cows, a pig or two, and a garden plot to feed themselves; for cash, they planted cabbage (to be sold to a nearby sauerkraut factory, long gone) and tobacco. All of that has changed. The word 'farm' has become a m ...
Topics: agriculture, food, GMOs (all these topics)

In Farm's Way Sustainable-ag legend Joel Salatin can farm -- but can he write?	Tom Philpott	29 Nov 2005	Arts and Minds
Over the past 20 years, Joel Salatin has emerged as a sort of guru of the sustainable-food movement. His 500-acre Polyface Farm in Swoope, Va., is legendary among a small circle of foodies for its robustly flavored beef, pork, chicken, and eggs. Among farmers, Salatin has won cult status for his innovations in multi-species, pasture-based animal husbandry. But readers of his new book, Holy ...
Topics: agriculture, food, green living, local food, slow food, sustainable ag (all these topics)

Raw milk, hot commodity Despite a recent crackdown, Washington State's raw-milk policy might point way forward.	Tom Philpott	28 Nov 2005	Gristmill
In a nation riddled with diet-related maladies like obesity and diabetes, the official fear that greets raw milk is impressive. You can waltz into any convenience store and snap up foods pumped liberally with government-subsidized high-fructose corn sweetener, deep-fried in government-subsidized partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Yet in many states, teams of bureaucrats devote themselves to 'protecting' us from raw milk -- and imposing onerous fines on farmers who da ...
Topics: ag policy, agriculture, food, health, Washington (all these topics)

Gobble It Up Three paths toward a green -- and tasty -- Thanksgiving	Tom Philpott	17 Nov 2005	Main Dish
Of all the crimes against nature Thanksgiving inspires -- SUVs clogging the highways, planes shuttling fliers around the country, factory farms churning out millions of frozen turkeys -- the most grievous may be culinary. First, the above-mentioned turkeys typically taste like sawdust; cranberry "sauce," a gelatinous goo that ominously retains the shape of the can it slipped out of, doesn't ...
Topics: Alice Waters, food, holiday, slow food, vegetarianism and veganism (all these topics)

The WSJ documents GM contamination	Tom Philpott	08 Nov 2005	Gristmill
The Wall Street Journal came out with a terrific page-one article documenting 'genetic pollution' -- the damage caused when genetically modified crops cross-pollinate with conventional crops. The article leads with an organic farmer in Spain whose sells his red field corn at a premium to nearby chicken farmers, who prize the product because it 'it gives their meat and eggs a rosy color.' (I'd be willing to bet that rosy color also translates to higher nutrition conte ...
Topics: agriculture, food, GMOs, industrial ag (all these topics)

Junk food: The Senate trashes organic standards	Tom Philpott	07 Nov 2005	Gristmill
The Senate succumbed last week to food-industry pressure and approved a rider that would water down organic standards. (Grist's Amanda Griscom Little a few weeks ago ably laid out the context behind the Senate's surrender.) This AP article states that a Senate vote last Thursday ... ... unravels a court ruling on whether products labeled 'USDA Organic' can contain small amounts of nonorganic substances. Earlier this year, an appeals court ruled that nonorganic substan ...
Topics: agriculture, food, legislation, organic food, politics (all these topics)

Genetically modified TV Ag giants launch new public-tv show that promises to be so bad it's ... bad	Tom Philpott	24 Oct 2005	Gristmill
What do you get when Monsanto and the Farm Bureau (whose sorry politics are discussed here) team up with the National Corn Growers Association, the United Soybean Board, the U.S. Grains Council, and the National Cotton Council (discussed here)? If your answer is vast-scale, heavily subsidized, environmentally ruinous agriculture, you have a point. But I was thinking of a different response: Television that promises to be so bad that it might qualify as camp.The above-m ...
Topics: agriculture, food, industrial ag, TV (all these topics)

How now, organic cow? USDA inaction supports feedlot-style	Tom Philpott	19 Oct 2005	Gristmill
Consumers looking for milk from grass-fed cows can't rely on the USDA's organic label. As this Chicago Tribune article shows, the department has been allowing feedlot-style mega-dairies to claim organic status -- despite a recommendation from the National Organic Standards Board that it close existing loopholes. Access to pasture lies at the heart of any meaningful definition of organic farm-animal stewardship. Grass-fed cows produce a healthier product, they're eas ...
Topics: agriculture, food, industrial ag, organic food (all these topics)

Organically groan: working conditions on California's organic farms Organic farms don't treat workers any better than other farms	Tom Philpott	18 Oct 2005	Gristmill
As Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little recently reported, a trade group representing Kraft and Dean Foods has been quietly pushing Congress to tweak organic labelling standards to make them more friendly to food-processing giants. Thankfully, the Organic Consumers Association has led a fight, so far successful, to stymie those changes. While it's important to preserve the organic label's integrity on the supermarket shelf, it's just as important to interrogate what it ...
Topics: agriculture, California, food, organic food (all these topics)

Food and class To create a truly sustainable food system, we'll need to make some fundamental changes.	Tom Philpott	12 Oct 2005	Gristmill
The sustainable-food movement has a class problem. Slow Food, for example, is an essential organization, with its declaration of a universal 'right to taste' and its mandate to ... ... oppose the standardisation of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable speci ...
Topics: agriculture, food, sustainable ag (all these topics)

Mad cash cow: Will the U.S. slaughter agriculture subsidies? Why the Bush Administration looks set to jettison the farm-subsidy program, beloved of industry and	Tom Philpott	11 Oct 2005	Gristmill
Long the bane of environmentalists and sustainable-agriculture proponents, the U.S. agriculture-subsidy system has drawn some unlikely new critics: top Bush administration officials. Speaking before a food-industry trade group last week, USDA chief Mike Johanns, the reliably pro-Big Ag former governer of subsidy-rich Nebraska, complained that in fiscal year 2005: 92 percent of commodity program spending was paid on five crops -- corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice ...
Topics: ag subsidies, agriculture, food, politics (all these topics)

Green lunch time? 'Naked Chef' dresses down U.S. school lunches, demands 'real food,	Tom Philpott	05 Oct 2005	Gristmill
Ten years after sustainable-food doyenne Alice Waters launched her innovative Edible Schoolyard program in Berkeley, U.S. school lunches remain abysmal. In cafeteria kitchens throughout the land, de-skilled workers busy themselves opening cans and zapping pre-made meals in giant microwaves. Out on the floor, kids swill soda and dig their little hands into bags of fried stuff that may have, somewhere far way, once resembled food. Waters' effort remains laudable, but it' ...
Topics: Alice Waters, education, food, United Kingdom (all these topics)

O Brother, Where Artificial Thou? Fight over synthetic ingredients splits organics community	Amanda Griscom Little	29 Sep 2005	Muckraker
What do xanthan gum, an artificial thickener, ammonium bicarbonate, a synthetic leavening agent, and ethylene, a chemical that accelerates the ripening of fruit, have in common? These and other synthetic additives commonly lurk behind that "USDA Organic" stamp of approval you see on the organic products increasingly crowding the shelves of big-box stores and ...
Topics: Department of Agriculture, food, Muckraker, organic food (all these topics)

Empty storage containers + robots = lettuce Who would have thought?	Chris Schults	28 Sep 2005	Gristmill
When I wrote about robots months ago, it didn't occur to me that robots could be used to grow our food. And if it had, I probably wouldn't have thought they would be doing it so soon. Ah, but they are! I guess Todd is right: the future is now. Thanks to Wired, I give you OrganiTech: Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They're heaped there in perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped ba ...
Topics: agriculture, food, tech (all these topics)

Foogle Former Google chef plans to launch sustainable cafe in Cali	Chris Schults	20 Sep 2005	Gristmill
Regular web searching was not enough. Neither were searches for images, news stories, and things for sale. Our own computers were becoming a web of their own, so there is desktop search to help keep us organized. And who can keep up with the ever-evolving blogosphere? But don't worry, there is now a search for that too. And the world is apparently not enough for Google. In addition to niche searches, Google also provides a number of services, such as email, photo mana ...
Topics: business, food, websites (all these topics)

The hundred-mile diet goes north And why we pay too little for well travelled food	Chris Schults	08 Sep 2005	Gristmill
Speaking of eating locally, I've neglected to keep you apprised of the latest developments of our heroes to the North, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who are living on a hundred-mile diet. In part four, Alisa and J.B. write about the hidden costs of food, China's agro ambitions, and Vancouver's bright spots. In part five, our dynamic duo heads oustide of their comfort zone to northern British Columbia, where they discover that following the hundred-mile diet isn't a ...
Topics: British Columbia, food, local food (all these topics)

What's your major? Universities considering adding organic-farming to curriculum.	Chris Schults	26 Jul 2005	Gristmill
Recently in Daily Grist we reported how locally grown foods are catching on at college dining halls. Now wouldn't it be nice if the students knew the in's and out's of how that food was produced? Well, they may get their chance, as several universities are offering (or are considering offering) organic-farming majors. But as KATU 2 in Portland, Ore., reports: ... starting up such a major can carry an implicit critique of traditional programs, said Matt Liebman, dire ...
Topics: education, food, local food, organic food (all these topics)

The hundred-mile diet Sustainable, yes. Possible, not so sure.	Chris Schults	15 Jul 2005	Gristmill
So you want to make sure your eating habits are not contributing to global warming, but aren't ready to go veg. You like the idea of eating only organic food, but worry about the long trek much of it makes to get from producer to grocer. So you're thinking about consuming only locally produced fare. But is it possible? Well, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon are giving it a go and sharing their experience with our friends to the north, The Tyee. In part one, we get the b ...
Topics: food, local food (all these topics)

Feel the farce, Cuke	Sarah van Schagen	14 Jun 2005	Gristmill
Well, it seems not everyone finds the (mis)adventures of Cuke Skywalker, Obi Wan Cannoli, TofuD2, and friends as funny as we do. Like its predecessor 'The Meatrix,' an online video spoof addressing factory farm issues that angered the dairy industry, 'Store Wars,' which touts organics and refers to conventional farming as the dark side, has many in the produce industry up in arms (er, light sabers?). 'It's one of the best spoofs I've ever seen,' said Tim Chelling, ...
Topics: agriculture, food, organic food (all these topics)

Beery, beery good High energy costs don't get in this brewery's way	Katharine Wroth	11 May 2005	Gristmill
Hey, I don't want to get a reputation. But here's more news from the beer-and-rising-energy-costs front: The New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colo., is hopping on alternative energy instead. To wit: The company uses methane captured from its wastewater to help power its facilities, and uses a biodiesel blend in its delivery trucks. No big surprise from an outfit whose employees voted, waaaay back in 1998, to make it the nation's first wind-powered brewer ...
Topics: business, energy, food, greening biz operations, renewable energy (all these topics)

A league of their own Now your $9 ballpark beer comes in an eco-cup	Katharine Wroth	10 May 2005	Gristmill
It's a single piece of news, but a revolution in its own right: starting Friday, the Oakland A's will serve drinks in compostable cornstarch cups, and provide compostable cutlery too. McAfee Coliseum staffers will dig the items out of the trash at the end of each game -- pausing only briefly to wonder if they should have taken that internship with Dad's friend's company instead -- and ship the whole beery, mustardy mess to a composting facility. It's all part of sta ...
Topics: food, sports, waste (all these topics)

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