Food and Farming
What Is Our Land For?
Should we graze it, log it, drill it, and mine it? Or should we preserve it, study it, recreate in it, and revere it?
I’m a Small Farmer from Iowa. Why Does Trump Want to Take My Health Care?
Republicans want to bring back “pre-existing conditions” as a reason to deny you care.
Soon You Can’t Use Food Stamps at Farmers Markets — But That’s Not Half of It
The diets of food stamp recipients lie at the intersection of two issues: our food system and economic inequality.
We Subsidize the Wrong Kind of Agriculture
We should be supporting the small farmers who sell at farmers markets, not the corporate giants that hurt our health and environment.
A Farm Bill Lost in Never-Never Land
As financial stress rises, suicide hotlines are spreading across farm country. Four straight years of low income, rising debt, and now fights with major trading partners are taking their toll on farmers and rural communities. Worse, Congress seems to be pretending...
Another Counterproductive Assault on Food Stamps
Once again, Republicans are taking aim at poor people. What is it this time? Adding a stricter work requirement to receive what used to be known as food stamps. (Today it's known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but that just doesn't have the same...
A Food Stamp Indignity Worthy of Dickens
Even Charles Dickens, England's masterful satirist of the Victorian upper class, couldn’t have imagined elite rulers using a box of food as a gratuitous way to slap poor people. But Donald Trump and two of his slap-happy cabinet officials did imagine it — and then did...
Long Live the Jersey Tomato
Food corporations and their academic cohorts keep trying to "make" an industrial tomato to rival Mother Nature’s product. And they keep failing. They might consider this instead: the Rutgers 250. It’s a revived version of the classic hybrid tomato bred in 1934 by...
America Dumps Its Fracking Waste in My Ohio Town
My southeastern Ohio town in the Appalachian foothills is a small, rural place where the demolition derby is a hot ticket, Walmart is the biggest store, and people in the surrounding villages must often drive for 30 minutes to grocery shop. We hold the unfortunate...
America’s Farmworkers Face Poverty, Neglect, and Now Deportation
Every decade or so, America’s mass media are surprised to discover that migrant farmworkers are being miserably paid and despicably treated by the industry that profits from their labor. Stories run, the public is outraged, assorted officials pledge action, then…...
