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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Secrets of the swamp
In early February 2022, Tom Van Lent sent a note to his employers: He intended to resign from The Everglades Foundation at the end of the month. He adopted a conciliatory tone—“my career at the Foundation has been a source of personal pride,” he wrote—but everyone knew that Van Lent, one of the most prominent scientists in Everglades restoration, had been unhappy for years.
A biogas boondoggle
After moving around with the US Air Force as newlyweds, Elaine and Jerry Howard returned home and bought a half acre of countryside in Sampson County, North Carolina. It was 1984, and they were in their twenties. Elaine liked the seclusion of the private road they shared with a few neighbors. Jerry liked being able to walk to his mother’s house. They hauled a 1966 Commodore mobile home onto the property, and Jerry added a porch and two bedrooms for their children.
America’s favorite fruit reveals the hidden truth about food waste
Consider the apple. America’s most iconic fruit is a crucial component of our culture (American as apple pie!), diet, and economy. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the apple ranks as America’s favorite fruit. Last year, the United States produced some 4.36 million metric tons of apples, the fourth largest producer of the fruit behind China, the EU, and Turkey. By one recent USDA estimate, every American eats about 26 pounds of apples a year.
Technology can help reduce food waste on the farm, but it’s only part of the solution.
An estimated 30 percent of produce in America never makes it off the farm. That means that for every two heads of iceberg lettuce shipped to a grocery store, one is left to rot. Likewise, for every two bunches of spinach or celery, for every two ears of sweet corn, for every pair of tomatoes, one is allowed to sit unharvested.
The cafeteria as classroom
In January 2019, students at Lovin Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, took a hard look at how much food they were throwing away. It was Taco Day, and as lunch period wrapped up, teacher Gerin Hennebaul and a group of students sorted the milk, fruit, vegetables, and other foods left on the cafeteria trays into buckets. “It really left an impact on the kids,” Hennebaul says. “They were shocked.”
The rotten secret plaguing America’s grocery stores
We live on a planet where people still die of starvation, and yet we continue to waste so much food. It’s a problem, for sustenance but also for the environment. You may not be aware of it, but a huge amount of that waste comes from the grocery stores and supermarkets we shop at every week. Part of it is just a category problem: Americans are used to seeing a wide and alluring variety of foods on shelves, and a lot of it, especially for produce and meats.
Five gadgets to fight food waste: the good, the bad, and the ridiculous
Only recently has the idea of reducing food waste moved beyond a niche concern. Gone are the days when it was solely the preoccupation of Depression-era grandparents and self-righteous dumpster divers. But it’s not like we’re reviving the can-do frugality of the pioneers — when was the last time you saw a house with a root cellar? For most people, pickling and canning are a hobby they embrace after taking a Groupon class at that crafting store downtown and abandon after the first half-sour. Even as fighting food waste has entered the mainstream consciousness 38 percent of all food in the U.S. is simply thrown away, and the average household tosses out almost $2,000 a year in wasted food.
A week in the life of a big-time food waster
I am an expert on wasting food, if only because I do it so much. For me, there’s a sense of profound shame in this profligacy, because I’m acting in ways that I know are destructive to mother earth, squandering the generous gifts she gives us from her soil.
The crab kings
Near the end of 1991, the residents of Bugøynes, then a village of about 300 people in Norway’s Arctic north, ran an ad in the national newspaper Dagbladet, begging somebody to relocate them en masse. Cod and other whitefish, once Bugøynes’ bread and butter, were disappearing, and no one was quite sure why. The hamlet’s only fish plant had closed years earlier. The local fishing industry had essentially collapsed, leaving the villagers near the Russian border stuck with few ways to earn a living. “The time has come,” their ad read, “to put everything behind us and start again somewhere else.”
The U.S.-Mexico tortilla war
Do nations have the right to determine their own food policies? Can they make laws to safeguard domestic agriculture, public health, the environment, and the genetic integrity of the national diet?. If sovereignty means anything, the answer to these questions is yes. Defending food supplies is an ancient cornerstone of...
In California, a native people fight to recover their stolen waters
When Noah Williams was about a year old, his parents took him on a fateful drive through the endless desert sagebrush of the Owens Valley—which the Nüümü call Payahuunadü—in California’s Eastern Sierra. Noah was strapped into his car seat behind his mother, Teri Red Owl, and his father, Harry Williams, a Nüümü tribal elder who loved a teachable moment. “Hey look—that’s our water!” he liked to tell Noah whenever they drove past the riffling cascades of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
Sludge report
Dostie Farm, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm’s milk: Tests had found that it contained three times the state’s allowable level of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, one of the class of “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
The ranching industry’s toxic grass problem
America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant.
Tribal nations want more control over their food supply
8 million monthly web readers. 2 million monthly social users. For years, the Oneida Nation has been growing crops and raising cattle and buffalo on its 65,000-acre reservation near Green Bay, Wisconsin. Now, some of that food is doing more than nourishing people: It’s helping undo centuries of government overreach. As part of a pilot program included in the 2018 farm bill, the tribe is using federal dollars to buy food grown on the reservation and by other nearby Native producers and distributing it for free to low-income members of its tribe and another, the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.
Growing tobacco in the United States no longer makes sense
Linwood Scott III climbs two-story tobacco cropping machines with real agility and apparently no thought to falling. The sixth-generation tobacco farmer is proud of his machinery, upgraded 20 years ago and therefore relatively new. He delights in every tool and accoutrement of the cropping, curing, and baling process: every trailer, every sawed-off school bus that pulls those trailers, every conveyor belt, every one of his 200 small curing barns.
A farm bill for farmworkers
Farm work has long been among the most dangerous jobs in America. But while Congress has had many chances to bolster labor protections in the 18 versions of the farm bill it has passed since 1933, it has instead largely ignored the needs of the workers who plant, tend, harvest, and process the nation’s food.
The farm bill hall of shame
This article is part of FERN’s series The Farm Bill Fight. The farm bill is among the most important pieces of legislation that Congress is more or less obliged to pass. Yet to all but a handful of people whose job it is to parse its every incremental gain or loss, it is largely inscrutable. Every five years we’re treated to bitter fights over things like the use and abuse of agricultural subsidies; attempts to defund SNAP; the notion that environmental stewardship should guide farm policy as much as increasing production; and how (and sadly whether) to build equity into an agriculture system with a racist history.
Why are GOP governors taking food out of the mouths of poor kids?
When I spoke to Mandi Remington in late January, she had $7 in her bank account and had run out of milk. At times like these, which happen toward the end of most months, she cobbles together “stone soup” from what’s in the house, she said, or feeds her three children and then makes her own meal from whatever is left on their plates.
When must-pass meets mega-partisan
The farm bill was once an example of bipartisan bonhomie in Washington. A marriage of farm subsidies and nutrition assistance programs, the recurring five-year legislation gave rural Republicans and urban Democrats in Congress strong incentives to support it even if neither was entirely satisfied. Pork helped, as it does. The bill has always relied on handouts to grease its wheels, like large milk subsidies that particularly benefited dairy farmers in states that happened to have powerful members on the Senate Agriculture Committee, or billions for an ethanol industry that likely wouldn’t exist without government help. The bill’s horse-trading quality, giant price tag, and broad mix of programs have always made it complicated to pass. Yet despite contentious fights and delays, final passage of some kind of omnibus compromise has rarely been in doubt.
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