I wrote about my TEDx Manhattan conference on sustainable food on the mainpage today, but before I moved on to hydrofracking, budget battles and the usual slate of depressing environment stories, I wanted to offer a few more tidbits from an excellent series of talks. And if you want to see the conference for yourself, the webcast for the …
Food
Why the Food Movement Is Becoming an Environmental Force
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have my weekly Going Green column, this time on the rise of the food movement. It was inspired by the TEDx Manhattan conference on sustainable food that I attended over the weekend, and specifically by something said by Brian Halweil—a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and the publisher and …
Food in China: Weather, Wheat and Worry
China is a nation of superlatives, and its role in weather manipulation is no exception. Beijing runs the world’s largest program in cloud seeding – the process of imbuing clouds with silver iodide to generate precipitation, usually in times of drought. China rolled out its cloud seeding technology to clear the skies of dust and …
Energy: Why Biofuels Help Push Up Food Prices
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece about the connection between biofuels and rising global food prices, which hit a record level in January. The math is pretty simple—with 40% of the country’s corn crop going to ethanol, and palm oil plantations around the world displacing farms for biodiesel production, biofuels do exert an …
Washington Will at Last Regulate Fish Farms
Chances are pretty good that the last fish you ate never saw a river or the open ocean. That’s because the U.S. imports 84% of the 5 billion lbs. of seafood we consume each year and more than half of that is raised on fish farms and other aquaculture operations. The U.S., however, has not gotten invested in the aquaculture game as …
Food Prices: Up, Up and Away
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report this week that food prices reached an all-time high in January. The Food Price Index rose 3.4% in January to 231, surpassing June 2008 levels that sparked food riots and hoarding from Haiti to the Philippines. Prices of all commodity groups except meat — cereals, …
Bread Is Life: Food and Protest in Egypt
It’s impossible to say what exactly the next few days will bring in Egypt, both for the protestors and for the government. It seems clear that the days of the administration of President Hosni Murbarak — at least in its present incarnation — are numbered, and tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Egypt’s cities …
Food Prices Hit Record High. What Now?
On Wednesday, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization announced that food prices for basic commodities had hit record highs last month – above and beyond the soaring prices in 2008 that sparked worldwide protests and food hoarding from Haiti to Egypt to the Philippines. Though the news has yet to evolve into the kind of crisis …
Fool’s Gold: Giant Tuna Sold for Nearly $400,000 in Tokyo
A behemoth bluefin tuna sold for a record 32.49 million yen — or about $396,000 — in Tokyo’s famed Tsukiji fish market on Wednesday, smashing the 2001 record when a bluefin auctioned for 20.2 million.
The fish, bought by a sushi restaurant in Tokyo’s Ginza district and a Hong Kong sushi chain, weighed in at market at an …
Global Warming: Farmers Will Need to Adapt to Changing Climates—But They’ve Done So in the Past
Of all the projected impacts of climate change, the scariest one in a world is the effect warming could have on our ability to feed ourselves. Scientists have looked at the impact of major heat waves in the past, and have found that such abnormally hot weather tends to hurt agriculture, with maize productivity levels falling by more …