EcocentricFood
As a scary E. coli outbreak spreads across Europe, health authorities in the EU are coming to grips with the fact that the transnational body may not be ready to investigate and stop a major foodborne illness. But surely we’d do better if a similar outbreak occurred in the U.S. Right?
Maybe not. We’re lucky to have the crack …
EcocentricFood
A guest post from TIME’s Feifei Sun:
In 1986, Gene Baur started selling veggie dogs out of his aqua blue Volkswagen van to raise money for Farm Sanctuary, an animal rights organization he co-founded with his then-wife. This May, Baur hopped back into his van to embark on a road trip across America, called the Just Eats Tour (which
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EcocentricFood
Chances are your hamburger is on drugs. Not the illegal kind—probably—but the medicinal sort. Though the statistics are fuzzy, environmentalists and sustainable food advocates believes vast amounts of antibiotics are delivered at low levels to farm animals, to promote rapid growth and produce meat more cheaply. According to a …
EcocentricFood
This is a guest post from TIME’s Kayla Webley:
As a full-fledged carnivore, I attended Farm Sanctuary’s 25th Anniversary Gala last weekend to eat a three-course vegan meal. Having been a vegetarian in years past and as a general lover of tofu, quinoa and other vegan staples, I was very open to the evening’s eats.
During the …
EcocentricFood
The hidden story of 2011 has been the record-breaking rise in global food prices. Global corn prices doubled between April 2010 and April 2011, while wheat prices are up some 60 to 80%. Exactly why food has gotten so expensive in recent months is the subject of an ongoing debate—biofuel policy, inflation, oil prices, natural …
EcocentricRegulation
Better hope you’ve got a little extra closet space. Sometime today, American industry will manufacture or import 250 lbs. of chemicals just for you. There will be another 250 lbs. tomorrow and another the day after that — every day, in fact, throughout the year. That’s a pretty big mountain of chemistry, but if we’re going to …
EcocentricFood
I met Barton Seaver about a year ago, on a TED expedition to the Galapagos Islands. We were there as part of oceanographer Sylvia Earle’s TED wish—she had brought scientists, celebrities, financiers and a few writers on board a National Geographic ship to talk about the best ways to protect the world’s oceans. During the day passengers …
EcocentricFood
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 …
EcocentricFood
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 …
EcocentricBiofuels
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 …
