The Future of Food

At the risk of upsetting some of my environmentalist friends, I offer this link to some fresh, and I think much-needed, new thinking. I was raised on 1960s-1970s-style environmentalism. I believed in the threat of the Population Bomb and the holy sanctity of Nature. But more recently, I’ve been revi

There’s nothing like a gorgeous summer day in Oregon. Just spent part of the weekend at local farmer’s markets, where the people are friendly, the produce is beautiful, and the prices are sky-high (c’mon, folks, $1 per leek?). I  love eating fresh,untainted vegetables and fruits, but wish that someb

See geneticist Pamela Ronald’s thoughts here. The point is that not all GMO crops are the same, they’re generally safe, and we should judge them on a case-by-case basis instead of painting them all as bad or all as good. Sounds reasonable to me.  Ronald is married to an organic farmer, and together

Well, this is swell. I received an email this morning saying that Raj Shah likes my book, “The Alchemy of Air.”  For those of you who don’t know,  Shah came out of the Dept. Agriculture, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and now heads USAID, the central agency for distributing tens of b

A new article in Scientific American makes the case that declining soil quality and increasing dependence on crops bred for size and transportability — rather than nutritional value — makes today’s grocery-store produce significantly less nutritious than the greens (and reds and yellows and purples)