Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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USA Today: oil prices drive up asphalt costs, derail road maintenance
For decades, public cash has gushed into building infrastructure designed to get us around in those little (or not-so-little) privatized pods. Indeed, the mobilization to create and maintain our road and highway network probably counts as our greatest public achievement of the last half-century. Meanwhile, while the highway rode high, our rail-transportation network crashed. Attacked […]
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Why mow the grass when you can harvest salad greens?
Lawn grass is the largest irrigated U.S. crop. “Even conservatively,” notes NASA researcher Cristina Milesi, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.” Wow, that’s a lot of ornamental grass — about 128,000 square kilometers worth, roughly equal in size to the state of Wisconsin. According Milesi, […]
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FDA warns of salmonella-infected tomatoes in the Southwest
What’s next, tainted buns? In yet another blow to the burger, tomatoes have joined beef and lettuce as star players in that booming industrial-food genre, the disease-outbreak drama. This one involves tomatoes that carry what the FDA calls “an uncommon strain” of salmonella called Saintpaul. Some 57 people have come down with salmonellosis in New […]
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Amnesty International: forced labor in Brazil’s sugarcane fields
As the case for corn-based ethanol unravels, a lot of pundits and green-minded investors have settled on a new panacea: ethanol from sugar cane, which thrives in the tropics. Thomas Friedman has been blustering about it for years now; Richard Branson recently hinted he might start investing in it. Sugarcane is a deeply ironic crop […]
