Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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Food prices and ‘level playing fields’
In last week’s Victual Reality, I took Alice Waters and Michael Pollan to task for praising recent hikes in industrial food prices as a prod for promoting sustainable agriculture. "Higher food prices level the playing field for sustainable food that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels," Pollan told The New York Times. Not likely so, I […]
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Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes
As their grocery bills rise, Americans should take comfort: the price they’re paying for industrially produced food in the supermarket is starting to approach that of artisanally produced food at the farmers’ market. And that might make more of them choose healthier, less environmentally destructive diets. At least, that’s the message of an article in […]
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Chinese miners and our appetite for cheap crap
As the United States has outsourced its industrial base to China over the last two decades, millions of manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But the trend has also allowed us to shed a lot of unpleasantness: industrial waste, air pollution, etc. The move also eased the burden on our electrical grid. The energy needed to produce […]
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NYT op-ed: pesticides wiping out songbirds
When the little bluebird Who has never said a word Starts to sing Spring … It is nature, that is all, Simply telling us to fall in love. — Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It” The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut — “birds do it; bees do it” — has taken on an […]
