Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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OSHA looks the other way while poultry giants abuse workers
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry. In an excellent muckraking report which underlines the importance of metropolitan newspapers, The Charlotte Observer has shined a bright light into one of the murkiest corners of our food system: poultry-packing factories. The report focuses on North Carolina-based House of Raeford, the […]
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A reflection on the lasting legacy of 1970s USDA Secretary Earl Butz
Industrial agriculture lost one of its greatest champions last week: Earl “Rusty” Butz, secretary of the USDA under Nixon. Blustering, boisterous, and often vulgar, Butz lorded over the U.S. farm scene at a key period. He plunged a pitchfork into New Deal agricultural policies that sought to protect farmers from the big agribusiness companies whose […]
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Thanks to the ethanol boom, big investors are plowing cash into corn country
Big investors seem to have forgotten how to exist without some sort of speculative bubble. In the last decade, they’ve whipped cash from tech stocks to bonds to emerging markets to real estate to junk mortgages. With the latter bubble now deflating rapidly, they’ve turned to … Midwestern farmland? Yes, big cornfields. Here’s a Chicago […]
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New NYT pundit bravely defends GMOs, cloning
Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web. The New York Times op-ed page appears to be grooming James E. McWilliams, a professor of history at Texas State University, as a rising pundit on food-politics issues. In August, The Times ran a McWilliams piece worrying that growing consumer […]
