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Articles by Tom Philpott

Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.

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  • U.S. investors make a killing off of Chinese coal

    China’s vast coal industry: Where would we be without it? Cheap Chinese coal keeps consumer-goods prices low, allowing us to consume like mad even as crude-oil prices skyrocket. It’s also returning handsome profits to U.S. investors. Take it away, Associated Press: As China’s appetite for coal is booming, American investors and businesses are cashing in. […]

  • The Senate Ag Committee’s Farm Bill

    No jaded observer will be surprised: The Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday released its version of the 2007 Farm Bill, leaving the subsidy mechanisms in the 2002 bill pretty well intact. I’m still trying to chase down details of the proposal, but here are a couple of tidbits. The big news is that the version contains […]

  • A couple of additions to this week’s Victual Reality column

    In this week’s Victual Reality, we ran an interview I did recently with officials from the National Corn Growers Association and the American Farmland Trust. I edited the transcript in a certain amount of haste (it was right during the chaos of our Sow What? series on food and farming) — and I left out […]

  • What’s up with that gated ‘community’ in Montana?

    Alice Waters, long-time champion of food as a tool for building community, has done something quite un-Alice Water-like: sold her name to promote a high-dollar gated development "community" in Montana. Over on Ethicurean, there’s a great post by the novelist Charlotte McQuinn Freeman, who lives in Livingston, Montana — near the site of the quote-unquote […]