Articles by Tom Philpott
Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.
All Articles
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My farm hits the newstands
It’s startling to see an article in Gourmet — the “magazine of good living” — end with a man groping for a bag of potato chips. It’s even more startling when that man is you. That’s the precise position I found myself in a few days ago, when the July issue of Gourmet (unavailable online) […]
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Time to kick it old school on the farm bill.
The terms of debate around the 2007 farm bill’s controversial commodity title have gotten rather narrow. On the one hand, you’ve got the House subcommittee on ag commodities, which essentially cut and pasted commodity language from the subsidy-heavy 2002 farm bill into the 2007 version now being drafted. On the other hand, you’ve got a […]
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Don’t blame farmers for the farm-subsidy mess
Agricultural and food products are not like other commodities. Their price is that of life, and below a certain threshold, that of death.— Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture from the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis Last month, after Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini dared question the virtue of certain […]
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Even USDA researchers are a bit creeped out by corporate control of food
Food production and retailing have gotten so squarely under the heel of a few corporations that even the USDA is raising an eyebrow. At the top, the agency teems with PR flacks for the agribusiness giants. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t competent researchers among the rank and file. One of them, Steven W. Martinez, […]
