"A Trump administration decision to move researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the Kansas City area is threatening to spark the flight of more than half of the staff selected to move, gutting the agency of its top scientific voices."
"People in El Rosario live on the edge of hunger, not knowing if the next harvest will come. Climate change is a driving force of food insecurity."
"Food and farming haven’t been high on the list of campaign priorities in recent decades, except maybe in Iowa. But this year, that appears to be shifting. With the pivotal role that rural voters played in the 2016 election firmly in mind, many presidential candidates are zooming in to address the challenges that abound in today’s farm country. And a number of them are connecting agriculture to other pressing issues—notably climate change, food insecurity, economic development, and more."
"Hundreds of thousands of children in the US remain at risk of exposure to lead, which causes cognitive and behavioral deficits".
"The plant-based burger company called regenerative grazing the “clean coal of meat” in a recent report. That hasn’t gone over well amongst carbon ranchers."
It’s a category of more than 4,000 industrial chemicals that affect our lives nearly every day — and many of which are toxic. So what do journalists need to know to report on the emerging contaminants known as PFAS? Our most recent Issue Backgrounder offers a detailed primer on what PFAS are, where they come from, what their health effects are and how they might be cleaned up.
"Last week, we learned that the Food and Drug Administration had detected PFAS compounds in pineapple, sweet potato, meat, and chocolate cake. ... [I]t has become clear that 3M, the company that originally developed PFOS and PFOA, had known for a very long time that these toxic and persistent chemicals were in our food."
"Take a walk through the grocery story; the packages are talking to you, proclaiming their moral virtue, appealing to your ideals: organic, cage-free, fair trade. When I dug into the world of eco-labels recently, I was surprised to find that some of the people who know these labels best are ambivalent about them."
"The Food and Drug Administration’s first broad testing of food for a worrisome class of nonstick, stain-resistant industrial compounds found substantial levels in some grocery store meats and seafood and in off-the-shelf chocolate cake, according to unreleased findings FDA researchers presented at a scientific conference in Europe."
The rise of the modern environmental and food movements has shifted urban farming into high gear. For environmental journalists, that could yield a bumper crop of local stories. The latest TipSheet has more, along with questions to ask, story angles to follow and reporting resources to tap.
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