Civil Eats has long been committed to covering the intersection of the food system and climate change. In addition to looking at the greenhouse gas impacts of growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, and distributing food, we also examine the ways food-system players are addressing climate change with strategies that sequester carbon, cut emissions, save water, and establish new markets.

This year, for example, we looked at the meat industry’s influence on climate research and the presidential candidates’ stances on climate change. We also reported on farmers experimenting with the wild seed relatives of domestic crops, which may be better able to withstand extreme weather, and the underground fungal networks that trap carbon and support healthy plant life.

Additionally, we published a four-part series examining the challenges and potential of kelp as a regenerative crop, a four-part series on the power and impact of the pesticide industry, and a five-part series looking at how the climate crisis is affecting restaurants, asking ourselves: What is a climate-conscious restaurant, if that even exists?

Here are our best climate stories of 2024.

As Saltwater Encroaches on Farms, Solutions Emerge From the Marshes
In the Mid-Atlantic, sea level rise due to climate change is already altering what farmers can grow.

The USDA Updated Its Gardening Map, But Downplays Connection to Climate Change
The USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map has been updated after more than a decade. It confirms what anyone who’s planted seeds recently already knows.

Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South? EnerWealth Solutions wants to bring the benefits of renewable energy to Black farmers and landowners in the Carolinas.

New Research Shows How the Meat Industry Infiltrated Universities to Obstruct Climate Policy
We look at how Big Meat seeks to influence climate understanding, climate-friendly farming practices, and more.

Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon
By tapping into underground fungal networks, farmers are learning how to build lush, spongy soil that supports healthy plants and stores carbon underground.

Seeds From Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change
The hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops can teach us how to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future.

Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee
In the face of severe climate change, farmers, researchers, and coffee devotees are refocusing on agroforestry and developing hardier varieties and high-tech beanless brews to save our morning cup of Joe.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines: Charting the Future of Seaweed in the Face of Climate Change
This in-depth four-part series, produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, looks at kelp as a valuable regenerative crop for both U.S. coasts, tracing the rise of the industry and the challenges it faces in fulfilling its potential.

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
In this investigative series, we examine whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of pesticides and other chemicals, and whether the influence that chemical companies wield in the halls of power make it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit analyses.

The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms
As festivals celebrate the pawpaw for its tropical flavor and custardy texture, researchers explore its potential as a low-input, high-value crop that’s easy to grow organically.

Why Are US Agricultural Emissions Dropping?
The EPA’s annual emissions report points to declines in cattle numbers and fertilizer use, data that could inform major climate events this fall.

Climate on the Menu
In this five-part series, produced in partnership with Eater, we examine how climate change is driving a shift in farm relationships, supply chains, labor, waste disposal, and service, aiming to better understand the ongoing climate realities that restaurants face—and we ask ourselves: What is a climate-conscious restaurant, if it even exists?

Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change?
We examined their track records and party platforms to explore the approaches each might take if elected, and how those might impact food and agriculture.

Colorado’s Groundwater Experiment
Farmers in the San Luis Valley mount an all-hands effort to restore the shrinking aquifers that make agriculture possible here. Their tactic: groundwater conservation easements.

Utah Tries a New Water Strategy
Amid drought and demand, this state is trying to circumvent one of the oldest water rules of the West: ‘Use It or Lose It.’

Farm Runoff May Be Tied to Respiratory Illness Near the Salton Sea
New research on California’s largest landlocked lake suggests agricultural runoff in the water is feeding ‘extreme microbes’ that can emit harmful compounds into the air.

Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation
Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past.

The post Our Best Climate Reporting of 2024 appeared first on Civil Eats.

Our choices include an examination of climate-friendly eating, an argument for gift economies, a  guide to keeping bees, and a history of how chicken nuggets have shaped our food system—plus a variety of other memoirs, social histories, and journalistic endeavors. We also offer a number of outstanding cookbooks for fueling good eating, conversation, and connection around your table during this holiday season. 

We hope this guide can help anchor your reading time over the coming weeks and months—and that our favorite titles become yours as well. If you want to suggest a book we missed, please let us know in the comments.

Against the Grain: How Farmers Around the Globe Are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet
By Roger Thurow

Award-winning journalist Roger Thurow brings forth stories of Indigenous farmers in the Great Plains of the United States, the Highlands of Central America, Africa’s Rift Valley, and India’s Indo-Gangetic Plain who are employing a range of sustainable agricultural practices. Prioritizing ecological integrity and community health over yield, these farmers stay profitable by diversifying their crops, producing value-added products like jams and sauces, and building community support and social capital. Through captivating case studies, Thurow’s hopeful book showcases farmers who have boldly gone against the grain of modern agriculture orthodoxy and are instead embracing regenerative practices—like agroecology and permaculture—that restore soil health, enhance biodiversity, and promote resilience against climate change.

In the book, we meet Brandon Kaufman, a Kansas farmer who, after generations of family farming, plans “to get a divorce from wheat” to focus on perennials as a way to nurture the soil and the vital underground network of insects and microorganisms within it. We also meet the affable Kansas dairyman Jason Schmidt, who orchestrated the grazing patterns of his cows to maintain healthy carbon-capturing grasslands and offset methane emissions. Against the Grain serves as a powerful call to action, encouraging consumers, agriculturalists, and policymakers alike to preserve the land that sustains them, and the world, and ensure the viability of farms for generations to come. —Mira Ptacin

Beekeeping for Gardeners
By Richard Rickett

In the first line of Beekeeping for Gardeners, Rick Rickitt professes that the honey bee is a close second to a dog as man’s best friend. Clearly, bees are more than just a hobby for him. Rickitt’s enthusiasm is contagious—and quickly turned me from bee appreciator to bee booster. I also learned that managing an apiary is not for the faint of heart; it’s a perennial commitment. 

Beekeeping for Gardeners goes beyond a typical guide, serving as a veritable compendium of bee knowledge. Yes, you will learn how to build a hive and identify whether your bees are about to swarm and send off members of the colony to establish a new one. But you will also learn that bees have existed since the Cretaceous period, their small bodies evolved perfectly to collect pollen, and they communicate through dance. Even if you decide managing an apiary isn’t for you, you’ll find there’s more than one way to “keep” bees. Gardeners can plant alliums or forget-me-nots in the spring, for example, to attract honey bees and solitary bees, rather than tend a hive that might swarm. Filled with vivid and beautiful images along with charts and lists that serve as easy reference guides, this book can make a beekeeper out of anyone. —Elizabeth Doerr

Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking
By Nisha Vora

Nisha Vora resigned herself to eating bland foods when she first went vegan, which she did for ethical reasons. A lawyer turned vegan recipe developer and founder of the lifestyle website Rainbow Plant Life, Vora often found herself hungry—until she became a better cook and started exploring what she calls “big vegan flavor.” Eventually, the concept became a rallying cry—and the name of her new book. 

By properly layering flavors at every stage of the cooking process to give vegetables the respect she believes they deserve, Vora aims to show that it’s possible to create satisfying meals without relying on crutches like cheese and butter. She goes deep into how to use an arsenal of herbs, aromatics, spices, and chiles to punch up a dish, along with chapters on grains, everyday veggies, and easy-to-swap proteins. She also includes a section of “wow-worthy meals” that she says are “hearty enough for omnivores,” stacked with recipes like velvety white-bean and tomato stew and crispy smashed potatoes, plus sauces like avocado crema and a throwback ranch dressing.

Vora shares everything she has learned during her vegan journey and aspires to help readers become more intuitive cooks by providing the “how” and “why” behind her recipes. Her lessons on using acid or sugar to balance out flavors, for example, and how to achieve a creamy texture without dairy, can be applied well beyond the book’s 150 recipes. Vora hopes these tricks, tips, and recipes show readers that you don’t have to deprive yourself to eat “more plants and fewer animals.” —Tilde Herrera

The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos
By Mark J. Easter

An ecologist who studies the carbon footprint of food, Mark Easter found himself making grim climate calculations every time he ate dinner. Then, after visiting a thriving urban farm with a minimal carbon footprint, he began to wonder whether we could shift our climate trajectory by eating and farming differently. 

In The Blue Plate, Easter answers that question with urgency and enthusiasm, taking us on a tour of a half-dozen of our most staple foods and connecting each to its particular legacy of extractive agriculture: wheat and the depleted soils of the Midwest, desert vegetables that depend on river-ruining dams, shrimp raised in waters where carbon-rich mangrove forests once stood. Some of these stories are familiar now, but Easter finds the details that make them come alive and unpacks the science with the panache of a storyteller. Throughout, carbon-footprint bar charts show the multiple emission sources for each food, conveying the impact of an entire supply chain at a glance.

The book goes beyond the problems, too. Every chapter dives into alternate ways of raising those same foods. Easter visits farmers and ranchers who follow restorative techniques tuned to the specific needs of their land, and reports on regenerative breakthroughs like perennial farming as well as ancient Indigenous practices like agroforestry. In a final chapter, he brings it all together in a list of suggestions for low-carbon eating—a “blue plate” that could help preserve our future on this blue planet. —Margo True

Chile, Clove, and Cardamom
By Beth Dooley and Gary Paul Nabhan

As much of the planet moves toward a hotter, drier future, here’s a book that accepts the inevitable, but not with dread or gloom. Instead, the authors of Chile, Clove, and Cardamom argue that even in a ferocious climate, we can find a way to eat well by embracing ingredients and cuisines from the desert regions of the globe, from the Middle East to the southwestern United States. 

Plants and herbs from arid regions tend to smell and taste more pungent, we learn—partly because the heat and lack of moisture concentrates their flavor, but also because of the protective antioxidants these species produce to help them withstand blistering sun and drought. Potent aromas and flavors practically rise from the pages as you thumb through the recipes: sage, thyme, oregano, chile, roasted eggplant, tahini, pomegranates, wild greens, nutty tepary beans, and toasted mesquite flour, the essences of ancient desert cuisines. Culinary history, science, and ingredient notes enrich the reading, but the real joy of this book rests in the cooking. The recipes are friendly, concise, and doable, with suggested alternatives for less-available ingredients. They may even offer, as the authors suggest, “sufficient sensuous pleasures to assure us that our lives need not be impoverished as the planet’s climates change.” —Margo True

The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots
By Shane Mitchell

Writer Shane Mitchell was born and raised in New York, but her Southern roots run 11 generations deep in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. The Crop Cycle is a collection of reported essays Mitchell has penned over the last nine years (including a never-before-published piece about dessert) that explore consequential Southern crops—corn, peanuts, tomatoes, okra, peaches, onions, and watermelon, to name a few. 

In the essays, many of which have earned James Beard Foundation nominations or awards, Mitchell follows the crops back to their origins in places like the African continent, and then traces their often-fraught journeys to the American South. She also visits people who grow, prepare, and celebrate those foods today—like the owner of an East Charleston Gullah restaurant known for its crab rice, organizers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) fighting for the rights of tomato pickers, and the 19-year-old winner of the Miss Georgia Peach pageant. 

Throughout, Mitchell weaves in her own connection to the foods—we hear about her nana’s rice-cooking regimen, her father’s habit of storing Vidalia onion bulbs in used pantyhose, and her great-aunt’s penchant for gifting kumquats for Christmas. The colorful essays, which span centuries and continents but also feel present-tense and intensely Southern, explore the crops’ personal and cultural significance as well as complicated issues of race, class, labor, and land. —Christina Cooke

Elysian Kitchens: Recipes Inspired by the Traditions and Tastes of the World’s Sacred Spaces
By Jody Eddy

What would it mean to treat food as a miracle, as a gift of the universe received in wonder and gratitude? Jody Eddy spent a globetrotting year engaging with that question through the lens of religious communities. The result is Elysian Kitchens, a combination cookbook, travelogue, and testament to the common culinary wisdom of the planet’s faiths. 

Regardless of their theology, the holy men and women Eddy interviews believe in sourcing locally, eating with the seasons, avoiding waste, and sharing abundance with their communities. Those shared values blossom in a vibrant diversity of expressions, from the wild rice casserole prepared by the monks of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota to the hamutzim (pickled vegetables) served at a Jewish soup kitchen in New York—all of them captured with meditative joy by photographer Kristin Teig. 

Eddy acknowledges that organized religion has too often become a source of conflict in the world. Yet her quietly beautiful book shines with the hope that, by reminding people of their common need for daily bread, Earth’s spiritual traditions can forge a deeper human solidarity. —Daniel Walton

The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef: In Pursuit of the Ideal Meal
By Daniel J. Philippon

For his new book, University of Minnesota English professor Daniel Philippon gave himself the assignment to study the writings of Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, Italian gastronome Carlo Petrini, and California chef Alice Waters to understand how each contributed to the sustainable food movement over the last half century. The resulting treatise yields insights into farming (“the teeming wilderness that is the soil,” according to Berry), food distribution (“the umbilical cord” that Petrini says connects producers and consumers), and the tension between methods and ingredients in good cooking (Waters declares it’s vital to have “the freshest ingredients you could find, and then doing as little as possible to them”). 

Philippon doesn’t sit still while he’s reading. To gather present-day viewpoints on the three thinkers, he spends time at places relevant to each. We join him as he transplants flats of vegetables on a Wisconsin Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, meets a small-scale rice producer in Italy’s Piedmont, and prepares a market-to-table meal in Lyon, France. (Fulbright scholarships and visiting professorships have their benefits.) Philippon concludes that “the ideal meal” is not so much about the end product but the practices that yielded its creation: “practice makes the world,” he says. To that point, my heavily underlined copy of The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef is likely to become dog-eared as well. —Lynn Fantom

From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture
By Stephanie Anderson

The “bigger and cheaper” mentality of industrial agriculture incurs great environmental and social costs. But the growing number of women working to promote regenerative agriculture—loosely defined as growing practices that benefit soil health, water supply, and the larger climate ecosystem—offers hope for the future, author Stephanie Anderson argues in From the Ground Up. Women tend to prioritize collaboration, mentorship, and sustainability, Anderson notes, and those qualities are sorely needed as the agricultural sector faces challenges such as declining soil quality and the effects of climate change. 

From the Ground Up spotlights a wide range of women who are prioritizing a sustainability mindset when it comes to feeding their community and the wider world. Anderson weaves together engaging interviews with a range of women farmers, business leaders, and scientists with on-the-ground reporting and reflection on her own family’s involvement in industrial agriculture. Furthermore, she examines the roots of regenerative agriculture and the many contributions made by members of marginalized groups. In the end, From the Ground Up paints a hopeful picture of how agricultural practices could evolve for the better. —Katherine Kornei

Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health
Edited by James Merchant and Robert Martin

While this tome is as academic as its title suggests, it is an extremely thorough and well-documented work on the industrialization of meat and egg production. A collection of essays by academic, government, and NGO experts, it provides a timely look at the impact of our industrial food system on generational poverty, diminished civic life, reduced self-determination, and a growing lack of trust in government in rural communities. In excruciating detail, the book surveys the horrifying consequences of industrial farm animal operations: human and animal disease and mortality, antibiotic resistance, the suffering of animals and meat-packing workers, the near-serfdom of farmers to multinational corporations, vile air and water pollution, and the unredressed destruction of neighbors’ quality of life. It also reveals how we got here and why governments (federal and state) won’t do anything about this broken system. Finally, as a ray of hope, it offers some proven solutions for alleviating the worst of the system’s problems and—as a moonshot—steps to dismantle the system itself. —Anne N. Connor 

Conflict of Interest Statement: Connor was recently hired as a part-time science writer at Johns Hopkins University, whose press published this title, but has had no involvement with the book’s editors or authors.

In Search of the Perfect Peach: Why Flavour Holds the Answer to Fixing our Food System
By Franco Fubini 

Produce distributor Franco Fubini’s new book, In Search of the Perfect Peach, makes the case for a “flavor-first food system.” As founder and CEO of Natoora, a specialty produce company with outposts in Europe, Australia, and North America, Fubini with this book joins a larger conversation exploring fixes for a deeply broken system. He points to research on the “dilution effect” caused by growing for yield and shelf-stability in industrial agriculture. This causes nutrient-depleted soils and a loss of both flavor ans nutritional value, he claims, making a case that better-tasting produce is also more nutritious.

The titular, world-changing peach appears in the form of the Greta, an intensely flavorful, aromatic white peach from Campania, Italy, that inspired in him a deeper appreciation for rich flavor and hyper-seasonality. From there, Fubini takes readers on a tour—from tomato growers in Italy to flower farmers in Cornwall to citrus groves in California—while arguing that it’s possible to build a supply chain tailored around fresh, flavorful, high-quality produce. While the book would have benefitted from interrogating the role of class in how people approach conversations about fresh food, Fubini makes a compelling case for strengthening the connections between consumers and farmers. —s.e. smith

Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold Story of the Disappearing American Farmer
By Brian Reisinger 

As the world population grows toward 10 billion over the next quarter century, straining the global food system, growers face rising challenges, from labor shortages to climate change to a steady decline in farmable soil. While these problems increasingly make news headlines, the stories less often told are those of the farmers themselves. Writer and rural policy expert Brian Reisinger’s memoir is thus a rare find. The raw and unfiltered narrative spans four generations of his farming family, set against the backdrop of agricultural history that runs from the Great Depression through COVID. Highlighting the barriers that small farms face amid a growing world population and demand for food, Reisinger poses the question, “Will we make it?” And rightly so: Since 1982, the number of farms has declined by 7 percent between 2017 and 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

The Reisinger family’s journey into farming began in 1912, soon after his great-grandfather and grandmother emigrated from Bavaria, Germany, to Wisconsin. The young couple started a 180-acre dairy farm for livelihood to raise their 14 children. Each new generation inherited the farm and faced many hardships, from icy winters to the Farm Crisis of the 1980s and rapid changes in technology. Gripping stories point to how dangerous the profession can be—the author’s grandfather Albert fell 30 feet in a corn silo, breaking his back, and his parents Jim and Jean braved ice storms, illness, and the forced sale of their cows, followed by the struggle to return to dairy farming. Does the author ultimately take on the family farm? The read is well worth finding out. Moreover, we gain a much greater appreciation of American farmers and all they brave to produce the food we eat. —Amy Wu

Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation
By Eleanor Barnett

Spoiler alert: Food waste squanders resources, contributes to climate change, and plagues wealthy nations—especially (and counterintuitively) since the advent of refrigeration. Though it’s a familiar topic for many by now, Eleanor Barnett’s detailed storytelling makes food waste fascinating in Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation. From medieval England to Brexit and the pandemic, Barnett expertly rolls out the dough of U.K. history to prove that “if ‘you are what you eat,’ our values and culture are equally defined by what we don’t eat.” 

The book traces changing attitudes towards food waste through several centuries, and though the focus is on Great Britain, Barnett shows how the British culture of excess spread with the empire and persists in many ways to this day. Wasting food in 1500s England was, of course, a luxury. But the widespread practice of redistributing leftovers helped those in need and limited waste. Colonialism brought new, mind-boggling bounty, and with the Victorian onset of the “throwaway society,” leftovers were out and convenience was in. During the world wars, the U.K. government rallied citizens to again save those leftovers: Land Girls saved crops from rotting on farms; Pig Clubs fed kitchen scraps to swine to produce extra meat rations. But after World War II, Europeans wanted a “seat at the feast the Americans were hosting.” The Brits abolished public funding for food preservation in 1954. Then came refrigeration, plastics, the Green Revolution, and agricultural advances that changed how the world gets—and throws out—its food.

“‘The world produces enough food to feed everyone, if distributed equally,’” Barnett writes, quoting the founders of Food Not Bombs. Pandemic-era distribution efforts showed us what’s possible in terms of food rescue, and AI is already in the kitchen tracking scraps. Pick up Leftovers for motivation on reducing the muckpile. —Leorah Gavidor

Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
By Alice Driver

Investigative journalist Alice Driver cements her reputation as one of the foremost chroniclers of the perilous lives of food chain workers in her debut book Life and Death of the American Worker, a story of the unrealized promise of the American dream. This sweeping investigation closely follows a handful of immigrant and refugee workers subjected to merciless, regulations-skirting conditions while processing more than a hundred birds per minute at Tyson’s meatpacking plants in rural Arkansas, where Driver grew up.

Expanding on Driver’s award-winning Civil Eats investigation, the book reveals how Tyson’s meatpacking industry is structured to conceal injuries. Workers are directed to on-site nurses and company-approved doctors, all part of a vertically integrated healthcare system that downplays and ignores injuries—and even punishes workers for seeking medical help. There is an eviscerating quality to Driver’s prose as she renders in exacting detail the workers’ repetitive motions and neglected injuries. 

But this is not just the story of a corporation’s harrowing disregard for life; it is also about what Driver describes as the “moral beauty of the immigrants who process our nation’s meat,” like the women workers who joined together to teach each other how to stand up for their rights. Driver takes us inside the homes of workers, witnessing their daily rituals of survival and grief. In one especially haunting scene, a former Tyson worker leaves a “cup covered in red hearts full of fresh coffee for Plácido”—an offering to her husband who died of Covid-19 early in the pandemic. He was likely predisposed to the virus because his lungs had been engulfed in ammonia after a chloride spill at Tyson. Life and Death of the American Worker is essential reading for anyone who cares about the U.S. food system and the immigrant workers who sacrifice their health to make it possible. —Grey Moran

Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden
By Maria Rodale

Grass, mosquitos, vultures, and paper wasps are some of the 26 more-than-human kin with whom Maria Rodale converses in her Pennsylvania garden in Love, Nature, Magic. Head of the Rodale Institute and Rodale, Inc. publishing group, which specializes in works about nature, Rodale provides a 101-level glimpse of the shamanic journeying process, which traditionally involves interacting with the spirit world and other realms of consciousness to unlock power or information for healing or reunification. Unlike some practitioners, her version of journeying does not involve ingesting anything; rather, Rodale facilitates these experiences using sound—specifically a drum or rattle—as her shamanic guide. (Still other practitioners may use ecstatic dance as a method of transport.)

This tome, a peek into animism and pantheism, relates a series of essay-like journal entries from April 2021 to May 2022 that detail Rodale’s visits with the insects, plants, fauna, and fungi in her garden. Her journals expound upon the dialogues she carries out with her more-than-human kin, and the lessons she absorbs from  observing the ways they conduct their lives. Love, Nature, Magic is suited to readers who yearn for nature amid urban life, seeking to connect with the wildness that is already within them. Ultimately, this book answers the question: How can we co-exist more peaceably with nature by understanding the ways of nature? —Sarahlynn Pablo

The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between 
By Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho

Tu David Phu’s new cookbook is an homage to immigrant families—and mothers, in particular. The Top Chef alum, raised in Oakland, California, focuses on stories and recipes from Phú Quoc, an island in the Southwest of Vietnam where his parents are from.

The son of refugees, Phu grew up with his father, a fishmonger, and his mother, a seamstress. Several essays throughout the cookbook serve as a guide to his upbringing and ethos. For example, an essay on seafood sustainability covers not only where fish are caught, but also how using all parts of a fish is the way his family sustained themselves, like the many generations before them. The book was written with Soleil Ho, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist and the paper’s former food critic, and edited by Bryant Terry (Black Food, Vegan Soul Kitchen).  

In these pages, you will find recipes for Vietnamese hotpot soup made with salmon, a brined herring salad, and classics like pho ga, a chicken noodle soup. Tu shares Vietnamese staples, including a pickle of julienned daikon and carrots that pairs well with many dishes, and a simple lime and fresh-cracked pepper dipping sauce for seafood such as steamed crab that opens up the palate. Filled with colorful photos, the book will be a welcome addition for food lovers who want to expand their repertoire of Vietnamese dishes, from traditional recipes to “authentically inauthentic” chef creations. —Momo Chang

The Mighty Red
By Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Mighty Red, takes place in a fictional town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, a region famous for growing sugar beets. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, previously wrote about the rise of that crop as a commodity  and the bittersweet ways it changed life in the valley, in her 1986 novel The Beet Queen.

The Mighty Red takes place between 2008 and 2024, with a different cast of characters and in a new era of commodity agriculture. Where beet-growing once brought population growth and chain stores, now trucking, chemicals, and climate change surround the industry. The novel centers on a mixed-race character named Kismet, following both her love triangle with Gary, the son of an established farming family, and Hugo, a dropout autodidact, and the financial and relationship troubles of her beet-truck driver mother and theater-teacher father. Yet the valley and its ecosystem, especially its birds, drive the motion of the novel as much as its characters. Erdrich’s well-hewn skill for writing multigenerational dramas about the Native, European-descended, and mixed-race people of the upper Midwest, mixed with detailed and poignant ecological themes, makes for a layered, urgent, human story. —Caroline Tracey

My Regenerative Kitchen: Plant-Based Recipes and Sustainable Practices to Nourish Ourselves and the Planet
By Camilla Marcus

At a time when achieving systemic change in the food system can feel next to impossible, Camilla Marcus invites readers to focus on the good they can do within their own homes. In My Regenerative Kitchen, the chef and restaurateur draws on her experience as the founder of west~bourne, New York City’s first certified zero-waste eatery, to present a bevy of dishes that support sustainable farming through delicious cooking. Now living in California, Marcus curates an eclectic menu that integrates her home state’s produce (think avocado oil and Espelette chili peppers) with world influences, particularly Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Italian cuisines. 

For her, “regenerative” reflects agriculture that improves soil health, protects water and biodiversity, and minimizes both waste and chemical inputs. In keeping with that philosophy, her recipes are all plant-based, often feature cover crops like sorghum and buckwheat, and are designed to maximize the use of every ingredient. I especially appreciated the zero-waste “pro tips” sprinkled throughout the text, such as saving the boiled kombu seaweed from Japanese dashi broth to transform into furikake seasoning. Marcus’ earnest writing style, combined with Ben Rosser’s airy film photography, lend the book a certain West Coast utopian vibe, and it’s clear she believes in the potential of individuals to shift food culture. “Together we can regenerate for the next generation,” she urges. “So, in our home kitchens, let’s be radicals, naturally.” —Daniel Walton

Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet
By Patrick Dixon

Few foods are more quintessentially American than the chicken nugget. In his debut book, Nuggets of Gold, historian Patrick Dixon offers a primer on the history of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the poultry industry, and the chicken nugget.

In 1923, a Delaware farmer accidentally received 10 times as many chickens as she ordered. Instead of returning the chickens, the farmer decided to expand her operation, figuring she might be able to return a decent profit. And she could. By 1926, she had 10,000 birds. Swiftly, an era of CAFOs began in poultry production, which still reigns today. In the post-World War II era, concerns about global food shortages and population booms made “ending hunger” a key focus of U.S. agricultural and foreign policy. The chicken nugget was born during this time—a solution to using parts of a chicken typically wasted in processing and an ideal consumerist option in a growing convenience-oriented economy. Made of “further processed chicken,” nugget production involves the “reclamation of meat that took place once the most popular cuts—breasts, wings, and legs—had been removed from the carcass,” Dixon explains. Increased nugget demand, driven by McDonald’s and other fast-food chains, meant increased demand for cheap chickens. Through the rise of chicken production and consumption, Dixon masterfully illustrates 20th and 21st century U.S. food history—and the evolution of extractive capitalism.

In Nuggets of Gold, which provides a multi-layered narrative through the analysis of historical documents, Dixon argues that the workers on farms, within processing plants, and on the meatpacking floor should be at the core of the poultry industry story. In the epilogue, he writes: “As a thousand poultry lines spun on into the future, nearly two hundred birds per minute hurtling along on a fast track from a cage to a cardboard box in a truck, the human damage that was the untold price of these journeys remained unaccounted for.” —Nina Elkadi

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens
By Ashleigh Shanti

The past few years have seen a handful of cookbook authors try to change perceptions of Black cuisine, rejecting old stereotypes that reduce the flavors of an entire diaspora to a few Southern dishes. Top Chef alum Ashleigh Shanti is the latest to add her voice to this conversation with her debut cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens.

A Black, queer, Southern chef raised in Virginia and now based in Asheville, North Carolina, Shanti takes readers on a journey through five southern microregions—Backcountry, Lowcountry, Midlands, Lowlands, and Homeland—showcasing their distinct food traditions. Each section honors a woman in her family whose unique cooking style shaped Shanti’s palate and culinary career. Classic recipes like stewed tomatoes, cornbread, Leather Britches (dried green beans), and potlikker meet more personal takes like Spicy Beet Chow Chow, Vinegar-Cured Trout and Sour Apples, and savory Cabbage and Mushroom Pancakes. 

With 125 recipes and stunning photography by Johnny Autry, Our South is both a traditional cookbook and coffee table book, making it a perfect centerpiece for any kitchen or living space. Whether you’re a seasoned cook or a culinary novice, Shanti’s book offers something for everyone, combining small bites and big meals with heartfelt anecdotes that all celebrate the rich cultural tapestry of the South. —Nicole J. Caruth

The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again
By Mariana Chilton

Mariana Chilton’s new book is a necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the issue of hunger in the United States. Chilton, a professor of health management and policy at Pennsylvania’s Drexel University with a master’s degree in epidemiology, has founded numerous anti-hunger programs like the Center for Hunger-Free Communities and Witnesses to Hunger, and has advised Congress on how to end hunger in America. With The Painful Truth about Hunger in America, she helps us wrap our heads around how, even in 2024, getting a nutritious and affordable meal in the United States can be so damn hard.

The book is not for the faint of heart, both for its painful subject matter and its academic tone (complete with four appendices). But to really tackle the complicated issue of food insecurity in the U.S., we cannot overlook Chilton’s wealth of understanding. The text journeys from personal stories—her own, and those of numerous Black and brown women—to the political and the spiritual. Chilton leaves no stone unturned in surveying how systemic biases and institutional greed have exacerbated the solvable problem of hunger in America. She links abuse and gender-based violence to hunger, a connection rarely made in conversations regarding malnutrition.

Furthermore, Chilton wants readers to understand the systemic nature of those biased inequities, which riddle all facets of a person’s life. In this, she challenges those who point to welfare dependency and the abundance of food as evidence the issue of hunger is no longer pressing. Chilton’s new work on a stunningly persistent American problem is paramount. —Paolo Bicchieri

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch
By Andrea Freeman

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a haunting read. Taking its title from George Washington’s 1779 command to destroy Indigenous harvests and “prevent their planting more,” this book details the use of food as a political weapon in America. Freeman, a law professor who coined the term “food oppression,” traces our country’s significant racial health disparities to U.S. food law and policy. Using research and centering the stories of individuals, she creates a narrative that shows the multiple roles food has played and continues to play in subjugating Indigenous, enslaved, and Latinx (Freeman prefers the term “Latine”) people.

Freeman offers thorough histories of the privations of Indian boarding schools and commodity diets, plantation feeding methods, and the home economics efforts used to “Americanize” immigrants. She writes about milk as a marker of whiteness and white superiority, compiling data that shows the narrow band of lactose tolerance that makes the popular and sometimes-force-fed drink harmful to many people. And she highlights a campaign started by Toronto high schoolers to boycott fast food, with images of a McDonald’s French fry box filled with bullets; the USDA, she writes, would not fund such food truth campaigns, because of the unbreakable bonds between industry and government. In the last chapter, she argues that health equity should be tackled in the courts in the same way as civil rights issues, in order to remedy the impacts of U.S. food policy. —Amy Halloran

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s small but mighty argument for gift economies. “I’ve never quite understood something about human economics, and that is the primacy of scarcity as an organizing principle,” she writes. Schooled by plants, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass understands abundance and gratitude as fundamental instead. She asks us to consider the currency of cooperative relationships as an alternative to the market economy, posing her reasoning under the generous berry-like fruits of the serviceberry, a small deciduous tree or shrub that blossoms white in spring. 

Native to the Americas, the plant is significant to Indigenous diets as one of the main ingredients in pemmican, a staple of dried berries and meat. Also known as shadbush and shadblow, for blooming during the time shad fish once spawned, the plant—important to many cultures—has other names, too, like sugarplum, sarvis, juneberry, and saskatoon berry. Using examples from ecological economics—not to be confused with environmental economics, which is transactional in nature—Kimmerer lovingly offers the serviceberry and its web of interdependent relationships, which include soil and birds, as a necessary way forward. Why not choose economic biomimicry and cooperation as a model for thriving? —Amy Halloran

Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming
By Leah Garcés 

In Transfarmation, Leah Garcés criss-crosses the United States helping farmers transition from industrial animal agriculture to raising hemp and crops people can eat. As president and CEO of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has long been a leader in the animal protection movement: her work led to a New York Times’ 2021 op-ed about the harms of the chicken industry. In 2019, Mercy for Animals founded Transfarmation, a program that helps farmers find alternatives to factory farming, which it views as harmful to animals, the environment, farmworkers, and rural communities.

This quick read, which serves as a primer for that project, is much like Manifesto for a Moral Revolution by Jacqueline Novogratz, as the writing of a leader who spends more time at work in the field than on email. In the book, Garcés helps chicken and pig operations transition to clean, climate-friendly crops including hemp and mushrooms and adopts a few chickens along the way, including one lucky hen aptly named Henrietta. In addition to her accounts of farm visits, Garcés provides hard-to-swallow stats, well-written personal reflections on family and the future, and actionable plans for what farmers—and eaters—can do to build better food systems. —Paolo Bicchieri     

Other Notable Titles

Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
By Caroline Eden

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
By Olivia Laing

Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge, and Resistance
Edited by Colleen Hammelman, Charles Z. Levkoe, and Kristin Reynolds

Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook
By Sarah Raven

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World
By Roger Crowley

Our Recent Books Coverage

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens
By Ashleigh Shanti
The new cookbook from ‘Top Chef’ alum Ashleigh Shanti features recipes from five micro-regions of the American South.

Group Living and Other Recipes
By Lola Milholland
In this memoir of communal living, which celebrates families, relationships, and food, Milholland explores how sharing meals and living space deepens our ability to connect to one another.

Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America
By Sonja Trom Eayrs
A family law attorney chronicles her family’s battle against factory hog farms in Minnesota and the corporate takeover of rural America.

The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future
By Peter Gleick
A water expert discusses agriculture in the Western U.S., the driest part of the country, and how to move toward a sustainable future.

Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere
By Rob Jackson
A climate scientist dives deep into the climate and health impacts of gas stoves and other food-and-climate solutions.

The post Our 2024 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide appeared first on Civil Eats.

As a nonprofit newsroom, we depend on your support to fund everything we do. Please consider donating to Civil Eats on Giving Tuesday. Your donation will automatically be doubled through our participation in NewsMatch, a national initiative to support journalism that strengthens democracy. Through December 31, individual donations up to $1,000, including memberships, will be matched through the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). Donations of $100 or more also will include a sustainably sourced, limited-edition Civil Eats tote bag.

As we approach 2025 and a new administration, we are doubling down on our commitment to produce critical, investigative journalism on the American food system, and to hold the powerful accountable. We will continue to also produce solutions-oriented journalism, which spotlights efforts  by communities to address the food system’s most pressing problems at a time when trust in our democratic institutions will be tested.

With your help, Civil Eats will be able to dig deeper into these emerging issues and continue this vital work. From everyone at Civil Eats, thank you for your unwavering support.

We proudly share with you our 2024 awards and nominations:

We won a 2024 excellence in newsletters award for our members-only newsletter, The Deep Dish, from the Online News Association (ONA). We were also a finalist for general excellence in online journalism (micro newsroom) award from ONA, which honors excellence in digital journalism.

We won four awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

• Former Contributing Editor Lee van der Voo won in the Business, Including Marketing category for reporting on the abusive and, in some cases, deadly working conditions of marine observers in the tuna industry.
• Contributor Alice Driver received the Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism for her reporting on the Honduran spiny lobster industry, included in our investigative series Walanthropy.
• Former Senior Reporter Wesley Brown won in the Social Change category for his story on the historically systemic racism behind the USDA’s lack of financial support for Black farmers.
• Contributor Daniel Walton won an honorable mention in the Food and Drink category for his story about farmers who see untapped potential in wild tree crops like acorn and black walnut.

Staff Reporter Grey Moran won a Covering Climate Now award for food and agriculture reporting for their story, “How Crop Insurance Prevents Some Farmers From Adapting to Climate Change.” The judges noted, “In this stellar investigation, journalist Grey Moran shows how the program often, ironically, fails to benefit—and can even penalize—farmers adopting climate-friendly practices endorsed by the very same USDA. Following publication, the department said it would reexamine practices dictated by the crop insurance program and better align them with the agency’s climate goals. Stories about niche government policy often struggle to engage audiences, but this one is imminently accessible. One judge put Moran’s accomplishment succinctly: ‘A compelling, readable, sharable story about crop insurance? Amazing.’”

Contributor Kate Nelson won second place in health reporting in the 2024 Indigenous Media Awards for her story about an Indigenous-led team transforming a Minneapolis Superfund site into an urban farm. Nelson also received an honorable mention for best environmental coverage for her story about how Alaska’s climate-driven fisheries collapse is devastating Indigenous communities.

Senior Staff Reporter and Contributing Editor Lisa Held and Contributor Ciara O’Brien were finalists in the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) 2024 Dateline Awards in the Online, Non-Breaking News category for their reporting on virtual fences for livestock and a new Lidl supermarket, respectively. Photojournalist Jake Price was a finalist in the online photography category for his photo essay on DC Central Kitchen’s efforts to fight summer hunger in the nation’s capital.

Staff Reporter Grey Moran won first place for Print Features from SPJ’s Louisiana chapter for their reporting on the challenges U.S. shrimpers endure in the face of cheap imports.

Staff Reporter and Contributing Editor Lisa Held and contributors Alice Driver and Aaron Van Neste were finalists for a James Beard Foundation Media Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting for our 2023 investigation series on Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation, Walanthropy. Contributor Virginia Gewin was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Media Award for Excellence in Health Reporting for her story about toxins and pollution around California’s Salton Sea.

From North American Agricultural Journalists (NAAJ), Staff Reporter Moran won first place in the 2024 Writing Contest for News Reporting for their story, “How Crop Insurance Prevents Some Farmers from Adapting to Climate Change.” Moran also won third place from NAAJ in the Next Generation/Young Writer category for their reporting. Held won third place from NAAJ for Feature Reporting for her story, “Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape,’” part of our 2023 Walanthropy investigative series. Both Moran and former Executive Editor Twilight Greenaway received honorable mentions in the same category for their reporting on paraquat and regenerative chicken farming, respectively. Held also won an honorable mention from NAAJ in the Ongoing Reporting/Series category for her reporting on the farm bill.

Contributor Alice Driver won the Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for her book, The Life and Death of the American Worker, which includes reporting previously published in our investigative series, Injured and Invisible.

Contributor Gabriel Pietrorazio won an honorary mention from the Military Reporters and Editors for his reporting on food insecurity in the military.

We’re thankful that our work has been recognized. But we’re not on this mission alone, so please join us and consider donating, becoming a member, or giving a gift membership today. From all of us at Civil Eats, thank you for being part of our community.

The post This #GivingTuesday, Help Us Celebrate Civil Eats’ Big Wins appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/11/13/food-and-agriculture-visionaries-look-forward/ https://civileats.com/2024/11/13/food-and-agriculture-visionaries-look-forward/#comments Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:33 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=59045 Now, a week past the 2024 election, we’re at the brink of momentous shifts in how our food system functions—and for whom. Food and ag organizations across the country are weighing in on what the election could bring. What better time to ask our Civil Eats advisors and other leading thinkers in food about how […]

The post The Path Forward for Food and Ag appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Civil Eats has covered the U.S. food system for nearly 16 years. In that time, we’ve been at the forefront of reporting on the policies—some arcane, some mundane—that impact everyone’s most basic daily need: food. From the farm bill to food justice to deep coverage of how the pandemic cratered our food system, we’ve pursued complicated and often underreported stories while lifting up underrepresented voices. Throughout, we’ve highlighted solutions to daunting challenges and interviewed the people working to create change.

Now, a week past the 2024 election, we’re at the brink of momentous shifts in how our food system functions—and for whom. Food and ag organizations across the country are weighing in on what the election could bring. What better time to ask our Civil Eats advisors and other leading thinkers in food about how they’re responding to this moment, what to expect from the new administration, and how to move forward? Below, they’ve generously shared their thoughts and insights on the future of food and ag during Trump 2.0. We encourage you to continue this conversation by adding your voices in the comments section.

Chef José Andrés, founder of the Global Food Institute at George Washington University

Food is not just fuel—it’s a powerful way to strengthen communities, rebuild economies, heal the planet, and improve health. But as a country, we often fail to give food the importance it deserves, and too many policies in Washington overlook the real solutions I see in small towns and big cities all across America.

The current political climate of division and exclusion leaves everyday Americans—hardworking farmers, first-generation restaurant owners, children in need of a healthy school meal—vulnerable. When policies fail to recognize their struggles, it isn’t just an oversight; it’s a neglect of the people who make up the fabric of our nation.

But I know we can prioritize food in a way that brings dignity and prosperity to all. That’s why I created the Global Food Institute at George Washington University to help America’s leaders—in government, business, and nonprofits—use food as a force for change. We must ensure that those who feed America are able to feed themselves. This is especially true for immigrant communities who keep our food system functioning, from fields to kitchens. Without them, the system collapses. Fair labor practices and common-sense immigration reform are the solutions, not deportations and family separations that destabilize our country and betray its ideals.

In my work responding to emergencies with World Central Kitchen, I don’t see red or blue communities; just neighbors feeding neighbors. Hunger knows no political party, and access to food should never be withheld or politicized. Working together, I know we can tackle hunger and the many problems it represents, such as poverty and poor health.

I believe we’ll find our strength in building longer tables where everyone is welcome. By coming together around food, we can find common ground and fuel ourselves to continue fighting for a healthier America. This is a moment to choose compassion over division, to recognize that food is a right, not a privilege. Together, let’s make food our first act of solidarity.

Mark Bittman, author and journalist

The plan “before” was to make sure that SNAP benefits remained intact, that the few significant steps forward by the Biden administration in food and farming were preserved, that conditions for immigrants would not worsen, that food workers’ rights would be improved, that newly invigorated agencies would take tougher stands on the uses of pesticides and antibiotics, and that there’d be some progress in supporting new and would-be farmers, marginalized farmers, and farmers who dare to practice agroecology.

Most of those forward-looking goals will have to be pared back. The most important fights are likely to be around defending farmworkers’ and other foodworkers’ right to stay in the United States; against absurd protectionist tariffs; to protect SNAP, and farm conservation programs, and anything progressive that’s happened in USDA; and to continue to hammer home the reality of the need to deal with the climate crisis.

We might have imagined we were finished with some of that, and indeed, a Harris administration likely would have given us opportunities to push a progressive food and farming agenda to a new point, especially because we imagined less energy would have been spent on immigrants’ rights, the climate struggle, protecting SNAP.

We know that Trump is mercurial and unpredictable, and we don’t know where the emphases of his new team will lie. What we think we know—are pretty sure of—is that the actions of the new government will have to be fought with renewed energy and that we will have victories amid our defeats.

We must be prepared for opportunities as they arise, and to find new battlegrounds on which we might win. But at the very least we can be pretty sure we’re going to be struggling to hold the line against cuts in entitlement programs like SNAP, and against the threat and promise of mass exportations, which are inhumane, immoral, and even unpractical. This food system cannot work without foreign-born workers.

Navina Khanna, executive director and co-founder, HEAL Food Alliance

This is not the outcome we wanted, but it is an outcome we’re prepared for. The deep love each of us holds for our communities, our shared vision of what is possible, and the ways that we work together continues to give me hope for the fight that is to come.

HEAL launched just weeks after Trump took office in 2017, and since then, we’ve seen time and again that in moments of crisis, organizations across the movement have come together to block the worst outcomes, protect each other and our wins, and build a future in which each of us can thrive. I have so much confidence that we will continue to do so, but we need to be organized.

For example, there are very real threats already being made to immigrant communities, including food and farmworkers. Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who is expected to be named deputy chief of staff for policy in the next term, never really went away, but with him back in the administration, we can expect further attempts to roll back support for BIPOC producers. We know that SNAP and school meals are at risk.

This moment calls on us to show up together. We need to stay connected, to deepen our relationships with each other, and to be ready to mobilize when our communities come under attack. This moment depends on all of us bringing our strengths—communications prowess, legal expertise, organizing skills, financial resources, ancestral knowledge—to the fight.

And even as we fight the worst, now is also a time for us to continue to build a new world. As a movement, folks organizing for food and farm justice have long imagined and cultivated systems that exist beyond and outside of a political system that was never designed for life to thrive.

May we continue to nourish and grow what we are building, and with our blood and political ancestors at our back, to claim power with our people.

Anna Lappé, executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food

There’s a lot about the next Trump Administration that has me deeply concerned, from the implications of electing a climate denier to the White House to the possibility of his making good on his dark promises to deport millions of our friends and neighbors, defund the World Health Organization, and much more. But I’m particularly focused on what this administration will mean for our collective efforts to make our food systems healthier, more resilient, and fairer, particularly in taking on the corporate consolidation that’s increasing prices and giving us less choice.

In the weeks just before the election, the voices of the Make America Healthy Again Trump backers, fueled by millions in dark money, were telling us that Trump will take on the pesticide industry and toxics in food, will tackle junk food, and much more. I and many colleagues were dubious about the proclamations: Trump’s track record points in the opposite direction. His decision to appoint a former tobacco lobbyist with ties to the ultra-processed foods industry as Chief of Staff seems to indicate our concerns were well-founded.

With the election behind us, it’s important to look ahead and be clear-eyed about what this administration will try to do (see this insightful take from the Union of Concerned Scientists) and support the groups and media outlets (like, ahem, Civil Eats) that will help us make sense of the implications of this administration’s actions and what we can do to exert our voices for what we believe in. We can also work to ensure that the litany of perilous possibilities under the Trump Administration do not paralyze us with fear or drain us with despair.

Instead, try internalizing the portmanteau of one of my favorite writers, Astra Taylor, who gives us this twist on labor activist Joe Hill’s line “Don’t mourn, organize!” As Astra notes, we can do both. We can mourganize.

Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health emerita, New York University

I wish I had a crystal ball to say how food and agriculture issues would play out over the next four years, but all I have to go on is what Trump and his followers say. If we take them at their word, then we must expect them to implement their Project 2025 plan, which replaces one deep state with another that favors conservative business interests and ideology. This calls for replacing staff in federal agencies with Trump loyalists and dismantling them, stopping the USDA from doing anything to prevent climate change, reforming farm subsidies (unclear how), splitting the farm bill to deal separately with agricultural supports and SNAP, reducing SNAP participation by reinstating work requirements and reducing the Thrifty Food Plan, and making it more difficult for kids to participate in school meals.

On the other hand, some of the plans make sense: eliminating checkoff programs and repealing the sugar program, for example. So do some of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s goals: Make America Healthy Again by focusing on chronic disease prevention, getting harmful chemicals out of kids’ foods, and getting rid of conflicts of interest among researchers and agency staff. It’s too early to know how much of this is just talk, but I’m planning to do what I can to oppose measures I view as harmful, but to strongly support the ones I think will be good for public health.

Raj Patel, ​​author, activist, and research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin

Milei, Musk, and Modi. Now Trump. It’s little comfort that inflation has caused a global mood of anti-incumbency after COVID. When President Biden said he’d run again, my heart sank, and only bobbed up again briefly when it became clear, after the first debate, that his campaign was doomed. Who knows what might have happened with a Democratic candidate who could credibly have recognized the pain that inflation had caused the working class, who acknowledged the rising rates of child hunger after the lapse of the pandemic-era SNAP expansion, and who could have offered a credible alternative to the Biden-Harris administration? (The anti-price-gouging Harris disappeared quickly.)

So, now we have a second Trump term, set to be crueler and more destructive than the first. These waters aren’t uncharted, though. Argentinian anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei won a mandate in late 2023 to take a chainsaw to government. He did, and has since laid off tens of thousands of government employees. Hunger rates are soaring. He’s now flying over to meet Musk and Trump to advise them on how to do the same.

Milei isn’t the only relevant international leader. Modi is too. In India, fascism has squatted for over a decade under Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist government. The persecution of enemies within has left dozens of journalists behind bars, defunded civil society, and created a permanent climate of fear for minority groups, particularly Muslims. Under cover of this nationalism, Modi is passing laws for his billionaire friends and gutting the parts of government that stand in the way. This is part of a broader right-wing international movement: the Atlas Network’s fingerprints are all over Project 2025.

If they’re coordinating and learning, we should be too. There’s much to study.

Look to how Milei’s project was frustrated in Argentina by widespread protests and strikes. His initial and far more radical project couldn’t advance because of overwhelming public opposition, led by unions and civil-society groups. In India, the plan to remove certain kinds of price supports and government markets for farmers resulted in the world’s largest protest, involving 250 million people, led by farmers’ movements but soon spreading across society. It was successful: Modi had to back down, marking a turning point that would result in his losing full control of government in the subsequent elections.

Here in the U.S., although we lack the union density and peasant movements, we are not without hope. The pandemic was an invitation to relearn the arts of mutual aid and protection. We’ll need those skills, together with the more atrophied ones of international solidarity, against the Trump administration. Protecting the families targeted for deportation is a moral calling, and it’ll take organization—local, national, and international—to fight back. But there’s little choice: This is the fight of and for our lives.

Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, author of Farming While Black and Black Earth Wisdom

A few days after the crushing election results were announced, community members gathered at Soul Fire Farm for our annual gleaning day –harvesting every last morsel of abundance from the fecund acres and taking it home to share with our communities. Through tears of heartbreak, rage, and overwhelm, we took note that the land continued to do what she always does–generously create life and beauty. So must we. Here’s how.

Squad Up. We protect us. We need to squad up to directly protect people who are targeted—immigrants, farm workers, queer and trans folks, the Muslim community, et al. We can’t have depleted ranks at this moment, so the circle of “we” must widen to include others who may not be in our ideologically pure echo chambers. Empire thrives on atomization, division, and isolation. We resist by building trust and coalitions, engaging in mutual aid, organizing outside the system, and creating unified strategy. Follow and support the campaigns of @undocuprofessionals @nativeorganizersalliance @indigenousrising @lylajune @ibramxk @adriennemareebrown @justice4blackgirls @zhaabowekwe

Ramify. We need to branch out. Remember that the butterfly of transformative social change has two wings, and electoral politics sits on just one of them. On the other: Grassroots reform and harm reduction. We won’t give up on policy pressure and defending civic institutions in the next four years, but we also need to strengthen and fortify our other strategies. It’s up to us, BIPOC farmers, earth workers, queer folks, women and nonbinary people, working class folks, immigrants, and all people of conscience to organize, heal, and build together. Check out this advice from Waging Nonviolence. 

Root in Love. Hate will not prevail in the end. There is time for grief, rage, and heartbreak, but it is not a time to blame other demographic groups in the community for this painful outcome. Don’t let them change you, exhaust you, and make you hate. Our playbook’s DNA is love and interdependence. With one another’s support, we will carry on in the long struggle for liberation. 

Zoom Out. The world we are dreaming does not settle for having a slightly more benign power-holder on the throne–it dispenses with the throne all together. It’s a world free of colonialism, militarized violence, capitalist greed, hatred of the perceived other, supremacy, and plunder of Mother Earth. It’s a world of compassion, justice, and interdependence. This work is a marathon relay, not a solitary sprint. Our ancestors have faced the burning of the world time and again, and they continued to carry seeds, sing songs, nurse children, and listen to our more-than-human kin that point the way. We are not to give up. We are to continue step by step, hand in hand, hearts leading the way. 

Michael Pollan, author, journalist

I’ll be closely watching the development (or abandonment) of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda set forth by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Leaving aside his vaccine and fluoride nuttiness, Kennedy injected into the campaign a whole set of concerns about food and health in children that resonated, especially with mothers: ultra-processed foods in school lunch; childhood cancer and chronic disease; the reliance on drugs to insure health rather than diet; the need to reform agricultural policy to improve public health. Trump picked up on this late in the campaign and promised to give RFK Jr. the authority to implement his agenda.

Trump did surprisingly well with mothers, and MAHA could well be the reason. I seriously doubt Trump will keep his promise to Kennedy—Big Food and Pharma would rebel, and surely he’s more committed to deregulation than public health. But already Joel Salatin, the regenerative farmer, has been asked to serve as an advisor in the USDA. What happens to MAHA—an issue that long ago should have belonged to the Democrats—promises to be one of the more interesting stories of the next few years.

Ashanté M. Reese, author, associate professor, department of African and African diaspora studies, the University of Texas at Austin

After I saw the election results and after I’d read texts from the wee hours of the morning, I sent a text of my own: “We for sure have a [mandate] and it’s been consistent: take care of each other. In very real ways. Real care happens at the community scale. Governments can make that easier or harder. But they can’t stop it from happening.”

This is what I believe to my very core, and this is what I will continue to be invested in. There is no way to avoid the reality of what elections mean for our movements and ourselves. This administration has pledged to destroy the earth, continue to pillage and plunder other parts of the world, and rip through the few social safety nets we still have. That is scary. But imperial power isn’t the only form of power.

My hope is that what we are calling a moment turns out to be more than a simple blip in history. My hope is that more people will reckon with a fundamental reality that the state and policy have failed to make equity and liberation priorities. That is not likely to change. My hope is that we coalesce around the belief that now is the time to collaborate and imagine and experiment and fail and build the most radical version of collective society we can. My hope is that we practice collaboration, imagining, experimenting, and building at every scale of our lives; that we do not cede that sacred, life-sustaining work to the state.

But we cannot build on a large scale what we do not practice at an everyday scale. To me, this means that the building blocks of justice and liberation—in the food system and otherwise—are organized, rearranged, and laid in our organizations, in our neighborhoods, in our families, and beyond. I am orienting my work and whole being towards intentionally gathering and building right where I am. I hope you are, too.

Ruth Reichl, writer, cook, editor

My fear is that Trump really will carry out his threat to deport all undocumented immigrants. It will, of course, be a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions.

Beyond that, the impact on our food system will be catastrophic. Our entire food system relies on the work of undocumented immigrants. Without them we will no longer be able to grow food (as opposed to commodities) in this country. Commodity crops—wheat, corn, soy and the like—can be harvested by machines, but the produce that we eat requires human harvesters. The plain fact is that Americans will not do that work.

Even if they can find people willing to harvest their crops, independent regenerative farmers across the country will be competing with foreign farmers who pay their workers very little. This cheap produce will flood the markets and put American farmers out of business.

We will then be completely dependent upon imported produce that has very little nutritional value, creating an even larger crisis of obesity and diabetes. Combined with the possible end of the Affordable Care Act, this will create a serious national health crisis.

Restaurants, which also rely on undocumented immigrants, will be stressed by the new policies too. Prices will rise, and a huge proportion of American restaurants will go out of business—leaving us with a thriving fast food system that relies on commodity crops and robot workers.

I plan to spend my time trying to make people understand how important our food choices are to our health, our communities, and our environment. And trying to persuade them that paying more for food is ultimately a bargain.

Teresa Romero, president, United Farm Workers

Farmworkers of all immigration statuses are continuing to work to feed America today, just like they do every day. Farmworkers don’t care if the food they are picking is going to end up on a Democrat or Republican’s table—they just want to be paid fairly and treated with dignity for their essential work and go home safely to their families each night.

Right now, many farmworkers are fearful. They worry about being separated from their children, or the holes in their communities that would be left by mass detention or deportation. Yet, most have lived through one Trump presidency already. They have deep and strong roots in the country which their labor feeds. And they know this country’s agricultural economy would collapse without them. Farmworkers are resilient. They have to be.

The United Farm Workers (UFW) will continue to organize, helping farmworkers to empower themselves. The threat of deportation is commonly used to keep workers afraid, but our worker leaders are courageous. We will look to the wider labor movement and our movement’s many supporters to stand in solidarity with immigrant workers and refuse to allow them to be intimidated into accepting unjust or dangerous working conditions.

We will also continue our advocacy efforts, both large and small. The UFW has always worked to protect farmworkers. We will continue to do absolutely everything we can, but we can’t do it alone. We will need support.

Ricardo Salvador, advisor, Union of Concerned Scientists

The second Trump administration was voted in because of avian influenza. Here’s how that worked: As numerous post-mortems have documented, significant numbers of 2020 Democratic voters shifted to the Republican column in 2024, and their top issue was the economy. Specifically, “about 9 in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the cost of groceries.” Eggs are the most cited example of food prices gone wild, because anyone who shops has seen their cost rise 85 percent over the past year. But food costs don’t stem from President Biden’s mysterious failure to twiddle a Food Price Knob in the Oval Office. Instead, they reflect the practices and values of an industrial food system operating within a highly distorted market system.

We depend on a concentrated, specialized, and linear food system that is easily disrupted, most notably as a pandemic, regional wars, and drought coincided over the past four years. Specifically, the model of producing eggs in massive facilities housing millions of laying hens, and concentrating those facilities geographically, leads to periodic outbreaks and the rapid spread of highly contagious diseases such as avian flu. Millions of hens must be euthanized, and facilities must be closed and sanitized to attempt to eliminate the contagion. Which is exactly what happened in Colorado this past summer, constraining supply, driving up prices, and bringing us to the present straits.

The outcome is that, a week past the election, rather than working on policies to transform the food system, President-Elect Trump is rapidly assembling a governing team to deliver measures that played well on the campaign trail but will exacerbate high food prices by further reducing the supply of eggs, dairy, fruits, vegetables, and meat. This will most certainly result from his promised deportation and restrictive immigration programs. His doubling down on the fossil-fuel economy and sanctioning the repurposing of “climate-smart” funding at the Department of Agriculture will further affect future food prices by accelerating the disruption of the predictable weather patterns that make crop production possible.

A lesson well known to Civil Eats readers is that food literacy matters. This election turned on a series of false narratives foisted on the electorate, with those about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and “Kamala Harris’ policies” being directly responsible for high egg (and food) prices. As our leading food voices have not tired of reminding us, competent food and agriculture discourse needs to be part of the nation’s policy conversations at the highest levels. And those of us in the business of informing public perceptions and narratives about food, from scientists to experienced practitioners, need to redouble our efforts—and correct misinformation wherever it occurs. As we have seen, the costs of not doing so are existential.

Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse restaurant

I know that there are many things to fear: I am worried about international separation. And global connections, which are so important for climate and for peace.

But I still believe in the power of gathering and the education of the senses—and I believe that the public school system could transform agriculture, health, and education overnight.

We have a lot of enlightened politicians still in power. It might not seem like it right now, but they are there, and more may be coming. I have known the farmer Joel Salatin for years and to think that he might be an advisor to the USDA is amazing.

My work moving forward will be exactly what I have been doing and have believed in for decades, with this added mandate: Could we use the new interest and energy in regenerative farming that has swelled over the past decade? Could we harness it to support school-purchased food directly from local, regenerative, and organic farmers and ranchers who take care of the land and their farmworkers? I believe School Supported Agriculture could be a national and global policy that could address the climate crisis and boost local economies immediately. This is what I continue to call a “delicious revolution.”

On October 19, 2024, we gathered 200 farmers, educators, activists, and nonprofit leaders in Washington, D.C. around the table for an example of what school lunch could be. We called it Climate Food Hope, and it made me realize a few things. We all have something to contribute to the big picture. That day, we brought together people from around the nation and the world to address climate change through regenerative agriculture, and that can continue. I believe it’s possible for school-supported agriculture and universal school lunch to be everyday realities, improving the health of our children and our future on this planet.

The post The Path Forward for Food and Ag appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/11/13/food-and-agriculture-visionaries-look-forward/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2024/10/02/immigrant-workers-are-the-backbone-of-our-food-system/ Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:03:32 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=58028 In fact, immigrants form the backbone of the U.S. food and agricultural industries, which would face unimaginable strain without their human labor. They also demonstrate remarkable resilience and creative ingenuity in their own cooking and farming, introducing us to their cultural traditions and enriching us as a society. To counter the negative narratives currently rampant […]

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As part of our mission, Civil Eats reports on the U.S. food system’s disproportionate impact on immigrants and communities of color. Immigrant food system workers toil in the nation’s restaurants, farms, and food processing facilities, and have some of the least visible but most strenuous and dangerous jobs in the country. Many are underpaid and vulnerable to food insecurity and workplace abuses. They were also subjected to unprecedented risks during the early days of the pandemic. Despite this, their contributions to the food system are overwhelmingly positive.

In fact, immigrants form the backbone of the U.S. food and agricultural industries, which would face unimaginable strain without their human labor. They also demonstrate remarkable resilience and creative ingenuity in their own cooking and farming, introducing us to their cultural traditions and enriching us as a society.

To counter the negative narratives currently rampant in this country, we selected just a few of our many stories from the recent past that demonstrate how immigrants play an important, outsize role in planting, picking, and processing the food on our plates. They also make up the very fabric of our culture and make us what we are as a nation.

We will continue to tell their stories.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm
A Q&A with Maximina Hernández Reyes, who credits her success to a Portland, Oregon, food network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative.

A Community of Growers
How East New York Farms builds food security and provides jobs for its neighborhood.

Photo courtesy of ALBA

This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
California’s farmworkers face untold barriers accessing the land, capital, and training needed to strike out on their own. For 20 years, ALBA has been slowly changing the landscape for this important group of aspiring growers.

The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida
The majority of migrant farmworkers live below the federal poverty line, without easy access to healthy foods or affordable housing. To survive, many in this tight-knit community have found strategies for mutual aid and collaborative resilience.

This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction.
The members of Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, Calif. are struggling to maintain access to their garden. Similar stories are unfolding across the country.

A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey
‘First Time Home,’ a short film created by American children of Triqui farmworkers, offers an unscripted, authentic glimpse into life for farmworker families—and why people choose to sacrifice their lives in Mexico for opportunities up North.

On the Rural Immigrant Experience: ‘We Come With a Culture, Our Own History, and We’re Here to Help’
Organizer Gladys Godinez on the way immigrants change, and are changed by, rural America.

The Fight for L.A.’s Street Food Vendors
Getting a permit is difficult and expensive, and the state food code is prohibitively complex for small-scale vendors. A coalition is working to help protect this important economic and cultural tradition.

Photo by Sarah Sax

A Vietnamese Farmers’ Cooperative in New Orleans Offers a Lesson in Resilience
VEGGI Co-op has weathered Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Now, it’s facing the twin threats of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

Immigrants Lift Up a Food System in Need of Reform
Farmworker advocates argue that if we want to revitalize the food economy, we must embrace—and not criminalize—immigrants.

The Halal Restaurant Helping Build Community in Suburban Detroit
Bismallah Kabob has become a gathering hotspot for Detroit’s Bangladeshi community—and is building bridges between immigrants and longtime residents.

A New American Dream: The Rise of Immigrants in Rural America
The upsurge of immigration has inarguably helped revitalize dying towns, especially in farm country.

Immigrant Farmers Help Grow Organic Ag in Wisconsin and Beyond
Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.

Immigrant Women are Providing a Taste of Oaxaca in California’s Central Valley
Diverse immigrant communities are forging new paths and bringing traditional culture to rural America.

A Cookbook Highlights the Power of Immigrants to Make Positive Change
Leyla Moushabeck, editor of The Immigrant Cookbook, talks about the power of food, and immigrants, in shaping this country.

On Cleveland’s Largest Urban Farm, Refugees Gain Language and Job Skills
The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program expects to harvest 22,000 pounds of produce this year, while helping refugees find a community.

Refugee Farmers are Putting Down Roots in North Carolina
Transplanting Traditions Community Farm is helping Burmese farmers create new community.

The post Immigrant Workers Are the Backbone of Our Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/03/our-reporting-is-now-free-for-everyone/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/03/our-reporting-is-now-free-for-everyone/#comments Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:00:51 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57385 In that time, our stories have had significant impact and reach, thanks in part to support from our readers and donors. We raised an unprecedented $100,000 via Kickstarter in 2013; we were named Publication of the Year in 2014 by the prestigious James Beard Foundation; we were inducted into the Library of Congress in 2019; […]

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When Civil Eats launched in 2009, no major media outlets focused on the relationship between food and other significant social and political issues. For the past 15 years, we have led the charge in creating robust conversations around food and farming, and worked to make complicated, underreported stories more accessible to a mainstream audience.

In that time, our stories have had significant impact and reach, thanks in part to support from our readers and donors. We raised an unprecedented $100,000 via Kickstarter in 2013; we were named Publication of the Year in 2014 by the prestigious James Beard Foundation; we were inducted into the Library of Congress in 2019; we won a 2022 IACP Award for best newsletter for our members-only monthly column, The Deep Dish, which also won best newsletter from the Online News Association in 2024; we were awarded a James Beard Foundation Media Award for our 2022 investigative series on animal agriculture workers, Injured and Invisible; and we were nominated for best micro newsroom by the Online News Association twice, in 2023 and 2024. Here is a list of our many other awards and recognitions.

In order to make it all work, in 2015, we put up a paywall—like many independent nonprofit news organizations have done. Readers could access a small number of articles for free, and they could pay to become a Civil Eats member and get full access to our reporting. Our members care about independent food systems news, and the membership program has been critical in supporting our work as a small, nonprofit newsroom.

We’ve always wanted to remove our paywall in order to make our journalism free and accessible to everyone. And in our surveys, we heard that sentiment from members, too. Because the membership program provided a significant amount of our budget, removing the paywall has been a constant concern. Until now.

We are thrilled to announce that, in honor of our 15th anniversary, two generous funders, the 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation, and GRACE Communications Foundation, have provided us funding to help us remove our paywall for one year. Our reporting will now be free to everyone, everywhere.

But we will still need your support! In order to keep our paywall down, we’re launching a membership drive to keep the site free, open, and accessible to all beyond this first year.

Without you, Civil Eats’ stories don’t just go unread—they go untold. Become a member today by making a contribution to ensure our vital reporting continues and thrives.

Membership Has Its Benefits.

Join the thousands of members who are driving systemic change in the food and farming  landscape and receive benefits like:

• The Weekly Newsletter: a rundown of all of our recent reporting;
• The Deep Dish: our award-winning, members-only newsletter, featuring an in-depth look at a different topic each month;
• Civil Eats Salons: an interactive platform for educational sessions, Q&A discussions, and community-building; and
• Slack Community: a vibrant community of food system changemakers, policymakers, and practitioners.

Have questions about the paywall and/or its removal? Check out our FAQ.

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