Like this excellent post says: It’s time to get beyond debates about  “organic” vs “conventional” and move toward developing an agriculture that is better than either: highly productive while at the same time highly sustainable, good for our health and good for the planet, wisely using resources while getting food equitably to poor and rich.  [...]

Genetically modified canola spreads in Midwest.

Media chatter in the past few weeks spurred by the “Pepsigate” exodus from scienceblogs.com has focused attention on “science bloggers” – whatever those are. I guess I’m one of them. The problem is, there’s no such thing – at least not in the singular. Instead, “science blogger” is a conglomerate term used loosely to describe [...]

One of my favorite science-writer-type sites, KSJ Tracker, ran a good summary today of recent news reports that — gasp! — the long-term effects of the Gulf oil spill are not going to be as bad as most people feared. They were nice enough to mention my earlier posts (here and here). Thanks for the [...]

Will e-books kill printed books? Ummm. . . on brief reflection, no. On a little more reflection, hell no. In fact, e-books might save the printed book. Buried in Amazon’s release about skyrocketing Kindle book sales was the fact that while Amazon’s Kindle e-book sales were up, so were hardcover sales. More e-books and more [...]

Being trained in microbiology, I can’t help but think about what happens when we feed millions of gallons of crude oil to billions of  sea-going, oil-eating Gulf bacteria — especially when we’re doing it right in the middle of the infamous “Dead Zone” caused by fertilizer pollution. I write about the potential Gumbo of Disaster [...]

There’s nothing more interesting than an intellectual slugfest. Well, OK, there are a lot of things more interesting than an intellectual slugfest, but this one is worth a look if you’re interested in the future of food. In this corner  . . . . Robert Paarlberg, political scientist and author of “Food Politics: What Everyone [...]

Anyone who grew up in the 1980s in Oregon remembers the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. I can still see the smoke billowing from the crater and the “Day After” sense of waking up to a world turned black and white, everything coated with half-an-inch of gray, soft ash. There were earthquakes and floods and [...]

Check out these graphs from a recent International Monetary Fund report on hunger. They are based on statistics from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and FAO numbers can be a little squishy, but still — the trend is dramatic. Click them to get a better image. The first graph shows [...]

It was only a matter of time. When Monsanto patented glyphosate — better known under its trade name Roundup — in the 1970s, it was a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough for farmers. Glyphosate was a completely new form of weedkiller. Spray it on a field and it knocked out a variety of weeds without, it seemed, harming [...]