Today’s Special: Grilled Salmon Laced With Plastic
Andrii Zastrozhnov/Getty Nearly 50 years ago, scientists studying the North Atlantic Ocean started noticing that tiny fragments of plastic were turning up in their plankton and seaweed samples. The microparticles, they found, absorbed toxic chemicals and were then eaten by flounder, perch, and other fish. Until recently, though, researchers thought these ingested plastics stayed in…
This Apple Might Be the Most Anticipated Piece of Produce in History
Aysia Stieb/The California Sunday Magazine After two decades of research and development, it’s no wonder the Cosmic Crisp, a new variety of apple, is causing such a stir even before it hits supermarket shelves: There have been launch parties, press conferences, Instagram Influencers, and a $10.5 million marketing budget. On this week’s episode of Bite,…
North Carolina Braces for Another Flood of Hog Poop
A hog operation with a lagoon in Sampson County, on North Carolina’s coastal plain.Matt Butler, Sound Rivers/Waterkeeper Alliance/Flicker It’s emerging as an annual rite: A massive hurricane roars across North Carolina and deposits epic amounts of water on the state’s coastal plain, home to a tangle of rivers intertwined with one of the globe’s most…
Jay Inslee Wants to Pay Farmers to Pull Carbon from the Atmosphere
Caroline Brehman/Associated Press True to his fixation on battling climate change, today Washington governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Jay Inslee released a rural policy platform centered on encouraging farmers to pull carbon from the atmosphere and trap it in soil. For decades, United States farm policy has pushed farmers in the nation’s Midwestern states to…
Farmers at the Iowa State Fair Say They’re Backing Trump’s Trade War
A man trips a sheep before showing it at the Iowa State Fair.Jack Kurtz/Zuma Beneath a blazing mid-August sun at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines last week, liberal voters crowded around the Des Moines Register’s political soapbox to hear the Democratic presidential candidates speak. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fairground, farmers…
Gorgeous Portraits of America’s Wild (and Surprisingly Delicious) Edible Plants
Photographer Jimmy Fike thinks often of the stories his grandmother liked to tell him, in a lively Southern drawl, about her youth on a farm in rural Alabama. She hunted for wild game and picked persimmons, filberts, and blackberries for cobblers. In 2008, feeling disillusioned with traditional landscape photography and inspired by these family memories,…