If you go on TikTok or Instagram, you’ll see legions of wellness influencers promoting the benefits of unpasteurized “raw” milk, which hasn’t been heated to kill off illness-causing microorganisms. Raw milk is risky business at the best of times, and despite what some influencers claim, there are no nutritional benefits to drinking it, according to the CDC. But it’s now also a vector for H5N1, the new bird flu spreading through cows. On April 1, it was confirmed that H5N1 had spread to at least one person who worked with cattle—as of April 30, 36 dairy herds have been confirmed to have had cas ..read more

This article was produced by The Bittman Project and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. It is co-published here with permission. EHRP’s high-quality journalism is co-published with mainstream media outlets, to help readers understand and address systemic hardship. Cooking and food shopping are very different in America than they used to be. For one thing, there’s an often overwhelming “time tax” on many workers, leaving us with mere minutes for cooking–the average American has only ab ..read more

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves. Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt. Dusty shrublands run into sleepy residential streets, which run into neat fields of cotton and alfalfa. Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company ..read more

Famine is likely already underway in parts of Gaza, Samantha Power, the top US humanitarian official, said publicly for the first time on Wednesday.  While testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Power, administrator of USAID and former US Ambassador to the UN, said that officials have “credible” information that famine is occurring in northern Gaza. Up until now, the UN has said famine in Gaza is “imminent.” (USAID did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Power’s comments.) Power’s statement came after Rep. Julián Castro (D-Texas) asked her about news rep ..read more

Dostie Farm, an organic dairy in Fairfield, Maine, was thriving until one day in October 2020 when owner Egide Dostie Jr. got a call from Stonyfield, his exclusive buyer. Something was off with the farm’s milk: Tests had found that it contained three times the state’s allowable level of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, one of the class of “forever chemicals” known as PFAS. “We called bullshit,” Dostie remembers. PFAS contamination had recently been found at two other Maine dairy farms. But those farms had used sewage sludge to fertilize their pastures—something Dostie had never done. This week th ..read more

When Americans of a certain age hear the word “paraquat,” the first thing that might leap to mind is Mexican weed. That’s because, in the late 1970s, the United States government thought it would be a good idea to pay the Mexican government to spray this potent herbicide on marijuana fields south of the border. Pot was illegal in every US state then, but plenty of Americans smoked imported weed, and the fear that people were inhaling a nasty chemical along with their THC caused quite the stir.    Bill Allayaud, who is of a certain age, knew immediately what I was talking about. He’s ..read more

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The rolling hills south of Salisbury Plain are a bleak scene of vast arable fields and tightly grazed pasture dotted with scores of sheep. In recent decades, Lower Pertwood farm has embraced organic growing, producing oats, barley and other crops, while boosting numbers of rare corn buntings and other wildlife with wildflower banks and newly planted trees. But as wildlife continues to decline in Wiltshire and the farm’s profits ..read more

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Around the world this holiday weekend, people will consume hundreds of millions of Easter eggs and bunnies, as part of an annual chocolate intake that can exceed 18 pounds for every person in the UK, or 11 pounds in the US and Europe. But a global shortage of cacao—the seed from which chocolate is made—has brought warnings of a “chocolate meltdown” that could see prices increase and bars shrink further. This week, cocoa prices rose to all ..read more

One Saturday night, I saw a post in a Facebook group for my autoimmune disorder: Thanks to Dr. Brooke Goldner’s vegan smoothie diet, the poster said, she’d been able to stop all medicines for our shared chronic illness. Goldner, a practicing psychiatrist, has garnered a strong social media following, thriving book sales, and business success around an extraordinary claim: that she was able to “reverse” her own case of lupus, a painful autoimmune disorder with no known cure that impacts around 5 million people worldwide. With her guidance, she says, people with all kinds of autoimmune cond ..read more

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees—those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state.  State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a “war on our ranching” and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduc ..read more