Yesterday I spotted a segment on the China Central Television (CCTV) web site describing the vegetarian restaurant scene in China and the emergence of a low-carbon diet trend. Meat consumption has risen dramatically in China in the last few decades; research by Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and others [...]

The latest posting by FoodforeThought summarizes recent debate in the United Kingdom about the role of genetically modified (GM) crops in planning for future food security. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) report, Food 2030 was released at the Oxford Farming Conference. The comments below by William Surman captured the mood of [...]

A new decade brings new opportunities and challenges. The interaction between diet and health received significant attention during “The Aughts.” What will we do during this next decade to respond to the call for action for a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle? This is the third in a continuing series highlighting 10 ways you can [...]

The New York Times’ Mark Bittman poses the interesting question in yesterday’s column, “Could Industrially Raised Meat Be Illegal?” Bittman pontificates that if the EPA has classified greenhouse gases as a human health hazard “as the EPA has declared, and the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act authorizes strict regulatory action on substances if there’s a reasonable [...]

Nobel Laureate Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Sir Paul McCartney, former Beatles superstar turned environmental activists addressed the European Parliament (EP) today (Dec. 3. 2009) in hopes of encouraging legislators to consider what actions Europeans can personally take to combat global warming, such as going Meatless on [...]

Dickson Despommier brought his idea for vertical urban farms to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on Friday, and his audience of more than 100 people responded with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism.
Despommier is director of the Vertical Farm Project and a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School [...]

There’s an interesting opinion piece on CNN today-“Eating Animals is Making Us Sick”-by Jonathan Safran Foer, author of “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” It’s a great prelude to his upcoming book–his first nonfiction entry–called “Eating Animals.” The book will be available next week. Foer zooms in on antibiotic resistance and the [...]

The American Veterinary Medical Association’s recent “response” to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production’s final report on the state of industrial animal agriculture is disconcerting. It appears that leadership of the veterinary professional organization is attempting to misuse science to obfuscate and delay critically needed changes in the food animal production system rather [...]

One of the perks of working for the Center for a Livable Future is the opportunity to listen to great speakers and catch the latest documentaries about sustainability and the environment.
Last week, CLF hosted a viewing of “Blue Gold: World Water Wars,” a new documentary about the state of one of our most vital resources.  [...]

A round of applause for Washington Post reporter Ezra Klein for pointing out last week the undeniable fact that meat production is a major contributor to global warming, and that consumers can make a difference by cutting out their meat consumption just one day a week. How big a difference in greenhouse gases reduction it [...]