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The Food Lab: Going Against the Grain

Can you spot the difference between the two hanger steaks? They were both cooked to a perfect 130°F medium-rare in the same pan, they are both cut from the same piece of meat, and they both sport a beautiful brown, crackly crust. Yet one of them is more tender than Otis Redding on a good day, while the other has more in common with a rubber band.

What’s the difference? It’s all got to do with the angle at which it’s sliced.

Why Did the Haitian Earthquake Become a Food Crisis?

Why did the Haitian earthquake become a food crisis? I spent the last nine days in Haiti working with refugees in Haiti and personally trying to better understand the answer to this question.

3 Reasons Comparative Advantage Doesn’t Apply to Agriculture

Specialization and trade has created incredible wealth and other benefits. Yet a dogmatic application of comparative advantage to agriculture has been a social and economic failure.

Indian Food-Delivery Phenoms

The Indian reverence for food itself drives what is arguably the most efficient food supply chain in the world: the Dabbawallahs.

The Last Real Rooibos Tea

All the world’s rooibos tea is produced in a small, red-earth area in western South Africa. The Khoi San Bushmen have been harvesting and drinking rooibos for tens of thousands of years. Two indigenous cooperatives continue that tradition. Yet their survival, and the survival of their uniquely superior product, is under threat.

Friday Desk Activism: Food Safety, Child Nutrition, and Siddiqui

After working-out and cleaning-up, what’s a more productive form of procrastination on a Friday than doing your part on political issues you care about?

Feeding the World: Pollan and Monsanto Debate at Google

The food supply crisis and the proper counterattack is emerging as one of the great debates of our time. Particularly timely is a great video that many missed last year: Google.org hosting a discussion between Hugh Grant, CEO of Monsanto, and Michael Pollan, on how the world can feed itself. It’s hardly as predictable as you might think.

Drip-Irrigation Social Enterprise in Rural Pakistan: An Interview with Joel Montgomery

What happens when the ideal of rural poverty alleviation meets the harsh sands of Pakistan, and the reality of earning an ROI? In this GoodEater interview, Joel Montgomery, an Alabamian, Yale-grad Acumen Fellow, tells the story of helping to build an drip-irrigation social enterprise in one of the driest agricultural countries in the world.

Eating Larvae with Khmer Rouge Fallout

In 2002-2003, I worked for Conservation International in Cambodia tracking endangered species and looking for tiger in the Cardamom Mountains on the southwestern Thai border. I lead small Khmer teams on survey trips in the jungle, where we set up “camera traps” and located many strange and fantastic species. Yet no specimens were stranger than those consumed as part of the insect-heavy diet of my compatriots.

Four Reasons Fair Trade Can’t Become a Universal Model

“There has probably never been a stronger force for change in history than the American consumer,” says Paul Rice, founder of the American Fair Trade movement. But can Fair Trade really become a universal model for all foods and even all imported consumer products? I believe that the answer is no.