Sustainability

Think about the last time you ate a burger. Maybe it was ground beef you bought at the farmer’s market. Maybe it was an elk burger from that shoulder season cow hunt or venison from a deer you shot with your dad. Perhaps you have that animal’s skull mounted on your wall or a picture of it on your...

In the Ancient Greek Skeptics tradition, one should constantly question and investigate their beliefs. The only way to true knowledge, if such a thing does exist, is to work to prove oneself wrong continually. It is not a comfortable endeavor, and it is not easy. As a butcher, I am intimately...

A recent study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a disturbing portion of children between ages 4 to 7 don’t know where their food comes from. The authors say their data demonstrates that about 40% of kids think bacon, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets come from plants...

In May 2019, The New York Times’ food and climate desks collaborated to help their readers understand the relationship between dietary choices and greenhouse gas emissions. The project embodied a primary function of journalism—demonstrating the power of individual actions to impact national and...

The stone walls in the wine cellar are cool to the touch. I have goosebumps even as the mid-August Hungarian sun scorches the grass 10 feet above us. We're in Etyek, 30 minutes east of Budapest, sipping wine under a bare lightbulb hanging from the low arched ceiling. The translator explains that the...

If you’ve ever found yourself dripping sweat with socks full of grass clippings in the middle of June, having just pushed your lawnmower in concentric circles for an entire Saturday, then you can thank the French and English aristocracy of the 16th century. The fact that lawns exist at all in North...

Sometime around 6,000 B.C., in the far reaches of what is now South America, an early human held a swollen root in their hand. The root was infected by a genus of bacteria called Agrobacterium which replaced a segment of the root’s DNA with its own, causing it to proliferate and grow tumors. As the...

Organic over conventional. Regenerative over sustainable. The recent shifts in our preferences when it comes to agriculture illuminate our modern understanding of how agricultural practices can and should work. Although the term “regenerative agriculture” is not new (the Rodale Institute coined it...

Have you ever walked down the meat aisle in the grocery store and felt completely overwhelmed by food labels? There are so many of them, and oftentimes they don’t mean much of anything and are just used for fancy marketing. Raising chickens, sheep, and pigs will teach you a thing or two about what...

Right now, in advanced laboratories across the world, meat is being grown outside the body of an animal. Petri dishes are packed tight with a stringy red substance that has the look, feel, and maybe even taste of a real burger. Back in 2013, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University introduced...

Anthropologists generally agree that eating meat was a pivotal change in early human diets. But they are still piecing together exactly how we evolved from big-stomached plant-eaters into big-brained meat-eaters about 2 million years ago. For example, a study published this March in the academic...