"The plant-based burger company called regenerative grazing the “clean coal of meat” in a recent report. That hasn’t gone over well amongst carbon ranchers."
It’s a category of more than 4,000 industrial chemicals that affect our lives nearly every day — and many of which are toxic. So what do journalists need to know to report on the emerging contaminants known as PFAS? Our most recent Issue Backgrounder offers a detailed primer on what PFAS are, where they come from, what their health effects are and how they might be cleaned up.
"Last week, we learned that the Food and Drug Administration had detected PFAS compounds in pineapple, sweet potato, meat, and chocolate cake. ... [I]t has become clear that 3M, the company that originally developed PFOS and PFOA, had known for a very long time that these toxic and persistent chemicals were in our food."
"Take a walk through the grocery story; the packages are talking to you, proclaiming their moral virtue, appealing to your ideals: organic, cage-free, fair trade. When I dug into the world of eco-labels recently, I was surprised to find that some of the people who know these labels best are ambivalent about them."
"The Food and Drug Administration’s first broad testing of food for a worrisome class of nonstick, stain-resistant industrial compounds found substantial levels in some grocery store meats and seafood and in off-the-shelf chocolate cake, according to unreleased findings FDA researchers presented at a scientific conference in Europe."
The rise of the modern environmental and food movements has shifted urban farming into high gear. For environmental journalists, that could yield a bumper crop of local stories. The latest TipSheet has more, along with questions to ask, story angles to follow and reporting resources to tap.
Toxic chemicals and disease-causing microorganisms can be found in some fresh-caught fish. And that means local stories for environmental journalists, who can pick up on problems through federal and state fish advisories. The latest TipSheet explains the health impacts and how they’re regulated, plus questions to ask and story ideas, including an environmental justice angle.
"By 9:30 a.m. the line for Fulton’s Pancake House and Sugarbush had snaked out the door and down the driveway toward the parking lot, like the day a new iPhone goes on sale."
"In every region, farmers and scientists are trying to adapt an array of crops to warmer temperatures, invasive pests, erratic weather and earlier growing seasons."
"Another tropical cyclone is expected to make landfall on Mozambique’s coast on Thursday, just over a month after a more powerful storm struck the Mozambican port city of Beira further south and killed hundreds of people."
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