The proposed $4.7 billion sale of Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork producer, to China’s biggest meat processing company comes amid significant trade friction between the two countries over meat and livestock. China bans ractopamine, a controversial growth-promoting drug that is widely used by U.S. livestock producers. Russia also bans the feed additive and both countries [...]

To get an idea of how American coastal waters might look just before they succumb to all the degradations they have suffered these past five centuries, it would be worth taking a July trip to Mobile Bay, an Alabama inlet that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico. If the air is still and hot, an [...]

Last fall I flew halfway across the country to go grocery shopping with Everly Macario. We set out from her second-story apartment in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago and walked to the supermarket to buy a couple of rib steaks that Macario planned to serve to her husband and two children, ages 7 and 13. Macario, [...]

The San Francisco Bay is a frenzy of rapturous seagulls, cormorants so gorged they can barely take flight, sea lions bellowing and porpoises spinning. The herring have returned to spawn. Humans are getting in on the action, too. A herring festival last weekend in Sausalito offered tastings of various preparations, and chefs all around the Bay Area [...]

In early January, scientists released jaw-dropping data showing that bluefin tuna in the North Pacific will soon be “functionally extinct.” A favorite of Japanese sushi lovers, Pacific bluefin is now so overfished, they said, that only 4 percent of its population remains. Earlier this month, a single bluefin sold for $1.7 million at Tokyo’s Tsukiji [...]

In the midst of the domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near oil-and-gas drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick and dying. While scientists have yet to isolate cause and effect, many suspect chemicals used in drilling and hydrofracking (or “fracking”) operations are poisoning animals through the air, water, or soil. Earlier this year, [...]

In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the foodshed upon which hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants [...]

In March 2010, Michelle Obama stood on a stage in Washington and leveled a challenge at the food industry’s biggest players. “We need you all to step it up,” she told a meeting of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Just a month earlier, she’d launched the Let’s Move campaign, the Obama administration’s flagship anti-obesity program, which [...]

  One summer day two years ago, Danny and Laura Jenkins’ black Labrador retriever Casey returned from a swim in Ohio’s Grand Lake St. Marys carpeted in thick green slime and reeking. Danny washed the dog off and, at some point, got some of the gunk in his left eye. A few weeks later, Danny [...]