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Dispatches from the front lines of food and farming
Enjoy some of our best work from over the years and support our independent, non-profit reporting efforts at the same time! We’ve gathered our most compelling stories of the past year into a series of elegant magazines with great writing, gorgeous photography.
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Some of Our Featured Writers
We want to keep investigating, explaining and exploring. But we can’t do it without you. Get up to five editions of The Dirt now and dive deep into the most critical issues facing the food system today.
A Taste of What’s Inside
“Police killing on the packing line” by Ted Genoways, published with The New Republic. With meticulous reporting and great storytelling, Genoways describes the events that led to the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old Sudanese refugee at a pork processing plant in Oklahoma. He also situates the tragedy in the context of the plant’s history of labor violations, and the general neglect of worker safety in the meatpacking industry.
“As climate change erodes land and health, a Louisiana tribe fights back” by Barry Yeoman for Harvard Public Health Magazine. The story of a young Native American who returned to lead his tribe on the Louisiana coast, bringing his geosciences education to bear on the climate catastrophe that has “chiseled away at tribal livelihoods and traditional diets, exacted a toll on citizens’ mental health, exacerbated chronic illnesses, and displaced families.”
“A remote Alaska village depended on the snow crab harvest for survival. Then billions of crabs died,” by Julia O’Malley for Grist. This piece explores the dilemma faced by a tiny Indigenous community whose livelihood—a snow crab fishery—collapsed. It won’t surprise you that scientists point to warming waters in the Bering Sea as the likely cause. But the residents of St. Paul Island must decide: Stay or go?