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Summer: the season on fire
Four countries are burning at once, a continent just recorded its hottest June on record, and European farms are absorbing losses that will show up on your plate before the year is out. The part of this that matters most is happening in a regulatory building in Brussels, while everyone is watching the flames. By the second week of July, Portugal, Spain, Greece and France were fighting wildfires at
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The lobby behind your lunch
Here is a question worth sitting with: when a farmer reaches for a pesticide, whose knowledge is informing that decision? Their own experience, perhaps. Their agronomist’s advice. A report they read, or were pointed towards. A training course from university. And at each of those junctions: the agronomist, the paper, the university, there is a reasonable chance that the answer is: Bayer. Or
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Gazpacho Recipe (Andalusian)
Before blenders and refrigerators, even before tomatoes, gazpacho was bread, oil, vinegar, and water crushed in a mortar: the lunch of day laborers working under the southern Iberian sun. For centuries, it was a subsistence dish, without tomato or pepper, because those ingredients had not yet crossed the Atlantic. Tomatoes and peppers arrived in Spanish cuisine after their introduction from Americ
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Your guide to composting
Waste is a human invention. Every other organism on earth operates in cycles. Nothing is discarded, everything is reabsorbed. We opted out of that arrangement somewhere along the way, and our soils are paying for it. Composting is how you opt back in. It transforms organic waste: vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, cardboard, grass clippings, into a nutrient-dense soil amendment that improves stru
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Why doesn’t Europe protect its producers?
There is a complaint that is gaining increasing traction across Europe: what is the point of requiring our farmers to meet increasingly strict labor and environmental standards if they then have to compete on store shelves with products imported from outside Europe, grown under very different conditions? The official response to this imbalance invokes the free market and diplomacy, but the reality
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Apricots in syrup: The anti-waste preserve
You know that feeling. You’ve got a bowl of peaches or apricots on the counter, you’re eating one a day, doing your best, and still somehow they’re ripening faster than you can keep up. This recipe is for that moment. Stone fruit in syrup is one of the simplest preservation techniques around, and it turns the problem into something you’ll actually be glad happened: intensel
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Toxic food, the invisible exposure
385 million cases of acute pesticide poisoning every year. Neurotoxic residues in 100% of urine samples tested in healthy Spanish adults. A pear with 14 pesticides in it — all perfectly legal. The history of industrial agriculture is a history of poisons we defended until we couldn’t anymore. So here is the only question that matters: what are we defending right now that our children will pa
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8 tips to bring back the Buzz
How to turn your home and neighbourhood into a pollinator paradise Up to 90% of flowering plants in Europe depend on bees to reproduce. In France alone, 72% of cultivated food species have some dependence on insect pollinators. In Germany (one of the most studied cases on the continent) the total biomass of flying insects collapsed by three-quarters in just 25 years. So, lose the bees, and the kno
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