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The Salt Has Launched!

Eliza Barclay — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:27:19 +0000

The Salt, NPR’s crispy new food blog, had a soft launch in September and has been quietly gaining steam since then. While the lovely April Fulton is on maternity leave, I am hosting, editing and writing for the blog and trying to maintain a flavorful mix of the heady topics that our ever-complex, ever-changing food system spits out every day. We’re leaving room for lots of fun stories, too, like cheese sculpture and Halloween candy economics. We have an excellent team of contributors mainly from NPR’s science desk who bring a freighter of experience with them covering nutrition, food trends, agriculture, hunger, sustainability and much more.

Here is a sampling of some recent stories I’ve been most pleased with:

A Food Sculptor On Her Passion: ‘The Cheese Found Me’
Farm-Raised Tilapia, With A Dash Of Antibiotic
From Grille To Grill: When Roadkill Is Good Enough For Dinner
From Nebraska Lab To McDonald’s Tray: The McRib’s Strange Journey
New Varieties Haven’t Taken The Nutrition Out Of Broccoli
A Coconut Cake From Emily Dickinson: Reclusive Poet, Passionate Baker
How That Food You Throw Out Is Linked To Global Warming

Looking Back At Fukushima

Eliza Barclay — Thu, 12 May 2011 02:41:03 +0000

I spent most of March and the first part of April covering the Fukushima nuclear crisis for NPR. While a lot of the work I did was behind the scenes, I wrote one featurey piece on some of TEPCO’s most avoidable mistakes. There were loads of fluky incidents precipitated by the tsunami that the electric company couldn’t have foreseen, but a number of nuclear experts I spoke to felt that there were also some clear missteps once the power was out and the plant went into emergency mode. That piece, In Wake Of Nuclear Crisis, TEPCO’s Plans Questioned, ran in early April on the NPR web site.

Chinese Wetlands

Eliza Barclay — Thu, 12 May 2011 02:32:28 +0000

I wrote captions for a slideshow a while back for National Geographic’s water series; it’s called China’s Wetland Revolution. The biggest attraction is the photos by Sean Gallagher, who did a pretty remarkable job documenting a not-so-sexy environmental issue — disappearing wetlands — in a country not so keen on dispensing information on environmental predicaments. The story was part of NatGeo’s ongoing series on global water issues, which was kicked off with its ASME award-winning issue on water in April 2010.

Bacon: The Gateway Meat

Eliza Barclay — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:41:30 +0000

Last week I wrote a blog post for NPR’s Shots that went viral. The post, entitled Why Bacon Is The Gateway To Meat For Vegetarians, was based on my accumulated observations over many years that bacon makes turncoats out of vegetarians. Now, many people have asked me if I am or was ever a vegetarian, and the answer is yes, I was, for roughly 13 years. Bacon didn’t lure me back to meat eating (it was tacos al pastor in Mexico), but I admit I sneaked the occasional slice off grease-soaked paper towels when no one was looking.

Cultivating A Culture of Lawfulness in Ciudad Juarez

Eliza Barclay — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 04:36:52 +0000

A piece I reported back in September in Juarez, Mexico appeared on TheAtlantic.com this month. I discovered during my visit there that there is a small but vital movement of citizens eager to refashion their city into a more trusting, law-abiding place. The violence rages on, however, and the city remains the most violent in the hemisphere. As the LA Times reported this week, an artificial-intelligence model generated by a university researcher there projected that 5,000 people will be killed there this year. It’s a bit of a bizarre way to project such a figure, but it’s entirely believable. That violence will have to plummet before enough citizens feel safe enough to leave their homes and really participate in rebuilding the city. Whether that will happen in the short or medium term is pretty unclear.

Give Lard A Chance

Eliza Barclay — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:03:48 +0000

Here’s another reason to save those bacon drippings: They can be converted into diesel fuel, that is if you have the the equipment handy to hydrogenate the fats and turn them into renewable diesel. Meat conglomerate Tyson Foods would like to see more Americans driving on lard if a new venture with Syntroleum works out. For more, see my recent piece in National Geographic News entitled Fat’s Chance as a Renewable Diesel Fuel.

Crime & Biogas

Eliza Barclay — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:04:06 +0000

I’ve neglected to post a few stories that were published over the last couple of months and so in the spirit of holiday catch up I’ll share them now.

In September, the CQ Global Researcher, a monthly report from the CQ Press, published my report on Crime in Latin America. It’s by no means definitive or exhaustive, but it was great getting caught up on some of the issues, particularly the complexities of the wars of Mexico and Central America.

Last month, the excellent Yale 360 online magazine ran my feature story on biogas in China, China Turns to Biogas to Ease Impact of Factory Farms. I reported much of this piece while in China in July on my grant from Johns Hopkins, which helped me research a variety of issues surrounding rising meat consumption in China.

Blogging for NPR

Eliza Barclay — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 02:59:50 +0000

I’m working at NPR these days and have contributed some wordy bits to the web site in the form of blogs posts and sidebars to radio stories. Today I took a jab at the health conditions of the incredibly courageous and fortunate Chilean miners for NPR’s health blog, Shots.

Earlier in the week, I wrote a little post on Google’s big announcement to build a badly needed transmission line for offshore wind energy in the Mid-Atlantic. This was good news in a relatively bleak period of climate and energy policy stagnancy in DC.

Last week I had something for Shots on the food pyramid and USDA’s plans to possibly replace it with something better.

I had a little sidebar on Jon Hamilton’s piece on a neuroscience discovery about how nerves communicate with each other.

And in my very first Shots post, I wrote about a geochemist in Indianapolis who is studying lead contamination in urban gardens. He says you can still grow vegetables safety in urban brownfields with raised beds and mulch.

The plague of bedbug false alarms

Eliza Barclay — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:47:36 +0000

My story on bedbugs is now up on Slate. This story was inspired by a series of run-ins with bedbugs — both real and assumed — in Baltimore and Washington, DC. Writing this piece helped reaffirm for me how little we know about household biology (who exactly are the tiny critters we co-habitate with?) and how easily we mistake a long list of small insects for bedbugs. Perhaps my next big project will be an illustrated guide to household bugs.

Academic funding for journalism

Eliza Barclay — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:12:34 +0000

Friend Monica Campbell has a nice piece in Nieman Reports, a site of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard where Campbell was a fellow last year, about our respective experiences finding funding through university research centers. She describes her own work with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and trips to Juárez, Mexico earlier this summer. And she mentions my opportunity to travel to China in July through the excellent Center of a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Kudos, Monica.