Debating Organics in The New York Times


The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” feature is tricky: They give you a tiny amount of space (300 words) to opine on what typically is a huge and knotty problem. In the wake of the recent Stanford study on organics (which I commented on here), the Room for Debate folks invited me to weigh in on the question of whether organics are worth the money. Other participants include Marion Nestle, NYU nutrition professor and veteran food-industry watchdog; Raj Patel author of Stuffed and Starved and a fierce critic of the corporate-dominated global food system; Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish writer who has made a career of, if not denying climate change, than comforting fossil fuel interests by arguing that climate change just isn’t that big of a deal; and Christy Wilcox, a grad student in molecular biology and blogger for Scientific American whom I have sparred with before. Read our Room for Debate forum here. Enjoy!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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