Eliza Barclay

From Bill Gates to Google's Sergei Brin, influential investors are putting their money where their mouth is. The pet cause of the tech world, it seems, is the need to find good-tasting substitutes to conventional animal products, like chicken-less eggs or in vitro beef, to avert environmental crisis ...

Fortunately for those of us who are suckers for novelty, every year fruits and vegetables seem to come in more bewitching colors, shapes and flavors. Lately, we've been tickled by the cotton candy grape and the vibrant orange Turkish eggplant. (Egg yolks can be ghostly white, too, but ...

As the supply chain that delivers our food to us gets longer and more complicated, many consumers want to understand — and control — where their food comes from.

But even if we meet farmers at the farmers market, urban consumers are still largely divorced from the people who ...

Would you taste or buy a lab-grown hamburger if you could? That's the question we posed Monday at the end of our report on the world's first in vitro burger, launched this week at a tasting event in London that was streamed via the Internet.

Making that burger a ...

After three months, $330,000 and a high-profile media blitz, the world's first hamburger grown in a lab made its worldwide debut Monday.

The unveiling of "cultured beef," as the burger is branded, was a production worthy of the Food Network era, complete with chatty host, live-streamed video, hand-picked taste ...

A state appeals court on Tuesday rejected New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to limit the size of sugary beverages sold in his city. But in a statement, Bloomberg and the city's top lawyer, Michael Cardozo, called the decision a "temporary setback" and vowed to appeal.

"The Board of ...

The dazzling array of food options at the Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif. — 25 cafes at last count — is the much-cited example of tech world food perks. And you can peruse the menus at Airbnb and Facebook to get a taste of an equally high ...

Come summertime, some of us here at Shots are reminded, as we lounge on decks and venture into overgrown gardens, that we are irresistible to mosquitoes. As we gripe about our itchy, pocked limbs, we can't help but wonder just why they unfailingly devour us and pass over our friends ...

Earlier this week, we told you about some of the people who are trying to make micro-gardening go big — by sharing their DIY tips and selling products designed to make gardening in a small space a piece of cake. Many readers of The Salt let us know they ...

Most urban consumers are happy to leave farming to the farmers, but for those with a green thumb, it is getting easier to garden in the city. That's thanks, in part, to DIYers sharing ideas for reusing old materials to garden in and a new range of tools designed to ...

One out of every 13 children has a food allergy, but the affliction still regularly stumps doctors. As Kari Nadeau, director of the Stanford Alliance for Food Allergy Research, told Terry Gross in April on Fresh Air, researchers still don't understand what "flips the switch between a food ...

When the State Department released its annual report on human trafficking Wednesday, we got a chilling reminder that even in 2013, slave labor is still embedded in the global food system.

As many as 27 million men, women and children are estimated to be trafficking victims at any given ...

We didn't plan it, but somehow, it has turned into Potato Week here at The Salt. The latest twist in the tater tales takes us to Capitol Hill.

Americans love to pile on the potatoes – we consumed a whopping 112 pounds per capita last year. But lately, the ...

In recent years, programs that double the value of food stamp dollars spent at farmers markets have generated a lot of attention. The basic idea: Spend, say, $10 in food stamps and get an extra $10 credit for purchases at the market.

The model, which has spread to more than ...

More women are getting into farming, according to a recent analysis from the U.S Department of Agriculture.

The agency crunched numbers from the Agriculture Census and found that the number of U.S. farms operated by women nearly tripled over the past three decades, from 5 percent in 1978 to ...

Our fascination with prison food is usually limited to death row prisoners' elaborate last meal requests and urban legends about disturbingly low-grade meat. But nowadays, the walls between the prison cafeteria and the outside world are coming down, at least metaphorically.

In early June, the Eastern State ...

The farm bill is expected to pass in the Senate on Monday night. And to the dismay of some, it likely won't include an amendment that would have eliminated a controversial program to keep a closer eye on a food product you probably weren't even worried about: catfish.

In an ...

Tossing out food is clearly a waste of money — and maybe even immoral, according to Pope Francis, who on Wednesday likened food waste to "stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry." And as we've reported, you also may be creating extra greenhouse gas ...

Are you more likely to sit less and exercise more if you've got a little device tracking you every step of the way?

Quite a few people think so. But public health do-gooders bent on getting Americans out of their chairs and off their couches want to know for sure.

For Percival Zhang, growing up in China meant learning to appreciate just how critical a stable food supply is to avoiding social unrest and disasters like famine.

When he became an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, he got to thinking just how risky growing food ...