@drflachsophone.bsky.social
Associate professor, Purdue Anthropology. Environmental anthropology, ethnobiology, political ecology, food, biotech, fermentation, agriculture. US Midwest, South Asia, Balkans. He/him/his www.andrewflachs.com
The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?
“farmers’ in-difference also troubles a more fundamental paradigm of ‘technology adoption,’ which inevitably assumes technologies to be at the center of analysis, rather than the farm, good working conditions …”
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Opportunity for early- and mid-career journalists on the food system beat—and those who aspire to be. Applications open for the 2026 Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future Food System Fellowship is now open. Please apply and/or share! clf.jhsph.edu/about-us/new...
Tremendous amount of work put into this, but love the addition of an oligarch layer in this GIS
Mapping food apartheid in its intersections of racial discrimination, economic segregation, and market consolidation - terrific layer to emphasize for this established pattern of food injustice
47,900,000 Americans, including one in five children, were food insecure in 2024. That was before restrictions to SNAP and higher food prices. The Trump administration has since ceased publication of these reports. Read the final one, by the dedicated USDA ERS team, here ers.usda.gov/sites/defaul...
Maybe my NYT essay can create common ground: Factory farms should be regulated like factories. Animal poop should be regulated like human poop. We can still fight about other stuff but this should be Big Ag against Everyone Else.
nytimes.com/2026/01/20/opinion/manure-population-rivers-water.html
Only barely edged out by my other favorite published diagram
#Poland: A sample of #farmers who diversified, i.e. who sell 15-50% of their products into short food #supplychains (and not only into normal/long food supply chains), have higher perceived #resilience, i.e. higher perceived adaptability & transformability of their farms: doi.org/10.1186/s401...
It's an incredible effort of imagination to see how much better the world might be with less crap in it. The Anthropause, out today, is Stan Cox's wonderous hymn to the joys of less stuff and more connection. Read it! bookshop.org/p/books/anth...
Interesting contrast to the proposed municipal grocery stores in NYC, where the focus is to ensure that a wide set of staples are affordable on the retail end
Perhaps some brave soul will show the administration a hobo-dyer projection and they will immediately lose interest
Wallerstein and Wolf also unsurprised to see empire doing empire stuff
Kill people and break things seems like an AI generated motto for the technofascists
Glyphosate expanded massively with a combination of generics and gmo monocultures - the problem with encouraging one poison instead of many is that you’re still encouraging poison doi.org/10.1111/joac...
Flachs knows about this.
Yes, GMOs are highly studied and there isn’t a reason to think they are worse for health or environment because they are GMO, but the chemical intensive reasons for which they are modified have allowed the expansion of agrochemical use onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
And domestication, a very different set of political, social, ecological relations (link.springer.com/article/10.1...)
As ever, important to differentiate between GMOs, which are just a handful of commercial crops grown for industrial agricultural systems, not including wheat mentioned here… (www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops...)
Against a sustainability that presupposes growth as the only path to development, nothing needs to be recovered or created here. If anything, such spaces need to continue as they are against the threat of development and dispossession
This is “just surviving” in an already existing, imperfect, sustainability that would be totally invisible in a productivist lens that externalizes social and ecological reproduction. And this is the paradox: there's a lot of sustainability already here, if only it could "count"
Bountiful, biodiverse, and socially important homegardens struggle to keep families, the agrobiodiversity they maintain, in place. This work is not sufficient to promise a nice living for young people in and of itself, but it provides an economic and social base to maintain these rural households
Farms are vehicles for rural social reproduction, anchoring a diverse economy of everyday exchange. They are a source of pride, a way to gift and participate in cycles of mutual aid; but they exist out of a frustration with the local political economy - there aren't other great options
Closing out 2025 with lessons on quiet sustainability from Bosnian home gardeners: productive agrobiodiversity and mutual aid, but frustration with a stymied opportunity. Gardens keep a home that one might return to...someday
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
One thing 2025 made clear: Durable progress on climate in the US will require structural reform to our corrupted political systems. Otherwise, steps forward will always be vulnerable to the bloody clawbacks we saw this year. A political strategy that doesn't center system reform is not "pragmatic."
Really gonna mess with their heads when they find out about the compensated emancipation act, and then worry that they'll have to pay reparations
Great conversation between two people who don’t agree about the solution to a shared problem - no gotchas or barbs, but we see value of deconstructing simple stories of tech and progress, and pushing us past talking points to see ag as political
You should be at the top of any list that offers insight into how to organize a society around more just food and agriculture systems, and it is a mighty long list of people who ought to be listened to
It is also grossly ironic to use faulty data to cut the statistics program.
www.dailynebraskan.com/news/unl-use...
It's over.
Despite the fact that the academic council recommended against it, despite the fact that the program brought in more tuition than it cost, and despite the fact that Nebraskans need & deserve this expertise, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences will be cut.
www.dailynebraskan.com/news/adminis...