For climate conscious eaters, beef has become the food to avoid. But what replaces it? For many people in the U.S., it’s factory farmed chicken, which has about one tenth the climate impact per serving. Some eaters might be surprised, though, to hear that this swap isn’t as environmentally friendly as they think. At a glance, the carbon footprint of factory farmed chicken is dramatically lower than that of industrially raised beef – but that’s dependent on scale, and as the industry expands, so do its emissions.

Lauren Rothman and her partner rented a house in Oaxaca City with a large 10,000-liter-capacity cistern—and despite that, and although they took daily measures to curb their water consumption, their cistern routinely ran dry before the next water delivery, leaving them without water for days at a time. More than 22 million people in Mexico City could soon face a complete water shortage, and millions more around the country deal with frequent droughts and water shortages. Is it time to rethink our relationship with water?

US farmworkers are a shocking ​35 times more likely to die​ from heat than other workers, and their growing vulnerability to heat stress cannot be blamed on climate alone – there are social and political causes, stemming from the way agricultural work is performed, organized and regulated. But since we don’t have years for these workers to gain the right to safe working conditions, action must be taken by civil society and the private sector. Here, we take a look at some of the ​comprehensive standards and protocols​ that have been developed for heat stress prevention and response, and what remains to be done.

When pressed, the nation’s biggest food processors and retailers, including General Mills, PepsiCo, and Tyson, say they’re doing their best to keep prices down, and blame inflation for unavoidable price rises. But as these companies hide behind ‘difficult times,’ they’re making record profits, issuing generous dividends to their shareholders, and spending billions of dollars buying back their own shares on the open market to inflate stock value, a move that serves to enrich executives and investors at consumers’ cost.

Our legal system is complicated, with roots in racial capitalism that drive mass incarceration; there’s also a mix of incentives within the prison network that promote various versions of convict leasing, agricultural labor programs, and coercive labor practices. And while the definitive numbers on prison labor in agriculture have been largely mysterious, we’ve recently learned more about which states, brands, and producers benefit most from this phenomenon.

In short, a ‘food baron’ is someone who’s benefitted from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation’s rural towns and local businesses. Here, Charlie Hope D’Anieri interviews Austin Frerick on his new book, Barons, which provides a portrait of our food system through stories of its oligarchs.

Katherine Miller, former senior director of food policy at the James Beard Foundation and author of At the Table: The Chef’s Guide to Advocacy, explains to Mark why chefs are so uniquely suited to help us fix what’s broken in the world of food.

Careful readers of The Bittman Project will note that we are increasingly giving active support to some of our especially like-minded partners. Among these is Agroecology Fund, a participatory grantmaking fund that supports agroecology movements from Mexico to Mali to Malaysia.

The latest episode of ​Food with Mark Bittman​ is up! Kate and I talked to God’s Love We Deliver executive…