@arockjonestown
✍️ Independent food & ag journalist alexandrajones.net 👩🏻💻 Content marketer & copywriter 📚 Author, Stuff Every Cheese Lover Should Know 🧀 Newsletter on cheese, culture, & climate: Milkfed.substack.com
Panic! At The Fertilizer Desk, US Edition
Americans: this is your regular reminder that maybe 0.01% of people who write for the news actually understand how fertilizer works.
But their editors all found out that scary headlines about "GLOBAL SHORTAGE??" get clicks.
While American farmers are overwhelmed by health insurance costs, German farmers don’t have to worry about their medical bills. And this difference could help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for climate change.
2026 nuclear family meme— featuring Fritzi as Neurodivergent Aunt, Sluggo as Sluggo, Nancy as Daughter, Nancy Jr as Woke Dog
The other place I’ve seen this (minus the TED talk vernacular) is in farming/ag industry publications.
Yes, get in mother fuckers. If you're feeling weirdly down, we're entering the covid anniversary period.
Trump overstepped executive power by imposing tariffs, supreme court rules
Half of our agricultural land is used for beef that provides 3% of our calories. Nobody likes it when I bang my spoon on my high chair about this but eventually we need to grapple with it.
food systems are the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss on land, freshwater use, and overfishing, and the number two cause of climate change after energy use
Amy Ash @lolennui.bsky.social (me making fun of your crop rotation idea and thereby holding our people back another 5000 years) jeff thinks the beans have to take turns Imao August 7, 2023 at 3:38 AM
thank you @goingmedieval.bsky.social for making me aware of this tweet
Don't want to listen? Subscribe to my newsletter to get scripts (complete with source links and media recs!) sent right to your inbox! milkfed.substack.com
Episode 3 traces how colonialism and capitalism set the stage for food production (among other human activities) to become a driver of an existential climate crisis. Plus: the first climate scientist, singing to cows, & the state of American artisan cheese today. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3...
Remember how I launched a podcast last month? I promptly forgot to promote the second episode, but here it is—a history of the first 8500-ish years of cheese and climate change on earth, featuring insights from THEE preeminent cheese historian Dr. Paul Kindstedt: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2...
Britney Spears 🌹🚀 @britneyspears Does anyone think global warming is a good thing? I love Lady Gaga. I think she's a really interesting artist. 12:31 PM · Feb 10, 2011
Happy 15th anniversary to this tweet:
Not really, it's always roulette.
You *can* get the risk level low enough that some people feel like roulette is worth it.
But fundamentally, cows' udders are just. directly underneath their poop chute. It is what it is. Even France, w rigorous raw milk standards, still has a lot of outbreaks.
every time someone has asked me the last week or so about priorities it is rental assistance. please please please people need rent to stay in their homes. scroll down to rent relief funds and pick something www.standwithminnesota.com
I’ll be sharing more BTS thoughts in my newsletter next week (link in my bio!). In the meantime, I invite you to give it a read: culturecheesemag.com/stories/amer...
That chaos continued into my reporting: as I was filing in early November for a piece that would go live in print in January, the news that shiny trinkets from the Swiss might drop their tariffs down to a more reasonable 15% meant that I had to do a bunch of re-reporting and rewriting 🫠
Aside from the jump in costs, especially on 🇨🇭cheeses, the haphazard and confusing way the tariffs were implemented had importers scrambling—no one along the supply chain knew how much more they’d have to pay or when, all during summer prep for the holiday season.
Small makers‘ costs also spike when inputs like cheese paper, cultures, rennet, and equipment—which are mostly produced in 🇨🇦, 🇨🇭, and 🇫🇷—go up in price. Meanwhile, indie cheese shops are stuck trying to justify a huge price jump on imports that doesn’t add value. It’s lose-lose.
In the reporting process, I gained a richer understanding of how artisan cheese in the US is interconnected: higher tariffs on imports don’t benefit US makers (except big industrial producers) bc those high-volume, cost-effective wheels subsidize $$$ farmstead cheeses from small-scale US makers.
To understand a complex aspect of the cheese world I didn't know much about—and how truly unprecedented the tariffs were—I spoke with nearly 20 importers, distributors, sales managers, cheese shop owners, mongers, and makers based in the US (though a few represented Swiss or EU businesses).
Who’s ready for 2600 words on cheese tariffs? 🙋🏻♀️
My reporting on how 2025’s chaotic and pointless tariff rollercoaster has affected specialty cheese importers, distributors, shop owners, makers, and mongers in the US is live!
culturecheesemag.com/stories/amer...
oh it's going to be a Recession recession
New Food Pyramid Just Picture of Cow
My fave Marieke flavors are foenegreek and honey clover—highly recommend if you come across them!
Hope you enjoy! For a Better World’s season on dairy was hugely formative for me as this project was percolating over the past few years. I’m hoping this limited series can become the start of a larger project in the future.
This is going to be worth your listen!
Prefer text over audio? Read the first episode script of Milkfed: A Podcast About Cheese, Culture, and Climate at my newsletter of the same name. milkfed.substack.com/p/milkfed-ep...
Hello! I have been working on a 6-part narrative podcast to present some cheese and climate research I have been working on for the past few years. The first ep—which covers who I am, why I'm doing this, and what listeners can expect—is out now. podcasts.apple.com/zw/podcast/m...