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RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—The largest newspapers in the country failed to make the connection between our food system and global warming, according to a Johns Hopkins study appearing in the journal Public Health Nutrition. Despite a pair of United Nations reports that cited livestock, meat production, and farming as major sources of global warming emissions, the press did not give the subject very much attention in the past three years, the study finds. Food production and agriculture were cited as contributors of global warming pollution in just 2.4% of articles about climate change. Less than 1% of climate change articles connected greenhouse-gas emissions to livestock and meat production.

THE DETAILS: Study author Roni Neff, PhD, research director for the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and other researchers searched for “climate change” and “food and climate change” in articles published between Sept. 2005 and Jan. 2008 in the nation’s 16 largest-circulation newspapers. Those papers included The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Rocky Mountain News (Denver), Houston Chronicle, New York Post, Detroit Free Press, Dallas Morning News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Boston Globe, Newark Star-Ledger, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Arizona Republic, Long Island Newsday and San Francisco Chronicle. The study was funded by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Researchers scanned the papers and found 4,582 stories that used the term “climate change” or “global warming” in the headline or first paragraph. They searched that set to see how many articles also mentioned “food,” “farm,” or “agriculture” anywhere in the story and found 109 articles (2.4%) matching the criteria. “When I talk to people, it is clear the information is not broadly known,” Neff says. “I still do not meet many who can identify meat production as the top food/agriculture contributor to climate change, and fewer still who can correctly explain why.”