Tom Philpott

Michael Pollan Journalism Fellow, 2018

Alum 2015 | Alum 2018 | Fellow 2018

Tom Philpott is the food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones. His work has won several awards, and he was named one of “ten culinary innovators” by Food & Wine. His piece on antibiotic use in agriculture appeared in the Best Science and Nature Writing of 2017. Tom has worked as an organic farmer, a steakhouse cook, and a community college teacher.

He served as a columnist, food editor, and senior food writer for the online environmental site Grist. He’s a cofounder of Maverick Farms, a center for sustainable food education in Valle Crucis, North Carolina.

His work on food politics has appeared in Newsweek, Gastronomica, and the Guardian. Maverick Farms has been featured in Gourmet and New York Times, and in September 2008, Food & Wine named Philpott one of “ten innovators” who “will continue to shape the culinary consciousness of our country for the next 30 years.”

In 2011, he was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award—the “Oscars of the food world,” as Time put it—in the “Food-Related Columns and Commentary” category.

During his 2015 residency, Tom worked on a book that teases out just how much Americans have come to rely on California’s farms to fill plates, shows why that reliance is likely to become increasingly troublesome, and examines efforts to redistribute fruit and vegetable production in other regions.

During his 2018 fellowship, he worked on a book titled, Perilous Bounty, teasing out the ecological and social catastrophes unfolding in the two main U.S. food-growing regions, California and the Corn Belt.