Civil Eats

Since 2009, Civil Eats, an independent, nonprofit digital news site about the American food system, has focused on high-quality, original journalism which breaks news, educates leaders and policymakers, and serves as a resource for broader mainstream media. Civil Eats brings a clear and compelling voice to a complex range of issues. Our years of reporting experience have shown that complicated and often underreported stories on climate change, the environment, social justice, and on policy issues such as health and nutrition, are all made more accessible to a mainstream audience through our nuanced, solutions-oriented reporting. For the first four years, Civil Eats operated with no funding and as a labor of love. Now, almost 15 years later, Civil Eats has achieved significant impact and reach: It raised an unprecedented $100,000 via Kickstarter in 2013, was named Publication of the Year in 2014 by the James Beard Foundation, inducted into the Library of Congress in 2019, and won the IACP Digital Media Award for Best Group Food Blog in 2020, all with very limited resources. Founder and editor-in-chief Naomi Starkman was a 2016 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and was named 2021 Journalist of the Year by Hunter College. Civil Eats has reported on some of the most important food and agriculture stories of our time. Unique in the media landscape, food justice has been central to its reporting since its inception. Civil Eats collaborates with high-profile print and online publications, and these partnerships bring Civil Eats important stories to millions of new readers, expanding the dialogue on economic and social justice. The site is on the regular reading lists of policymakers in D.C. and grassroots leaders alike, and its stories appear in daily news round-ups, and are shared on social media by elected officials. In 2022, Civil Eats published 200 articles with more than 80 reporters, and was nominated for and received numerous awards. The article, Craft Beer Faces a Gender and Race Reckoning, received the Best Commentary award from the North American Guild of Beer Writers. Civil Eats also received a digital media award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals for best newsletter or its monthly members content The Deep Dish. Senior Editor Twilight Greenaway won an SPJ NorCal Honors 2022 Excellence in Journalism Award for reporting on climate change in her Op-ed: The Flood of Climate Disasters Has the Food System Reeling. Its Time to Act. Civil Eats launched an investigative desk in 2022, and hired an investigations editor to lead a team of reporters who have produced award-winning work to date. The site published stories related to toxic waste and mining in farm communities, investment markets for Colorado River water, and union-busting by Kimbal Musks vertical gardening company (which has since closed). Investigative stories have attracted tens of thousands of readers, been named story of the week by the Institute for Nonprofit News, and attracted new funders like the Gumshoe Group and the Earth Journalism Network. As part of the desk, Civil Eats launched Injured and Invisible, a five-part investigation that deeply reported on an often unprotected, unseen workforce. The response to the series has been overwhelmingly positive, and the stories have been shared thousands of times. We partnered with Energy News Network and Gatopardo, a Mexican monthly news magazine, to publish a Spanish-language version of one story. The first story in the series was named an Aspen Institute Best Idea of the Day. In 2023, this series was awarded a James Beard Foundation Media Award for excellence in investigative reporting. As the desk develops, weve offered new opportunities to freelance writers, photographers, fact-checkers, and illustrators at competitive rates of pay. Weve also been able to hire internationally, hiring bicultural, multilingual reporters and photographers who increase our cultural competency in areas where our current network hasnt yet reached. Meanwhile, the desk has created new opportunities for in-house writers to pursue complex projects on their own beats, garner funding and editorial support for their work, and develop investigative and narrative writing skills. Weve also developed a new relationship with the pro-bono legal program ProJourn and deepened our relationship with key sources who offered their ideas in early stages of the desks development.