About

Our mission is to broaden and deepen the conversation around food and agriculture, amplify underrepresented voices, hold power–both government officials and corporations–to account, and inspire a more equitable, sustainable future.

If you’ve been with us since we started in 2009, you’re part of a community of changemakers and food innovators. We keep you front of mind as we’re identifying the challenges and solutions you need to stay at the forefront of food-system thought leadership.

Both through our reporting and through conversations with you, our readers, Civil Eats brings together diverse viewpoints that are essential to thoughtful, meaningful change.

Civil Eats brings a clear and compelling voice to the most important food and agriculture stories of our time: How climate change impacts our food system, the challenges many communities face in finding good, nutritious food, and the ways state and federal policies shape every bite we eat.

We dig deep to find solutions that center ecosystem health, human-scale farming, and previously overlooked communities, adding levels of context and detail that are rare on other sites and in other publications. We don't shy away from pursuing difficult or complicated stories.

By covering rural America, urban centers, Capitol Hill and beyond, and by delivering fair, balanced, high-quality journalism, Civil Eats breaks important news, educates leaders and policymakers, influences the national conversation, and serves as an invaluable resource for mainstream media. We pride ourselves on our reputation for nuanced and trusted reporting.

Although we focus on the U.S., we also occasionally cover American food policy and American corporate operations overseas. We do not report on international issues in the regular course of our journalism.

When Civil Eats launched in 2009, no major media outlets focused on the intersectionality of food and other significant social and political issues. For the past 15 years, we have led the charge in creating robust public discourse on food and farming and worked to make complicated, underreported stories more accessible to a mainstream audience.

In particular, we remain unparalleled in the media landscape for our commitment to reporting on food justice and Indigenous foodways, both of which we’ve covered since our inception in 2009. We routinely reveal the connection between race and environmental health. Our reporting centers BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities that are disproportionately and negatively impacted by the food and agriculture system, and we've broken new ground in our coverage of inequity in food access. We also strive to cultivate diverse contributors.

We are rigorous and fair in our assessment and analysis of current events, and seek to add new information and fresh perspectives. We are not in the business of breaking news, but are often the first to report on the people, places, and projects that deserve our attention. We approach our work with curiosity, thoroughness, and integrity, and we try to achieve equity both as a team and through our work.

As a digital-only newsroom, we have always worked remotely. Our team is based across the U.S., with headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are unique in our collaborative approach to identifying unreported issues, voices, and ideas, and work intensively with our reporters and freelancers to tell important stories that capture the complexity of the food system.

Civil Eats began as a website for Slow Food Nation, a San Francisco event in 2008 where 85,000 people converged at to focus on the politics and pleasures of eating. Leading up to the event, the website received close to 1 million visitors and became a touchstone for people interested in broadening the conversation about food politics.

Shortly thereafter, in January 2009, Civil Eats was co-founded by Paula Crossfield and Naomi Starkman as an independent site offering a range of high-level analysis and news stories—and to give voice to people who were actively changing the food system.

For our first four years, Civil Eats operated with no funding and as a labor of love. We were fiscally sponsored thereafter, and in 2020, became an independent 501-C-3 public charity. We continue to raise funding from individual donors, foundations, and through our membership program.

The team operates a virtual newsroom on a shoestring budget, with little to no overhead. As a pioneer in this space, we have never accepted advertising and remain deeply committed to editorial independence, providing our writers and commentators autonomy.

In our 15 years, Civil Eats has achieved significant impact and reach:

• We raised an unprecedented $100,000 via Kickstarter in 2013;
• We were named Publication of the Year in 2014 by the prestigious James Beard Foundation;
• We were inducted into the Library of Congress in 2019;
• We won a 2022 IACP Award for best newsletter for our members-only monthly column, The Deep Dish, which was also won best newsletter from the Online News Association in 2024;
• We were awarded a James Beard Foundation Media Award for our 2022 investigative series on animal agriculture workers, Injured and Invisible;
• We were nominated for a James Beard Award for our 2023 investigative series on Walmart and the Walton Family; and
• We were nominated for best micro newsroom by the Online News Association twice, in 2023 and 2024.

Read about our many other awards and honors.

In 2015, we put up a paywall like many independent nonprofit news organizations have done—as a way to raise funds to support our operations. Readers could access a small number of articles for free, and if they wanted to get past the paywall, they paid a fee to become a Civil Eats member. Our members care about independent food systems news, and the membership program has been critical in supporting our work as a small, nonprofit newsroom.

In 2024, we dropped our paywall and launched a campaign to make our award-winning reporting available to everyone.

Learn more about our paywall here—and become a member to support our work.

We practice standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a strict firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of revenue, and accepting financial support does not mean we endorse donors or their products, services, or opinions.

We avoid conflicts of interest—real or perceived—by refusing special treatment and favors, and by refraining from political involvement. We also avoid investing in any companies we cover. When conflicts are unavoidable, we disclose them. We accept gifts, grants, and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but we make our news judgments independently and not on the basis of donor support.

We may consider accepting donations to support coverage of particular topics, but we keep editorial control of that coverage. We don’t give donors the right to review or influence editorial content, or to distribute it without our authorization.

We are committed to transparency in every aspect of funding our organization, including financial support from our donors. Accepting donor support does not mean we endorse them or their products, services, or opinions. We accept gifts, grants, and sponsorships from individuals, organizations, and foundations to help with our general operations, coverage of specific topics, and special projects. We make our news judgments independently—not based on or influenced by donors. We don’t give supporters the rights to assign, review, or edit content.

Even when applying these criteria, cases may arise in which accepting a gift, grant, or some other form of support might compromise our mission or goals, or might create the appearance of such a compromise. Accordingly, Civil Eats reserves the right to decline or to return any gift, grant, or other form of support if we determine that it would not be in our best interest to accept or to continue to receive such support.

Gifts of tangible real property, personal property, securities, cryptocurrency, bequests, in-kind donations, or other such types of donations of $200,000 or more may only be accepted upon approval of the board of directors. We make public all donors who give $5,000 or more per year.

We prefer not to accept donations from anonymous sources, but will, for general support, only if we’re sure that we are spending the donation according to our own intent and in compliance with INN’s Membership Standards. We do not accept donations from sources who, deemed by our board of directors, present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence.