Bridget Shirvell
Bridget Shirvell writes about the connection between everyday food decisions, long-term health, and the climate crisis, with a particular focus on how families eat and live. Her work for Martha Stewart centres on health-driven food stories that blend nutrition guidance, ingredient ethics, and practical home cooking advice. She is a freelance journalist and editorial consultant whose broader portfolio spans parenting, climate crisis solutions, and the modern food system.
Health-Driven Food and Nutrition Coverage
At Martha Stewart, Shirvell’s health coverage is anchored in service journalism that explains what specific foods do to the body in clear, expert-informed terms.
Her piece on what eating fermented foods every day does to the body draws on nutrition experts to break down gut health, potential benefits, and realistic ways to integrate these foods into daily meals without hype. Her reporting style foregrounds evidence and practical takeaways, making complex nutrition topics accessible while staying grounded in mainstream medical and dietetic perspectives.
Shirvell’s work also explores staple ingredients through a health and history lens, as in coverage that questions whether cranberries were part of the first Thanksgiving while connecting them to contemporary holiday eating. In this kind of story she combines historical context with guidance on how people use traditional ingredients now, linking cultural rituals to present-day health choices. Across these pieces, she consistently treats nutrition as part of a wider lifestyle rather than a siloed topic, situating individual foods within patterns of eating, celebration, and everyday routines.
Food Systems, Sustainability, and Home Cooking
Shirvell distinguishes herself from a generic health reporter by consistently tying personal food choices to the wider food system and sustainability. In her Martha Stewart story on home cooks buying whole cows and saving money, she focuses on how families manage cost, sourcing, and storage when buying meat in bulk, positioning the kitchen as a site where budget, ethics, and convenience intersect. The piece reflects her interest in showing readers how system-level issues such as meat supply chains and pricing translate into concrete decisions at the household level.
Her coverage of ingredients like palm oil shows the same systems lens, examining a ubiquitous product through its environmental, ethical, and consumer-health implications. In that reporting she draws on subject-matter experts to unpack why palm oil is everywhere, what it means for forests and climate, and how home cooks can respond through ingredient choices and label-reading. Beyond Martha Stewart, her professional bios emphasise that she reports on the environment and food systems for multiple outlets, which reinforces that these themes are not occasional but central to her beat.
For communications tied to food, agriculture, or sustainable brands, she engages most directly when a story sits at the intersection of everyday cooking, cost, and climate-aware sourcing.
Parenting in a Climate Crisis
A second core strand of Shirvell’s work is parenting in the age of climate change, which she approaches as both an emotional and practical challenge. She is the author of Parenting in a Climate Crisis: A Handbook for Turning Fear into Action, a book that offers guidance on raising children amid climate concerns and translating anxiety into concrete family-level decisions.
Her various professional bios describe her as a climate communicator whose writing explores curiosity, resilience, and hope in the context of parenting, indicating that she treats parents as a distinct audience with specific information needs.
This parenting-focused perspective shapes how she handles health and environment topics, often framing them around what families can do together rather than what individuals should do alone. When she writes about climate crisis solutions or food systems, she tends to emphasise actions that fit into family routines - cooking, shopping, talking with children about climate - and the psychological dimensions of making those changes.
That through-line makes her coverage particularly attuned to stories that help parents navigate health, sustainability, and climate in ways their children can see and participate in.
Environment, Sustainability, and Lifestyle Reporting
Shirvell’s wider portfolio reinforces a consistent interest in sustainability beyond the kitchen, encompassing travel, home life, and consumer choices.
She is described in multiple biographies as a freelance journalist covering food, travel, and sustainability, with work appearing in outlets including The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Teen Vogue, Civil Eats, PBS NewsHour, Good Housekeeping, and others. This breadth shows that she approaches health not only as physical wellbeing but as something intertwined with environmental quality, cultural experience, and everyday lifestyle design.
Her editorial and consulting work with brands focused on climate solutions, zero-waste stores, seed-to-cup coffee businesses, and chefs addressing invasive species further underlines her commitment to climate-conscious storytelling. In these collaborations she applies the same narrative approach seen in her journalism: translating system-level sustainability issues into concrete choices and stories that non-specialists can follow.
Taken together, her body of work marks her out as a journalist whose health coverage is inseparable from a deep, recurring engagement with environmental responsibility, family life, and the ethics of how people eat and travel.
4 more health journalists.
Alanna Smith
Alanna Smith is a national health reporter whose work links health policy and politics to real access to care, with a constant focus on health equity, infectious disease and the toxic drug crisis. She reports for The Globe and Mail on infectious diseases, hospitals and long-term care, mental health, drug policy and the pressures on health systems in Western Canada. Her stories connect big-picture decisions to patients, families, front-line workers and volunteers, showing how funding, privatization and federal standards shape public care. She has covered trauma care inequities, proposed public‑private models in Alberta, drug toxicity and overdose policy, respiratory virus surges, measles elimination, gene‑editing advances and gender‑affirming health care laws. Her work combines narrative reporting, data, legal and policy analysis, and has been recognized by national journalism and press freedom organizations.
Allan Levine
Allan Levine is a historian and author whose journalism uses the past to explain present-day issues. He writes for the Winnipeg Free Press, including the Now & Then column, which examines current events through history. His subjects include public health, disease, medical treatment, health systems, politics, social conflict, strikes, wars, antisemitism and Canadian public life. His polio reporting traces Manitoba epidemics, hospital pressures, treatment, mortality and the arrival of vaccines through archival data and medical history. He also writes about the Winnipeg General Strike and Jewish communities, including discrimination, rights and security. His work draws on books about Canadian political leaders, Jewish history and the wartime economy, including The Dollar A Year Men. He writes long-form, analytical pieces that combine dates, statistics, policy decisions and narrative storytelling to connect people and institutions with broader historical change.
Angela Amato
Angela Amato is a digital news producer with CTV News, and her coverage is distinct for linking health research and public safety concerns to legal and policy decisions that shape daily life. She reports on health, justice, politics, business, arts and culture, crime and public-interest stories. Her health work covers academic and clinical research, including studies on vaping and lung blood flow, exercise tolerance and early heart dysfunction in young adults. She also reports on motorcycle gang arrests, homicide and death investigations, Indigenous justice stories, wildfire evacuations, ambulance contracts, property taxes, labour negotiations and political advocacy rules. She explains complex findings in plain language and stays close to documents, data and expert sources. Her background includes investigative and daily newsrooms, and she has earned nominations for national journalism awards.
Apoorva Mandavilli
Apoorva Mandavilli covers the collision of infectious disease science, vaccine policy and public health agencies for The New York Times, following how research, regulation and politics shape outbreaks and access to vaccines. She reports on science and global health with a steady focus on infectious diseases and pandemics, including Covid-19, mpox, H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis, treating them as ongoing global threats. Her work explains complex epidemiology and virology in clear narratives about risk, evidence and the consequences of scientific decisions. She repeatedly returns to vaccine policy, law and misinformation, tracing how court fights and agency disputes affect immunization schedules and public trust. She also reports on global health programs, funding cuts and inequity in care and technology. A longtime science journalist and former founding editor in chief of Spectrum, she has written widely on science and health and received major honors for medical science reporting and pandemic coverage.