Food + Policy | Civil Eats

Can Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ‘Make America Healthy Again’?

Lisa Held — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:00:54 +0000

Marion Nestle watched, deeply surprised, last month as bits and pieces of her long-time efforts to sound alarms about food industry influence on research and government trickled out of a Capitol Hill roundtable hosted by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the former presidential candidate now stumping for Donald Trump.

Skyrocketing rates of chronic disease connected to unhealthy food production? Conflicts of interest between business and government? “This is an old story—for me, anyway,” Nestle—who is a member of Civil Eats’ advisory board—explained. But she added that it’s not one that typically gets much airtime in Washington, D.C., and the people communicating the message were not the same experts typically tapped by lawmakers.

“They all feel like they’re unheard, when they have some of the largest health and wellness platforms in the country.”

Participants at the roundtable included physician Marty Makary, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who talked about a lack of research on why pancreatic cancer rates have spiked; activist Vani Hari, who railed against food companies using ingredients banned in other countries in ultra-processed products like Froot Loops; and podcaster Mikhaila Fuller, who told a personal story of an all-meat diet curing her chronic illness.

Nestle disagreed with many of the finer points and thought the opinions at times came across as anti-nutrition science. Even so, she said she understood the frustrations and broader concerns. What irked her is the fact that her fellow nutritionists, who have plenty of scientific know-how, are not doing more to push the government to do something about chronic disease.

“I’d rather see mainstream nutritionists screaming bloody murder that we’ve created a food supply that’s making people sick,” she said. “Seventy-four percent of Americans are overweight. There is something seriously wrong.”

It was not the only D.C. gathering tackling connections between food, environmental exposures, and health last month. A formal Senate subcommittee hearing on chronic disease prevention and treatment featured three physicians and a food and addiction psychologist. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle there expressed a surprising amount of bipartisan concern and collaboration, according to reporting from Food Fix. And last week, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf acknowledged ultra-processed foods’ potential harms with new, stronger language, which Food Fix also reported on.

But Sen. Johnson, who has been advocating for “healthcare freedom” since he became a loud opponent of vaccine mandates during the pandemic, hosted a different kind of event. With none of the bipartisan questioning that would happen in an official hearing—and with recent presidential candidate Kennedy sharing the spotlight—it came across as a campaign event for Kennedy’s super PAC and its larger movement, Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Less than two months ago, Kennedy—who runs a controversial nonprofit that works on reducing children’s chemical exposures and has been a primary disseminator of vaccine misinformation—dropped out of the race and launched MAHA to help elect Trump.

It’s unclear how many of the panelists have formally signed onto that effort (most have not publicly endorsed Trump), but many have become regular guests on conservative media. Hari also spoke at a MAHA rally organized by Kennedy’s super PAC later in the week. And last night, two of the panelists, Makary and physician Casey Means, were scheduled to appear at a virtual MAHA town hall alongside Kennedy and Trump. (The town hall was postponed due to Hurricane Milton’s approach; Means said by email to Civil Eats that Vice President Kamala Harris was also invited to participate.)

Regardless of the panelists’ stated allegiances and while many are quick to dismiss MAHA as a fringe coalition, these advocates are tapping into dissatisfaction with the food-system status quo and are feeding into a new energy around food and health as an issue the right is ready to take on. As the election quickly approaches, many voters who care about healthier food are paying attention, and Instagram and X comments on the Johnson–RFK, Jr. roundtable were filled with MAHA enthusiasm.

While presenting themselves as silenced by mainstream media, they are reaching tens of millions of people daily through podcasts, best-selling books, and social media. “They all feel like they’re unheard, when they have some of the largest health and wellness platforms in the country,” said Melisse Gelula, who co-founded the publication Well+Good in 2008 and was one the foremost chroniclers of and experts on the growing culture around “wellness” in America. (She is no longer affiliated with the publication.)

Johnson’s opening statements invoked COVID-era fears about vaccines, and that made sense to Gelula: At the height of the pandemic, she saw many popular food and wellness gurus move rightward as misinformation around COVID vaccines and treatments spread. It confounded her because, in her mind, many of the bigger issues the Democrats focused on—like healthcare and climate change—could impact American well-being in even deeper ways. “Can we have abortion rights? Can we have LGBTQ rights? The protection of humanity locked down? Those are really under threat, too,” she said.

But the thing that both Gelula and Nestle emphasized is that while the Biden administration may not have done enough to advance research on how processed foods are impacting Americans’ health or reducing very real chemical exposures, there is ample evidence that a second Trump presidency would turn back the clock further on these issues.

“Why would anybody think anything else?” Nestle said. As to whether a Trump administration might tackle conflicts of interests between business and government, “They’re absolutely not going to do that. We know, because it didn’t happen during the first Trump administration. The opposite happened.”

To sort fact from rhetoric, here are a few key examples of how the Trump administration’s track record is in opposition to the MAHA movement’s goals.

Industry Influence on Government Agencies

Industry has long held significant influence in the government agencies that are responsible for regulating them—a phenomenon often referred to as corporate capture, and one that Civil Eats has covered at length. Kennedy’s MAHA materials reference it constantly, but this trend accelerated during the Trump administration.

Pesticide industry operators have always had an inside line to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, but their influence ballooned under Trump.

For instance, pesticide industry operators have always had an inside line to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, but their influence ballooned under Trump. Rebeckah Adcock moved from CropLife America, the industry’s powerful trade association, to a position as senior advisor to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and continued to meet with her industry peers. Trump also gutted the Economic Research Service, a subagency tasked with publishing objective research on farming, food consumption, and the environment that is often understood to be one of the only independent arms of the USDA.

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump appointed Alexandra Dunn as assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Dunn is now the president and CEO of CropLife America. In his first few months leading the agency, Scott Pruitt met with dozens of industry groups—including CropLife America—but just five environmental groups.

At the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the administration installed Mindy Brashears, a Texas Tech University professor who had a number of research projects funded by the cattle and pork industries, as the top food safety official.

Chemical Exposures From the Food Supply

That influence contributed to significant deregulation of food and agriculture chemicals, a concern that is central to supporters of MAHA.

In response to direct pressure from the agriculture industry, Trump’s EPA chief rejected his own scientists’ recommendation to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide Kennedy has called attention to for its ability to cause brain damage and reduce IQs in children. Trump’s EPA also weakened safeguards for atrazine, an herbicide that is banned in Europe and is linked to birth defects and cancer, and for pyrethroids—a class of insecticides used in bug sprays, pet shampoos, and on fruits and vegetables—that are linked to learning deficiencies in children.

Under Trump, the EPA also proposed weakening safety protections for farmers and workers that apply pesticides, and a recent whistleblower report detailed a culture of rushing through chemical approvals. Scientists who spoke up about safety concerns were “encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage, and neurological problems, from their reports—and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves,” according to ProPublica.

Trump’s FDA denied a petition filed by environmental groups to ban perchlorate, a chemical that can be dangerous for children and developing fetuses, in food packaging, and it dismissed concerns from outside scientists about levels of toxic chemicals known as PFAS in food.

Trump signed an executive order directing the USDA, FDA, and EPA to make it easier for companies to get genetically engineered crops approved and cut cost-share payments for organic certification.

During a 2020 interview with pro GMO advocate Jon Entine, Sonny Perdue dismissed Americans who worry about the effects of pesticides as having an irrational fear of technology and agreed with Entine as he equated organic farmers’ techniques to “sprinkling organic fairy dust over crops.”

Ultra-Processed Foods and Metabolic Health and Nutrition

Growing concern over the health impacts of ultra-processed foods is also fueling the MAHA movement.

Like all presidents to date, Trump didn’t do anything of note to address ultra-processed foods or metabolic health. His USDA did try to roll back school meal standards to cut whole grain requirements in half and reintroduce flavored, sweetened milks and tried to weaken rules meant to keep junk food out of schools.

In the end, Trump’s 2024 platform does not mention any of these issues, but it does promise to “reinstate President Trump’s Deregulation Policies,” which would most certainly result in fewer safeguards against chemical exposure and more unhealthy foods entering the U.S. food supply.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group summed it up this way in 2017: “Thanks to Trump, it may soon be harder for Americans to feed their families, build healthy diets, and eat food free of dangerous pathogens and pesticides.”

In response to an emailed question about why, given his past actions, she is supporting Trump, physician Casey Means said, “We need to be discussing the critical issues of chronic disease, the toxic food system, and misaligned incentives in our healthcare, food, and agriculture systems. These are fully bipartisan issues.”

But while the issues cross party lines, MAHA is an extension of MAGA, and that conversation is now happening in the middle of a politically charged and consequential moment. “It will get worse,” Marion Nestle said, if Trump gets into office. “We already know that, because we just had four years of that.”

(Disclosure: Held worked at Well+Good as a reporter and editor from 2010 – 2016, where Gelula was her boss.)

No-Spray Zone. Relatedly, on October 2, the EPA announced it had finalized regulations intended to prevent farmers and farmworkers from being exposed to pesticides during and after they’re sprayed. After the Trump administration attempted to weaken the rule, the agency revisited the text and reinstated some of the original, stronger protections, such as establishing a protective zone of 100 feet for some chemicals. Farmworkers, especially, lack critical protections from pesticides and are often harmed in the fields due to breathing in and having their skin exposed to the chemicals.

Climate-Friendly Farms. USDA officials announced nearly $8 billion will be available to farmers in fiscal year 2025 through conservation programs that pay for a range of practices with environmental benefits. It’s a record amount of funding for popular programs that always have many more applicants than recipients. Because it comes from Inflation Reduction Act funding, $5.7 billion from that pot is earmarked specifically for practices that have climate benefits, and the agency recently updated the list of practices that qualify. In addition to planting cover crops and establishing pollinator habitats, some of the new practices include prescribed burning, wetland restoration, and silvopasture—or farming with trees—which has been gaining traction in recent years. Separately, the agency also announced it funded 300 clean energy projects to the tune of $104 million, many of which touch the food system, including building solar arrays on oyster farms and poultry houses, new refrigeration for small meat processors, and digesters on dairy lagoons.

So Goes the West Coast . . . Because of California’s outsized population and massive agricultural industry, its food and agriculture policies often have effects far beyond the state’s borders. And last week, a flurry of bills with national implications for the food system landed on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. Newsom signed bills that ban six controversial chemicals from being used in public school food, standardize food packaging expiration dates to reduce waste, and review the use of paraquat, an herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease. He vetoed bills that would have put health warnings on new gas stoves and made it easier for farmworkers to file heat-related worker’s compensation claims.

The post Can Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ‘Make America Healthy Again’? appeared first on Civil Eats.

For Contract Farmers, the Election Could Change Everything—or Nothing at All

Lisa Held — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 09:00:44 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

This spring, Minh and Nhu-Hai Ngo were so stressed out by being at home on their farm in Vienna, Georgia, they made plans to visit family in Vietnam. When they spoke to Civil Eats, Nhu-Hai was already there. Minh, a soft-spoken farmer, was getting ready to join her. He sounded defeated.

“I go outside, look at the [chicken] houses, and it’s just empty,” he said. It was the first time in nearly eight years that the houses weren’t packed with birds owned by Tyson, a $21 billion company.

Minh started raising chickens in 2016, when he and Nhu-Hai took out a federal loan to purchase a farm with eight long metal barns built for housing poultry. Every few months, Tyson employees dropped off chicks and feed. They came back six weeks later to fetch fattened birds ready for slaughter.

After five years, in 2021, Tyson demanded that Minh install new fans and controllers in the houses, even though the old ones worked just fine, said Nhu-Hai, who handled the finances. So, despite the debt they still had from the initial farm purchase, the couple took out another loan. Less than three years after that—in October 2023—a Tyson production manager sent a letter with an ominous heading: “RE: Expiration and subsequent non-replacement of Broiler Production Contract.” Tyson was ending its relationship with the Ngos, effective January 26, 2024.

In 1992, the top four chicken companies controlled 41 percent of the market; today, they control 60 percent.

Ever since, Minh and Nhu-Hai have been fretting over how to come up with the money to pay back the bank. They put the farm on the market, but Nhu-Hai said it’s now nearly worthless, without an accompanying contract to grow chickens. (There is little else, after all, that one can do with eight windowless metal barns, each longer than a football field.)

“They give you just enough to survive every day—that’s it,” Minh said, of Tyson’s approach to compensation. “And then they make sure you spend any money on the houses.” Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.

For the Ngos, the situation is uniquely and intimately distressing. However, it’s a common story among America’s chicken farmers, because companies set up the system to place the risk of capital investments on farmers, while they control pretty much everything else. And as the industry has become more consolidated, their power has grown.

Over the past three decades, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, concentration across the meat industry has accelerated. In 1992, the top four chicken companies controlled 41 percent of the market; today, they control 60 percent. In pork, those numbers are 43 vs. 67 percent. In beef, 71 vs. 85 percent.

Economists predict market abuses are likely to occur when control by the four top players in any sector exceeds 40 percent. “What a monopoly does . . . is it uses its market power to raise prices for consumers or to raise prices in a stealthy way by reducing quality,” explained Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket, while moderating a virtual Farm Action event called “Justice for America’s Poultry Growers” in July. “At the same time, on the other end of the ledger, they suppress what they pay producers . . . and they capture the profits that are in the middle. It’s a pretty simple playbook.”

Now, as the election approaches, many experts and farmers say the outcome could determine whether the farm economy continues toward consolidation and monopoly, or whether—if the next administration enacts policies to restore a more competitive marketplace—it shifts power away from corporations and toward farmers.

They’ve got good reason: Upon taking office, the Trump administration immediately scrapped rules meant to protect farmers and was generally passive on antitrust enforcement. Meanwhile, shortly after being sworn in, the Biden Administration announced it would tackle consolidation with an executive order on “promoting competition in the American economy.” The order included a long to-do list for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to, among other goals, “address the unfair treatment of farmers” and a directive for the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “address the consolidation of industry in many markets across the economy.”

Some farmers and advocates say the Biden administration has delivered on an impressive number of those priorities, while others see its passionate rhetoric as disguising a lack of meaningful progress. Many predict that as president, Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to advance efforts to confront consolidation in meatpacking, but without a formal policy document, it’s hard to know exactly how. Most say that despite Trump’s populist language and popularity among commodity farmers, his focus on deregulation and actions during his first term point to a future with more power for meatpackers and less for contract farmers.

Industry groups that represent the biggest companies, including the National Chicken Council and the Meat Institute have repeatedly pushed back on the characterization of consolidation and harms to contract farmers as an issue, calling the Biden Administration’s efforts “a solution in search of a problem.”

However, experts like Austin Frerick—author of Barons and former co-chair of the Biden campaign’s Agriculture Antitrust Policy Committee—say the problem of consolidation and its multiple impacts on Americans represents a real opportunity for candidates. “The piñata is so big, and it’s saying, ‘Hit me, hit me,’ especially in meat markets,” he said. For example, recent reports show that some of the largest meat companies including Tyson and JBS USA have used their power to skirt child labor laws and to fix prices, raising the cost of groceries. “Someone’s eventually going to latch onto this. The politics are just too good.”

A Century of Regulatory Inaction

“(The companies) say we’re independent, but we’re not independent,” said Jonathan Buttram, a former contract chicken farmer who is now president of the Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association, during the Farm Action event. “How can we be independent when we have the debt, we have all the dead chickens, and that’s basically all we have? They own everything else. They make you feel like a sharecropper.”

Americans have been here before. Worker abuses perpetrated by turn-of-the-century meat barons prompted Congress to pass the Packers & Stockyards Act in 1921, in part to “assure fair competition and fair trade practices, to safeguard farmers and ranchers.”

Meatpacking workers in Chicago circa 1905. Photo from the Library of Congress.

More than 100 years later, however, after a mind-numbing series of false starts, there were still no rules on the books to enforce the law when President Biden took office. Former President Trump is partially responsible: During the Obama administration, Secretary Vilsack got some rules started, but Trump immediately threw them out when he took office. Trump then went a step further, dissolving the office that was set up to enforce Packers & Stockyards and moving oversight of the law to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS).

“AMS’s job is basically promoting the largest corporations, including meatpackers and grain traders, so to say, ‘You have to hold these companies accountable, but your bigger mission is to promote those companies,’ that gave us a lot of concern,” said Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action.

When Vilsack came in with a directive from Biden to restart work on Packers & Stockyards, he didn’t reverse that decision. However, under his watch, the USDA has finalized or proposed multiple rules that have earned the support of a wide range of farmer groups, including the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation. “We’ve been really happy that the Biden administration has taken this up,” Huffman said, and she’s been surprised by how vigorously they’ve pursued it. “Our big concern is just with the pace.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency used maximum resources to expedite the pace but that the rulemaking process is complex.

Huffman sees two pending rules as the most important for contract poultry farmers, and notes that if they’re not finalized before the election, an incoming president could throw them out immediately. Given that’s what Trump did the last time around, there’s reason to believe he would do it again, while Harris would likely let them stand. However, support of the rules doesn’t always break down along party lines: Some Republican lawmakers have attempted to roll back progress on the rules by attaching policy riders to legislative packages, while a few Democrats have made requests to slow down the process in ways that echo meat industry requests.

Others are frustrated by the fact that the rules seem to flit around the edges of deeper reform. For example, one of the most controversial aspects of contract farming in the chicken industry has long been the “tournament system,” so called because wages are turned into a competition, with farmers paid based on how fat their chickens are compared to those at neighboring farms. If implemented, the rules could set minimums for base pay and require companies to provide more information on how their pay rate is calculated. The fundamental structure of the tournament system, however, would remain.

Experts at organizations like the Open Markets Institute say that while the rules would help, the system itself is unfair and therefore violates the law and should be banned outright.

The National Chicken Council, on the other hand, says the Packers and Stockyards Act already prohibits anti-competitive practices and that some of the rules would increase costs, including to farmers.

Another rule would require companies to provide more details on the purpose and costs of upgrades when they demand farmers make expensive improvements to chicken houses, like Tyson did with the Ngos in 2021. But Nhu-Hai said there’s only one thing that would really make a difference for farmers: if the pay covered the upgrade. “Otherwise, you still have to be more in debt. It’s not worth it.”

Still, some farmer advocates see big potential in small tweaks to regulations, and Biden’s USDA did deliver on another major priority of independent cattle ranchers: In March, the USDA finalized a new “Product of USA” rule so that meat carrying that label will now have to come from animals born, raised, and processed here. It’s a change that comes after years of work, to ensure American farmers don’t face unfair competition from cheaper imports that carry the USA label.

The Consolidation of Agriculture

During Trump’s presidency, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue famously told a group of struggling Wisconsin dairy farmers that “In America, the big get bigger, and the small go out.”

Secretary Vilsack’s language couldn’t be more different. Since the USDA released the 2022 Farm Census data earlier this year, statistics on consolidation and the loss of small and mid-size farms have been a fixture in his regular speeches. At a recent Field Day at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, for example, he shared the fact that in 2022, the largest 7.5 percent of farms took in 89 percent of overall farm income, “which means that 1.7 million farms had to share 11 percent.”

“How can we be independent when we have the debt, we have all the dead chickens, and that’s basically all we have?

He also noted that 544,000 farms have gone out of business since 1981. “If you took every farmer today in North Dakota and South Dakota and added them to the ones in Minnesota and Wisconsin and those in Illinois and Iowa, as well as those in Nebraska and Colorado and those in Missouri and Oklahoma, you’d have roughly 544,000 farmers,” he laid out, for emphasis.

One of the key actions his USDA has taken to save small- and mid-size farms has been to invest in slaughterhouses and processing plants that work with farmers at that scale. The reasoning is simple: If there are more smaller, independent plants to buy and process animals for small farmers, competition will increase and the big packers will have less power.

In January 2022, the USDA announced a plan to invest $1 billion in competitive meat infrastructure. In July of this year, the agency said it had already distributed $700 million to that end.

But many experts say that because the big packers have already gotten so big, new, smaller plants will never be able to compete. “The reality is that the meat markets got more concentrated these last four years. JBS made a purchase. Tyson made a purchase. Cargill got back into the chicken industry,” Frerick said.

A spokesperson for the USDA emphasized that many of the smaller plants have not even opened yet, and that reversing decades of concentration will require a long-term commitment to a whole-of-government approach.

“From the very first days of the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA has been working to promote competition in agriculture by making landmark investments that diversify agriculture processing and support small and rural businesses, modernizing the rulebook under the Packers & Stockyards Act, and implementing wide-ranging policies to address the harms that market concentration poses to farmers and consumers,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “These unprecedented actions will help to bring transparency, choice, and integrity back to the markets and serve the interests of farmers and small- and mid-sized independent processors alike.”

The USDA’s actions on other fronts have strengthened large companies: Vilsack’s USDA, for example, gave Tyson a $60 million Climate-Smart Commodities Grant. Under Trump, Brazil-based JBS, the largest meat company in the world, got the largest pork contract in a program meant to compensate American farmers for trade deficits, netting nearly $78 million. (In both cases, the administrations have said that the money is passed through to farmers.)

Where Frerick thinks real change could happen to reign in consolidation is in antitrust regulation, which the Biden administration has also been pushing forward after appointing antitrust crusader Lina Khan to chair the FTC. Kahn has met with Iowa farmers about consolidation in the fertilizer industry, and in 2023, she led a significant update to the government’s merger guidelines. “The FTC and DOJ [Department of Justice] now have much stronger guidelines. Over time, I think that’s going to make a big difference, regardless of who’s president,” Huffman said.

Looking to November

As to the two candidates angling to move into the White House next year, neither has said much or published detailed positions on meat industry consolidation.

However, Harris recently said she plans to crack down on food industry mergers, and the 2024 Democratic Party Platform mentions concentration and notes the Biden administration’s work to “make livestock and poultry markets fairer and more transparent.” Her past actions also provide some clues: Huffman said that when Harris was a senator, she voted in favor of checkoff reform, another big priority for groups working on curtailing corporate power in the food system.

Frerick said it will all depend on who Harris appoints to lead the USDA. Because while he is emphatically disappointed in the Biden Administration’s performance on corporate consolidation, he thinks much of the failure lies in Vilsack’s ties to industry. If Trump wins, on the other hand, based on the former president’s last term, “everything bad will get turbocharged,” he said. While farmers have become a sort of emblematic picture of a typical Trump voter and many support the former president this time around, across a diverse agricultural landscape, there are also many who agree with Frerick’s opinion.

Carlton Sanders has been advocating for farmers since his Mississippi farm went into foreclosure in 2017, after, he said, the company he grew chickens for drove him out of business using discriminatory practices (which were later documented by the USDA). During the Farm Action event, he told a story of going to D.C. to meet with Trump during his first term. “He checked my case and my records, and he said I should get back to Mississippi and be proud that Koch Foods is providing jobs for the Mississippians. He said he won’t help with nothing, and he did not,” Sanders said. “Donald Trump is definitely not gonna help the chicken farmers.”

The 2024 Republican Party Platform does not mention corporate power, antitrust issues, or farmers in the meat industry.

As for Minh and Nhu-Hai Ngo, at the end of the day, they’re not sure it matters who is in office in Washington. They are desperate to get out of the chicken business altogether, and Minh is thinking about going back to driving a truck. But they also just heard that Tyson sold its local operations to a smaller company that may be offering new contracts to farms in the region. So, they waver as they reason it out: If they can’t sell the barns or make loan payments and a company comes along offering a contract, will the least terrible option be to get back in?

In August, after half a year of empty barns, they were increasingly anxious about their financial predicament. It seemed, Nhu-Hai said, that as long as companies like Tyson could amass unlimited wealth and power, elections would do little to change the course of their future. “Sometimes, I don’t feel like it makes a big difference,” she said.

The post For Contract Farmers, the Election Could Change Everything—or Nothing at All appeared first on Civil Eats.

Battling Meltdown: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Work for Change in the Kitchen

Amy McCarthy — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 13:13:26 +0000

This is the third article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater.

In the middle of the summer in Houston, Texas, the only thing that is more pervasive than the heat is the humidity—and when the air conditioning isn’t working properly, the consequences can be dire. Mad Austin, a former barista at a Houston Starbucks, knows those consequences all too well.

“Last summer, my store did not have a properly working AC—it was over 85 degrees in the store on a regular basis,” she says. “Having to go from one end of the store to the other constantly in order to gather customers’ items and bring them up front, you’re basically doing a workout.” And given that the external temperature was 110 degrees at the time, going outside offered no relief.

Read the stories in our series with Eater:

Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems As global warming bears down, some restaurants are forging stronger bonds with regional food systems and regenerative farms.
Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions To overcome ingredient shortages and high food costs, some restaurateurs are rethinking their staple ingredients and strengthening their relationships with suppliers.
Battling Meltdown: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Work for Change in the Kitchen As climate change drives temperatures up, restaurant staff face uncomfortable, even unsafe conditions with no heat regulations to protect them. Some workers are taking matters into their own hands.

Eventually, it got to be too much. Austin says that workers in the store went back and forth with management on repairs for their air conditioner for weeks, resulting only in temporary fixes that would break down again. Then, they decided to go on strike to demand a permanent solution. Workers picketed outside the Starbucks, holding signs with slogans like, “Our work environment is hotter than the coffee!”

Austin says that after the strike, Starbucks management ordered two external air-conditioning units for the building, and after they were installed, the temperature in the store dropped 20 degrees. More than a year later, Austin left her job at Starbucks and is now an organizer with Starbucks Workers United, the labor union that has organized more than 10,000 Starbucks employees. Along with wages and benefits, protections for safe working conditions—including heat mitigation—are one of the union’s asks in the ongoing negotiations with Starbucks.

“It wasn’t just uncomfortable,” she says of the heat inside the store; she was concerned for her health and safety. In a statement, a representative for Starbucks said, “We are committed to ensuring our partners feel safe and supported at work . . . Where issues in store jeopardize the well-being of our partners, we have been working with deep care and urgency to take action.”

Workers protest the heat outside a Starbucks in Houston, TX, July 2023. Mad Austin, who went on to become an organizer with Starbucks Workers United, holds the “Ask Me Why I Am on Strike” sign. Photo courtesy of Starbucks Workers United.

The Hazards of a Hot Kitchen

Summer heat is, of course, not a new phenomenon, but as climate change takes hold, it’s clear we are in a time of increasingly hot summers. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and with those unprecedented temperatures came more severe weather, including wildfires, floods, and brutal heat waves and drought in places across the globe.

Temperatures are only predicted to rise further in the coming years, intensifying those effects and their impact on local infrastructure. When Hurricane Beryl thrashed the city of Houston in early July, millions of people went without power for days, forcing an untold number of business closures—and countless lost wages for employees. Hurricane Helene devastated businesses and restaurants in its wake, and doubtless Milton will too.

For restaurant workers in particular, the hazards are immediate: Standing over a ripping-hot stove or in front of an oven all day would make anyone sweat, even under the best weather conditions. According to a 2023 survey of restaurant workers conducted by Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, 20 percent of respondents “described experiencing a significant heat-related incident or long-term health impact due to prolonged work in extreme heat,” recalling incidents of fainting, dizziness, and heatstroke.

And it’s a legitimate risk: More than 2,300 people in the U.S. died in 2023 as a result of “excessive heat,” according to an Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control data, though that figure is likely underreported.

But there are currently no federal regulations for working conditions in the heat. Only six states—California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—have passed laws that provide protections for workers in extreme heat conditions, and those laws mostly apply to outdoor workers. Just this July, Cal/OSHA, California’s worker safety agency, introduced new rules for indoor workplaces, requiring employers to have a plan for mitigating heat when temperatures exceed 82 degrees.

Other states, including Texas and Florida, have banned local municipalities from passing their own heat protection regulations, suggesting that local laws were more burdensome to enforce than those at the state level; the Texas ban also invalidated local ordinances that mandated break time for construction workers in the heat.

In July, President Biden proposed federal heat regulations that would apply to all employers under the jurisdiction of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), meaning they would cover both indoor and outdoor workers. Under the regulations, indoor employers like restaurants and commercial kitchens “would be required to identify work areas with the potential for hazardous heat exposure” and enact policies to monitor them.

Employers would also be obligated to provide specific worker protections depending on the heat level: At a temperature threshold of 80 degrees, they would be required to provide employees with cold drinking water and cooler break areas; a temperature of 90 degrees and above (considered a “High Heat Trigger”) also requires mandatory rest breaks of 15 minutes every two hours.

“Climate change is a workers’ rights issue, and if we don’t fight for each other, who’s going to do it?”

ROC United, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the lives of the restaurant workforce, has held heat awareness trainings for restaurant workers in the past. The organization is actively campaigning to get OSHA to certify the federal regulations, urging workers to submit comments to the U.S. Department of Labor. Over the past couple of years, as OSHA has developed this rule, ROC United has submitted more than 1,000 comments from workers in the restaurant industry.

“When you think about the restaurant industry, you think about these tight, confined spaces with open flames,” says ROC United Deputy Director of Organizing Jordan Romanus. “But we’ve also been trying to focus on making sure that all restaurant workers are included in this process, both the back-of-the-house and the front-of-the-house. If you’re working on the patio and it’s a hot summer day, that is equally brutal to being in the tight, extremely hot kitchen.”

Workers Organize for Change

In recent months, more workers have taken matters into their own hands, fighting for protections from the heat. Workers at Seattle sandwich shop Homegrown signed their first union contract, which ensured time-and-a-half “heat pay” for working on days when temperatures are especially high. But four months after that contract went into effect, Homegrown announced it would shutter all but two of its locations, citing “economic impacts, including rising labor costs, and food prices” as the reason, impacting more than 150 employees.

Last summer, Shae Parker was working at a Waffle House in South Carolina where she says the air conditioner was constantly on the fritz. The first few times, the company would call a maintenance technician to make repairs, but Parker describes them as a series of “quick fixes” that didn’t solve the problem. Parker was one of many Waffle House workers who picketed outside of the company’s Georgia headquarters in July 2023, demanding protections from the heat as well as other important safety measures. Waffle House did not respond to a request for comment.

Heat has also galvanized Starbucks workers at locations other than Austin. Last October, a group of Starbucks baristas in Berkeley, California went on strike, citing a broken air-conditioning unit that resulted in some employees experiencing symptoms of heat exhaustion. “Heat is actually a very common issue at Starbucks stores; we’re hearing about issues with air conditioners constantly,” Austin says. “We’re trying to secure a contract that makes sure any issue that impacts the health and safety of workers is taken seriously, and that the company is held accountable. We have to make sure that our concerns and issues can’t just be pushed to the side.”

Regarding the ongoing bargaining, a Starbucks representative said in a statement that “we are proud of our progress to date. The work together continues, and we look forward to continued negotiations.”

What happens at Starbucks could have an impact far beyond its own stores. The coffee behemoth has always been a trendsetter—it’s credited with making benefits like health insurance for part-time employees and tuition reimbursement more common throughout the sector—and its approach to heat protections could inform the entire industry’s approach.

In the interim, workers are fighting for what the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) calls “heat justice.” COSH, a federation of 26 grassroots worker groups, is advocating for a slightly more comprehensive national heat standard than proposed by OSHA. The COSH standard would require workplaces to maintain a maximum temperature of 80 degrees, and if that is exceeded, ensure that workers have access to water and breaks in air-conditioned spaces.

COSH is also advocating for mandatory training for workers on how to recognize the signs of heat-related illness before they become too severe. “This heat is not just uncomfortable, it’s dangerous,” said Keith Bullard, the deputy director of the Union of Southern Service Workers, at a September town hall. “Heat illnesses at work are 100 percent preventable, and what makes it preventable is not rocket science: It’s air conditioning, it’s water, it’s access to cooling breaks.”

The Ethics and Expense of Protecting Workers

Without a mandated standard in place, it’s up to individual restaurant owners to act ethically and protect employees from the heat. The ROC United report explicitly suggests “installing and maintaining HVAC/AC systems in kitchens, ensuring workers are hydrating and taking frequent breaks, and implementing proper ventilation systems around ovens, stovetops, and heat-producing restaurant equipment.”

Chleo restaurant. Photo by Read McKendree.

Energy-efficient HVAC upgrades can have a major impact. “Getting rid of an old, inefficient machine is a no-brainer,” says Michael Oshman, CEO of the nonprofit Green Restaurant Association, which offers sustainability certification to restaurants that meet its environmental standards. “It can be hard to justify financially, but when it’s hot and the [electric] bills are getting higher, it makes more sense to make that investment.”

He also encourages restaurants to think creatively, both for their bottom line and the environment. He recommends painting the roof white, which reflects heat away from the building, or putting in a rooftop garden, an upgrade that can both add locally grown produce to the menu and help cool the air well beyond the restaurant itself.

But the costs of these upgrades can be prohibitive in an industry with famously thin margins. In July, Hope and Charles Mathews, the owners of Chleo, a small restaurant in Kingston, New York, closed for an entire week to install an HVAC upgrade to their building, which they own. Their building’s HVAC system piped “makeup air” directly from outside into the kitchen to alleviate the extreme heat of the restaurant’s wood-fired grills, which can burn up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But when the outside temperature is nearly 100 degrees, that approach offers little relief.

Initially, the couple intended to replace the system with one that would push cooled air into the building year-round, but that would’ve cost them more than $60,000, money they didn’t have to spend. They’ve settled, instead, for a pair of “splits,” a cheaper set of units that would pump cooled air only into the restaurant’s warmest spaces, still a major investment in equipment. Also an investment: increased utility bills that come with more air-conditioning.

“Utilities are very expensive. Honestly, I don’t even know what these new air-conditioning units are going to cost us, which is totally scary,” Hope says. “When your utility bills are already over $2,000 per month, you don’t want to go much higher than that.”

And sometimes, protecting workers from the heat means telling them not to show up at all. The Mathews’ HVAC upgrades happened only after they made a decision earlier in the summer to shutter their doors for a few days during a heat wave. “We’re a mom-and-pop operation, and we have to make decisions sometimes that aren’t necessarily in our best financial interest, but are in the best interest of the people that work with us,” Hope says.

Yukon Pizza’s pies are made with sourdough starter from 1897, passed down by owner Alex White’s great-great-grandfather, a miner during the Klondike Gold Rush. Photo courtesy of Yukon Pizza.

Yukon Pizza owner Alex White closed his Las Vegas restaurant for much the same reasons. During a July heat wave after its HVAC system gave out, the restaurant’s wood-fired pizza ovens were pumping heat into the space, and it was nearly 100 degrees indoors. “Our number one priority is the health and safety of our customers and our employees,” White says. “There’s no reason or need for any of them to be working in those temperatures.”

OSHA’s proposed rules for a national heat standard are now in the final public comment phase, and both workers and business owners can offer feedback on the proposal through the end of 2024. But even if those rules go into effect—and the outcome of the 2024 election will certainly be the main factor—they will only be useful if restaurant owners and operators follow them. In California, lawmakers have had to find “creative workarounds” for its farmworker heat safety rules to force employers to comply.

“We need permanent solutions, and we need support,” Parker says. “We need everyone to get on board and spread the word. Climate change is a workers’ rights issue, and if we don’t fight for each other, who’s going to do it?”

Workers hope that alerting the public—the customers who enjoy the fruits of their labor—will help their cause. “We got to talk to a lot of our customers and people walking by on the street about what was going on,” Austin says of the Houston Starbucks strike. “People really responded to that. They were going inside telling managers that they stood with the workers, and that they didn’t feel comfortable buying from a store where workers are sweating into their drinks or suffering while making them.”

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Immigrant Workers Are the Backbone of Our Food System

The Civil Eats Editors — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:03:32 +0000

As part of our mission, Civil Eats reports on the U.S. food system’s disproportionate impact on immigrants and communities of color. Immigrant food system workers toil in the nation’s restaurants, farms, and food processing facilities, and have some of the least visible but most strenuous and dangerous jobs in the country. Many are underpaid and vulnerable to food insecurity and workplace abuses. They were also subjected to unprecedented risks during the early days of the pandemic. Despite this, their contributions to the food system are overwhelmingly positive.

In fact, immigrants form the backbone of the U.S. food and agricultural industries, which would face unimaginable strain without their human labor. They also demonstrate remarkable resilience and creative ingenuity in their own cooking and farming, introducing us to their cultural traditions and enriching us as a society.

To counter the negative narratives currently rampant in this country, we selected just a few of our many stories from the recent past that demonstrate how immigrants play an important, outsize role in planting, picking, and processing the food on our plates. They also make up the very fabric of our culture and make us what we are as a nation.

We will continue to tell their stories.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm
A Q&A with Maximina Hernández Reyes, who credits her success to a Portland, Oregon, food network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative.

A Community of Growers
How East New York Farms builds food security and provides jobs for its neighborhood.

Photo courtesy of ALBA

This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
California’s farmworkers face untold barriers accessing the land, capital, and training needed to strike out on their own. For 20 years, ALBA has been slowly changing the landscape for this important group of aspiring growers.

The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida
The majority of migrant farmworkers live below the federal poverty line, without easy access to healthy foods or affordable housing. To survive, many in this tight-knit community have found strategies for mutual aid and collaborative resilience.

This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction.
The members of Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, Calif. are struggling to maintain access to their garden. Similar stories are unfolding across the country.

A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey
‘First Time Home,’ a short film created by American children of Triqui farmworkers, offers an unscripted, authentic glimpse into life for farmworker families—and why people choose to sacrifice their lives in Mexico for opportunities up North.

On the Rural Immigrant Experience: ‘We Come With a Culture, Our Own History, and We’re Here to Help’
Organizer Gladys Godinez on the way immigrants change, and are changed by, rural America.

The Fight for L.A.’s Street Food Vendors
Getting a permit is difficult and expensive, and the state food code is prohibitively complex for small-scale vendors. A coalition is working to help protect this important economic and cultural tradition.

Photo by Sarah Sax

A Vietnamese Farmers’ Cooperative in New Orleans Offers a Lesson in Resilience
VEGGI Co-op has weathered Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Now, it’s facing the twin threats of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

Immigrants Lift Up a Food System in Need of Reform
Farmworker advocates argue that if we want to revitalize the food economy, we must embrace—and not criminalize—immigrants.

The Halal Restaurant Helping Build Community in Suburban Detroit
Bismallah Kabob has become a gathering hotspot for Detroit’s Bangladeshi community—and is building bridges between immigrants and longtime residents.

A New American Dream: The Rise of Immigrants in Rural America
The upsurge of immigration has inarguably helped revitalize dying towns, especially in farm country.

Immigrant Farmers Help Grow Organic Ag in Wisconsin and Beyond
Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.

Immigrant Women are Providing a Taste of Oaxaca in California’s Central Valley
Diverse immigrant communities are forging new paths and bringing traditional culture to rural America.

A Cookbook Highlights the Power of Immigrants to Make Positive Change
Leyla Moushabeck, editor of The Immigrant Cookbook, talks about the power of food, and immigrants, in shaping this country.

On Cleveland’s Largest Urban Farm, Refugees Gain Language and Job Skills
The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program expects to harvest 22,000 pounds of produce this year, while helping refugees find a community.

Refugee Farmers are Putting Down Roots in North Carolina
Transplanting Traditions Community Farm is helping Burmese farmers create new community.

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Good Goats Make Good Neighbors

Carmen Kohlruss — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 09:00:39 +0000

On a sunny California day, Ricky Bobby the goat chomps across a hillside with the speed and pizazz of his NASCAR driver namesake from Talladega Nights.

Along with his fellow herd members, all employed by the nonprofit Happy Goat to reduce wildfire risks, Ricky Bobby is doing what he does best, gobbling up weeds, shrubs, and leaves from low-hanging branches. No plant appears to be too much of a challenge, including poison oak and spiky live-oak leaves. He and 100 caprine teammates can clear about an acre a day.

“I really think that this is a hope of the future—organizations like them who really care about the environment, who care about the welfare of the Earth, who care about the climate and the quality of life for people,” says Carole Beckham, who hired Happy Goat to graze a portion of her 23-acre residential property in the Sierra Nevada. “With all the big fires we’ve had over the last several years, it’s really impacted the quality of life for a lot of people. It seems like Mariposa County has been in PTSD every year.”

A goat nips on a branch on a hillside property outside of Mariposa. The goats are part of Happy Goat of Mariposa, California which provides the vegetation-clearing creatures to landowners to reduce wildfire risk. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Founded in 2020, Happy Goat farm sits on a 2,000-acre property in Mariposa County, near Yosemite National Park. The organization’s Goats for Good program leases out its grazing herd to nearby landowners in the Sierra Nevada at a reduced price, and hopes to make the service free of charge for some residents via a lottery. The farm also teaches local students about agriculture and conservation—and donates much of the fruits and vegetables it grows to people in need.

“It’s a crazy twisted road that I went down that ended up here in this magical place,” says John Cahalin, one of three Happy Goat co-founders (and the one who named Ricky Bobby).

Ricky Bobby is doing what he does best, gobbling up weeds, shrubs, and leaves from low-hanging branches.

The San Diego transplant came to Mariposa several years ago in search of land for an off-road vehicle rally school, but his vision for the property changed after he met Jesse Fouch, a sixth-generation farmer, rancher, and owner of Fouch Farms. As Cahalin learned more about his new home, he decided farming was a better fit—something intrinsic to Mariposa and good for tourists, too. Fouch joined him as one of three co-founders of Happy Goat.

Cahalin wanted goats to be a big part of the farm. “Goats are mischievous, they’re affectionate, and they’re just the most beautiful animals to me,” Cahalin says. “They make me laugh every time I see my favorite ones.”

Happy Goat co-founder John Cahalin holds a baby goat on the nonprofit’s farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Mariposa. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Lacey Sharp, Happy Goat’s daily operations manager, among other things, launched the organization’s Goats for Good grazing program over a year and a half ago, and since then, the goats have cleared more than 40 properties in the Mariposa area. That amounts to approximately 200 acres in addition to the 220 acres the goats take on each year back at the farm.

Sharp runs a holistic program that puts the health of all involved—the animals, the landscape, and the humans seeking fewer wildfire risks—at the center of every decision. The goats spend a limited amount of time in each section of a property, managed by a moveable fence and the watchful eyes of a couple of shepherds and dogs. Sharp is careful not to let the goats overgraze, which can compact soil.

“We’re very in tune with the climate around us and the land we’re working on,” she says. Sharp is also a veterinary technician, and runs a small cattle business influenced by the Texas ranch where she grew up.

Happy Goat grazing director Lacey Sharp pets Ricky Bobby, one of the many goats that Happy Goat uses for Sierra foothill wildfire mitigation. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

The nonprofit has around 450 goats—primarily the cashmere type—with plans to grow the herd to nearly 3,000. About 100 billy goats currently handle the grazing contracts, while the nannies grow the herd back at the farm. Their kids enjoy a happy youth that includes scrambling all over a massive jungle gym called the “Goatnasium.”

The goats are part of a growing trend of using livestock to mitigate wildfire risks across the West. That need is acute in California’s Sierra region, where catastrophic fire presents an unprecedented challenge. More than 880,000 people live in this mountainous stretch of the state, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.

Mariposa County, where 16 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, is still recovering from the particularly devastating Oak Fire, an arson-caused blaze that leveled 127 homes and 66 outbuildings in 2022. In July, a new threat, the 908-acre French Fire—caused by a lawn mower that ignited dry grass—burned dangerously close to Mariposa’s historic main street and destroyed or damaged 18 structures.

The use of goats for targeted grazing is becoming more popular statewide as it is consistent with increasing the protection of people, structures, and communities

“The use of goats for targeted grazing is becoming more popular statewide as it is consistent with increasing the protection of people, structures, and communities,” says Kara Garrett, coordinator of Cal Fire’s Community Risk Reduction Program. “Many have found grazing to be an effective tool. Not only do [the goats] help clear annual vegetation, but they also browse up trees and reduce fuel loads, helping property owners with their fuel reduction.”

Cal Fire doesn’t hold contracts specifically for grazing, Garrett says, but 18 of the Wildfire Prevention Grants it awarded for 2022-2023 went to projects that included grazing. “Lawn mowers, weed eaters, chainsaws, tractors, and trimmers can all spark a wildland fire if used during the wrong time of year,” Garrett says. “And with work still left to be done across California, the grazing goats are a safe alternative to help maintain vegetation.”

Happy Goat co-founder John Cahalin, in lime green, tosses out feed to a mob of goats as they climb over him and some fellow Happy Goat supporters during a break in the daily work effort. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Nearly a third of all acres treated in fuel-reduction projects by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in California utilize grazing, which includes goats, says Sarah Denos, a spokesperson for the BLM in California. Acres grazed for fire mitigation through the agency more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, Denos says. BLM data shows a spike from about 5,400 acres in the state to 18,000 acres during that period.

Goats can be used in lieu of herbicides to target invasive plants in a way that helps restore balance to the ecosystem, including by adding nutrients back to the soil through their waste, Denos says. Additionally, goats can navigate steep, rugged terrain where machines aren’t practical, she adds.

There are drawbacks, of course. A herd of goats, if not properly monitored, can mow through a lot of land, eating up everything.

But if they’re well guided, goats can also be an appropriate tool in locations requiring a “lighter touch,” such as sensitive cultural sites, says Mark Thibideau, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region. Beyond general grazing permits, which the Forest Service has issued since its inception, Thibideau says that last year his region used livestock to graze 4,544 acres specifically to mitigate wildfire.

In rural Mariposa County, where many large, historic ranches have been replaced by smaller residential parcels that can easily get overgrown, Happy Goat provides help. Goats’ love of leaves means they create extra clearance between the ground and low-hanging branches, which helps prevent fire from jumping into the tree canopy. Happy Goat’s humans also assist by doing some pruning to ensure that clearance extends to six vertical feet.

Other goat operations in California include those led by the Ojai Valley Fire Safe Council, City Grazing in San Francisco, and numerous Sonoma County grazing cooperatives. “They’re more sustainable—they have less impact to the environment,” one Southern California Edison worker told The Fresno Bee about using goats from Chasin Goat Grazing for vegetation management beneath power lines in the Sierra. “And from a sociological perspective, people can get behind goats.” A free, online search tool and map called match.graze, launched by the University of California Cooperative Extension and previously reported on by Civil Eats, displays many more California herds for hire.

“In California every year, everyone gets nervous for wildfire season, and rightfully so,” says entrepreneur Willie Morris, the third Happy Goat co-founder. “But the fact that we can take goats—which to me are like such silly, funny creatures—and they can be the frontline of fire prevention, and they can get to places we could never really do with machinery, to me, it’s just a no-brainer.”

Jessica Segale talks about her work as Happy Goat’s greenhouse manager and produce grown on their regenerative farm in the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Mariposa, California. Segale is also director of Happy Goat’s farm-to-school program. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Grazing is just one of the programs that makes Happy Goat a boon to its community.

Happy Goat’s farm-to-school program connected with around 1,400 students last year from several local schools, supported by federal and state grants, for hands-on learning experiences in agriculture and conservation. That outreach continues, and the farm recently became a new contracted provider of produce for Mariposa County Unified School District. Happy Goat also helps recycle food waste from local school cafeterias, using it to create compost for small school gardens and its farm.

Meanwhile, Happy Goat is working toward regenerative farm certification from the Savory Institute, a nonprofit focused on restoring grasslands through holistic management. “We’re building topsoil, we’re sequestering carbon, we’re improving the forage, the trees, the grasses,” says Fouch, who designed the farm and is also an associate educator with the Savory Institute. “We monitor insect populations, the birds, the bees—everything.”

Goats can be used in lieu of herbicides to target invasive plants in a way that helps restore balance to the ecosystem, including by adding nutrients back to the soil through their waste.

The farm grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables by intercropping them, choosing varieties that are “happy around each other,” says Jessica Segale, director of its farm-to-school program. This classic organic farming technique promotes biodiversity and can also reduce pests. Also, plants are sprayed with natural compost extracts instead of harmful chemicals.

Happy Goat donates much of its produce to food banks. It gave away 4,400 pounds of produce last year—more than a third of all it grew—and plans to double that number. Beyond goats, other animals on its farm include chickens for eggs, sheep, pigs, ducks, guineafowl, and a goose. None are used for meat.

The organization also has a goat therapy program that provides stress relief for humans—including some college students who got to enjoy the animals at the University of California, Merced, campus during finals week.

Funding for Happy Goat’s philanthropic efforts comes from related enterprises, like its for-profit diner, Happy Goat Farm to Table, which opened last fall in the town of Mariposa just down the road. Happy Goat was also awarded a rural development grant from the United States Department of Agriculture last year to research the feasibility of using the goats’ hair for cashmere production, which is limited in the United States.

Happy Goat Farm to Table diner in downtown Mariposa offers meals with ingredients from the nearby Happy Goat farm. The for-profit diner opened in the fall of 2023 and its proceeds support the work of nonprofit Happy Goat. Photo by Craig Kohlruss.

Happy Goat intends to keep growing, all with the help of Ricky Bobby and the rest of the goats.

“They have limitless land to range on.” Sharp says. “They never run out of feed. They are not put into a holding pen where they spend 24/7 on a dry lot. We literally use them for what they were created for, and that’s what makes them so happy—and it’s what makes us happy.”

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The Case for Seafood Self-Reliance

Ben Seal — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:00:45 +0000

Scan the seafood case at your local grocery store and you’re likely to see the same staples, no matter where you are: shrimp, salmon, tuna, tilapia, cod. Most of it crossed international borders to reach you.

The U.S. is the world’s second-largest seafood importer, despite the fact that U.S. fishers catch 8 billion pounds of seafood each year. Much of the fish landed here is eaten elsewhere. That conundrum makes it harder for American fishermen to sustain their operations and forces fish to be shipped thousands of miles before it reaches the dinner table. Climate change and global crises disrupting the international market only add to the complications.

“It’s not a law of gravity that 90 percent of the seafood we consume in the U.S. has to be imported.”

Fisheries would be healthier and more sustainable if fish caught locally were consumed locally. But the discrepancy is by design, says Joshua Stoll, associate professor at the University of Maine and founder of Local Catch Network, a hub of seafood harvesters, businesses, researchers, and organizers that supports the growth of community-based seafood.

“We’ve built roads around the world that don’t have exit ramps to our local communities when it comes to seafood,” Stoll says.

A healthier system more reflective of the diversity of U.S. seafood is attainable, Stoll says, if we invest in connecting harvesters and consumers at the regional level. In a paper published in Nature in June, he and his colleagues found that seafood independence—the ability to meet the country’s consumption needs through its own production—is “within reach” for the U.S.

From 2012 through 2021, U.S. fishermen caught 76 percent of the country’s seafood needs on average, Stoll and his colleagues found. As recently as the 1990s, the average was 98 percent. Those numbers are based on the federal recommendation of eight ounces of seafood per week per adult, or 26 pounds annually; Americans currently eat about 20 pounds each per year.

Community supported fisheries (CSFs), where consumers buy shares of fresh seafood through pre-paid memberships, similar to the community supported agriculture model for produce, can help bridge the existing gap between what we catch and what we eat, Stoll says.

Currently, 12 percent of U.S. fishers sell directly to consumers, according to the first national survey of seafood harvesters, which he helped lead; the findings were published in Marine Policy in July. By avoiding middlemen like distributors and processors, direct sales allow harvesters to build relationships with the people eating their fish, mitigate shipping-related climate impacts and costs by keeping what they catch closer to home, and, typically, make more money in the process.

Civil Eats spoke with Stoll about why seafood self-reliance matters, where CSFs fit into the conversation, and how climate change is making these issues all the more urgent.

What are the benefits of seafood independence that make it a goal worth targeting?

Fishermen are really struggling to make their livelihoods work. We hear from people in the Gulf of Mexico, where prices are so depressed for shrimp that they’re tying up on the docks [rather than going out to fish]. We’re hearing about the price of salmon and the markets being flooded. A lot of that has to do with global trade dynamics.

At Local Catch Network, we’re working at the local harvester level, thinking about how to transform this system based on high volume and low value to one that’s deeply rooted in low volume and high value. Part of the way we get there is by localizing and working toward seafood independence.

This country is also facing a health epidemic. Something like one in 10 Americans is experiencing food insecurity on some level. That blows my mind. Seafood doesn’t fundamentally solve that, but there is a real opportunity to better integrate seafood into policy discussions around food systems that change our country’s health.

Part of that is thinking about self-reliance. The objective isn’t full self-reliance. I don’t think that’s realistic. The point of this paper was to stretch the boundaries of what is possible, because right now, we’re almost the opposite. It’s not a law of gravity that 90 percent of the seafood we consume in the U.S. has to be imported.

What stands in the way of our country’s seafood self-reliance, and how can we overcome those obstacles?

Almost everyone in the fisheries space can roll that 90 percent figure off their tongues. That figure has actually been challenged in the literature, but most of the seafood we eat is imported. And that narrative creates a vacuum for imagining alternatives. What if everyone knew that we could achieve seafood independence and that’s what everyone was talking about?

There are real policy barriers as well. We’ve seen massive consolidation in our fishing fleet at the harvester level, at the processor level, at the distribution level. We’ve made investments, both for better and for worse, in supporting a global seafood distribution system through trade policy agreements, trade missions, and marketing and promotion boards that are focused on moving product away from the places where it’s harvested and produced.

That’s come at the cost of investing in the infrastructure that we need to keep a product local and regional. We’ve lost public infrastructure—working waterfront infrastructure, small-scale community-based ice machines. We also need federal investment in processing and distribution. We’re trapped in this model: Catch it and get it out of here. [Also,] it starts in the water. Who has access to fishing? We need to find ways to support new entrants, whether it’s in wild-capture fisheries or aquaculture.

Which regions are in the best and worst position to reach seafood independence?

Alaska drives the bus. Alaska is a dominant player nationally in seafood production and plays an important role in the potential for seafood independence. But I don’t think that lets other regions off the hook. All regions make an important contribution.

New England has witnessed a relative decline [in seafood harvests], but I’m hopeful for the innovation that’s happening there and the investment in the seafood sector, especially in a place like Maine with oysters and kelp. The wild-capture fisheries continue to be anchors of coastal communities there, too, and unlike most places I’ve been, they’re still part of the fabric of daily conversations. When you get to the point where seafood is an afterthought and not part of those conversations, that’s when you’re in slippery territory.

Beside policy, consolidation, and lack of infrastructure, what accounts for the discrepancy between what we catch and what we eat in this country?

The average consumer doesn’t understand seafood as a protein and struggles with knowing what to do with it. Then you offer some species they’ve never heard of, and it’s end of story. Part of it is education. We need to invest in people understanding different species and what is seasonal and local. Researchers have found that today, while there is some regional variance in seafood consumption, it’s awfully similar no matter where you are—you’re going to get salmon, shrimp, and tilapia or some other white fish.

Where do community supported fisheries and other harvesters selling directly to consumers fit into the future of these conversations?

CSFs will likely never be the dominant mode of distribution, and that’s OK. But diverse supply chains are critical to the functioning of a vibrant seafood economy in the U.S. Sometimes it makes sense to distribute globally, but you can’t just rely on that, [especially] with increasing global shocks. Our research [for the Marine Policy paper] was the first attempt at documenting the number of people participating in the sector. The USDA has been collecting similar data [for agriculture] for decades, and seafood, except for aquaculture, has been sidelined from that process. When you see that one in 10 harvesters are involved in direct sales, that changes the dynamic. It’s a sector worth investing in. This is part of the off-ramp infrastructure.

How did the pandemic influence direct-to-consumer sales by harvesters, and what policy changes emerged there that could bring the U.S. closer to seafood self-reliance?

One change was around permitting for direct sales. There’s always been this narrative that seafood is a little bit fishy, it will make you sick, and therefore it needs to be regulated in a different way than ag commodities. There’s some reality to that, but it’s often been a red herring used [by regulators] to thwart these types of activities. During the pandemic, we saw policies relax. And guess what? People weren’t getting sick. Harvesters were able to connect with consumers. And now those emergency rules have been institutionalized and continue to exist. A place like Rhode Island [where a new law allows fishers to obtain permits for docksides sales] is a good example of that.

Our survey of seafood harvesters was done in partnership with the USDA and the National Marine Fisheries Service. If we’d gone to either of those departments pre-pandemic, I’m not sure we’d even have gotten a meeting, let alone been able to co-lead this national effort. The funding we received and the support from leadership in both agencies reflects a recognition that diverse supply chains are really important.

How is climate change impacting the seafood system and both our need and ability to become more self-reliant?

Climate change has a whole range of effects, and one is the level of uncertainty it brings. Many of our management decisions are based on stock assessment science. I often hear people in stock assessment say, anything they thought they knew before, they’ve had to throw out the window and admit, ‘We don’t know what the future is going to look like.’ That has massive ripple effects in setting annual catch limits, policies, regulations, and [ultimately] business decisions like whether to participate in fisheries.

We’re also seeing a spike in major weather events. In Maine this past winter, we had massive storm surges that had absolutely devastating effects on our working waterfront. We’re still grappling with that. Climate change adds layers of stress to a sector that is already struggling with competition from foreign imports, with decline in the industry, with aging fleets—a whole suite of compounding issues. That creates a lot of anxiety for what the future holds, and it affects self-reliance by introducing uncertainty.

If you’re eating a menu of seafood that reflects global production, you are undermining your ability to understand how climate change is affecting an ecosystem, because the production system can hop between climate disasters. It can dodge those effects by saying, “Oh, there’s a failure here? We’ll source seafood over there.” It’s harder to do that when you’re sourcing seafood from the Gulf of Maine to support New England or from the South Atlantic to support the Southeast. It really connects people to their source of seafood and makes them better positioned to be engaged consumers and to engage in change.

How can the average person play a role in supporting a healthier seafood ecosystem?

Know your fisherman. If you can trace your food back to the source, inevitably you will gain an understanding of the context in which that food is produced. That’s a luxury, though. Many people don’t have the privilege to be able to choose where their food comes from. It’s up to policymakers, funders, and decision-makers. They need to recognize the disconnect between [reality and] an idealized food system where an idealized consumer knows their fisherman—and implement policies that create access to that food.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post The Case for Seafood Self-Reliance appeared first on Civil Eats.

The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance

Lisa Held — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:01:29 +0000

Last May, the United Nations (U.N.) released the first draft of a global plan to tackle antibiotic resistance that aligned with a call from world leaders’ expert advisors to take “bold and specific action.” That included a commitment to reduce the use of antibiotics used in the food and agriculture system by 30 percent by 2030.

But when those leaders meet at the U.N. on Thursday to adopt the Political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance, that concrete goal and others will be missing from the latest draft.

After months of negotiations and edits to the proposal, these ambitious—and likely effective—commitments have been replaced with a toothless target: to “strive to meaningfully reduce” antibiotic use in agriculture. Now, experts and advocates are concerned that this new, vague provision, among other weakened commitments, will be included in the final declaration.

“I think it’s a serious mistake,” said Andre Delattre, the senior vice president and COO for programs at the Public Interest Network, which has advocated for reducing antibiotic use on farms as a matter of public interest for years. “We’ve known for a very long time that the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is really problematic for public health. Saying we’re going to reduce without setting targets just shows we’re not as serious as we should be about the problem.”

The news comes at a pivotal moment. While the urgency of antibiotic resistance as a public health threat is well known, a new study released last week upped the ante. According to a systemic analysis of the problem, researchers predicted deaths directly caused by resistance will increase nearly 70 percent between 2022 and 2050, rising to around 2 million per year globally, with another 8 million deaths associated with the issue.

In the U.S., the largest volume of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture. Also, the preventive dosing of animals with medically important drugs—that is, drugs for treating humans—is still routine. This use of drugs can drive the development of resistant bacteria that then threaten human lives. Reducing or eliminating the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock would slow the development of resistant bacteria, experts say, safeguarding the efficacy of important drugs for longer.

U.S. officials were at least partially responsible for weakening the U.N. declaration’s commitments on animal agriculture. The advocacy organization U.S. Right to Know obtained a document showing that the U.S. was one of a few meat-producing countries that suggested deleting the 2030 goal. The organization also cites the fact that a Washington, D.C. trade group representing the animal drug industry objected to the goal. In response to questions about involvement in the U.N. declaration, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesperson referred Civil Eats to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA officials did not respond by press time.

Steve Roach, the Safe & Healthy Food Program Director at Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), has been tracking U.S. policy on antibiotic use in agriculture for years. He said that on the international stage, he’s seen the U.S. “actively undermining” stronger policies time and time again.

“The U.S. always seems to be aiming for something weaker,” he said. For example, he said the U.S. worked to keep targets for the reduction of antibiotic use out of international food safety standards. The U.S. was also one of five countries—all top users of antibiotics in animal agriculture— that did not sign onto an earlier global agreement, called the Muscat Ministerial Manifesto on AMR, that did include targeted reductions.

And Roach said that this approach on the global stage mirrors how federal agencies continue to approach the issue at home. “We’ve been calling for targets for years, and FDA is always saying, ‘We don’t have enough data to determine how much use is inappropriate. So, therefore, we don’t support targets,’” he said.

The FDA does track the volume of medically important antibiotics sold for use in animals, but it is still not tracking exactly how those drugs are being used on farms. Instead, it has funded small pilot projects and is now in the process of working with the meat industry on a voluntary reporting system.

The agency outlined some of those efforts in a letter sent to Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) last week. The letter was in response to concerns Booker raised in July about updates he felt would weaken guidance the FDA creates for the industry on responsible antibiotic use. Booker’s team was far from satisfied with the agency’s response and said that after more than a decade of attention, they found it incredibly troubling that basic issues of data collection and setting concrete targets were still unresolved.

“It is estimated that by 2050, as many as 10 million people globally will die annually from antibiotic-resistant infections unless the United States joins with other countries to quickly take aggressive action to address this issue. That is why I am deeply concerned that the FDA has caved under pressure from special interests for decades and failed to take any meaningful steps to address this overuse in industrial livestock production,” Booker said in an email to Civil Eats. “Not only has the FDA been unwilling to use its legal authority to reduce the massive overuse of antibiotics on factory farms in the U.S., but the agency is now actively working to block international commitments to address antimicrobial resistance.”

In 2016, the agency banned the use of medically important drugs on farms solely for the purpose of making animals get bigger, faster. That change led to a big drop in overall drug use. But pork producers and cattle feedlots still routinely add antibiotics to feed and water, often for long stretches, and drug use in those sectors has been rising over the past two years.

At the end of August, the USDA reported its recent testing even found antibiotic residue in about 20 percent of beef samples labeled “raised without antibiotics.” And over the past year, companies that once committed to moving their supply chains away from routine antibiotic use have been backtracking.

Multiple experts expressed dismay over what they said now feels like continued steps away from stronger regulations that can adequately protect public health.

“The U.S. government will do whatever it can to fight the serious public health threat of antimicrobial resistance—as long as that action has no impact on anyone whatsoever, as long as nobody has to make any changes to what they’re doing,” Roach said. “It’s really disappointing, because the U.S. could be a leader on this issue, and it just consistently chooses not to.”

In the absence of government leadership, Delattre said, watchdog groups will have to work harder.

“The commitment as it’s drafted now says it’s supposed to aim for meaningful reductions by every member country. Those numeric targets represented an idea of meaningful reduction,” he said. “Whether they’re in there or not, they’re the sort of thing we need to aim for, and it’s what we’ll be holding the U.S. farm animal industry to going forward.”

Poultry Implosion. According to a lawsuit filed today, an ambitious plan to create a poultry company dedicated to slower-growing chickens involved rapid company growth that led to its downfall—and ultimately harmed farmers raising its birds. Although Cooks’ Venture set out to raise healthier birds under better farm conditions, it replicated the contract system used by bigger industry players like Tyson and Perdue, placing financial risk on the shoulders of producers.

In the legal complaint, farmers say the company’s leadership misled them by misrepresenting the financial health of the operation. As a result, many took on debt to house and care for the chickens in anticipation of a long-term payoff. When the company went out of business without notice, it left farmers in the lurch. The lawsuit also alleges the individuals in charge of the company conspired with the Arkansas Department of Agriculture to kill more than a million chickens after the company folded—so they wouldn’t have to process them or pay farmers for the flocks—and left farmers to clean up the mess.

The lawsuit will be one of the first brought under new rules finalized by the Biden administration intended to better enforce the Packers & Stockyards Act.

Food-and-Climate Funding. As companies, advocates, and investors gather in New York City for Climate Week, multiple organizations are calling attention to the flow of capital toward food and agriculture systems that accelerate climate change—and how to redirect those funds.

Given meat’s outsized climate impacts, the global meat industry is at the top of the list. A group of 105 food and environmental organizations sent a letter to the world’s biggest private banks demanding they halt new funding for industrial livestock production and require meat and dairy clients to report emissions reduction targets. Meanwhile, Tilt Collective, a new nonprofit promoting a rapid shift toward plant-based diets, released a report highlighting investment opportunities. According to its analysis, investments in transitioning to a plant-based food system could reduce energy emissions far more than investments in renewable energy or electric vehicles, while also delivering other benefits, like reduced water use and biodiversity loss.

Nonprofits that work directly with the biggest food and agriculture companies are also in on the action. The Environmental Defense Fund released a report for investors on how they can play a role in reducing methane from livestock, while Ceres updated its investor-focused reporting on the 50 biggest food companies’ greenhouse gas emissions reporting and reductions. Their data showed that only 11 of the 50 companies reduced their overall greenhouse gas emissions compared to their base years, while 12 increased emissions. Lack of progress on emissions reductions was largely linked to the food companies’ supply chains. So while many companies did cut emissions from their own operations by shifting to renewable energy, for example, they struggled to reduce those that happened in farm fields and feedlots, which typically represent about 90 percent of a food company’s overall emissions.

Fresh Cafeteria Fare. A lengthy progress report on California’s farm-to-school grant program—the largest in the nation—found the state’s efforts are paying off. More local food is getting into schools while supporting farmers. Between 2020 and 2022, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) distributed about $100 million to increase locally farmed food served in school cafeterias. The results of this program—which includes farm-fresh meals and nutrition education efforts—disproportionately benefitted students from lower-income families who were eligible for free or reduced-price meals. At the same time, the funding went primarily to small- and mid-size farms, more than half of which were owned by women; more than 40 percent were owned by producers of color.

Participating farms were also much more likely to be organic or transitioning to organic production compared to the state average. They were also likely to be implementing and/or expanding other environmentally friendly practices.

Still, despite California’s advantages over other states—namely a super-long growing season that overlaps with the school year and a plethora of farms selling fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy—the total money spent by school grantees on local food represented just 1 percent of total food budgets. And schools cited many challenges common across the farm-to-school landscape: price constraints, processing capacity, and staffing. “The challenges around changing a complex school food system are substantial,” said Dr. Gail Feenstra, one of the researchers involved in the report, in a press release. “Fortunately, the state’s strategic and innovative investments in the entire farm to school supply chain—meaning funding for school districts, farmers, and also their regional partners, combined with support from CDFA’s regional staff—are beginning to address those long-standing challenges.”

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The High Cost of Groceries: Experts Weigh In

Momo Chang — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:00:17 +0000

Last Tuesday, Civil Eats held a virtual salon focusing on a hotly debated topic: Food prices and the 2024 election.

Who Spoke: Civil Eats’ Senior Staff Reporter and Contributing Editor Lisa Held moderated our conversation with expert panelists David Ortega, a professor and the Noel W. Stuckman Chair in Food Economics and Policy at Michigan State University; and Lindsay Owens, an economic sociologist and the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative.

What’s at Stake

Food prices are up about 25 percent since 2020.
There’s been a sharp rise in food insecurity. The latest U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows:
- 13.5 percent (18 million) of U.S. households were food insecure at some time during 2023.
- That’s up from 12.8 percent (17 million) just the year before.

The full talk: Become a member today to access the full recording and invitations to future salons—along with other benefits that come with being a Civil Eats member.

What’s Driving High Food Prices?

Dwindling supply plus rising demand, said Ortega.
Several factors caused supplies to sink.
- During the pandemic, people rushed into stores and cleaned out the shelves, throwing suppliers into a tailspin. Then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to a global shortage of wheat, vegetable oils, and other grains. There were also export restrictions on staples such as palm oil, leading to price increases.
- On top of this, significant drought in the U.S. affected beef prices, and a multiyear avian flu impacted commercial poultry and eggs.
All of these shortages caused prices to spike.

Meanwhile, What Caused Demand to Rise?

Fiscal stimulus payments made during the pandemic added more money to the economy. And, at the same time, households accumulated more savings because they weren’t traveling or going on vacations.
- Now people are spending, but there’s not as much to buy—so the demand drives up prices.

Price Gouging Also Factors Into High Prices

Price gouging is when suppliers raise prices by 10 percent to 25 percent or more during periods of crises such as a hurricane, power outage, and other triggers in the market.
- Nearly 40 states have laws banning price gouging, but there’s no law at the federal level.
- Owens supports a federal ban on price gouging. “I think it’s one more tool that the federal government would have to prevent against this kind of extractive disaster capitalism,” she said. Ortega worried the law could have unintended consequences.
Price fixing through corporate consolidation is also an issue, with companies joining up with other companies to set a price.
- Owens said, “I like to use a true crime metaphor: It requires means, motive, and opportunity to commit the perfect crime. The motive is pretty clear . . . companies are out to make a buck. The means is the power and size that these companies have been amassing for decades. But what changes is you finally have that opportunity, under the cover of inflation, to push harder, faster, higher, and longer for pricing. And that’s what we’ve been seeing in the grocery sector.”

The Overall Takeaway

Presidents actually have little power to affect food prices in the short run. There’s a need to address the root causes of high prices, and there are ways our country can do this:

Take action to make sure our food system is more resilient to future shocks, including those caused by climate, by taking steps like planting drought-resistant crop varieties.
Strengthen the social safety net to make sure food is more affordable for everyone; support the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Build resilience in the supply chain–such as buffer stocks for grain—that would help prepare for the next disruption or emergency.
Antitrust policy is a critical tool to tackle consolidation over the long term. “In a world in which we have increased competition, we have more players in the space, and that will have good impacts on pricing,” Owens said.

Reading and More

“Under Trump, consolidated corporations generally benefited. The Trump administration dissolved the USDA agency tasked with regulating anti-competitive practices in the livestock, poultry, meat, grain, and oilseed industries. . . . The Biden administration made some attempts to rein in consolidation. In 2022, for example, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at creating more competitive practices, especially in meat and poultry supply chains. Harris’s plans to go after “price gouging” fall in line with these initiatives.” — from Can Lawmakers Really Tackle High Food Prices? by Nick Bowlin
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Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change?

Christina Cooke — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 09:00:18 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaign for the November election, farmers across the U.S. grapple with extreme and unprecedented weather: blistering heatwaves, severe drought, explosive wildfires, devastating storms, and deadly floods. Climate policies have not been a huge point of discussion on the campaign trail, but the next president’s approach to the changing climate will have massive implications, affecting everything from biodiversity to human migration to farmers’ ability to produce food.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sounded a final alarm for the planet in March 2023, emphasizing that we need to make “rapid and far-reaching transitions” across the board, including in food and agriculture, within the current decade. The report warns that as the climate warms and farmers face increasing challenges, food insecurity and supply instability will rise.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” the authors said. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

Details on the presidential candidates’ specific climate policies remain scant, but their track records, party platforms, and election-season statements point to the sort of approach each might take if elected. And they could not be more different. When it comes to energy production, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases—and the regulations that shape it and a number of other climate-related policies—the two candidates’ opposing approaches would have wildly different implications for the state of the climate—and the resulting stability of the food system.

The 2024 Democratic platform acknowledges the climate crisis as “an existential threat to future generations” and reflects that priority with robust support for clean energy and climate-friendly regulation. Meanwhile, to the Republican mantra of “drill, baby, drill,” Trump has called climate change a hoax and promised to achieve “energy dominance” while eliminating regulation and undoing the Democrats’ progress toward clean energy.

Numerous climate and environment advocacy groups have endorsed Harris for president. Meanwhile, agribusiness interests have poured their money into the GOP.

The Democrats’ Track Records on Climate

President Joe Biden’s administration has weathered mixed reviews on climate. For the past six years, the U.S. has produced more crude oil than any other country, and the Biden administration approved thousands of permits for drilling and fracking on federal land, like the Alaska Willow oil drilling project. And while Harris called for a ban on fracking in 2019 during a presidential debate on CNN, she has since changed her position.

Still, the Biden-Harris administration set the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and made unprecedented investments in renewable energy. The $1.6 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which includes $369 billion for clean-energy projects and decarbonizing the energy and transportation sectors—is the most aggressive piece of climate legislation in American history. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass it.

Additionally, under Biden and Harris, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized strong pollution standards for cars and fossil fuel-fired power plants.

Though Harris has not made climate a focus of her 2024 campaign—and has not revealed specifics about her climate agenda this year—her campaign has said she plans to build on Biden’s climate legacy. Some look at her Climate Plan for the People, which she unveiled during her run in the 2020 primaries, as an indication of where her priorities might lie. The plan called for a $10 trillion public and private investment in climate action over the next decade and included funding clean energy, electrifying transportation, and pursuing climate-smart agriculture.

In her previous roles, Harris has held big polluters to account and supported bold climate action, often framing the crisis through the lens of environmental justice, recognizing that poor and minority communities bear the brunt of pollution and looking to reverse the inequities. As California’s attorney general, Harris sued the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking in the Santa Barbara Channel and amassed $50 million in settlements from lawsuits against fossil fuel companies including Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66. And as a U.S. Senator, in 2019, she joined Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, a plan to transition the country to clean energy while providing job guarantees and high-quality healthcare.

“Kamala Harris has been a driving force in delivering the strongest climate action in history. She’s ready to build on those gains from day one as president,” said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund, in a statement. “Harris grasps the urgency and scale of the challenge…. She’ll raise climate ambition to make sure we confront the climate crisis in a way that makes the country more inclusive, more economically competitive, and more energy secure.”

The Biden-Harris administration has also cracked down on corporate consolidation. In many parts of the food system, a few massive companies dominate—the four largest meatpackers control 85 percent of all beef cattle in the U.S., for instance. Some contend that consolidated corporate power positions companies to successfully lobby against regulation that limits air and water pollution and see reigning in corporate power as a vital step in pursuing climate-friendly policies. Biden signed an executive order in July 2021 to promote competition in the American economy, including the meat industry.

While Harris’ running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, supported the creation of the now-defunct Keystone XL pipeline project, he generally has an extremely climate-friendly record as well. Last year, he signed a law that requires state power plants to transition to 100 percent climate-friendly energy—like wind and solar power—by the year 2040, eliminating gas and coal-fired power plants. And during the 2023 legislative session, he supported state Democrats in passing around 40 other climate-friendly initiatives.

The Republicans’ Climate Histories

Trump, on the other hand, denies the threat of climate change and makes inaccurate claims about sea level rise. In 2017, he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Deal, the pre-eminent international agreement to stave off climate change. (Biden rejoined the Agreement on his first day in office.)

As president, Trump dismantled the agencies responsible for protecting the environment and climate, like the EPA, and rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. He also weakened limits on CO2 emissions from power plants and vehicles and removed protections on more than half of the country’s wetlands.

Kip Tom, an Indiana farmer who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations food and agriculture programs during Trump’s presidency and who currently leads the Farmers and Ranchers for Trump Coalition, said at a Farm Foundation forum in early September that the Biden-Harris administration hurt farmers in many ways, including with regulations like those issued under the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.

“We have collapsing farm incomes. We’ve got a growing trade deficit. We have the tax policies, which are a threat to our industry,” Tom said. “We have the overreach of some agencies, agencies that should be working to help us bring these new innovations to market, yet they slow us down.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has acknowledged the problem of climate change in the past, but he changed his views when seeking Trump’s support in his bid for Senate. Since then, he has denied the role of humans in driving climate change, championed the oil and gas industries, and opposed the development of alternative energy sources.

The Democrats Look Forward: Clean Energy and Regulation

While Harris emphasized her support of the oil and gas industries during the presidential debate, the 2024 Democratic platform calls for a continuation of the “clean energy boom” the Biden-Harris administration launched with the IRA. This includes developing solar, wind, batteries, and other clean technologies, modernizing the electricity grid, and running the American Climate Corps workforce training and service initiative. Recognizing that agriculture sector produces 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, the platform sets forth the goal of making “our farm sector the world’s first to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”

Sheep graze under solar panels. (Photo CC-licensed by AgriSolar Clearinghouse)

The platform also supports using federal agencies to set and enforce regulations that protect the environment and combat climate change. In addition to regulating water and air pollution and making polluters pay, Democrats plan to use federal agencies to encourage climate-smart investment. And, it targets these investments “with the goal of delivering 40 percent of the overall benefits to disadvantaged and frontline communities,” or those who are most impacted by climate change.

With the help of IRA funding, for instance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is paying farmers to adopt climate-smart practices like reducing tillage and planting cover crops. According to the Democrats’ 2024 platform, more than 80,000 farms covering 75 million acres have adopted these practices already. The agency also funds projects that gather data on the efficacy of the efforts.

Harris has not detailed where she stands on breaking up corporate power, though her economic policy includes blocking unfair mergers and a federal ban on grocery-store price gouging. Harris has also tapped Brian Deese, Biden’s top economic advisor, who drafted the actions addressing concentration in the meatpacking industry, to join her campaign.

The Republican Plan: Fossil Fuels and Deregulation

Trump plans to pursue an agenda that is friendly to the fossil-fuel industry. His support for oil and gas companies, which he provided with $25 billion in tax benefits during his presidency, would likely continue. “Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World,” states the GOP Platform.

Project 2025, the roadmap for a conservative presidency developed by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped Republican administrations dating back to Ronald Reagan, also expresses a commitment to “unleashing all of America’s energy resources.” (While Trump has tried to distance himself from the Project 2025 as it has faced scrutiny, many of its authors are his former advisers and shaped policies during his presidency.)

Trump is expected to double down on his deregulatory agenda during a second term. The former president plans to undo many of Biden’s climate and environmental protections and dismantle the IRA by repealing sections that promote electric vehicles and offshore wind projects. (Since the IRA passed two years ago, Republicans have voted to repeal it 42 times.) He has also proposed eliminating key regulations for liquefied natural gas. At a dinner with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago in April, the former president suggested if they contributed $1 billion to his campaign, he would roll back Biden-Harris environmental regulations.

Drill rig working to drill a natural gas well to be fracked next to the Red Hawk Elementary School. Elementary school is the building behind the drill rig in the photo.

If elected, Trump told the American Farm Bureau Federation, “I will slash regulations that stifle American agriculture and make everything more expensive.”

Project 2025 spells out similar deregulatory plans. It calls for demolishing the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, which it describes as “the main drivers of climate change alarm.” (During his previous term, Trump required the term “climate change” be removed from government websites.)

Criticizing the Biden-administration’s EPA for pursuing a global, climate-themed agenda “against the will of Congress,” the document also advocates for shrinking the agency’s power, which would include eliminating its office of environmental justice and civil rights: “EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government,” it says.

The conservative plan criticizes the Biden-Harris USDA for encouraging “climate-smart agricultural practices” and says the next administration should “denounce efforts to place ancillary issues like climate change ahead of food productivity and affordability.” Along those lines, it recommends eliminating conservation programs like the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to stop farming on low-quality pieces of land to help reduce runoff, improve biodiversity, and hold carbon. And it calls for the president to issue an executive order that removes references to “transforming the food system” from all USDA literature.

On the corporate power front, Trump suggested to oil executive donors at a fundraising event in May that if he becomes president, he will fast-track their merger deals with the Federal Trade Commission.

It should be noted that implementing any of the candidates’ plans would require Congressional approval, which may or may not be achievable with the current configuration of the House and Senate.

Support for the Candidates

As of early September, agribusiness interests had donated $9.9 million to the 2024 Trump campaign and only $2.7 million to Harris.

“President Trump has a strong record of advancing policies to strengthen American agriculture,” Alabama FarmPAC president Jimmy Parnell told the conservative Alabama news website 1819 News. “His administration reduced burdensome regulations, held trade partners accountable, lowered energy costs, and invested in rural economic development.”

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC Action Fund, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, the youth-led Sunrise Movement, and a number of other climate-focused groups have endorsed Harris for president. And in August, a group of climate organizations announced a $55 million ad campaign in her support.

“Kamala Harris’s record provides a stark contrast with Donald Trump and the far-right, pro-polluter Project 2025,” said Wenonah Hauter, founder and executive director of Food and Water Action, in a statement. “She has long championed bold clean water legislation, and the Biden-Harris administration provided a dramatic boost to clean energy, tackled corporate consolidation, and passed an infrastructure law that will provide much-needed resources to protecting clean water.”

Harris’ positions do not yet go far enough to tackle the existential threats to our food, water, and climate, says Hauter.“But with a President Harris, we will have a chance to build the political power to move the bold climate initiatives we need.”

The post Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems

Grey Moran — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:00:35 +0000

This is the first article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater.

At the height of summer, chef Rob Rubba and his team at Oyster Oyster, a vegetable-first restaurant in Washington, D.C., are preparing for the dwindling of food in the coming winter. It’s a tedious but worthwhile process: drying mushrooms, vegetables, and herbs, making pickles and slaw, and preserving garlic blossoms and coriander seeds in airtight jars before these ingredients vanish with the end of the season.

This may seem like an antiquated concern for chefs in an era of global food distribution systems, but it’s an all-consuming preoccupation for Oyster Oyster, a restaurant named after two ingredients—a bivalve and a mushroom—known for their ecosystem benefits. This radically seasonal, regional restaurant sources its ingredients exclusively from the ocean, climate-adapted farms, and wild plants of the Mid-Atlantic.

Read the stories in our series with Eater:

Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems As global warming bears down, some restaurants are forging stronger bonds with regional food systems and regenerative farms.
Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions To overcome ingredient shortages and high food costs, some restaurateurs are rethinking their staple ingredients and strengthening their relationships with suppliers.
Battling Meltdown: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Work for Change in the Kitchen As climate change drives temperatures up, restaurant staff face uncomfortable, even unsafe conditions with no heat regulations to protect them. Some workers are taking matters into their own hands.

“Toward the end of winter, it gets a little . . . . scary and sparse,” admits Rubba. “Come February, we have this very short farm list. It’s just cellared roots and some kales. Making that creative takes a lot of mental energy.” That’s when Oyster Oyster draws heavily from its pantry of foraged wild plants and ingredients preserved from nearby climate-friendly farms. They lend the food “bright, salty, acidic flavor pops throughout the winter” that wouldn’t otherwise be available, and give his food a joyful exuberance that one critic described as “a garden of good eating.”

Rubba, who won the Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation in 2023, is one of many chefs reinvisioning the farm-to-table movement in the clarifying, urgent light of climate change. At a time when storms, fires, and droughts are lashing the planet with increasing severity, restaurants like Oyster Oyster source ingredients with a heightened due diligence around their climate and environmental impacts. In doing so, they’re also recognizing that chefs can play a larger role in building food systems able to survive long into the future.

When Ingredients Do Harm—or Good

Oyster Oyster’s approach to regional sourcing comes from Rubba’s stark realization that many staples sold in grocery stores and used in most restaurants have wreaked havoc on the ecosystems and livelihoods of people in other countries. Many of the staple “commodities” imported from overseas come from regions once covered by rainforests and other critical ecosystems that stabilize the climate.

Take chocolate, for instance. The majority of the world’s cocoa is sourced from West Africa, often harvested by children on vast plantations linked to widespread deforestation. Sugar comes with its problems, too. Even when grown in the U.S., the burning of sugar cane emits large amounts of earth-warming carbon dioxide, while dusting communities with toxic ash. Also, these foods require fossil fuels to transport them across the ocean and then throughout the U.S. to warehouses, grocery stores, and restaurants. Rubba also avoids domestic foods that have a large environmental toll. This includes meat, a major driver of earth-warming methane pollution, accounting for 60 percent of food-related emissions.

Oysters, along with oyster mushrooms, are the namesake ingredients at Oyster Oyster, which is helmed by chef Rob Rubba. At right: roasted asparagus with locally foraged ramps, crispy potato, radish and a Virginia peanut broth infused with Thai basil oil. (Photo credits: Rey Lopez)

With a bit of due diligence, Rubba has found local substitutes for all these ingredients. “We don’t use a lot of sweeteners in our food, but we source a really good maple syrup from Pennsylvania that is sometimes reduced down to a maple sugar,” he says.

He and his team use alternatives to other staples, too: They source vinegars from Keepwell Vinegar in Pennsylvania, which relies on sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, fruit, and sorghum from nearby farms to prepare vinegar from scratch. They get their salt from Henlopen, a flaky sea salt from the Delaware coast. They source sunflower and canola oil from Pennsylvania farms. For spices, they work with foragers to gather and preserve Northern spicebush, a shrub native to the eastern U.S. with a delightfully versatile flavor, both fruity and peppery at once. They use a dash of this spice instead of pepper, mixing it with ginger and chiles for a hit of complexity and warmth.

And, just because food is raised locally doesn’t mean it’s grown with climate-friendly practices. “[The farmer] could be spraying with every insecticide, pesticide, fertilizer, and drive a big, stinky diesel truck into my city and sit outside idling for 20 minutes while he unloads all his plastic containers into my restaurant, right?” says Rubba.

Many staples used in restaurants have wreaked havoc on ecosystems and livelihoods.

This has prompted Rubba to develop deeper relationships with the farms in his network, including an interview process to understand how the food is produced before he buys from a particular farm. Although he sources organic produce, USDA organic certification isn’t his biggest requirement—he’s more interested in the actual farming methods. Certain farming practices and crop varieties can help farms adapt to the erratic, intensified weather patterns and disasters shaking the foundation of U.S. agriculture. Healthy soil can act like a sponge, easily absorbing water during intense flooding and retaining water during times of drought. Some approaches, like agroforestry, can directly fight climate change by drawing down planet-warming carbon.

Rubba visits all the farms that supply the restaurant, asking about their crop rotations, soil health practices, and how the farmworkers are treated. “I love to see the operation, how they do things, what it’s like, and who works there,” he said. “I don’t want to serve food that someone labored over and wasn’t paid correctly for.”

Origins to Table

Other climate-conscious restaurants have adopted a similar approach of thinking deeply about the origins of the food they serve. At Carmo, a tropical restaurant and cultural space in New Orleans, building the knowledge and relationships necessary for ethical, regenerative sourcing has been a lifelong project for the restaurant’s co-owners and chefs, Dana and Christina do Carmo Honn. They’ve forged relationships with Gulf Coast shrimpers and Indigenous tribes in the Amazon to support traditional, ecological food systems. These relationships also give each ingredient a layered story rooted in culture, place, and geographies.

“We’re in it for the relationships,” said Dana Honn. “The whole idea of farm-to-table has always been so important, but what I realized is that we’re trying to do origins-to-table–we’re trying to tell the story of where our food came from.”

Tiradito, left, is a Peruvian-style sashimi. Center: Cafe Carmo co-owner Dana Honn with a fresh catch. Beiju de Tapioca, right, features crispy Amazonian tapioca topped with peach palm hummus and dabs of black tucupi (reduced fermented cassava juice). (Photo credits: Dana Honn)

Chefs can be part of the next chapter of this story, not only by telling the history of a food but also by helping build a sustainable market for its future. This is part of the inspiration behind the Honn’s project Origins: Amazonia, the result of a decades-long relationship formed with Juruna Indigenous communities in the state of Pará, Brazil, whose livelihoods and traditional food systems were upended by a megadam. The project is an ambitious, multidimensional effort to tell the story of the violent destruction of biodiversity and Indigenous land, while also helping support a market for traditional Juruna foods like cassava, which allows the communities to cultivate them once more. By focusing on the richest source of biodiversity in the world—one that affects the entire planet, where deforestation has eradicated at least 20 percent of the rainforest—the Honns hope to help their customers understand what’s at stake there, and by extension, everywhere.

“If there are more people engaged in production of ancestral foods, they actually begin to consume those foods again,” said Honn about the Juruna communities. Many of their traditional plants, like manioc, are also highly adapted to the environment and climate, cultivated over thousands of years. Carmo has been supporting the renewal of these foodways, in part, through a dinner series partly sourced from the Juruna (along with fresh ingredients from the New Orleans area) that also functions as a fundraiser. The money is returned to the Juruna peoples to help restore the agroforestry systems that have long sustained them.

Honn has developed a similar approach to supporting a more sustainable market for Louisiana’s shrinking fishing industry, which has been eroding for decades. The local industry is struggling to compete with cheap imported seafood, which currently accounts for the majority of seafood sold in the U.S. Many New Orleans chefs find it easier to rely on cheaper, imported seafood, readily available through major restaurant distributors like Sysco or Restaurant Depot that source from around the globe. Yet the reliance on imported seafood—at the expense of local seafood—can come with steep consequences.

“Seafood processing houses, they just cut the filet off and throw the carcass in the bin. You have the collars and the cheeks and the pectoral fins and the ribs and everything else that could literally just be cooked and put on a plate.”

For instance, shrimp farms in other countries are routinely linked to labor abuses and the destruction of mangroves—a coastal ecosystem critical for adapting to climate change by building carbon-rich soil and buffering against sea-level rise. To address this, Honn has been working with a group of chefs, fishers, and other experts to build back Louisiana’s seafood economy, including shrimp, by developing a more sustainable, local supply chain. They’re developing a program called Full Catch, a set of protocols for harvesting, transporting, and distributing fish from the Gulf of Mexico, including cutting down on food waste by selling and marketing the whole fish.

“When you go to seafood processing houses, they just cut the filet off and throw the carcass in the bin. You have the collars and the cheeks and the pectoral fins and the ribs and everything else that could . . . literally just be cooked and put on a plate,” said Honn. “We sell it every night at Carmo and run out of it every night. Really, people love it.”

Supporting Climate-Conscious Farms

One of the challenges of this sustainable approach to sourcing is that it can be unpredictable, without a year-round guarantee of ingredients.

Many farmers don’t grow a fixed amount of each crop every year; instead, they experiment and innovate with different crop plans, the varieties of crops grown, methods of building soil health and minimizing fertilizer use, and other variables. In other words, climate-friendly farming can be a bit messy and unpredictable–a system that is designed to be more responsive to climate disruptions and ecosystem fluctuations, building long-term stability, resilience, and high yields.

The restaurants that support these kinds of farms also tend to be highly adaptable, adjusting their menu to reflect the needs of farmers. They source according to the schedule of the crops growing nearby, the waning and waxing seasons. For some chefs, this means keeping in constant touch with farms to know when their crops will be ready, and then adjusting their menu accordingly–rather than relying on a predictable production schedule.

Isaiah Martinez, the chef and owner of Yardy Rum Bar, a Caribbean restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, says he keeps close tabs on local farms. “I’m asking them, ‘When are your peppers going to be in season? When are melons going to be in season? When are you going to have different cucumber varieties? When will you have stone fruit?’” He admits that he’s a bit competitive about this, too; he wants to be the first chef that farmers call when a new crop is ready to be delivered, so he builds strong relationships with them.

“I create a relationship where [farmers] feel like they have to tell me first,” he said. “They’re giving me the first handful of perfect peaches, and I’m putting it on my menu.” This approach is also good for farmers: The peach grows according to its own timeline, and the chef is enthusiastically waiting for it as soon as it is ready. He changes his menu usually every three to four weeks, while making smaller tweaks on a daily basis. “When carrots are not very good, we can do beets, and when beets are not very good, we can do collards.”

Isaiah Martinez of Yardy Rum Bar prepares a dish for an event spotlighting Black food, sustainability, and inequality in food culture. Center: Yardy Rum Bar’s signature chicken and waffles with seasonal fruit, maple syrup, seasonal jam, and peppa sauce. Right: Yardy Rum Bar’s menu. (Photos courtesy of Yardy Rum Bar)

For peppers, herbs, lettuces and gem beets, Martinez goes to Red Tail Organics, a certified organic vegetable farm along Oregon’s Mohawk River that focuses on the often overlooked edges of the farm. Red Tail plants hedgerows of elderberries, Oregon Grape trees, and Cascara trees, native plants that serve as a habitat for wildlife while helping sequester carbon in the soil. They’ve also planted Pacific willow, California incense-cedar, Western red cedar, Ash trees, and Alders along the river that cuts through the farm. Known as a riparian buffer, this prevents erosion, stabilizes the soil, and can absorb storm water, helping the farm adapt to more erratic weather.

Martinez also sources some ingredients from Hummingbird Wholesale, a local distributor in Oregon focused on building a market for regional organic farms that are sustainable in the truest sense of the word. “We have a big, audacious goal that organic becomes the norm in agriculture, as opposed to the 2.5 percent [of U.S. food sales] that it is currently,” said Stacy Kraker, the company’s director of marketing. Hummingbird does this by acting as the missing link between the area’s organic farms, retailers, and restaurants, building a regional supply chain that chefs that quickly tap into. In pursuing what it calls “distributor supported agriculture,” Hummingbird—and chefs like Martinez, who support it—are helping create a local foodshed that nourishes all the life that depends on it, from humans to soil microbes and pollinators.

Hummingbird’s sourcing team considers some of the regional climate stressors, such as prolonged periods of drought, when seeking out farmers. “Some of the farmers we work with are, in fact, dry-land farming, which means that they rely on rain to give them as much moisture as they’re ever going to use,” said Kraker. “So, they’re intentionally choosing to grow crops in the regions that can handle long periods without any rain.”

While Martinez deeply values building direct relationships with farmers, Hummingbird Wholesale allows him to confidently source from nearby organic farms for some ingredients, sparing him a bit of time and research in what can be a lengthy process.

A chef’s vigilant, knowledgeable sourcing can lead to cherishing certain ingredients—and using less of them. Oyster Oyster’s Rob Rubba thinks some foods are best reserved for special occasions, including his restaurant’s namesake bivalve.

His oysters come from Chesapeake Bay, which has lost nearly all of its once-abundant oyster population due to reckless harvesting techniques like dredging. Although Rubba buys from farmers dedicated to sustainably raising Bay oysters, he still sources them in moderation. Part of the idea is simply not taking too much from the earth, especially for ingredients that have historically been extracted like they are an infinite resource.

“I think we have to look at [these oysters] as a luxury,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they should be limited out of a sense of elitism. I just think in how we consume them—we should just be a little more grateful for them when we do get them.”

The post Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.