As she pulled into the neighborhood, she began gently, repeatedly tapping the horn outside homes where she had identified—a few weeks earlier—that children were present. It was no ice cream truck, but mothers ushered their children out to greet her at the sound of the arrival.

Sweat dripped off her forehead as she carried bags of food and milk jugs to their doorsteps, tallying each on a clipboard with a smile. Families expressed their thanks and then hurried back inside trailers plagued by disrepair as the sun bore down, the strained hum of rusted, aging air conditioners filling the air.

Adding Sun Bucks to Summer Programs

“What we heard last year is that this meets the needs of their communities like nothing else,” she said. In her state, it’s even more critical, she said: Despite new survey data showing one in five kids in the state live in food-insecure households, Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration chose not to participate in Summer EBT, the other program that came out of Congress’ 2022 changes. DeSantis also rejected earlier, COVID-related summer food aid dollars for kids and is one of more than a dozen governors, all Republicans, who have rejected the latest federal funds.

Summer EBT, which the USDA has rebranded as “Sun Bucks,” is an extra benefit of $40 per month provided to families whose children qualify for free meals during the school year. In places where the two changes are being rolled out and adopted at the same time, advocates say the combination is a powerful one-two punch.

“With summer EBT in conjunction with our summer feeding programs, it’s an opportunity to make up for the loss of meals that a child will experience” when school is closed, said LaMonika Jones, who runs Maryland Hunger Solutions and D.C. Hunger Solutions, both initiatives of the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “We know we had greater participation with non-congregate meals during the pandemic. So, this is an opportunity for us to extend that and for us to continue to make improvements to the summer feeding program.”

In Maryland, Jones has been helping rural districts implement non-congregate meal programs while also helping families access summer EBT benefits. In Washington, D.C., her focus has been on those latter benefits, since the region is entirely urban.

“I’ve been sharing with my staff for the last couple of months as an FYI: ‘Be on the lookout and listen up. Parents may be calling,’” she said. While many students will automatically be enrolled  in Summer EBT through other nutrition-assistance programs, there are always cracks people fall through, and each state’s system for distributing the benefits is slightly different. Jones’ group communicates how the program works so that families know how and when to expect benefits—and what to do if things don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

For example, she said, a benefit card might be mailed in an unlabeled envelope, which gets accidentally thrown away. “That’s another question that I get,” she said. “‘I was waiting for a summer EBT benefit to arrive, but I never got it. What do I do?’”

Jones and her team keep information on hand to direct families to the right offices where they can get help and access resources they’re eligible for.

Challenges and Paperwork

Improved nutrition standards in school meals, for example, have successfully moved the needle on improving the health of low-income students. But for Figueroa’s team showing up to chop broccoli, those standards can make the job harder and often feel like red tape, because the rules are incredibly specific. And what each meal contains during the school year is different than what it must consist of in the summer.

“We’re receiving federal funds, and we want to do it right. We have to do it right. We get reviewed, we get audited, we get inspected all the time, but we also want to feed our kids,” Figueroa said. “Sometimes all of the politics and rules make it hard to just feed a kid a hamburger.”

One of her biggest challenges, which Brandon Comer in Virginia echoed, is monitoring all the different sites, especially as the non-congregate option takes off. The USDA requires that the districts and nonprofits running summer meal programs provide oversight of all the locations at which they distribute meals. Depending on how new the site is, it may mean a member of the management team will have to go to that site multiple times to evaluate its performance.

Another is staffing. “Ever since COVID, we have not been able to [fully] staff,” Comer said. Finding truck drivers is especially difficult, so the team ends up using smaller vehicles, which requires more trips and therefore more time. Still, she is making it work and expects her meal numbers to be 25 to 30 percent higher than they were last summer.

While COVID taught her she could make anything work, both she and Figueroa said they’re hoping these recent policy shifts stick around so that they can ultimately build systems that last, rather than having to figure out new plans as June approaches. “I feel like every year is a trial run,” Figueroa said, “but I’m hoping this is the year where next year, I won’t have to write a million different menus because hopefully we’re in a final rule that we can stick with.”

Whatever happens, each week this summer until school starts, the staff at Lockerman will be unpacking boxes and packing bags of meals over and over, while Meghan Hewitt and others drive their vans around Caroline County, beeping to let families know they’ve arrived.

“It’s not always easy for them to get to us,” Figueroa said. “We’ve got to go to them.”

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With holiday feasts and Black Friday sales around the corner, Walmart’s leadership knew it needed to address supply chain upheaval, according to company statements to shareholders. There were three options: one was to simply pay a premium to skip the queue.

“There was some of that that went on with L.A. and Long Beach,” said Captain Kip Louttit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, who helped direct traffic at the ports at the time.

According to Louttit, some retailers chose to go to a different, smaller port to unload, often at a higher cost. Walmart could have also chosen to do the same.

Or, for a hefty sum, it could bypass the system entirely and hire its own ships. And that’s exactly what Walmart did.

“Our merchants continue to take steps to mitigate challenges, including adding extra lead time to orders and chartering vessels specifically for Walmart goods,” Walmart’s then-CFO Brett Biggs later said during a 2022 earnings call. In the interim, Walmart had pushed more than $1 billion in additional capital toward supply chain costs, investments in ecommerce, and other tech and customer-facing initiatives.

During the initial food shocks of COVID, when food was wasting in fields and some people experienced increased food insecurity, Walmart had another plan. Rather than transporting food, clothing, electronics, and toys via containers on massive ships servicing multiple retailers, Walmart chartered its own ships to carry goods for only its stores. The decision to pay for private vessels combined with the COVID aftermath to increase sales, allowed Walmart to increase all inventory by more than 20 percent, ultimately muscling other, smaller retailers aside and sidestepping the choked container terminals altogether.

“Nobody was overtly trying to throw a cog in the wheel,” said Louttit. “They just might be trying to maximize profitability for their piece of the system.”

And maximize Walmart did. While independent retailers and mom-and-pop shops faced shortages and even empty shelves during the 2021 holiday season, Walmart’s sales grew more than 8 percent. And, despite its logistical challenges, the pandemic overall had already proved to be a boon for the retail giant. Long one of the biggest retail businesses in the world, with $572.8 billion in annual revenue, Walmart’s gross profits jumped 7.33 percent by the end of 2021, hitting $138 billion.

Walmart did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

That the company thrived in the face of the pandemic and the ensuing supply chain disruption, however, illustrates its enormous influence over world trade and global pricing for goods, and how that influence is squeezing other retailers, which further weakens the global supply chain, including for food.

Walmart’s strategy at the ports also showcases how the company supports a network of lobbyists that work to expand its interests. Experts say the combination leaves supply chains too rigid to respond to disruption and makes prices, particularly for food, vulnerable to inflation.

The ‘Elephant in the Room’

“The pandemic and ‘containergeddon’ was putting these small and medium-sized mom and pops out of business,” said Steve Ferreira, CEO of shipping consultancy Ocean Audit, referring to a term he coined to describe the ocean shipping slowdowns during the pandemic.

Exporters also struggled. American dairy producers, for example, faced unprecedented challenges in exporting goods during the pandemic’s first year. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) was tasked with assessing the supply chain crisis by surveying industries most impacted. As part of that survey, the National Milk Producers Federation and the U.S. Dairy Export Council submitted public comments to the DOT, saying the increased cost of shipping was “significant and damaging” to dairy producers “and the thousands of workers they support throughout the supply chain.”

“There has been a change in behavior by the ocean carriers that is severely harming shippers, including American dairy exporters,” the public comment read.

Even a year later, in 2022, massive disruption remained for many U.S. producers, including the seafood industry—which includes many small businesses.

“Although the story has been driven off the front page, and the nation’s attention has turned to other challenges, supply chain disruptions at U.S. ports continue to cause severe problems, imposing significant and unnecessary costs on American seafood businesses still trying to recover from the pandemic, lockdowns, food inflation, and other obstacles,” reads a public comment submitted in December 2022 by the National Fisheries Institute in a subsequent Congressional push for reform.

Ultimately, the high cost of shipping also trickled down to American consumers via record-high inflation. According to the International Monetary Fund, the increase in global shipping costs in 2021 caused inflation to increase by more than 2 percentage points.

But Walmart not only bucked those high shipping costs, it turned them into an opportunity.

“Because of Walmart’s sheer size and the fact that they’re the 800-pound elephant in the room, they were prospering during the pandemic,” Ferreira said.

Walmart is the largest importer in the U.S., having imported nearly 1 million 20-foot shipping containers full of goods just last year. Amazon, by comparison, brought in about 3 percent of that, or roughly 33,000 containers. And yet, Ferreira estimates that during the pandemic, Walmart paid less than half what the average importer paid for shipping.

“It all has to do with the leverage that they have in terms of the amount of spend and containers that they have,” he said.

In other words, ocean shippers couldn’t say no to their biggest client.

“Flexing that market power over the supply chain is a way to elbow out the competition,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), who has studied Walmart extensively. “They’re able to demand special treatment from suppliers who are looking at Walmart thinking, ‘Well, you’re a quarter of my revenue. I cannot say no due to the threat of losing you as a customer, which would capsize my company. So, therefore, I have to give you the special deal. And the way I’m going to make up for that is I’m going to raise prices on your smaller competitors.’”

Walmart did not respond to a request for comment about whether the company commanded special treatment from suppliers, or whether consumers inherited the cost of its dealmaking. But the advantage larger companies had in the pandemic marketplace was part of the reason COVID took such a drastic toll on small businesses across the U.S., according to one study by a consortium of economy and business experts. Not only were larger retailers commandeering their own ships and supplies, but they were also leveraging the marketplace in their favor.

Port Reform

More specifically, the bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and John Thune (R-South Dakota), aims to crack down on ocean carriers and shipping companies taking advantage of a largely unregulated international shipping system.

The act prohibits retaliation by ocean carriers, requires increased public disclosure by the Federal Maritime Commission—which oversees the shipping industry—and protects U.S. importers and exporters from being denied cargo space when it’s available.

The goal is to “ensure an efficient, competitive, and economical transportation system in the ocean commerce of the United States,” the legislation reads.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden touched on the need for such legislation, saying, “When corporations don’t have to compete, their profits go up, your prices go up, and small businesses and family farmers and ranchers go under. We see it happening with ocean carriers moving goods in and out of America.”

He later applauded members of Congress for supporting legislation that “will help lower costs for American retailers, farmers, and consumers” when the Ocean Shipping Reform Act passed later in the year.

Lobbying disclosure reports reviewed by Civil Eats show Walmart was active in lobbying on the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022, as well as other iterations of the legislation. Between 2022 and 2023, Walmart spent nearly $9.7 million lobbying the federal government on ocean reform and other efforts.

The company annually spends such sums to advance and protect its interests. In the last 10 years, Walmart has deployed lobbyists to affect agriculture policy, labor law, market competition, food safety, trade, climate solutions, and other legislation that affects the company’s bottom line, supply chain, and other interests in the federal arena.

Since 2013, Walmart has spent more than $70 million lobbying. It’s one of the top lobbying retailers in the U.S.

The company is similarly active in state politics. For example, Walmart was involved in a court battle in California over a ban on big-box stores. And the company regularly spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists in its home state of Arkansas.

Walmart did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation or the company’s lobbying goals. Therefore, it’s not clear exactly how Walmart lobbied on the legislation. But Ferreira said it’s not surprising that Walmart was active on the issue on Capitol Hill.

“What Walmart is trying to do is say, ‘Hey, let’s let the free-market play this out.’ And it’s great for them, right? They really want that because they are the market,” he said. “The less bureaucracy and rules in the way makes them a better player.”

And not every organization was interested in reform. The shipping industry, for example, lobbied hard against the legislation. The World Shipping Council, which represents the world’s largest shipping companies, spent at least $300,000 and hired a lobbyist known for strong ties in the Senate in order to prevent the legislation from being introduced at all. The Council called an early iteration of the Ocean Shipping Reform Act “unworkable, unnecessary, and duplicative.” It declined to answer specific questions from Civil Eats about opposition to the legislation.

Ultimately those lobbying efforts helped keep things mostly unchanged for large shippers and retailers like Walmart. Despite the legislation being signed into law last year, Ferreira said the legislation contains so many exceptions for the ocean shipping industry that it’s ineffective in moving the culture of an ocean shipping system he likened to a “cartel.”

“It really hasn’t had much of an impact or effect, if any,” he said. “It’s a very broken industry and system, and OSRA did nothing to help it. The bottom line is it doesn’t really have any teeth.”

And with the pandemic and supply chain disruptions largely behind us, combined with the fact that container shipping rates are so low right now, it’s unlikely the issue will garner attention again until the next shipping crisis.

Consequences of Concentrated Power

“During the height of the supply chain bottlenecks, a lot of independent grocers did not have basic products on their shelves because Walmart had commandeered those products,” said ILSR’s Stacy Mitchell. “So, people were walking into the independent grocer and there’s no baby formula, or whatever it may be. But it’s on the shelf at Walmart, and so that drove business to Walmart.”

Walmart’s tendency to vacuum up business from smaller retailers even has a name: the Walmart Effect, a colloquialism since a book by the same name documented Walmart’s impacts on smaller retailers in the communities it serves. Through its command of the global marketplace, as well as its ability to commandeer its own ships for importing goods, the Walmart Effect deepened retail divides during the pandemic, as Walmart raked in profits and even more market share.

During the pandemic, Walmart dominated sales in almost every category—from groceries to retail goods. Its online sales increased as much as 74 percent.

Mitchell said Walmart’s size and massive market share drove food companies to further consolidate, forcing them to “bulk up,” or merge in order to hold their own against a powerful buyer. That helped craft a highly consolidated market where production has been largely driven overseas and supply lines are consolidated, tenuous, and vulnerable to collusion, Mitchell said.

And Walmart is now one of only a handful of retailers that are able to maneuver that system. That consolidation—both on the grocery and food production level—has contributed to high food prices and inflation overall.

“I would argue that Walmart is actually the primary culprit behind the set of changes in the supply chain that actually led to all of these supply chain problems and to inflation,” she said. “We are so wholly dependent on a small number of corporations who are so top heavy that they’re very brittle, they’re not terribly adaptable. They don’t have any reason to be nimble because there’s no competitor that’s going to come along and eat their lunch.”

In a truly competitive market economy, retailers and supply chains should be nimble, she said. Nothing should be able to cause shortages and bottlenecks to the extent we saw the last few years—not even global pandemics, climate catastrophes, or worker shortages.

U.S. lawmakers are aware of this problem. Last year, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law held a series of antitrust hearings, one of which focused entirely on the food supply chain for goods, though not specifically on Walmart. Throughout the hearing, committee members heard from workers, farmers, low-income families, and small businesses.

“With very few companies in the lead, the long, complex supply chains that we rely on to eat daily are extremely vulnerable to disruption by health and environmental disasters—and a problem in a single location can ripple rapidly across the nation,” testified Allison Johnson, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Local and regional food supplies can be more nimble and resilient in the face of adversity, but small businesses struggle to compete in a marketplace skewed toward the largest players.”

President Biden has also been active in combating consolidation in the food sector, including by providing resources to state attorneys general to “crack down on price-gouging and other anticompetitive practices” and by preventing large corporate mergers.

Ocean Audit’s Steve Ferreira adds that, on the other hand, Walmart’s immense power grants it the ability to offer low prices to American consumers. It boils down to a matter of preference, he said.

“Is it better for Walmart to have the lowest prices and protect American savings accounts, or is it better to have Walmart and then a hundred mom-and-pop competitors that give the American people more choice?”

Suzi Parker contributed research.

The post Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/01/19/long-covid-food-workers-parosmia-anosmia-loss-of-smell-taste/ Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:00:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50492 Many workers in the food industry experiencing parosmia—or a long-term distorted sense of smell—find their lives and livelihoods disrupted. And they have trouble accessing help.

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Anaïs Saint-André Loughran remembers every cheese she’s ever tasted. The owner of Chantal’s Cheese Shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recalls that when she decided she wanted to be a cheesemonger—at age 4—“all the doors of my memories were tied to cheese, and where and how I tasted it.”

So when Loughran lost her sense of smell after she contracted COVID in March 2020, she was devastated. On the second day, she says, “I woke up, I tried to eat something, and it felt like I was eating nothing.” Since then, her career has been irrevocably changed.

Anaïs Saint-André Loughran outside Chantal’s Cheese Shop.

Many food professionals have shared their stories about how COVID impacted their sense of taste and smell. New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, food and wine writer Lisa Denning, and Arden Wine Bar owner and sommelier Kelsey Glasser all also experienced temporary bouts with loss of smell and taste. But there are others, like Loughran, who are experiencing a longer-term distorted experience of smell called parosmia, a common symptom of long COVID.

“I realized I had parosmia by drinking rotten milk without knowing,” says Loughran.

At first, she recalls, “I could barely eat food. Everything tasted like sewage.” Now, three years later, she says her sense of smell and taste has returned, but it’s completely different than before. “I didn’t get to try the cheese in my shop for a very long time. I had to go through hating everything I had loved, and also liking things I used to hate.” She worked at eating things that now tasted rotten a little bit at time to get used to it and to relearn the new tastes. “Onions were horrible. Still today, raw onions make my stomach jump,” says Loughran.

Before Loughran got sick, she could easily give recommendations for cheese pairings or substitutions. Then, once she began living with long COVID, none of the flavor matched what she had previously known. “Everything came crashing down,” she says.

Cheese is directly tied to Loughran’ earliest memories of her childhood in France. And the work she does is closely tied to her identity, as is the work of many other food professionals who rely on their senses. When her sense of smell and taste changed, everything else had to change too.

Loughran is just one of many people in the food industry who are suffering from long-haul sensory loss that affects her professional life. Holly Fann is a food writer, dining critic, and chef based in St. Louis. She contracted COVID for the first time in October 2021 and her sense of smell and taste have yet to return.

“I was a dining critic at that time and had a regular column,” says Fann. “Everything I do is freelance. There were no resources for me. I contacted the Freelancers Union, and they told me, ‘Maybe there’ll be resources someday, but there aren’t any now.’”

When trying to get support from doctors, she said, “It took six months to get my first appointment,” but there was no cure. “They tell you the best thing to do is to take time off and rest. The best treatment is weeks of incredibly reduced activity—but for anyone who works freelance or with food, you can’t take that time off.”

To help with her loss, Fann has joined a support group for people with long COVID.

“It’s amazing how many other people had the same odd symptoms,” she says, referring to the support group, “but I noticed that there were no people from the hospitality industry.” And while many of the members spoke of chronic pain and other systemic health issues, she was the only one there specifically to talk about her experience with parosmia.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines long COVID very broadly as a “range of ongoing health problems,” it’s typically associated with symptoms lasting more than four weeks: brain fog, lightheadedness, sleeping problems, depression and anxiety, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or “chronic fatigue syndrome,” to name a few. Aside from neurological symptoms, it can also trigger health conditions including heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease.

Last summer, a CDC analysis found that more than 40 percent of adults in the United States had reported having COVID in the past, and nearly one in five of those reported at least one lingering post-infection symptom that is seriously affecting their daily life. In recent CDC surveys, 14 percent of respondents say they have experienced some form of long COVID. As of August, an estimated 2 to 4 million of those people were out of work due to their ongoing symptoms.

Dr. Nancy Rawson, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, shared the science behind parosmia in an interview with KCRW, describing parosmia as an incorrect aroma experience. “It actually happens quite commonly in people that are recovering their sense of smell following having lost it completely from COVID,” she added. The olfactory system, which controls the mechanisms behind our sense of smell, doesn’t recover equally across all of the nerve pathways that detect thousands of different chemicals.

“Some nerves may be regenerating sooner than others,” she continued. “In order to get the full impact of a coffee aroma, for example, you need to be able to detect many different chemicals in a particular proportion in the way that the brain interprets that as coffee. But if you’re only now able to detect a few of those … they don’t smell anything like what you think the coffee should smell like.”

Smell is directly tied to taste, through a retronasal pathway that creates nuances of flavor, and without that, we lose the ability to identify food. This is especially detrimental to food workers experiencing parosmia and anosmia. According to an article in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), parosmia can turn previous sources of joy into causes of distress, as well as depression, anxiety, loss of appetite, and malnourishment, and many patients  feeling trivialized by their healthcare providers when seeking help for these experiences.

Jameeale Arzeno is a chef based in New York City who contracted COVID in July 2020 and experienced a radically reduced sense of taste and smell within a few days. “My taste was diminished to salty, sweet, spicy, and sour. I could not discern specific flavors,” she said. After 28 days, she says she could only smell “sulfur and a metallic bergamot.”

Arzeno was devastated; she felt like she couldn’t trust her senses in the kitchen, and she had to stop taking private clients. “I didn’t feel I could fulfill my commitment to the quality of work I had delivered in the past,” she says.

Loughran and Fann have also worried about their credibility.

Loughran opted to restructure her entire business. “I had to hire more people. My dream to be behind the counter talking with folks about cheese and tasting with them for the rest of my life has changed,” she says. “I had many months of crying. I have imposter syndrome because I now have no confidence in myself.”

“My way of communicating has always been through food. When you have a convoluted sense of what your baseline is, it throws off your sense of self and makes you question everything.”

Fann recalls encountering a moral dilemma with her work. “Ethically, I was torn between letting people know [my sense of taste and smell was diminished] and worrying that my integrity would be questioned if I did.” She ended up having to table her food column until she was recovered, and losing out on regular writing gigs, which relied on her ability to write criticism.

Fann shifted to write about other topics, such as her experience with ADHD, in order to get by. “Before becoming a food writer, I was a chef for 20 years,” she says. “My way of communicating has always been through food. When you have a convoluted sense of what your baseline is, it throws off your sense of self and makes you question everything.”

As a chef, Arzeno also relies heavily on her memory. She started cooking only dishes she had cooked for years, and no longer trusts herself to try or develop new ones. She has kept her experience of parosmia to herself: “I was ashamed, and for a long time I was trying to hide it,” she says.

Numerous clinics around the country are focused on helping patients manage and recover from long COVID through specified treatment and support. And yet there is no definitive treatment for COVID-induced parosmia or olfactory dysfunction. For instance, Fann was treated at the innovative Washington University Long COVID Care program, but she didn’t regain her sense of taste or smell.

Some patients find olfactory retraining to be helpful, and it’s something Loughran has committed herself to practicing by actively sniffing the same scents every day. “With time, I will be able to master a bigger flavor profile, I think,” she says.

Anaïs Saint-André Loughran talks to a customer inside Chantal’s Cheese Shop. (Photo credit: Lindsay Herring)

For people in the food industry without health insurance, the effects of parosmia can be especially challenging. “There [is no] compensation offered for anyone in this situation. I wish there was free treatment,” says Arzeno. “Or that something was offered to those affected by long COVID.”

The Biden-Harris administration announced more resources to support individuals with long COVID in July 2021, with a website that workers can visit to understand their rights. There is also now language that exists at part of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protecting workers with symptoms of long COVID, such as fatigue, in the workplace. But these new guidelines don’t mention anosmia or parosmia, and there is no specific language or delineation for food workers who need their sense of smell and taste.

When reached via the notoriously flooded ADA information line, an unnamed ADA professional spoke about the lack of language around this issue, saying that “there is no concrete answer. If it affects their ability to do their job, [food professionals experiencing parosmia] may be able to get reasonable accommodation from their employment.”

But for some workers with parosmia who decide to apply for support, the long waits for disability assistance have ended in denial. While long COVID patients who can still work may ask their employers for accommodations, such as a space to rest or a more flexible schedule, chefs or food writers who rely on their senses may not find it easy to access such accommodations.

And while life has kept moving, and many COVID protections have been relaxed, support groups and advocacy organizations, such as Body Politic, are still working to support long COVID patients while educating the public about their experiences.

Even with these challenges and the overall lack of support, Loughran—who is nearly three years into the shift—says there have been positive moments as well. “In the long term, I’m taking it as a positive,” she adds. “Because I have no nostalgia and no memories about food tied to scent, I now try everything that comes my way.”

The post For Some Food Professionals, COVID Has Cast a Long Shadow on Their Senses appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/10/13/ex-usda-official-defends-pandemic-efforts-to-keep-meatpacking-plants-running/ https://civileats.com/2022/10/13/ex-usda-official-defends-pandemic-efforts-to-keep-meatpacking-plants-running/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2022 08:00:55 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=48748 Throughout 2020, industry representatives communicated often with top federal officials leading the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Food Safety and Inspection Service, the agency charged with overseeing plants. Other than Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, perhaps no other person was more central to the department’s effort to keep plants operating than FSIS’s head, Mindy Brashears. […]

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During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the meatpacking industry mobilized to keep plants open, even as its workers fell ill. It claimed a meat shortage was on the way, and it pushed for legal cover.

Throughout 2020, industry representatives communicated often with top federal officials leading the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Food Safety and Inspection Service, the agency charged with overseeing plants.

Other than Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, perhaps no other person was more central to the department’s effort to keep plants operating than FSIS’s head, Mindy Brashears.

One Tyson Foods executive said, if its plants continued to face pressure to shut down, “we may need to get Mindy involved.” Brashears “hasn’t lost a battle for us,” another industry executive said in an internal email. In short, she was the meat industry’s “go-to fixer,” a Congressional subcommittee concluded in a May report.

Like other top USDA officials, Brashears has remained largely silent about the USDA’s efforts to keep meatpacking plants running. Through his current employer the University of Georgia System, Perdue has declined several opportunities to speak with Investigate Midwest about his time at the USDA.

But in exclusive interviews with Investigate Midwest, Brashears, 52, defended her actions. Her FSIS tenure—laid bare in tens of thousands of emails Congress obtained, thousands of others Public Citizen sued to collect, and numerous news stories—has been mischaracterized, she said.

For instance, she intervened when a California plant, which would be linked to eight COVID-19 deaths, faced closure. The Congressional report didn’t note why it needed time to shut down. She said that if workers left immediately, the plant’s product could spoil.

“When the Congressional report came out, I mean, I’m not going to say it was untruthful. It was completely misrepresented,” she said. “They called me the ‘go-to fixer.’ I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I guess I’ve been called worse.”

Another problem with the report, she explained, is that it doesn’t show her “reporting back” to industry leaders. This undermines its credibility and overall conclusions, she said.

Brashears’ ties to the meat industry are extensive. Before joining the USDA, for example, she was paid $100,000 for her work during a trial to rebuff an ABC News’ story calling a company’s meat product “pink slime,” according to the Texas Observer. She readily admitted to being friends with industry lobbyists.

But in her telling, she provided effective oversight to an industry in crisis. Despite Congress finding the industry’s claims to a meat shortage were likely overheated, Brashears said she focused on keeping food on Americans’ tables.

“Food security is a matter of national security,” she said. “The industry did email me and other undersecretaries. We were all working together and communicating in that way. But what was happening was . . . we would get on the phone and say, ‘OK, what resources do you need?’”

Her work focused on procuring hand sanitizer, tests and masks for plants at a time when demand far outstripped supply, she said.

Some—including former Occupational Safety and Health Administration head, David Michaels—called for USDA to take a lead role in worker safety because it had inspectors in every large plant in the country on a daily basis. But worker safety wasn’t her job, Brashears said.

“I had no regulatory jurisdiction over worker safety. There were, you know, requests. People were asking, ‘Why aren’t inspectors looking for worker safety?’ Well, they’re not trained for that.

“We were trying to make sure that everyone was talking and communicating and getting the resources that were needed,” she continued. “Because, going back to our personnel that were in the plants, we wanted them to be safe.”

After the report was released, Brashears said she and her colleagues at Texas Tech University, where she now teaches, were threatened.

“They called me all sorts of names and scared (us) to death,” she said. “It was very hard.”

A Texas Tech police incident report shows “unwanted communications” at the university’s administrative building, but a university spokesperson wouldn’t provide more detail when asked. Brashears also declined to describe the incident further, citing the police investigation.

Brashears said the Congressional report blindsided her because she wasn’t interviewed for it.

“They never reached out to me, never emailed me,” she said. “I would have been more than happy to clarify anything. I was never asked, which baffles me.”

The subcommittee had “ample contemporaneous evidence” of Brashears’ actions, a spokesperson said.

“The voluminous evidence cited in the report, more than 150,000 pages, from both governmental and industry sources speaks for itself,” the subcommittee’s spokesperson said in an email to Investigate Midwest. “This investigation’s launch was public and we held a public hearing on the dire conditions in meatpacking plants, but Dr. Brashears did not reach out to the (subcommittee) to share her experiences.”

A major criticism of the Trump administration in 2020 was it did very little to prevent meatpacking workers from becoming infected with the virus. OSHA began conducting worker safety inspections remotely, which a government watchdog later found likely led to more dangerous environments for workers.

The USDA also drew scrutiny for its role. Brashears and Loren Sweatt, OSHA’s head at the time, waited months after the pandemic started to begin coordinating, despite both having oversight of meatpacking plants.

The USDA’s regulation of meatpacking plants can be complicated, said Jordan Barab, a high-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration official under former President Obama. OSHA shares oversight of many meatpacking plants with FSIS.

Top officials at the USDA often are tied to the agriculture industry, Barab said. This can be tricky because the department is tasked with both protecting the industry’s interests and regulating its operations.

In his experience, Barab said, Republican administrations, such as Trump’s, discourage government intervention in business.

“Obviously,” he said, “you’ve got an ideology that discourages any type of enforcement or any kind of thing that may be seen as hostile to employers.”

Mark Lauritsen saw the ideology play out on the ground. He’s the international vice president and head of the processing and meatpacking division at United Food and Commercial Workers, the union that represents many meatpacking employees across the country.

Trump administration officials, including Brashears, cultivated a “culture of fear” that left workers without protections, he said.

“Early 2020 all the way through when that administration left, it was zero effort to protect workers,” he said. “I don’t care what Brashears says. Our members know. We worked on it. We were in those plants. We know what happened.”

More than 400 meatpacking plant workers have died from COVID-19 during the pandemic, according to Investigate Midwest tracking.

Keeping workers safe and healthy wasn’t her responsibility, Brashears said. Instead, her focus was the safety of USDA inspectors entering the plants.

“Any USDA employee had the option to stay home, no questions asked,” Brashears said. “USDA does not regulate worker safety. It regulates food safety.

“I was not put on the job for worker safety. That’s not my area of expertise,” she continued. “I stayed in the job that I was assigned by Congress to do, to protect the U.S. food supply.”

Brashears said she was raised on a farm in small-town west Texas—she met her husband while showing lambs in high school. She attended Texas Tech University on an agricultural scholarship and then pursued a master’s and doctorate at Oklahoma State University.

She said she’s long been interested in food safety: The day she began her teaching career at the University of Nebraska in the late 1990s, Hudson Foods began recalling 25 million pounds of ground beef—one of the largest food recalls in history. She eventually moved on to Texas Tech.

“I love mentoring students, and I love teaching and educating,” she said. “That’s where my passion is.”

While at Texas Tech University, she accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the meat industry, according to documents obtained by the Texas Observer. Cargill, one of the country’s largest private companies and a meat processor, paid her for consulting, as did Perdue Farms, a major chicken processing company. Another company also paid her to try to sell a cattle probiotic she developed. For any money she received for research, Brashears told Investigate Midwest the funds were given through a “competitive process.”

After Brashears’ FSIS hiring was announced, a lobbyist for the Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents some major meatpacking companies, said she “is great news for us here in the industry,” according to the Observer.

Brashears noted some of her good friends and former students are now industry insiders who pushed the federal agency to keep meatpacking plants open as hundreds of workers died from COVID-19.

For instance, KatieRose McCullough—an executive at NAMI, which provided the Trump administration with the draft executive order to keep plants open—is a former student of hers, Brashears said.

Despite her connections, Brashears said she wasn’t sure why President Trump tapped her to be the Under Secretary of Agriculture for Food Safety, FSIS’s leader. Even before his inauguration, she said, she was asked if she’d consider the position.

“I’m often asked, ‘How did you end up at the USDA?’ ” she said. “And I tell people: ‘I don’t really know.’ I’m not a politician. . . . At the beginning of 2020, I rolled out a vision at USDA, and one of our foundations was leading with science.”

She took over in January 2019. One major decision she made before COVID-19 hit was approving a rule the meatpacking industry had long sought.

The USDA regulates how fast production lines at plants are allowed to go. Faster line speeds often lead to more injuries, as workers are forced to repeat the same motion over and over again at a faster clip, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. Faster line speeds also may contribute to USDA food inspector injuries, according to the GAO.

But FSIS eliminated limits on how fast pork processing plants could push their production lines under Brashears’ leadership. In early 2020, a judge found the agency failed to consider worker safety while drafting its rule, according to Agri-Pulse.

More than a year into her tenure, COVID-19 swept through the industry’s workforce. The concern at the USDA’s highest level was plants shutting down. In early April 2020, USDA and White House officials worried in emails about a major JBS plant closing in Colorado setting a “precedent” for the entire industry.

Perdue personally lobbied South Dakota’s governor to keep a Smithfield plant open, and he asked the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for help.

But Brashears facilitated phone calls between the USDA, health departments, and companies to engage “with plants that are on the brink of closure,” according to an April 2020 memo obtained by Public Citizen.

In the interviews, Brashears contested that the calls were used to counteract the will of local public health officials.

“If we were enlisted to override a health department decision, we never would have done it,” she told Investigate Midwest. “We never did. Never did we go and say, ‘You must reopen.’”

However, health officials in two states said they felt they had no other choice but to allow plants to continue operating after meeting with Brashears and other USDA officials.

In Illinois, a local health director said he felt manipulated into allowing Rochelle Foods to stay open. “We essentially had to leave Rochelle Foods alone,” the director, Kyle Auman, said last year.

After the USDA’s intervention, the plant suffered a second outbreak.

A similar intervention happened at a California chicken plant–Foster Farms–where eight workers died. The plant “enlisted” Brashears to block the Merced County Health Department’s attempts to address a COVID-19 outbreak after Foster Farms “refused” to implement worker protections for months, the Congressional report found.

Health officials told the subcommittee that they left the meeting with the understanding closure wasn’t an option.

Brashears did not deny her involvement in the incident. She said the plant couldn’t safely shut down immediately because chickens in various stages couldn’t be left alone while the plant was vacant. Some would have suffocated, rotted and potentially carried diseases, Brashears said.

Finally, the health department managed to close the plant, but it allowed the plant to remain open for an additional 48 hours, according to the report. This was so employees could prepare for an extended closure, Brashears said.

The UFCW’s Lauritsen said options beyond exposing workers for an additional 48 hours could have been implemented. The chickens could have been euthanized or sold to other companies, he said. (Brashears said everyone who worked those 48 hours had tested negative before entering.)

Even then, Lauritsen said, the plant likely didn’t need 48 hours to close.

The Merced County health department didn’t respond to questions.

Public officials are required to conduct business through their government-issued email and phone numbers, which are subject to public records laws.

Early in the pandemic, Brashears gave her personal cell phone number to NAMI’s president. And, on more than one occasion, companies sent “official” communication to Brashears’ work email and “presentations” to her personal email.

When discussing documentation Brashears needed, one Foster Farms executive wrote, “I thought all of this was going to her non-work email?”

Ashley Peterson, a top official at the National Chicken Council, an organization that represents poultry processors, responded that the “presentation from last night went to her personal email” but the “official order went to her work email.”

Brashears described Peterson as a friend and colleague. She had Brashears’ personal email address because they met long before Brashears worked in government, she said.

Brashears said she only found “one” email that should have gone to her work email, but it was “kind of irrelevant.” She said she forwarded it to the USDA.

“I want to make sure that I uphold integrity and make sure everything is really on the level,” she said.

Brashears also admitted to speaking with two industry insiders—NAMI’s McCullough and Wade Fluckey of the Clemens Food Group—through her personal email and cell phone while she was a public official.

She said the communication was not government-related. Both are friends, she said.

“This was in reference to developing a program for students at universities,” she said in an email. “It has nothing to do with government business or COVID.”

In the interviews, Brashears said her relationship with the industry and its leaders while she helmed their regulatory agency was professional.

“I think they have a healthy amount of respect for us,” she said.

Assistant editor/senior reporter Sky Chadde contributed to this story. This article originally appeared at Investigate Midwest, and is reprinted with permission.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/10/13/ex-usda-official-defends-pandemic-efforts-to-keep-meatpacking-plants-running/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2022/07/28/op-ed-farmworkers-face-stress-and-depression-the-pandemic-made-it-worse/ Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:01 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47777 Yet, while COVID and other health impacts—including increasing the dangers of heat stress as the climate crisis ramps up—have received national attention, the mental health challenges faced by agricultural workers are less visible. This is particularly problematic because even before the pandemic, agricultural workers nation-wide were vulnerable to very high stress levels, as well as […]

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It’s a very hard time to be a farmworker. Across the nation, these essential workers have faced increased risk of COVID-19 infection and mortality. In California, farmworkers have been among the most impacted—2021 research found that they were four times more likely to test positive than the general population.

Yet, while COVID and other health impacts—including increasing the dangers of heat stress as the climate crisis ramps up—have received national attention, the mental health challenges faced by agricultural workers are less visible. This is particularly problematic because even before the pandemic, agricultural workers nation-wide were vulnerable to very high stress levels, as well as higher than average rates of depression and anxiety. All of that is also linked to poor physical health, substance abuse, and high injury rates.

“Adding to the stresses for agricultural workers, temperatures often average well above 100 degrees during the summer and the air quality is some of the poorest in the state.”

According to our recent study, 40 percent of agricultural workers in Imperial County, a farming community along California’s southern border, experience high enough levels of stress to pose significant mental health risks. Imperial County is home to massive farms that produce more than half the nation’s winter vegetables, and many workers commute daily from Mexico to work in the fields. Despite the successes of the agricultural industry, Imperial County ranks highest in the state for income inequality, unemployment, and children living in poverty and has the highest proportion of non-white residents in California. There are well-documented housing shortages in the county and access to healthcare is limited. Adding to the stresses for agricultural workers, temperatures often average well above 100 degrees during the summer and the air quality is some of the poorest in the state.

As a joint effort between San Diego State University and the Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition, our findings point to the intersections between workplace conditions, access to healthcare, and mental well-being among agricultural workers. We conducted 199 surveys and 12 interviews with Latinx agricultural workers who are employed in Imperial County and reside on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. We found similarly high levels of stress in both groups, despite the fact that workers who cross the border daily often start their commutes at 2am. Instead, we found that foreign-born and older agricultural workers were more likely to report elevated stress than their younger and U.S.-born co-workers. This means that regardless of residing on the Mexican or U.S. side of the border, those born outside the U.S. reported higher stress levels.

Summary of agricultural worker stress study results

Many workers reported stresses endemic to agricultural labor, but other stressors may be directly connected to COVID. For example, workers reported high stress from English-language communication and lack of access to clean restrooms and medical care.

Language-related stress was often seen as a barrier to accessing COVID relief, testing, and vaccines; these often required not only English proficiency but also computer literacy. Lack of access to clean restrooms made hand washing difficult on the job. Meanwhile, lack of accessible medical care could mean the difference between life and death.

Essential to harvesting the nation’s food supply, agricultural workers in California have been targeted with an influx of federal, state, and local resources meant to mitigate the impact of COVID over the last two years. These included mobile testing sites, priority for vaccinations, eviction protections, health and sanitation guidelines and resources, and state-sponsored programs such as Governor Gavin Newsom’s Housing for the Harvest program and paid sick leave.

But it’s not clear that these programs helped reduce levels among farmworkers or improved their access to health resources. While many employers in Imperial County followed health and safety guidelines, several larger agricultural processing companies have been fined for negligence in protecting workers. The Housing for the Harvest program was marred with underutilization, and in Imperial County alone, $900,000 of available funding went unspent. Workers in our study were quick to mention poor bathroom quality and how hard it is to maintain a distance from co-workers in the field, in crowded housing, and while commuting to and from work.

In addition to the factors we’ve mentioned, inequity in the location of COVID testing and vaccine sites often leads many agricultural workers to seek health care in Mexico from more accessible and trusted—though pricier—sites. One agricultural worker we spoke to said, “Going to Mexicali was easier for me, since I don’t know how to read or write. They gave my test results to me in six hours.”

While government programs had mixed success, community-based approaches from trusted, local, Spanish-speaking organizations have been shown to be critical to connecting farmworkers with needed resources.

Workers told us that these organizations linked them with resources while also mitigating stressors having to do with work hours, literacy, and a lack of familiarity with U.S. healthcare services. For example, one local health center hosted Spanish-language, 2 a.m. vaccination clinics near the U.S.-Mexico border crossing. Those hours were accessible for agricultural workers who cross early in the morning to U.S.-based transit sites, but do not return from work until after the close of most other clinics. One agricultural worker praised these community-based approaches as, “always being attentive, always calling us, always being aware of when there are going to be vaccines, notifying us. So, in that moment I feel less stressed.”

“Medical and mental health provision must meet farmworkers in their places of residence, at daily transit points, and at the workplace.”

For many migrant farmworkers, COVID-19 housing, testing, and vaccine programs were among their first experiences with affordable healthcare in the United States. But our research suggests that free services are not enough to make care accessible. Stressors from workplace conditions, English-language communication, and long work hours means that healthcare must travel to farmworkers. Medical and mental health provision must meet farmworkers in their places of residence, at daily transit points, and at the workplace.

This means that trusted, Spanish-speaking community organizations are not ancillary, but  central to what a truly accessible system of farmworker healthcare must look like. Yet while local governments across California have largely used American Recovery Plan Act funds for public safety and bonuses for government staff, community-based organizations struggle to find financial support and often rely on volunteers and underpaid staff members.

Survey collection in downtown Calexico (Photo credit: Luis Flores)

If we want to ensure a continued workforce for our farms and prevent a massive ongoing mental health crisis among farmworkers, funding programs must recognize the critical role of trusted community-based organizations in providing critical resources to our burdened agricultural workers. Nationally, these types of resources and efforts can address inequities in access to mental health services, as well as other vital services such as education. Federal, state, and local governments must see community organizations as key providers of localized care and invest to bring more mental health care workers to these communities.

The post Op-ed: Farmworkers Face Stress and Depression. The Pandemic Made It Worse. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/07/25/as-the-ukraine-invasion-disrupts-the-sunflower-oil-supply-chain-small-us-producers-step-up/ Mon, 25 Jul 2022 08:00:52 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47721 For Oliver, that’s a staggering volume. In 2013, he began pressing his crops—pecans, peanuts, and sunflower seeds—into oils. He now sells his Oliver Farm Artisan Oils directly to home cooks all over the country and in bulk to local businesses. But his small farm-based, specialty business operates in a different universe than the global commodity […]

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In mid-July, Georgia farmer Clay Oliver received a mind-boggling email: A sender claiming to be in Panama working for a Spanish company was looking for someone to supply 50,000 metric tons of refined sunflower oil every month for a year.

For Oliver, that’s a staggering volume. In 2013, he began pressing his crops—pecans, peanuts, and sunflower seeds—into oils. He now sells his Oliver Farm Artisan Oils directly to home cooks all over the country and in bulk to local businesses. But his small farm-based, specialty business operates in a different universe than the global commodity bulk oil trade. Altogether, he estimates he produces up to 10,000 gallons of sunflower oil annually—which equals roughly 34 metric tons.

While he thought the email might be a scam, he has since fielded many similar requests for oil from people all over the world. “I used to get a couple of emails [like that] a year. Now, they call on the phone and you can almost hear their desperation,” said Oliver.

In addition to the horrific conditions on the ground, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked the global food system on multiple fronts. Most consequential are the ongoing disruptions to the country’s planting, harvesting, and exporting of wheat and other grains, which low-income countries including Nigeria and Yemen rely on. Although the two countries agreed last week to allow blockaded Ukrainian grain to be exported (although that is now in question), the war is one of several factors contributing to a sharp rise in global food prices at a time when global hunger is rising at alarming rates.

But Ukraine is also the world’s number one-source of sunflower oil, with Russia in second place. Pressed from the seeds of summer’s flashiest flower, the oil is increasingly in-demand for home and restaurant cooking and in products such as salad dressings and nut-butter alternatives. Between the invasion and mid-April, global prices for sunflower oil rose 40 percent. In Europe, grocery stores have introduced caps on sunflower oil purchases and food companies are scrambling to find substitutes for their products, pushing the prices of other oils higher.

“If anything good could come from all of this, it’s really strengthening the local agricultural community. Why aren’t we selling more of this stuff to our neighbors?”

Now, the ripple effects are also being felt by small farms and businesses on the ground in the U.S. It’s the latest example of how instability—whether the result of war, the pandemic, or the increasing frequency and severity of climate change events—has far-reaching, complex impacts when food supply chains are complicated and global.

Food businesses are rethinking their product formulation, while farms are hoping it shows people the value of local oil producers, similar to the way disruptions to the global meat supply early in the pandemic highlighted the resilience of smaller, regional processors.

“If anything good could come from all of this, it’s really strengthening the local agricultural community,” said Josh Leidhecker, founder of Susquehanna Mills, a company that produces sunflower, canola, and hemp oil in Pennsylvania. “Why aren’t we selling more of this stuff to our neighbors?”

Demand Spike at Small Farms

For his part, Leidhecker farms about 250 acres and contracts with farmers on about 1,000 more acres throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Before the pandemic, he had established relationships with top restaurants in Philadelphia and Baltimore as well as prominent institutions including Goucher College and Johns Hopkins University.

In March 2020, those sales channels disappeared overnight. Leidhecker tried to diversify the business further, and Susquehanna Mills began selling more bottles of oil directly to individuals for home cooking through local markets and an online shop. Now, things have shifted once again, and like Clay Oliver, he’s getting lots of requests from new customers—including a potato chip company—for bulk quantities of oil.

It’s a market smaller farmers didn’t consider themselves a part of in the past. Even in the U.S., their production is dwarfed by larger operations; in 2020, North and South Dakota produced 85 percent of the country’s sunflower crop. These companies are farming and pressing on their own, and the oils are cold-pressed, unrefined, and much more expensive than their commodity counterparts. They typically market them to customers who want a healthier product or are willing to pay more to support local agriculture.

But since the prices of sunflower oil as a commodity—and other oils that can be substituted for it—have risen so much and the price of transporting oil around the world has skyrocketed due to high fuel costs, the price gap is suddenly not as significant as it once was.

At the moment, however, Leidhecker’s oil is mainly spoken for, and he’s focused on supplying his most consistent customers. “We can’t really take on new business,” he said. “Every acre we’ve got anywhere has oilseeds in it. I wish I would have rented more land.”

A few hours north, in upstate New York, Jeffrey Haight has more room to pick up the extra business coming his way, but he’s worried about the unknowns. Haight is one of the owners of Hudson Valley Cold Pressed Oils, which grows its own sunflowers on a small family farm to make oil (and gluten-free flour from the leftover mash).

“We’re positioned to be able to sell three times our current business,” Haight said, mainly because, unlike with olives that need to be pressed into oil almost immediately after harvest, “we’re able to grow, harvest, and store seed until we need to make oil.” But like Leidhecker, he was selling to many restaurants in New York City that never reopened after March 2020 and he’s now trying to sift through requests from unknown buyers (including scams).

“Some random food distributor will call and say, ‘I need four pallets of oil.’ I’ll take the sale, but that may never come back,” he said, making forecasting nearly impossible. “It’s really hard to quantify what normal is these days.”

Sourcing Sunflower Oil

Decision makers at food companies that rely on sunflower oil are managing ongoing uncertainty, too. Many, like Boston-based 88 Acres, which makes seed-based nutrition bars and nut butter alternatives, contract with global sunflower oil companies that source their seeds from countries all over the world, including Ukraine.

When the war started, co-founder and CEO Nicole Ledoux watched as other countries began shutting down their exports in anticipation of disruptions there. Then, “As the situation dragged on, it became really apparent that the Ukrainian supply was just gone,” she said.

Even though she had a contract in place, her supplier used what is called a “force majeure” clause to end it. The clause lets parties out of a contract in the event of extreme, unforeseen circumstances. Since then, her team has been scrambling to find back-up sources. When they are able to get some, they stockpile the oil at a volume they wouldn’t have before.

“The price of the cheapest stuff you could ever get in the world is now more expensive than organic olive oil. So you start going, ‘Oh my god, what else is there? What can I find to use?’ And the answer is kind of, ‘nothing.’”

It’s a far from ideal situation, and Ledoux’s long-term plan is reducing the amount of oil needed to make the products. “The most promising angle is basically getting it out of our formula,” she said. “If we don’t think that we’re going to have a consistent supply, we’ll just stop using it.”

Her R&D team is also testing new oils, such as avocado, but others say substitutions are just as hard to come by.

“Everybody started looking for additional oils, and then the price of the cheapest stuff you could ever get in the world is now more expensive than organic olive oil,” said Greg Vetter, the CEO of Tessemae’s, a Maryland-based organic salad dressing and condiment company. “So you start going, ‘Oh my god, what else is there? What can I find to use?’ And the answer is kind of, ‘nothing.’”

Unlike 88 Acres, Tessemae’s two-year contract with a global sunflower oil company remains in place, so they were lucky to be locked in at a lower price. But Vetter said the supply is “really inconsistent” and future production is even more up in the air. As the war drags on, it’s now clear that there will be no Ukrainian sunflower crop next year, and their supplier is contracting with farmers in other countries to grow more sunflowers.

In the meantime, Vetter and his team have started to explore plans that would make the company less reliant on global supply chains. They’ve considered buying a farm in South Dakota or working with Leidhecker at Susquehanna Hills to produce their sunflower oil locally. But Vetter is reluctant to go out on a limb to try something new when the status quo keeps changing (and the company is facing additional supply chain issues, like a potential mustard shortage).

“Prices continue to go up, gas [prices] continue to go up. Everything just continues to be completely insane at every turn,” he said. “It comes down to: Am I willing to allocate X, Y, Z dollars in the midst of all of this other uncertain chaos?”

From within that chaos, the smaller sunflower oil producers are hoping for the thinnest silver lining: strong demand and a recognition that these local farms are staying the course and have the same supply and similar prices, despite the disruptions to global supply.

“I’m not excited that something bad happened. But it’s a good opportunity to at least increase awareness of our little company,” Oliver said from his farm in Georgia. “If it brings us a little business, that’s good. We’re just trying to keep steady.”

The post As the Ukraine Invasion Disrupts the Sunflower Oil Supply Chain, Small US Producers Step Up appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/28/buy-nothing-groups-facebook-food-distribution-networks-food-pantry-hunger-san-francisco/ Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:00:33 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47398 “For my parents, it’s very helpful because they see the support of the members of our community,” Koudriashova said. “They have nothing, they don’t have money, and we are sharing the same budget for five people.” If Koudriashova can’t make a pickup, which typically takes place on Saturdays, she will likely receive a text message […]

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Yulia Koudriashova is a single mom and teacher living with her two daughters in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood. Her parents moved in with them in March when they were evacuated from Kiev after Russia invaded Ukraine. With Koudriashova’s salary as the household’s only source of income, the family has come to rely on the boxes of food they pick up nearly every week from a neighbor’s garage.

“For my parents, it’s very helpful because they see the support of the members of our community,” Koudriashova said. “They have nothing, they don’t have money, and we are sharing the same budget for five people.”

If Koudriashova can’t make a pickup, which typically takes place on Saturdays, she will likely receive a text message from host Priscilla “Cilla” Lee to make alternative arrangements. For the last 15 months, Lee has hosted a weekly food pantry out of her garage for the community of people she connects with through the online platform Buy Nothing. The neighbors share everything from food to clothing and furniture.

Lee is the administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has more than 700 members on Facebook, and she recently launched an unofficial Buy Nothing sister group that also includes a nearby neighborhood to accommodate residents who wanted to participate. Within a month, it had 350 members, and now it’s close to 500.

Koudriashova estimates that the boxes save her at least $50 on groceries; without Lee’s food pantry, Koudriashova would have to visit a food bank, which she says would be much less convenient and welcoming.

Lee envisions her hyperlocal food pantry as a feel-good familial event, where members can meet their neighbors and build community. Members must RSVP to visit the food pantry to ensure Lee has enough food, but she has noticed that spaces are filling up faster these days. At a time when inflation has skyrocketed across the country, making everything from groceries to clothing and services more expensive, members of the group view the food pantry as a valuable resource that helps feed their families while preventing food from going to waste.

Grocery prices have soared nearly 12 percent in the last year, the largest increase since 1979. At the same time, 1 in 6 adults turned to charitable food in the previous 12 months, according to a December 2021 Urban Institute survey. Although that’s a 10 percent decline from 2020, the rate is still higher than before the pandemic.

If it weren’t for Lee’s food pantry, Koudriashova says she would probably have to visit a food bank, which she said would be much less convenient and welcoming. She estimates that each week, the boxes save her family at least $50 that she can use for children’s activities or other expenses. “That’s why it’s very important,” she said, “Now prices are so high in the shops, so I need to pay much more [for groceries] than before.”

On a recent Saturday, a Buy Nothing member with a flower-decorated van pulled up in front of Lee’s house loaded with fresh food from the Second Harvest food bank; Lee coordinates volunteers through her community to pick up the food at various food drives if she can’t do it herself. Perishable items like meat are transported in cooler bags before they’re placed in ice chests. For food safety reasons, Lee said she typically distributes food within an hour of its arrival.

By the time she had set up, roughly 50 people had started lining up on the sidewalk outside her house. Then, one by one, they grabbed a box and filled it with food. There were coolers of packaged raw chicken drumsticks and crates filled with apples, melons, onions, potatoes, and heads of lettuce. Bright blue buckets held loose carrots and ears of corn, and cartons of eggs, loaves of bread, and bags of coffee beans, rice, and pasta were up for grabs. Lee also set up a table for visiting kids with donated cupcakes, ice cream drumsticks, and snacks.

Each person made their way through, picking what they wanted. After everyone finished, some stood in another line for a second round to grab whatever was left. Lee walked around checking in with members and making sure the distribution went smoothly, with a senior poodle in a sling on her side. Any food not taken is added to food boxes that are picked up later by members who couldn’t visit the pantry that day. Lee aims to give it all away every week.

Since Lee, who works in customer service for a major airline, started the makeshift food pantry more than a year ago, she has only missed one week; when that happened, she assembled boxes that members could pick up.

She’s come to know pantry regulars and remembers their needs. For example, she’ll tag member Khadija Lchgar when she sees someone in the group giving away diapers. Lchgar, a stay-at-home mother from Morocco, lives in San Francisco with her 3-year-old son and husband, who is a full-time student and works part time—the family’s sole source of income. Lchgar learned about the food pantry after joining the Buy Nothing group to look for free supplies for her home. Lee often receives donations of things like sushi, bagels, and sandwich rolls from local restaurants and she’ll point out whether any of it contains pork or alcohol, which Lchgar’s family avoids as Muslims. Sushi, for example, is made with Mirin, a Japanese rice wine.

For the food pantry regulars like Lchgar, Lee started a group Facebook chat. She shares recipe ideas, which come in handy for times when the pantry receives an abundance of zucchini three weeks in a row. Lchgar said the recipes motivate her to experiment with new dishes. “It helps my family because I am able to feed them healthy food,” Lchgar said. “We always get protein, dairy, vegetables, pasta, and whole grains. I think if you have this variety of food, you can make a different dish every time.”

Origins in the Gift Economy

Back at home on Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle, Clark and friend Rebecca Rockefeller used the Facebook Groups platform to invite friends and friends of friends to their inaugural Buy Nothing group. It was an experiment: Before you buy something at the store, consider asking the group for it first. If you have anything in abundance from your garden or home, offer it here first. And when the giving and receiving starts to feel good, share your gratitude.

Neighbors began sharing odds and ends. Someone asked for—and received—a missing part for their coffee maker. A woman needed a spring for her toilet paper holder; lo and behold, a neighbor had one, and the two met and became close friends. “Those were funny little matches, but then the human matches were happening,” Clark said. “And we were starting to come to know our proximal neighbors and really connecting with them. And the easy part was the food.”

Clark shared eggs with a neighbor she’d never met (and made a film about it). Some gave away tomatoes, lettuces, and even weeds from their gardens. (Chickens love to eat weeds.) Others gifted extra enchiladas or half-eaten pizzas they didn’t want to throw out. Members purged their pantries and offered up their unwanted canned goods, teas, and spices. Clark’s group started a community potluck in a park, where they gathered and shared meals or extra food. A local farmer handed out vegetable seedlings so members could grow their own produce. One woman filled her car with donated food and held impromptu mobile food shares.

Buy Nothing communities proliferated on Facebook, eventually reaching 5,000 groups. Participation has tripled since the beginning of the pandemic, Clark said. After facing some limitations with the platform, the Buy Nothing Project launched an app last year on Buy Nothing Day—also known as Black Friday—to give users more flexibility to engage with communities beyond neighborhood boundaries. Six months later, the app has more than 400,000 participants.

Clark has heard of other food pantries held through Buy Nothing groups. But they may not have the scale of Lee’s operation.

Inspired By Her Mother—and the Pandemic

Lee had always wanted to volunteer during the holidays serving food to those in need. But she typically worked holidays. Then the pandemic hit. “It was so scary. If I was financially stable, scared, and unable to get food [because shelves were bare], I could only imagine how other people were feeling,” Lee said. “I just decided to look for places where I could volunteer and find out how I could be active and give back to my community.”

She was also inspired by her mother, who passed away six years ago from cancer. Even during her treatment, Lee saw her mother still helping family, friends, and acquaintances however she could. “My mom’s not here anymore, so I think about all the things that she did,” Lee said. “Like everybody else during pandemic, you kind of reflect upon your life and the things that are important to you.”

In 2020, she took a leave of absence from work to help the company reduce layoffs. She also rallied her colleagues with seniority or financially stability to do the same. She ended up taking off a year and a half. During this time, she started fostering senior dogs and volunteering at food banks. She discovered her local Buy Nothing group and saw that there were people in the group looking for food. “I said to myself, ‘Wow, we live in a really nice district. Who would’ve known that there were so many challenges to get food?’”

She found that one door opened another. A food pantry where she volunteered let her take home excess food—five crates of potatoes here or 10 boxes of apples there—which she gave away. Before the pandemic, Lee didn’t know how to cook, but when she had too much extra produce, she taught herself how to transform tons of zucchini into zoodles, turn too many cucumbers into salads, and she used a food chopper to make cauliflower “rice” like she saw sold at Trader Joe’s, all of which she shared with her community.

“I always have some kind of shenanigans going,” Lee said. “It’s almost like the ‘Lucy’ show. I come up with an idea and I’m just like, ‘We’ve got to get this going.’”

She keeps extra produce, dry goods, and bins on hand for members who need help outside the normal pickup times. For example, a new Buy Nothing member needed extra food for her three kids after a family member stole her EBT benefits. “Everyone has a different story, and I never ask,” Lee said. “They tell me, but I don’t require any story to visit. Just good faith from everyone, and I request they don’t pantry hop since I always can get plenty for people weekly.”

Now, Lee works about 30 hours a week at her airline job and spends at least 10 hours on the food pantry every week. Her dedication inspired Paola Capuano, a Buy Nothing member and single mom, to volunteer at the pantry. “When you see a person so involved, it makes you feel more motivated,” Capuano said. “So, whenever I can do anything to help her, I’m happy to do it.”

That makes Lee feel grateful that other people want to contribute. “I find if I lead by example, people will follow.”

The post ‘Buy Nothing’ as a Food Distribution Network appeared first on Civil Eats.