Janine Jackson interviewed Popular Information‘s Tesnim Zekeria about baby formula shortages for the May 13, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Popular Info (5/12/22)
Janine Jackson: According to research cited by our next guest, the national out-of-stock rate for baby formula reached 43% last week. It’s a story that should shock the conscience: people driving for hours to get to a place where they can possibly buy the food that their baby needs, or paying insane markup rates to people who are exploiting the shortage to price-gouge.
The question is what do we do with that shock? One Texas newspaper responded with a no doubt well-intentioned op-ed beginning with the declaration that there “are some things that shouldn’t happen in America, and the shortage of baby formula we’re seeing now is one of them.”
Well, it’s past time to explore the implication that anything inhumane or harmful in this country must be an aberration, and that surely getting US institutions back to their roots, or back on track, would solve things.
We have, many of us, caught on to the fact that systems not designed for a multiracial democracy, or for super-powerful corporate actors—at this point, they’re part of the problem and not part of the solution, and so a conversation about how to reorient or replace those institutions is one of the most significant conversations that journalists could possibly host or encourage or platform right now. That we don’t see that is not about journalism itself, but just about journalism as it’s usually done.
On, in particular, the baby formula story, we’re joined now with a different way of doing reporting on it by Tesnim Zekeria, researcher with Popular Information. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tesnim Zekeria.
Tesnim Zekeria: Hi, Janine. Thanks for having me.
JJ: So you’re a reporter presented with a reality, an important reality, but, you know, you can take it as “supply chain shortage,” or you can take it as “people are unable to feed their children.”
It seems to matter, the prism that you bring to a story, the way you report it. So I just wonder, where do you even start, as a reporter, in terms of what you think people need to know when they’re confronted with a problem, which a lot of folks just kind of woke up to and read in the paper: “Oh my goodness. There’s a shortage of baby formula.” Where do you start?
TZ: Yeah, that’s a great question. So first, there are immediate things that you can point to as reasons that explain why supplies are low.
So for instance, as you mentioned, supply chain disruptions; we’ve seen this across many industries. But then, you also have a contamination problem at Abbott, which is one of the largest baby formula manufacturers. And in February of this year, the FDA issued a guidance, warning consumers to avoid certain Abbott formula products from the company, following the death of two infants, I believe, and I think two others were also hospitalized.
But those are just pieces to the story. There’s also the reality that we live in an economy, and live in a government, that really provides little to no support or protection to new parents, and children, for that matter. So I think when you’re also looking into these stories, it’s important to look and ask the question of who is really being impacted by this the most, and research shows that it’s really low-income families who rely on formula, as well as families with babies who have special needs, that need these products the most, and unfortunately have been hit the hardest.
JJ: It’s interesting, because you’ll see outlets, like the Washington Post, saying “US Baby Formula Shortage Leaves Parents Scrambling: Low-Income and Rural Parents Most at Risk, Experts and Organizations Say.”
There’s no part of that that’s a lie; it’s all true. But to me, I don’t know, it just speaks to a number of failings. First of all, yeah. Yeah, a lack of formula is going to leave parents scrambling, and yes, the people who are low-income and rural and outside of things and marginalized are going to be hit worst.
There’s a thing I call “narrating the nightmare,” which is just, why do you present it as news that the people who are most marginalized are going to be the most hurt? I just have a question about a style of journalism that presents that as new. News is meant to be something new, right? And this is not new.
Tesnim Zekeria: “A lot of the audiences from these mainstream outlets are not necessarily the folks who are being hit the hardest by the shortage.”
TZ: Definitely. The other thing you have to consider is that a lot of the audiences from these mainstream outlets are not necessarily the folks who are being hit the hardest by the shortage, right? Maybe they’re going to a grocery store and they’re noticing that, hey, there’s a little less formula than there normally is.
But, for the most part, some of these elite publications have wealthy audiences that can get formula when they desperately need it.
JJ: Right. And then the need to say that people who are marginalized are most at risk when there’s a shortage, and the fact that you need to add in the headline, “experts and organizations say,” as though that might be not just a generically acceptable fact, but it might be, like, “depends on who you listen to.”
TZ: Yeah. The other thing, too, that I find interesting is that, I was curious to learn more about how the lack of paid family leave in this country has also contributed to this crisis.
And unfortunately, there’s only really a handful of pieces, like kind of blog posts, just things on the fringe, that really touched on the fact that, hey, a lot of moms in this country are unable to breastfeed. While, yeah, we did guarantee working moms breaks to pump milk, this requires adequate space, this requires expensive equipment. And, as a result, this means that it’s pretty inaccessible.
There’s also no federal requirement that workers are paid while they’re pumping. So for women who work in low-wage industries, like fast food, pumping milk is just not affordable nor practical.
JJ: That’s what I appreciate about this story, is that it starts from a question of: There’s a baby formula shortage. How can people feed babies? And that’s the question you start from, rather than, well, let’s talk to a CEO of a company that’s involved in the supply chain. It changes everything when you consider things as a problem, and try to think of it from the perspective of a person trying to navigate that problem. That seems to be just a categorically different way of doing reporting to me.
TZ: Definitely. Yeah.
JJ: So when you went into journalism, and I did a little research, and I know that you were a college journalist and editor, and had an idea of the role that journalism plays in the world. How did that transition when you became, then, a working journalist, if I can ask, and do you think, when you’re talking to other college journalism students, and they’re trying to find a place in the world, what do you say in terms of, yeah, you should still do this, it still can make a difference. What do you say?
TZ: I tell them that, both unfortunately and fortunately, there are a lot of stories that are kind of brushed aside, right? There are a lot of voices that are swept underneath the carpet. And there’s a lot happening that you don’t really necessarily notice.
And so I always really try to encourage folks to look beyond what they’re seeing from just general headlines from your mainstream publications, and to really ask, whose voices are missing here, right? Whose perspectives are missing here? Are we actually being holistic in our investigation? Are we really looking at problems through a systemic lens?
The reality is, I think sometimes it’s easy to chalk up a certain problem to just two or three reasons, and leave it at that, as opposed to taking on the more challenging task of being like, hey, as a journalist, it’s my responsibility to take this really complicated matter and try to distill it as best as I can to folks, and show people that a lot of these things that we’re seeing, right, even in the case of the baby formula shortage, it’s tied to other issues, or it’s tied to the fact that the Biden administration failed to pass their Build Back Better plan, because you had this multi-million dollar lobbying campaign from major, major corporations.
So that’s kind of a long-winded answer there, but I really believe in, as you mentioned, really just approaching things from a systemic point, and just figuring out, finding the points where things intersect, and shedding light on those points, because I think you actually end up touching on several issues with just one story.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Tesnim Zekeria from Popular Information. You can find their work on this story and others online at Popular.Info. Tesnim Zekeria, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TZ: Yeah, thank you for having me; it was a pleasure.
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