Category: Food


  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida three weeks ago, Jason Madison was alone at his place, which doubled as a shrimp storefront in Keaton Beach. As the wind began to roar and the bay started to roil, Madison decided to flee. It was the right call. When he returned home the next morning, he found that the nearly 20-foot storm surge had torn it apart. Dead fish and broken furniture littered the landscape. Most everything in the building was lost, taking with it a cornerstone of his livelihood. 

    “I had five tanks under there where I stored shrimp, because we sell everything alive, but all that’s all gone now,” said Madison, a commercial bait and shrimp farmer for the last 23 years. He paused to take in the strewn debris. “Well, the pieces are around.” Anything Helene left behind is a waterlogged shell of what used to be. He doesn’t know how, or even if, he’ll rebuild.

    Stories like this are playing out all through the Southeast. The storm battered six states, causing billions of dollars in losses to crops, livestock, and aquaculture. Just 13 days later, Milton barreled across Florida, leaving millions without power and hampering ports, feed facilities, and fertilizer plants along the state’s west coast. 

    Preliminary estimates suggest Helene, one of the nation’s deadliest and costliest hurricanes since Katrina in 2005, upended hundreds of thousands of businesses throughout the Southeast and devastated a wide swath of the region’s agricultural operations. Milton’s impact was more limited, but the two calamities are expected to reduce feed and fertilizer supplies and increase production costs, which could drive up prices for things like chicken and fruit in the months and years to come.

    The compounding effect of the two storms will create “a direct impact on agricultural production,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University. 

    When a farm, an orchard, a ranch, or any other agricultural operation is damaged in a disaster, it often leads to a drop in production, or even brings it to a screeching halt. That slowdown inevitably ripples through the companies that sell things like seeds and fertilizer and equipment. Even those growers and producers who manage to keep going — or weren’t directly impacted at all — might find that damage to roads and other critical infrastructure hampers the ability to bring their goods to market.

    Early reports indicate this is already happening. Downed trees, flooded roads, and congested highways have disrupted key transport routes throughout the Southeast, while ports across the region suspended operations because of the storms, compounding a slowdown that followed a dockworker strike along the Gulf and East Coast.

    Helene dismantled farming operations that serve as linchpins for the nation’s food supply chain. Cataclysmic winds destroyed hundreds of poultry houses across Georgia and North Carolina, which account for more than 25 percent of the machinery used to produce most of the country’s chicken meat. An analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation found that the region hit by Helene produced some $6.3 billion in poultry products in 2022, with over 80 percent of it coming from the most severely impacted parts of both states. In Florida, the storm flattened roughly one in seven broiler houses, which the Farm Bureau noted, compounding losses throughout the region that “will not only reduce the immediate supply of poultry but also hinder local production capacity for months or even years.”

    The storm uprooted groves, vegetable fields, and row crops throughout the region. Georgia produces more than a third of the nation’s pecans, and some growers have lost all of their trees. Farmers in Florida, one of the nation’s leading producers of oranges, bell peppers, sugar, and orchids, also have reported steep production losses, facing an uncertain future. The rain and floods unleashed by Helene hobbled livestock operations in every affected state, with the situation in western North Carolina so dire that local agricultural officials are crowdfunding feed and other supplies to help ranchers who lost their hay to rising water. Those working the sea were impacted as well; clam farmers along the Gulf Coast are grappling with the losses they incurred when Helene’s storm surge ravaged their stocks.

    Residents in Black Mountain, North Carolina prepare to tow donated hay across Helene’s floodwaters with a paddleboard to feed horses and goats on a nearby farm on October 3, 2024.
    Mario Tama via Getty Images

    All told, the counties affected by Helene produce about $14.8 billion in crops and livestock each year, with Georgia and Florida accounting for more than half of that. If even one-third of that output has been lost to the two hurricanes, the loss could reach nearly $5 billion, according to the Farm Bureau. 

    Preliminary estimates from the Department of Agriculture suggest the one-two punch may incur more than $7 billion in crop insurance payouts. On October 15, the USDA reported allocating $233 million in payments to producers so far. 

    As bad as it is, it could have been worse both for consumers and for farmers nationwide. Florida is home to the highest concentration of fertilizer manufacturing plants in the nation. Twenty-two of the state’s 25 phosphate waste piles, several owned by industry powerhouse Mosaic, were in Milton’s path. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, shuttered operations ahead of the storm, and has since announced it sustained  “limited damage” to its plants and warehouses. (But the Tampa Bay Times reported that one facility was grappling with water intrusion following Helene and was inundated during Milton, likely sending water polluted with phosphate waste flowing into Tampa Bay.) The storm also halted operations for several days at Port Tampa Bay, which handles around a quarter of the country’s fertilizer exports.  

    Production impacts from both hurricanes may be felt most acutely by the Sunshine State’s struggling citrus industry, which has long been embattled by diseases and destructive hurricanes. Any additional losses could further inflate costs for goods like orange juice, which reached record highs this year, according to Lee, the agricultural economist. “In the face of hurricane shocks, agricultural production in southern states like Florida will take it on the chin,” he said. 

    But teasing out the effect of a single storm on consumer prices is not only exceedingly difficult, it requires many years of research, Lee warned. Although all signs indicate that Hurricane Ian was partly responsible for the record food prices that followed that storm in 2022, the strain the hurricane placed on costs compounded other factors, including global conflict, droughts in breadbasket regions and the bird flu epidemic that decimated the poultry sector.  

    Even so, there’s still a chance that ongoing disruptions to ports and trucking routes could cause “the entire food supply chain to experience additional strain due to rising prices” associated with moving those goods, said Lee. If that turns out to be the case, “eventually, when you go to the supermarket, you will end up finding more expensive commodities, by and large.”

    One of the greatest unknowns remains the question of how many storm-weary operations will simply call it quits. Industrial-scale businesses will surely rebound, but the rapid succession of ruinous hurricanes may well discourage family farms and small producers from rebuilding, abandoning their livelihoods for less vulnerable ventures.

    “It’s what we call a compound disaster. You’re still dealing with the effects of one particular storm while another storm is hitting,” said economist Christa Court. She directs the University of Florida’s Economic Impact Analysis program, which specializes in rapid assessments of agricultural losses after disasters. “We did see after Hurricane Idalia that there were operations that just decided to get out of the business and do something else because they were impacted so severely.”

    A man surveys the damage from Hurricane Helene to his property
    Jason Madison, pictured, surveys the damage caused by Helene to his waterfront property in Keaton Beach, Florida on September 28, 2024.
    Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist

    Madison isn’t sure what’s next for his shrimp operation. He’s too focused on salvaging what he can to think that far ahead. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” he said. He hasn’t been able to afford flood insurance, so he’s not sure how much financial support he’ll end up getting to help him rebuild even as he’s still recovering from Hurricane Idalia, which pummeled Florida’s Big Bend area in August. “The last few years, it’s just things are dropping off, and times are getting hard … it’s like, what can you do?” 

    As the world continues to warm, more and more farmers may find themselves confronting the same question. 

    Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this story. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Helene and Milton upended a key part of the nation’s food supply on Oct 24, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ukraine urged North Korean soldiers arriving in Russia to surrender, offering them food and shelter, as the United States and NATO confirmed for the first time they have evidence of North Koreans deployed to Russia. 

    North Korea and Russia have denied that North Korean soldiers are being sent to help Russia with its war in Ukraine but South Korea and its allies have warned of a dangerous escalation of the conflict.

    “We appeal to the soldiers of the Korean People’s Army who were sent to support the Putin regime. Don’t die senselessly on foreign soil. Do not repeat the fate of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who will never return home,” said the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Directorate, or GUR, in a Korean-language message on its Telegram messaging channel on Wednesday. 

    “Surrender! Ukraine will provide you with shelter, food, and warmth,” it added, introducing its surrender hotline “I Want to Live.”

    The project was originally designed to help Russian servicemen in Ukraine who did not want to participate in the Russian invasion, launched in February 2022, to safely surrender to Ukrainian forces.

    As of June, more than 300 Russian soldiers had surrendered through the hotline, according to the Ukraine government.

    “It doesn’t matter how many soldiers Pyongyang sends or to which sector – they will be accepted. Ukrainian prisoner-of-war camps are ready to receive soldiers of any nationality, religion, or ideology,” the GUR said.

    The message was posted with a video, just over a minute long, showing facilities where surrendered North Korean soldiers would stay. 

    “In camps, prisoners of war are housed in large, warm, bright rooms with separate sleeping quarters. They receive three meals a day, and their diet includes meat, fresh vegetables, and bread,” the narrator of the video said in the Korean language.  

    north-korea-ukraine-hotline_10242024_2.png
    A message posted on the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Directorate’s Telegram channel for the surrender hotline “I Want to Live” project. (Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Directorate)

    Ukraine’s message to North Korean soldiers came after the U.S. and NATO confirmed they had evidence that North Korean troops had deployed to Russia.

    Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense chief, said it remained to be seen what exactly Pyongyang’s forces were doing there, but according to South Korean and Ukrainian warnings, they were preparing to join Russia’s side in the war in Ukraine.

    Austin added the U.S. was also still attempting to determine what North Korea would get in return for helping Russia with manpower.


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    ‘Security consequences’

    NATO spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah said in a statement that alliance members had “confirmed evidence of a DPRK troop deployment to Russia.”

    “If these troops are destined to fight in Ukraine, it would mark a significant escalation in North Korea’s support for Russia’s illegal war and yet another sign of Russia’s significant losses on the front lines,” Dakhlallah said.

    The Democratic People’s of Republic of Korea, or DPRK, is North Korea’s official name. 

    NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned that the involvement of North Korean troops could significantly escalate the conflict.

    The U.S. and NATO confirmation followed a report by South Korea’s spy agency that more than 3,000 North Korean troops had been sent to Russia, with the total expected to reach 10,000 by December.

    The South has vowed to take “phased” measures in response to growing military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow, including sending weapons to Ukraine for the first time.

    In response, Russia’s foreign ministry warned on Wednesday that South Korea would pay a heavy price if it got involved.

    “They should think about the security consequences if they get involved in the Ukrainian crisis. The Russian Federation will react to those aggressive steps, if our citizens are under threat, under peril,” said ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.

    “We sincerely hope that the Seoul authorities are guided by common sense,” she added.

    north-korea-ukraine-hotline_10242024_3.JPG
    Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova attends a press conference in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, June 11, 2024. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

    Zakharova also dismissed the reports of the North’s troop dispatch as “fake.”

    “The armed forces of North Korea exist, but you should turn to Pyongyang to identify their location,” she said. “I cannot [understand] why there has been so many gossips, so many loud noises around this. This is a propaganda work.”

    “Russian cooperation with North Korea in military and other areas corresponds to international law … That is the first, and the second is that we don’t inflict any damage to South Korea,” she added. 

    “I cannot understand so much fuss about it coming from Seoul.”

    On Monday, North Korea’s representative to the United Nations dismissed reports it was sending soldiers to support Russia in its war as “groundless rumors,” adding that its cooperation with Moscow was “legitimate and cooperative.”

    Edited by Mike Firn.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Taejun Kang for RFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Three years ago, Erin Primer had an idea for a new summer program for her school district: She wanted students to learn about where their food comes from. Primer, who has worked in student nutrition within California’s public school system for 10 years, applied for grant funding from the state to kick off the curriculum, and got it. Students planted cilantro in a garden tower, met a local organic farmer who grows red lentils, and learned about corn. “Many kids didn’t know that corn grew in a really tall plant,” said Primer. “They didn’t know that it had a husk.” 

    The curriculum, focused on bringing the farm into the school, had an effect beyond the classroom: Primer found that, after learning about and planting ingredients that they then used to make simple meals like veggie burgers, students were excited to try new foods and flavors in the lunchroom. One crowd pleaser happened to be totally vegan: a red lentil dal served with coconut rice. 

    “We have had students tell us that this is the best dish they’ve ever had in school food. To me, I was floored to hear this,” said Primer, who leads student nutrition for the San Luis Coastal district on California’s central coast, meaning she develops and ultimately decides on what goes on all school food menus. “It really builds respect into our food system. So not only are they more inclined to eat it, they’re also less inclined to waste it. They’re more inclined to eat all of it.”

    Primer’s summer program, which the district is now considering making a permanent part of the school calendar, was not intended to inspire students to embrace plant-based cooking. But that was one of the things that happened — and it’s happening in different forms across California. 

    Kids seated at a lunch table try three new school lunch menu options at a taste testing event.
    Students participate in an annual food-testing event for the Los Angeles Unified School District, with a menu that included vegan chickpea masala.
    Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    A recent report shows that the number of schools in California serving vegan meals has skyrocketed over the past five years. Although experts say this growth is partly a reflection of demand from students and parents, they also credit several California state programs that are helping school districts access more local produce and prepare fresh, plant-based meals on-site. 

    Growing meat for human consumption takes a tremendous toll on both the climate and the environment; the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock production contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, cattle and other ruminants are a huge source of methane. Animal agriculture is also extremely resource-intensive, using up tremendous amounts of water and land. Reducing the global demand for meat and dairy, especially in high-income countries, is an effective way to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the rate of global warming. 

    The climate benefits of eating less meat are one reason that school districts across the country have introduced more vegetarian — and to a lesser degree, vegan — lunch options. In 2009, Baltimore City Public Schools removed meat from its school lunch menus on Mondays, part of the Meatless Mondays campaign. A decade later, New York City Public Schools, the nation’s largest school district, did the same. In recent years, vegan initiatives have built upon the success of Meatless Mondays, like Mayor Eric Adams’ “Plant-Powered Fridays” program in New York City. 

    But California, the state that first put vegetarianism on the map in the early 20th century, has been leading the country on plant-based school lunch. “California is always ahead of the curve, and we’ve been eating plant-based or plant-forward for many years — this is not a new concept in our state,” said Primer. A recent report from the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth found that among California’s 25 largest school districts, more than half — 56 percent — of middle and high school menus now have daily vegan options, a significant jump compared to 36 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, the percentage of elementary districts offering weekly vegan options increased from 16 percent to 60 percent over the last five years. 

    Interior shot of a greenhouse with tables holding plant sprouts
    A view of the greenhouse used for a Los Angeles magnet school’s after-school program focused on climate knowledge.
    Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    Student nutrition directors like Primer say the foundation that allows schools to experiment with new recipes is California’s universal free lunch program. She notes that, when school lunch is free, students are more likely to actually try and enjoy it: “Free food plus good food equals a participation meal increase every time.”

    Nora Stewart, the author of the Friends of the Earth report, says the recent increase in vegan school lunch options has also been in response to a growing demand for less meat and dairy in cafeterias from climate-conscious students. “We’re seeing a lot of interest from students and parents to have more plant-based [meals] as a way to really help curb greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. A majority of Gen Zers — 79 percent — say they would eat meatless at least once or twice a week, according to research conducted by Aramark, a company provides food services to school districts and universities, among other clients. And the food-service company that recently introduced an all-vegetarian menu in the San Francisco Unified School District credits students with having “led the way” in asking for less meat in their cafeterias. The menu includes four vegan options: an edamame teriyaki bowl, a bean burrito bowl, a taco bowl with a pea-based meat alternative, and marinara pasta.

    Stewart theorizes that school nutrition directors are also increasingly aware of other benefits to serving vegan meals. “A lot of school districts are recognizing that they can integrate more culturally diverse options with more plant-based meals,” said Stewart. In the last five years, the nonprofit found, California school districts have added 41 new vegan dishes to their menus, including chana masala bowls, vegan tamales, and falafel wraps. Dairy-free meals also benefit lactose-intolerant students, who are more likely to be students of color.

    Still, vegan meals are hardly the default in California cafeterias, and in many places, they’re unheard of. Out of the 25 largest school districts in the state, only three elementary districts offer daily vegan options, the same number as did in 2019. According to Friends of the Earth, a fourth of the California school districts they reviewed offer no plant-based meal options; in another fourth, the only vegan option for students is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I was surprised to see that,” said Stewart. 

    In their climate-focused after-school program, students learn about farm-to-table cooking, composting, greenhouse sciences, and more.

    Making school lunches without animal products isn’t just a question of ingredients. It’s also a question of knowledge and resources — and the California legislature has created a number of programs in recent years that aim to get those tools to schools that need them. 

    In 2022, the state put $600 million toward its Kitchen Infrastructure and Training Funds program, which offers funding to schools to upgrade their kitchen equipment and train staff. This kind of leveling up allows kitchen staff to better incorporate “scratch cooking” — essentially, preparing meals on-site from fresh ingredients — into their operations. (The standard in school lunch sometimes is jokingly referred to as “cooking with a box cutter,” as in heating up and serving premade meals that come delivered in a box.) Another state program, the $100 million School Food Best Practices Funds, gives schools money to purchase more locally grown food. And the Farm to School incubator grant program has awarded about $86 million since 2021 to allow schools to develop programming focused on climate-smart or organic agriculture. 

    Although only the School Food Best Practices program explicitly incentivizes schools to choose plant-based foods, Stewart credits all of them with helping schools increase their vegan options. Primer said the Farm to School program — which provided the funding to develop her school district’s farming curriculum in its first two years — has driven new recipe development and testing. 

    All three state programs are set to run out of money by the end of the 2024-2025 school year. Nick Anicich is the program manager for Farm to School, which is run out of the state Office of Farm to Fork. (“That’s a real thing that exists in California,” he likes to say.) He says when state benefits expire, it’s up to schools to see how to further advance the things they’ve learned. “We’ll see how schools continue to innovate and implement these initiatives with their other resources,” said Anicich. Stewart says California has set “a powerful example” by bettering the quality and sustainability of its school lunch, “showing what’s possible nationwide.” 

    One takeaway Primer has had from the program is to reframe food that’s better for the planet as an expansive experience, one with more flavor and more depth, rather than a restrictive one — one without meat. Both ideas can be true, but one seems to get more students excited. 

    “That has been a really important focus for us. We want [to serve] food that is just so good, everybody wants to eat it,” Primer said. “Whether or not it has meat in it is almost secondary.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More schools than ever are serving vegan meals in California. Here’s how they did it. on Oct 15, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • You begin your cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens, by giving the reader a clear sense of your focus. You write that the cookbook is not going to be a Southern cookbook, or a chef cookbook. It’s more about challenging the belief that Black cuisine is monochromatic. Did you always know that this would be the lens for the book?

    When I thought about why I wanted to embark upon this very special yet very challenging thing that I’ve never done before, one of the things that I kept coming back to was that I knew that there were recipes that were very familiar to me and very special to the regions that I felt like made me who I am as a chef that needed to be highlighted, documented, talked about. And one of the moments that I kept going back to was me being a young chef and having a really hard time finding this lens. And I just know that having that information and having those food ways [and] their history talked about on such a platform—having that readily available for me, I think, would’ve been very transformative. So, no, I didn’t know initially that this is how it was all going to play out.

    I appreciate the way that you take us through your early childhood. You describe yourself as a precocious only child in Coastal Virginia, and how that was really important as one of your earliest food experiences. And then you also talk about your grandparents, their relationships to food and the land, and the visits that you made to family members throughout the South. What was it like to revisit these memories?

    Revisiting the memories of my childhood was a really large part of writing this. And doing that was very nostalgic. I learned a lot about my family—some things that I didn’t know. It helped me to see the power of food. It really showed me how powerful food was in my family because, I mean, I even was finding skeletons in closets. And ones that I couldn’t believe were right in front of me growing up, all along. Those moments where we allowed the kitchen to be the gathering place, those integral moments where food was at the center—that just showed me how food truly is the great unifier. So, yes, it was a very special and emotional time diving back in that way.

    You give us this great visual of your journey, going to Hampton University to study business marketing, but spending your time watching Food Network and cooking. You’d later go on to be a finalist in Top Chef. How have TV and pop culture been important in your journey?

    For my family— my parents—me wanting to be a chef was a really hard sell. And for me, knowing that this is something that I wanted to do, I felt that I needed proof that I could do it. I wouldn’t call Virginia Beach a food city. I didn’t live in New York City, where you know who’s cooking the food in the kitchen. So when I was actually looking for tangible examples, it was easy to turn to places like Food Network and see someone like Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay and find inspiration in that. And also, being a latchkey kid, my parents worked quite a bit growing up, so I wasn’t supposed to be, but I did watch a lot of Food Network when they were at work… That was an introduction to ingredients that I didn’t have readily available and I wasn’t accustomed to. Things like Food Network had a pretty big impact on my formative years, and just falling in love with food.

    Was it surreal, then, to be on Top Chef later?

    Yes. Definitely, I feel like for the first time, I was able to understand what that phrase “out-of-body experience” meant. It was really important for me at that time to ground myself, and just remember that I had worked really hard to get there, but also that I was so grateful to be in that space with such amazing talent. Yeah, it was a pretty wild experience.

    One thing that you’re really transparent about is how the food you grew up with, you didn’t really see as the food that you “should be” making as a chef. You write that you fantasized about going to restaurants that you read about in magazines like Food & Wine and that you felt like earning the respect of your peers in the kitchen meant cooking the food that you were seeing in these magazines. Why was it important to include this internal struggle?

    It was important to include because there was a moment—this intersection in my career—where I just stopped caring what people thought. I just turned away from what I felt was this box that I was put in as a Black chef. In doing that, I readily turned to the food that was most familiar to me. And I was in a position where I was able to put that food in the same restaurants that I would’ve never expected to [see it] before. And the response was very warm… It was a really defining moment for me as a chef.

    You mentioned that sometimes you felt like leaving the industry entirely. One thing that came to mind for me was just this, I think, push and pull that sometimes creative folks have—it’s like the industry itself as an institution can really get you down, but it’s not always necessarily about the craft. What fueled you to keep going?

    I mean, it’s that thing you said: It’s the institution, I think, that can really grind my gears—this French hierarchy that doesn’t have the same warm, fuzzy feelings that I grew up with. And for me, people talk about hating their jobs often—and that’s not something I’ve ever experienced because I’ll never stop loving food. As long as my job relates to food, I’m always going to love it, and that’s always the thing that continues to pull me back in. So, I mean, I think it’s that—and just the respect of the humble Southern ingredient, and the makers that work so hard to get these beautiful things on our tables. Those are the things that allow me to continue to have that drive, even when the industry itself doesn’t always feel so good.

    In 2020, you started to collaborate with other chef friends, putting on pop-up events, and then you were able to open your own restaurant, Good Hot Fish, in 2024. What were your priorities when you were starting your own space?

    I was so focused on finding a creative space. I knew that, at the time, that creative space was owning my own restaurant and finally feeling like I have ownership of my own stories. And having that autonomy that I never really felt like I had as a chef—and being able to travel and cook with chefs that I really admire.

    My biggest thing as a Black chef, as a woman that’s only worked for white people [is] I never felt like I had a seat at the table. And while I’ve put in so much sweat equity, I’d never felt like I learned the guts of how to run a restaurant. I helped so many people open their own restaurants, but I still just felt like I didn’t get it.

    And that was the one thing that was really special about that time—I had friends that would sit me down and we would just go over their P&L statements for hours. And they would go over food and labor costs with me. That was something that I really cherished. Beyond that, of course, it was [about] having that platform where I could cook food without any real boundaries, and get some honest immediate feedback about it as well.

    You shared that you realized, later in your career, that you weren’t the first person in your family who had multiple side hustles—that you were part of this long lineage of women who were also using their talent in the kitchen. What’s your advice, or what are some insights, for folks in creative careers that are maybe feeling unsure about this feeling of patching together side hustles? Or, maybe, folks who aren’t feeling ready for the leap, but they have something in mind that they want to pursue?

    A lot of my drive is driven by just my personality. I don’t know if this is advice, but just in describing my personality and where that drive comes from, it is because of—even your question, what advice for other creators, because there isn’t a lot of advice out there. People often feel like there’s a glass ceiling and they can’t [do it] because there aren’t a lot of examples and they don’t see a lot of people like them doing it. And that is part of what drives me and why I push myself.

    So I don’t even know if that is advice necessarily, but it is something to reflect on as a creative, especially Black and Brown creatives. Sometimes what keeps me in the game is that there’s going to be a lot of people, I would hope, that look like me and can find a reflection of themselves and find hope in that. It’s easy for me to note how much fulfillment I find in my career as well. And of course, there are things about what I do that can feel thankless, but I’ve been able to find such reward in what I do. So I think just focusing on what that reward and fulfillment is for you, and going after that is probably the best bit of advice I can give. Because it’s going to be really hard, so sometimes you really do just have to stare at the finish line.

    Yeah, definitely. You’ve also mentioned that, in Asheville, you’re really surrounded by a lot of writers, and makers, and artists, and how you feel really grateful for that community. I’m curious: Is community and collaboration something that also feeds your drive at this point in your career?

    Yes, and part of my gratitude in living here is that there’s just so much creativity around me, and that also fuels me. I talk about that in the book—we have so many makers around us, even just from the folks that grow our iceberg lettuce for our wedge salad to the trout farmers. And the folks that mill our cornmeal 15 miles down the road. That inspires me. And when I have a really special product like that in my hand, I want to make sure that I do it its due diligence. So, I mean, even down to the ingredient and just knowing that there’s a restaurant a couple blocks away that is doing some really cool things too. There’s a really incredible chef community here that’s super tight-knit, and that certainly helps when times get tough.

    I would imagine you keep very busy, but I was curious if there are any non-cooking, non-food avenues of inspiration that you find?

    Yes, but it’s funny because it all ends up tying back to food. I really enjoy nature and specifically foraging, fishing. Those are things I really enjoy. And of course, I usually do something with my harvest. But, yeah, I’m starting to get into more design stuff. My wife and I just bought a house not too long ago, so that’s been a fun and very, very new undertaking. So maybe a new interest, we’ll see if it sticks.

    That’s exciting, congratulations!

    Thanks.

    In your cookbook, there’s such a visual lushness both in the photography that you include, but also just in your writing and the way that you’re setting these scenes from your childhood to present time. Why was this an important part of your process?

    So, I mean, obviously, I’m a new writer, so I think I was doing a lot of what just comes naturally to me. I talked about just going back and revisiting a lot of those places. I did that physically as well. And even my proposal was written in my childhood home—a lot of times, I was just sitting in my backyard, the first place I ever foraged. And so maybe I was cheating a little, but that made it really easy to put all of these descriptors around these places, because I was in it. And also, the memories are so vivid. I can often close my eyes and just be in them again. And of course, like you said, the photography—I was able to go back to all of these places and just instantly feel like a kid again, and [access] a lot of those memories as an adolescent just learning what food meant to me.

    What are some recent or significant interactions that you’ve had with other folks who have resonated with your story?

    One thing I will never forget is this little sweet girl named Marley, who I think, at the time, was in the fourth grade. It was when I was a chef at Benne on Eagle, and it was during Black History Month. She did her Black History Month project on me and did her presentation in front of the class. Her mom took pictures, and at the time, I think I wore a bandana almost every day to work. She wore a bandana and had a little chef shirt on. It was really cool. And I still have the pictures from that.

    We have another little regular that comes into Good Hot Fish all the time and wrote us this letter that inspired some merchandise. And it’s just things like that that really keep me going and make me smile… Like I said, some days can feel a little thankless, and those are things I hold onto.

    Ashleigh Shanti recommends:

    All About Love by Bell Hooks. This book has taught me a lot about love and its many forms. Profound but straight to the point, I find myself referring to this book through just about every phase of life.

    Photos of old Black Asheville by photographer Andrea Clark. I’m thankful Andrea captured such a special time in Asheville’s Black history. Her photos hang in my restaurant and looking at them gives me a sense of joy and hope for the future.

    Citric acid. I love citric acid. It’s the white powder that coats your favorite sour candy. It’s fun to use to adjust the acid in cocktails or to give your favorite spice blend a punch.

    Brittany Howard – “What Now”. I can’t stop playing this funky album at the restaurant. It feels groovy and nostalgic but fresh. It’s fun to see people in our dining room getting down while they dine.

    Hoka Ora Primo. These are my new kitchen shoes for as long as I can find them. Good kitchen shoes are nearly impossible to find and naturally, after 10+ hours on your feet, you experience discomfort. These foot pillows make me feel like I’m walking on clouds.

    This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

  • Two pro-animal measures could raise the Mile High City to even greater heights! Next month, voters in Denver will have the chance to support two exciting initiatives that would prevent countless animals from being slaughtered for their fur and flesh.

    denver, colorado landscape with photos of lamb and fox

    Denver Residents: Vote YES on These Bills to Ban Fur Sales and Slaughterhouses!

    Ordinance 308 would end the sale, manufacture, trade, and display of all new fur products in the city. This ban would spare countless minks, foxes, rabbits, chinchillas, and other animals who would otherwise be held captive in cramped, filthy conditions and ultimately slaughtered via the cheapest possible methods, including suffocation, electrocution, gassing, and poisoning.

    Ordinance 309 would prohibit the operation of existing slaughterhouses and ban the construction of new ones in Denver. There is currently one known slaughterhouse in the city, responsible for killing at least half a million lambs each year. This initiative would spare a vast number of animals annually and allow the city to be a leader in the switch to more ethical food production.

    Here’s What YOU Can Do

    If you live in Denver, please support these lifesaving bills—every vote matters! If you aren’t a registered voter in the city, there are still ways you can help animals suffering on farms and in slaughterhouses. Pledge never to wear fur, leather, feathers, or any other animal-derived material, and go vegan today!

    Note: PETA supports animal rights and opposes all forms of animal exploitation and educates the public on those issues. PETA does not directly or indirectly participate or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office or any political party.

    The post Denver Voters: THESE Initiatives Would Prevent Animals From Being Killed for Their Fur, Flesh appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Animal Rights and Campaign News | PETA.

  • Indonesia’s military is taking a leading role in plans to convert more than 2 million hectares of wetlands and savannah into rice farms and sugarcane plantations in a part of the conflict-prone Papua region that conservationists say is an environmental treasure.

    The military’s involvement has added to perceptions it is increasingly intruding into civilian areas in Indonesia and prompted a warning it will bring bloodshed to Merauke, the region slated to become a giant food estate. It’s an area of easternmost Indonesia that has largely avoided violence during the decades-long armed conflict between Indonesia and indigenous Papuans seeking their own state. 

    The plans are part of the government’s ambitions for the nation of 270 million people to achieve food and energy self-sufficiency. They highlight the tension globally between the push for economic development in lower-income countries and protection of the diminishing number of pristine ecosystems.

    Taken together, the sugarcane and rice projects for Merauke represent at least a fifth of a 10,000 square kilometer (38,600 square mile) lowland known as the TransFly that spans Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Its name comes from the Fly River – a squiggle on the otherwise straight line on the map that marks the border of the two countries on the island of New Guinea. 

    The great expanse of wetlands, grasslands and pockets of tropical rainforest in the south of the island is “globally outstanding,” said Eric Wikramanayake, a conservation biologist who wrote about its significance for a book on conservation regions in Asia.

    Researchers say it is home to half of the bird species found in New Guinea including about 80 that exist nowhere else and other endemic animals such as the pig-nosed turtle and cat-like carnivorous marsupials. The World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, has called it a “global treasure” and a proposed World Heritage listing says no other place in the region compares to it, including the famous Kakadu national park in northern Australia.  

    “If you were to convert a lot of the TransFly into agriculture then it’s going to change the conservation assessment, it will make it much more threatened,” Wikramanayake said.

    “There is going to be some impact and those impacts, it’s like opening the can of worms” in paving the way for further development, he said.  

    000_1EN4OO.jpg
    In this picture taken on March 14, 2019 an Indonesian police officer inspects boxes full of endangered pig-nosed turtles in Merauke regency–part of the TransFly Eco Region–after they were seized from a wildlife smuggler. (Abdul Syan/AFP)

    For Ahmad Rizal Ramdhani, the major-general who heads Indonesia’s National Food Security Taskforce, the area targeted for development is swamps that should be converted to agriculture to realize their “extraordinary” fertile potential.

    He told a 40-minute long podcast with state broadcaster Radio Indonesia in August that the 1 million-hectare rice component of the agricultural plans is funded by the government and overseen by the military and agriculture ministry. The sugar cane plantations and a related bioethanol industry are funded by private investors, he said.

    Wearing an indigenous Papuan headdress, Ramdhani said he envisioned that Papuans would ask “Mr. TNI” – the initials of the name of the Indonesian military – for help with cultivating their customary lands. 

    Sacred and conservation areas would be protected and the land would remain in the ownership of indigenous Papuans, he said.

    “To the people of Papua, especially those in Merauke, there is no need to worry and doubt, there is no need to be afraid,” Ramdhani said.

    In seemingly contradictory remarks, Ramdhani said the conversion to rice paddy needed to be carried out in three years to ensure food security, but rice would also be exported – to Pacific island countries and Australia because it’s too expensive to send it to Java, Indonesia’s most populated island. 

    Analysis of land-use maps shows areas designated for rice overlap with conservation areas, indigenous sacred places and ancestral trails and hunting grounds, said Franky Samperante, director of Indonesian civil society organization Pusaka. 

    Pusaka said in a report in September that more than 200 excavators had begun clearing wetlands, customary forests and other lands belonging to the Malind Makleuw indigenous people in Ilwayab, Merauke. 

    protest grab 1 (1).jpg
    Indigenous Papuans protesting against land clearance in Wanam, Merauke regency, Indonesia for a military-led rice-growing project on Sept. 24, 2024. (Pusaka)

    Members of the community protested against the rice project during a Sept. 24 reception for Indonesian officials, video shows. Women with faces caked in white mud to symbolize grief wore cardboard signs around their necks that said “We reject Jhonlin Group company” – an Indonesian conglomerate that is reportedly a key part of the agricultural projects.

    Earlier government and military-led attempts to develop agriculture in Merauke, including in the last decade, led to land grabs and other problems.

    ‘Risk of resentment’

    The military’s leadership of the rice program adds to perceptions it is increasingly intruding into civilian areas, according to three Indonesian security researchers.

    The large agricultural projects could fuel pro-independence sentiment and grievances over environmental destruction, said military analyst Raden Mokhamad Luthfi at Al Azhar University Indonesia.

    “There’s a real risk that the project could spark new resentment from OPM [Organisasi Papua Merdeka-Free Papua Movement], who may view it as further evidence of inequality, injustice, and environmental harm faced by Papuans,” he told BenarNews, a RFA-affiliated online media organization.

    Justification for the military’s role in the Merauke project, Luthfi said, is based on the concept of food security outlined in Indonesia’s 2015 defense white paper. 

    Officers at the army staff college perceived a security threat from possible food shortages in the future caused by climate change and population growth, he said. However, the white paper also said food security efforts should be led by civilian ministries.

    Hipolitus Wangge, a researcher at Australian National University, said the military silenced discontent among Papuans during a failed program last decade to make Merauke into a major center of food production.

    “We should expect more discontent, even bloodshed in Merauke in the next five years,” he told Radio Free Asia.


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    The Indonesian government’s development plans for the region and armed conflict were likely behind the demise of a once ambitious plan to protect the TransFly environment.

    WWF’s Indonesia and Papua New Guinea chapters made a concerted attempt in the early-to-mid 2000s to develop a conservation plan and expand protected areas. Within a few years, the effort had foundered. 

    At the time, the WWF waxed lyrical about the environmental significance of the TransFly but the conservation group’s Indonesian chapter now says it “recognizes the importance of national strategic projects, such as the Food Estate initiative in Merauke, in addressing Indonesia’s food security challenges.” 

    The conservation program ended in 2016 because of insecurity in Papua and lack of resources, WWF Indonesia spokeswoman Diah Sulistiowati told RFA.

    “We understand that the government prioritizes this [agricultural] development to meet the growing demand for food and to support national food security goals,” she said.

    WWF Indonesia is helping to ensure development of the TransFly region respects “rich ecological and cultural values,” Sulistiowati said, through its past recommendations for protection of high conservation value forests, cultural heritage sites and areas crucial to indigenous communities.

    A lesser heralded aspect of the TransFly’s importance is that it’s one of a diminishing number of wetland stopovers for migratory birds that make epic journeys along a millenia-old Asian “flyway” stretching from Alaska to New Zealand.

    “Whatever few wetlands and bird habitats that are used by these birds should be conserved,” said Wikramanayake, the conservation biologist. “There could be some sort of tipping point that causes the flyway to collapse.” 

    Edited by Mike Firn.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for RFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nathan Ryder raises livestock and grows vegetables on 10 acres of pasture in Golconda, Illinois with his wife and three kids. They also live in a food desert; the local grocery store closed a few months ago, and the closest farmers market is at least 45 miles away, leaving their community struggling to access nutritious food. 

    Opening another supermarket isn’t the answer. The U.S. government has spent the last decade investing millions to establish them in similar areas, with mixed results. Ryder thinks it would be better to expand federal assistance programs to make them more available to those in need, allowing more people to use those benefits at local farms like his own. 

    Expanding the reach of the nation’s small growers and producers could be a way to address growing food insecurity, he said, a problem augmented by inflation and supply chains strained by climate change. “It’s a great opportunity, not only to help the bottom-line of local farmers, instead of some of these giant commodity food corporations … but to [help people] buy healthy, wholesome foods,” said Ryder.

    That is just one of the solutions that could be codified into the 2024 farm bill, but it isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. The deadline to finalize the omnibus bill arrives Monday, and with lawmakers deadlocked along partisan lines, it appears likely that they will simply extend the current law for at least another year. 

    Congress has been here before. Although the farm bill is supposed to be renewed every five years, legislators passed a one-year extension of the 2018 policy last November after struggling to agree on key nutrition and conservation facets of the $1.5 trillion-dollar spending package. 

    Extensions and delays have grave implications, because the farm bill governs many aspects of America’s food and agricultural systems. It covers everything from food assistance programs and crop subsidies to international food aid and even conservation measures. Some of them, like crop insurance, are permanently funded, meaning any hiccups in the reauthorization timeline do not impact them. But others, such as beginning farmer and rancher development grants and local food promotion programs, are entirely dependent upon the appropriations within the law. Without a new appropriation or an extension of the existing one, some would shut down until the bill is reauthorized. If Congress fails to act before Jan. 1, several  programs would even revert to 1940s-era policies with considerable impacts on consumer prices for commodities like milk.

    After nearly a century of bipartisanship, negotiations over recent farm bills have been punctuated by partisan stalemates. The main difference this time around is that a new piece is dominating the Hill’s political chessboard: The election. “It doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen before the election, which puts a lot of teeth-gnashing and hair-wringing into hand,” said Ryder. He is worried that a new administration and a new Congress could result in a farm bill that further disadvantages small farmers and producers. “It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure novel right now. Which way is this farm bill going to go?”

    A combine harvests wheat in an expansive hillside field in rural Washington.
    The Farm Bill covers everything from crop subsidies to food assistance programs and even conservation measures. Typically a bipartisan effort, it has of late been bogged down by politics.
    Rick Dalton for Design Pics Editorial / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    The new president will bring their own agricultural policy agenda to the job, which could influence aspects of the bill. And, of course, whoever sits in the Oval Office can veto whatever emerges from Congress. (President Obama threatened to nix the bill House Republicans put forward in 2013 because it proposed up to $39 billion in cuts to food benefits.) Of even greater consequence is the potential for a dramatically different Congress. Of the 535 seats in the House and Senate, 468 are up for election. That will likely lead to renewed negotiations among a new slate of lawmakers, a process further complicated by the pending retirement of Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the Democratic chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Although representatives are ramping up pressure on Congressional leadership to enact a new farm bill before this Congress reaches the end of its term, there is a high chance all of this will result in added delays, if not require an entirely new bill to be written.

    That has profound implications for consumers already struggling with rising prices and farmers facing the compounding pressures of consolidation, not to mention efforts to remake U.S. food systems to mitigate, and adapt to, a warming world, said Rebecca Wolf, a senior food policy analyst with Food & Water Watch. (The nonprofit advocates for policies that ensure access to safe food, clean water, and a livable climate.) “The farm bill has a really big impact on changing the kind of food and farm system that we’re building,” said Wolf. 

    Still, Monday’s looming deadline is somewhat arbitrary — lawmakers have until the end of the calendar year to pass a bill, because most key programs have already been extended through the appropriations cycle. But DeShawn Blanding, who analyzes food and environment policy for the science nonprofit the Union of Concerned Scientists, finds the likelihood of that happening low. He expects to see negotiations stretch into next year, and perhaps into 2026. “Congress is much more divided now,” he said. 

    The House Agriculture committee passed a draft bill in May, but the proposal has not reached the floor for a vote because of negotiating hang-ups. Meanwhile, the Senate Agriculture committee has yet to introduce a bill, although the chamber’s Democrats and Republicans have introduced frameworks that reflect their agendas. Given the forthcoming election and higher legislative priorities, like funding the government before December 20, the last legislative day on the congressional calendar, “it’s a likelihood that this could be one of the longest farm bills that we’ve had,” Blanding said.

    As is often the case, food assistance funding is among the biggest points of contention. SNAP and the Thrifty Food Plan, which determines how much a household receives through SNAP, have remained two of the biggest sticking points, with Democrats and Republicans largely divided over how the program is structured and funded. The Republican-controlled House Agriculture committee’s draft bill proposed the equivalent of nearly $30 billion in cuts to SNAP by limiting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ability to adjust the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, used to set SNAP benefits. The provision, supported by Republicans, met staunch opposition from Democrats who have criticized the plan for limiting benefits during an escalating food insecurity crisis

    The farm bill “was supposed to be designed to help address food insecurity and the food system at large and should boost and expand programs like SNAP that help do that,” said Blanding, which becomes all the more vital as climate change continues to dwindle food access for many Americans. Without a new farm bill, “we’re stuck with what [food insecurity] looked like in 2018, which is not what it looks like today in 2024.” 

    Nutrition programs governed by the current law were designed to address pre-pandemic levels of hunger in a world that had not yet crossed key climate thresholds. As the crisis of planetary warming deepens, fueling crises that tend to deepen existing barriers to food access in areas affected, food programs authorized in the farm bill are “an extraordinarily important part of disaster response,” said Vince Hall, chief government relations officer at the nonprofit Feeding America. “The number of disasters that Feeding America food banks are asked to respond to each year is only increasing with extreme weather fueled by climate change.” 

    That strain is making it more critical than ever that Congress increase funding for programs like the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP. Its Farm to Food Bank Project Grants, established under the 2018 law, underwrites projects that enable the nation’s food banks to have a supply of fresh food produced by local farmers and growers. It must be written into the new bill or risk being phased out. 

    David Toledo, an urban farmer in Chicago, used to work with a local food pantry and community garden that supplies fresh produce to neighborhoods that need it. To Toledo, the farm bill is a gateway to solutions to the impacts of climate change on the accessibility of food in the U.S. He wants to see lawmakers put aside politics and pass a bill for the good of the people they serve.

    “With the farm bill, what is at stake is a healthy nation, healthy communities, engagements from farmers and rising farmers. And I mean, God forbid, but the potential of seeing a lot more hunger,” Toledo said. “It needs to pass. It needs to pass with bipartisan support. There’s so much at the table right now.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The election could shape the future of America’s food system on Sep 27, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In a major victory for cows, Starbucks announced that it will stop charging extra for vegan milks, effective November 7! The move follows a vigorous four year campaign, letters from more than 160,000 PETA supporters, protests at Starbucks around the country, and help from actor James Cromwell who glued his hand to a café counter in protest and starred in a satirical video calling out the upcharge, as well as an appeal from Sir Paul McCartney.

    In September 2024, PETA paused our campaign to allow Starbucks’ new CEO Brian Niccol time to course correct. We’re thrilled that he made the right decision for everyone from cows to compassionate customers. To thank him, we’re sending over a box of cow-friendly vegan chocolates.

    Starbucks cup on left side, cow in field on right side

    What Does a Surcharge-Free Starbucks Mean for Animals—and the Planet?

    Starbucks is a top user of cow’s milk and prioritizes it above all other types of milk. Cow’s milk is a product of the dirty dairy industry, which forcibly impregnates cows, kidnaps their babies, and treats mother cows like milk machines instead of the deeply emotional individuals they are.

    cow and calf drinking milk

    Now, customers are free to choose whichever vegan milk they prefer in their latte and they won’t be unfairly charged for making a compassionate choice!

    Icons of Protest: We Took a ‘Dead Calf’ and ‘Polar Bears’ on Tour

    To remind Starbucks and its customers about the cruelty that goes into drinks made with cow’s milk, PETA protesters took an extremely lifelike “dead calf” stuffed into a giant Starbucks cup to demonstrations outside the chain’s stores across the country.

    We also had a pack of “polar bears” occupy several Starbucks cafés to illustrate how the dairy industry contributes to melting the ice caps, killing polar bears, and otherwise driving the climate catastrophe.

    100+ Days of Nonstop Protests

    Because Starbucks agrees that animal-friendly vegan milks are better for the planet yet continues to charge extra for them, PETA and Animal Rights Initiative supporters descended on the café at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle and protested every single day for over 100 days, starting in January 2022.

    We Brought the Action to Starbucks and Its Execs

    PETA and our allies brought our A game to direct actions in protest against Starbucks’ vegan milk upcharge.

    Read The Reports

    November 15, 2019: On the day when the largest Starbucks location in the world opened its doors in Chicago, PETA supporters marked the occasion by sitting outside the store all day with posters proclaiming, “Soy Milk Surcharge Sux.”

    Protesters pointed out that Starbucks’ extra charge for dairy-free milk punishes those who are lactose intolerant—most of whom are people of color—and anyone who simply wants to reduce methane gas emissions or opposes cruelty to cows.

    January 29, 2021: After Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson acknowledged that vegan milk is “a big part of the solution” in reducing the company’s carbon footprint, PETA’s “climate change cow” hand-delivered a letter to the company’s Seattle headquarters calling out Johnson and his disingenuous pledge to make changes to benefit the environment.

    December 9, 2021: A mock website called out Starbucks for claiming to be committed to inclusion and diversity while still charging extra for nondairy milk—something that PETA has been challenging the company on for years, in light of the dairy industry’s cruelty to cows and people’s concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and their own health.

    PETA cheered on these pranksters—who are apparently from the group Switch4Good—and their hoax news release (which took the internet by storm and even had multiple outlets reporting on it before realizing that it was all a ruse).

    December 23, 2021: Christmas came early for Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson when PETA’s little helpers delivered a heaping pile of coal and a letter of admonishment to his door. The bold stunt was a reminder to the company that until it stops penalizing customers who care about animals, their own health, and the environment, it will remain on PETA’s naughty list.

    March 16, 2022: PETA supporters joined Animal Rights Initiative in a spirited demonstration outside Starbucks’ headquarters in Seattle in which activists dressed as cows took center stage, drenched themselves in fake blood, and performed as a mother cow mourning the abduction of her baby—which is a reality for mother cows, whose calves are torn away from them by the dairy industry.

    April 6, 2022: As new Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz started his first day on the job, PETA supporters joined Animal Rights Initiative for a spirited demonstration in Seattle. Udderly fed-up “cows” stood inside the company’s headquarters with signs explaining that the dairy industry is a leading cause of the climate catastrophe, and PETA supporters outside encouraged passersby to tell Starbucks to ditch the upcharge for dairy-free milk.

    May 1, 2022: Members of PETA and Animal Rights Initiative protested outside Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s lakeside gated community, calling him out for charging customers extra for animal-friendly vegan milk. The company gave former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson a $60 million payout when he stepped down in March, which alone could have offset nearly 86 million70-cent vegan milk upcharges.

    starbucks campaign demo

    July 13, 2022: On the day Starbucks opened its new grab-and-go café in the lobby of The New York Times Building—directly across the street from Sir Paul McCartney’s PETA billboard calling on the chain to stop charging customers extra for vegan milks—PETA was on hand to cause a ruckus with our “bloody calf” prop. Customers who missed PETA’s bold demonstration could still see our powerful billboard featuring the former Beatle.

    August 18 and November 18, 2022: PETA supporters encased their feet in blocks of concrete and blocked the driveway and drive-through at Starbucks stores in Detroit and Nashville, Tennessee, while wearing shirts emblazoned with messages such as “Not Your Mom, Not Your Milk.”

    Celebrities Brought PETA’s Message to New Heights

    Our celebrity friends, staunch defenders of cows and the Earth, lent their images to sky-high billboards that called for an era of change for the coffee chain.

    Read The Reports

    May and June 2022: PETA billboards featuring Sir Paul McCartney are going up during his national tour at prominent locations in East Rutherford, New Jersey; New York City; Seattle; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina—including one near the company’s headquarters. They urged Starbucks to end its unethical upcharge for vegan milk, a request the pop legend also made in a letter to former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. PETA also joined McCartney on his tour, bringing along information about our Starbucks campaign and other animal rights issues.

    May 22, 2023: Ahead of Succession’s May 28 series finale, actor James Cromwell took over the Atlantic City Boardwalk in New Jersey with a message for Starbucks: Stop milking customers who choose vegan options. The actor’s appeal was blasted on nearly 100 screens along the busiest stretch of the iconic walkway and within sight of two Starbucks locations.

    PETA Blitzed Starbucks in North America With Our ‘Weeks of Action’

    During PETA’s Weeks of Action against Starbucks, supporters occupied Starbucks locations across North America to protest the chain’s vegan milk upcharge.

    Read The Reports

    January 23, 2020: While PETA’s 2020 Week of Action was underway, Starbucks announced that it would add more vegan menu options and push customers to ditch dairy to combat the climate catastrophe, but we remained strong in our demands since the chain only responded with half-measures.

    June 21, 2022: PETA took on Starbucks and its unethical vegan milk upcharge during our Starbucks Week of Action from June 20 to 26. Supporters took to the streets in bold demonstrations in Atlanta; Dallas; Orlando; Seattle; St. Paul, Minnesota; and more than a dozen other cities across the U.S. Activists also blasted the company on social media, blitzed the company’s phone lines, demanded change on Yelp, and took other actions.

    April 12, 2023: Supporters of PETA and Switch4Good kicked off a weeklong push for Starbucks to drop its “penalty charge” for dairy-free milk, culminating in a sit-in with Animal Rights Initiative at a local Starbucks store. Accompanied by a social media uproar and protests in 23 cities across North America, the week of action followed PETA’s shareholder resolution, which won so many votes that PETA was able to submit it for a new vote in 2024.

    Celebs and Others Glued Themselves to Starbucks Counters

    To really get the message of outrage at Starbucks to stick, celebrities, a Buddhist monk, and other PETA supporters found a way to put a little more skin into our disruptions—literally.

    Read The Reports

    April 20, 2022: With Earth Day looming, two climate and animal rights activists superglued their hands to the café counter at Starbucks’ headquarters, chanting, “Save the planet, save the cows, stop the plant milk upcharge!”

    May 10, 2022: Succession star and PETA Honorary Director James Cromwell superglued his hand to the café counter at a New York City Starbucks to protest the vegan milk upcharge. Police arrived to shut down the store.

    June 16, 2022: After spending over an hour superglued to the café counter at a downtown Chicago Starbucks, two PETA supporters, including a Buddhist monk in traditional robes, were arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

    PETA Starbucks protest in Chicago

    March 8, 2024: On International Women’s Day, 74-year-old grandmother and renowned chef Babette Davis made headlines by supergluing her hand to the counter of a Starbucks store in Inglewood, California, in support of PETA’s campaign against the chain. 

    James Cromwell Became a Greedy Starbucks Exec in a Cutting Ad

    In his first acting role since Succession, actor James Cromwell played Ewan Roy’s worst nightmare—a greedy, fictional Starbucks executive who exploits eco-conscious customers by charging them more for vegan milk—in a PETA video released in time for National Coffee Day (September 29, 2023).

    Starbucks Sent Police to Arrest a Law-Abiding 13-Year-Old?!

    On March 8, 2024, Evan and his family were joining other PETA supporters at a Starbucks store near Orlando, Florida—and although the store manager had given the protesters permission to hold a sit-in there, the coffee giant later called the police on the group.

    13-year-old arrested at PETA protest of Starbucks in Orlando, FL

    Evan, at just 13-years-old, was wrongfully arrested on trespassing charges while peacefully protesting against Starbucks for charging extra for vegan milks. His charges were dropped in June.

    Celebrities Penned Letters to Starbucks’ Top Brass

    Kate Nash, Paul McCartney, and Alan Cumming all contacted Starbucks executives to ask them to put an end to the vegan milk upcharge.

    Read The Reports

    March 1, 2021: PETA Honorary Director Alan Cumming joined PETA’s campaign by writing to Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. His letter urged Starbucks to drop the upcharge on vegan milks, noting that the dairy industry produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases and that manure from dairy farms contaminates waterways and creates dead zones in the ocean where no life can survive.

    The most responsible move would be to stop selling cow’s milk altogether. But at the very least, you can end the upcharge on vegan milk that penalizes customers who are making the humane, environmentally friendly choice, along with those who are lactose intolerant—most of whom are people of color.”

    —Alan Cumming

    March 30, 2022: Ahead of Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson’s upcoming retirement on April 4, Sir Paul McCartney sent a letter to the outgoing exec, urging him to take the coffee giant’s problematic vegan milk upcharge out the door with him as he leaves the company.

    “My friends at PETA are campaigning for this,” wrote McCartney. “I sincerely hope that for the future of the planet and animal welfare you are able to implement this policy.”

    August 22, 2023: Hot off the set of Coffee Wars, actor, singer, and longtime vegan Kate Nash sent a letter on PETA’s behalf to Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan urging him to end the chain’s shameless upcharge on vegan milks in the U.S.

    “I’m currently starring in Coffee Wars, a movie in which my character, like me, is all about creating delicious coffee drinks that no animal had to suffer for. And while I love Starbucks coffee, it left a bitter taste in my mouth when I learned from my friends at PETA that customers who choose non-dairy milk still have to pay extra in the US. There’s no surcharge for plant-based milk in the UK, so that just doesn’t add up.”

    —Kate Nash

    PETA Crafted Special Gifts for Starbucks Execs

    Our creative gag gifts to the people in charge at Starbucks symbolized the harm that prioritizing cow’s milk over vegan milks does to the planet.

    Read The Reports

    July 28, 2022: It’s the golden global warming awards, and PETA presented three Starbucks executives—CEO Howard Schultz, Chief Sustainability Officer Michael Kobori, and Head of Sustainability Una Hrnjak—with a Climate Catastrophy. With each award—which included a personalized placard and a letter—we let the coffee chain’s leaders know that if they really gave a frap about the planet, then they would drop the upcharge for vegan milks.

    April 21, 2023: Gear up for a gas! New Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan got a cheeky gift from PETA in honor of Earth Day: a “cow fart” in a jar. Hoping Narasimhan would help clear the air, PETA urged him to stop “milking” customers and harming animals and the planet.

    PETA Headed to Starbucks’ Boardroom

    Since 2019, we’ve given Starbucks a piece of our mind at its shareholder meetings and submitted shareholder resolutions to advocate against the nonsensical charge for vegan milks.

    PETA’s ‘Dead Calf’ Protests Starbucks’ Vegan Milk Upcharge
    Read The Reports

    March 18, 2020: Clueless actor and PETA Honorary Director Alicia Silverstone joined Starbucks’ virtual annual meeting to ask the company to stop charging extra for nondairy milks.

    “When will Starbucks put its money where its mouth is and remove the barrier to customers choosing climate-, health-, and animal-friendly vegan options by dropping the surcharge on nondairy milk?”

    —Alicia Silverstone

    March 16, 2022: PETA caused a stir during Starbucks’ annual meeting by calling out the company for being all talk and no action. We pointed out that the CEO himself—Kevin Johnson—has claimed that Starbucks wants to “give more than [it takes] from the planet,” but if that were really the case, the company would incentivize consuming animal- and environmentally friendly vegan milks by not charging extra for them.

    Producing cow’s milk generates around three times more greenhouse gas emissions and uses nine times more land than vegan options do. It takes 628 liters of water to make 1 liter of cow’s milk—oat or soy milk requires 90% less water.

    “Starbucks claims to value ‘challenging the status quo and … holding ourselves accountable.’ Words have to mean something.”

    —From PETA’s question to Starbucks at its annual meeting

    September 19, 2022: In PETA’s first-ever Starbucks shareholder resolution, we called on the company’s board of directors to commission a report examining whether the coffee chain is harming its reputation—and losing customers—by charging a premium price for the vegan milks it agrees are better for the planet.

    PETA members caused a stir outside Starbucks’ headquarters in Seattle to call on the chain to stop penalizing customers who care about animals and the environment.

    March 23, 2023: At Starbucks’ latest virtual shareholder meeting, PETA asked four pressing questions—one of our own and three on behalf of fellow shareholders who are also passionate about ending the vegan milk upcharge.

    Since Starbucks’ new CEO Laxman Narasimhan started two weeks early and led the meeting, PETA hopes he received our input with fresh urgency.

    We explained how the dairy industry condemns cows exploited for their milk to a relentless cycle of forced impregnation, birth, and nearly round-the-clock milking before sending them to a gruesome death after four or five years. Then we asked, “Knowing that dairy is the product of immense suffering, environmental destruction, and dietary racism, how do you justify supporting and even actively promoting its consumption by continuing to impose an ‘ethical tax’ on vegan milks?”

    Following introductory lead-in comments for each, the three other questions were read:

    “When will Starbucks return to the values that made me an investor by listening to its customers, leading the coffee industry instead of lagging behind, and dropping the upcharge on vegan milks?”

    “Since Starbucks has admitted that dairy is the biggest contributor to the company’s carbon footprint and is a major factor in climate change, why doesn’t Starbucks institute a dairy upcharge or, even better, drop dairy altogether?”

    “Given Gen Z’s aversion to dairy, why doesn’t Starbucks make vegan milk the default option instead of charging more for it?”

    During the meeting, we also presented our shareholder resolution—originally submitted in September 2022—urging the company to commission a report examining how dropping the upcharge for vegan milks could increase Starbucks’ sales.

    PETA supporters with Animal Rights Initiative descended on Starbucks’ headquarters in downtown Seattle at the start of the meeting to make their position known.

    April 13, 2023: After PETA submitted a shareholder resolution calling out Starbucks’ problematic vegan milk upcharge, we received enough votes from the company’s shareholders to qualify to submit another resolution in 2024. This was great news, as submitting back-to-back shareholder resolutions allows us to keep pressure on the chain.

    While we won a victory in the boardroom, we also kept the heat on Starbucks by partnering with Switch4Good—a nonprofit run by Olympian Dotsie Bausch dedicated to “[d]isrupting norms around dairy and health, working to abolish dietary racial oppression, and fighting climate change”—to hold a day of action against the company.

    During the action-packed day, we hosted protests across the U.S. and Canada, mobilized supporters to blast the company on social media, held sit-ins, encouraged everyone to call the company to express their opposition, and more.

    September 25, 2023: In our second-ever Starbucks shareholder resolution submission, PETA pressed the company’s executives to examine the true cost of alienating consumers who can’t stomach cow’s milk for ethical, religious, environmental, or dietary reasons.

    According to multiple studies, Gen Zers—whose spending power has more than doubled in three years to reach an estimated $360 billion—view cow’s milk as “basic” or “uncool.” So by charging a premium price for vegan milks, Starbucks may be harming its reputation and actually losing customers in the process.

    Do Animals and the Planet a Favor: Go Vegan

    Why stop at coffee creamer? Whether your goals include being healthier, showing animals more kindness, or saving the planet, being vegan is the only way to go. And you won’t believe how easy it is! Click on the link below to get started on your journey of compassion.

    The post Starbucks Becomes the Largest Chain in the US to Offer Free Vegan Milk appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Animal Rights and Campaign News | PETA.

  •  

    Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Freddy Brewster about the supermarket megamerger for the August 30, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

     

    Lever: Kroger and Albertsons’ Dirty Tricks To Preserve Greedflation

    Lever (8/26/24)

    Janine Jackson: In October of 2022, the largest supermarket chain in the US, Kroger, announced a plan to take over the second-largest supermarket chain in the country, Albertsons, in a merger that would create the country’s third-largest private-sector employer overall—after Walmart and Amazon—a conglomerate of some 5,000 stores and 710,000 employees. What could go wrong?

    A lot of things, the Federal Trade Commission suggested, as they sued to block the merger this February, including less competition, lower quality products and weaker bargaining positions for workers. Legal proceedings began this week.

    Our guest is helping make sense of this story. Writer and journalist Freddy Brewster’s latest piece on the proposed Kroger and Albertsons merger, and the maneuvering behind it, appears at LeverNews.com. He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Freddy Brewster.

    Freddy Brewster: Hi, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

    JJ: If we could first situate this in common sense and lived experience: Americans have been seeing the price of eggs and milk and other staples go way up, to the point where already-struggling people are pressed to the limit. Asking why this is happening, we’ve been told for years now, well, Covid, and related supply chain problems, and inflation. It’s out of companies’ control.

    I have problems already with that, because the notion that companies have to maintain a certain profit margin, no matter what’s happening in the world, is a choice. Companies could always accept less profit, or pay managers less, if keeping prices down was their aim.

    But, OK, Covid, supply chain, inflation: That’s no longer the reality, yet it’s still somehow the story. Did Kroger not just acknowledge in testimony that, oh yes, we did push prices higher than inflation just because we could, but still if you give us more market power, you should believe we won’t do that anymore? I want to ask you about specifics, but this whole baseline, to begin with, almost seems like a joke at the expense of people already struggling. Am I missing something there?

    Freddy Brewster

    Freddy Brewster: “Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices.”

    FB: No, no, you’re kind of right on it. And just add to that, in 2021, Kroger’s CEO, on a shareholder call, admitted that inflation is a good thing, because it’ll allow the company to raise prices, pass the cost on to consumers and keep prices high. In fact, I have a quote right here from Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, from that shareholder call, and it says, “We view a little bit of inflation as always good in our business, and we would expect to be able to pass those costs through to consumers on things that are permanent in nature.” And so, right here, he is admitting that they can use inflation to raise prices, and then keep those prices high.

    JJ: And that sounds like exactly what they’re saying they won’t be doing in this sort of PR talk about lower prices and better choices.

    I went to look up this story, and I found a website called KrogerAlbertsons.com, which opens with this, I find, hilarious disclaimer, and I just want to read it:

    Certain information included in this website is forward-looking, and involves risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the assumptions and beliefs of Kroger and Albertsons companies management in light of information currently available to them.

    And it goes on:

    Such statements are indicated by words or phrases such as “accelerate,” “create,” “committed,” “confident,” “continue,” “deliver,” “driving,” “expect,” “future,” “guidance,” “positioned,” “strategy,” “target,” “synergies,” “trends” and “will.”

    Now companies call this skating where the puck’s going to be, right? You just act as though you’ve already gotten the thing that you’re demanding. And then if the deal doesn’t happen, you’re encouraging people to see it as nature’s path being interfered with, rather than public-protecting processes being followed.

    FB: Yeah, that website is funny, and it’s almost like, if there’s any young people out there who are aspiring to work in PR, you can read that website. It is just like those words that they highlight themselves are rather interesting, and kind of like buzzwords, to be able to push a certain type of narrative that they find benefits them, or would be profitable to their narrative.

    Reuters: Surging grocery prices in focus as US tries to stop Kroger deal

    Reuters (8/28/24)

    JJ: What information is the FTC working with when they set up to question or potentially block this merger? Why are they doing that?

    FB: They want to block this merger because, like you had mentioned earlier on, this merger could result in poor-quality products, higher prices and worse employment options for employees, especially for employees who are trying to unionize or who want to threaten to be able to go work at the competitor.

    Just to give you kind of a sense of Kroger’s market power, in an attempt to allay the concerns from the FTC about this merger, Kroger had promised to sell off 600 stores, slash prices by a billion dollars, and invest a billion dollars in wages if the merger is allowed to go through.

    So what this kind of says and highlights is that Kroger is already buying Albertsons for $24.6 billion, and is willing to invest another $2 billion to bring down prices and to get more wages. That shows that they already have quite a bit of market power. They have $29 billion sitting around that they can use to buy another company and lower prices and give people better wages. Well, why aren’t they lowering prices and giving people better wages right now?

    That statement itself just highlights the market power that Kroger has, and if this merger is allowed to go through, they’ll have even greater market power. And Kroger says that they want this merger to go through to be able to compete with Walmart and Amazon, which may be legitimate, but Walmart and Amazon, they operate in different spheres than what traditional grocery stores do.

    Boise Dev: Albertsons and Kroger supermarket brands

    Boise Dev (2/20/23)

    JJ: Right. So the idea that all four of these companies… we as citizens are meant to be excited about a bigger behemoth getting into the fight with other behemoths.

    FB: Yeah, exactly. And Kroger already owns a handful of common grocery stores that people know about. There’s Fred Meyer, there’s Harris Teeter, they own King Soopers and Ralphs. And then also Albertsons owns Safeway. They own…

    JJ: Acme, I think….

    FB: Shaw’s and Vons. Yeah, exactly. And so all of this would put it all under one roof.

    And then also, if this merger’s allowed to go through, what puts it under that same roof, too, are also all those store-brand products. Like Kroger has Kroger brand salad dressing, for example, or different sauces or snacks or whatever. And Albertsons has the same thing. But then that puts it all under one roof, one house in one store, and that leaves less options for consumers.

    And an expert I talked to highlighted about how when there’s less options, that these companies are focused on profits, and they often use emulsifiers and other things that really aren’t the best to be consuming for the average human, and that can affect health in different ways, weight in different ways.

    JJ: Among other tactics, Kroger is declaring that the FTC’s whole case should be thrown out because it’s unconstitutional, because it involves Kroger’s “private rights.” What legal legs do they think they’re standing on there?

    Vox: The Supreme Court just lit a match and tossed it into dozens of federal agencies

    Vox (6/27/24)

    FB: So, historically, the courts have ruled in favor of these government agencies. The FTC, for example, and similar with the Securities and Exchange Commission, have these internal courts that rule on certain matters. So, for example, the FTC internal administrative court, they hear evidence, kind of like a standard court, and will issue initial decisions. And companies have sued in the past to try to say this is unconstitutional, and has to be fought in federal court. But the courts have largely ruled in favor of these government agencies.

    Up until recently; that’s begun to change. Now the Supreme Court, earlier the summer, ruled that the in-house courts issuing civil penalties for securities fraud, for the Securities Exchange Commission, is unconstitutional. And then, also, there was a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that allowed companies facing an FTC enforcement action to challenge those actions that the companies deemed unconstitutional in federal court, before those actions are deliberated inside the internal FTC court. So it’s a little convoluted, but those are the two main cases that Kroger is relying on to say that the internal FTC court is unconstitutional.

    JJ: Listeners will know that we’ve been instructed to see corporations as people since Citizens United, but if I’m in court and I’m deleting relevant text messages, I’m not sure that I could just say, “Oh, well, you know, stuff happens.” Tell us a little bit about some of the behind the scenes actions, if you will, that seem meaningful here to this case.

    CPI: Judge Accuses Google of ‘Clear Abuse’ in Antitrust Case Over Deleted Employee Chats

    CPI (8/29/24)

    FB: So deleting text messages and internal chats has seemed to become the go-to tactic for business executives facing enforcement actions and regulations from the federal government. Jeff Bezos and Amazon executives were caught using Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app, but it also has the option for auto delete. And so a lot of these messages that they were exchanging between each other were automatically deleted.

    Google executives were also caught deleting messages. So Google has this internal policy where it directs employees to use a feature that automatically deletes Google Chat messages after 24 hours. And Google received an order from regulators to preserve these messages, but a judge found that the executives did not properly notify employees to stop using the auto delete feature, and some messages were deleted.

    And there’s also, in the case of Google, messages that have been preserved that show that some of these executives realized the fact that the auto delete function was not turned off. And so it’s preserved in court documents that show that they know that they were supposed to turn off this auto delete function, but they had left it on.

    But then Albertsons, some of their executives were using auto-delete features on iPhone, and recent filings from the FTC, I’ll just quote right from it, it says: “Of the eight Albertsons executives set to testify at this evidentiary hearing, four exhibited a pervasive practice of deleting business-related text messages,” the FTC found. And these text messages allegedly included details on whether selling off certain stores will remedy the merger’s anticompetitive impacts, and FTC investigators urge the court to view the executive’s testimony with skepticism, meaning that they should view what they have to say in light of these guys deleting text messages talking about details about the merger.

    Chicago Trib: Albertsons-Kroger merger should be allowed, but we need assurance the sale of Mariano’s won’t harm consumers

    Chicago Tribune (8/27/24)

    JJ: Yeah. I’ll bring you back to that big regulatory picture in just a second, but let me just ask you about corporate media response. There’s been some coverage. I’ve seen some coverage.

    It includes things like the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, who weighed in saying that, yes, food prices in America are a real problem, but that it’s “only politicians who want to be seen as doing something about them” that “conveniently focus merely on retail operations, because those are price stickers most voters see.” Well, yeah, OK. But they go on to say:

    In reality, supermarkets are a famously high-volume, low-margin business, and their price increases are downwind from wholesale price increases with those flowing from suppliers with increased costs. And the retail operations have their own costs dominated by the price of labor, which has seen hefty increases in recent years.

    Now, I think listeners can likely parse that: It’s supply chains and it’s unions that are driving those high grocery prices—even as Kroger’s own senior director for pricing admits in testimony that, yeah, we’re actually price-gouging, but if you let us merge, well, we pinky promise to stop. What do you make of media response here?

    FB: Yeah, so I haven’t read that Chicago Tribune article, but I’d imagine that they don’t take in consideration the billions of dollars that Kroger has spent in stock buybacks over recent years. And so it’s not like they’re hurt or cash-strapped in a way that they’re having to pinch pennies to get by. They pay their executives handsomely. They’re paid well, and they have billions of dollars in leftover money to buy back stocks to juice shareholder value. I don’t really see that mentioned too often in corporate media, but that is a key context to consider when it comes to these issues and food prices.

    JJ: Yeah, consumers and workers and competition, those terms get thrown around a lot in stories like this. But the Consumer Federation of America opposes the merger, the Food Workers Union opposes the merger, state attorney generals who are interested in competition oppose the merger. So there’s this gap between media and political rhetoric, and what folks on the ground actually see and have seen happening, it seems like.

    FB: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and folks on the ground know really what’s affecting them, and what’s affecting them largely, as of late, has been high prices at the grocery store. And we know from Kroger’s own internal conversations that they see these price hikes as a good thing.

    JJ: While it is hard, understandably, for many of us to see past the price of eggs, which is alarming, but there is also, as you write about, a long game here that has to do with hobbling government’s ability to protect consumers, or to regulate businesses, period. I think Kroger seems to see, and other businesses seem to see, a longer-term gain here by undermining the whole system.

    FB: Imagine Kroger’s case against the FTC. This is a bit of a prediction from me. I’d imagine it’ll make its way to the Supreme Court, because if the federal court in Cincinnati, where Kroger sued, if they rule in favor of Kroger, then that says the FTC control of courts is unconstitutional, and I imagine the FTC would challenge that or appeal that. And if Kroger loses, I’d imagine they would appeal as well, because they want to be able to fight this in federal courts, which have largely been stocked with corporate-friendly judges over the past few decades.

    FAIR: WSJ Attacks Antitrust Champion Lina Khan Every 11 Days Since FTC Appointment

    FAIR.org (6/23/23)

    JJ: We try to always say, notice those down-ballot elections. Notice those electoral judge positions. All of this is so integral to the rules and policies that govern our lives, but we don’t always see it highlighted as those races or those positions as important as they absolutely are.

    Well, corporate America hate them some Lina Khan, don’t they? I mean, we have seen this, in terms of the FTC. It’s almost like there’s something wrong with a person in a government agency just straight up saying, “I’m looking to protect the public interest here.” It’s almost as though we’re being told to see regulatory agencies as just kind of refereeing the game between big corporations, and we, the public, are just not in it.

    FB: And a lot of these executives, they get brought onto CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and they praise Vice President Harris, and are happy she’s running, but they also pressure her to fire Lina Khan and other regulators. And the news anchors there failed to mention the cases that those business executives or those billionaires have in front of the FTC, or have in front of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Or some of the motivations on why they would want to get rid of regulators who have a strong anti-monopoly type of mindset, and a very pro-consumer mindset. That doesn’t really get mentioned too often on some of these corporate media outlets.

    JJ: What do you think happens now? You’ve indicated it a little bit, but we’re still very much in the midst of this case. What do you think is likely to happen, and what would you look for journalists to be keeping an eye on?

    FB: Yeah, so it’s hard to determine what’s going to happen. I think it’s really going to be interesting on the federal case out of Cincinnati, Ohio, where Kroger sued, challenging FTC’s internal court being constitutional. The current case that’s playing out right now, that’s a temporary halt to the merger. That’ll have some ramifications for sure, but the big one to pay attention to is the Kroger v. FTC federal case out of Cincinnati, and what the ramifications of that will be, because that could also have, if that rules in Kroger’s favor, then that case could be cited to challenge other regulators, their internal administrative courts as well.

    JJ: I won’t put words in your mouth, but I’m guessing that you think that independent journalism has a role to play here, in terms of informing the public about these sorts of things?

    FB: Absolutely, absolutely. Independent journalists have been ones that have been spearheading some of the pro–consumer protection type stuff. This stems back all the way from a consumer protection advocate, Ralph Nader, back in the ’70s, all the way to our current system now. Independent media is very important in our current age.

    And if you are interested about the corporate takeover of America and America’s courts, we have a really good podcast out right now called Master Plan that tracks the beginnings, the origins of how money in politics came to be. Like all good political conspiracies, it goes back to Watergate, in the Nixon administration, that involves the milk lobby, that involves Lewis Powell and the infamous Powell Memo, and then goes all the way to Citizens United and the billions of dollars that are being spent on our current election. So if listeners are interested in that, then they can check out Master Plan.

    JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with writer and journalist Freddy Brewster. The piece we’re talking about, on the Kroger/Albertsons merger, can be found at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Freddy Brewster, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    FB: Thank you so much for having me on.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  •  

     

    Lever: Kroger and Albertsons’ Dirty Tricks To Preserve Greedflation

    Lever (8/26/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it—a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And also: If you try to stop us, that’s illegal!

    It could hardly be clearer that the public—consumers and workers—needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com. We hear about that this week on CounterSpin.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.


  • This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hong Kongers fleeing a political crackdown in their home city are the biggest wave of migrants to settle in Britain since the Windrush generation arrived from the Caribbean — and they’re bringing their food with them. 

    While previous generations of Chinese immigrants would gravitate towards Chinatowns in London and Manchester to make and sell dim sum or roast Cantonese duck to local diners, this cohort is bringing an updated menu of Hong Kong food that offers fellow migrants a nostalgic taste of home.

    Instead of being concentrated in inner city areas like their forerunners, the nearly 200,000 holders of the British National Overseas passport are making use of a lifeboat visa program to fan out across the country, from Sutton in Surrey, to Brick Lane and Canary Wharf in East London, to affordable neighborhoods in Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester.

    They’re even growing their own vegetables in their backyards instead of relying on the fresh foods available through chains of Asian foods wholesalers.

    ENG_CHN_FEATURE HKUK FOOD_08212024.2.jpg
    A shop in the U.K. sells Hong Kong-style milk tea. (Cynthia Hung Jones/RFA)

    The Hong Kong food stall with the longest line of waiting diners at a weekend food market in the Canary Wharf financial district in early June 2024 offers salt beef tripe, brisket and tendon braised Hong Kong style, attracting a mixed crowd of expectant customers.

    For some, it’s the taste of home, and for others raised on typical fare from earlier British Hong Kong takeaways, it’s a far cry from sweet and sour chicken balls.

    “Food has always been an important part of the way that immigrant communities construct their identities,” says Hong Kong columnist Carpier Leung. “I have high hopes for the influence that this wave of immigration can have on Hong Kong cuisine.”

    The new wave is already breaking on British shores.

    Over the past two years, more supermarkets have started selling packages of dim sum like har gau shrimp dumplings and char siu pork buns, while Hong Kong-style egg tarts and the city’s signature mix of strong black tea with evaporated milk have started popping up in trendy cafes in areas where Hong Kongers have congregated.

    You can buy street snacks like egg waffles and French toast, Hong Kong diner (or cha chaan teng) style, in Sutton and Manchester these days.

    Dreams of Mong Kok

    Nicole, who founded the Hong Kong nostalgia restaurant HOKO in Brick Lane, said she was drawn to the area because its grittiness and trendiness reminded her of Kowloon’s Mong Kok district. 

    That was home to the “fishball revolution” of 2016 when disgruntled young people — some of them supporters of the city’s independence movement — ripped up paving bricks from the area’s narrow shopping streets and hurled them at police.

    ENG_CHN_FEATURE HKUK FOOD_08212024.3.jpg
    Founder Nicole outside her Hong Kong nostalgia restaurant HOKO in London’s Brick Lane. (Cynthia Hung Jones/RFA)

    The first thing you see when you walk into HOKO is a row of evaporated milk tins used by cha chaan teng, with their distinctive red-and-white packaging. The next is the diner-style layout with high-backed, partitioned seating of the kind where low-paid office workers would rub shoulders with blue-collar workers in search of an affordable breakfast or set lunch deal.

    The tables are stacked with orange melamine chopsticks, with menus in glass cases, throwbacks to Nicole’s memories of these eateries that date back to the 1960s and ‘70s in her home city. Cantopop by Justin Lo is blaring from the speaker system, while posters of Hong Kong bands bedeck the walls.

    “We sell Hong Kong food that tells a story,” she says, listing milk tea, French toast, pork chop, Swiss chicken wings and borscht, all staples of cha chaan teng — food that arrived in a global free port from somewhere else, only to acquire a peculiarly Hong Kong twist, making it quite unlike the original.

    “Swiss chicken wings” was the result of a miscommunication between English-speaking tourists and Hong Kong chefs, who heard “Swiss” when the customer said “sweet,” according to HOKO’s menu. Milk tea was brought in during British colonial times and persisted long after British tea-drinkers had forgotten all about evaporated milk.

    Nicole thinks the latest generation of migrants from Hong Kong is “braver, and truer to ourselves and to Hong Kong cuisine.”

    Telling the difference

    Another Hong Kong eatery in east London, Aquila, has directly imported some of its ingredients from Hong Kong to ensure its dishes remain authentic. 

    “We have to insist on that authenticity so that British people will be able to tell the difference between Hong Kong and China [when it comes to food],” says co-founder Lucas.

    ENG_CHN_FEATURE HKUK FOOD_08212024.4.jpg
    The founders and manager of Hong Kong restaurant Aquila in London’s Leytonstone pose for a photo under the flags of British Hong Kong and the Republic of China (Taiwan) in June 2024. (Cynthia Hung Jones/RFA)

    The first thing you see when you walk into this joint is a political statement — the flags of British Hong Kong and the Republic of China, currently located in democratic Taiwan, alongside photos from the 2019 protest movement against the loss of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms that would land a person in hot water back home, under two national security laws.

    But the founders don’t worry much about annoying China, which took back control of Hong Kong in 1997 and still insists on a territorial claim on Taiwan.

    “I’m running a British business — what is there to be afraid of?” says Lucas. “My grandfather’s business was ruined by the Chinese Communist Party, and my family has been anti-communist ever since.”

    “I hope that customers will ask why these things are on display, so I can tell them the story of Hong Kong,” he adds.

    Chicken hotpot

    Not all food translates easily, however. Hong Kongers have developed a passion in recent years for a local form of chicken hotpot. But Hong Kong migrant and entrepreneur Sam says he doesn’t think the dish has taken off with British diners, who prefer their chicken boneless and not floating around in scalding hot soup.

    Sam started Lulu Chicken Pot, a business selling hotpot soup base, chicken nuggets and spicy sauce, but orders fell off sharply in the second year, and he was unable to pay the #3,000 (US$3,925) a month rent on his kitchen.

    ENG_CHN_FEATURE HKUK FOOD_08212024.5.jpg
    Lulu Chicken Pot founder Sam, out delivering hotpot orders to customers in the U.K. (Cynthia Hung Jones/RFA)

    “It doesn’t matter how many Hong Kongers you have following you on your Facebook page,” he says. “It’s not the same as reaching tens of millions of consumers in the U.K.”

    In New Malden, south London, organic farmer Wong Yu-wing is growing vegetables that Hong Kongers love to eat, but which aren’t widely available in British stores.

    He also partners with the local government to grow his vegetables in public spaces, as well as selling seeds and seedlings to other Hong Kong migrants who want to start their own vegetable plots.

    ENG_CHN_FEATURE HKUK FOOD_08212024.6.jpg
    Organic farmer Wong Yu-wing inspects cabbages he’s growing in New Malden, U.K., June 2024. (Cynthia Hung Jones/RFA)

    But the shadow of China still looms large in many people’s lives, even on British soil.

    The Hong Kong March cultural festival now in its second year has seen a sharp fall in participating businesses, which organizer and former pro-democracy District Councilor Carmen Lau says is likely linked to the chilling effect of bounties and arrest warrants placed by national security police on the heads of overseas democracy activists last year, including several based in the United Kingdom.

    At the same time, funding from the U.K. government has been cut or canceled, leaving several groups representing Hong Kongers in the lurch financially, she says.

    ‘Milk tea alliance’

    Nonetheless, food and drink is still bringing Hong Kongers together.

    In Reading, a town to the west of London, the local Hong Kongers’ group holds a Hong Kong market every month.

    ENG_CHN_FEATURE HKUK FOOD_08212024.7.jpg
    Former democratic District Councilor Carmen Lau (left), one of the organizers of the Hong Kong March cultural festival in the U.K. (Courtesy of Hong Kong March)

    Stallholder and former pro-democracy politician Wilber Lee sells milk tea, while displaying photos from the 2019 protests. His “Double Price For Drinks Only” stall is popular, and customers line up to get their brew.

    It’s as much a political statement as a hot beverage.

    “A lot of people know me and come to support me by buying my milk tea,” Lee says, adding that his stall’s branding is largely aimed at Hong Kongers, and is a humorous nod to the way cha chaan teng diners would charge double for drinks if customers didn’t buy food.

    Lee’s product is deliberately aligned with the “milk tea alliance” of pro-democracy protesters across several East Asian nations, who routinely support each other online and face down the army of pro-Beijing commentators known as the “little pinks.”

    He sees himself as continually engaged in the struggle to make Hong Kong free again.

    “Everything I do now is to prepare for that day,” he says.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cynthia Hung Jones for The Reporter/RFA Mandarin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In a recent paper published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (WHO), we argued that women’s unpaid work needs better recognition through decent time use statistics as well as by counting investments in breastfeeding.

    A gender budgeting perspective on the Australian Breastfeeding Strategy highlights that while successive governments are happy to spend money on consultants and the formula industry, they are less willing to invest in the measures to help women with breastfeeding such as better maternity care, longer paid maternity leave, and full implementation of the Code of Marketing on Breastmilk Substitutes. This has implications for planetary health, as well as human health.

    It is well known that both women and children’s health benefits from breastfeeding. What is less understood is its importance for environmental health. In a recent special issue of the WHO Bulletin on the economics of health for all, we argued that the lack of visibility of unpaid work such as breastfeeding contributes to gender-blind policies on the environment, as well as a misguided view of what is valuable economically.

    A rethink on the global economy and health inequities

    Reflecting on the inequities and failures of global governance on the COVID19 pandemic, the Director-General of the World Health Organization commissioned an all-female team to examine the economics of health for all. The WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All included one of the pioneers of feminist economics, Dame Professor Marilyn Waring, as well as UCL professor Mariana Mazzucato an expert in ‘financialisation’ and investment flows. Dr Tedros called for a ‘rethink of what matters’.

    During the pandemic, gross inequities in health policy responses became apparent. Women who were pregnant or breastfeeding were not included in COVID-19 vaccine research.

    Putting ‘women and children last’ likely harmed their health. Maternity care practices and policies, including in Australia, were poorly aligned with WHO recommendations on breastfeeding during the pandemic emergency.

    The WHO efforts to ensure global equity in access to protections and treatments for COVID19 were also undermined by ‘vaccine protectionism’ as high income countries and pharmaceutical companies prioritised populations in countries while using international investor protection and intellectual property laws to block the equitable sharing of research on COVID19 vaccines and treatments.

    Meanwhile, the pandemic was overlaid on multiple crises including the glacial response to climate change and related issues including escalating problems of malnutrition and food insecurity and antibiotic resistance.

    Maternity care chaos

    Early in the pandemic, WHO issued guidance for health professionals indicating that breastfeeding should be protected in maternity care and mothers and newborns should not be separated. Instead, there were egregious violations of women’s and children’s human rights, as health care protocols ignored this advice to prioritise resources away from maternity care and breastfeeding support. In some locations, caesarean section was mandated, and breastfeeding was not permitted. This resulted in needless distress and disruption for new mothers and newborns.

    Since that time, research has reinforced the value of breastfeeding in strengthening children’s immune systems, and demonstrating its role in protecting against coronavirus disease. In 2022 WHO and UNICEF leaders emphasised that breastfeeding is the first immunisation, following a study demonstrating that more babies were likely to die from lack of breastfeeding than from COVID19.

    While poor data collections mean that the effects of pandemic responses on breastfeeding, infant and child health are not clear, lack of time use data also hinders assessment of the economic burdens of the COVID19 pandemic. Women’s unpaid workloads soared as childcare and schools closed, and healthcare systems came under strain.

    The increased productivity of women juggling these additional roles remains unmeasured and invisible to economic policymakers, who missed the opportunity to ‘rethink what matters’, and instead exhorted the importance of ‘back to work’ and ‘return to normal’.

    Measuring what matters

    At the foundation of measuring what matters is collecting adequate data, and the WHO Council recommendations were built on a call for better time use statistics as the basis for measuring economic burdens and economic productivity. Our proposal for considering breastfeeding investments as a carbon offset is founded in the need for full recognition and appropriate measurement of women’s unpaid work including breastfeeding.

    Although it is well established that excluding mothers’ milk production from measures of food production biases policy priorities, most countries (other than Norway) continue to do so. When breastfeeding declines, the economy, as currently measured, expands, because only commercial baby food sales are counted in GDP. The Mothers Milk Tool developed at ANU with Alive & Thrive Southeast Asia Pacific demonstrates the large magnitude of this omission: if women’s production of milk for babies were counted as economically valuable, its monetary value in Australia would exceed $5 billion a year, compared to less than a billion dollars of commercial milk formula.

    Our proposal also calls for better time use data, so that who does the work provides the foundation for valuing the economy and for more appropriate distribution of income and wealth.

    Investing in what matters – sustainable food systems

    Central to our proposal that investments in enabling breastfeeding should count as a carbon offset is the science on the huge environmental impacts of the global dairy industry, of which commercial milk formula products are part. Only quite recently has it been acknowledged that the global food system, and particularly meat and dairy, is a key contributor to environmental damage, through pressures for land clearing, as well as emissions associated with production, distribution and consumption. Recent discussion of sustainable food systems asks whether impacts on animal welfare should also be part of the equation.

    Research has shown that as much as 11-14 kilograms of greenhouse gases are emitted during the product life cycle of commercial milk formula. This includes during the production of raw milk with huge methane gas production of cows, through the processing, packaging and transportation of powdered milk, and the emissions and waste during the consumption and disposal phases of the product life cycle.

    Globally, production and use of CMF by infants under 6 months results in annual global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of between 5.9 and 7.5 billion kg CO2 eq. and consumes 2,562.5 billion liters of water. If populous countries like China and India were to adopt western feeding practices, the effects on the environment as well as population health would be dire. An infant that is not breastfed generates around a quarter of a tonne of greenhouse gas emissions during the first six months of life, as it requires around 20-21 kilograms of milk powder. Breastfeeding a baby by contrast involves minimal ‘food miles’, even after accounting for ensuring mothers diets are adequate.

    This harm to planetary health and early nutrition is avoidable through investments in better maternity care, such as programs which implement the WHO/UNICEF Ten Steps to Succecsful Bresatfeeding, as well as through longer paid maternity leave. These are well evidenced ways of enabling women to breastfeed. Countries like Brazil have shown that integrated packages of breastfeeding support – including community milk banking replacing use of commercial milk formula – can increase breastfeeding rates at country level.

    The dairy industry is adept at adapting to new challenges, and the growing phenomenon of ‘greenwashing’ is used to convince consumers that technology can fix the problem by feeding cows seaweed in their diets, or using renewable energy in baby formula factories.

    However, this doesn’t help the environment or human health if CMF sales continue to rise. A recent series on breastfeeding in the top medical journal The Lancet documented industry marketing practices which exploit the vulnerabilities and anxieties of new mothers and their families, as well as targeting health professionals  and health facilities – seen in the baby food industry as ‘category entry points’. Another study has demonstrated that more than half of CMF sales in the Asia Pacific region are of ‘toddler formula’, which the WHO has stated is unnecessary and possibly harmful to children’s nutrition and health.

    Researchers from Ireland, a major dairy exporting country, have shown that achieving global nutrition targets for breastfeeding – for 70% of infants to be exclusively breastfed for the first six months, and for 80% to continue breastfeeding to 2 years and beyond – would do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than improving the energy efficiency of CMF production.

    Young mother choosing baby formula for her newborn. Picking different options from the shelf and reading the labels.

    Young mother choosing baby formula for her newborn. (Please note: Stock photo)

    The Paris Agreement on Climate Change

    Global public policy addresses climate change through three policy pillars, mitigation, adaptation and resilience. That is, preventing climate change, getting used to it, and coping with the resulting adversities. Breastfeeding assists all three, through minimising environmental harms, delivering good nutrition and clean fluids and strengthening the immune system, and via its potential to ameliorate the care, nutritional and health vulnerability of infants and young children in emergencies and disasters when usual infrastructure is unavailable. Australia, like other high income countries, has been poorly prepared to protect mothers and babies during such crisis. Ukraine is another tragic example.

    Although progress is glacial and inadequate, global agreements for a ‘clean development mechanism’ including a recent ‘loss and damage fund’ have potential to redistribute global development financing to low and middle income countries to tackle climate change challenges.

    Our proposal is that countries’ investments in breastfeeding, such as through better paid maternity leave, should be eligible for such funding.

    Using the Green Feeding Tool, the impact of such measures on greenhouse gas emissions and water use can be estimated, based on data on infant feeding practices. Maternity care services investments could also contribute. Recognition of the economic and environmental importance of breastfeeding would also help generate improvements in support for women and gender equity.

    The transition to a sustainable food system and health for all must be equitable, including for women. Advancing the proposal for investments to better enable women to breastfeed is one important way that will be achieved.

     

    Picture at top: Nicholas Felix/Adobe Stock

    The post Investing in breastfeeding: Sustainable solutions for global health appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.


  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

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  • This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

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  • Residents in western Myanmar who rely on trade with India said they are experiencing food shortages due to the closure of some border crossings with India amid Myanmar’s civil war.

    People in Chin state, western Sagaing region and northern Rakhine state said their supplies of  rice, cooking oil, salt, fuel and medicine are dwindling because of the trade disruption following the border gate closures.

    Indian authorities cited the need to check the flow of illegal goods from Myanmar as the reason, according to local sources.

    But Reeta Meena, an Indian Embassy diplomat in Yangon, told Radio Free Asia that the Indian government permits movement through designated border crossing points, including ones at Tamu-Moreh, Rikhawdar-Zokhawthar and Zorinpui-Paletwa.

    Any restrictions might have been imposed by Myanmar or local authorities, she told Radio Free Asia.

    Thousands of civilians from Chin state and Sagaing region have fled across the Indian border and into neighboring Mizoram and Manipur states to escape fighting between junta troops and rebel forces following the Myanmar military’s February 2021 coup d’état.

    But those who have stayed behind have struggled to get goods from India amid periodic border closures due to fighting in their areas, while communication blackouts have cut them off from key cities in Myanmar. 

    In April, 2023, India locked the gates to key border crossings with Myanmar’s Chin state after three Indian citizens were killed that February during an intensified junta offensive against rebel forces in the western states. 


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    Myanmar permits legal international trade with India via the two crossings at Tamu-Moreh in Sagaing region and Rikhawdar-Zokhawthar in Chin state.

    The Moreh-Tamu border gate has remained closed on the Indian side since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

    ‘Severe difficulties’

    But the recent closures of other crossings have led to shortages of basic food items, said a Tamu resident.

    “Indian products, such as food and basic consumer goods, are no longer available to local residents living along the border, creating severe difficulties for them,” the resident said. “Job opportunities are scarce, making it increasingly challenging for them to afford basic necessities.”

    Indian authorities announced that the Myanmar-India border gate, which connects Rikhawdar in Chin state with India’s Mizoram state, would be closed from July 25 to Aug. 7, though Myanmar residents say it is unlikely to reopen until Aug. 12.  

    As a result of this closure, prices of goods in Rikhawdar have surged, with people paying twice as much for goods as they did before, Myanmar locals said.

    Since November 2023, Rikhawdar has been under the control of Chin defense forces who oppose Myanmar’s ruling military junta and have jointly established a public administration focused on the India-Myanmar border trade, public security and regional stability.

    A spokesman for the Regional Defense Force-Hualngoram, the other organization involved in setting up the town’s administration, expressed hope that the Mizoram state government would take measures to help locals obtain essential supplies from India.

    “The closure of the bridge, which we rely on for the flow of goods, has made things more difficult,” he said. “We are currently facing a crisis.”

    Because Mizoram residents rely on produce from Myanmar, a prolonged border crossing closure would negatively impact both sides, said Salai Van Sui Sang, deputy director of the Institute of Chin Affairs.

    It also could lead to tensions between residents of Mizoram and their state government, he added.

    Arakan Army

    Some internal trade routes, which run directly between towns in India and western Myanmar, have been cut off because of fighting between junta soldiers and resistance forces in Chin state’s Paletwa and in Rakhine state — areas controlled by the rebel Arakan Army. As a result, Myanmar residents must rely on products from Lawngtlai in Mizoram state.

    But since June 24, the Central Young Lai Association, an influential NGO in Lawngtlai, has banned the export of goods. Though it allowed some items, including basic foodstuffs, to be transported again in July, restrictions on fuel and fertilizer remain in place.

    On Aug. 7, the organization warned it would take action against the transport of prohibited fuel and fertilizer from Lawngtlai, but did not provide specifics.

    Goods transported from Lawngtlai have been banned because the Arakan Army said they were being used to supply junta forces attacking Chin armed groups.

    Translated by Kalyar Lwin for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • So far this year, the city of Boston has recorded a grand total of 8 homicides while the similarly populated city of Washington D.C has had 110. Professor Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction explains what Boston is doing right. Plus, noted nutrition expert, Michael Jacobson reveals his latest project, The National Food Museum, to promote critical thinking about food’s impact on health, the environment, farm animal welfare, social equity, global and domestic hunger, and how the food industry and politics affect what we eat.

    Thomas Abt is the founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction (VRC) and an associate research professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Professor Abt is the author of “Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets” His work is cited in academic journals and featured in major media outlets, both print and video. His TED talk on community violence has been viewed more than 200,000 times.

    Here’s the important thing to remember. It’s not just about police, and it can’t just be about police… It’s also important to have balance… So, while you’re engaging these high-risk individuals, these people who are most likely to shoot or be shot, you need to back up those warnings of enforcement with offers of support and services. And that’s something that’s happening in Boston.

    Thomas Abt

    When you look at correlations between the restrictiveness of state laws and about how many guns there are, it’s about the access to guns. And when access to guns is particularly easy, that’s when you have higher rates of violence. Now, in D.C. they have restrictive gun laws, but they’re closer to states that have much more permissive laws, particularly in the South. And no city is an island.

    Thomas Abt

    While you’re hearing a lot of fear mongering out there about violent crime. The truth is that we have erased that massive surge that happened during the pandemic. And that’s very good news.

    Thomas Abt

    Michael Jacobson holds a PhD. in microbiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he co-founded and then led the Center for Science in the Public Interest for four decades. Dr. Jacobson is the author of “Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet.” And he is the founder of the National Food Museum.

    Some of the exhibits will focus on how healthier diets could improve our health, how better farming techniques could improve the climate. And there’s that intersection between climate and health. I thought of making a cow a symbol for the museum. Or maybe an anti-symbol, because meat-eating is a major contributor to disease; and it’s a major contributor to climate change and other environmental issues and animal welfare issues, of course. The museum will get into those.

    Michael Jacobson

    There are so many fascinating issues related to food. You know, I think about the history of the human diet, going back to the Stone Age, say 10 or 12 ,000 years ago, and the future of the human diet. It would be wonderful to have an exhibit, showing how diet has changed and may well change in the next 75 years, when many kids just growing up will still be alive.

    Michael Jacobson

    And in addition to all the wonderful improvements that you’re going to exhibit and inform people about once this museum gets underway, you want people to enjoy it and have fun. That’s what you’ve always been about, Mike.

    Ralph Nader

    In Case You Haven’t Heard with Franceso DeSantis

    News 8/7/24

    1. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz who presided over the passage of an impressive list of progressive priorities in Minnesota, arrayed a broad coalition of Democratic leaders behind his bid for the VP slot, including organized labor, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. His key rival, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, faced increasing scrutiny over his support for anti-public school vouchers, his history of anti-Palestinian racism, and involvement with the shady cover-up in the death of Ellen Greenberg. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler praised the selection of Walz, writing in a statement “By selecting Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris chose a principled fighter and labor champion who will stand up for working people and strengthen this historic ticket.”

    2. In the UK, the new Labour government continues sending mixed signals on their Middle East policy. Last Friday, the Daily Mail reported the government had implemented a “secret arms boycott,” of Israel, supposedly “freez[ing] applications for new weapons export licences.” Yet on Monday, the Middle East Eye reported that the government has denied this report and maintains that “there has been ‘no change’ in its approach to export licences.” The Guardian adds “Although [British] military exports to Israel were only estimated at £18.2m last year, an arms embargo is widely perceived as an appropriate and powerful means to register disapproval of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians.”

    3. The Canary, a left-wing British new outlet, reports “During the early hours of the morning of Tuesday 6 August, six Palestine Action activists were arrested after they broke inside and damaged weaponry inside the highly secured Bristol manufacturing hub of Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems.” According to this report, the group “used a prison van to smash through the outer perimeter and the roller shutters into the building,” and “Once…inside, they began damaging…machinery and Israeli quadcopter drones.” As the Canary notes, “Elbit System…supplies up to 85% of Israel’s military drones and land-based equipment.” Palestine Action issued a statement on this protest, writing “As a party to the Genocide Convention, Britain has a responsibility to prevent the occurrence of genocide. When our government fails to abide by their legal and moral obligations, it’s the responsibility of ordinary people to take direct action.”

    4. Semafor reports “In January, The Wall Street Journal made an explosive claim: Quoting ‘intelligence reports,’ the paper reported that not only had 12 members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, taken part in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but 10% of the relief agency’s 12,000 workers in Gaza had ties to militant groups.” Yet, “months later, the paper’s top editor overseeing standards privately made an admission: The paper didn’t know — and still doesn’t know —whether the allegation, based on Israeli intelligence reports, was true.” As Semafor notes, the fact that this story was “based on information [the paper] could not verify is a startling acknowledgment, and calls into question the validity of the claims.” This unconfirmed story resulted in more than a dozen nations – among them the US, the UK, and Germany – freezing their funding for UNRWA, totaling $450 million.

    5. Federal News Network reports “The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved… funding the Defense Department at $852.2 billion, a 3.3% increase over fiscal [year] 2024.” In other words, another year, another $10 billion for the Pentagon. In 2023, the Department of Defense failed its sixth audit in a row, per Reuters.

    In more positive news, this has been a banner week for consumer protection action at the federal level.

    6. On August 2nd, the FTC reported “On behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice sued video-sharing platform TikTok, its parent company ByteDance, as well as its affiliated companies, with flagrantly violating a children’s privacy law—the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act—and also alleged they infringed an existing FTC 2019 consent order against TikTok for violating COPPA.” Specifically, “The complaint alleges defendants failed to comply with the COPPA requirement to notify and obtain parental consent before collecting and using personal information from children under the age of 13.” FTC Chair Lina Khan is quoted saying “TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country…The FTC will continue to use the full scope of its authorities to protect children online—especially as firms deploy increasingly sophisticated digital tools to surveil kids and profit from their data.”

    7. On August 1st, the Consumer Product Safety Commission ruled that online retail titan Amazon qualifies as a “distributor” and “therefore bears a legal responsibility for recalling dangerous products and informing customers and the public,” per NPR. This report continues to say this decision “stems from a lawsuit filed by the CPSC against Amazon in 2021 over a slew of [unsafe] products offered on the retailer’s platform… [including] children’s sleepwear that didn’t meet federal flammability standards, carbon monoxide detectors that failed to detect carbon monoxide and sound their alarms, and hair dryers that didn’t protect against electrocution when immersed in water. Amazon sold more than 418,000 units between 2018 and 2021.” Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director at U.S. PIRG is quoted saying “This order is about making sure Amazon is just as accountable as every other company that sells products to consumers who often think that if something is for sale, it must be safe.”

    8. AP reports “Coca-Cola…said Friday it will pay $6 billion in back taxes and interest to the Internal Revenue Service while it appeals a final federal tax court decision in a case dating back 17 years.” This lawsuit began in 2015 and centered around how the beverage giant “calculate[s] U.S. income based on profits amounting to more than $9 billion from foreign licensees and affiliates.” The company has been enjoying increased profitability this quarter, reportedly “boosted by product price increases.”

    9. “The D.C. attorney general is suing online ticket provider StubHub for allegedly adding surprise fees onto a needlessly long checkout process in violation of local consumer protection laws,” the Washington Post reports. Specifically, this suit alleges “StubHub deceives customers by offering them an incomplete price at first, then making them go through a purchase process that can involve more than 12 pages — with a timer to impart a sense of urgency — and adding extra fees.” The office of Brian Schwalb, the D.C. AG, alleges StubHub has “[extracted] an estimated $118 million in hidden fees,” from District consumers, using “drip pricing” – described by the FTC as “a pricing technique in which firms advertise only part of a product’s price and reveal other charges later as the customer goes through the buying process.” This model is illegal under the District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act.

    10. Finally, “The Justice Department and several dozen state attorneys general won a sweeping victory against Google Monday as a federal judge ruled that the search giant illegally monopolized the online search and advertising markets over the past decade,” per POLITICO. In a lengthy ruling U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google “locked up some 90 percent of the internet search market through a partnership with Apple to be the default search provider in its Safari web browser, alongside similar agreements with handset makers and mobile carriers such Samsung and Verizon. Mehta also found that Google disadvantaged Microsoft in the market for ads displayed next to search results, allowing it to illegally dominate that market as well.” Judge Mehta further stated that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Attorney General Merrick Garland commented “This victory against Google is a historic win for the American people…No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”

    This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.



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    This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

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  • Food and medicine shortages in two townships in Myanmar’s Chin state have worsened in the six months since the Arakan Army took control, causing most residents to leave the area, aid workers and residents said.

    The ethnic rebel Arakan Army, or AA, drove junta forces out of Paletwa and Samee townships on Jan. 14

    A Paletwa resident, who requested not to be named for security reasons, told Radio Free Asia that people in the township’s urban area have been trading pigs and cattle for rice and other consumer goods over the last several months.

    “People living in the urban areas can’t travel at all,” he said. “They have no salt, cooking oil or fish paste. They are facing many difficulties in traveling and living.”

    The AA has been fighting the military junta as it seeks self-determination for the Buddhist ethnic Rakhine population in western Myanmar.

    ENG_BUR_CHIN SHORTAGES_07302024_003.jpg
    Bags of rice are donated to Kaki Swar Refugee Camp in Palatwa township, June 19, 2024. (Paletwa IDPs and Humanitarian Supporting via Facebook)

    In Paletwa, ethnic Chin residents have had to seek permission from the AA to travel from their homes to their farms in the township’s rural areas, residents told RFA. That has created difficulties for residents trying to make a living, they said.

    RFA was unable to contact AA spokesperson Khaing Thukha for comment on the shortages. 

    For the last seven years, Paletwa and Samee township residents have been importing fuel and basic consumer goods from India’s Mizoram state through the Kaladan River, which flows into Myanmar.

    But last month, an influential Indian civil society organization – the Central Young Lai Association – called for a halt to the transport of goods from Mizoram state to AA-controlled areas in Chin state, citing the AA’s treatment of ethnic Chin people.

    That has caused a severe shortage of fuel and basic foodstuffs in northern Rakhine state and in some areas of Chin state, residents said.

    Since January, many residents have since taken refuge in Mizoram state, while others have moved through neighboring Rakhine state to Myanmar’s commercial capital, Yangon.

    Due to unstable phone lines and internet communication, the exact number of residents left in Paletwa and Samee townships was unknown. But relief workers said only one-third of residents are still living in the urban areas of the two townships.

    Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Matt Reed.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

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  • In Pioneer Plaza, in Dallas’ vibrant downtown, the city’s famous “Cattle Drive” sculpture sits with embarrassed silence. As the installation’s 40 bronze steer baked in the scorching summer sun, PETA contacted a Dallas official to breathe new life into the installation.

    Why Dallas’ ‘Cattle Drive’ Needs an Update

    “Cattle Drive” depicts a scene from the mid- to late 1800s, when humans forced Longhorn cows on long journeys to Midwestern feedlots—locations hundreds of miles from their homes, where other people would kill them for their flesh.

    These destination feedlots were the precursor to today’s American farms, which now kill over 33 million cows yearly for food. They stain the country, poison the land, and jeopardize our collective future on Earth.

    The meat and dairy industries not only kill cows but also produce saturated fat– and cholesterol-laden foods and belch methane, which is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.

    As Texas’ infrastructure buckles under the effects of the climate emergency, many agree: “Cattle Drive” doesn’t deserve state pride!

    PETA’s Answer to ‘Cattle Drive’ Reflects Reality

    But how can the sculpture change course with so many statues already in place? PETA has the answer.

    We wrote to Dallas’ director of the Office of Arts & Culture, Martine Elyse Philippe, asking her to contract an artist to design PETA’s new pro-vegan concept piece: a statue of a mother cow nuzzling her calf with the message “Meat and Dairy Drive Us All to Our Deaths. Go Vegan.”

    photorealistic illustration of bronze statue of mother cow nuzzling her calf, standing on rocks. engraved text on the base reads "meat and dairy drive us all to our deaths. go vegan"
    A mock-up of PETA’s suggested design. Credit: PETA

    This addition to “Cattle Drive” would introduce a counterpoint to the relic. Instead of resigning ourselves to a future in which humans continue to inflict the worst cruelty on cows just for a taste of their flesh and bodily fluids, the installation would affirm the power that every visitor has to end the entrenched systems that harm animals and humans alike.

    We also see this becoming a windfall for tourism in Dallas. The city is on the map as a vegan destination, and our proposed sculpture would give those who don’t consume animal-derived products for ethical, environmental, or other reasons something to visit in Dallas that honors cows, rather than glorifying their suffering.

    Going Vegan Saves Lives

    Every vegan spares the lives of nearly 200 animals—including cows—every year. They reduce their own risk of suffering from cancer, heart disease, strokes, and diabetes, and they resist the industry players who insist on charging toward certain climate doom.

    Are you looking to make the switch? PETA’s free vegan starter kit is invaluable, with recipes, guides, and other tips and tricks for being vegan.

    The post Helping the Dallas ‘Cattle Drive’ Reflect Reality appeared first on PETA.

    This post was originally published on Animal Rights and Campaign News | PETA.

  • Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an increasingly vital source of food to feed her family. 

    It also makes her think of Guatemala, where she grew up surrounded by plants. “It reminds me of working the earth there,” Morales said in Spanish. 

    Tending to the peaceful community garden is a far cry from the harvesting Morales does for her livelihood. Ever since moving to the United States 16 years ago, Morales has been a farmworker at local nurseries and farms. She takes seasonal jobs that allow her the flexibility and income to care for her five children, who range from 18 months to 15 years old. 

    This year, she picked blueberries until the season ended in May, earning $1 for every pound she gathered. On a good day, she earned about two-thirds of the state’s minimum hourly wage of $12. For that, Morales toiled in brutal heat, with little in the way of protection from the sun, pesticides, or herbicides. With scant water available, the risk of dehydration or heat stroke was never far from her mind. But these are the sorts of things she must endure to ensure her family is fed. “I don’t really have many options,” she said. 

    Now, she’s grappling with rising food prices, a burden that isn’t relieved by state or federal safety nets. Her husband works as a roofer, but as climate change diminishes crop yields and intensifies extreme weather, there’s been less work for the two of them. They have struggled to cover the rent, let alone the family’s ballooning grocery bill. “It’s hard,” she said. “It’s really, really hot … the heat is increasing, but the salaries aren’t.” The Campesinos’ Garden helps fill in the gap between her wages and the cost of food.

    A woman in a red shirt hoes the ground in an urban garden
    Rosa Morales, left, and Amadely Roblero, right, work in the Apopka garden in their free time. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist

    Her story highlights a hidden but mounting crisis: The very people who ensure the rest of the country has food to eat are going hungry. Although no one can say for sure how many farmworkers are food insecure (local studies suggest it ranges from 52 to 82 percent), advocates are sure the number is climbing, driven in no small part by climate change

    The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019. Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.

    “When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. 

    Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.

    There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the question for the roughly 40 percent of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.

    “Even though [farmworkers] are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”

    A migrant worker tends to farmland in Homestead, Florida, in 2023. Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images

    Historically, hunger rates among farmworkers, as with other low-income communities, have been at their worst during the winter due to the inherent seasonality of a job that revolves around growing seasons. But climate change and inflation have made food insecurity a growing, year-round problem

    In September, torrential rain caused heavy flooding across western Massachusetts. The inundation decimated farmland already ravaged by a series of storms. “It impacted people’s ability to make money and then be able to support their families,” Claudia Rosales said in Spanish. “People do not have access to basic food.” 

    As executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Rosales fights to expand protections for farmworkers, a community she knows intimately. After immigrating from El Salvador, she spent six years working in vegetable farms, flower nurseries, and tobacco fields across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and knows what it’s like to experience food insecurity. She also understands how other exploitative conditions, such as a lack of protective gear or accessible bathrooms, can add to the stress of simply trying to feed a family. Rosales remembers how, when her kids got sick, she was afraid she’d get fired if she took them to the doctor instead of going to work. (Employers harassed her and threatened to deport her if she tried to do anything about it, she said.) The need to put food on the table left her feeling like she had no choice but to tolerate the abuse. 

    “I know what it’s like, how much my people suffer,” said Rosales. “We’re not recognized as essential … but without us, there would not be food on the tables across this country.”

    A young girl carries a red sign that says 'We FEED You'
    Supporters of farmworkers march against anti-immigrant policies in the agricultural town of Delano, California, in 2017. Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images

    The floodwaters have long since receded and many farms are once again producing crops, but labor advocates like Rosales say the region’s farmworkers still have not recovered. Federal and state disaster assistance helps those with damaged homes, businesses, or personal property, but does not typically support workers. Under federal law, if agricultural workers with a temporary visa lose their job when a flood or storm wipes out a harvest, they are owed up to 75 percent of the wages they were entitled to before the disaster, alongside other expenses. They aren’t always paid, however. “Last year, there were emergency funds because of the flooding here in Massachusetts that never actually made it to the pockets of workers,” Rosales said. 

    The heat wave that recently scorched parts of Massachusetts likely reduced worker productivity and is poised to trigger more crop loss, further limiting workers’ ability to make ends meet. “Climate-related events impact people economically, and so that then means limited access to food and being able to afford basic needs,” said Rosales, forcing workers to make difficult decisions on what they spend their money on — and what they don’t.

    The impossible choice between buying food or paying other bills is something that social scientists have been studying for years. Research has shown, for example, that low-income families often buy less food during cold weather to keep the heat on. But climate change has given rise to a new area to examine: how extreme heat can trigger caloric and nutritional deficits. A 2023 study of 150 countries revealed that unusually hot weather can, within days, create higher risks of food insecurity by limiting the ability to earn enough money to pay for groceries. 

    It’s a trend Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior policy analyst studying economic inequities at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, is seeing escalate nationwide, particularly as utility bills surge. “Families are definitely having to grapple with ‘What am I going to pay for?’” she said. “People, at the end of the month, are not eating as much, having makeshift meals, and not what we consider a full meal.” Federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are designed to help at times like these. More than 41 million people nationwide rely on the monthly grocery stipends, which are based on income, family size, and some expenses. But one national survey of nearly 3,700 farmworkers found just 12.2 percent used SNAP. Many farmworkers and migrant workers do not qualify because of their immigration status, and those who do often hesitate to use the program out of fear that enrolling could jeopardize their status. Even workers with temporary legal status like a working visa, or those considered a “qualified immigrant,” typically must wait five years before they can begin receiving SNAP benefits. Just six states provide nutrition assistance to populations, like undocumented farmworkers, ineligible for the federal program.

    two workers in neon vest move boxes of food from a large stack
    Los Angeles Food Bank workers in California prepare boxes of food for distribution to people facing economic or food insecurity during the COVID pandemic in August 2020. Mario Tama / Getty Images

    The expiration of COVID-era benefit programs, surging food costs, and international conflicts last year forced millions more Americans into a state of food insecurity, but no one can say just how many are farmworkers. That’s because such data is almost nonexistent — even though the Agriculture Department tracks annual national statistics on the issue. Lisa Ramirez, the director of the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, acknowledged that the lack of data on hunger rates for farmworkers should be addressed on a federal level and said there is a “desire” to do something about it internally. But she didn’t clarify what specifically is being done. “We know that food insecurity is a problem,” said Ramirez, who is a former farmworker herself. “I wouldn’t be able to point to statistics directly, because I don’t have [that] data.” 

    Without that insight, little progress can be made to address the crisis, leaving the bulk of the problem to be tackled by labor and hunger relief organizations nationwide.

    “My guess is it would be the lack of interest or will — sort of like a willful ignorance — to better understand and protect these populations,” said social scientist Miranda Carver Martin, who studies food justice and farmworkers at the University of Florida. “Part of it is just a lack of awareness on the part of the general public about the conditions that farmworkers are actually working in. And that correlates to a lack of existing interest or resources available to build an evidence base that reflects those concerns.”

    The lack of empirical information prevented Martin and her colleagues Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan from creating a tool that would identify the vulnerabilities local farmworkers experience before and after a disaster. “What we’ve found is that the tool that we dreamed of, that would sort of comprehensively provide all this data and mapping, is not feasible right now, given the dearth of data,” she noted.

    However, Martin and her colleagues did find, in a forthcoming report she shared with Grist, that language barriers often keep farmworkers from getting aid after an extreme weather event. Examining the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, they found cases of farmworkers in Florida trying, and failing, to get food at emergency stations because so many workers spoke Spanish and instructions were written only in English. She suspects the same impediments may hinder post-disaster hunger relief efforts nationwide.

    Martin also believes there is too little focus on the issue, in part because some politicians demonize immigrants and the agriculture industry depends upon cheap labor. It is easier “to pretend that these populations don’t exist,” she said. “These inequities need to be addressed at the federal level. Farmworkers are human beings, and our society is treating them like they’re not.”

    A sign with a painted milk carton on it and plants growing
    A hand-painted sign at the Apopka garden highlights the poor conditions farmworkers say they experience in the fields, despite growing the food that helps to feed the nation’s population. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist

    Tackling hunger has emerged as one of the biggest priorities for the Pioneer Valley Workers Center that Claudia Rosales leads. Her team feeds farmworker families in Massachusetts through La Despensa del Pueblo, a food pantry that distributes food to roughly 780 people each month.

    The nonprofit launched the pantry in the winter of 2017. When the pandemic struck, it rapidly evolved from a makeshift food bank into a larger operation. But the program ran out of money last month when a key state grant expired, sharply curtailing the amount of food it can distribute. The growing need to feed people also has limited the organization’s ability to focus on its primary goal of community organizing. Rosales wants to see the food bank give way to a more entrepreneurial model that offers farmworkers greater autonomy. 

    “For the long term, I’d like to create our own network of cooperatives owned by immigrants, where people can go and grow and harvest their own food and products and really have access to producing their own food and then selling their food to folks within the network,” she said. 

    Mónica Ramírez, founder of the national advocacy organization Justice for Migrant Women, is developing something very much like that in Ohio. Ramírez herself hails from a farmworker family. “Both of my parents started working in the fields as children,” she said. “My dad was eight, my mom was five.” Growing up in rural Ohio, Ramírez remembers visiting the one-room shack her father lived in while picking cotton in Mississippi, and spending time with her grandparents who would “pile on a truck” each year and drive from Texas to Ohio to harvest tomatoes and cucumbers all summer. 

    The challenges the Ramírez family faced then persist for others today. Food security has grown so tenuous for farmworkers in Fremont, Ohio, where Justice for Migrant Women is based, that the organization has gone beyond collaborating with organizations like Feeding America to design its own hyperlocal food system. These hunger relief efforts are focused on women in the community, who Ramírez says usually face the biggest burdens when a household does not have enough money for food.

    Migrant women, she said, “bear the stress of economic insecurity and food insecurity, because they are the ones who are organizing their families and making sure their families have food in the house.”

    Later this month, Ramírez and her team will launch a pilot program out of their office that mimics a farmers market — one in which farmworkers and migrant workers will be encouraged to pick up food provided by a local farmer, at no charge. That allows those visiting the food bank to feel empowered by choice instead of being handed a box with preselected goods, and they hope it will alleviate hunger in a way that preserves a sense of agency for families in need.

    Although federal lawmakers have begun at least considering protecting workers from heat exposure and regulators are making progress on a national heat standard, so far there’s been no targeted legislative or regulatory effort to address food insecurity among farmworkers. 

    In fact, legislators may be on the verge of making things worse.

    In May, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a draft farm bill that would gut SNAP and do little to promote food security. It also would bar state and local governments from adopting farmworker protection standards regulating agricultural production and pesticide use, echoing legislation Florida recently passed. The inclusion of such a provision is “disappointing,” said DeShawn Blanding, a senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. He hopes to see the version that eventually emerges from the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it remains stalled, incorporate several other proposed bills aimed at protecting farmworkers and providing a measure of food security.

    Those include the Voice for Farm Workers Act, which would shore up funding for several established farmworker support initiatives and expand resources for the Agriculture Department’s farmworker coordinator. This position was created to pinpoint challenges faced by farmworkers and connect them with federal resources, but it has not been “adequately funded and sustained,” according to a 2023 USDA Equity Commission report. Another bill would create an office within the Agriculture Department to act as a liaison to farm and food workers.
    These bills, introduced by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, would give lawmakers and policymakers greater visibility into the needs and experiences of farmworkers. But the greatest benefit could come from a third proposal Padilla reintroduced, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act. It would reform the 1938 law that governs the minimum wage and overtime policies for farmworkers while exempting them from labor protections.

    An aerial shot of farmworkers picking strawberries from rows of plants
    Migrant workers pick strawberries south of San Francisco in April. Visions of America / Joe Sohm / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    “As food prices increase, low-income workers are facing greater rates of food insecurity,” Padilla told Grist. “But roughly half of our nation’s farmworkers are undocumented and unable to access these benefits.” He’d like to see an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million essential workers, including farmworkers, who lack access to permanent legal status and social safety benefits. “More can be done to address rising food insecurity rates for farmworkers.”

    Still, none of these bills squarely addresses farmworker hunger. Without a concerted approach, these efforts, though important, kind of miss the point, Mónica Ramírez said. 

    “I just don’t think there’s been a fine point on this issue with food and farmworkers,” she said. “To me it’s kind of ironic. You would think that would be a starting point. What will it take to make sure that the people who are feeding us, who literally sustain us, are not themselves starving?”


    For 68-year-old Jesús Morales, the Campesinos’ Garden in Apopka is a second home. Drawing on his background studying alternative medicine in Jalisco, Mexico, he’s been helping tend the land for the last three years. He particularly likes growing and harvesting moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments. Regular visitors know him as the “plant doctor.” 

    “Look around. This is the gift of God,” Morales said in Spanish. “This is a meadow of hospitals, a meadow of medicines. Everything that God has given us for our health and well-being and for our happiness is here, and that’s the most important thing that we have here.”

    A man cradles a small plant while standing in a community garden
    Jesús Morales views plants like moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments, as “the gift of God.” Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist

    He came across the headquarters of the state farmworker organization when it hosted free English classes, then learned about its garden. Although it started a decade ago, its purpose has expanded over the years to become a source of food security and sovereignty for local farmworkers. 

    The half-acre garden teems with a staggering assortment of produce. Tomatoes, lemons, jalapeños. Nearby trees offer dragonfruit and limes, and there’s even a smattering of papaya plants. The air is thick with the smell of freshly dug soil and hints of herbs like mint and rosemary. Two compost piles sit side by side, and a greenhouse bursts with still more produce. Anyone who visits during bi-monthly public gardening days is encouraged to plant their own seeds and take home anything they care to harvest. 

    “The people who come to our community garden, they take buckets with them when they can,” said Ernesto Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida who oversees the garden. “These are families with six kids, and they work poverty wages. … They love working the land and they love being out there, but food is a huge incentive for them, too.”

    A man in a purple shirt kneels in a garden with tall plants
    Ernesto Ruiz kneels in the Farmworker Association of Florida’s garden in Apopka, which he oversees. He opens the site twice a month to people living nearby, who are encouraged to take home anything they care to harvest. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist

    Throughout the week, the nonprofit distributes what Ruiz harvests. The produce it so readily shares is supplemented by regular donations from local supermarkets, which Ruiz often distributes himself.

    But some of the same factors driving farmworkers to hunger have begun to encroach on the garden. Blistering summer heat and earlier, warmer springs have wiped out crops, including several plots of tomatoes, peppers, and cantaloupes. “A lot of plants are dying because it’s so hot, and we’re not getting rains,” said Ruiz. The garden could also use new equipment — the irrigation system is manual while the weed whacker is third-rate, often swapped out for a machete — and funding to hire another person to help Ruiz increase the amount of food grown and expand when the garden is open to the public.

    Demand is rising, and with it, pressure to deliver. Federal legislation addressing the low wages that lead to hunger for many farmworkers across the country is a big part of the solution, but so are community-based initiatives like the Campesinos’ Garden, according to Ruiz. “You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s always the right thing to feed somebody. Always.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The people who feed America are going hungry on Jul 17, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of “forever chemicals” in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows. The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In an era of retrenchment in social policy, food assistance is becoming more generous and inclusive. But Republican politicians are attempting to gut one of the most popular programs: free school lunch.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

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    Chicago Sun-Times article

    Chicago Sun-Times (4/8/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said.  Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particularly in the light of hostility toward efforts to provide those workers a livable basic wage.

    Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. And that’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.” And often lead with customers, like one cited in a recent piece in Bon Appetit, who proudly states that he only tips 10%, half today’s norm, because it’s what he’s always done, and “if servers want more, then they should put the same effort in that I took to earn that money.”

    As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.

    Transcript: ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of child labor.

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Kennedy Smith about the proliferation and impact of chain dollar stores for the June 14, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. 

    Dollar General Overcharges Customers

    As the American Prospect (1/19/24) reports, Dollar General has also been fined by New York and sued by Ohio and Missouri for business practices that harm consumers.

    Janine Jackson: Some listeners may have seen the story of Dollar General stores in Missouri being caught cheating customers by listing one price on the shelf, then charging a higher price at checkout. It’s a crummy thing to do to folks just trying to meet household needs. And yet it’s just one of many harms dollar stores—some call them deal destinations—are doing to communities across the country. What’s the nature of the problem, and what can we do about it? 

    Our guest has been tracking the various impacts of chain dollar stores and their proliferation, as well as what can happen when communities and policymakers fight back. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She joins us now by phone from Arlington, Virginia. Welcome to Counterspin, Kennedy Smith.

    Kennedy Smith: Thank you.

    JJ: Well, dollar stores are sort of like fancy restaurants. If they aren’t part of your life, you might not even physically notice them. But they’ve been proliferating wildly in recent years. In 2021, as the Institute’s report, “The Dollar Store Invasion,” begins, nearly half of new stores that opened in the US were chain dollar stores, a degree of momentum with no parallel in the history of the retail industry. 

    Now, I want to talk through specific problems, but could you maybe start by talking about where these stores are and what’s giving rise to them, which connects directly to what they do?

    KS: Basically, they are everywhere. They are in 48 states now. They haven’t quite made the leap yet to Hawaii and Alaska, but they began—the two major chains, Dollar General, which is headquartered in Tennessee, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, which is now in Virginia Beach, Virginia—began by radiating out from their headquarters. And so we see heavy concentrations of them sort of in the east and the southeast. They are now marching across the country and entering all kinds of markets. 

    And they have slightly different profiles. Dollar General tends to be a little more rural. They tend to go into smaller rural communities. Dollar Tree tends to be more suburban, and Family Dollar tends to be located primarily in urban neighborhoods

    And they are being fueled by a variety of factors, including consolidation in the grocery industry and people’s desire to find more affordable food and products in general are driving people to believe that dollar stores are offering them a better value. 

    And in fact, that’s one of the tricks that the dollar stores play on people, is that they actually are getting poor value and usually paying more in a per ounce or per pound basis than they might be if they were shopping at a traditional, independently owned grocery store or hardware store or office supply store, whatever it might be.

    JJ: It sounds like they’re filling a need, like they’re reaching to an overlooked group of people. And it reminds me a little of check-cashing stores, where folks who are oppressed economically in terms of their wages, so they don’t get to bank in a regular way, and then these fill-in spots show up and it’s perverse, you know. 

    But it’s also just not how a lot of folks think things work. They see these things, oh, these are cheap stores. These are for folks who can’t afford as much as, you know, maybe some others. And this is filling their need. That’s exactly what it’s not doing

    So let’s start on this “17 problems” that you engage in a pullout piece of the Institute’s work on this. What are some of the big things you lift up as the harmful impacts?

    17 Problems report

    ILSR’s report on dollar store impacts

    KS: Well, I should mention, to begin, that these are 17 of the problems that we hear mentioned most frequently, but there are plenty of others. And there are slight variations around the country. For example, in areas of the country that are susceptible to flooding and to hurricanes, there’s a lot more concern about the environmental impact of these stores and what it might mean in terms of stormwater runoff, because one of the problems with dollar stores in general is that they tend to have a very thin operating model. They’re thinly staffed. They look for inexpensive land. They build cheap buildings if they’re building new buildings. And so they’re not likely to want to afford to put in stormwater retention basins and things like that. So there’s some regional variations. 

    But in general, the things that we find to be the biggest problems are, one, their economic impact on the community, and two, their sort of social impact on a community. In terms of the economy, they are a direct threat to independent grocery stores. And there are a number of studies now that have come out that have looked at what that impact is. 

    There’s one that the USDA did last year, which found that basically grocery store sales will decline by 10 percent when a dollar store enters the market. There was one that was done by the University of Toronto and UCLA in 2022 that found after looking at 800-some dollar stores, that when you have three dollar stores within a two mile radius of one another, they’re likely to kill a grocery store that’s there. 

    And that has a huge impact on a community because grocery stores are really community anchors in many ways and are responsible for providing their community members with healthy food as opposed to the sort of overly preserved things that you’re likely to get at a dollar store, like a box of macaroni and cheese or a box of sugary cereal or something like that. When a community loses its grocery store, it can be devastating. 

    And the same thing can be true for some of the other categories, industry categories on which dollar stores tend to compete, like hardware and like office supplies and school supplies. Those are important anchor businesses for communities that people don’t want to lose. 

    On the sort of social side of things, there are a number of problems and probably first and foremost is crime. Because they are so thinly staffed, dollar stores are easy targets for robberies. It’s very easy for someone to come in and just reach into the cash register, grab cash and leave. And communities complain about this all the time. I have literally hundreds of news articles that I’ve clipped about dollar store crime. 

    They also have poor labor practices. They pay their workers less than the independently owned grocery stores that they’re threatening. They tend to promote workers to assistant manager relatively quickly, which means that they’re then exempt from overtime, and they make them work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They’ve been sued several times, both of the major chains, successfully by groups of workers or former workers for wage theft for exactly that. 

    There are other things, too. One of the things that we have observed and a researcher actually at the University of Georgia in the Geography Department has reported on and written about is that they tend to target black and brown neighborhoods. Dollar General, for example, 79 percent of its stores tend to be located in majority minority neighborhoods. And we think this is a little bit parasitic. And we also think that they’re looking for places where the community is likely not to have as much influence at City Hall as somebody in another neighborhood. And we think that’s just despicable.

    JJ: Well, if I could just bring you back to that economic impact for a second, because it’s not that they are able to deliver better things cheaper, just to spell that out. That’s not what they’re doing.

    Price of chicken, Dollar General vs. Walmart vs. Local

    A More Perfect Union investigation found that Dollar General frequently charges more than its competitors for staple goods but “masks the high cost from consumers by stocking smaller pack sizes.”

    KS: Correct. No, they’re selling similar products, but the packaging that they’ll sell them in tends to be smaller. And therefore, on an ounce-by-ounce basis, we find that the products are often actually more expensive for consumers to buy. It’s a practice called “shrinkflation.” There are a couple of other names that it goes by—”cheater sizes.”

    JJ: So it’s not, well, they just build a better mousetrap. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not what’s going on.

    KS: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that you mention capitalism because in communities that are where a dollar store has been proposed to be built and the community kind of comes out and opposes it, the people who tend to support the idea of the dollar store coming in tend to say, well, that’s just capitalism. That’s just free market economics.

    It isn’t. Free market economics are based on having a level playing field. And that’s why all of our major antitrust laws were developed a century ago, because we wanted for small businesses to be able to compete on the same playing field as bigger businesses. One of the things that dollar store chains often do is that they will go to their suppliers, their wholesalers, and say, we want you to offer this product to us, but not offer it to our competitors, do not offer it to grocery stores. Or we want you to make a special size for us of a package that no one else can get. And we can price it the way we want. 

    Those are blatant violations of federal antitrust laws. And I think that on a federal level, we need to begin paying attention to that. And the same thing at the state level, while communities themselves are doing what they can to fight dollars for proliferation at the local level.

    JJ: OK, I don’t shop at dollar stores. I’m just a taxpayer. Why should I care about the issue of dollar store proliferation as a taxpayer?

    KS: Well, I think there are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons I would think as a taxpayer is that tax revenue that would normally accrue to the community, and wages that would normally accrue to the community, are now leaving the community, and they’re going to a corporate headquarters where they’re being either reinvested in corporate expansion, or they’re being distributed to shareholders or being used to pay off their investors. 

    There’s an example that we cite in one of our reports about Haven, Kansas, which had a local grocery store that was there that was paying $75,000 a year in property taxes. So the city was getting that revenue. A dollar store came in, a Dollar General store came in, and within a couple of years, the grocery store couldn’t hold on anymore. The dollar store had eked away just enough of its sales that it couldn’t hold on. And so it closed. The dollar store was paying $60,000 a year in property tax. So the city right off the bat is losing $15,000 a year in property tax revenue that it had before. 

    But not only that, as a concession to attract the dollar store, the city council had agreed to basically rebate half of the municipal utility taxes that the dollar store developer would have paid for two years. That was $36,000. So now all of a sudden the grocery store is gone and the city is losing $51,000 a year in property tax revenue. 

    And that’s just an example of tax revenue. We’re not even talking about the wage differential and the fact that dollar stores typically only have one or two staff employed at a time, whereas a grocery store might have 30 or 40 people employed. And the dollar store, Dollar General, is at the rock bottom of the 66 largest corporations in terms of hourly wages. So the community is just losing right and left.

    JJ: Right. Well, what happens when communities recognize that, and they resist these dollar stores? I know that the Institute tracks that as well.

    KS: Dollar General tends to work with developers who build buildings for them that they then lease for 15 years, usually with three five-year expansion options. And the developer is going to try to minimize costs. And so the developer tends to look for inexpensive land, which tends to be land that is often zoned for agricultural use, or on a scenic byway, or in some kind of rural area, or maybe on the edge of a residential neighborhood. 

    And to do that, they have to go to the city generally and request a zoning variance. And that’s where the battles tend to develop, is people come out and say, no, we want this area to remain zoned like it is, because there was a reason for that, that we wanted it zoned that way. And we don’t want to change that. I’ve tracked 140 communities now that have defeated dollar stores. And in 138 of those, all but two, they’ve been defeated based on the city denying a zoning variance request. 

    The other two—it’s something pretty exciting that’s happened recently. In Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana—which is where Hammond and Ponchatoula is, if you know Louisiana—last spring, a developer came to the Planning Commission and submitted plans to build a Dollar General store. It was an unzoned parcel of land. There was no zoning, so he wasn’t requesting a zoning variance. He simply had to have his building plans approved. 

    The Planning Commission turned him down. And they turned him down based on their police power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the community, which is a completely novel approach. We had not seen that happen before. The developer appealed that to the parish council. The parish council supported the Planning Commission. 

    The developer then sued. And last September, the trial took place. And then in November, the judge—in a, you know, this is a pretty conservative part of the country—the judge ruled in favor of the parish and said that they were completely correct in using their police power to protect the health and safety of the community by denying that developer the right to build a dollar store there.

    JJ: Wow.

    KS: This is a kind of groundbreaking thing. There’s another community that we found, Newton County, Georgia, used essentially the same approach. So we’re getting to have now sort of a body of case law that provides a precedent for a community saying, wait a minute, forget, I mean, zoning is one thing, but these stores are unhealthy for our community. They’re not good for the economy. They’re not good for jobs. They’re not good for the environment. They’re not good for crime. And we’ve had enough.

    JJ: Well, it sounds as though that community involvement relies a lot on information and on advance information. They have to know that this is in the planning process to know about the points that they could intervene, which is wonderful. But it also suggests, as I know the work does, that there could be interventions from a higher level, including from the federal level. What do you see as potentially useful that could happen there?

    KS: Well, at the federal level, we would, of course, like to see stronger and more vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws that we already have on the books. The Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act are all laws that are there to prevent exactly what’s happening with dollar store proliferation. And states can also adopt those same laws at the state level to provide some protection there. And that may be, in some instances, easier than getting federal attention. 

    States also are being pretty aggressive in looking at things like scanner errors, which you mentioned. In fact, the former attorney general of Ohio—well, first of all, the current attorney general of Ohio has investigated and fined Dollar General a million dollars for scanner violations. Basically, the price someone sees on the shelf is not the price they’re being charged by the scanner when they check out. The former attorney general of Ohio, a guy named Marc Dann, is now putting together a class action lawsuit against the dollar store chains for scanner errors, which he’s estimating Dollar General loan is making hundreds of millions of dollars annually in scanner errors because they’re so huge and they’re almost always in favor of the company and not the consumer. 

    The adage is, “the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago.” And often communities don’t think about protecting themselves from this sort of proliferation, this kind of predatory business expansion until it’s too late. But for those who are seeing this happening around them in other communities and thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense to put some protection in place right away. 

    And some of the things that communities are doing are things like what we call dispersal ordinances, which basically say you cannot build a new dollar store within X distance, two miles, five miles of an existing store so that we don’t have the market crowded with them. Or they’re putting in place ordinances like just happened in a town in Oregon that I saw that has put in place a formula business ordinance saying we want to have retail diversity in the community. We don’t want to have 10 identical pizza places. We don’t want to have five identical grocery stores. We want to have diversity. So therefore, we are fine with one dollar store, but not with five.

    JJ: Well, finally, information seems key to all of this—information of the actual impacts of dollar stores and then about the possible levers of potential resistance. And that brings me back to news media and reporting. The report itself on the dollar store invasion got coverage, absolutely. But of course, the implications go well beyond covering the report itself as an event. What would you like to see finally more of or less of from news media on this set of issues?

    Kennedy Smith: “I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while…. I don’t see much looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.”

    KS: That’s a great question. I think I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while. I don’t see much on that. I don’t see much sort of looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome. 

    I’d also like to see more news media tying this to threats to democracy, because if we have major corporations that are able to basically extract this kind of money, this vast volume of money from communities and make it difficult for independently owned businesses to compete, then we’ve changed what the nature of capitalism is. And we need to get back to the roots of what democracy is about. And that really is about having a level playing field for small businesses, for every American to basically have the opportunity to create a business enterprise and thrive and reinvest in their community. And that’s being taken away from us.

    JJ: Well, we’ll end it there for now. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find a lot of work on dollar stores, along with much else on their site, ILSR.org. Kennedy Smith thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    KS: Thank you so much, Janine.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

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    Rolling Stone: Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America ‘Can’t Be Compromised’

    Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

    This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.

     

    Boycott Dollar General: protest sign

    Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24)

    Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.