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?”
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 ImagesThe 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.
Read Next 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.
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.
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!
PETA’s Campaign of Action Against Starbucks
Since 2019, PETA has made business as usual impossible for Starbucks. Here’s what we and our supporters have done so far to push the company to ditch its vegan milk upcharge.
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.
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.
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.
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 CummingMarch 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 NashPETA 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.
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 SilverstoneMarch 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.
What Does Dairy Have to Do With the Climate Catastrophe?
An environmental assessment revealed that Starbucks reportedly found that dairy-based items are the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions across its operations and supply chain. This isn’t surprising, considering that the production of dairy is to blame for a significant percentage of planet-warming emissions.
The most significant thing that you can do to combat the climate catastrophe is to go vegan.
And what makes it so easy to be vegan is accessibility. Visit a Noah’s New York Bagels, Philz Coffee, or Costa Coffee store and get dairy-free milk in your drinks for free! Visit a Starbucks, however, and you’ll be forced to pay upwards of 90 cents for vegan milk in your handcrafted drink—and vegan food choices there are very limited.
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 (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: “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 (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 (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 (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 (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 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.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 (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. (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.
- Julie would like to fully acknowledge her co-authors on the aforementioned academic paper titled A proposal to recognize investment in breastfeeding as a carbon offset: Phillip Baker, Roger Mathisen, Aoife Long, Nigel Rollins, Marilyn Waring
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.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.
-
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.
RELATED STORIES
Food shortages reported in rebel-controlled areas of Myanmar’s Chin state
Jailed Myanmar activists in India in danger of deportation: rights groups
Indian authorities in Manipur state force Myanmar refugees out of border villagers
India plans to extend fence along Myanmar border
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.
Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe
This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
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.
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.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
-
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.
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?
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.
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.
-
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.
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.
-
Can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Ho Chi Minh City and how that sort of impacted your life now and your creative practice?
I think my styling career now really began with my mom because I grew up in a restaurant built into the side of my house in Saigon. So I was always finding a way to stick my nose into everything being cooked, despite my parents trying to lock me out. I just found that the energy in preparation is so fascinating. My mom just kind of has this natural sense of how to pick the right ingredients that will look beautiful on a plate, how to carve the cheese into gorgeous shapes for parties or for when guests come over, and that really just stuck with me for years. Her dad was a poet and an author, and then her mom paints and draws and cooks and sews and embroiders, so I guess it kind of runs in the family, in a way.
Later on I went on work in marketing because my mom never wanted me to be in the kitchen. She was like, “That’s just so much hard work and effort,” and she didn’t want to see her daughter going back into the kitchen, so she sent me to school, and then wanted me to have an office job. Later on, when I was doing those marketing jobs, I realized all I wanted was the food as jobs, and what I wanted was just actually making the food myself. So I ended up at Le Cordon Bleu in Madrid, where I learned all the traditional techniques for cooking. It was brutal but really it gave me the training I think I needed to bring my version of Vietnamese food to life.
So, you went from marketing specialist to Cordon Bleu… Where did you go from there?
From Spain, I moved to New York City, and then began shadowing established stylists. I was totally shocked that someone could do this for a living and get away with it.
I never just wanted to cook food—I always wanted to make it look beautiful, too. I took pictures for my blog, I arranged spices into a map of Vietnam or whatever. And so, I always had that sense of artistry in me, even before I knew styling was a thing.
So I started looking up a lot of magazines, because it’s not a thing in Vietnam, we don’t have food magazines in Vietnam. We also don’t have recipes because people are just like, “Okay, just a bowl of soy sauce in that, a splash of something.”
So I start looking up a lot of magazines, and then I think on Bon Appétit or New York Times I saw beautiful food, and I was like, “Oh my gosh. Who are those people making those foods?” I saw the credits below that said, “Food styling by…” I was like, “Food styling, what is it?” So I looked up food styling, and then it opened up a whole universe, and then there’s no looking back.
There are not many stylists and the industry is so small where everyone knows everyone. There’s just so much that could scare people away, like the long physical hours on set, being at the whim of the clients, huge amount of hours spent on the business side, or just sourcing out-of-season ingredients. You’re kind of one person doing it all, from getting the ingredients, cooking it, to working with clients, photographers, prop stylists, recipe developers, art directors, brand directors.
When you first started and you were reaching out and shadowing these stylists, how did you get in touch with them?
I literally started on LinkedIn, reached out, and sent hundreds of messages. And hundreds of emails—literally every day—to everyone. I just looked up all food photographers in New York, all food stylists in New York, all prop stylists in New York, and I just reached out to so many of them. I think all of the people I work with now probably got one of my emails back then.
I was just like, “Hey, I really want to do this. If you have a chance, I would love to assist you or have a chat and coffee, just want to learn more about the industry and how to get into this thing.” And then, I think every 50 emails, I might get one back. That’s how it goes.
I’m grateful for those few people that responded back and took me into their wings. I’m forever grateful for those people.
It sounds like you’ve dabbled in a lot: Food styling, photography, art direction, cooking… I saw you made puppets out of vegetables recently. Where do you find the most joy? Where are your passions and do you feel burnt out?
I would do anything where food is involved because that’s where I feel the most joy. I don’t care if it’s a puppet made out of food, I don’t care if it’s a dinner party, I don’t care if it’s just feeding people on the street, whatever. If it’s food involved and feeding people and making people full and happy and see the joy on their face, that gives me the most joy. And do I feel burn out? Not yet. For me, the harder I work, the more excited I feel.
I try to take a break between each project and I have felt so bored. After one day I was like, “Okay, what’s next? What’s next? I’m dying here.” So I don’t know, I think it depends on the personality, it depends on each person, but I also think that if I’m not totally insane, I would not be here. There are so many times where it was like 3:00 am, and then I still had like 10 other things to do. Let’s say that batch of gelatin art that I was making for the dinner was just a little cloudy, and so I asked my husband and friends, “Is this okay to serve?” And they were all like, “Yes, of course it’s okay. Just get it done, because you have to do other things, too. The most important thing is to get it done.”
And I asked myself, “Would I be proud to serve this?” And I was like, “No,” so I threw it back into the pot and started all over at 3:00 am. There were a lot of tears along the process but it was necessary for me to restart. So I think, a lot of times, it boils down to those moments where things are good enough, but just not enough to make you proud. Do you have the insanity to start all over? For me, the most important thing is not to get it done, but to get it done right.
How do you come up with the concepts for your dinners?
Every time I start with the menu. Because Vietnamese cuisine is so diverse, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, all of these dishes, if you go from the north to the south, the number of dishes that, let’s say you can eat three times a day, three meals a day, every day for three months, you would never repeat a dish.” I’m like, “All of these dishes and all people know is pho and banh mi and spring rolls. I’m like, “Those are really delicious and amazing but let’s do something else.”
I actually start with the region: What are the dishes, the delicacy from that region, that province? And then, come up with the concept: What’s special about that? So last time, we brought the people to the Highlands of Vietnam, so we have 54 ethnic groups, but people only know the Vietnamese Vietnamese, which is my ethnic, so there are many other ethnicities, and they all have their own different cuisines and cooking techniques that people just don’t know about. So I wanted to highlight and give the spotlight to those ethnic, so also educate people about Vietnamese history and cuisines.
And this last concept was the coastal cuisine because Vietnam, the coastal line stretches for so long all over Vietnam, so if you count the distance it’s from New York to Colombia.
How did you find your team? Did people reach out to you or was it just you and your husband in the beginning, and then it grew?
We’re a group of friends. We’ve been hanging out for a couple years, and we started to get really, really close during the pandemic. In Vietnamese culture, cooking is our love language, so I always have them over and cook a feast for everyone. I just love feeding people.
And then, we all were talking about, “Let’s do a pop-up, because these things that we cook at home people just don’t know.” Or sometimes we crave some regional dishes from a region in Vietnam, and then we just make it here, and then it’s like, “It’s possible to make it here, so why don’t we do a pop-up and scale it and see what happens?”
My team, they’re all non-professionals, in a way, not kitchen people, but all from different backgrounds. So in my team I have a designer, a coder, a photographer, an architect, a stylist, and my husband, a consultant.
We all believe in the mission, and we all come together and we want to bring Vietnamese food out to the world. And I think what’s interesting is we all come from different backgrounds, so we all bring different aspects and different expertise to the table. I think that’s part of the success.
That’s awesome. I feel like what I’m hearing from you, too, is a lot of learning from building on your skills and learning, and because you have new knowledge, that makes the next project more exciting, because you’re like, “Now I know more of what I doing,” and the possibilities become a lot clearer once you have the skills and stuff.
I think the skills are important but what I’ve realized and what I’ve learned is the most important thing is the message. What do you want to convey to the world? Because I always start with the message. Back then, I cared so much about skills and techniques and composition and all those fine arts things that people told me before I started this career and this journey like, “Oh, if you want to become an artist, you don’t have to go to art school, but you have to kind of lean into fine arts or those things, to be considered a real artist.”
And then, to be honest, I never considered myself an artist until recently, when I started picking beautiful slices of my culture and history and use food as the canvas to convey a message that I want to tell the world. So, to be honest, if there’s one thing that I wish people told me before I started this journey, was anything can be a canvas and anything can be a medium to convey a message, and as long as you have a strong message that you want to say and you find a canvas to express and a medium to express your message, that’s art. And that’s what artists are doing day in, day out.
I feel like the world has conspired to arrange things in a beautiful way naturally, and somehow you just need the eyes to see it. And there’s just so much hidden potential art everywhere, with the right framing and color it can jump to life. Not everything has to be painstakingly created from scratch. You can use a lot that exists. So in my mind, I kind of give everything sort of a personality. For example, if I find lettuce, right? I would look for lettuce with attitude or grace or the ones that are crooked, because I know those give me the personality that I need to convey the message that I want, not the perfect one.
Yeah, I love that. A lot of people think about food as utilitarian but there’s so much artistry in just the creation of it, too. You think about music, you think about paintings, things that you can see with your eyes or hear with your ears, but with food it’s smell and taste. There’s also such an ephemeral quality to it. It’s the experience of being there and eating it and smelling it, but it lasts forever. A smell or a taste can take you back to childhood.
Right, exactly. I think food triggers something really deep within us that we connect to more than many other things, and that’s why I’m obsessed with it.
I have one last question for you, a fun one. If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?
Oh my gosh. I think I would be a durian.
Why?
Because the outside and the inside of it are totally different. I think a lot of people, when they first meet me, they said that I have a fierce face, so they feel scared or intimidated by me. And also, when I work or when I focus on something or when I make art, I put on this fierce, do not bother me face.
But then, on the inside, I just feel like I’m very playful and I want everything to be exciting and fun and interesting and unexpected. So I feel like a lot of my work is, if you keep peeling, there are so many layers that you can keep exploring, and I think it’s like a durian.
Thu Buser Recommends:
Coffee mixed with Coca-Cola for hectic mornings (double the power!!)
Tbilisi, Georgia in the springtime
Try every cuisine on earth at least once
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Farmer’s markets
This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.
-
The first thing you notice walking up to a dai pai dong, one of Hong Kong’s signature open-air street food stalls, is the smoke. Aromatic plumes billow out from aluminum-covered vent hoods as chefs with decades of experience produce steaming plates of crackled shrimp, juicy mussels, and crisped-up rice by tossing the ingredients in a giant, flame-cradled wok.
As a foodie and avid stir-fry consumer, I love everything involved in wok cooking — the artistry, the bursts of orange under the deep, round-bottomed pan, the incomparable taste. But as a climate reporter, I see just one problem: It typically relies on gas stoves, which release planet-warming methane even when turned off.
Chefs cook at a dai pai dong in the Sham Shui Po district in Hong Kong in November 2018. Vivek Prakash / AFP via Getty Images Climate experts say that we need to phase out fossil fuel use to address the climate crisis, especially in buildings, which account for 35 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Gas stoves also produce harmful air pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and benzene, a known carcinogen.
So when I heard that an all-electric food hall on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, featured a pair of custom-made induction woks, I was eager to try out a climate-friendly stir-fry. Unlike gas stoves, induction ranges use electromagnetic currents to heat food, eliminating both the carbon emissions and harmful air pollutants produced by gas. Yet minutes into my lunch with a friend who works at Microsoft, my excitement dissolved. My tofu noodles arrived limp and drowning in vegetable oil.
As I poked at my soggy introduction to induction wok fare, I couldn’t help but think back to a plate of noodles I had eaten at a dai pai dong in Hong Kong just a few weeks before. The two noodle dishes could not have been more different. One was prepared with state-of-the-art climate tech — yet produced lukewarm results. The other was freshly tossed in a kerosene-fueled wok, yielding glossy, chewy noodles bursting with soy sauce, blackened slivers of onion, and, most importantly, that elusive, umami-filled char called wok hei.
There were many differences between the stir fry noodles I bought from a dai pai dong in Hong Kong, left, and the plate I of noodles I got from Microsoft’s all-electric food hall in Redmond, Washington, right. Akielly Hu
Wok hei, loosely translated from Cantonese as the “breath of the wok,” represents the pinnacle of the stir-fry cooking technique most commonly associated with southern China. (While many cuisines rely on the wok, not all strive for that signature aroma.) From street food stalls to high-end restaurants, diners from all over the world seek the intangible flavor that renowned chef and wok whisperer Grace Young described as “a special life force or essence from the wok.”
For all its coveted glory, wok hei — and the question of what exactly produces it — remains somewhat mysterious. The term itself is fairly abstract: while wok refers to the cooking vessel, hei can simultaneously mean “air,” “breath,” “energy,” and “spirit,” leaving room for a variety of interpretations. Many chefs say that fire, and therefore a gas stove, is essential for achieving the aroma, putting it at odds with climate-driven legal trends: Since 2019, more than a hundred local governments across the United States have introduced policies to ban the use of natural gas in buildings, including gas stoves. Others argue that with high enough temperatures and a few adjustments, chefs can switch to induction and still produce foods with wok hei.
In the face of this gastronomic debate, many chefs are asking what an all-electric future will mean for cherished culinary traditions like wok cooking.
When the city of Berkeley, California, enacted its local gas ban in 2019, the California Restaurant Association sued, arguing that gas is essential for certain specialty techniques, including “the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok.” It wasn’t the only attempt to derail gas bans. An investigation by the Sacramento Bee, for example, revealed that the gas utility SoCalGas actively recruited Chinese American restaurant owners to advocate against electrification policies in Southern California.
It would be naive to say gas utility companies were driven by a love of great stir fry when they turned their lobbying efforts toward wok-based cooking. But the culinary debate around whether wok hei can be achieved over an induction stove has certainly added fuel to the electrification debate.
An employee of the commercial kitchen equipment company Bartscher shows an induction wok at a trade event in 2019. Ulrich Perrey / Picture alliance via Getty Images For chefs, the most important consideration when it comes to switching off gas is whether induction can support their livelihoods. In cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, some restaurant owners serving Chinese, Thai, and other Asian cuisines using woks have expressed concerns that local gas bans could jeopardize signature tastes and textures.
Whether individual chefs think that induction can achieve wok hei depends largely on how they define it. Wok cooking expert and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt, for example, defines wok hei as a quintessential smoky flavor. He told Grist that it’s impossible to achieve wok hei without gas or fire — and the reason comes down to the food science.
A number of different elements go into that signature smoky aroma, according to López-Alt. One is the flavor imparted from hot, well-seasoned carbon steel or cast iron, two of the most common materials used to make woks. Another component is the caramelization that happens when sauce hits a searing hot pan. If you “watch a Chinese chef cooking, when they add soy sauce to a stir fry, they swirl it around the outside of the pan where it immediately sizzles and gets intense heat, and that changes the flavor and gives it a bit of smokiness,” he said.
But the main flavor component flavor of wok hei, López-Alt says, comes from the igniting of aerosolized oil with fire. As chefs toss food up into the flames of a gas stove, tiny droplets of fat suspended in the air catch on fire, dripping back down into the wok to impart a subtle smokiness. “You can’t get that without an actual fire,” he said.
Martin Yan, restaurateur and longtime host of the PBS cooking show Yan Can Cook, has a different take on wok hei, which he defines as an ephemeral, fragrant aroma that lasts a mere 15 to 20 seconds after a dish is prepared. He told Grist that achieving that aroma depends not on fire, but on applying intense, high heat. When fresh ingredients hit the wok’s surface, they undergo a Maillard reaction, in which proteins and sugars break down and develop new, complex flavors. “The wok hei is not created by the gas,” he said. “It’s created by the frying pan and that chemical reaction.”
In theory, Yan said, the heat could come from any source: electricity, gas, even wood or charcoal. “You could use nuclear fusion, as long as you can create that intense heat.”
Celebrity cook Martin Yan demonstrates his wok cooking skills over a gas-powered stove at an event at the Conrad Hotel in 2006. K. Y. Cheng / South China Morning Post via Getty Images Induction stoves, which can instantly heat to temperatures of up to 643 degrees Fahrenheit, are capable of the intensity Yan describes as necessary for wok hei. Yet some chefs like López-Alt say that the shape of the wok presents another obstacle to using induction. Woks feature a deep, high-walled bowl, which allows flames to curl around the vessel and create varied temperature zones — ideal for moving sauces and ingredients around to optimize flavors and control heat. But induction stoves are typically flat and only activate when directly in contact with the pan’s surface. Lifting the wok to toss ingredients, therefore, would result in an instant loss of heating.
Jon Kung, a Detroit-based chef and TikTok personality who advocates for induction cooking, says that induction stoves designed specifically for woks can help with this issue. Like Yan, he defines wok hei as a “mix of char and caramelization” as a result of the Maillard reaction, requiring high heat rather than flames.
Kung owns two portable induction wok burners that feature a curved heating bowl in which the wok sits, allowing for better temperature control up the sides of the pan. While this setup may not totally replicate the temperature gradient present in a traditional fire-heated wok, Kung said the conditions are sufficient for producing high-quality stir fry, a task he points out is difficult even for those with gas stoves at home.
“It’s incorrect to assume that the only things you need to achieve wok hei are a wok and a gas burner,” he said in a 2023 video. “The ones in Chinese restaurants have a power output of 150,000 BTUs. That’s way more than the 30,000 that comes out of your Viking range. The fact of the matter is, these induction wok burners do a better job at mimicking the focus of energy into the bottom of a wok that you get from a genuine Chinese wok burner.”
While Kung’s induction models plug into a typical outlet and are designed for home use, similarly shaped and far more powerful commercial induction wok ranges exist on the market — including at Microsoft’s all-electric food court. But the stove itself wasn’t the reason for the company’s substandard stir fry. The noodles I ate there appeared to have been batch-cooked, an efficient way to feed hungry tech workers but a less-than-optimal method for achieving wok hei, which depends on the freshness of the ingredients. And since I wasn’t present at the time of cooking, I also can’t evaluate the temperature used for cooking.
As of now, I can safely say that my induction-versus-flame-fueled wok hei taste test remains inconclusive. And sadly, I don’t have many nearby options to gather more data. Although Yan reported that some hotels in China like the Hilton and Marriott already exclusively use induction woks, commercial induction kitchens are rare in the United States.
According to a 2022 survey by the National Restaurant Association, 76 percent of restaurants in the U.S. still use gas. That proportion goes up to 87 percent for full-service restaurants, or sit-down eateries that provide table service. Meanwhile, less than five percent of U.S. households currently use an induction stove — though wok expert Grace Young has said she’s often asked which wok to buy for induction and glass-topped ranges.
Chef and wok expert Grace Young has a razor clam dish at a restaurant in New York’s Chinatown in December 2021. Jeenah Moon / The Washington Post via Getty Images A big reason for the lack of commercial induction uptake is the cost. Yan noted that induction wok burners for restaurants remain prohibitively expensive in the U.S., especially since the technology is still maturing. Upgrading a gas kitchen to accommodate all-electric appliances to begin with can require up to tens of thousands of dollars, an exorbitant price for businesses operating on thin profit margins. Commercial induction ranges also typically cost three to four times as much as gas-powered ones.
Kung told Grist that he is not aware of any restaurants in the U.S. achieving wok hei with induction — although he believes that with a few tweaks in technique, it’s “absolutely” possible. The problem, beyond the cost of induction ranges, is that chefs might also simply prefer the tactile experience of cooking with fire, or generally feel resistance to adopting new techniques. But Kung maintains that if governments want to take the climate crisis seriously, they need to pass policies to incentivize and help businesses switch to electric.
“Chefs are problem-solvers by nature,” Kung said, and will likely innovate and relearn how to achieve wok hei on induction at a commercial level.
Although López-Alt says achieving wok hei is not possible without a flame, he isn’t against induction stoves in general. He initially felt wary of switching when he first came across the debate over gas stoves a few years ago. Yet he eventually concluded that, for most Western cooking and home cooking, the technology can be just as good as gas if not better — not just for climate and health reasons, but also in terms of efficiency of cooking.
“It’s a topic that gets a lot of knee-jerk, immediate reactions,” he said. But “for most things it actually makes sense to get rid of gas.”
-
![red-roofed lighthouse stands in rolling blue water with white waves against blue-gray sky]()
Michigan wants fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change damages
Harms include severe weather, crop failures, and economic hits from lack of ice and snow.
-
![Two homes and two cars appear on a street with huge waves pounding a wall behind them.]()
As sea levels rise, the Quinalt Nation moves to higher ground
The community on the coast of Washington state has a plan to establish a new village with low-impact development and green infrastructure.
-
![A large array of solar panels stretches over an urban landscape under a cloudy sky.]()
A year in, New York’s pioneering public power law makes uneven progress
New York Power Authority is preparing to build state-owned clean energy projects for the first time — but advocates want more transparency.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can electric woks produce great stir fry? on May 14, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
-
-
In early April of last year, a white capsule the size of a small school bus detached from the International Space Station and splashed down off the coast of Tampa, Florida. On board were 4,300 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments, including samples of dwarf tomatoes grown in space; crystals that could be used to make semiconductors; and medical data on the astronauts working in the space station. Tucked away among these contents was a much smaller and lighter cargo: more than a million tiny orange seeds.
Half a world away in Seibersdorf, Austria, a town about 22 miles outside the capital of Vienna, Pooja Mathur waited eagerly for the seeds — from a plant called arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family — to arrive. Mathur, a plant geneticist, leads the Plant Breeding & Genetics Laboratory for the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, a collaboration between two United Nations agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
For over 60 years, the laboratory has studied whether nuclear technologies can be used to breed new and more resilient varieties of crops, and the seeds from the space capsule were its newest venture. They had spent nearly five months in low earth orbit, exposed to cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and low gravity, which altered their DNA in unpredictable but potentially beneficial ways. Scientists like Mathur hope that a few of these seeds might sprout into plants that can survive changing conditions here on Earth, such varieties more resistant to drought or heat.
An expert at the Plant Breeding and Genetics Laboratory holds the sorghum seeds that spent five months at the International Space Station. Katy Laffan / IAEA “It was a great opportunity to receive them,” Mathur told Grist over a video call from her office in Austria. “But there was also a nervousness — there are always these questions when you embark on something unknown.”
The “cosmic crops” project is the United Nations’ first foray into space breeding, part of a global effort to address rising risks of food insecurity stemming from shifting land use patterns, population growth, and climate change-driven extreme weather. Heat waves, droughts, floods, erratic rainfall, and worsening pest and disease outbreaks all threaten agricultural production around the world, and the effects are already being felt in many countries. Massive flooding destroyed at least 4 million acres of farmland in Pakistan in 2022, triggering a food crisis for more than 8 million people; in East Africa, extreme drought has pushed millions of people to the brink of famine in the past three years. In the United States, natural disasters, many made worse by climate change, caused $21.5 billion in agricultural losses in 2022 alone.
While space breeding seeds was first attempted in the 1960s, the scientific endeavor is currently experiencing a golden age as space travel and research becomes more accessible for nations outside the U.S., Russia, and Europe. Chinese researchers have been at the forefront of this experimentation, developing more than 200 varieties of space-mutated plants since 1987. Other countries that have developed space programs in recent years, like India and the United Arab Emirates, are also among the most vulnerable to climate change, and have expressed interest in the technology.
But the joint FAO/IAEA center’s project, known officially as Seeds in Space, is the first such effort on an international level, which will help make the results of these experiments available even to nations that can’t afford to build rockets or extensive plant genetics laboratories. And it will help answer essential questions about what makes space mutations different from those done here on earth, and where scientists should direct their efforts in order to adapt to climate change.
“[If] we can understand how plants mitigate stress [in a space environment], we can use that knowledge in our approach to global warming on earth,” said Tapan Mohanta, a former agricultural researcher at the University of Nizwa in Oman who has studied the potential of space breeding for developing new crop varieties and was not involved in the FAO/IAEA mission.
The joint FAO/IAEA center was founded in 1964 amidst a post-war push to use atomic energy for peaceful means. Researchers at the time found that exposing plant material to radiation encourages mutations at a much faster rate than conventional breeding, a painstaking procedure that requires multiple generations to show changes in the plants’ phenotype, or outward characteristics. Mutations occur naturally as cells multiply by making copies of their genetic code; what starts as a random error in one strand of DNA can be replicated over and over again until the organism either repairs the damage or allows it to spread to all of its cells.
Scientist Shoba Sivasankar, right, receives a package of seeds that journeyed from the International Space Station to the FAO/IAEA Plant Breeding and Genetics Laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria, in 2023. Katy Laffan / IAEA Hitting seeds with gamma rays, the most powerful form of radiation, speeds up this process, known as “mutagenesis,” by as much as 1 million times. Irradiated seeds which survive the high doses of radiation can grow into plants that show much clearer phenotype variations than their conventionally-bred counterparts; scientists can then test these new specimens to see whether they can withstand difficult conditions or produce a higher crop yield than currently existing varieties. This process does not make the seeds themselves radioactive, and the resulting crops are safe to eat, Mathur said.
By selecting and then further breeding the most promising candidates, researchers have produced over 3,400 new varieties of more than 210 plant species, according to the IAEA’s Mutant Variety Database. Farmers in more than 70 countries are already growing the resulting plants; the seeds are often crossbred with widely used “elite” varieties to better suit local conditions. Other mutations can be induced using chemicals, bypassing nuclear technology altogether.
Cosmic rays, which are emitted by distant space objects like the sun, other stars, and even black holes, offer a different way to trigger mutagenesis, Mathur said. One of the goals of the “cosmic crops” project is to determine whether radiation from space, which is lower intensity but applied over a longer period of time than in the lab, can create different results than experiments with gamma rays on earth. Previous experiments by Chinese researchers have found that space radiation induces “useful” mutations more often than gamma radiation applied in a lab, according to the BBC.
“Mutagenesis is a very slow process on a day-to-day basis,” Mathur said. Space breeding “can accelerate the process to harness the power of natural changes at a much faster scale, considering that there is a dire need to have solutions in food and agriculture.”
Two types of seeds were picked for the experiment: arabidopsis, a weed that, while usually not edible, is a “model species” with a well-studied genome that researchers can quickly examine for the most obvious genetic changes and useful traits, and sorghum, a dryland crop that’s consumed by 500 million people around the world and is therefore useful from a food security standpoint, Mathur said. Half were kept outside the International Space Station, where they were exposed to the full range of cosmic radiation along with the extreme cold and zero-gravity environment of outer space; the other half stayed inside the station, under microgravity conditions but shielded from most radiation, to provide a point of comparison.
Because the mutations that occurred in space were random, scientists are taking two approaches to figure out what they look like: Since receiving the seeds in June of last year, Mathur’s lab has planted them and will now begin using DNA sequencing technology to study the arabidopsis seedlings and determine what changes took place at the genetic level. They plan to have results by summer or early fall. After that, researchers will screen the ones that seem to display positive genetic changes to determine whether they can actually better withstand harsh conditions like drought, salinity, and pest infestations. They’ll follow up by testing the sorghum, which takes longer to sprout and grow to maturity.
Crops take root in a beaker at the IAEA Plant Breeding Unit in Seibersdorf, Austria. Adriana Vargas Terrones / IAEA Mathur’s lab is sharing its results with countries that want to learn which techniques — encompassing everything from the length of time the seeds are in space to the way they’re grown once they return — produce the most resilient crop varieties. One such “coordinated research project,” which would compare mutations induced by cosmic rays with those applied in the lab, has attracted researchers from Australia, Burkina Faso, China, France, Ghana, India, Kenya, Niger, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
“The molecular variations in plants induced by space mutagenesis are largely unknown,” said Hongchun Xiong, an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences who is working on the coordinated research project. Although Xiong’s previous research using space-exposed seeds has identified mutant varieties of wheat that are more tolerant to saline soil, which can prove useful as saltwater encroaches on agricultural fields thanks to rising sea levels, she hopes to identify others that are resistant to dry conditions or use nitrogen more efficiently.
“We believe this is important for [the] development of new wheat varieties for food security and climate-change adaptation,” Xiong said.
Previous experiments with space breeding have already yielded results. China registered a new variety of wheat called Yannong 5158, which was developed using space mutagenesis, in 2007. Smaller than conventional wheat, with dark green leaves, this version proved more resistant to bacterial diseases and stem rust, a type of fungal infection, while also producing a higher yield. This variety has since been planted in several villages in the Fuyang prefecture in eastern China. The country also harvested its first batch of rice that had traveled to deep space — nicknamed “rice from heaven” by state media — in 2021, though it has not yet announced whether the resulting plants were more resilient in any way than their earth-bred counterparts.
Experiments like these carry risks, Mohanta pointed out. Mutant DNA could potentially escape and contaminate wild species or other crops through cross-pollination, which could pose a threat to biodiversity or human health if the mutations are harmful in any way — a small possibility, but one that plant breeders developing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, also face. One genetically modified variety of corn, for example, was suspected of unintentionally introducing allergens into the U.S. food supply in the early 2000s and later had to be recalled, although officials could not prove that the GMO corn actually caused allergic reactions. And although contamination incidents are common, with nearly 400 recorded by Greenpeace between 1997 and 2014, researchers have found no definitive links between GMO foods and negative health effects.
While space-bred varieties are not GMOs, because the mutations that occur are random and not controlled by humans, the joint FAO/IAEA center still follows protocols to keep cross-contamination from occurring. But it can’t control what member states do once they have access to the technology and mutated seeds.
“Although developing plant varieties that thrive in microgravity and resist cosmic radiation may be an important goal for the scientific community, an undesirable mutation in the genome could have deleterious effects on other crop varieties,” Mohanta wrote in a 2021 paper in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. “Therefore, the conduct of such research should be subject to strict international regulations to avoid the possibility of unexpected results.”
Mathur emphasized, though, that despite the unknowns, space breeding has enormous potential, which scientists are only just beginning to unpack. She pointed to previous studies that found peppers exposed to cosmic radiation had a higher nutritional content, a promising feature given widespread deficiencies of iron, zinc, vitamin A, and other nutrients around the world. And although space experiments are still a very small component of plant breeding, the results of the “cosmic crops” project will help researchers decide whether to invest more into this technology in the future.
Mutation breeding “has been the cornerstone of agriculture for a long, long time,” Mathur said. “Agriculture is all about harnessing mutations … and mutation is very much a part of our evolutionary process.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can the harsh conditions of space breed more resistant crops for Earth? on May 14, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
-
For the past year and a half, you may have heard a lot about butter. It started with a viral video of influencer chef Justine Doiron carefully slathering two sticks of butter directly onto a wooden cheese board, seasoning the thick layer with flaky sea salt and lemon zest, arranging torn herbs and red onion across the surface, and finally finishing the dish with flower petals and a drizzle of honey. This was the butter board, a TikTok trend that quickly reached escape velocity and was featured by The New York Times, CNN, and the Today Show.
On high-end restaurant menus, the once-humble bread-and-butter course snowballed into $38 tableside “butter service,” and 14-inch cylinders of creamy, imported carved-to-order butter earned prominent placement in restaurants’ open kitchens. By early March, New York Magazine could declare that “butter has become the main character.”
A butter charcuterie board with fresh herbs. Getty Images What accounts for butter’s spectacular renaissance in American cuisine? According to the U.S. dairy lobby, it’s their own public relations campaign that started the spread. The industry marketing group Dairy Management Inc., has claimed credit for the butter board in industry press, because it paid Doiron as a sponsor at the time of her video. While Doiron’s original butter board video did not include an advertising disclosure — and, according to Dairy Management, was not itself technically part of the partnership — the chef posted a Dairy Management ad two days before her viral post and was part of the industry group’s “Dairy Dream Team” of paid influencers at the time. (Doiron did not respond to an interview request, but Dairy Management told Grist that her contract has since expired.)
Dairy Management, whose funding largely consists of legally mandated fees collected from farmers, is one of a constellation of government-supported dairy marketing groups that also includes the Fluid Milk Board, a beverage-focused entity whose promotion arm has paid Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Amanda Gorman, and more than 200 others to promote milk on social media. (The milk board also recently sponsored a section in New York Magazine’s The Cut, focused on women in sports.) In recent years, Dairy Management has partnered with mega-influencer MrBeast at least twice, filming him as he toured a dairy farm and paying him to promote a dairy-focused competition in the video game Minecraft.
In perhaps the dairy lobby’s biggest coup of last year, the limited-run McDonald’s Grimace shake went viral after TikTok users began crafting miniature horror films featuring the bright purple beverage. Dairy Management has a longstanding partnership with McDonald’s; beginning in 2009, it placed two dairy scientists at the fast food chain to help incorporate more dairy into the menu. Less than a decade later, 4 in 5 McDonald’s menu items contained dairy, according to a Dairy Management board member. Dairy Management has even funded research to help improve McDonald’s notoriously glitchy milkshake machines.
“My hope is that farmers, when they see a new milkshake or a new McFlurry at McDonald’s, that they know that it’s their new product,” Dairy Management CEO Barb O’Brien said on a podcast in December.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s told Grist that they could not independently confirm the proportion of their offerings that contain dairy due to variations in local menus, but added that the fast food chain makes its own menu decisions. “Our partnership with [Dairy Management] helps McDonald’s ensure the quality and great taste of the dairy-based items on our menu, and deepen relationships with the thousands of dairy farmers who supply milk, cream, butter, and cheese to restaurants across the U.S.,” the company said in an emailed statement to Grist.
Partnering with food companies to roll out products that contain ever-escalating quantities of dairy is one of the industry group’s tried-and-true strategies. In the last couple of years, Dairy Management has partnered with Taco Bell to launch a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco. The organization also assisted with last year’s rollout of pepperoni-stuffed cheesy bread at Domino’s and supported marketing efforts for General Mills’ Oui line of yogurts.
Thirty years after the era-defining “Got Milk?” campaign — itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board — the U.S. dairy lobby’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind. The point of all these efforts is straightforward: The dairy promotion boards’ mission is to increase demand for their products. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars, collected from farmers and milk processors, on annual research and advertising in hopes of growing the market for dairy domestically and abroad.
Clayton Aldern / Grist However, as dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too does the industry’s environmental footprint. In 2019, the EPA estimated that U.S. dairy cattle emitted 1,729,000 tons of methane each year, pollution roughly equivalent to 11.5 million gasoline-powered cars being driven over the same period. A United Nations report found that the dairy sector’s global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015.
Meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear that all these efforts are helping the average dairy farmer. The number of U.S. dairy farms has fallen by three quarters in the last 30 years, as farmers’ costs rise and milk prices fluctuate. Many small and mid-sized dairy farms have been driven out of business and farmers’ net returns fall below zero year after year. In 2000, farms with more than 2,000 cattle produced less than 10 percent of milk, but by 2016 farms of this size were responsible for more than 30 percent of U.S. production. The diverging trend lines have prompted some farmers to question whether the focus on market growth above all else — which has been accompanied by increasing climate pollution and the collapse of small dairy herds — is still the best policy.
Ever since Congress passed the Dairy Act in the 1980s, farmers have been required to pay 15 cents per hundred-weight of milk (equivalent to a little less than 12 gallons) toward industry promotion programs overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. Ten cents is sent to local promotion entities and the remaining five cents go to the national Dairy Board, which promotes all dairy products. (Eggs have their own $20 million program.) Farmer contributions to the national program totaled $124.5 million in 2021.
The Dairy Board in turn sends money to Dairy Management Inc. Milk processors work under a similar structure, paying their own assessments to the Fluid Milk Board, which works exclusively on promoting a category that includes milk, flavored milk, buttermilk, and eggnog. The Fluid Milk Board received $82.4 million in processor fees in 2021. Its marketing arm is called MilkPEP.
Read Next In an emailed statement, a Dairy Management spokesperson told Grist that “all dairy research, promotion content and information not only complies with all regulations and standards, but also seeks to help consumers make informed decisions about the foods they choose for themselves and their families, including nutritious, sustainably produced dairy.”
The financial structure of these efforts is complicated, but the end result is that these programs, which are known to farmers as “checkoffs,” bring in more than $200 million each year in the dairy industry alone. As a result, the lobby takes care to note its accomplishments. For instance, in the first eight years the checkoff of partnered with Domino’s Pizza, the average store increased its cheese use by 43 percent.
Other promotional efforts, however, have amounted to slickly-produced flops. Last year, the Fluid Milk Board hired actor Aubrey Plaza to hawk “wood milk” in an apparent effort to lampoon plant-based milk alternatives, which resulted in a formal complaint filed by a group of physicians who advocate for plant-based diets. Another effort involved a Board-funded website featuring Queen Latifah, which was devoted to combating the seemingly fictional phenomenon of “milk shaming.”
‘The Office’ actor Brian Baumgartner poses for a 2023 promotional photo for “Never Doubt What You Love,” a pro-dairy parody news campaign created by the California Milk Processor Board. Rachel Murray for CMPB / Getty Images Some recent industry-funded persuasion campaigns have been more subtle. In 2021, the fluid milk checkoff sponsored a wellness weekend for top editors from Bustle, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, and others at a $750-per-night Hamptons resort where they participated in workouts led by a celebrity trainer and “partook in milk-forward meals.” Congressional disclosures indicate that the Fluid Milk Board held USDA-approved advertising and marketing contracts with Vice Media and Food52 in 2021. A spokesperson for MilkPEP told Grist that these were branded editorial contracts to develop milk-inclusive recipe content.
There’s some evidence that all this marketing has worked. A recent USDA report delivered to Congress claimed that farmers earn $1.91 for every dollar spent on “demand-enhancing activities” for fluid milk, $3.27 for every dollar spent promoting cheese, and $24.11 for every dollar spent boosting butter. An independent evaluation by the Government Accountability Office in 2017 likewise found that, between 1995 and 2012, the fluid milk program returned $2.14 for every dollar spent.
After decades of growth, per-capita U.S. dairy consumption reached an all-time high in 2021, though fluid milk consumption has been steadily declining since the 1970s. This presents formidable challenges for climate action: Meat and dairy consumption is responsible for a full 75 percent of the country’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, even though animal products account for only 18 percent of calories consumed.
Read Next And even setting aside climate concerns, small-scale farmers worry that this emphasis on demand growth might actually end up edging them out of the market. They say that the checkoffs have unfairly benefited a few big producers, supercharging their growth while driving others out of the industry.
“[The checkoff is] set up to be entirely demand-side,” said Wisconsin farmer and former Dairy Board member Rose Lloyd. “You’re not allowed to talk about price, you’re not allowed to talk about supply. It’s a wasted effort.”
Lloyd and her family maintain a herd of 350 cows, and while checkoff assessments represent less than 1 percent of her revenue, she says she feels like she’s paying to reinforce a structure that’s working against her farm and her community. For example, she’s watched a neighboring dairy farm quadruple in size to supply mozzarella to a nearby factory that produces frozen pizzas. The local infrastructure has struggled to contend with the waste produced by all those additional cows.
“We have massive water quality issues,” she told Grist. “It’s a real crisis right now on all the legs of sustainability: ecologically, socially, economically.”
Some farm groups are holding out hope that they can persuade Congress to pass a form of supply-management legislation that limits total milk production, which they are pitching as a win-win for small-scale farmers and the environment. If the government placed a cap on the amount of dairy produced in the United States, the idea goes, such a policy could theoretically ensure that a market exists for all the dairy produced.
A similar model has functioned in Canada for decades. Each year, annual dairy demand is forecasted based on the previous year’s sales figures. The resulting estimate is divided among provincial boards, which in turn distribute production quotas to individual farmers. In exchange for promising not to market more milk than the quotas allow, farmers are guaranteed minimum prices for their products — meaning they’re somewhat insulated from the seasonal price fluctuations and rising costs that plague their U.S. counterparts.
To maintain this delicate balance, Canada prevents an influx of cheap imported milk using high tariffs. In part for this reason, the system is not without controversy. Critics argue that the policy pushes up dairy prices, and the quota licensing system can make it hard for new producers to enter the market.
A farmer moves cows into a barn for their evening milking near Cambridge, Wisconsin, in 2017. Scott Olson / Getty Images Still, the system has enough admirers that some are hoping it will be adopted in the U.S. Earlier this year, representatives from the National Family Farmers Coalition, or NFFC, flew to Washington, D.C., to try to persuade legislators to adopt supply-management legislation through their proposed “Milk from Family Dairies Act” in the next Farm Bill. The bill would establish price minimums and quota-like “production bases” for farmers. Farmers would have to pay additional fees to export their product, and the policy would raise import fees where possible.
Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at NFFC, said the proposal has garnered support from environmental groups who see supply management as a means of reducing emissions from feed and trucking.
Nevertheless, Tovar is clear-eyed about the bill’s likelihood of passage, at least in the near term. “I have to be honest with you, I’m a little bit pessimistic about these proposals being included in the next Farm Bill,” he said, citing Congressional gridlock and limited political will to pursue the change.
In the meantime, the dairy checkoff has set its sights on the export market. Specifically, it’s promoting pizza — which one executive called “a strong carrier for U.S. cheese” — in the Middle East and Asia. In Japan, the checkoff and Domino’s launched a “New Yorker” pizza topped with a full kilogram of cheese and served with a packet of seaweed and maple syrup. The New Yorker was subsequently rolled out in Taiwan.
Domestically, there are still some fast-food menu items that haven’t yet been topped with a slice of American cheese or shaken with milk. In a 2022 blog post, Dairy Management Inc., chair Marilyn Hershey pointed out that 80 percent of the 2 billion chicken sandwiches sold in the U.S. each year do not contain a slice of cheese.
The checkoff, she wrote, was engaging with Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s, and McDonald’s to change that.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Behind the ‘butter board’: How the dairy lobby took over your feed on May 10, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
-
North Korean authorities have arrested workers at an orphanage where seven infants died earlier this year after investigators found that caregivers “systematically stole” food supplies the government had provided for infants and toddlers, a provincial health official said.
When an outbreak of a coronavirus-like disease left seven children dead in February at an orphanage in Hyesan city, party officials in northern Ryanggang province began an investigation into how the orphanage was being run, a provincial resident told Radio Free Asia.
“They found that the children’s nutritional conditions were serious and ordered a judicial agency to investigate,” said the resident, who requested anonymity for personal safety.
“During that investigation, mismanagement of children began to be revealed one by one,” he said. “As a result, the investigation was expanded to include all orphan care facilities.”
This undated picture released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency on June 2, 2014, shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visiting a Pyongyang orphanage to celebrate International Children’s Day. (KNS KCNA AFP) They found that infants and toddlers at the Hyesan orphanage were fed a difficult-to-digest concoction of corn flour and sugar instead of milk, the resident said.
Residents of the province are shocked that babies were fed this combination – and they’re angered by the deaths, he said.
“They fed the powder to breastfeeding-age infants. Children less than a year old were fed corn porridge,” he said. “Even adults have difficulty digesting that.”
Investigators also found that caregivers had taken rice, sugar, cooking oil and flour, and had regularly bribed supply officials, the resident said. North Korea regularly suffers from food shortages.
Judicial provincial authorities detained the heads of the accounting department and the medical department at the center on April 27, the provincial health official said. Four nutritionists at the center were also arrested, and the number of arrests is expected to increase, the resident said.
This handout photo released on July 30, 2008, from the World Food Programme shows malnourished children sitting on the floor of an orphanage in Chongjin City in North Korea’s North Hamgyong province on June 20, 2008. (World Food Programme/AFP) The director of the orphanage and the orphanage’s party secretary haven’t been arrested, the resident added.
Since 2015, North Korea has built childcare centers and orphanages in every provincial capital, Pyongyang and several other cities. Some of the centers focus on newborns to 3-year-olds, while others are designated for children between 3 and 6 years old.
“From the first day of operation, childcare centers and orphanages had many problems due to poor nutrition management for children,” said the provincial health official, who also requested anonymity for personal safety.
North Korean orphans watch a TV program as a foreign delegation visits their orphanage in the area damaged by recent floods and typhoons in North Hwanghae province Sept. 29, 2011. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters) “In 2021, Kim Jong Un ordered that those children be fed dairy products – and nutritional care for orphans greatly improved,” the official said.
Milk from farm cows in each province is supplied to children in orphanages, he said. The centers also receive regular shipments of rice powder and sugar, which are used to make rice porridge.
Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Moon Sung Hui for RFA Korean.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
Back when I worked as a bartender, I always found it interesting how men and women tend to gravitate towards different drinks. The more time I spent behind the bar, the more I came to understand how even something as simple as our beverage preferences are surrounded in gendered expectations.
I remember one instance where a male customer approached me to voice his reservations about ordering the same fruity cocktail as his girlfriend. The drink was usually served in a martini glass, which he deemed too ‘feminine’. He was worried about their male friends teasing him about his order and asked me to serve the cocktail in a ‘manly’ whiskey glass instead.
While I was happy to honour his request, it left me wondering why something as simple as the shape of a glass made the difference between a drink being seen as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’.
How did we even get to a point where the things we eat and drink act as a way for us to signify and perform gender? And why are there social consequences for people who wish to deviate from their assigned food and drink preferences?
200 years of gendered food
The notion that women prefer salads and sangrias while men gravitate towards T-bone steaks and craft beer did not simply emerge out of thin air.
A cursory look into our recent history shows that these gendered ideas have been carried through several generations now. We’ve come to associate certain foods with masculinity or femininity largely due to cultural ideas that have taken hold over the past 200 years.
Even though gendered notions of food can be observed at different points over the last few hundred years, it wasn’t until the late 19th century that we saw the concept of explicitly gendered foods start to appear, particularly in the United States.
Professor of History at Yale University, Paul Freedman, who specialises in the history of American cuisine says clear demarcations began to be made between what foods men and women were expected to prefer during this time.
“At this point, women were thought to prefer light food, or in the parlance of the time ‘dainty’ food, as well sweets,” he says.
“Men came to be associated with meat or other hearty preparations, as well as spicy foods.”
“It was especially prevalent in what was known as the ‘scientific cookery’ or ‘domestic science’ movement, which arose in America.”
“The idea of women consuming ‘dainty’ foods like salads, jellies and tiny sandwiches to fit in line with performative femininity came to be the standard.”
Women were encouraged to eat ‘light’ foods to keep a slim figure. Picture: Adobe Stock
Professor Freedman cites a couple of key factors that came to shape these gendered divisions: advertising, the cultural influence of magazines, and diet culture which portrayed a slim and athletic body as the ideal female figure.
One interesting institution that helped to communicate some of these ideas were dining venues known as ‘women’s restaurants’. They were places set apart for women to eat and socialise with one another, free of the ‘rowdiness’ and vulgarity of workingmen’s cafes and free-lunch bars.
While ‘Ladies’ Ordinances’ or women’s restaurants were operational in the United States from as early as the 1830s, they originally served similar dishes to men’s dining rooms – roast meat, offal and calf’s head.
Beginning in the 1870s however, shifting social norms allowed women opportunities to socialise with one another through these venues and urban chains like Schrafft’s and Child’s proliferated throughout the US.
“They positioned themselves to serve two types of women – both in groups alone – affluent shoppers needing a place to rest and have lunch, or office and retail employees,” says Professor Freedman.
The idea of women being partial to desserts had already begun to talk hold prior to this period, particularly to ice cream.
But Professor Freedman says it was in the late 19th century that sweet foods and femininity came to be associated.
“In the 1890s, these [restaurants] came to offer both ice cream and other often elaborate desserts, along with ‘light foods’ such as chicken, salad, pancakes and sandwiches.”
Cookbooks and magazines
After these ‘dainty foods’ had become more or less the designated go-to meals for women, magazines, advertisements and cookbooks began to reinforce these ideas even further.
“Before 1890, there is no indication in cookbooks that men and women prefer different sorts of food, or that women need to cater to men’s needs,” says Professor Freedman.
“[In the 20th century] advertisers came to seize on women’s anxieties about pleasing their husbands through their cooking”.
“They would show the importance of women pleasing their husbands by depicting men throwing tantrums or leaving their marriage because they don’t like the food their wife has cooked.”
While these advertisements certainly had overtones of misogyny, companies tapped into these gender roles to sell their products. Playing off of women’s anxieties about being good cooks, companies would advertise products as ‘easy to use’ while being able to satisfy your husband’s taste buds at the same time.
These gendered advertisements were not limited to the United States. however.
Food Historian, Dr Lauren Samuelsson studies the impact Women’s Weekly has had on Australian culture and says clear demarcations of feminine and masculine meals is also evident in Australia during this time.
Dr Lauren Samuelsson is a food historian who specialises in the impact ‘Women’s Weekly’ magazines have had on food culture. Picture: Supplied/Lauren Samuelsson
“An article in Women’s Weekly in 1965 titled ‘Meals Men Love’ provides us with a pretty good overview of dishes we have come to consider ‘masculine’,” says Dr Samuelsson.
“Steak and kidney pudding, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, hearty beef stew and bread and butter pudding are just some of the dishes men were thought to prefer.”
Many of the dishes notably feature red meat, which attempts to draw on ideas from the past, says Dr Samuelson.
“It speaks to hunting, men working physical jobs and the need for them to be muscular and powerful.”
And even though women largely performed, (and still do) much of the cooking, men would hardly ever cook anything besides meat when they decided to venture into the kitchen.
“Men were also considered to be more adventurous than women when it came to food and eating,” she says.
“They’d be more likely to try cooking things like frogs legs or offal, as these were seen as being ‘gourmet’ and ‘special’ – and men would only cook at home when it was gourmet and special.”
What about drinks?
So, what about the man who really didn’t want me to serve his cocktail in a martini glass? What’s going on with gendered ideas when it comes to alcoholic beverages?
Well, Dr Samuelsson says things used to be the opposite way around.
“Interestingly, cocktails, even fruity ones, were originally considered highly masculine,” she says.
Stigma around men liking ‘feminine’ drinks still exists today. Picture: Adobe Stock
“Spirits were not ‘proper’ drinks for women. It wasn’t until transgressive women in the 1920s and 1930s started to drink them to appear more ‘worldly’ and cosmopolitan, that other women started to drink them as well.”
Red and white wine were also split down the gendered lines, she says.
“Men drank red wine which was considered a ‘serious’ drink and women drank white wine which was considered especially bubbly and ‘decidedly unserious.”
However all wine – red and white – came to be targeted towards women from the 1950s onwards as men were already firmly considered to be beer drinkers and women were chosen as a target market to expand sales.
Diet culture and its continuing effects
Diet culture is one of the more pernicious developments to arise out of the gendering of food, with women’s bodies and insecurities being the primary targets.
If we take a look at housewives in the 20th century, the only meal they generally ate alone was lunch, as they were usually cooking for their husbands’ preferences in the mornings and evenings. As a result, this time alone was thought to be a time for women to ‘watch their figure’ and perform femininity by eating ‘light’ things like fish, salads and soups.
Dr Samuelsson says this was only the beginning of dietary advice encouraging slenderness.
“By the time diet culture really got its hands into women in the 1970s, they were being advised to have a pot of yoghurt for lunch.”
And this is certainly something that women still feel the effects of today.
I asked modern women about their own experiences with diet culture and the expectations around their food choices, and it appears some things haven’t changed.
One woman said she felt judged after ordering a rare steak while on a date with a man who appeared put off by her choice of a ‘masculine’ meal.
She also shared other ideas she had been expected to conform to such as “eating salad instead of burgers to fit in with men’s and women’s expectations.”
“Sharing the cake you wanted all to yourself” was another norm she felt pressure to conform to as well as “eating Special K as a teenager because of how it was marketed.”
Several other women also mentioned having to be aware of co-workers perceptions during work morning teas so as not to be perceived as “a fat pig.”
Going back for seconds for many women was also out of the question, even if they were hungry.
“It’s because you don’t want to be seen as having an unladylike hearty appetite,” one woman said.
“But the result is that men have more access to food.”
She also talked about women catering to men’s preferences in dinner settings to the detriment of their own needs.
“When I would share food in restaurants in my youth, the women at the table would estimate the amount of each dish and take their share. The men would eat what the wanted, even if it meant someone missed out. So they got more, women got less, and everyone split the cost, meaning the men’s share was subsidised by the women,” she said.
After reading the responses and experiences of so many women when it came to their eating habits, it’s very clear that we still have deeply ingrained gendered ideas of food, even if we’ve moved away from some of the more traditional notions seen in the 20th century.
Even so, Dr Samuelsson notes that diet culture is still one of the more pervasive aspects of gendered notions of food in our modern culture.
“On social media, the ‘mukbang’ trend is largely dominated by slender women because it is still so culturally ingrained in us that a woman, especially a conventionally attractive woman, eating a big meal of junk food is unacceptable,” she says.
Despite an effort to break down gender roles over the past few decades, men are still free to eat things like red meat and junk food without judgement.
“Things like burgers, especially over the top versions with big patties and lots of cheese are coded masculine,” she says.
“We know this has a real-world effect because men are less likely to be vegan or vegetarian compared to women,”
Professor Freedman also agrees that this is simply a continuation or evolution of gendered food preferences.
“Vegetarianism and veganism are essentially female, and outdoor cooking and meat are viewed as male,” he says.
“However, we are seeing that things like spicy foods, hearty dishes and sweets as being less gendered than in the past.”
So, perhaps there is some hope that we are shifting away from the ridiculous notion that our gender ought to dictate what is and is not appropriate for us to eat and drink.
There is certainly no doubt that more of us would defy these food preference stereotypes if we were not judged as harshly, both men and women.
If we can move past the idea of pink for girls and blue for boys, it’s probably time we did the same thing for food too.
The post The surprising way your gender influences your food choices appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
-
The World Food Programme is warning northern Gaza has reached a “full-blown” famine that is spreading south. This comes after the Israeli military has spent months blocking the entry of vital aid into Gaza, attacking humanitarian aid convoys and opening fire on Palestinian civilians waiting to receive lifesaving aid. We get an update on conditions among the besieged and starving population of Gaza — including of children now suffering from the psychological effects of intense and prolonged trauma — from Dr. Walid Masoud, a vascular surgeon and a board member of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund who is just back from heading a medical mission to Gaza.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
For several months last year, patrons of a Seattle coffee shop called Tailwind Cafe had the option of ordering their Americanos and lattes in returnable metal to-go cups. Customers could simply borrow a cup from Tailwind, go on their way, and then at some point — perhaps a few hours later, perhaps on another day that week — return the cup to the shop, which would clean it and refill it for the next person. If it wasn’t returned within 14 days, the customer would be charged a $15 deposit, though even that was ultimately refundable if the cup was returned by the end of 45 days.
Tailwind’s head chef, Kayla Tekautz, said her cafe started the program out of a desire to address the environmental scourge of disposable plastic foodware and other packaging, the vast majority of which cannot be recycled. It was a partnership with a reusable packaging and logistics company called Reusables.com, which provided Tailwind and another Seattle area store, Cloud City Coffee, with branded cups and a QR code-operated drop-off receptacle.
But the cafe quickly ran into trouble. It was “overwhelming” to explain the return system to every interested customer, Tekautz said. Many were hesitant to participate after learning that they could only return the cups to Tailwind or the other drop-off location, 6 miles away. Plus, Tailwind’s QR code reader kept malfunctioning, requiring repeated visits from a mechanic. At the end of last summer, Tailwind quietly ended the return program. “It just didn’t work,” Tekautz said. (Reusables.com didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.)
In an effort to reduce consumption of single-use plastic, Seattle has spent the past several years encouraging local businesses to offer reusable cups, dishes, utensils, and packaging. It has made some laudable progress. Concertgoers at the Paramount Theater and attendees of the Northwest Folklife Festival, for example, can now order their libations in reusable polypropylene cups. And since 2022, students at the University of Washington have been able to check out bright green reusable food containers from a company called Ozzi.
Reusable cups offered at the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle. Courtesy of Reuse Seattle These programs are helping Seattle avoid single-use plastic and create a “waste-free future,” according to the city’s reuse website. It’s a target that’s being pursued by many American cities, and at the global level too. Disposable plastic foodware and packaging — which accounts for nearly 40 percent of all plastic production — can only be phased out if there are robust, efficient reuse systems to replace them.
But some businesses, like Tailwind, have struggled to get reusable containers off the ground, often because of the small scale and disconnected nature of existing reuse programs. Instead of pooling resources and employing just one or two large cleaning and logistics services, businesses have so far chosen among several competing initiatives — or in some cases, have created and run their own programs. The result is a slew of incompatible containers, specific to just a few stores or locations, and inefficient systems for gathering, washing, and transporting between customers’ homes, sanitation facilities, and storefronts.
Having so many companies creating their own designs and logistics can be expensive, causing them to miss out on economies of scale that could make reuse more affordable and easily adoptable. According to Ashima Sukhdev, a policy adviser for the city of Seattle, she should be able to “pick up a coffee from my local cafe, and then drop it off in the lobby of my office building. Or drop it off at the library, or at a bus stop.”
What Sukhdev is describing would represent a highly unusual level of coordination across company lines. At coffee shops, this would mean reusable mugs shared not only between Tailwind and Cloud City, but also Starbucks and Peets. For grocery stores, it could mean picking up a jar of olives at Safeway, dropping off the empty container at Walgreens, and then having the same jar refilled with jam and sold at Whole Foods. Achieving this would require companies to rethink the way they compete with each other and differentiate their products. It would also require big changes from consumers, who have been trained for 70 years to expect disposability in just about every aspect of daily life.
Pat Kaufman, right, with Reuse Seattle team members. Courtesy of Reuse Seattle Experts say these changes are necessary. “For this solution to become a reality, you’re gonna need standards,” said Pat Kaufman, manager of Seattle Public Utilities’ composting, recycling, and reuse program.
Kaufman is currently on a yearlong sabbatical working for a nonprofit called PR3, which is trying to create those standards. The questions they’re facing are: What will standardized reusable packaging systems look like — and what will it take to get companies, and consumers, to adopt them?
Every year, the world produces about 400 million metric tons of plastic — almost entirely out of fossil fuels like oil and gas. Some of this is used in essential products like contact lenses and medical equipment, but a much greater fraction goes toward sporks, cups, bags, takeout containers, and other items that get thrown away after just a few minutes of use. Most of this plastic will never be recycled due to technical and economic restraints; more than 90 percent of all plastics get sent to a landfill or incinerator, or turn up as litter in the environment, where they degrade into microplastics and leach hazardous chemicals. Plastics manufacturing causes additional harms, including air pollution that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color living nearby.
For all of these reasons, public pressure to cut back on single-use plastics has escalated dramatically in recent years. Many companies have responded by launching trials and pilot programs allowing customers to borrow and return reusable cups, bottles, trays, jars, and other containers. These include small players like Ozzi, as well as behemoth brands like Walmart and Coca-Cola. There have been “more trials than Donald Trump,” said Stuart Chidley, co-founder of a reusable packaging company called Reposit.
Returnable containers from Reposit are offered at Mark & Spencer grocery stores in the U.K. Courtesy of Reposit As in Seattle, however, their efforts have been siloed, making it hard for the reuse sector to grow. According to a recent report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, or EMF — a nonprofit that advocates for a “circular economy” that conserves resources — even companies that have pledged to dramatically scale down their use of plastics have only replaced 2 percent or less of their single-use containers with reusables.
“To realize the full benefits of return systems, a fundamentally new approach is required,” the authors concluded.
The four types of reuse systems
The EMF report focuses on reusable containers that you can return to the coffee shop, grocery store, or another drop-off point — known as “return on the go” — as opposed to those that consumers own and bring with them to stores. It says that three things need to happen to make reuse mainstream. First, companies have to achieve high return rates, so they don’t lose inventory when people steal or forget to return their containers. Second, they have to share infrastructure for washing, collecting, sorting, and delivery in order to achieve economies of scale. Third, reusable containers must be standardized. The third pillar makes the other two much easier to achieve, since it’s simpler to share logistics, scale up, and familiarize customers with reuse systems if they share common characteristics — for instance, if containers are designed with similar shapes, sizes, and materials.
To that end, PR3 has spent the past four years drafting standards for reuse systems, with a particular focus on container design. Through a “consensus body” composed of members from big business, the advocacy world, and government, PR3 is hoping to eventually certify the world’s first reuse standards under the International Organization for Standardization (known as ISO, to prevent confusion around different acronyms in different languages). This would lend legitimacy to the PR3 proposals, as the ISO maintains one of the world’s most widely accepted catalogs of standards. Others within its portfolio cover everything from food safety to the manufacturing of medical devices, and have been voluntarily adopted by many large companies and government bodies.
PR3 released a draft of its standards last year, and it’s been updating them behind closed doors since then. Specific standards on washing protocols are set to be published for public review this week, and the nonprofit hopes that its consensus body will vote to finalize standards for container design later this year.
A worker from Taiwan’s Blue Ocean, an environmental protection company, cleans reusable mugs in Taoyuan. Sam Yeh / AFP via Getty Images PR3 released a draft of its standards last year, and it’s been updating them behind closed doors since then. Specific standards on washing protocols are set to be published for public review this week, and the nonprofit hopes that its consensus body will vote to finalize standards for container design later this year.
So, what makes a good reusable container system? It’s complicated. Containers have to hold up under the stresses of logistics and transportation. They have to be relatively inexpensive. Perhaps most intangibly, they have to seem reusable, so customers don’t accidentally throw them in the trash. This can be accomplished through design elements — like containers’ color, texture, shape, and weight — or through other means, like easily recognizable drop-off boxes for used containers. Some reuse advocates support deposit fees, in which customers pay a small amount, usually just a dollar or two, in order to borrow a reusable container. They get the deposit back once they’ve returned the container.
None of these features is guaranteed to work. In designing draft standards, PR3 has often had to make educated predictions about which ones consumers will respond to. And those predictions can have far-reaching implications. If you assume customers will frequently lose or forget to return their containers, for example, then it probably won’t make sense to design thick containers that are capable of withstanding hundreds of uses.
“In the real world, return rates vary wildly,” Claudette Juska, PR3’s technical director and one of its co-founders, told Grist. “You don’t want to design a container for 400 uses if it’s only going to be used four times.” The most recent version of PR3’s standards say containers must be designed to withstand at least 20 uses and reused in practice at least 10 times.
On the other hand, it may be counterproductive to design containers with the expectation that they won’t be returned. According to Chidley, with Reposit, cheap-looking and -feeling containers could actually cause low return rates, since people might be more careless with them. His philosophy is to use features like color, weight, and shape to communicate containers’ reusability, making it less plausible that people will confuse them for disposables.
PR3 doesn’t have much specific advice on these characteristics, but some entrepreneurs Grist spoke with said they’ve hit higher return rates through particular design choices. For Chidley, this means making containers “beautiful” through high-quality, heavier materials with stylish branding. His containers are available at Marks & Spencer grocery stores across England and Scotland. Lindsey Hoell, founder of a reusable container logistics company called Dispatch Goods and a member of PR3’s standards panel, has forgone sharp-edged takeout food containers in favor of ones with smoother edges that “feel fancier.” And because so many single-use plastics are either black or white, her containers are bright red. “There’s a lot of soft science of what makes a consumer feel like something is durable,” she told Grist. Her containers are available across most of the U.S., mostly through grocery and meal delivery programs like Blue Apron and Imperfect Foods.
To some extent, the discussion about expected use cycles and perceived quality is really just another way of asking what kinds of materials reusable containers should be made of: durable plastic or something else? Answering that question can bring into conflict businesses’ economic interests with concerns about health and the environment.
In the published draft of its standards from last year, PR3 recommended that reusable containers be “plastic-free,” citing plastic additives’ wide-ranging impacts on human health and ecosystems. Plastic can be cheap, light, and durable, but plastic-related chemicals have been shown to build up in people’s bodies and the environment, where they may contribute to hormone disruption, cancer, and reproductive harm.
PR3 panel members like Jane Muncke, chief scientific officer for the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, supported the recommendation. “I don’t think plastics are suitable materials for reusable packaging,” she told Grist. She’s concerned about chemicals migrating into foods and beverages — especially hot, acidic, or fatty foods, which are better at soaking up some plastic additives. Durable plastics are also largely nonrecyclable; after being turned into new products a few times, they have to be thrown away or “downcycled” into lower-quality products like carpeting.
Still, many entrepreneurs and even the PR3 founders themselves have moved away from a hard-line stance against plastics. Hoell, for example, originally got into reuse because she was frustrated by plastic-strewn beaches in California — “I’m a surfer and I hate plastics,” she told Grist. She started out making stainless steel containers but soon discovered that rigid plastics had much lower up-front costs, giving her more wiggle room to deal with lower return rates. She didn’t have to worry as much about frequently lost, stolen, or damaged containers.
Plastic was also easier to transport because of its light weight, Hoell added, and she cited some analyses suggesting that it has a lower carbon footprint than alternatives like steel. (These findings are controversial, however; critics say it’s misleading to focus only on plastic-related carbon emissions and not the materials’ other dangers, like toxic chemicals leaching from landfills.)Dispatch Goods now only makes its containers out of polypropylene, a kind of plastic that’s generally considered more inert than others (although it can still leach hazardous chemicals). Other reuse logistics companies like R.world, which operates in Seattle and is also represented on the PR3 panel, have similarly opted for polypropylene containers instead of metal or glass.
At Seattle Pacific University, a reusable container program for students eating at the Gwinn Commons dining hall also uses rigid plastic. The containers’ low cost allows Sodexo, the school’s foodservice provider, to charge students just $5 to participate in its reuse system all year, without tracking return rates or worrying too much about lost inventory. “We don’t have a list of subscribers,” said Andrew Chaplin, the dining team’s general manager. The program “runs itself.”
Representatives from PR3 told Grist that plastic has been a hot topic of debate among consensus body members, and that the final version of the standards is likely to move away from the “plastic-free” recommendation. “The standards are going to address this with the understanding that if the world can move away from plastic, great, but in the meantime, before that’s feasible, we’d better move where we can,” said Amy Larkin, PR3’s co-founder and director, who pointed out that moving to reusable plastics will still make a huge dent in overall plastic demand. “Let’s get rid of 90 to 95 percent of the production of single-use packaging.”
Rather than calling for specific container shapes and sizes, PR3 has drafted a few broad requirements — like that containers be designed to “optimize durability,” and that they follow “best practices for recyclability.” They must comply with existing food-safety regulations. Optionally, companies may label products with a universal symbol — kind of like the ubiquitous “chasing arrows” used to indicate recyclability. Such a symbol doesn’t yet exist for reuse, but PR3 has proposed one: a black, white, or orange rose-like pictogram along with the word “reuse.”
More specific design elements are included only as recommendations. To make washing easier, for instance, PR3’s draft says reusable containers should have interior angles no smaller than 90 degrees, as well as “feet” to maximize airflow during drying. They also say containers should “nest” to save storage space and make transportation easier.
A stack of reusable plastic to-go containers at a restaurant in Denver. Hyoung Chang / The Denver Post via Getty Images This flexible approach fits into a category that EMF calls “bespoke with shared standards,” where containers can vary from brand to brand while still sharing common characteristics — like where labels are placed, or the width of a bottle’s mouth. This leaves big brands free to design their own unique packaging if they want to.
PR3’s approach aims to appease big businesses by allowing them to keep using containers that look and feel very different, so long as they conform to a set of broad requirements. “Product companies want that kind of autonomy,” Juska told Grist.
Coca-Cola, for example, sets itself apart with its iconic — and patented — hourglass-shaped Coke bottle. And beauty companies are notorious for differentiated packaging: Walking down the perfume aisle, you might see bottles shaped like everything from a high-heeled shoe to a kitten.
Many reuse advocates want to do away with those unique container designs, going even further than what PR3 has suggested in order to enable sharing among different companies — a situation where packaging is considered “pooled” within a market. So instead of an extravagant diversity of perfume bottles, all fragrances might come in interchangeable cylindrical jars.
A small number of companies — especially in Europe — already do this. For example, through a German program called Mach Mehrweg Pool (roughly translated to “Make Reuse Pool”), brands share a collection of identical glass jars that can be filled with different foods. When consumers return the empty containers to a supermarket, a logistics provider picks them up and brings them back to food producers for cleaning. Another organization called the German Wells Cooperative runs a similar program for reusable soda and water bottles, counting more than 150 beverage makers as members.
Other companies that have experimented with pooling, however, have only done so within the brands they control. Coca-Cola, for instance, has a “universal bottle” initiative in South America in which a single, standardized reusable bottle can be used for all of its beverage brands — Fanta, Sprite, Coke, and others. But the initiative is not universal across company lines; you couldn’t refill a Coke bottle with Pepsi.
Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of Loop, a “global reuse platform” that is represented on the PR3 panel, said standard-setters shouldn’t try to resist companies’ impulses to differentiate. Brands should be allowed to experiment with both unique and standardized reusable packaging and then “let the market decide” which is preferable, he told Grist. Others, like Kaufman, have raised concerns that pooling might not make sense for some particular products — like baby food, since shared containers can increase the risk of contamination, and babies are more vulnerable to illness.
There is already evidence, however, that companies are leaving money on the table by choosing not to pool their containers. According to EMF’s direct comparison of pooled and nonpooled standardized packaging, pooling containers reduces the cost of reusable packaging systems by up to 28 percent.
Plus, at least some intervention — perhaps regulation or financial incentives — is likely required to create conditions that are more favorable to reusables; a hands-off, market-led approach is what has led to today’s proliferation of throwaway plastics. EMF’s modeling suggests that only reuse systems “built collaboratively from the outset” can reach cost parity with single-use. Exactly what that collaboration will look like, however, is unclear, since the kinds of government regulations that could help foster it might be incompatible with the United States’ free market ethos and antitrust laws. Internationally, some cities and countries have done more than the U.S. to promote reuse, but none has gone as far as what EMF is suggesting.Plus, at least some intervention — perhaps regulation or financial incentives — is likely required to create conditions that are more favorable to reusables; a hands-off, market-led approach is what has led to today’s proliferation of throwaway plastics. EMF’s modeling suggests that only reuse systems “built collaboratively from the outset” can reach cost parity with single-use. Exactly what that collaboration will look like, however, is unclear, since the kinds of government regulations that could help foster it might be incompatible with the United States’ free market ethos and antitrust laws. Internationally, some cities and countries have done more than the U.S. to promote reuse, but none has gone as far as what EMF is suggesting.
Even in the absence of robust regulations, PR3’s standards are likely to nudge the country — and the world — in the right direction. Once they’re finalized, PR3 plans to submit them to the American National Standards Institute, the U.S. member organization of the ISO. From there, the standards would be opened up to public comment, potential revisions, and then final approval. PR3 would have to go through a separate submission and review process to get the standards approved by member countries of the ISO.
What would happen next is unclear. Other ISO standards — like for information security and energy efficiency — have been voluntarily adopted by individual companies or industry groups, either because they contain genuinely useful guidance on a complicated issue or because they increase businesses’ perceived trustworthiness.
ISO standards can also inform government regulations and international agreements. According to Juska, PR3 is already in talks with Canada’s environment ministry to shape new rules on reusable packaging, and the same thing could happen in any number of other jurisdictions. Juska is also hopeful that PR3’s standards will be acknowledged by or incorporated into the United Nations’ global treaty to end plastic pollution. The latest draft of the treaty mentions the need for standards — including for reusable packaging systems — some three dozen times, which Juska said is indicative of how “desperately needed” they are.
“If we want everyone to move in the same direction, we need to set some design parameters for how we want the system to function,” she said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What will it take to get companies to embrace reusable packaging? on May 1, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
-
Janine Jackson interviewed the National Employment Law Project’s Sally Dworak-Fisher about delivery workers for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Less than four months after it came into effect, Seattle is looking to “adjust”—as it’s being described—the app-based worker minimum-payment ordinance calling on companies like Uber and DoorDash to improve labor conditions for employees.
Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson described the ordinance’s impact on the local economy as “catastrophic.” The Seattle Times reports that the “whiplash reversal comes as both drivers and businesses complained about the added cost of delivery, largely in the form of service charges added by the companies in the wake of the new law”—”in the wake of” being the load-bearing language here.
Common Dreams (3/28/24)
The story of a recent piece by our next guest is in its headline: “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It.” So here to help us break down what’s going on is Sally Dworak-Fisher, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. She joins us now by phone from Baltimore City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sally Dworak-Fisher.
Sally Dworak-Fisher: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: Though more and more people are taking on gig work—for reasons largely to do with the conditions of non-gig work—I think it’s still safe to say that more mainstream news media consumers use app-based delivery systems than work for them. And reporters know what they’re doing when they explain this story by saying, for instance, “Companies like DoorDash have implemented regulatory fees in response to the new law, causing the cost of orders to go up.” What’s being skipped over in that formulation, or that explanation, of what’s happening here, that there was a new law and now costs have gone up? What’s missing there?
SD: Sure. Well, it’s not a surprise that companies might choose to pass on some percentage of new costs to consumers, but they’re by no means required to, and compliance with bedrock pay standards, or any workplace law or social safety net, is part of running a business. If you need to charge a certain amount so you can pay your employee a minimum wage, you don’t normally issue a receipt that says, this is due to the minimum wage law. The practice of specifically pointing the finger at some new law seems really designed to make customers angry at the law, and pit them against the workers. It’s a business choice, it’s not a requirement.
And businesses could choose to, for instance, not pass on the entire cost of the law, or not pass on any of it, if they can afford to do that within their profit margin. So this particular situation, where customers are getting receipts that, in effect, blame the law, seems like a play to pit workers and consumers against one another.
JJ: Absolutely. In your piece that I saw in Common Dreams, you note that charging new service fees is an effort to “tank consumer demand and available work.” What are you getting at there? Why would a company want to draw down consumer demand, and then, more specifically, why would they want to lessen available work?
SD: My point there was just that, in so doing, they can also again create an outcry, a backlash, with workers themselves also saying, “Hey, the law isn’t working as intended. We need to change it.” But, really, it’s a manufactured crisis, and it’s not the law that’s to blame there. It’s really the policy of the business that’s to blame.
JJ: And we don’t see media, at least that I’ve seen, digging into that kind of elision, that kind of skip.
Seattle Times (4/26/24)
SD: Another interesting thing to note would be, so they add a $5 fee that’s purportedly because of the new legal requirements. But it’ll be interesting to know how much of that fee from all those people is really going through the compliance, versus how much is going to profit. And their data is not easily shared.
JJ: And I wanted to ask you about that data. Companies are saying these new service charges are a necessary counterbalance to increased labor costs. Though according to, at least, the Seattle Times, they have declined to release internal data. So we’re being asked to trust the very companies that fought tooth and nail against this ordinance, against paying workers more. We’re just supposed to trust their explanation of what the impact of that ordinance has been. That is, as you say, an information deficit there.
SD: Yes, and I think that they closely guard their information, and don’t turn it over to policymakers. It’s sort of shadow-boxing, in a way, because they have all the information. So I would hope that policymakers would make them show their work, in effect.
JJ: Or at least make a point of the fact that they’re not; that they’re making assertions based on something that they’re not proving or illustrating. We can call that out.
SD: And that was part of our point, is that this law has only gone into effect two months ago. Just be cognizant of the fact that this is a choice that the companies are making to raise these service fees. And before you go about rushing to judgment on anything, demand the data, and see what’s going on.
CounterSpin (4/3/20)
JJ: When I spoke with Bama Athreya, who hosts the podcast the Gig, she was saying that there’s a glaring need for a bridge between labor rights advocates and digital rights advocates. Because these companies, they’re not making toasters. Their business model is crucial here, and part of that involves, in fact, data, and that, beyond our regular understanding of workers’ rights, there needs to be a bigger-picture understanding of this new way of doing business.
SD: That dovetails with something that we talk about frequently here, which is the algorithmic control and the gamification of the work. These corporations are really well-versed in touting flexibility, but the day-to-day job of an app-based worker is highly mediated, monitored, controlled by algorithms that detail how much they’ll be paid, when they’ll be paid, when they can work. There’s a whole lot of algorithms and tech that come into play here. But I do just want to say, it doesn’t make them special. These are just new ways of misclassifying workers as independent contractors.
JJ: It’s just a new shine on an old practice.
Another thing that Bama Athreya pointed out was that it’s often presented to us as, “Well, I guess you’re going to have to pay $26 for a cup of coffee, because the workers want to get paid more.” And that’s the pitting workers versus consumers angle that a lot of elite media take.
Intercept (1/7/22)
But also, if we look at other countries, companies like Uber say, “Well golly, if you make us improve our labor practices, I guess we’ll have to”—and then they kick rocks and look sad—“I guess we’ll just have to go out of business.” And then a government says, “Well, yeah, OK, but you still have to follow the law.” And then they say, “Oh, all right, we’ll just follow it.” They can do it.
SD: And I think they’ve admitted that. I believe that the Uber CEO, after California passed AB 5, which is a law regarding who’s an employee and who’s an independent contractor in that state, Uber, I’m pretty sure, was on record saying, “Well, we can comply with any law.”
And, honestly, I think that really gets into, what do we as a society want in terms of our policies? Do we want just any business? Don’t we have minimum wage laws for a reason? If you can’t make it work while still paying a living wage, then consumers aren’t in the business of subsidizing that. I’m sorry, but not every business is entitled to run on the lowest wage possible.
JJ: And I wish a lot of the folks were not saying, out of the same mouth, that capitalism is this wonderful thing where if you build a better mousetrap, then you succeed, and if you don’t, well, you don’t. And that’s why they have to be rewarded, because of the risk they take. When then, at the same time, we’re saying, oh, but if you want to fall afoul of certain basic human rights laws, we’ll subsidize that, and make sure you get to exist anyway. It’s a confusing picture.
SD: I mean, should we bring back child labor?
JJ: Yeah. Hmm. You thought that would be a less interesting question than it turns out that it is.
Let me just ask you, finally, what should we be looking for to happen from public advocates, which we would hope elected officials would be public advocates, and also reporters we would hope would be public advocates. What should they be calling for, and what should they notice if it doesn’t happen? What’s the right move right now?
Sally Dworak-Fisher: “Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor.”
SD: I think whatever can be done to support the movement. There’s movements across states of app-based workers demanding accountability, and really trying to shine a light on what’s really going on here. I think the more reporting on that, and exposing—you know, every worker should have flexibility and a good job, but the flexibility that’s offered app-based workers is not necessarily the flexibility that a regular reader might assume.
In 2018, NELP issued a report with another organization, called Uber State Interference, and we really identified these ways that Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor. And now, coming out of the pandemic, as workers are successfully organizing again, like they’ve been doing in Seattle and New York City and Minneapolis, the companies are orchestrating a backlash. So understanding the context of what’s going on, and exposing it, would go a long way in solidarity with the workers.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sally Dworak-Fisher from the National Employment Law Project; they’re online at NELP.org. And her piece, “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It,” can be found at CommonDreams.org. Thank you so much, Sally Dworak-Fisher, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.
SD: A pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
The post ‘This Is a Choice Companies Are Making to Raise Fees’: <br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Sally Dworak-Fisher on delivery workers appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
