That future seemed one step closer to reality last year when San Francisco-based indoor farming startup Plenty, which grows a variety of salad and leafy greens hydroponically (without soil) and uses artificial lighting in facilities in three locations, announced that it had raised a whopping $200 million in funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund, whose investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Flush with cash, Plenty quickly opened a 100,000-square-foot indoor farm outside Seattle that promised to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually—and testing some varieties not yet grown for the masses at scale, such as strawberries and tomatoes, at its research and development farm in Wyoming.  To Plenty’s leadership and many observers, the cash influx signaled the economic promise of growing food indoors without sunlight and with less soil and water than field farming.

Photo courtesy of Plenty.

“My reaction [to the $200 million round] was both that of validation, excitement,” said Matt Barnard, Plenty’s co-founder and CEO, over a manner of farming he says yields 350 times the produce per acre on one percent of the water used by dirt farming. “Now we must move with speed and efficiency if we’re to accomplish our mission of bringing people worldwide an experience that’s healthier for them and the planet.”

Not everyone is in agreement.

“My first thought was, ‘we could build a lot of greenhouses for $200 million,’” recalls Neil Mattson, a professor of plant science at Cornell and one of the country’s leading academic voices on indoor agriculture, who’s found that high-tech greenhouses that harness sunlight are more cost- and carbon-friendly than vertical farms that use artificial light.

Most vertical farmers are only hoping to claim a percentage of the conventional produce market, not replace it. To these founders and their investors, the market for lettuce and greens, especially—grown primarily in California and Arizona and shipped worldwide—is ripe for disruption. E. coli outbreaks like the one that hit Arizona-grown romaine lettuce earlier this year, killing a handful of people and sickening hundreds, only further their case.

But behind futurists’ fervent predictions about indoor agriculture, claims about product quality, and sexy technology lies a reality known by industry insiders but too often missing from media coverage: The future success of this nascent industry is still very much an open question.

The astronomical capital costs associated with starting a large hydroponic farm (compared to field and greenhouse farming), its reliance on investor capital and yet-to-be-developed technology, and challenges around energy efficiency and environmental impact make vertical farming anything but a sure bet. And even if vertical farms do scale, there’s no clear sense of whether brand-loyal consumers, en masse, will make the switch from field-grown produce to foods grown indoors.

Tricky Economics

Walking into any supermarket will reveal a small mountain of salad greens, carrying a price tag of between $9 and $12 per pound. They may be locally grown or organic, which will add $0.50 or $1 to the price tag. Meanwhile, a 4.5-ounce carton of Massachusetts-based FreshBox Farms’ spring mix—grown in the company’s hydroponic farm in Massachusetts—costs $3.99 for a 4-ounce box, or $15.96 per pound. Or kale: the conventional variety will run you $1.33 per pound at Walmart; organic kale costs around $4.99 per pound at Whole Foods; and vertically farmed kale grown at Newark, New Jersey-based AeroFarms will cost you a whopping $14.18 per pound.

That dramatic price gap is due to the millions of dollars currently needed to build one large indoor vertical farm—and that price is not going to drop until the industry scales up. Agritecture Consulting, whose clients include current and prospective indoor farms, estimates that a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm growing leafy greens and herbs in the tri-state area around New York City requires nearly $4 million in startup capital—not including labor.

They should know: In 2016, Agritecture built farm.one in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, which supplies hydroponic greens and edible flowers to a number of the city’s top restaurants. Chefs have been quick to catch onto the value of consistent, year-round, locally grown produce.

A farm.one indoor farming operation. (Photo courtesy of farm.one.)

In 2016, AeroFarms, now considered an industry leader, spent $30 million on its flagship aeroponic farm in Newark. The majority of these costs lie in the equipment needed to grow greens without soil or sunlight—heating and cooling systems, ventilation, shading, environmental controls, and lights.

All of these costs add up to a hefty electricity bill: According to models compiled for Civil Eats by Agritecture, a 30,000-square-foot vertical farm in metro New York City should budget upwards of $216,000 annually for lighting and power, and another $120,000 on HVAC systems; costs will vary region to region depending on what each state charges for electricity.

Energy and equipment costs are, by far, the largest drivers of expenses that can bring the price of operating a vertical farm close to $27 per square foot. By contrast, Agritecture’s models show that the cost to run a 100,000-square-foot smart greenhouse is roughly a third as expensive, thanks to the use of natural sunlight and more advanced automation.

Vertical farms’ energy usage carries a significant carbon footprint. While vertical farm companies promise more-sustainable produce by growing it closer to consumers and using renewable energy to power their operations, the industry still has a long row to hoe.

Industry leaders acknowledge the energy challenges in the short term, yet tout continually improving lighting technology that has brought down costs. But Mattson, whose Cornell team studies the way plants respond to different lighting, predicts a plateau coming for improvements to LED technology.

LEDs lighting an indoor farming operation. (Photo courtesy of Agritecture.)

“The best LEDs are 40 percent more energy efficient than in 2014,” Mattson says. “There continue to be improvements; however, those improvements will start to slow down over time. There’s only a finite amount of light you can generate at a given wavelength, and in 2022, I’m not expecting new lights to be 40 percent more efficient than the current lights now.”

FreshBox Farms began shipping greens from its 40,000-square-foot hydroponic facility in Millis, Massachusetts, in 2015. The warehouse farm, located 30 miles outside of Boston, runs on a combination of renewable energy and non-renewables, and CFO Dave Vosburg admits his company is “not doing any better” than field-grown greens when it comes to carbon usage.

When it eventually expands outside of Massachusetts, Vosberg says that by introducing a cogeneration system—technology that recycles otherwise wasted heat into new energy—FreshBox Farms will eventually keep costs and carbon emissions down in expensive markets like Connecticut, where commercial users pay an average of more than 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. But Vosburg says the company’s priority is to use contextually appropriate renewable energy sources to power the farms, such as wind energy in the Midwest, hydro in the Northwest, and solar in the Southwest.

“Yes, it sounds crazy to take the sun and turn it into electricity and turn that electricity back into light. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s what we’ll be doing,” Vosburg says. “It’ll be really efficient and clean and create a better product, and it won’t have the same carbon impact that we’re having today.”

And energy isn’t even a vertical farm’s top ongoing expense. The companies Civil Eats spoke to say labor is actually their largest budget item. Vertical farms typically pay workers higher, more metropolitan pay rates than both dirt farms—many of which rely heavily on migrant labor—and the more automated smart greenhouses. The fast-food chain Wendy’s announced in June that it plans to source vine-ripened tomatoes exclusively from greenhouse farms by early 2019.

Moreover, no matter how automated the indoor growing system is, vertical farmers are discovering the constant need for a human eye—or several—on the process. In fact, some estimate that if indoor agriculture continues to grow at the pace it has in recent years, vertical farms will have to hire 100,000 workers over the next decade.

That continued growth is not a given, however. Because of the high cost to launch, operate, and scale up a vertical farming operation, the industry is highly leveraged, with each new farm requiring tens of millions of dollars in investor capital before it can grow a single plant. Between 2016 and 2017, investments in vertical farming skyrocketed 653 percent, from $36 million to $271 million. The lion’s share of that investment went to Plenty, but Newark-based AeroFarms has raised $80 million in recent years and New Jersey’s Bowery Farming added another $27 million.

Just last week, Manhattan-based BrightFarms announced it had raised $55 million. Shoppers can now find produce grown indoors by more than 23 large vertical farms in more than 20 supermarket chains in nearly every major metropolitan area in the country, according to Agritecture.

While industry leaders say scaling offers the best hope for profitability in this business, many vertical farms have encountered problems when they began planning to add additional production facilities. Before Atlanta-based PodPonics closed its doors in 2016, executives from the five-year-old hydroponic farm startup met with executives from supermarket chain Kroger.

Kroger indicated that it was ready to purchase 25 million pounds of produce from PodPonics annually if it would build the facilities to support that kind of production, founder Matt Liotta told a crowd at the 2017 Aglanta Conference. According to Liotta, who said PodPonics had lowered the cost to produce a pound of lettuce to $1.36, Whole Foods and Fresh Market also expressed interest in bringing PodPonics greens into their stores nationally.

“This was our wildest dream,” Liotta said. “Then we realized how much capital that was going to require, how many people we were going to have to hire. Every retailer told us the same thing: ‘We will buy it if you will build it.’ We realized we were incapable of building everything that they wanted.”

Unproven Demand for Food Grown Indoors

In early 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois-Urbana set out to determine whether consumers would spring for produce grown indoors. They asked a panel of 117 participants a series of questions about their perceptions of and willingness to pay for lettuce grown in fields, greenhouses, and in vertical farms. While vertical farming ranked fairly high in terms of produce quality and safety, the tech-heavy production method was rated less “natural” than both field farming and greenhouse and ranked last in participants’ willingness to purchase it.

Photo courtesy of Plenty

For the vertical agriculture industry to eat into the profits of field-grown products—a roughly $140 billion industry—Agritecture Consulting founder and managing director Henry Gordon-Smith says it will first need to prove consumers are demanding produce grown indoors. He points out that because of a lack of demand, many vertical farming operations are not yet at full production year-round—despite touting the 12-month growing season as a main benefit of the industry.

His sense is that indoor farms that have achieved the sales to produce continually—such as Gotham Greens has with its New York City greenhouses, for example—have a customer base that’s responding to strong “local” branding rather than the technology behind the food. That may include vertical farms selling their produce using the USDA Certified Organic label, which the National Organic Board reaffirmed in January, much to the dismay of many organic dirt farmers.

Gotham Greens’ greenhouse (photo courtesy of Reana Kovalcik)

“I think the automation and economics are all improving,” Gordon-Smith says, adding that the question of “whether consumers are going to pay more or whether the products coming out of vertical farms are going to align with their values” is still an open question.

But while many of the East Coast vertical farms built their business models around replacing greens being shipped cross-country from California and Arizona, Matt Barnard of Plenty hopes to add to the global population consuming fresh produce. A 2015 report found that where USDA guidelines suggest each of us in the U.S. should eat up to three cups of vegetables daily, current U.S. production is only providing enough for 1.7 cups per person. Barnard extends that supply gap to the rest of the world, especially the Middle East and Asia, where a lack of water and high pollution have hampered agriculture.

Plenty CEO Matt Barnard. (Photo courtesy of Plenty.)

“We believe the industry will be five times larger when there is supply to meet the demand,” Barnard says. “With the field unable to deliver consistent supply, new forms of agricultural capacity like Plenty must be added to the global food system.”

But as vertical farming companies like Plenty go city by city attempting to dominate local markets, it may be that small farmers get hurt the most. Barnard drew the ire of Washington State dirt farmers last year when he told GeekWire that Plenty expanded to Seattle, in part, because it was the West Coast’s “best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally.”

Not so, according to Sofia Gidlund, Farm Programs Manager at Tilth Alliance, which advocates for and supports local agriculture systems in Greater Seattle.

“We work with many hardworking local farmers who supply Seattle with high-quality, delicious, and nutritious food while caring deeply for our land. These farmers use sustainable farming practices, nurse the soil, create beautiful open green space and provide wildlife habitat,” says Gidlund, who adds that she does not speak for all area farmers on the issue of vertical farming. “Many consumers in Seattle choose to support local farmers, both urban or rural, because of this deep connection to the land. Providing that support is a point of pride for many Seattleites.”

Actual Data Is Coming

Peer-reviewed research into the business of vertical farming has been sparse, partly because the industry is so new. That’s set to change, however, when Mattson and a team of researchers at Cornell University finish a comprehensive study into the viability of this approach.

A three-year, $2.4 million research grant, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and kicked off in January, will compare the vertical farming industry to field agriculture in a slew of categories, including energy, carbon, and water footprints, profitability, workforce development, and scalability. The study will include one of the first nutritional analyses of food grown indoors, as well as comparing the price-per-pound to deliver strawberries, lettuce, and tomatoes grown vertically and outdoors to five U.S. metropolitan areas: New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.

A 2016 study conducted by a few of Mattson’s colleagues at Cornell found that the energy consumption and carbon footprint associated with a vertical farm (the study calls it a “plant factory”) is significantly higher than that of a greenhouse. Vertical farming leaders counter that they use significantly less water than field farms, are more space-efficient, and do not produce emissions from trucking produce across the country. Mattson says these factors were not considered in Cornell’s previous research but will be included in the current grant.

“[Vertical farming] is not a fad,” says Mattson, who wants to use data to help the industry become more sustainable over time. “I’m not sure to what degree it’s going to scale up, but this is happening. So we need to understand the economic and environmental implications—both the good and the bad.”

Update: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Plenty is testing its strawberry and tomato crops in Wyoming, not at its facility in Washington state.

The post Can Vertical Farms Reap Their Harvest? It’s Anyone’s Bet. appeared first on Civil Eats.

But what sets Spyce apart from the Dig Inn two doors down or the two Sweetgreens within a stone’s throw is who—or, rather, what—cooks the food. The star culinarian at Spyce is a nine-foot long, 14-foot wide robotic kitchen—so, not really an employee at all.

The machine wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a spinning wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below. Only then does a human handle any part of your meal, adding fresh ingredients and handing over the order, a process designed to take as few as three minutes.

But, despite the small number of humans involved, Spyce’s co-owners appear to be taking the human touch quite seriously.

“At the end of the day, a restaurant is all about hospitality and, obviously, how good the food is,” says Spyce’s COO Kale Rogers, who built an early prototype of the robotic kitchen with his three current business partners in the basement of their fraternity house at MIT. “We see the automation as a tool to allow us to serve incredible quality to more people. A necessary component is the human touch—the presentation, the personalization, the handing it to you with a smile.”

One of Spyce’s robot-prepared dishes.

Spyce’s robotic system, plus a number of other recent advances in restaurant automation, may raise questions about the culinary future we want. They’re questions easily recognized in nearly every sector, from driverless cars in the automotive industry to self-checkout in grocery stores. Will replacing cooks with robots or cashiers with computers be good for the nation’s often-undervalued food workers? Or will it just make them obsolete?

Restaurant industry leaders have blamed fair pay movements like Fight for $15 for the rise of restaurant automation, with the assumption that more robots equals fewer human workers. But some workforce advocates note that automation may actually end up being beneficial to restaurant workers.

A Short History of Robotic Restaurants

In developing Spyce, Rogers and his co-founders had a lot to learn from less-successful experiments in automation over the last several years.

For one, they brought on renowned chef Daniel Boulud, who drew from his Michelin-rated restaurants for design and flow. Along with executive chef Sam Benson, Boulud helped develop Spyce’s menu. Boulud and Benson also convinced the co-founders, who may have been leaning more robot-centric, to place two French-inspired garde mangers at the front counter to garnish the bowls. Two more employees roam the front-of-house, welcoming guests and helping troubleshoot any snags with the kiosk ordering system. A handful of additional human workers prepare ingredients at an off-site commissary kitchen.

From left: Co-founder Luke Schlueter, co-founder Michael Farid, co-founder Kale Rogers, executive chef Sam Benson, co-founder Brady Knight, chef Daniel Boulud.

Kale Rogers, co-founder and chief operating officer, wouldn’t say what Spyce is paying its workers—though Boston’s minimum wage is $11 an hour, so assume employees make at least that much—but he acknowledged that customer service is key to creating an environment to which the lunch crowd wants to return week after week.

“It’s staff whose job is to enhance your experience in the store,” he says.

Technology and automation have been seeping into the restaurant industry for years now, dating back even to the automats of the early 20th century. But not all companies wear their automation on their sleeve like Spyce does.

Visit San Francisco-based eatsa—where customers order on kiosks and pick up their machine-made bento bowl or chile con quinoa from a space-age cubby—and you may avoid interacting with a single employee. And at Café X, a coffee bar also in San Francisco, your barista is a robot that pulls orders from a touch-screen monitor and pours espresso drinks, drip coffee, and cups of nitro cold brew. There’s also Flippy, the food-safe robot arm that has made national headlines for its ability to grill, monitor, and place burger patties on buns at CaliBurger’s Pasadena location.

Many other, more mainstream eateries are experimenting with automation and technology, such as digital menus and payment pads at the table, as a way to lower rising labor costs, says Patrick Maguire, a restaurant consultant in Boston and author of the blog Server Not Servant. Maguire says the idea of automation may make sense from an economic and efficiency standpoint, but it can end up harming the guest experience because machines and humans are not equal in their intangible service skills.

“It’s true that robots can’t call out sick or bitch about their schedules, but they also can’t ‘think on their feet’ or provide the same hospitality that humans can,” Maguire says. “And often, one of the best aspects of dining out is interacting with a great server, bartender, or staff member.”

And yet, some have predicted we’re moving closer to the widespread replacement of human restaurant workers with robots, computers, and other forms of technology. These predictions sometimes come in the form of threats from restaurant lobbyists to advocates of higher wages for food workers, such as the Fight For $15.

Robots and the Restaurant Workforce of the Future

Saru Jayaraman, cofounder of the worker advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and one of the engines behind the Fight For $15, says she has yet to see robots replace humans in the restaurant industry. In fact, Jayaraman noted that data suggest automation could lead to increased restaurant employment in the future.

One need only look, she says, to California: ground zero for both the booming restaurant industry and for automation in restaurants. For starters, even as automation becomes more commonplace in California, restaurant employment there has exploded, increasing 45 percent from 2001 to 2016.

Many headline-grabbing robots and systems, like Flippy, were born in the Golden State, and fast-food chains have used California as proving grounds for technologies like self-service kiosks and tablets, mobile ordering and payment, customizable menus, and table service. A September 2017 ROC memo points out that on the whole, automation of some tasks has led to changes in the kinds of positions restaurants need, but not in the number of staff.

“We see two futures in our industry: One future [leads to] higher wages, better benefits, and professionalizing an industry that has been undervalued for too long,” says Jayaraman. “The other future is what we call the ‘low road,’ and involves digitization and extremely low wages. Which future is tech supporting with automation?”

The real question may be whether consumers will buy wholesale into a more automated, less human-run restaurant industry. Eatsa, the quick-service restaurant where meals were placed into cubbies for customer pickup, closed all but two of its retail locations after sales flagged and shifted its business model to licensing its technology. Jayaraman points to chains that have scaled back automated systems following customer complaints that they were too impersonal. Another full-service chain she heard of rolled out automation on its prep line, only to find that it needed to hire more human employees to monitor and repair the automation.

“Our industry doesn’t lend itself well to workers being replaced by robots,” she says.

Time will tell whether Spyce will be able to find a happy medium in an industry built on hospitality and the human touch. Their model is yet unproven in one of the city’s busiest business districts, but Spyce COO Rogers says he’s confident in what they’ve built, and he and his team will “understand right away if the customer really values what we bring.”

Photos courtesy of Spyce.

The post Will Robot-Led Restaurants Be a Gift or a Curse to Food Workers? appeared first on Civil Eats.

At the same time, many people are also seeking out alternative protein sources. Whether motivated by concerns for health, animal welfare, or the environment, nearly one-third of Americans practice meat-free days and 35 percent say they’re increasing the amount of non-meat proteins they eat, according to market intelligence agency Mintel. Surveys have found that vegans make up as much as 6 percent of the population, though other studies put that figure much lower.

Of the protein-packed plants taking the country by storm, one unlikely source is experiencing something of a meteoric rise: the pea. Peas have been around forever, but only recently have they found their footing as a go-to protein in many energy bars, milk alternatives, and burgers.

Pea protein is creating something of a feeding frenzy among investors and big food companies hoping to strike it rich off the new designer protein. In 2018 alone, global food giant Cargill poured $25 million into Minnesota-based pea protein manufacturer Puris, while Ripple Foods brought in $65 million in series C funding to expand its line of pea protein-based milks and yogurts. And last year, director James Cameron, seeing the growth in the plant-based foods, invested in Canadian pea processing plant Verdient Foods. While he wouldn’t disclose the amount of his investment, Cameron told CBC News the “ballpark is big.”

Globally, the pea protein market increases each year, with some estimates placing its value at $360 million by 2022.

As with all hot, “new” foods, there’s more than meets the eye. We asked experts to give us the lowdown on pea protein—where does it come from, how is it produced, and is it substantially better than other plant-based proteins?

Taking a Bite out of Soy and Almond

First, we need to address the billion-dollar elephant in the room: soy. Protein derived from soybeans accounts for the largest segment of plant-based proteins by far. It’s currently a $1.7 billion market worldwide, expected to grow by around 10 percent a year for the foreseeable future. Soy has for years been the go-to alternative protein source for consumer packaged goods manufacturers, and for a long time the leading source for dairy-free milk (almond milk has since taken the lead).

But both soy and almonds have struggled with image problems of late. At the peak of California’s punishing five-year drought, almonds became a scapegoat for irrational water use in the state, owing to the widely cited statistic that it takes more than a gallon of water to grow one nut.

Ripple’s pea milk bottles. (Photo courtesy of Ripple Foods)

Soy comes with its own baggage. For one thing, almost all domestically grown soybeans are genetically modified—a potential red flag for many consumers. And since that modification tends to be focused on making the plants tolerant to Roundup and other weed killers, it’s also one of foods most commonly sprayed with pesticides. Soy’s prevalence in the U.S. diet over the last few decades has also earned it a spot among the eight most common food allergens, as identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additional questions surround the isoflavones prevalent in soy, which can mimic estrogen in the body, although studies are inconclusive on the damage these do to humans.

But if there’s anything we know about the food industry, it’s that it doesn’t take much bad press—much less scientific proof—to turn consumers away from a product.

Enter pea protein.

It Starts with a Pea

The industry starts with the high-protein yellow or green “field peas” known by most consumers as “split peas.” More than 400 growers in the U.S. and Canada buy yellow field peas from Puris, grow them organically, and sell them back to the company. Split peas are naturally higher in protein (20-25 percent) than sweet green peas (5-6 percent), making them a better raw material from which to isolate the protein.

The harvested peas are then dried and shipped to Puris’s manufacturing facility, where they are milled into a fine powder. The powder is immersed in water to create a pea “milk” or “slurry,” which scientists place into a centrifuge machine to mechanically separate the proteins from the starches and fibers. (Puris also manufactures and sells its condensed fiber and starch isolates to food manufacturers, using the entire pea.)

Now it’s time to make the protein isolate taste good. This is where the clean-eating critics of protein isolates begin to get wary. In order to improve flavor, texture, and functionality, some have wondered whether the protein is treated with harmful chemicals or submerged in petroleum-based hexane, like many soy proteins. That’s true of some pea protein isolates, but not the ones made by Puris, where food scientist MarJanie Kinney says the protein is treated only with food-grade enzymes and acidulants such as citric acid. The protein is then removed from the water and spray-dried, leaving behind a powder that is approximately 80 percent protein.

Pea Protein in Use

“Pea protein allows you to plug a plant-based protein source in a number of different applications that people are willing and ready to eat,” says Kinney, who helped develop Puris’s pea protein isolate before becoming an independent consultant. “Puris is creating a plant-based future in every food category.”

The company is certainly not alone; the number of products containing pea protein isolate has increased nearly 200 percent in the last few years, with food companies adding it to just about everything—from energy bars to bread. Food conglomerate Cargill’s principal technologist Bill Gilbert told FoodNavigator that where the market for whole grain and fiber breads is fairly saturated, baking breads with pea proteins could “extend that category further.”

Tyler Lorenzen of Puris Foods in a pea field. (Photo by Bill Phelps, courtesy of Puris Foods)

Pea protein is also the star in a line of plant-based burgers that the company Beyond Meat says “looks, cooks, and satisfies like beef”—without the cholesterol, animal fat, and environmental burden of meat. Beyond Meat’s burger even “bleeds” beet juice when thrown on the grill.

But it’s pea protein milk alternatives that are making perhaps the biggest splash. Companies like Ripple and Bolthouse Farms hope their products can take market share from soy, almond, and dairy milk.

Transparency and Nutritional Properties

The key thing to remember regarding transparency is that production methods can differ, especially in pea proteins imported from abroad. For instance, while Puris may grow its peas organically and in the United States, it may be more difficult for consumers to verify claims made by manufacturers from China and Europe—especially around their organic standards. (Canada grows more than three-quarters of all split peas imported by the United States.)

Nutritionally, peas are technically not a complete protein—they don’t contain all the amino acids needed for the body to process proteins. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and a growing number of nutritionists, as long as we get those amino acids from other plant-based foods at other times in the day, having them all in one meal isn’t necessary. Boston-based vegan nutritionist Kristen Ciccolini says pea protein has been shown to benefit the human body in many important ways.

“It’s easier to digest than the dairy versions, there’s evidence showing it’s a great choice for weight loss and appetite control, and it has been found to help keep blood sugar in balance,” Ciccolini says. “The branch-chain amino acids that it contains support muscle repair as well.”

Despite claims like this, pea protein has been the subject of only a few peer-reviewed research studies. In a recent letter to Congressional lawmakers from lobby group Plant Based Foods Association regarding the 2018 Farm Bill, executive director Michele Simon and board chair Jaime Athos specifically requested additional research into plant-based sources of protein in a general call for a fairer food system for plant-based foods.

Simon told Civil Eats that the academic study of plant-based foods is dwarfed by those of meat and dairy, the production of which amounts to a “catastrophe situation” for our health and planet.

“Research can really drive a lot of innovation and food products that come on to market,” Simon says. Funding more research into plant-based proteins like peas could open the door to further innovations in plant-based nutrition. “How can we tap into the variety of plant-based proteins to help consumers shift away from a meat-centered diet to a plant-based diet?”

Sustainability and Scalability

With companies like Nestlé and Cargill getting into the pea business, questions about environmental sustainability abound. After all, an increasing amount of U.S. farmland is controlled by fewer, larger commodity farms, which in turn frequently contract with a handful of mega-corporations who make our food.

But from an environmental standpoint, the addition of peas can actually improve the sustainability of large-scale cereal farms, according to Dr. Chengci Chen, Cropping Systems Agronomist and Superintendent of the Eastern Agriculture Research Center at Montana State University. Chen says that’s because peas and other legumes grow in concert with bacteria in the soil to take nitrogen from the air and soil and feed it to the plant as a natural fertilizer.

When peas are grown as a rotational crop on Montana’s large cereal farms, Chen says that the nitrogen created by the peas keeps the soil healthy and reduces the amount of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizer that is applied to the wheat before running off into the groundwater supply.

“It’s a win-win situation. Peas build nitrogen in the soil, they require no fertilizer, they increase yields for farmers, they’re a clean crop and healthy for human and animal consumption,” Chen says. “I can’t think of any negative impact to growing peas.”

And what if field peas are grown at the same scale as soybeans? Marion Nestle, an author and nutrition professor at New York University, says it’s not going to happen—or at least not anytime soon. Soybeans have been paired with corn on most Corn Belt farms since they were made popular by Henry Ford the 1930s and the nation is covered with billions of dollars worth of farm infrastructure designed around storing, processing, and transporting them.

American farmers planted around 90 million acres of soybeans in 2017, compared to just 1.1 million acres of field peas. Some surveys suggest soy’s 2018 acreage could match the 91 million acres of King Corn planted in 2017. This dynamic means domestic soy will most likely always remain less expensive than peas for the consumer.

In the end, however, a nutritionally balanced and economical diet may require Americans to seek out proteins from more than just one source, says Nestle.

“Lots of people do not want to eat meat for reasons of religion, politics, economics, or health and greatly prefer plant proteins,” Nestle says. “Fortunately, these work just fine as long as sources are varied. I wouldn’t call this a fad—it’s more of a lifestyle choice.”

Top photo courtesy of Ripple Foods.

Cookies made with pea milk. (Photo courtesy of Puris Foods)

The post Your Pea Protein Primer appeared first on Civil Eats.

Then, last year, the Albertson’s closed and a Safeway, a subsidiary of Albertson’s, opened three miles outside of town. Since then, the building that housed the Birchwood store has been sitting empty. Neighborhood residents must now make their way to a supermarket further afield—which, especially for low-income residents, may require taking a bus or spending more for their groceries at the higher-priced Haggen slightly closer to home.

A grocery store re-opening in Birchwood’s Park Manor strip mall likely would help some of the income- and transportation-challenged residents in a neighborhood that meets the federal government’s technical definition of a “food desert.” But Albertson’s, which still owns the 44,000-square-foot space, refuses to rent it to any tenant using more than 5,000 square feet to sell food.

Legal scholars say “restrictive covenants” like these are typically agreed to at the time of a building’s lease or sale and have been used for years to prevent landlords from selling or leasing space within the same shopping center or strip mall to a retailer’s direct competition. Courts have consistently backed such covenants, so long as the deed’s language is “clear and unambiguous” and restrictions are not “illegal or unconscionable.”

It’s an issue nationwide, as similar use restrictions are present in the leases or deeds of Safeway stores in California, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. At one point, 250 Walmart stores across the country sat empty because of such restrictions.

Critics say some retailers are using these covenants to keep competitors out of a space they’ve vacated for years, and sometimes decades—even when direct competition is not an issue. Now, a growing movement around the country seeks to end this “scorched-earth” use of restrictive covenants by grocery stores, noting that access to food is fundamentally important to the health and well-being of a neighborhood.

Veteran grocer Doug Rauch, a retired president of Trader Joe’s who started a chain of nonprofit grocery stores in Boston in 2015 to combat food insecurity, thinks such restrictive deeds and leases constitute a restriction of free competition in the marketplace when they extend beyond a single shopping center.

“These are unfair in my point of view in that they are clearly a restriction of free trade and often hurt the property-owner’s business—as well as reduce options for customers,” he said. “It keeps smaller, often more local or entrepreneurial businesses out of a market. I don’t think that’s good for the customer.”

Safeway spokesperson Christine Wilcox, who declined an interview and did not address any store location specifically, emailed Civil Eats the following statement: “While lease and deed restrictions are common across the retail sector,” she wrote, “for our company, which has more than 2,300 locations, such restrictions are rare.”

Birchwood resident Jesi Van Leeuwen, who volunteers with a group that calls itself the Birchwood Food Desert Fighters, said she heard from one man—an immigrant from Mexico—who’d moved into the neighborhood specifically because the Albertson’s was so close by. Now, the man, who uses a cane, walks to a bus stop, rides a bus to a supermarket further away, and occasionally must stay on the bus until it turns around at the end of the line so he and his bags can be dropped off in front of his house. “That’s not a sustainable way for people to live,” Van Leeuwen said.

Many experts have noted that supermarkets alone will not solve food-access problems in economically challenged neighborhoods. But even as communities engage in more sustainable solutions like gardening and making community supported agriculture (CSA) shares accessible and affordable, large-scale supermarkets remain a nutritional lifeline for many low-income shoppers and an economic anchor for smaller businesses nearby.

Losing a grocery store can truly devastate a community. For instance, the 2014 closing of a Safeway in downtown Greeley, Colorado, left an estimated 33,000 residents without a convenient supermarket and led to the closure of a nearby liquor store that used to haul in $100,000 a month.

Local activists in Washington State—who’ve responded to the Albertson’s closure in Bellingham both with protests and by periodically giving away free produce at neighborhood “share spots”—say restrictive covenants pertaining to such a need as basic as food are especially harmful.

“It’s criminal,” said Van Leeuwen. “It’s saying, ‘You cannot feed these people.’”

In the other cities where Safeway is employing restrictive covenants, communities are pushing back as well, with responses ranging from direct action to legislation, and sometimes both.

District of Columbia officials are currently working to ban restrictive covenants there as Safeway attempts to sell its property in the Palisades neighborhood of Ward 7. The closure of this store—which remains open for now—said City Council member Mary Cheh, would disproportionately impact pedestrians who shop there because of the distance to the next nearest supermarket. While Cheh—a health and nutrition advocate who started D.C.’s first food policy council—represents a different part of the District, she said the Palisades case is a cautionary tale for other neighborhoods.

That’s why, last fall, Cheh proposed to make permanent an emergency act that curbs this practice in the District. Under the carefully worded act, which requires approval by the Council, D.C.’s mayor, and Congress to pass, property owners could ultimately choose to whom they lease or sell a space but could not specifically prohibit a user from opening a grocery or supermarket.

“[Supermarkets] are in business to make money and to succeed, and if they don’t want competition where they’ve just sold a store, I understand,” said Cheh, who has written several temporary Council bills banning restrictive deeds over the last few years. “I don’t think it’s good for the community, though. [Cities and residents] can’t always get what we want in the place we want it, but I think we can limit the harm of them selling it with this restrictive covenant.”

Sometimes City Hall isn’t willing to take a stand, or feels powerless to influence these corporate practices. Downtown Vallejo, California, was without a supermarket for 15 years as a former Safeway store sat empty and prospective buyers waited out a longstanding deed restriction—all legal and in plain sight of city officials. When the restriction finally ended in 2015, a Grocery Outlet moved into the space. But not before an entire generation of young people in the downtown neighborhood of the Northern California town had grown up with limited access to healthy food.

Absent ample support from Vallejo officials, activists from the nearby Food Empowerment Project have targeted Safeway with a campaign in an attempt to force the company to stop using restrictive covenants. A year-long effort to communicate directly with Safeway leadership broke down in early 2016, when local activists “decided to be more in-your-face about things because they weren’t willing to make the changes,” said Lauren Ornelas, the organization’s executive director.

Ornelas’s organization has organized several protests at nearby Safeway stores, and more than 33,000 people nationwide have signed an online petition urging the company’s chief executive to stop writing restrictive deeds and leases. Vallejo residents are also asking for more worker-owned cooperatives in town in order to give food shoppers an alternative to large chains.

“Corporations are massive, and the communities they’re doing this to don’t have anywhere near the influence of Safeway,” said Ornelas. But, she adds, “Communities will exert their power, and that’s who Safeway’s going to have to answer to.”

The post How Leaving Stores Closed for Years Helps Grocery Chains and Hurts Communities appeared first on Civil Eats.

“It’s taco day!” one boy yells, adding a joy-filled jig to his exclamation.

Despite the fact he’s brought his lunch from home, the 11-year-old herald enthusiastically hops into the line to have his tray filled with salad greens, whole-grain rice, black beans, seasoned chicken, and a few spears of broccoli—steamed and seasoned minutes before by a chef. Instead of receiving a plastic-wrapped, pre-heated lunch, today’s taco ingredients have been prepared and cooked fresh, then served separately on the line to give students more choice.

The scene more closely resembles lunchtime at a fast casual restaurant like Sweetgreen or Chipotle than an elementary school—and that’s by design. At four schools in East Boston—Bradley Elementary, Patrick J. Kennedy Elementary School, the East Boston Early Education Center, and East Boston High School—a pilot has been underway since May testing the feasibility of cooking meals made with fresher ingredients.

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Jill Shah, whose husband Niraj Shah founded the ecommerce site Wayfair, approached Boston Public Schools and offered to fund and implement a pilot to improve school food in the city’s schools. Last year, looking for the first philanthropic opportunities for the Shah Family Foundation, she visited a few schools, where she said she saw kids “sporking a [plastic-wrapped] waffle stuffed with some kind of syrup.”

“This is not a great way to feed kids. But for a majority of kids, this is the majority of their calories,” said Shah, who found a kindred change-agent in the newly hired Boston Public Schools’ Director of Food and Nutrition Services Laura Benavidez.

“If you have a vision for transformation, there’s no way you do that just with a [U.S. Department of Agriculture] subsidy,” Benavidez said. “Like any good entrepreneurial venture, you need some investment to go out and play around and figure out how does this thing transform?”

It Takes a Village to Feed Kids

Shah tapped a former chief of staff at Boston Public Schools, Ross Wilson, to direct both the foundation and the school food pilot. She then recognized her own limits after “playing around” in this area and instead looked to successful restaurateurs and grocers for guidance.

Veteran chef Ken Oringer has been helping the foundation out with menu creation and staff training, even conducting a knife skills boot camp over the summer. Oringer put together recipes that can be served “deconstructed,” rather than pre-assembled, giving students choices about protein, vegetables, or whether they want salsa on their chicken.

For help purchasing quality ingredients that both meet U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrition guidelines and the subsidized prices of $3.31 per lunch, program organizers reached out to Doug Rauch, former president of Trader Joe’s and founder of Daily Table, a nonprofit retail store aimed at helping low-income people gain access to more healthy food.

After Rauch bought into the model, he pulled in two of his friends to help with ingredient procurement: former Shop & Stop supermarket CEO José Alvarez and Friendly’s CEO John Maguire. Wilson said food titans like Rauch have helped the participating schools be more active in their procurement, rather than simply accepting the products that arrive on a vendor’s truck.

“How do we use our buying power as a school district of 57,000 kids to create this predictable buying structure so that we can get our costs down and our quality up?” Wilson asked.

Once ingredients arrive, they must be cooked as close to the students as possible, often in decades-old school buildings that do not contain full-service kitchens, a conundrum not uncommon in schools nationwide. In fact, as with school districts across the country, kitchens are not common: Just 43 of Boston’s 125 school buildings are equipped to prepare and cook food on-site.

Working with local managers at Sweetgreen and restaurant designer RealFood Consulting, the Shah Foundation equipped the pilot schools with food preparation stations, dishwashing sinks, rice cookers, and combi-ovens, like the ones found in many fast-casual restaurants—at a cost of between $30,000 and $65,000 per kitchen. Wilson says these ovens, much more than traditional convection ovens, allow staff to cook food “to the right temp, the right consistency—ready to serve on the line.”

A new combi oven in the kitchen at Bradley Elementary.

Take broccoli, for example. To keep it from going soggy, it must be cooked fresh, then served and eaten almost immediately. It’s simply not the same after being reheated or plastic-wrapped, Wilson said, and students barely touch it, if they take it at all. But on taco day at the Bradley, the broccoli out of the combi-oven is hot and crunchy, and students are not only requesting it in the lunch line, they’re devouring it.

“Nothing screams ‘success’ more than when the vegetable is the dish that goes first,” said Benavidez of Boston Public Schools.

In three of the test kitchens, there’s something else you don’t often see in school cafeterias: chefs. Besides the culinary skills they bring to the school kitchens, organizers of the pilot believe that when children see and engage with a formally trained chef, they’re prone to make better food choices.

A Harvard study bears this out. In 2015, researchers from the T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that students were 20-30 percent more likely to choose and consume a fruit or vegetable when a chef was present than students in schools with no chef.

Effort Quickly Takes Off

In the Bradley school kitchen, chef Guy Koppe from Massachusetts-based food security nonprofit Project Bread is running the show. For years he has been working with Massachusetts schools to reform the way they feed kids. He said the pilot being tested is one of the most hopeful projects he’s seen.

For one, he said, “the speed of the change feels different from the way things have gone in the past.” The pilot launched in May, with chef-made meals being prepared at East Boston High School once weekly and delivered to the other three schools in what was being called a “hub and spoke model.”

This fall, the organizers have been testing the feasibility of preparing and cooking the food at all the individual schools, and ramped up the program so that students at each of the pilot schools are now being served scratch-cooked meals five days a week. According to Ross, student participation in school lunches—which, in Boston, are provided free of charge to any student who wants them—was up 15 percent across the board at all four schools.

In foreground, left to right: Jill Shah, Laura Benavidez, Ross Wilson. In background, right to left: Chef Guy Koppe with his staff at Bradley Elementary School.

The speed of change is likely because, for the first time in years, there appears to be a unified front of food service officials, administration, parents, and advocacy groups involved.

Superintendent Tommy Chang made school food a priority when he took office in March of 2015, and last year he hired Benavidez as the district’s food and nutrition services director—a position that had been left vacant for three years. A first step was bringing on a more healthful vendor to bring pre-made lunches to schools without kitchens. After a lengthy vetting process, the district tapped San Francisco-based vendor Revolution Foods. But, longer-term, Benavidez has a vision to “reset the way we serve meals to children.”

Benavidez hopes to make “a business case” for expanding the neighborhood model to other parts of the district. “The program is evolving, children’s tastes and trends are evolving, and we want to be on the forefront rather than behind the trend,” she said.

But the district will likely need more support to outfit additional schools. Chef Ann Cooper, a national school food advocate and director of food services at the Boulder Valley School District, has consulted on the pilot program in East Boston and applauds the public-private model for transformation—even as she advocates for an increase in the federal nutrition subsidy.

“The [Trump Administration] has proposed cutting the USDA budget by more than 20 percent, and that’s where school lunch subsidies come from,” Cooper says. “As that happens, we need to look to these public-private partnerships to make change, because there’s just not the federal role to work on school meals and anti-hunger systems. Either way, it looks like Boston will get a self-operated system, which is always better in my opinion.”

Bringing food production back in-house appears to be the goal of some on Boston Public Schools’ School Committee as well.

At the committee’s October 4 meeting, Chairman Michael D. O’Neill acknowledged that while parents and students are excited about the meals they’re getting from Revolution Foods, they are still “a vendor providing us with food covered in plastic.” O’Neill says he’s “a thousand times more excited” about a model that would bring real cooking back into the schools.

“This,” he said, “is how we’re going to revolutionize food service in Boston Public Schools.”

Photos courtesy of the author.

The post Should School Cafeterias Be More Like Fast-Casual Restaurants? appeared first on Civil Eats.

The entwined topics all happen to comprise one of the most contentious food and agriculture debates of the last decade. In fact, the European Union is set to vote later this month on whether to approve a 10-year license renewal for the chemical glyphosate—the main ingredient in Monsanto’s flagship Roundup weed-killer and a probable carcinogen, according to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. (A year later, the WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization said glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer to humans “through the diet.”)

Carey Gillam ventures right into this global hornets’ nest in her new book, Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, published today from Island Press. An investigative journalist for more than two decades, Gillam covered business and agriculture for national news outlets, including Reuters, where she wrote some of the first articles looking at the potential dangers of glyphosate. After spending years on the “Monsanto beat,” Gillam left Reuters in 2015 to serve as research director at U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit group that advocates for transparency in America’s food system.

Civil Eats spoke with Gillam about her life in and out of mainstream journalism, the farmers she met along the way, and the big business of agriculture.

The main character in your book is glyphosate. Can you say more about how it’s made, what it’s used for, and why you center your book around this fairly obscure chemical?

Glyphosate was remarkable in that it was very efficient and could be applied broadly to a range of different weed types. It was considered much safer than many other herbicides, and it was considered much more environmentally benign. It got a lot of applause, a lot of attention. The Monsanto scientists who discovered the weed-killing properties won awards for that.

It was embraced pretty widely around the world as a replacement for some more dangerous weed killers, and of course moms and dads know it because people use it on their lawns and gardens. It’s used on golf courses, and cities and municipalities use it in parks and playgrounds. [Roundup] really has become pervasive in our world, and I see it as the poster child for larger discussions about pesticide use.

You begin and end Whitewash with the story of Jack McCall. Who was he and why did you feel it was important to start with him?

Throughout Whitewash, I tried to tell the stories of real people, because that’s what I care about—I think that’s what we all care about. People like Jack McCall, his wife Teri, and their family have this beautiful little farm in Cambria, California, and grew different types of citrus fruits as well as avocados. Jack developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a very aggressive kind, and died a particularly horrible, suffering death the day after Christmas in 2015.

Their story is particularly compelling to me because Jack did not want to use pesticides on his farm. He was kind of a hippie environmentalist, and he used Roundup because he had been told and believed it was very, very safe. Which is a story that we hear from a lot of people—that they believed Roundup to be safe.

You write a lot about what you see as Monsanto’s effort to cover-up evidence that glyphosate effects farm communities and the environment adversely. Can you say more about that?

The research and the revelations in Whitewash really are the culmination of 19 years of work I’ve done on glyphosate and Monsanto. Over those years, I’ve learned about Monsanto’s business strategies, and their efforts to promote and expand the use of their glyphosate products. In the course of doing that, I’ve interviewed a lot of individuals, and I’ve learned that the company’s position, and the narrative that it put forward didn’t really always jibe with the story on the ground—what you were hearing from farmers, scientists, or other researchers.

You also add on top of that Freedom of Information Act documents that I have obtained—literally thousands of pages—from different regulatory agencies: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Agriculture.

You layer on top of that the other documents that the organization I work for, U.S. Right to Know, has obtained from agricultural professors and plant pathologists at universities who have been working secretly behind the scenes with Monsanto. Then you layer on top of that the documents that have been recently coming out through discovery in the litigation that is pending against Monsanto.

When you put all this together, it paints a very clear picture of strategic efforts to control, manipulate, and deceive. It’s indisputable that Monsanto has made a grand effort to deceive regulators, policymakers, and the public for many, many years about this chemical.

What did you find in the course of reviewing the FOIA documents that particularly shocked you?

There’s such a long list. One example is the network of scientists around the world that Monsanto has developed as a secret army of soldiers that it can deploy whenever it needs in order to convince regulators, scientific journals, or the press that Monsanto’s position is valid and that any concerns are not. As I found in the documents, Monsanto is giving assignments to these professors to write a policy paper or put out a particular journal article that Monsanto’s public relations firm has written, that will carry the name of the scientist and appear to be independent.

One very specific example is University of Illinois professor Bruce Chassy, who, while he was at the university, received a lot of money over the years for his program. When he was retiring, Monsanto wanted to set him up in the nonprofit organization called Academics Review—which purports to be independent and publishes articles and weighs in on important issues.

Monsanto in the emails back and forth is talking about how they want to set this up, don’t want anyone to know Monsanto’s behind it. And they’ve done that over and over again with numerous organizations and numerous professors that they can deploy as attack dogs to discredit scientists or journalists or put forth false narratives regarding the safety of Monsanto’s products. To me, it’s outrageous and egregious. It seems unethical and deceitful.

There have been Marches Against Monsanto around the globe and a great deal of efforts to illuminate the company’s practices. Has any of this impacted Monsanto’s bottom line?

I don’t think so. The company’s share price has been on the uptick the last few months. Shareholders love it, investors love it, and yes, they get a lot of negativity and earn the ire of food safety advocates and environmentalists, but they know how to generate money and profits, and they have such a dominant position in the agriculture market with their seeds and traits. That’s what the market rewards.

You document the lengths to which Monsanto goes to discredit and attack scientists and journalists. Have they come after you?

Yes. Monsanto admits that they reached out to my editors, and made efforts to get me removed from the food and agriculture beat at Reuters. They also employed surrogates like BIO and CropLife in the ag-chemical industry who tried to block my and limit my coverage. They had nonprofits like Academics Review write attack articles about me. They’ve tried to vilify and discredit my work for at least the last decade—after they discovered that I wasn’t going to parrot the propaganda that they want reporters to use.

You worked for a couple decades as an investigative journalist. Why did you give up such a successful career as a reporter?

I had a new editor come in [at Reuters] who wasn’t fully familiar with the food and ag beat. The pressure from Monsanto and the industry created a lot of tensions, and I eventually decided it was best to move to U.S. Right to Know, where I could focus full-time on researching food and ag—a topic I had become particularly passionate about.

Was it hard to make that switch from a neutral journalist position to more of an advocacy position?

I still reject the “advocacy” label—other than advocating for truth and transparency, which, as a journalist, that’s what you’re supposed to do. When you are a journalist, you are a seeker of truth, and you share that with others. That’s what I’m trying to do now.

For instance, I do not take a position or weigh in on whether glyphosate should be banned or not. That is a risk management position to be made by policymakers and regulators—it is not my job. My job is to present truthful, relevant information that has been hidden from the public or that is not readily available to the public so that informed decisions can be made. That doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, and eventually maybe I will be more comfortable in [an advocacy] role, but at this point I think it’s simply enough just to tell the truth.

How do you think the issue’s being reported in the mainstream media?

I think there is a lack of sufficient, in-depth reporting on the important topics surrounding food and agriculture and the health of our environment. That’s for a lot of reasons: space demands for other stories; a lack of clarity on very complex, complicated, highly controversial issues. There are a lot of reasons why it’s difficult for a journalist at a newswire, for instance, or a radio station or a newspaper to dig deep into these things…. There are outlets that are doing really good investigative work, but they’re few and far between. But you see this with a lot of really important issues today.

You were just in France presenting on glyphosate before Parliament. The E.U. has traditionally been much tougher on regulating the weed killer than the U.S. Why do you think this is?

What I have found in Europe is that they have long had a more precautionary view of protecting their food, their people, and their environment than we do here. Historically, it doesn’t seem like they’ve had the kind of regulatory capture by corporations that we have here in the U.S., although there certainly appear to be concerns about that there. They value their public and environmental health, and quality and purity of their food, more than we do here in the United States.

Here, we all just expect a rubber stamp from the EPA because that’s what we always get from the EPA. That is another, bigger message: I don’t see this as just a Monsanto or glyphosate problem. If we did away with Monsanto or glyphosate tomorrow, that doesn’t solve the pesticide problem. We have become so dependent on pesticides as an easy or quick fix for anything we identify as a problem. It’s not healthy, and it’s not sustainable for the long term.

What do you anticipate happening under EPA head Scott Pruitt, who has shown himself to be quite cozy with the agrichemical companies and the other industries he regulates.

We’re definitely not improving, and it seems to be pretty clear we’re going in the opposite direction, where it doesn’t matter what the science says or what the concerns are—if the corporation wants it, the corporation’s going get it. Look at Dow Chemical and chlorpyrifos, for crying out loud. Chlorpyrifos has an abundance of evidence of harm to small children and their neuro-development, and was set to be banned. And then Dow Chemical waltzes in with a $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural fund and lo and behold, the EPA decides not to ban chlorpyrifos. They’re not even trying to hide the collusion.

What is giving you hope these days?

I see it as a hopeful sign that so many people seem to be paying attention to these issues. We’re seeing at least a slight groundswell of grassroots interest, and education, and outreach and attempts to wake up policymakers and others to try to protect our communities. We’re seeing it more on the local levels where people are urging their school systems to stop spraying the weed-killers on the playgrounds, than we are on the national level. But I do think people are starting to pay attention, so there’s hope in that, maybe?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Reporting on the World’s Most Controversial Farm Chemical appeared first on Civil Eats.

And, while many of those communities have replaced coal with oil and natural gas extraction, others are turning to local food as an economic driver.

A new book co-published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says the time has never been better for thriving regional food systems, given Americans’ increasing interest in fresh, local food. In  Harvesting Opportunity: The Power of Regional Food System Investment to Transform Communities, Deborah Tropp, deputy director of marketing services at USDA, points to data showing that consumers are willing to pay more for food produced in their own communities.

Increasingly, farms are responding: more than 167,000 U.S. farms sold their food directly to consumers in their areas in 2015, resulting in $8.7 billion in revenue, according to the authors. And data cited in the report suggest that more than half of local farm sales in 2012 were through intermediaries like wholesalers or institutions, suggesting an even more lucrative prospect for regional producers.

“Recognition is growing that support of small/local farm businesses may keep a greater share of money recirculating in the local economy and allow farmers to retain a greater share of consumer expenditures on food,” Tropp writes in the book’s first chapter.

The authors also note that so much more is possible, and that food has the potential to transform rural communities across the nation, with the right mix of support from local and federal governments, investors, banks, and philanthropists. The ground may be especially fertile in communities traditionally reliant on coal. For one, many coal-mining communities are also farming communities.

Coal’s Demise

Take Delta County, Colorado. For decades, the region’s coal companies flourished. Good-paying jobs attracted miners from across the nation. Towns like Somerset and Paonia, built by coal, were busting at the seams.

And then, almost overnight, it was nearly all gone. Following a slow recovery from the last economic downturn, the rapid closure of two of the region’s three largest mines between 2013 and 2016 sent shockwaves of panic throughout the area. Over the last four years, nearly 1,000 coal jobs—many of which paid upwards of $80,000 annually—vanished from the county. The one remaining mine is now under bankruptcy protection and on life support, every job hanging in the balance.

As many residents, especially younger ones, left the county to find work elsewhere, financial hardship hit many of the mining families who stayed. Enrollment in the public schools plummeted, while enrollment in the schools’ free or reduced lunch program nearly doubled, says Trish Thibodo, executive director of Delta County Economic Development, Inc. Revenues at area businesses have been flat for years.

“They were the volunteers at the schools, they were the coaches,” says Robbie LeValley, Delta County administrator, of the region’s mining families. “Their families were just critical to building this county.”

County officials and business leaders have been driven to envision life and business in Delta County after coal. One vision is a county teeming with productive farms and value-added food businesses marketing and distributing the region’s bounty throughout the state. This was the recommendation made in a recent strategic plan by county officials. Published last year, the plan recommended looking to food and agriculture to turn its economy around.

The county is already home to one of the state’s largest concentration of organic produce farms and livestock ranches. But many producers here, lacking more efficient distribution channels, put tens of thousands of miles on their own vehicles driving their products to restaurants and farmers’ markets as far as a state away.

Leaders envision the creation of a thriving food hub in Delta County, where ears of the area’s famous sweet corn, for example, can be marketed and distributed to restaurants and institutions and excess produce made into foods like salsa and jam in a new commercial incubator kitchen. Producers and farmers would receive business assistance as well, with longer-term plans including the creation of a food manufacturing certificate at Delta-Montrose Technical College and regular conferences on agricultural innovation.

“They may be making a great sauce or chocolate, but don’t necessarily have the skill base or the experience around distribution, marketing, planning and financials,” says Thibodo, who’s leading much of the effort. “We’re doing specialized support in that area.”

County Administrator LeValley will benefit from a bolstered local food sector herself. She is a fourth-generation cattle rancher, the co-owner of a direct-to-consumer beef operation and processing facility. She says that in addition to taking its food throughout the state, Delta County could become a food and farm destination for tourists.

“This area has always been very innovative in its agriculture,” she says. “We want to invite people here to enjoy what we have.”

Food as an Economic Driver

Delta County isn’t the only community thinking big about the power of local food, says Sanah Baig, program director with the National Association of Counties, which has been helping traditionally coal-reliant communities retool and diversify their economies since 2014. “No one community should rely on one employer—it’s not sustainable, not good for business, and it doesn’t let people sleep well at night,” she adds.

Across Appalachia, for instance, where more than 33,000 coal mining jobs disappeared between 2011 and 2016, diversification efforts are underway to provide people with technology training, courses for small-air drone operation, and careers in the natural gas utility and pipeline industry. Local food systems could also play a major role in revitalizing the economy.

Appalachian Sustainable Development was one of several agriculture-focused groups to receive a Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) grant funded partially by the U.S. Department of Labor. The funding will help the nonprofit, which runs a large, successful food hub called Appalachian Harvest, to create and support a “food enterprise corridor” across 43 counties in five states to connect growers and value-added food producers to wholesale markets across the region. The corridor has also received funding from the Just Transition Fund and CoBank.

Another POWER grant recipient, Sprouting Farms, is a newer program training and incubating new farmers in two valleys in central West Virginia. The project, which aims to create 20 new businesses and 33 jobs, also hopes to leverage nearly $1 million in additional investment from private and public sources.

In all of these cases, it’s important to note that the authors of Harvesting Opportunity stress that initiatives like these can’t be solely funded by the federal government. It can provide an agricultural project some seed funding through a grant or low-interest financing, but foundations, corporations, and other private investors need to step in to sustain these projects and build capacity.

“If the government, which is so risk averse, is willing to put money into these communities, then the private sector has a lot to gain by doing the same,” says Baig. “This is a call to action for them to step up to the plate.”

Colorado Town at an Economic Junction

Back in Colorado, oil and gas is still one of the state’s largest employers, contributing more than $31 billion to the state’s economy annually. But like coal and other extractive industries, oil and gas is prone to cycles of boom and bust.

The people of Grand Junction, located just 40 miles from the Utah state line in Western Colorado and 250 mountainous miles from Denver, know this all too well. In 1982, on a day known locally as Black Sunday, Exxon ceased its extensive oil shale operation in the region, resulting in thousands of job losses and large-scale migration from the area. A decade ago, natural gas drilling on the Western Slope—including the Grand Junction—hit an all-time high, and the town thrived. But then, the Great Recession brought yet another bust.

Annalisa Pearson of the Business Incubator Center has witnessed the impact that downturns have on families and businesses and would like to see Grand Junction break free from the whims of the boom-bust cycle. She sees a thriving local-foods sector as a way to do that. In 2004, the Center opened its commercial kitchen incubator, which serves as a professional space to produce value-added foods and a commissary for a number of food trucks. In all, more than 30 food businesses now use the space.

In Pearson’s mind, there was always a sense that more could be done to support producers on the Western Slope. For instance, she found that if each household in the county spent just 10 percent of their cook-at-home food budget locally, $24 million would go into the pockets of the area’s farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs. A commitment from restaurants to source 10 percent of their food locally would add another $6.2 million to that equation. Last March, Pearson convened a group of small- and medium-sized food producers, as well as potential buyers, to begin talking about how they could leverage local food as an economic driver.

In attendance was rancher Kathryn Bedell, whose 85 head of cattle and sheep graze more than 10,000 mountainous acres in the county. She shared her experiences as a single mom, loading cattle into the truck by herself, the 120-hour workweeks, and the 40,000 miles a year she put on her truck hauling beef and lamb to six farmers’ markets between Glenwood Springs and Mesa, Utah.

“When you try and run any kind of business, from growing all the food to marketing it to getting it to the end user, there are so many steps,” she says. “If we can take [marketing] off [farmers’] plates, that will give them more time to grow.”

Building on the success of the incubator kitchen, Bedell, Pearson, and the rest of the steering committee have begun work on a regional food hub that will promote the county’s bounty, provide business and distribution support to producers, and build a larger processing space. Long-term, they envision a permanent indoor public market where visitors can buy meat, cheese, produce, and wine. Grand Junction would be the hub, distributing local food across Western Colorado.

“For us, it’s creating a community with enhanced economic and social benefits,” Pearson says.

There will always be those in the community who want Grand Junction to remain an oil town, Bedell says, but continuing to throw everything at such a volatile industry doesn’t make much sense. “On the other hand,” she says, “we can pick something else we’re good at and go with that.”

Photos courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The post From Coal to Kale: Saving Rural Economies with Local Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

But for many, this is a huge deal—and dead serious. If it happens—and there are at least a few observers and a congressman who think the merger may violate antitrust laws—Amazon’s move into the grocery marketplace signals that the giant appears poised to realign consumer habits around how we buy quinoa, cereal, and meat in precisely the same way it changed the way we buy books, clothes, and detergent.

That prospect sent shockwaves through the set-in-its-ways grocery industry, wreaking havoc on the stocks of brick-and-mortar food retailers like Walmart, Target, and Kroger. (Kroger saw its stocks plummet an unbelievable 28 percent Thursday and Friday.)

“This is the first step to changing just how society shops for food in general,” says Mike Lee, a product consultant and founder of The Future Market.

And, provided the sale doesn’t face antitrust challenges, a successful merger of the two companies will likely be a mixed bag for the sustainable food movement in America.

Food Retail is Shifting Toward Healthy, Sustainable

Whether it’s a trend or shift that is here to stay, food that is perceived to be better for people and the planet is hot. The Amazon–Whole Foods deal confirms what organic and other natural food sales trends have been showing us for years. According to the Organic Trade Association, Americans spent $43 billion on organic foods in 2016—an increase of more than eight percent over the previous year. And Whole Foods has positioned itself as an alternative to the mainstream, even as it has worked to reach an increasingly mainstream audience over the last decade. And since the hedge fund Jana Partners upped its stake in Amazon in April, a move like this has been on the horizon.

Several CEOs of natural and organic brands—even the companies’ direct competitors—said the merger validated their core principles, as they double-down on differentiating themselves.

Bentley Hall, CEO of online grocery-delivery service Good Eggs, shared an internal memo that includes the sentiment “The game is on and I am honestly excited and honored to compete against such a worthy new opponent.”

Gunnar Lovelace, co-founder of online food retailer Thrive Market—a retailer selling only organic, non-GMO products online—says his executive team was not in panic mode Friday morning. Instead, he said the company had recommitted to its principles of high-quality food, environmental sustainability, and fair labor standards in a way they feel goes above and beyond Whole Foods.

“That’s a very different value proposition to the consumer who wants value and convenience—but also wants real alignment with doing better in the world,” he says. [Disclosure: The author has in the past worked as a writer for Thrive Market’s blog and has written a feature for Whole Foods Magazine.]

Increased Access to Healthy Food

Though the numbers have never been made public, analysts estimate that more than 50 million Americans, from all walks of life, pay for Amazon Prime. By joining forces with an organic grocer like Whole Foods, Amazon is poised to bring natural and organic food directly to more Americans than ever, at prices that could be more competitive with conventional foods. Reports are already surfacing to this effect. Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon wants to shed Whole Foods’ “Whole Paycheck” image and make it more competitive with larger retailers like Walmart. If this happens, affordable organic food could become the rule, rather than the exception—and find its way into more kitchens than ever.

This includes those of many low-income Americans who lack access to affordable, healthy food. Already, John Foraker, CEO of organic food company Annie’s, has called on Jeff Bezos to commit to ending food deserts—urban and rural neighborhoods containing few healthy food options—by 2027.

The ability for low-income Americans to use supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) benefits online could assist this cause immensely. The United States Department of Agriculture is piloting a program, expected to launch in early 2018, allowing SNAP recipients in seven states to use their benefit to buy food online. Amazon is one of the retailers selected for the program.

Amazon Could Singlehandedly Transform Our Food System

Chef Alice Waters, a leader in the good food movement, expressed her hope for the merger in a strategically crafted open letter to Bezos on Friday.

“You have an unprecedented opportunity to change our food system overnight: It is time to demand that produce comes from farmers who are taking care of the land, to require meat and seafood to come from operations that are not depleting natural resources, and to support the entrepreneurial endeavors of those American farmers and food makers who do not enjoy federal subsidies,” she wrote.

“It’s time to do the right thing for our country, our farmers, and our planet,” she continued. “And we’re all here to help you do it!”

Of course, by essentially asking Amazon to bring its standards up, however, Waters’ goal may be at odds with the idea of bringing prices of this kind of food down for consumers.

Concerns Abound

If an Amazon–Whole Foods deal is allowed to go through, every food retailer—big-box stores, online retailers, and even farmers’ markets—will feel the crunch, says Future Market’s Lee. Meal-kit delivery services like Blue Apron and Plated could suffer the most in the short term. Swallowing up lifestyle services like these would be easy pickings for the new grocery behemoth, Lee says, given Whole Foods’ access to quality food and Amazon’s logistics prowess.

According to Barry C. Lynn, Director of the Open Markets Program at New America, that’s too much power for one corporation. Lynn’s organization condemned the deal Friday, calling it anti-competitive and asking regulators to reject the merger.

“This private corporation already dominates every corner of online commerce, and uses its power to set terms and prices for many of the most important products Americans buy or sell to one another,” Lynn said in a statement. “Now Amazon is exploiting that advantage to take over physical retail.”

While he does think anti-trust regulators must be vigilant, Parke Wilde, associate professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, suggested the combined company is unlikely to be able to control prices as a monopolist does. In a healthy food system, he says, smaller farms and retailers would play a growing role, and he has mixed feelings about a merger of major corporations.

“We should never forget that these are big corporations, pursuing their own profits foremost, but I still see some potential in a merger of Amazon and Whole Foods,” Parke said.

For others, the deal could create a labor war. Bloomberg reported over the weekend that Amazon may be planning to lay off Whole Foods cashiers and replace them with machines. But beyond in-store employees, Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant-Based Foods Association and author of Appetite for Profit, worries “about the additional pressures being placed on farmers and food manufacturers to lower prices” at a time when most of our food prices are not reflective of their true cost.

“The driving down of food prices could come at a cost to farmers and every worker throughout the supply chain,” she told Civil Eats.

And even as demand for organic food increases in America, less than 1 percent of domestic fields are certified organic—and when domestic demand outstrips domestic supply, the practices that underlie USDA Organic-certified foods are sometimes put at risk. Expanding the supply of U.S.-grown organic foods is hampered by federal incentives that give the upper hand to conventionally grown food. So even if tens of millions more Americans begin to demand more humane and environmentally friendly food, the supply—at least here in the U.S.—will likely fall short.

“We still need a host of policy reforms to fix this problem,” Simon said. “Will Amazon and Whole Foods join us in that effort? I hope so.”

The post Will the Amazon-Whole Foods Deal Mean Better Food for All? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Case in point: A plurality of Americans now believe healthy food should be more affordable, farm subsidies should be used to grow that healthy food, farming should happen in harmony with the environment, and food system workers should be treated—and paid—fairly.

Last summer, a coalition of food-justice groups called “Plate of the Union” decided there was enough energy surrounding the issue to attempt to introduce food policy as a campaign issue in the 2016 election. Alas, the issue never quite broke through the noise. But many voters assumed Hillary Clinton would be elected, and food policy advocates hoped that she would at least continue the momentum created during the Obama administration—and maybe even take it to another level.

Oh, the difference a few months can make.

By most any measure, the prospects for advancing a progressive food and agriculture agenda now seem grim. But all is not entirely lost, and some advocates are working to create a national food strategy—a centralized list of federal policies, priorities, and principles to guide our nation’s food system.

Emily Broad Leib thinks it can be done. As director of the Food Policy and Law Clinic at Harvard, Leib—along with contributors from the Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems—published last month what the authors call a “Blueprint for a National Food Strategy.” They not only made the case for creating a national plan, they also detailed mechanisms for getting it done.

Protecting the Interests of Eaters and Farmers

More than a dozen federal agencies currently regulate food and agriculture. Sometimes, multiple departments oversee the same product. Take eggs, for instance: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects shelled eggs, while egg products—including liquid, frozen, and dehydrated eggs—fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Much of the federal government’s food, farm, and nutrition policy is set every five years in the hulking, omnibus Farm Bill, which is next up for re-authorization in 2018. Analysts say priorities in the Farm Bill—such as subsidies for farms growing corn to be turned into corn syrup and other processed food ingredients—clash with the dietary guidelines suggesting we eat less sugar. Then there’s the patchwork of state policies governing what we eat—from animal welfare regulations to prohibitions of raw milk.

Across it all, there seems to be little in the way of a guiding philosophy or strategy. And supporters say a national food strategy would change that.

Back in 2014, food movement leaders Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador, and Olivier De Schutter set out to change that. In a widely circulated Washington Post op-ed, the four made an impassioned case for creating a national food plan. Their plan would guarantee access to healthy food for all Americans, coordinate farm policy with public health and environmental objectives, guarantee food safety and transparency, enforce fair wages and conditions for food industry workers, regulate food marketing to children, ensure the well-being of animals used in food production, reduce the food system’s carbon footprint, and bolster the system’s resiliency to withstanding the effects of climate change.

Salvador, one of the authors and senior scientist and director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Civil Eats that one of the primary purposes of a national food plan is to reduce redundancy and inefficiency—as in the regulation of the egg industry.

“We need coordination at the federal level,” Salvador said, “so that all those agencies are pointed in the same direction and that the first question they ask is, ‘Is this policy that we’re considering going to improve public well-being and, particularly, [the well-being] of our taxpayers, and people on the land, and our children?’ It has to put the public interest over the private interest, because that’s the role of government.”

Blueprint for a National Food Strategy

As the name implies, the Blueprint recommends four principles for building a powerful strategy: coordination, participation, transparency and accountability, and durability.

1. Coordination: The report calls for creating an inter-agency working group to gather information from stakeholders, engage state, local, and tribal governments as partners, and oversee the implementation of a national food strategy.

2. Participation: In our food system, Leib said, “No one’s made space for average Americans to give input on what they prefer.” A successful national food strategy would not only incorporate insights and experiences from diverse stakeholders within the food system, it would respond to their input and provide opportunities for ongoing feedback.

3. Transparency and Accountability: The process of creating a national food system strategy should model the transparency and accountability many desire for the food system as a whole by creating a clearly written document outlining the strategy’s priorities and goals—including the ways they will be implemented and measured. Frequent, public-facing reports would evaluate how well the strategy’s goals and outcomes are being achieved.

4. Durability: As the food system is vast and ever-evolving, so also should our national food system strategy possess both the durability to withstand those changes and the ability to evolve.

The million-dollar question, of course, is whether our government—especially this government—would ever assume such a role, let alone work toward a national food plan that protects the interests of eaters and farmers.

Leib says conservatives should be able to come together around a plan that would consolidate and coordinate food and farming policy efforts. Over the next several months, her group will be taking their blueprint to policymakers and stakeholders on both sides of the aisle with that unified message.

And we’ve done it before, Leib says. The National Strategy for HIV/AIDS, passed in 2010 with bipartisan support, was recently updated to give oversight of the strategy to the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

“This isn’t pie in the sky—we have the tools in the U.S. and have used them to create national strategies on lots of other things that are not as foundational as food,” Leib said.

But Should We Create a National Food Strategy?

Just because we can create a new national food strategy doesn’t mean we should. Count Baylen Linniken among the skeptics. The attorney and food policy and law expert says he agrees that there is a need at the federal level to coordinate oversight of food production and points to the patchwork of “illogical, incoherent” food laws currently on the books—many of which he details in his 2016 book: “Biting the Hands that Feed Us.”

Though he’s worked closely with Leib and her co-authors in the past, Linniken is wary of top-down approaches to policymaking “when there are political alternatives available”—such as relying on the state and regional food plans we already have. He points to the War on Drugs and creation of the Department of Homeland Security as top-down policy failures that have done far more harm than good.

He said the process of bringing together stakeholders to assess and discuss national food policy—especially in an era when those of different views tend to talk past one another—would be “a win,” however.

Linniken said he wouldn’t necessarily “recommend that what comes out of that dialogue turns into law,” preferring that the control remain with the various regions—which can differ greatly in their food policy needs.

With many regions already hard at work creating strategies for local food production, wouldn’t a national strategy step on those efforts?

Leib doesn’t think so. “We think there is a lot of really interesting state and local innovation, and we don’t want to squash any of that,” she said. “When we see these baseline challenges that are the same in Mississippi and Massachusetts, it helps me see that there are decisions being made at the federal level that are relevant in all the states.”

‘Choppy Waters’ Ahead

Food and anti-hunger policy is never far from the lips of Congressman Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts). As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, he’s contended for years that the White House must lead in areas of food policy. Every year during the Obama presidency, he called for a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Hunger to bring attention to the more than 36 million Americans who struggle with food insecurity. He also says there should be a “food czar” in the White House—“somebody who wakes up every single day and thinks about these issues.”

But as proactive as he’s been, McGovern says he’s currently more concerned with preventing Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the nutrition assistance programs he champions, the evisceration of school nutrition standards, and financial supports for small farms and local food.

“I believe it’s only a matter of time before we get to creating a national food policy, but right now I think we’re running into some very choppy waters,” he said. “I hope I’m proven wrong and that all of a sudden we realize we’re dealing with people who get it—but I’m basing my anxiety on statements and preliminary actions coming out of this administration and this Congress that have me deeply worried.”

The post In Trump’s America, Navigating a Path for a Progressive National Food Strategy appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Each one of these heirloom beans holds genetic similarities to each of the others around the room, but each also holds its own unique traits,” Zuckerman said. “One may be more tolerant to a pest or a disease … one may require sandy soil while another needs fertile loam.

“I have given you these beans to reflect on with respect to our children, ourselves, and our future,” he continued. “Each child has unique qualities and the potential for success and each deserves an environment where they can blossom. It is our job to ensure that the best environment for each child is provided.”

It’s a striking metaphor, crafted by a public servant who knows a thing or a hundred about seeds and soil. In addition to 20 years’ service as a state representative and senator, David Zuckerman has been farming organically for the last two decades.

In fact, he’s the first active farmer to occupy either the governor’s or lieutenant governor’s office in Vermont in more than 75 years, a fact that may be shocking in a state with more than 7,000 farms and one farm for every 89 people.

His distinction as a small farmer gives Zuckerman a leading role in moving Vermont forward in the areas of food, farming, and sustainability. At a time when federal leadership in those areas is shifting in ways that may be even less friendly to small, diversified and organic agriculture than ever before—Zuckerman may become an example of how states can continue the work toward sustainability without federal support.

Farmer-in-Chief

As lieutenant governor, Zuckerman’s two main roles are to stand in for the governor when he is out of the state and preside over the Senate, where he is the tie-breaking vote. Beyond that, the lieutenant governor has ample leeway to choose the issues around which he’ll organize. Zuckerman has promised to continue the work he started as a representative, speaking out on issues of social and economic justice such as increasing the minimum wage, instituting cannabis reform, bolstering unions, and giving Vermonters control over end-of-life choices.

But it’s Zuckerman’s championing of family farmers and the local food system that makes Ellen Kahler, executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund (VSJF), particularly optimistic about the new lieutenant governor. In 2009, Zuckerman and the Vermont legislature passed the Farm to Plate Investment Program, which set benchmarks for increasing economic development in the state’s farm and food sector. The legislature tasked the VSJF with administering and tracking the program, which effectively made Vermont America’s food relocalization laboratory.

Now, the investment is paying off. In its annual report, published this month, Vermont Farm to Plate reports that since 2009, more than 700 new food or farm businesses have been started and 6,000 jobs have been added in the sector. This, the group says, has resulted in more than $10 billion in gross sales in Vermont’s food systems in 2016—up more than 20 percent in less than a decade.

“David has consistently been a strong advocate and cheerleader for this work,” Kahler said, adding that he served as vice chair of the Agriculture Committee while he was a senator. “He is very curious about issues impacting other farmers and understands the larger food system that production agriculture is a part of and the regulatory environment that will support good food production.”

When necessary, Zuckerman is also poised to speak up when national policies impact agricultural realities in his home state. For starters, he has joined new Governor Phil Scott, a Republican, in condemning President Donald Trump’s executive orders threatening undocumented Vermonters. Zuckerman estimates that between 1,200 and 1,500 of these workers serve the dairy industry alone.

“Our farming and food production industry would not be able to continue without these workers,” Zuckerman said. “Leaders from rural and agricultural states must work together to understand the impacts of the president’s order and must stand up for this vital constituency.”

Progressive and Agricultural Roots

In addition to being a lone farming voice in state politics, Zuckerman holds the distinction of being the only third-party governor or lieutenant governor in the U.S. He joined the independent Progressive Party in the early 1990s, when he met Bernie Sanders as a student at the University of Vermont. At a time when he says he “was young and cynical about politics,” Zuckerman said meeting Sanders “exposed me to the fact that people could run and serve stating what they believe. It gave me a new hope.”

Zuckerman volunteered with Sanders’ 1992 congressional campaign, which he says connected him with many Burlington progressives and stoked his own fire to one day run for office. Two years later, in 1994, he would get his chance, running for a House seat to represent wards in Burlington. Like most first-time candidates, though, he came up short—by 59 votes.

Meanwhile, after studying environmental science at the University of Vermont, Zuckerman began working on organic farms. He learned the ropes on two farms outside Burlington—both of which were run by people who eventually became state lawmakers.

But even as he tended to livestock and tilled black Vermont soil, the young man would not let his dream of public service die. In 1996, Zuckerman ran again for a seat in the Vermont House, winning this time and becoming just the fourth Progressive Party member to serve in Montpelier. Zuckerman won his constituents’ trust—a fact made evident by the fact that he would serve them for the next 14 years.

“He can talk to anyone and is a good listener,” said Kahler. “He connects with people easily—a skill that has no doubt been honed by his years of selling directly to a wide range of consumers at farmers’ markets.”

Even as Zuckerman presides over the Vermont Senate and works to increase voter engagement, he will continue to feed the pigs and chickens and harvest and sell produce from his 25-acre Full Moon Farm in Hinesburg, just south of Burlington. His work in agriculture, he said, offers strong lessons that apply to leadership and policy-making.

“Farming requires patience, and so does politics. How I treat the soil now will affect the long term—a long term that’s bigger than any individual,” he said. “I happen to be the lieutenant governor now, and when I leave this job there will be things we didn’t accomplish. But I want to leave that soil in better shape than when I found it.”

Vermont state house photo CC-licensed by David Mennerich.

This article has been updated to reflect the statehouse’s location in Montpelier, not Burlington. We regret the error.

The post Vermont’s New Lieutenant Governor is a Veggie-Growing Progressive appeared first on Civil Eats.

This week, Trump’s 64 newly appointed agriculture advisers and five Clinton aides received a letter from Plate of the Union, a coalition of food and agriculture groups that set out together last fall with the audacious goal of influencing the next President’s policies on food justice and sustainable agriculture.

“The Trump campaign is fighting to ‘make America great again’ by helping more people realize the American dream,” reads a passage from the group that has been taking its message across the country via media placements and a retrofitted food truck, and directly to the candidates’ campaigns themselves. “A food system that works for all Americans is an important part of that dream.”

In a truly wild and unprecedented race for the Oval Office, the Republican nominee’s committee appointments and comments in Iowa shined a rare bit of light on national agricultural issues. And Plate of the Union’s plea for both candidates to engage even more deeply with food issues is certainly impassioned. But in the current landscape, it’s hard to say what impact its efforts can have.

An Uphill Battle: Making Food Policy an Election Issue

Less than 70 days from election day, both organizers and outside political observers use the same phrase to describe the larger efforts to make food policy a central election issue: an uphill battle.

Last October, Plate of the Union’s organizers were confident that during this election cycle, food policy could hold a more central place in the national conversation. They’d procured some pretty convincing poll numbers showing that many Americans were hungry for a transformed food system that was more equitable, nutritious, and sustainable. Issues like food access, childhood nutrition, and worker justice “could really move the kind of people who need to come out for the next presidential win,” Claire Benjamin DiMattina, the Executive Director of Food Policy Action (FPA), one of the core groups behind the campaign, said at the time.

Ten months and two primaries later, the nominees from both major parties are set and organizers say their initial strategy was formed to withstand the volatility and surprises we’ve seen. Organizers say they’ve had “a pretty good back and forth” with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, whose “good written discussion of food policy … hasn’t yet made it to the public discourse,” according to Jenn Yates, who manages campaigns and advocacy for the food program at Union of Concerned Scientists, a member group of Plate of the Union.

As for the group’s repeated outreach to the Trump campaign? Crickets.

Where’s the Appeal to ‘Food Voters’?

In late 2014, the Union of Concern Scientists met with Food Policy Action and the HEAL Food Alliance to brainstorm ways to encourage the next president to adopt a more active role in food and agriculture policy. One of the first steps the newly formed Plate of the Union coalition took was to gauge public opinion on various food policy issues through a national poll, conducted by Lake Research and Bellweather Research in 2015.

Fifty-three percent of the bipartisan field of respondents said too many Americans lack access to nutritious food; 81 percent were concerned about the amount of money industrial food interests give to elected officials; 81 percent were concerned with the disparity between the kinds of crops that receive agricultural subsidies and the fruits and vegetables the government recommends Americans eat; and 75 percent believed domestic farming practices should be more sustainable.

Then, early this year, a poll out of Johns Hopkins University found even higher support among American voters for sustainable food production—92 percent—identifying what it called the emergence of the “new food voter.”

Both polls appeared to suggest that the American people care a lot more about creating a fair, safe, and equitable food system than most politicians give them credit for. This gave Plate of the Union and other advocates the confidence that if candidates talked about food, voters would come.

All in all, there were precious few substantive mentions of food and agriculture during the Primaries. Exceptions exist, of course: the occasional question from a farmer at a town hall or debate; Bernie Sanders’ public stand against a bill that would regulate the labeling of genetically modified foods; or a position page on a candidate’s website here or there.

At this point, it’s hard to tell whether or not the lack of food-related discourse in this election cycle has anything to do with what voters want or don’t want. On the contrary, for a striking number of Americans, this election seems to be more about effectively blocking the candidate on the other side of the aisle than it is about going after something they truly want. For instance, a poll conducted by Reuters found that, “nearly half of American voters who support either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump for the White House said they will mainly be trying to block the other side from winning.”

Plate of the Union tried to insert food and ag into the conversation at the parties’ conventions in July. Driving a retrofitted food truck right up to the Republican and Democratic conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia, respectively, campaign organizers invited delegates, elected officials, and the campaigns themselves to events with celebrity chef and activist Tom Colicchio that told the story of why we need broad change in the food and agriculture system.

Given the fact that Republicans and Democrats tend to approach food and farm policy differently, Yates says each convention message was tailored—elevating fiscal responsibility with the Republicans, or environmental sustainability with the Democrats, for instance—but, “in general, it’s a message that resonates across the board,” she adds.

The message may resonate with voters across the political spectrum, but don’t think Plate of the Union’s suggested steps for improving the food system will be warmly welcomed by both parties, says Steffen Schmidt, political science professor at Iowa State University. Among other things, Plate of the Union is calling on the candidates for president to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) strong, reform the agricultural subsidy program, and ban the marketing of junk food to kids—positions Schmidt says many on the Right will see as “anti-business and anti-industrial agriculture.”

Traditionally, politicians on the political right have tended to side with large-scale agriculture operations and biotechnology companies over smaller farms, generally oppose the expansion of nutrition assistance programs like SNAP, and take a less regulatory approach to land conservation. (See also Lucky Peach’s breakdown of Clinton and Trump’s positions on various food and agriculture issues.)

Still, Yates considers Plate of the Union’s party convention presence a success, citing the members of Congress who showed up to events and follow-ups with those who did RSVP, but didn’t attend. Even so, that strategy failed to get the candidates themselves to engage with the issues in any meaningful way.

“I haven’t seen a single discussion of food,” Schmidt says. “It’s not an issue that’s easy to get on the agenda. There’s too many other things on the agenda—people blowing themselves up in Turkey, Hillary Clinton’s various scandals, Donald Trump blowing himself up—those suck the oxygen out, and that means there’s not much oxygen left for this.”

Some are pointing to Trump’s appointment last week of an ag advisory committee–which is comprised of current and former governors, members of Congress, agribusiness executives, and the like—as a demonstration of the candidate’s desire to learn about the issues facing farmers, albeit from a right-leaning, more corporate perspective.

But his Iowa “Roast and Ride” speech notwithstanding, farm and food policy isn’t a regular part of Trump’s speeches on the stump, and his committee appointment last week barely registered against news of his sliding poll numbers, his campaign director’s resignation, or continued questions about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail servers and foundation practices.

If Trump himself can’t raise the profile of food and farming in this election, is there any hope for an outside group like Plate of the Union?

The Strategy Ahead

Yates and Plate of the Union remain hopeful. The coalition will keep pushing the issue straight through the November 8 national election. The centerpiece of the strategy between now and then, Yates says, is the mobile food truck, which will travel to battleground states like North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to mobilize voters around food and farming.

A September 8 event in Londonderry, New Hampshire will feature Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg. Plate of the Union will continue to pressure the Clinton and Trump campaigns to make public statements, and engage with both voters and campaigns through social media during debates and major speeches “to drive the conversation,” Yates says.

If they are successful, she expects there to be some backlash against the campaign from agribusiness interests seeking “to advance their interest within their current system and our campaign finance laws.” But at this point, the campaign’s impact hasn’t been great enough to merit such a response from Big Ag.

On a larger scale, to Schmidt, Washington, D.C. is “paralyzed by huge, powerful interests,” making a national campaign to bring food policy to the fore “practically hopeless.” The political scientist thinks local, grassroots food policy campaigns are more likely to be successful on this front.

To the food activists behind the Plate of the Union campaign, if the short-term goals aren’t met, there’s always the long game: lobbying whomever’s elected President of the United States.

“Whether it rises up to the level of getting a public mention or not, the next president will have to have food and agriculture policies,” Yates says. “They’ll have to pick advisers, pick a team, institute policy priorities for what they’re going to be working on in this area.”

When this happens, Plate of the Union hopes its advocates for a food system that is more equitable and healthy will have a seat at the table.

The post Getting Food on the Candidates’ Plates appeared first on Civil Eats.

On the sales front, a number of of startups—including Farmigo, Full Circle, Barn2Door, and Good Eggs—have been working to connect customers to local and organic food that comes direct from producers. Their approaches differ slightly, but they all essentially give farmers and other food producers an online marketplace to sell their wares. Several even go the last mile and arrange for the product’s delivery, while a few leave distribution in the hands of the producer.

Online sales of local food is a hot and crowded—saturated, some say—segment of the larger tech boom. Investors have poured $1.65 billion into more than 100 farm e-commerce companies serving mainly small to midsized producers, according to AgFunder.

But are these e-commerce and food delivery startups actually making it any easier for small and sustainably-minded producers to make a living?

On one end of the spectrum, some farmers say they just don’t want to engage with technology. Laura Hewitt, who farms in Sheshequin, Pennsylvania, puts a premium on the personal connection she’s established with the customers to whom she delivers her garlic or chicken. It’s unlikely she will register with one of the e-commerce upstarts, and says she worries “we are becoming disconnected from people.”

But for those farmers who have tried it, the answer is complicated. On the one hand, farmers’ markets have begun to plateau and many producers looking to sell directly to consumers need multiple revenue streams. Selling through one of these sites can also serve as a marketing device. On the other hand, some farmers are still wondering whether the investment on their end will pay off, and whether they might be turning over their hard-earned customers to other, larger businesses.

“Generally, I think these platforms are convenient for the consumer, but maybe at the cost of convenience, relationship, and profit to the farm,” says Craig Jensen, a Rindge, New Hampshire farmer who tried an e-commerce site for wholesale ordering. “But even with a nonprofit supporting the delivery, it was just too inconvenient,” he says.

A Tough Landscape

Many e-commerce startups connect consumers directly with small farms, which comprise only around 8 percent of all U.S. farms, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA reported that between 2007-2012, farms selling directly to consumers were more likely to stay operational than those that weren’t, but direct-to-consumer operations also tended to have a harder time scaling up than other farms.

Rachel Greenberger of Food Sol—a food entrepreneurship “action tank” at Babson College—says both the skepticism and dissatisfaction from farmers about online direct-to-consumer channels may stem from companies not solving for what many small and mid-sized producers actually need.

“Whether we’re talking about grocery delivery or about meal kit delivery services or anything in between, a lot of the money that’s going to these services is coming out of the tech industry,” she says. “These investors understand technology and are comfortable with it; they don’t necessarily understand food.”

What is needed, she says, is a middle supply chain that integrates local food producers into the existing mainstream food economy, a service many food hubs currently offer.

Jeff Cole of Mass Farmers’ Markets says that despite the very real risks such technologies present, “any business must change with ever-changing conditions going on around it or face obsolescence and closure.”

“These technologies are just one of many things farmers must look at, carefully evaluate, and make a decision about,” he adds.

A number of the earlier farm-to-table tech companies, like Farmigo and Good Eggs, set out to make procuring local food more convenient for consumers by building a completely new food chain. Both companies allow customers to buy from local producers, then arrange for the packaging and delivery of the products—Farmigo to community drop-off points and Good Eggs to just about anywhere.

Financially, this model proved too difficult for Good Eggs to do while scaling up to multiple cities, and last summer the startup shut down its three operations outside San Francisco, laying off 140 employees.

Growing the Market for Local? Or Flooding it?

Many farmers are adopting online strategies because they feel they have few other options. Johnny Parker, who runs the mid-sized, multi-site Edible Earth Farm outside Pittsburgh, says he started listing his produce on Farmigo in late 2014 for the 2015 season after seeing the farm’s community supported agriculture (CSA) revenue plummet.

He says that for the six seasons he’s been farming, CSA memberships have comprised upwards of 80 percent of his gross revenues. Then last season he had a difficult time signing up new CSA members. He projects that CSA income will comprise just 55 percent of his gross revenues in 2016. The reason? Parker, who was a university director of systems and software development before turning to farming, blames the glut of fresh food delivery services that “popped up seemingly overnight,” offering produce to consumers at slimmer margins and with more variety than many local CSAs.

Still, last season, Parker decided to outsource his CSA operation to Farmigo—one of the companies he blames for cutting into his profits after it went from providing existing CSAs with online ordering software to creating its own online local food marketplace called Farmigo Communities—and he began growing a little of everything to cater to a choosier consumer.

“If you can’t beat them, join them,” he says.

Susan Ujcic and Annie Salafsky, who together run Helsing Junction Farm, a farm and CSA south of Seattle, Washington, had a similar experience. When Farmigo was in the business of developing CSA software, it “really helped [their] business,” Salafasky says. The CSA became “more streamlined” and the software provided “a lot of great features” such as automatic revenue reports and other data do-dads that simply weren’t available elsewhere.

But the farmers say they were disappointed, when, after being Farmigo’s loyal customer for several years, the company (backed by $26 million in funding) “came into the market we’ve developed over the past 25 years and started competing with us.”

As Farmigo founder Benzi Ronen sees it, Farmigo’s customers are not his competitors; on and offline retailers like Safeway, Walmart, Instacart, and Amazon are. “Based on research we conducted, there is a large number of people who aspire to buy from CSAs and farmers’ markets, but are not able to do so,” he says. “Farmigo Communities was designed to become an alternative to going to the supermarket, while delivering on the benefits of local food.”

But in the strict sense, Farmigo Communities does compete with its CSA customers. It sells locally grown food in the same markets: Seattle, Northern California, New York, and New Jersey, so far. These are many of the same places where traditional CSAs are expanding and natural markets for the company to enter, in part because the cities have already shown that they want such services. And Farmigo buys from many of the same farms and suppliers that CSAs do. But, Ronan contends, Farmigo had to move beyond providing software to other CSAs because there’s simply not enough growth in that market.

A More Farmer-Centric Model?

Some of startups that are newer to the market appear to put the focus even more on farmers than their predecessors—while attempting to solve for some of the logistics hurdles that got Good Eggs in financial trouble. In 2013, Farmstr was an early entrant into the e-commerce and delivery space. But in late 2014, founder Janelle Maiocco shut it down because the venture-funded startup found the economics of owning warehouses and delivery trucks—and managing other “last-mile” logistics—“too expensive for us to offer a low-cost solution” for farmers, consumers, and her business.

In an example of what she calls “failing forward,” Maiocco quickly hatched a plan to start a company that would focus on providing the technology for producers to sell their products, rather than on distribution and delivery. Barn2Door, founded in March 2015, serves as a matchmaker between farmers and customers who could be down the street or across the country.

The producer pays a $10 monthly fee for the e-commerce site, sets his or her own prices, and Maiocco says Barn2Door takes nothing from the transaction. This prevents the “markups of 60 to 80 percent” she says customers sometimes see on other e-commerce sites. Once a sale is made, producers arrange with the buyer to get the food.

“It might be, ‘meet me at the boat,’ or ‘I do home delivery in these two zip codes,’ or ‘I’ll drop a farm box at these locations.’ It might also be direct shipping cross-country,” Maiocco says.

But for some producers, this mode may not be particularly efficient either, because it can mean responding to orders on a case-by-case basis.

For farmers who want to sell their food direct to consumers in larger quantities, distribution is often still a big logistical and financial barrier. Take Rachel Kasa of Casa Rosa Farms in Capay Valley, California. She has had a positive experience selling her produce and meats on Farmigo, Good Eggs, and Full Circle, but she says she wouldn’t be able to access these providers if she didn’t belong to a food hub, which handles all the last-mile delivery and distribution logistics.

“The food hub delivers to the tech company’s warehouse, which then delivers the items to the consumers,” she says.

Websites that don’t solve for those last-mile logistics, in other words, may not be solving for one of most producers’ biggest pain points, says Greenberger of Food Sol.

“Tech companies come in and want to say ‘we’re connecting farmers to the consumers,’” she says. “But from a business point of view, they haven’t connected them because the bag of apples hasn’t changed hands.”

Complicating matters is the fact that, despite growth in online grocery shopping in recent years, 80 percent of us still buy our apples in-person, from a physical location. Supermarkets, Greenberger says, are still “incredibly efficient.” That industry—with its legions of faithful consumers, all set in their ways—will be a tough one to disrupt, she says, unless these online companies can find a way to band together to create a truly competitive online grocery, thereby pooling the risk.

As unlikely as that is to happen, no high-tech solution may ever be enough to convince New Hampshire farmer Craig Jensen that connecting online is as beneficial as connecting offline and face-to-face.

“When we work directly with our local co-op or small restaurant we can, in a conversation, both state our needs and try to be flexible,” he says. “The e-commerce that we’ve had available just isn’t as flexible.”

Update: In July 2016, Farmigo announced that it was discontinuing its farm delivery service.

Dan Mitchell contributed reporting to this story.

The post Does Food Tech Help Farmers? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Further to the South, in rural North Carolina, another, less-known battle is taking shape. This crisis involves the lasting impact of pollution from large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) housing pigs. Now a group of citizens is claiming that the state’s $3 billion pork industry is disposing of its waste in a manner that disproportionately and negatively affects residents of color, and that the negotiating efforts are being stalled by the pork industry.

In 2014, the University of North Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights and the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice filed a complaint with the state’s Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that recipients of federal funds ensure their actions don’t harm individuals or communities based on race. Since then, the community groups have been negotiating with state regulators, but the process broke down earlier this month, when those regulators brought pork industry representatives to a mediation session which was supposed to be confidential.

Last fall, Ann Edmondson, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Pork Council, told North Carolina Health News that it doesn’t see its operations as endangering the health of nearby residents.

“More than 80 percent of North Carolina’s hog farms are owned and operated by individual farm families, almost all of whom live in close proximity to their swine or in communities where their swine operations are located,” she said, “It strains credibility to believe our hog farmers are risking the health of their own families, along with their neighbors’ health, in order to make a living.”

We spoke with Elizabeth Haddix, attorney at the Center for Civil Rights, to hear more about her take on the process.

Can you describe the hog farms in the area where your clients live?

In the late 80s and early 90s, these CAFOs began to come into existence. The pork industry was very quickly monopolized by Smithfield, which bought up a lot of farms that were historically owned by Black farmers—which is part of the irony here, because of the disproportionate impact on the Black community. A lot of Black farmers lost their land at that time to these industrial operations. What they do is contract with local farmers, and everything is owned by the integrator, Smithfield, which is now owned by the Chinese corporation, WH Group.

The contractors have no control over what feed, antibiotics, etc. are given to speed up production, but they do own the waste from the hogs. And one hog creates a lot of waste—up to three times what a human creates.

The hog waste disposal system was instituted as this antiquated “lagoon” and “spray field” [approach]. The hogs are kept in cement houses on slatted floors, and the waste goes down through the slats and into a tank, and it gets pumped out into an open pit. All of these open pits were unlined. Supposedly, the solids and liquids separate naturally, and the waste is then pumped through these sprayers and sprayed onto nearby agricultural fields. All of this is supposed to be regulated by North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DEQ).

There’s a moratorium on the lagoons [as of 2007]—you can’t build any more—but for the ones that are in operation now, there aren’t any incentives to stop using this form of waste disposal.

What do you see as the fallout from this particular type of disposal system? Who is being impacted?

Black, Latino, and Native American people are disproportionately impacted, because they live in these areas where the hog operations are. The impacts are everything from the stench of the operation to the water impacts, to having your house, your clothes, your car, everything sprayed with this waste. In Eastern North Carolina the water tables are really high; there are rivers, creeks, and ditches throughout the fields. All of the waste runs off and into these ditches. The pork industry has said that the Black River, which runs through Sampson County, is pristine, but it’s not. Our client, the Water Keeper Alliance, has done testing on that river.

Can you share any anecdotes from people who have been impacted?

Renee Miller lives in Warsaw, North Carolina. She grew up there, in the house that was her mother’s. She moved away for a better job, and then came back to take care of her aging parent. She lives close to the road that divides her property from some of these spray fields. Behind her is a trailer park that has a lot of working class, low-income people living in it.

The contract grower [for WH Group] puts his jet-powered sprayer less than 50 feet away from where Miller lives and lets it spray waste all over her house and car. She doesn’t hang her laundry out to dry anymore because it ruins her clothes.

She used to spend a lot of time outdoors and have family picnics there, but she doesn’t do that anymore because it’s so unbearable to be outside—especially in the summertime when it’s hot, because of the stench from the spray fields and lagoons.

Miller has called and complained, asked for help. She’s on the board of Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH) [a group which has worked to help rural residents in the area respond to CAFO waste]. So she has a target on her back, and often feels retaliated against by the contract grower there, who’s also related to the former Sherriff of Duplin County.

Another gentleman who has given a declaration in this case used to fish in the creek behind his house with his son. He grew up there fishing on that same tributary, and he can’t anymore. The fish have open sores on them from listeria, which is a disease caused by super-saturation of these nutrients from hog waste. They used to have fish frys out there—part of traditional Black culture. The churches do them as fundraisers, it’s traditional to catch a bunch of fish, fry them up outside, have a big table, and your whole family comes. He hasn’t done that in over a decade.

How has the Pork Council responded to these complaints? 

We filed this complaint back in September 2014, and the Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. EPA set the jurisdiction in 2015, and we agreed to go into alternative dispute resolution. We get set up to have our first mediation session in January, and in December we get a “motion to intervene” from the National Pork Council and the North Carolina Pork Council.

They sent it to EPA saying that they wanted to be involved in the mediation, which was a surprise to us because we had been instructed by EPA that the very fact that we were in settlement negotiations should remain confidential. This is a community that has suffered a lot of retaliation and intimidation from the pork industry. Relationships with their neighbors who are contract growers have been disrupted. And so, here comes the Pork Council who has never agreed to come sit down at the table and listen to these community members’ concerns, and all of a sudden they’re telling EPA that they want to sit down at the table during this mediation process.

On behalf of our clients, who were adamant that the Pork Council should not be at the table—this was not about them, it was about DEQ’s responsibility to protect the environment and health and safety of the people of North Carolina—we said no, there’s no place for you here.

But they showed up at the Center for Civil Rights offices on the morning of the mediation session. DEQ attorneys made it very clear that they wanted the Pork Council there, and that sent a very clear message to our clients: DEQ is less interested in protecting the health and safety of the communities that disproportionately bear the burden of these facilities than they are in the concerns of the Pork Council.

Last year North Carolina passed a bill (seen by some as an “ag-gag law”) that will make it illegal for employees to document what happens on farms. How do you think this law relates to the work that your clients are doing?

The political climate in North Carolina right now is certainly advantageous for the pork industry.

We have some of our clients from REACH—people who live on these streams—going out to do water testing and getting threats from the industry. [One activist] at REACH called in a complaint about jet-powered sprayers operating during rain, which they’re not supposed to do. Less than 24 hours later, he received an anonymous phone call saying, “Did you just call in to complain? Who is this?” [The activist] said, “Well, who is this? You’re calling me.” Apparently the guy had gotten the phone number from DEQ.

What are your hopes for a resolution?

We’re hopeful EPA will intervene and do a real investigation. Our clients want to see the spray field system ended permanently.

DEQ has permitted more than 2,000 swine operations in North Carolina. That’s more than 9.5 million swine in confinement in these operations. Most of them are in the eastern portion of the state, which also happens to be the most dense population of African Americans and Native Americans in North Carolina. That capacity needs to be scrutinized, and the disproportionate burdens on communities of color need to be recognized and abated. The only way to do that is to deal with the waste situation and the concentration of these animals through the permitting process.

There are interim changes that could be made, though. They don’t have enough inspectors—16 for the whole state. So the inspections are not adequate to protect the environment nor the people who live around these places.

This interview was condensed for length and clarity. Photo courtesy of Waterkeeper Alliance.

The post Is Rural North Carolina the Next Flint? Groups Say People of Color There Bear the Brunt of Hog Farm Pollution appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Carly Fiorina—I was with her yesterday,” Couser told Civil Eats. “I sat with Trump for a couple hours last week.”

But unlike in the lead-up to past Iowa Caususes, when Ben Carson or Ted Cruz arrive at the Couser farm, the candidates’ ears aren’t being bent on food production, land access, or even a specific wishlist for the next Farm Bill. When he’s with the candidates, Couser grills them on ethanol, or fuel made from corn byproduct.

As a co-chair of advocacy group America’s Renewable Future and a corn grower, Couser wants to make candidates understand what ethanol means to farmers. He has made it his mission to educate each candidate on why they should support and strengthen the Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—which requires that transportation fuel sold in the U.S. contain a certain percentage of “renewable” fuel—usually ethanol.

“We want to make sure that stays intact and that we build on this new energy. As a farmer, that’s my safety net now. It’s a win-win for ag and a win-win for small communities,” he says. And he’s not alone. According to a recent poll, more than three out of four likely Iowa caucus-goers support the 2007 requirement.

Although many of the voters in next week’s caucus will be farmers and farmworkers, food rarely comes up in the campaigns in Iowa these days, says Dr. Steffen Schmidt, Iowa State professor of political science. Schmidt has closely observed every Iowa caucus since 1970, and he says even Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has arguably the most fleshed-out and progressive positions on food productions and farms, has not made the subject a regular part of his Iowa stump speech.

Sanders has, at times, hedged when asked about his positions, too. When asked by a Carroll Daily Times Herald reporter last summer whether his opposition of all things big (banks, money) extends to farms, he responded, “Good question, I just don’t know,” before continuing, “I’m not a great fan of factory farming, I should tell you that.”

Schmidt remembers when non-fuel-based agriculture was among the top four or five issues during the caucus. These days, though, he says candidates may bring up an issue specific to food production, such as federal crop subsidies, about once a decade, when the Farm Bill is up for reauthorization.

“Other than that, what comes up mostly nowadays is ethanol and renewable fuels,” says Schmidt, who is also a neighbor of Couser’s.

One reason traditional agricultural issues have moved to the background in Iowa politics is that fewer Iowans than ever are farming—just 66,000 of 3.1 million people—resulting in fewer voters considering agriculture when they vote.

“It’s simple math,” Matt Strawn, the former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, told the Kansas City Star. “You’re seeing a generational shift. You hear fewer farm voices as more and more family farms have gone away.”

But even among the remaining farm voices, agriculture is seemingly off voters’ radar this election cycle—despite a quarter of Iowans being directly connected to farms and farming. Iowa State pollsters asked 1,074 likely caucus-goers about the “most important problems facing the country today,” and agriculture did not make the final list of 16.

“A Republican candidate is better off talking about abortion and gay marriage than agriculture,” Schmidt says. “And a Democrat is better off talking about income inequality and Black Lives Matter and all that.”

In one recent exception, Sanders released an ad online featuring a third-generation farm couple speaking out against a proposed crude oil pipeline that would cut diagonally across the state, threatening to take significant amounts of farmland, some by eminent domain. But even in that case, the ad steered around addressing farming explicitly.

On the Republican side, voters’ preference for non-agriculture issues may explain why social conservative Senator Ted Cruz continues to do well in Iowa—where he is currently in second place, but has led at times—despite his publicly stated desire to phase out the Renewable Fuel Standard. Earlier this month, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad publicly denounced Cruz, citing his opposition to renewable energy and support from oil companies. Cruz and Senator Rand Paul are the only candidates from either party who oppose the RFS. Cruz and Paul represent a current GOP that is “anti-government” and “anti-spending,” says Schmidt, which may be another reason why this year’s candidates have not talked as much about food and farming. Fuel production is an easier lift for the current crop of Republican candidates.

“A lot of farm programs, food stamps, research—it’s big government,” he adds.

Couser insists that his concerns extend beyond energy interests, however, such as the recent attempt to restructure the dietary guidelines and the Des Moines’ lawsuit against rural counties for allegedly polluting the city’s water supply—issues he says he discussed with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently.

“It’s all very important to us,” he says. “We want to make sure we have a seat at the table and are not just on the menu.”

Separate from the interests of large-scale agriculture, chef and activist Kurt Michael Friese—who edits Edible Iowa River Valley—says he’d like to see candidates talking more about issues such as school lunch reform. And launched last fall, the Plate of the Union campaign is challenging presidential candidates to discuss solutions to problems like food access, diet-related illness, the treatment of food workers, and the impact of agriculture on the environment.

Then, during Monday’s Democratic Town Hall, televised on CNN, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley answered a question from Iowa Farmers’ Union President Jana Linderman about how he would provide opportunities for young farmers and small family farms. O’Malley’s answer—he would use the Farm Bill to lower the barrier for young people who want to farm, pushing back against consolidation in agriculture—might have pleased sustainable farming advocates, but neither Sanders not Clinton was asked about farming.

That’s because in a state where corporatization and consolidation has dramatically cut into the number of smaller, family-run farms, sustainable agriculture advocates are generally outnumbered when candidates show up in Iowa. Friese remembers cornering then-Senator Barack Obama at a 2007 Earth Day rally in Iowa City and asking him what he would do to transform an industrialized food system. After indicating that he’d been moved by a recent Michael Pollan column in the New York Times, Obama followed with a sobering piece of advice: “If you want to do anything in Washington about [the food system], you’ve got to bring me 1 million people. That’s the only thing that will counteract the billions of lobbyist dollars.”

Back in Iowa, Bill Couser says he and many of his neighbors are tired of being bombarded by political ads, but glad that the candidates start their campaigns in farm country, and bring the media with them. Has he met the perfect Iowa candidate in this field?

Many of them are “very smart and understand most issues,” but “when [they] come to the Midwest and talk about ag,” he says, “they’re all just a little bit short.”

The post As Family Farms Wane, Most Farm Issues Absent in Iowa’s Presidential Race appeared first on Civil Eats.

The bill—which called for safety warnings to be printed on all sugar-sweetened drinks and vending machines—had picked up public endorsements from heavyweight food and fitness gurus like Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and CrossFit founder Greg Glassman. Its sponsor, Senator Bill Monning (Democrat, Carmel), withdrew the bill from consideration by Health Committee members on Wednesday because he was unsure it would have the votes to move to the Senate floor, his spokeswoman told Civil Eats. In a statement, Monning expressed disappointment that a “soda labeling” bill will fail to advance for the third year in a row.

“Timing is everything when dealing with public policy issues and I remain committed to this issue and will continue to explore future options,” Monning said, referring to the possibility of re-introducing the bill next session. “Scientific studies have shown the adverse health impacts of sugar sweetened beverages and it is only a matter of time before meaningful legislation will be enacted that will address the current diabetes epidemic and the other chronic diseases driven by sugary drinks.”

Three Senators Abstained

To be approved by a Senate committee, a bill must receive yea votes from a majority of its members. In 2015, four of the nine Health Committee members abstained from a vote on SB 203, bringing it one vote short of passing. In 2014, the bill, under a different number, passed the Senate and nearly cleared the House before being stopped by a handful of abstaining Democrats.

This round, another advocacy group, 16 Packets, had been targeting the three Democrats on the Health Committee who abstained from voting on the 2015 version of the bill, effectively blocking it. The grassroots group, whose name refers to the amount of sugar in a 20-ounce bottle of soda, has been sending the Senators 16 packets of sugar daily to urge their support of the bill this session.

16 Packets spokesman Yonatan Landau said that despite the stalling of the bill this session, the three Senators will continue to receive weekly sugar packet mailings. He also points to the fact that the lawmakers have received the tens of thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions each has received from the soft drink industry.

“A few legislators have chosen to let this bill quietly be killed by industry lobbying even though it would help keep their constituents healthy and cost nothing,” Landau told Civil Eats.

Data Supports Labeling

The bill’s most recent demise came the same day the California Center for Public Health Advocacy released the results of a field poll on the issue showing widespread support for SB 203. The group found that nearly four out of five registered California voters support a warning label on sugary beverages, and that support was highest among the state’s Latino (85 percent) and African-American (82 percent) populations—communities traditionally hit hardest by diabetes and obesity.

Additional research released today by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation suggests that warning labels may actually dissuade many parents from buying sweet drinks for their kids. In an online survey of 2,381 parents, only 40 percent of parents said they would choose a sugar-sweetened beverage for their kids after viewing a warning label, compared to 60 percent of participating parents who saw no label.

California Sugar Wars

The Golden State has become something of a battleground between nutrition activists and food companies over sugary beverages in recent years. In November of 2014, voters in Berkeley by a three to one margin approved a measure that charges retailers a penny per ounce of every sugary drink sold, a tax intended to discourage the sale and purchase of sodas and other beverages.

Last June, San Francisco lawmakers approved a ban on advertisements of sugary beverages on city land, as well as this label on all sugar-sweetened beverages sold in the city: “WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay. This is a message from the City and County of San Francisco.” The American Beverage promptly sued the city over the measure, saying it infringed upon soda companies’ First Amendment rights.

Advocates view efforts in California to curb the consumption of sugary drinks as a public health effort analogous to the anti-smoking campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s, when steep taxes were levied against cigarette purchases and dire warning labels were placed on every box.

“The big question here is whether or not sugar drinks are going to slide over into the same position as tobacco, which is why it’s so hotly contested,” said Kim Kessler, policy and special programs director at UCLA’s Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy. Kessler said she views a warning label as a step forward in efforts to warn Californians of the health risks associated with drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.

Meanwhile, she added, “the response of industry has been to fight these efforts with vigorous lobbying and legal strategies.”
Photo by Radu Bercan / Shutterstock.com.

The post California Soda Warning Label Bill Dies as Research Suggests Efficacy appeared first on Civil Eats.

“I thought about what it is about food that I love. It’s where it comes from,” Barnett recalls. He also recognized that he could have an impact at the farm level, where he saw the most challenges. “Our models are not at all sustainable,” he says. The segment of the industry that spoke to him loudest was indoor farming, the emerging industry of high-tech urban greenhouses, vertical farms, hydroponics, and aquaponics.

After landing an entry-level job with an aquaponics startup, Barnett found that growing food “opened up a whole creative channel” for him. “That’s when I knew this was my calling,” says Barnett, who is now an account manager with the fast-growing greenhouse startup BrightFarms outside Philadelphia.

Barnett was early to embrace a trend that is quickly attracting his peers. As urban and suburban farms begin to appear in more cities and suburbs, they’re creating a host of jobs that look very different from traditional farm work. Proponents estimate that indoor agriculture has the potential to be a $9 billion industry, and as such, could transform communities and reduce unemployment.

The growing networks of hydroponic greenhouses and vertical farms have the potential to relocate food production to urban and suburban areas, where Americans have been migrating for a few decades now. The United Nations projects that by 2030, 53 urban areas in the United States will have populations of at least 1 million—up from 41 cities in 2010. All those people will need to eat and work.

Indoor farming—“future farming” or “Ag 3.0,” as some have called it—is expanding rapidly in many areas as a way to grow food and economies in and around cities. In early December, AeroFarms, which builds water efficient aeroponic vertical farms, announced that it had raised $20 million in venture capital to launch a consumer-facing brand and continue building new farms—including a massive new headquarters in Newark projected to yield two million pounds of greens annually.

BrightFarms’ staff will double in 2016 alone with the opening of its second and third greenhouse markets in Chicago and Washington D.C., according to CEO Paul Lightfoot. He says the company aims to build 20 commercial greenhouse farms in the next 3 to 5 years—an expansion that is bolstered by a $13.7 million venture investment in November and which will require around 500 new staff.

Also in November, Gotham Greens—which employs 120 and has seen 400 percent growth in just the last year—opened the world’s largest urban farm in Chicago. It’s a project that has promised to create jobs in the historic African-American Pullman neighborhood.

“Food jobs have steadily left our cities for the past 100 years, and local food demand is driving production that is now bringing some of these jobs back to the communities in which their food is produced,” Lightfoot, of BrightFarms, tells Civil Eats. “This has no downside for urban markets—it only increases jobs and economic activities.”

But unlike outdoor commercial farms, where the bulk of the labor is done by low-income people and recent immigrants, it’s less clear who exactly is filling the jobs in indoor farming, as companies are understandably buttoned up about who they employ.

When indoors farms are built with private-public partnerships, such as the planned Community Located Agricultural Research Area (or CLARA) in Pasadena, Texas, economic development can be written into the design. CLARA will be open-source education campus for indoor farming on the city’s north side, which has been hurt by the downturn in oil and gas, says John Choo, president of partner organization Indoor Harvest. He says the will donate all the food it grows to the city’s food bank and serve as a training center for “the next generation of farmers.”

Indoor Harvest must also create a minimum of 12 short- to intermediate-term jobs in construction, plumbing, electrical, and materials handling for local workers, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Greenhouse jobs also differ significantly from those in traditional agriculture. Where a rural farm mainly needs people focused on the crops, building an indoor farm can require designers and architects, plus skilled laborers to construct, wire, and pipe the growing system. Although Choo says the ongoing farm operations, are generally more automated indoors than outdoors, these farms also require growers and horticulturists savvy in the emerging fields of hydroponics, aquaponics, and other tech-heavy practices—skills in which Choo says Pasadena’s CLARA will train prospective workers.

“We are going to create a talent pool,” he says. “When you look at farming tractors in an outdoor space and all those components, all that can be translated inside, just with different tools and a different footprint. There needs to be a pipeline of people who can work in the industry.”

Indoor agriculture has thus far seen the greatest amount of interest from Millennials like Barnett, says Henry Gordon-Smith of Blue Planet Consulting, the small, Manhattan-based indoor farming consulting firm he started last year. Gordon-Smith, 29, employs a staff that includes engineers, technicians, greenhouse specialists and curriculum designers who are all 31 years old or younger. They would undoubtedly be making more money elsewhere but have chosen to help build an industry that both provides sustainable food and jobs for city-dwellers, says Gordon-Smith.

“There’s real power in the young people and what they’re bringing to this, and to the agriculture, which is a tedious, tiresome, labor-intensive, and low-wage industry,” he says.

But for some workers in tech-heavy greenhouses and vertical farms, the wages can be better than they would be on rural farms. Gordon-Smith estimates that an urban indoor grower can earn as much as $65,000 starting out, while a master grower with a PhD can earn up to $90,000 annually. That’s a far cry from workers in traditional agriculture, who earn an average of $19,000 annually or $9.30 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of course, indoor farms are not “panaceas for the multiple challenges to more conventional farming,” warns Dr. Hugh Joseph, a farm and food systems expert at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. He believes that for indoor farms to be economic engines and job creators, they must first “prove themselves prove viable economically and in the marketplace.”

Over at BrightFarms, you wouldn’t know the industry hasn’t already “arrived.” The company is currently hiring for 50 positions at its new greenhouses—including an experienced head grower in Chicago—where Lightfoot says the company “will train people and provide career opportunities, so long as they are a great cultural fit.” Although the company did not disclose its pay scale, he says each employee at BrightFarms is paid “a living wage,” including healthcare benefits

Barnett is quite optimistic about the future growth of indoor farming, even if it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet. He even started Ponicjobs.com, a job search engine for positions within his emerging space.

“The number one group of people who contact me are in their 20s, driven, and in love with this new concept. It’s a really passionate field,” he says.

The post Not Your Dad’s Farm Job: Millennials Look to High-Tech Farms For Careers appeared first on Civil Eats.

There’s a memorable scene in the documentary

The men waste no time skinning and butchering the kudu, starting a small fire, and cooking up a portion of the animal’s ribs then and there. After all, as some of the last true nomadic hunter-gatherers on the planet, this may be some the Hadza’s only meat for a while. The hunters share a meal before bringing the rest of the animal back to camp to savor with the rest of the tribe.

Meat, precisely because it is so difficult to procure, comprises a relatively small part of the Hadza diet. The tribe mainly dines on more than 200 foraged plants, berries, and tubers found in the surrounding bush. If food grows scarce, the nomads will pick up and move.

“These are the foods we seek, because they are the foods that are in our environment,” tribal elder Nyanzobe Mpanda says in the film. “They all have their times when we can eat them–the seasons.”

In Defense of Food is based Michael Pollan’s best-selling 2008 book of the same name, and premieres on PBS on December 30. In the film, director Michael Schwarz set out to build upon the book by answering the question: “What should we eat?” Narrated by Pollan and featuring interviews with more than 40 food and nutrition experts, In Defense of Food brings fresh research and stories to support the now-popular thesis set forth in the book: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

The film highlights a new body of research that brings into focus the Hadza diet, which has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. Dr. Alyssa Crittenden is a professor of anthropology and co-director of the Metabolism, Anthropometry, and Nutrition Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has been studying the foodways of the Hadza for the past 11 years. She says the group’s diet can teach Westerners a lot about our ancestral diet.

Crittenden has found that the Hadza eat a vastly diverse and well-balanced array of foods—almost exclusively hunted and foraged within their environment, and none of which is processed or farmed. Meat, for instance, comprises around 35 percent of the Hadza diet, the majority of which is comprised of fruits, nuts, beans, roots, and a fairly large percentage of honey and honeycomb.

Although they’re a nomadic people with little access to hospitals or healthcare, many Hadza live long lives and suffer from diet-related diseases and cancers at a lower rate than other, more modernized Tanzanians.

Researchers suggest the tribe’s health may be a result of superior gut bacteria from the diverse array of foods that the Hadza forage and hunt. Crittenden and others have found that these tribespeople stress very little about the nutritional content of what they will eat; they simply eat the foods (mostly plants) that are available to them.

Crittenden co-authored a 2013 study that found the Hadza’s microbiome—the ecosystem of protective bacteria in all humans—was more rich and biodiverse than a control group of urban Italian participants.

Another ongoing study should shed even more light on why the Hadza diet has worked for the nomadic tribe for so long. The crowdfunded Human Food Project, launched by Jeff Leach, who is featured prominently in the documentary, seeks to expand on Crittenden’s study of the Hadza microbiome through analysis of fecal samples and the plants, berries, and trees in the tribe’s surrounding environment. According to its website, the project is “an effort to understand modern disease against the back drop of our ancestral/microbial past.”

“Westernization is associated with a reduction in the diversity of microbial life in the gut,” says Dr. Jeffrey Gordon in the film. Gordon directs the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine. He says that a lack of biodiversity in our diets, including a reliance on animal products to the detriment of plants, is likely to blame for this shift.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman has found that 55 percent of the modern diet is comprised of processed foods, with almost half of us reporting drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage daily. This “Western diet”—which has been exported to many places, with negative consequences—is a relatively new occurrence in human evolution, but is already wreaking havoc.

If the Western diet is killing us, what, then, should we eat? This is the question at the center of both Pollan’s book and Schwarz’s film. Crittenden says the Hadza demonstrate the importance of eating what nature gives us.

Although Pollan included the latest information about the human microbiome in his book, Cooked, most of it had not been published by the time In Defense of Food came out. But once Schwarz found out Leach was in Tanzania collecting bacteria samples from the Hadza and their environment, he decided to make the long, expensive trip to Tanzania to document the effort. Schwarz says the week he spent embedded with the Hadza was one of the most memorable of his life, but he was also struck by the difficulty of the lives the nomads lead.

“I certainly wouldn’t want viewers of the film to think we advocate going back to a hunter-gatherer diet or a Paleo diet,” Schwarz told Civil Eats. “There are a wide variety of healthy diets around the world, some of which are sometimes surprising. The common element is that they’re all based on the environments of the people who eat them; over time, those people have adapted to the foods from their environments.”

The post What the Hunter-Gatherers from ‘In Defense of Food’ Can Teach Us About Our Diets appeared first on Civil Eats.

“The food system itself in the U.S. is reflective of a society unable to deal with certain social ills,” says co-author Elsadig Elsheikh, Global Justice Program Director at Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. “One of the ways we are unable to deal is to uplift people who are being harmed in society—not only with a handout, but with the opportunity to labor and live in dignity.”

The irony, Elsheikh adds, is that corporations and large-scale farms receive far more handouts and subsidies under the law today than needy individuals. He says corporate influence is “a threat not only to our food system, but also to our democratic principles.”

How Did We Get Here?

The Farm Bill wasn’t always so skewed toward corporate control and maximum production, however. The goal of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act—the inaugural Farm Bill—was actually to “raise the value of crops and reduce crop production and surplus,” according to the report. In fact, production subsidies were initially funded through a tax on corporations that processed farm products.

The 1950s brought on a new era of agribusiness control over the food system, wherein price floors for crops were artificially lowered, sending farm prices plummeting, but directly benefitting big business. Finally, the authors say, the deregulation of the corn market under Nixon—a development that was heavily influenced by agricultural lobbyists—led to overproduction of the crop, farm consolidation, and the conversion of corn into ethanol and sweetener.

“The Farm Bill went from supporting smaller-sized farmers and rural development to supporting large agribusiness and corporations,” Esheikh says.

Through it all, non-whites were often marginalized within the food system, the report claims, and Black Americans were “systematically barred” from New Deal-era agricultural unions and federal support programs for landowners, frequently not covered under federal wage laws (and thus paid less than white farmers), and even blocked for a time by Southern Conservatives from receiving benefits through the Social Security Act.

An increase of federal supports for farmers during the 1930s actually had the opposite effect for Black farmers; the number of Black landowners dropped from around 900,000 in 1930 to less than 700,000 in 1939. By 1997, there were fewer than 20,000 Black farmers on just 2 million acres of land*—a loss of land Esheikh believes is “even worse than during slavery or extreme racial exclusion.”

Last week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appointed 15 members to the first Minority Farmers Advisory Committee, which will provide guidance to the agriculture department on policies and strategies that impact minority farmers and ranchers.

Still, a food chain built around maximum production, efficiency, and low prices is one in which the workers along that chain often suffer the most. Today, the workers who pick, pack, and cook our food—often the majority being people of color—work long hours for significantly less than their white counterparts and depend on nutrition benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at 1.5 times the rate of non-food workers, according to the report, which cites a 2012 Food Chain Worker Alliance report.

“We need to take care of the people who are feeding us,” Esheikh says. “You and I can go out to dinner, but too often, the people who are serving the food, making the food, or washing the dishes are unable to enjoy the same dinner.”

Shining a Light on Structural Injustice

Eric Holt Giménez, whose organization Food First supports communities fighting for food justice, praised the Haas Institute’s report, which he says “pulls the veil off the U.S. food system, exposing its structural injustices.”

“At Food First we know that hunger, food insecurity, malnutrition, and diet-related diseases are not the result of a lack of food—we produce one and a half times more than we need to feed every man, woman and child on the planet. Those problems, he continues, “are due to injustice. This report shows how racial injustice is built into the most powerful piece of food legislation on the planet.”

Esheikh says even if conditions for food workers are improved—including raising the minimum wage and enforcing protections for migrant farm workers—it will be difficult to attain a democratic food system that benefits everybody without reducing corporate control over food policy. The development of a national food policy, like the one Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and several other thought leaders and groups are advocating could help. “Ultimately, the report calls for a long-range movement toward food sovereignty—a goal close to the heart of Giménez at Food First.”

“The Farm Bill is a pillar of the global food system,” Giménez says. “This is why it is insulated by layer after layer of legislative committees, making it all but impossible for citizens to comprehend or change it. This is why it is important to build a broad-based movement for food sovereignty that can create the political will to introduce reforms—even to the Farm Bill.”

*The 2012 Ag Census indicated that number had increased to 44,000.

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