The post Op-ed: The New York Times Took on the Food System. Here’s What They Missed. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>This week, The New York Times released the third in a series of provocative opinion videos called “We’re Cooked” that focus on “our broken food system,” with the idea that “you get three chances to help fix it—and save the planet—every day.” The videos make a rare attempt to call out agribusiness and the factory farm system of meat and dairy production from which the industry profits for a general U.S. audience and try to capture the attention of today’s online readers with polished visuals, gruesome insider footage, and expert testimony.
First off: Amen. The current food system is responsible for enormous harms, from inhumane treatment of animals and people to gross pollution of water and air quality and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
While the series hits hard and directly at agribusiness power, however, it misses a huge part of the story. And the core messages fall back on a framing of agriculture that furthers an already deep rural-urban divide when it comes to how we can transform damaging food systems. Primarily addressing urban consumers, the videos give the microphone to environmental lawyers, academics, an animal rights organizer and—in the final episode—clean-cut entrepreneurs promising their own brand of factory-produced protein in the form of crickets and other insects.
Absent from the series are the rural voices from North Carolina to Iowa to California who oppose factory farms because of the water and air pollution they face every day. Also missing are the rural-based environmental justice leaders who are important defenders of the country’s land and water. Absent, too, are the growing number of farmers in the U.S. and around the world who are raising animals within agroecological systems that protect the land’s adaptive capacity and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
“The videos fall back on a framing of agriculture that furthers an already deep rural-urban divide when it comes to how we can transform damaging food systems.”
The series’ first episode, “Meet the People Getting Paid to Kill Our Planet,” raises issues that merit debate, from the meat and dairy industry’s systematic evasion of responsibility for their emissions-intensive production systems, to the corruption of trade groups and lobbying organizations that claim to represent all farmers’ interests. But the deafening absence of rural people who have been fighting this fight for decades only grows louder in the subsequent episodes.
The lone farmer in the series appears in the second episode, “See the True Cost of Your Cheap Chicken”: A Georgia-based contract chicken farmer working for Pilgrim’s Pride who has been bankrupted and is a figure of despair. There’s not one word from farmers who have rejected the exploitation of the factory farm sector for decades or the new and beginning farmers who are trying to build a different kind of system grounded in fairness and ecological sustainability.
Our research has documented the rising greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies and detailed how those companies dodge accountability. Last year, we joined environmental justice, climate, and rural groups in calling for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin regulating the potent greenhouse gas methane from the biggest hog and dairy operations and to launch a strategy to work with farmers to transition out of this damaging factory farm system. In November, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), more than 110 governments signed a Global Methane Pledge that commits to reduce agriculture’s methane footprint. Factory farm animal production now accounts for 13 percent of total U.S. methane emissions.
The second video tells the story of how U.S. chicken producers are exploited by a handful of big poultry companies. And while it offers a close, insider look at the animals in a poultry barn and the inhumane way they are made to live (and often die prematurely), it doesn’t explain how a series of policy decisions—and policy failures—have allowed that system to become so entrenched.
The government has historically left farmers without protection from unfair contracts and retaliation by corporations; allowed the four large poultry firms to consolidate, eliminating effective competition; failed to aggressively enforce environmental laws; and provided federal backing for large loans that often trap poultry farmers in unescapable debt. The system did not come about by accident: It is the result of public policy choices that have favored consolidated corporate power at every turn. This abuse of power, too, must be called out.
The video series stands in stark contrast to reporting in the Times—and in its podcast—on consolidation in the beef industry. In that instance, a Montana rancher and his family get to tell their own story, to powerful effect. It also explained how U.S. regulators routinely ignored the impacts of beef company consolidation on ranchers, closed out local markets, and contributed to a situation that has left independent ranchers barely able to survive at a time of record-high consumer prices and record-high profits for the four controlling meatpackers.
All this brings us to one of the series’ biggest misses. While it points out the global damage wrought by the food system it depicts, it fails to drive home the fact that the system is dominated by global companies. The videos also miss the chance to point to transformative strategies that we can learn from around the world.
As global companies are promoting policies and investment that would export the factory farm system of animal production globally, smaller-scale farmers are learning from one another. They’re also adopting and advocating for agroecology—a system of food production that empowers farmers and Indigenous peoples, uses local knowledge to meet local needs, and integrates animals in biologically diverse systems that protect the land and water.
“The New York Times sets up a ridiculous false choice: Either we pollute the planet and treat animals inhumanely, or we eat crickets. Really?”
Some governments in Africa are following civil society calls to include agroecology in their National Adaptation Strategies, embracing agriculture’s potential to mitigate climate change and protecting the land’s adaptive capacity. Elsewhere, in Mexico, the government is developing concrete programs that respond to the calls of farmers’ organizations who have lowered costs and risks, while increasing biodiversity, by following agroecological practices.
Rather than follow these promising alternatives, the third episode takes us instead to an ancient solution to meeting protein needs when few alternatives exist: insects. And not insects raised in a barn but raised instead in a capital-intensive high-rise: a different kind of factory farm, one that is odorless and (we assume) less distressing.
The New York Times sets up a ridiculous false choice: Either we pollute the planet and treat animals inhumanely, or we eat crickets. Really?
We urgently need to stop the harm caused by factory farm systems. We need to protect our land’s adaptive capacity for the climate challenges ahead, not least the challenge of supplying a healthy diet to an ever-expanding global population. In turn, that requires that the government enforce existing laws: to protect the environment and ensure fair competition. It requires new climate and agriculture policies, too. We need a new vision for the farm bill that acknowledges the escalating climate crisis and advances critical solutions while acknowledging that all of us—urban consumers as well as farmers, rural communities—will all be affected.
Finally, and crucially, The New York Times and its readers, as well as U.S. policymakers, need to hear from farmers, farmworkers, and a diversity of other rural voices. Let’s not confuse agribusiness interests with the humans on the ground, many of whom are working hard to steward the land and rethink entrenched systems—all while keeping us fed.
The post Op-ed: The New York Times Took on the Food System. Here’s What They Missed. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Op-ed: We Don’t Need a ‘Moonshot’ for Faux Burgers—We Need To Hold ‘Big Meat’ Accountable. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Ezra Klein proposed a moonshot investment in “Meatless Meat.” Klein makes a cogent, fact-filled case for the government to spend a few billion dollars on public research to increase the commercial viability of plant-based and cellular (i.e., lab-created) meats.
Klein’s objective is straightforward: reduce the climate footprint of meat and dairy, reduce the suffering of animals confined in feed lots and barns, and prevent the next pandemic. He proposes use public funding to accelerate research and development—much like Tesla’s boost to e-cars or the Department of Defense’s boost to the internet—as the best way to move production and demand of alternative meats quickly and effectively.
The stakes are high. And Klein is not wrong. Cheap meat is a problem. The much-loved (recently mythologized) hamburger is brought to us by an extractive industry whose recent record profits come on the backs of disadvantaged workers, animal cruelty, mountains of manure, and a whole lot of public subsidies. But even the quickest, most superficial look at today’s U.S. food system shows the solution to the mess is not public subsidies for petri-dish proteins that will inevitably be produced (or at least funded) by a handful of large, vertically integrated food and feed companies.
Klein’s analysis forgets the first instinct of any investigator: cui bono, or, who stands to benefit? It’s not as if consumers ask for animal suffering, or excess greenhouse gas emissions. Sure, we like burgers—but we like fish and chips, too, and falafels and dumplings and pakora. The great thing about being an omnivorous species is that there is not much we won’t eat. Involve sugar or a deep fat fryer and we’ll eat far too much of it, sadly.
The problem with cheap meat is not that it should cost the consumer more (though it probably should). It is that what looks cheap to the consumer is in fact costing the public all the way down the production line. From unchecked pollution to uninsured workers, cheap meat makes a lot of money for a very few, while costing the earth—quite literally—for all of us.
The challenge is not how to save the hamburger by making an animal-free, lower-emission proxy, nor is it about generating enough chemical compounds to make soy and fungi taste like blood at an affordable price.
The problem is unchecked market power, enjoyed by a small handful of corporations. They often own all parts of the food chain—from the grain silos to the feedlots to the final brand that shoppers see on grocery store shelves. And they make a lot of money by selling unhealthy food, extracting profits from farmers whose livelihoods are squeezed in poorly regulated and noncompetitive markets, using a vulnerable workforce whose rights they violate. Market power is turned into political capital as these corporations use campaign donations to capture state and federal legislators, who have spent decades commissioning reports that document these harm and bemoaning the hollowing out of rural America in public speeches, all the while eliminating the funding for inspectors, enlarging legal loopholes, and handing out public money in support of those few highly profitable firms.
The part of the food system that really needs a moonshot is the human cost. The pandemic brought that cost home sharply: Meat companies such as Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield openly put their workforce at risk, with nearly 59,000 meatpacking workers testing positive for COVID-19 to date. They did not provide PPE. At first, companies refused to test, and when they did, they refused to share the numbers. They denied workers paid sick leave and are now denying them disability.
To top it off, the Trump administration used the Defense Production Act to reopen closed or slowed-down meatpacking plant and offered to support meatpackers in any litigation brought by workers related to workplace exposures to the virus. Pandemic conditions aside, workers earn too little to live with dignity, and their earnings are so precarious that a day off work is not an option. Meat plants employ people from dozens of countries in the world—many of them new immigrants—and treat them as dispensable.
Factory farms run on cheap feed, lax environmental regulations, and disposable labor. We do not need rocket science to change that. We just need to enforce the existing labor, environmental, and anti-trust laws. We can stop emissions before they happen. We know how to protect animal welfare. We know how to protect public health, too—the burger is not so bad, nutritionally, just hold the cheese, the extra patty and the sugar-laden sauces that turn the average fast food burger into a high-calorie, low-nutrition meal.
The answer is not a moonshot. Instead we need a government and a public that stand up for workers and demands corporations and their investors obey the laws, pay their share of taxes, and pay their fines when their companies are found guilty of price-fixing, food safety violations, or grossly negligent pollution of the communities where they operate.
What else?
A sustainable, adaptive, and resilient food system is so much more than a low-emitting carbon sink. Animal agriculture must be regulated on a life-cycle basis, from the millions of acres of corn and soy the animals eat to the piles of manure that the industry now wants to convert and pipe like natural gas, in exchange for yet more public money. Nip too-cheap meat in the bud by making sure that at every step companies are held responsible for their own pollution, workers are paid, and animals are treated right.
Rather than asking for a moonshot, let’s shift power away from the small handful of megacorporations that control our food system. Let’s spend public money protecting the health of the whole ecosystem, people included. That way we’ll all win.
The post Op-ed: We Don’t Need a ‘Moonshot’ for Faux Burgers—We Need To Hold ‘Big Meat’ Accountable. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>