The post In Hawai‘i, Restoring Kava Helps Sustain Native Food Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Last fall, Ava Taesali opened Kava Queen, O‘ahu’s only brick-and-mortar kava bar, after three years of building a loyal following for this traditional beverage at farmers’ markets in Honolulu. Located in the repurposed Waialua Sugar Mill, former home of a sugar industry giant, the establishment is surrounded by a mix of local businesses that includes a yoga studio, a surf shop, and a sewing collective. The eclectic space reflects the North Shore’s laid-back, community vibe—a perfect backdrop for sipping the Polynesian brew. “Kava is meant to bring people together,” said Taesali.
Earthy, bitter, and tingly on the tongue, kava—‘awa in Hawaiian—calms the body without dulling the brain. “The only thing it numbs is your mouth,” said Taesali, a Samoan American whose first name, aptly, means kava in Samoan.
Kava, also known as Piper methysticum, is a perennial shrub with large, heart-shaped leaves. Its fibrous root, when crushed and steeped in water and massaged to release its essence, produces a cloudy, cool infusion traditionally served in an apu, or coconut-shell cup. Consumed in the South Pacific for at least 2,000 years for pleasure, relaxation, and in cultural and spiritual ceremonies, the drink holds deep significance in both Hawaiian mythology and Polynesian identity.
“This designation helps sustain Native culture, reassure public health, and encourage state food sovereignty.”
Beyond its traditional ceremonial and social importance, kava’s calming effects have sparked new research into kavalactones, the plant’s active compounds known to reduce stress, as an anti-anxiety remedy. Studies have also found that the elixir may have broader medicinal potential, from anti-cancer benefits to treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Despite these findings, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has yet to embrace these benefits. A longstanding federal advisory memorandum labels kava as an “unsafe” ingredient and classifies it as “an unapproved food additive,” citing unresolved health concerns including potential liver damage and cancer.
The FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) designation deems substances safe to use in foods and beverages, covering everything from staples such as salt and vinegar to certain food dyes and other controversial additives. However, the FDA has withheld GRAS status from kava, classifying it instead as a dietary supplement alongside vitamins, herbs, and probiotics, subjecting it to stricter labeling requirements and health warnings—as well as lower consumer demand. Beyond limiting kava’s mainstream acceptance, the cautious stance has also cast a shadow over its reputation, overshadowing its deep-rooted significance in Polynesian culture.
Last year, however, Hawai‘i took matters into its own hands by labeling the root as GRAS. While states can’t overturn federal standards, they can set their own restrictions—California, for example, bans potassium bromate, a baking additive—or, as is the case here, make exceptions for certain substances.
Ava Taesali pours kava into an apu at Kava Queen in Waialua. (Photo credit: Naoki Nitta)
By adopting the FDA term for safe-to-consume ingredients, the decision honors the plant’s cultural legacy. It also aligns with the international Codex Alimentarius, the food safety standard of the World Health Organization (WHO), which recognized the safety of traditional kava preparations in 2020, citing their cultural significance to Native Polynesians.
“This designation helps sustain Native culture, reassure public health, and encourage state food sovereignty,” said Kristen Wong, an information specialist for the Hawai‘i Department of Health (DOH).
The Stigma Surrounding Kava
Advocates blame the kava controversy on widespread adulteration of the ingredient. In 2002, Germany banned the substance due to reports of liver toxicity, which were later traced to extracts mixed with kratom, a Southeast Asian herb linked to liver damage and addiction. Though the national ban was eventually lifted, the stigma lingers. “There are so many misconceptions about kava,” Taesali said, adding that official recognition is key to changing the narrative.
Kava has endured a long history of adversity, said Lakea Trask, a Hawaiian farmer and local activist who cultivates kava and other Native crops for Kanaka Kava, his family’s farm-to-table restaurant in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island. The plant has weathered centuries of hardship, he notes, from missionaries suppressing its use during colonization to the shift toward large-scale monocultures that crowded out Indigenous staples. The GRAS stamp is a long-overdue validation, he said, of kava’s importance to Hawaiian agriculture and identity.
As recognition grows, so have opportunities for small-scale farming initiatives and environmental restoration. By reviving Hawaiian self-sufficiency and healing the scars left by plantations, Trask said, “‘awa [presents] an opportunity to restore our sovereignty and our ancestral connection to the land.”
A History of Resilience
Polynesian settlers brought kava to Hawai‘i roughly 1,600 years ago, selecting it as a canoe plant—essential crops carried across the Pacific by ancestral voyagers—alongside taro (kalo), breadfruit (‘ulu), and other staples that fed, healed, and built thriving communities across the archipelago. Along with its ceremonial and medicinal role, kava was also an important social drink.
Yet by the 19th century, kava was headed toward obscurity. The rise of plantation agriculture uprooted Native communities, replacing local food systems with sprawling sugarcane and pineapple fields. “It’s the same story as all of our Indigenous crops,” said Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, a University of Hawai‘i (UH) associate professor at the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources and head of the Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory.
Despite these challenges, kava’s ability to thrive in sun, shade, and diverse soils enabled it to persist, mainly in the wild. Forty years ago, Edward Johnston, a leading kava expert and co-founder of the Association for Hawaiian ‘Awa (AHA), stumbled on a hidden patch of kava deep in the Big Island’s Waipi‘o Valley. Struck by its calming properties, he began collecting and propagating different varieties in his back yard, eventually offering them for sale at the newly established Hilo Farmers Market.
Since kava reproduces only through cuttings, not seeds, Johnston’s work has been vital to preserving Hawai‘i’s 13 known cultivars. Known as noble varieties, all Hawaiian strains contain balanced levels of kavalactones, the compounds responsible for kava’s calming effects. Through AHA, a non-profit promoting the cultural, educational, and sustainable use of kava, Johnston has helped safeguard these native plants and elevated their cultural significance.
Edward Johnston walks through a field of kava in 1999. (Photo credit: Edward Johnston)
Johnston’s efforts helped spark a kava comeback, riding the wave of the Hawaiian Renaissance, a late-1960s cultural movement to reclaim Native traditions, language, and sovereignty. The resurgence gained further traction in the 1990s with support from the Department of Defense’s Rural Economic Transition Assistance-Hawai‘i grants, which helped farmers shift from sugarcane plantations to diversified agriculture. The late Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawai‘i) championed the program amid the decline of the sugarcane industry, spurring about 200 acres of kava cultivation by backyard growers and commercial farms, according to Johnston.
Demand for kava soared during this time, especially in Germany, where Hawaiian strains fetched a premium. In a 1998 newsreel, AHA co-founder Jerry Konanui urged farmers to seize the moment, highlighting that the raw kava prices had doubled to $10 a pound, presenting a sustainable source of supplemental income.
But when the liver toxicity reports surfaced in 2000, “everything went downhill,” Johnston said. Germany’s 2002 ban left a lasting impact: Despite inclusion in the Codex Alimentarius in 2020, kava is still illegal in Poland, the United Kingdom, and a host of other countries. And in the U.S., the FDA’s 2002 advisory, which labels kava as an unapproved food additive with potential health risks, still rules, lumping traditional preparations together with processed products.
A Growing Market Amid Regulatory Ambiguity
With federal oversight of kava in a gray zone that allows its use as a supplement, kava bars have popped up across the country over the last decade. Currently, about 180 establishments cater to a growing thirst for the drink as a social tonic and alcohol alternative.
As kava’s allure grows, so, too, have local restrictions. In Florida, the so-called “U.S. Kava Capital” and home to 75 kava venues and a small crop of farms, one county recently imposed limits on kava bars near schools (there are no state age regulations around kava consumption). And in New York City, officials shut down a cafe serving kava and kratom, calling the combination “dangerous.”
Michigan, however, greenlit kava in 2023, becoming the first state to grant it GRAS status. “Michigan relies on the FDA to provide new information on GRAS products,” said a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD), which issued the designation. But in this case, “MDARD believed the WHO document provided sufficient evidence” to confirm the safety of traditionally prepared kava.
Soon after, Hawai‘i followed suit, citing the FDA’s “erroneous” classification of kava. The state’s health department invoked a federal exception that grants GRAS status to substances with a proven history of safe use before 1958—a milestone in food safety marked by the Food Additives Amendment. The state ruling recognizes noble kava cultivars brewed with water or coconut water as safe, while warning against alcohol-based extracts and processed products.
Although studies have linked kava to elevated liver enzyme levels, research shows that most cases of liver damage involve concentrated extracts or products made with non-root parts, like leaves or stems, rather than traditional brews. Genetics also play a role: While nearly all Pacific Islanders have an enzyme that metabolizes kava safely, upwards of a fifth of Caucasians lack it, increasing their risk of liver toxicity when consuming adulterated kava.
In an email to Civil Eats, an FDA spokesperson clarified that, absent GRAS status, kava can’t be used in foods and drinks and must be sold as a dietary supplement. Even though “this determination does not apply to kava steeped in water and consumed as food,” the agency’s warning still stands; “the cultural use of kava does not influence its safety assessment,” added the spokesperson, citing “data gaps” in the WHO evaluation.
Yet, as U.H.’s Lincoln notes, by the FDA’s own definition, kava—safely consumed for millennia—should qualify as GRAS. Not recognizing the historical safety of traditional preparations amounts to “[an] erasure of indigenous Hawaiian identity,” he adds, and an act of “ongoing colonial repression.”
Ultimately, the regulatory ambiguity creates inconsistent approaches for other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). While the DEA doesn’t classify kava as a controlled substance, it lists the root alongside LSD and fentanyl on its Drugs of Abuse list, further muddling its legal status. Adding to the uncertainty, California echoed the FDA’s position last May by issuing its own caution in a consumer fact sheet.
Harvesting ‘awa requires leaving the corm and lateral roots intact. (Photo credit: Kanaka Kava)
The ambiguity is causing significant challenges for Rami Kayali, who owns two kava bars in California with plans to open a third—‘Awa Hou—in Honolulu this month. After six years of insuring his two mainland establishments, Kayali’s provider abruptly canceled coverage, citing the DEA scrutiny. Kayali has had to scramble, turning to pricey cannabis-industry insurance at nearly triple the cost. “It’s been a nightmare,” he said.
Amid these challenges, Hawai‘i’s formal stance provides vital legal footing for the industry, said Trask of Kanaka Kava, at least in the islands. “To have some of those protections put on paper is important.”
Yet those protections are weakly enforced. “We conduct investigations when notified,” a DOH spokesperson said, conceding that while state statutes require labeling and compliance, enforcement is largely reactive. “Blasphemous” kava extracts and adulterations are widely available, both on-island and online, said Trask, perpetuating misconceptions about “‘awa done traditionally,” prepared with just water or coconut water.
Supporting Local and Sustainable Kava Production
Nevertheless, the GRAS designation is opening new doors for kava entrepreneurs and farmers alike. A recent $70,000 state grant aims to boost sustainable kava production and reduce Hawai‘i’s reliance on food imports, which currently hovers at around 85 percent of the state’s total food supply. And the economic potential is clear: In Vanuatu, kava makes up 75 percent of exports, generating nearly $50 million a year for the remote South Pacific island nation.
Hawai‘i’s noble kava varieties fetch premium prices—fresh “wet” kava can retail for $64 a pound—though local production remains “microscopic,” said Taesali of Kava Queen in O‘ahu. Her bar, like many in the U.S., serves mainly Fijian and Vanuatuan kava.
Scaling up won’t be easy, as kava plants take a few years to establish, and the slow returns can deter farmers. Growers like Trask of the farm-to-table Kanaka Kava, however, are tackling these hurdles by creating regional hubs and kava farm networks.
“We’re building a place-based community model of production,” Trask said, helping farmers grow cultivars suited to local microclimates, offering harvest support, and buying back crops in three to five years.
For Trask, kava is also central to healing Hawai‘i’s post-plantation scars. Fertile rainforests were razed for sugarcane fields, then abandoned after the industry’s collapse in the 1990s. Now overrun with “acres and acres of pasture and eucalyptus,” the land faces threats from pests and wildfires. By integrating native trees such as breadfruit and morinda (noni) with kava, taro, and other canoe plants, “we’re rebuilding our agroforestry system,” he said. Doing so “restores pono,” he adds, using a Hawaiian expression for the reestablishment of balance in the soil, in biodiversity, and in cultural practices.
Still, U.H,’s Lincoln is wary of kava becoming another commodity crop, where profits flow up, not down. “Hawai‘i is a state of small farms,” he said, with more than 90 percent measuring less than 50 acres. Aggregators and marketers tend to dominate supply chains, however, siphoning revenue and squeezing out small-scale growers. Kona coffee beans are a prime example: While beans retail upwards of $80 a pound, farmers, on average, earn just $2.25 per pound of cherries.
Lincoln sees co-ops as a promising model. His wife, Dana Shapiro, heads the Hawaiʻi ʻUlu Cooperative, which has helped revitalize breadfruit as an island staple. Co-ops allow farmers to “increase their equity and power,” he said, through collective control over aggregation, processing, and marketing. That results in fairer prices, higher profits, and greater “‘āina”—land stewardship practices like agroforestry and crop rotation that nurture both the land and local food system.
Trask echoes the sentiment. As demand for kava grows, restoring pono means honoring kava from soil to cup. “It’s about cultivating more farmers—and more [informed] consumers,” he said, to ensure that this ancient crop once again thrives.
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]]>The post Op-ed: Egg Prices Are Soaring. Are Backyard Chickens the Answer? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The end-of-day chitchat among the parents at my kid’s school tends to revolve around the usual pleasantries: soccer schedules, the weather, the latest snow report from Mt. Baker, our local ski resort. On a recent afternoon, however, the talk among the moms and dads as we kept half an eye on a hotly contested game of four-square swerved to a somewhat unusual topic—eggs.
Where was the best place to find them? Which brands were available? Were any stores completely out? Parents rattled off reports of what they had seen at various places, from the big box outlets to the local food co-op, from high-end Whole Foods to discounters like Grocery Outlet and WinCo. “And,” someone sighed, “Can you believe the prices?” I listened and nodded, secure in the knowledge that I had six fresh eggs, straight from the backyard, on my kitchen counter.
“When a few chickens get sick in a facility that has millions of other chickens, the whole flock gets wiped out. As a nation, we have too many eggs in one industrialized basket.”
Eggs are suddenly a conversation starter as the latest wave of highly pathogenic avian flu clobbers U.S. poultry farmers in the worst outbreak of the virus since 2022. In December, some 13.2 million laying hens either succumbed to the disease or were culled as a result of the flu, dominated by the H5N1 subtype. In the first six weeks of this year, 23.5 million have already died. Altogether, more than 159 million poultry livestock in the U.S. have died due to the virus over the last three years.
So far, the risks to humans remains low. However, public health experts worry that the Center for Disease Control’s ability to release updates on the virus might be compromised. The agency recently found that the virus may be spreading undetected in cows and in veterinarians who treat them—but that study was omitted from an agency report released this month, after the Trump administration’s pause on federal health-agency communications.
Meanwhile, in a repeat of the 2022 outbreak, the virus has once again led to a sharp price spike and sent restaurants and shoppers scrambling for eggs. Social media is awash with reports of bare grocery-store shelves. Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen—an all time-record. The wholesale price restaurants pay is even higher, recently topping $7 a dozen. Waffle House recently announced that it was placing a 50-cent surcharge on every egg it cooks.
The virus’s impacts on the poultry industry—and, to a lesser extent, on dairy production—may well be the biggest interruption to the U.S. food system since the COVID-19 quarantine, which created a rush on vegetable seeds and baby chicks.
Such shocks to the food system are evidence of some of the inherent weaknesses of an industrialized and highly concentrated agriculture sector. Just 20 firms raise more than two-thirds of the roughly 380 million laying hens in America. To some people, such concentration is an asset, proof of the impressive productivity of modern agriculture. But concentration, it turns out, comes with its own risks—especially with a highly pathogenic virus on the loose.
Eggs from backyard hens. (Photo credit: Jason Mark)
When a few chickens get sick in a facility that has millions of other chickens, the whole flock gets wiped out. When that happens again and again, in state after state, prices inevitably shoot upward. Concentration may lead to efficiencies, but it also comes with brittleness. As a nation, we have too many eggs in one industrialized basket.
There are, though, other ways of making an omelet. Even though they are not immune from the ravages of the virus, smaller-scale and pasture-raised poultry operations have, so far, shown themselves to be more resilient against the outbreak, some experts say—even if that’s only because their smaller size is a check against hundreds of thousands of birds dying all at once at a single location.
And there’s another option for maintaining a steady supply of eggs: home-scale chicken flocks.
The eggs on my countertop came courtesy of the five laying hens my family keeps on our suburban Bellingham, Washington homestead. Such abundance affords me a measure of detachment when after-school talk turns to egg prices.
But as the virus spreads, and news comes of egg farmers holding emergency meetings in Washington, D.C. and of backyard birds getting sick too, I’ve begun to wonder whether my own chickens are worth the trouble, and whether keeping them is safe for my family.
The Origin of Bird Flu
Bird flu has been with us for nearly 30 years now. Most people first heard the term “avian flu” back in 1997, when a spillover event in Hong Kong led to six human deaths. Since then, human cases have been exceedingly, thankfully rare. But in the intervening decades the once-novel virus has become widespread among wild fowl. It has jumped to other animals, including domesticated cows and wild marine mammals like seals and sea lions. And it has infected humans, though the risk to the public is minimal, at least for now.
The virus can spread by direct contact, as well as through the air, which makes it highly contagious. Biologists estimate that in recent years millions of wild birds have died from the virus. The disease has been especially hard on waterfowl like geese and ducks, though few bird species have been spared. Bird flu has caused deaths of bald eagles, especially chicks before they fledge. An outbreak among the endangered California condors has set back efforts to recover that species.
“What we do know is that the virus is now endemic in some wild birds, like wild ducks that move through our country,” says Carol Cardona, a professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences at University of Minnesota. “We know that is partially why we keep getting these seasonal outbreaks.”
Every year, tens of millions of migratory birds travel from the northern latitudes southward, and they inevitably cross paths with domesticated flocks. During a recent briefing for reporters, Maurice Pitesky, a cooperative extension agent at the University of California, Davis used California as an example.
“During the winter . . . we go from 600,000 resident waterfowl to over 8 million waterfowl. You will see ducks and geese. And we’ve decided to have our poultry and dairy operations overlap with where the wildfowl over-winter. They spatially overlap, and that is where infection can take place.”
After years of repeated bird flu outbreaks, most industrialized poultry operations have implemented sophisticated biosecurity protocols to try to keep their flocks safe. The birds spend the entirety of their lives indoors, quarantined from direct contact with wild fowl. No visitors are allowed on site, and at some facilities staff are even required to shower on the way in and the way out of the barns where the birds live.
So, how is it possible for the virus to get into a high-tech barn? Simple: the birds still need to breathe, which requires a ventilation system of some kind, which allows an entry point for the virus. Phillip Clauer, a professor emeritus of poultry science at Penn State, explains: “In the Midwest, they are working the fields in the fall, and you’ll see dust coming up from the fields, and the geese will land there to glean the extra corn, and they crap in the field. The dust goes aerosol, and that dust travels a long distance. We had one infected layer house in Pennsylvania, and they could tell you exactly what air vent the virus came in from. And then it spread through the whole flock.”
What does that mean for pasture-raised poultry, which spend most of their lives outdoors and therefore are at greater risk of contact with contagious wild birds? Farmers involved in smaller scale and regenerative poultry production insist that pastured birds are less susceptible to the virus, thanks to overall better health and wellbeing.
“In general, birds raised in high-welfare systems with access to pasture and sunlight are healthier and more resilient than birds raised in confinement,” says Tim Holmes, the director of compliance at A Greener World, which oversees the Certified Regenerative and Animal Welfare Approved labels. “In a pasture-based system, the key is having enough space and sunlight for the birds so that the pathogen load does not become too great. The ability [of] birds to forage and express natural behaviors also helps reduce stress, so the bird has a healthier immune system.”
I heard a similar argument when I paid a visit to David Whittaker at Oak Meadows Farm, a pasture-raised poultry and hog operation near where I live in Whatcom County, WA. Whittaker maintains his own biosecurity protocols—he wouldn’t let me enter the barn where about 100 chickens of his breeder flock were clucking around—but his chickens spend most of their lives freely roaming outside, with an epic view of glacier-capped Mount Baker.
Whittaker raises about 6,000 broiler chickens annually on 10 acres, and he has flocks on pasture well into October and November, when tens of thousands of snow geese, trumpeter swans, tundra swans, and ducks of all kinds fly overhead. In the 10 years since he turned his childhood hobby into a commercial operation, he’s never had a bird infected by the virus. “The birds I raise are healthier; they’ve got more resistance to it,” Whittaker says.
David Whittaker and his breeding flock. (Photo credit: Jason Mark)
How come, exactly? “Just because I’m using high-quality feed, I’m not packing 100,000 or more into a building. They are out on pasture, eating grass.”
Clauer—who made a point to tell me that he has worked with both pastured operations and industrial players—was skeptical of the idea that pasture-raised birds might be less susceptible to the virus. “The more birds you have spread all over creation, the more opportunities you have to interface with wild waterfowl.”
He was also leery of the notion that smaller farms could meet the country’s demands for chicken breasts, turkey dinners, and egg scrambles. “You would need so many small flocks that you couldn’t produce enough eggs. You wouldn’t have enough people to collect the eggs.”
But Clauer didn’t dispute that the high concentrations of birds in industrial facilities (the biggest one he knows of is a 4-million-bird operation in Iowa) come with the risk of high mortality numbers, as well as greater chances of the virus mutating. “If you have a lot of animals, a lot more birds can become infected a lot more quickly. The bigger the flock, the bigger the concern.”
I have to wonder if some of the risk-reward calculus between industrial poultry farms and smaller, pasture-raised ones might start to change if—or when—bird flu becomes endemic in domesticated flocks. Especially now that the virus is going back and forth between cattle and birds, containment may no longer be an option. All the biosecurity measures in the world won’t stop geese from crapping in farm fields. It’s like wearing a hazmat suit to keep away the common cold.
If that’s so, then the way to create a more resilient—which is to say, a more efficient—food system would be to have more poultry farms like Whittaker’s. Of course, the economics of small-scale livestock farming are punishingly difficult and it would require a sweeping overhaul of the food system to get more locally raised eggs from pasture to market.
For that reason alone, we’re unlikely to see a flowering of more thousand-bird flocks any time soon. But there is another route to diversifying egg production from healthy, resilient birds: the kind of backyard flock like mine. “Basically, every couple of families [could have] enough hens to supply their friends and family,” Whittaker says. “Even if a small farm goes out, it wouldn’t matter. That would be the ultimate dream—pretty much everybody produc[ing] their own eggs, if they have the space to.”
Should You Raise Chickens?
Far from being a problem, then, backyard birds offer something of a solution. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this latest avian flu–driven price shock has reignited interest in backyard flocks. Even if the virus were to disappear tomorrow, retail egg prices will be well above normal for another 12 to 18 months. It will take at least that long for commercial breeding flocks to recover. So this may be the good time to invest in a backyard flock.
If you’re serious about joining the estimated 13 percent of U.S. households that keep backyard chickens, here are some things to keep in mind.
“Every couple of families [could have] enough hens to supply their friends and family. Even if a small farm goes out, it wouldn’t matter.”
Given all the news about bird flu, you’re no doubt wondering whether backyard poultry could put you or your household at serious risk. At this point, the answer is no. Most of the 67 human cases of bird flu in the United States have resulted from people catching the virus from dairy cattle, and most of them have been mild cases. The one human fatality from bird flu took place in Louisiana, where a woman apparently contracted it from dead chickens, but according to all reports the person was elderly and in poor health.
The risk is low, but it isn’t zero, and contact with backyard chickens would put you at a higher exposure. There are, though, ways to mitigate the danger. Clauer says one of the most important strategies for keeping your backyard flock—and you—healthy is to keep them away from wild birds. This can be as simple as ensuring that their living space is secured from feathered visitors by, for example, putting a net above the coop and run.
Beyond that, you’d want to follow some basic biosecurity protocols (the USDA and UC Davis have some good cheat sheets). Keep an extra pair of “coop boots” that you use only for going in and out of the poultry enclosure, so you’re not tracking poop into your house. Secure the birds’ food and water to keep out other critters, like rodents, that can carry disease. And always, always wash your hands after collecting eggs and feeding and watering your hens—an instruction so simple that even young children can follow it.
The next big question is: Are you ready to make the commitment of time and attention? Chickens require a level of care not dissimilar to any other animal companion. They need fresh water and food daily, plus regular cleanings of their coop and runs. They also—and this is harder than it sounds—need to be kept safe from predators.
If you’ve only ever cared for a house plant, you may want to think twice. That said, there are plenty of how-to guides to help you learn the basics, from the encyclopedic The Small-Scale Poultry Flock to the more quick and dirty tips in The Essential Urban Farmer. Maurice Pitesky and his colleagues at U.C. Davis also have a useful library of fact sheets.
Next, you need to ensure that it’s legally permissible to keep poultry in your city, town, or county. Most areas allow backyard poultry raising, but you need to be aware of the idiosyncrasies of local ordinances. Some places have strict rules about setbacks from neighbors’ properties, and many others prohibit roosters (too noisy). You can find a useful guide to local poultry rules at backyardchickens.com. Also: Be sure to check in with your neighbors before hatching your plans, to avoid drama.
Finally, ask yourself if it’s financially worth it to you. An off-the-shelf chicken coop can easily cost $300—and well more if you go for a bespoke model. If you’re handy, you can build one yourself, but lumber ain’t cheap, and even a homemade coop will pinch your pocketbook. You’ll also need some waterers, and maybe even a heated model if, like me, you live in a place with icy winters. If you’re rearing day-old chicks (which run anywhere from $5 to $15 per bird or more), you’ll need a heat lamp system and the proper feeders. Keep in mind that if you do purchase day-old chicks this spring, you won’t get your first eggs for about 20 weeks.
In short, there’s no such thing as a free egg. If you’re launching a laying hen setup from scratch, the payoff horizon may be longer than you wish. But if bird flu does become a permanent challenge for the U.S. poultry industry, the investment will eventually be worth it. “That might not be a bad economic equation for the next two years,” Clauer figures.
I’ve kept chickens for a total of six years in two different states, and by now I’ve paid off my initial investments and ongoing feed costs. During the summer, we’re overflowing with eggs, and routinely give away a half dozen here and a dozen there to friends, family, and neighbors. The egg volume does decline in the winter, yet even without artificial light we manage to get one or two eggs a day up here at the 49th parallel.
But I would keep backyard chickens even if it were a break-even proposition. I don’t raise hens simply as a matter of grocery-bill savings. They provide me with a subjective, but very real, sense of abundance and security.
I keep a large home garden, big enough to produce well more than half of my family’s annual fruits and vegetables. But, being a flexitarian, I can’t live on kale alone. And even though I can’t live off kale frittatas alone either, by producing some of my own protein I cultivate a feeling of ecological resilience, knowing that I’m more insulated from the brittleness—and the injustices and the pollution—of industrialized agriculture.
My small flock represents one additional node in the food production network. Imagine many more nodes like that, hundreds of thousands of new backyard flocks, and you might come to see how every home-scale hen helps strengthen the food system.
I’m convinced that even with all the cost and labor and time, such resilience and abundance is worth the price tag—is in fact, priceless.
An earlier edition of this article misspelled the name of Tim Holmes, the director of compliance at A Greener World.
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]]>The post The Fate of Denver’s Last Slaughterhouse Is on the Ballot appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>With her silver rings and turquoise bracelets, Mercedes Ortiz Gutierrez cuts a stylish figure. Her black cane with golden finishes could be mistaken for another accessory if she didn’t lean so heavily on it. Gingerly, she shuffles to the gray couch in her one-bedroom apartment in Thornton, Colorado, just outside Denver and five miles from the slaughterhouse where her life irrevocably changed.
Then 46, Gutierrez had been working at Superior Farms for two years, skinning slaughtered lambs and cleaving off their noses, tongues, and hooves. She also restocked the facility’s paper towels, soap, and aprons. On July 25, 2020, her hands clutching gallon containers of soap, she descended the stairs to the plant’s storage room.
Her manager had just ordered her to hurry. Rushed and unable to hang onto the handrail, Gutierrez misstepped, her right foot landing awkwardly on one of the stairs. X-rays later confirmed she’d fractured her ankle, becoming one of the thousands of workers injured in an industry that is both physically and mentally hazardous.
This November, Denver voters will decide on a ballot initiative banning all commercial slaughter in the city. If it passes, Superior—the city’s only remaining slaughterhouse—will shutter.
At the clinic, she was given a boot, crutches, and medicine. But as the days went by, the pain worsened. She initially returned to work, but doctors soon forbade her from doing so. A few weeks later, she claims Superior fired her. “Fundamentally, I no longer served them,” she said in an interview.
In the following months, Gutierrez’s pain was so severe she couldn’t sleep or shower. She was eventually diagnosed with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a chronic pain following injuries that doesn’t resolve as expected.
In November 2022, Gutierrez settled a workers’ compensation claim with Superior for $77,000. When asked for comment, Bob Mariano, Superior’s Director of Marketing, told Civil Eats that the company worked with the Colorado Department of Employment to manage her case throughout treatment. Once she reached “maximum medical improvement”—where additional treatment is unlikely to improve a condition—Mariano said a financial settlement based on workers’ comp regulations was a standard last step.
To Gutierrez, the compensation she received was not nearly enough. “It’s not the same anymore with the pain,” she said.
This November, Denver voters will decide on Initiated Ordinance 309, a ballot initiative banning all commercial slaughter in the city. If it passes, Superior—the city’s only remaining slaughterhouse—will shutter. This would eliminate at least 160 jobs but, according to animal rights activists, also stop the suffering of the 300,000 lambs slaughtered there every year.
But what might appear as a choice between animal welfare and workers’ livelihoods is actually more complicated: Stories like Gutierrez’s suggest some workers might also suffer at Superior, while several experts believe closing one slaughterhouse could worsen conditions—for animals, workers, local economies, and the environment—in and around other meat processing plants. It’s now up to voters to decide: Will getting rid of their city’s last slaughterhouse do more harm than good?
A Local Measure with National Implications
In 2020, America watched as outbreaks of COVID-19 ravaged meatpacking plants, killing hundreds of workers and infecting thousands more. As former President Donald Trump ordered the plants to stay open, neither employers nor the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) did much to protect employees, who continued to fall sick and die. With slaughterhouse operations slowed, industrial feedlots grew overcrowded. Hundreds of thousands of animals were killed using “depopulation” methods like suffocation and drowning.
Yet, according to Austin Frerick, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, industrial farming has faced little consequence for its actions (or lack thereof). “They paid a fine, which is the cost of doing business for them,” he said. Bills introduced by members of Congress to add protections for workers have not gone anywhere.
Over 600 instances of non-compliance with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) standards have been documented at Superior’s Denver facility since 2019.
“I think people are just feeling like [there’s been] such a failure of federal and state officials to do something,” Frerick said. “So, they’re now trying to least do something locally.” Berkeley, California, will consider a slaughterhouse ban in this year’s election. Further north in California, the elimination of concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) is also on Sonoma County’s ballot.
To Pro-Animal Future, the group behind Denver’s initiative, Initiated Ordinance 309 is a pilot—the first step in a plan to scale to bigger cities and subsectors of industrial farming. Sheep production in the United States makes up less than 1 percent of the nation’s livestock industry. Unlike chicken or beef, lamb is a higher-end product, popular mostly for special occasions and among Middle Eastern, Caribbean, and African customers. Others may not even notice lamb’s disappearance from supermarket shelves.
Denver also offers an ideal laboratory for testing initiatives: Only about 9,000 signatures are needed to get a citizen-initiated measure on the ballot here. Compare that to say, Portland, Oregon, where over 40,000 signatures are required, and Denver—even with its longstanding reputation as a “cowtown” that hosts the annual National Western Stock Show—looks appealing to activists.
Pre-seasoned lamb steaks prepared by Superior Farms in Denver, Colorado, which are sold at Walmarts across the U.S. (Photo credit: Raksha Vasudevan)
The livestock industry argues the targeted closure of Superior, which processes up to 20 percent of U.S. lambs, would only scramble the sheep supply chain and create higher prices for consumers. They also claim it would ruin the livelihoods of Superior’s employees, many of whom live in Globeville, a primarily immigrant, low-income neighborhood.
Polling conducted by Superior earlier this year showed that voters were evenly split on the issue, but in September, the Denver Democrats’ Central Committee officially opposed the initiative, citing the loss of good jobs and associated benefits. With liberal voters in the city likely to follow the party’s lead, the ban’s chances of passing appeared slim in early fall, especially considering that Pro-Animal Future had only raised about $244,000 for their campaign by the end of September.
Meanwhile, “Stop the Ban,” a coalition of livestock industry associations, local restaurants, and labor unions that oppose the measure, has amassed over $1.6 million from donors such as the Meat Institute, the American Sheep Industry Association, the Colorado Livestock Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the National Milk Producers Federation, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and Iowa Pork Producers.
“We take Pro Animal Future at their word when they say this is just the first step in their campaign to eventually ban meat,” said Ian Silverii, founder of the Bighorn Company, which handles Stop the Ban’s public relations. “We’re intent on stopping them now.”
Animal rights activists, meanwhile, continue to vie for voters. In early October, Direct Action Everywhere, a network of animal rights activists, released undercover footage captured inside Superior this summer. Video footage shows what activists call potential legal and ethical violations: one lamb that appears to be conscious after slaughter; another with a prolapsed uterus, untreated and headed to slaughter; and workers laughing, spanking animals, and simulating sex acts with machinery on the slaughter line.
“It’s clear that Superior Farms is engaging in not only animal cruelty as prohibited by state law but also in violation of the federal Humane Methods Of Slaughter Act,” Chris Carraway, an animal rights specialist at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, told media following the release of the footage.
Superior disagrees. “Nothing included in the footage we have seen is evidence of extreme violence, animal cruelty, or halal violations,” Mariano told Civil Eats. “This is yet another example of proponents of the slaughterhouse ban misunderstanding or misrepresenting standard, legally compliant parts of the slaughter process in an attempt to shock voters and influence an election.”
Denver’s voters will now decide if they want such slaughter—legal or not—happening in their city.
Tradeoffs of Work at Superior
At the Superior plant in late August, Keyri Reyes, 28, was shivering in a puffer jacket inside Superior. The killing room was not in operation that day, but on a fast-moving assembly line, dozens of Black and brown workers carved large hunks of meat into chops, spareribs, and other cuts. Reyes, towards the end of the line, barely finished garnishing the lamb steaks with sprigs of rosemary and garlic and squeezing them into plastic packets before the next round barreled toward her. The pre-seasoned cuts would soon be sold at Walmarts across the country.
Despite moving quickly, Reyes was cold: The factory floor resembles a refrigerator, a far cry from the balmy air of her native Honduras. “Poverty obligates one to leave one’s country,” she told Civil Eats. Reyes has dark, lively eyes and hands that gesture animatedly as she talks. But she hasn’t necessarily escaped poverty here, earning $19.30/hour—just a dollar above Denver’s minimum wage. Denver regularly ranks among the country’s most expensive cities to live, and even with this comparatively high wage, Reyes must share a rented house with six other people.
“There’s a lot of folks that maybe that’s one of the first jobs they’re able to get when they move to the community.”
To offset the relatively low pay, Superior offers an employee stock ownership program (ESOP), which it touts as a rare perk in meatpacking. Frank Sabedra, who’s worked in maintenance at Superior since 2022, says the ESOP, along with the company’s 401K match and the camaraderie within his team make Superior a far better place to work than his previous employers, Amazon and FedEx. “I plan on working here for the rest of my life,” he said.
Currently, less than a third of its Denver employees are currently vested in the ESOP (employees become eligible after three years), according to Mariano. Reyes, who’s been at Superior since 2021, doesn’t know if she is or will ever become an employee owner. Part of her confusion stems from being hired through an agency: She only became a direct employee of Superior two years ago. Either way, with limited English, a seven-year-old, and a mother to support, her options are limited.
Reyes’ situation is not unusual among Superior’s employees. “They have employed folks that have trouble finding work in other places,” said Nola Miguel, director of the Globeville Elyria Swansea (GES) Coalition, which works to improve affordable housing and health equity in the community. “There’s a lot of folks that maybe that’s one of the first jobs they’re able to get when they move to the community.”
If the ban passes, Austin Frerick fears pushing out a smaller, independent player like Superior from an already consolidated industry might result in less competition for workers—and even lower wages. He also wonders if it might simply displace the problems associated with industrial farming to another location: likely a more rural town, with less oversight than a large, liberal city. But Pro-Animal Future contends that Superior is not following the rules as it is.
According to records acquired by Civil Eats through a Freedom of Information Act request, over 600 instances of non-compliance with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) standards have been documented at Superior’s Denver facility since 2019. Inspectors observed cuts labeled as halal even when not prepared according to halal practices, and products backdated by over a week.
Other violations included fecal contamination on carcasses, inadequate ventilation, and flies spotted in various parts of the facility—all of which threaten to spread bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella. (Superior points out its compliance rate with USDA regulations is 98.31 percent, which is nearly on par with the 2024 industry average of 98.9 percent.)
OSHA has also documented multiple accidents and safety violations at Superior, including amputation of a thumb in 2022. Adan Hernandez, who worked at Superior from 2006 to 2021, told Civil Eats that he was often forced to do multiple jobs when the line was short-staffed. “Sometimes I was ripping limbs off and also opening the throat of sheep,” he said. “These are things that one has to pay attention to.” With workers at slaughterhouses already cutting at speeds that experts call “dangerously fast,” doubling his tasks felt like asking for an accident.
Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fined Superior $119,200 for violating chemical safety standards, for ventilation, labeling, and ammonia detectors. Hernandez said ammonia leaks were common at the plant, as was clogged drainage that led to interior flooding. “The water would get up to the knees,” he said. “The [animals’] excrements were floating, blood, everything.”
Superior acknowledges that “just like a home–sometimes we have to deal with a clogged drain.” They emphasize that they have a valid sewer permit, that chemical leaks did not expose workers to chemicals, and that they chose to participate in a Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP) with the EPA that surpasses required standards to prevent ammonia releases.
Mariano also noted that Superior’s employee-owners “take their own safety very seriously and take appropriate precautions against the various risks inherent to any kind of industrial work. They also ensure strong health benefits to provide care and treatment for employee-owners in the rare instances when workplace injuries occur.”
They note that OSHA has only recorded three accidents at Superior in the past decade—but companies are not required to report minor injuries to OSHA, meaning injuries treated with first aid, or that employees choose to seek treatment for on their own, could be missing from this record. When Hernandez got cut on the leg at work, he ended up paying for his own treatment; he said the clinic that Superior sent workers to was slow. He ended up with a hematoma and six stitches.
What the Neighbors Want
A metal scrapyard, a shuttered warehouse with cracked windows, and modular homes border Superior’s facility in Denver. Typically, the meatpacking industry locates its facilities in rural and low-income areas, entrenching their poverty and degrading their natural environments. Globeville, home to more than a dozen meatpacking plants in the early 1900s, is now one of the country’s most polluted zip codes. Locals complain of noxious odors from the Purina plant and an oil refinery, car exhaust from two major highways, and the “killing smell” that wafts from Superior.
Behind the facility snakes the South Platte River, where Superior discharges its stormwater. According to the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment, Superior has violated the Clean Water Act since at least 2018 by failing to report monitoring of pollutants in its discharge. Available data shows the facility exceeded benchmarks for solid effluents by almost 800 percent earlier this summer.
Superior claims the solid effluent reading was erroneous, and that the Water Quality Control Division of the State of Colorado has awarded them a “No Exposure Certification,” meaning their infrastructure is sound enough to prevent any accidental pollution of the South Platte River.
Three out of four slaughterhouses that discharge pollution directly into rivers and streams, meanwhile, are within one mile of low-income or BIPOC communities, according to the EPA. Air and water pollution from slaughterhouses can also contribute to headaches, breathing difficulties, and nose, eye, and throat irritation—all common complaints in Globeville, where locals are hospitalized for asthma-related conditions 63 percent more often than the state average.
Though one study by the Common Sense Institute, a conservative think tank, predicts Superior’s closure would actually increase emissions from the construction of a new slaughterhouse and longer trucking routes, experts largely agree that transport accounts for a tiny proportion of meat’s emissions. They also point out that a new facility would likely be more efficient than a 70-year-old slaughterhouse, and therefore generate fewer emissions. Shutting down Superior, then, might not impact overall greenhouse gas emissions from industrial farming—but it would likely improve air and water quality in Globeville.
It might also lead to land in Globeville becoming more sought after. With its proximity to downtown and the hyper-gentrified River North Arts District, luxury apartments have recently sprung up in the area. Property taxes have also skyrocketed in Globeville, threatening to displace long-time residents.
Pro Animal Future points to Blueprint Denver, a land use plan that designates Superior’s parcel as a mixed-use community center. If the ban passes, they claim the property could be converted to something more “community friendly,” like a park or recreation center. But a city spokesperson said the owners will ultimately decide what redevelopment, if any, happens.
Nola Miguel, at the Globeville Elyria Swansea Coalition, wants to see the land turned into affordable housing or another employer for her working-class neighbors. But she knows there’s no guaranteeing that under the ballot initiative.
“I don’t think it’s been fully vetted and processed, or that the community has even been asked about it, other than very few meetings,” she said. “This is typical of how policy happens in GES. It’s not formed with the neighborhood.”
A Future Without a Slaughterhouse
In Greeley, 65 miles northeast of Denver, loom the industrial giants of Colorado factory farming: JBS, Cactus Hill Ranch, and Double J Lamb Feeders. Superior confirms that most of its lambs come from these “feeders,” industrial operations that pack thousands of animals into outdoor pens. Such large-scale outfits make up the majority of Colorado’s sheep production.
A JBS Processing Plant in Greeley, Colorado. (Photo credit: Chet Strange/Getty Images)
“When you’re that big, when you’re doing 20,000 sheep, you have access to capital,” said Frerick. Meaning: The closure of a single slaughterhouse is unlikely to put these corporate giants out of business.
Aaron Smith, the Gordon Rausser Distinguished Chair and Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at U.C. Berkeley, also doubts the sheep industry as a whole will suffer if the ban passes. Total lamb consumption in the U.S. is unlikely to change, he said, but processing might shift to other places. Recent history reinforces this: In 2020, Greeley’s Mountain States Rosen plant, America’s largest lamb processing facility at the time, went bankrupt. Despite a short-term disruption, new facilities in Brush, Colorado, and San Angelo, Texas, swiftly helped absorb the demand.
However, Nick Maneotis, a third-generation rancher in Craig, Colorado, worries that Superior’s disappearance might spell the end of his family’s mid-size operation. Maneotis, 53, and his father, 78, raise about 4,000 lambs a year, all of which end up at Superior either directly or through feeders.
“There’s really nowhere else to go with them,” he said. “Colorado Lamb Processors in Brush only do whole carcasses, so that they don’t cut down to individual cuts to supply to restaurants.” He suspects restaurants will replace Superior’s cuts with imported meat from Australia and New Zealand, which already make up over 60 percent of lamb consumed in the U.S.
A recent Colorado State University study tried to quantify these industry-wide impacts, predicting up to 2,700 job losses from ranching to animal feed to trucking. But other experts criticize this study as overly pessimistic. Smith, for one, believes that Colorado’s robust job market, with 1.5 openings per unemployed person, can absorb most affected workers in the industry.
The ballot initiative also stipulates that the city prioritize Superior’s workers in “workforce training or employment assistance programs, including those provisioned by the Climate Protection Fund.” In 2023, this fund supported training and placement in “green jobs” like solar installation, urban forestry, and facility and water quality management. But some Superior employees object to outsiders dictating what jobs they should do.
With a sigh, Reyes, still in her puffer jacket, said would consider a “green job.” “If there’s no other option, then there’s no other option,” she said. For years, her life had been narrowed by circumstances outside her control. This would just be one more constriction.
But she has a plan.
“More than anything, I want to build my house in Honduras,” she said. In four years, Reyes hopes to have saved enough money to build a home next to her mom’s house in El Rosario and open a little grocery store, a pulpería. She’ll be not just an employee, but an owner—this time, for sure.
This article was updated to correct Aaron Smith’s title at UC Berkeley.
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]]>The post Is Recycled Plastic Safe for Food Use? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.
Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website. Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of seven to eight per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.
Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont, and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India, and other countries.
“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective.”
The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30 percent recycled “soft plastic packaging.” The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100 percent recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35 percent recycled plastic film.
Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics. The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told EHN. Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to. In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals—such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others—than virgin plastic.
FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges defended the process, telling EHN the agency “reviews [industry] data against stringent scientific guidelines” and can “use its resources to spot test materials” if it sees an issue.
But researchers say the agency fails to protect the public from the toxic chemical soup found in recycled plastics.
“[The] FDA is most concerned about pathogen contamination coming with the recycled material, rather than chemicals,” Maricel Maffini told EHN. The approval process “is very lax,” she said.
Recycled Plastic Is More Toxic
Globally, just 9 percent of plastic is recycled. Most is recycled mechanically, by sorting, washing, grinding, and re-compounding the material into pellets.
Most recycling centers collect a mix of materials, allowing milk jugs, say, to intermingle with detergent bottles or pesticide containers and potentially absorb the hazardous chemicals from those non-food containers. Recycling facilities that are set up to collect one plastic type, such as PET bottles, can better control potential contamination, although chemicals could still be introduced from bottle caps or the adhesives in labels.
Hazardous chemicals can also be introduced when plastics are decontaminated and stabilized during recycling. Plastics degrade with recycling, “so you may need to add more stabilizers to make the material as robust as the virgin material,” Birgit Geueke, senior scientific officer at the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, told EHN. “Recycling can therefore increase the material complexity and the presence of different additives and degradation products.”
Geueke, who led a review of more than 700 studies on chemicals in plastic food contact items, said that research on recycled plastics is limited. Despite that caveat, “there are a few studies really showing that contamination can be introduced more easily if you use recycled content.”
One study found 524 volatile organic chemicals in recycled PET versus 461 in virgin PET. Chemicals detected in the recycled PET included styrene, benzene, BPA, antimony, formaldehyde, and phthalates—chemicals linked to an array of health issues, including cancer, and the ability to hack hormones and cause development delays in children, obesity, and reproductive problems.
Most studies have focused on recycled PET, which is “not as prone to picking chemicals up,” in comparison to other plastics such as recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene, or PP, Geueke said. “HDPE milk bottles really take up chemicals during all stages of their life cycle, much more than PET bottles, and [those chemicals] are harder to remove, because they stick harder to the material,” she said.
Indeed, a study on recycled HDPE pellets obtained from various countries in the Global South identified pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals in the pellets.
FDA’s Lax Approach
The FDA must authorize all materials that contact food before they reach the market. To be authorized, a material cannot contain intentionally added cancer-causing chemicals nor any other chemicals that leach from the material at a level of more than 0.5 parts per billion.
But as Maffini pointed out, the FDA recommends, but does not require, the type of testing that manufacturers should do to ensure their products are safe, and it doesn’t always require them to submit any safety data, she said.
“If you tell the FDA the substance or substances used to make the plastic are not mutagenic or genotoxicant, and the exposure in the diet would be less than 0.5 parts per billion, FDA does not expect you to send any safety data [to back up these claims].”
In defense, the agency’s Dinges said, “the FDA has robust guidelines for the underlying scientific data that should be provided” by industry. But he also said, “it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure that their material meets all applicable specifications.”
For recycled plastics, companies may also voluntarily submit a requested review of their recycling process. In this case, the FDA asks companies to provide a description of the process, test results showing that the process removes possible incidental contamination, and a description of how the material will be used.
The FDA further advises manufacturers to conduct “surrogate testing,” which involves challenging recycled materials with, or submerging them into, different classes of hazardous chemicals that could theoretically contaminate the plastic, to determine whether the company’s recycling processes can eliminate those toxic chemicals.
Surrogate testing is the “best available practice” for evaluating chemical migration from recycled plastics, Gueke said, although research shows it works better for PET than for other plastics like PP or HDPE. Though the FDA doesn’t require surrogate testing, Tom Neltner, executive director at Unleaded Kids, said, “I don’t think you’re going to find a market in the industry without having gone through FDA review.”
Neltner, who formerly worked with Environmental Defense Fund’s Safer Chemical Initiative, said that in his experience, big food companies are skittish about using mechanically recycled plastic on packaging that touches food.
According to the FDA database of recycled plastic applications, two-thirds of the approvals are for recycled PET, for a broad range of products from drink bottles to clam shell containers for fruits and vegetables to tea bags. Most of the remaining approvals are for recycled PP for products including clam shells, disposable tableware, cutlery, caps, and lids; recycled HDPE for grocery bags, milk and juice bottles, meat trays, and disposable tableware, and recycled polystyrene (PS) for meat and poultry trays and clam shells.
Most requests are for mechanical recycling processes, though a couple dozen were submitted for chemical recycling, which uses an energy-intensive, largely unproven, process to convert plastics back to their original monomer chemicals. [The FDA no longer evaluates chemical recycling proposals for PET because it says the process produces material of suitable purity for food-contact use.]
Outdated Approach to Evaluating Toxics
“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective,” Tom Zoeller, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told EHN, referring to testing for the effects of endocrine disruptors or for the mixtures of chemicals found in plastics.
FDA’s requirement that a chemical not exceed a threshold of 0.5 parts per billion is based on cancer risk, Zoeller said, and while that number is protective for evaluating exposure to a single chemical, “I’m not sure that means a lot, when you consider the 16,000 chemicals that are put in plastic.”
In other words, the FDA’s approach doesn’t account for multiple chemical exposures, even as research shows that chemical mixtures can have significant health impact. A European study, for instance, found that a mixture of nine different chemicals had a greater impact on children’s IQ than what was expected based on individual risk assessments.
“It’s the combination of chemicals that are impacting IQ and basically stealing human potential,” Zoeller said. “We are way behind the curve,” in assessing chemical risks, he added.
Dinges responded that “while it is unlikely that appropriately sourced and controlled feedstock will experience incidental contamination to any appreciable amount, potential incidental contamination is addressed by the FDA’s surrogate testing recommendations.”
Yet the ability to control feedstock is what worries experts. Researchers who found BPA and heavy metals migrating at higher levels from recycled PET compared to virgin PET, stressed that the plastic’s safety depends on transparency and cooperation across the value chain. Moreover, surrogate testing is not required.
Neither does FDA’s approach account for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can act at levels in the parts per trillion by disrupting metabolism, Maffini and Zoeller commented. “This concept that there’s a threshold below which there are no effects or no adverse effects is fundamentally incorrect,” said Zoeller.
Dinges countered that the “effects on the endocrine system are just one of many areas of toxicology that the FDA evaluates,” while also repeating industry talking points. “Endocrine activation . . . does not necessarily translate into toxicity,” he wrote. “Consumption of any food (for example, sugar) can activate the endocrine system.”
Such responses have led Zoeller to conclude that FDA has “become a foil for industry,” and that their “precautionary principle is applied to industry, not public health.”
Unless government agencies can do a better job at ensuring manufacturers are keeping chemical hazards out of recycled plastic, experts think it shouldn’t be used for food contact materials.
“I’m not a big fan of recycled plastic and food contact, because it’s really hard to know [if it’s safe], and I think producers have to be more careful than when they produce virgin materials,” Geueke said, adding that she thinks that only recycled PET should be considered because the other types so readily absorb chemical contaminants.
“If you have a very good process and can prove that it gets rid of most of the contaminants . . . but nobody knows whether that really happens or not,” she said.
This article originally appeared in EHN, and is reprinted with permission.
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]]>The post Tracking Tire Plastics—and Chemicals—From Road to Plate appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the last few years, vehicle tires have emerged as a shockingly prolific producer of microplastics. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Each year, roughly 3 billion new tires are made, consisting of synthetic rubber, which is a plastic polymer, as well as natural rubber, metal, and other materials. And each year, about 800 million of them become waste. As tires wear down—from contact with the road or the friction of the brakes—they shed chemical-laden particles, and those chemicals, it turns out, can find their way into crops.
A new study has shown for the first time that store-bought lettuce contains chemical tire additives.
Tire-derived microplastics are a growing source of plastic pollution and a target of the United Nations International Plastic Treaty negotiations. Further, concern is growing about the hundreds of chemicals, up to 15 percent of the weight of the tire, that are shed into the environment via tire microplastics. “It is the additives that are the toxic compounds,” says Thilo Hofmann, an environmental scientist at the University of Vienna.
While scientists agree that tire particles contribute significantly to microplastic emissions in the environment, the numbers are difficult to quantify. Recent studies have found tire particles made up to 30 percent of microplastics in Germany, roughly 54 percent in China, 61 to 79 percent in Sweden, and a whopping 94 percent in Switzerland.
Researchers have already demonstrated that some crops, including lettuce and fruits, can take up microplastics, possibly putting human health at risk. But a new study has shown for the first time that store-bought lettuce contains chemical tire additives. It is an unexpected finding, according to study co-author Anya Sherman, a doctoral student working with Hofmann at the University of Vienna.
Sherman and colleagues found one or more of the 16 tire additives they looked for in 20 of 28 lettuce samples. The concentrations of tire additives in leafy vegetables were low overall, but two compounds were most common: benzothiazole, used to strengthen rubber, was detected in 12 of the 28 samples; and 6PPD, used to prevent its oxidation, was found in seven.
It’s hard to know the exact source of the pollutants. Leaching from tire-wear particles is a major source of benzothiazoles in the environment, but the compound is used in other applications, including agrochemicals and consumer products. Likewise, 6PPD can be found in sporting equipment and recreation facilities.
Sherman’s methodology, meanwhile, couldn’t target all of the tire additives, and therefore can’t provide the total chemical load in lettuces. “We don’t know the total chemical burden; that’s left out of the conversation,” she says. “Some compounds are toxic or mutagenic at trace levels.” Even less is known about the toxicity of the mixture of chemicals.
Still, the study highlights the increased dangers from our industrialized world. Scientists have documented microplastics in human breast milk, semen, placentas, and blood. These tiny particles can accumulate in organs including the lungs, heart, and brain. Microplastics can have a range of health impacts: They can cause oxidative stress, disrupt metabolism, interfere with gut microflora, disrupt immune systems, and alter reproductive health. Perhaps the biggest concern is cardiovascular distress caused by microplastics.
In March, scientists revealed that people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries had a four-fold higher risk of heart attack or stroke. Perhaps not surprisingly, researchers are urgently trying to determine the degree of microplastic risk from ingestion versus inhalation.
To that end, Sherman’s lettuce findings were a surprise in another regard: How did these chemicals get into lettuce fields in the first place? Of the three most likely suspects—biosolids, atmospheric deposition, and recycled irrigation water—none has emerged as the most likely offender.
Biosolids to Blame?
As tire particles are shed on roadways, they are often washed into water catchments by rain. From there, microplastics can become concentrated in wastewater, where the waste products—biosolids or as irrigation water—can be applied to the land.
Sherman analyzed lettuce grown in four countries with very different policies for biosolids or recycled irrigation water—the two most direct avenues by which tire plastics could concentrate in farm fields. Switzerland, for example, has banned biosolids applications; Spain and Italy had the highest and lowest application rate, respectively, of biosolids; and Israel relies heavily on recycled irrigation water. But there was no discernable pattern related to waste application policies, suggesting that these particles may be more ubiquitous than anticipated.
“There are so many different pathways by which contaminants can reach fields,” Sherman says. “We are nowhere close to understanding the full picture yet.”
Amid nutrient scarcities, many countries around the world, including the U.S., are dramatically increasing the application of biosolids to farmlands. But because pollutants can concentrate in biosolids, some scientists are concerned that soil biosolid applications could exceed the high concentrations have been found in marine environments. “The solutions are an attempt to be sustainable, but they could be introducing more contaminants to the agricultural environment,” Sherman says.
Roughly 56 percent of biosolids are applied to the land in California and across the U.S.—but state and county policies are sharply divided on their use. “The percentage of biosolids application varies by state,” says Scott Coffin, a research scientist at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Some states are near 0 percent; others are near 80 percent.
![Map source: Holmes et al (2018). “Estimating environmental emissions and aquatic concentrations of sludge-bound CECs [Contaminants of Emerging Concern] using spatial modeling and US datasets.” SETAC North America 39th Annual Meeting Sacramento, CA.](https://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240716-tires-to-lettuce-map-biosolids.jpg)
Map source: Holmes et al (2018). “Estimating environmental emissions and aquatic concentrations of sludge-bound CECs [Contaminants of Emerging Concern] using spatial modeling and US datasets.” SETAC North America 39th Annual Meeting Sacramento, California.
Atmospheric Microplastics and Chemicals
When microplastics are incorporated into soil, they behave differently from soil particles: They are more easily carried by wind. In January, Jamie Leonard, a UCLA Ph.D. candidate, found microplastics in wind-blown sediments from fields amended with biosolids.
“Microplastics are very light,” Leonard says. They also don’t like water, and therefore they are less bound to the soil, which makes them loft into the air at windspeeds far lower than expected for bare soils. As a result, Leonard says, the current dust emission models may underestimate the microplastic component of dust from biosolid-amended soil. It may also help explain why microplastics are able to travel thousands of miles and contribute an estimated 6.6 million U.S. tons of tire particles globally per year, equivalent to approximately 5 percent of airborne ambient particulate matter concentrations.
When microplastics are incorporated into soil, they behave differently from soil particles: They are more easily carried by wind.
That includes microplastics from tires, which tend to be overlooked, due to the technological challenges in identifying them. The biggest problem? Black microplastics, including tire wear particles, absorb (rather than reflect) radiation from the instrumentation used to find them.
An alternate approach exists to detect tire microplastics, one that involves heating up a sample to measure its composite chemicals via gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. But few laboratories have this equipment, Coffin says. “That’s why the tire particle aspect of microplastics wasn’t really considered until quite recently; they were just simply not detected.”
Biosolids are complex mixtures of nutrients and pollutants from disparate sources, and they present difficult challenges when trying to separate out microplastics. Scientists have to know which compounds they are searching for, as well as their breakdown products. Given there are thousands of chemicals in tires, it’s literally impossible to trace the environmental fate of all of them.
Furthermore, tire producers do not disclose what additives are used in tires because they’re considered a trade secret. “[Tire additives] are not regulated, which may change in the coming years,” Hofmann says.
Microplastics and Chemicals in Irrigation Water
Evidence of microplastics’ toxic impacts has largely been found in marine and freshwater systems, because it’s relatively easy to measure microplastics in water, says Coffin. In 2020, for instance, researchers identified 6PPD-quinone, the breakdown product of 6PPD, as the culprit behind massive salmon deaths in Washington after storms washed tire particles into streams.
Given that water is easier to work with than solids, the scientific community has begun to develop a methodology to quantify microplastics in aquatic environments.
“We were strategically using our very limited resources dedicated to microplastics on what we think that we can make the most progress on in the short term; pretty much all of our effort is focused on the marine environment,” Coffin says. Environmental researchers have so far developed hazard thresholds in marine environments, to be adopted by the California State Water Board, to evaluate water body impairment. For a long time, Coffin adds, “the conversation about water has detracted from what’s happening on land.”
Water is also far easier to monitor—and treat—than biosolids, Coffin says. “Treating biosolids is effectively out of the equation,” he says. “Even if we do determine this is a huge problem, we’re basically left trying to find solutions upstream,” he adds, meaning preventing microplastics from getting into biosolids to begin with. There’s also little incentive to challenge the use of biosolids in agriculture, as it’s been touted as an example of sustainable return of nutrients to the soil.
In response to a lawsuit by the Yurok, Port Gamble S’Klallam, and Puyallup tribes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently reviewing 6PPD as tire makers scramble to come up with alternatives. California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control, which is also part of the state EPA, has a consumer products section that is evaluating safer chemical alternatives to replace 6PPD in tires as well.
Forging Ahead with Research
Despite all these efforts, researchers are not yet able to determine the health threat of the tiniest microplastics. That’s because it’s not yet possible to detect the smallest, most hazardous particles. “Below 10 micrometers is when we start to care about [the health effects of] particles that we’re ingesting—and we can’t detect those in the environment with standardized methods yet,” Coffin says. While researchers continue to make progress developing detection methods for water, the monitoring campaigns are expensive and scientifically challenging, he adds.
“We’re not even close to developing standardized methods for detecting microplastics in biosolids or soils or terrestrial samples,” says Susanne Brander, who studies microplastics at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Gathering data on [microplastics in] food systems is where [research] needs to go next.”
That research is starting to get underway. Funding to study plastics in agriculture is limited, but Brander says that the USDA is prioritizing microplastics research going forward. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley is sponsoring a Research for Healthy Soils Act to fund studies on microplastics in land-applied biosolids.
Although this is a move in the right direction, it sidesteps the main problem. “Those of us who are concerned and have been doing research for a decade are pushing for source reduction and waste management approaches that don’t create more problems,” Brander says. She says the singular focus on 6PPD in recent years risks overlooking the impacts of all the other tire chemicals that are leaching into the environment.
“We know enough to act—that’s the feeling and opinion of most of the other scientists in the [U.N.] global plastics treaty,” Brander says. “We need to push for chemical reduction and a reduction in the production of virgin plastics.”
Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.
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]]>The post Pesticide Industry Could Win Big in Latest Farm Bill Proposal appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>“As a doctor, I am concerned about eroding protections for those most affected by dangerous pesticide exposures—the workers who apply them,” said Representative Yadira Caraveo (D-Colorado) during last Thursday’s session to discuss, amend, and vote on the House Agriculture Committee’s first draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.
Despite those objections, Caraveo was one of four Democrats on the committee who joined Republicans in moving the bill forward, complete with several controversial provisions that would make it harder for states to regulate pesticides and hamper individuals’ ability to seek compensation for harm caused by the chemicals.
Lawmakers have tried, unsuccessfully, to get similar language into past farm bills. Now, ongoing lawsuits involving Roundup’s link to cancer and paraquat’s link to Parkinson’s disease and recent state efforts to restrict the use of certain pesticides have raised the stakes. As a result, insiders say the industry is fighting harder than ever before and the new provisions reflect that push.
“This is an effort to not only cut off the ability of farmers, farmworkers, and groundskeepers to hold the companies accountable, it’s an effort to prevent the public from ever learning about the dangers in the first place.”
Bayer, CropLife America (the industry’s trade association), and allied agricultural organizations including the American Farm Bureau are lobbying on Capitol Hill, and CropLife has been running frequent ad campaigns targeting D.C. policymakers. Bayer has also been pushing to get laws passed that would achieve some of the same goals in individual states.
A coalition of 360 agricultural industry groups have signed on to support their efforts, while public health and environmental groups and local government officials have joined together to oppose them.
Some of the language in the farm bill would position the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pesticide labels the be-all-end-all when it comes to spelling out safety and environmental risks. But Daniel Hinkle, the senior state affairs counsel for the American Association for Justice, said labels are not immediately updated as new research on risk becomes available. And pesticides can be mislabeled, as in the case of dicamba, which was initially approved without protections to prevent drift and subsequently destroyed millions of acres of various crops, including soybeans and peaches.
Those are just a few of the reasons Hinkle believes preserving the ability for individuals to sue companies over health harms is critical.
“Litigation has already revealed that companies have spent decades covering up harm,” he said. “This is an effort to not only cut off the ability of farmers, farmworkers, and groundskeepers to hold the companies accountable, it’s an effort to prevent the public from ever learning about the dangers in the first place.”
Additional language in the bill could also overturn state and local laws that restrict the use of pesticides. For example, many counties and cities around the country have banned the spraying of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in parks where children play. And just last week, California lawmakers voted to move a bill that would ban paraquat in fields and orchards starting in 2026 forward.
“Paraquat is a perfect example of a case where there are special circumstances that justify taking action that is stronger than the action taken by EPA,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). A growing body of research shows paraquat exposure can significantly increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease, and the chemical is banned in dozens of countries.
In support of the ban proposed in California, EWG has been looking at paraquat use data in the state and found intensive spraying in just a few agricultural counties. Faber said the data also shows many pesticide applicators are using more paraquat than the label permits and are not following practices required for safety. “Farmers and farmworkers are being exposed to far more paraquat than EPA estimates,” he said.
In an email, a spokesperson for the House Agriculture Committee leadership argued neither provision would restrict states’ ability to regulate the sale or use of pesticides in a new way and that they would simply clarify and codify a section of federal pesticide law that is already on the books (and in some cases strengthen state regulatory power over local jurisdictions). The spokesperson said the bill “clarifies that only the EPA can make safety findings related to pesticides” and that it “would still allow for users of pesticides to litigate legitimate claims based on EPA safety findings.”
Yet another less-discussed provision buried in the farm bill text makes changes to how an “interagency working group” set up to improve regulations related to pesticides and endangered species would operate. The provision requires the group, when consulting with the private sector, to “take into consideration factors, such as actual and potential differences in interest between, and the views of, those stakeholders and organizations.”
While it’s not entirely clear how the language would be interpreted, Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said it would likely “tip the scales significantly toward industry.” For example, during past meetings, representatives from pesticide companies, farm groups, and environmental groups offered public comments. As read, the language suggests agencies could make a determination that one group has a greater “interest” compared to another. According to the House Agriculture Committee spokesperson, the provision will ensure the EPA consults the working group “before developing any future strategies for improving the consultation process for pesticide registration and minimizing the impact on agriculture.”
At this point, due to contentious provisions related to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and climate-focused conservation funding, the farm bill is unlikely to pass in the House and is essentially dead on arrival in the Senate. In fact, behind the scenes, most D.C. insiders doubt a farm bill will happen this year at all. If it does, it almost certainly won’t be this exact version.
But Hartl and others still believe stopping the progress of the pesticide provisions is crucial. “While it’s certainly true that Bayer is spending more than ever to try to escape accountability for the harms caused by their pesticides,” said Faber at EWG, “it is also true that ordinary people who are impacted by the harms of pesticides, whether it’s farmworkers, farmers, or school teachers, have never worked harder to defend these protections.”
Read More:
Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits
Paraquat, the Deadliest Chemical in U.S. Agriculture, Goes on Trial
The EPA Ignored the Endangered Species Act for 50 Years. Is Time Running Out?
Inflation Interrogation. During an at-times heated Senate subcommittee hearing last week, Senators battled with witnesses and each other over the underlying causes of high food prices over the last several years. Republican senators invited economic experts from conservative think-tanks The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who bolstered their case that President Biden is to blame by pointing to increased federal spending as a driver of inflation.
On the other side of the aisle, the executive director of left-leaning economic policy organization Groundwork Collaborative, Farm Action’s chief strategy officer, and the owner of a small grocery store pointed to consolidation in the food industry and corporate profiteering as the cause. Consolidation across the food system, from farms to meatpackers to retailers, has been increasing, and the Biden administration has made it a priority to increase competition by both sending funds to small farms and businesses and cracking down on anticompetitive practices, for example, filing lawsuits against the biggest chicken companies for conspiring to fix prices. A March Federal Trade Commission report concluded some grocers used pandemic price spikes to charge even more and increase their profits.
Read More:
Biden Targets Consolidation in the Meat Industry (Again)
As Grocery Stores Get Bigger, Small Farms Get Squeezed Out
Feeding Away Greenhouse Gas Emissions. How much new feed additives could actually reduce methane emissions from belching cows remains unclear, according to a review of the research to date published by the Expert Panel on Livestock Methane. Red seaweed (asparagopsis) and a synthetic compound called 3-NOP (sold as Bovaer) added to cows’ diets have been pitched by many companies as having the potential to reduce the powerful planet-warming emissions by upwards of 90 percent. However, the scientists found that while lab studies found impressive reductions, studies that have measured emissions in animal trials have reported much more variable results, from 6–98 percent in seaweed trials and from 4–76 percent with 3-NOP.
Most notably, the longest and largest trial of red seaweed in cattle produced no reduction in methane intensity (the amount of the gas produced per unit of milk or meat) because the 28 percent reduction in burped methane was offset by the fact that the cattle ate less and gained less weight. The researchers also pointed to barriers in getting the additives to more animals, including the ability to grow enough seaweed without harming ecosystems and how often supplements need to be administered, which currently makes it nearly impossible for farmers to feed them to grazing cattle.
“All of these additives vary substantially in their methane mitigation potential, meaning that it is difficult to confidently say how much of current emissions they will be able to reduce,” the experts concluded. “More studies testing the interactions of different variables are needed to offer robust long-term estimates of their mitigation potential and of their costs, benefits and risks.”
Read More:
Methane from Agriculture Is a Big Problem. We Explain Why.
Can We Grow Enough Seaweed to Help Cows Fight Climate Change?
Forever Contaminated. Organic farmers in Maine are threatening to sue the EPA for its failure to prevent PFAS from contaminating their fields. Over the last few years, farms have discovered the chemicals—which are linked to multiple health risks—in their soils as a result of past applications of sewage sludge. In a “Notice of Intent” to sue the agency, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener’s Association (MOFGA) argues that the Clean Water Act requires the EPA to identify pollutants in biosolids every two years and, when risks are identified, to adopt regulations that prevent harm to human health or the environment.
“If the EPA had been regulating appropriately, many of our farmers wouldn’t be facing the harm they are today,” said Sarah Alexander, the executive director of MOFGA. “We demand that the EPA do the work required under the Clean Water Act and stop allowing these toxic chemicals to contaminate the U.S. food and water supply.” MOFGA will file suit if it believes EPA has still not met its obligations within 60 days.
The EPA has also been playing catch-up on regulating PFAS in drinking water over the past several years, and last week released new data showing PFAS are present in drinking water systems that serve 90 million people across the country. Earlier this year, the agency finalized the first limits on PFAS in drinking water.
Class-action lawsuits have already been filed against companies over PFAS contamination, and experts expect the legal battles to heat up in the coming years.
Read More:
PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding.
New Evidence Shows Pesticides Contain PFAS, and the Scale of Contamination Is Unknown
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]]>The post New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finalized long-anticipated changes to the nutrition standards that regulate school meals. Among the changes that attracted the most attention were the first-ever limits on added sugar and a scaled-down plan to reduce salt.
But another small tweak has big implications for the increasing number of schools working to get more fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats produced by nearby farmers onto students’ trays. Starting July 1, when districts put out a call for an unprocessed or minimally processed food—whether it’s tomatoes, taco meat, or tuna—they’ll be able to specify that they’d like it to be “locally grown, locally raised, or locally caught.”
“We’re . . . freeing up schools to continue to look for ways in which they can partner with producers and with local and regional food systems,” agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said during a press conference last week, “so that we create additional market opportunities for farmers and ranchers in the area, but also create a better connection between those who produce the food and those who consume it.”
Two days later, Vilsack landed in Michigan, where his travel schedule attempted to trace that connection, with a first stop at a Detroit middle school followed by a visit to Williamston to talk about helping farmers access “new and better markets.”
Karen Spangler, the policy director for the National Farm to School Network, said the change has long been a priority for the group because it often hears how the shift will simplify the process for school nutrition directors while also making it possible for more farmers to get involved in the first place. In addition to funding institutes and expanding farm-to-school efforts to early childcare centers, she sees as one piece of the USDA’s current focus on “integrating farm-to-school and local purchasing to a degree that hasn’t been seen before,” she said.
From the start of the Biden administration, Vilsack announced a priority on nutrition security and building regional markets for farmers, and farm-to-school efforts happened to sit right at the nexus. Since the release of the latest Agricultural Census in February showed small- and mid-size farms continue to disappear as consolidation in agriculture accelerates, Vilsack has been beating the drum of saving smaller farms by supporting markets they can sell into even more intensely. In addition to the shift to local purchasing, the nutrition standards also strengthen the “Buy America” provision already in place for school meals.
But forging a stronger connection between fields and cafeterias goes back to 2010, when Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by Michelle Obama. It was the first Child Nutrition Reauthorization to push nutrition to the forefront of school meal programs, and it included the first federal farm-to-school grants. Since then, the federal government has supported the efforts in additional ways, alongside numerous state incentives and grant programs as well as work done by nonprofit organizations. During the 2018–19 school year, about 77 percent of school food authorities (districts or individual schools) reported serving some local food, spending a total of $1.26 billion.
However, that number is still a small sliver of total school meal spending, and buying local can be more complicated for districts and schools than just making up a funding gap. In addition to delivery, packaging, and labor challenges, school food procurement involves a complicated bid process with many rules attached. That’s where this change comes in.
Spangler explained that right now, schools can list a “geographic preference” as one factor to be evaluated alongside others such as price, volume, and other criteria. For example, if a New York district wants to buy apples grown in-state today, they would have to evaluate bids from in-state orchards alongside bids from out-of-state distributors, many of which are likely to come in with a much lower price. “It discourages local producers from participating in the process because they can be drastically undercut,” Spangler said.
With this change, if the district is confident that plenty of in-state orchards have enough Macintosh and Granny Smiths to satisfy their students’ appetites, it could specify up-front that it only wants bids from in-state orchards.
Alongside the National Farm to School Network, groups including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, National Farmers Union, and FoodCorps have been pushing for the change for years. In its summary of the new standards, USDA officials said the agency received close to 400 comments on the proposed change.
“Commentors noted that expanding the geographic preference option to allow local as a specification will broaden opportunities for CNP [Child Nutrition Program] operators to purchase directly from local farmers, reinforce local food systems, and ease procurement challenges for operators interested in sourcing food from local producers,” they wrote.
Previously, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) attempted to go the Congressional route to make it happen, introducing the Kids Eat Local Act multiple times with bipartisan support. But the bill never went anywhere because the overall Child Nutrition Reauthorization process is now nine years overdue.
Pingree celebrated the USDA for moving forward with the change in the meantime, and she plans to continue to reintroduce the bill so that it will eventually be set in law and therefore be more likely to stick. “Our children deserve healthy, nutritious school meals that are made with locally-sourced ingredients—not highly processed foods,” she said in a press release applauding the agency.
At Morgan Hill Unified School District in California, Michael Jochner said he’s ready to make that happen. Jochner has been working to improve meal quality by forging relationships with organic farmers in his area and growing his own lettuces using hydroponic shipping container systems for several years.
“As a district going out to bid across all food items for next school year, we’re very excited to have the flexibility to use ‘local’ as a bid specification,” he told Civil Eats. “We feel this will allow us to prioritize our local farmers, ranchers, and fisherman, and in turn help the local economy.”
Read More:
Inside New York’s Pursuit to Bring Local Food Into More Schools
Farm-to-School Programs Are Finally Making Inroads on Capitol Hill
California Farm-to-School Efforts Get a Big Influx of Cash
Pandemic Disruptions Created an Opportunity for Organic School Meals in California
Pesticide Ban Moves Forward. California legislators advanced a state bill proposed to ban the herbicide paraquat, sending it to another committee for consideration. Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and is banned in dozens of other countries due to its health risks, including the United Kingdom, throughout the European Union, and in China. Over the past few months, the Environmental Working Group has been supporting the campaign to ban paraquat in California, releasing reports that show it is sprayed disproportionately in counties home to low-income communities of color and that the top users in the state include the Wonderful Company, which sprays it to produce pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds. The legislation comes at a time when the pesticide industry is fighting on several fronts to prevent states from passing laws that regulate farm chemicals.
Read More:
Paraquat, the Deadliest Chemical in American Agriculture, Goes on Trial
Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits
Confronting Poultry Problems. As avian influenza continues to spread in dairy cattle herds in nine states, the USDA announced it will now require mandatory reporting of infections in cattle and testing before moving cattle to other states. Some states, meanwhile, had already closed their borders to incoming cattle. And on Thursday, Colombia became the first country to restrict beef imports from the U.S. based on the situation. While beef cattle have not tested positive for the virus to date, retired dairy cows are generally processed into beef at the end of their lives.
Prior to the crossover into cattle, the virus had been circulating in poultry since early 2022 and is still is, primarily affecting egg-laying hens and turkeys. One dairy worker, whose only symptoms were conjunctivitis, remains the only reported infection in humans, and while particles of the virus have been found in milk, officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) say the milk is still safe to drink, since pasteurization kills the virus.
Meanwhile, the FDA also finalized a food safety rule that will allow the agency to enforce limits on Salmonella in some chicken products for the first time. The rule only applies to “frozen, breaded, and stuffed” chicken products, but in those products, if salmonella is found to exceed the limit, the products will be considered adulterated and will not be able to be sold. It’s a major change for the agency and is one piece of a larger plan to reduce illnesses from the common bacteria.
Read More:
A Deadly Bird Flu Resurfaces
Will New Standards for Salmonella in Chicken Cut Down on Food Poisoning?
Farmworker Rights. On Friday, the Department of Labor finalized new regulations intended to increase protections for workers employed on farms through the H-2A guestworker program. Under the new rules, workers have more tools to advocate for their rights and obtain legal assistance, foreign recruiters are required to provide new documentation to increase transparency, and new procedures are in place to kick out farms that break the rules.
“With these new rules, the power of the federal government has sided with farm workers—both those who are born here and those from other countries—who for too long have been exploited, silenced, displaced, or harmed by the H-2A program,” United Farm Workers (UFW) President Teresa Romero said in a press release.
The news came days after the UFW Foundation released a new documentary video series showcasing the impacts of climate change on farmworkers. As the effects of climate change worsen, workers in the field increasingly face and lack adequate protection from hazards including dangerous heat, flooding, and wildfire smoke.
Read More:
The H-2A Program Has Ballooned in Size; Both Farmers and Workers Want it Fixed
As the Climate Emergency Grows, Farmworkers Lack Protection from Deadly Heat
Farmworkers Are on the Frontlines of Climate Change. Can New Laws Protect Them?
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]]>The post Can Agriculture Kick Its Plastic Addiction? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Plastics are tightly woven into the fabric of modern agriculture. Black polyethylene “mulch film” gets tucked snugly around crop rows, clear plastic sheeting covers hoop houses, and most farmers use plastic seed trays, irrigation tubes, and fertilizer bags.
These synthetic polymer products have often been used to help boost yields up to 60 percent and make water and pesticide use more efficient. In China, for example, research shows that plastic field covers keep the soil warm and wet in a way that boosts productivity considerably; an additional 15,000 square miles of arable land—an area about the size of Switzerland—would be required to produce the same amount of food.
Research shows that as the chemicals from degrading debris leach into the soil, their persistence decreases crop productivity while snaking up the food chain, appearing in earthworm guts and even human placentas.
But plasticulture, or the use of plastic products in agriculture, also comes with a wide range of known problems. Plastic contaminates fields at a much greater scale than it does our oceans, posing an acute threat to soil health and food security. Research shows that as the chemicals from degrading debris leach into the soil, their persistence decreases crop productivity while snaking up the food chain, appearing in earthworm guts and even human placentas.
In the larger scope, agriculture accounts for a small slice of the plastics pie—less than 3 percent of the annual 440 million tons produced worldwide. Yet their pervasive use—along with farmland, plastics cover everything from individual seeds to bales of hay and packaged produce—has allowed them to plant themselves deeply in our food supply. “Relatively speaking, it’s a small volume,” says Philip Demokritou, vice chair of Rutgers University’s environmental occupational health and justice department and author of a recent international report on plastics in agriculture. “But it carries the highest risks.”
Given the challenges of feeding a ballooning global population, curtailing our dependence on plastics to grow food is a daunting proposition. Simply put, “there are no magic solutions,” says Demokritou. Mitigation requires slashing production and consumption, he adds, and increasing recycling and reuse all along the supply chain.
From implementing policies, incentives, and regulations to engaging producers, farmers, and consumers, it’s an all-encompassing effort that “we need to battle collectively as a society,” he says. And yet considering the impacts to both environmental and human health, investing in comprehensive, innovative, and proactive measures will be far more cost-effective, Demokritou suggests, “than feeding disease and disasters down the line.”
Polluting the Food Chain
The world has a voracious appetite for plastic. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that global plastic waste is on track to nearly triple by 2060. With less than a fifth of the end stream getting recycled, single-use products make up the bulk of the waste, and it’s destined to go to landfills, be incinerated, or escape into the larger environment.
Meanwhile, 98 percent of disposables are made from “virgin” feedstock, driving renewed growth for fossil fuel companies that supply the raw material. All told, annual greenhouse gases released from plastic production, landfilling, and incineration total 850 million tons, or 4.5 percent of global emissions. And studies also show that plastic pollution disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities.
According to FAO, plastic films such as black mulch and greenhouse covers account for the bulk of annual global use, at more than 8 million tons.
Nevertheless, the versatility, affordability, and convenience of synthetic polymers make them indispensable to most industries, including agriculture. The field consumes 14 million tons of plastics every year, with crop and livestock production accounting for 80 percent.
In 2021, the United Nations (U.N.) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a report highlighting the urgent need for more sustainable use of agricultural plastics. The landmark assessment subsequently paved the way for the U.N. to push for a global treaty to slash plastic pollution.
According to FAO, plastic films such as black mulch and greenhouse covers account for the bulk of annual global use, at more than 8 million tons. In addition to extending the growing season by warming the soil, safeguarding plants’ roots, and preserving soil moisture, these plastics also suppress weeds.
The drawbacks, however, are just as consequential. Plastic mulch creates an impervious surface that concentrates chemical runoff while overheating fields and impacting soil health. And the single-use product is neither recyclable nor reusable, requiring seasonal retrieval and disposal. The Rodale Institute, a nonprofit research institution for organic farming, cites that every acre of land farmed with plastic mulch creates upwards of 120 pounds of waste that typically end up in landfill, or otherwise break down into the soil or nearby watersheds.
In China, where farms use enough plastic film to cover the surface area of Idaho every year, the difficulty of end-of-season removal led growers, at one point, to plow the plastic directly into the field. The widespread practice, which took place through the late aughts, “had a deleterious effect on soil quality,” says Richard H. Thompson, a former agricultural plastics sustainability expert at FAO and a lead author of the 2021 report. As contamination rose, crop yields fell by 15 percent.
That practice was banned, but plastics have continued to disintegrate and leave an unavoidable trail of debris and impacts—wherever they’re used. “It takes about 10,000 chemicals to produce plastics,” says Rutgers’ Demokritou, noting that the additives are necessary to give polymers flexibility and other functionality.
As they fragment under sunlight, temperature fluctuations, and wear and tear, the micro- and nanoplastic (MNP) particles remain chemically stable even as they physically decompose. Accumulating in soils over time, the residues hinder water absorption and impact microbial communities. Eventually, MNPs “pollute the food chain,” Demokritou says, posing health risks such as disrupting endocrine and digestive functions and harboring drug-resistant superbugs.
Driving Coordinated Action
In the past decade, the massive reliance on plastic mulch has spurred the development of greener alternatives employable on an equivalent scale. Several agrochemical companies have developed biodegradable plastic mulches (BDMs) that, while doubly expensive, relieve farmers of the cost and labor of removal by decomposing into the soil.
Yet independent studies on their long-term impacts to both soil health and crop productivity remain inconclusive. To give them the requisite plasticity, BDMs contain many similar additives as those found in conventional films, says Thompson, “so the jury is still out.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program (NOP) regulations require organic growers to use BDMs made with no less than 80 percent bio-based sources. Currently organic farms are permitted to use petroleum-based, non-PVC covers, granted that they are removed from the field at season’s end. However, no biodegradable films meet the NOP’s minimum threshold. (The European Union‘s organic farming regulations, however, permit bio-based, biodegradable films.)
While regulations can help drive innovation, driving coordinated action requires the development of an international framework that outlines sustainable use and management practices, says Thompson. By setting legally binding targets along the lines of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the proposed U.N. treaty will be a groundbreaking effort to address plastic waste.
But achieving universal consensus is never easy, he says, so a voluntary code of conduct—a blueprint of sorts that outlines best practices and establishes responsibility for “all the different actors in the plastic supply chain”—would be much more effective in directing country-specific policies and legislation.
The U.S., for its part, has dragged its feet on endorsing a binding U.N. treaty, despite being the world’s largest generator of plastic waste. National efforts to stem the tide have also largely stalled. The latest federal bill, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2023—the dead-on-arrival proposal was the third of its kind introduced in Congress in the last four years—called for a ban on certain single-use products and more end-of-life responsibility for producers.
“Without binding agreements, these programs fail when they begin to threaten [the] bottom line.”
A few states have made strides in directing the onus of waste management onto the industry itself. Maine, Oregon, and Colorado have approved extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs, which require packaging producers to shoulder the costs of recycling their products. And California recently passed the Plastic Pollution Producer Responsibility Act. The comprehensive law, which includes EPR provisions that go into effect in 2027, is intended to decrease single-use plastics and packaging, support communities vulnerable to plastic pollution, and promote a path toward a circular economy.
“Mandatory EPR policies are a powerful tool for transparency and accountability in an industry that is currently anything but,” says Anja Brandon, Ocean Conservancy’s associate director of U.S. plastics policy.
Industry-supported programs such as the Ag Container Recycling Council (ACRC)—the 30-year-old, not-for-profit trade association that collects pesticide drums and containers for recycling into landscaping pavers, drainpipe, and other end products—are voluntary. Yet producer-set goals and targets lack financial accountability for end-of-life product management, Brandon says. “Without binding agreements, these programs fail when they begin to threaten [the] bottom line.”
Currently, none of the EPR laws on the books specifically address agricultural plastics, focusing instead on reducing single-use packaging and food containers. California has required pesticide containers of a certain size to be recycled since 2009, though with no deposit or tracking system for returning containers in place, the estimated recycling rate runs about 50 percent, according to a spokesperson for the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, which runs the program
Creating transformational change and investment in the circular economy require policies that extend across the industry, Brandon adds. And along with redesigning plastics to “actually be recyclable,” improved reuse and recycling processes and investment in cleanups are crucial to meeting those goals, she says.
Weaning the Industry Off Plastic
Still, the broad impacts of agricultural plastics create an inherent opportunity to engage a diverse range of players. A 2019 study by the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation (CMSF) shows the extensive reach of farm-generated debris, particularly along watersheds adjacent to agricultural hotspots. Researchers found the state’s coastline along the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS)—the country’s largest federally protected marine area—littered with mulch and film, as well as irrigation tape, tubing, and hoses that had escaped from nearby fields in the farm-rich region.
The findings also revealed an array of stakeholders, who have since worked in tandem to develop effective waste management strategies. The Monterey County-based effort has created “strong collaboration all across the supply chain,” says Jazmine Mejia-Muñoz, CMSF’s water quality program manager, one that has prompted similar efforts further down the California coast.
By enlisting stakeholders—from small to large-scale growers, product manufacturers, and service providers that provide on-farm plastics collection and retrieval—through awareness and incentivized action, the regional waste management district has vastly increased the collection and recycling of drip tape and plastic film, says Mejia-Muñoz. (Growers get discounted dumping fees for cleaning, separating, and bundling products, all of which streamline the recycling process.)
The work is also supported by the MBNMS and the Agriculture Water Quality Alliance, a partnership of agriculture industry groups, resource conservation agencies, researchers, and environmental organizations stewarding Monterey Bay. CMSF has also partnered with the USDA and academic institutions in trialing biodegradable and recyclable films, helping to create a feedback loop between farmers, manufacturers and soil scientists on field-specific needs and performance. “It’s definitely a big team, but every member is so critical,” Mejia-Muñoz says.
But despite these efforts, tackling the scourge of plastics will still take large efforts to wean our dependence on disposables. “We need to mandate a reduction in plastic production across the board,” says Ocean Conservatory’s Brandon, “starting with single-use plastics.”
“We cannot continue to throw chemicals and materials out there . . . and clean up the mess 20, 30, 40 years later.”
For agriculture, bio-based alternatives to its biggest offender may not, in fact, require extensive innovation. Instead of film, many small farms employing sustainable and regenerative practices use natural mulches such as wood chips, leaves, or straw, relying on the low-cost, time-honored practice to keep weeds in check and regulate soil moisture and temperature. And while kraft paper has fallen short of matching the yields and durability of plastic mulch, a recently trialed version promises an uncoated and industrially compostable product that, according to the manufacturer, “provides a comparable level of protection.”
The Rodale Institute has also studied cover crops as a viable solution: Mowing or rolling vetch or rye grass into a solid mat has “great potential to replace plastic mulch,” says Vegetable Systems Trial Director Gladys Zinati. Though crop type, growing region, and the existing weed bank—the level of invasive seeds present in the soil—all impact effectiveness, her research showed that a solid mat of crimped vetch or rye grass resulted in greater crop yields with lower implementation costs than plastic sheets. (Soil moisture also increased, though minimally, and not enough to replace irrigation.)
While the trials were limited to farms less than 80 acres in size, Zinati sees major promise in expanding the practice. “Depending on [those] factors,” she adds,” everything is scalable.” (Rodale has even designed an add-on device for tractors, making the blueprint publicly available.)
Ultimately, history has repeatedly shown that the cycle of plastic pollution “is not a sustainable model,” says Rutgers’ Demokritou. “We cannot continue to throw chemicals and materials out there . . . and clean up the mess 20, 30, 40 years later.” And as much as our widespread reliance on plastics may seem inseverable, transformative change, he adds, is possible.
“Look what happened to asbestos,” Demokritou says. “That industry [all but] disappeared, right?”
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]]>The post Will a Food and Ag Focus at COP28 Distract From the Fossil Fuel Economy? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Last year, in the lead-up to COP27, the biggest global convening on climate change, many groups worked to call attention to the fact that governments and businesses were not doing nearly enough to address food and agriculture in their plans to tackle the crisis. Now, as COP28 approaches at the end of November, some of the same advocates say the event may finally put food and agriculture “at the center” of the conversation.
“For the first time during a global climate summit, heads of states of many countries are expected to commit to transforming their food and agricultural systems,” said Patty Fong, the program director of climate at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food (GAFF), during a press conference last week. “In addition, actors from across the food system—from food producers to financial institutions—are expected to pledge their own resources and advance ambitious plans.”
The urgency is clear. In the last year, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summed up the takeaways from its Sixth Assessment of the climate crisis by calling for “rapid and far-reaching transitions in every sector.” Expert panel members pointed to food and agriculture solutions, including reducing deforestation, improving cropland management, and shifting diets as critical to meeting targets that will ensure “a livable and sustainable future.”
At last week’s press conference, a group of panelists, some of whom are directly involved in COP28, spoke in broad terms about the new prominence the food sector will have in Dubai. The agenda for the two-week-long event currently includes a full day dedicated to food, agriculture, and water, and another focused on nature, land use, and oceans.
In terms of specific outcomes, David Nabarro, senior advisor to the COP28 food systems team, said that at least 50 (and possibly closer to 100) countries are expected to sign a “declaration” around food and climate.
“The declaration is key to what will be a two-year process through which countries will converge their work on climate and their work on food in ways that serve the interests of farmers and . . . consumers of all kinds,” said Nabarro. “There is built into the declaration the notion that there will also be accountability.”
Diane Holdorf, the executive vice president of pathways at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, added that businesses will sign on to their own declaration, which she said would build on the Business Declaration for Food Systems Transformation created at the U.N. Food Systems Summit in 2021.
Photo by Sascha Schuermann, Getty Images
At the time, some hailed that summit as a pivotal step forward for food and climate, but hundreds of Indigenous organizations, smallholder farmer groups, and scientists boycotted it because they felt it allowed corporations to steer the ship away from grassroots solutions like agroecology in the name of profit and control.
In response to a question about how consolidation in food and agriculture might impact climate solutions and equity coming out COP28, panelists at the press conference diverged on their concerns.
Estrella “Esther” Penunia, the secretary general of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development, called consolidation a “big problem” and talked about transforming the food system to “shift the power to the people.”
But Tim Benton, research director of the Environment and Society Programme at the think tank Chatham House, said that concentrated power presented both risks and opportunities. If businesses maintained the status quo, the power asymmetry could prevent efforts to build resilience on small farms at the local level, he said, but, “the opportunity is that . . . if we convince five or six companies to do the right thing in the right way, then large scale change can happen very, very quickly,” he said.
“It is unprecedented that food systems is on the political agenda in this coming COP and it’s an opportunity that we need to support. On the other hand, it is not separate from the need to phase out fossil fuels and is not separate from the energy transition.”
Regardless, questions about what kinds of food and agriculture solutions get prioritized and who will benefit from those solutions will undoubtedly continue to arise as more details emerge in the run-up to November 30.
The host of COP28, the oil-rich United Arab Emirates—with its increasingly hot and arid landscape, heavy dependence on imports, and sizable investments in ag-tech—has made the food sector a big priority. In May, Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, the U.A.E.’s minister of climate change and environment, was in Washington, D.C. working alongside U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to advance AIM for Climate, a joint U.S.-U.A.E initiative developed in partnership with the world’s biggest chemical, seed, and meat companies—many of whom drive the food system’s biggest sources of greenhouse emissions. Farmers and environmental groups were also notably sparse at the summit.
In August, Almheiri declared in an op-ed that the U.A.E. will “put the focus squarely on food systems and agriculture, encouraging governments to update their nationally determined contributions or NDCs, with specific food targets, and gathering commitments from private and public sector stakeholders for funding and technology.”
But it’s not clear whether this focus on food will draw attention away from the world’s superpowers and their responsibility to immediately, rapidly decrease fossil fuel production.
Less than two weeks before Almheiri’s op-ed ran, reporting out of France found that despite plans to increase renewable energy production, the U.A.E’s own contribution falls far short of the action needed to align with the 1.5 degree warming target set in the Paris Agreement due to the state oil company’s plan to continue increasing oil and gas production. U.A.E. leadership also chose the head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. as president of COP28, and OPEC will have a dedicated pavilion for the first time at a COP conference.
When asked, panelists at the press conference said they did not see the focus on food as distracting from that larger push. “It is unprecedented that food systems is on the political agenda in this coming COP and it’s an opportunity that we need to support. On the other hand, it is not separate from the need to phase out fossil fuels and is not separate from the energy transition,” said Fong from GAFF, who also flagged an upcoming report from her organization that will look at how fossil fuels and agriculture are intertwined.
Read More:
The IPPC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too
Did the First U.N. Food Systems Summit Give Corporations Too Much of a Voice?
Is Agroecology Being Coopted by Big Ag?
Packaged Food Policy. Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom signed two different bills into law that will have significant impacts on eaters and food companies both within and beyond the state.
The first will require baby food manufacturers to regularly test samples of their products for heavy metals and to make the results available both on their website and to the California Department of Health. Over the past several years, multiple testing efforts have discovered arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury in baby foods at levels that are considered dangerous for developing brains. Federal regulators have set limits on the metals but do not require final product testing.
The second law bans the use of four additives currently used in some processed foods: brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, and red dye no. 3. All of the additives have been linked to health risks.
“This is a milestone in food safety, and California is once again leading the nation,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which pushed the law forward. California has a long history of moving first on food regulations. Other states and the federal government sometimes follow, and because of the state’s market size, food companies typically choose to change their products and processes for the entire nation.
Read More:
Michael Moss on How Big Food Gets Us Hooked
New California Bill Could Be the First in Nation to Require Food Dye Labeling
Bison Boost. On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the federal program that provides food aid on federal reservations will expand its purchasing of bison meat from small and mid-sized Indigenous producers, creating a closed loop in which those producers are able to feed their communities. Over the past several years, the agency began testing other changes to the program that could increase food sovereignty on reservations. “This pilot is an important step to use government procurement flexibly for the benefit of tribal and our smaller producers and their surrounding communities,” said USDA Director of Tribal Relations Heather Dawn Thompson.
Recently, the idea of using government procurement to support all kinds of small- and mid-size producers who have historically been left out of the picture has been catching on in Washington, D.C. In September, for example, Senator John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) introduced a bill that would eventually require the USDA to spend 20 percent of its meat and poultry procurement dollars with small- and mid-size processors. A coalition of farm groups are pushing to get the program written into the upcoming farm bill.
Read More:
This Pilot Program Is Supporting Tribal Food Sovereignty with Federal Dollars
Calls Grow for a Farm Bill That Supports “All of Us”
Active Ingredients Only. After several years of delay, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a petition filed by environmental groups asking the agency to begin testing whole pesticide formulations, essentially pesticides in the form that they would typically be used. Currently, the EPA focuses its evaluation on the “active” ingredient in pesticides, but formulations include other ingredients called “inert,” such as compounds that help disperse the liquid, and groups had argued that the mixtures of different chemicals could result in new toxicity concerns that aren’t currently being captured.
In its denial, the agency said it “disagrees with the petitioner’s assertion that EPA does not adequately assess risks from formulations or ‘tank mixes.’” In a press release, Sylvia Wu, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case, called the denial “an irresponsible and unlawful decision that leaves farming communities and endangered species unprotected from exposure to different pesticide formulations and mixtures.”
Read more:
Paraquat, the Deadliest Chemical in U.S. Agriculture, Goes on Trial
When Seeds Become Toxic Waste
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]]>The post AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Like mushrooms after an autumn rain, a new flush of books have popped up on Amazon that claim to provide everything you need to forage your next meal from local parks and woodlands—an increasingly popular hobby in the wake of the pandemic. The books appear to part of a large new wave of books that are being assembled and “published” using artificial intelligence (AI). And experts are concerned that some of them may give misleading, even dangerous, information to novice foragers.
Chef and forager Alan Bergo says he first heard about the books from a worried Facebook post by John Kallas, a fellow forager and author, who runs Wild Food Adventures in Portland, Oregon. Kallas wrote, “We are in a new era of scams,” calling the books a “disturbing trend” and the product of people “that don’t give a hoot about wild foods, don’t know wild foods, and want to drain you of your money.”
But Bergo didn’t think much of this complaint until he was reviewing a manuscript for a new foraging book and saw that the author had referenced a book that he knew from Kallas was “plagiarized blatantly” from the work of fellow forager Sam Thayer.
“I was just incensed, and it was on from there,” Bergo says. The reference was a wake-up call, he says, that “this is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”
“This is way more of a pervasive problem than I had imagined, and we need to squash this right now.”
The alarm in the wild food community goes well beyond plagiarism, however. A trained forager—the sort that would usually publish a book on the topic—would not only guide readers towards foods that are safe to harvest and detail how to prepare them for consumption but would also talk about how to avoid overharvesting for the health of the wider ecosystem. By scraping and collating information without an expert’s guiding hand, these AI books could lead novices to make damaging and potentially deadly mistakes.
Generative AI, the technology behind the popular ChatGPT tool, can be used to “write” books in seconds by drawing from text available online and in published manuscripts. With the use of self-publishing tools like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, those books can be made available for purchase within a few hours. At present, there are over 3,000 books on Amazon that list ChatGPT as an author or co-author, less than a year after the tool’s debut.
The book world is already grappling with controversy around AI as a result, including a scandal around allegedly AI-written books published under a real author’s name without her consent, and a New York Times investigation into a flood of AI-written travel guides. Comedian Sarah Silverman is one of three authors suing both OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies trained their systems on datasets illegally containing their books.
In July, nearly 8,000 authors signed a letter asking AI companies to stop using their writing to generate text without the authors’ consent and without compensation; this summer, these complaints received some solid backing when an journalist from The Atlantic obtained the Books3 data set, which listed 183,000 copyrighted ebooks that had been pirated and used to train generative AI systems at Bloomberg and Meta. .
And while numbers are hard to come by, the popularity that foraging saw during the worst of the pandemic seems to have continued: foraging accounts are booming on social media, and those who run wild food workshops continue to report record attendance.
After Bergo posted a video about AI-generated foraging books on Instagram, Alexis Nikole Nelson, a forager with a cumulative 5.9 million followers on her popular @blackforager Instagram and TikTok accounts, posted her own warning about the books. Since then, several have been taken down by Amazon.
“Amazon is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and is committed to providing the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for authors and customers,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told Civil Eats in an email. “All publishers in the store must adhere to our content guidelines, and while we allow AI-generated content, we reserve the right to reject or remove AI-generated content that does not meet those guidelines. We’re committed to providing a safe shopping and reading experience for our customers, and we take matters like this seriously.”
Amazon has recently taken some steps towards controlling the proliferation of these books, by limiting the number of books an author can self-publish through the site to three per day and requiring that self-publishers disclose whether their work was AI-generated. However, the company did not say if they have any method of verifying these disclosures, and copyright compliance is entirely the responsibility of the seller.
In other words, new books appear to replace the ones removed quite easily. In her video, Nelson compared them to the mythical hydra, which grows two heads every time you cut one off.
Computers Don’t Make Good Foragers
The reason that generative AI is likely to make mistakes in this field, explains computer scientist Margaret Mitchell, is that these programs are not built to generate information based on fact. “They are trained to make what look like reasonable sentences, but [it] isn’t necessarily going to be factual,” she says. Mitchell is a researcher and the chief ethics officer at HuggingFace, a software company focused on building what it calls “good” machine learning.
“Saying [language models] have human-like intelligence, human-like, fact-based reasoning—that put forward to the general public that language models are factual,” Mitchell adds. “I think that the larger companies that put forward this technology for search did the public a great disservice in giving this impression.”
One of the most obvious concerns about AI-generated foraging books is around misidentification: the potential that they provide incorrect or incomplete information, which could cause newbies to misidentify dangerous plants. Bergo gave the examples of wild carrot, commonly known as Queen Anne’s Lace, which has edible roots and flowers; and wild parsnip, which has edible roots. Both can easily be confused with poison hemlock and water hemlock, all parts of which are toxic enough that consuming even small amounts could be fatal.
“There’s a big possibility of missing small details that can make people really sick, or injured in some way.”
“I think there’s a big possibility of missing small details that can make people really sick, or injured in some way,” Bergo added in a follow-up email. He pointed to an instance from a few years ago, when a publisher recalled a foraging blogger’s book because it contained recipes with raw morel mushrooms, which can cause illness.
Mushrooms are at the center of the conversation about AI-written books: In August, the New York Mycological Society warned followers about the new books in a tweet, noting that a mistake could “literally mean life or death.”
While there are fewer toxic mushrooms than popular culture suggests, eating inedible fungi can lead to intense gastrointestinal distress at best and organ damage or death at worst. Some online sleuths have already found AI-generated books misidentifying mushrooms in their pages, including labeling non-edible fungi as edible.
The biggest species of concern is the death cap mushroom, which can easily be confused with edible lookalikes, and which is becoming more common in North America. The Canadian province of Quebec recently reported that there has been an increase in hospital visits for mushroom poisonings as foraging becomes more popular there.
Nathan Wilson, an experienced forager who runs the website Mushroom Observer, isn’t specifically concerned that AI-generated books could lead to mushroom poisoning. He points out that plants actually tend to be much more dangerous than mushrooms and thinks that the concerns around mushrooms can mostly be chalked up to “fungi-phobia.” To him, AI-written books likely aren’t a huge departure from other books and field guides, which have “common and well documented errors” in mushroom identification.
“There have always been charlatans, and one of the challenges of AI is it potentially masks those charlatans in a way that’s harder to dig into, at which point you just have to be skeptical,” he says.
Beyond concerns about identification, experienced foragers and their books often teach readers about the ethics of harvesting, such as leaving enough of certain species for other foragers and for the wider ecosystem. Interest in wild food has grown enough that it has put certain species at risk. For example, ramps and wild onions have become darlings of the culinary scene even as botanists have warned they grow too slowly to sustain heavy foraging.
They’re considered plants of “special concern” in three states, and there’s a law regulating ramp collection in Quebec that comes with a steep fee for violators. According to a 2021 study, “crop wild relatives” hold pest and disease-resistant traits that could be essential to protecting the wider food supply, yet many of these plants are endangered.
Additionally, many in the foraging field are taking a decolonizing approach. Modern foraging often comes with an acknowledgement of the colonial and white supremacist laws that intentionally prevented marginalized groups from gathering wild food. Experts in the field are highlighting the Indigenous knowledge that underpins foraging, in which respect for plants’ role in the larger community builds in a naturally cautious approach to harvesting.
In a 2020 panel by the Indigenous food sovereignty group I-Collective, ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk of the Catawba Nation highlighted the need to return this perspective to modern-day foraging: “If non-Indigenous people can go around knowing plants are relatives, people are way less likely to exploit,” she said.
These are perspectives that artificial intelligence can’t bring to the table. And Bergo is concerned that books written by computers could also be extremely damaging to real authors’ livelihood if they flood the market.
“These are the people that would be hurt the most by something like this: small independent authors,” he said. He suspects that whoever is responsible for the new books moved into foraging quite intentionally. “I think they . . . identify literary niches that have high sales, high interaction and engagement, and low competition. So, they spit out a bunch of books to create competition in that market to skim some cream off the top,” said Bergo.
Reining In the Risks
Outside of his mycology habit, Mushroom Observer’s Wilson has worked in computer science for four decades, and he’s currently designing an AI-powered mushroom identifier for the site. And while AI writing books doesn’t raise alarms for him, he sees the current hubbub over this technology as simply the surface of a bigger issue: that artificial intelligence is getting smart enough that it could be trained for much deadlier purposes, and that it’s currently completely unregulated.
“The rates at which [AI interfaces] are growing is terrifying, and the way that these technologies are learning is beyond human comprehension,” he says. “I am not at all scared of a book written on foraging, but if someone actually created an interface whose purpose was to persuade people to do something deadly? That’s the kind of thing I am terrified about AI doing.”
“The rates at which [AI interfaces] are growing is terrifying, and the way that these technologies are learning is beyond human comprehension… If someone actually created an interface whose purpose was to persuade people to do something deadly? That’s the kind of thing I am terrified about.”
The lack of regulation around language models is particularly frustrating to Margaret Mitchell, as she’s worked for much of the last decade on guardrails that could be used to prevent AI from putting human life at risk. One form of this is a type of documentation called model cards, which tell a developer the potential uses, limitations, and ethical considerations of a program.
Developers are then directed to display a disclaimer for the public—Mitchell compares them to the choking hazard warnings you might find on toys with small parts—that explain what the models shouldn’t be used for. This would include any text generated about activities that could lead to someone poisoning themselves, including cooking, mixing household chemicals, and yes, foraging.
“The fact [AI is currently] being used in a domain where poison is involved says that they’re being used out of scope,” Mitchell says. “Any situation where you’re going to be giving advice on eating things, you need to be grounded in a knowledge base.”
Currently there are no repercussions for companies who allow their software to be used in this way, as model cards are only adopted voluntarily. However, there’s a movement aimed at changing that: the European Union is currently in the process of implementing the EU AI Act, which would require model cards along with other regulations that make AI “safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly.” According to Mitchell, the U.S. and the U.K. are considering similar policies.
Until then, Wilson’s number-one recommendation for foragers continues to be skepticism; he notes that even experienced wild food gatherers often cross-reference multiple sources before they decide to eat something unfamiliar.
For newcomers who might be most at risk from falling for computer-generated information, Wilson has a standard suggestion: “When I was first starting, my iron-clad rule was that I would not eat something unless I have been taught what it is by a person—and if someone is a beginner, I strongly recommend that.”
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]]>The post PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Until a few years ago, Songbird Farm in Unity, Maine, grew wheat, rye, oats, and corn, as well as an array of vegetables in three high tunnel greenhouses, and supported a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program for over 100 customers. It was a successful farm, says Adam Nordell, that supported he and his wife Johanna Davis, their two children, and an employee.
“The business was working,” Nordell says. “We were hitting our stride.”
But at the end of 2020, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection tested their farm and found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called PFAS, PFOS, or forever chemicals—and found them in shockingly high numbers. Forever chemicals have been linked to a number of serious health problems including cancer, reproductive issues, and liver and kidney disease.
Consumption of crops or animals grown on PFAS-contaminated land puts humans at high risk of illness. To Nordell’s dismay, Songbird Farm’s well water tested 400 times the state’s safety threshold of 20 parts per trillion.
Songbird Farm (Photo credit: Jenny McNulty)
Maine had been spreading what is called sludge on its farmland and fields since the 1980s. The fittingly named sludge is a combination of wastewater and sewage, and its application on farms has been seen as a way to keep waste out of waterways and feed fields.
For years, application of sludge in Maine was regarded as safe, as it was in a number of other states; a 1994 booklet from the EPA claimed that the “beneficial application of biosolids to provide crop nutrients or to condition the soil is not only safe but good public policy.” The state later discovered, however, that the sludge contained harmful PFAS.
The sources of contamination were numerous. Once the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, many chemicals and toxins that had flowed freely from paper mills into Maine’s rivers started to be processed through sewage plants. Additionally, forever chemicals that appeared in cleaning chemicals, makeup, and nonstick pans made their way down household drains and ended up in local sewage plants.
The biosolids created as sewage breaks down can be used as fertilizer on farmland, a practice that the Environmental Protection Agency still touts as “beneficial,” even though spreading these highly toxic chemicals across farmland allows the compounds to leach into the groundwater, contaminate crops grown on the land, and affect grazing animals.
The spreading of sludge as fertilizer in Maine was documented thanks to licensing requirements to apply biosolids. In late 2021, the Maine DEP identified 60 sites where 10,000 cubic yards of biosolids were applied as fertilizer with homes within half an acre of the application, a practice the agency called “Tier 1” because it presented the highest risk to human health.
The state began testing soil and water samples from those sites, which included Songbird Farm, in the fall of 2021. In addition, it began to test more than a thousand sites with lower levels of contamination in 2023. While the affected sites are situated across the state, most are concentrated in agricultural areas.
By the spring of 2022, more than 50 farms in Tier 1 areas learned they had high levels of forever chemicals in their products, their fields, and their water. Some farms were able to stop production temporarily while they identified possible solutions. However, several farmers, including Nordell and Davis, were forced to close up shop permanently. Farmers were hurting, consumers were worried, and Maine’s food system looked to be in crisis.
“From an agriculture perspective, we want the soil to come out the other side usable and healthy. But in the meantime, we have adopted the truism that PFAs do not have to mean the end of a farm, and there may be alternative options.”
While the Environmental Working Group has estimated that over 2 million acres of farmland across the United States have been spread with sludge, only Maine and Michigan have done significant testing for chemical contamination of farmland. The spreading of sludge as fertilizer remains legal in all U.S. states aside from Maine, where it was outlawed in 2022.
Scientists are still piecing together what happened in the state, but it’s clear that some forever chemical contamination has also come from other waste materials, such as jet fuel and firefighting foam, particularly in Northern Maine, in and around the former home of the Loring Air Force Base.
Today, many of the Maine farms originally affected are operational again. While Songbird Farm is no longer commercially productive, Nordell now works for Defend Our Health, a local organization dedicated to removing toxins from the environment. A series of special fundraisers and an emergency relief fund helped to keep farms afloat in the aftermath of the discovery, and since then, some have changed what they grow or altered their crops. Others have been able to relieve the problem through water treatments and removal of affected hay and manure. And some are considering building solar arrays instead of farming.
“We are trying to be as optimistic as possible that there will be feasible scientific strategies in the future,” says Nancy McBrady, deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry (DACF). “From an agriculture perspective, we want the soil to come out the other side usable and healthy. But in the meantime, we have adopted the truism that PFAs do not have to mean the end of a farm, and there may be alternative options.”
First Steps: Supporting Farmers and Conducting Research
In January of 2022, as the level of contamination became clear, the Maine Farmland Trust, which holds easements on many of the farms that were directly affected by contamination, organized with the DACF and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) to work with the farmers who were now without a livelihood, providing them with income replacement for lost crops.
Financial support from the PFAS Emergency Relief Fund assists with direct monetary assistance and covers to cost of biosolids testing, health coverage for affected farmers, and has also been used to invest in infrastructure for PFAS relief and remediation.
“We provide a continuum of support,” McBrady says DACF’s Brady of the collective effort. “First and foremost, we are on the ground doing scientific analysis of the source of the PFAS with comprehensive testing that we pay for. This gives a blueprint of the situation and provides an opportunity to consider mitigation strategies such as changing the rotation of livestock, cleaning up the water, or trying a different crop.”
In addition to soil and water testing, the emergency fund also covers continued product testing, allowing farmers to return their goods to store shelves with confidence. In an effort to embrace full transparency, some affected farms even post their PFAS test results on their websites. Testing, however, is only the first step towards regaining use of PFAS contaminated farmland.
“There isn’t that much great land for farming in Maine,” says Amy Fisher, President & CEO of the Maine Farmland Trust, referring to the state’s famously rocky soil. “So we cannot lose any of it to contamination. These farms have easements on them which permanently restrict development, so we have a long-term legal interest in returning these properties to agriculture.”
The trust also moved rapidly to learn more about the problem and potential solutions, reaching out to researchers and universities studying forever chemicals and the challenges of soil remediation.
“There are a lot of theories being tested. We are eagerly awaiting research breakthroughs that we can start implementing.”
Until Maine began its soil testing, there was little known about the extent of the chemicals’ impact on agriculture, and even less known about reversing those impacts. In July 2023, the Maine legislature passed a bipartisan bill to devote $60 million to a fund to address PFAS contamination. A portion of those funds was allocated to farm and soil research. Then MFT partnered with the University of Maine, Colby College, and Michigan State University to study the farmland impact of forever chemicals.
Michigan State University was already home to one of the premier PFAS research centers in the country. Maine was able to offer the researchers there access to a number of case studies of affected farm as well as areas of contaminated farmland on which to test remediation methods.
“There are a lot of theories being tested,” says Maine DACF’s PFAS director Meagan Hennessey. “We are eagerly awaiting research breakthroughs that we can start implementing.”
Methods of Remediation
Researchers are testing various methods of remediation in the field, including using biochar, a form of charcoal, to bind to the dangerous chemicals so they then be extracted from the soil, and absorbing the dangerous chemicals with plants that can then be removed, processed, and burned at temperatures over 2,730 Fahrenheit with special incinerators.
The hope is to help farmers continue farming despite PFAS contamination. “One thing that we recognized as we went was just how specific every farm is,” explains Hennessey. “A lot of farms may have a hot area, but it is pretty rare that the land is contaminated through the whole farming property.”
Hennessey also notes there are high-risk and low-risk plants. Plants that bear fruit, as well as garlic and asparagus, have a low transfer rate, which means even when grown in contaminated soils they do not contain high levels of PFAS.
Leafy greens, such as lettuce, have a high transfer rate and can easily carry dangerous levels of forever chemicals as can hay and grasses usedfor animal forage. Hay provides a particular challenge because it is often sold and transported to other farms where it is fed to livestock who spread the chemicals through their manure.
For this reason, McBrady adds, some farms are being encouraged to switch to grains, which are less likely to absorb PFAS. “We can fund a farm to switch from hay to grain cultivation, which requires new equipment, new storage, and new drying facilities,” she added. “In doing so, they now have a robust alternative feed supply and their impacted fields are still being utilized. That’s an example of keeping a farm and acreage in production with an alternative crop.”
On Contaminated Mi’kmaq Land, Hemp as a Solution
While farms around the state are adjusting to the new reality, in far Northern Maine in Aroostook County, a novel idea for soil remediation is in the experimental stages.
Upon the deactivation of the Loring Air Force Base in 1994, the state of Maine returned 800 acres to the Aroostook Band of the Mi’kmaq, a tribal community of approximately 1,500 people living in the remote Maine county. Because the area of the former air force base had been the site of firefighting foam testing and jet fuel spills, it was supposed to have been cleaned before being returned to the Mi’kmaq. But tests in 2020 showed levels of PFAS, PFOS, and heavy metals in the soil that were so high they have made the land unsuitable for farming, gardening, or human habitation.
Chelli Stanley and the organization she founded, Upland Grassroots, have been working with the Mi’kmaq people since 2019 to test fiber hemp as a crop that extracts PFAS from the soil as it grows. The organization, based in Limestone, Maine, is growing hemp on contaminated Mi’kmaq land with the assistance of tribal members.
Monitoring the hemp crop. (Photo by Chelli Stanley, Upland Grassroots)
“My initial interest was cleaning the environment in general,” Stanley explains. “Hemp is known for its soil-remediation abilities. We started working on PFAS, and just as the problem in Maine became evident, we were already looking for a solution.”
“We know that hemp is taking PFAS out of the soil,” says Stanley. “What we are working on now is the breakdown method.”
University of Virginia scientist Bryan Berger works with Stanley on the hemp project. “For the past two years, we’ve done greenhouse testing with hemp to see how much [PFAS] it can take up and how growth conditions affect it,” he says. “It is pretty remarkable how much PFAS you can put in hemp. It is levels that would melt our skin. It seems to have almost an unlimited capacity to absorb things out of the environment.”
The challenge facing the scientists now is the removal of the PFAS from the hemp plants once they’re harvested. “This year,” says Stanley, “We’re sending samples to the University of Minnesota to test breaking [the hemp] down and turning it into biofuels.”
Hemp as an option for soil remediation has been slow to catch on in the rest of the state. Further studies need to be done and the process of complete soil rehabilitation would likely take several years. But the Mi’kmaq tribe understands the need for a longer timeline.
“This is an area where the air force was spraying PFAs for over 50 years,” explains Stanley, “so it doesn’t make sense that you can pollute for that long and have a solution in a very short time. [Mi’kmaq] Chief Peter Paul said this land will be with us forever, so if it takes a generation or two to clean it, it will be worth it for the people in the future.”
Holding on to Hope
The Maine DEP maintains a map of where the sludge was originally spread and continues testing farms where contamination is a concern. But for now, many of the experts we spoke to say they feel hopeful about what the future holds for PFAS remediation in the state.
“It’s important to realize we have over 76,000 farms in Maine, and the vast majority do not have PFAs concerns.”
“It’s important to realize we have over 76,000 farms in Maine, and the vast majority do not have PFAs concerns,” says McBrady of DACF.
Despite his own farm’s trajectory, Adam Nordell is proud of how Maine stepped up to support its farmers. “We embraced transparency,” he says. “Those who stayed in business won an incredible amount of trust, and several of them have actually grown their sales in the same year they had to stop sales—that’s an incredible success story coming out of a crisis.”
Songbird Farm (Photo credit: Jenny McNulty)
Nordell hopes other farmers, scientists, and NGOs can learn from what has transpired in Maine. “Other states are starting to test,” he says. “They need to be ready with a safety net when farmers discover they have contamination on their land, so people can stay in business.”
The organizations that originally banded together to handle the emergency response to the PFAS crisis have now shifted to searching for long-term solutions. And they remain optimistic that they’ll find them.
In late October, delegates from MFT and the three universities involved in researching farmland will gather in Michigan for the second annual symposium on the Current Knowledge and Application for Agricultural Production of PFAS, where they hope to encourage collaboration and present research on farmland remediation possibilities.
“Academics around the world want to work on this and solve these problems,” says Fisher MFT. “Connecting them to farmers is how we can contribute.”
The post PFAS Shut Maine Farms Down. Now, Some Are Rebounding. appeared first on Civil Eats.
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]]>March 14, 2025 Update: Four Indonesian fishermen filed a lawsuit against Bumble Bee Foods, claiming that the company was aware of worker abuse, physical violence, denial of medical care, and forced labor on a “trusted network” of vessels. Bumble Bee declined to comment, pending litigation. In 2023, Civil Eats reported on tuna brands like Bumble Bee, the workers aboard fishing vessels, and the observers entrusted to watch them.
Simi Cagilaba could hear the fighting outside his cabin door. In the hallway of the 209-foot tuna seiner, drunken crewmen were roiling the ship yet again. It was late, and the vessel was bobbing on the currents of the South Pacific, the fighting typical of nights when the cook let the crew drink the rice wine. Now, the unwelcome clamor moved toward his door like another bad omen in a trip that was steadily devolving.
An official observer of marine fisheries, Cagilaba was miles offshore of the Marshall Islands, dispatched aboard the seiner then known as the Sea Quest. It was 2015. He had a background in marine affairs and was working for the Fijian government in its national Ministry of Fisheries, tasked with upholding a patchwork of regulations meant to safeguard tuna.
Among the harassment observers have faced: Being locked in their rooms, threatened at knifepoint, chased around docks, forced to accept bribes, raped, starved, pressured to sign off on sustainability criteria. Conditions in the South Pacific are among the worst.
He was used to being a lone technician amid raucous crews, overseeing fishing on vessels from all over the world. He had been an observer for 18 years, deployed for weeks at a time in gigs that net some of the best wages around. But this deployment was an outlier. Earlier in the trip, Cagilaba had watched as the captain of the Sea Quest twice falsified catch reports.
Then he’d seen two crewmen dumping 10 hefty bales of plastic and straps into the sea. The captain had been menacing Cagilaba ever since, pestering him to censor his report in a not-nice way that went from uncomfortable to unnerving. Once back on land, it was a saga that would cost Cagilaba his job. But the trick at the time was to stay alive until he got there.
“Others will not be coming home at all,” Cagilaba said. Years later, he recalled the experience in testimony to Congress during a probe of observer harassment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency his employer frequently partnered with.
His story echoes others like it. Harassment of marine observers aboard fishing vessels is one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets. In a survey of observers in the United States alone, about half said that they had been harassed on the job. Anecdotally, Liz Mitchell, president of the Association for Professional Observers (APO) and herself a former observer, says the APO routinely logs stories of such incidents. The APO’s website describes them in detail: observers locked in their rooms, threatened at knifepoint, chased around docks, forced to accept bribes, raped, starved, pressured to sign off on sustainability criteria. Conditions in the South Pacific are among the worst.
This is the true price of a can of tuna, that lucrative shelf-stable fare that whips from the Pacific Ocean onto grocery shelves like millions of widgets flung from a slingshot. Amid rising numbers of marine observers allegedly murdered and disappeared at sea, Cagilaba’s story underscores how little words like “sustainably caught” and “certified” may mean when it comes to protecting the humans in the supply chain. And how much grocery and retail brands profit anyway.
Industry experts say that purveyors of canned tuna—major grocers like Walmart, Costco, Aldi, and Albertsons and the brands that stock their shelves—have the power to pressure tuna suppliers to ensure the safety of marine observers, not to mention fishing crews. Mostly, they don’t. In years past, that’s been because they’ve had little way of knowing when the boats they buy from are responsible for throwing observers overboard, bringing them lifeless into port after “accidents,” or harboring polluters, carrying slaves, or indulging in other kinds of human rights abuses.
Technology is now slowly making these questions answerable, however. So, too, are strategies to strengthen the laws and relationships that make such behavior unacceptable, or at least unprofitable.
“Global seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque. No one knows what’s going on there. And the companies are benefitting from that.”
As connecting problem boats to products becomes possible, advocates for at-sea workers question whether it is now just inconvenience, rather than geography or logistics, that still causes retail brands and grocers to stand aside while observers like Cagilaba are risking—and increasingly losing—their lives at sea. Whatever the reason, critics say those who earn the most money on tuna aren’t doing enough to secure the well-being of those who earn the least.
“As you go back in the supply chain, the difference in profits between what retailers make and what you see at the fishing vessel level is so vast . . . It’s almost four times more,” said Mallika Talwar, a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace.
Tuna brands like Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea and the grocers that sell their products anchor one end of the supply chain. Workers aboard fishing vessels and the observers entrusted to watch them are on the other. In between, “Global seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque,” said Talwar. “No one knows what’s going on there. And the companies are benefitting from that.”
Observing How Your Canned Tuna Gets Caught
To understand how this all works, and how it could work better, imagine the vast swath of water between the west coast of the U.S. and the eastern flank of Asia being cradled by a string of islands—Pacific Island nations—like a watermelon teetering on the bowl of a long-handled spoon. More than 1.5 million square miles of ocean make up the watermelon and are home to migrating tunas worth billions in the global market. The fish don’t care about national borders. But people do, especially in places where there is little land and few natural resources to claim besides the fish in the water.
So it is that island nations and states—from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii and south to New Zealand—have staked their claims to swaths of ocean in the tunas’ paths. On maps, each nation sits within its own ring. And everyone generally agrees that the rings denote each nation’s territorial seas. A smattering of treaties and agreements delineate who can fish where within the rings. And the unclaimed sea beyond is governed by regional authorities that function about as efficiently as the U.S. Congress.
Marine observers like Cagilaba are deployed in concert with the rules that nations and regional authorities make. Employed by a handful of companies and several governments, their job is to collect important data about the fish and to ensure that the people on the boats don’t pillage or pollute. Thus, marine observers are the last men and women standing between any island nation and the destructive potential of its seafaring visitors. Sometimes that’s a dangerous place to be standing.
Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer
This is where more than half of the world’s tuna supply comes from. It includes fresh-caught fish as well as canned, though the cans fuel the wealthiest actors. Canned tuna accounts for two-thirds of the $42 billion industry worldwide. The companies behind the Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist brands control the largest share of those cans. It is this multi-billion-dollar haul that entices vessels from all over the world to hunt what is arguably the largest and most lucrative wild protein supply left on Earth. But while marine observers protect the fish, there are scant protections for the observers themselves. Sometimes, the job is a little like being sent behind enemy lines to make sure that the other army plays fair.
For Cagilaba, the trip aboard the Sea Quest was one of those times. After he refused the captain’s entreaties to fudge his reports to authorities, as he later told Congress, he heard the captain on the phone, complaining loudly and falsely about him in what the captain had warned would be a call to a friend at NOAA. The captain was highly motivated to influence NOAA’s official narrative of the trip.
The plastics dumping alone was a violation of a MARPOL convention, an international treaty that spelled big trouble for any vessel. It was especially big trouble for this vessel, which had just been fined for hanging lights off the boat and into the water to cause the fish to aggregate there, a violation of another treaty between the U.S. and island nations. The dumping and the fictitious catch reports could provoke legal action, fines, and possibly criminal charges.
Inside the wheelhouse, a rough cube with windows towering high above the Sea Quest’s deck, Cagilaba could hear the captain describing him in harsh and fictitious terms. The next day, he received an email from his boss via the captain, who’d been contacted by NOAA. It read:
“Simi . . . Just to remind you that you are an observer . . . You are never to direct or make threats to anybody on board the vessel.”
Rules to Protect Marine Observers
Protections for marine observers would begin to take shape later that year. The effort followed the disappearance of a prominent American observer who went missing during the transshipment of tuna from one boat to another somewhere west of Peru soon after Cagilaba’s Sea Quest tour. The investigation of his disappearance soon gave new urgency to other reports of disappearances and deaths of marine observers. Within two and a half years, one of the primary regulatory authorities presiding over the watermelon—the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, or WCPFC—would pass a measure committing its member nations to observer safety to discourage these kinds of things from happening again.
This would be the first mandate to protect marine observers adopted by the world’s international authorities. It followed rules intended to equip observers with two-way satellite radios to give them a direct line of communication back to land. This, so they could subvert ship systems if ever they were under threat, bypassing the captain and crew. Under the measure, participating nations would also be expected to ensure that observers made it off the boat alive.
However, none of that was rule yet. Stuck aboard the Sea Quest, Cagilaba had safety gear to help him survive the water should the crew decide to throw him in. But he lacked a radio.
So, he did what he could. He sent an email through the ship’s system detailing the situation to one of his supervisors back in Fiji. It was a dangerous move—the captain could see all that he wrote. But Cagilaba wanted the opportunity to explain himself to his employer. And he wanted to get off of the Sea Quest. Still, he knew the score. The captain’s NOAA contact was a long-serving officer in the National Marine Fisheries Service, a fixture in the small enclave of South Pacific fishery regulators since at least the ‘90s. Cagilaba’s own bosses already favored the man.
That the Sea Quest was American-flagged was part of the rub. In reality, the ship was Taiwanese. So were all the officers on board, save for the captain, an American whose nationality enabled the flag. Taiwanese vessels are notoriously bad actors in these parts. An investigation of the nation’s more than 1,390 flagged and foreign operated vessels by the Environmental Justice Foundation between 2016 and 2020 would later surface charges of illegal activity on 10 percent of those boats, ranging from abusing and enslaving crews to illegal fishing and other international atrocities, like killing whales and using dolphins as bait. These were crimes that the American government was, by proxy in this scenario, now associating with.
To further complicate things, the two men whose fighting later unspooled outside Cagilaba’s cabin door were not at all his fans, thanks to his having turned them both in for violations on other trips. And because of the jurisdictional challenges of prosecuting any crime at sea—Cagilaba was a Fijian aboard an American-flagged vessel crewed by Taiwanese officers and whose fishing port was in the Marshall Islands—there was no guarantee of consequences if the Sea Quest returned to port without him.
Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer
So, Cagilaba told Congress later, he stayed up most of that night and every other night after, sleeping during lulls in the fishing during the day while the crew was kept sober and busy. Days passed.
Challenges with the U.S. Approach to Illegal Seafood
In Europe, it’s illegal to sell a product that’s tied to illegal fishing. In the U.S., not so much.
The brands that rule the cans—StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee—have all been purchased by Asian companies since 2000, and their sustainability commitments have shifted.
“In Europe, the retailers over the last 10 years have evolved in a different way,” said Daniel Suddaby, vice president at the international nonprofit Ocean Outcomes, which promotes healthy ocean ecosystems, fishing communities, and plentiful and profitable seafood. “Most will have a team of three to four quite qualified and experienced marine scientist advocates who really understand the issues. And they will engage in it in more of a deep, meaningful, and careful way. It’s not to say there isn’t a ton of risk in the supply chain in Europe.”
The purchasing risks he describes come with responsibilities. Businesses that import seafood are legally required to undertake due diligence to ensure they’re not buying illegal catch. They also have to be able to demonstrate the steps they take to ensure the legal purchase.
Those steps support port inspectors, whose job is to check catch certificates supplied by foreign exporters. Regular audits assess whether the countries that import seafood to the European Union—there’s an approved list—are honoring agreements to keep illegal catch out of their exports. Problem nations are graded with yellow and red cards that help businesses understand where the greatest risks lie when they’re buying seafood from abroad. When they improve, those colors switch to green.
In the U.S., there’s no such framework. Instead, port inspectors are the only bulwark against all illegal catch. The U.S. does have a Seafood Import Monitoring Program, but the regulators that oversee it don’t often issue information that helps businesses understand purchasing risk. Brands that import seafood face no legal liability if they buy illegal catch. Neither do retailers. In short, there is little incentive to do anything more than shrug about widely known abuses of fishing and humanitarian rules.
Some American importers are interested in trying to resist illegal fare anyway, especially more boutique retailers that serve a more socially conscious shopper. But the marketplace doesn’t make it easy. Huw Thomas, a seafood industry consultant for Global Fishing Watch, says that to really assess the sustainability and human rights record of a product, “there’s 200 data sets that a business would need to know. It’s beyond their capabilities to get their arms around it.” Retailers also stock tens of thousands of products, and struggle to prioritize what to check.
But retailers do have power. Lots of it, though the weight of the lucrative end of the supply chain has not been brought to bear on better regulations, frameworks, and accountability for tuna suppliers. It’s a fact that allows bad actors to fish as profitably as the vast majority of those who follow the rules, if not more so.
What’s more, the brands that rule the cans—StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee—are all following the lead of the U.S.’s largest grocers. Those brands have all been purchased by Asian companies since 2000. Bumble Bee was bought by Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company, Ltd. (FCF) of Kaoshiung, Taiwan, in 2021; StarKist by Dongwon Group of Seoul and Busan, South Korea, in 2008; and Chicken of the Sea was fully acquired by Thai Union Group of Samut Sakhon, Thailand, in 2000. As each company has reorganized its leadership, sustainability commitments have shifted.
Chicken of the Sea has continued some efforts. The company has a vessel code of conduct program, and it said in a statement that it is engaged in third-party audits of its supply chain. Its leadership has joined the boards of other organizations aimed at reducing illegal fishing and human rights abuses. It’s also made commitments to source all of its tuna from monitored vessels, either human or otherwise, and to reduce fishery bycatch, though the deadlines for meeting those goals are still ahead.
Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer
At Bumble Bee, however, trends toward cleaning up the supply chain have reversed course, with its former sustainability targets ratcheted downward since its FCF buyout. Bumble Bee did not respond to requests for comment about these issues. StarKist also did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to combat illegal seafood and human rights abuses. “These companies are super sensitive to what the retailers are asking,” said Suddaby. And yet, he adds: “Some of the big retailers in the U.S. have limited understandings of the sustainability issues.”
This is why many large U.S. retailers default to third-party certifiers like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) instead of staffing or partnering with qualified, experienced marine science advocates. “What would really be supportive for sustainability, as well as the MSC push, is having the big retailers say to FCF, ‘You need to greatly increase observer coverage,’” said Suddaby.
Instead, MSC certifies seafood to environmental standards. It is seen as better than nothing by advocates. But it lacks clear human rights standards, even though its certifications depend on the work of marine observers, as well as the work of the crews that catch the fish. The approach hasn’t worked to defend against human rights abuses. In the last seven years, Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) found, four observers have gone missing from or died suspiciously aboard four different vessels that were authorized to fish MSC-certified tuna by regional authorities. A fifth observer had also disappeared from a vessel in 2010. His remains were later recovered—his legs and body bound by chains.
In a statement, MSC’s head of social policy, Oluyemisi Oloruntuyi, stressed that the organization certifies only fisheries, not the boats that catch MSC fish, which are determined by regional fisheries authorities. Two of the boats on which observers died never did fish MSC catch, despite having permission to, according to the statement. And MSC questions the motivations behind the report, which HRAS discloses was funded by World Wise Foods. World Wise Foods shares a chairman with the International Pole and Line Foundation, an organization that promotes competing sectors and is a historic critic of the fishery, and sources tuna from a commercial competitor.
Such hair-splitting statements effectively allow MSC to avoid accountability for the challenges faced by observers, but they are hallmarks of the global tuna industry. And while the Sea Quest was fishing conventional—not MSC—tuna at the time, this is the marketplace that Cagilaba was working in while under threat and under-slept aboard the Sea Quest in 2015.
Certain of the dangers, he hastened to get off at the next port. His supervisors had already told him to stay on board via email. But once the Sea Quest docked in the Marshall Islands, Cagilaba quickly made contact with the observer coordinator for the Ministry of Fisheries. He tried again to relay his unease about the fudged catch reports, the threats from the captain, and the captain’s call to the American official who’d relayed the fictitious narrative of the trip to his bosses. The coordinator downplayed Cagilaba’s account, according to Cagilaba’s statements to Congress. Then he told him to get back on the boat.
Later, Cagilaba learned that the coordinator was friends with the Sea Quest’s agent, another cog in a shaky wheel, rattled by corruption. Once told to get back aboard, he knew his report would be buried. And that if he didn’t make it known soon, somehow, he was unlikely to get off the Sea Quest alive.
‘Retailer Apathy’ for Addressing Marine Observer Safety
This is the part of the industry that is lesser known: How shaky this wheel is. Observer harassment aboard fishing vessels is well understood. But that observers face harassment from compromised program and agency staff is less common knowledge.
According to the survey of American observers by NOAA Fisheries, among the 46 percent who said they had been harassed at sea, most were either dissatisfied or nonplussed by the experience of reporting it. Nearly 60 percent of those who made reports said there was no response. And some feared the repercussions of saying anything: fewer deployments, assignments back to problem vessels. “Some respondents mentioned that most of time they handled situations on their own, since they felt that some observer program staff would not take their reports seriously,” the survey found.
The extent to which officials in observer programs and oversight agencies were being co-opted into the dark underworld of tuna—and how often tuna brands play along—would become better understood in 2020. That’s the year that Eritara Aati Kaierua, a fishery observer from Kiribati, was brought ashore lifeless by a Taiwanese purse seiner, the Win Far 636, after a tuna fishing trip off the coast of Nauru.
Observer harassment aboard fishing vessels is well understood, but observers also face harassment from compromised program and agency staff.
Kaierua should have been protected under the new WCPFC mandate for observer safety. But while working as part of a special project to certify tuna for MSC, he was found dead in one of the boat’s cabins. An autopsy later conducted in Fiji found he had died from a blow to the head. Local authorities next opened a murder investigation, but it has never concluded.
“We initially heard that it was homicide. Then seven months later, we heard of a second opinion that changed the cause of death to natural causes due to hypertension,” Nicky Kaierua, his sister, said in an email. She added that she has seen the initial autopsy report on her brother and is confident that hypertension didn’t cause his death. That word—hypertension—has now been used to explain two other observer deaths, and families of observers missing and murdered in the Pacific have come together in grief to note their experiences with its use.
Some charge that authorities are unmotivated to resolve such cases in countries that are economically dependent on fishing, or reluctant to take a tough stance on all crimes at sea. Tuna accounts for a substantial share of jobs in the Pacific Islands and an often-larger share of public spending. In Kiribati, for example, tuna revenues fuel 63 percent of the national budget. The geopolitics and jurisdictional mayhem involved with prosecuting crimes aboard foreign fishing vessels, or involving citizens from other countries or both, also don’t make it easy.
Meanwhile, Nicky Kaierua said, “My brother’s ‘unsolved’ death has had devastating impacts on our family.” Like many observers, Kaierua was his family’s breadwinner, supporting a wife and four children who have had little financial support since he died. “Fisheries observers are often forewarned that the job is risky. They are also told that the position comes with good pay because of the risk that comes with it. My brother earned 60 Australian dollars a day. Should we be lenient on their safety because they get a little bit extra?”
According to the investigation by Human Rights at Sea, after the Win Far 636 brought Kaierua’s body back to port, it took regional authorities another 38 days to suspend the boat’s certificate to fish in the MSC program. MSC later emphasized that its certification was an environmental standard, not a human rights one, in a statement, which noted that it took steps to assure that no catch from the vessel entered the supply chain as MSC-certified.
Some charge that authorities are unmotivated to resolve such cases in countries that are economically dependent on fishing; in Kiribati, for example, tuna revenues fuel 63 percent of the national budget.
APO has since recommended that programs like MSC have criteria that protect observers and processes that gauge whether those programs work. APO has also pressed the international community to outlaw observer harassment globally and document observer deaths for the public.
In response to such critiques, the MSC introduced new requirements in October 2022 that “entities involved in unacceptable conduct inclusive of mistreatment of crew and fisheries observers must be removed from MSC certificates.” It also gave $137,000 toward the development of communications technology and a review of observer programs in April 2021. But those changes won’t impact the Win Far 636. In July 2022, after no criminal charges were filed in Kaierua’s death, the boat was again certified to fish MSC tuna through 2025.
Observer advocates admit that blacklisting problem boats and companies can sometimes backfire anyway, making space for other bad actors. Most believe the best response to human rights abuses would be for grocers to use their market heft to directly push their suppliers toward better practices, moving the whole market. Among retailers that use MSC as a proxy for examining supply chains, however, that conversation isn’t happening, at least not publicly.
Costco declined to comment for this article. Neither Albertsons, Walmart, nor Aldi responded to requests for interviews or comments. And it’s this distinctive indifference, an overall lack of action, that critics describe as most problematic, an institutional buck-passing that is a defining characteristic of the tuna marketplace.
“You can call it retailer apathy,” said Talwar of Greenpeace. In its own survey of tuna retailers, Greenpeace found that only five of 16 of the largest retailers that sell tuna took specific steps to advocate for observer protections. Among those, most had only gone as far as to formally encourage observer programs to work together toward an International Observer Bill of Rights. In evaluating tuna retailers overall, Talwar said, “They’re far behind anything that we would expect from companies that are in this business.”
Most believe the best response to human rights abuses would be for grocers to use their market heft to directly push their suppliers toward better practices, moving the whole market.
Most large retailers just return to the same big cans. They buy from StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumble Bee, primarily, and acquiesce to whatever supply-chain due-diligence the brands provide. In its investigation of Kaierua’s death, Human Rights at Sea found that it was most likely Bumble Bee’s parent company, FCF, that bought the tuna from the ill-fated voyage. It wasn’t the first time that suspected illegal fishing was found in the Bumble Bee supply chain. In March 2023, Bumble Bee agreed to remove the terms “fair and safe supply chain” and “fair and responsible working conditions” from its website, social media, and advertising for a decade after being sued by a labor rights group for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by claiming them.
But not much, otherwise, has changed. The Win Far 636, while it continues fishing, is just as connected to the tuna marketplace as ever, one of 27 vessels owned by a consortium of companies that delivers its MSC catch to FCF for canning for Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, among other brands. Then there’s that other vessel, the Sea Quest. At the time of Cagilaba’s voyage, it was owned by a company run by a prominent group of tuna executives, including those with ties to Chicken of the Sea, Mitsui, and headed by FCF president, Max Chou. A spokesman for the company declined to comment, citing corporate policy.
Technology, Policy, and Consumer Pressure for Change
Cagilaba never got back aboard the Sea Quest. After his supervisor told him to, he refused and walked straight to the refuge of the U.S. Embassy in Majuro, Marshall Islands, where officials reacted swiftly. They sent a message to NOAA recommending that Cagilaba not be sent back to the vessel. And, he told Congress, they secured his report to keep it from being buried once he arrived back in Fiji and gave it to his employer.
That report later led to an investigation that, like that of Kaierua’s death, went nowhere. Then the Sea Quest also disappeared. Records show it was renamed Joe Turner, sold to a new owner in the Philippines, and now fishes tuna for a seafood company that charters it from Papua New Guinea. Nambawan Seafoods PNG Limited is one of FCF’s many partners in the region.
It is common for formal inquiries like Cagilaba’s to be abandoned, languishing in a state of perpetual unresolve, and for problem boats to vanish into the opacity of the tuna supply chain, while issues aboard go unresolved. Yet a combination of technology, policy, and consumer pressure on suppliers could actually keep the problem from happening in the first place.
Illustration credit: Tina Zellmer
Most people working for brands and retailers know this. But none were willing to go on record to talk about an effort that’s now underway to connect the fish they sell with whatever happens on the boats when it’s caught.
That work—called the SCRP, or Supply Chain Risk Project—is being led by a trifecta of institutions adept at using technology and data to track illegal fishing. They include Global Fishing Watch, which creates and shares knowledge about human activity at sea; the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, which leads research and innovation involving oceans; and FishWise, which works with companies to address environmental and humanitarian goals in seafood supply chains. Hosted by the World Economic Forum, the three are steeped in a massive data project that can help retailers check a supplier’s word. And maybe twist their arm.
The data comes from global tracking devices that use transceivers on ships, called AIS or Automatic Identification System, that are required aboard vessels and can be tracked by satellite and analyzed by the likes of Global Fishing Watch. To watch a vessel through AIS is to understand where it is in the ocean, when it ports and anchors, and when it’s making the kinds of maneuvers associated with fishing. It’s possible to use that data to see, say, when a boat is fishing in a marine protected area. Or when a vessel’s beacon shuts off right outside of one.
Such systems don’t eliminate the need for observers, even when paired with cameras aboard boats. Fisheries scientists maintain that having a human presence at least 20 percent of the time is still critical to guaranteeing that the science underpinning stock assessments that guide fishing are accurate. Observers also collect a lot of other information—details about the age of the fish caught, and ratios of males to females, for example—that help set the rules about what fish can be caught where.
That said, digital oversight that can command better practices is increasingly possible, if not imminent. Some private sector companies that use blockchain to collect data at various points along the supply chain, such as Wholechain, say they are already close to pinpointing vessels tied to observer deaths and other human rights abuses. Whether that oversight someday comes with consumer-facing tools that assure customers a safe supply chain is up to the companies. But it’s now conceivable. And that’s no small thing.
Details about which corporations’ data is powering the SCRP’s test drive are top secret and, again, none of the major tuna brands or grocers—Aldi, Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea—would comment on the effort to daylight the seafood supply chain, or say whether they’re involved. Right now, it is being funded by philanthropists.
The fact that some retailers are indeed in the mix, even behind the scenes, is likely good news for Cagilaba’s ilk, who had no such potential ally back in 2015. It’s unclear who bought the catch from his harrowing trip, to what market it flew, or where in the world it landed. But it’s clear that the answers to those questions would allow people on one end of the supply chain to bolster the safety for those on the other end.
While digital oversight can command better practices at sea, fisheries scientists maintain that having a human presence at least 20 percent of the time is still critical to guaranteeing the accuracy of the stock assessments that guide fishing.
For Cagilaba, back in Fiji, safety was a relative term. He was fired within months, while the NOAA investigation of his rough tour aboard the Sea Quest was still underway. It took six months for NOAA’s law enforcement to interview him. And as far as he could tell later, the only result was an early retirement.
“It made me realize that some government officials from the Pacific island countries are overly familiar with the fishing company personnel and their boat agents and have been compromised, making our jobs as fisheries observers impossible and dangerous,” he wrote in testimony to Congress later.
Cagilaba eventually moved to America, became a criminal investigator first, and then a lawyer. No more boisterous drunks in the night, captains that could order him thrown into the sea, or employers who wouldn’t prevent it.
It’s too late for 13 of his colleagues who have died since 2014. It may not be too late for the rest.
Ofani Eremae contributed reporting.
This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.
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]]>The post How the Jackson Water Crisis Is Hurting Its Restaurants appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When historic flooding caused the pumps to fail at a water treatment plant in Jackson, Mississippi, last August, leaving the city without running water for about a week, restaurateur Jeff Good had to close all three of his establishments.
Even when water finally did return to the tap, it was unsafe to drink. In order to operate under the nine-week boil-water notice, Good had to buy bottled water for baking, washing vegetables, and filling customers’ glasses. He also had to turn off his ice machines and soda fountain and serve commercial ice and canned sodas.
“It’s $2,000 per restaurant per week in extra expenses,” said the owner of BRAVO! Italian restaurant, the Broad Street bakery and café, and Sal & Mookie’s pizza and ice cream joint. “So that’s $18,000 over nine weeks for three restaurants. And we never get that money back.”
“If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story.”
Other restaurateurs also reported damage. At Johnny T’s Bistro and Blues in the Farish Street Historic District, John Tierre bought the same extra supplies—and paid his staff to come in one to two hours early each day to unpack and distribute them and boil dishwater, Tierre said.
At Lou’s Full-Serv, owner Louis LaRose said, “We went from having a good summer and a little bit of cash flow to basically zero cash flow. We were so slow that it literally almost bankrupted us.”
The August water crisis resolved, at least for the short term, after Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency and brought in the Mississippi National Guard to distribute safe water and oversee emergency repairs, and after President Joe Biden declared Jackson a disaster area and sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with resources and assistance.
While the city’s water shutdown made national news, it wasn’t the first time water issues have plagued the Mississippi capital. Decades of deferred maintenance to the crumbling water system—some parts of which are more than 100 years old—coupled with recent extreme weather events like freezes and flooding have brought the system to its breaking point.
Some see mismanagement and poor planning at the local level at the root of the water crisis. Others see racism as the cause; as a progressive city that is 84 percent Black in a conservative, white-led state, the city for years has not often received the state support it has requested to address its challenges.
But now, for the first time, the federal government has stepped in in a major way. In November 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice appointed a third-party manager—water systems expert Ted Henifin—to fix the drinking water and the associated billing system, allocating $600 million for that job exclusively.
With the repair process underway, many hope this can be a turning point—for the city’s residents and also for the restaurants and other businesses that keep the city’s economy afloat and its identity intact.
Good says repairing the infrastructure is a crucial first step. “If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story,” he said.
Ramon Davis stocks bagged ice at Babalu in Jackson during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)
A Long-Failing Water System
Jackson has faced population decline and severe economic challenges over the last few decades. The city shrunk from around 203,000 residents in 1980 to around 150,000 residents in 2021 as many white people fled the city limits, taking their wealth—and tax dollars—with them.
While the suburbs surrounding Jackson—nonexistent in the ’80s—are growing and thriving, the city’s 26 percent poverty rate is more than twice the national rate of 11.6 percent.
“Our city has been tanking year after year,” said Good, who in addition to owning three restaurants is past president of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce. “Every system we have—social, educational, economic, public safety, public works—is strained and failing. And that’s led to the outflow of care and economics. We have hit rock bottom.”
Without a solid revenue stream over the last few decades—and with problems including residents altering their meters to avoid paying for water and the 2012 installation of a faulty water meter and billing system by the German technology company Siemens—city leaders have not had the money necessary to maintain the water system. And with severe worker shortages and high turnover, the water department does not have enough operators on staff to conduct preventative maintenance.
Amidst this dysfunction and neglect, Jackson residents and businesses became accustomed to regular service shut offs, line breaks, boil-water notices, low pressure, and exposure to lead and harmful bacteria like E. coli. In March 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an emergency administrative order for the Jackson water system—one of many official warnings about the city’s water—saying it put consumers’ health at risk.
Then in February 2021, when the winter freeze took out the Texas power grid, old pipes in Jackson froze and burst, leaving the city without clean water for more than a month.
“A two- to three-day boil notice poses challenges for restaurants,” said LaRose of Lou’s Full-Serv. “You multiply that by 50 days, and you can’t wash lettuce, you can’t wash fruits and vegetables, you’ve got to boil water and cool it or buy distilled water. Your costs go through the roof.”
“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water.’ It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”
Tensions between the city and state leaders have been running high, including a particularly hostile relationship between Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jackson’s progressive mayor, and Reeves, Mississippi’s conservative governor. Reeves has described the water situation as “a crisis of incompetence,” implicating Lumumba, and Lumumba has characterized the state’s dealings with Jackson as “racist” and “paternalistic.” When Jackson asked for $47 million from the state to fix the pipes after the big freeze to try to get ahead of the problem, for instance, it received $3 million, 6 percent of the requested amount.
Though the city’s water system has stabilized since the August crisis, there have been a number of boil-water notices issued, and people generally don’t trust Jackson water, which makes them wary of eating out, restaurant owners say.
“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water,’” Tierre said. “It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”
Good sees water as vital to restaurants’ success—and restaurants as vital to the city’s success. “I hire 210 people—they’re all Jacksonians,” he said. In his 30 years in business, he estimates he has hired between 10,000 and 20,000 people. “I am a major job provider here, and a major quality-of-life provider, and an economic engine,” he said.
After the August outage, Good organized a coalition of 46 Jackson restaurateurs, including Tierre and LaRose, asking city, county, and state representatives to cooperate to solve the problems. Without a solid fix, he said, “we’re going to become a burned-out donut—we will be the hole and around us will be great wealth and prosperity.”
Brent’s Drugs manager Sarah Donald pours bottled water into a coffee pot during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)
Neglect, Bad Planning, Racism—or All Three?
Some Jacksonians blame local lawmakers. “There has been mismanagement through local government and leaders for so long,” said LaRose. “I don’t care if they’re blue or red, it has been mismanaged. People choose not to work with one another, and nothing gets done.”
Tierre of Johnny T’s sees the issue as primarily about money. “You can shake it how you want to, but the bottom line is, it’s economics, it’s funding,” he said.
Others, however, see racism at the root. In September 2022, the NAACP filed a complaint with the EPA under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing a history of discrimination through the repeated rejection of requests for federal funds to address the problem.
“The water crisis in Jackson is just the latest example of a negligent—if not racist—pattern of underfunding basic water services for Black communities,” added Abre’ Conner, NAACP’s Director of Environmental and Climate Justice. “Our country has a longstanding history of mistreating and neglecting Black communities, putting the lives of men, women, and children at risk.”
Cindy Ayers Elliott, owner of the 68-acre Foot Print Farms, which sits within the Jackson city limits, sees the disinvestment as an intentional move on the part of conservative state leaders to disempower the Black city and take control, as has happened in other parts of the U.S.
“The policies that they are pushing and the legislation that they have been passing, without a doubt, brings you back into the ’40s or ’50s,” she said. “They keep this state depressed, deprived of resources that [should be] available to the people . . . It’s just a different way they’re lynching now. And it’s with the dollar, and with something as basic as water.”’
Indeed, in recent years, the state has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the city’s spending, services, and infrastructure. State leaders have tried to take over the Jackson airport and expand the jurisdiction of the Capitol police. Then, in January, Republican state legislators introduced a bill that would place Jackson’s water systems under state control, giving the state access to the $600 million designated by the federal government for the repairs.
Notices posted on the social media pages of Broad Street Baking Company & Cafe and Lou’s Full-Serve during the 2022 water crisis.
‘I Believe in the City; I Fight for the Underdog’
Since he started, Henifin, the third-party manager, has set to work on 13 main priorities. To rebuild trust, he has created a water bill debt-relief program for residents who were unfairly overcharged.
Additionally, Henifin’s team is identifying leaks in the system and creating plans to replace small-diameter water lines with larger ones. They have also lined up systems for corrosion control and identifying lead.
The restaurateurs Civil Eats spoke to expressed confidence in Henifin’s leadership, and a sense of relief that the water system is in the hands of a competent federal appointee with the money to complete the work. And many are committed to sticking with the city through what they expect to be a long process.
“I understand it won’t get fixed overnight. It’ll probably take 10 to 15 years,” said Tierre. “But I think the people of Jackson are strong. So, we’ll get through it, and we’ll continue to thrive.”
Good is aware he could move across the Pearl River into Rankin County and earn more in sales—without the water issues. “But I believe in the city, and I fight for the underdog. I have a deep-seated belief that business has a responsibility to the community,” he said. “And I tend to believe that we’re going to rebirth, and this is going to be the phoenix from the ashes.”
“I have high hopes,” said LaRose. “If nothing else, I’ve got hope.”
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]]>The post After 60 Years, ‘Silent Spring’ Is Still Changing the World appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In late September, California released a sobering report on the amount of pesticide residue found on produce sold in the state: Sixty-five percent had detectable levels, the highest level since the state began monitoring pesticides on food in 2012.
These findings are just the latest reminder of how prevalent these chemicals are in our food system, and they’re especially pertinent six decades after the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s seminal book about the dangers of pesticides.
“It had a radical message at the time: raising the alarm about the devastating impact of chemical pesticides and connecting those dots to the profit motive of the corporations behind them.”
Despite her warnings—and all we have learned since—pesticide use is up 81 percent in the past 35 years, with some regions of the world spiking considerably. South America, for instance, has seen an almost 500 percent jump in use during that period.
With pesticides still so rampant, what is the legacy of Silent Spring? How far have we come and how much farther do we have to go to realize the human right to healthy food, and to protect the rights of the farmers and farmworkers growing that food?
To explore these questions, Civil Eats hosted a roundtable with some of the field’s leading voices. They include Mas Masumoto, a California organic peach farmer and author; his forthcoming memoir Secret Harvests is a tale of family farms and a history of secrets. Marcia Ishii is Senior Scientist at Pesticide Action Network of North America, where she has worked for 26 years as a senior scientist. Anne Frederick is a community organizer in Hawaii, working with communities impacted by agrochemical companies’ expansion. Sharon Lerner is an investigative journalist who has reported on pesticides, chemical regulation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Sandra Steingraber is a biologist and author, who blends her gifts as a writer, storyteller, and scientist with advocacy.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did Silent Spring and Rachel Carson’s work touch your life?
Mas Masumoto: The book touched my life directly: I grew up on a farm, in a farm community. My grandparents were farmworkers. For me, her book was a lens into the human condition that is a part of farming: It’s not just growing and producing something—it’s about what’s happening to the people on the land, too.
Marcia Ishii, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network of North America
Marcia Ishii: I started this work many years ago, working in Thailand with farmers who were being directly exposed to chemical pesticides and witnessing the extremely aggressive marketing of pesticides by corporations and agricultural extensionists. When I read Silent Spring, I saw that Rachel Carson was connecting so many of the dots that I had seen firsthand.
It had a radical message at the time: raising the alarm about the devastating impact of chemical pesticides and connecting those dots to the profit motive of the corporations behind them.
By providing well-documented research and beautifully written compelling narratives, she raised the alarm, galvanized public outrage, and forced people to actively and vocally question the agenda behind the pesticide industry’s campaigns. In that sense, Carson played a pivotal role in igniting the environmental movement, with many connections to the issues I was seeing in Thailand, and that Pesticide Action Network activists decades later are still documenting and mobilizing around at the global level.
Sandra Steingraber, a biologist and author, with a portrait of Rachel Carson.
Sandra, you edited a Library of America volume of Silent Spring, including letters that Carson wrote to her fellow scientists at the time she was working on her manuscript. What did that project teach you about the book’s insights?
Sandra Steingraber: You can see her mind working in those letters. She’s trying to put this jigsaw puzzle together of all the scattered pieces of evidence showing the risks and harms of pesticides—and especially the class of today’s chemicals we call organochlorines, known now to siphon their way up the food chain, concentrating as they go, as hormone-mimicking chemicals linked to cancer. Back then, without a cancer data registry or pesticide registry, Carson was blind to a lot of data we have now. Yet by piecing together all these different studies, she was able to see the harm and mechanisms by which the harm was created.
“Carson is definitely a scientist, but she’s also an amazing reporter, someone who stuck her neck out. And it always strikes me reading Silent Spring how much she cares about what she’s writing about—it bursts out of her. She’s angry.”
She was really interested in the fact that most of the crop dusters had been military planes in World War II—pesticides were products of the war as well. DDT came home as a war hero. It stopped typhus and malaria epidemics and saved the lives of our troops, and the chemical companies were contracted to make great quantities. When we dropped the atom bomb on Japan, ending the war more quickly than we thought, the stockpile of chemicals remained. Madison Avenue was put to work developing ad campaigns to turn these poisons—for which there was no advanced safety testing because it was done under wartime secrecy—into pesticides and broadcast spraying them.
Carson looked at emerging data showing high rates of diabetes among crop dusters, and then looked at what was happening to roosters who were exposed to DDT: The combs on their head were becoming more feminized. From those little bits of data, she was able to correctly deduce that DDT and other organochlorines were what we would call today endocrine disruptors. They were having an effect on the endocrine system—and she was absolutely right.
Anne Frederick, a community organizer in Hawaii
Anne, from your vantage point in Hawaii, what are you seeing in terms of the pesticide impacts Carson warned us about?
Anne Frederick: My way into this work has been through the stories of folks living on the west side of Kauai, the island where I live. It was in the 1990s and 2000s as the last sugar and pineapple plantations were moving overseas, and agrichemical test fields were being planted in their place. There had been more than a century of scraping away the biodiversity in Hawaii to make way for endless seas of sugar and pineapple, so it was easy for the agrichemical industry to step into the footprint left behind [and grow crops that were genetically modified to withstand large quantities of pesticides]. These fields were adjacent to schools, homes, and the largest concentration of Native Hawaiian residents on island. I started hearing stories from communities living near these test fields, like that of a dear friend who lived 100 feet from one; she and her daughters started developing asthma, other illnesses. Stories like hers drew me in.
I didn’t have a history of working on pesticides, but as a community organizer I wanted to apply my skills to this work. We started by asking for basic transparency and policies like buffer zones between test fields and schools and hospitals. It has taken us decades to win even some of the most basic protections for these communities. When I look at this book from 60 years ago, and all the data that’s followed since, I’m still struck by what an uphill battle it is to get even modest protections and transparency. Part of the reason is because of the hold industry has on our local government. Realizing that has informed our approach of political power building and identifying how we can address regulatory capture and corporate influence in our local government—and seeing that as a root cause that has allowed this harm to go on for so many years before it was addressed.
Sharon Lerner, investigative journalist
Sharon, as an investigative journalist, can you share an example from your reporting of how you’ve seen the industry shirk the kind of regulation that might have protected us more?
Sharon Lerner: Yes, I come to Rachel Carson as a fellow reporter. Carson is definitely a scientist, but she’s also an amazing reporter, someone who stuck her neck out. And it always strikes me reading Silent Spring how much she cares about what she’s writing about—it bursts out of her. She’s angry. There’s this idea that as a journalist you are balanced and unbiased, but I don’t believe we are ever not biased. I believe I do have a bias and that my bias is toward not having toxic chemicals in nature and in our bodies. I readily admit to that bias.
I have also always been struck by how much she was attacked in response to this book. Monsanto came out with its own takedown and was really awful. I’m also struck that she died of cancer, and so have many of the people I talked to as I’ve done this kind of reporting.
As a journalist, I’ve focused on pesticides, and particularly the pesticide paraquat. With a reporter from Le Monde, we looked through hundreds of internal documents mostly from Syngenta and its predecessor companies. Our story focused on an additive to paraquat that was supposed to ensure that people didn’t get poisoned with it—and it didn’t work.
In reading through those documents, you saw the evolution of the dialogue internally about pesticide regulation in the U.S. over time. When you look at some of the early documents, you can see that the executives are extremely worried about what the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] will do to them. Over time, the attitude toward the EPA changes.
“Carson articulated really important concepts in Silent Spring, including the concept of chemical trespass against our bodies, land, water, and air.”
I ended up writing a piece that tried to answer the question of what happened between 1970 (i.e., the founding of the EPA) and today, when we have 16,800 pesticide products on the market. The EPA is [now] not so much a regulator to be feared, but a partner in the production of thousands of pesticides—there has been a real joining forces between industry and EPA. Part of that is the revolving door with regulators going into the pesticide industry. One of the things I showed was that, since 1974, all the directors of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs who continued work after holding that office went on to work for the pesticide industry in one way or another. That’s part of the problem.
That paraquat story was chilling. Paraquat is one of the most highly toxic pesticides—a teaspoon of it will kill you, right?
Lerner: Yes, and for that reason, it’s banned in many countries but still in use in the United States. It’s also believed to be linked to Parkinson’s [disease]. There’s litigation now about that—and whether folks can prove in a courtroom that it causes Parkinson’s.
Mas Masumoto, a California organic peach farmer and author
Masumoto: I think part of the power of Silent Spring is the legacy it leaves behind. When I first came back to the farm, I started farming organically, but we were still using some chemicals on part of the farm, and my dad broke out in a rash. He went to the doctor, and his answer was simply: “Stay out of the fields.” You don’t tell a farmer to stay out of his fields. It made me rethink how we were doing things and question how we farmed. It made me realize there’s a human impact of how we do our work—the idea that we take farming practices personally.
Where have we seen the most progress since Silent Spring?
Lerner: There is greater awareness of how important it is to eat foods that weren’t grown with pesticides: organic food. In the seven, eight years I’ve been reporting on this, there’s a change in how people receive this and a greater level of interest. I cannot provide any cheer on the regulatory side.
Steingraber: I appreciate everything that Sharon said. I would never want to bright-side this: We’re in a world of serious harm here. These institutions remain, though some are vestiges of their former selves. But their persistence is because Carson’s words also fomented a populist environmental movement.
Narrowly speaking, Silent Spring is about the toxicological properties of 19 pesticides, yet it was written in such a way that it rocketed to the top of the best-seller list when it was published in September 1962.
This was at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. It caught his attention, which caught the attention of the press and emboldened the media to stand up against the disinformation campaign that the chemical industry almost immediately—even before the book was published—started churning out [responses]. The New Yorker serialized her work. [The magazine] was threatened by the chemical industry, but it just shrugged off the threats of a lawsuit and published it anyway; so did Houghton Mifflin.
Kennedy commissioned an advisory group that wrote a report vindicating her book, which triggered a public hearing where she testified before the Senate. It opened a space in the culture, then all kinds of things happened, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, all these monumental pieces of legislation. The least well-known but maybe the most important was NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act], the federal statute that requires that any time a government proposes to do something with environmental consequences, the public gets to weigh in, stakeholders have to be consulted, and the government has to take into account what they say.
Recently, we’ve seen this amazing thing happen in Washington, D.C., which is a direct legacy of Rachel Carson: There was this attempt to do so-called “permitting reform” and weaken these regulations for being too cumbersome. Led by Senator [Joe] Manchin [D-West Virginia], with his connections to the fossil-fuel industry, the idea was to throw key provisions of NEPA out the window. The consequence almost surely would be more pipelines built faster, environmental justice would go out the window, public health of communities would be impacted, as well as the climate consequences. But there was strong enough outcry, led by communities of color and people on the ground in Appalachia, where the Mountain Valley Pipeline was supposed to run through, that permitting reform got thrown out. This political power, which prevented Chuck Schumer from moving forward with Joe Manchin and throwing out this really important regulatory framework, is a direct result of Silent Spring. I consider it a kind of indirect victory for Rachel Carson.
Ishii: Carson articulated really important concepts in Silent Spring, including the concept of chemical trespass against our bodies, land, water, and air. She articulated this important concept of the public’s right to know, and not only in biological and scientific terms, but also what’s going on politically behind closed doors. Connecting that and looking at past decades of global pesticide activism and advocacy, we do see a tremendous amount of progress since PAN was founded 30 years ago in Malaysia at a gathering of activists looking at health and environmental harms and injustices of the global pesticide trade.
“It has become politically untenable to spray pesticides next to schools and homes in our community, which is a huge shift.”
We’ve fought for and won a 1,000 percent increase in bans of the worst pesticides. But more than just banning individual pesticides, we have been able to push on the public’s right to know not only what toxins we’re being exposed to, but also governments’ right to know about and refuse the importation of pesticides that have been banned or restricted elsewhere. After 20 years of advocacy, we got the Rotterdam Convention on prior informed consent that provides the right of country importing pesticides to know and then decide to refuse the import. That’s a huge success.
We also got the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants established to phase out chemicals, including a number of pesticides that persist in the environment, that travel far beyond where they’re used, committing chemical trespass along the way. Both of these conventions have been ratified by over 170 countries.
Just this year, after much advocacy by our partner, PAN Germany, the German government publicly committed to prohibit the exporting of pesticides banned at home. This legal action will come into force next year. A lot is happening, and I attribute it to the power of community mobilizing and coalition organizing, challenging corporate lies and false solutions with scientific and empirical evidence, and lifting up the voices of directly affected communities.
Implementation is always an issue. You get these laws, policies, and agreements, and they’re not always implemented on the ground. It’s not only the USDA and EPA that have been captured by corporate influence, but the United Nations, too. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) a couple years back announced its intention to formalize a partnership with Crop Life International, the pesticide industry trade group. After mobilizing hundreds of thousands of voices of opposition, the FAO said they are not moving forward with the partnership, but they’re also not really canceling it; it’s just sort of sitting there behind a curtain.
I also have to say despite all this amazing work, pesticide use, profits, and poisonings are all increasing. This is a huge problem. PAN recently investigated pesticide poisonings globally and found that over 385 million people are poisoned from acute unintentional poisonings every year. That’s 44 percent of the 850 million people involved in agriculture. This is a big jump from the often-cited 1990 figure of 25 million.
The problem hasn’t gone away. We can’t just ban, restrict, and phase out. We must do that, especially highly hazard pesticides, but we need to build solutions on the ground. That’s where I’m so excited by local agroecology movements, the work of farmers like Mas who are creating viable, resilient systems on the ground, who are building bridges between rural and urban communities.
Anne, can you speak to how much you’ve been able to accomplish in Hawaii and how much are you’re still up against?
Frederick: I think about my friend who lived 100 feet from test fields—her, her daughters, and community are safer these days. It has become politically untenable to spray pesticides next to schools and homes in our community, which is a huge shift. I see tangible improvements to people’s lives. The banning of chlorpyrifos is another [win], especially because it was so heavily used, particularly on the west side of our island.
“Reframing—that’s what good stories do. Stories reframe things, rewrite things, and allow people to reflect. Suddenly the foods that they eat, it’s like, ‘What are we consuming?'”
One thing that gives me hope in our movement is the groundswell of activism that started around the acute exposure incidents in schools, when teachers and students were hospitalized, and that it has really evolved. There’s still very much a grassroots movement in the streets, but there’s also a political savvy that has evolved, too. A lot of the folks who first mobilized around these basic protections have gotten involved in local politics. For example, the Maui County Council is majority progressive for the first time in the political history of Hawaii. They’ve been able to pass the most stringent organic public land management ordinance. There’s a lot of great news at our local level, which we know is also threatened by preemption at the federal level.
Mas, are farmers more open to the lessons of Silent Spring? What do you see as its legacy for farmers?
Masumoto: Farmers are obviously close to working with nature and understanding things like climate change. What Silent Spring showed was the power of stories, and Carson captured the story of pesticides for a broader public, but it penetrated rural sectors and farmers, too. Out of the book was this idea that there are new directions we have to start taking. I’m seeing more and more farmers talking about and looking at soil life and biology. Dirt isn’t just dirt and lifeless. They’re starting to look at it through a different lens—that’s a quantum leap. That’s very important, because suddenly you see life in the soils, you see life around us, we’re growing life! With that comes this idea that our goal as farmers is not to kill what we don’t see and don’t know.
I also think a younger generation is seeing food through the lens of how it is grown and who grows it. For an older generation, it’s looking at food as medicine and realizing it’s not just a matter of taking another pill—it’s about the foods we eat.
Reframing—that’s what good stories do. Stories reframe things, rewrite things, and allow people to reflect. Suddenly the foods that they eat, it’s like, “What are we consuming?” Boy, that’s a huge leap to start thinking, “Who grows it, how do they grow it, what ways do they grow it, and what goes into the food?”
The public is beginning to see, feel, and taste the environment in the foods we eat. And that’s a huge shift as opposed to the old model—you just go to the grocery store and you don’t care where it comes from. That makes me very, very optimistic.
What’s the biggest takeaway you want people to hold from Silent Spring?
Steingraber: The human rights approach. Carson was clear that people affected by pesticides and other harmful chemicals have the right to know and take action—and the government needs to be responsive.
Lerner: She was already onto the concern about regrettable substitutions: DDT itself was a substitute, and she was looking ahead, unfortunately, to what would be an ongoing cycle.
Frederick: The example of the courage of speaking out against a powerful industry, even when it’s uncomfortable. They’re always going to try to marginalize this work, but we need to persevere. We owe it to our communities and our planet.
Ishii: Yes to all of this. I would add Carson’s passion, joy, and love. As we organize and come together as social movements, we’re fighting the bad, but we’re also building beautiful, loving systems of mutual care and healing. This collectivist, community approach is at the heart of what we need to do going forward.
Masumoto: For me, it’s about what we can and should demand to control.
The post After 60 Years, ‘Silent Spring’ Is Still Changing the World appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Will New Standards for Salmonella in Chicken Cut Down on Food Poisoning? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>October 14, 2022 update: The FSIS today released its draft framework for salmonella in poultry, which includes proposals to test flocks for salmonella before they enter processing plants and to implement a final product standard that would allow the agency to stop contaminated chicken from being sold to the public. The agency scheduled a virtual public meeting for November 3, 2022 to collect input on the framework.
Most people have experienced a form of “food poisoning” at some point in their lives. When salmonella is the cause, typical symptoms include diarrhea, stomach cramps, and fever, which resolve themselves within a few days. But some people—especially those with weakened immune systems—develop a more severe infection that can cause long-term complications and even death.
Six years ago, a particularly dangerous strain of salmonella, which is resistant to two common drugs, infected at least 129 people in 32 states. Twenty-five people were hospitalized, and one died, as of February 2019.
After an extensive investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) traced the source to multiple brands of raw chicken products the victims had purchased in grocery stores, and identified the same strain in 76 meatpacking plants around the country.
Although its 2019 report declared its investigation into the outbreak over, the investigators included an important caveat: “Illnesses could continue because this strain appears to be widespread in the chicken industry.”
This scenario illustrates a larger, complicated truth about government oversight of salmonella in poultry: While multiple agencies test chicken and turkey for contamination, track illnesses, research the problem, and issue voluntary recalls, they do not have the power to prevent contaminated chicken from being sold to consumers in the first place. Similarly, those agencies can’t shut down plants that repeatedly violate standards, nor require salmonella prevention practices on farms.
And although the percentage of chicken products contaminated with salmonella has fallen significantly over the past two decades, consumer and patient advocates say it’s still too high. In addition to recent FSIS tests, a Consumer Reports study this year found salmonella in 23 out of 75 packages of raw ground chicken purchased at grocery stores. “Thirty-one percent is pretty high,” said James Rogers, director of food safety research and testing at Consumer Reports. “It should not be this bad.”
While multiple agencies test chicken and turkey for contamination, they do not have the power to prevent contaminated chicken from being sold to consumers in the first place.
More alarming is the fact that even as overall contamination has gone down, illnesses from salmonella have not. It is still the leading cause of foodborne illness in the country, causing about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations, and 420 deaths annually. And while many other foods carry the bacteria, and thorough cooking kills it in meat and poultry, chicken is the biggest contributor to illness, accounting for 14 percent of outbreaks.
Now, the USDA under President Biden is setting out to tackle the problem in a big way. To lead the charge, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appointed Sandra Eskin—who worked on salmonella and other foodborne illness issues for the Pew Charitable Trusts for more than a decade—as one of his food safety czars in 2021. By the end of last year, FSIS announced it was reevaluating its strategy for salmonella in poultry, and Eskin told Civil Eats her team has been meeting with stakeholders ever since. They will release a draft of their new framework in the first week of October and follow it up with a public meeting in November.
Although this momentum could mean that long-awaited change is on its way, there are plenty of barriers to meaningfully reducing illnesses, given the prevalence of salmonella in chicken, the interests involved, and the regulatory barriers in place.
Performance vs. Product Standards
“The bottom line is: the current standards for salmonella are not enforceable,” Eskin says.
In fact, they haven’t been enforceable for 20 years. In 1999, the now-defunct meatpacker Supreme Beef took the USDA to court after FSIS shut one of its plants down for failing to meet salmonella standards three times in eight months. (According to a PBS report from that time, one test showed close to half of ground beef samples contained salmonella.) The meat company argued that the USDA didn’t have the authority to limit salmonella in meat, since the bacteria occurs naturally and is not a risk to consumers when the meat is thoroughly cooked. The court agreed, effectively rendering FSIS’ standards useless.
Today, FSIS still has standards for what it considers “acceptable levels” of salmonella present during processing: 9.8 percent of whole birds tested, 15.4 percent of parts, and 25 percent of ground meat. Agency inspectors test for salmonella, but if a plant is out of compliance, there’s nothing regulators can do about it. In its latest reporting through July of this year, 93 of 847 poultry plants—or 11 percent—had exceeded those limits in the past year.
Advocacy groups have long urged FSIS to scrap those standards for new ones that can be enforced; Consumer Reports, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the Consumer Federation of America, and STOP Foodborne Illness submitted a joint petition to FSIS that laid out a plan to do that in January 2021.
Last year, a salmonella outbreak in a group of products including Costco’s Kirkland Raw Stuffed Chicken with Broccoli and Cheese caused 36 illnesses and 12 hospitalizations.
They argued that if any salmonella that could be dangerous is found in chicken, FSIS should be able to immediately stop it from heading toward a grocery store shelf or restaurant. But because not all salmonella presents a health risk, depending on the strain and the amount present, that doesn’t mean the agency would have to implement a zero-tolerance policy. Instead, they could make targeted changes, and the agency’s first big move since they announced their plan to tackle the issue indicates they may take steps in that direction.
In August, FSIS announced that in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products—think packaged chicken cordon bleu—it was planning on declaring salmonella an adulterant. That term matters because suddenly, as Eskin explained it, “it means enforcement is available, period. The minute we do that, we can use every enforcement tool. Once it’s adulterated, it cannot be sold to consumers.”
FSIS started with those products, she said, because the way they’re prepared makes it difficult for eaters to cook them properly, raising the risk of illness. Some customers don’t even realize they’re not pre-cooked and think they just need to be warmed up. Last year, a salmonella outbreak in a group of products including Costco’s Kirkland Raw Stuffed Chicken with Broccoli and Cheese caused 36 illnesses and 12 hospitalizations.
FSIS plans to publish the rule detailing the new regulations in the federal register in October, when industry representatives, advocates, and anyone else who wants to will have a chance to comment before it’s finalized. “We are very mindful that this is a different approach than we’ve taken in the past,” Eskin said. “We want to give all stakeholders a chance to weigh in . . . to make sure that the policy we finalize is the best one.”
Another way FSIS could shape enforceable product standards that work for companies and consumers alike, advocates say, is to focus on the most dangerous types of salmonella—an approach that Eskin spoke at length about considering.
While about 2,500 different serotypes of salmonella exist, just a handful account for the majority of illnesses. Other prevalent varieties are seen as relatively harmless. “Salmonella Kentucky is one of the most commonly found serotypes on poultry in slaughter plants and sampling from carcasses and parts, and that serotype really doesn’t cause that many human illnesses,” explained James Kincheloe, an agricultural veterinarian who is now the food safety campaign manager at CSPI. “We need to be more specific.”
FSIS is not currently testing for serotypes, but Eskin said they are considering it. “The tests that we’ve used historically have [answered the question]: is it contaminated or not? The problem is that it doesn’t provide any focus on what has the biggest public health impact,” she said. She noted that one criticism of focusing on serotypes is that it can lead to a game of whack-a-mole: When one dangerous serotype is controlled, another may pop up to take its place.
Eskin said FSIS has also started using testing that allows inspectors to quantify the amount of salmonella found. That could feed into a new standard that is more specific about how much of a certain type of salmonella is allowed on any given product, since a higher volume makes it much more likely that the bacteria will get someone sick.
One criticism of focusing on serotypes is that it can lead to a game of whack-a-mole: When one dangerous serotype is controlled, another may pop up to take its place.
Everyone Civil Eats spoke with expects industry pushback to new product safety standards, but Kincheloe said poultry companies might not fight the standards in the same way they have against other kinds of regulations. Last year, Butterball, Perdue Farms, Tyson Foods, and Wayne Farms all signed on to join the Coalition for Poultry Safety Reform alongside CSPI and other consumer and patient advocacy groups. “This cooperation is unprecedented,” he said. “There likely will be protests from trade groups or specific segments of the poultry industry, but there are large players who are for making substantial changes to the system.”
However, in response to FSIS’ announcement that it would label salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed products, the National Chicken Council put out a statement calling the plan “not science-based or data-driven” and claimed that the decision had “the potential to shutter processing plants, cost jobs, and take safe food and convenient products off shelves.”
The Council is the loudest voice in the chicken industry, and while it does acknowledge salmonella as a pressing challenge, it says the industry is already spending millions of dollars annually to reduce contamination of a bacteria that occurs naturally in chicken. “There is no single most effective way to reduce salmonella. And there is no silver bullet or one-size-fits all approach to food safety, which is why we employ a multi-hurdle, multi-stage strategy,”
National Chicken Council spokesperson Tom Super told Civil Eats in an email. “The industry addresses salmonella through all stages of the process—from breeders to the feed mill to the farm to the processing plant and through transportation of the product.”
Back to Breeding and the Farms
Those earlier stages of the process are critical, and it’s the other place in the supply chain where advocates see regulatory loopholes. “What’s the best way to control these types of salmonella?” Kincheloe asked. “It’s in the live birds.”
Recent research has shown common salmonella strains can start as far back as the breeding hens that lay the eggs that become the chickens we eventually eat, spreading across the industry from there. And countries that have attacked the problem closer to its root have come close to eliminating it entirely.
According to a 2019 Pew analysis, governments in Sweden, Norway, and Finland all implemented strict requirements around cleaning chicken housing, on-farm testing in animals and feed, and culling infected breeding animals. They later found salmonella in less than 1 percent of the chickens they tested. In the United Kingdom, an industry-led effort to vaccinate laying hens and the parents of chickens being raised for meat was linked to a nearly 70 percent decline in illness caused by salmonella between the mid ’90s, when vaccination began, and 2010.
Advocates like Teresa Murray, the consumer watchdog for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), say vaccine requirements could be put in place for the most dangerous serotypes, and there’s some evidence that could make a difference. After a large outbreak of a type called salmonella Heidelberg in Foster Farms chicken in 2013, multiple producers began vaccinating parent chickens in addition to requiring chicks to be free of the type. Illnesses linked to that type fell dramatically over the next five years.
Governments in Sweden, Norway, and Finland all implemented strict requirements around cleaning chicken housing, on-farm testing in animals and feed, and culling infected breeding animals. They later found salmonella in less than 1 percent of the chickens they tested.
Tom Super at the National Chicken Council said that the industry has invested in on-farm controls such as “sanitation, strict biosecurity measures, litter treatments, feed treatments, and more.” He also said that the majority of breeder (parent) flocks in the country are vaccinated for multiple salmonella serotypes already. However, he did not share the exact numbers, and there is no public information on which companies are vaccinating or which types they are vaccinating against. Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress, the two companies that supply nearly all the breeding stock in the country, did not respond to requests for information. Super also said that there are several barriers to companies and farmers vaccinating the broiler flocks (the chickens destined to become meat), including limited vaccine availability in the U.S.
Either way, FSIS can’t require vaccines or other on-farm practices that might help reduce contamination, because its authority starts with slaughter. Another division of the USDA, the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), has authority on farms, but its focus is squarely on diseases that affect animal health, and salmonella doesn’t bother chickens.
“In many other countries, the comparable regulators have authority from the beginning of the supply chain to the end. We cannot dictate to growers . . . that they must vaccinate, or they must do something else,” Eskin said. “If we can bring down the loads of salmonella going into the plant, it will be much easier for the plant to do its interventions to further reduce it, she added”
The CSPI and Consumer Reports petition calls for the implementation of a “supply chain program” with multiple controls. Kincheloe is also working on teeing up legislation that would allow APHIS to more effectively address contaminants on farms that don’t affect animals but do have public health implications.
At Consumer Reports, Rogers is also hoping that a new system could include testing animals for dangerous serotypes before they enter a slaughter facility and rejecting flocks if they don’t meet standards. “Not only would that mean less salmonella downstream, but it would also force [chicken] corporations to figure out a way to lower the level of these strains associated with clinical disease,” he said.
Of course, in every discussion about salmonella, industry and government representatives inevitably end up talking about the importance of educating eaters on how to cook chicken thoroughly. Could more be done to reduce the risk they face every time they unwrap a boneless skinless breast and start breading? Absolutely. But Murray, the consumer watchdog, said that’s not where the conversation should end.
“When it comes to any kind of consumer issue, whether it’s buying something online or consuming food that could make you or your family sick, nobody takes care of you better than you,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the regulators and companies shouldn’t be doing more to protect us, too.”
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]]>The post High Levels of PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found in Fish appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Eh Mwee still remembers a fish he received over a decade ago, and—more importantly—where it came from.
Mwee, who is of Karen ethnicity and was born in Burma (now Myanmar), was 29 years old and had just arrived in Syracuse, New York, after spending 25 years in a Thai refugee camp. Food was scarce in the camp. Mwee was accustomed to eating what he could find. So when a fellow Karen refugee offered him a fish from nearby Onondaga Lake, a Superfund site that butts up against several polluting factories, he gladly accepted. “I didn’t believe anything about poison. ‘Come on, a fish is fish,’” he recalls thinking.
But his meal came from waters contaminated with industrial pollutants—including those known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) or “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to health conditions, such as cancers and impaired immune function.
Htoo Say prepares to fish in the Oswego River in New York.
PFAS are infamous for contaminating drinking water. But a growing number of studies suggest that we may also consume concerning quantities of these chemicals through food—especially fish.
Earlier this year, New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) scientists published a study finding that refugees from Burma living in the Syracuse area had elevated PFAS concentrations in their blood. Locally caught fish may be the source.
But the full extent of PFAS contamination in fish—whether from a fishing hole or supermarket counter—is not yet known. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) studies are ongoing, and researchers are still working out how best to quantify PFAS in fish, as even exceedingly low levels are now believed to threaten human health.
One concern is clear: Communities that rely on locally caught fish as a key component of their diet and culture may face the greatest risk.
Awash with PFAS
PFAS hit the manufacturing scene in the 1940s as an exciting new tool for making products more water, grease, and stain resistant.
But PFAS molecules contain carbon-fluorine bonds so strong that, once created, these “forever chemicals” do not easily break down in the environment. PFAS are increasingly showing up in food, such as beef in Michigan and produce in Maine, due to soil fertilized with contaminated wastewater sludge.
Fish are also a concern, says Heidi Pickard, a PhD candidate at Harvard University who studies PFAS in aquatic ecosystems. “The same way that [PFAS] can get into the drinking water, they can get into the surface waters and a lot of these chemicals then can accumulate into the fish.”
A 2017 study drawing on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that Americans who ate more fish and shellfish had greater PFAS concentrations in their blood than those who did not.
“The same way that [PFAS] can get into the drinking water, they can get into the surface waters and a lot of these chemicals then can accumulate into the fish.”
The EPA has been testing for PFAS in fish from select rivers since 2008 and from the Great Lakes since 2010. “In the majority of our studies we have found low levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in nearly all of the fish tissue tested, and five additional PFAS chemicals that are often found with the PFOS in fish but are less likely to be detected in ambient or drinking water,” said an EPA spokesperson in a statement to Civil Eats.
As part of their Total Diet Study (TDS), the FDA has tested for PFAS in food since 2019—including in fish from supermarket counters. They’ve detected PFAS in fish sticks and canned tuna, as well as tilapia, cod, and shrimp. But their stance is that, “Based on the best available current science, the FDA has no scientific evidence that the levels of PFAS found in the TDS samples tested to date indicate a need to avoid any particular food.”
Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemist at Harvard University, questions that messaging. “The big issue I have is how that limited set of data has been interpreted and communicated to the public,” she says, noting that standard PFAS analyses only capture a limited number of these chemicals. There are now over 9,000 PFAS; the FDA’s most recent analysis included only 20.
Sunderland also worries that standard analytical tools are not yet sensitive enough to capture PFAS concentrations in food at levels that could potentially impact human health when multiplied by many meals. “Quantifying the concentrations at low levels is hard,” says Sunderland. “But it turns out that that is what we need to do because people eat a lot of certain things.”
Because of their diets, subsistence fishers can be at risk of increased exposure to a range of environmental pollutants. “If someone eats 10 times more fish, they are going to have 10 times more exposure to whatever is in that fish,” says Jeremy FiveCrows, communications director for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) and a member of the Idaho-based Nez Perce Tribe. In the early 1990s the commission conducted a survey of tribal members’ fish eating habits. The study revealed that they ate 6 to 11 times more fish than the general U.S. population, which at the time ate 6.5 grams per day.
CRITFC uses this data to advocate for cleaner water standards to protect those who eat more fish. The organization is not currently focused on PFAS, as the chemicals have not yet been found in Columbia Basin salmonids, says Dianne Barton, CRITFC water quality coordinator and member of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians. But they follow PFAS data as it becomes available.
FiveCrows says he tries to direct tribal members away from fishing in regions where fish consumption advisories are in place because of pesticides, metals, and other contaminants. But simply eating fewer fish is not a solution. FiveCrows says he often hears regional tribal members say, “I’m going to eat salmon because it’s my culture. It’s who I am.”
Meals from New York Waters
On a warm June afternoon, Mwee sifts through a bait box by the Oswego River, about 15 miles north of where it runs into Onondaga Lake. He holds up a purplish lure—meant to draw walleye and bass, he tells me.
Mwee doesn’t do a lot of fishing, but he’s brought me here to speak with his friend, Htoo Say, who is also Karen, and who visits this or other local fishing haunts with friends and family nearly every weekend.
Say, who is 23, arrived in Syracuse in 2014 after spending nine years in a Thai refugee camp. He had never fished until his brother-in-law took him to this spot five years ago. He was immediately hooked. “I love fishing,” says Say, noting the fresh air. Whatever he catches, he gives to his sister and father.
For many Karen refugees, fishing is more than a hobby—it’s a rare, accessible source of abundance. “[Burma] is a very poor country. They don’t have enough food,” says Mwee. “The first time we come here, we’re gonna eat everything.”
In 2015 and 2016, scientists from the NYSDOH and the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry began exploring whether regularly eating fish from the waters in and near Onondaga Lake, might be associated with increased levels of PFAS and other environmental pollutants in blood.
“[Burma] is a very poor country. They don’t have enough food. The first time we come here, we’re gonna eat everything.”
“We wanted to understand a baseline level of body burdens of contaminants to better inform public health actions to help reduce exposures for these vulnerable populations,” says study author Sanghamitra Savadatti, assistant director of the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology at NYSDOH.
Over 300 refugees from Myanmar and Bhutan and 89, mostly minority, U.S.-born anglers offered up blood samples and responded to a questionnaire about fish consumption habits in the past year.
More than half of Karen participants said they had eaten 135 fish meals or more from the region’s waters in the previous year. The PFAS results, published earlier this year, also showed that blood from Karen volunteers contained a median PFOS level nearly 10 times greater than the general U.S. population. For another PFAS, known as PFDA, the level was nearly 27 times greater.
Other refugees from Myanmar ate a median of 103 locally caught fish meals a year. And their blood also contained elevated PFAS levels—three times that of the general population for PFOS and over seven times for PFDA.
Other study participants (not from Myanmar) ate relatively fewer fish and did not have elevated PFAS levels in their blood.
Fishing on Onondaga Lake in 2017. (Photo CC-licensed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation)
Earlier this year, this same research team similarly reported that refugees from Myanmar in Buffalo, New York had blood PFOS levels six times that of the general population.
Though these studies suggest a link between local fish and PFAS, it isn’t clear whether fish are truly the exposure source. Overall, the Syracuse study found that refugees from Burma ate more fish and also had higher PFAS levels than the other participants. But within this group, the researchers weren’t able to show a statistically significant correlation between the two. They explained that it’s hard to show PFAS increasing with fish consumption when all participants ate fish in high quantities.
It’s also possible that the elevated PFAS levels stemmed from other factors, including exposures predating time in Syracuse.
The potential health risks of these high exposures are also not entirely known, in part because the toxicology studies are all done on animals, which often excrete PFAS chemicals at different rates than humans. This month, the EPA announced an interim updated drinking water health advisory for PFOS, as well as another PFAS known as PFOA, suggesting that “some negative health effects may occur with concentrations of PFOA or PFOS in water that are near zero.”
The EPA’s decision was based on studies suggesting that exposure to PFOS and PFOA can reduce responsiveness to vaccines in children, though they note other potential health concerns such as decreased birth weight and cancer. EPA scientists are still assessing the toxicity of PFDA.
Mwee suspects that his fellow Karen refugees fish less now than at the time of the survey, since they’ve become more accustomed to a greater variety of accessible food. But many continue to fish simply for enjoyment, and also to supplement their diets.
More Data Coming
We’ll soon learn more about the threat of PFAS in fish, both to subsistence fishers and the general population. “The TDS results indicated that additional data on PFAS in commercially caught fish and shellfish will help the FDA better understand potential exposure,” the FDA said in a statement to Civil Eats. Scientists there are currently analyzing 80 commercially caught, primarily imported, seafood samples purchased in the Washington, D.C.-area for PFAS.
This summer, the EPA also began testing for PFAS in fish in U.S. lakes as part of their 2022 National Lakes Assessment. According to the agency’s PFAS Strategic Roadmap, the data will “allow EPA to better understand unique impacts on subsistence fishers, who may eat fish from contaminated waterbodies in higher quantities.”
Academics are also working to quantify PFAS in fish, often in collaboration with those who are potentially impacted. In Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Harvard’s Pickard studies PFAS in fish from waters below a military base that historically used aqueous firefighting foam—a common source of PFAS contamination.
Pickard is a member of STEEP (Sources, Transport, Exposure, and Effects of PFASs), a collaboration between Harvard, the University of Rhode Island, and the Silent Spring Institute. “A big part of the STEEP program is doing bidirectional research,” explains Pickard, “asking the communities what their needs are, what their questions are, and then forming our scientific questions around that.”
The team is collaborating with the local Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to test the fish and shellfish in waters where the tribal members fish.
Further south, endocrine toxicologist Scott Belcher of North Carolina State University’s Center for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS is studying fish in the Cape Fear River, which was contaminated with PFAS from the Chemours chemical manufacturing plant in Fayetteville.
In 2020, Belcher’s team reported that striped bass living in these waters contain total PFAS levels, on average, 40 times greater than hatchery raised counterparts. There’s a moratorium on catching striped bass in the region because the population is in decline—PFAS, Belcher hypothesizes, could be a contributing factor.
He is now studying PFAS in other fish. “The high levels that we saw in the striped bass really motivated me to look more closely,” he says. He also studies alligators—a charismatic species that he chose, in part, to draw more public attention to the issue. While conducting his striped bass study, Belcher often saw families out fishing and groups having catfish fries on Wednesdays. In 2020, the state awarded over 20,000 subsistence fishing licenses.
As more data comes in, PFAS fish consumption advisories are popping up in states across the country, from Oregon and Wisconsin to Michigan and Maine.
Audrey Van Genechten, a public health specialist in outreach and education with the NYSDOH’s Center for Environmental Health, is working with Karen and Burmese anglers in focus groups across several New York locations, including Syracuse, to develop safe fishing guides geared to their communities. “We’re going through local waters with them and finding out what they call the waters,” she says. “We’re taking it to the community and going through it page by page and they are giving us feedback on what works and what doesn’t.”
Mwee hasn’t been involved with the state’s research. But he doesn’t eat the fish from Onondaga Lake anymore. The Karen community now refers to it as “Noh Ner Au,” he tells me, meaning “Stinky Lake,” because they understand that it’s polluted.
On a broader level, educating communities about fishing risks is critical for keeping people safe. Long term, the goal should be to clean up the water, says FiveCrows of CRITFC, “so [fish] don’t get contaminated in the first place.”
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]]>The post The US Is a Dumping Ground for Illegal Seafood. Some Lawmakers Want to Clean Up the Market appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the end, the eels were worth an estimated $160 million. Over four years, they trickled through U.S. seaports in 138 shipping containers that eight people were later accused of importing illegally.
In March, a grand jury indicted the CEO of American Eel Depot, a New Jersey company, along with three members of the staff and four business affiliates in association with the alleged crimes. U.S. attorneys charged that the eels—packaged and labeled as unagi—were illegally harvested as juveniles in Europe and Asia, then shipped around the world to disguise their origins. They were raised to adulthood in a Chinese fish farm and sent to the United States as purportedly legal fare.
Those 138 shipping containers represent just a tiny portion of the illegal seafood that is sold in America annually. According to a report by the U.S. International Trade Commission, illegal seafood accounted for $2.4 billion in sales in 2019, or nearly 11 percent of $22 billion in seafood imports that year. Should the allegations against American Eel Depot prove true, nabbing them is a coup for federal investigators, a rare win in an oft-elusive struggle to slow the speed of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) seafood coming through U.S. ports in huge volumes. It has been a problem for years, but legislation currently in Congress aims to advance efforts to curtail it.
“IUU fishing really undermines all of the progress the U.S. and other countries around the world have made in trying to more sustainably manage their fisheries to ensure that we have fish forever,” said Beth Lowell, who oversees campaigns to deter illegal fishing at the environmental nonprofit Oceana. “That’s of course important because of food security, coastal economies, and people rely on these fisheries for jobs but also for food.”
Lowell describes IUU this way: fishing without a permit, ignoring catch limits, fishing in restricted areas where marine wildlife is harmed or habitat destroyed, or fishing where there’s no regulation or reporting at all.
“Illegal fishing really undermines all of the progress the U.S. and other countries around the world have made in trying to more sustainably manage their fisheries to ensure that we have fish forever.”
The United States already restricts such abuse in its domestic fisheries. Ecologically speaking, they are among the most tightly regulated in the world, and national labor laws prevent the forced labor issues often tied to seafood elsewhere. But fishermen working in the U.S. regularly compete against ill-gotten—and often cheaper—imports. In 2016, the nation began implementing the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) to help change that. SIMP creates a paper trail for certain seafood imports and tracks those fish from the docks, through distributors, and then to buyers. That documentation aids law enforcement and deters the sort of scheme prosecutors say American Eel Depot devised.
The SIMP, however, only targets 13 species groups. They’re the most frequently imported and illegally or mislabeled seafood in America—including tuna, shrimp, and Atlantic cod—but they represent only 45 percent of the nation’s seafood imports.
New legislation introduced last year by U.S. Representatives Jared Huffman (D-California) and Garret Graves (R-Louisiana) could expand the rules to all imported seafood, requiring importers to keep records about where fish were harvested and landed, and the chain of custody before they arrive in ports. The expansion would net hundreds of other species. The legislation also proposes to expand data requirements, establish seafood labeling, and beef up enforcement.
After initially stalling, the proposal became separate iterations of new bills in the House and Senate. The most viable is now the America COMPETES Act, which mostly pertains to manufacturing and has the best chance of becoming law, though both the House and Senate have passed versions of the bills. Efforts to reconcile both are now underway, but efforts to combat IUU fishing generally have strong bipartisan support in America—five of the last six presidential administrations supported efforts to keep IUU seafood out of the country. This latest effort has so far been hailed as a success by environmental and labor advocates. It also has support from domestic fishers and others in the seafood industry.
An Uneven Playing Field
Nathan Rickard is one such supporter. Rickard is an attorney who specializes in trade remedies for the Southern Shrimp Alliance. Right now, his is a big job. Eighty-five percent of seafood in America is imported, ripe for the illicit finfare that ends up in grocery stores, restaurants, and prepared foods. Rickard says shrimp make up 27 percent of those imports, which makes it hard for domestic shrimpers to make an honest living while they compete with cheaper, illegally gotten products. Every day for 19 years, Rickard has helped them push back against this illegal tide. And that’s how much effort it takes: every day for 19 years.
When something shows up at the border, he says, the ability to trace it back to the pond or boat that it came from “is going to be incredibly helpful in putting a measure of accountability in this industry,” he said.
Expanding the SIMP could make it easier, for example, to track imports from nations including China, India, Thailand, and Vietnam, which pay duties on certain shrimp products to make sure they don’t skirt the rules. Those duties help keep the playing field level with countries like China, which have given subsidies to shrimp producers, enabling them to land cheap shrimp in the U.S. market, bottoming out prices for domestic shrimpers.
A Shrimp Boat At Sunrise In the Gulf of Mexico
Those domestic shrimpers fish in small boats between the southeast tip of Texas and the outer banks of North Carolina. Their catch is capped to ensure the health of the species. They are also required to use technology that keeps turtles from being ensnared in their gear and to abide by a host of other rules the National Marine Fishery Service decrees. Those fishers’ landings are closely monitored to ensure compliance, and domestic fishing is also overseen by marine biologists that often ride aboard vessels, collecting data on fishing practices and the health of various species.
But those shrimpers must compete with Gulf shrimpers from Mexico, who don’t have comparable catch limits, have differing labor requirements, and aren’t required to turtle-proof their gear. And some of the farmed shrimp they’re competing against from abroad can not only harm mangroves and other sensitive ecosystems, it can also be tank-farmed in nations that do not regulate antibiotics or chemical use. Chinese aquaculture, for example, can often be identified simply by testing it for antibiotic residue, Rickard said.
“Those companies just disappear the moment that anybody comes knocking or looks into stuff. That shouldn’t happen with food products.”
Eyeing the proposed legislation, he added, “There are so many different things about the law that are promising going forward.” As one example, he pointed to a provision that would require all seafood importers to have an International Fisheries Trade Permit.
“On all the shrimp trade fraud that we were facing, it was these . . . fly-by-night companies that would just open and start importing huge amounts of stuff in the U.S. They were operating out of post office boxes, FedEx boxes,” Rickard said. “Those companies just disappear the moment that anybody comes knocking or looks into stuff. That shouldn’t happen with food products.”
If all seafood importers were required to apply for permits, that address data could direct investigations of those fly-by-night companies, including of forced labor associated with illegal seafood.
Environmental groups echo a need for collecting basic information about all seafood from importers: Noting what type of fish was caught or raised, and where and how the fishermen or farmer was licensed, can help the National Marine Fishery Service use that information to identify the highest-risk shipments and more effectively target scofflaws. Maybe somebody reported they caught a fish where it isn’t found; maybe they described a license that doesn’t exist; or maybe they fished somewhere where the season was closed. Expanding SIMP could help punish these abuses—and discourage people from continuing to skirt the law.
Loopholes, Reimports Pose a Challenge
As long as there are loopholes—for species, for nations—schemes that evade such tracking are ongoing and bedeviling. And they’re increasingly an American problem: The European Union is adopting tougher laws, and Canada, Japan, and Mexico are making progress toward tighter borders, while the United States is becoming the world’s dumping ground for illegally caught seafood.
Consider that unagi from American Eel Depot, for example. U.S. attorneys say it was illegally harvested by fishers in The Netherlands and Ukraine, where juvenile eels, called elvers, are endangered. In an indictment, those fishers were described as part of “a multi-billion dollar international black market for freshwater eels” that flourishes around the globe. Eels are a popular sushi ingredient, but due to their complex biology, they can’t be bred in captivity, only reared there.
Traditional eel fisherman Peter Carter holds an eel at first light near Outwell, England.
In the indictment, American Eel Depot is charged with making deposits to foreign bank accounts for payment to the fishers who shipped elvers to American Eel contacts in Thailand and Hong Kong, at points mislabeling them as live crabs and scrubbing the shipping papers of any mention of the company. Some ended up at a facility in China, the indictment says, where they were reared to adulthood and processed. By the time they made it to the U.S., American Eel Depot was allegedly labeling them as American and telling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as much.
That would have been legit—if it were true: Eels are endangered in Europe and Japan, but not in Maine. Fishermen there fetch as much as $2,000 a pound for some of the only legally harvestable eels in the world. And because 20 percent of the 85 percent of seafood that is imported annually to the U.S. market is actually “reimported” (meaning caught in America but processed overseas), those eels could have been American. Similar reimport issues affect salmon, tunas, and a host of other seafood species often processed in China. Disguising illegal fare as American also greatly muddies enforcement of protections for endangered species.
The Cost of Making Gains
Not everybody welcomes tighter rules, however. For example, the seafood education nonprofit National Fisheries Institute, along with a coalition of seafood businesses, sued the Obama administration after the administration began implementing the SIMP in 2016. At the time, the litigants argued that the National Marine Fisheries Service lacked the authority to regulate seafood fraud and made a number of errors in implementing the program. A federal court upheld the SIMP a year later, but the group maintained that it would cost American companies $53 million in record-keeping and boost the price of seafood for consumers. The litigants included companies from the middle of the seafood supply chain, like restaurant chains and seafood processors who buy imports for sale to grocery stores, restaurants and consumers.
“Seafood traceability helps all branches in the supply chain, from the fishermen all the way to the final point of sale. Right now we put a lot of pressure on the individual consumer to make choices on what seafood they’re going to buy.”
This opaque middle—a place where products change hands frequently—is also tough to track. Oceana’s Lowell said the proposed legislation would trace fish through that space, where it would ultimately prevent mislabeling for grocers, restaurants and consumers.
“Seafood traceability helps all branches in the supply chain, from the fishermen all the way to the final point of sale, because it gives you a chain of custody of the product throughout the supply chain,” she said. “Right now we put a lot of pressure on the individual consumer to make choices on what seafood they’re going to buy. If you had built-in assurances that at least what you were getting was legally caught, I think that would be good for both the end seller and the end buyer.”
At FishWise, a nonprofit that helps seafood companies respond to environmental and social supply chain issues, that notion also gets support, as do plans in the proposed legislation that would synchronize the government’s ability to respond to labor violations in the seafood supply chain. The legislation proposes to formally expand the definition of IUU fishing under U.S. law to include human trafficking, forced labor, and labor rights violations, which would enable critical government entities and law enforcement to work more cohesively to combat them. It would also increase data requirements in documenting labor conditions and expand the authority of the U.S. to revoke port privileges from boats associated with IUU fishing.
“We would like labor and legal harvest to be taken together, if possible,” said Sara Lewis, who directs the traceability division at FishWise. “We’re not shifting regulatory authority as much as we’re allowing for better communication and better coordination of tools and strategies to address both of those things.”
She said the effort would greatly ease the burden for companies that would like to improve on both within their supply chains, which right now requires doubling up on efforts to address the problems separately.
“It makes sense that a product could not be legally harvested if it was harvested using forced or other coerced labor,” Lewis added.
Should the legislation pass—it is likely to be voted on again this session—Lewis and others foresee more work ahead, navigating a future of advanced data tools that help forecast risk and monitor crews at sea. Advocates suggest that, if it passes, there will also likely need to be efforts to adequately fund the implementation of any SIMP expansion and urging the National Marine Fisheries Service to use SIMP data to target investigations, rather than the standardized audits of the past. Grocers, restaurants, and seafood producers are also likely to be drawn into conversations about labeling and transparency as more data about seafood sourcing becomes available.
“We’re making a lot of progress in the conversation,” Lewis said. “The NGO community, the industry, and the government are not as far apart as one might think; we’re actually all moving toward a common set of issues.”
The post The US Is a Dumping Ground for Illegal Seafood. Some Lawmakers Want to Clean Up the Market appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Glass, Plastic, Or PLA? Dairies Struggle to Replace Single-Use Bottles appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Alexandre Family Farm prides itself on being America’s first certified organic regenerative dairy. It’s a large-scale operation—4,500 mature cows pastured on about 9,000 acres—and it successfully uses rotational grazing and compost applications to boost soil health, build up carbon, and foster biodiversity.
But one aspect of its operation remains contentious: the packaging. Like most dairy products in the U.S., Alexandre Family Farm’s milk and yogurt are sold in plastic jugs and containers, to the chagrin of some customers. Most plastic packaging is made from fossil fuels and more than 90 percent of it is not recycled. Instead, it fills our landfills, ends up as tiny particles in our soil and our bodies, and more than 8 million tons of it is dumped into oceans annually.
As more dairies turn to organic and regenerative practices, consumers are pushing for packaging that eliminates single-use plastics, and dairies like Alexandre are actively looking for new solutions. But, it turns out, there is no simple fix. Switching to glass milk bottles is one approach that has become popular among some consumers, but it comes with the potential for high carbon emissions and logistical challenges. New technologies, including containers made from plants, aren’t yet optimized for holding liquids. And, even if they were, our waste systems can’t process them, meaning most end up in landfills.
“We’re not happy to use plastic . . . but there aren’t yet alternative solutions, especially for beverage companies,” said Robert Brewer, Alexandre’s chief operating officer, who has been focused on finding new packaging since he was hired two years ago. “We just can’t continue to put billions of pounds of waste into the ocean and expect to have life on earth.”
The dairy industry’s pursuit of new packaging also reflects the ongoing debate about whether society’s focus should be on inventing and refining disposable single-use packaging that is compostable or biodegradable or on improving recycling and reinforcing a circular economy that continues to rely on plastic. The makers of plant-based milks (almond, oat, rice, and soy)—many of which are also sold in plastic bottles—face similar conundrums.
Retailers, Distributors Refuse Glass Milk Bottles
Regardless of how milk is produced, in the U.S. most of it is sold in plastic containers made from virgin high-density polyethylene, also known as HDPE or No. 2 plastic. Nearly two-thirds of milk containers sold in North America are HDPE bottles, followed by cartons (24 percent) and plastic bags (7 percent). In recent years, some dairy companies—including Alexandre Family Farm—are turning to containers made from transparent, sturdy polyethylene terephthalate, which is also known as PET or No. 1 plastic, and commonly used in water bottles.
Reba Brindley, a project manager at the University of California, San Francisco, said she gave up on buying Alexandre’s milk specifically because it came in plastic bottles—a choice she finds incompatible with the farm’s other values.
“I am impressed by their work and dedication,” Brindley said of Alexandre. “But considering how little plastic is recycled and what an inefficient process it is, I don’t see how they can be held up as an environmental example when they pump out plastic bottles . . . I just can’t handle throwing out a plastic bottle every week.”
Brindley switched to milk from the Straus Family Creamery, which comes in reusable glass containers. “There is so much emphasis on recycling when I think we need to move towards reuse and reduce,” said Brindley.
Brindley is not alone in believing that glass—once the material of choice for milk bottles—is the dairy industry’s best shot at sustainability. Over the past decade, glass manufacturers have seen a resurgence of glass milk bottles across the U.S., particularly among small dairies and creameries. Some companies offer old-fashioned glass milk delivery to consumers’ doorsteps, while others offer reusable glass bottles that and can be returned to grocery stores, as in the case with Straus.
But while using glass may keep plastic out of landfills, prevent some toxic chemicals from leaching into our milk, and cater to our nostalgia and notions of improved taste and freshness, it’s not a panacea. Each packaging system has environmental impacts that go beyond the issue of solid waste, said Gregory Keoleian, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Those environmental impacts stem from material production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life processing and include energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use.
“There will be tradeoffs with respect to these impacts and also between packaging performance and cost,” Keoleian said.
Glass bottles weigh much more than other containers, so they take more energy to transport and result in higher transport-based emissions per volume of packaged milk. Extracting raw materials for new glass is also energy intensive, fueled mainly by natural gas. And only 31 percent of all glass containers are recycled—most end up in landfills, where they will take more 1 million years to decompose. Despite these drawbacks, when Keoleian and his colleagues studied milk packaging systems, they found that glass refillable bottles can outcompete single use containers such as plastic HDPE milk jugs and gable-top cartons with respect to energy and carbon footprints as long as they are reused at least five times—and the savings increases at higher reuse rates.
Keoleian’s research also found that refillable plastic bottles—which are not used much today— can have an even lower environmental impact than glass because they can have higher reuse rates. But the most sustainable choice for milk packaging? He says it’s lightweight plastic pouches, which are used mostly in Canada and have a significantly smaller environmental impact than reusable glass or plastic. Aluminum, which is recycled at very high rates, could also serve as a sustainable packaging for milk.
But most consumers want traditional bottles, Alexandre’s Brewer said, hence his dairy’s search for an alternative to standard plastic. Brewer was vice-president of sales and distribution for Straus from 2004 to 2008, overseeing its glass bottle reuse system. At the time, a significant number of retailers and distributors were willing to offer glass bottles, Brewer said. Today, it’s difficult to get them into large grocery chains.
The system, he adds, is a logistical nightmare. Straus buys the glass bottles, made of approximately 30 percent recycled glass, sanitizes, fills, and counts them. They are then sent to a distributor, who is charged a deposit. The distributor delivers the bottles to retailers who, in turn, are charged another deposit, and retailers then sell the milk to customers, who get charged yet another deposit. The whole process is then repeated backwards, until the used bottles are returned to Straus for sanitizing and refilling. In all, it entails six different accounting steps, Brewer said. In addition, the bottles can break during shipping, increasing costs.
So while Straus bottles are reused an average of five times before they are recycled (that number is primarily driven by the consumer return rate, which prior to the pandemic was close to 80 percent, and by ink wearing out on bottle labels), it’s a limited retail niche.
“It’s not a bad system, it’s just that we were told clearly by retailers and distributors that they were not willing to do it,” Brewer said. “They told us, ‘If you want to come into our stores, you have to put the milk in plastic bottles.’ So the choice was existential.”
A spokesperson from Straus Family Creamery, which has bottled its milk in reusable glass since 1994, told Civil Eats that “it may take longer for some stores to adapt and implement new sustainability programs.” But, the creamery added, the bottle logistics and accounting are not onerous once in place and “when retailers realize that there is demand among their shoppers . . . they are willing to invest time in developing the program with us and our distributor partners.” The creamery’s analysis has shown that its glass reuse program prevents approximately 500,000 pounds of milk containers and plastic out of the landfills each year.
There’s one limiting factor: Straus operates a regional distribution model, with its milk sold in California and other Western states, primarily in natural food co-ops and independent grocers, as well as a few retail chains (Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Fred Meyer). Because it’s minimally processed, the milk’s shelf life is also shorter, making it more difficult to sell in other regions.
“The reusable glass program would be more costly to implement in a national distribution model,” the spokesperson said.
Alternatives to Single-Use Plastic in the Works
With glass no longer an option, Alexandre Family Farm is searching for other green options to replace its PET bottles. Brewer has worked with the Climate Collaborative—a natural foods industry group of companies committed to climate action—on finding new packaging solutions and assessment tools.
Virgin plastic bottle alternatives, including recycled plastics and plant-based bioplastics, are being rapidly developed and have attracted significant attention from the food industry, Brewer said. But for now they’re mostly suitable for dry packaging.
“The packaging is in the final steps [of development] and then it’s about manufacturers being willing to make the packaging,” he said.
Bioplastics—the most commonly used being polylactic acid or PLA—have characteristics similar to plastic, but are made from plants such as corn, sugarcane, sugar beet, or cassava. Bioplastics help companies continue with their disposable, single-use packaging status quo. But because they are biodegradable or compostable, and because they can reduce non-renewable energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions, they’re championed as a greener solution to stemming the growth of plastic pollution. Bioplastics are now used to make everything from bottles to cups to cutlery and bags.
But PLA and other plant-based materials are far from perfect. Bioplastics also require a complex mixture of chemical additives to improve their functionality—and because of those additives, biopastics are just as toxic as other plastics, according to a 2020 study. And PLA requires specialized, high-temperature industrial composting facilities to decompose. Because few such facilities exist and because most consumers assume they can simply dispose of plant-based packaging in garbage or compost bins, most PLA containers end up in oceans or landfills where they emit methane and don’t actually decompose for hundreds of years. And when PLA containers are recycled alongside other plastics they tend to look nearly the same, making it impossible to separate them out and prevent them from contaminating recycling streams.
And while bioplastics tend to generate fewer emissions in their lifecycle—since the crops used to make them absorb carbon out of the atmosphere—those crops also tend to be genetically modified, grown using monoculture agricultural practices, and sprayed heavily with pesticides. They also require a lot of water and take vast amounts of land out of food production. Bioplastics don’t create as enough of a barrier between milk and the outside world, meaning they let in some gas and light that degrades and eventually allows the milk to spoil faster, Brewer said. They are also more brittle than plastic bottles.
PLA milk bottles aren’t yet available—but the dairy is looking into bottles currently being developed by PLA Bottles EU, a company based in the Netherlands which has an ambitious goal of collecting 90 percent of its bottles after use, 90 percent of the time, assuring they do not end up in landfills. Alexandre is also evaluating containers made with PLA beads by Gaia Herbs and Earth Renewable Technologies as an alternative to its plastic yogurt tubs.
One major challenge, Brewer said, is the fact that legacy plastic packaging manufacturers tend to be unwilling to run unfamiliar resins through their molding machines, because they fear gumming up the machines. Cost is also an issue since testing milk bottles made with custom molds is a sizeable investment, he said. Now that Alexandre Family Farm has become a successful brand and has increased its packaging purchases, the company has a better chance of convincing plastic manufacturers to try something new and it can afford to pay for testing the alternatives.
“We’ve grown a lot in the past few years,” said Brewer. “So now our plastic usage is large enough that it’s a priority for us.”
Another option Alexandre is exploring for its packaging is post-consumer (recycled) plastic. It’s another recent trend in the food industry, with several U.S. beverage companies already in the process of switching to bottles made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). While no dairy company in the U.S. is currently using such technology, it’s been deployed in other parts of the world. The Austrian milk processing company NÖM AG introduced a milk bottle made of 100 percent rPET in 2019. Similarly, the Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina and New Zealand dairy producer Lewis Road Creamery have both switched to bottles made entirely of recycled PET.
Is Chemical Recycling the Future of Food Packaging?
Alexandre Family Farm is also teaming up with King Plastics, a food container manufacturer in Orange, California, to do a test run of a yogurt container made of chemically recycled polypropylene (rPP), by using the latest advances in plastic recycling.
Polypropylene—one of the most widely used materials in packaging for consumer goods, including yogurt tubs—is currently marked with number 5 and is one of the least recycled post-consumer plastics (just under 1 percent of it is recycled). Most curbside recycling programs don’t accept it. Since it’s difficult to distinguish between food grade and non-food grade containers during the sorting process, what little polypropylene is recycled is potentially contaminated and unavailable for food-grade packaging. Instead, most is reused by decking companies, furniture manufacturers, and crate and bin makers.
Enter chemical recycling, an emerging industry that promises a solution to the plastic pollution problem by recycling plastics in an infinite recycling loop. The process is purported to “purify the plastics” at the molecular level and restores them to a “virgin-like” quality that’s devoid of contaminants, colors, or odors. Chemically recycled plastic can potentially be reused an infinite number of times, while mechanically recycled plastic falls apart after just a few uses. Chemical recycling also has the potential to recycle multiple plastics and composites together and may still be used for food-grade packaging.
When it comes to polypropylene, a new chemical recycling process invented by Procter & Gamble could vastly increase the amount recycled. PureCycle is developing facilities to collect, sort, and chemically recycle polypropylene plastic. The company will provide chemically recycled resin (rPP) to King Plastics to make the test yogurt containers for Alexandre Family Farm.
Tom Bryan, director of sales with King Plastics, said chemical plastic recycling has many advantages over manufacturing new packaging with plant-based bioplastics. Not only does chemical recycling result in a cleaner product that’s food-grade safe as compared to mechanically recycled polypropylene, Bryan said, but container manufacturers across the country who currently use virgin polypropylene could use existing machines and processes. If they wanted to make containers with bioplastics, on the other hand, they would have to invest in new equipment infrastructure.
“We think chemical recycling is a faster and better solution,” Bryan said. “There’s already a recycling infrastructure in the U.S., the pieces are there, and there’s more investment year after year. And recycling feeds into the circular economy.”
Even if manufacturing compostable or biodegradable containers made of plant-based material was easier or less costly, Bryan added, the lack of industrial composting facilities that can handle these products makes their current use questionable.
“A lot of brands are trying to find compostable, disposable plastic so the customer can feel good about throwing it away,” Bryan said. “But it’s a false narrative meant to convince customers they don’t bear any responsibility for those products. Right now, the technology just isn’t there.”
But chemical recycling’s technology is also untested and not yet commercially viable. So while billions in capital are being invested and startups in the U.S. and Europe have announced plans to build chemical recycling facilities, critics point out that quickly building enough commercial plants to make a dent in the plastic pollution problem doesn’t seem feasible. And a report published last year by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) reveals that the chemical recycling process generates chemical byproducts toxic to the environment and to human health, is extremely energy intensive, and produces high greenhouse gas emissions.
“Chemical recycling . . . is not at present, and is unlikely to be in the next 10 years, an effective form of plastic waste management,” the report’s authors conclude.
Keoleian, the University of Michigan professor, said the U.S. should focus on developing a circular economy that aims to reduce all lifecycle impacts, including the resource extraction stage and energy use, not just solid waste. Reducing overall consumption and production of plastic is also key, he said, as is improving the recycling process. A major challenge is that the market doesn’t currently drive a circular economy, he added, because markets for recyclables are weak, meaning “the costs of petroleum and the natural gas feedstocks needed to make plastic are relatively inexpensive compared to the value of recycled resin.” The cost of plastic disposal is also relatively cheap. In addition, he said, the costs of climate change aren’t currently reflected in the economy.
“Until we put a price on carbon and better value the use of nonrenewable resources, it will be more difficult to create sustainable solutions,” Keoleian said.
While none of the milk packaging choices are impact-free, it’s clear that consumers have a role in reducing the environmental impact of the milk they buy. And they can start by using it all before it spoils. Keoleian’s research showed that packaging impacts can be dwarfed by the impacts of consumer food waste.
The post Glass, Plastic, Or PLA? Dairies Struggle to Replace Single-Use Bottles appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Concerns About Workplace Safety as Meatpacking Plants Recruit Foreign Visa Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Colored hard hats distinguish different roles and jobs at Seaboard Foods, a major meatpacking plant in Guymon, Oklahoma. Senior management have green. Supervisors wear dark blue. Foreign workers on visas don yellow-green.
But Seaboard is part of a small but growing trend in the meatpacking industry, which already largely relied on an immigrant workforce: More foreigners are being hired to perform the dangerous job of cutting and packaging America’s meat.
In 2015, six plants requested to hire foreign workers. Last year, the number almost doubled, to 11, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data. (Data for 2021 is not yet available.)
Each year since 2017, Seaboard has employed at least a hundred workers on H-2B visas. Under the federal program, businesses can hire foreigners for temporary jobs when faced with labor shortages. Most visa holders work as landscapers, maids and cooks.
Industry experts said foreign workers — whose time in the states is tied to the employer sponsoring their visas and, generally, aren’t members of plants’ unions — are probably less likely to speak out about working conditions in an industry where lacerations and amputations are common.
“(Plants) need to employ a lot of people, and you have to push them as hard as possible,” said Joshua Specht, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied the meat industry. “The best way to do that, obviously, is to focus on employing people who are rather marginal and who are willing to put up with being overworked.”
The North American Meat Institute, meatpacking’s lobbying arm that often speaks for the industry, did not respond to multiple requests for comment over several weeks about the increased use of H-2B visas or criticisms of plant safety.
The Department of Labor approves applications for H-2B visa labor and ensures the visa workers’ rights.
“The Department takes very seriously violations of H-2B program requirements and strives to protect the wages, working conditions, and safety of all workers, especially during these difficult and challenging times,” agency spokesman Grant Vaught said in a statement.
“The company gives them a different color of hat,” he said. “That alone makes them a target by the supervisor, by anyone who wants to mistreat workers.”
Employing H-2B workers from October through June allows the company to keep up with high demand, and it treats every employee equally, a Seaboard Foods spokesman said. All receive a starting wage of $17.25, paid holidays and health insurance, he said.
“The H-2B participants are treated exactly the same as full-time production workers,” he said.
Because more than a thousand employees are on the production floor during a shift, different hat colors allow workers and supervisors to easily identify each other, he said.
To qualify as an H-2B employer, a company must pay a wage equal to or above the industry’s prevailing wage or the area’s minimum wage. But, across all industries, H-2B workers are often paid less than U.S. workers, according to the progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute.
Another requirement for a company hiring H-2B visa labor is to show a shortage of available workers. However, according to an EPI report, the U.S. economy shows no sign of labor shortages in the industries that often use H-2B visas. DOL data in the report shows about 5 million unemployed workers in occupations with H-2B approvals.
One criticism of the visa program is that positions can become semi-permanent because companies request extensions.
“It really has become a way to replace labor in the United States for cheap jobs,” said Victoria Mesa, a civil rights attorney with the Immigrant Justice Project at Southern Poverty Law Center.
The situation where a person’s time in the country — and so their ability to make a paycheck—is tied their employer is similar to the H-2B’s agricultural counterpart, the H-2A visa. Workers often endure abuse and exploitation because they don’t want to be deported.
Centro de Los Derechos del Immigrante, Inc., an organization that helps to improve the working conditions of Mexico-based migrant workers in the U.S., interviewed 100 workers on H-2A visas and concluded all had had their rights violated.
“Many find that when they arrive in the U.S. conditions are far different from those promised,” reads the organization’s 2020 report. “Even workers who described a generally positive experience with their employer labored in a workplace with at least one serious legal violation.”
Angela Stuesse, anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the meatpacking industry allows workers to endure repetitive labor that leads to injuries.
“People are standing on the line, shoulder to shoulder with people on either side of them. And they’re making the same cut over and over and over,” said Stuesse.”It’s a hostile environment. You’re not expected to get sick, you’re not expected to get injured.”
High injury rates, lots of languages
Meatpacking plant employees often deal with high rates of illness and severe injuries.
Meat and poultry workers experienced about 160 cases per 10,000 employees in 2013, compared to about 40 cases for manufacturing overall, according to a 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report. The injury rate decreased between 2004 and 2013, but it was still higher than manufacturing overall.
Both those rates are likely higher because workers and employers may underreport injuries and illnesses, according to the report.
Specht, the industry historian, said the meatpacking industry has a long history of worker exploitation.
Initially, meatpacking plants were built in populated cities, giving workers an opportunity to protect themselves by creating unions, he said. However, after World War II, new meatpacking companies began to migrate to rural areas and did not continue to use a traditional union workforce.
With the move to rural areas, plants sought a workforce that was willing to work cheaply and live away from city amenities, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study. They turned to Latin American immigrants and, more recently, African refugees.
In 2015, about a quarter of all meat and poultry workers were foreign-born non-citizens, according to the GAO report.
The numerous languages spoken at a plant attest to its diverse workforce. One South Dakota plant employs a workforce where about 40 languages are spoken, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
But the many languages can also foster an inability for workers to protect themselves, Specht said.
“It’s not just an issue between English and Spanish,” he said. “It’s also the fact that in some of these facilities, you might have a dozen different languages being spoken. Workers can’t talk to each other, or organize particularly effectively or even advocate for themselves.”
A Complaint at Seaboard Foods
In 2016, UFCW Local 2 learned Seaboard — the country’s second-largest pig producer and the fourth-largest pork processing plant — planned to hire H-2B workers, said Rosas, the union’s president. Soon after, the union made an effort to recruit them. Its collective bargaining agreement allows the union to speak with visa workers about joining its ranks.
But, compared to their domestic counterparts, few workers on visas have joined.
Out of about 2,000 employees, 95% are union members, Rosas said. Last year, Seaboard requested its highest number of visa workers: about 180, according to DOL data; about 40% are unionized, Rosas said.
In April, UFCW 2 submitted a complaint about Seaboard Foods to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The union claimed that the company did not do enough to protect workers during the pandemic, that it penalized workers for taking sick leave and that it excluded at least four languages regularly spoken at the plant from COVID-19 posters and training.
After the company told the union it applied for more H-2B workers for this year and next, the union also complained in July to the DOL’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification.
At issue is worker pay.
Seaboard Foods’ base wage rate starts at $17.25 for all workers, including those on visas. But other area plants — the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, and the JBS plant in Dalhart, Texas, both about an hour from Guymon — pay their workers at least $3 more, according to the union’s letter.
(National Beef told Investigate Midwest it pays $20.70. JBS pays $22 at its beef plants, according to Meat + Poultry.)
But Seaboard is attempting to show it pays the industry’s prevailing wage in the area in order to qualify for the visa program, according to the letter.
Vaught, the DOL spokesman, said the wages agreed upon in the collective bargaining agreement would supersede the local area’s prevailing wage when determining pay for H-2B visa workers.
The union’s letter also claims that Seaboard Foods does not face employee shortages, which is a requirement for applying for visa labor.
“The workload and workforce need is consistent throughout the year, it is not seasonal, impacted by peak load or intermittent,” the union’s letter reads. “Seaboard … has hired workers with the H-2B visas from 6 to 9 months for each of those years.”
Seaboard’s spokesman said the pork industry has historically seen increased demand from January to March and October to December, which is why there is a need for temporary workers.
“One of the many ways that Seaboard Foods attempts to mitigate workforce challenges is the Labor Department’s H-2B program,” the spokesman said.
Regardless of who is performing the job, the bottom line is plants are dangerous workplaces, said Debbie Berkowitz, worker health and safety program director from the National Employment Law Project.
“The industry doesn’t invest in safe conditions,” she said. “They’re just trying to get the most vulnerable workers who won’t speak up and won’t reveal what happened.”
The data for this story comes from the U.S. Department of Labor’s performance data on visas. “Meatpacking” was defined as having an NAICS code of 311611, 311612, 311613 or 311615. OSHA uses the first three codes to define “meatpacking.” The fourth code is poultry processing. Prior to 2015, the performance data on the DOL’s website does not include NAICS codes, making comparison to previous years difficult.
This article originally appeard in Investigate Midwest, and is reprinted with permission. Luis Velazquez is a Gary Marx Journalism Fund intern at Investigate Midwest.
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]]>Since they were developed around the middle of last century, PFAS have been hailed by multiple industries as miracle chemicals. Not only could they stop rain from soaking through fabric, but they could also prevent eggs from sticking to pans and repel grease that would otherwise seep through fast food wrappers.
In short, they have made eating more convenient, but a growing body of science suggests that PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are toxic and linked to serious health problems, and chemical companies have hidden internal science showing their dangers.
In recent years, testing has found the chemicals in a range of foods, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to allow companies to use PFAS in food packaging, cookware, and processing equipment.
That could soon change. A new piece of legislation that will likely be introduced in the coming weeks by Representative Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) would largely enact a federal ban on the chemicals’ use in food production and packaging.
“We know that PFAS builds up in your blood, it damages health, it causes cancer, and it’s a really dangerous chemical,” Dingell told Civil Eats. “And most people don’t realize that it’s in their food containers.”
PFAS are a class of 9,000 compounds dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t ever fully break down in nature. They are typically used to make products water-, stain-, and grease-resistant. They’re so effective that they’re used across dozens of industries in everything from cosmetics to waterproof clothing, Scotchgard, and firefighting foam. Their ubiquity has led to contamination of drinking water supplies for more than 110 million people nationwide.
Until 2020, PFAS were also in every “biodegradable” molded fiber packaging product, including the clam shells commonly used at restaurants such as Chipotle and Sweetgreen. They’re also regularly used in food wrappers, paper plates, and paper straws, among other products. It’s difficult to differentiate between paper products coated with PFAS and those coated with bioplastics, but the latter don’t contain the chemicals.
Research has shown that the compounds can leach into food, while PFAS researchers at the Silent Spring Institute found an association between elevated levels of the chemicals in humans and increases in the number of meals eaten outside the home. There’s now growing consensus that lawmakers must act to get PFAS out of food.
“There are so many ways that we’re exposed to PFAS, but our food is probably the primary route of exposure,” said Scott Faber, legislative director for public health advocate Environmental Working Group. “Unfortunately, the FDA has for too long ignored the risks of PFAS, even though their dangers are well documented and well understood.So, Congress must act because the FDA has simply failed to do so.”
Federal regulators allow companies to claim the chemicals’ use as a trade secret, so there’s little public information about which products contain them. But independent analyses have revealed how widely they’re used. Recent testing of more than 300 fast food sandwich wrappers, pastry bags, French fry bags, pizza boxes, and other paper and paperboard packaging found fluorine, a marker of PFAS, in 40 percent of samples. Similarly, a 2017 Toxic Free Future study detected their likely use in 13 percent of grocery stores’ deli and bakery packaging, and testing found fluorine in all molded fiber products.
Beyond carryout food packaging, PFAS can also be found in the packaging that holds items ranging from microwave popcorn to salami. They’re used as lubricants in the machinery that produces packaging, which unintentionally leaves traces of PFAS. They’re also commonly found in baking supplies, such as parchment paper. And the nonstick coatings on frying pans, crock pots, panini presses, aluminum foil, and more often contain PFAS.
The chemicals’ widespread use in the food industry frustrates Maricel Maffini, an independent researcher who studies PFAS in food packaging, because good alternatives are increasingly available.
“A valid question is, ‘Do we really need to use this type of toxic, persistent chemical in food packaging? Is that an essential use?’ I would say it’s not,” she said.
‘It Will Move’
Rep. Dingell’s bill, called the Keep Food Containers Safe From PFAS Act, is her second attempt at a ban on the chemicals’ use in food contact surfaces. A 2020 bill of the same name was one of more than 100 pieces of PFAS legislation introduced in Congress last session that would’ve enacted limits on the compounds’ use, and nearly all failed amid intense opposition from the chemical industry.
The broadest of them was the PFAS Action Act, which had bipartisan support in both chambers; it was passed in the House by a wide margin but filibustered in the Senate. The Trump administration had promised a veto.
Its failure highlights the difficulty in moving PFAS legislation past industry allies in Congress, but the political environment is friendlier this legislative session as Democrats control both chambers and President Joe Biden has called for stricter regulations.
“It’s a different time, different place, people care, and it will move,” Dingell said. “I’m hopeful that with a Democratic administration and an EPA administrator who recognizes the chemicals’ danger, we will get this through.”
Though Republicans in the Senate could again use a filibuster to stop legislation, Faber and Dingell say that there is now a greater sense of urgency around the chemicals’ use than there was just a few years back.
“There is literally no chemical that’s getting more attention by legislators than PFAS, so, regardless of party, they’re aware and concerned that PFAS is building up in the blood of millions of people,” Faber said.
One of Congress’ few PFAS successes last session was a ban on their use in military food packaging that was included in the National Defense Authorization Act. States have also taken action in the absence of federal legislation, with Washington, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine passing PFAS bans. Similar bills have momentum in Connecticut and California and have been introduced in about 10 other states.
Meanwhile, restaurant and grocery chains that collectively represent nearly 80,000 stores, including Chipotle, Wendy’s, Whole Foods Market, and McDonald’s, have removed or committed to limiting PFAS in their products. Food packaging companies have begun to do the same.
The market movement and state laws are key to success in passing a federal ban, Faber said. “Oftentimes, Congress will act to bring consistency instead of winding up with inconsistent laws,” he added.
‘Not an Easy Fix’
A federal PFAS ban would accelerate the already growing demand for alternatives, but finding replacements is a time-consuming and costly undertaking.
In 2016, the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), a nonprofit that certifies packaging as compostable, began internally discussing whether it should stop certifying plant-based products made with PFAS. The rationale: It was contaminating compost streams.
The discussion spurred development of alternatives among compostable packaging manufacturers such as World Centric. “It’s a difficult issue—not an easy fix,” said Aseem Das, founder of World Centric, which has spent more than a year experimenting with PFAS substitutes.
PFAS made it easy to manufacture World Centric’s molded fiber products: It added PFAS to a slurry that was formed into the bowl or product, providing water, grease, and heat resistance. For its PFAS-free products, World Centric had to change its approach to incorporate a 100 percent plant-based spray coating that’s applied post-production.
Developing the coating was one challenge, and changing the manufacturing process was another because it requires more steps and cost. It took World Centric about a year of manufacturing trials, pilot production, adjusting machinery, and generally ramping up its output to be able to produce millions of PFAS-free products to meet demand.
Once the products are ready for full production, the changes then must be made at the multiple manufacturing facilities with which World Centric works. While some molded fiber bowls in its catalog are already made without PFAS, about 90 percent of its products will likely be PFAS-free by the year’s end. Das wouldn’t disclose what’s in the alternative but said it’s 100 percent plant-based.
BPI now certifies World Centric’s PFAS-free molded fiber products as compostable. The challenges the company faced to find a replacement are common, said BPI executive director Rhodes Yepsen. Besides providing a grease and water barrier in molded fiber packaging, PFAS also allows moisture to escape, which prevents food from getting soggy. For that reason, Yepsen said, PFAS “is a hard one to replace.”
BPI has recently tightened up its certification protocol and is better prepared to identify potentially problematic chemicals, Yepsen added.
Among the alternatives are bioplastics and waxes. And while Das noted that World Centric is using FDA-approved ingredients, public health advocates like Maffini cautioned that little is known about the safety profiles of the alternatives. Meanwhile, the FDA won’t make that information public either, as most companies are allowed to claim new formulas as trade secrets.
That’s created some uncertainty about whether the agency is protecting the public, Maffini said. “I hope that they’re learning from the PFAS story.”
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