Politics

‘Beloved Berlin Currywurst Stand Delivers a Bite of History’ ∞

December 1, 2019

Christopher F. Schuetze writes a beautiful piece for the NYTimes about Konnopke’s which is a small Currywurst stand in Berlin. This essay is filled with so many interesting bits about their life in-and-out of communist Berlin throughout time, but just check out this little zinger:

“I like to call it the golden West,” Ms. Ziervogel said sarcastically during an interview in her garden, where in the early years she grew tomatoes for ketchup that was unavailable in the communist state. […]

But the biggest challenge came in 1990 with the reunification of East and West Germany. Not just because of a new set of suppliers, taxes and rules, but because a new universe of customers expected a different set of offerings.

Konnopke’s started selling French fries. The currywurst, which used to be served with a bun and a hot mug of broth, is now cut up and served on a paper plate. (A tiny plastic fork is provided.)

As someone who has never worked in a kitchen or run a restaurant, stories like this feel like they’re written with gold. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to survive and thrive in Berlin through all of that time, and — of course — I love seeing they have a vegan option now.

‘New study shows the EAT-Lancet diet is unaffordable for at least 1.6 billion people’ ∞

December 1, 2019

H. Claire Brown for the New Food Economy:

Earlier this year, a groundbreaking study from the EAT-Lancet Commission outlined a climate-friendly path to feeding 10 billion people “within planetary boundaries.” Its recommendations included limiting meat consumption to about an ounce per day, or roughly two chicken nuggets, and bulking up on low-impact foods like beans. […]

A new study from researchers at Tufts University and the International Food Policy Research Institute adds a wrinkle to the debate: the diet recommended by the EAT-Lancet commission is simply unaffordable for an estimated 1.58 billion people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

To get these numbers, the researchers cross-referenced local income data with the retail prices of 744 foods in 159 countries. They based their model on the lowest-cost diet that conformed to the recommendations made in the report and found that following the EAT-Lancet diet would cost a median of $2.84 per day globally. It was also about 60 percent more expensive than a diet that met minimum nutritional requirements, largely because it includes high-cost meat and dairy. 

Our future is largely tied to diet and the related agricultural effects. I have no idea what the answer is, but I’m glad the discussion is happening passionately. It needs to if we’re going to actually figure out how to eat our way out of this climate mess.

‘How conventional soy farming starves honey bees’ ∞

December 1, 2019

Jessica Fu writing for the New Food Economy:

A significant, multi-year study […] provides new evidence that commodity crop production can be detrimental to honey bees, putting colonies at risk by depleting their access to food. […]

Now, by examining the health of honey bees in Iowa soy fields, scientists have showed precisely how damaging that lack of variation can be. Soy is one of the U.S.’s most highly produced and exported foods.

In 2018, farmers harvested 4.54 billion bushels of the crop (for reference, a bushel of soy weighs 60 pounds), with the Midwest contributing to the vast majority of this output. The industry’s rise, however, has come at the cost of traditional habitat: In Iowa, the second-largest soy producing state, the expansion of farmland has driven a steep decline in native tallgrass prairie. That, in turn, has depleted both the quantity and variety of food sources available to honey bees, according to the new research[.] […]

Typically, bees are supposed to produce honey for their colony from spring through fall in order to have enough food to survive the winter. What the researchers found, however, was that colonies adjacent to soy farms were turning to food stores for sustenance as early as August, and that by mid-October, all of them had wiped out the gains that they had made in the spring and summer. That’s like clearing out your fridge and pantry right before a power outage—and it means those hives would be far less likely to survive.

Ninety-eight percent of soy that is grown in the US is used for animal feed. One percent is grown for human consumption.

‘Will 2020 Mark the Rise of a Vegan Voting Bloc?’ ∞

November 20, 2019

Nadra Nittle for Civil Eats:

Animal welfare advocates point out that, while vegans make up a small percentage of the electorate, voters of all dietary backgrounds are increasingly concerned about animal cruelty and climate change—particularly the large carbon footprint of animal agriculture. Through platforms that discuss the human toll of concentrated livestock farming, candidates can make a compelling case for why animal welfare should matter to Americans—vegan or otherwise.

“The relationship between factory farming and climate change has really changed the conversation; it’s been a great gateway to discuss how issues of animal agriculture aren’t just about animals but also the people who work in factory farms or food processing plants—they’re more likely to have injuries—and the contract farmers who are very heavily in debt,” said Diane May, director of communications for the advocacy group Mercy for Animals. “There is a way to talk about these issues really holistically in a way that allows people to care about them, whether they are vegan, vegetarian, or eat meat.”

Case in point: Last week, the Senate unanimously passed a bill making certain types of animal cruelty a federal felony, following the House of Representatives’ unanimous support of a similar bill last month.

This will become a wedge issue, but a much milder one. I’d love to see more discussion of animal welfare, from how they’re kept and live their lives to how they’re slaughtered.

Most states have absurd laws that make it illegal to film inside slaughterhouses. They’re afraid that people will see what happens and won’t have the stomach for it. And they’re right, which is why someday people interested in their food (vegan or not) will make this a part of what they look for in their politicians’ platforms.

‘Olive oil lobby to FDA: Regulate us, please’ ∞

November 19, 2019

Jessica Fu for the New Food Economy:

The olive oil industry wants more government oversight. On Monday, the American Olive Oil Producers Association (AOOPA) formally requested the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set and enforce quality standards for different kinds of olive oil. In a citizens’ petition, it argued that the current dearth of industry regulation is causing “widespread mislabeling of grades, adulteration, consumer mistrust, and unfair and unethical industry business practices.”

[…]

Englehart’s claim is corroborated by evidence that olive oil is frequently mislabeled. In 2011, a team of researchers at the University of California Davis analyzed samples of popular olive oils labeled as “extra virgin.” Scientists found that, among the five top-selling olive oil brands in the U.S., 73 percent of samples failed to meet the International Olive Council’s definition of “extra virgin.”

Until recently, I don’t think I’d ever actually tasted fresh olive oil. My friends went to an olive farm and made their own olive oil. When they came back, they let me sample a few that they had made and they were delicious, even on their own. I imagine he’s weened himself by now, but at the time I think my buddy would sometimes drink it on its own—sort of like a fine whiskey.

Shopping for olive oil does make my head hurt a little, so some formal standards sound nice. But, knowing me, I’ll probably just buy the pretty one anyway.

‘Farm Country Feeds America. But Just Try Buying Groceries There.’ ∞

November 15, 2019

Jack Healy writing for the NYTimes about food deserts in rural America:

The loss of grocery stores can feel like a cruel joke when you live surrounded by farmland. About 5 million people in rural areas have to travel 10 miles or more to buy groceries, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Dollar-store chains selling cheap food are entering hundreds of small towns, but their shelves are mostly stocked with frozen, refrigerated and packaged foods. Local health officials worry that the flight of fresh foods will only add to rural America’s health problems by exacerbating higher rates of heart disease and obesity.

I knew rural America had food deserts, but I was surprised recently learn they happen in Los Angeles too. I had realized it could happen in densely populated regions in the same way it could to sparsely populated places. Pop-up markets like Süprmarkt were LA’s answer in Leimert Park.

“Communities tell me: We don’t want to use the term co-op,” said Sean Park, a program manager for the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs. He has helped guide rural towns through setting up their own markets. “It’s ironic because it was farmers who pioneered co-ops. They’re O.K. with ‘community store.’ They’re the same thing, but you’ve got to speak the language.”

Yet again, it always comes down to language. People are afraid of certain words.

But the challenges of starting a small grocery store at a time of increasing consolidation in the food business are daunting. The Great Scott! market could not persuade any wholesalers to work with them, so they bought a van and make regular trips to buy basics at a small markup from another supermarket.

“I called all the major chains, and if they didn’t laugh in my face they hung up on me,” said Shaun Tyson, a farmer in Mount Pulaski, a town about an hour from Winchester that is working to start its own co-op market by the spring.

A few states including Alabama, Nevada and Oklahoma have begun to study rural food deserts. They offer tax credits and loans to help stores finance construction projects and move to underserved places. In March, a bipartisan cluster of lawmakers in Washington proposed a new tax credit for grocery stores in food deserts.

But mostly, the people setting up crowd-funding sites to buy vegetable coolers and negotiating wholesale rates with huge grocery chains say they are stumbling around with little assistance and no map.

There is no easy fix here. And I’m sad to say that it’s likely going to get worse for rural parts of America.

‘Why are people malnourished in the richest country on earth?’ ∞

November 6, 2019

Tracie McMillan writes a thoughtful and difficult piece for National Geographic:

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. […]

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s.

And these numbers will keep growing as the divide between the poor and the wealthy grows wider.

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.”

It’s terrible that obesity would be an indicator of hunger or malnourishment. It could be a different picture if the government would subsidize the right things. This part, with emphasis mine, speaks to that:

These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier’s kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They’re also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops”—the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.

The USA needs to subsidize produce with a focus on health. Every dollar that goes against that is a dollar squandered, and it’s easy to see this in our population. The government is the reason fast food is cheaper than vegetables. The general health of the people should be considered our government’s problem, because it starts with what crops they subsidize.

‘Proposed Bill Wants All Plant-Based Beef Labeled ‘Imitation’’ ∞

October 31, 2019

Jenny G. Zhang for Eater:

A new bipartisan bill requiring beef that’s not derived from cows (i.e., plant-based beef like Impossible Burgers) to be labeled “imitation” was proposed in Congress on Monday, Food Dive reports. The legislation, called the Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully Act (or the Real MEAT Act), was introduced by Rep. Anthony Brindisi, a Democrat whose district covers a rural part of New York, and Rep. Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas.

[…]

The proposed bill, as currently written, suggests that slapping a prominent “imitation” label on plant-based beef would prevent “confusion” and “ensure that consumers can make informed decisions in choosing between meat products such as beef and imitation meat products.” Brindisi, in a statement by the United States Cattlemen’s Association obtained by Food Dive, emphasized this line of thinking: “American families have a right to know what’s in their food … Accurate labeling helps consumers make informed decisions and helps ensure families have access to a safe, abundant, affordable food supply.”

However, there’s little evidence that consumers are actually confused about the difference between plant-based and animal-based meat. In the dairy world, where the use of the word “milk” has similarly been a source of contention, the majority of consumers know that plant-based milk doesn’t contain dairy, per a survey from the International Food Information Council.

I think honesty is a good practice if there is confusion, but I don’t think anyone is confused by plant-based products.

If we’re open to discussing clear labeling, meat could be better too. I’d love to see meats labeled about their: antibiotics the animal received, square-footage allotted to each animal in their lifetime, percentage of time spent outside per day, whether the animal was at any point maimed without anesthesia, and if this product contains fecal matter. It’d also be nice to see a reversal on the ag-gag laws that were passed to ban videos from being recorded in slaughterhouses. Is that not the kind of honesty they like?

‘Why do People Hate Vegans?’ ∞

October 28, 2019

George Reynolds has a thorough and thoughtful piece for the Guardian about where veganism started, currently is, and it’s future. I liked this bit that shows that vegans have always been dreamers:

Early attempts to establish a vegan utopia did not go well. In the 1840s, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May) founded Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts – a vegan community intended to be nothing less than a second Eden. But Alcott’s insistence that crops had to be planted and fields tilled by hand meant that not enough food could be grown for all of the members (even though the population peaked at just 13); a diet of fruit and grains, typically consumed raw, left participants severely malnourished. Just seven months after opening, Fruitlands closed – derided, in the words of one biographer, as “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias”.

In a universal setting, veganism has to be plausible. It’s easy to dream that nothing and no one will suffer for a meal, but controlling those conditions is nearly impossible. It doesn’t mean that shouldn’t be an ambition. It means there needs to be a realistic understanding of what can be done. Being vegan can never exist under perfect conditions. Heaven has to meet earth at some point.

One thing that veganism rarely approaches is what meat means to the people who consume it and where that approach came from:

There is no justification for the amount of meat we eat in western society. The resources that go into humanely rearing and butchering an animal should make its flesh a borderline-unattainable luxury – and, indeed, in the past, it was. Meat always used to be the preserve of the wealthy, a symbol of prosperity: “A chicken in every pot” remained an aspirational but impractical promise across the best part of a millennium, from the days of Henry IV of France (when the term was invented) all the way through to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign.

It was only through the technological advances of modern agriculture that meat became attainable and available at supermarket prices. From the mid-1800s onwards, farmers could raise animals bigger, better and faster than in the past; kill them quicker; treat their flesh to prevent it from spoiling; transport it further and store it longer. A commonly cited psychological turning point was the second world war, which engendered what Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times, later described as a kind of “beef madness”. GIs were sent to the front with rations of tinned meat; once peace had been declared, there was no better symbol of the brave new world than a sizzling celebratory steak. In the course of just over a century, meat went from unattainable luxury to dietary cornerstone; these days, we feel entitled to eat meat every day.

And it’s been interesting to see how meat-eating has become a part of politics and in some ways performative:

But “they’re taking our meat” is as evocative a rallying cry as “they’re taking our jobs” or “they’re taking our guns” – it conveys the same sense of individual freedoms being menaced by external forces, a birthright under attack. Ted Cruz (wrongly) alleged that his Democrat rival Beto O’Rourke planned to ban Texas barbecue if elected senator in his place: like the personal firearm, animal flesh has become an emblem of resistance against the encroachments of progressivism, something to be prised from your cold, dead hand. Men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson is famed for following a beef and salt diet; Donald Trump is renowned for his love of fast food and well-done steak with ketchup; there is even a subset of libertarian cryptocurrency enthusiasts who call themselves Bitcoin carnivores.

With the massive inroads that veganism has made in the last few years, it’s important to recognize it still has a long way to go:

Sales may be growing fast, but they are barely making a dent in the $1.7tr global market for animal-derived protein. Certainly, a change of culture will not happen without the involvement of government, industry and science; as the past few years have shown, widespread change is also unlikely to happen without a fight. This makes the current field of conflict an unfortunate one – in the real world, we can practise moderation, emotional flexitarianism.

Emotional flexitarianism is a beautiful turn of phrase and absolutely the way we all must approach each other.

‘The Shadowy Beef Lobbyist Fighting Against Plant-Based ‘Meat’’ ∞

October 14, 2019

Here’s a small excerpt from Eater’s podcast called Eater’s Digest hosted by Martha Daniel. She speaks with Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods, and Rachel Konrad, Impossible’s Chief Communications Officer — and I think they’ve found their nemesis:

Pat Brown: There’s obviously a lot of effort to limit our ability to market our products. That just has to do with regulations around what we can call them and how we can talk about them. There were efforts in a number of producing States to put those restrictions on. I would say by and large they were not very successful. I don’t think that the smart money is betting that it will withstand a constitutional challenge. They’ve hired this guy Richard Berman, the Center for Consumer Freedom, who’s like mister mouthpiece for every big evil industry you can think of.Which I feel like boy, that’s a point of pride for me. You definitely want to be the people he’s going after. Not the people who he’s defending.

Martha Daniel: Richard Berman, again, is the inspiration behind the movie Thank You for Smoking. As I said, he’s defended cigarettes. He’s lobbied against raising the minimum wage and lowering blood alcohol content limits for drivers. His PR group’s website proudly declares him quote the industry’s weapon of mass destruction. Berman has his sight set on Impossible and the person from Impossible who is really locking horns with him is Rachel Konrad, their chief communications officer.

Rachel Konrad: He is probably the sleaziest PR guy in America. He’s of course a raging climate denier. He’s actually now taken the mantle to try to defend big beef and to really quote, “Tell the story of big beef.” His nonprofit has taken out advertisements in Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. He’s done a series of stupid op-eds that tried to question the nutritional benefits of plant based meat. He loves to trash plant based meat as too processed, which is complete bullshit. I think that the biggest possible validation that we are truly about to change the world is the fact that they’ve hired Richard Berman. Like you don’t hire Richard Berman unless you are evil incumbent industry so reviled that your back is against the wall.

I love that it’s a point of pride for Brown that Richard Berman is in the fight against Impossible. I’d feel the same way. I know it’s easy to villainize people but Berman is about as evil and repugnant as a person can get.

✏️ by C. W. Moss