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The Tricky Thing About Labeling Foods as Locally Grown

by ArletteMacdermot Posted on September 4, 2016

Were living in an age of conscious consumption. For many of us, settling for the cheapest, quickest option doesnt cut it; we want to know that our purchases arenot contributingto economic or environmental degradation.

One of the best places to spot this trend? Our food shopping habits. Weve learned about the demise of the small farmer, the incredible distances most ingredients travel to our plates, and the damage industrial farming is doing to our soil and airand we want something different. Recent polling shows that for most Americans, purchasing food from local producers is a high priority. According to a2014 survey by Cone Communications, almost three-quarters of Americans stated that buying locally was a significant factor in determining what they buy, and 77 percent of shoppers consider the sustainability factor of what they purchase.

According to anothersurveyfrom Consumer Reports, two-thirds of shoppers specifically look for a label indicating that a product has been grown locally. In New York, shoppers can now pick up a product and see on the label if its beengrown in-state. The new Empire State label goes beyond just identifying food origins, though. According to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, it indicates that a product has been inspected for the highest level of food safety and environmental sustainability standards.

New York State Grown & Certified is the first state program in the nation to combine modern food safety standards with environmental stewardship to achieve a premium level of certification, reads theNew York Governorswebsite. By certifying food at this level, New York is providing consumers with an assurance of quality in how and where the food is grown and produced while promoting New York State producers who are meeting a growing market demand for foods that are safely handled and grown in an environmentally responsible manner.

But pinning down what locally grown means can be adifficult task. There is no standardized definition provided by the United States Department of Agriculture, only corporate and state-level definitions. Vermont considers anything grown within its borders or 30miles outside them; a locally grown label in large states like California or Texas could mean a product has traveled as much as 800 miles from its source. Its clear that a local label has its limits, and if it goes unregulated by the USDA could become as meaningless as an all-natural label.

So whats a conscious consumer to do? Get educated about the food youre buying. After all, your local farmer might be cranking out beautiful producethats loaded with pesticides and GMOs. Shop local and organic as often as you can, and meanwhile, support producers that might not be local but use sustainable practices.

Written by Steve Holt. Reposted with permission from Thrive Market.

More from Thrive Market:
The Olympics Are Still Flooded with Junk Food Ads
Test Your Strength and Flexibility with Gymnastics-Inspired Moves
5 Surprising Places You’ll Find Fast Food

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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When the Food in Silicon Valley Isn’t Spicy Enough

by DominikSommers Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Listen to this story on Bite, Mother Jones’ new food politics podcast. You can access all our episodes here, or subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS.

In the back of an industrial park in Silicon Valley, Dewi Sutanto stands over a simmering pot of red and bright orange sauce. It’s over 80 degrees in the kitchen, and stacked food containers line the counter. Sutanto has filled about half of the day’s orders, mostly with beef rendang, a clove and cardamom-infused slow-cooked meat. She wipes her hands on her apron before lifting the lid off a steaming pot of white rice.

Sutanto, originally from an island near Sumatra, Indonesia, lives in Milpitas, California. When she moved to the United States 40 years ago, she brought her family’s recipes cooked for friends. Word of her food spread quickly among the Indonesian community, and Sutanto started a small catering business. But now, instead of relying on word-of-mouth to connect with customers, she’s using an app.

Nasi padang is a staple of Sumatra, a dish of steamed rice and miniature bites of fish, vegetables, and spicy meat. Photo courtesy TaroBites.com

Taro, named after the root vegetable commonly used in African and South Asian food, allows users to order straight from cooks who specialize in cuisine from regions around the world. About 50 chefs offer menus that range from Moroccan and West Indian, to Sumatran and Chinese fusion. Silicon Valley is in many ways the perfect place for these chefs to find loyal customers: Busy tech workers, often immigrants, don’t have time to cook but often yearn for the authentic tastes of home. Out of Sutanto’s estimated 300 customers, 250 are from Indonesia.

Krisha Mehra co-founded Taro earlier this year. He said after watching his aunt try to juggle orders for her Indian food via text message, he wanted to make the process easier—for her and her customers. She never wanted to open her own eatery, Mehra said; she just enjoyed making home-cooked Indian food.

“If somebody really cooks well, opening a restaurant is one of the worst things they can do for themselves,” Mehra said, citing high start-up costs and long hours. “A lot of the chefs are stay-at-home moms or people who have a family…they’re adventurous enough to try a business out once a week.”

Now that more people are finding Sutanto through the app, she admits there have been a few changes to her traditional menu, especially when she cooks for non-Indonesians: “Everyone says that my food is too spicy,” she says with a laugh.

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Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

by MartyMulkey Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like a jittery upstart on The Apprentice, Donald Trump is looking like an unlikely contender for the prize he’s groping for. To beat the long odds stacked against him in the presidential election, the mercurial reality TV star will have to conquer a chunk of real estate quite distinct from the vast gambling dens and condo castles he’s used to: Iowa.

While the US corn, soybean, and hog capital isn’t a big enough prize on its own to push the GOP nominee to victory, “there is no realistic path to the presidency for Trump without Iowa’s six electoral votes,” as the Washington Post recently reported. Ohio, too, has emerged as a necessary but insufficient piece of the electoral map for Trump.

So the lifelong urbanite is plunging those famous fingers of his into the muck of farm-state politics. Trump reportedly declined to mount a Harley and participate in the ride portion of Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” event at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines last week, but he did deliver a red-meat speech pandering to some of the baser urges of the Corn Belt’s agribusiness interests.

Here are some highlights:

• He thundered against government regulation of farming practices—a highly contentious topic in a state where waterways and drinking water are routinely polluted by runoff from farms. “We are going to end the EPA intrusion into your family homes and into your family farms, for no reason—what they’re doing to you is a disgrace,” he declared, adding without citing evidence the unlikely claim that “many” Iowans have lost their farms to overzealous enforcement of environmental standards.

• To the crowd’s delight, Trump vowed to revoke the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency greater authority to regulate water pollution. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, “wants to shut down family farms just like she wants to shut down the miners and the steelworkers… through radical regulation,” he warned.

• Yet Trump pledged support for an infamous federal government boondoggle: a 2007 law that mandates that a huge portion of the US corn crop be diverted into ethanol production. “President Obama lied to you about his support for the Renewable Fuel Standard, and you can trust Hillary Clinton even less,” he said. In reality, Obama has never wavered in his support for the corn-ethanol mandate, and Clinton, too, supports it—as does one of her main ag policy advisers, USDA chief Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.

• Trump promised to “end double taxation of family farms at death”—a reference to the estate tax. Repealing the so-called death tax is a perennial applause line for GOP politicians, and Trump’s proclamation drew an enthusiastic response. It’s hard to figure out why the issue still resonates with farm audiences—after years of rollbacks, the tax now applies only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher, and affects fewer than 1 percent of US family-owned farm operations, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

On two other issues, Trump declined to pander to the ag crowd during his Iowa speech. On immigration, the candidate has maneuvered himself into a tight corner. Anti-migrant rants fueled Trump’s blitz through the primaries, appealing to the nativist impulses of the GOP base. But Big Ag relies heavily on immigrants for labor, from the fruit and vegetable fields of California and Florida to Iowa’s industrial-scale hog slaughterhouses. Perhaps in deference to such business interests, Trump has on some recent occasions softened his stance on immigration. Underlining these tensions, several members of Trumps 64-person ag policy committee support a much softer stance on migration, the Washington Post recently reported. But in his Iowa speech, Trump for some reason reverted to old ways, fulminating against “criminal illegal immigrants” and vowing yet again to “build a great border wall.”

The other issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade deal championed by President Barack Obama and prized by Big Ag because it pries open Asian markets for US-grown seeds, grain, and meat. Trump has been denouncing the TPP on nativist grounds since he launched his campaign. Perhaps because Iowa stands second only to California in agricultural exports, Trump held his tongue on the TPP during his speech, declining to mention trade at all.

Perhaps to smooth over those immigration and trade rough spots with the Big Ag community, the Trump campaign deployed the chairman of its Rural Advisory Committee, Charles Herbster, to address the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association’s annual roundup in Jackson, Ohio, last Saturday. Herbster, a Nebraska rancher and multilevel-marketing magnate, did not return calls asking for details of his presentation. According to Elizabeth Harsh, executive director of the OCA, Herbster “answered many questions from OCA members,” ranging from “trade and TPP to health care and immigration.” She added, “OCA’s members were very interested and engaged in the discussion,” but she declined to say more.

In a brief interview a month ago, Herbster acknowledged that he’d been getting calls from farmers concerned about Trump’s crusade against the TPP, and insisted that a President Trump would renegotiate trade deals in a way that keeps ag exports booming.

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Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

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Soda Companies Have a New, Evil Language Trick to Keep You Hooked on Sugar

by JuliaBuley Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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I live in Oakland, California, and lately I’ve been getting flyers at my house with images like this:

No Oakland Grocery Tax

Have you ever heard of a “grocery tax?” If not, that’s probably because most people know it by another name: soda tax.

I’ll get back to the brilliant rebranding in a second, but first, a little background: Once considered a radical idea, soda taxes are gaining momentum. Philly passed one in June. In November, soda taxes will be on the ballots in San Francisco, Oakland, and possibly Boulder, Colorado.

In all of these places, the basic idea is essentially the same: Drinking sugary beverages leads to obesity, diabetes, and a host of other health problems. Since soda companies target residents of poor neighborhoods, particularly people of color, those people end up disproportionately getting sick from drinking too much soda. The tax makes sugary drinks (not just soda, but any drink—juices, iced tea, etc.—with added sugar) more expensive, which in theory discourages people from buying them. The money the cities raise from the tax goes toward programs, like free preschool, that help the people that sodas hurt.

Of course, soda companies are not big fans of these taxes. And they’re dipping into their deep pockets to fight them: The last time a soda tax was on the ballot in San Francisco, the American Beverage Association, the soda industry’s lobbying group, spent $9.1 million to defeat it. And it worked.

That’s partially because ABA employs some marketing geniuses—which brings us back to the phrase “grocery tax.” ABA argues that’s an accurate description because of the way soda taxes are structured. The tax doesn’t actually apply directly to the sugary drinks that you buy at the store. Instead, they’re a tax on the distributors who sell sugary drinks to store owners. The distributor usually passes the tax on to the store owner, in the form of higher wholesale prices. Store owners can then decide to make up for that cost however they want. If they want to hike the price of soda, that’s cool. But if they want to keep the price of soda the same and instead raise the price on, say, a bottle of water or a bunch of kale, that’s totally fair game.

“That means whether you purchase soda or not, you could be seeing a big impact on your grocery bill,” says the No Oakland Grocery Tax website.

Not everyone agrees. Three members of the Oakland City Council have accused the No Oakland Grocery Tax campaign of misleading citizens. Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan told me over the phone that the campaign has “been lying to the voters of Oakland by trying to scare them into thinking that someone is going to tax their groceries.”

So who’s right? The question is whether store owners will apply the tax just to sugary beverages or spread it out to other groceries as well. Joe Arellano, spokesman for the No Oakland Grocery Tax campaign (which is funded by ABA), says his group has done spot checks on stores in Berkeley and found that store owners aren’t raising the prices on soda. When I asked for evidence, he sent me a bunch of photos showing diet and regular sodas priced the same (diet sodas are exempt from the tax because they’re sugar free), though he didn’t provide the kind of before-and-after documentation that showed that prices stayed the same after the tax went into effect.

Meanwhile, that team of University of California-Berkeley public health researchers studying the tax has found exactly the opposite: Most store owners in Berkeley actually have raised the prices on sugary drinks, the group reported. Two other groups of researchers had similar findings. (And it’s worth pointing out that those three studies were all peer reviewed, unlike the spot checks that No Oakland Grocery Tax has conducted.)

I talked to a few store owners in Berkeley this past weekend. Some said they had raised soda prices since the tax went into effect, some said they hadn’t. Among those who hadn’t, a few reported raising prices on other goods to make up for the difference. None of them were wild about the tax. Adel Gergess, the owner of a convenience store called Alex Market, told me that beverages make up a whopping 40 percent of his sales. He did the math, and he figured out that he couldn’t raise the prices on sodas or any other groceries, or he’d lose too much business. So he ate the cost himself. But it’s been really tough.

“We’ve been in the business like 19 months and we lost a lot of money,” he said. “Ninety percent of the beverages we have—even the organic or natural ones—have sugar.”

Soda tax proponents hope that the demand for sugary drinks will continue to fall, and that store owners will eventually ditch soda in favor of more popular items.

There’s some evidence that the plan is working. In a just-published study by a team at the University of California-Berkeley, researchers found that since the city of Berkeley enacted the nation’s first-ever citywide soda tax last year, soda consumption in poor neighborhoods has declined by 21 percent. A lead researcher called the findings “very encouraging.” It also showed that people were drinking 63 percent more water. (A caveat: Other factors may have contributed to the switch from soda to water—most notably, a public awareness campaign in Berkeley about the unhealthiness of soda.) Another hopeful sign: After Mexico passed a nationwide soda tax, soda sales decreased 12 percent, while bottled water sales rose by 4 percent.

The bottom line: The “grocery tax” argument has some truth to it—and so far, it’s certainly put owners of markets and restaurants in a bind. On the other hand, preliminary research on soda taxes—which shows that they actually might actually discourage people from drinking sugary beverages—is promising.

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Soda Companies Have a New, Evil Language Trick to Keep You Hooked on Sugar

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Avoids Imploding For Two Days!

by Mickie6771 Posted on August 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the front page of the LA Times this morning. I have to say I’m impressed. Donald Trump gets a huge headline in the lead spot for spending—what? Two days? Maybe three? Anyway, two or three days without doing anything egregiously idiotic. It’s like the way we lavish praise on a two-year-old for not throwing his food all over the kitchen.

According to the story itself, Trump gave a good speech! He ran some TV ads! He visited Baton Rouge for 49 seconds! The first was plainly aimed at his white base, not at the African-Americans it was putatively meant for. The second is the bare minimum that any presidential campaign is expected to do. And the third was transparent hucksterism. Still, he managed to avoid imploding the entire time. Good boy, Donald!

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BREAKING: Donald Trump Avoids Imploding For Two Days!

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It’ll be hard to toast to the end of the world without champagne

by JenniferMcQuist Posted on August 17, 2016

c’est la vie

It’ll be hard to toast to the end of the world without champagne

By on Aug 17, 2016Share

No. No. No. No. No. No. No.  

Wildfires, we can extinguish. Floods, we can flee. Sea levels, we can rise with. But this, this, is one downside of climate change there is just no recovering from.

That’s right: Climate change is coming for our champagne.

Vice reports that dramatic changes in France’s climate are wrecking havoc on the country’s champagne-makers. This season has been particularly unstable, according to Eric Rodez of the winery Champagne Rodez, who told Decanter that late spring frosts killed up to 70 percent of some winemakers’ grape harvests.

It’s an ongoing problem. “The early budding of the plant due to climate change makes them vulnerable to spring freezes,” Eric Fournel, director of the Duval-Leroy Vineyard, told PRI in 2014 — the same year Duval-Leroy lost over half their grape harvest to a freeze in May.

There is, however, a silver-lining to this otherwise horrid news: While climate change might make champagne harder to come by, it could make it tastier. Fournel said that climate change has actually improved the quality of the grapes as high temperatures lead to richer sugars, more alcohol, and less acidity.

Finally, there’s one reason to pop a cork.

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What is ‘Glamping’?

by LillianaLlewell Posted on August 7, 2016

I grew up camping, but as I get older, “glamping” is definitely taking on more appeal. Don’t know the difference?

Camping is the no-frills way to get out and experience the wild. You might sleep in sleeping bags on a mat on the ground, in a tent you’ve pitched after perhaps hiking into a campsite on a trail that could be challenging to traverse. You’ll builda fire in a fire pit or power up your cookstove and make a meal that, while delicious, might also be pretty basic. Your “bathroom” could be an outhouse or a spot away from camp that you dig yourself. You may have to purify water to drink and cook and clean with; there may not be showering or bathing facilities.

“Glamping” combines the experience of the wildwith a bit more glamour and comfort. In fact, Glamping.com says glamping offers travelers a way to “experience the positive aspects of camping without the ‘uncomfortable’ negatives….to experience the great outdoors without sacrificing luxury.”

I love traditional stylecamping precisely because it IS so basic. Just head out somewhere, throw up a tent, roll out a bag, and look up at the sky. That can be pretty perfect.

But I’ve had a few glamping trips, too, and they were pretty great. For example, on my first trip to Africa, I went on a camping safari in Kenya. With two guides and some other campers, a few of usdrove into the bush, threw up tents, slept in sleeping bags, and cooked over a fire. Our camp was surrounded by barbed wire to keep out big game like lions and cheetahs, but that was it. When we went to the outhouse, our guide came with us in case some animals were on the prowl.

The second time I went to Africa, it was definitely glamping. My family slept in clean spacious tents on actual beds that were really comfortable. In one camp, showers were attached to our tents and though they weren’t filled with hot water, the water was definitely warm enough to provide a comfortable cleanse. Our food was cookedin an outdoor kitchen and was bothabundant and gourmet. Though elephants did roam around the camp, we didn’t have to worry about lions or rhinos because the compound was so well protected.

The camping trip was thrilling because it felt so edgy and dangerous. Who cares if it was grimy and the food, while filling, was a little on the plain side?

The glamping trip was wonderful because it was socomfortable but still exotic. We got very close to lots of animals and probably learned more about local cultures because we had more time to stop in villages and talk with people rather than have to scurryto find a campsite before sunset.

If you like the idea of glamping, you’ll have two major considerations: where to do it, and how to do it.

Pretty much every continent offers glamping options, and at prices that can range from less than a hundred dollars a night to ten times that much. For example, in South America, Ypora in Argentina, offers tents, solar power,safari style tents and running water, all with meals included, for $40 a night. On the other hand, the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica in Peru starts at $542 a night, along with more upscale amenities. You can see a list of glamping facilities by continent here.GoGlamping.net focuses specifically on glamping in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

As for accommodations, you’ll find a variety of exotic ways to put a roof over your head. In addition to fancy safari trips, glamping lodging includes:

Airstream trailers
Treehouses
Teepees
Huts and Cottages
Yurts
Cubes, Pods and Domes

Glamping doesn’t only have to be for you. Many locations are pet friendly. These options listed on GlampingHub.com partner with PETA and The Humane Society to make sure they offer safe and health accommodations if you want to bring your dog on your trip.

Some trips are a hybrid of camping and glamping. That’s what I got when I did a 10-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. Wehad to pitch our own tents, roll out our sleeping bags, and pack everything up in the morning. Only the bravest among us dared take a bath in the fridge Colorado waters. On the other hand, we had three gourmet meals cooked for us every day, were handily and safely transported down the river, guided on fascinating canyon hikes, and concluded the trip in a lovely hotel.

In many respects, it was the best of both worlds.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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McDonald’s kept its promise to use fewer antibiotics

by EdisonNeild7936 Posted on August 2, 2016

Nugget of Truth

McDonald’s kept its promise to use fewer antibiotics

By on Aug 2, 2016Share

McDonald’s may give us false hope when it comes to the Gaelic sorcery that lurks in its Shamrock Shakes, but the fast food chain just made good on a more important promise. Last year, the home of the Hamburglar announced a plan to stop buying chicken served in its U.S. restaurants from farmers that use antibiotics prescribed to humans. Groups that campaign against the overuse of antibiotics, like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Pew Charitable Trusts are applauding McDonald’s for reaching the milestone ahead of its own deadline.

A move like this — especially made by an oft-maligned fast food giant — really matters. The more we use antibiotics, the more germs evolve to resist them. Human use of antibiotics is the biggest cause of antimicrobial-resistant diseases, but there’s good evidence that agricultural use of antibiotics can contribute to the problem as well.

The spring of 2015 was a tipping point for corporate pledges: Around that time, just about every U.S. food company that uses poultry (with one defiant exception) made a commitment to stop using antibiotics that are important for human medicine. If you wondered if a corporation like McDonald’s can stick to a pledge, now you know: Reform is possible.

Of course, this doesn’t fix the problem entirely — these pledges apply to the United States, but antibiotic resistance knows no borders. And because we continue to spur the evolution of resistance every time we prescribe antibiotics to humans, we must invent alternatives. To paraphrase words of the great philosopher and space pirate, Mark Watney: In the face of overwhelming odds, we are left with only one option. We’re going to have to science the shit out of this.

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Olympians Are Selling Sugar Water to Kids

by JoelWalter Posted on August 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back in 2012, just ahead of the summer Olympics in London and the associated advertising blitz, the prestigious UK medical journal BMJ issued a scathing takedown of sports drinks, ably summarized for Mother Jones by health writer David Tuller. Takeaway: The colorful fluids are utterly unnecessary for restoring electrolytes after exercise, but do contain unhealthy jolts of sugar.

Four years later, beverage giants are once again using Olympians’ beauty and grit to market these supposed elixirs—this time, to children. Above, see tennis wizard Serena Williams, sprint champ Usain Bolt, and NBA star Paul George picturesquely working out with a charismatic kid in an Olympics-focused ad for Pepsi’s flagship sports drink Gatorade. And here‘s boxer Shakur Stevenson doing the same for Coca-Cola’s Powerade. Expect to see these ads and many more during the broadcast of this year’s Olympics, which open in Rio de Janeiro Friday.

And it’s easy to see why the industry is investing heavily in this massively watched sports spectacle. According to the industry tracker Beverage Marketing Corporation, US carbonated soda consumption fell 1.5 percent in 2015, the eleventh straight year of decline. But sports drink volumes raced ahead by a (relatively) Usain Bolt-like 5.5 percent. In short, people are turning away from sugary carbonated drinks because they know they’re unhealthy—and turning to sports drinks, which are associated with lean, athletic bodies, but are also quite sugary.

Over at The Washington Post, Casey Seidenberg notes that the sports drinks’ success is drawing new brands into the market. Honest Tea (also owned by Coca Cola) and upstart Greater Than have rolled out “healthier sports drinks that are lower in sugar and free of artificial food colorings.” While less sugary than Gatorade, etc, these products are equally unnecessary, Seidenberg writes; like adults, “kids and teens rarely, if ever, lose enough electrolytes during their athletic endeavors to require extra replenishment.” She adds: “Sodium is the most common electrolyte lost in sweat, yet most Americans get more than enough sodium from their diets.”

She subjected her sons and their friends to a blind taste test pitting Gatorade and Powerade against new-wave products from Honest Tea and Greater Than, as well as a glass of water and a piece of fruit, which, as she shows, provides just as much hydration as—and several times more potassium (a non-sodium electrolyte) than—most sports drinks, with zero added sugar.

“To my dismay (but not to my surprise), the kids blindly chose Powerade and Gatorade as their favorites,” she writes.” After all, these varieties are the sweetest and the most chemically engineered to cause consumers to come back for more.” As for water and fruit, she found that her experiment subjects “prefer a sports drink” but agree that the combination “satisfies when thirsty or hungry after a game.” If only influential athletes like basketball giant LeBron James would dump their sports-drink deals deal get behind that solution.

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Olympians Are Selling Sugar Water to Kids

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The One Thing Hillary Cares About Most—When It Comes to Food

by ModestoKXP Posted on July 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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If Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wins in November, what kind of food and farm policy can we expect from her? Like most presidential campaign seasons, the current one has been lighter than a soufflé in terms of debate around food issues. Here’s what we know so far.

(1) The 2016 Democratic Party platform is mostly short on food policy details. Farm programs get all of two paragraphs, under the rubric of “Investing in Rural America.” The section nods to “promoting environmentally sustainable agricultural practices” and “expanding local food markets and regional food systems,” a likely reference to the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program instituted under President Barack Obama. It also takes a stand on farm workers, advocating “stronger agricultural worker protections including regulation of work hours, elimination of child labor, ensuring adequate housing for migrant workers, and sanitary facilities in the field.”

In other notable sections, the platform mentions developing “science-based restrictions” to protect Alaska’s wild salmon fisheries from a controversial proposed mine, and it vows to enforce antitrust laws to “protect competition and prevent excessively consolidated economic and political power, which can be corrosive to a healthy democracy.” As I noted a few weeks ago, that section contains the first mention of antitrust policy in a Democratic Party presidential platform in three decades; and if a President Clinton were to make good on it, there could be profound implications for our highly concentrated food industry.

(2) …except one: Clinton will likely defend hunger programs. The platform bluntly promises to protect “proven programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—our nation’s most important anti-hunger program—that help struggling families put food on the table.” SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, has been in the Republican crosshairs for years. President Obama and Democrats in Congress fought off a GOP attempt to slash SNAP in 2013, and there’s no reason to think Clinton won’t hold the line.

(3) The State Department hotly promoted GMOs abroad under Clinton. Diplomatic cables dumped by WikiLeaks back in 2013 showed that Clinton’s State Department lobbied foreign governments to weaken regulation of GMOs, including food labels, and operated public relations campaigns to improve their popularity. (More here and here.) Back in 2012, Jack Bobo, then serving as senior adviser for biotechnology at the State Department, even lobbied me to take a less critical view of ag biotech. (Bobo is now the chief communications officer of a biotech company.)

(4) She showed signs of appreciating organic ag as first lady. In the 1990s, before organic food went mainstream, Clinton was a fan. Walter Scheib, whom the first lady hired as White House chef in 1994, later reminisced that the Clintons “dined regularly on organic foods” and favored “both wagyu and grass-fed beef.” He added that “nearly all the product used was obtained from local growers and suppliers.” While Michelle Obama is widely celebrated for her robust White House garden, Hillary Clinton kept a small one on the roof, Scheib noted.

(5) She’s tightly aligned with Tom Vilsack, Obama’s US Department of Agriculture chief. The two veteran pols go way back—Vilsack credits Hillary Clinton’s fundraising efforts on his behalf for boosting his successful run as Iowa governor back in 1998. A decade later, Vilsack endorsed Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. Last year, Clinton put longtime Vilsack adviser Matt Paul in charge of her Iowa caucus campaign, plucking him from his post as the USDA’s director of communications. The Clinton team aggressively floated Vilsack as a contender for vice president before settling on Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine for the post. But despite his getting passed over, there was a Vilsack angle—the campaign quickly named Paul, Vilsack’s longtime right-hand man, as Kaine’s chief of staff. Two Washington insiders who declined to be quoted directly have told me that Vilsack is and will likely remain Clinton’s top ag adviser, on everything from policy details to choosing the next USDA chief. That tells me that if Clinton prevails, the next administration will look a lot like the current one on ag policy. Here’s my recent summary of Vilsack’s eight-year run as USDA chief.

Originally from:

The One Thing Hillary Cares About Most—When It Comes to Food

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