Tag Archives: food

Whole Foods is finally getting its comeuppance.

by RachelAirey Posted on February 15, 2017

The notoriously pricey grocery chain will close nine stores after six consecutive quarters of plummeting same-store sales. It seems $6 asparagus-infused water and bouquets of California ornamental kale just aren’t flying off the shelves.

There’s a bitter green irony here: The organic products the chain popularized are now more popular than ever, just not at Whole Foods. Americans bought three times more organic food in 2015 than in 2005. But now, superstores like Kroger, Walmart, and Target are selling organic food at reasonable prices that threaten Whole Foods’ claim to the all-natural throne.

To compete in a crowded lower-cost organic market, the company launched a new chain in April 2016: 365 by Whole Foods Market, aka Whole Foods for Broke People. The 365 stores are cheaper to build, require less staff, and offer goods at lower prices.

Whole Foods may have a squeaky clean image, but that doesn’t square with its labor practices. The company has historically quashed employees’ attempts to unionize, and it sold goat cheese produced with prison labor until last April.

Still, if you’ve a hankering for “Veganic Sprouted Ancient Maize Flakes,” we’re pretty sure that Whole Foods has that market cornered.

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Whole Foods is finally getting its comeuppance.

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Now Trump’s Going After the Bumblebees

by DamionCopeley95 Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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First, it was puppies. Now Trump is going after bees.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Obama administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service placed the rusty patched bumblebee on the endangered species list—the first bee species to gain that status in the continental United States. Just weeks after taking office, the Trump administration temporarily reversed that decision. (See great pictures of this charismatic pollinator here.)

The official announcement of the delay cites a White House memo, released just after Trump’s inauguration, instructing federal agencies to freeze all new regulations that had been announced but not yet taken effect, for the purpose of “reviewing questions of fact, law, and policy they raise.” The Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the endangered species list, acted just in the nick of time in delaying the bumble bee’s endangered status—it was scheduled to make its debut on the list on February 10.

Rebecca Riley, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me the move may not be a mere procedural delay. “We don’t think this is just a freeze—it’s an opportunity for the administration to reconsider and perhaps revoke the rule entirely,” she said.

Why would the Trump administration want to reverse Endangered Species Act protections for this pollinating insect? After all, the rusty patched bumble bee has “experienced a swift and dramatic decline since the late 1990s,” with its abundance having “plummeted by 87 percent, leaving small, scattered populations in 13 states,” according to a December Fish and Wildlife Service notice. And it’s not just pretty to look at—the Fish and Wildlide Services notes that like other bees, rusty patched bumblebees “pollinate many plants, including economically important crops such as tomatoes, cranberries and peppers,” adding that bumblebees are “especially good pollinators; even plants that can self-pollinate produce more and bigger fruit when pollinated by bumble bees.”

The answer may lie in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s blunt discussion of pesticides as a threat to this bumblebee species. Like commercial honeybees, bumblebees face a variety of threats: exposure to pesticides, disease, climate change, and loss of forage. FWS cited all of those, noting that “no one single factor is likely responsible, but these threats working together have likely caused the decline.” But it didn’t mince any words about neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides widely used on US farm fields.

Neonics, as they’re known, are a highly contentious topic. They make up the globe’s most widely used insecticide class, with annual global sales of $2.6 billion, dominated by agrichemical giants Syngenta and Bayer (which is currently in the process of merging with Monsanto). They have been substantially implicated in the declining health of honeybees and other pollinators, birds, and waterborne animals. The European Union maintains a moratorium on most neonic use in farming, based on their threat to bees. The US Environmental Protection Agency is currently in the middle of a yearslong reassessment of the risk they pose to bees and other critters.

Here is what the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote about neonics in the context of the rusty patched bumblebee:

Neonicotinoids have been strongly implicated as the cause of the decline of bees, in general, and for rusty patched bumble bees, specifically. The introduction of neonicotinoid use and the precipitous decline of this bumble bee occurred during the same time. Neonicotinoids are of particular concern because they are systemic chemicals, meaning that the plant takes up the chemical and incorporates it throughout, including in leaf tissue, nectar and pollen. The use of neonicotinoids rapidly increased when suppliers began selling pre-treated seeds. The chemical remains in pre-treated seeds and is taken up by the developing plants and becomes present throughout the plant. Pollinators foraging on treated plants are exposed to the chemicals directly. This type of insecticide use marked a shift to using systemic insecticides for large-scale, preemptive treatment.

Note also that of the 13 states that still harbor scattered rusty patched bumblebee populations, four—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio—are in the US Corn Belt, where corn and soybean crops from neonic-treated seeds are common.

The NRDC’s Riley noted that as the EPA reassess neonics, it is obligated to consider the insecticides’ impact on endangered species. If the rusty patched bumblebee makes it onto the list, that would place an endangered species that’s clearly harmed by neonics directly into the region where the lucrative chemicals are most widely used—possibly forcing it to restrict neonic use in those areas. It’s worth noting that the man Trump chose to lead the EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, works for the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, which runs a website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of chemicals. More on that here.

If science guides the Trump team, this fast-disappearing bumblebee will get its endangered status soon, Riley said. “We don’t think there’s any legitimate basis to roll this rule back,” she said. “The original decision to protect the bee was based on compressive scientific analysis.” The question is the degree to which science will guide the administration as it decides the fate of this once-flourishing insect.

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Now Trump’s Going After the Bumblebees

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What the heck were thousands of red Skittles doing strewn across a frozen Wisconsin road?

by AlenaHowland288 Posted on January 20, 2017

That’s according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You’re probably used to hearing about how denser cities cut transportation emissions, thanks to reduced driving. This study looks at a different impact: how density affects greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The researchers projected emissions from buildings under different potential urban densities between now and 2050. They found that denser development patterns lead to lower emissions because people live and work in smaller units that consume less energy. Attached buildings are also more efficient for heating and cooling.

So the PNAS study finds that greater density has the potential to substantially reduce building emissions, more so than other efforts to improve energy efficiency like better weather-proofing.

Unfortunately, global trends are moving in the wrong direction. Cities around the world are growing, but at the same time, urban density is decreasing, as cars enable cities and their suburbs to sprawl outwards.

Governments can adopt policies to make their cities and towns denser, and they’ll need to — not just in the relatively sprawling cities of North America and Europe, but in the fast-growing cities of Asia and the rest of the developing world.

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What the heck were thousands of red Skittles doing strewn across a frozen Wisconsin road?

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Obama administration just gave a little breathing room to organic livestock.

by JosefF098836806 Posted on January 19, 2017

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Obama administration just gave a little breathing room to organic livestock.

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It’s Time to Stop Shaming Poor People for What They Buy With Food Stamps

by Selina56N8452582 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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Poor people who receive government food aid use it to load up on Coke. Or so The New York Times suggests. Under an image of a shopping cart stuffed with half-gallon jugs of soda, The Times’ Anahad O’Connor writes in a widely shared recent piece that the “No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks.” SNAP refers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known food stamps. By contrast, he writes, among non-SNAP households, “soft drinks ranked second on the list of food purchases, behind milk.”

SNAP is an important program in a society with a 13.5 percent poverty rate and growing inequality. According to a 2015 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers the “large majority of households receiving SNAP include children, senior citizens, individuals with disabilities, and working adults,” and “two-thirds of SNAP benefits go to households with children.” Here’s more:

SNAP benefits lifted at least 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2014—including 2.1 million children. SNAP also lifted more than 1.3 million children out of deep poverty, or above half of the poverty line (for example, $11,925 for a family of four)

Unfortunately, as University of Minnesota public affairs professor Joe Soss argues on Jacobin, the O’Connor article presents a skewed picture of poor people engaging in tax-payer financed bad behavior. “The poors! They’re behaving badly! And government handouts paid for with your tax dollars are to blame,” Soss writes. Such an attitude about the safety net neatly mimics the ideology now ascendant in the GOP-controlled Congress, perfectly encapsulated by this infamous 2014 National Review article, “White Ghetto,” which depicts SNAP recipients using their benefits to buy soda by the case load and then trading it for cash, drugs, and even sex.

In that context, Soss is right to characterize the Times piece as a “political hack job against a program that helps millions of Americans feed themselves, and we should all be outraged that the New York Times has disguised it as a piece of factual news reporting on its front page.” I’m sympathetic to Soss’ view—I made a similar argument in this 2015 piece on SNAP.

Indeed, the O’Connor piece is based on this recent US Department of Agriculture study comparing the grocery purchases of SNAP and non-SNAP shoppers, tracked at a a “leading grocery retailer” over 2011. Its conclusions are quite different than those trumpeted by O’Connor. The report found that “There were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP households, no matter how the data were categorized.” That conclusion comes on the heels of a 2014 USDA study finding that SNAP participants are no more likely to consumer sugary beverages than their non-SNAP peers.

As for O’Connor’s factoid about how SNAP households spend more on soft drinks than milk—while the opposite is true for non-SNAP household—that’s true, but the differences are tiny, the new USDA report shows. While SNAP shoppers devoted 5.44 percent of their expenditures to soft drinks, vs. 3.85 percent to milk, non-SNAPers divided their spending share on the products roughly equally: 4.01 percent on soda vs. 4.03 percent on milk. For a $100 trip to the supermarket, in other words, non-SNAP recipients allocated on average 18 cents more on milk than their non-SNAP peers. And they allocate just two cents more to milk than they do to soda.

O’Connor does acknowledge that SNAP-subsidized poor people aren’t making uniquely bad choices at the supermarket—but he buries that fact. In paragraph three, we get the dodgy soda-milk comparison. It isn’t until way down in paragraph seven that he hints at the USDA researchers’ “no major difference” conclusion.

Beyond the implicit poor-shaming—unfortunate, given that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan now has a GOP president in place to sign SNAP-cutting budget bills—the Times piece also muddies a legitimate debate about what sort of diets should be subsidized by food aid. The experts quoted by O’Connor, including New York University researcher Marion Nestle and the food industry critic Michele Simon, want the USDA to ban soda and other junk food from SNAP expenditures. On the other side, according to O’Connor, stands the soda industry, which lobbies against such limits.

But as Parke Wilde, an economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, notes, the debate is more complicated than that:

One would think from the NYT article that all the good folks favor the restrictions, and all the bad folks oppose. O’Connor didn’t say that the list of supporters for such proposals also includes conservative critics of SNAP, who sometimes include such proposals in an agenda that also has budget cuts, nor that the list of opponents includes anti-hunger organizations, who are concerned that the proposals would increase program stigma and food insecurity by discouraging participation among eligible people.

Wilde argues that soda restrictions in SNAP are worth considering—not in a knee-jerk way, but rather after seeing what happens in a carefully constructed pilot project. If the results suggest that soda restrictions end up reducing the quality of participants’ diets by driving them out of the SNAP program, the idea should be scrapped, he says. And if it results in people making healthier purchases, then restrictions make sense—especially if packaged with incentives to buy more vegetables and fruit. (Early evidence suggests that soda taxes, another policy tool for improving diets, might be effective as well.)

Such a dispassionate approach is difficult, he suggests, because of the “poisoned partisan struggle” over whether a robust safety net is worth having at all. And O’Connor’s piece, I fear, added more heat than light to the debate.

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It’s Time to Stop Shaming Poor People for What They Buy With Food Stamps

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6 Money-Saving Rules for Limiting Food Waste When Shopping

by DelbertHaskell Posted on January 16, 2017

There has been a lot of focus on food waste of late, and with good reason. To cite the oft-cited statistic, some 40 percent of food in America goes uneaten what an embarrassment of luxury we have.

Fortunately, the issue is no longer being mindlessly swept aside.Ugly produceis now trendy and hopefully here to stay; and the media is increasingly rife with tips for how not to waste food at home.

But were kind of missing an important point on a personal level we need to start addressing food waste before it comes into the home; that is, when were shopping. And this is more of an uphill challenge than may meet the eye. We have manipulative marketing thrust upon us by food manufacturers to buy their products; we have devilishly sneaky supermarket tactics that entice us to fill up our cart. I also think that there may be some good old animal instinct going on here as well after all, procuring too much food and storing it away is a time-honored survival strategy.

With all of that in mind, having some simple rules can help steer a shopper away from buying too much food; food that may likely end up in the trash and in the meantime, save a little money along the way as well.

1. Dont shop hungry

This is a well-known dieting strategy, but applies to food waste and money-saving as well.Researchfinds that shopping when youre hungry leads not only to the buying of higher-calorie items, but also to buying more of everything. And incidentally, this applies toshopping for non-food items too. Being hungry just naturally boosts the desire to acquire things, whether they’re needed or not.

2. Dont shop tired

A Swedishstudyfound that sleep deprivation led to not only the purchase of higher calorie foods, but more food by weight as well. And although it was a small study, this writer’s real-life experience points in the same direction. Another problem with shopping when youre tired is that you may be more tempted to purchase convenience foods and ready-made meals these may not lead to more food waste, but they are more expensive and often come with excess packaging waste.

3. Bring your own storage containers

In her quest to live a zero waste life,TreeHugger writer Katherine shops with jars she brings clean empty jars to the market for bulk items and foods from the deli, meat and seafood counters. Not only is this a wonderful way to avoid packaging, but its also a great way to maintain portion control as you can purchase custom amounts of an item.

4. Don’t buy big

Unless you know you will use all of the product, dont fall for the buy big and save swindle for perishable food. The little bit of savings will mean nothing if you end up throwing the unused food out.

5. Dont be seduced by sales

If something on your shopping list is on sale, no problem. But dont be enticed to buy more than you need unless you are sure you will be able to use it. And especially dont buy something thats on sale just because its a good deal impulse bargain shopping all too often ends up as wasteful shopping. If you want to take advantage of sales, use coupons or a circular and make sure to work the sale items into your shopping list at the menu planning stage. (If you have a menu planning stage.)

6. Shop frequently

While shopping every day or two may not work with the one-giant-shopping-trip-a-week-lifestyle model, it definitely has its benefits: You can be less glued to a meal plan; you can take advantage of whats local and fresh daily; you can shop to suit what youre in the mood for; food will sit in your refrigerator for shorter periods of time; you will need to store less food at home which is more energy-efficient, et cetera. When shopping more frequently, use just a hand-held basket rather than using a cart a big cart does nothing but whisper secret siren songs enticing you to feed it.

And granted, living in a walkable city or European village makes shopping more more feasible, but as Katherine notes inChange your shopping habits to reduce food waste: “Unless youre a diligent home cook, who sticks faithfully to the meal plan and then creates meals based on whats in the fridge, its a good idea to buy less food more frequently. Limit your planning to the next several meals, in order to accommodate unforeseen schedule changes, and then watch your trash output shrink along with your total grocery expenses.”

Written by Melissa Breyer. This post originally appeared on TreeHugger.

Photo Credit: Brooke Cagle/Unsplash

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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6 Money-Saving Rules for Limiting Food Waste When Shopping

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The Most Popular Theory About What Causes Obesity May Be Very Wrong

by Francis7894 Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard it over and over again: The obesity crisis, which affects more than a third of US adults and costs the country hundreds of billions of dollars every year, is due to the fact that people eat more calories than they expend. In other words, one of the leading causes of preventable deaths is rooted in gluttony and sloth. If people jogged more and ate fewer Big Macs, they wouldn’t get obese.

What if that idea is just wrong? Gary Taubes thinks it is. Taubes joined us on the most recent episode of Bite to talk about the flaws in this popular idea of how we get fat.

As a journalist and author, Taubes has devoted his career to understanding how what we eat affects our weight. Taubes sees serious flaws in the “energy-balance theory”—that you just have to eat less and move more to stave off the pounds—and thinks that the idea is seriously undermining the fight against obesity. The more nutritionists and doctors promote that theory, he argues, the more they avoid talking about what Taubes sees as a more convincing cause of our public health woes: sugar.

Taubes traces the roots of the energy-balance theory in his new book, The Case Against Sugar. In the 1860s, German scientists invented a calorimeter which measured how many calories a person consumed and then used up. This innovation helped inform the “new” nutrition science of the early 1900s: “You could measure the energy in, you could measure the energy out,” Taubes explains. “Clearly if someone was getting fatter, they were taking in more energy than they expended. From this came this theory that obesity was an energy-balance disorder.”

But in the 1960s, researchers developed radioimmunoassay, allowing them to measure the circulation of hormones in the blood. Scientists could soon establish how hormones regulate the fat we accumulate, and how the food we eat influences those hormones. But at that point, notes Taubes: “The obesity and nutrition community continues to say, ‘look, we know why people get fat: It’s because they take in more calories than they expend.'”

That stubborn theory—Taubes sarcastically deems it “the gift that keeps on giving”—prevails even today. As my colleague Julia Lurie pointed out in this story, junk food companies use this idea in order to peddle sugary foods to kids. In one lesson of Energy Balance 101, a curriculum backed by companies like Hershey and PepsiCo and taught to 28 million students and counting, students learn that going for a bike ride can balance out munching on a chocolate bar.

The problem with this mentality, Taubes and numerous doctors and scientists argue, is that it ignores the way certain ingredients play a unique role in the way our bodies develop fat. Sugar is metabolized differently, and it doesn’t trigger the hormone that tells us when we’re full. Doctor Robert Lustig argues that too much sugar causes metabolic syndrome, a condition linked to heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses.

So if obesity isn’t an energy-balance disorder, but is rather a metabolic defect, says Taubes, “you have to fix the hormonal thing.” And “the way you start fixing it is you get rid of all the sugar in your diet.”

Taubes realizes all of this is such a bummer to swallow. He’s written a book that’s “the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas,” he writes. So I wanted to know, if not sugar, what’s his vice? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ podcast for people who think hard about their food. Listen to all our episodes here, or subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS.

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The Most Popular Theory About What Causes Obesity May Be Very Wrong

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Science Says This Weird Virus Could Make You Fat

by BelindaStowers Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s January, the month of new diets and gym memberships. In the spirit of starting off a brand new year, there’s no reason not to eat healthier and move around more. But if your aim is just to lose pounds, you might be on the wrong track. In her new book, The Secret Life of Fat, biochemist Sylvia Tara reveals what many dieters have suspected for a long time: There’s more to losing weight than just eating less and exercise. Tara joined us on the most recent episode of Mother Jones’ food politics podcast Bite.

The long list of factors that influence body size and shape, writes Tara, includes our genes, hormones, and bacteria in our gut. And what’s more, she notes, weight is not a great indicator of overall health (a topic I’ve written about before).

But here’s what hardly anyone talks about: Viruses, too, can lead to weight gain. In her book, Tara tells the story of a 62-year-old man named Randy who had struggled with his weight for his entire life. After being scratched by a chicken on his family’s farm at age 11, Randy’s appetite increased dramatically—and despite his intense physical work on the farm every day, he swiftly packed on the pounds. No one could explain Randy’s weight gain, and the fact that the rest of his family members were slim made it even more puzzling.

It wasn’t until decades later that Randy found a possible explanation. He went to see a pioneering endocrinologist named Dr. Richard Atkinson, who suspected that Randy had contracted a virus that was partially responsible for his extra weight—and his difficulty shedding pounds. Atkinson’s postdoctoral assistant, an Indian scientist named Nikhil Dhurandhar who had studied metabolism-changing chicken viruses, confirmed Atkinson’s suspicion with a blood test: Randy tested positive for a virus called AD-36.

Tara chronicles a fascinating series of experiments in which Atkinson and Dhurandhar showed that AD-36 changed animals’ metabolisms. When marmoset monkeys were infected with the virus, for example, their body fat increased by almost 60 percent. The team then set about studying AD-36 in humans. Here’s how Tara describes what they found:

Dhurandhar and Atkinson tested over 500 human subjects to see if they had antibodies to the AD-36 virus, indicating they had been infected with it at some point in their lives. His team found that 30 percent of subjects who were obese tested positive for AD-36, but only 11 percent of nonobese individuals did—a 3-to-1 ratio. In addition, nonobese individuals who tested positive for AD-36 were significantly heavier than those who had never been exposed to a virus. Once again, the virus was correlated with fat.

The team went on to study pairs of twins in which one tested positive for AD-36 and the other tested negative. “It turned out exactly the way we hypothesized,” Dhurandhar told Tara. “The Ad-36 positive co-twins were significantly fatter compared to their AD-36 negative counterparts.”

Whether Randy was infected with AD-36 from the chicken that had scratched him as a child—and how large of a role AD-36 played in his own struggles—is almost impossible to know. There’s no cure for AD-36, though Atkinson is hopeful that scientists will someday develop a vaccine. He believes that as many as 30 percent of obese people may be infected with the virus.

Meanwhile, Tara reports, Randy still struggles to lose weight. He eats just 1,500 calories a day; his main meal is typically a salad. Atkinson told Tara that Randy “is a remarkable person, with more discipline than anyone I have ever met.”

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Science Says This Weird Virus Could Make You Fat

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A new label could release a flood of organic food.

by Mike Herman Posted on January 12, 2017

Senate confirmation hearings began on Wednesday for Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil and Trump’s nominee for secretary of state. Tillerson was pressed on the issue of climate change by several senators, including Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, who asked Tillerson if he believes that human activity is the cause.

“The increase in greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is having an effect,” Tillerson said, demonstrating that he at least knows more about the issue than our future president. But, Tillerson added, “Our ability to predict that effect is very limited.” This is false.

Tillerson had less to say about allegations that Exxon, his employer for 40 years, knew about the effect of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere back in the ’70s and failed to disclose the risks to the public or shareholders. When asked about it by Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine, Tillerson punted and said he didn’t work there anymore: “You’ll have to ask them.”

The nominee did acknowledge that it’s important for the U.S. to stay involved in international climate negotiations and “maintain its seat at the table in the conversation.” As for what he would do at that table, he’s not saying. If he wanted to do anything constructive, first he’d have to convince his boss.

You can read more about the hearing here.

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A new label could release a flood of organic food.

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Trump Somehow Found Time Today to Meet With Monsanto Execs

by BeatrizVSGP Posted on January 12, 2017

Mother Jones

Amid the furor surrounding allegations of covert ties with Russian intelligence figures as well as his first press conference since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump found time in his hectic Wednesday schedule to meet with two towering figures in the agriculture world, reports Fox Business Daily. But the main conversation topic wasn’t the job opening atop the US Department of Agriculture, the sole cabinet spot awaiting an appointment from Trump.

Rather, the meeting involved German chemical giant Bayer’s $66 billion buyout of US seed/agrichemical giant Monsanto—a deal that will have to pass antitrust muster with Trump’s Department of Justice (more on that here). Fox reports that Bayer CEO Werner Baumann and his Monsanto counterpart Hugh Grant met with the incoming president at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to promote the merger. In an email to the news organization, a Monsanto spokesperson confirmed that the two execs “had a productive meeting with President-Elect Trump and his team to share their views on the future of the agriculture industry and its need for innovation.”

Baumann and Grant have plenty to be concerned about regarding possible antitrust obstacles to their mega-deal. As I’ve reported before, a combined Bayer-Monsanto would own 29 percent of the global seed market, and 25 percent of the global pesticide market. And if the pending merger between agribiz goliaths Dow and DuPont also wins approval, three enormous companies—the above two combined firms, plus Syngenta (itself recently taken over by a Chinese chemical conglomerate)—would sell about 59 percent of the globe’s seeds and 64 percent of its pesticides. In this post, I tease out how such concentrated power can harm farmers and consumers alike.

And as The Wall Street Journal reports, opposition to these mergers has arisen even in rival agribusiness circles, including among the motley crew of execs and aligned GOP farm-state pols who served on Trump’s rural advisory committee during the campaign. Iowa corn, pork, and ethanol magnate Bruce Rastetter, a member of that committee and a leading candidate for the USDA post, told The Journal he “plans to raise his concerns about the mergers directly with Mr. Trump in the near future.” Rastetter is tightly aligned with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, whom Trump has picked to serve as ambassador to China.

As with everything else he does, Trump seems intent on plunging these momentous decisions—on both the future of the seed market and the leadership of the USDA—into a swirling sea of chaos and drama.

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Trump Somehow Found Time Today to Meet With Monsanto Execs

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