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Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart

by CarolNXGmes Posted on January 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Before fast-food workers began agitating for a liveable wage, before Walmart employees began holding public demonstrations to demand better pay from the largest US private employer, there was the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida’s vast tomato fields.

Living in dire conditions, disempowered by their status as undocumented migrants from points south, making sub-poverty wages, subjected to often-violent repression and sometimes outright slavery—all depicted in detail in Barry Estrabrook’s Tomatoland—the workers rolled out an ambitious and quixotic-seeming strategy to improve their lot in the mid-2000s. Rather than continuing to knock their heads against Florida’s entrenched tomato barons directly, CIW instead brought battle to their case to the growers’ customers: massive fast-food chains.

Using boycotts and partnering with college-student activists, CIW demanded that the chains pay an extra penny per pound for their tomatoes, which would then be passed on directly to the workers. A penny per pound would represent the first major pay raise in years for the workers, and a minor dip in profits for massive chains like McDonalds. Yet the chains fought back, sometimes voraciously.

And then, one by one, they fell: first YUM Brands (Taco Bell) signed the penny-a-pound pledge, then McDonalds, then Burger King, and finally, after a long battle, Chipotle Grill. After that, CIW turned its attention to retailers, signing agreements with Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

Late Thursday, CIW netted the biggest fish of all: Walmart, by far the largest private food buyer in the US. A company that muscled its way to the top of the US corporate heap by pinching pennies—squeezing suppliers and its own workers relentlessly—has now agreed to shell out an extra penny per pound for tomatoes.

CIW has shown yet again that scrappy workers, sufficiently organized, can win concessions from even the most ruthless companies. Barry Estabrook has more.

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Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart

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Will Tyson Finally Ditch Cruel Crates for Pregnant Pigs?

by ElouiseR69 Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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In November, the animal-welfare group Mercy For Animals released a video, captured by an undercover investigator, documenting alarming conditions on a hog farm contracted to meat giant Tyson Foods. Some of the actions caught on tape were truly awful: men kicking sows and pounding them with sheets of wood. But it was just as devastating to watch how those pregnant sows lived day-to-day: crammed individually into spaces so tight, they can’t turn around.

On Thursday, Tyson announced it had begun “urging” its hog contractors to “improve housing for pregnant sows…urging all future sow barn construction or remodeling to allow for pregnant sows of all sizes to stand, lie down, stretch their legs and turn around.” Granted, it’s a statement without teeth: It requests, not requires, action, and gives no timeline. But even Mercy For Animals acknowledged in an emailed statement that it “signals an important new era and direction for the company,” which had before resisted considerable pressure to take a stand on the practice.

Gestation crates really, really need to be phased out. As Ted Genoways showed so forcefully in his 2013 Mother Jones feature “Gagged by Big Ag,” the techniques not only essentially tortures the sows, but it also puts the workers who handle them in danger—and leads them in turn to heap yet more abuse on the sows. Get this, from Genoways’ account of an interview with a Hormel worker who had been caught on tape in the act:

As we sat recently in the tiny, tumbledown house he grew up in and now shares with his wife and two kids, Lyons acknowledged—as he did to the sheriff’s deputy back then—that he had prodded sows with clothespins, hit them with broad, wooden herding boards, and pulled them by their ears, but only in an effort, he said, to get pregnant sows that had spent the last 114 days immobilized in gestation crates up and moving to the farrowing crates where they would give birth. Lyons said he never intended to hurt the hogs, that he was just “scared to death” of the angry sows “who had spent their lives in a little pen”—and this was how he had been trained to deal with them. Lyons had watery blue eyes that seemed always on the verge of tears and spoke in a skittish mutter that would sometimes disappear all the way into silence as he rubbed his thin beard. “You do feel sorry for them, because they don’t have much room to move around,” he said, but if they get spooked coming out of their crates, “you’re in for a fight.”

Did the revelations in the latest video inspire Tyson’s baby steps toward change? In its statement, Tyson attributed the announcement to its “ongoing animal well-being program,” “input we’ve received from our Animal Well-Being Advisory Panel, customers, farmers and industry experts,” and “our continuing efforts to balance the expectations of consumers with the realities of today’s hog farming business.”

But it’s becoming clear that videos like the Mercy For Animals one are increasingly shaping those consumer expectations. Tyson’s rival Smithfield found religion on hog crates after being burned by a particularly grotesque video in 2010. Unlike Tyson, which buys the great bulk of the pigs it slaughters from contract farmers, Smithfield is a massive hog producer in its own right, raising about 60 percent of its own sows. In 2010, it vowed to phase out the gestation crates in its company hog-production facilities by 2017. And just this week, Smithfield announced it would pressure its contract farmers, suppliers of the other 40 percent, to phase out crates by 2022.

The lesson from this trend is clear: When people see what goes on in factory farms, they don’t like it, and they force change (granted, at a slow and halting pace). And that is why, as Genoways’ Mother Jones piece demonstrates, the meat industry is fighting so hard to criminalize the act of secretly documenting conditions within these massive facilities.

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Will Tyson Finally Ditch Cruel Crates for Pregnant Pigs?

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BPA Sales Are Booming

by Kennith30E Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Bisphenol A, a chemical used in can linings and plastic bottles, is pretty nasty stuff. The Food and Drug Administration recently banished it from baby bottles (at the behest of the chemical industry itself, after baby bottle producers had already phased it out under consumer pressure). BPA, as it’s known, is an endocrine-disrupting chemical, meaning that it likely causes hormonal damage at extremely low levels. The packaging industry uses it to make plastics more flexible and to delay spoilage in canned foods.

You might think that such a substance would lose popularity as evidence of its likely harms piles up and up. Instead, however, the global market for it will boom over the next six years, according to a proprietary, paywall-protected report from the consultancy Transparency Market Research. The group expects global BPA sales to reach $18.8 billion by 2019, from $13.1 billion this year—about a 44 percent jump.

TMR researchers declined to be interviewed by me and wouldn’t give me access to a full copy of their report. But they did send me a heavily redacted sample. One of the few trends I could glean from it is that the “steady growth” in global BPA consumption is driven by “increasing demand in the Asia-Pacific region.” (According to this 2012 paper by Hong Kong researchers, Chinese BPA production and consumption have both “grown rapidly” in recent years, meaning “much more BPA contamination” for the nation’s environment and citizens.) As for the United States, the report says that North America is the globe’s “third largest regional market for BPA,” behind Asia and Europe. North American BPA consumption is growing, but a “at a very slow rate,” the report states. As a result, our share of the global BPA is expected to experience a “slight decline” by 2019. Not exactly comforting.

The sample that Transparency Market Research sent me blacked out its analysis of which companies have what share of the global BPA market. This 2012 US Department of Agriculture report claims that just two companies, German chemical giant Bayer and its US rival Dow, “produce the bulk of BPA in the world.” Another major producer is Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a company 70 percent owned by the Saudi government. This charming corporate crew looks set to cash in on handsomely on the ongoing BPA boom.

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BPA Sales Are Booming

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FDA Moves to Ban Trans Fat

by SpencerKarpinsk Posted on November 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Of all the Food and Drug Administration’s bows to Big Food—examples here, here, here, and here—perhaps the most pernicious is the status it has long bestowed on partially hydrogenated oils, also known as trans fat: “generally regarded as safe.”

With trans fat deemed “GRAS,” the food industry has been free to dump the cheap butter substitute in a whole array of foods for decades. Meanwhile, the public health community generally regards the stuff as quite ruinous to a bodily organ generally regarded as critical to one’s health: the heart. The Harvard School of Public Health calls it the “worst fat for the heart, blood vessels, and rest of the body.”

After decades of fending off demands, the FDA finally required food manufacturers to label trans fats starting in 2006. And just today, the FDA announced it had begun the process of revoking trans fat’s “generally regarded as safe” status. The process begins with a 60-day comment period. If the agency follows through, any foods containing trans fats will be “considered adulterated under U.S. law, meaning they cannot legally be sold,” the FDA wrote in its press release.

For the industry-addled history of the FDA’s effort to reckon with the health menace of trans fats, see this post from last year.

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FDA Moves to Ban Trans Fat

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Washington State’s GMO Labeling Appears Headed for Defeat

by JohnsieaJensen Posted on November 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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Vote counts go slowly in Washington State, where ballots come in via mail and can be sent in as late as election day. But early returns suggest that—like its predecessor, California’s Prop. 37—Washington’s ballot initiative that would have required labeling of genetically modified food has been snuffed out under a fluffy pillow of cash from the agrichemical and food-processing industries.

As in California, the Washington initiative, known as I-522, polled strongly early and then swan-dived as the election approached amid a flurry of anti-labeling TV ads. Again, the anti forces outspent the pro forces by a wide margin; again, they promoted the trumped-up charge that labeling would dramatically ramp up food prices, which I debunked here. Here’s the money-in-politics group Maplight:

Maplight

You’ll note from that list that there are two distinct kinds of corporations that dumped cash into the effort to squash labeling in Washington: agrichemical/GMO seed companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, BASF) and Big Food companies (Pepsi, Nestle, Coca Cola, etc.).

The agrichem firms are united in their zealous opposition to labeling. Their products dominate the corn, soybean, sugar beets, and cotton markets, and GMO versions of these crops suffuse the US food system, making up the great bulk of the sweeteners and fats that end up in processed food. They’d obviously prefer to keep that information off of labels, in fear that consumers might demand non-GMO versions of those products.

The Big Food firms, of course, buy those sweeteners and fats and turn them into highly processed foodstuffs. For them, labeling is inconvenient, but not a major threat. After all, they operate quite happily in Europe, where GMO ingredients are rare and labeling is mandatory. Even before the Washington fight, Big Food was ambivalent about continuing to fight labeling, as Tom Laskawy noted in January. Many of these companies have organic brands, and the cash they devoted to defeating labeling in California put them in a tight spot with fans of their organic lines.

They ended up coming out in force to fund the opposition to I-522, but not without making an awkward and ultimately failed attempt to hide their contributions by funneling them through a powerful trade group called the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

In a statement issued Wednesday, the GMA celebrated the likely defeat of labeling in Washington State but left the door open to supporting possible nation-wide labeling that would come from Washington, DC:

Because a 50-state patchwork of GMO labeling laws would be confusing and costly to consumers, GMA will advocate for a federal solution that will protect consumers by ensuring that the FDA, America’s leading food safety authority, sets national standards for the safety and labeling of products made with GMO ingredients.

National labeling? If Big Food does get behind it, it could conceivably happen.

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Washington State’s GMO Labeling Appears Headed for Defeat

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What It’s Like To Sneak Across the Border To Harvest Food

by 2343b4u4u Posted on October 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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For most anthropologists, “field work” means talking to and observing a particular group. But for Seth Holmes, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, it also literally means working in a field: toiling alongside farm workers from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a vast Washington State berry patch. It also means visiting them in their tiny home village—and making the harrowing trek back to US farm fields through a militarized and increasingly perilous border.

Holmes recounts his year and a half among the people who harvest our food in his new book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. It’s a work of academic anthropology, but written vividly and without jargon. In its unvarnished view into what our easy culinary bounty means for the people burdened with generating it, Fresh Fruit/Broken Bodies has earned its place on a short shelf alongside works like Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, and Frank Bardacke‘s Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.

I recently caught up with Holmes via phone about the view from the depths of our food system.

Mother Jones: What sparked your interest in farm workers—and how did you gain access to the workers you cover in the book?

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What It’s Like To Sneak Across the Border To Harvest Food

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40 Percent of Your Chicken Nugget Is Meat. The Rest Is…

by 4q4cv8v Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Marketing isn’t about giving people what they want; it’s about convincing people to want what you’ve got—that is, what you can buy cheap, spiff up, and sell at a profit. Take the chicken nugget, that staple of fast-food outlets and school lunches.

The implicit marketing pitch goes something like this: “You like fried chicken, right? How about some bite-sized fried chicken chunks, without the messy bones?” When most people think of eating chicken, they think of, say, biting into a drumstick. What they get when they do so is a mouthful of muscle—popularly known as meat.

What people are actually getting from chicken nuggets is a bit different, according to a new study by University of Mississippi medical researchers. (Abstract here; I have access to the full paper but can’t upload it for copyright reasons.) They bought an order of chicken nuggets from two (unnamed) fast-food chains, plucked a nugget from each, broke them down, and analyzed them in a lab.

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40 Percent of Your Chicken Nugget Is Meat. The Rest Is…

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Tom’s Kitchen: Spaghetti with Butternut Squash, Bacon, and Chickpeas

by munrhexaa Posted on September 28, 2013

Mother Jones

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September in Austin is a bit like February in northern climes: months of harsh weather have turned the farmers market into a study in austerity. Here in Texas, tomatoes are mostly gone, done in by the unrelenting heat. Greens are as rare as rain. Eggplant, zucchini, and melons soldier on. And on.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite vegetables began to appear at farm stands: butternut squash. The trouble was, the idea of whipping up—much less eating—a butternut squash soup on a 100+ degree day had all the appeal of sporting a down parka at a swimming hole.

At a recent Sunday farmers market, I broke down and bought one of the squashes anyway, desperate for new flavors. I figured I’d find something appealing to do with it. And then, fall—or at least a preview of it—arrived in the form of a day-long rainstorm. The temperature barely cracked 80 degrees: a veritable cold front! So I decided to combine that one butternut squash with a little slab of bacon I bought from the excellent Austin butcher Dai Due into an autumnal pasta.

To bring the sweet smokiness of the squash/bacon combination to the fore, I deployed an old Mark Bittman trick: I used half the amount of spaghetti that a typical recipe would call for. If you want to feed more people, you could get away with using a full pound of pasta. Just add additional lashings of olive oil and cheese to ramp up flavor. Substitution note: Try swapping the pasta for farro—see here for more on that excellent grain.

Spaghetti with Butternut Squash, Bacon, and Chickpeas
(Yields three generous portions.)

Extra-virgin olive oil

6 oz. bacon, preferably from pastured hogs, diced into quarter-inch bits

1 large butternut squash, cut into half-inch chunks
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

8 oz. spaghetti
4 cloves garlic, mashed flat, peeled, and finely chopped
A pinch or two, to taste, of crushed chili flakes
1 15 oz. can of chickpeas, drained (cannellini beans would also work well)
A wedge of Parmesan, grano padano, or other hard cheese
1 bunch parsley, chopped

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place a large, oven-proof skillet—one big enough to hold the squash in one layer—over a medium flame. Add barely enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the skillet. When it’s hot, add the bacon and cook, stirring often, until brown and crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside, leaving the heat on.

Add the squash to the hot pan and gently toss until it’s sizzling and coated in fat. (If there isn’t enough fat left in the pan from cooking the bacon, add a bit of olive oil.) Add a small pinch of salt—go easy, because bacon is salty—and a generous grinding of pepper. Toss the squash one more time to make sure the pieces are laid out more or less in one layer.

Place the pan in the heated oven. Cook, tossing occasionally, until the squash is tender and lightly browned, 15 to 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, get the pasta going. (I use Harold McGhee’s low-water, high-speed method.)

When the squash is done, take the pan out of the oven and mix in the chopped garlic and crushed chili flakes. Let it sizzle for a minute or two, as the pan’s residual heat cooks the garlic. Now add the drained beans, a ladle of pasta water, the cooked bacon, a good grating of cheese, and toss it all together.

When the pasta is done, drain it and combine with the squash mixture. Add the chopped parsley, and toss until well combined. Taste for seasoning, adding salt, pepper, and chili flakes as needed. If the dish seems a little dry, add a glug of olive oil.

Pass around the block of cheese and the grater as you serve. This dish goes well with a sturdy red wine—maybe one from France’s Rhône region.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Spaghetti with Butternut Squash, Bacon, and Chickpeas

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CDC Reveals Scary Truth About Factory Farms and Superbugs

by Cynthia Perez Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nearly 80 percent of antibiotics consumed in the United States go to livestock farms. Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant pathogens affecting people are on the rise. Is there a connection here? No need for alarm, insists the National Pork Producers Council. Existing regulations “provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance,” the group insists on its site. It even enlists the Centers for Disease Control in its effort to show that “animal antibiotic use is safe for everyone,” claiming that the CDC has found “no proven link to antibiotic treatment failure in humans due to antibiotic use in animals.”

So move along, nothing to see here, right? Not so fast. On Monday, the CDC came out with a new report called “Antibiotic resistance threats in the United States, 2013,” available here. And far from exonerating the meat industry and its voracious appetite for drugs, the report spotlights it as a driver of resistance. Check out the left side of this infographic drawn from the report:

CDC

Note the text on the bottom: “These drugs should be only used to treat infections.” Compare that to the National Pork Producers Council’s much more expansive conception of proper uses of antibiotics in livestock facilities: “treatment of illness, prevention of disease, control of disease, and nutritional efficiency of animals.” Dosing animals with daily hits of antibiotics to prevent disease only makes sense, of course, if you’re keeping animals on an industrial scale.

The CDC report lays out a couple of specific pathogens whose spread among people is driven by farm practices. Drug-resistant campylobacter causes 310,000 infections per year, resulting in 28 deaths, the report states. The agency’s recommendations for reducing those numbers is blunt:

• Avoiding inappropriate antibiotic use in food animals.

• Tracking antibiotic use in different types of food animals.

• Stopping spread of Campylobacter among animals on farms.

• Improving food production and processing to reduce contamination.

• Educating consumers and food workers about safe food handling

practices.

Then there’s drug-resistant salmonella, which infects 100,000 people each year and kills 38, CDC reports. The agency lists a similar set of regulations—including “Avoiding inappropriate antibiotic use in food animals”—for reversing the rising trend of resistance in salmonella.

Finally, there’s Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which racks up 80,461 “severe” cases per year and kills a mind-numbing 11,285 people annually. The CDC report doesn’t link MRSA to livestock production, but it does note that the number of cases of MRSA caught during hospital stays has plunged in recent years, while “rates of MRSA infections have increased rapidly among the general population (people who have not recently received care in a healthcare setting).”

Why are so many people coming down with MRSA who have not had recent contact with hospitals? Increasing evidence points to factory-scale hog facilities as a source. In a recent study, a team of researchers led by University of Iowa’s Tara Smith found MRSA in 8.5 percent of pigs on conventional farms and no pigs on antibiotic-free farms. Meanwhile, a study just released by the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that people who live near hog farms or places where hog manure is applied as fertilizer have a much greater risk of contracting MRSA. Former Mother Jones writer Sarah Zhang summed up the study like this for Nature:

The team analyzed cases of two different types of MRSA — community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA), which affected 1,539 patients, and health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA), which affected 1,335 patients. (The two categories refer to where patients acquire the infection as well as the bacteria’s genetic lineages, but the distinction has grown fuzzier as more patients bring MRSA in and out of the hospital.) Then the researchers examined whether infected people lived near pig farms or agricultural land where pig manure was spread. They found that people who had the highest exposure to manure—calculated on the basis of how close they lived to farms, how large the farms were and how much manure was used—were 38% more likely to get CA-MRSA and 30% more likely to get HA-MRSA.

In short, the meat industry’s protestations aside, livestock production is emerging as a vital engine for the rising threat of antibiotic resistance. Perhaps the scariest chart in the whole report is this one—showing that once we generate pathogens that can withstand all the antibiotics currently on the market, there are very few new antibiotics on the horizon that can fill the breach—the pharma industry just isn’t investing in R&D for new ones.

CDC

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration rolled out proposed new rules for antibiotic uses on farms. At the time I found them wanting, because they include a massive loophole: They would phase out growth promotion as a legitimate use for antibiotics, but still accept disease prevention as a worthy reason for feeding them to animals. As I wrote at the time, “The industry can simply claim it’s using antibiotics preventively and go on about its business—continuing to reap the benefits of growth promotion and continuing to menace public health by breeding resistance.” To repeat the CDC’s phrase from its new report, “These drugs should be only used to treat infections.” Worse, the FDA’s new rules would be purely voluntary, relying on the pharma and meat industries to self-regulate.

Nearly a year and a half later, the FDA still hasn’t moved to initiate even that timid step in the right direction. Perhaps the CDC’s blunt reckoning will provide sufficient motivation.

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CDC Reveals Scary Truth About Factory Farms and Superbugs

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The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water

by Merv Carlson Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Like dot-com moguls in the ’90s and real-estate gurus in the 2000s, farmers in western Kansas are enjoying the fruits of a bubble: their crop yields are borne up by a gusher of soon-to-vanish irrigation water. That’s the message of a new study by Kansas State University researchers. Drawing down their region’s groundwater at more than six times the natural rate of recharge, farmers there have managed to become so productive that the area boasts “the highest total market value of agriculture products” of any Congressional district in the nation,” the authors note. Those products are mainly beef fattened on large feedlots; and the corn used to fatten those beef cows.

But they’re on the verge of essentially sucking dry a large swath of the High Plains Aquifer, one of the United States’ greatest water resources. The researchers found that 30 percent of the region’s groundwater has been tapped out, and if present trends continue, another 39 percent will be gone within 50 years. As the water stock dwindles, of course, pumping what’s left gets more and more expensive—and farming becomes less profitable and ultimately uneconomical. But all isn’t necessarily lost. The authors calculate that if the region’s farmers can act collectively and cut their water use 20 percent now, their farms would produce less and generate lower profits in the short term, but could sustain corn and beef farming in the area into the next century.

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The Real Reason Kansas Is Running Out of Water

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