At that moment, something clicked in Myers. An esteemed sustainable farming organizer and a cultural anthropologist of agricultural history, she spent time interviewing Black farmers while writing her doctoral anthropology dissertation at Ohio State University  Then in 2004, she co-founded a nonprofit for underserved sustainable farmers called Farms to Grow. In the intervening years, she had continued teaching, writing, speaking, and organizing events aimed at connecting Black farmers and educating the public about their work.

The 2012 call mobilized her to act, and she decided to spend nearly two months that summer traveling across 10 Southern states, documenting Black farmers’ stories and generational knowledge for the documentary Rhythms of the Land. She applied for grants and fellowships to make the film, which she shot herself. The documentary, which acts as a powerful document of a pivotal time in U.S. history, was released in 2022 and has been screened so far at the New York Botanical Garden, Cornell University, and The New School.

We spoke with Myers recently about the making of the film, the oppressive history of sharecropping, and the power of seed saving for Black farmers.

Your film comes at a time when the struggles of Black farmers are finally attracting more mainstream media attention and advocacy. What has led to that groundswell?

The work started long ago, and this is the natural progression, but we’ve been pushing the rock uphill to tell this story. Initially, Rhythms of the Land was supposed to come out in 2013, but I think it was too early and there wasn’t the appetite then; 2022 was the perfect time for it to come out. George Floyd’s murder had a lot to do with people wanting to open their eyes to the Black community and Black farmers, who after Pigford [v. Glickman] are still trying to tell their stories.

In 1997, there were a handful of organizations doing this [advocacy] work. That number has quadrupled, so the ecosystem of support for Black farmers has expanded. Black and brown communities are really coming together to tell the story of BIPOC farmers.

Do you want to name a few of those groups?

There have been some key organizations, like Soul Fire Farm; I can’t say enough about their work, like their summer farming program. Another is Black Urban Growers (BUGs), whose conference I first attended in 2012 or 2013. BUGs has brought together Black growers from all over the world, including more young people.

In the film, you feature Arkansas farmer Alvin Steppes, who was denied an operating loan by the Farmers Home Administration in 1986 and lost his farm. He kept records of his own lawsuit, which supported Black farmers in advancing Pigford v. Glickman.

Yes, but sadly, Alvin never received a dime from Pigford 1 or Pigford 2. Those who received a $50,000 payment might have put a down payment on a tractor, but Pigford did not benefit Black farmers on the whole as it should have. Black farmers are still losing land without relief.

The recent commitment from Biden was for $5 billion loan forgiveness [later walked back after lawsuits from white farmers claiming discrimination], but not a lot of Black farmers got loans that can get forgiven. What we would have loved and have been pushing for is a foreclosure moratorium.

What other challenges are Black farmers facing now?

Black farmers are isolated and often don’t have anyone to advocate for them. Our farmers aren’t even at the starting line, and don’t know how to ask for support from agricultural agencies. Or they’ve applied for loan services and been denied.

Black farmers continue to face land takeovers from developers and local and city governments. There is also local level interpersonal violence Black farmers have to deal with. There have also been attempts from white neighbors of Black farmers who want to take Black farm land and their animals. Farmers have mentioned livestock being stolen and poisoned.

The film explains how the numbers related to Black farm ownership are deceptive. 

Yes. In 1920, over 920,000 farms were owned by Black farmers. But only 219,000 of these farms were operated by Black families who were independent owners, and 703,000 were farmed by tenants or sharecroppers. Cotton was king, and tobacco was the queen. It was $1.89 per bale for white man’s tobacco and $1.40 for a Black man’s tobacco.

Land sovereignty is vitally important to Black farmers. You explore that historic oppression of sharecropping in the film, and how it’s connected to the current fight for land ownership.  

The connection to the land is even more vital now for Black farmers, in making sure that they are able to hand the land down to the next generation, that it’s something that represents the family struggle and the family’s investment in the community. Land represented a position in their community where they could have not necessarily a sense of status, but a place. You had to have land to have a sense of independence.

There was Jim Crow violence, and a lot of towns were burned, but we could build our families and our farms right here. Land was very important and is still very important.

The stories in the film are heartbreaking, like the woman who recollected her childhood experience of farming with her family for an entire year, only to have their profits taken by a white landowner charging exorbitant fees for living expenses.

The plantation system allowed the white families to exploit Black families. The sharecropper system controlled the social and economic mobility of these families. Families worked six months, nine months, a year and then took cotton to the gin to get paid but would get nothing because, according to the white owner, they didn’t have enough to cover rent, seeds, and food expenses for that year. They were left owing the landowner.

The elderly farmers also explain how hard it was for Black children to get an education during the cotton season, because they were forced to work, stunting the educational wealth and upward mobility of Black families.

What I find so interesting about them not being able to go to school is that the quest for learning was always there and continued to grow. The demographic [most likely to get a college degree] is Black women, and it’s amazing where we have come with not having access to education. We were in the cotton fields and on the tobacco farms, not being able to go to school, and yet today we’re able to achieve high levels of education. That just shows the tenacity and the strength in the community of the folks who wanted an education. There were gaps in education in both urban and rural communities, and a lot of these schools are still catching up, while white students were able to go to school continuously. Education is a big piece, and it’s connected to our farming past.

You highlight the importance of Black woman farmers, starting with 109-year-old Icefene Thomas and then moving on to Aunt Rose Hurt, Sarah Buchanan, and Laurntean Garrett, all in their 90s, and Vergie Peacock, who says her family was sprayed with chemicals while working in the field. Why was it important to amplify women’s voices?

Icefene had won so many awards for her watermelons and tomatoes, entering them into the county show, and she would always win. Vergie Peacock’s story is so important, because not many women were independent farm owners, and most were sharecroppers. By the time she got married, she had her own land, and she could take her own cotton to the gin.

Women were in many ways the primary seed keepers and the organizers. As mentioned in the film, women picked cotton, took care of the children, and found ways to stave off starvation. Women knew how to make something out of nothing—they always had canned peaches or pears for desserts. It was women who made sure that communities survived.

These women had every right to be angry about how they were treated. How did they portray such grace?

I think there was a certain amount of not necessarily forgetting about it, but they had to forgive and move forward without anger, without cruelty, without carrying the trauma and passing it on. They had to get on with the lovingness. There was no room for that hate. They tried to look for their loved ones who were sold off, tried to find a place to call home. In doing so, they built their communities from all the love that they built for each other.

This isn’t just a discussion around how Black farmers were wronged. It is about what they endured, but it’s really a love story about how they loved, nurtured, and supported each other. It’s about those principles of natural farming with no pesticides, and those collective stories of raising, cooking, and sharing food together.

The farmers in the film speak with reverence about seed saving. What stories did you find?

Seeds are our connection to not only the food, but also the culture and legacy of the stories that go along with the food. Yes, it was about resilience and making sure that we had the inputs for the next season, but it was also about the memories.

Bill Chambers, who is 89, told me about a pepper seed his grandmother had, and he was so regretful that they lost that seed. He said that seed was so hot that if you put your hand in the bag, you would get blisters. Seeds were continuity for food, but also culture and identification with the ancestors.

Elders would say, “You put seeds in your mouth and roll them around in the saliva, so that the seeds will know you. Once they know you, they will grow for you.” I heard from an elder that if you move into a house and there’s something growing there and you didn’t plant it, there’s someone in that house who will need that, and it was planted by your elders. If you have lobelia growing around your house, you can use it for congestion issues, or if you have mint, then it’s for allergies. There was a lot of wisdom around plant knowledge, seed knowledge, memory.

What is the lesson in your film for our current times?

Right now, there are maybe a handful of Black billionaires, quite a few Black millionaires, and we have resources available we didn’t have before. But back then, we had a really tight community—we had the trillion-dollar community investment account, which is the investment from everyone in the community. Black farming families bought into the collective, and we’ve gone away from that. We have to figure out how we support everybody in the community.

One of the beautiful things I love about these farm stories is that they didn’t have much, but they had a responsibility to help. That commitment to a larger community is missing in our rugged individualism stance. There’s a lot of competition, and competition is OK, but what about collectivization of our resources? How do we spread it around so everyone can have it?

That is what this story is showing: You don’t need a million dollars, just the intentionality that gives everyone enough to eat. These Black farming communities were able to nourish each other and combat the trauma. The food was the salve. It wasn’t OK, but they knew they would have something to eat. With all this money we have, we have too many children going to bed hungry. They had big gardens, and everyone knew there was no shame in asking.

What are your plans for the film?

Currently, we are hosting local screenings across the country. These local screenings really engage communities and the networking that takes place in these screening spaces, in person and virtual, is incomparable. By spring of 2024, we plan to have the film available for broader distribution.  Please refer to our website to request a screening in your local area. 

I also definitely want to do part two—there’s a sense of another film. I do hope that I’m able to go around the world and translate this film into many different languages. There’s not enough of a footprint of the Black farming experience. We say: “Black lives matter,” but let’s see the images. A film like this can soften the hearts of a lot of people who just don’t know all the details when Black folks say we helped build this country, and we’re the originator of a lot of the foods of this country. They need to see these stories, so I’m very thankful I was able to share this particular narrative at this point in our existence.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post ‘Rhythms of the Land’ Preserves the Untold Stories of Black Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Thu, 01 Jun 2023 10:00:14 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPEKHzvfD-_OQ https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNdy9VZYKXeZg

“There was confusion about that,” Stueber recalls. Many low-income families didn’t realize they had to submit a school meal application to obtain free and reduced-price meals. Others were suddenly faced with a new financial constraint.

Stueber recalls a “difficult conversation” she had with a single mother of four kids, for instance. While her gross income was over the qualifying limit of $60,000 for reduced-price meals, her take-home pay was far less, after health insurance and other deductions chipped away at her earnings, making it hard to cover groceries and meals that have grown more expensive due to rising food costs.

Stueber’s experience in Mankato reflects a wider trend. In a recent survey completed by the School Nutrition Association (SNA), 90 percent of the 1,200 responding districts reported challenges with getting families to submit school meal applications, and 96 percent of responding districts reported an increase in unpaid school meal debt that totaled about $19 million. (Per district debt varied drastically, from $15 in one district to nearly $2 million in another.)

Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson with the SNA, says the survey also showed a drop in school meal participation in districts that had to start charging for breakfast and lunch again, perhaps in part due to “an increase in stigma for low-income students who rely on those meals,” she says.

Stueber, who is also the public policy chair of the Minnesota School Nutrition Association, spent much of the last year advocating for a return to free meals. In March, she says she was “excited and proud” when Minnesota’s governor signed legislation creating a permanent free school meal program in the state.

Over the last year, momentum has been building to revive the pandemic-era model of school food access. In addition to Minnesota, lawmakers in California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Maine have all committed to funding what are often referred to as universal free meals. Other states, including Vermont and Connecticut, extended free meals through the 2023 school year, and more than 20 other states have at least attempted to pass universal meal legislation, according to the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC.) While it’s state legislatures that have led the charge back to free meals, advocacy groups, medical associations, a teachers union, and parents organizations this month joined together to form the Healthy School Meals for All Coalition, which plans to push Congress to bring back universal school meals.

“Making sure that all kids who are in school for seven hours a day have access to the nutrition they need to concentrate and focus and thrive in school is really the best way to make sure that we can support kids and families,” says Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs at the FRAC, which is one of the members of the coalition.

Leah Gardner, policy director with Hunger Solutions Minnesota, says that advocates have been “screaming into the wilderness”  for universal school means  for many years. But it wasn’t until the pandemic, when parents, schools, and legislators realized it could be accomplished that the political will started to surface. “Why would we go backwards if we want to invest in our children?” Gardner asks.

Money Matters for Universal School Meals

In New Mexico, a universal school meal law that passed unanimously in the state House and Senate sets aside $22.5 million to cover the cost of those meals, filling the gap that federal reimbursements won’t cover. The bill also sets aside additional money to upgrade school kitchen equipment to allow for more scratch cooking. “We want fresh farm-to-table,” says Senator Michael Padilla, a Democrat who sponsored the bill.

Padilla has been a longtime advocate for healthy school meals in a state where 67 percent of kids qualify for free and reduced-price meals. He grew up in extreme poverty and says he ate whatever was available, which often meant fast, unhealthy food. “I had horrible eating habits,” he says, adding that his health has suffered as a result.

He knew the timing was right to push for healthier universal school meals because New Mexico is now the second largest oil and gas producer in the U.S. Though such economic activity isn’t a win for the planet at a time when nations must drastically cut oil and gas production to limit the impacts of the climate crisis, it has left the state flush with cash at the moment. “We don’t know when we’re going to see this money again,” says Padilla.

California also launched its universal school meal program in 2021 amid a budget surplus, and Gardner, with Hunger Solutions Minnesota, says a healthy budget has also helped with the $388 million price tag of supplying free meals for students in her state over the next two years. “That could change,” she says, adding that part of the state’s strategy is to secure all available federal reimbursement dollars.

One way to do that is by requiring eligible districts to participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which permits schools in poor areas to feed all kids at no cost. Currently, schools where 40 percent or more students receive federal food assistance or other benefits can participate.

But districts sometimes opt not to because the federal reimbursement rate for CEP schools doesn’t always cover the cost of meals in full, leaving districts with the bill for a portion of them. And that’s not something all districts have the means to pay. “Minnesota has been one of the worst in terms of our participation rate in CEP,” says Gardner, adding that the new universal school meal legislation (and the newly dedicated funds) should greatly increase participation around the state. A recently released FRAC report indicates the end to universal meals in many states did boost CEP participation. Nearly 7,000 schools nationwide adopted CEP this past school year, a 20 percent increase over the 2021-2022 school year.

A recently proposed rule by the USDA would free up more schools to participate in CEP by dropping that 40 percent threshold down to 25 percent of identified students who receive federal assistance. But Pratt-Heavner, with SNA, says widespread participation will likely only occur if Congress also increases the amount of federal reimbursement that is offered to CEP schools, something USDA has no control over. “Lowering the identified student percentage is really only helpful to those states that have stepped up and provided state funding. Or if the local school board is providing funding,” says Pratt-Heavner. (Last month, Representative Morgan McGarvey (D-Kentucky) introduced a bill that would increase the federal CEP reimbursement rate.)

This patchwork state-by-state revival of free meals isn’t ideal, says FitzSimons, who adds that she would rather see action from Congress. President Biden has pledged his commitment to expanding access to free school meals, and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) are spearheading an effort to reintroduce universal school meal legislation, a move the newly formed Healthy School Meals for all Coalition supports.

“We think kids in Florida should have as much access to free school meals as kids in California,” FitzSimons says, adding that the National School Lunch Program and National School Breakfast Program is, after all, “a federal program that is designed to meet the nutritional needs of our schoolchildren.”

Progress and Politics

Oregon, for instance, was “one of the first states to work on healthy school meals for all, and that was before the pandemic,” she says. In fact, Oregon expanded free meals in 2019 to include children whose family incomes are 300 percent above the poverty line, meaning a family of four with an annual income of about $83,000 would qualify for free school meals. (The federal program caps income for free meals at no more than $36,000.)

Representative Courtney Neron, an Oregon Democrat who sponsored a universal school meal bill that didn’t garner enough support this year, says she’s now focusing on encouraging greater CEP participation in her state by funneling more state dollars toward schools that opt in.

A path toward free meals remains more elusive in states where conservative ideology rules. In North Dakota, for instance, a bill that at first aimed to secure universal school meals was revamped to expand free meals to children whose families sit at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. The bill failed by one vote in the Senate.

Republican State Senator Michael Wobbema says he doesn’t think the state should intervene and change the rules of a federal program, and, he says, he doesn’t like the idea of taxpayers funding meals for kids whose families may have the means to pay. “I’m just a conservative Republican kind of guy who lives by the tenet of personal responsibility,” Wobbema told Civil Eats.

Stueber, of Mankato public schools, has heard that argument many times. But after years of working with families who often ride the line between financial stability and struggle, she thinks schools should serve kids in all capacities, no questions asked. “We don’t charge for books and desks,” she says, adding that lunch is just another part of the day that helps steer kids toward learning and clear of hunger.

The post States Are Fighting to Bring Back Free School Meals appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Wed, 31 May 2023 10:00:06 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNdy9VZYKXeZg https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNAA0oaq-m_rA

This is the latest installment of our new series, Faces of the Farm Bill, where we humanize the real-world impacts of ag policy.

Climate change is emerging as a central theme of the 2023 Farm Bill negotiations. Some farming groups are asking Congress to prioritize young farmers and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) farmers in those climate provisions, given the historic discrimination they’ve faced, coupled with the fact that BIPOC communities bear disproportionate impacts of climate change.

According to the National Young Farmers Coalition, which surveyed over 10,000 people under 40 years old, lack of access to land and capital are the core issues young farmers face across the U.S., and the challenge they would most like to see addressed in the next farm bill.

We spoke to Mazariegos-Anastassiou recently about the challenges she faces and how the 2023 Farm Bill could better support farmers like her in recovering from the effects of climate change.

Is climate change impacting your farm?

The short answer is yes, in the sense that there have been fluctuations in what we should expect. There was the drought, and then there was a deluge of water. In 2020, we were directly affected by the CZU Lightning Complex fires. We understand there are many causes of wildfires, like the warming weather and the drought. But it’s also a land management problem; [people] haven’t been maintaining certain land, and therefore you have these very devastating effects of fire. We felt that directly impacting our operation. I think when you go into farming, you know that things are sometimes out of your control, but you do expect patterns. Now, those patterns are changing at a faster pace than past generations experienced.

During the CZU Lightning Complex fires, did you have support—financial or otherwise—from the federal government to get through?

Absolutely not. But we were supported by our community—family, friends, our customers . . . that’s where we felt supported.

One of the biggest conversations around this latest set of floods is how inaccessible federal support is. The Farm Service Agency, which is the main point of contact for a farmer at the local level, is so bureaucratic. Its products and supports are not geared toward the kind of agriculture that we and other BIPOC farmers are doing. We’re farming in a very different way than what these programs are designed for, so you automatically feel like you don’t even qualify.

There’s also a staffing shortage problem; there are just not enough people to address all the issues. And when you’re talking about smaller, diversified producers, we are all the way at the bottom of the list of whoever gets assistance.

It does seem like there are some improvements. The Inflation Reduction Act started to acknowledge the role that farmers like us play in climate change mitigation and the need to support us in adapting to these inevitable climate change impacts. But we have a long way to go.

Why do you feel like you don’t qualify for federal assistance programs?

When you look at some of the assistance programs, like the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) or the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP), you apply based on the acreage you’re growing of a particular crop. The payout is a very small fraction. In that calculation, if you’re growing very small quantities, there is no point. Filling out the application is actually more work than what I will get out of it. Because the programs are not designed for diverse systems, it feels like they don’t really apply to you. That has been my experience.

With the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), there is a lot of funding for management of a property, but they tend to favor you heavily when you’re the landowner. It’s much harder to access the support when you’re a tenant. And when you’re thinking about BIPOC-owned farms, the reality is that you have a lot less land ownership in that group. We’re subleasing one of our properties, so we’re not able to access the support that’s available, because it really is for folks that have complete agency over their property.

What climate provisions would you like to see in the farm bill?

There are three things I think about. How do we help farmers of all sorts deal with the effects of climate change? And that comes in [the form of] insurance, lower interest loans, and even grants to deal with something that’s unforeseen.

The second thing is the role that farmers and ranchers play in mitigating the effects of climate change. When we’re talking about cover cropping, composting, managing riparian areas, maximizing biodiversity . . . can we have more support to do that work? Because right now we’re doing it because we know it’s important, but it’s not a revenue stream. Federal programs need to provide concrete support for those farmers who are implementing those practices.

The third and probably most important is that you need to have programs that help farmers stay in business and do their work. If we can’t stay in business, forget climate change; we’re not going to be able to do this work, period. And being able to stay on a piece of property long term is very important. What programs can make that easier? Supporting first-time land buyers with down payments or incentivizing landowners that are leasing land to farmers to have really good terms and co-invest in a property. Right now, for example, we are in a year-to-year lease situation, and that’s very difficult when you’re planning a business with long-term ramifications. So that’s another way the farm bill can support beginning farmers and BIPOC farmers.

Why is it important to prioritize BIPOC farmers in the farm bill?

BIPOC communities in our country are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, food insecurity, and a lot of the issues that are tied to agriculture. Yet, we’ve also been essential and crucial in agriculture because we have often been the farmworkers, the ones actually doing the work, but we have not had the agency to lead those projects.

I am a first-generation American. I’m also a first-generation farmer. A lot of the motivation I had to farm is because I saw how challenging it is to provide healthy food for a family of limited means. And this is not just about food; it’s about our environment. My communities are being more affected by environmental degradation. We’ve largely been left out of the picture when we’re talking about agriculture in the United States.

We have heard ad nauseum about the average farmer’s age, race, and background. Now I think there is an interest in [seeing] these other communities play a role and influence the direction the agriculture industry takes. We’re moving away from a monoculture. There is a wave of young farmers and ranchers that are seeing this as the way forward for agriculture. I think that’s an important perspective to support. We know that certain communities have been historically discriminated against by institutions like the [USDA’s] Farm Service Agency, so I think we are a key group to listen to and support, since we have historically not been afforded that opportunity to lead.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Why BIPOC Farmers Need More Protection From Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Tue, 30 May 2023 10:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNAA0oaq-m_rA https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNWalFZimXN4A

Then, a real estate agent, Mr. Fenner of Fenner & Fenner, who had been poised to sell Tiana her coveted restaurant space, tells her she has been outbid.

“A little woman of your . . . background would have had her hands full trying to run a big business like that. You’re better off where you’re at,” he tells her.

It doesn’t take much imagination to intuit what function that pregnant pause, and the word “background,” have in the scene. Disney, as much a mirror on American life as any media, was punctuating a disturbing American credo in that scene: the U.S., as represented by Mr. Fenner, thinks Tiana is better off as a laborer, nothing more.

After Mr. Fenner breaks the news, Tiana takes her place back behind the catering table at the Mardi Gras ball where she’s serving her specialty beignets. She trips and falls, all of the beignets she baked for the event go flying, and our heroine sits dejectedly in a dustbowl of powdered sugar and sorrow.

In his foreword to The Jemima Code, author Toni Tipton Martin’s presentation of more than 150 African American cookbooks, journalist John Edgerton wrote:

“Throughout 350 years of slavery, segregation, and legally enforced white supremacy, the vast majority of women of African ancestry in the South lived lives tightly circumscribed [to] . . . domestic kitchens. To them fell the overarching responsibility for the feeding of the South, as well as the duty of birthing and nurturing replacement generations.”

In the collection, Tipton Martin lays out another brutal conundrum: the image of the Black woman chef embedded in the cruel stereotype and barbarous invention of racism and in the caricature of the Mammy—a deceit that functions, in part, to bury the rich culinary gifts that Black women have given American cooking.

After years working as a chef, I did not see myself reflected in the food industry. Around four years ago, Tipton Martin’s book opened up my own personal search for other Black women in food.

I quickly learned that I was not alone in my search. Modern American cooking enthusiasts have long been wringing their hands over the question of what “American” food actually means, and a growing number of chefs are circumventing the Eurocentric answer to that question and revealing actual Native American ingredients and cookery—ancient traditions hidden and all but destroyed by colonialism.

But the millions of Black women who picked up those Native ingredients and applied both the intelligence and traditions of Africa and those of Europe that were imposed on them have yet to garner rightful recognition in the pantheon of the American professional kitchen. Their toil and intellectual property have been as dismissed and concealed as that of any slave, their names sacrificed and lost to the American project.

Of the roughly 1 million restaurants in the country, for instance, about 8 percent are Black-owned. About 2,800 are owned by Black women, according to 2019 Census information. That’s less than a third of 1 percent of all American restaurants.

Invisible Domestic Work

“The elite homes of Virginia, going back to the days when the Colonial elite socialized with French politicians and generals during the Revolutionary War, dined on a cuisine inspired by France. It was built on local ingredients—many originally shared by Native Americans or brought by slaves from Africa—and developed by enslaved black chefs like James Hemings, who cooked for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Because this aristocratic strain of Southern cuisine was provisioned and cooked largely by black people, it came into their communities as well, including Freetown.”

Freetown was Lewis’s hometown, a Virginia homestead built by a community of formerly enslaved people, including her grandfather.

For anyone concerned with the legacy of the Black chef in America, James Hemings and Edna Lewis are familiar names. Lewis left Freetown during the Great Migration for Washington, D.C. and then New York, where she found work first as a domestic and then eventually as a cook in stylish restaurants, which led her finally to her own restaurant and a cookbook deal.

In her cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking, Miss Lewis, as she was known, writes in almost ecstatically loving terms about her childhood in Freetown. She recalls details like the “moist smell of chickens hatching” and “the first asparagus that appeared on the fence row, grown from the seed the birds dropped.” Along with hundreds of others, these memories recall a life made of not just four seasons, but the many seasons that arrive each year, and with them, the resulting cuisine that was so endemic it was sacred.

But by the time she was 15, Lewis left Freetown as part of the Great Migration, an event often described as millions of people moving for a “better life.” In reality, 6 million African Americans fled the South in an effort to get away from white terrorism: the lynching and indentured servitude that made “free” life not much better than enslavement, and the destruction of their homesteads and farm properties to a degree that often resulted in starvation.

Miss Lewis likely didn’t leave her community as a child—for a place completely unknown to her—because she was in search of a better life. When she did leave, her dressmaking skills put her in circles with white socialites, including an antiques dealer with whom she eventually became a partner in her first restaurant.

Tipton Martin, who had a chance to meet Miss Lewis before she passed away in 2006, told her that the world needed to know that there were a lot more people like her—they have just been invisible, hidden. Miss Lewis responded in a letter: “Leave no stone unturned to prove this point. Make sure that you do.”

So what of the millions of other women constrained to the American kitchen for 350 years, and what of their bequest? What of their descendants? Where are our restaurants and our book deals?

Not at all incidentally, Tiana’s mother in The Princess and The Frog works as a domestic and seamstress in the home of a wealthy white family in New Orleans’ opulent Garden District. When Tiana grows up, she works as a server and baker in a modest restaurant. At least Disney does not lie in this portrayal of Southern racial hierarchy in 1912. Though in 1926, at the height of the Great Migration, Tiana would have been more likely to wake up as a frog than be granted the keys to a restaurant. (Spoiler: in the film’s end, Tiana gets the prince and her dream business.)

But among the many tired anachronisms in the film (racist voodoo tropes, Bayou dwellers portrayed as toothless hillbillies, etc.) the most tired is its repetition of America’s favorite fusty nugget: If you just work hard enough, you can get what you dream of. The film doesn’t mention of the 400 years of work with no pay.

Criminally little about Black history, particularly antebellum Black history, has been told through the eyes of Black people. Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was the first African American woman to publish her own slave narrative, in 1861. She had the extremely rare fortune of being taught to read and write by one of the women who owned her.

In the book, Jacobs recounts the plight of her grandmother, known as “Aunt Marthy:”

“She became an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress. She was much praised for her cooking; and her nice crackers became famous in the neighborhood that many people were desirous of obtaining them. In consequence of numerous requests of this kind, she asked permission of her mistress to bake crackers at night, after all the household work was done. . . . The business proved profitable, and each year she laid by a little, which was saved for a fund to purchase her children.”

Jacobs goes on to describe how her grandmother’s mistress eventually asked to borrow the $300 she had saved. It was never returned, but the mistress did purchase a silver candelabra with the money, which likely got passed down to her own heirs over the generations. Aunt Marthy’s 10-year-old son was sold for around $700, about the cost of two candelabras.

This description of the condition of the enslaved female cook, housekeeper, waiting maid, and housemaid was a relatively benign experience, compared to the other sadistic abuses described in the book. But it begins to paint a picture of the legacy, or lack thereof, for the Black woman culinary worker in America.

The enslaved domestic servant after Reconstruction didn’t fare much better than the enslaved sugar mill and sugar plantation worker, who had no other choice but to go on to coerced labor or indentured servitude, working in the very same mills and living in the very same slave quarters.

For instance, by the 1880s, about 98 percent of Black women in large southern cities like Atlanta worked as domestics. In the 1912 essay, “More Slavery at the South,” an anonymous African American domestic woman contacted hundreds of other women like her and attempted to present a snapshot of their daily working lives. “The condition of this vast host of poor colored people is just as bad as, if not worse than, it was during the days of slavery,” she wrote. “Tho [sic] today we are enjoying nominal freedom, we are literally slaves.”

She describes 16-hour work days and adds that just as enslaved Black women were expected to acquiesce to rape and sexual harassment by their white masters, as rejecting advances by the man of the house, even under emancipation, was widespread grounds for termination. Many, if not most, Black women were raising children by their husbands as well as by the white men whose homes they worked in.

“You might as well say that I’m on duty all the time—from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week I am the slave, body and soul, of this family,” the unnamed author wrote. “We are but little more than pack horses, beasts of burden, slaves! In the distant future, it may be, centuries and centuries hence, a monument of brass or stone will be erected to the Old Black Mammies of the South.”

To this day I don’t know of any such monument, with the additional added insult that the “Old Black Mammy” is itself an invented apparatus, in part to explain away the relationship between white men and Black women. In actuality, domestic workers were likely to be underweight, not overweight, thanks to severely rationed food, light skinned, because household work was often assigned to mixed-race women, and young, because less than 10 percent of Black women lived beyond 50 during that time period.

When a Southern movement to erect such monuments and memorials began in the early 1920’s, Black protests voiced that a better memorial would be to extend the full rights of American citizenship to the descendants of these women.

Moving From Service to Ownership

Whilst still a frog, she sang, “I’m going to do my best to take my place in the sun when we’re human.” So maybe it was in that moment—when she was at long last recognized as human.

In 2023, when the most recognizable movement for Black rights goes by the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” I think we can mostly agree that we are still fighting for our lives to matter enough to be recognized as fully human.

By the Jim Crow era, as late as 1966, the one job open to Black women was as a maid who cooked, washed and ironed clothes, and cared for children, for as little as $20 per week. Though Black women domestic workers fought for better wages and conditions, Black women’s contributions to the project of American cookery hasn’t been reflected in a way that even begins to scratch the surface of the true history. And the industry seems content with this fact.

There were no better farmers at the end of the Civil War than the formerly enslaved people, who were captured from African countries for their agricultural knowledge and had done all of the planting, harvesting, and gardening that went to feed the big house, as well as their own communities and families. Similarly, there were no better cooks than Black women, who were at the helm of virtually every kitchen in the South. Forbidden from reading and writing, they would not have been cooking from recipes or formal technique, but by memory, or “by hand”—a skillset that none but the most proficient cooks and chefs can boast.

And while it’s true that many Black women wanted to move out of the domestic sphere when more lucrative and less oppressive jobs became available to them after the civil rights movement, I still have extreme difficulty understanding how America’s most proficient cooks still don’t have a piece of the restaurant ownership pie.

While the Mammy stereotype remains highly visible in American culture—with Aunt Jemima (who was recently retired after a 130-year run) being the most prominent—the actual Black woman chef is, conversely, invisible. The most famous Black women chefs—including Leah Chase and Edna Lewis—are dead and gone, and the industry has done little to elevate any of our current talent to the status of household name.

The 2021, post-George Floyd New York Times article, “How High-End Restaurants Have Failed Black Female Chefs,” cites a study from that same year published by a nonprofit advocacy group for restaurant workers’ rights. It indicates that racial and gender biases compound to make it especially hard for Black women to attain leadership roles in restaurants.

“Using Seattle’s restaurants as an example, the study detailed several factors—openly discriminatory hiring and training, implicit bias among employers and customers, a lack of networking and training opportunities—that prompt many Black women to leave the industry,” the article reads.

As the 20th century progressed, Black women went from the domestic service sector to performing similar duties in hospitals, schools, and restaurants, including fast food. Today, almost a third of Black women are employed as service workers, compared to one fifth of white women.

“Since the era of slavery, the dominant view of Black women has been that they should be workers, a view that contributed to their devaluation as mothers with caregiving needs at home,” wrote economics professor Nina Banks in a 2019 article for the Economic Policy Institute. “African American women’s unique labor market history and current occupational status reflects these beliefs and practices.”

Indeed, the service industry continues to profit off of our labor and skill, but it is hardly more likely to hand over the keys today than it was in 1926.

But that shouldn’t stop us from imagining an America where the legacy of Black women’s intellectual property and centuries of culinary know-how gets applied to the restaurant world and a true American cuisine emerges that hails from the actual founding of this nation—the arrival of enslaved Africans to the colonies.

It would be a world where more restaurants reflect the genuine American cooking tradition that starts with Native ingredients and African artistry and intelligence. Where women cook with the spirit of providing everyone with what they need, and where the true definition of feeding—“to give, to supply with nourishment”—is the order of the day.

Where all of the Edna Lewises and their descendants, the architects of the American kitchen, have their rightful place in the sun. And where Black women are seen as living monuments who have the full rights of American citizenship, recognized not for our labor, but for our humanity.

The post Op-ed: Black Women, Architects of the American Kitchen, Deserve a Rightful Place in the Sun appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Wed, 24 May 2023 10:00:00 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNWalFZimXN4A https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByO1KvKPhnYTwQ

An official observer of marine fisheries, Cagilaba was miles offshore of the Marshall Islands, dispatched aboard the seiner then known as the Sea Quest. It was 2015. He had a background in marine affairs and was working for the Fijian government in its national Ministry of Fisheries, tasked with upholding a patchwork of regulations meant to safeguard tuna.

He was used to being a lone technician amid raucous crews, overseeing fishing on vessels from all over the world. He had been an observer for 18 years, deployed for weeks at a time in gigs that net some of the best wages around. But this deployment was an outlier. Earlier in the trip, Cagilaba had watched as the captain of the Sea Quest twice falsified catch reports.

Then he’d seen two crewmen dumping 10 hefty bales of plastic and straps into the sea. The captain had been menacing Cagilaba ever since, pestering him to censor his report in a not-nice way that went from uncomfortable to unnerving. Once back on land, it was a saga that would cost Cagilaba his job. But the trick at the time was to stay alive until he got there.

“Others will not be coming home at all,” Cagilaba said. Years later, he recalled the experience in testimony to Congress during a probe of observer harassment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency his employer frequently partnered with.

His story echoes others like it. Harassment of marine observers aboard fishing vessels is one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets. In a survey of observers in the United States alone, about half said that they had been harassed on the job. Anecdotally, Liz Mitchell, president of the Association for Professional Observers (APO) and herself a former observer, says the APO routinely logs stories of such incidents. The APO’s website describes them in detail: observers locked in their rooms, threatened at knifepoint, chased around docks, forced to accept bribes, raped, starved, pressured to sign off on sustainability criteria. Conditions in the South Pacific are among the worst.

This is the true price of a can of tuna, that lucrative shelf-stable fare that whips from the Pacific Ocean onto grocery shelves like millions of widgets flung from a slingshot. Amid rising numbers of marine observers allegedly murdered and disappeared at sea, Cagilaba’s story underscores how little words like “sustainably caught” and “certified” may mean when it comes to protecting the humans in the supply chain. And how much grocery and retail brands profit anyway.

Industry experts say that purveyors of canned tuna—major grocers like Walmart, Costco, Aldi, and Albertsons and the brands that stock their shelves—have the power to pressure tuna suppliers to ensure the safety of marine observers, not to mention fishing crews. Mostly, they don’t. In years past, that’s been because they’ve had little way of knowing when the boats they buy from are responsible for throwing observers overboard, bringing them lifeless into port after “accidents,” or harboring polluters, carrying slaves, or indulging in other kinds of human rights abuses.

Technology is now slowly making these questions answerable, however. So, too, are strategies to strengthen the laws and relationships that make such behavior unacceptable, or at least unprofitable.

As connecting problem boats to products becomes possible, advocates for at-sea workers question whether it is now just inconvenience, rather than geography or logistics, that still causes retail brands and grocers to stand aside while observers like Cagilaba are risking—and increasingly losing—their lives at sea. Whatever the reason, critics say those who earn the most money on tuna aren’t doing enough to secure the well-being of those who earn the least.

“As you go back in the supply chain, the difference in profits between what retailers make and what you see at the fishing vessel level is so vast . . . It’s almost four times more,” said Mallika Talwar, a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace.

Tuna brands like Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea and the grocers that sell their products anchor one end of the supply chain. Workers aboard fishing vessels and the observers entrusted to watch them are on the other. In between, “Global seafood supply chains are notoriously opaque,” said Talwar. “No one knows what’s going on there. And the companies are benefitting from that.”

Observing How Your Canned Tuna Gets Caught

So it is that island nations and states—from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii and south to New Zealand—have staked their claims to swaths of ocean in the tunas’ paths. On maps, each nation sits within its own ring. And everyone generally agrees that the rings denote each nation’s territorial seas. A smattering of treaties and agreements delineate who can fish where within the rings. And the unclaimed sea beyond is governed by regional authorities that function about as efficiently as the U.S. Congress.

Marine observers like Cagilaba are deployed in concert with the rules that nations and regional authorities make. Employed by a handful of companies and several governments, their job is to collect important data about the fish and to ensure that the people on the boats don’t pillage or pollute. Thus, marine observers are the last men and women standing between any island nation and the destructive potential of its seafaring visitors. Sometimes that’s a dangerous place to be standing.

This is where more than half of the world’s tuna supply comes from. It includes fresh-caught fish as well as canned, though the cans fuel the wealthiest actors. Canned tuna accounts for two-thirds of the $42 billion industry worldwide. The companies behind the Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist brands control the largest share of those cans. It is this multi-billion-dollar haul that entices vessels from all over the world to hunt what is arguably the largest and most lucrative wild protein supply left on Earth. But while marine observers protect the fish, there are scant protections for the observers themselves. Sometimes, the job is a little like being sent behind enemy lines to make sure that the other army plays fair.

For Cagilaba, the trip aboard the Sea Quest was one of those times. After he refused the captain’s entreaties to fudge his reports to authorities, as he later told Congress, he heard the captain on the phone, complaining loudly and falsely about him in what the captain had warned would be a call to a friend at NOAA. The captain was highly motivated to influence NOAA’s official narrative of the trip.

The plastics dumping alone was a violation of a MARPOL convention, an international treaty that spelled big trouble for any vessel. It was especially big trouble for this vessel, which had just been fined for hanging lights off the boat and into the water to cause the fish to aggregate there, a violation of another treaty between the U.S. and island nations. The dumping and the fictitious catch reports could provoke legal action, fines, and possibly criminal charges.

Inside the wheelhouse, a rough cube with windows towering high above the Sea Quest’s deck, Cagilaba could hear the captain describing him in harsh and fictitious terms. The next day, he received an email from his boss via the captain, who’d been contacted by NOAA. It read:

“Simi . . . Just to remind you that you are an observer . . . You are never to direct or make threats to anybody on board the vessel.”

Rules to Protect Marine Observers

This would be the first mandate to protect marine observers adopted by the world’s international authorities. It followed rules intended to equip observers with two-way satellite radios to give them a direct line of communication back to land. This, so they could subvert ship systems if ever they were under threat, bypassing the captain and crew. Under the measure, participating nations would also be expected to ensure that observers made it off the boat alive.

However, none of that was rule yet. Stuck aboard the Sea Quest, Cagilaba had safety gear to help him survive the water should the crew decide to throw him in. But he lacked a radio.

So, he did what he could. He sent an email through the ship’s system detailing the situation to one of his supervisors back in Fiji. It was a dangerous move—the captain could see all that he wrote. But Cagilaba wanted the opportunity to explain himself to his employer. And he wanted to get off of the Sea Quest. Still, he knew the score. The captain’s NOAA contact was a long-serving officer in the National Marine Fisheries Service, a fixture in the small enclave of South Pacific fishery regulators since at least the ‘90s. Cagilaba’s own bosses already favored the man.

That the Sea Quest was American-flagged was part of the rub. In reality, the ship was Taiwanese. So were all the officers on board, save for the captain, an American whose nationality enabled the flag. Taiwanese vessels are notoriously bad actors in these parts. An investigation of the nation’s more than 1,390 flagged and foreign operated vessels by the Environmental Justice Foundation between 2016 and 2020 would later surface charges of illegal activity on 10 percent of those boats, ranging from abusing and enslaving crews to illegal fishing and other international atrocities, like killing whales and using dolphins as bait. These were crimes that the American government was, by proxy in this scenario, now associating with.

To further complicate things, the two men whose fighting later unspooled outside Cagilaba’s cabin door were not at all his fans, thanks to his having turned them both in for violations on other trips. And because of the jurisdictional challenges of prosecuting any crime at sea—Cagilaba was a Fijian aboard an American-flagged vessel crewed by Taiwanese officers and whose fishing port was in the Marshall Islands—there was no guarantee of consequences if the Sea Quest returned to port without him.

So, Cagilaba told Congress later, he stayed up most of that night and every other night after, sleeping during lulls in the fishing during the day while the crew was kept sober and busy. Days passed.

Challenges with the U.S. Approach to Illegal Seafood

“In Europe, the retailers over the last 10 years have evolved in a different way,” said Daniel Suddaby, vice president at the international nonprofit Ocean Outcomes, which promotes healthy ocean ecosystems, fishing communities, and plentiful and profitable seafood. “Most will have a team of three to four quite qualified and experienced marine scientist advocates who really understand the issues. And they will engage in it in more of a deep, meaningful, and careful way. It’s not to say there isn’t a ton of risk in the supply chain in Europe.”

The purchasing risks he describes come with responsibilities. Businesses that import seafood are legally required to undertake due diligence to ensure they’re not buying illegal catch. They also have to be able to demonstrate the steps they take to ensure the legal purchase.

Those steps support port inspectors, whose job is to check catch certificates supplied by foreign exporters. Regular audits assess whether the countries that import seafood to the European Union—there’s an approved list—are honoring agreements to keep illegal catch out of their exports. Problem nations are graded with yellow and red cards that help businesses understand where the greatest risks lie when they’re buying seafood from abroad. When they improve, those colors switch to green.

In the U.S., there’s no such framework. Instead, port inspectors are the only bulwark against all illegal catch. The U.S. does have a Seafood Import Monitoring Program, but the regulators that oversee it don’t often issue information that helps businesses understand purchasing risk. Brands that import seafood face no legal liability if they buy illegal catch. Neither do retailers. In short, there is little incentive to do anything more than shrug about widely known abuses of fishing and humanitarian rules.

Some American importers are interested in trying to resist illegal fare anyway, especially more boutique retailers that serve a more socially conscious shopper. But the marketplace doesn’t make it easy. Huw Thomas, a seafood industry consultant for Global Fishing Watch, says that to really assess the sustainability and human rights record of a product, “there’s 200 data sets that a business would need to know. It’s beyond their capabilities to get their arms around it.” Retailers also stock tens of thousands of products, and struggle to prioritize what to check.

But retailers do have power. Lots of it, though the weight of the lucrative end of the supply chain has not been brought to bear on better regulations, frameworks, and accountability for tuna suppliers. It’s a fact that allows bad actors to fish as profitably as the vast majority of those who follow the rules, if not more so.

What’s more, the brands that rule the cans—StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee—are all following the lead of the U.S.’s largest grocers. Those brands have all been purchased by Asian companies since 2000. Bumble Bee was bought by Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company, Ltd. (FCF) of Kaoshiung, Taiwan, in 2021; StarKist by Dongwon Group of Seoul and Busan, South Korea, in 2008; and Chicken of the Sea was fully acquired by Thai Union Group of Samut Sakhon, Thailand, in 2000. As each company has reorganized its leadership, sustainability commitments have shifted.

Chicken of the Sea has continued some efforts. The company has a vessel code of conduct program, and it said in a statement that it is engaged in third-party audits of its supply chain. Its leadership has joined the boards of other organizations aimed at reducing illegal fishing and human rights abuses. It’s also made commitments to source all of its tuna from monitored vessels, either human or otherwise, and to reduce fishery bycatch, though the deadlines for meeting those goals are still ahead.

At Bumble Bee, however, trends toward cleaning up the supply chain have reversed course, with its former sustainability targets ratcheted downward since its FCF buyout. Bumble Bee did not respond to requests for comment about these issues. StarKist also did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to combat illegal seafood and human rights abuses. “These companies are super sensitive to what the retailers are asking,” said Suddaby. And yet, he adds: “Some of the big retailers in the U.S. have limited understandings of the sustainability issues.”

This is why many large U.S. retailers default to third-party certifiers like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) instead of staffing or partnering with qualified, experienced marine science advocates. “What would really be supportive for sustainability, as well as the MSC push, is having the big retailers say to FCF, ‘You need to greatly increase observer coverage,’” said Suddaby.

Instead, MSC certifies seafood to environmental standards. It is seen as better than nothing by advocates. But it lacks clear human rights standards, even though its certifications depend on the work of marine observers, as well as the work of the crews that catch the fish. The approach hasn’t worked to defend against human rights abuses. In the last seven years, Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) found, four observers have gone missing from or died suspiciously aboard four different vessels that were authorized to fish MSC-certified tuna by regional authorities. A fifth observer had also disappeared from a vessel in 2010. His remains were later recovered—his legs and body bound by chains.

In a statement, MSC’s head of social policy, Oluyemisi Oloruntuyi, stressed that the organization certifies only fisheries, not the boats that catch MSC fish, which are determined by regional fisheries authorities. Two of the boats on which observers died never did fish MSC catch, despite having permission to, according to the statement. And MSC questions the motivations behind the HRAS report, noting it was funded by World Wise Foods, which shares a chairman with the International Pole and Line Foundation, an organization that promotes competing sectors and is a historic critic of the fishery. World Wise Foods also sources tuna from a commercial competitor.

Such hair-splitting statements effectively allow MSC to avoid accountability for the challenges faced by observers, but they are hallmarks of the global tuna industry. And while the Sea Quest was fishing conventional—not MSC—tuna at the time, this is the marketplace that Cagilaba was working in while under threat and under-slept aboard the Sea Quest in 2015.

Certain of the dangers, he hastened to get off at the next port. His supervisors had already told him to stay on board via email. But once the Sea Quest docked in the Marshall Islands, Cagilaba quickly made contact with the observer coordinator for the Ministry of Fisheries. He tried again to relay his unease about the fudged catch reports, the threats from the captain, and the captain’s call to the American official who’d relayed the fictitious narrative of the trip to his bosses. The coordinator downplayed Cagilaba’s account, according to Cagilaba’s statements to Congress. Then he told him to get back on the boat.

Later, Cagilaba learned that the coordinator was friends with the Sea Quest’s agent, another cog in a shaky wheel, rattled by corruption. Once told to get back aboard, he knew his report would be buried. And that if he didn’t make it known soon, somehow, he was unlikely to get off the Sea Quest alive.

‘Retailer Apathy’ for Addressing Marine Observer Safety

According to the survey of American observers by NOAA Fisheries, among the 46 percent who said they had been harassed at sea, most were either dissatisfied or nonplussed by the experience of reporting it. Nearly 60 percent of those who made reports said there was no response. And some feared the repercussions of saying anything: fewer deployments, assignments back to problem vessels. “Some respondents mentioned that most of time they handled situations on their own, since they felt that some observer program staff would not take their reports seriously,” the survey found.

The extent to which officials in observer programs and oversight agencies were being co-opted into the dark underworld of tuna—and how often tuna brands play along—would become better understood in 2020. That’s the year that Eritara Aati Kaierua, a fishery observer from Kiribati, was brought ashore lifeless by a Taiwanese purse seiner, the Win Far 636, after a tuna fishing trip off the coast of Nauru.

Kaierua should have been protected under the new WCPFC mandate for observer safety. But while working as part of a special project to certify tuna for MSC, he was found dead in one of the boat’s cabins. An autopsy later conducted in Fiji found he had died from a blow to the head. Local authorities next opened a murder investigation, but it has never concluded.

“We initially heard that it was homicide. Then seven months later, we heard of a second opinion that changed the cause of death to natural causes due to hypertension,” Nicky Kaierua, his sister, said in an email. She added that she has seen the initial autopsy report on her brother and is confident that hypertension didn’t cause his death. That word—hypertension—has now been used to explain two other observer deaths, and families of observers missing and murdered in the Pacific have come together in grief to note their experiences with its use.

Some charge that authorities are unmotivated to resolve such cases in countries that are economically dependent on fishing, or reluctant to take a tough stance on all crimes at sea. Tuna accounts for a substantial share of jobs in the Pacific Islands and an often-larger share of public spending. In Kiribati, for example, tuna revenues fuel 63 percent of the national budget. The geopolitics and jurisdictional mayhem involved with prosecuting crimes aboard foreign fishing vessels, or involving citizens from other countries or both, also don’t make it easy.

Meanwhile, Nicky Kaierua said, “My brother’s ‘unsolved’ death has had devastating impacts on our family.” Like many observers, Kaierua was his family’s breadwinner, supporting a wife and four children who have had little financial support since he died. “Fisheries observers are often forewarned that the job is risky. They are also told that the position comes with good pay because of the risk that comes with it. My brother earned 60 Australian dollars a day. Should we be lenient on their safety because they get a little bit extra?”

According to the investigation by Human Rights at Sea, after the Win Far 636 brought Kaierua’s body back to port, it took regional authorities another 38 days to suspend the boat’s certificate to fish in the MSC program. MSC later emphasized that its certification was an environmental standard, not a human rights one, in a statement, which noted that it took steps to assure that no catch from the vessel entered the supply chain as MSC-certified.

APO has since recommended that programs like MSC have criteria that protect observers and processes that gauge whether those programs work. APO has also pressed the international community to outlaw observer harassment globally and document observer deaths for the public.

In response to such critiques, the MSC introduced new requirements in October 2022 that “entities involved in unacceptable conduct inclusive of mistreatment of crew and fisheries observers must be removed from MSC certificates.” It also gave $137,000 toward the development of communications technology and a review of observer programs in April 2021. But those changes won’t impact the Win Far 636. In July 2022, after no criminal charges were filed in Kaierua’s death, the boat was again certified to fish MSC tuna through 2025.

Observer advocates admit that blacklisting problem boats and companies can sometimes backfire anyway, making space for other bad actors. Most believe the best response to human rights abuses would be for grocers to use their market heft to directly push their suppliers toward better practices, moving the whole market. Among retailers that use MSC as a proxy for examining supply chains, however, that conversation isn’t happening, at least not publicly.

Costco declined to comment for this article. Neither Albertsons, Walmart, nor Aldi responded to requests for interviews or comments. And it’s this distinctive indifference, an overall lack of action, that critics describe as most problematic, an institutional buck-passing that is a defining characteristic of the tuna marketplace.

“You can call it retailer apathy,” said Talwar of Greenpeace. In its own survey of tuna retailers, Greenpeace found that only five of 16 of the largest retailers that sell tuna took specific steps to advocate for observer protections. Among those, most had only gone as far as to formally encourage observer programs to work together toward an International Observer Bill of Rights. In evaluating tuna retailers overall, Talwar said, “They’re far behind anything that we would expect from companies that are in this business.”

Most large retailers just return to the same big cans. They buy from StarKist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumble Bee, primarily, and acquiesce to whatever supply-chain due-diligence the brands provide. In its investigation of Kaierua’s death, Human Rights at Sea found that it was most likely Bumble Bee’s parent company, FCF, that bought the tuna from the ill-fated voyage. It wasn’t the first time that suspected illegal fishing was found in the Bumble Bee supply chain. In March 2023, Bumble Bee agreed to remove the terms “fair and safe supply chain” and “fair and responsible working conditions” from its website, social media, and advertising for a decade after being sued by a labor rights group for allegedly violating consumer protection laws by claiming them.

But not much, otherwise, has changed. The Win Far 636, while it continues fishing, is just as connected to the tuna marketplace as ever, one of 27 vessels owned by a consortium of companies that delivers its MSC catch to FCF for canning for Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, among other brands. Then there’s that other vessel, the Sea Quest. At the time of Cagilaba’s voyage, it was owned by a company run by a prominent group of tuna executives, including those with ties to Chicken of the Sea, Mitsui, and headed by FCF president, Max Chou. A spokesman for the company declined to comment, citing corporate policy.

Technology, Policy, and Consumer Pressure for Change

That report later led to an investigation that, like that of Kaierua’s death, went nowhere. Then the Sea Quest also disappeared. Records show it was renamed Joe Turner, sold to a new owner in the Philippines, and now fishes tuna for a seafood company that charters it from Papua New Guinea. Nambawan Seafoods PNG Limited is one of FCF’s many partners in the region.

It is common for formal inquiries like Cagilaba’s to be abandoned, languishing in a state of perpetual unresolve, and for problem boats to vanish into the opacity of the tuna supply chain, while issues aboard go unresolved. Yet a combination of technology, policy, and consumer pressure on suppliers could actually keep the problem from happening in the first place.

Most people working for brands and retailers know this. But none were willing to go on record to talk about an effort that’s now underway to connect the fish they sell with whatever happens on the boats when it’s caught.

That work—called the SCRP, or Supply Chain Risk Project—is being led by a trifecta of institutions adept at using technology and data to track illegal fishing. They include Global Fishing Watch, which creates and shares knowledge about human activity at sea; the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, which leads research and innovation involving oceans; and FishWise, which works with companies to address environmental and humanitarian goals in seafood supply chains. Hosted by the World Economic Forum, the three are steeped in a massive data project that can help retailers check a supplier’s word. And maybe twist their arm.

The data comes from global tracking devices that use transceivers on ships, called AIS or Automatic Identification System, that are required aboard vessels and can be tracked by satellite and analyzed by the likes of Global Fishing Watch. To watch a vessel through AIS is to understand where it is in the ocean, when it ports and anchors, and when it’s making the kinds of maneuvers associated with fishing. It’s possible to use that data to see, say, when a boat is fishing in a marine protected area. Or when a vessel’s beacon shuts off right outside of one.

Such systems don’t eliminate the need for observers, even when paired with cameras aboard boats. Fisheries scientists maintain that having a human presence at least 20 percent of the time is still critical to guaranteeing that the science underpinning stock assessments that guide fishing are accurate. Observers also collect a lot of other information—details about the age of the fish caught, and ratios of males to females, for example—that help set the rules about what fish can be caught where.

That said, digital oversight that can command better practices is increasingly possible, if not imminent. Some private sector companies that use blockchain to collect data at various points along the supply chain, such as Wholechain, say they are already close to pinpointing vessels tied to observer deaths and other human rights abuses. Whether that oversight someday comes with consumer-facing tools that assure customers a safe supply chain is up to the companies. But it’s now conceivable. And that’s no small thing.

Details about which corporations’ data is powering the SCRP’s test drive are top secret and, again, none of the major tuna brands or grocers—Aldi, Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, Bumble Bee, StarKist, and Chicken of the Sea—would comment on the effort to daylight the seafood supply chain, or say whether they’re involved. Right now, it is being funded by philanthropists.

The fact that some retailers are indeed in the mix, even behind the scenes, is likely good news for Cagilaba’s ilk, who had no such potential ally back in 2015. It’s unclear who bought the catch from his harrowing trip, to what market it flew, or where in the world it landed. But it’s clear that the answers to those questions would allow people on one end of the supply chain to bolster the safety for those on the other end.

For Cagilaba, back in Fiji, safety was a relative term. He was fired within months, while the NOAA investigation of his rough tour aboard the Sea Quest was still underway. It took six months for NOAA’s law enforcement to interview him. And as far as he could tell later, the only result was an early retirement.

“It made me realize that some government officials from the Pacific island countries are overly familiar with the fishing company personnel and their boat agents and have been compromised, making our jobs as fisheries observers impossible and dangerous,” he wrote in testimony to Congress later.

Cagilaba eventually moved to America, became a criminal investigator first, and then a lawyer. No more boisterous drunks in the night, captains that could order him thrown into the sea, or employers who wouldn’t prevent it.

It’s too late for 13 of his colleagues who have died since 2014. It may not be too late for the rest.

Ofani Eremae contributed reporting.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.

The post The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Tue, 23 May 2023 10:00:11 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByO1KvKPhnYTwQ https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPDnzuhAsl6cQ

But those price drops will likely only go so far. That’s largely because, over the last few years, the small handful of food corporations controlling the sector have been charging premiums for their products, blaming supply chain disruptions. They’ve raked in record profits as a result, and nothing is stopping them from continuing to do so.

It’s well known that the triple threats of the pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the effects of climate change have done a number on the supply chain. Then came avian flu, adding to the pile in 2022 and early 2023.

This series of supply chain disruptions has led to the highest food prices ever, leaving many families unable to afford their groceries. But that’s not the whole story.

Food corporations are thriving. Between 2021 and 2022, the food and beverage industry recorded more than $155 billion in profits, according to Forbes. Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, increased its gross profits last year by almost 3 percent to $46 billion. Cargill recorded a 23 percent jump in revenue last year to $165 billion—$6.68 billion of which was profit. Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in the U.S., nearly doubled its profits in the first quarter of 2022 due to soaring meat prices.

That profit windfall is making its way to corporate food executives and their shareholders. Last year, Tyson Foods’ CEO’s salary increased by 33 percent to $12 million. Cargill doled out $1.21 billion in its fiscal year 2022 to shareholders—an all-time record.

How is the corporate food world flourishing amid a global food crisis? Can these two realities be reconciled? And what does it all mean for food prices going forward? We spoke with experts to help explain what’s going on.

Pricing Food

“When food supplies are disrupted in times of crisis, people are willing to pay a premium,” said David Ortega, food economist and associate professor at Michigan State University.

And not only has supply been low, but, over the last few years, demand has been very high. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), consumer spending on food outpaced pre-pandemic levels, even after accounting for inflation.

“Some of this can likely be attributed to some of the excess savings that households accumulated during the pandemic,” said Ortega. A surplus of savings has increased demand from some consumers, typically younger ones, who are willing to pay premium prices for foods that are grown or raised ethically and in an environmentally sustainable manner.

“I think that’s what the grocery industry is really grappling with now, because they do not live in a world of true cost accounting” said Errol Schweizer, who led the national grocery program at Whole Foods for almost a decade. “They live in [a world with] a lot of externalities where the real costs of these products are paid by our future generations, but also by the environment, by communities of color—particularly farmworkers and low-income rural folks who live in heavily polluted agricultural areas.”

Right now, the price of food doesn’t reflect any of those factors. In fact, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, corporate profits accounted for 54 percent of food price increases between 2020 and 2021. For the four decades prior, only 11 percent was attributed to corporate profits, the rest to the cost of labor.

When avian influenza recently wiped out more than 58 million birds in about a year and egg prices dramatically shot up, Cal-Maine, the largest distributor of eggs in the U.S., increased its gross profit margins five-fold. That raised questions for farmer-led advocacy group Farm Action, which penned a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in January asking the agency to investigate Cal-Maine for price gouging and collusion.

“Contrary to industry narratives, the increase in the price of eggs has not been an ‘Act of God’—it has been simple profiteering,” the letter states.

Farm Action pointed to the USDA’s analyses of egg prices throughout 2022, in which researchers consistently noted prices were “significantly higher than expected.” The fact that no other egg producer stepped in to sell their eggs for less “can be evidence that there is tacit collusion in the marketplace,” said Farm Action’s co-founder and president, Joe Maxwell.

And it’s not just the egg industry that has been accused of price gouging over the last year.

“Basically, what corporations have been able to do—and they brag about this constantly in earnings calls—is that they’ve taken these cost increases and they passed all of that onto consumers,” said Chris Becker, senior economist at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic think tank. “But they’ve been able to go well beyond that and jacked up prices by so much that they’re actually having skyrocketing profit margins. On every unit they’re selling, they’re making a higher share of profits relative to what they’re paying in labor input costs.”

Researchers at Groundwork have been listening in on corporate earnings calls to hear what food company executives are telling their shareholders regarding profits. “They don’t use the word ‘profiteering,’ but they’re talking about the ways that they can get away with much higher prices than they normally would be able to,” said Becker.

The shareholder system further incentivizes these price hikes.

“Corporations are not being run to benefit everyone in society,” Becker said. “We’ve seen a shift in the last several decades towards the very shareholder-dominant organization of corporations. And so we’ve also seen real effects of that that have amplified the incentives for this profiteering.”

Plus, over the last decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has dramatically expanded corporate rights. And, it seems, corporations are taking those rights and running with them.

For example, in a recent earnings call for food giant General Mills, which owns brands including Annie’s, Betty Crocker, and Pillsbury, the company’s CFO confirmed that price increases were outstripping cost inflation. Executives at Tyson Foods recently cited “pricing initiatives” for increased profits. PepsiCo’s CFO claimed the company is “capable of taking whatever pricing we need.”

Food prices are only so elastic, however; if prices go up too high, consumers start buying less—and visiting food pantries instead. That’s already starting to happen, evidenced by long lines at food banks and retailers going over their recessionary playbooks in recent earnings reports.

But, Becker said, even when the cost of producing food goes down, it typically takes longer for prices to drop than it does for them to shoot up in the first place. “As the cost goes down, they keep the prices high to kind of extract a little bit more profit margin while they still can,” he said.

Price gouging is a difficult thing to prove, but the current makeup of our corporate food system is certainly ripe for it.

How the Hyper-Concentrated Food Sector Shapes Prices

But in our current food system, companies have the power.

Right now, only four companies control more than half of the market for nearly 80 percent of grocery items, according to an investigation from the Guardian and Food and Water Watch. Food retailers are also extremely concentrated, with only four companies—Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Ahold Delhaize—controlling 65 percent of the market. Supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons are currently planning a merger which, if it takes effect in 2024 as expected, would make them the second-largest food retailer in the U.S.

“These firms control such a large segment of the market that the basic supply and demand market dynamics cannot function,” said Farm Action’s Joe Maxwell.

This hyper-concentration dates back to the 1970s, when then Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out.” In the years since, corporations have taken that advice and run with it. Mergers and acquisitions have resulted in an agricultural supply chain that is dominated—from seed to grocery store—by a small handful of companies. And now consumers are paying the price.

It also gives corporations the power to keep prices high in tandem with their rivals. Not necessarily through explicit collusion, but rather a wink and nod, tacit agreement. It’s even easier to do that during emergencies, such as a global food crisis.

“In the context where all firms are facing these cost shocks, collusion isn’t really necessary because when you know that all other firms are facing the same conditions as you, you can raise your prices,” said Evan Wasner, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who has recently co-authored multiple papers on the topic with economist Isabella Weber. In the latest, they wrote, “Sellers’ inflation generates a general price rise which may be transitory, but can also lead to self-sustaining inflationary spirals under certain conditions.”

Records show that many companies announce exactly how much they’ll raise prices on their public earnings calls, deeming explicit collusion unnecessary.

The Biden administration has been outspoken against a monopolistic marketplace, though little has been done in practice to crack down on corporations. But the issue has garnered some attention in Congress recently. In February, Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) re-introduced the Farm System Reform Act which, among other things, would target concentration in the meatpacking industry.

Putting Power Back in the Hands of Consumers

Legislation introduced last year by Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) proposes creating a task force to monitor price changes in food and other goods and investigate corporate profiteering. In a GOP-controlled Congress, however, it’s unlikely the legislation will get very far.

Some states are taking matters into their own hands, including New York, where the Attorney General recently proposed rules against price gouging. Changes would include prohibiting corporations with large market shares from increasing their profit margins during market disruptions.

Crackdowns on price gouging are extending beyond food, too: In California, Governor Gavin Newsom introduced a proposal in response to excessive gas prices, which would create a watchdog group and set a price-gouging penalty for the oil and gas industry.

Another approach is to implement price-gouging laws for upstream sectors—that is, goods that are used as inputs, such as fertilizer, oil, steel, and shipping materials. In general, price-gouging laws target consumer goods. Tracing price increases through the supply chain all the way back to the source could help tamp down inflation.

Experts are also predicting supply chain shocks in the future. As the effects of climate change ramp up around the world, we can expect more extreme disasters and geopolitical tension. University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Evan Wasner argues we should prepare for that future the way we prepare for war: by keeping buffer stock reserves.

“When oil prices really skyrocketed in the beginning of 2022, the Biden administration started releasing oil onto the market and that really brought prices down pretty significantly,” he said. The same could be done for other supplies, such as grain and wheat.

Ultimately, workers and consumers need a bigger seat at the table, said Groundwork Collaborative’s Chris Becker. Several recent bills aim to do just that, including one in California that would establish a council that dictates working conditions and wages for the state’s fast-food industry, with fast-food workers sitting on the council.

“Without empowered workers and consumers, corporations exist primarily to benefit their own executives and shareholders. That’s the root of the problem,” said Becker.

“What purpose are they serving? Are they serving the interests of wealthy investors?” he asked. “Do we regulate corporations so that they care about paying their workers well, and care about not raising prices to these unsustainable levels that consumers can’t afford?

The post Food Prices Are Still High. What Role Do Corporate Profits Play? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Mon, 22 May 2023 10:00:57 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPDnzuhAsl6cQ https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByN-WTwnjLmmdw

Nava and Contreras are the community coordinator and an elder advisor with Tierras Milperas, a nonprofit community garden group that operates seven gardens in this and other Central Coast farming communities. The garden in question is the largest; it occupies 1 acre of land on the larger grounds of the All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church and serves 51 immigrant farmworker families. In late April, its members had been served a two-week lease termination notice, and although the end date had come and gone, Tierras Milperas members haven’t stopped gardening.

The gardeners were first sent a letter terminating their lease in June 2022. At the time, the church claimed that neighbors in the surrounding neighborhood had made multiple complaints about suspicious activity on its property. After a series of tense negotiations, the gardeners have managed to stay on the property for the last 10 months. Now, however, the future of the garden is in jeopardy again.

And this time the threat of eviction has gained attention throughout the food sovereignty community, and the gardeners have received a growing groundswell of support. That’s largely because Tierras Milperas’s spaces—like the other rare but crucial gardens created by farmworkers—are more than your typical community gardens.

“The space is for growing organic vegetables, and when we come out of the fields where we work, it’s a place to be more tranquil,” says Contreras. “We all come from farming backgrounds, and this is our tradition.”

In addition to providing an important opportunity to farm, Tierras Milperas is also a community gathering place. In recent years, it gained fiscal sponsorship from the Community Agroecology Network and has increasingly focused on expanding its efforts, and on working as a collective through an assembly, a group of elders, and a working group.

Many of its members are Indigenous, and they focus on growing and sharing knowledge about traditional cultural foods while using chemical-free farming and seed-keeping practices. The goal, says the group’s website, is to “put our health decisions and community social fabric in our hands rather than in an agrofood and health care system that sicken us with diabetes, stress, individuality, and labor exploitation.”

The garden on the Church’s property has become all the more important this spring, as one of the group’s other gardens was damaged when a broken levee led to devastating floods and mass evacuation in the nearby town of Pajaro.

“The garden serves as a lifeline to communities of farmworkers who live in a part of the state that produces an immense amount of produce, but they can’t afford [to buy] it themselves and so they have to grow it,” says Neil Thapar, the co-director of Minnow, a group working for land tenure for farmers of color and Indigenous land stewards that has been collaborating with Tierras Milperas for several years to help them secure their own land. “They’re growing food because they need to support their families. And that should be a right that’s afforded to anyone who wants to do that,” adds Thapar.

“The church broke our contract,” Nava says. “Now, we’re asking for reasonable time to harvest everything we’ve planted. We can give them the land, but we’re asking to wait until February 2024.”

All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church did not responded to a request for comment by press time. In a statement to a local news outlet last summer, Bishop Lucinda Ashby of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real wrote, “The gardeners have not been evicted, but the lease with Tierras Milperas is being terminated.” At the time, Ashby said “calls to police have been made frequently by surrounding neighbors due to suspicious activity on the property.”

The initial letter from the church mentioned drug paraphernalia left on the property and the death of a groundskeeper, who garden members say had been living in his car on the property at the time and suffered from alcoholism.

“They got false information and are unwilling to analyze it,” says Nava.

“It seems to us that they don’t like what we do when we come together as a community and have meetings,” added Contreras. “Many families come to the garden and women and children enjoy it and see it as a safe space.”

“Since then they haven’t wanted to [communicate] to us, just our fiscal sponsor—and even then they didn’t actually want to speak with them,” says Nava. “After we had such a big public outcry locally, the bishop agreed to have the pastor have dialogues with us and come to a different agreement.” That agreement didn’t last.

“There are a lot of negative statements being made about a community, that work as dog whistles . . . to make some assumptions about who the members of Tierras Milperas are,” says Thapar. “If the church had these concerns, the assumption would be that you’d discuss this with your tenants of 13 years. Instead, their approach was to accuse and make assumptions, when there never had been any such situations.”

Thapar points to the power held by institutions such as churches, as well as the fact that a primarily Latin American and Indigenous population in an agricultural region is already at a disadvantage culturally.

“That social inequality is tied to property ownership. This situation is an example where that tension is very apparent, because while the gardeners had access to the lease, it’s clear that it can be taken away in an instant,” Thapar adds.

At this point, Tierras Milperas has gathered more than 600 signatures in an online petition that calls on church leaders to stop the eviction.

“We’ve received support from many people from here but also from around the country, and around the world. [Author, professor, and filmmaker] Raj Patel visited the garden recently. That has helped a lot in the last two weeks,” says Contreras.

“One of the most important things that community gardens can cultivate is community,” Patel, who is also on Civil Eats’ advisory board, explained by email. “With the church’s permission, those communities have flourished, turning soil into food, land into a schoolyard for children, and into a center for care in which seniors can be part of a community, not segregated away. At heart, Tierras Milperas’ fight is a struggle against segregation. Affluent white suburbanites don’t want ‘those people.’ But Tierras Milperas’ communities are vastly inclusive. With its eviction announcement, the church betrays its own principles, and I’m struggling to understand what they gain instead.”

The group’s struggle to stay on the land in Watsonville is just one of several similar situations. In Los Angeles, Compton Community Garden is working to raise $600,000 to buy the land it occupies while its fate lies in the hands of a developer.

In Saint Louis, Missouri, urban farmer Tosha Phonix told Civil Eats that several urban farmers in the city are being turned down in their attempts to buy previously vacant land, despite the fact that the city has “close to 12,000 blighted or vacant properties.”

When asked about whether he sees the fight for the Watsonville garden as part of a larger trend, Nava says, “It is a process of pricing people or out, or gentrification. The people who do this act like they’re the majority, but they’re the minority. We’re in a predominantly immigrant community and there has been a lot of pricing out of our immigrant families in this region. Thirty percent of our community is Indigenous people who have already been displaced from their lands. It is these forces that continue to try to erase us.”

Regardless of how the scenario plays out, the gardeners intend to continue growing food together as a community. And for now, Tierras Milperas is raising funds for a plot of land through GoFundMe.

“We’ll continue what we’ve been doing for the last 5 years, working as collective,” says Nava. This is the part they don’t like—we’re organized.”

The post This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Thu, 18 May 2023 15:45:37 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByN-WTwnjLmmdw https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOTf-4KTRbgjA

This article was produced in partnership with Edible Communities; a version of this article will appear in future issues of local Edible magazines.

“This was the great Eastern Woodlands,” says Sauder. “It wants to be a forest here.”

Centuries ago, Sauder’s Anabaptist ancestors arrived and, instead of learning from and alongside the Native peoples who had already developed techniques to farm within the forest, took the land and cleared the trees to grow crops and graze livestock. Now, Sauder sees its next chapter as both practical action and penance.

“I do it for the sake of my children’s future and for the sins of my ancestors,” he says, of the 3,500 young hybrid willow, honey locust, mulberry, chestnut, and persimmon trees that are now maturing slowly in neat rows across 30 acres of pastures.

Sauder’s system—where his cows will soon graze among trees instead of in fully open pastures—is called silvopasture. And it’s one of several practices that fall under a broader agricultural approach called agroforestry, or farming with trees.

Farmers can plant trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife (windbreaks and hedgerows), along streams to stop nutrient pollution (riparian buffers), or between rows of corn (alley cropping). These practices, long part of Indigenous farming, are taking root all across the country.

In California, Rebekka and Nathanael Siemens graze sheep to their 2,000-tree almond orchard. On 18 acres in Wisconsin, the Midwest’s leading agroforestry nonprofit, the Savanna Institute, is growing chestnut, elderberry, black currant, and black walnut trees between rows of organic soybeans.

Whatever the approach, more abundant plant life that stays put year after year—i.e., perennials—lead to healthier ecosystems that support biodiversity and store carbon. Indigenous cultures around the world, including Native American tribes, have long practiced various forms of agroforestry. And, as researchers, policymakers, and governments look for effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience on farms to secure the food supply, agroforestry is approaching a renaissance.

Funding Agroforestry as a Climate Solution

“Farmers are stewards of photosynthesis, one of our oldest and best technologies for getting carbon out of the atmosphere,” Keefe Keeley told policymakers, government officials, and CEOs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) biggest annual gathering this year.

Keeley, the executive director of the Savanna Institute, was invited to speak to highlight the USDA’s Climate-Smart Commodities program. The agency awarded $3.1 billion in two rounds of grants last fall, including $153 million to projects focused specifically on agroforestry. (Additional broader projects also include elements of agroforestry.)

The Savanna Institute is one of many organizations involved in a $60 million effort coordinated by The Nature Conservancy across 29 states. In the Southeast, Tuskegee University is leading two projects intended to help underserved farmers transition to agroforestry practices and to grow markets for their products. The Adirondack North Country Association will help women-owned farms measure the benefits of riparian buffers and cropland reforestation in New York, while Caribbean Regenerative Community Development will work with small coffee farms in Puerto Rico.

In recent months, the USDA started distributing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act designated for climate-smart agriculture—including agroforestry practices. Then, in late March, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) reintroduced the Agriculture Resilience Act. If included in the next farm bill, it would direct the USDA to establish three new regional agroforestry centers. As lawmakers prepare to write the 2023 Farm Bill, many are looking to continue to expand funding for climate-smart practices.

“When we did a pre-survey of farmers across the region, agroforestry was the No. 1 thing they were interested in doing. And the No. 1 practice they were interested in is silvopasture,” says Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, an organization that supports Mid-Atlantic farmers.

Pasa received a $50 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant to implement and expand agroforestry and other soil health practices on 2,000 small- and mid-size farms along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina. Through a network of partner organizations, it will subsidize the cost of tree planting and offer technical support.

The Nature Conservancy’s project will tackle the same two challenges in additional regions. And covering the upfront cost is key, said Joe Fargione, the group’s North America science director. Fargione compared getting started in agroforestry to organic transition. Initially, farmers have to invest money and time into going organic, they often see lower yields as they work out the kinks, and it takes three years before they can charge more for their crops. With agroforestry, trees are expensive, other costs often arise in setting up the system, and farmers won’t see benefits to their bottom line until the trees mature, which takes a minimum of three years—and usually more like six to eight. “But one of the things that’s exciting about agroforestry is that . . . it’s profitable,” Fargione said.

The Need for Local Agroforestry Expertise

Still, on his own, Sauder didn’t have the cash to plant the trees until Austin Unruch made it possible.

Unruch is the founder of Trees for Graziers, and he and his team have now completed about 20 silvopasture installations in Lancaster County, with more in the works. Key to his success has been access to public and private funds directed at reducing nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. (Pennsylvania is behind on its goals to reduce Chesapeake Bay pollution and is counting on 90 percent of future reductions to come from farms.) Unruch finds the funding for farms like Fiddle Creek and then brings his deep expertise to help farmers develop their systems.

“There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of farmers comparing notes, but very few agroforestry technical support people out there advising farmers,” said Pasa’s Brubaker-Smith.

Unruch is the exception, and his knowledge of the local climate and landscape is crucial. He knows exactly how much shade is good for cool-weather grasses that thrive in the Mid-Atlantic, but that calculation would be very different if he were helping a farmer plant trees between rows of corn in Illinois. “I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting,” he said. “It’s something that needs to be done locally.”

And while the Climate-Smart Commodities projects will train more experts and get a lot of farms planting trees, Unruch said agroforestry will only reach its potential if support for the approach is sustained over time. In his state, for example, silvopasture isn’t eligible for funding through existing conservation programs. But demonstrating and measuring the impacts over the next five years should help, he said.

Brubaker-Smith agrees. “Alley cropping wasn’t approved before, but we were able to do these demonstration sites and then have NRCS [the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service] agents come out, and now NRCS does fund alley cropping. We’re hoping the same will happen with silvopasture,” she said.

On its own, the acreage that will be affected by this new funding won’t be enough to make a huge dent in agricultural emissions, but Fargione says it will provide important data and tools that could spur future investment and growth, allowing it to scale up. The Nature Conservancy project, for example, will be measuring carbon stored in trees and soil on the farms while also working to develop an affordable measurement method. He said giving farms the tools to implement agroforestry practices and document the impacts will then allow food companies with net-zero commitments to buy from them.

Either way, says Unruch, “it’s a drop in the bucket compared to how big agroforestry should be and what the opportunities are.” Beyond dairies like Fiddle Creek, there are also pastured poultry and hog farms that Unruch sees as having even more potential. Those have barely been considered.

For now, spring is in full effect. Robins are flitting between grasses and still-thin branches speckled with buds. In about three weeks, Sauder says, the pastures will be ready for the cows. For the first time since planting, a canopy will start to provide shade for the animals. While it will be far from a forest, the farm will inch closer to its roots—and toward a resilient future.

Illustrations by Nhatt Nichols.

The post Can Farming with Trees Save the Food System? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Wed, 17 May 2023 10:00:01 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOTf-4KTRbgjA https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPJ-lxOIZYFYw

That may change soon. In addition to the historic water funding included in recent infrastructure bills, the farm bill that is currently being negotiated in Congress could support real progress in small towns across the country, thanks to the billions it includes for construction of rural water and sewer systems.

We know firsthand what a huge impact those dollars can make on the ground. In California, people in an estimated 300 communities can’t drink from the tap. And two examples—the unincorporated farmworker communities of Monson and Sultana—show how federal funding can make the difference between residents having to rely on bottled water to drink, brush their teeth, and cook dinner, or having safe water from the tap.

For decades, the residents of Monson, which is just 15 miles north of Visalia, has faced water access challenges, including struggles with dry wells and high levels of nitrates.

Like many regions that are home to the people responsible for growing and harvesting the bulk of this nation’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables, this community still relies on bottled water and septic tanks for wastewater. Sultana, on the other hand, which is just 4 miles north, upgraded its infrastructure in the 1970s, replacing aging water and sewer systems.

Through advocacy by Sultana residents, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Development helped to fund a $2.1 million project in 2017 to drill a new community well and lay pipes to supply more than 200 homes with safe water. The two neighboring communities are currently working together to connect more homes in Monson to the safe water system in Sultana.

The USDA’s Rural Development programs are a lifeline for thousands of small towns that don’t have enough residents to cover infrastructure costs through property taxes, water bills, or other revenue sources. Over the past decade, the USDA has released more than $10 billion in grants and loans for water projects through the Rural Utilities Service. But, despite the fact that Black, Indigenous and People of Color households are far more likely than white households to lack complete plumbing, and more likely to be served by water systems that fail to meet safety standards, only 15 percent of all USDA-funded water projects over the past 10 years were located in communities of color.

Our nation’s racial water gaps exist and persist in large part because of past disinvestment, and even today, communities with larger numbers of people of color often receive less funding from key federal water programs. Many critical water projects in these communities are eligible for funding by USDA Rural Development, but continue to sit in an unfunded backlog.

Right now, on the heels of President Biden’s declared commitment to environmental justice, we still have families in rural communities forced to rely on bottled water, and worrying about their wells running dry.

USDA Rural Development must fulfill its commitment to Justice40, and prioritize the needs of low-income and rural communities of color. Farmworker communities, Tribal Nations, colonias, stakeholders, and government agencies must collaborate to protect the vital human right to safe drinking water. Environmental justice advocates and community-based organizations deserve a seat at the table of federal decision making dedicated to underserved communities.

And the money the USDA has today for rural water is simply not enough to meet the needs in communities across the country. Ensuring every family in this country can trust their tap water will also require increased rural water funding in the 2023 Farm Bill.

More projects like those completed in Monson and Sultana are possible if we remain committed to prioritizing communities most in need. Federal support prevents vulnerable communities from being left behind and keeps the water and wastewater gap from expanding. The Biden-Harris Administration and current agency administrators have made some of the most progressive investments in underserved communities in this nation’s history. Congress should do its part to follow suit as it negotiates the farm bill. We all need to stand up for expanding access so that every American has safe and affordable water in their homes.

The post Op-ed: How Federal Dollars Can Help Ease the Rural Water Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Tue, 16 May 2023 10:01:12 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPJ-lxOIZYFYw https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByN7wgNvr4K89A

Vilsack was there to highlight the Department of Agriculture’s progress on several long-stalled rules around enforcing organic standards and Origin of Livestock rules for dairy. In addition, Vilsack mentioned that the long-anticipated animal welfare rule will likely be finalized by late summer or early fall.

But the biggest announcements were focused on opening up new markets for organic food, getting more U.S. farmers certified to grow organic food, and helping them pay for that certification.

Under the new Organic Market Development Grants (OMDG) Program, the USDA is making $75 million in grant funding available to nonprofits and state, local, and tribal governments for projects designed to expand markets for organic food produced in the U.S.

The domestic piece is key, because while the U.S. market for organic food continues to increase, surpassing $60 billion in 2022, the most recent data shows organic farmland acreage has not grown beyond 1 percent of the total U.S. farmland—and the number actually decreased between 2019 and 2021. (OTA representatives said they don’t believe the acreage data is entirely accurate because of the voluntary nature of the survey.) As a result, the country is importing more and more of its organic food, which is a missed economic opportunity for farmers—and increases the risks of organic fraud.

“I believe the challenge is in the transition [to organic, which takes three years and typically comes with an increase in labor], and producers need to be able to have some certainty that they can recover some of the costs of that transition,” USDA Farm Service Administrator Zach Ducheneaux told Civil Eats. To that end, Vilsack’s other big announcement at the OTA conference was that the agency would increase how much it will reimburse producers for certification.

The USDA will now cover up to 75 percent of the costs associated with organic certification, up to $750. That’s the maximum amount authorized by the last farm bill, and farmers were getting that rate for several years. Then, in 2020, the USDA cut it to 50 percent, up to $500. Groups including the National Organic Coalition and the Organic Farmers Association cheered the restoration of the higher rate and said they’ll be pushing to increase the maximum even further in the next farm bill, to cover 100 percent of the cost of certification up to $1,500. The following day, Senator Peter Welch (D-Vermont) introduced a marker bill that would do just that, and a House companion bill is expected soon.

On the USDA’s side, Ducheneaux pointed to an overall message. “I think all of these [announcements] indicate the commitment of the administration to help all of our producers really reimagine what our food system looks like and stand up the resources that are needed to provide alternatives for the consumers they serve,” he said. “It aligns with our work on Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities and with our work on equity and more and better markets.”

Not everyone is drawing the connection between organic and the climate crisis, however.

To visit the OTA conference, Vilsack stepped out of the AIM for Climate Summit, where there was almost no mention of organic farming. Vilsack said the Summit, which was much larger and higher-profile than the OTA conference, represented “the largest number of ag ministers in D.C. ever.” Over the course of several days, agricultural leaders from 50 nations and representatives from the world’s largest food and agriculture companies highlighted global projects to reduce agriculture’s climate impacts.

Not only were representatives of organic agriculture absent, but  the conference was heavily sponsored by the chemical pesticide industry, including Corteva, FMC, and CropLife (the pesticide industry’s trade association). New AIM for Climate “innovation sprints” announced at the conference include several that tout regenerative practices but none that will focus on organic farming.

“Regenerative,” in fact, was the term most often used by attendees at the Summit—from the CEO of PepsiCo to Syngenta executives. As the term has gained momentum among farmers and food companies over the past several years, whether chemical-intensive systems can be considered “regenerative” has been a source of debate. While definitions vary, regenerative agriculture is generally intended to prioritize soil health, while chemical pesticides can decrease biodiversity in soil ecosystems.

For his part, Vilsack has generally rejected agricultural approaches that limit chemical use in any way. For example, he has pushed back on the European Union’s “Farm to Fork” plan, which sets concrete targets to cut chemical pesticide and fertilizer use.

While OTA conference speakers repeatedly declared that “organic is the original climate-smart agriculture,” Vilsack talked about organic purely as a market opportunity for farmers. And the dissonance between the events illustrated a chasm in the realm of “climate-smart” agriculture that seems to be deepening as more attention and funding flows into the space.

“I’m encouraged by the fact that [climate] is on everyone’s agenda,” said OTA CEO Tom Chapman when asked about the lack of overlap between the two events, “but I would like organic to be recognized further.”

Read More:
Can Organic Farming Solve the Climate Crisis?
What Does the Future Look Like for Organic?

Talking Trash. The climate impact of food waste was on the agenda at the AIM for Climate conference, while elsewhere in D.C., Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), Dan Newhouse (R-Washington) and U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conneticut) reintroduced their Food Date Labeling Act. The bill would standardize how the expiration-date labels on packaged foods to reduce the amount of food Americans throw out for fear that it has gone bad. Studies have shown the current system is confusing, and home cooks often end up tossing food that has not actually expired. The provisions will likely be considered for inclusion in the farm bill, especially because similar solutions are also included in Pingree and Senator Martin Heinrich’s (D-New Mexico) Agriculture Resilience Act, which was reintroduced earlier this year and has garnered support from food and agriculture groups.

Read More:
Stopping Food Waste Before It Starts Is Key to Reaching Climate Goals
A New Bill Aims to Fix Food Waste in Schools

The Supreme Court Rules on Cages. After hearing arguments in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross last October, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision this week to preserve Proposition 12, the California law banning the sale of pork from pigs kept in tight cages. The case was the latest in a long list of attempts by the pork industry to challenge the voter-approved animal welfare measure, and it hinged on the regulation of interstate commerce. Interestingly, it was one case in which the justices did not vote along their typical ideological lines. While the case was specific to California’s law, other states are considering similar measures, so it will have larger implications for animal welfare on farms (and beyond). Groups and companies including the Humane Society, ASPCA, Public Justice, Farm Action, and Niman Ranch cheered the decision, while the meat industry’s trade association issued a statement saying its members were “disappointed in the Court’s decision and will carefully study the ruling to determine next steps.”

Read More:
Morality at the Center of Supreme Court Arguments Over Raising Farmed Pigs in Crates
Next on the Supreme Court Docket: Farm Animal Welfare

Iowa Water Crisis. Speaking of the powerful pork industry, University of Iowa research engineer Chris Jones suddenly retired last week after he said two state senators pressured the university to take down his popular blog on the pollution of Iowa’s waterways. Jones has been outspoken about how the agricultural industry in Iowa has contributed to terrible water quality and about the political power that allows farms to avoid regulation. His new book on the topic, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth About Agriculture and Water Quality, which draws on those blog posts to explore the issue, comes out on June 1.

Read More:
Op-Ed: Water Pollution in Iowa is Environmental Injustice
The Trickle-Down Effect of Agriculture in Iowa

The post In DC, Organic Ag Gets a Funding Boost but Is Missing from the Climate Conversation appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Tue, 16 May 2023 10:00:17 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByN7wgNvr4K89A https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNkIVDyC7zhzw

As a participant in the Billion Oyster Project, Crave Fishbar is in its eighth year of collecting shells to help restore the oyster reefs in New York Harbor. The restaurant’s servers, who include many aspiring actors, tell the origin stories of the daily array of oyster options—the better the story, the greater the popularity of that brand, said Jeremy Benson, general manager of the Upper West Side location.

But the best story the team tells is that of the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit founded in 2014 that has organized 15,000 volunteers and 60 restaurants to restore oysters at 15 reef sites across New York’s five boroughs.

The effort seeks to bring back the harbor’s oyster population—which was destroyed by overharvesting and pollution in less than 100 years—by collecting used shells, installing them in critical locations, and “seeding” baby oysters on top to form reefs.

In addition to donating shells, Crave Fishbar employees have learned about the bivalve’s ability to clean the water and make shorelines more resilient to climate change. Every year, they join other volunteers who remove plastic forks from shell piles, clean cured shell, and load cages destined for the harbor, a body of water that The New York Times has described as “once an open sewer.”

“Now there are dolphins in the Bronx River. There are whales in New York Harbor. There are harbor seals underneath the Verrazano Bridge,” Benson told me during a recent visit, wrapping up his story with a happy ending also due in no small part to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and subsequent changes to wastewater handling.

When it comes to oyster reef restoration, the enthusiasm of the Crave Fishbar crew is not unusual, and that type of engagement is a driver of environmental activism that’s not to be underestimated.

“When the community is enthusiastic, the aquaculture community is enthusiastic, the conservation community is enthusiastic, then the regulators are sitting there saying, ‘Wow, this is great.  Let’s go!’ So, this has been enormously powerful,” said Boze Hancock, senior marine habitat restoration scientist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

Though some oyster reef restoration projects, like those in the Chesapeake Bay, operate at unprecedented scale globally, others are small, community efforts. They have involved Rotary Club members, public school kids, nonprofits, community shellfish commissions, universities, federal, state, and local governments, even the lawyers who won the Deepwater Horizon oil settlement. (Baby oysters are now growing on some of the 33 reefs built along Florida’s Gulf Coast as a result of that payout.)

In addition to New York Harbor, Pew Charitable Trusts points to reef restoration efforts in the Chesapeake Bay, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas—and throughout the world.

With 20 years of momentum behind them, the people and groups undertaking these conservation projects have garnered both funding and expertise. But one thing that’s in short supply is the oyster shell itself. That scarcity has led to concerns about what to use instead, with disagreements playing out in heated meetings, court battles, and op-eds. And the challenges are often amplified because so many different players have a stake in restoration efforts.

“If you have five different people in a room, you’re going to have six opinions,” said Taylor Goelz, a marine scientist and senior program manager focused on the ocean and the climate for the Aspen Institute, who also hosts The Ocean Decade Show podcast. She was the lead author on a paper, “Alternative Substrates Used for Oyster Reef Restoration,” when she was a research associate at Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Although approaches may differ, Goelz said most people can agree on one thing: “They all want more oysters.”

Ecosystem Engineers

Like all bivalves, oysters are multitasking ecosystem engineers. They feed by filtering algae from the water—more than 50 gallons a day. That process removes excess nitrogen, which can create harmful algae blooms, and leaves cleaner water behind.

As they build their shells from calcium carbonate, oysters sequester carbon in a way that is cost effective and energy efficient. Clustered on reefs, they also help protect shorelines from erosion and storm surges. The reef itself provides shade and traps moisture during low tide, giving heat-stressed intertidal marine life a cool microhabitat that helps them adapt to rising temperatures.

The clearer water resulting from filter feeding also allows sunlight to penetrate and promote the growth of seagrass, “one of the other really important habitats that we are missing,” said Hancock. Ecosystem engineers themselves, seagrasses also clean the surrounding water and help take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, while sheltering a wide array of marine life.

Oyster reefs provide habitat for hundreds of species, a benefit TNC started to quantify as early as 2012. Mussels, barnacles, and sea anemones settle on reefs and provide food for many species. Crabs and fish also hide from predators in reef crevices. “These reefs pump out fish. It’s amazing,” added Hancock, who has worked in shellfish restoration in the U.S. since 2004.

The wallets of fishermen benefit—but so do community coffers. In Greenwich, Connecticut, for example, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fisheries study calculated that oysters provided the town with an annual financial benefit between $2.8 and $5.8 million. Without shellfish, the town would need to invest that much in wastewater treatment, septic system upgrades, and better storm water management.

Experts agree that the general public is increasingly aware of both these economic and environmental benefits. It’s one reason there has been such a boom in oyster reef restoration, Goelz said. Crave Fishbar’s Benson agreed. “In the restaurant, I have four or five in-depth conversations with people every week about oyster restoration,” he added.

Oyster Reef Restoration Also Spawns Controversy

The scale is enormous and because different locations have seen different arrays of impacts. But all successful reefs require two things: healthy oysters and strong foundations on which they can grow.

Generally, the reefs in the Southeast and Gulf of Mexico tend to have enough native oysters but not enough substrate for the babies to latch on to, Hancock explained. In other places, such as the West Coast and the northern portion of the East Coast, there are too few oysters left to settle a reef.

“So, the process of restoration has to step back to [first] provide the substrate and then add the breeding oysters to provide the larvae to settle on that substrate,” he said.

The go-to substrate for restoration projects has traditionally been recycled, fossilized, or dredged native oyster shell. Some Chesapeake Bay watermen, along with the Maryland Department of Marine Resources, still advocate for dredging shell deposits in one place and moving them to another, although the stance is controversial.

As one example of a shell recycling program, New York’s Billion Oyster Project has collected 2 million pounds of shell (1,000 tons) since 2014. Meanwhile, a Florida quarry produced 112,000 tons of fossilized shell—enough for just a single Maryland tributary restoration. (As a point of reference, the landmark Chesapeake Bay Program has plans to restore native oyster habitat and populations in 10 tributaries by 2025.)

For the scale of restoration needed, there is simply not enough shell. “Alternative substrates have to become part of the equation when you get down to it,” said Goelz.

For the last two decades, oyster restoration projects have tapped non-oyster shell, non-calcium stone (such as granite and sandstone), and limestone, as well as manufactured materials like porcelain and concrete. Which one works best is a matter of how well it matches the needs of an individual project, including which ecosystem services are sought.

If oysters will be harvested, experts say, alternative substrates should be layered with natural shell that doesn’t interfere with commonly used fishing methods like dredging or hand-tonging. Oysters growing on chunks of concrete, for example, can be too heavy for a hand-tonger to lift.

Stone such as granite has often successfully fostered oyster growth, but its use was questioned in 2021 during a major restoration project in Maryland when watermen contended that it might snag baited lines. (A county lawsuit and then a court injunction followed, which was only lifted in February.)

Varying public perceptions have also come into play with manufactured materials. For example, porcelain can be recycled from toilets and other bathroom fixtures, yet it has been eschewed as “potty-reef.”

Concrete can also be recycled from demolished buildings or bridges, and because it can be mounted vertically, it has performed as well as—or better than—natural oyster shell in supporting oyster growth and attracting other species to the ecosystem. But recycled concrete can contain toxic substances that leach when flooded with water. Although numerous studies have found it to be safe when it is prepared properly, skepticism remains, with new incidents fueling concerns.

Last September, for example, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission ordered removal of three reefs from the Lynnhaven River, a Chesapeake tributary in Virginia, after tests revealed the presence of harmful polyaromatic hydrocarbons in chunks of concrete and asphalt.

“I’m a great advocate of limestone” as an alternative substrate, said TNC’s Hancock. Limestone is calcium-based, like shells themselves. Plus, it can be built upward to avoid being buried in sediment over time.

“[We can get] barge loads of limestone and do it on a pretty big scale,” he added. “We’ve proved around the world that you could actually make a difference to the ecology fast enough. We’ve beaten up the planet so badly that we don’t have time to muck around.”

A New Market for Oysters

New Hampshire has only 18 miles of coastline, but Great Bay adds 144 more miles of shoreline. Ocean water travels 15 miles inland to reach Great Bay, where it then mixes with fresh water from seven rivers. It bears the distinction of being one of the nation’s most inland estuaries, and it’s a treasured habitat for Ward. “It can feel like a little hidden jewel,” she said.

Like some other oyster farmers, Ward found that a number of perfectly healthy oysters weren’t making it to market because they had grown too large for diners’ tastes. “You’re cleaning bags, you’re raking ‘em up from the bottom. And then there are some places you just overlook or you can’t get to one year,” Ward explained.

She began wondering: “What can we do with these? How can we still get a decent price?”

The Nature Conservancy helped answer that question. In 2019, its team worked with Ward and a few other farmers to study whether larger, older oysters could be substituted for the baby oysters (or “spat on shell” grown in nurseries) that are customary in restoration projects. The pilot study found that, one year later, 70 percent had survived. It was an “overwhelming success” and well-timed, with results coming in just as the pandemic was shuttering restaurants, leaving farmers with no market.

In 2020, TNC launched a broader program named SOAR—Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration—in partnership with The Pew Charitable Trusts, NOAA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In two years, the program purchased more than 3.5 million live oysters and brought them to 25 sites to restore 40 acres of oyster reef. At the same time, it supported 125 shellfish companies and preserved more than 450 jobs, according to TNC.

In February, TNC and Pew announced the second phase of SOAR, with funding of $6.3 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Builders Vision. Later this year, growers who want to participate can apply to the program, which has set a goal of buying 2.5 million oysters and planting them at 12 restoration sites along the East and West Coasts.

“[Growers] are really excited about being able to provide an environmental benefit while they’re at it,” said Hancock. “We’ve even had growers who have said, ‘If all I do is produce oysters for restoration, that’ll be great.’”

What About Cost?

In 2013, fisherman-journalist Bob Melamud was wondering much the same thing as he took the boat with a reef construction crew to the site of the world’s largest oyster restoration project on Maryland’s Harris Creek, a Chesapeake Bay tributary. Project managers were in the process of importing some $6.3 million worth of fossilized oyster shell from Florida because there wasn’t enough in Maryland.

“It takes a lot of work to build a reef. What I want to know is: will it work? And you should want to know, too. After all, you and I are paying for it,” Melamud wrote in Bay Weekly.

Altogether, with more than 200,000 cubic meters of substrate and over two billion oyster spat on shell, the project cost $52 million. But after just three years, comprehensive monitoring has already demonstrated a return on investment of $23 million annually through a robust increase in fishing revenues alone. “And there’s $11 million worth of blue crab produced by those reefs,” added Hancock. A model developed by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science also found that the oysters contribute more than $3 million a year in water purification services.

And all because they filtered the full volume of Harris Creek—350 acres, an area bigger than the National Mall—in less than 10 days in the summer. “It’s not just a bunch of tree-hugging greenies that wanna put these habitats back,” Hancock said.

Oysters: On a Reef or in a Cage

But extreme weather has been a problem. “Loads of sediment come down the rivers and then pile up on the beds, smothering adult or newly settled oysters,” said Tessa Getchis of the Connecticut Sea Grant and University of Connecticut Extension Program.

Last year the state began implementing a plan to restore and expand shellfish populations, and a 2021 law expanded Connecticut’s ability to acquire oyster shells for that purpose. It authorized the Commissioner of Agriculture to tap into federal, state, and private funding to support an oyster shell recycling program and conduct restoration. It also classified aquaculture as “farmland,” bestowing on shellfish growers key tax benefits.

As Boze Hancock said, “Oysters have those same [ecosystem] services, whether they’re in a cage or on a reef.”

Now, various shell recycling efforts—run by a private farm, town shellfish commissions, and university researchers—have been launched and a “state shell recycling coordinator” hired.

At restaurants, oyster festivals, and raw bars, “we’re seeing volumes of shell just thrown away,” said Getchis. But she knows that trend won’t be easy to reverse. “It takes a lot of work on the part of the restaurant,” ranging from training staff to sort out the shell to isolating it to avoid cross-contamination and rodent infestations. “While we’re optimistic, we’re trying to learn as much as we can now,” she said.

Undeterred, she added, “We want to keep the shell out of driveways and construction sites and incinerators. We want it in the water.”

The post Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs is a Climate Solution appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Mon, 15 May 2023 10:00:56 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNkIVDyC7zhzw https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPKOa1xZC3nxQ

Founded by farmer-activist Karen Washington and social entrepreneur Olivia Watkins in 2017, this nonprofit organization acts as a racially just investment fund created explicitly to support Black farmers, agricultural businesses, and food entrepreneurs in the Northeast, with the goal of building community wealth and local food sovereignty through collective power. Rocky Acres was among the first cohort of eight agricultural businesses that received support through the organization’s 2021 $1.1-million pilot fund.

The money helped Aponte shift his direct-to-consumer business model to include a home delivery service and a small on-farm store or bodega. “It allows me to aggregate products from other farmers of color who don’t have the time to spend at the market,” he says. “Being from the Bronx, I’ve always come at things from a food justice lens and really look to make sure folks have sufficient access to their foods.”

Rocky Acres started out as 10 acres but has since expanded to 30, all owned by Aponte and his family. The pilot fund support—including a $50,000 grant and a $25,000 loan—allowed him to put the additional acreage into production sooner, create infrastructure for new crop fields, install greenhouses, and establish the bodega, which opened on Earth Day 2022.

To stay true to its community roots, Black Farmer Fund tapped a committee of 11 Black farmers and food industry entrepreneurs to help determine which of 50 Pilot Fund applicants would receive grants and/or low-interest loans, supported by private donors and foundations such as the Sandy River Charitable Foundation.

All of the investees—including 716 CBD, Rootwork Herbals, Black Yard Farm Collective, and more—are based in New York, where there are marked inequities: The average annual net cash income for Black farmers in the state is $-900 while white farmers made over $42,000, according to Black Farmer Fund research.

This echoes the hugely disproportionate hurdles that Black farmers across America face, the long-lasting result of centuries of systemic racism. Despite acting as the bedrock of the agricultural industry, they have historically experienced violence, such as the 1919 Elaine Massacre, and discrimination when dealing with financial institutions and government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

These disparities have meaningful, measurable consequences, with research showing that Black farmers—who represent just 1.4 percent of farmers, compared to 14 percent a century ago—earn a mere $2,408 per year on average, compared to the $17,190 that white farmers take home.

“From a historic economic perspective, the loss of Black agricultural land represents a significant loss of wealth and capital to the Black community in the United States,” says Dania V. Francis, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who has extensively researched Black land loss.

Francis and her colleagues estimate that the Black agricultural land that was lost or stolen in the U.S. from 1920 to 1997 would be worth a cumulative $326 billion today. “While that is only a fraction of the current Black-white wealth gap, it represents lost opportunities for Black farmers to invest in the higher education of their children, to invest in opening other small businesses, and to serve as a family and social safety net against hard times. Ownership of an asset as valuable as arable land comes with many benefits that could enhance the well-being of Black communities,” she explains.

Recent attempts to right these wrongs are often characterized as too little too late, such as the 2021 effort by the Biden Administration to offer Black farmers $4 billion in debt relief. The offer was walked back after white farmers brought multiple lawsuits claiming that the race-specific debt-relief program was discriminatory, then a group of Black farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government in response.

The following year, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included $2.2 billion in funding to compensate farmers who have been subject to discrimination within USDA programs and $3.1 billion in loan help for farmers in serious financial distress. But how much of that will reach Black farmers is yet to be seen.

“The USDA has to get their act together. They’ve put money out there, but they need to change their ways to make it easier for communities of color to navigate their system,” says Washington, a celebrated community organizer and co-owner of multigenerational QTBIPOC Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York. “For so long, decisions have been made that impact communities of color and we’re never asked to be at the table.”

After watching what they describe as pervasive inequities and broken promises, Washington and Watkins have taken matters into their own hands. “We’re trying to break that extractive, capitalistic system that for so long has come from outside trying to control the lives and well-being of our community without our voices,” adds Washington.

The recipients of this year’s James Beard Award for Humanitarian of the Year, the duo recently launched BFF Fund 2.0, a $20-million integrated capital fund to support an estimated 30 Black farmers and agricultural businesses across the Northeast over the next four years. It builds on the momentum of the organization’s Pilot Fund and includes key improvements.

“The Pilot Fund was just that—a pilot,” says Watkins, who serves as the organization’s president. “There’s definitely a lot of gratitude that something like this exists; we’re hearing that people feel safe being able to access funding from people who look like them. And because we have community at our center, we’re really receptive to feedback about how we can evolve.”

Due to popular demand, the coverage area for version 2.0 of the fund has expanded to include the broader Northeast. Over the past year, Black Farmer Fund has developed a more robust internal team to handle logistics and an influx of donors and applicants, again with a community-led investment committee to oversee the selection process. The nonprofit has also debuted a Rapid Response Fund to support Northeast Black farmers and food entrepreneurs in the event of an emergency.

“It’s still very early in the pilot fund, but we’re already seeing it enhance Black equitable businesses,” says Watkins, who notes that 95 percent of investees’ goods and services are sold within a 200-mile radius and that 35 percent of their suppliers are BIPOC. “We found that within the pilot cohort the lowest paid [farm] employees on average make more than New York state minimum wage—showing that people are really invested in building wealth for others.”

Beyond capital, Black Farmer Fund also provides technical assistance, business development, relationship building, and other vitally needed support. The nonprofit’s monthly community workdays, for instance, bring together farmers and volunteers to work on farm projects, like Aponte’s. “They literally came out and helped paint the bodega bright yellow and stood up on a ladder 20 feet in the air to help me put a greenhouse together,” he says. “I’ve never met any other lender that would do that.”

These bonding experiences reflect Black Farmer Fund’s mission to foster community. “Our workdays allow us to be grounded in our roots and bring people together in a way that’s in alignment with Afrocentric values,” says Washington. “Within that, we are creating a space for Black food businesses to come together and learn from one another, exchange ideas and resources, and celebrate the bounty and harvest. It’s a Pan-African tradition.”

Even with this early success, Washington and Watkins are eager to see a larger shift in power. That includes closing the racial wealth gap in the agricultural industry, which they say has long been perpetuated by skewed lending practices that often render small minority-owned farms high-risk. In 2022, for example, the USDA granted direct loans to only 37 percent of Black applicants versus 71 percent of white applicants.

“For so long, a lot of the people we work with have been considered risky by traditional banking standards,” says Watkins. “But what does it look like for traditional banking standards to shift from what’s the risk of investing to what’s the risk of not investing?”

Black food and economic development thought leaders across the country are eager to learn from the Black Farmer Fund to set up similar programs. “We’re just one part of the broader food justice movement, and we really want to see other folks doing this in a way that best suits their place,” says Watkins. “We’ve been talking with Black folks in other states and regions who are interested, and we’re very excited to be generous with all the information and materials we’ve developed along the way.”

Watkins says local and state lawmakers have also approached her and Washington for more insight into the fund’s successes, but the organization is focused on its grassroots, community-based initiatives rather than trying to influence policy at this point.

“Here we are with no federal dollars, no state dollars, no city dollars—no support from the government. So, we have really built this on the backs of our community,” says Washington. That said, Black Farmer Fund has partnered with OpenTEAM and Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust to develop culturally appropriate software to help minority-owned agricultural businesses measure and share information about crop yields, current markets, and the like—all useful for lender and grant application processes.

And while there’s undoubtedly more work to be done to get Black growers the support they need to start new farms and stay on the land, the Black Farmer Fund’s efforts to shift power back to these producers have certainly made a difference for agricultural entrepreneurs like Aponte of Rocky Acres.

“If folks believe in capitalism as a system, then we understand that businesses need to be able to compete—and we also understand the historic disenfranchisement of Black farmers in this country’s history,” Aponte says. “We need more resources at the table to level the playing field. The Black Farmer Fund is sorely needed and right on time. I hope to see them continue to grow and become the model for regenerative capital across the country.”

The post This Fund Is Investing $20 Million to Help Black Farmers Thrive appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Wed, 10 May 2023 10:00:53 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByPKOa1xZC3nxQ https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOtHBVPjMTSvA

Edible poppy seeds, which can be contaminated with the poppy plant’s natural opioids if not processed properly, have long been linked to failed drug tests. In the past, most tests have been able to distinguish illicit drug use from poppy seed consumption. But according to the U.S. Defense Department, recent data suggest that some poppy seeds now contain a higher level of contamination, making it more difficult to determine the cause of a failed test.

In 2022, in response to mounting public pressure, Congress directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to finally regulate the opiate contamination of poppy seeds; the agency has yet to do so.

“I’m still blown away that doctors and nurses don’t know more about this, considering it doesn’t seem that uncommon,” Silakowski, a resident of Depew, New York, said. “I wasn’t allowed to take my son home for four days. It turned my life upside down. Child Protective Services visited my older children’s school, and it was a huge embarrassment. I lost a lot of relationships because people doubted me.”

Silakowski, whose case was cleared after a four-month investigation that began in 2018, signed a 2021 petition to the FDA that highlighted the dire need for the agency to set a maximum threshold limiting opiate contamination of poppy seeds. Regulations would not only address the food safety issue for the general public, but also the lesser-known problem of consumers soaking contaminated seeds to brew a potent tea, which has led to overdoses and deaths.

A number of stakeholders are advocating for these regulations. The 2021 petition’s signatories included Silakowski and one other mother, two medical experts, the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), and the family members of three people who died from poppy-seed tea overdoses. Meanwhile, mothers nationwide continue to report the problem, and the Defense Department recently warned military servicemembers to avoid poppy seed products.

“We believe that the FDA has the ability to act,” said Steve Hacala, who signed the FDA petition after his son died at age 24 from drinking poppy-seed tea. “We know they’ve been looking at this issue for years, but [we] are disappointed with the fact that they have not made any public policy decisions, as far as regulating the way these seeds come into the country.”

Since 1942, it has been illegal in the U.S. to grow Papaver somniferum, the poppy species that produces opiate alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, and thebaine—all controlled substances. The only part of the Papaver somniferum plants that are not highly regulated are the edible seeds, which are imported to the U.S. for baking and widely available. The seeds can be contaminated with the milky sap that permeates other parts of the plant if not cleaned.

Enforcing best practices for imported seeds could go a long way toward reducing the problem. The European Commission released seed processing guidance in 2014 for preventing opiate contamination, noting that a combination of washing, heating, and grinding the seeds at lower temperatures can effectively bring contamination to “non-detectable quantities.”

Notably, seed contamination is also deliberate in some cases and intended for drug abuse, according to Dr. James Kincheloe from CSPI. “Sellers know exactly what they are doing, selling these seeds that are highly contaminated. [They] will market ‘unwashed’ or ‘unprocessed’ poppy seeds.”

CSPI has shown that abuse in the U.S. is likely on the rise. A 2021 study coauthored by two of the group’s scientists found 19 reported deaths associated with poppy plants, most of which  occurred since 2015. Many of these deaths were overdoses from poppy-seed tea.

Slow Response from the FDA

In response to “reports of positive drug tests, addiction, overdose, and death related to contaminated imported poppy seeds,” Congressional reports on the 2022 Appropriations bill directed the FDA “to establish a maximum permissible threshold of opiate alkaloid content for poppy seeds and carry out appropriate regulatory or enforcement measures to ensure safety of poppy seeds.”

In February, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Arkansas) and Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland) sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, chastising the agency for not addressing the issue.

“The inaction to accomplish this straightforward task of determining an opiate contamination threshold for poppy seeds only contributes to the perception of the dysfunction at the agency,” the representatives wrote. “Such a threshold, set publicly by the FDA, would warn consumers of the potential dangers of poppy seeds and act as a catalyst for both the government and private industry to determine the best means of ensuring that seeds entering the country are safe.”

Under widespread scrutiny, the FDA is currently restructuring its foods program. In the wake of the infant formula crisis, the agency last year commissioned an external review, which ultimately recommended an overhaul of division’s management structure and mission. In their February letter, the representatives underscored poppy seed contamination as a priority, requesting a briefing with FDA staff to discuss “actions and timelines.”

In an email to Civil Eats, the FDA acknowledged “the significant importance of this issue and its impact on public health,” according to an agency spokesperson. The spokesperson said that the FDA is gathering and evaluating the scientific evidence relevant to setting a threshold level, “in addition to information that may help inform other potential options, including appropriate regulatory and enforcement measures, that could be part of a strategy for addressing poppy seed opiate alkaloid content.”

Food safety groups such as CSPI have asked for the FDA to coordinate with both the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Customs and Border Protection. In a win for advocates, in 2019, the DEA clarified that “unwashed” poppy seeds that show opiate contamination should be considered controlled substances.

The DEA already defined other parts of Papaver somniferum—including the opium poppy, poppy straw, opium, opiates, and their derivatives—as Schedule II controlled substances under the Controlled Substances Act, but had previously excluded the seeds as a concern.

Outside of the U.S., there are several precedents for setting an opiate contamination threshold. Most significantly, the European Union last July established maximum levels for morphine and codeine in whole, ground, or milled poppy seeds and for bakery products containing poppy seeds.

Poppy Seed Food Product Safety

Swortwood published a study in 2017 that noted that “poppy seeds are typically consumed in small quantities in baked goods, such as 3 grams of seeds in a poppy seed bun. These quantities may not pose a risk to consumers.” The study instead focused on the risks of home-brewed teas, used as opiates, proving they can be fatal.

Nevertheless, contaminated food products remain a huge problem with dire consequences for people who fail a drug test, such as new mothers—and the issue may be getting worse.

In a February memo, Under Secretary of Defense Gilbert R. Cisneros, Jr. advised all service members to avoid poppy seed products out of an “abundance of caution.” He wrote, “Consumption of poppy seed products could cause a codeine positive urinalysis result and undermine the department’s ability to identify illicit drug use.”

New parents like Silakowski have continually reported the issue. In some cases, they say, hospitals are setting their tests at too low a level, causing more false-positive results and upending more lives. They note that the Department of Health and Human Services raised the acceptable limit back in 1998 to account for prescribed medications and poppy seed food products, but some institutions are still testing for lower levels of opiates.

Most recently, the ACLU filed two separate complaints on behalf of two women who say eating poppy seed bagels resulted in positive opiate test results in the hospitals where they gave birth. Although both women were ultimately cleared of suspected opiate abuse, the ACLU is using the complaints to push for broader change.

In March, the ACLU appealed to New Jersey’s civil rights division to investigate the mothers’ claims, order the two hospitals to stop drug testing expectant mothers without their consent, publicize hospital drug testing policies—including cut-off limits for each substance—and award compensatory damages for mental and psychological pain and suffering.

Silakowski is glad to hear that the new parents are taking legal action. “It’s a lot more draining than people realize,” she said, “especially at a time when you’re supposed to be enjoying a newborn and you’re going through all that stress.”

The post Eating the Wrong Poppy Seeds Can Upend Your Life appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Tue, 09 May 2023 10:00:17 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOtHBVPjMTSvA https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNusDrEyzVzPw

This is the third installment of our new series, Faces of the Farm Bill, where we humanize the real-world impacts of ag policy.

In 2019, Ducheneaux founded Akiptan, a certified community development financial institution, or CDFI, based in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. While CDFIs are designed to serve the broad financial needs of historically underserved communities, some, like Akiptan, play a pivotal role in the agricultural landscape, providing much-needed financial and technical support to food producers.

While there are over 1,400 CDFIs in the U.S., Akiptan is one of only 65 that are focused on serving Native Americans. It has distributed more than $16 million in capital through almost 240 loans across 24 nations for projects over the last three years—including Morning Light Kombucha, a company focused on sustainable practices in Kansas, and Sakari Farms, an operation that specializes in growing first foods and expanding research-based tribal seed production in Oregon—and its work is just getting started.

Akiptan’s 2022 market study determined that nearly three-quarters of the farmers they spoke to needed additional capital to purchase new equipment or infrastructure, but most don’t have access to CDFI loans, which accounted for only 9 percent of all the capital they raised.

The Native CDFI Network found that 86 percent of Indigenous communities lacked a single financial institution to access loans or capital within their borders. One of the network’s 2023 Policy Priorities focuses on increasing the flow of capital and subsidies to farmers and ranchers through the farm bill. The hope is to create a CDFI pilot program.

The “2022 Gaining Ground Report,” authored by the Native Farm Bill Coalition (NFBC), is also advocating for “creative flexibilities” that would enable Native CDFIs to “expand their agricultural lending and provide those key lines of credit that improve Native food economies and support rural America.”

Akiptan was one of three lenders named as a part of the Farm Service Agency’s Heirs’ Property Relending Program last August. Authorized as a 2018 Farm Bill provision, the program strives to address entrenched agricultural inequities by targeting the status of fractionated lands among Black and Indigenous farmers.

Farm Service Agency Administrator Zach Ducheneaux, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and a relative of Skya’s who helped her create Akiptan, told Civil Eats that “there isn’t enough funding in the CDFI sector, let alone the Native CDFI sector, that is structured like an investment that really lets the money go out there to work.”

Skya Ducheneaux spoke with Civil Eats recently about Akiptan, her hopes for the 2023 Farm Bill, and the importance of funding for Native American food producers.

How did your childhood on the ranch inspire you to get involved in agriculture?

My dad ranched with his dad, who ranched with his dad. Everybody in my family was expected to help. And even though I’m a girl, my dad very much raised me so that I can do the same thing as every man in my life. I was out there all day with him—from sunup to sundown, before school and after school. It’s tough; ranching is hard work.

I was chasing cows, pulling calves, fixing tractors. Then, when I turned 18, I never wanted to work that hard again. I said, “I’m going to get a business degree. It’s getting me off the ranch, out of the hay field.” I went to college and I started missing agriculture, never the work but the good-natured, honest people.

After I graduated, I wanted to move back home, which is funny because just a few years prior I couldn’t get far enough away. The Intertribal Agriculture Council caught wind of the fact that I was trying to move home and they offered me a position to start this CDFI.

I didn’t know what a CDFI was, so there was a huge learning curve, but I haven’t looked back. And I’m a fair-weather cowgirl these days.

Can you briefly describe Akiptan’s growth over the last few years?

We began lending and did $1.8 million in new loans that very first year. By 2022, we did just under $10 million in new loans, and closed $3 million to $4 million in loans so far this year.

Oftentimes, you see Native CDFI growth is slower because of the lack of access to resources and disinvestment, so the fact that we were growing like this with a record year was amazing. We hired two loan officers this winter and we need like three more. It’s absolutely crazy.

How do you stay sustainable while continuing to offer financial and technical services?

I spend a lot of time fundraising, and even with that, it’s still just never enough, which means needs are going unmet out there. Our market study indicates that each producer has $539,000 of unmet need, on average. If you extrapolate that to all 80,000 Native agriculture producers, it’s $43 billion.

Most of that unmet need is land, buying out fractionated interests. Infrastructure, equipment, livestock, there’s so much need, and we’re [only] seeing a drop in the bucket of that $43 billion.

Our interest rates are still really low. We also practice patient capital, which means our loan terms are longer than what you would see at a bank. It gives our producers healthy cash flows and makes sure they’re able to not only have a business that can stand on its own, but a good quality of life.

All of our loans are paired with technical assistance, and we really meet the producer where they’re at. We’ll also do up to five years interest-only, which allows producers who have room to grow upfront at accelerated capacity growth. We’ve seen producers take all their profits and reinvest it back in themselves and absolutely kick butt.

We try to take a partnership approach with them, which is where Akiptan comes from—it’s the Lakota word for doing something together in a joint effort. We are intentionally building relationships with our producers. We do quarterly check-ins with them just to make sure that they don’t have any budgeting or tax questions for us. Basically, we focus on the relational side just as much as the transactional side.

Do you think your recent market study reflects an inequity in lending services?

Traditional lenders are focused on credit risk. If you don’t have a strong balance sheet for them to fall back on, they won’t extend credit—or they will, but it’s not at terms that are beneficial to the producer. Without somebody giving you a loan and taking a chance on your business, having to start from scratch with no support is so hard.

That’s what so many of our producers are doing because of that disinvestment, because there’s a lot of distrust in Indian Country and financial institutions. You feel like you’re not being heard or understood, you’re not being valued.

(That systemic discrimination) stunts the economic development on reservations, and agriculture is such an underutilized economic driver. They get funding that keeps them surviving and never thriving, but if we have proper investments, agriculture can easily surpass gaming because we are such great producers in Indian Country.

The 2018 Farm Bill brought unprecedented resources to Indian Country thanks in part to the Native Farm Bill Coalition’s work. How that has been panning out for Native farmers—within the finance world and beyond?

The NFBC is a team of absolute rock stars. I believe they got 63 provisions in their first round of advocacy with the 2018 Farm Bill, lots around tribal parity and pilot programs. Their report “Gaining Ground” goes through all of their previous work and upcoming priorities. We saw improvements in Farm Service Agency programs in regards to loan limits, for example. [NFBC] has tons of recommendations for new opportunities in the Farm Bill, and we fully support them in their work.

How has Akiptan been involved with this farm bill and what are you hoping to see this time around?

We’ve been to D.C. a couple times this year, helping the Native Farm Bill Coalition by telling our story and advocating in that way. We’ve been meeting with the offices of U.S. representatives and senators, making sure those policymakers know the realities on the ground.

That’s our part of the farm bill, lifting up the Native Farm Bill Coalition’s recommendations for CDFIs, which we fully support. You’ve got a space at the table with something as big as the farm bill, and you can share your stories and the statistics.

We need to advocate for programs that would help CDFIs with ag lending at the national level. I see a lot of hope and desire and almost like an “enough is enough” attitude [from people struggling to get loans].

A lot of my family is involved in agriculture, and I’ve heard them cussing about their bankers for years. The culture that I wanted to create wasn’t one like that—I didn’t want to be getting cussed about every day.

We want to keep our boots dirty with our producers. We are going to feed and pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. There’s a lot of innovation, a lot of hope, a lot of desire, wanting to do better, wanting to break those generational cycles, wanting to make a better world for Indian Country.

The post Farm Bill Funding for Indigenous Food Producers Needs a Boost appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Mon, 08 May 2023 10:00:35 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNusDrEyzVzPw https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByO7j4tmLcgSCA

The complaint includes a number of residents’ detailed descriptions of the ways that chicken farms are affecting their lives. For instance, resident Henry Brewer described living next to mountains of chicken litter—a mixture of feces, urine, sawdust, and other particles—that industrial-scale chicken farms remove from barns and spread on fields.

“Each of the five piles is over eight feet tall. They stand there and start fuming off. The odor is terrible,” Brewer noted in the complaint. “Sometimes it feels like the flies are about to eat us alive—the dogs can’t even live in the yard.”

Over the past two decades, the size of the chicken industry in North Carolina has exploded and now produces close to a billion birds from large confinement operations each year. In 2017, two-thirds of the state’s chickens came from farms that each sold more than half a million birds annually. Research shows waste from those farms pollutes groundwater, local waterways, and the air, leading to health hazards for local residents. And the farms have built in the same counties where concentrated hog production has long harmed the health and well-being of local communities, adding insult to injury for many residents.

The complaint, filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rests on a central fact: While North Carolina’s hog farms must now obtain permits to operate (partially because of a previous Title VI complaint), a loophole in the state environmental agency’s regulations has allowed chicken farms to set up shop without any permitting. As a result, they are now concentrated in counties that are disproportionately home to people of color, many of whom are also low-income. Essentially, the complaint claims, the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is discriminating against Black, Native, and Latin American residents by failing to regulate the industry.

“Under state law, DEQ has to take into account cumulative impacts that are happening in a particular location,” said Fredrick Ole Ikayo, a legal fellow who worked on the complaint. “But they don’t even know where these poultry facilities are or anything about the way they are polluting the air and water.”

The action holds particular significance because the lawyers filed the complaint during the same month that President Biden issued an executive order further outlining his administration’s “whole-of-government approach to environmental justice.”

“This approach is long overdue, and it should have animated the civil rights work at EPA since its inception,” said Cristophe Courchesne, the attorney who worked on the complaint. “Now, given direction from the top, hopefully EPA will act expeditiously on these types of complaints and really push the state agencies that are the subject of these complaints to change their practices in ways that help these communities.”

It’s not the first Title VI civil rights complaint related to industrial animal agriculture filed this year. In January, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a complaint against Delaware’s state environmental agency after it approved the construction of a facility that will convert gases from the breakdown of poultry waste into to natural gas. The groups said the agency failed to consider the impact on the surrounding low-income communities of color, many of whom are immigrants and have limited English proficiency.

In North Carolina, how the EPA responds to the complaint is of particular interest since the current administrator, Michael Regan, was in charge of the very system that is being targeted until 2020.

“The administrator has deep knowledge of the issues in North Carolina and the political challenges that have resulted in DEQ taking the approach that it has,” Courchesne said. “We take him at his word that the federal administration is committed to environmental justice and where there are issues like these identified, that the agency will take action.”

Read More:
Is Rural North Carolina the next Flint?
In North Carolina, New Pollution Allegations Add to Residents’ Woes
The Battle Over Air Quality on Maryland’s Eastern Shore

Deadly Farm Dust. Six people died and 37 were hospitalized on Monday after a dust storm caused a horrific, fiery crash on an interstate in central Illinois, involving more than 70 vehicles. The blowing dust came from recently plowed farm fields, and it’s not the first time farm practices have intersected with weather to cause accidents and other serious damage. As droughts get worse due to climate change and some farm fields are left bare, dust is a growing concern. Currently, researchers are working to identify dust hot spots and how they are linked to agriculture.

Read More:
Dust Is a Growing Problem. What Role Does Farmland Play?
A Wild, Windy Spring Is Creating a Soil Erosion Nightmare for Farmers

Methane Metrics and Solutions. Ahead of next week’s global food-and-climate conference in Washington, D.C, Climateworks and the Global Methane Hub released a new report on what’s needed to cut methane emissions from the food system. Methane is a shorter-lived but significantly more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and research has increasingly pointed to the importance of reigning in emissions to meet climate goals.

Globally, the food system produces 60 percent of methane emissions, from livestock, food waste, and rice production. The new report found that a set of innovations could mitigate up to 75 percent of those emissions by 2050, but that getting there would require an additional $60 billion—five times what is currently being spent.

Shifting diets away from beef would have the greatest impact, followed by changes to the way cattle are raised, preventing food waste throughout the supply chain, and composting and other practices that keep food out of landfills. Improving rice production would have less of an impact but is still powerful because of how much rice is grown globally, especially in Asia. And many of the solutions, such as managing water in paddies differently, could be deployed immediately.

In the U.S., diverting food waste away from landfills would be the most powerful change, followed by dietary shifts. The report also found that investing in methane-reducing innovations may have co-benefits including job creation, improving food and nutrition security, and reducing air and water pollution.

Read More:
Methane From Agriculture Is a Big Problem. We Explain Why.
Report Says Plans to Reduce Methane Fall Short on Beef and Dairy

Better for Bees. Bills that would limit the use of commonly used pesticides that harm pollinators and broader ecosystems moved forward in two states last week. In New York, the state Assembly passed the Birds and Bees Protection Act. A coalition of environmental groups, farmers, and health experts then joined legislators to rally for its passage in the state Senate. The act would limit the use of neonicotinoids, or neonics, on lawns and gardens and as a seed coating in agriculture. Meanwhile, the Nevada assembly passed a bill that would ban their use on lawns and plants. That bill would exempt agriculture completely.

Neonics are systemic insecticides that are sprayed on lawns and fruit and vegetable crops and applied as a coating to corn and soybean seeds planted on millions of acres across the country. In recent years, research on their disastrous impacts on bees, birds, and aquatic life has piled up. While policymakers in Europe have instituted various bans and restrictions on their use, federal-level efforts to curb their use in the U.S. have stalled. As a result, states have stepped in, with Maine, New Jersey, and California already implementing some stricter limites on their use.

Still, the fact that most of the state laws carve out exemptions for agriculture shows how difficult it is to limit pesticide use outside federal action, said Drew Toher, Beyond Pesticide’s Community Resource and Policy Director. “State-level bills are important at reining in toxic pesticide use, but they are also important because they send a message to EPA about the agency’s shortcomings,” he said. In recent months, the EPA has been working through a backlog of projects to evaluate how already-approved pesticides harm endangered species. Despite being required by federal law, the agency has barely evaluated them for decades.

Read More:
Beyond Bees, Neonics Damage Ecosystems
Dead Bees, Sick Residents from Pesticide Pollution in Nebraska
What the Insect Crisis Means for Food, Farming, and Humanity

A New Way to Spray. In California, farmers were given a new tool to spray their crops after the Federal Aviation Administration approved the first autonomous drones for pesticide application. A spokesperson for Massachusetts-based Guardian Agriculture told a local news station that its drones will begin flying over Salinas Valley farms within the next few months and that it already has $100 million in customer orders. And while the shift may lead to fewer acute cases of pesticide exposure for workers, it’s not yet clear what it will mean for rural communities in the state.

Read More:
New Evidence Shows Pesticides Contain PFAS, and the Scale of Contamination Is Unknown
Changes to Federal Rule Could Expose More Farmworkers to Pesticides

The post Unchecked Poultry Farming in North Carolina Violates Civil Rights, Residents Say appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Wed, 03 May 2023 16:00:31 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByO7j4tmLcgSCA https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNFtj4OInnRgg

Today, a handful of chefs in Mexico City are seeking to revive the country’s genetic diversity and pre-industrial foodways—similar to the way that chefs like Alice Waters and David Tanis reinvented fine dining through farm-to-table ideals and spurred a resurgence of interest in local ingredients and small farms in the U.S.

One of those chefs, Eduardo “Lalo” García of Máximo Bistrot, knows the deleterious effects of industrial, chemical-dependent agriculture firsthand. Born in 1977 in the village of San José de las Pilas, Guanajuato, he grew up laboring alongside his family in fruit and vegetable fields across the U.S. in the years after NAFTA eviscerated Mexico’s rural economy. He later spent his formative years working as a dishwasher and line cook in Atlanta, before being deported to the country of his birth in 2007.

Since that return, he has become one of Mexico City’s most famous chefs. His three restaurants—Máximo Bistrot, Lalo!, and Havre 77—have gained widespread recognition for their distinctive French-Mexican cuisine and their commitment to sourcing local, fresh ingredients—including, most recently, “Best International Restaurant” in Food and Wine’s Global Tastemakers awards.

The new book The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García, by Laura Tillman, uses García’s life story as a lens onto the larger shifts underway in Mexico and the United States’ conjoined food and labor systems. Tillman, whose first book, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, is about a Texas death row case, moved to Mexico City in 2014 for her husband’s job as a foreign correspondent and came to García’s story as she looked for a book-length project that stemmed from her love of food.

Civil Eats spoke with Tillman about the political significance of García’s life story, Mexican cuisine’s long history of innovation, and how readers can share in its flavors and creativity from wherever they happen to be.

How did you come to this story?

I’ve always been interested in food and cooking on a personal level. And when you move to Mexico City, food is a big piece of getting to know the city, both in terms of the amazing restaurants but also that you start to pick up on many of the dynamics of the culture and history of Mexico through educating yourself about the food.

Originally, my thought was to write a book about all the people who worked in a restaurant kitchen—using it as a crossroads of Mexican life.

Then I met Lalo and heard his life story, which is pretty dramatic. I realized that his story touched upon a lot of these issues that I was interested in telling through different people’s experiences—he’d been a migrant farm worker, he’d been the dishwasher in a kitchen, he’d been the person on the line. He had all of those different perspectives. He brings a multifaceted point of view.

On top of that, it was a moment in his life when he was interested in telling his story, because it was during the Trump presidential campaign, and there was this “bad hombre” narrative in the news. So, his story had started to feel politically significant in a way that it hadn’t up to that point.

Because of the way his childhood was, reading and writing are pretty labor-intensive for him. He wanted to tell his story, but he wasn’t going to write it himself.

How does the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico appear in García’s life, and in the book?

For the middle half of Lalo’s life, he was in the U.S., and it’s a place he feels very close to. There’s a lot at play in his story in terms of the types of exploitation inherent in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. He and his family were migrant farmworkers. He’s been deported multiple times, and he can’t return to the U.S.

But he also has a deep love for the U.S. and its culture. This past Thanksgiving, for instance, he did this huge Thanksgiving meal at this hacienda outside Mexico City. It was the most amazing Thanksgiving I’ve ever experienced—and it was in Mexico. That day means a lot to him, partially because [while he was in the U.S.] it was one of the only days of the year when his family wouldn’t work.

In The Migrant Chef you describe the rise of farm-to-table restaurants in Mexico City, partially inspired by chefs and restaurants in the United States. How did that type of dining come about there?

It’s interesting because there are different currents taking place at the same time. You have restaurateurs who are inspired by U.S. figures like Alice Waters and these movements in the U.S. But at the same time, they’re also really inspired by the history of Mexican agriculture and the ingenuity of using all these different ingredients in different ways.

Before the conquest, Mexico already had a very complex cuisine. For example, the list of foods that were taken to one of Hernán Cortés’ ships in 1519 included things like tortillas, tamales, and quelites [wild greens] that are still very central to Mexican cuisine today. And it’s hard to think of what could be more farm-to-table than the milpa [a form of traditional agriculture in which fields are intercropped with maize, squash, beans, and other crops].

In general, the way that colonization worked in Mexico was that mostly men came from Europe. So, over generations of colonization, most of the cooking was still being done by Indigenous and mixed-race women, which I think is partially responsible for the way that Mexican food has really endured.

That traditional Mexican food, which Lalo grew up on, hadn’t really been recognized as belonging in a fine dining space, but it had been the food that people loved and cherished in their families—even in the upper class, where they would have cooks in their homes that would come from other parts of Mexico and bring that food to them in their dining rooms.

Now, you come to Mexico City, and this fine dining scene that emphasizes Mexican food is so vibrant and exciting, so full-throated. But this “fusion” cuisine is continuing a very long tradition of a gastronomy that’s connected to innovation, whether because of scarcity or because of plenty.

It’s continuing a tradition of people like the chef Mónica Patiño, whose family had a cook that would make things like French pastry stuffed with rajas [sliced poblano pepper] and cream, and whose family grew up eating things like tacos de nopales [cactus pads] alongside champagne, and those didn’t seem like strange things for them to combine. But it’s also continuing the innovation of someone like Natalia, Lalo’s mom, who was essentially doing the same thing on the road, because of scarcity.

For these restaurants that are aiming to recuperate Mexico’s genetic diversity and foodways and to innovate, what does the sourcing look like?

Some of the small farms are in Xochimilco, which is the section in the south that most resembles ancient Mexico City. It was essentially an island in the middle of a shallow lake, [and now] it’s a series of canals where there are these man-made islands called chinampas that are made of compost and where they still use old farming methods to create a super nutrient-rich soil.

There are other farms on the outskirts of Mexico City that are doing similar work to the milpa system, where you don’t just have homogenized agriculture, you have different plants that are intercropped and that lend their characteristics to one another to grow together.

There are a lot of conversations about the ongoing tourist-ification and gentrification of Mexico City. I imagine that fine-dining restaurants like Máximo Bistrot probably have a lot of tourist patrons—and that this book is going to make people want to visit. Are there ways that these kinds of top-tier restaurants, which are inaccessible to most local residents, have a positive impact on local economies and food systems?

It’s complex. In her book Eating NAFTA, Ayesha Gálvez critiques this role of fine-dining chefs—the irony that the ingredients that are being presented in some of these dining rooms are only possible to rescue when they’re already endangered. You can take an example like mezcal, where the chef Mónica Patiño spearheaded a movement to bring it into the dining room of her restaurant in a way that was trying to get people to appreciate this drink that had been kind of looked down upon.

Fast forward 15, 20 years, and now it’s this super popular drink, even abroad. Big companies have moved into Oaxaca and are dominating its landscape, and the price of the primary materials to make it have skyrocketed. It’s definitely capitalism at work.

At the same time, I think there’s a ripple effect that happens. For example, I’ve watched Arca Tierra, which is one of the main groups that does traditional chinampa farming. That traditional agriculture has gained a bigger and bigger following over the years that I’ve lived here. Whereas at one point it seemed like they were in danger of not being able to continue and exist, now they’re doing really well.

I don’t want to over-emphasize their importance, but the impact it has is real. Even if it’s not completely changing the whole system, it is changing parts of the system and having a positive effect.

For readers who feel the excitement of the rich cuisine that you describe in The Migrant Chef, but aren’t themselves in Mexico—how can they capture a piece of it?

One of the things that happened when I was reporting this book was that I had two kids—so I became a kind of short-order cook for these two very difficult clients that were in my dining room night after night. It made me look at my own creative process in the kitchen in a more generous way: I might not be the head chef of some fancy restaurant, but I like being creative.

There’s a quote in the book from Yuri de Gortari, who started the first cooking school in Mexico that was devoted to teaching Mexican cooking techniques. He said to me: “You know who’s truly creative in the kitchen? The housewife, because she’s cooking with inspiration from the fridge.”

I think about that when I’m feeling a little desperate. It has made me feel more a part of this lineage of mostly women, but also men, who are innovating out of necessity with the way that they cook, and the way that that can be a creative act as well. Lalo has people he idolizes as chefs, but the people he idolized the most in the kitchen were his parents. So, I’ve developed an appreciation for the fact that as we all approach our cooking and our food, we’re all participating in this tradition in some way.

One very basic thing that I learned to make that was really transformational for me was salsa tatemada. It’s a salsa where essentially you char a bunch of vegetables—tomatoes and onion and chile and garlic—on a comal or griddle, and then you blend them with salt, and that’s the whole recipe. But you can use it to make amazing enchiladas or chilaquiles or just eat it with chips. It’s one of those things where you open that door and a million possibilities come in, and you start to see how you build flavors in Mexican cuisine.

The post How Lalo García Went From Farmworker to Celebrity Chef appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Tue, 02 May 2023 10:00:04 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNFtj4OInnRgg https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNIblAtSYF8NA

While many Americans have struggled with rising food prices this year, the pressures are even more intense for disabled people who have to balance additional constraints—and whose needs are sometimes more expensive, and more complex, than those of the general population.

Complicating matters for disabled people are ever-present systemic realities. Almost 27 percent of disabled people live in poverty, nearly twice the rate of the general population, and that high poverty rate drives a high rate of food insecurity. Even in the best of times, disabled people are struggling to feed themselves.

Additionally, the end of the public health emergency associated with COVID triggered a series of catastrophic changes to benefits programs affecting members of the disabled community. Many relied on the pandemic-era increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to access the food they needed. The expiration of those increases in March has put many in a tough spot, causing individuals to lose at least $95 per month in benefits, as much as $250 per month for some households.

In addition, the certification requirements for Medicaid have resumed, which may lead to loss of coverage for as many as 14 million Americans. At a time when more and more people are living with long COVID, there have also been changes to funding for free COVID testing, vaccination, and treatment.

The brief period of increased benefits was revolutionary for some disabled people, notes Bonnielin Swenor, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center. Like other pandemic programs in the process of a wind down, the drop in SNAP benefits is coming at the worst possible moment for disabled people as inflation increases the cost of living.

Expense of Dietary Constraints

Diabetics rely on their diets to help them manage their blood sugar, for instance. And while people with postural orthostatic hypotension may need a high-salt diet, those with kidney disease require reduced salt.

Allergies in particular can have a profound impact on what people are able to purchase; even with more allergy-friendly items on shelves, people who need to avoid tree nuts, peanuts, dairy, eggs, shellfish, and other common allergens are sometimes forced to seek out more expensive options. Similarly, shoppers with gluten or soy sensitivity can find their choices severely limited.

Dietary restrictions can contribute to the “disability tax,” or the higher cost of living associated with being disabled.

“A thing people don’t realize about food intolerances is not just how expensive the special foods are, but how expensive it is to find new foods,” says Liz Moore, a disabled person with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) who lives with family in the D.C. area. Their condition means that even small changes not just in food but even in the glue, ink, or paper used in packaging can trigger a flareup, sending them into a spiral as they try to figure out what is making them sick.

Sensory sensitivities are also an issue for some disabled people. Cancer patients on chemotherapy and people with long COVID may struggle with the smell and texture of foods. Some neurodiverse people also have sensory sensitivities that can be extreme, and also highly variable. That can mean going to the grocery store and later throwing food out or giving it away after discovering that the smell, taste, or texture is suddenly unbearable. When there are no “safe” foods, going shopping can turn into a very expensive guessing game with big stakes.

“We put together the list and go through it a second time to make sure we aren’t getting frivolous things,” says Alicia Lee, a disabled woman who is a caregiver to her disabled teenager in a home that also includes her disabled adult son and mother, who has a visual impairment. Her husband is the only person currently working, and their “house of disability” requires constant adjustments to meet fluctuating dietary needs.

Lee speaks of the need to “pinch pennies” in a low-income household even before recent cuts to SNAP and disruptions to her ability to run her small business making custom bags, caused by long COVID and complications of her other disabilities. During the worst of the supply chain problems, Lee couldn’t even go to the store, because she would have a panic attack at the sight of empty shelving, thanks to growing up poor. She’s not alone: One in three caregivers are disabled themselves, and their benefits often end up needing to stretch further than their personal needs.

Navigating the Restrictions of Benefits Programs

“It’s been very much viewed as this charity model,” says Swenor of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center of the limited benefits disabled Americans receive. “[We need] to shift the paradigm a little bit, to an empowerment model.”

Swenor’s suggestion reflects a larger shift in thinking away from a century-old approach that treats disabled people as figures of pity who need to be helped to one that positions them as individuals with autonomy.

The disability community is accustomed to the experience of feeling patronized by programs and agencies that are ostensibly there to help; the myriad complicated restrictions associated with SNAP are an excellent example, says Swenor.

“Within SNAP specifically, there’s many other problems including how benefits are determined, who’s called disabled, who’s within the program, work requirements. . . . There’s a just a cumbersome process beyond the accessibility to enroll in SNAP that does keep people out,” she says.

Those who can navigate the application process and meet income and asset requirements are provided with an average of $6 a day to spend on food, a benefit based on the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan,” a hypothetical food budget that is in practice extremely difficult to live on. With the expiration of pandemic emergency allotments, two people receive a maximum benefit of $516 per month, while a family of four can receive a maximum of $939. In practice, beneficiaries rarely receive the maximum amount, thanks to the labyrinthine calculations that go into SNAP. Those benefits also come with strings attached.

People cannot use SNAP for hot prepared meals, for example, which can be an issue for those who struggle to cook on their own, or who want to take advantage of highly flexible foods such as rotisserie chickens, which can be stretched, repurposed, and reimagined for several days. Meanwhile, SNAP’s online shopping pilot does not include delivery costs.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, Children (WIC) has even more restrictive rules that turn shopping into a complex calculus for beneficiaries. Only certain foods in certain packaging are eligible for WIC coverage. While stores often have tags on the shelves identifying those foods, people trying to cross-reference for allergies and other dietary needs may find themselves with very limited options.

Beyond Cost: The Shopping Experience

Swenor hopes to see a conversation about accessibility in food join the growing discussion of food apartheid. Inaccessibility throughout the food system interacts with the ability to obtain nourishing and appropriate foods and requires complex fixes.

For example, disabled people reliant on public transit or paratransit may have a hard time getting to and from the store, and while basic accessibility has been legally required since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, some grocery stores remain inaccessible to many.

This includes functional problems such as “just one step” doorways, narrow aisles cluttered with items that make it hard to get through with a wheelchair or scooter, and accessible restroom stalls that are used as temporary storage. These are just some of the barriers that Liz Moore says make it challenging to shop across multiple stores for affordable deals.

“I try to avoid eating things where I know the labor practices are appalling,” added Moore, who says maintaining that standard is even more challenging for people who have limited purchasing power paired with restrictions on what they can safely eat. Still, for some disabled shoppers, it’s part of their values.

Challenges of Seeking Pantry Assistance

While these entities aim to serve hungry members of their communities, when it comes to disability, their efforts sometimes fall short in ways that can be challenging to correct.

Cross-contact, where allergens are stored with or near theoretically safe foods, is one issue, especially in facilities that receive bulk orders of dry goods and repackage them on site. A bag of beans, for example, may have been packaged in the same area as nuts or wheat flour, making it potentially unsafe for people with allergies to those foods. Some facilities are growing sensitive to this issue, however.

The Food Equality Initiative offers direct services to clients in Missouri and Kansas who need access to medically indicated diets. “Locally, food banks will have a clean room,” an isolated room where sensitive products such as gluten-free flour can be packaged, says Erin Martinez, the organization’s CEO. “It’s in the clean rooms where they can divide up bulk items.” The organization has pushed for these allergen-friendly spaces, which have not caught on nationally—yet.

These kinds of measures can be low-hanging fruit for increasing the accessibility of the food supply, especially if a food bank has a room that can be easily used for or converted to this purpose, says Swenor.

Even when food banks are being extremely careful, some disabled people are still wary, worrying that products may make them ill. Peanut oil may pop up in an item where it didn’t used to be, for example, or soy might be used as a filler to increase the amount of protein, and inattentive food pantry staff or volunteers might not realize that an item is no longer safe.

Promising Solutions

Universal basic income pilots have also shown promise for reducing food insecurity, providing participants with the flexibility to decide how and where they want to spend money, rather than limiting them to the requirements of specific benefits programs.

The 2023 Farm Bill will be a battleground for food assistance for both disabled people and low-income people more broadly, with Republican lawmakers already pushing cuts to SNAP and other safety net programs. But funding allocations through the farm bill could also direct money to projects such as Martinez’ Food Equality Initiative, which ran a successful pandemic pilot that allowed clients around the country to order food online.

It also offers a key opportunity to set policy priorities that raise larger questions about how the U.S. wants to address agriculture, food security issues, and the integrity of the food system.

Still, the 2023 Farm Bill will have to reckon with a big problem, says Swenor: “To count, you have to be counted.” Detailed, real-time data is not available, she says, making it hard to track responsiveness to policy interventions, and survey data can offer an incomplete picture of the disability community. Tackling hunger in the disability community, she says, first requires thinking its members are worthy of being included in data collection.

Alicia Lee, like many disabled people, is hesitant to accept help, and may slip between the cracks of data collection that could help agencies and lawmakers develop more effective policy interventions. “Give folks the money and let them decide,” she says, speaking to the bureaucratic nightmare that is applying for benefits and offering advice for reforming the system.

She is also concerned about the welfare of those she feels having an even more difficult time. “Since we are struggling but not desperate,” says Lee, “I would feel no small amount of guilt for taking anything someone else in a worse situation might need more.”

The post How Food Inflation Adds to the Burdens Disabled People Carry appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Mon, 01 May 2023 10:00:05 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByNIblAtSYF8NA https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOzUnXwhBCFVA

This interview is an installment of our new series, Faces of the Farm Bill, where we humanize the real-world impacts of ag policy. The first article in the series is an interview with Esperanza Fonseca, a SNAP recipient turned food justice activist.

Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) is not most lawmakers. Known for his ever-present bowtie and bicycle lapel pin, the latter of which sends an immediate signal (to those who don’t already know he represents Portlandia) that he is a crunchy, eco-conscious progressive. And when it comes to the farm bill negotiations, many of the powerful players in D.C. agricultural circles write him off, especially since he’s not even on the Agriculture Committee.

But Blumenauer has been calling attention to real food and farm issues that affect people’s lives—and that no other politicians will touch—since he was sworn into Congress 26 years ago. Long before Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) gained traction as one of the only players willing to talk about regulating the meat industry, Blumenauer advocated for shifting funding away from large, industrial, confinement-based animal operations. He has also repeatedly introduced bills attempting to cancel the registration of common pesticides known to kill bees and harm ecosystems.

At the end of March, as the 2023 Farm Bill cycle picked up momentum, he reintroduced the Food and Farm Act, an updated version of a bill he tried to get passed during the last farm bill negotiations in 2018. Among many sweeping changes, the bill would establish new titles in the farm bill dedicated to cutting food waste and ensuring animal welfare; direct more resources toward local food, beginning farmers, and healthy food access; and limit and shift farm subsidies to reward smaller, diversified farms.

Civil Eats caught up with Blumenauer as the recently passed Republican bill written to exchange deep spending cuts for raising the nation’s debt ceiling made its way to the House floor. Due to attempts to further restrict Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits within it, debates around the bill have been bleeding into conversations around the farm bill. And Blumenauer was particularly amped up around what he saw as the hypocrisy of limiting “food stamps” for poor people while maintaining a willingness to pay subsidies to commodity farmers regardless of their income.

“The stakes are very high,” he said. “We’ve been squeezing out small and medium-sized farmers and ranchers. We have been subsidizing a diet that makes people sick. I mean, this is the future of the planet. It’s the future of the agricultural system.”

We spoke to Blumenauer about those issues, his other 2023 Farm Bill priorities, and why he continues to pedal uphill against the D.C. winds after all this time.

The debt ceiling bill that Republicans are likely to send to the House floor this week includes proposals to expand work requirements for SNAP recipients, which you oppose. This conversation seems to happen every farm bill cycle. Why is it such a flash point?

Republicans have been doing this since the Gingrich Revolution [in the 1990s]. They push this mythology that food stamps are lavishing support on poor people so they don’t have to work. This time, it has taken on increased intensity, I think, because they are desperate to change the subject from the potential of wrecking the global economy. They’ve offered up something that sounds good to their base, but it doesn’t really pencil out.

The vast majority of people who get nutrition assistance are old. They’re [children], they’re disabled. And in areas where they’ve tried to force people to work, they find out that there aren’t jobs available, and that it takes more time and energy to try and administer it. I mean, it’s just nonsensical, it’s expensive, and it’s not fair.

Part of what I am insisting that we look at is, if you really want to impose work requirements and income limits, don’t just focus on poor people and their food. Let’s look at rich farmers. Almost 20,000 farmers got an average of a million dollars in subsidy payments over 37 consecutive years. There are no income limits, no requirement that they actually work on a farm. Subsidy payments get mailed to high-rises in New York and penthouses in Chicago. It’s outrageous.

Your Food and Farm Act includes some changes to those commodity crop subsidy programs. What would those look like?

What we want to do is cap them and limit them. And we want to make sure that there’s some connection to the land. As I took our presentation around Oregon, talking to ranchers and farmers, people weren’t upset with the notion of having some limitation. The vast majority of farmers and ranchers in Oregon get far fewer subsidies.

Indeed, people who grow what we call food—fruits and vegetables, nuts and berries—don’t get anything at all. [Commodity programs only benefit growers of row crops like corn, soy, and wheat and about 80 percent of crop insurance dollars go to those same crops.] The crop insurance program, which is lavishly subsidized, gets a guaranteed rate of return far above what the market would require. And some of the subsidies go to companies that are foreign. It just defies the imagination why we would go after poor Americans and not have the same standard for rich farmers.

It’s interesting to hear that ranchers and farmers in Oregon are supportive of some limitations. These ideas about limits on commodity and crop insurance payments are typically seen as a political nonstarter in D.C. Why is that?

Well, it’s a nonstarter if people don’t pay attention. Take a national poll and ask, “Should there be some limitations on agricultural subsidy payments?” An overwhelming number of people would say yes. The reason that people don’t pay attention is [they] have not been able to understand.

I’ve experienced that debating on the floor of the House: I find that many of the proponents [of crop insurance] don’t fully understand the facts or how the programs work. It is deliberately complex so that people can’t follow it. They’re confused, and then they can be misled. You know, I spent an entire cross-country flight several farm bills ago trying to understand the dairy program. A six-hour flight across the country. And all I had after was a headache and very little knowledge. It’s incomprehensible to the average person, and frankly, most people in the agricultural sector are not well-versed.

This is your fifth farm bill as a congressman. How have your priorities changed? Is this Food and Farm Act different compared to the one you put forward in 2017?

My interests have broadened as I understand more about the ins and outs of the various programs and what people need. We start each farm bill cycle working from the ground up, so to speak. It’s not just reintroducing the same legislation. We spend a lot of time talking to environmental groups and farm groups and looking at the needs that develop.

For example, beginning farmers: This is an area that I’m obsessed with. There are young people who want to be involved in food production, and it’s so hard for them to get started. The average farmer is [close to] 60 years of age, and they’re looking at what happens to their land after they’re gone. Not all of them have family members that want to pick up the reins. We’re working to make sure we can ease that transition. We can work with farmers, ranchers, and environmental groups on conservation easements. There are different mechanisms to meet their needs financially and in terms of their legacies.

This is also a very important year in terms of what we’re doing with climate challenges. Agricultural practices are one of the major areas where we can deal with climate change. Climate change is threatening farm life around America. We can [encourage] the use of cover crops and no-till agriculture keeping the carbon in the soil. It’s very important to make it easier for people who want to become [certified] organic. . . to help them transition. These are areas that have come into focus and are a higher priority for me.

What is different than any of the other farm bills I’ve worked on is that there’s a broader awareness of some of these challenges. There is greater interest in trying to promote sustainable agriculture and understanding the potential of being able to be a low-carbon operation.

We also have an animal protection title that we haven’t had before. Animal protection is a high priority for me. And I would say that one of the other new developments in this conversation is that . . . the American diet that we are subsidizing is making our citizens sick. The costs of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease—these are massive costs for the American public and for the health-care system. Fifty percent of chronic conditions are directly tied to the American diet, which is tied to the agricultural patterns we’re subsidizing. There are more intersecting interests.

There’s certainly more awareness of the connection between agriculture and the climate crisis and some of these health issues than there has been before, but in terms of the kinds of changes you’re proposing—to commodity programs, crop insurance, regulating animal agriculture—these are not popular with your colleagues on either side of the aisle. I imagine it’s a bit lonely.

No, no, no, no. I mean, sometimes I quote Samuel Johnson about second marriages representing the triumph of hope over experience . . . but I do think things are fundamentally different. I have been working on this since I came to Congress, but every year I find more and more interest, the case gets stronger for reform, and more and more people are getting involved.

Each farm bill, there are more elements introduced to support healthy food. We haven’t had the restructuring of commodity programs or crop insurance, but the case gets stronger, and as more and more people get involved, there is greater potential to make those changes. And now, when the Republicans are trying to make a showdown over government spending and deficits, this is a perfect time to spotlight their hypocrisy to continue the gravy train for the richest farmers—not the average farmer, but the richest farmers and big agribusiness.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Why Rep. Earl Blumenauer Remains Dedicated to Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Thu, 27 Apr 2023 10:00:41 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOzUnXwhBCFVA https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/rDheaKDnByOqSMaPSb5wzg

Increasingly, she has had to contend with extreme weather: early frosts threaten her fall crops. False springs have caused her winter crops to bolt too soon. Rain comes all at once and then not at all.

“Over the past 12 years, it does feel like the seasons are getting less predictable,” she said in early March at the Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience in D.C., where she held a hand-drawn sign decorated with beets and tomatoes.

As an organic grower focused on building healthy, carbon-holding soil, Jagoz’s climate activism may seem predictable. But the already-devastating impacts of more frequent extreme weather on farms, combined with calls for agriculture to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, have now pushed farmers and farm groups across the political spectrum into the climate change conversation.

On a few key issues, such as paying more farmers to use climate-friendly conservation practices, farm groups that don’t always agree—including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), the National Farmers’ Union, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a leading member of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance—are now in accordance.

It’s no wonder: In the last round of reports published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate experts warned of “a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” The reports confirmed what many farmers are experiencing firsthand: Droughts, floods, and wildfires are destroying crops and threatening livelihoods and food supplies in more frequent and severe ways than ever before. Increasing temperatures are also causing heat and water stress that directly impacts the productivity of both crops and livestock.

“If we don’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the severity of those impacts will be greater with each subsequent year,” explained Rachel Bezner Kerr, the lead author of the food and agriculture chapter in the IPCC’s impacts and adaptation report. At the same time, agriculture’s emissions have been rising, especially when it comes to the extra-potent but shorter-lived greenhouse gas methane.

So, as negotiations around the 2023 Farm Bill, the country’s most important piece of food and farm legislation, heat up, the question is: will it play a meaningful role in addressing and responding to the climate crisis?

Furthermore, can an unwieldy government bill, shaped by a bureaucratic system heavily influenced by the powerful agriculture lobby, really shift the food system toward a lower-emission, climate-resilient future?

“I would try as quickly as possible to shift subsidies and programs that encourage large-scale monocropping and high-input intensive farming to those that support a system that is more diversified and uses agroecological strategies for production,” said Kerr, when asked about how a climate scientist might rewrite the bill. “That would require a big shift in where the money goes.”

So far, however, the odds that the bill will bring about that kind of sea change seem slim. Based on the early negotiations and conversations, it looks like it won’t move the needle on many of the things that would have the greatest impact: reducing meat (especially beef) in American diets, diversifying farms from coast to coast, and cutting food waste.

But there has been significant movement on incentivizing farmers to increase the use of practices that build soil health to both absorb carbon and ensure farms can adapt to changing conditions. Experts say, at this point, every small change is meaningful and the opportunity has never been greater—despite the disagreements in D.C. that tend to garner headlines.

How the Conservation Title Could Shape a Climate-Friendly Farm Bill

Currently, the farm bill funds a handful of programs that pay farmers to implement a wide variety of practices with environmental benefits. “These incentive-based programs that assist producers in raising the bar on their operations . . . represent a huge climate opportunity,” said Ben Thomas, senior policy director for agriculture at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “Producers are ready to engage and activate these policy solutions in a big way. We need to meet them for that.”

Advocates and lawmakers are essentially proposing two things. First, they want to inject more money into the programs. During a March hearing, Terry Cosby, who leads the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), told senators that conservation dollars from the last farm bill limited the agency to approving just 30 percent of farmer applications. In other words, many farmers who want to plant cover crops or hedgerows are being denied federal funding, and as a result might decide to skip it.

Second, advocates want the programs to prioritize funding practices that have clear climate benefits over other practices. In the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), for example, practices like silvopasture, which involves planting trees and fostering healthy pastures that hold carbon, could be given higher funding priority over adding sprinkler systems, a practice that currently receives a significant share of funding. Progressive groups like NSAC also want lawmakers to change the rules so that industrial animal farms or CAFOs can no longer use conservation funding for things like manure storage.

The push to expand the pot of money and send funds specifically to climate-related practices already got a jump start with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022. The USDA started making that money available in February, but there’s a chance that Republican lawmakers will divert the rest of the funds to other things during farm bill negotiations, despite the fact that nearly every farm and environmental group supports leaving it in place.

In addition to that extra funding, climate-centered conservation may get a boost from Representative Chellie Pingree’s (D-Maine) Agriculture Resilience Act (ARA), which she reintroduced at the end of March. In addition to a laundry list of climate and food provisions—from research funding to renewable energy on farms—the bill proposes several changes that would fund more projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon. Supporters will try to incorporate as many of those items as possible into the larger farm bill.

The ARA would also increase the number of acres eligible to be enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to stop farming less-productive land, thereby leaving the soil and carbon-holding plants undisturbed. Scott Faber, senior vice president for Government Affairs at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) says CRP is particularly ripe for reform. While it has the most potential of all conservation programs to sequester significant amounts of carbon in the soil, the benefits are often lost as soon as farmers’ contracts end.

“A lot of the acres are being wasted, plain and simple, on 10-year deals,” Faber said. “Farmers grow grass and then plow it up and release all the soil carbon that may have built up back into the atmosphere.” One fix the ARA proposes is a pilot program for grasslands featuring 30-year contracts.

However conservation programs are improved, many groups say that to really make a difference, more contracts should go to the small, diversified farms that are often already implementing climate-resilient systems, but often have a hard time accessing the programs.

“We’re not going to be able to afford to do a lot of these long-term soil health practices . . . if the laws are written for large, conventional farms,” Jagoz of Moon Valley Farm said. “Right now, when I go to fill out the forms, they often don’t even make sense for farmers like me.”

NSAC’s members also want to make it easier for small farms like Moon Valley to get crop insurance, which pays farmers when crops fail, but which currently mostly benefits large, commodity growers. EWG and other groups want to link crop insurance to conservation practices in more significant ways, but other groups like the Farm Bureau oppose any changes that aren’t voluntary.

Addressing the Roles of Monocropping and Meat in Climate Change

“Even since we submitted the [IPCC] report, papers have come out that strengthen the evidence for diversification as a central adaptation strategy, both in terms of economic risk and adaptation more broadly,” she said. Commodity farms that grow one crop over thousands of acres can be particularly vulnerable to climate risks, she said, because increasing pests or extreme weather events can wipe out an entire farm’s crops faster.

But aside from the tiny slices of the farm bill pie that go to local and organic agriculture, the vast majority of dollars will go to those larger operations through crop insurance, commodity support, and conservation programs, thereby discouraging diversification. Representative Earl Blumenauer’s (D-Oregon) Food and Farm Act is the one marker bill that proposes changing commodity subsidies and rewarding crop diversification, but it is widely viewed as politically impossible to move forward in D.C.

Not only is diversification unlikely, but about 90 percent of soybeans and 40 percent of corn are produced to feed animals raised for meat, dairy, and eggs. Those foods—especially beef— account for the vast majority of emissions from the food system, in the form of nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer used to grow feed crops and methane from animal burps and manure. In fact, the evidence is clear that the single most powerful lever to build a more climate-friendly and resilient food system would be to shift American diets away from meat and toward more plants.

In March, 300 advocacy groups signed a letter urging members of Congress to include Senator Cory Booker’s (D-New Jersey) Farm System Reform Act in the farm bill. In addition to stopping the construction or expansion of large-scale animal farms, the bill would phase out the largest of those facilities by 2040 and provide buyouts to help farmers who had contracts with big meat companies transition to more climate-friendly crops and systems.

“We’ve got to find a way to scale up plant-based production, including growing more pulses and oats and other ingredients and helping to share the cost of the processing facilities,” Faber said. “And not just because we need to make it easier for carnivores like me to occasionally get our protein from plants, but because it’s good for our farmers and it will create . . . rural jobs.”

But once again, conversations about cutting meat production are seen as politically toxic in farm bill negotiations and in D.C. in general. In 2021, despite the fact that the Biden administration’s climate plan failed to address greenhouse gas emissions from meat production at all, some Republican lawmakers and conservative media ran with a completely false narrative around the President limiting Americans’ meat intake. In March, the USDA predicted beef, chicken, and pork production will continue to rise over the next decade.

(To be clear, reducing the quantity of meat in American diets meat and cutting American meat production are two related but distinct issues because of the global nature of today’s food system. Some experts point to any reduction in industrial meat production as a climate boon, while groups like the World Resources Institute say that Americans should eat less meat, but that American production should not be cut because it is more efficient than production elsewhere.)

What could make it into the farm bill is research and programs that tweak the current animal agriculture system in smaller ways to reduce or contain emissions. While some groups are fighting against funding digesters that capture methane from industrial hog and dairy farms, for example, the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance supports more funding for digesters. And Thomas said that EDF is focused on funding research on and implementation of new technologies like feed additives, which may reduce methane emissions from cattle.

“There is going to be a lot more opportunity for reducing methane without completely changing the diet of every American,” said Thomas. “That’s what we’ve been focused on.”

Putting a High Priority on Preventing Food Waste

At the end of 2021, researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculated that about 35 percent of the U.S. food supply is wasted, resulting in annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 42 coal-fired power plants. That’s before the waste heads to a landfill, where it then emits methane, a greenhouse gas around 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And last week, the national nonprofit ReFED shared sobering news: Between 2016 and 2021, food waste in the U.S. increased by nearly 5 percent, to about 38 percent of the food supply. They estimate that 36 percent of the 91 million tons of wasted food went straight to landfills.

So far, Pingree’s ARA includes provisions to reform “best by” date labeling on foods to reduce at-home food waste. It also funds composting projects, programs to reduce food waste in schools, research on cutting food waste, and a national food-waste reduction campaign. In recent years, similar campaigns contributed to significant reductions in food waste in other countries such as the United Kingdom.

And unlike meat or SNAP benefits, food waste has historically been an issue that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are able to come together on. During the last farm bill process, Pingree was able to get provisions into the bill to create the first full-time food loss and waste liaison at the USDA as well as a composting and food waste reduction pilot program. That program has since supported composting programs from Rhode Island to Alaska. Still, it has not been the focus of any farm bill hearings or negotiations to date.

In the end, there’s only so much money to go around, so tackling these big food-system climate issues will be a matter of lawmaker priorities. However, many of the people pushing more of those lawmakers to move climate to the top of their lists, are optimistic.

“I’m encouraged by the common denominators,” says EWG’s Scott Faber. “We’re no longer arguing about whether . . . our conservation programs should reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We’re no longer arguing about whether farmers are a source of greenhouse gas emissions. You hear some [lawmakers] saying, ‘Well, we don’t want the conservation title to become a climate title.’ To me, [the fact that we’re having] that conversation is a sign we’re headed in the right direction.”

The post Climate Change Is Walloping US Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Real Solutions? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Although we didn’t know quite what we were in for, there was a palpable energy in the room, because we were all there for a shared purpose: to help dismantle white supremacy through food—macaroni and cheese, to be precise.

After brief intros, Carolyn Holbrook and her granddaughter Tess Lee invited us to taste their family’s baked mac ‘n’ cheese recipe alongside roasted chicken, collard greens, honey cornbread, and sweet potato pie. While we ate, they led a casual discussion about what the meal means to so many Black communities. The dish—which was brought to the U.S. in the 18th century by James Hemings, a mixed-race chef who spent time in Europe before being enslaved by Thomas Jefferson—has since become a popular food served at family celebrations in Black communities across the South and beyond.

At the dinner, Holbrook talked about being her family’s designated mac ‘n’ cheese bearer at holiday gatherings and explained that the role is an exalted one passed down through the generations. The conversation was illuminating and intimate, but it never felt forced or overly didactic. Instead, it was like a sacred meal shared with loved ones.

I savored every word along with each bite of macaroni and cheese. Afterward, we all toasted over mezcal and shared laughs watching TikTok videos that jest at the significance of mac ‘n’ cheese for Black families. At that moment, I realized just what a rare experience it was to be granted access to another culture’s traditions in such a warm, intimate way.

That’s the goal of the BIPOC Foodways Alliance. Sherman—who was just named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023—has been in the news a great deal in recent years as his Native-focused restaurant, Owamni, has gained notoriety and won awards. But he and Bos know all too well that this attention comes after a long stretch when diverse voices were all but completely left out of the mainstream dialogues around food. That’s why the duo has set out to preserve, protect, and uplift food stories from the vast diaspora of BIPOC people across America through communal dinners like this.

“For people of color, there’s so much commonality in American history due to colonization and slavery, so we thought, why not invite everybody to the literal table to celebrate these diversities?” said Sherman in an interview after the event. “There are still so many barriers for people of color, especially in the food world. We wanted to create a space to bring people together to share their recipes, stories, and struggles, and to help people understand other cultures.”

This ambition is closely aligned with Sherman’s mission to revitalize Native American foodways through the decolonized fare served at Owamni as well as the efforts of his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, and the Indigenous Food Lab, a training kitchen for Native American culinary entrepreneurs. Bos, who worked in the kitchens of several lauded Twin Cities eateries, has been amplifying the stories of marginalized peoples through her reporting for Minnesota Public Radio and other outlets.

In short, they have witnessed the inner workings of the food world and are uniquely positioned to help bring about change.

Unlike typical culinary incubators, the BIPOC Foodways Alliance isn’t designed to help aspiring chefs gain credibility or expertise. Instead, it’s built on the premise that everyone has a food story to tell, even if they don’t have a restaurant or a platform. With official nonprofit status currently in the works, the organization hopes to promote cross-cultural understanding by telling the unheard, underrepresented food stories of elders, immigrants, and other often-overlooked individuals who hold deep culinary knowledge.

For now, that translates to free monthly communal dinners held at Minneapolis’s Glass House event venue, made possible thanks to community fundraising.

Bos said the idea for the alliance actually stems from a joke between she and Sean in which they often say, “All we have to do is dismantle white supremacy.” And while, in reality, it’s an ambitious goal, she sees the dinner series as an important first step.

“Dismantling white supremacy will not be easy, but we believe that bringing all BIPOC people together using food as the catalyst is a step in the right direction. You only need to look at Sean’s work to see how powerful a tool food can be. It shows that when you bring people together, you only get stronger. I would love to see more folks lifting each other up in a tangible way,” says Bos, who will run the nonprofit until there is funding to hire a director. There’s a resonance about this notion of joining forces, understanding each other, and working toward the common goal of dismantling white supremacy.

And while these intimate meals are at the heart of their initiative, Sherman and Bos hope its reach stretches beyond those who will be sitting at the table. The dinners will be documented and disseminated online in an effort to make them more accessible while also helping document different cultural approaches to cooking and sharing food—many of which are often passed down orally and therefore stand to be lost.

Sherman and Bos are also exploring the idea of creating media to accompany the meals, such as a recurring zine, a podcast, and even a possible book. Of course, all of these efforts are contingent on ample funding, a key focus for 2023.

So far, the Twin Cities community has been enthusiastic about the nonprofit’s recent launch, with hundreds of supporters in attendance at a February fundraiser. But the duo has their sights set on larger national—and even global—impact.

“Food touches all of us, and there are so many people out there holding these really important food stories,” Sherman says. “As Mecca and I travel, we’re finding all these interesting BIPOC initiatives happening in various cities. We’re hoping we can do this not just in Minneapolis, but all over the world.”

That future involves collaborating with similar organizations around the country, cohosting events in other destinations, and helping establish BIPOC Foodways Alliance chapters across the globe. The initiative will soon be getting some time in the spotlight, thanks to an upcoming dinner in early May at the James Beard Foundation’s new Platform culinary arts center in New York City. And later that month, the organization will take part in the George Floyd Global Memorial Celebration, with special culinary storytelling to take place at a Paisley Park gala featuring Floyd family recipes.

Even with these high-profile partnerships, the focus always comes back to creating space for people of color to share their own food stories. “The culinary world has been very Eurocentric for way too long, and historically we’ve seen a lot of recipes interpreted through this perspective,” says Sherman. “We’ve seen many white chefs become very famous for making other cultures’ foods feel safe and accessible for white people. It’s time to step back and let people of color tell their own stories.”

Bos is quick to point out that white allies play an important role in this effort, too. “We can’t afford to dismiss white allies,” she says. “To be frank, some of my white allies have been more supportive than some BIPOC people, probably because they understand their privilege and typically have access to more resources.”

So, what does success look like for BIPOC Foodways Alliance in year one? Sherman encompasses it in a single word: curiosity. He wants to see a world where more people stretch beyond their own identities, engage with different cultures, and stop seeing other foodways, traditions, and customs as foreign—a set of concepts he has long been championing when it comes to Native American foods.

He and Bos acknowledge they might not see this objective achieved within their lifetimes and that this effort will require more than just the two of them, as Bos explains: “Do Sean and I expect to dismantle white supremacy single-handedly? Absolutely not. Can a powerful legion of people of color make a mighty stand against racism? Yes.” That’s why they’re willing to put in the work, despite the odds.

“In this moment, just as we’re having this reckoning about the plight of people of color in this country, white supremacy is doubling down,” Bos says, alluding to the gun violence against people of color as well as voter suppression, book bans, and other policy efforts enacted by Republican lawmakers across the country.

“But we really are a minority-majority country, and I believe the only way to tackle the issue of white supremacy is for all people to come together,” she says. “After all, if something can be built, it can be dismantled.”

The post Can the Sioux Chef’s BIPOC Alliance Dismantle White Supremacy Over Dinner? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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