Oy Vey It's A Food Newsletter - Vol 2, Issue 14

An all natural newsletter freshly produced from a free-range vegan

Hi hi,

If you’re reading this then hot damn I got this thing written before going on my trip, good for me! I can focus on reading one of the 6 books I’m currently reading for pleasure (probably Feasting and Fasting) and trying new restaurants with my East Coast friends.

It’s a super busy month between traveling, work, Jewish holidays, and other events. Speaking of which, Bay Area friends I’ll be at Clay with your food in Emeryville on the 21st. You can register here if you’d like to join me for an evening of artsy food tech fun.

-K

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What I’ve Read

• The myths we tell ourselves about American farming - The US “farms” billions of animals annually and these farmed animal operations generate 2.5 billion pounds of waste per DAY. This waste is extremely damaging the environmental health and polluting waterways is one of the huge causes of concern. The EPA was given regulatory control over water pollution from CAFOs (and other operations) in 1972. Environmental agencies have petitioned the EPA to better regulate factory farms under the Clean Water Act but the EPA has recently announced that instead of taking regulatory action now they are setting up a committee next year to further study the issue. In the animal ag world, this news is being celebrated by players, like the National Pork Producers Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The Meat + Poultry publication is phrasing this news as, “EPA denies activists on CAFO reform”. This article details how “agricultural exceptionalism” has allowed for the agricultural sector to skirt progressive regulation and legislation, like the Fair Labor Standards Act and Animal Welfare Act. It also mentions the “right to farm” laws in each US state that prevents us from suing farms for pollution and other negative impacts on quality of life.

• Meatpacker JBS Listing in NYC Would Be an ESG Nightmare - JBS has become the worlds largest meatpacking company, built mainly by market consolidation (either through majority shares or purchases of other meatpacking or processing companies). JBBS SA has stated their desire to list shares on the NYSE by the end of 2023. Many environmental organizations are petitioning the US SEC to prevent this listing citing environmental concerns like governance, emissions, and deforestation. JBS is, as the article states, “a wolf in wolf’s clothing,” though I think that’s a bit insulting to wolves.
  P.S. If the logistics of corporate greed and the history of how JBS came to be are interesting, I recommend reading Raw Deal by Chloe Sorvino.

• The negative impact of vegetarian and vegan labels: Results from randomized controlled experiments with US consumers - This research was conducted to investigate the efficacy of vegetarian and vegan labeling on menu items on changing the choices of US consumers. It’s very much rooted in choice architecture, or nudges, and examining how options are presented (P.S. interesting podcast diving into nudges, how they rose to popularity in research, and popular misconceptions and limitations that are often overlooked— it’s broken up into parts 1 and 2). The study was conducted, in part, through an event at the MIT Media Lab in 2022, the variables were “labeled” and “unlabeled”, the authors note that the outcomes would likely differ if there was a cost involved versus free food. The results showed that the vegan option was preferred by participants who viewed the “unlabeled” form (didn’t say vegan) but the vegetarian option was preferred by those who viewed the “labeled” form (note the sample size was only 103 total). The study also included an online survey of 792 participants and included animal meat options. For the online portion, vegan and vegetarian labels also showed a negative impact (except on those who identified as vegan or vegetarian lol). The limitations of the study mentioned in the discussion include sample size, the focus on what choices were made, but not why people made those choices, and other terminology that was not present in the research (like plant-based).

  

• Healthy eating curriculum may contribute to eating disorders in kids - (CW: disordered eating behaviors, mentions of obesity) The point of this article can be summed up well in one of it’s quotes from a family mentor at an eating disorder clinic, “Other than an anaphylactic allergy, there’s nothing in a food that can do more harm to a child than fear of food.” Teaching kids that foods fall into a binary of good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, can contribute to harmful, restrictive, or disordered eating behaviors. I think this goes for the majority of adults, too. Nutrition education should not induce fear, shame, or guilt. This article does include how some teachers and parents have changed their approach.

• In U.S., 4% Identify as Vegetarian, 1% as Vegan - Gallup released a poll with a sample size of 1,015 adults in the US.The downloadable PDF only released question 28, “In terms of your eating preferences, do you consider yourself to be a vegetarian, or not?” and 29, “In terms of your eating preferences, do you consider yourself to be vegan, or not?” The findings from this years survey are similar to previous years and the research generalizes the findings to the US population; 4% of Americans (assuming they mean American adults) are vegetarian and 1% are vegan. The survey measured this in terms of eating preferences only and noted there was some overlap between people who identified as vegan and vegetarian. I reached out to Gallup to ask if the survey had given any context or definition for these terms during the data collection or if they have a definition of each of these terms that is used in the discussions of these measurements, recommendations, or preparation of future survey materials. TBD on the response.

• The B.S. Behind the USDA’s New “Climate-Friendly Beef” Label - Definitely looking forward to the FOIA request results for the USDA Low Carbon Beef Program, since according to this article the publicly available specifics are scant. The USDA announced the Climate-Smart Commodities opportunity in February 2022 and in September 2022 Secretary Vilsack announced the USDA would be investing up to $2.8 billion in 70 selected projects. Tyson, which has a “climate-friendly” line called Brazen Beef is a participant in the program. Climate claims are extremely difficult to verify and are not yet fully standardized or regulated, which is not stopping food and agriculture companies from using them in marketing. As the article states, “One of the trickiest parts about businesses making claims about “low-emissions” products is that much of the time, consumers don’t have sufficient information about what the product in question is being contrasted with. The choice of a baseline matters here—a lot.”

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Q&Kay

Today’s question is for you (again)!

And it’s less of a question and more of a request for you to click here and take 60 seconds to provide me with feedback so that I know if I should keep channeling energy into one of the current mini-projects I’m noodling on for this community.

Hoping I can get a few more responses asking this for a second time to help me make a decision.

As always, you can submit a question for a future Q&Kay here!

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Kvetch Sesh

A couple of months ago a friend and I, both vegans, were sitting around a dinner table with a couple of other people, none of whom are vegan. We were decompressing after a long day at the AVA Summit. Naturally, the conversation came to us talking about the Summit, who we’d seen there, and what we’d learned, among other vegan things.

Most of the details from that conversation are fuzzy, but one piece of the evening remains very clear in my memory. By clear I mean, I still think about this interaction on (at least) a weekly basis. One of the non-vegans at the table started talking about how unnatural cultivated (lab grown) meat is.

This may seem like I’m about to repeat the same schpiel from the last newsletter’s Kvetch Sesh, but I promise it’s a similar premise with a different point.

I tried to remain polite without letting this comment slide. I like to believe I’m super chill and easygoing and have learned how to preserve my own peace by picking my battles. In reality, I pointed out that the farmed animals raised and slaughtered for human consumption aren’t exactly natural. By natural, I meant that those animals only exist in their current form because of human manipulation of their genetics and environment.

Today’s farmed animals were bred to maximize their productive efficiency, to the point where the physiological traits we’ve selected for are detrimental to the animal’s own health. The architecture of farmed animal operations has also been designed for maximum productivity, manipulating the natural breeding and gestation of animals.

Let’s talk about chickens, both from a US poultry meat and egg perspective. A large majority of egg laying hens are kept in battery cages, which prevent them from engaging in natural behaviors like foraging, roosting, and dust bathing, causing painful bone problems and aggression. Eggs are incubated for 3 weeks until they hatch, then the newly born chicks are put onto a conveyor belt. The male chicks are immediately killed, through a couple of extremely cruel methods, and the female chicks tend to have their beaks removed to prevent other natural behaviors, like pecking and grooming. Laying facilities use constant artificial lighting to stimulate the pituitary gland and forced molting to increase egg production. Chickens raised for meat, known as broiler chickens, are also fed and bred for productivity causing health and animal welfare issues. Broilers are bred for a high muscle to bone ratio, to the point where they may not be able to stand up or support themselves, and often suffer from cardiovascular disease, sudden death syndrome, and pulmonary hypertension.

All of this is to say that in our food system natural is highly subjective and relative, which may be why it is not a regulated claim. The USDA and FDA loosely consider natural to mean no artificial additives and minimal processing. The fact that people perceive consuming farmed animals as natural, or unprocessed, is successful marketing and animal agriculture propaganda. Consumers have had misconceptions around what natural means since food companies started using the phrase to market their products. Resarch shows that consumers tend to think of all-natural meat, in particular, as meat with no preservatives, additives, antibiotics, hormones, extra liquids, phosphates, or chemicals, and that it comes from high-welfare farmed animals. A label with natural as a descriptor is not guarantee any of these claims. Consumers gravitate towards products labeled natural with lots of free-from claims even if we don’t fully understand what these labels mean and are aware that they don’t have a clear government definition. We come to associate desirable, positive values with the terminology we don’t quite understand and begin to internalize the marketing claims as personal preferences.

What I believe the person at the table with me meant was that meat products coming from traditional industrial production methods, where an animal was selectively bread to be raised in a factory farm and slaughtered and processed to land at their grocery store’s meat counter, are more familiar to them than other novel animal-free methods. One of the novel methods is cultivated, or lab-grown, meat, which is another manufacturing process that manipulates animal cells to become a product desirable for human consumption. You can learn more about the science of cultivated meat here. For more on the culture war between plant-based meat and animal-based meat, I suggest reading Sentient Media’s article, There’s Nothing Natural About Modern Meat

What we’ve been conditioned to believe as all-natural is really just familiarity and comfort with the cognitive dissonance, between the animals we eat and how they came to our plates, that the industry has constructed for us. I am not dismissive of people who do not want to eat animal-free meat products. What I believe to be important is that we don’t put animal meats on a pedestal as the pristine, natural choice. I’m personally excited for cultivated meat to hit grocery stores and become an accessible option for consumers but have zero desire to consume it myself. It’s not a moral high ground or suspicion of the science behind it, I’m not interested in consuming animal flesh, however it’s produced.

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