Food News: Why Combat Chemophobia When You Can Cut Seed Oils Instead?
The newsletter that is completely disillusioned about our food freedom
hi hi,
we’ve made it through another week of unprecented times and i’m proud of us. after a busy week that ended with me being sick, again, ill be resting this weekend and feasting on saltines instead of challah. i hope you’re able to decompress in a meaningful way, whether it’s dissolving into an abyss of nothingness for a day, enjoying nature in some form, petting a cute dog, eating a good meal, or doing something nice for someone else in addition to yourself.
before we get into our news, are you a jewish nutrition professional who is also vegan or aligned with plant-based food and nutrition? please comment below or send me an email if the answer is yes! if the answer is no, please feel free to amplify this to your network or pass it along to anyone who you think may be interested.
this ask isn’t for a specific project (yet), i’m curious to know who else within this niche niche is out there and am hoping to facilitate support, referrals, collaborations, or other opportunities.
i have had people ask about opening this up to include other professionals in the food space and i will definitely consider doing so, but for now we’re sticking to nutrition professionals. stay tuned!
-k
What I’ve Read
Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says - Denmark has about 5,000 pig farms that “produce” (raise, grow, slaughter…) 28 million pigs per year making it one of the largest pig meat exporters in the world. At the end of June, Denmark became the first country in the world to introduce, what a Danish Taxation Minister called, a “real CO2 tax on agriculture.” This tax will supposedly aid Denmark in hitting its target of a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
It’s expected that the bill will pass with an initial proposed tax of $43.16 per tonne of CO2 and raise the tax to $109.63 per tonne of CO2. However, farmers will be eligible for an income tax deduction of 60%. It’s estimated that the tax could pass along a cost of $0.29 per 2.2 pounds of minced beef to consumers in 2030, which currently costs about $10.23. New Zealand attempted to pass similar legislation that would have gone into effect in 2025. It was recently removed after pushback from farmers and a shift to a more center-right government elected last year.The Illusion of Food Freedom: Corporate Control of Our Agricultural Systems - '“The meat industry is the closest we have to a criminal organization in modern day American business and the USDA just seems incompetent to deal with them. It’s allowing them to keep engaging in these incredibly abusive practices to both our workers and farmers.” - Austin Frerick’
This article addresses some of the actions by the Biden-Harris Administration focusing on mitigating corporate consolidation—especially of the animal ag industry—and addressing the inflation of food prices caused by price-fixing, consolidation, and corporate greed. The influences from the Executive Branch, along with the upcoming new Farm Bill, may be why Big Meat spent over $10 million on lobbying and poltical contributions in 2023. We also get an overview of biased research, meat indudstry marketing campaigns targeting plant-based foods, and more of how Big Ag is trying to protect its power and status quo.Chemophobia - the fear of chemicals - is a public health crisis - I’ve often mentioned chemophobia and how its weaponized by unqualified food, fitness, and lifestyle influencers, brands, animal agricutlure industry, diet industry, and more to sell us their version of cleaner, better, safer, and more natural products. Even if you’re new to my newsletter, you’ve likely heard of the “Dirty Dozen” or have seen someone mention you should “only eat ingredients you can pronounce” and therefore are somewhat familiar with how chemophobia is used in food marketing.
, she shares the ways in which improving science literacy—in our education system along with the journalism and media landscapes—and improved infrastructure can address chemophobia as a global health crisis.
provides an excellent breakdown of what chemophobia is and how it’s exploited in health and science misinformation. Manipulation of low science literacy combined with other tactics—like the appeal to nature fallacy that urges us to believe that “synthetic” sunstances are always inferior and more dangerous than “natural” substances—removes important context and nuance. This manipulation urges us to make fear-based decisions rather than rational ones. Dr. Love doesn’t just list the problems of chemophobia in this edition ofSeed Oils are Under Fire: The Health Debate is Heating Up - Speaking of chemophobia and poor health science journalism…This is a frustrating article. The introduction offers undeserved and vague credibility to “health and wellness influencers and experts” who are vocal in the POTENTIAL negative impacts of seed oils but does nothing to differentiate between influencers and experts, except to cite Joe Rogan and influencer Brian Johnson. This article does not present any legitimate scientific evidence or external sources to support any of the information and was not written by a science communication professional or nutrition expert, it was written by a CEO of research management and insight consultancy who has worked for major global food conglomerates.
The publication, The Food Institute, is geared for food industry professionals who want to stay current on news and trends. It likely doesn’t matter to its audience whether or not the concerns are legitimate because the solutions this article puts forward are for marketers to address growing consumer concern. They do not want to combat the misinformation, they want to commodify it and encourage readers to replace seed oil ingredients (soybean, sunflower, corn, canola oil) people view as highly processed and bad for you with other highly processed oils that are, for some reason, seen as not-as-processed or bad for you (organic, cold pressed seed oils, avocado oils, coconut oil, olive oil). The reason the seed oil “debate” is heating up is because of media like this that chooses to platform influencers and trendy misinformation under the guise of listening to the concerns of “conscious consumers”.Britain Approves Lab-Grown Meat for Pet Food - In a move made possible by Brexit, Meatly—a British company making cultivated chicken meat specifically for domestic pet food—will beging feeding trials next month. When scaled, this would be significant for the environmental footprint of the domesticated pet food industry. In 2020 it was estimated that in the US we have about 86 million dogs and 61 million cats. It’s estimated that dogs are responsible for 17.7% of average livestock consumption and cats are responsible for 2.3%. Introducing cultivated (lab-grown) meat to the pet food industry would substantially reduce the number and amount of environmental resources required of animals raised and slaughtered for food. While some studies have shown that dogs and cats can live on animal-free food, as long as it’s nutritionally-complete, by my understanding pet nutrition—especially for cats, often known as obligate carnivores—is still debated.
Despite all of the possible environmental and animal welfare benefits, cultivated meat is a polarizing topic that is far from garnering universal support. As Tomi Lahren states in an overdramatic but brief Fox News commentary, “So-called environmental experts want you to start feeding your cats lab-grown meat so as to save Mother Earth.” Lahren’s argument is that environmentalists are being silly because God placed cats on Mother Earth and through all of time they’ve been eating “actual meat” and cats are not causing a “climate apocalypse”. Because who better to judge the expertise and qualifications of scientists and environmentalists than a right-wing news commentator, climate change denialist, anti-feminist, rage-bait expert, Tomi Lahren. Sorry to break it to you, Tomi, but domestic pet food is a product of the industrialized food industry. Cats are not hunting their natural predators, processing them into canned wet food, and grabbing a can opener every night to feed themselves. The only line in her comentary I can agree with is, “The animal rights groups are all for it because no real chickens have to die to cultivate this fake meat in a Petri dish.”
If You’re Going to Read 1 Piece in Full
Read How public universities hooked America on meat by Grace van Deelen for Vox
The animal agriculture industry is rightfully known for its mistreatment of animals and the toll its operations take on the environment. Though industry groups would call this reputation “consumer misperceptions of pork production practices”. Instead of going to therapy, the pork industry is following in the footsteps of tobacco and oil and throwing millions of dollars into PR. Its main strategy is funding the research of scientists in academia, which I’m sure will be properly disclosed and not impact the favorability of research findings in any way (trying to make my sarcasm very clear, read Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle for more on this). If this tactic sounds familiar, you may remember that in March I discussed how the animal agriculture industry works within academia to undermine the public’s understanding of climate issues and related policy. These are far from the only 2 examples of this comingling of industry and academia.
In 2023, the National Pork Board—funded by the USDA commodity checkoff program, AKA a federally funded industry marketing program—spent $8.5 MILLION funding university research into perceptions of the pork industry and ways it can improve its reputation. By producing this biased research the animal ag industry will be able to point to these findings as justification for why it is doing the exact opposite of what is recommended by climate experts and sound environmental research, which would be reducing our production and consumption of animal meat. It definitely isn’t because the industry wants to keep making money, no, it is doing all of this out of the goodness of its heart and commitment to feeding the world in incredibly destructive, cruel, and inefficient ways.
If you are fuming by the end of this article and feeling sick to your stomach about how billions of animals, your fellow humans, and our natural environment will suffer because the animal ag industry and its hypeman, the U.S. federal government, prioritize productivity under capitalism above all else, you are in good company.
