Oy Vey It's A Food Newsletter - Vol 2, Issue 5
A newsletter fueled by rice and beans, but not only rice and beans.
Hello there,
How are we doing these days?
Personally, I am the busiest I have been in a while. It’s good busy, but I definitely feel the impact on my body. In addition to my consulting work, in the past few weeks I taught a webinar on Demystifying Food Labeling Claims with Planetary Health Collective (when this webinar and the entire Food and Climate Foundations lineup becomes evergreen content you can get asynchronous access to I will let you know), walked the floors of ExpoWest with EatQ, and attended day one of Future Food Tech SF. I know I really put myself out there on the internet and am known for talking a shit ton, but I’m absolutely an introvert. I require a lot of enrichment time in my enclosure, which I have not been getting nearly enough of.
While I may not be getting the recuperating time on my couch I desire, at least I’ve been seeing some funny memes! Oh look, here’s one now…
What I’ve Read
Cows vs. Chemists: The Health Debates Over Plant-Based Meat - This is one of the better articles covering the controversies, from many perspectives, on animal non-animal meats that I have read. It also does a great job explaining the limitations of nutrition science research and why it is so difficult to find a solid consensus. Some of the top reasons: everyone is different, nutrition studies cannot be done in a vacuum so there are many factors that even the best modeling cannot completely account for, the field is still new and there is so much we just don’t know. I especially like that the article ended with optimistic summaries and skeptical ones.
On Semantics: While not totally specific to food, this newsletter from A Growing Culture explores how language shapes our relationship to the world and the divisive impact it can have. Their organization has adopted “Majority World” and “Minority World”, terms coined by Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist Shahidul Alam, to replace “developed” and “developing” worlds. People always seem to get riled up at the idea that terminology evolves, they wave it off as a matter of semantics, different words same idea, but that is the history of language. It is constantly evolving with our culture and I think it’s incredibly important to make space for exploring new terms, especially if they seek to shift the narratives to empower or at least give credit to historically marginalized groups.
The Future of AI and the Food Industry - I have been working with companies innovating the food space with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for the past few years, however my focus of food tech has mainly been in the omnichannel retail and product attribution space. This article shows ways AI is being used across the industry, including in foodservice and operations, to improve efficiency, analyze trends, and tailor product development to consumers.
Related piece: The Latest, But Not The First: Five Ways AI Altered The Food Industry Before ChatGPT - This article covers AI-generated recipes, discovery of novel food ingredients and predictive modeling, personalized meal planning and recipes, computer vision in retail startups and restaurants operations, and robots being employed across the value chain.
Breaking the Cycle of Unsustainable Food Systems, Hunger and Debt - The food price crisis is still a huge global concern, this report points out that one of the reasons for that is the globalized food economy that is so reliant on imports and outports. According to the repor there are four main ways that “food systems are deepening today’s debt crisis:
Import dependencies and dollar dependencies generate high debts and prevent countries investing in diversifying their food systems and economies. Countries are increasingly locked into generating dollars, oen through cash crops, to pay off debts and import basic necessities.
Extractive financial flows: Over decades, governments have cut social spending and outsourced food system investment to corporate actors and creditors – resulting in uneven development, persistent hunger, and the depletion of state capacity – and ultimately funneling resources out of the Global South.
Boom-bust cycles: When food prices rise, powerful and highly concentrated agribusinesses benefit while farmers get squeezed. But when prices crash, many farms and food businesses fail, leading to further corporate consolidation, undermining investment in resilience.
Climate breakdown is fast becoming the biggest driver of economic collapse and debt distress in the Global South, decimating harvests and destroying livelihoods in countries least responsible for the crisis. With climate finance failing to materialize, it is becoming harder for low-income countries to repay debts and invest in climate-resilient food systems.
(Summary quoted directly from the press release)
U.S. Considers Vaccinating Chickens as Bird Flu Kills Millions of Them - The avian influenza outbreak that began in 2022 and has carried not 2023 has affected 47 states and almost 60 million farmed birds, it is one of the many factors impacting the cost of hen eggs and poultry. It is also cause for concern because of the ability of avian flu to mutate and spread to other mammals with the rare potential to carry over to humans. Since the animal agriculture industry doesn’t plan on reducing the scale of their operations to construct safer environments for their birds where infections may not spread so violently and quickly and since our society doesn’t seem keen on forgoing the consumption of birds and their eggs, the apparent reasonable solution is a large-scale avian influenza vaccine for the farmed birds. The birds are treated like inputs and outputs, while bottom lines are impacted and the cost of hen eggs is a huge issue, the top of the hierarchy of concern seems to be the potential for another global pandemic in humans.
Bottled Water Sales Exceed Cost of Providing Safe Water for All, UN Says - The UN Sustainable Development Goals estimated that, globally, 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water. One of the main causes for lack of safe drinking water is underinvestment in infrastructure. This new UN report estimates that providing safe water for the 2 billion people would require an annual investment of $114 billion, which seems high, but is currently less than half of what is spent annually on bottled water. Even if that investment was made, the next hurdle would be gaining public trust for municipal water system safety after decades of companies selling bottled water that employed fear mongering marketing to distort public perception about the safety of non-bottled water. Shameful that the investment be possible due to the influence of companies that profit off of the sales of bottled water, even though it could help billions of people and reduce millions of tons of plastic waste.
The Hunger Museum - This completely virtual museum is a project of MAZON. I read through the various galleries and explored the SNAP Café, which is probably the first SNAP-related project I’ve seen that calls out kosher options. (Thanks Kathleen for the rec!)
Q&Kay
Q: How old is Ginny and where did you get her?
Kay: We are now taking a break from discussing food systems to address this incredibly important topic. I am doing my very best to keep this brief and within the realm of the question but could talk about Ginny forever, this dog is my entire heart.
We got Ginny from the animal shelter in Bloomington, Indiana about 5.5 years ago. We were there with some friends who were interested in getting a cat, maybe, and this dog named Alexis (I maintain this is a horrible name for a dog, especially this dog) curled up in the corner of the kennel caught my partner’s eye.
The shelter couldn’t tell us much about her other than they thought she was some type of German shepherd and beagle mix, had all her adult teeth, was found wandering the streets, and was pretty fearful and skittish. Based on her behaviors they thought she had come from an overcrowded situation where she was fighting for food but hadn’t been on the streets long because she was only slightly underweight and not mangy. We visited her once before coming back to pick her up, and in the little outdoor area and indoor room, she was fairly disinterested in us and very anxious. The shelter staff did warn us many times before taking her home that she would be a lot of work, and they weren’t wrong.
It took us about 40 minutes to get her from the shelter to the car after signing all the paperwork because she would not walk on a leash, was scared of everything, and refused to let us pick her up. The vet estimated she was 1-1.5 years old when we brought her home but people still stop us on the street (which she hates because she is not a fan of strangers) and ask us how old our puppy is.
Submit your own question here for a future Q&Kay!
Kvetch Sesh
Is plant-based food cheaper than animal-based food?
According to comments on my recent video that explored, in 60 seconds, whether plant-based diets are a privilege, the answer is straightforward enough. The intention of my video was to offer a call to action for us to discuss why food choice and access are privileges in the United States, without doing so as a gotcha argument against veganism. What ensued were dozens of people stating that of course plant foods are cheaper, so choosing to follow a plant-based diet or a vegan lifestyle is not a privilege. Like, hello, have I never heard of rice and beans?
As with most things related to food systems, the answer is not so simple. The reality is that the true cost of food is impacted by a wide variety of factors, including hunger, poverty, resources, geography, and personal ability. This question requires more nuance than a reference to the cost of agricultural commodities or consumer food prices.
According to data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), plant-based foods tend to be cheaper than animal-based foods when you compare prices on a per calorie basis. For example, in 2019, the average cost per calorie of vegetables was $0.19, while the cost per calorie of beef was $0.67. So, if we're looking at it purely from a price-per-calorie standpoint, it would seem that plant-based foods are the cheaper option. While I wish the rice and beans commenters were the bearers of absolute truth, unfortunately, we don’t live in a vacuum where the price of agricultural commodities is the only factor for consideration.
The cost of food can vary greatly depending on where you live in the United States. Plant foods being cheap and accessible for you, in your area and within your means is not something that is necessarily true for others. Many people live in environments where there is little or no access to fresh, plant-based foods. These areas tend to be located in underresourced and/or rural communities, where it can be difficult for people to get to full-service grocery stores that offer a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. People may be limited to whatever is available based on the schedule and geographic area that public transportation or rides from friends or family allow for. In some situations convenience stores or fast food restaurants offering primarily ultra-processed foods, and have limited to no plant-based items, can be the most accessible. In other situations people are constrained to the options provided by food pantries and government assistance programs, that have constraints on what food items can be purchased.
Additional resources and barriers to consider are time and personal ability. For many people, especially those who are working multiple jobs or caring for children or elderly relatives, cooking a meal from scratch may not be feasible on a regular basis. Not everyone has the skills, knowledge, or desire to turn the cheaper plant-based ingredients, like lentils, rice, or beans, into a balanced meal. In fact, many low-income individuals and families may not have continuous access to a kitchen or the necessary equipment to prepare fresh meals. This can make it difficult or impossible to cook, which means that they may need to rely on pre-packaged meals, donated food items, or fast food- all of which are typically limited on choice and more focused on providing calorie-dense options to address acute hunger.
Health and ability also play crucial roles. For example, individuals with diabetes, food allergies or intolerances, and other chronic health conditions may need to follow a specific diet or avoid certain foods. This may can potentially make it more difficult to follow an exclusively plant-based diet, especially when health conditions intersect with the barriers mentioned above. Minimizing the complexity of navigating health conditions and disabilities, as many comments tried to do, is ableist and not something I tolerate on my platforms.
All of these factors, and more, make it clear that this subject requires more depth and nuance than what is provided by most social media comment sections. While I am absolutely not surprised, I still find it frustrating to see people on the internet telling others that plant-based foods are cheaper than animal-based foods, therefore cost can't be an excuse to not go vegan. This kind of oversimplification ignores that food choice requires many privileges and is more of a luxury than a guaranteed right. Rather than shaming people for their dietary choices, or repeating oversimplified talking points, we need to acknowledge and address the systemic barriers that make it more difficult for some individuals and communities to have secure and consistent access to foods, including but limited to those that make up a varied, plant-based diet.
My vegan advocacy will always include working towards a food system that is equitable and sustainable for all.
[A source mentioned in my video: Accessibility to emergency food systems in south-central Indiana evaluated by spatiotemporal indices of pressure at count and pantry level - one of the papers I was a lead author and researcher on published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.]
I lol’d at “I require a lot of enrichment time in my enclosure.” I feel the same way! Thanks for sharing the article on semantics; as a speech-language pathologist I found it really interesting!