Oy Vey It's A Food Newsletter - Vol 2, Issue 13

A newsletter that can assure you it is not (yet) funded by dark-money coalitions.

Hi hi,

I have so many things that I want to do or try to do. These things include personal and professional projects, showing up for the people in my life, new content for you, actually finishing 1 of the 5 books I’m reading, being more social IRL (this one really depends on my mood in the moment), decide how to decorate my new apartment, and so much more. But I’m tired. And I’m about to get vulnerable, feel free to skip ahead I won’t know and won’t be offended.

It recently hit me how hard my own expectations have been weighing on me. I’ve been expecting myself to snap back to the person I was just a couple of years ago. That person was working while going to grad school full time, constantly ideating on or building up new projects, being social, turning out content much more regularly, and doing soooo much. That person also hadn’t ever experienced coming to a full stop and didn’t know how much inertia it would take to overcome one, especially when the reasons everything in their life stopped in the first place were beyond their control or expectations. Like a certain law of physics, a Kayla in motion stays in motion and has the tendency to resist changes in velocity.

Yes, the pandemic we all collectively experienced changed us in many different ways, but within that period of time I had, what I’m reeeeally hoping, was the worst year of my life. I’m still figuring out how to come back from that when a lot of the things that would provide me security and grant me a break from existing in a constant state of survival and panic are still outside of my control. I’m also working to figure out how to be the person I am right now, what my capacity is, and how I can push myself to act on some of the things I’ve been wanting to try doing.

This may seem deliberately mysterious, and maybe it is a little bit for my own privacy or because I care more about sharing my state of being than the specifics of everything that’s been going on, but I’m definitely not trying to be clickbaity. Maybe I’m hoping someone else will relate to my vague state of vulnerability and feel seen. I think I’m mostly dropping a not-so-obvious hint that if I can get myself from ideation to action, you’ll be seeing some new things soon, and am hoping that by putting ~this~ out there I’ll have people who will hold me accountable, or be able to offer resources and mentorship when I reach out.

Grateful for store-bought neurotransmitters and a good therapist.

-K

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What I’ve Read

• The Truth About Your Bacon - (CW: written description and video footage of graphic content) This is an opinion piece by journalist Nicholas Kristof, whose family raised hogs on their farm, that discusses why he believes, “today’s mass production of pork is intrinsically inhumane.” Kristof touches on gestation crates and the life cycle of a sow, documentation of extremely cruel painful treatment of piglets, and other horrifying practices. He also acknowledges some defenses of this industrialized food system, including efficiency means cheaper animal meat compared to pre-factory farmed animal meat prices, and the limited benefits for the pigs that come from the controlled environment of a factory farm. This article raised many important considerations in addition to bringing awareness to the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act that could undermine state and local governments from setting standards of production or manufacturing of agricultural products that would almost certainly be even more detrimental to animal welfare. Many quotes really stuck with me, I’ll leave you with his closing paragraph, “What I am confident of is that right now we’re on the wrong side of history and that future generations will look back at videos like these and be baffled that nice people like us could blindly tolerate such systematized cruelty toward intelligent if cantankerous fellow mammals not so different from us.”

• An Annotated Bibliography on Structural Racism Present in the U.S. Food System, Tenth Edition - Michigan State University’s Center for Regional Food Systems released the Tenth Edition of An annotated bibliography on structural racism present in the U.S. food system. This is an excellent resource for food and nutrition professionals, or anyone else who wants a jumping-off point for research and references on many aspects of structural racism across our supply chain and the impact of the social construction of Whiteness on the U.S. local food movement. I have not gone through the full 132 pages but appreciate the nuance and diversity of media included in this bibliography that I will use for my own further learning and writing.

• Kellogg’s ‘woke’ workplace diversity programs are illegal, group claims - American First Legal filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about Kellogg’s hiring, training, and promotion practices. They’re mad because Kellogg’s has committed to achieving 50/50 gender parity (yay advancing opportunities for women, boo for upholding the gender binary) and having, "25% underrepresented talent at the management level” by 2025. They’re also pissed with Kellogg’s collaborating with RuPaul to promote Cheez-Its, accusing the partnership of politicizing and sexualizing Kellogg’s products. They’d likely be much happier to see Kellogg’s return to John Harvey Kellogg’s original anti-masturbatory and pro-eugenics values.

• I Attended a Workshop on the Impact of AI on The Food World. Here’s What We Discussed - A brief overview of what was covered at a National Science Foundation-funded project workshop on the impact of automation, AI, and the food system. The author, Michael Wolf, shared a few key themes from the workshop: atrophying cooking skills, loss of together time, loss of authenticity and creativity. My first interaction with automation in food was eating at Spyce, the robot kitchen restaurant in Boston that has since closed. There are many aspects to consider when applying this newer technology to food, and I appreciated Wolf’s acknowledgment of AI’s inherent biases. One potential positive that I could see coming from “highly automated food prep” that was not mentioned, would be for disabled people who may want homemade food but need adaptive tools or technology.

• This grocery store wants to fix capitalism - (video) De Aanzet, a grocery store in Amsterdam, uses a “true price” cost model for items in their inventory. This takes into account negative externalities including natural costs, like air pollution and water usage, and social costs, like worker treatment and safety. This model ideally compensates people at the “short end” of the supply chain and overcomes the issues of 3rd party certifications. These costs are displayed by item so you can assess the proportional responsibility of purchasing the product. The lower the true price cost, the more sustainable the product, theoretically. Important to note that the supermarket itself doesn’t have an effective way to disseminate the “hidden costs” down the supply chain, so for now they are redistributed to farms where De Aanzet sources their products. This model has traction across the Netherlands including in a major grocery chain.
  P.S. Bonus points for the video interviewing my grad school econ teacher, Will Masters.

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Q&Kay

Today’s question is for you!

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.

P.S. Those of you who have submitted Q&Kays that require me to watch a documentary or do deeper research, I promise I am not ignoring you I’m working on it based on my current capacity!

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

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Kvetch Sesh

I was the only vegan at an event I attended earlier this week. This was not a food-focused event, it was a four-night guided offsite retreat for early stage startups. Naturally, at meal times I had to ask retreat staff about the vegan options (which I was able to request ahead of time through an attendee survey) since the allergen and ingredient labeling was inconsistent or missing altogether. My veganism came up at other times as it tends to do, when I declined a snack, Googled the brand of wine at the wine-tasting painting activity to see if it was vegan-friendly, or was asked about myself and I mentioned writing this very newsletter.

I got the usual questions and had some semi-interesting conversations, but none of the reactions about veganism were new to me. In fact, they were all already on my list, Shit People Say to Vegans, that I’ve been collecting for the past seven years. One interaction, which I think is worth discussing, was something I overheard while walking away from a group of people. Their conversation touched upon how they don’t mind veganism but just can’t get on board with the whole fake meat thing. I’m sure there was more to it, but I was already walking away and the details don’t really matter. There’s always something about: the level of processing, the ingredient list being full of chemicals and other unclean and unnatural things, why we don’t just eat real meat instead, they don’t trust it blah blah blah.

As I’ve grown my list of Shit People Say to Vegans I have also been doing research trying to identify how these reactions became ubiquitous enough that I can predict the entire flow of a conversation between someone who is vegan and someone who is not. The fake meat one is one of the more intriguing list items because, from my research, it’s one with the most identifiable origins that has emerged fairly recently with the boom of animal-free meat consumer products in the industrialized Western food system. This is always important to clarify because plant-based meat alternatives have existed for centuries in Asia, primarily in China.

A recent article, The mystery of the social media disinformation war on plant-based meat by Clint Rainey, does a decent job summarizing the pipeline of disinformation with a focus on how talking points spread on social media. Hypothetically, if you would perhaps like to scoot around the paywall it may be possible to do so. It’s not some coincidence that wellness grifter influencers all cycle through the same points, it’s a result of really successful marketing, communications, and PR work. This work, likely funded by the animal ag industry and disseminated through channels like the Center for Consumer Freedom, the Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research Center, and meat industry lobbyists, along with other key pro-animal ag “dark-money coalitions”, successfully planted the talking points over the span of years. These campaigns and the use of influencers have been so effective, that people have subconsciously absorbed them as their own viewpoints and opinions. This is how weaponizing disinformation, or propaganda, succeeds.

In the recently published study, Public policies and vested interests preserve the animal farming status quo at the expense of animal product analogs, more research has been done on tracing public financial support for animal farming and how the livestock center has created such resistance to food system changes. The scope of this research is both the United States and European Union and investigates how regulations impede the progress of ‘novel technologies”, like alternative proteins. It also shares the spending by lobbying groups, trade organizations, and NGOs by sector and topic. The discussion section of this paper presents a very thorough overview of how the incumbent food and agricultural systems of both regions are supported by lobbyists, weak environmental requirements, public dietary guidelines, and more. Institutional power in combination with the pro-animal ag campaigns is a hell of a propaganda machine for the alternative protein sector to overcome and an even greater barrier to changing the opinions and choices of individuals.

One of my favorite responses after people launch into an anti-animal-free-meat schpiel is simply to ask them where their beliefs came from or what their sources of information are. This tends to really throw people off. My guess is either because I don’t take their bait and launch into my own schpiel (unless they seem genuinely interested and I have the time and energy) or because they don’t really know how those answers, proving the efficacy of the insidious tactics in the resources mentioned above.

I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to think about why we hold certain beliefs and where they may have come from. I certainly haven’t sussed out all of the specifics of my own choices, but this is one of my regular thought exercises. We are constantly taking in information and being influenced from all angles of our social and political landscape along with all of the systems functioning within them. Perhaps this reflection will enable you to receive information with more intention before transforming it into an opinion or spreading it to others.

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