Oy Vey It's - The End of 2022
Surveys say this is a plant-based, vegan, meatless, meat-free, animal-free food newsletter!
Oy vey it’s my last newsletter of 2022! I’m wishing us both many opportunities to rest and recharge until we meet again in your inbox.
Also, I want to thank you deeply for your support and readership this year. It means more to me than I could ever hope to be able to convey to you accurately, and by accurately I mean overexplaining myself by obsessively analyzing my thoughts and feelings and attempting to synthesize them through run-on sentences and rambling paragraphs.
With the sappy stuff out of the way, here’s a few memes of varying genres to hold you over until the next newsletter.
P.S. If you’re wondering what I want for Chanukkah it’s for you to share this newsletter with the food geeks in your life!
What I’ve Read
McDonald’s and Walmart beef suppliers criticised for ‘reckless’ antibiotics use - I am so surprised that, among the other shitty things about these companies, Cargill, JBS, and Green Bay don’t prioritize public health…Supporters of animal agriculture say that antibiotic use in farmed animals is to prevent sick animals from entering our food supply and making the consumer sick, though they also have other uses besides preventive health to keep meat production cheap and fast. Antibiotics have been overused in industrialized animal agriculture for decades in the U.S. without much regulation. In 2017 the FDA banned the use of antibiotics common to human use for growth promotion and required farmer’s to get the drugs with a prescription from a vet, rather than over the counter. Antibiotic resistance is a global public health issue with the overuse in farmed animals as one of the major causes. Since the industry obviously cannot be trusted to prioritize our health over their profits, we need more substantive oversight and regulation.
Disabled Shoppers Struggle With Inaccessible Self-Checkouts - I hate using the self-checkout machine if I have more than 3-4 items; however if I do ever want or need to use them, I can. Since the grocery industry wants to push automation to promote efficiency (and cut down on their labor costs) self-checkout machines are becoming more and more present. As you can gather from the article, title self-checkout machines that are currently in grocery stores are inaccessible for people with various disabilities. Lyndsay Patterson, a disabled person in the UK, pointed out that a benefit of self-checkout machines is that they could mean one less person you have to interact with. Since COVID-19 is still very much a thing, minimizing face-to-face contact is important especially for people with disabilities or other conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID, among other infections and viruses. As detailed in the article, there are automated machines made to be more accessible, but these accessible options are not universal. Will the potential regulations mentioned make accessibility more of a priority? I want to be optimistic but realistically, disabled people will likely continue to be an afterthought.
What consumers say they want versus what they actually buy - A shocking discovery, people say they want one thing but their actions align with a different thing. I like that statistics and insights from research firms are shared throughout the article and then there is a quote from an employee of one of the research firms who says, “it’s important to realize that survey answers are not 100% accurate. Also, from he headline I was not expecting that so much of this piece would discuss veganism but it does!
As the USDA Invests in “Climate-Smart” Agriculture, It’s Hard to Follow the Money - In September 2022 the USDA announced an investment of up to $2.8 billion for 70 projects within the first ever funding pool for Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. If you want to know the criteria for “climate-smart” projects you have to visit the program’s FAQ section, they are mainly focused on greenhouse gas mitigation, though many of the descriptions include the phrase “climate-smart” so we don’t fully know what it means. Two scientists at the Union of Concerned Scientists went through the program’s publicly available information in an attempt to trace the funding, measures of impact, and methods of accountability to funding recipients. According to their research, there are major information gaps in all of these areas. From what they were able to access, 55 out of the 70 chosen projects were focused on meat, dairy, and livestock commodities. If the industries of these commodities weren’t already sketchy, it would probably be a good thing to fund projects to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of those industries. But they are sketchy and have an already cozy relationship with the USDA compared to other commodities and specialty crops.
Diversifying Dietetics Is Going to Require White-Lady Discomfort - As I have talked about in this newsletter before, dietetics is rooted in whiteness, not unlike most other areas of human-related science. This whiteness applies to the actual nutrition science as well as the dietitians themselves, 93% of registered dietitians in the US are women and 80% of dietitians are white. To become a dietitian you have to be able to afford a competitive 1200 hour unpaid internship and by 2024 you will also have to be able to afford a master’s degree. As Anjali thoroughly explains in her article, this cost and the requirement for so much unpaid labor puts BIPOC students, Black students in particular, at a greater disadvantage due to structural racism and other factors that have marginalized and continue to marginalize these communities. With white women dominating the field, whiteness continues to be upheld as the norm in dietetics. Definitely worth a read and a great call in to support BIPOC dietitians and BIPOC-led organizations that are improving the quality of care for their communities and challenging the normative whiteness of the field.
Plant-based meat isn’t perfect, but it is a form of harm reduction - We already know the premise of an article like this; it has to mention that animal-free meats have wildly grown in popularity for many reasons but a major critique is that they are not “healthy”. The best and worst quote from this article has to be “It’s no secret that these legume-derived, highly processed patties aren’t a diet food: By design, they have comparable caloric values, as well as fat and protein contents, as an equivalent serving of beef.” Obviously I hate the term “diet food” and the inherent fatphobia of its use, but that quote does show how ridiculous it is that the nutrition of meatless burgers is so often positioned as their biggest con, but their nutrients are usually designed to mimic those of cow burgers, minus cholesterol and the other nutrients unique to animal foods. Okay beyond that quote part of me really likes positioning animal-free options as a form of harm reduction for human and planetary health, it makes sense. The other part of me knows that harm reduction is usually done on a smaller, individual or community scale rather than at a national policy level (look at the history of fighting the tobacco industry on cigarettes). That’s why this vegan takes issue with the author saying, “advocates of veganism need to accept this principle as well.” I do accept and support it and at the same time I know we need more radical systemic change along with individuals opting for meatless Mondays or a Beyond Burger at the drive through.
A Vegan Food Wave Hits Cafeteria Menus at 4 US Universities - I was very intrigued by this article as someone who “went vegan” in college in Indiana in 2014 and ate 99% of meals on-campus (my dietary intake was mainly the same salad basically every night with heaps of plain and uncooked tofu, banana and pb for breakfast, and lots of tiny individual cartons of soy milk). Apparently times have changed since I was in school, in large part because of efforts by the Humane Society of the United Sates (HSUS) to work with universities at no cost to transition their dining halls to offer more plant-based options. There are all-vegan dining halls now and enough vegan-friendly universities that PETA and the HSUS have ranking systems for them.
(shoutout to my friend Jamie who wrote this piece and my friend Silvia who was interviewed and quoted in it!)Why So Many Food Workers Unionized This Year - Unionization of food service, grocery, agriculture, and hospitality businesses has been in the news pretty consistently. Starbucks employees unionized over 250 branches, the Trader Joe’s in Hadley, MA was the companies first employee union, and as I mentioned a few newsletters ago hospitality workers at SFO organized for better wages and benefits. According to this article, unionization has mainly re-gained recent traction because of the ever-widening wage gaps between on-the-ground employees and those in the C-Suite and the fact that hospitality and service workers became front-line workers in a pandemic almost overnight while still making (sub)minimum wages without great work environments or benefits.
Q&Kay
Q: How do you stay current and organized on the news? Do you have sources or strategies you recommend?
Kay: I subscribe to and read way more newsletters than I write. I tend to read a lot of things I don’t necessarily like or enjoy. I keep doing so because my writing content and process is largely influenced by what I read and if I don’t like the way someone else has written about a subject it motivates me to think about why and avoid the things that gave me the ick in my own content. You can tell what I mainly subscribe to and use as sources because they’ll consistently appear in the What I’ve Read section. Also, if you also want to subscribe to a bunch of things I recommend creating an email specifically for this so your personal inbox doesn’t feel so cluttered.
Also, thanks to this newsletter I have been decent about reading and writing consistently but please don’t be fooled into thinking I am organized. I tend to be most productive in batches so my newsletter creation process is usually: see an article via email or newsletters or social media, save link to a note on my phone to read later, and do a couple of batch reading and writing sessions the week of sending out a newsletter. When I am particularly busy and stressed (as I have been these past few weeks) the newsletter gets written the night before or morning of publishing. These rush jobs are usually the least self-edited and proofread, for me that is really saying something.
Kvetch Sesh
The end of the year always brings tons of reports, news, and research about annual trends so here is a roundup of some research about plant-based/animal-free shopping and labeling preferences that have come across my inbox.
Understanding Consumer Shifts From Animal-Based to Plant-Based Foods in the Retail Environment (November 2022, by the Plant Based Food Institute, Kroger, and 84.51°)
Research details: qualitative survey with a sample of 150 behaviorally-targeted Kroger shoppers per segment, increaser segment (customers increasing their plant-based spend by more than 10% compared to the previous year) and decreaser segment (customers decreasing their plant-based spend by more than 10% compared to prior year).
Key Findings: people buying plant-based are motivated by personal health concerns, choose plant milk over cow’s milk, and maintain or decrease their spending on animal foods.
Limitations: the study was only conducted on a fairly small sample size (300) and I’m not sure if that’s individuals or households since I did not see any demographic information of the sample, the scope was limited to only Kroger customers, and I didn’t find a definition of “plant-based” shared anywhere, this is an industry study not a peer-reviewed scientific study
Nomenclature of cell-cultivated meat & seafood products (December 2022, npj Science of Food)
Research details: online experimental survey conducted on 2,653 participants, who were recruited to try and be representative of U.S. consumers, with 27 experimental conditions (find more details in the methods section) with the goal to qualify the appeal and consumer understanding of terminology for cell-cultivated meats and seafood products, descriptive phrases were more accurately understood than new terminology
Key Findings: science-y or tech-y sounding names showed lower measures of appeal and purchase intent even for terms like “lab-grown” which were well understood by consumers, cell-cultivated meat and seafood products should be labelled as meat and seafood especially in consideration of food allergies
Limitations: self-reported data is always limiting, online study results may not be indicative of how people would actually act in stores, some selection bias (since this is peer-reviewed research in a reputable journal, these limitations are mentioned in discussion section)
Plant-based labelling: how common labelling language impacts consumer perceptions of plant-based products (July 2022, ProVeg)
Research details: 1000 people in the UK were surveyed online to better understand how people perceive plant-based food labels and terminology, demographic data of age, gender, and educational background of the sample was collected to try and make the sample representative of the general population (the full questions and definitions of dietary lifestyle categories are given in the report)
Key Findings: consumers are most likely to choose a food labeled “100% plant-based”, “plant-based”, or “veggie” and less likely to choose foods labeled “meatless” and “vegan” though “vegan” was the most well-understood term by consumers, the majority of consumers are not confused by plant-based labeling of products like nuggets and choose them consciously (if you want to look into it or are in the food industry I recommend reading to see the full discussion about consumer perception of terminology)
Limitations: self-reported data is limiting, the study was conducted online, ProVeg is an NGO in the alt-protein space that works with private companies which may contribute to bias, this is not a peer-reviewed scientific study