hello and happy holidays (Passover, Ramadan, Easter, 4/20, Earth Day…)!
i’ve been celebrating Passover by sharing meals with friends and family, leaving a trail of matzah crumbs all over my apartment, and complaining online about how ready I am to eat a bagel!
obviously 4/20 is a “holiday” of a very different significance compared to commemorating the Jewish people’s Exodus from Egypt. if you also enjoy partaking in cannabis culture I highly recommend you show up for cannabis activism. Last Prisoner Project is one of the resources I use most frequently and they make it quite easy to take a variety of actions. take a look at their 4/20 for Justice page to read Perspectives From The Inside; letters from currently incarcerated cannabis constituents on what 4/20 means to them.
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quick check in - how are we feeling about this newsletter format & frequency?
(please leave your answer in the comments)
a) call me goldilocks - this format & frequency feels juuuust right
b) i want more timely news - bump up to 1x/week & gimme more news
c) you need to organize - maybe restructure, possibly keep news-focused content & kvetch sesh updates separate, get your shit together friend
d) other - i’ll leave a comment with my brilliant suggestion
what i’ve read
As Dollar Stores Proliferate, Some Communities Push Back
where urban/city planning, municipal governments, and food access research overlap in an incredibly necessary way. this article also points out a lot of gross details and OSHA violations of Family Dollar and Dollar General so there’s a new fun fact for you to whip out at your next party.
bonus - I assisted in field research and analysis for a project mapping food access in south central Indiana and have personally surveyed a lot of dollar and convenience stores for their food options. read here!
CEOs of major beef processors to testify at House Ag Committee
supposedly this hearing will discuss anti-competitive behavior and if it caused increases on cow beef for consumers. I have little faith that this will result in meaningful anti-trust action, but im looking forward to seeing their well rehearsed mental gymnastics performed on the national stage.3 Keys for Successful Social Media Marketing
nothing radical here- brands are annoyed at Instagram’s big shift to video just like the rest of us content creators. I think the interesting tip here is about social commerce and the integration of shopping pathways directly into content (shoppable livestreams, recipes, etc). this trend has been predicted within the industry for the last couple years and big brands are definitely capitalizing on this. ethically I think this type of content needs to come with way bigger disclosures than just #ad, especially in video format on platforms like TikTok it’s hard to tell what is user generated content, sponsored content, and what is an ad.
examples: Albertsons x Pinterest, Walmart livestream
The FDA’s Food Failure
None of this is surprising but it’s very important and while long, the article includes some very fun interactive visuals. Chapter 1 title feels like the extremely accurate, concise summary of this report; ‘It’s a structure that’s designed to fail’. My food law and policy professor repeated a similar statement many times over our semester long class as we discussed the major shortcomings of government food regulation. I don’t think much of this information about the FDA, including how little enforcement power they have and how weird the lines of authority and jurisdiction are drawn, is common knowledge even to people who work in food. The agency isn’t even accomplishing the basics of what it was created to do (like protect consumers from fraudulent, adulterated, or misleading goods) and honestly, how could it when the world has changed so drastically since its origin? There is so so much more I would like to see this report touch on (@ supplement industry, influence of lobbying groups, how GRAS makes any sense, food marketing and advertising/how they work together with other agencies like the FTC, etc…)My favorite quote, “While FDA is often deferential to industry when it does make decisions – something that infuriates consumer advocates – the agency isn’t working particularly well for industry, either.”
Op-ed: Fake Meat Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis
Consumption is not a solution and this op-ed echoes this truth as well as identifies the damage of consolidation within the alt protein space. Worth a read. I do not like that articles on this subject feel the need to compare costs and benefits of animal-based and animal-free foods without acknowledging the inherent harm of animal-based foods done to animals. Animal-based foods require the systematic commodification of animals and the way they’re often discussed in this climate context equates the trade-off of their welfare or life as equal to factors like their nutrient profile or environmental output.Example of a quote I strongly disliked: “Highly processed alternative proteins may therefore be more harmful than animal source foods in some contexts, depending on how they are produced.”
How does this comparison help? Why do we need to subvert the horrific nature of a food system that has commodified living beings, to make the point that global food conglomerates and Big Ag fucking suck? People are so quick to minimize the significance of animals when we discuss food, and (alt) protein specifically like their welfare isn’t a necessary part of the discussion. We can recognize the environmental costs/benefits of animal vs animal-free food all day without minimizing the horrifying reality of producing food from animals (especially factory farming, as is the context of this quote).
States scale back food stamp benefits as prices soar
I guess the return to normalcy includes shitting on food insecure folks and shoddy public benefits, let’s hurry back to it! Interesting quote from Feeding America, they estimate food banks, “will spend 40% more to buy food in the fiscal year ending June 2022 as in the previous year” and states the demand will only grow as SNAP continues to be cut. Unfortunately, this is pretty much exactly how food banks and the rest of domestic Emergency Food System were designed to function; privatize the responsibility for feeding people in times of crisis even when that crisis is exacerbated by the actions and environment created by local, state, and federal governments!The Counter is shutting down May 20th ):
A nonprofit newsroom that is/was one of my favorite food publications, I am so sad to see them shutting down and hope the work they’ve done will carry on.
what i’m excited about
working to celebrate my time of being “lazy” instead of leaning into the shame and stigma I have internalized around being unemployed, unmotivated, and unsure of what ~professional~ life I want for myself.
this comes largely from my current read: Laziness Does Not Exist* by Dr. Devon Price. while I’m very aware and comfortable with the idea that my worth as a human is not tied to my productivity and the many many other negative consequences of existing in contemporary American capitalism hustle culture, it’s been an affirming and validating reading experience.
*Bookshop affiliate link
i’m trying to implement some of Dr. Price’s suggested actions, this week i’m trying my hand at expressive writing. if you’d like to join me here’s the gist: choose an amount of time, choose a prompt or topic, write for the entire allotted amount of time, done.
there are a lot of prompts and suggested exercises online, I liked this list from Positive Psychology.
upcoming events
May 6th - Food & Climate Coffee Chats with Planetary Health Collective (free, recurs monthly)
(feel free to invite me to relevant virtual events & i’ll also share them here!)
kvetch sesh
Food doses…a looming fad in the “food is medicine” community that seems to be a result of a big PR push on the talk show circuit for Dr. Will Li who wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease. Apparently his Ted Talk “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer” has 11 million+ listens, a claim that has my stomach in knots.
Though I’m familiar with the phrase “food doses” I haven’t ever looked too much into it, until a The Food Institute article came across my inbox. So I then read further from Rachel Ray Show and even Dr. Li’s own website, I could not find what I would consider reputable sources, on this subject. There are plenty of scientific studies that do investigate specific nutrients and their potential impact on other diseases but these studies are incredibly difficult because pinpointing a concrete cause-and-effect in nutrition research is complex. While there are many ways researchers can control for variability and outcomes, the reality is that every human is being is different and there are so many factors (genetics, lifestyle, environment, socioeconomic status, etc) that allow us to function. The same input of foods does not guarantee the same output or effect on an individual level, despite what diet culture and the ever popular “What I Eat in a Day” videos would want you to believe.
The highlight from these articles on food doses is that regular weekly consumption of certain foods (that the articles stated came from specific studies they did not care to link so I could not read) can do things like “level out metabolism” “kill cancer cells” “lower blood pressure” etc.
Dr. Li’s website defines a food dose as, “the amount of any food or beverage consumed that is associated with or leads to a specific health outcome”.
Dr. Li says the foods that combat disease do so by promoting health through activating 5 defense systems: angiogenesis, cell regeneration, the microbiome, immunity, and DNA protection. While these things may all certainly be affected by changes in health or lifestyle, they are also autonomous processes your body will continue to do, whether or not you eat 5 cups of navy beans* per week.
* Dr. Li mentions a University of Toronto study looking at navy beans and metabolism but does not provide a direct link sooo..
In addition to navy beans, the foods lauded in these articles include: tree nuts (1 ounce twice a week to kill cancer cells), spices (1 ⅓ tsp per meal to lower blood pressure), spinach (1 cup cooked) or beets (1 cup juice to lower blood pressure). Li’s quoted across the articles saying these amounts are very reasonable for such pantry staples.
What is not discussed in these articles:
🚩 people who are allergic to any of these foods - despite the fact that tree nuts are a major allergen
🚩 food insecurity or people who lack consistent access to a kitchen, fresh produce, or ability to cook, etc
🚩 the classism, ableism, anti-fatness, elitism, etc that comes with this type of reductionist, individualistic fallacy of eat-this-cure-that. they make a really bold and shitty assumption that these foods, especially the spices, are staples everyone probably has in their pantry already.
🚩 specifics. maybe they’re in Dr. Li’s book…but not in the articles he’s being cited in. these articles lack a lot of necessary clarifying information; telling people to consume “1 ⅓ teaspoons per meal” of spices, without specifying meal frequency is sloppy and unhelpful.
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a) Goldilocks