Chocolate-covered broccoli, light on the chocolate
Before the Cutting Board: March 10, 2022
Hey there,
Ever since I sent last week’s 'challenge-focused' round up, I’ve been thinking about Don’t Look Up, a satirical film that uses an impending comet speeding toward earth as a metaphor for climate change. Some people loved it, some people hated it - as comes with the territory of any Hollywood effort to make edgy, but still palatable social commentary. For me personally, what stuck with me most was the idea that we can’t have conversations about serious topics without some sort of ‘feel-good’ cushion. It resonated deeply. We’ve been in the process of pitching Point of Origin for only a few months, but I’ve had to listen to more than one development executive explain the concept of “chocolate-covered broccoli” - people only want to learn something on television if you sprinkle some chocolate on top!
So when I was thinking through how to focus on solutions this week in a way that was constructive, I realized it was important to me that this not necessarily be all rainbows and butterflies. And, as I got to writing, I began to notice a pattern. At the most obvious, highest level: there is no one solution to the challenges happening within our food system that will make us feel warm and fuzzy inside. Digging a little deeper: there are lots of opportunities for change - some more system-revolutionizing than others - that require a process of critically assessing how, why, and for who. The first part of implementing a solution is recognizing that it won’t be easy, and it won’t be the same for everyone.
Welcome back to Before the Cutting Board, your weekly roundup of food + supply chain hot topics to help keep you up to speed on what’s going down with your food.
If you’re new to Before The Cutting Board, here’s how it works: The “This Week” section focuses on news and current events, while the “Food Fights” section usually explores some of the interesting debates flying around the food news world.
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Let’s dig in.
-This Week-
Stairway to Regenerative Agriculture
Last week, beer and alcohol corporate giant Diageo announced intentions to launch a regenerative agriculture pilot on barley farms in Ireland to support more sustainable Guinness production. The move reflects a broader acceptance among food brand multinationals of regenerative agriculture as the key solution to the increasing pressure on the food industry to address the large role that large-scale, conventional farming plays in fueling climate change. For those who don’t know, regenerative agriculture refers to a multitude of practices - ranging from cover crops to no-till farming (among the more well-known techniques - applied to farming with the intent of rehabilitating the soil and reducing carbon emissions through re-equipping the land with the ability to sequester, or retain carbon.
It is indeed an important and relevant approach to farming, but the way in which it has been so easy for big food and agriculture companies like Diageo to use it as a new badge of sustainability has raised questions and drawn concerns about what a transition from conventional farming to regenerative agriculture at a large-scale looks like in practicality. Since regenerative agriculture is multifaceted and encompasses many practices, it lacks a standardized, collective definition. This arguably makes it easier for these companies to ‘regen-wash’. Intertwined with the murkiness of what it means for a company sourcing from millions of acres of farmland to switch to regenerative agriculture is the insidious nature through which the popularized concept of regenerative agriculture has been detached from the Indigenous knowledge and history that these practices originated from. Interestingly, last week’s IPCC report on food systems didn’t point directly toward regenerative agriculture as an adaptation or mitigation strategy, but instead reflected on specific practices while making sure to note the urgency of prioritizing local community and Indigenous knowledge systems.
These discussions can certainly make regenerative agriculture feel like a loaded conversation, but it also feels hopeful that perhaps the tide is turning on our usual blanket solution and one-size-fits-all approaches.
Palm Oil Deforestation Drop: A clue for change or a red herring?
Palm oil is in everything, or at least it feels that way. It’s in our noodles, pizza dough, nut butters - the list goes on. It’s also been in the crosshairs of push and pull between economic growth and environmental cost. The demand for palm oil, which comes from oil palm tree kernels, has long had deep and problematic linkages to widespread deforestation and land-use change. This week, however, palm oil industry stakeholders have been celebrating a study that found a four-year low in the number of trees being cleared to make way for oil palm plantations across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea.
Since 2017, deforestation has peaked as high as 90,000 hectares of forest cleared - a stark contrast to the 8,000 hectares that were deforested last year. It’s still not completely clear to what extent the big drop in palm oil driven deforestation can be attributed to the region’s strict COVID restrictions and the ongoing impacts of the supply chain crisis. Palm oil cultivation is hugely reliant upon migrant labor, which has also seen a big drop due to COVID restrictions. The true test will be how the deforestation rate responds to prices as they continue to rise - when prices rise, oil palm plantation expansion tends to get more aggressive in order to take advantage of higher profit opportunities. One thing that is more clear is that blanket bans on high-deforestation palm oil don’t work, while approaches that integrate local-expertise and focus on influencing production decisions on-the-ground tend to be more effective.
Honorable Mentions: Researchers are trying to help crabbers adapt to the impacts of warming oceans and mitigate further devastation to seafood supply
-Food Fights-
Is the Carbon Market plausible?
Among attempts to incentivize efforts to thwart climate change across a system that rewards financial gain above all else, carbon markets have emerged in the food and supply chain arena as a way to get producers - both large and small - to want to reduce their carbon emissions. This is a pretty good primer on how carbon markets and carbon credits work within a food production context. For farmers at the start of the supply chain, it’s a mechanism that is seen as a way to encourage regenerative farming, via the idea that farmers can get paid for the carbon they store in their soil from companies looking to offset their emissions.
On one hand, it makes a lot of sense to financially incentivize and reward farmers for the immense efforts and investment it takes to effectively sequester enough carbon in farmland to warrant a carbon credit. But, pinpointing a worthy price level with no cap, actually standardizing techniques and measurements for carbon storage in soil, and ensuring a carbon market system is executed fairly in a global system that has historically passed down any pollution leakages to marginalized communities makes it hard to trust that carbon markets can be executed well. That hasn’t stopped the buzz surrounding them, of course. President Biden often touted the idea of prospect of a carbon market for US farmers, and several start-ups are trying to lead the charge via creating technology solutions to make carbon accounting and trading easier.
When I was first writing this, I had a joke or two up my sleeve about Biden and the cryptocurrency bros believing that carbon markets are a sure fix. It’s difficult for me to discuss carbon markets without feeling at least a little wry or sardonic. Sometimes the way people talk about carbon trading reminds me of the big ‘NFT Rush’ that’s happening right now. At the end of the supply chain, there continues to be this fascination with making a profit off of climate change mitigation instead of critically thinking through how to do it right and how to make these strategies fair.
But, I then remembered, somewhat abashedly, that I have spoken to farmers who are truly hopeful that carbon markets are an opportunity to both change the tide of agriculture’s relationship to climate change and recognize the need for support from institutional actors with power to see a solution like regenerative agriculture actually be successful. These are farmers who have committed dollars and land to farming organic, and to finding an effective combination of regenerative practices, at an ultimate cost to their bottom lines. They do this because they believe that farming will have to be different if it’s something that their kids and future generations would ever consider doing one day. This is what reminds me to take the carbon market conversation seriously. But I hope, like the larger talk surrounding regenerative agriculture, it’s a conversation that reckons with the idea that these envisioned benefits are not realistic until and unless they are benefits that can be realized fairly - something that incentive-based solutions don’t exactly have a great track record of, especially in the US.
Honorable Mentions: Remember my ambivalence toward lab-grown lobster and the implications of the big plant-based biotech push for food access? This week, Finless Foods announced they raised $34M to advance the distribution of their lab-grown Bluefin tuna. They seem to have more holistic distribution and price-parity goals, and bluefin tuna is among the most imperiled species in warming waters. Civil Eats also dug deeper into the companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars to produce “milk without cows” and the transparency issues that are still clouding these companies’ promises.
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed reading this, please forward to a friend. Even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, still tell your friends - misery loves company :)
So many great insights and perspectives. Thank you for the breakdown and developing digestible content!!