Hey there,
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. Occasionally, I’ll include a “Food Fights” section that explores some of the interesting debates flying around the food news world.
Let’s dig in.
-This Week-
Problem swapping vs. problem solving
As Western states navigate how to maintain food production with urgently dwindling water supplies, High Country News reported on the potential consequences of simply fallowing farmland (putting the land out of use). The article explains that in order to comply with its Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), California must retire over 500,000 acres of land over the next two decades. But, taking land out of production could seriously increase dust in a region that has some of the worst air quality in the country - an outcome that disproportionately affects Black, Filipino, and Latino communities. The piece points toward new uses for the land and leaning into agroecology as paths forward to avoid exacerbating environmental and public health injustices in Western state farm-adjacent communities.
A step toward justice for food workers
In a recent article I wrote about a food recovery milestone, LA Food Policy Council Executive Director Christine Tran provided a powerful quote about the approaches we take to addressing food insecurity: “Oftentimes, unfortunately, our communities see themselves as an afterthought in the supply chain, which is sad because when you think about the last mile of food for low-income communities, they should be the priority and not an afterthought, right?”
Food workers are among those often treated as an afterthought in a system predicated on convenience and purchasing power. Writing for Forbes, Errol Schweizer provides the 411 on AB257, or California’s FAST Recovery Act, breaking down why the bill is necessary and potentially life-changing for fast food workers. The legislation, signed into law on Labor Day, covers workers employed by fast food chains with 100 or more locations nationally.
What lessons can we learn from organic cotton?
A little outside the food realm, but firmly inside the supply chain sphere: this report from Draper detailing how the demand for organic cotton is outpacing supply. As brands race to swap in the material to fulfill sustainability objectives, climate change is battering top cotton producers and the cost of transitioning to organic remains out of reach for many farmers. It seems like some of the broader lessons to be learned from the fashion world’s challenges with organic cotton are a) improving sustainability will likely have to involve more than just replacing one material with another b) companies expecting to source more organic material should be prepared to provide transition and conversion support to farmers and c) all of these supply chain puzzles are telling us to reevaluate how, where and why we concentrate mass production for a given commodity.
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 :)