The art of preservation
Before the Cutting Board: April 28, 2022
Hey there,
It’s the last Thursday of the month! Perhaps that’s somewhat unremarkable for any given person, but as someone who felt constantly crunched this month, getting through April feels like a real accomplishment. So congrats to me and congrats to you.
If you read only two articles from this week’s round up, my recommendations would be the NPR piece about the superhero seed savers at the Heirloom Collard Project and the report in the Honorable Mentions section on how women are bearing the biggest burden of rising inflation. There are a lot of important and well done pieces nested in here though, so read what speaks to you and leave what doesn’t.
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.
A huge thank you to everyone who has shown love and shared this newsletter! Please continue to share and spread the word!
Without further ado, let’s dig in.
-This Week-
One step for collard greens, one giant leap for mankind
This week, two stories covered the incredible work of seed saver Ira Wallace and her leadership of the Heirloom Collard Project. The initiative is a collective of farmers, activists, academics, and seed savers preserving nearly extinct varieties of collard greens - some of which are over a century old - in order to protect the vegetable’s diversity and the history in which it’s deeply ingrained. This piece from NPR covers the varieties that the Heirloom Collard Project is working to save as well as the journey of protecting collard greens in Black American food culture which dates back to the vegetable’s significance for the enslaved.
As someone who grew up with a grandfather who pulled garden-grown greens out of the freezer nearly every night to prepare for dinner, these stories deeply resonated with me. More broadly, as the US reckons with the implications of dwindling small farms and the growing uniformity of large farms, the story of Heirloom Collard Project offers everyone insight into why preserving seed diversity is growing increasingly urgent.
Keeping up to date on the latest in food safety
Food safety challenges, and scrutiny of the Food and Drug Administration’s handling of these issues, are still abound. Here are the ones you should know about:
Today, Politico broke that a whistleblower made FDA officials aware of serious infant formula plant concerns months before three infants fell ill after ingesting formula produced at said plant, and several months more before the FDA opened an official inspection. The foodborne illness outbreak in three major baby formula brands has led to the death of two infants, the hospitalization of multiple, and a widespread shortage of formula in the US. For more background, check out this previous BTC roundup.
A beef processor in New Jersey is recalling over 120,000 ground beef products that are at risk of E.Coli contamination
Poultry industries across the world are still grappling with a growing outbreak of bird flu. The US is being hit particularly hard by the outbreak which is not only affecting grocery bills, but additionally leaving egg factory workers out of a job or putting them in more precarious work conditions (avian flu can transfer to humans). A significant contributing factor to the quick spread of bird flu in poultry facilities is overcrowding.
Honorable Mention: Great reporting on how food inflation is hitting women, particularly women of color, the hardest as food assistance programs struggle to keep up with rising prices
-Food Fights-
Getting real about beef and responsibility
Last week, I covered a lot of the recent scrutiny that’s been leveled at plant-based and lab-based meat production. So this week it’s only fair that we take a look at beef ;) Today, Vox covered the intensifying destruction of climate-vital rainforests in spite of numerous pledges from world leaders to halt deforestation within the decade. Cattle ranching is the number one driver of deforestation in the tropic region, where most of the world’s forest destruction takes place.
For many smallholder farmers in the region, cattle ranching offers the safest return on investment compared with other agricultural commodities. In a very non-transparent and convoluted global supply chain like beef, it’s difficult to hold individual cattle ranchers and farms accountable for illegal deforestation. However, it’s arguably unfair to simply point a finger at ranchers whose livelihoods rely upon this commodity without questioning the systems that set up and benefit from that reliance.
Brazil, where nearly half of tropical deforestation has taken place in the last year, is the largest exporter of beef and the second largest producer of beef behind the US. Brazil’s beef industry is consolidated into 3 big corporations: JBS, Mafrig, and Minerva. These companies are rarely held accountable for enabling unsustainable ranching practices, and they go largely unregulated. The last pledge these three companies made to refrain from buying cattle from ranches linked to deforestation or the expulsion of indigenous communities was in 2009. Since then, the companies have been linked to over 42,000 acres of illegal deforestation.
Brazil isn’t the only country being asked to acknowledge the consequences of an increasingly monopolized beef industry. This week, a bipartisan panel of US senators probed into how intense consolidation and dying competition in the beef industry is devastating ranchers as corporate profits increase at record rates.
When having this conversation, it’s important to recognize that there are cattle ranchers and livestock organizations across the world, including in Brazil, that are focused on local (vs. globalized), sustainable beef production: whether that’s through silvopastoralism, leveraging livestock byproducts to reduce waste, or raising smaller herds of grass-fed cattle. In the midst of the recent IPCC report that basically said “you’re running out of time”, this is an area where individual responsibility and purchasing power (if you’ve got it like that) can have an impact.
Too long didn’t read? If you’re a beef eater, the origins of the beef that you purchase matters. A lot.
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 :)
It might be interesting to look at the NPR article on Beef slaughter concentration. Randy Feenstra, the representative from Iowa’s fourth district, in an uncharacteristically non-republican stance, called for hearings on price-fixing for JBS.