Hey there,
You may have noticed that there wasn’t a roundup last week. Or maybe you didn’t notice, in which case you can keep scrolling and pretend this little intro doesn’t exist. Last week was my birthday, and I decided that another trip around the sun warranted a small pause. Doesn’t that one song go “It’s my birthday, and I’ll skip a week of my Substack if I want to”?
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.
Let’s dig in.
-This Week-
Teenage farmworkers
Often when I tell people I spent some time working in the cocoa supply chain in Ghana, the first thing they bring up is child labor. They typically ask if it truly is pervasive and how companies mitigate it. I was reminded of this conversation when I read this piece about the realities that teenage farmworkers face in the US. It’s a good reminder that the root of an issue like this is living wage and the conditions faced by those our food system relies on to operate at high volumes. It’s also a reminder that child labor isn’t a foreign or distant concept.
National Pork Producers Council v. Ross
Need the 411 on what happened with the Supreme Court case involving the pork indsutry in California? I definitely needed one, and this report from Civil Eats did the trick. In 2018, California voters approved Proposition 12, aka the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The law establishes ethical standards for how farm animals can be raised, and bans the sale of uncooked pork (among other animal source products) that does not meet the requirements. Interestingly, as the report points out, the Biden administration made a show of support for the pork industry during the Supreme Court oral arguments. That’s somewhat of a surprise considering the administration’s vocal commitment to putting an end to anti-competitive practices in the meat industry - something big pork companies have become notorious for.
The elephant in the voting room
Food insecurity and hardship remains an issue affecting over 13 million households in the US, and yet the Guardian points out that it’s not being directly addressed in midterm discourse across battleground states. The piece digs into why food policy remains the elephant in the voting room, even as our collective awareness of food and supply chain issues has increased in the last few years
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 :)