• Food

The Food Industry Begins to Struggle with the Effects of COVID-19

• agribusiness
• conservation
• COVID-19
• environment
• farms
• food
• food waste

Farmers are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food because of COVID-19’s impact on their usual markets, according to the New York Times.  Producers are depending on $9.5 billion from the CARES Act stimulus package for their farms to survive this pandemic.

Why This Matters: As the unemployment rates sky-rocket due to national shutdowns, it’s hard to imagine food going to waste.

• Food

Farms Face Challenges Getting and Protecting Workers During The Pandemic

According to The Wall Street Journal, there are growing issues surrounding seasonal workers entering (or not) the U.S., protecting farmworkers from becoming ill, and if they do, finding replacements to ensure crops are harvested before they go bad.

Why This Matters: The lack of resilience in our food system is showing.  The Trump administration has created worker shortages when in the past it restricted the H-2A visa program out of concerns over illegal immigration. The pandemic has only made this concern worse.

• Food

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Food of Environmental Activism

• farming
• food
• food waste
• produce

by Zoey Shipley and Miro Korenha In America, 30-40% (by weight) of food goes to waste each day–which also wastes water and creates needless GHG emissions. One solution that’s been floated to combat food waste is selling more “ugly” produce to consumers. As Vox explained, venture capital-backed companies like Imperfect Produce, Full Harvest, Hungry Harvest, […]

• Food

As Climate Impacts CA’s Ag, the Mississippi Delta Could Be Our Next Bread Basket

• agriculture
• climate change
• Mississippi

California has been an agricultural powerhouse and produces more than 1/3 of the vegetables and 2/3 of fruits and nuts that are grown in the United States. However, climate change is a ticking time bomb for the Golden State’s agricultural industry and will bring changes in precipitation patterns, leading to more drought and more flooding, […]

• Food

One Fishy Thing: How To Buy Sustainable and Healthy Fish

• Monterey Bay Aquarium
• seafood
• Seafood watch
• sustainability

Reducing meat consumption is something we can all do to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  But if you want to eat fish, how do you know whether the fish you are buying in the grocery store or choosing in a restaurant is sustainably caught?  Of course, there’s an app for that! Several actually. The folks […]

• Food

Super Bowl Anti-Plant-Based Meat Ad Is Deceptive

• fecal bacteria
• hamburger
• Impossible Foods
• plant-based meat
• poop

The Super Bowl is known as much for its advertisements as for the game itself.  This year as people watched the big game with a hamburger in hand, The Center for Consumer Freedom, a conservative front group for the beef industry, aired a highly deceptive ad that, according to James Hamblin of The Atlantic, was intended to “scare people about plant-based meats.”

Why This Matters:  Clearly the culture war over meat is heating up, which is unfortunate since this should be an issue of personal choice.