An article in Food Navigator—Asia got my attention:  “A study by researchers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China has found that the levels of iron, chromium, cadmium and nickel in fish caught from the Red Sea exceeded the levels recommended by various authorities such as the EU, FAO, and WHO.”

Heavy metals are not just in baby foods (see post from a couple of days ago).

Now they are a problem in Red Sea fish.

This is no surprise.  Recall the enormous effort needed to  extract the 1300-foot container ship, Ever Given, from the banks of the Suez Canal.

Hundreds of ships going through the Red Sea and the Canal every week, all of them dumping waste water.

An article in the Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences observes that the Red Sea environment is heavily contaminated with heavy metals; these accumulate in fish muscles.

The concentrations of Cr, Fe, Ni and Cd, analyzed in this study were higher than other heavy metals due to the overloading of industrial waste and the disposal of the water from Jeddah. Mn, Cu, and Pb concentrations, however, were far below the levels recommended by various authorities…It was concluded that the fishes captured from Jeddah Coast, Red Sea, are still safe for human consumption, but the amount consumed should be controlled under the FAO/WHO guidelines.

So–it’s up to you to protect yourself from contaminated fish.

How about international shipping policies that restrict what ships can dump into international waters?

I read in DairyReporter.com that Danone reports an increased score in it B-Corporation certification.

I am interested in the B-Corporation phenomenon.

B Corporations are required to include social values—along with the usual profit motives—as established goals.

Society’s most challenging problems cannot be solved by government and nonprofits alone. The B Corp community works toward reduced inequality, lower levels of poverty, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and the creation of more high quality jobs with dignity and purpose. By harnessing the power of business, B Corps use profits and growth as a means to a greater end: positive impact for their employees, communities, and the environment.

What is that one unifying goal?  “We envision a global economy that uses business as a force for good.”

Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. This is a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good.

B Corporations promise:

• That we must be the change we seek in the world.
• That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
• That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
• To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.

Companies are assessed and rated on social value criteria.  They must achieve 80 of 200 points to be certified.

Food companies are among those certified as B corps

I’m not sure how this plays out in practice, but this certainly appears to be a step in the right direction.

If we want to encourage this effort:

• Support food companies that sign up to be B corps.
• Urge other food companies to join.
• Hold them all accountable.

I’ve written previously about the alarming findings of toxic heavy metals in baby foods.  These toxins are in all foods, but are particularly harmful to infants and young children, a situation that calls for immediate FDA action to set limits on the amounts these foods contain.

The FDA has a Q and A on this issue.  It has also issued previous guidance.

• Metals and Your Food
• What FDA is Doing to Protect Consumers from Toxic Metals in Foods
• What You Can Do to Limit Exposure to Arsenic
• Arsenic in Food and Dietary Supplements
• FDA Makes Available Results from Testing of Infant Rice Cereal for Inorganic Arsenic

In response to many complaints, the FDA has now issued a plan for action:  “Closer to Zero.”

Translation: the agency will propose action levels (limits on allowable amounts), consult with stakeholders, finalize the limits, and then evaluate how the whole thing works to reduce intake levels.

Timeline: It plans to do this starting now, with the aim of finishing the process by 2025.

The FDA must not consider limiting toxic metals in baby food to be urgent.

No wonder some members of Congress have introduced la bill to force the FDA to set limits for the most common toxic metals within a year.  It suggests what those limits should be: 10 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in baby food (15 ppb for cereal); 5 ppb for both cadmium and lead (10 ppb for cereal); and 2 ppb for mercury.

While all this is going on, what are parents to do?

Suggestions from Harvard Health

The FDA is working on doing better monitoring and regulation of heavy metals in commercial baby foods. In the meantime, it’s nearly impossible to know which are completely safe and which aren’t. Babies don’t need solid foods until 6 months of age. At that time it’s perfectly fine to give them soft table foods instead of baby foods. You can also make your own baby food, using steamed or naturally soft foods and a blender. (Storage tip: you can pour a homemade puree into an ice cube tray and freeze it, and then just grab the cubes you need each time.)

Suggestions from Healthy Children

• Give your child a wide variety of different foods (the more natural colors, the better).
• Vary the grains. As mentioned above, it’s best to limit rice and rice products (check labels — rice is in a lot of foods marketed for babies, like “puffs”). Try barley, oats, and other grains. When cooking rice, it’s best to cook it in extra water and drain that water off, and to use white basmati and sushi rice, which have less arsenic.
• Check your water. Old pipes can contain lead, which can leach into drinking water.
• Avoid fruit juices. Not only can they increase the risk of cavities and obesity, but many commercial juices also contain heavy metals.
• Make healthy fish choices. Fish contains nutrients that are very healthy for the developing brain, but some fish can contain unhealthy amounts of mercury. Stay clear of big, predatory, long-living fish like swordfish, shark, or albacore tuna; it’s better to choose fish like cod, light tuna, salmon, or pollock.

In the meantime…

• The lawsuits!  At least 69 had been filed as of April 29.
• The New York Attorney General is also looking into this.

Thanks to Sinead Boylan in Australia for alerting me to this paper about the influence of the meat and dairy industries on climate change policy.  The authors are Environmental Science colleagues at NYU.

The Study: The climate responsibilities of industrial meat and dairy producers.  Oliver Lazarus & Sonali McDermid & Jennifer Jacquet.  Climatic Change (2021) 165:30.

Method: The authors examined the role of 35 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies in actions related to preventing climate change. But in particular, it investigated “the transparency of emissions reporting, mitigation commitments, and influence on public opinion and politics of the 10 US meat and dairy companies.”

Its overall conclusion: “all 10 US companies have contributed to efforts to undermine climate-related policies.”

Through a questionnaire, it found (these are direct quotes):

• All 10 US companies have contributed to research that minimizes the link between animal agriculture and climate change (Q11). Three companies—Tyson, Cargill, and Smithfield—have contributed directly to what Brulle (2014) called “climate change countermovement organizations” or organizations that have minimized the link between agriculture and climate change (Q13).
• Four companies—Tyson, National Beef, Smithfield, and Hormel—have each made statements linking climate change regulation with potentially harming their profitability, either in an SEC form or in an annual report (Q17…).

Through researching OpenSecrets

• Nine of the 10 companies have spent at least $600,000 on lobbying activities since 2000, with five of those companies spending over $14 million each…Tyson has spent the most on lobbying—$25 million—over the last two decades.
• Cargill has spent $21.5 million; Smithfield Foods, $21 million; Dean Foods, $16 million; and Dairy Farmers of America, $14 million….
• Combined, the companies have spent a total of $109 million on lobbying activities since 2000.
• The other nine US-based companies [the tenth, Koch Foods, did not report] have spent a combined $26 million on political campaigns since 2000.
• Dairy Farmers of America has spent the most, at $6.3 million since 2000. California Dairies has spent $5 million; Dean Foods, $4.3 million; Cargill, $4 million; and Tyson, $3.2 million.
• Since 2000, Tyson has spent more on Republican candidates in every election cycle but one, and a similar pattern was observed for most of the companies examined here.
• US meat and dairy companies act collectively…Together, six of these [trade] groups—the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the International Dairy Foods Association, and the combined expenses of the American Farm Bureau Federation and its state groups—have spent nearly $200 million in lobbying since 2000, lobbying yearly on climate related issues like cap-and-trade, the Clean Air Act, and greenhouse gas regulations and reporting rules.
• A recent sustainability report published by the US pork industry noted that “pork production contributes just 0.46% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere” (Pork Checkoff 2020).
• In 2019, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association published a 21-part series, “Tough Questions About Beef Sustainability,” that, among other things, claims US beef production accounted for just 1.9% of total US emissions in 2014 (Beef Research 2019)

Their analysis also suggests: “the level of influence generally corresponded with emissions. Tyson, for example, is the largest emitter of the 10 US companies.  Tyson received the highest total influence score in response to our 20 questions at 15, tied with National Beef Packing Company, the fourth highest emitter.”

Overall: “In the case of the USA, our analysis provides evidence to suggest that the 10 largest meat and dairy companies have worked to frame the conversation, influence climate-related policies, and minimize the link between animal agriculture and climate change.”

Comment: This issue matters because animal agriculture is estimated to contribute 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions.  This, and industry behavior around this issue, is a reason why sustainability needs to be part of Dietary Guidelines, and “eat less meat” is good dietary advice for people in industrialized economies.

Hi.  After last week’s follow.it fiasco, I’ve transferred the subscription service to one called ActiveCampaign.  The e-mails should be sent out as soon as I post them, look a lot better, and will not come with ads.  You should have gotten a message from ActiveCampaign asking you to Verify that you wish to continue the subscription.  If you don’t see it, check your spam folder (that’s where I had to look for mine).   Everything should be back to normal starting Monday.  I am truly sorry this happened and for the inconvenience.  Thanks for subscribing and for your patience with this electronic glitch.  Onward!

–Marion

J.L. Anderson.  Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America.  West Virginia University Press, 2019.

I saw this book in the office of my food historian colleague, Amy Bentley, and snatched it up.

I love the title.

The book is a well researched history of pigs, feral and domestic, in the United States, from colonial times to the present, from free-range to CAFO, from waste as fertilizer to waste lagoons, and from lard to lean.

The book is fabulously illustrated with dozens of reproductions of etchings, drawing, and photographs of pigs in all their glory, as well as their confinement and butchery.

If you want to know how pigs arrived in America, how farmers treated them, how their numbers grew, and their place in U.S. diets, this book has it all.

But for me, the title is the best part of this book.  I was disappointed in its lack of a more forceful discussion of how pigs exemplify larger issues of corporate power and capitalism in today’s society.  The index has not one listing for “capitalism,” “neoliberalism,” or “pig industry.”

Unless I missed others, only two sentences bear directly on “Pigs, Pork, and Power:”

What about the farmers who continue in the pig production business, including the large-scale enterprises, contractors, and independent producers?  While it is difficult to generate much sympathy for the corporate leaders and integrators who are more concerned about shareholders and the bottom line than about communities, it is important to remember that many farmers and farm wage workers care about the animals they raise and the communities in which they live (p. 220)

For a recent update on the politics of pig farming, see Charlie Mitchell and Austin Frerick’s The Hog Barons, on Vox (April 19).  This article focuses on Jeff Hansen, Iowa’s largest hog producer.

Hansen’s company, Iowa Select Farms, employs more than 7,400 people, including contractors, and has built hundreds of confinement sheds in more than 50 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Since they began to arrive in the 1990s, these sheds have provoked controversy. Citing damage to health, livelihoods, property values, the environment, and the farm economy, rural communities in Iowa have campaigned fiercely against them.  While their efforts have yielded small victories, they have lost the war: The state’s hog industry, led by Hansen, has cultivated close relationships with state politicians on both sides of the aisle to roll back regulations, and confinements have flooded the countryside. The Hansen family’s charitable efforts have seemingly solidified these ties; it’s not unusual for a sitting governor to attend a charity gala thrown by the Hansens.

The big issues in that chocolate you like so much: low prices for farmers, unsustainable practices, child labor.  These are still with us.

• European governments and legislators urged to help cocoa farmers as prices continue to fall in West Africa:  Fairtrade urges EU to implement regulation to recognise the right to living income in cocoa sector in any forthcoming human rights due diligence regulation, as European Cocoa Association calls for an ‘enabling environment’ across the industry. Read more
• New Oxfam study shows cocoa suppliers still falling short on supply chain transparency:  The world’s largest food and beverage companies and their suppliers must do more to create an equitable and sustainable food system for all, says Oxfam. Read more
• Cocoa giants face fresh US lawsuit over child labour claims in Cote d’Ivoire:  Multi-national cocoa companies Nestlé, Cargill, Barry Callebaut USA LLC, Mars, Olam, Hershey and Mondelēz have been named as defendants in a federal class action lawsuit in the United States on behalf of eight Malian boys who have alleged they were used as slave labour on cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire for one or more of the firms. Read more
• NORC final report released – finds over 1m cases of child labour in West Africa’s cocoa sector:  Long-awaited US government-funded report from National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC) that assesses progress in reducing child labour in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana’s cocoa regions shows figures are lower than previously thought (1.56 million compared to estimates of 2.1 million in 2013/14) but it is still a sobering read for the chocolate industry, despite some signs of progress in trying to eradicate the issue. Read more

The new subscription system to Food Politics has ads.  I did not know that either.  I am looking into other methods.  Apologies again.  Please stay tuned.