The Trump Administration has poured billions of dollars into supporting Midwest producers of industrial corn, but to date is not doing anything in particular to help producers of corn-based ethanol.  Because Americans are not traveling as much, demand for gasoline is down and so is demand for fuel ethanol (required by law to comprise 10% of automobile fuel).

The ethanol industry is unhappy about this situation, and is accusing the Trump Administration of reneging on its promises.

This secret list of promises, the vast majority of which have not been fulfilled, was first reported by Reuters today and offers powerful evidence of the Trump administration’s failure to support ethanol, despite his rhetoric. This secret list also highlights how Senator Ernst and Grassley have failed to follow through on their own promises to fight for Iowa farmers with this administration, despite their rhetoric. Just last week, Senator Ernst touted herself as a “tireless advocate” for the ethanol industry yet by never releasing the list of White House ethanol promises she has avoided having to call out the President for the full extent of his failures.

What’s all this about?  Money, of course.

But I don’t have much sympathy for ethanol producers.

I don’t think corn—a food mainly for animals but also for people—should be used as fuel for cars.

For one thing, it takes almost as much energy to produce a gallon of ethanol as it does to produce gasoline.  The best that can be said is this:

Energy is required to turn any raw feedstock into ethanol. Ethanol produced from corn demonstrates a positive energy balance, meaning that the process of producing ethanol fuel does not require more energy than the amount of energy contained in the fuel itself.

If you want details, see the USDA’s report on ethanol energy balance.

An astonishing 40% or so of US corn is grown to produce ethanol.

I’m not the only one who thinks growing food to fuel cars is ridiculous, or—more politely—needs rethinking.

As a crop, corn is highly productive, flexible and successful. It has been a pillar of American agriculture for decades, and there is no doubt that it will be a crucial part of American agriculture in the future. However, many are beginning to question corn as a system: how it dominates American agriculture compared with other farming systems; how in America it is used primarily for ethanol, animal feed and high-fructose corn syrup; how it consumes natural resources; and how it receives preferential treatment from our government.

Another reason, as the USDA puts it: “Strong demand for ethanol production has resulted in higher corn prices and has provided incentives for farmers to increase corn acreage.”

Neither of those is good for the health of people or the planet.

Growing corn for ethanol makes no sense to me.  It’s too bad that the companies that invested in ethanol plants are hurting, but hey: that’s how capitalism works

I was pleased to see Jessica Fu’s article in The Counter: One year after a mass employee exodus, USDA’s research arm remains half-staffed. New work has ground to a near halt.

Long-time readers of foodpolitics.com will be familiar with  my distress at the USDA’s moving the Economic Research Service out of Washington DC to Kansas City, in a clear effort to destroy an agency that sometimes produced inconvenient research.

• September 21, 2018  USDA’s double-speak proposal to “improve” the ERS: brute-force politics
• May 28, 2019 USDA’s destruction of the Economic Research Service: A National Tragedy
• June 18, 2019 The tragic destruction of the Economic Research Service, continued
• July 10, 2019 One more time: the Economic Research Service tragedy  
• August 6, 2019 The true purpose of moving the ERS out of DC: “Drain the Swamp”

Fu supplies the data.

She also did some investigating.

“Everybody that was doing [work] on seeds, chemicals, and precision agriculture left—so all that work is wiped out completely,” MacDonald said. “We had a significant amount of work on the health and environmental impacts of industrialized livestock production. That was wiped out.”

Reports on tariffs, farm workers, honey bees, herbicide resistance, and antibiotic use in animal production are all among the work forfeited or delayed in the transition, according to an internal memo shared among staffers and reviewed by The Counter.

Her article points out that “some staffers believe” the ERS was targeted “because its findings frequently conflicted with political stances on food stamps, trade, and the environment.”  The USDA, of course, denies this, but the available evidence strongly supports this hypothesis.

I thought the ERS was the best kept secret in Washington—non-partisan researchers who reported on food system facts.  It got noticed.

An American tragedy indeed.

Today is the official publication date for my latest book.  This one is unusual for me.  It is tiny (4″ by 6″), short (fewer than 200 pages of text), and done in a Q and A format.  Kerry Trueman asks the questions in mini-essays.  I answer them in brief essays intended for anyone who eats.

I will be discussing the book via Zoom:

• Tonight (September 29):  at 6:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center.  Information and registration (required for Zoom link) here.
• October 1: with Clark Wolf as part of the Fales Library Critical Topics Series at 5:00 p.m., via Zoom.   It’s free but registration is required—here.
• October 4: I’m on a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival at 11:00 a.m.  Information about the festival, registration, and Zoom links is here.

The Table of Contents is here.  You can read the Introduction here.

More information is here

• About the Book
• About the Author
• Reviews
• Related Books

Buying options

• UC Press
• IndieBound
• Bookshop
• Powell’s
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon

Enjoy!

I.  Expert Opinion on Benefits of Long-Chain Omega-3 Fatty Acids (DHA and EPA) in Aging and Clinical Nutrition, Troesch B, et al.  Nutrients 2020;12(9):2555.

Conclusion: The evidence to date indicates that the provision of DHA and EPA through capsules, oral nutrition supplements, or enteral or parenteral formulas can help to regulate the inflammatory environment in a number of medical conditions and that this is linked in many cases to improved function, clinical course and outcomes.

Tom Philpott.  Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It.  Bloomsbury, 2020.  

Here’s my blurb:

In Perilous Bounty, Tom Philpott probes what’s wrong with Big Agriculture—examining how it depletes California’s water, poisons water in the Midwest, and ruins soil resources—and proposes ways to reconfigure the food system to better promote health and sustain the environment. This must-read book is deeply researched, compellingly written, and thoroughly inspiring.

And here’s a quick excerpt:

We have reached the limits of “market-as-movement” to transform the food system.  In an economy marked by severe inequality, wage stagnation, and persistently high levels of poverty, the market approach excludes the population that can’t afford to pay the higher prices of organic, local food or devote time to cooking from scratch.  It threatens to create an ecologically robust niche for the prosperous within a dominant food system that quietly lurches on, wrecking the environment and making people sick.  Well-off consumers should vote with their forks three times a day, but the pace of positive change they create has been no match for Big Food’s massive inertia and the rapid advance of climate change.  But something important has emerged over the same period: the stirrings of a new form of movement politics…  [p. 255]

I am interested in the politics of CBD edibles and supplements, and have been collecting items.  The big issue, of course, is regulation.

The FDA has a web page devoted to this topic:

FDA Regulation of Cannabis and Cannabis-Derived Products, Including Cannabidiol (CBD)

• Consumer Information
• FDA Communications
• Regulatory Resources
• Questions and Answers

Here are some recent articles on what’s happening with CBD.

• FDA chief Hahn says it would be ‘fool’s game’ to try to shut down CBD markets: FDA Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn, MD, in a speech on Wednesday that despite its continued concern about insufficient safety data FDA has no plans to try to shut down the CBD markets. Hahn said that would amount to a “fool’s game.”… Read more
• FDA report on CBD seen as ‘disappointing’ recap of status quo: A report on CBD delivered by FDA Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn, MD, was seen by food and dietary supplement industry stakeholders as offering little hope of a timely regulatory solution for the ingredient…. Read more
• Economic Viability of Industrial Hemp in the United States: A Review of State Pilot Programs: After a hiatus of almost 45 years, the 2014 Farm Bill reintroduced industrial hemp production in the U.S. through State pilot programs. This study documents outcomes and lessons learned from the State pilot programs.
•  GALLERY: Trend watching at the Cannabis Forum… ‘The hippies are being pushed out and the suits are coming in’:The hemp-derived CBD market is growing rapidly, although many CPG brands and retailers are waiting for clarity from the FDA on the regulatory path forward for cannabidiol before piling in, but what will distinguish the winners from the losers in this space? FoodNavigator-USA headed to the BevNET/Nosh Cannabis Forum in Santa Monica to find out. Read more
• CBD industry headed toward big overcapacity, expert asserts: The hemp/CBD industry may have gotten the cart before the horse in terms of extraction capacity and raw material supply, said an investment analyst familiar with the sector…. Read more
• FSAI issues updates to CBD food and supplement recall: The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) has updated its recall of CBD-related foods and food supplements that have flagged up safety concerns due to the presence of delta‐9‐tetrahydrocannabinol or THC…. Read more
• Hemp-based meat: New Zealand firm eyes 2021 launch for minimally processed, sustainable new product: New Zealand alternative protein firm Sustainable Foods is planning a 2021 launch for its hemp-based meat analogues, which will be made will locally-grown hemp and processed using the firm’s own hydroelectric power plant…. Read more
• USDA seeks more hemp comments: For the second time, the Agricultural Marketing Service re-opened the public comment period for its industrial hemp regulations, this time asking for comment by Oct. 8 on a dozen topics including disposal and remediation of plants containing too much THC, whether to allow a longer harvest window after samples are gathered for testing and whether to allow more laboratories to conduct THC tests.

Before getting into the statistics, let’s start with the on-the-ground reality: real people, often with small children, are too poor to feed themselves and their families properly.  For the human impact of pandemic poverty, see:

• New York Times Magazine: America at Hunger’s Edge

Prior to the pandemic, poverty and food insecurity were declining in America.

•  Census Bureau report: official poverty rate was 10.5 percent in 2019, down from 11.8 percent in 2018
• USDA Household Food Security report, 2019:  10.5 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time in 2019, down from 11.1 percent in 2018.

But now we have pandemic-induced illness, job losses, school closures, business closures.

• Food Research & Action Center report: more than one in 10 adults with children say they do not have enough to eat. The rates are double for Black and Latino households with children.
• IRI Market Research report: SNAP enrollments include 13% of American households (but this can be good for the retail food business)

The USDA won’t report on food insecurity for another year, so it’s difficult to know what’s happening right now.  USDA data on SNAP are available only through April.

Even then, early signs were alarming.

We badly need effective policies to protect people against hunger.

Additional USDA resources

• Food Security in the U.S.  Food security—access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life—is one requirement for a healthy, well-nourished population. ERS plays a leading role in Federal research on food security in U.S. households and communities.
• Food Security in the United States: This product provides information about publicly available data from national surveys that include the U.S. Food Security Survey Module. Technical information is provided to facilitate appropriate use of the data, and links are provided to access data online or to order the data files on CD-ROM.
• Statistical Supplement to Household Food Security in the United States in 2019: This supplement to Household Food Security in the United States in 2019 describes food insecurity and how it is assessed.

I’ve written previously (see this one, for example) about the meat industry’s role in keeping plants open despite worker illnesses, but much about the industry’s pressures on government has been based on conjecture.  No more.

In another example of the value of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), two groups have obtained e-mails documenting these pressures.

FROM PRO PUBLICA, September 14, 2020: “Emails Show the Meatpacking Industry Drafted an Executive Order to Keep Plants Open: Hundreds of emails offer a rare look at the meat industry’s influence and access to the highest levels of government. The draft was submitted a week before Trump’s executive order, which bore striking similarities.”

The e-mails indicate that the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), the trade association for the meat industry, essentially wrote President Trump’s executive order invoking the Defense Production Act, which forced plants to stay open and workers to continue working under unsafe and highly virus-transmissable conditions.

For example (and look on the site for #6, which does a longer and even more compelling comparison):

FROM PUBLIC CITIZEN, September 15, 2020: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the meatpacking industry worked together to downplay and disregard risks to worker health during the pandemic, as shown in documents uncovered by Public Citizen and American Oversight through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.”

The documents show that:

• The executive order signed by President Donald Trump regarding meatpacking plants, ostensibly invoking the Defense Production Act, was the result of lobbying by the North American Meat Institute, a meat-packing trade association, which prepared what appears to be the first draft of what would become the executive order;
• The North American Meat Institute repeatedly requested that USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue discourage workers who were afraid to return to work from staying home;
• Meatpacking plants asked the USDA to intervene on multiple occasions when state and local governments either shut them down over health and safety concerns or sought to impose worker health and safety standards; and
• Smithfield Foods repeatedly requested that the USDA “order” it to reopen its meat processing plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. – despite no legal basis for such an order.

WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE?

Check out Leah Douglas’s ongoing count of Covid-19 cases among meatpacking workers.  Her figures as of September 18, include at least:

• 804 meatpacking and food processing plants (496 meatpacking and 308 food processing) and 106 farms and production facilities have had confirmed cases of Covid-19.
• 59,430 workers (42,606 meatpacking workers, 9,571 food processing workers, and 7,253 farmworkers) have tested positive for Covid-19.
• 254 workers (203 meatpacking workers, 35 food processing workers, and 16 farmworkers) have died.

To state the obvious: corporate capture of government agencies and the presidency is not good for public health or American democracy.