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.

When I saw the title of this study, I had two questions:

• Why would anyone do a study like this? (OK, in short-term studies, consuming water or soup before meals reduces immediate calorie consumption, but in the long term?)
• Who paid for it?  (Getting the answer to this one took some digging).

The study: Association between soup consumption and obesity: A systematic review with meta-analysis. M.Kuroda and K. Ninomiya. Physiology & Behavior,  Volume 225, 15 October 2020, 113103.

Conclusion: “soup consumption is significantly related to lower odds ratio of obesity…suggesting that soup consumption was inversely correlated with a risk of obesity.”

Jeff Miller.  Avocado: A Global History.  Reaktion Books, 2020.  

I did a blurb for this one:

Avocados is a welcome addition to the Reaktion food series, so filled with splendid facts, figures, and illustrations that I learned something new on every page.   I particularly appreciated Jeff Miller’s discussion of avocados as an international commodity—legally grown and traded but also the target of organized thievery and now too expensive for many of their growers to have for their own use.  This is a fascinating story, beautifully told.

This book comes early in the alphabetical listing of Reaktion Books’ Edible series, which includes dozens of single-food monographs from Apples to Wine.  I didn’t know they had blurbs on the back cover, but I was pleased to do this one, especially because I met Jeff Miller when he took the course I taught with Sidney Mintz in Puerto Rico in 2003 and appreciate his subsequent work as a food studies scholar.

The NCD [Non-Communicable Disease] Alliance has issued a press release for its latest report, Signalling Virtue, Promoting Harm – Unhealthy Commodity Industries and COVID-19

As the press release explains, the

new report details hundreds of examples of unhealthy commodity industries, led by Big Alcohol, Big Food, and Big Soda, leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial gain. This report raises concerns of corporate capture during the pandemic by the very industries that are fuelling the burden of NCDs worldwide and putting people at greater risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.

The Alliance released the report in conjunction with the  Global Week for Action on NCDs and the theme of accountability.

The report includes hundreds of case studies submitted from more than 90 countries of business responses to Covid-19, in these categories.

The report illustrates dozens of examples, and it’s hard to choose the most egregious from among so many possibilities.  I particularly appreciated this one.

This report is well worth a close look.  I found it highly instructive.

These USDA announcements about Disaster SNAP were forwarded to me by Kaitlyn Waugaman, MPH, RDN, LDN, who is in the Division of Preventive Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The one from August 27:

The one on September 8, a few weeks closer to the November election:

At issue: whether the more recent announcement violates the Hatch Act, as amended in 2012, which generally prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan politics while on the job.  According to the US Office of Special Counsel, the President and Vice-President are excluded from the Act’s provisions.  But the New York Times has raised questions about Trump’s use of the White House to announce his candidacy.

This is another example of questionable use of the Presidency, just like Trump’s notes in the Farmers to Families food boxes that I wrote about earlier.

I have complained previously how Covid-19 has exposed corporate capture of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency ostensibly responsible for ensuring “safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women.”

You don’t believe me?  Try this.

U.S. Department of Labor Cites Smithfield Packaged Meats Corp. For Failing to Protect Employees from Coronavirus: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited Smithfield Packaged Meats Corp. in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus. OSHA proposed a penalty of $13,494, the maximum allowed by law.

Or this.  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR CITES JBS FOODS INC. FOR FAILING TO PROTECT EMPLOYEES FROM EXPOSURE TO THE CORONAVIRUS: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited JBS Foods Inc. in Greeley, Colorado, for failing to protect employees from exposure to the coronavirus. OSHA proposed $15,615 in penalties.

They have to be kidding.  We are talking here, according to Leah Douglas’s statistics, about how more than 2500 Smithfield employees and more than 2700 JBS employees have been confirmed with Covid-19.

If these are the maximum penalties (!), how about assigning them to every one of those cases.

The companies can certainly afford it: Smithfield had $13.2 billion in sales in 2019, and JBS had $51.7 billion.

Never mind, even that pittance penalty is too high for the meat industry to accept.

Furthermore, Smithfield is appealing the fine.  A representative said the fine is

“wholly without merit” because the company took”extraordinary measures” to protect employees from the COVID-19 virus. And during the pandemic, Smithfield took direction from OSHA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Translation: “It’s not our fault.  It’s OSHA fault, the CDC’s fault, the USDA’s fault.

That’s not what the meatpacking workers’ union says.

Today [September 10], the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union, which represents1.3 million workersin meatpacking plants and other essential businesses, condemned the new U.S. Department of Labor fine on Smithfield Foods as completely insufficient in the wake of the company’s failure to protect meatpacking workers at its Sioux Falls, South Dakota which reported nearly 1,300 COVID-19 infections and at least four deaths among its employees. As the union for Smithfield workers at this plant, UFCW called today’s fine by the Trump Administration insulting and a slap on the wrist that will do nothing to help those already infected or prevent future worker deaths.

It issued a similar statement on the JBS fine.

The meat industry has rallied to the defense of its Big Meat members.  To wit: Meat Institute Issues Statement on OSHA Citation Related to COVID-19.  

The meat and poultry industry’s first priority is the safety of the men and women who work in their facilities [every time you read a statement like this, think of a red flag on the playing field—a warning that it means just the opposite]. Notwithstanding inconsistent and sometimes tardy government advice, (‘don’t wear a mask/wear a mask’/April 26 OSHA guidance specific to the meat and poultry industry) when the pandemic hit in mid-March, meat and poultry processing companies quickly and diligently took steps to protect their workers. Companies had to overcome challenges associated with limited personal protective equipment…Most importantly, as evidenced in trends in data collected by the Food and Environment Reporting Network and The New York Times, these many programs and controls once in place worked and continue to work. Positive cases of COVID-19 associated with meat and poultry companies are trending down compared with cases nationwide.

The Meat Institute actually has the nerve to cite Leah Douglas’s data to support its defense—this, while meat companies are refusing to provide accurate data.  (Even the union cites much lower figures despite its reports of workers being forced to stay on the lines without masks despite being ill or risk losing their jobs).

It details its arguments that all those illnesses and deaths are OSHA’s fault in yet another press release on September 14. 

I suppose we will now go through all this again for Tyson’s, where more than 10,000 workers have become ill.

Expect another of OSHA’s “slaps on the wrist” followed by the Meat Institute’s objections.

My colleague Lisa Sasson, who is a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association), sent me a copy of its September 11 newsletter.  This, she pointed out, contains this advertisement for  Canadian maple syrup.

Maple syrup, delicious as it is, is basically sugar(s) in liquid form.

But “health and performance benefits”?  They have to be kidding.  I clicked on Give it a turn!

The first thing up: “Pure Maple Syrup is packed with nutritional benefits.”

Oh come on.  We’re talking sugars here.

But the hype continues:

• Pure maple syrup from Canada contains vitamins and minerals – at approximately 110 calories per serving (2 tablespoons).  It is an excellent source of manganese and a good source of riboflavin. Pure maple syrup is also a source of calcium, thiamin, potassium, and copper.
• Scientists have identified more than 67 different plant compounds, or polyphenols, nine of which are unique to pure maple syrup. One of these polyphenols, named Quebecol, naturally forms when the sap is boiled to produce maple syrup.

I went to the USDA’s food composition database to see what it says about maple syrup.  Its figures are pretty close to what’s given in this ad, but so what?  Manganese and riboflavin are hardly nutrients of concern in American diets—many foods have plenty—and all the other nutrients listed are in too small amounts to bother to count.

But it continues:

Maple Syrup for Fitness

• Pure maple syrup can be a natural endurance booster for athletes because it is made primarily of carbohydrates. Since carbohydrates are the primary fuel for the body, it can help give athletes the energy they need. Use in homemade sports drinks and energy snacks for a readily available supply of energy that helps maintain your stamina.
• Pure Maple syrup contains manganese, which may help support healthy muscles.

Translation: Eat sugar!

As for manganese,

Manganese is present in a wide variety of foods, including whole grains, clams, oysters, mussels, nuts, soybeans and other legumes, rice, leafy vegetables, coffee, tea, and many spices, such as black pepper [1,2,5,10,11]. Drinking water also contains small amounts of manganese at concentrations of 1 to 100 mcg/L [5]. The top sources of manganese in the diets of U.S. adults are grain products, tea, and vegetables [4].

Maple syrup is delicious and I love it, but it is not a health food and should not be advertised to dietitians as such.  The ad is misleading and makes the Academy look like it’s not on top of efforts to mislead its members.

Nicolas Rasmussen.  Fat in the Fifties: America’s First Obesity Crisis.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.  

I wrote a blurb for this book:

Fat in the Fifties is a riveting analysis of the rise and fall of early concerns about the health consequences of obesity.  Rasmussen’s history is indispensable for understanding the social, psychological, political, and environmental origins of today’s obesity “crisis.”

Even though the prevalence of obesity was quite low—by current standards—in the 1950s, Rasmussen documents widespread professional and public concern.  These concerns drifted away in the 1960s and 1970s, overtaken by efforts to prevent coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death.   At the time, obesity did not seem to be an important coronary risk factor.  Rasmussen explains how all this happened, and does it well.

I had a personal interest in this book.  My father died of a heart attack in 1950—at age 47.  It was no coincidence that he was also an extremely overweight chain smoker.  Rasmussen’s book provides the context for this particularly tragic aspect of my family history and I found his analysis helpful.