The New York Times describes the enormous gap between the pay of company chief executives and their employees.

Its two printed pages of lists compare CEO total annual compensation (in millions of dollars) to the median pay of employees (in $ thousands).  

Median means half the employees get that amount or more, but the other half gets that amount or less.

I looked for the data on companies that produce, food, beverage, or agricultural products.  I could not find many (where is Coca-Cola?).  Several of the companies of interest—Monsanto, Sysco, and Procter & Gamble, for example—list the pay of the CEOs, but not employees.

Even so, the comparison is striking.  Repeat: CEO pay is in $ millions; worker pay is in $ thousands.

The Times interactive lists provide calculations of the ratios (and its account explains the limitations of these data—part-time work, etc).

If you need quantifiable evidence for income inequality, here it is.

American Farmland Trust has a new report out documenting the rapid loss of farmland to urban and suburban development.

Action Aid USA has videos demonstrating how “Agribusiness Is Devastating to Family Farmers, Rural Communities, and the Environment.”

One of the industry newsletters I read regularly is GlobalMeatNews.com, which occasionally collects articles on specific topics into “special editions.”  This one is about pork.

Still the most-consumed meat in the world, the pork sector is shifting quickly with global markets opening for processors on a weekly basis. In this special newsletter, we look at the lucrative Chinese market that everyone is looking to break into, as well as work being done to tackle diseases in the pork sector.

• Canada heads to China to expand pork and beef exports: Canada is aiming to boost its position in the global meat market by initiating discussions with China in order to strengthen trading relationships and to pursue other opportunities across the agricultural sector… Read
• Chinese pig meat imports slow during first quarter: Chinese pig meat imports declined 10% compared with 2017 levels during the first quarter of this year… Read
• HKScan launches pork exports to China: Finnish processor HKScan has launched pork exports to China from its Forssa production unit… Read
• Access for US pork in Argentina takes a step closer: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Argentina’s Ministry of Agro-Industry have finalised technical details for US pork to be imported into the South American country… Read
• University study finds growth link between pork and formula-fed infants: The University of Colorado has published a report that supports pork as an important source of protein in an infant’s diet when transitioning to solid foods… Read and see note below.
• Poland’s wall to tackle ASF should have been built four years ago, say meat experts: The Polish Government’s decision to build a 1,200-kilometre-long fence along the country’s eastern border, as a tool to fight African Swine Fever (ASF) by blocking the migration of infected wild boars, has been condemned as too little, too late by Poland’s meat sector… Read
• Supermarkets urged to end poor pig welfare in WAP campaign: World Animal Protection (WAP) has launched a global campaign calling on supermarket chains to source their pork from high-welfare farms… Read

A note on the pork study: it elicited a tirade in the New Food Economy about how so much of nutrition research is correlational and says little about causation.  The writer singles out the pork study as one of three examples of possible misuse of statistics.

Feeding infants puréed pork and increased body length? Trick question. P = 0.001—so something really seems to be happening. But does greater body length in infants actually matter? We’ll let the scientists pursue this one on their own until they come up with something that’s not just statistically significant but meaningful…The point isn’t to prevent you from snacking on prunes and chocolate while you shovel puréed pork into the baby. Do it if you want to, and given the marvelous powers of the placebo effect, you’ll probably be happy you did. But stop treating studies like these as if they contain the truth.

The study, no surprise, was sponsored by NIH but also by the National Pork Board, among other industry groups.  The Pork Board issued a press release: “New Study Finds Pureed Pork Supports Infant Growth.”

The Government Accountability Office reports that

Under the Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill), each member of a farming operation that is a general partnership can generally receive directly or indirectly up to $125,000 per year through the applicable programs if the member meets eligibility requirements, including being determined to be actively engaged in farming.

The GAO’a full report provides the data for 2015:

For those USDA program payments requiring active engagement in farming, we determined that

• USDA distributed about $2.7 billion in payments to 95,417 entities, such as corporations, general partnerships, joint ventures, and limited liability companies;
• USDA distributed an average of $884,495 in payments to the 50 farming operations receiving the highest payments for 2015; and
• General partnership members’ payments were predominantly based on members’ claimed contributions of combined management and labor (74.6 percent) and management (23.1 percent), while labor was 2.3 percent.

To game this system, it’s best to have many individuals qualifying for maximum payments.  Here’s how that works:

Will the new farm bill, if it ever passes, do a better job of supporting small farmers and fruit-and-vegetable (“specialty crop”) producers?  It doesn’t look like it at this point, alas.

Plant-based meats are touted as the technological solution to the health and environmental problems caused by excessive meat-eating.   Venture capital is flooding to what seems like a hot new market.

One objection to these products is that they are heavily processed and contain long lists of processing ingredients (my emphasis on the color ingredients).

The Beyond Burger: pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, water, yeast extract, maltodextrin, natural flavors, gum arabic, sunflower oil, salt, succinic acid, acetic acid, non-GMO modified food starch, cellulose from bamboo, methylcellulose, potato starch, beet juice extract (for color), ascorbic acid (to maintain color), annatto extract (for color), citrus fruit extract (to maintain quality), vegetable glycerin.

The Impossible Burger: water, textured wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein, natural flavors, 2% or less of: leghemoglobin (heme protein), yeast extract, salt, soy protein isolate, konjac gum, xanthan gum, thiamin (vitamin B1), zinc, niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin (vitamin B2), vitamin B12.

I was intrigued by this article from Food Navigator about the color problem.  Plant-based meats are naturally an unappealing grey and need color to make them appear palatable. What to do?

According to botanical extract supplier, Naturex, whose portfolio includes colouring foods, plant-based meat analogues are “a booming sector​” and, with colour one of the most important factors in determining a food’s appeal, manufacturers are interested in natural ways to colour meat alternatives.

Category manager for natural colours at Naturex Nathalie Pauleau said that carmine, derived from cochineal insects, is the most frequently used colour for real meat applications but cannot be used in plant based products because it is not vegetarian.

Vegetable-based alternatives include beetroot or red radish concentrates that deliver good colouring results, and in Europe, both can be classified as colouring foods, ​she said.

But there are big problems with color stability under conditions of heat and high or low pH.  If manufacturers want a browner color, carmelized sugar sometimes works.

As for the “bleeding” burger produced by Impossible Foods: this is

a plant-based burger made from the standard base ingredients of wheat, potato and soy protein. The addition of its IP-protected ingredient, leghemoglobin, however, means that the burger’s label lists added flavours but no colours.  Leghemoglobin is a heme molecule similar to myoglobin and haemoglobin that make blood and meat red but is found in the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants such as soy, meaning it is vegetarian-friendly. When added to the burger, it looks like blood.

And how do these taste?  Not bad, by most reports.

But one of my personal food rules is never to eat anything artificial.  These products are off my dietary radar.

The House version of the farm bill is in a mess right now and there is much to say about both its process (highly politicized) and content (thoughtless, mean-spirited, and just plain nasty).  I will be singling out specific pieces for comment every now and then.

Let’s start with a proposed amendment that the House soundly defeated.  AP reporter Candace Choi succinctly summarized the significance of this defeat: Big Sugar beats back Big Candy.

I’ve discussed our absurd Big Sugar policy in previous posts.

For decades, despite endless reform attempts, U.S. sugar policy has protected the interests of producers of sugar cane and sugar beets.

Basically, current policy maintains the price of domestic sugar at a level higher than the market price in order to protect politically powerful sugar cane growers in Louisiana and Florida, and somewhat less powerful—but far more numerous—growers of sugar beets.

American consumers pay more for sugar, but only an average of $10 per capita per year, not enough to get people upset.

The big losers are candy makers and other commercial users of cane and beet sugars.  Soft drink makers are relatively unaffected because they mostly use high fructose corn sweeteners.

Reps. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) sponsored an amendment to the farm bill that would require the sugar industry to repay the government if and when its loan program operates at a loss.

The sugar program is not supposed to cost taxpayers any money because it keeps prices high enough so that loans get paid back.  But in 2013, prices fell and the USDA had to buy surplus sugar at a loss of $259 million. The Congressional Budget Office says that the sugar program will cost about taxpayers about $76 million over the next decade.

Nevertheless the House defeated the sugar amendment by a vote of 137 to 278.  How come?  Louisiana and Florida are key election states.  Sugar beet growers operate in practically every northern state in the U.S.

The successful fight to defeat the amendment was led by the American Sugar Alliance.  The Washington Post reports how the Alliance paid for an advertising campaign positioning the growers it represents as victims.

A full-page ad in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal featured a picture of two Louisiana sugar planters and the words: “Excluding us from loans available to other crops isn’t ‘modest reform,’ it’s discriminatory. Don’t cut sugar farmers out of the Farm Bill. Oppose harmful amendments.”

And so the House did.

This is only the latest episode in attempts to reform sugar policy.  Chalk this one up as a win for Big Sugar, as Candace Choi so nicely pointed out.

Food and Water Watch has a new report advocating a ban on factory farms.

Why?  Because factory farms:

• Produce enormous volumes of waste
• Fuel climate change
• Pollute air and water
• Exploit workers
• Harm animal welfare
• Drive antibiotic resistance
• Harm rural communities

This is ten years after the report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (on which I served).

Not much has changed but this new one is particularly well researched and is a welcome addition to the ongoing debate.