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The Guardian and Food and Water Watch have produced a lengthy, interactive, and fact-filled investigative report, essential reading for anyone interested in how power is distributed in the US food system.

The report is a about how consolidation has increased the power of every segment of the food industry, and how that power imbalance threatens workers, consumers, and American democracy.

The size, power and profits of these mega companies have expanded thanks to political lobbying and weak regulation which enabled a wave of unchecked mergers and acquisitions. This matters because the size and influence of these mega-companies enables them to largely dictate what America’s 2 million farmers grow and how much they are paid, as well as what consumers eat and how much our groceries cost.

Here are some of the facts (and the Guardian summarizes others in an article on “The Illusion of Choice“):

• At least half of the 10 lowest-paid jobs are in the food industry. Farms and meat processing plants are among the most dangerous and exploitative workplaces in the country.
• Overall, only 15 cents of every dollar we spend in the supermarket goes to farmers. The rest goes to processing and marketing our food.
• Four firms or fewer controlled at least 50% of the market for 79% of the groceries. For almost a third of shopping items, the top firms controlled at least 75% of the market share.
• During the 2020 election cycle, the food industry spent $175m on political contributions, including lobbying by PACs and individuals and other efforts.
• Until the 1990s, most people shopped in local or regional grocery stores. Now, just four companies – Walmart, Costco, Kroger and Ahold Delhaize – control 65% of the retail market.
• Farmers received $424.4bn in subsidies between 1995 and 2020, of which 49% were for just three crops: corn, wheat and soybeans, according to the Environmental Working Group. Corn subsidies are the largest by a long way – $116.6bn – accounting for 27% of the total.
• At least half of the 10 lowest-paid jobs in the US are in the food industry, and they rely disproportionately on federal benefits. Walmart and McDonald’s are among the top employers of beneficiaries of food stamps and Medicaid, according to a 2020 study by a non-partisan government watchdog.
• Here in the US, there were 1.6bn animals living on 25,000 factory farms in 2017 – a 14% rise in just five years. Together, these animals produced about 885bn pounds of manure annually – equivalent to the human sewage generated by residents of 30 New York Cities.

The big news in food politics last week: revelations about toxic metals in baby foods.

This is not a new topic, as I’ve discussed previously with respect to arsenic in rice cereal.  Babies should be eating the healthy foods parents eat, just mashed or cut to size so they don’t choke.  Commercial baby food is a convenience for sure, but not at the price of babies’ health.

What’s new are these revelations:

• Arsenic, led, cadmium, and mercury are present in commercial baby foods at levels much higher than considered safe.
• Their sources: foods raised on contaminated soil and water, and vitamin/mineral pre-mixes.
• Baby food companies set their own safety standards for toxic metals.
• The FDA knows baby foods have high levels of toxic metals but isn’t doing anything about it.
• Some baby food companies refused to share data on this topic.

This news comes from, of all places, the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee in a report titled Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury

The Food and Drug Administration has set the maximum allowable levels in bottled water at 10 ppb inorganic arsenic, 5 ppb lead, and 5 ppb cadmium, and the Environmental Protection Agency has capped the allowable level of mercury in drinking water at 2 ppb. The test results of baby foods and their ingredients eclipse those levels: including results up to 91 times the arsenic level, up to 177 times the lead level, up to 69 times the cadmium level, and up to 5 times the mercury level.

Furthermore,

The Subcommittee has grave concerns about baby food products manufactured by Walmart (Parent’s Choice), Sprout Organic Foods, and Campbell (Plum Organics). These companies refused to cooperate with the Subcommittee’s investigation.

The Subcommittee complains:

• Contaminated baby foods do not carry warning labels
• Manufacturers do not have to test for heavy metals.
• The FDA has only one standard for heavy metals in baby food—a 100 ppb inorganic arsenic standard for infant rice cereal.  Even this is too high.

The Subcommittee recommends:

• Mandatory testing of baby foods for heavy metals
• Mandatory labeling of toxic heavy metals
• Voluntary phase-out of toxic ingredients (rice, for example, is high in arsenic)
• Mandatory FDA standards for maximum levels of toxic metals in baby foods
• Parental vigilance: Avoid commercial baby foods containing toxic heavy metals.

Consumer Reports, which has been complaining about this problem for years (see CR’s 2019 testing of fruit juices and CR’s 2014 tests) , explains:

Heavy metals all are part of the earth’s crust, so they are naturally found in the environment. But most of the heavy metals in food come from soil or water that has been contaminated through either farming and manufacturing practices (such as pesticide application, mining, and smelting) or pollution (such as the use of leaded gasoline).

Its recommendations for parents and caretakers:

• Ease up on fruit juice
• Consider making your own
• Minimize baby food snacks
• Vary the foods you feed your child

Its recommendations for the FDA:

• Establish aggressive targets
• Create and enforce benchmarks
• Finalize existing proposed guidelines

Comment: This is a scandal and an emergency.  Parents should be warned off  baby foods that test high in any of these heavy metals.  Now.

Press accounts:

• Washington Post: Worth reading for its account of previous reports by Healthy Babies Bright Futures
• New York Times: See its account of secret meetings
• FoodNavigator: How should the food industry respond?

Update, February 16: the FDA’s response to the congressional report

Brookings has a new report: Windfall profits and deadly risks: How the biggest retail companies are compensating essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We find that while top retail companies’ profits have soared during the pandemic, pay for their frontline workers—in most cases—has not. In total, the top retail companies in our analysis earned on average an extra $16.9 billion in profit this year compared to last—a stunning 39% increase—while stock prices are up an average of 33%. And with few exceptions, frontline retail workers have seen little of this windfall. The 13 companies we studied raised pay for their frontline workers by an average of just $1.11 per hour since the pandemic began—a 10% increase on top of wages that are often too low to meet a family’s basic needs. On average, it has been 133 days since the retail workers in our analysis last received any hazard pay.

In a blog about this report, Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria summarize its findings in these headlines:

• Bezos gets $73 billion; Amazon workers get 95 cents per hour
• CVS profits increase 27%; CVS workers get 2% raise
• Walton family adds $45 billion to its wealth; Walmart workers get 63 cents per hour
• Kroger cancels “hero pay,” authorizes $1 billion stock repurchases

How are these workers getting by?  Federal food assistanc.  A new government report has the data.

The report is titled “FEDERAL SOCIAL SAFETY NET PROGRAMS: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs.”

It finds that roughly half of Medicaid and SNAP enrollees work at least 35 hours a week, but make so little money that they qualify for these programs.

The employers of low-wage workers who get federal benefits are companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Waffle House, Kroger, Burger King, and Wendy’s.

What this means is that taxpayers are making up the shortfall in wages, and that use of Medicaid and SNAP are externalized costs of these businesses, as these reports make clear.

The USDA has a pilot program that permits most low-income families enrolled in SNAP (formerly food stamps) to use their benefits to buy groceries online.

This could be convenient and protect participants from Covid-19 exposure.

But food will be more expensive: SNAP does not cover delivery costs.

Only a few retailers at the moment can accept SNAP benefit payments: Amazon, Walmart, Fresh Direct, and Safeway/Albertson’s.

This situation has induced the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) to publish a research report that raises some serious questions.

According to the press release, the pilot program exposes SNAP participants

to a loss of their privacy through “increased data collection and surveillance,” as well as risks involving “intrusive and manipulative online marketing techniques.” The report reveals how online grocers and retailers use an orchestrated array of digital techniques—including granular data profiling, predictive analytics, geolocation tracking, personalized online coupons, AI and machine learning —to promote unhealthy products, trigger impulsive purchases, and increase overall spending at check-out….The increased reliance on these services for daily food and other household purchases could expose these consumers to extensive data collection, as well as unfair and predatory techniques, exacerbating existing disparities in racial and health equity.”

On the basis of this report, several advocacy groups jointly wrote the USDA Secretary to make sure that these retailers do not unfairly target or take advantage of SNAP participants.

Our request is based on a new study by the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), which finds that leading online grocery and e-commerce companies…are engaged in extensive data profiling, and deploying geolocation tracking, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral science techniques to track and target consumers, promote unhealthy products, and trigger impulsive purchases. Most of these operations are largely invisible, and CDD’s analysis of the companies’ privacy policies reveals that they fail to protect consumers from these data collection, targeting, and predatory marketing practices.

The letter has several “asks,” among them:

• Forbid the use of techniques that take advantage of consumers’ psychological vulnerabilities, or employ manipulative practices designed to foster impulsive behavior.
• Require participating retailers to prioritize healthier products in their ecommerce and online promotion efforts, discounts, and coupons.
• Facilitate the participation of smaller, independent retailers, farmers markets and other local produce suppliers.

These groups also plan to ask Congress to conduct oversight hearings.

It’s terrific that these groups are keeping an eye on this program.

I’m curious to see the percentage of SNAP participants who use the program and are willing to pay the higher delivery costs.

I imagine that the big retailers are for it.  As was documented in Michele Simon’s 2012 report—Food Stamps: Follow the Money—for some time, retailers are SNAP’s greatest beneficiaries.

With millions of people out of work, food insecurity is becoming a bigger problem than it has been. Some recent items:

From Politico: “Stark racial disparities emerge as families struggle to get enough food”

The last time the government formally measured food insecurity nationally was in 2018. At that time, about 25 percent of Black households with children were food insecure. Today, the rate is about 39 percent, according to the latest analysis by the Northwestern economists, which is set to be published this week. For Hispanic households with kids, the rate was nearly 17 percent in 2018. Today, it is nearly 37 percent.

From Northwestern, a new report: “Food Insecurity During COVID-19 in Households with Children: Results by Racial and Ethnic Groups”

Disparities in food insecurity across racial and ethnic groups are large. Across the eight weeks for which CHHPS microdata are available covering April 23–June 23, 41.1% of Black respondents’ households have experienced food insecurity in the prior week, as have 36.9% of Hispanic respondents’ households and 23.2% of White respondents’ households.

From the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project: “About 14 million children in America are not getting enough to eat”

Accounting for the number of children in these households, I find that 13.9 million children lived in a household characterized by child food insecurity in the third week in June, 5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many than did at the peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million). During the week of June 19-23, 17.9 percent of children in the United States live in a household where an adult reported that the children are not getting enough to eat due to a lack of resources.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “Boosting SNAP: 5 Reasons Why Households Need More”

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act of March included much-needed measures to temporarily increase SNAP benefits for many households and let state SNAP agencies temporarily modify procedures…But these temporary benefits didn’t help everyone who needs them, and they aren’t enough to help families afford food, given the challenges that COVID-19 and the downturn have presented. Here are five reasons why the next relief package needs to include an additional boost in SNAP benefits:

From The Counter: “Covid-19 has increased online SNAP purchases twentyfold—and Amazon, Walmart have a lock on virtually all those sales”

The USDA has been pushing online food sales for SNAP recipients, and COVID-19 is accelerating the trend.  The Counter article explains that

more than 750,000 households had used food stamps benefits online as of late June. That’s up from just 35,000 in March….As of early July, 43 states are approved to accept SNAP benefits online, and 39 have the program up and running.

The Counter also notes:

One thing is certain: At this point, two big retailers stand to benefit from the explosion in online SNAP sales. In 34 of the 39 states, Amazon and Walmart are the only participating grocers. The reasons why are likely logistical.. Few independent grocers have the web infrastructure to display and update their inventory online, making Amazon and Walmart a kind of duopoly by default. Even fewer have enough staff to assemble complex orders and deliver them to people’s homes. By contrast, Amazon and Walmart have been investing heavily in grocery delivery for years.

Comment

No matter how useful they are, online deliveries cost more and SNAP does not pay delivery costs.  Online also requires a computer and broadband access.  Do SNAP participants have these things?

The 750,000 housaeholds using the online system constitute a small fraction of the 19 million households enrolled in SNAP.

We have a long way to go to solve problems of food insecurity in this country.

Read these and you will be up to date on anything known about food systems in the age of COVID-19.

FAO and Hopkins Dashboard

This gives data on aspects of food systems—supply chains, food environments,  consumer behavior, diets and nutrition, and the effects of key drivers like climate change and income, 170 indicators in all—on the food systems of 230 countries and territories.  This is one-stop shopping for this kind of information.

• Press release 
• The Dashboard 

“What struck us back in 2017 while working on the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition Report was the lack of accessible, organised, quality-checked information on food systems. Without that data, it’s difficult to identify the best evidence-based actions that could improve food systems,” said Johns Hopkins Global Food Ethics and Policy Program Director Jessica Fanzo. “It was really important to us, given the level of complexity and interconnections inherent to food systems, that the data be presented in a way that is easily usable – and that’s what the Dashboard does. Now decision makers have easy access to both data and to policy advice that is specific to their situations.”

Oxfam: “Exposed: How US supermarkets are failing their workers in a global pandemic”

Oxfam analyzed the formal policies of major US supermarkets during the first months of the pandemic, including Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, Kroger, Walmart, and Whole Foods/Amazon in five key areas: paid sick leave, hazard pay, protective gear, engagement with workers and worker representatives, and gender and dependent care. While all of these supermarkets stepped up some of their policies, none of them are doing nearly enough as they continue to make outsized profits on the backs of their low-wage workers.

Here are the Press release and the report.

CGIAR: Actions to Transform Food Systems Under Climate Change

Nothing short of a systemic transformation of food systems is required if we are to feed the world’s current and future population sustainably under climate change…we aimed to identify the high priority actions that we must collectively take now, for climate change adaptation and mitigation in food systems.  [Note: CGIAR was formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, but now goes just by CGIAR]

Here is the report.

HLPE [High Level Panel of Experts] 15: Fooc Security and Nutrition: Building a Global Narrative Towards 2030.

Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HLPE was asked to urgently prepare an issues paper on the potential impact of the pandemic on global food security and nutrition for an extraordinary meeting of the CFS on 19 March 2020. The key findings and recommendations from this issues paper have been updated and included in this report…The current COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented in its global scale and the situation is changing rapidly, with many unknowns. It serves as a reminder of the fragility of the global food system and the importance of global coordination.

Here is the report.

Here are two ads sent to me last week.  Both have now been taken down.

This one, according to reader Tony Vassallo (thanks!) comes from the Walmart Supercenter Store 908 at 8101 South John Young Parkway, Orlando FL.  I’m not the only one who thought this was in bad taste (sorry).   After a Twitter storm, Pepsi took it down.

But what about this one?

I looked up Westbrook Mall: Calgary, Alberta.  This too caused an uproar.   The franchise owner apologized, explaining that he was struggling and hoped to generate business, and the sign is now gone, apparently.

The Business Roundtable’s Statement (and see B Corporation Statement below)

The Business Roundtable, an organization of corporations, issued a statement last week—in a two-page advertisement with all the signatures in the Wall Street Journal, no less—that got this New York Times headline: Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say.

What?  This is some kind of joke, right?

I’ve been arguing for years that the Shareholder Value Movement, which forced corporations to single-mindedly focus on maximizing profits at the expense of every other societal value—attention to the welfare of workers, farm animals, public health, environmental protection—is responsible for just about everything that is wrong with our food system.

Corporations are now saying that they are committing to change that?

The Business Roundtable’s press release says that it is redefining the purpose of corporations to promote an economy that serves all Americans—customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders.   Here is its website with all the commitment info.

Its statement, signed by nearly 200 corporations, commits them to [with my comments]:

• Delivering value to our customers [they aren’t already doing this?].
• Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits [this would indeed be a groundbreaking improvement].
• Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers [they weren’t doing this either?].
• Supporting the communities in which we work [another excellent idea].
• Generating long-term value for shareholders [isn’t this what they’ve been doing to the detriment of everything else?]

This sounds good, but how do they plan to solve the central dilemma?  How do they intend to pay workers decent wages, improve the communities in which they operate, and stop damaging the environment—and still maximize benefits for shareholders?

No surprise, they don’t say.

Also, as the Times noted,

There was no mention at the Roundtable of curbing executive compensation, a lightning-rod topic when the highest-paid 100 chief executives make 254 times the salary of an employee receiving the median pay at their company. And hardly a week goes by without a major company getting drawn into a contentious political debate. As consumers and employees hold companies to higher ethical standards, big brands increasingly have to defend their positions on worker pay, guns, immigration, President Trump and more.

I looked for food corporations among the signers (sorry if I missed any):

• Aramark
• Bayer (it owns Monsanto)
• Coca-Cola
• Land O’Lakes
• PepsiCo
• Procter & Gamble
• Walmart

This is a small list.  Where, for example, are Mars, Nestlé, and Unilever?

I see this as flat out public relations, a response to increasing public distrust of corporate America and demands for corporate accountability.

If the signers mean business, let’s see them deal with workers’ wages right away.

Otherwise, I’m not holding my breath

The B Corporation Statement

And here’s more.  Sunday’s New York Times carried this advertisement from Certified B Corporations “meeting the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.”

The ad is addressed to Business Rountable CEOs.

We are part of a community of Certified B Corporations who are walking the walk of stakeholder capitalism…We operate with a better model of corporate governance—benefit corporate governance—which gives us, and could give you, a way to combat short-termism and the freedom to make decisions to balance profit and purpose.

Among its food company signers are Ben & Jerry’s, Cabot Creamery Cooperative, Danone North America, King Arthur Flour, Sir Kensington’s, Stonyfield Organic, and Stumptown Coffee (there are others, as well).

I read this as a challenge: if the Business Rountable CEOs are serious about ensuring as B Corporations do, that “the purpose of capitalism is to work for everyone and for the long term,” why don’t they start by becoming B Corporations?

Until they do, the Business Roundtable statement is smoke and mirrors, to distract us from the damage the corporations are doing to our society and to our democratic institutions.