Food + Policy | Civil Eats

How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive

Jake Price — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 09:00:07 +0000

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The post How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive appeared first on Civil Eats.

Our Reporting Is Now Free for Everyone

The Civil Eats Editors — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:00:51 +0000

When Civil Eats launched in 2009, no major media outlets focused on the relationship between food and other significant social and political issues. For the past 15 years, we have led the charge in creating robust conversations around food and farming, and worked to make complicated, underreported stories more accessible to a mainstream audience.

In that time, our stories have had significant impact and reach, thanks in part to support from our readers and donors. We raised an unprecedented $100,000 via Kickstarter in 2013; we were named Publication of the Year in 2014 by the prestigious James Beard Foundation; we were inducted into the Library of Congress in 2019; we won a 2022 IACP Award for best newsletter for our members-only monthly column, The Deep Dish, which also won best newsletter from the Online News Association in 2024; we were awarded a James Beard Foundation Media Award for our 2022 investigative series on animal agriculture workers, Injured and Invisible; and we were nominated for best micro newsroom by the Online News Association twice, in 2023 and 2024. Here is a list of our many other awards and recognitions.

In order to make it all work, in 2015, we put up a paywall—like many independent nonprofit news organizations have done. Readers could access a small number of articles for free, and they could pay to become a Civil Eats member and get full access to our reporting. Our members care about independent food systems news, and the membership program has been critical in supporting our work as a small, nonprofit newsroom.

We’ve always wanted to remove our paywall in order to make our journalism free and accessible to everyone. And in our surveys, we heard that sentiment from members, too. Because the membership program provided a significant amount of our budget, removing the paywall has been a constant concern. Until now.

We are thrilled to announce that, in honor of our 15th anniversary, two generous funders, the 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation, and GRACE Communications Foundation, have provided us funding to help us remove our paywall for one year. Our reporting will now be free to everyone, everywhere.

But we will still need your support! In order to keep our paywall down, we’re launching a membership drive to keep the site free, open, and accessible to all beyond this first year.

Without you, Civil Eats’ stories don’t just go unread—they go untold. Become a member today by making a contribution to ensure our vital reporting continues and thrives.

Membership Has Its Benefits.

Join the thousands of members who are driving systemic change in the food and farming landscape and receive benefits like:

The Weekly Newsletter: a rundown of all of our recent reporting;
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Have questions about the paywall and/or its removal? Check out our FAQ.

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Project 2025 Calls for Major Cuts to the US Nutrition Safety Net

Grey Moran — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:00:41 +0000

Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for the executive branch, has gained feverish political attention in recent weeks as a central talking point of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and many speakers at the Democratic National Convention. The sweeping, 920-page document calls for drastic overhauls of federal agencies as well as the erosion of civil rights and the expansion of presidential powers. It’s an agenda many have described as authoritarian.

While the ultraconservative vision has received much scrutiny, its proposal to sharply cut the federal nutrition safety net—and the devastating impacts this could have on food security and hunger—has largely flown under the radar. These plans are detailed in the project’s chapter on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which calls for drastically narrowing the scope of the agency to primarily focus on agricultural programs. This would involve radically restructuring the USDA by moving its food and nutritional assistance programs to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“Proposing to reduce benefits to millions of people who are counting on food assistance for their basic well-being is alarming.”

Criticizing the USDA as “a major welfare agency,” the agenda takes issue with the agency’s long-standing nutrition programs that help feed millions of low-income Americans every year, including pregnant women, infants, and K-12 school children. It outlines policies that would substantially cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). It would also shrink federal support for universal school meal programs.

“We have really effective federal food assistance programs that are evidence-based, and there’s just a long history of seeking to continuously improve them,” said Stacy Dean, the former deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services at the USDA under the Biden administration. Project 2025’s plan would reverse that trajectory. “Proposing to reduce benefits to millions of people who are counting on food assistance for their basic well-being is alarming,” she said.

The proposal to restructure the USDA builds on a previous Trump-era proposal to consolidate federal safety net programs. This included moving SNAP and WIC–which it rebranded as welfare programs, a term often used pejoratively–from the USDA to HSS. It’s a move that experts pointed out would likely make these programs easier to cut, including by designating them as welfare benefits, often deemed unnecessary by conservatives.

“I think the effect would be to make [nutritional programs] more vulnerable to a kind of annual politics on Health and Human Services issues,” said Shawn Fremstad, a senior advisor at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who researches food assistance programs. He notes that the level of vulnerability would partially depend on whether these programs are mandatory or discretionary spending programs in HHS.

As Project 2025 has gained scrutiny, Trump has publicly distanced himself from the proposal. The project was assembled and published by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has long helped set the conservative agenda and informed previous Trump policies. For instance, Trump’s 2018 proposal to restructure the federal government and move nutritional programs to the HHS was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation.

Many of the policies in Project 2025’s USDA chapter are a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s previous efforts to dismantle the federal nutrition safety net. This agenda stands in sharp contrast to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s recent endorsement of Trump as a president who will “make American healthy again.” Instead, as Trump’s former administration assumed its duties, guided by a transition team that included 70 former Heritage Foundation officials, it repeatedly targeted food and nutritional programs without any sign of changing this policy directive.

This agenda includes another conservative policy goal that was pushed for by the previous Trump administration and has been gaining traction on a state level: imposing stricter work requirements as a condition for receiving SNAP benefits. The plan references a Trump-era rule—which was challenged in court and abandoned—that would make it more difficult for states to waive SNAP’s work requirement for able-bodied adults without young children in regions of the country with high unemployment rates or a lack of jobs.

While Project 2025 doesn’t specify how it would tighten work requirements, re-introducing the Trump-era rule is one avenue alluded to in its agenda. The USDA estimated that this rule would have forced 688,000 recipients, unable to meet the work requirement of at least 80 hours per month, to leave the federal assistance program. It’s a rule that experts have pointed out can be challenging for gig workers with inconsistent schedules, people with undocumented health conditions, and people simply struggling to find work.

“You’re taking a vulnerable group of people, and you’re removing their one critical access point to food, which is SNAP,” said Dean. The group of adults affected by this policy “might be unemployed, temporarily unemployed, or they might be in jobs where the hours fluctuate dramatically, or they might have medical conditions that make it harder for them to work but not access to health care to document their health condition,” she added.

The tightening of SNAP work requirements is often proposed under the assumption that receiving SNAP benefits disincentivizes work, but this isn’t supported by existing academic research.

“These rules basically penalize people who are in need of food assistance for no economic gain,” said Pia Chaparro, a public health nutritionist and researcher at the University of Washington who has studied the program. “Research shows that SNAP participation reduces food insecurity but does not act as a disincentive to work. Moreover, research shows that the work requirements don’t lead to increased employment.”

The amount of supplemental assistance people receive on SNAP can stretch a food budget, but isn’t enough to disincentivize working, noted Ed Bolen, the director of SNAP state strategies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a progressive think tank. “The theory is that if you get $6.20 a day in SNAP, you’re not looking for work enough or not working enough hours. But $6.20 a day, it’s not going to pay your rent,” he said.

The Trump-era rule was struck down in 2020 by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who determined that it “radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving states scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans.”

Since the rule was blocked, employment levels have improved, but food insecurity has not. In fact, the USDA found that levels of household food insecurity soared to nearly 13 percent in 2022, exceeding both 2021 and 2020 levels. This has been attributed to both inflation and the end of pandemic food assistance. In 2022, 44 million people lived in homes without enough food, including 7.3 million children.

“I see these [proposals] as really doing a lot of harm to working-class communities, rural communities, urban communities alike.”

The proposal to tighten SNAP work requirements is one of many that would collectively chip away at federal food assistance programs that have supported low-income Americans for decades. It would also eliminate some of the streamlined processes that allow participants in other social benefit programs to more easily receive SNAP benefits, including a cash-assistance program for low-income families and a program that helps low-income households with the often steep costs of energy bills.

The plan also calls for reforming the voucher program for infant formula under WIC, which provides nutritional benefits to pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and children under 6 years old. Currently, states award contracts to whichever infant formula manufacturer offers the lowest net cost in a competitive bidding process. Project 2025 proposes to regulate this process (though it doesn’t specify how), claiming it’s driving monopolies in the marketplace. At the same time, the plan calls for weakening regulations on infant formula labeling and manufacturing to, in theory, prevent shortages.

“Upending this process could result in a funding shortfall, jeopardize access to WIC for millions of parents, infants, and young children, and result in higher formula prices for all consumers,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the CBBP. “WIC’s competitive bidding process for infant formula saves the program between $1 billion and $2 billion each year.”

Bergh pointed to a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences on supply chain disruptions in the U.S. infant formula market. It concluded that the “competitive bidding process is not the driver of industry concentration at the national level,” while also finding that eliminating the program would lead to higher WIC costs and higher formula costs for all consumers.

In yet another cut to food assistance for children, Project 2025 would also threaten the future of some universal school meal programs. This plan specifically calls to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, which was established in 2010 to allow schools in districts with high poverty levels to provide free meals for all students. This provision is widely used across all 50 states, providing over 19.9 million school children with free breakfast and lunch. The alternative, used in schools without CEP or another universal meal program, is to individually assess each student’s eligibility for free meal tickets.

Fremstad, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points to how CEP reduces the stigma of students being sorted into a different lunch line based on their family’s income, which can be a source of shame and behavioral issues. It also removes the penalties that low-income parents face when they can’t provide their child with money for school meals.

“We have a situation where there literally is something called ‘school lunch debt collection,’ where some schools have been sending debt collectors after very low-income parents to pay for their [child’s] lunch,” he said. It’s one of the many nutrition program cuts in Project 2025 that would further hurt working families, he continued.

“I see these [proposals] as really doing a lot of harm to working-class communities, rural communities, urban communities alike,” said Fremstad. “And I also see them as bad for middle-class people, who are often insecure in the middle class themselves.”

California poised to ban food dye in schools. The California Senate is expected to vote this week on a bill that would prohibit K-12 schools from serving food that contains synthetic food dyes. The bill would specifically ban six dyes—Blue No. 1, Blue No. 2, Green No. 3, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6 and Red No. 40. While the F.D.A. has maintained that these food dyes are safe, emerging research has found links between synthetic dyes and behavioral issues in children. The bill is the first of its kind in the nation, which could usher in more nationwide change and similar bills.

Kamala Harris Proposes Ban on Price Gouging. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has proposed the first federal ban on price gouging in the grocery store industry, aimed at curbing high food prices. “My plan will include harsh penalties for opportunist companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules,” said Harris, at a campaign speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on August 16, her first address on economic policies. This would be enacted through a Federal Trade Commission ruling, though details of the ban have yet to be unveiled.

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Is Recycled Plastic Safe for Food Use?

Meg Wilcox — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 09:00:22 +0000

Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.

Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website. Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of seven to eight per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.

Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont, and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India, and other countries.

“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective.”

The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30 percent recycled “soft plastic packaging.” The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100 percent recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35 percent recycled plastic film.

Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics. The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told EHN. Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to. In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals—such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others—than virgin plastic.

FDA spokesperson Enrico Dinges defended the process, telling EHN the agency “reviews [industry] data against stringent scientific guidelines” and can “use its resources to spot test materials” if it sees an issue.

But researchers say the agency fails to protect the public from the toxic chemical soup found in recycled plastics.

“[The] FDA is most concerned about pathogen contamination coming with the recycled material, rather than chemicals,” Maricel Maffini told EHN. The approval process “is very lax,” she said.

Recycled Plastic Is More Toxic

Globally, just 9 percent of plastic is recycled. Most is recycled mechanically, by sorting, washing, grinding, and re-compounding the material into pellets.

Most recycling centers collect a mix of materials, allowing milk jugs, say, to intermingle with detergent bottles or pesticide containers and potentially absorb the hazardous chemicals from those non-food containers. Recycling facilities that are set up to collect one plastic type, such as PET bottles, can better control potential contamination, although chemicals could still be introduced from bottle caps or the adhesives in labels.

Hazardous chemicals can also be introduced when plastics are decontaminated and stabilized during recycling. Plastics degrade with recycling, “so you may need to add more stabilizers to make the material as robust as the virgin material,” Birgit Geueke, senior scientific officer at the nonprofit Food Packaging Forum, told EHN. “Recycling can therefore increase the material complexity and the presence of different additives and degradation products.”

Geueke, who led a review of more than 700 studies on chemicals in plastic food contact items, said that research on recycled plastics is limited. Despite that caveat, “there are a few studies really showing that contamination can be introduced more easily if you use recycled content.”

One study found 524 volatile organic chemicals in recycled PET versus 461 in virgin PET. Chemicals detected in the recycled PET included styrene, benzene, BPA, antimony, formaldehyde, and phthalates—chemicals linked to an array of health issues, including cancer, and the ability to hack hormones and cause development delays in children, obesity, and reproductive problems.

Most studies have focused on recycled PET, which is “not as prone to picking chemicals up,” in comparison to other plastics such as recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene, or PP, Geueke said. “HDPE milk bottles really take up chemicals during all stages of their life cycle, much more than PET bottles, and [those chemicals] are harder to remove, because they stick harder to the material,” she said.

Indeed, a study on recycled HDPE pellets obtained from various countries in the Global South identified pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals in the pellets.

FDA’s Lax Approach

The FDA must authorize all materials that contact food before they reach the market. To be authorized, a material cannot contain intentionally added cancer-causing chemicals nor any other chemicals that leach from the material at a level of more than 0.5 parts per billion.

But as Maffini pointed out, the FDA recommends, but does not require, the type of testing that manufacturers should do to ensure their products are safe, and it doesn’t always require them to submit any safety data, she said.

“If you tell the FDA the substance or substances used to make the plastic are not mutagenic or genotoxicant, and the exposure in the diet would be less than 0.5 parts per billion, FDA does not expect you to send any safety data [to back up these claims].”

In defense, the agency’s Dinges said, “the FDA has robust guidelines for the underlying scientific data that should be provided” by industry. But he also said, “it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure that their material meets all applicable specifications.”

For recycled plastics, companies may also voluntarily submit a requested review of their recycling process. In this case, the FDA asks companies to provide a description of the process, test results showing that the process removes possible incidental contamination, and a description of how the material will be used.

The FDA further advises manufacturers to conduct “surrogate testing,” which involves challenging recycled materials with, or submerging them into, different classes of hazardous chemicals that could theoretically contaminate the plastic, to determine whether the company’s recycling processes can eliminate those toxic chemicals.

Surrogate testing is the “best available practice” for evaluating chemical migration from recycled plastics, Gueke said, although research shows it works better for PET than for other plastics like PP or HDPE. Though the FDA doesn’t require surrogate testing, Tom Neltner, executive director at Unleaded Kids, said, “I don’t think you’re going to find a market in the industry without having gone through FDA review.”

Neltner, who formerly worked with Environmental Defense Fund’s Safer Chemical Initiative, said that in his experience, big food companies are skittish about using mechanically recycled plastic on packaging that touches food.

According to the FDA database of recycled plastic applications, two-thirds of the approvals are for recycled PET, for a broad range of products from drink bottles to clam shell containers for fruits and vegetables to tea bags. Most of the remaining approvals are for recycled PP for products including clam shells, disposable tableware, cutlery, caps, and lids; recycled HDPE for grocery bags, milk and juice bottles, meat trays, and disposable tableware, and recycled polystyrene (PS) for meat and poultry trays and clam shells.

Most requests are for mechanical recycling processes, though a couple dozen were submitted for chemical recycling, which uses an energy-intensive, largely unproven, process to convert plastics back to their original monomer chemicals. [The FDA no longer evaluates chemical recycling proposals for PET because it says the process produces material of suitable purity for food-contact use.]

Outdated Approach to Evaluating Toxics

“The FDA has been very reluctant to adopt a modern perspective,” Tom Zoeller, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told EHN, referring to testing for the effects of endocrine disruptors or for the mixtures of chemicals found in plastics.

FDA’s requirement that a chemical not exceed a threshold of 0.5 parts per billion is based on cancer risk, Zoeller said, and while that number is protective for evaluating exposure to a single chemical, “I’m not sure that means a lot, when you consider the 16,000 chemicals that are put in plastic.”

In other words, the FDA’s approach doesn’t account for multiple chemical exposures, even as research shows that chemical mixtures can have significant health impact. A European study, for instance, found that a mixture of nine different chemicals had a greater impact on children’s IQ than what was expected based on individual risk assessments.

“It’s the combination of chemicals that are impacting IQ and basically stealing human potential,” Zoeller said. “We are way behind the curve,” in assessing chemical risks, he added.

Dinges responded that “while it is unlikely that appropriately sourced and controlled feedstock will experience incidental contamination to any appreciable amount, potential incidental contamination is addressed by the FDA’s surrogate testing recommendations.”

Yet the ability to control feedstock is what worries experts. Researchers who found BPA and heavy metals migrating at higher levels from recycled PET compared to virgin PET, stressed that the plastic’s safety depends on transparency and cooperation across the value chain. Moreover, surrogate testing is not required.

Neither does FDA’s approach account for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can act at levels in the parts per trillion by disrupting metabolism, Maffini and Zoeller commented. “This concept that there’s a threshold below which there are no effects or no adverse effects is fundamentally incorrect,” said Zoeller.

Dinges countered that the “effects on the endocrine system are just one of many areas of toxicology that the FDA evaluates,” while also repeating industry talking points. “Endocrine activation . . . does not necessarily translate into toxicity,” he wrote. “Consumption of any food (for example, sugar) can activate the endocrine system.”

Such responses have led Zoeller to conclude that FDA has “become a foil for industry,” and that their “precautionary principle is applied to industry, not public health.”

Unless government agencies can do a better job at ensuring manufacturers are keeping chemical hazards out of recycled plastic, experts think it shouldn’t be used for food contact materials.

“I’m not a big fan of recycled plastic and food contact, because it’s really hard to know [if it’s safe], and I think producers have to be more careful than when they produce virgin materials,” Geueke said, adding that she thinks that only recycled PET should be considered because the other types so readily absorb chemical contaminants.

“If you have a very good process and can prove that it gets rid of most of the contaminants . . . but nobody knows whether that really happens or not,” she said.

This article originally appeared in EHN, and is reprinted with permission.

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Civil Eats Welcomes Momo Chang as Senior Editor

The Civil Eats Editors — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 09:00:41 +0000

Seasoned journalist Momo Chang joins Civil Eats as a senior editor. She is the former co-director of Oakland Voices, a community journalism training program and outlet of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Chang is a longtime journalist focusing on food, justice, health, and environmental stories. She is the former features editor and writer for Hyphen magazine, where she received national Asian American Journalists Association awards for her coverage of Asian American and Pacific Islander issues. She is also the former content manager at the Center for Asian American Media.

“I cannot be more thrilled to join Civil Eats’ editorial team,” Chang said. “I look forward to helping build on the canon of work that Civil Eats has been publishing for the past 15 years. Food is central to our lives, and Civil Eats maintains a vital role in bringing relevant information, analysis, and storytelling to the public.”

Chang spent her early years in journalism as a staff writer at the Oakland Tribune. Chang’s journalism career has been focused on elevating undertold stories, from the health impacts on refugee Vietnamese American women who work in nail salons to an Asian American farmer saving heritage seeds. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Guardian US, Edible San Francisco, Bon Appétit, PBS, and other outlets.

“Momo Chang is an extremely skilled editor, educator, and award-winning reporter,” said Naomi Starkman, founder, executive director, and former editor-in-chief of Civil Eats. “We very much look forward to working with her as a senior member of our team.”

Chang received a B.A. in Mass Communications and English from U.C. Berkeley, and an M.A. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Fusing her love of education and writing, she jumped into journalism after a short stint teaching at a high school.

In 2019, Chang was a part of a team to receive a James Beard Journalism Award for a San Francisco Chronicle project on Chinese regional restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. More recently, she wrote about commercial crabbers operating small vessels in the Bay Area amidst stricter fishing regulations. Chang also brings her deep community connections in the world of journalism and media to her new role at Civil Eats.

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On Cape Cod, the Wampanoag Assert Their Legal Right to Harvest the Waters

Emma Glassman-Hughes — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:00:55 +0000

This is the first of a two-part series.

On a recent spring afternoon, CheeNulKa Pocknett’s truck rattled slowly across Monomoscoy Island, the engine roar swallowing the caw of seabirds. It caught the attention of a gray-haired woman working in her garden who popped up from behind a wall of red and yellow tulips, a scowl shading her face.

“She knows me and doesn’t like me,” Pocknett said, casting a half-hearted wave in her direction. Pocknett, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, is a regular here on Mashpee’s Little River, a stretch of Cape Cod ringed by multi-story homes, each with its own private dock. He knows all the good fishing spots—or at least, what were once good fishing spots—along the murky perimeter.

Pocknett steered down a gravel driveway and parked between two wind-worn wooden houses, unfurling his 6’7” frame from the driver’s side, boots first. He hefted a 50-pound rake and stack of plastic baskets from the bed of his truck and tramped toward the river, ignoring the “private property” warnings staked around the backyard. Like his ancestors for 12,000 years, he had come to this river in search of a hard-shelled clam known as a quahog, and no amount of anti-trespassing signs could keep him away.

“They’re preventing us from practicing our culture, our right of ways, our livelihood.”

Pocknett sloshed through the shallows, waders dredging up brown clouds of mud. “This is nothing like ‘black mayonnaise,’” he said, referring to other areas where once-sandy bottoms are now thick sludge. “Here it’s actually not so bad.”

Low-lying Mashpee is carved from water: from mosquito-bogged marshes, pine-shrouded ponds, and rivers that wind in brackish ropes past condos and golf courses. Since the 1970s, much of the town’s waterfront has been privatized and developed by nonmembers of the Wampanoag tribe.

The manicured and serene landscape above the waterline belies tremendous damage below, where shellfish and finfish have thinned—and in some cases disappeared—due to nitrogen pollution emitted from multi-million–dollar developments and their septic tanks. Stripped of land and resources, a dwindling group of Mashpee’s Wampanoag is committed now more than ever to asserting their rights to hunting and fishing.

The Monomoscoy Island beach on Mashpee’s Little River, where CheeNulKa Pocknett frequently digs for wild quahogs (pictured right), with a private dock that extends into the water. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

These “Aboriginal rights,” as they’re legally known, are reflected in treaties between the U.S. and sovereign Indigenous nations, and grant unlimited harvests, even from private property. But not everyone on Cape Cod respects these rights, sometimes resulting in screaming matches and 911 calls. Wampanoag fishers, like Pocknett, are forced to shrug it off. Their work, they say, is to both triage a dying ecosystem and continue an essential expression of their heritage, sovereignty, and lifeways.

Under the April gloom, Pocknett waded deeper into the river, the current pulling at his knees. With a grunt, he plunged his rake into the water and dug in.

People of the First Light

For thousands of years, the Wampanoag—the “People of the First Light”—have harvested fish for food, trade, art, and fertilizer. A shellfish farmer as well as a fisherman, 39-year-old Pocknett can trace his lineage on these Atlantic shores well into the past, before poquauhock, in Algonquin, became “quahog,” before his ancestor, Massasoit, would be known as the first “Indian” to meet the pilgrims, and long before federal recognition (won by the Wampanoag in 2007) held any meaning for the Indigenous nations of this continent. For most of that time, the Wampanoag stewarded a thriving waterway.

When he isn’t raking for wild quahog, Pocknett manages the tribe’s shellfish farm, using modern aquaculture practices that are a footnote in the Wampanoags’ millennia-old relationship to the waterways of the Cape. Generations before Pocknett’s great uncle founded the First Light Shellfish Farm on Popponesset Bay, in the 1970s, Pocknett says it’s likely the tribe cultivated bivalve species and maintained the shallows with ancient clam gardening techniques, constructing “reefs” out of rocks in the sandy bottoms of the bays and rivers. The abundant eelgrass that once grew in those same waters fostered eels, scallops, and fish species like striped bass, all important elements of the Wampanoag diet, culture, and worldview.

CheeNulKa Pocknett reached down to grab the handle of a 50-pound bull rake used to dig quahogs on the Monomoscoy Island beach along Mashpee’s Little River. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

The natural abundance of the bay, however, has been severely diminished by development and nitrogen pollution. Today, Pocknett and his cousins receive funding from U.S. Fish and Wildlife to raise the tribe’s quahogs and oysters in that pocket of the Popponesset, a small body cradled on the Cape’s southwestern arm. Instead of clam reefs, the farmers use oyster cages and clunky steel rakes to manage their crop.

This helps the local ecosystem somewhat, as shellfish remove nitrogen from the water by absorbing small amounts into their shells. But the eelgrass is already gone from this bay, as are most of its wild fish. And First Light is not nearly big enough to replace what’s been lost, Cape-wide.

Off the farm, other bays and rivers that sustained past generations with abundant wild shellfish have been radically transformed, too. Areas that were once quahog hotbeds are now so mucky from nitrogen-fed algae that they’re inhospitable to growth. Aboriginal rights allow Wampanoags to cross public and private land to fish, but they don’t guarantee that there will be any fish in the water once they arrive.

Those sites that remain viable have limited fishing access. Many have been blocked by private developers, fences, or overgrown brush. But there are psychological deterrences, as well. The prospect of aggravated non-Indigenous neighbors is enough to keep some Wampanoags out of the water.

One of Pocknett’s cousins, Aaron Hendricks, worries that for Wampanoag youth, the once-proud practice of fishing is now entangled with shame. He recently recalled a day from his childhood when he was about four. His Aunt June took him fishing in Simons Narrows, down a dirt path that had previously “always been a way to the water.” A strange woman burst out of the property, “cussing, yelling, screaming that you can’t park here.”

Now 42, Hendricks has his own children to teach—except instead of taking the well-worn paths “my people showed me as a puppy,” he said, they sneak through “a briar patch and a thousand mosquitoes and poison ivy” to avoid confrontation. “Half the kids don’t even want to go because they hear the stories,” he said. “I don’t want to show them that. It scars them, type shit.”

Pocknett’s fishing trips can also devolve into ugly confrontations, pitting his tribe’s ancient claims to fishing grounds against the rights of property owners in newer developments. Pocknett often live-streams these encounters on Facebook, as he did four years ago, when a homeowner reported him and his brother for trespassing on a Monomoscoy Island driveway.

In that encounter, Pocknett accused the Mashpee police and natural resources officers of impeding his rights. In the footage, Pocknett’s voice throbs with rage: “We fish every day, they don’t care. They tell us that we’re nothing but a bunch of dumb Indians.” When asked about the incident, he was only slightly more measured. “They’re preventing us from practicing our culture, our right of ways, our livelihood,” he said.

The beach at Punkhorn Point on Popponesset Bay, where the First Light aquaculturists load their boats. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

Such confrontations are likely to continue. As of April, the tribe has 321 total acres of reservation land, designated by the Supreme Court when it ended a protracted legal battle that began in 2015. All but one of those acres, however, are landlocked. To fish as they’ve always fished, Wampanoags have no choice but to assert their Aboriginal rights on private property. So, Pocknett walks through yards.

Legal Precedent

Not everyone in Mashpee respects the rights of the Wampanoag. Non-Indigenous officials have historically misunderstood these rights—or ignored them. In recent years, for example, the local Shellfish Commission began discussing tribal fishing rights in its monthly meetings at the Mashpee Town Hall. Minutes from a January 2019 meeting note: “Can anyone pass through private property based on the colonial ordinance? It is still unknown.”

A few months later, minutes show that the commission discussed a statement issued by Wampanoag police claiming the tribe “has the right to access water to fish through any property.” The Commission’s response was firm: “The town manager has notified both the police and the tribal council that this is not where the town of Mashpee stands,” those minutes say. “No-one [sic] can access the water through private property.”

“Putting up a bunch of fences and denying somebody access to a parcel of land or water that they have a property interest in” goes against fundamental rules of law.

Legal experts on Indigenous affairs disagree. A landmark 1999 appeal in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court favored the Mashpee tribe’s extensive Aboriginal rights and forever clarified the state’s stance, according to a New England–based lawyer who is working with the tribe on current litigation and asked not to be named to avoid appearing biased.

The 1999 case, Commonwealth v. Maxim, determined that Aboriginal rights supersede a town’s shellfish bylaws, which set rigid standards and limits for non-Indigenous hunting and fishing. The decision relied primarily on protections outlined in the Treaty of Falmouth, signed in 1749.

Other cases, including the 1974 “Boldt Decision” in Washington State, have firmly set legal precedent for sovereign fishing rights. In Massachusetts, in 1982, the state House of Representatives adopted a resolution recognizing “the ancient and aboriginal claim of Indians” to “hunt and fish the wildlife of this land for the sustenance of their families.”

Matthew Fletcher, director of Michigan State University’s Indigenous Law and Policy Center and member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, spent seven weeks as a visiting professor of Federal Indian Law at Harvard Law School this spring and sits as a judge on the Mashpee tribe’s appellate court. In an interview, he said anyone who claims Wampanoag fishing rights are unclear is willfully overlooking decades of precedent. Aboriginal fishing rights are property rights and should be understood as such, he said.

“Putting up a bunch of fences and denying somebody access to a parcel of land or water that they have a property interest in” goes against fundamental rules of law, Fletcher said. The property interest of the Wampanoags in this case is their Aboriginal fishing right, which extends to those lands and waters.

“Under every rule of law, going back to England before there was the United States, people have a right to access, within reasonable limits, other people’s property in order to get to their property,” Fletcher said. “You learn that in the first year of law school. And Indian people are denied that basic right every single day.”

The denial of rights in Mashpee can be subtle, as with “No Trespassing” signs, or overt, as when local homeowners involve police. Attitudes vary, but the town is marred with distrust.

On a summer day at Mashpee Neck Marina, I took a walk down a residential street crowded with large homes, each with a neatly trimmed yard and picture windows looking out on the Santuit River, where a fleet of chrome yachts and speedboats winked under the midday sun. At one home, I met a seasonal resident named Kathy, who declined to give her last name, but said she tries to keep Wampanoag fishers from crossing her yard. She and her husband had stapled “No Trespassing” signs to the pitch pines that gird a narrow path from the front of the house to the river in the back.

“They’re tribal people, and they carry buckets down there and take oysters in bulk,” Kathy said, standing in her doorway, a small dog drooped over her feet. “They think they own the land. They think it’s theirs.”

Nearby, in another doorway, an older man said the Wampanoag have “always been respectful” of him and his property. His wife, who joined him at the door, was less amiable. “We won’t say anything about the Wampanoags in any newspaper,” she said angrily, motioning for her husband to come inside. “We don’t want any trouble,” she said, then slammed the door.

The Meaning of Sustenance

In late September, a row of sullen three-story homes stood guard over the Mashpee River, flat as a sheet of glass. Down a gravel path, the beach at Punkhorn Point bid its quiet farewell to summer, the sand populated now by a large blue crab, belly-up in surrender, and a silent procession of fiddler crabs creeping through tufts of beachgrass.

Nearby, Pocknett measured out bolts of hazard-orange mesh, a cigarette affixed to his bottom lip. He pulled a few bull rakes from his truck and dragged them to a small motorboat in a clatter of steel, tossing them in the boat along with plastic baskets, a coil of rope, and enough cigarette packs for each of his three cousins, who had also come to work.

In 2022, the tribe was awarded an aquaculture grant of $1.1 million through the Economic Development Administration, part of the American Rescue Plan’s Indigenous Communities program. The cousins were preparing for the arrival of Pocknett’s uncle, Buddy, who was driving in with a truckload of baby quahogs. They would plant the clams out near a sandbar in Popponesset Bay, knowing that each mollusk would clear out some nitrogen, if only a little, as it grew.

Two million baby quahogs sat in sacks in the back of Vernon “Buddy” Pocknett’s truck, ready to be seeded into the Popponesset Bay off Punkhorn Point. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

When Buddy arrived, the men transferred a dozen sacks containing 2 million baby quahogs into the boat, and cast off for where the murky water ran clear.

Here, Pocknett dropped anchor. The men disembarked, water up to their knees. A couple of them set the mesh in a giant rectangle in the bed of the bay, then sprinkled the tiny shellfish over the water like seeds. As his cousins scattered the new crop, Pocknett attached a rake to his waist with a rusty chain and shuffled to the side a few feet to dig for larger clams. The rake’s cage allowed small clams to slip through the bars, giving the next generation a chance to grow.

In legal terms, the Mashpee tribe’s traditional hunting and fishing rights are protected acts of “sustenance.” The state understands that to mean pure calories. But Fletcher, of Michigan, argues the Indigenous interpretation honors full livelihood. “It is deeply cynical and cramped for non-Indians to say sustenance is merely calories,” he said.

To Pocknett, true sustenance means much more. Out on the sandbar, he leaned back 45 degrees, driving his rake into the mud with coordinated thrusts of hips and arms. Sustenance means to “provide life,” he said. “Not just food.”

The post On Cape Cod, the Wampanoag Assert Their Legal Right to Harvest the Waters appeared first on Civil Eats.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm

Elizabeth Doerr — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 09:00:21 +0000

When Maximina Hernández Reyes emigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico, to Oregon in 2001, she was still learning English, had no idea where the food pantries were, and knew very few people. She struggled to find a support system in Gresham, the suburb of Portland where she settled, until 2012, when she happened upon a community garden in the city’s Vance Park.

Hernández Reyes grew up subsistence farming with her parents in Oaxaca, and the garden spoke to her. She called a number posted nearby and reached Adam Kohl, the executive director of Outgrowing Hunger, an organization that rents unused land at accessible costs to help immigrants and refugees grow their own food. Hernández Reyes was able to secure a small plot in the community garden and started growing food for her family. This was just the beginning.

Over the next decade, gardening evolved from a hobby to a passion for Hernández Reyes, but it wasn’t how she earned her income. While she worked her way up at McDonald’s, eventually becoming a manager, she gardened on the side as a way to provide her family and neighbors with fresh produce. Eventually, she became a community leader through her work in the garden; her original plot is now an educational site where she teaches gardening to other Latinas.

Maximina Hernández Reyes grows a range of produce, including many types of vegetables and herbs found in her home state of Oaxaca, Mexico. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Doerr)

Two years ago, Hernández Reyes had the opportunity to scale up her own growing operation and turn it into a source of income. She is now in her second season of managing a one-acre farm that Outgrowing Hunger leases in the nearby town of Boring, Oregon. While she named the operation MR. Farms after her initials, she has leaned into people misreading it as “Mister.” The business has been so successful that she was able to quit her job at McDonald’s last year and has transitioned from feeding her family to feeding—and mentoring—her whole community.

Hernández Reyes attributes her success at this food sovereignty endeavor to the support of a network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative (RFSC), part of a larger organization called Rockwood Community Development Corporation, which focuses on underserved areas of East Portland and Gresham. RFSC is comprised of nearly 30 organizations, including social services, food justice initiatives, and health and educational institutions.

Traditionally, food security organizations receive food from anywhere they can get it, and because donations are rarely from local growers, the system often results in processed foods and a reliance on the precarious global food system. The collaborative model, rather than providing one-way charity, is focused on mutualism and community care. Partnerships with local growers create a market that supports farmer entrepreneurship; community members receive fresh produce; and the system is more resilient to global food shortages.

“When people see these vegetables in the farmers’ market, they get really excited. They say, ‘I haven’t seen these in many years!’ or ‘I’ve been looking for these.’”

At Rockwood, when someone shows a knack for farming, especially when it benefits their community, someone from the collaborative connects them with various member organizations that can help them access resources and connections to build a successful farm business. When Hernández Reyes got involved, Outgrowing Hunger provided her with land and put her in touch with the Oregon Food Bank, which buys her vegetables for their pantries, and Rockwood People’s Market, a BIPOC-led farmers market in Gresham, where she sells produce every Sunday. She and other growers are also able to sell produce to local community members, who pay with tokens provided by food systems partners, the local low-cost health clinic Wallace Medical Concern, and the youth services organization Play Grow Learn.

The Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative is one of hundreds of similar networks across the U.S. that are serving as a model for a more resilient food and health system. Others include Hawai’i Food Hub Hui, Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, and the Mississippi Farm to School Network. Leveraging social capital between and among institutions, these networks, along with community members themselves, create an alternative local food system. This can be particularly powerful for immigrants and U.S. noncitizens, who are twice as likely to be among the 44 million people in the U.S. facing food insecurity.

Civil Eats recently spoke to Hernández Reyes about her journey toward this collaborative model, the organizations that supported her new business, and how growing food offers freedom to immigrant families.

What do you miss most about your home in Oaxaca?

What I miss are the simple things like traditions, family, and my culture. That was before. But now we’ve built the same community here and brought our traditions here. My vegetables are part of those traditions.

At first, they only grew a little bit because I only had one plant from the seeds I brought with me. But we saved the seeds and acclimatized them and now we have more of our traditional vegetables to share with my community: tomatillos and Roma tomatoes (but not like the ones you get from the grocery store; they’re better), green beans from my state, types of Mexican corn, and pipicha, p ápalo, and epazote [herbs used in traditional dishes in central and southern Mexico]. When people see these vegetables in the farmers’ market, they get really excited. They say, “I haven’t seen these in many years!” or “I’ve been looking for these.”

What is your role in the Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative and how have these connections helped you?

I was volunteering during the pandemic with Outgrowing Hunger to distribute food boxes to families. Through that, I met people from Rockwood CDC, Play Grow Learn, Metropolitan Family Service, and a lot of other organizations. Then I got involved with Guerreras Latinas [an empowerment program for Spanish-speaking Latinas] where I taught gardening through a program called Sembradoras, which was supported by funding from the Oregon Food Bank.

The connections benefit my business. When the organizations have grant money, they can purchase some vegetables from me—that way, they help me, and then I help the community. There’s this cycle. I want to keep my vegetables in the community; I don’t want to send my vegetables to the huge stores.

How did you get your business off the ground?

I started my business when I saw that my community needed the kinds of vegetables that I grow. And I was thinking, how could I sell my vegetables? I talked to Lynn [Ketch, executive director] from Rockwood CDC, and she asked why didn’t I make it a business. And I said, ‘Yes! Why not?!’ I was a gardener before, but I wanted to get to the next level of farming. I’m motivated to work hard because I want to serve my community; I want to grow more food.

“When the organizations have grant money, they can purchase some vegetables from me—that way, they help me, and then I help the community. There’s this cycle.”

At first, we didn’t have enough money to pay the rent on the land at Outgrowing Hunger. So, Adam gave me some options where I could pay after three to four months of selling vegetables. He always had somebody to help when we needed it and connected me with other organizations.

Another support was the Oregon Food Bank. Because it was my first year of farming, they gave me support by buying my products to give out in the food pantry. They pay you upfront, so with that money, I started to buy the irrigation and everything. Another organization, the Metropolitan Family Service, bought a small amount of vegetables, which helped, too.

Does growing food and the connections to the Food Collaborative offer freedom to the immigrant families in your community?

Yes, it helps a lot. Here at Outgrowing Hunger, the price for rent is not that high. And Outgrowing Hunger helps us apply for grants. There isn’t a lot of space for people to grow their own food at home, so the land for gardening helps so much. But, we need to educate people about how and where to grow fresh vegetables.

The collaborative has helped bring more information to people. For the people who can’t grow their food, the organizations buy the food, and community members receive tokens for free and can get fresh food from the farmers’ market. There are a lot of benefits—people’s hearts are better, they’re healthier, and they have less stress. There’s a lot of freedom in that.

How has working in this kind of collaborative model been different from what you experienced when you first arrived in the U.S.?

There’s a big difference. At some food pantries, they asked for your address, social security information, and documentation. Immigrants were scared to go there, because they would have to share all their information. It was also hard to find out where those pantries were. Now the food pantries don’t ask for that. But also, because of this group of organizations, there’s a lot more information about where people can get more food.

I experienced challenges before I found the collaborative. Organizations didn’t have enough Spanish speakers, and there wasn’t a lot of information available. It was hard to make connections. I also didn’t know my neighbors very well. But now, with this group of organizations, it has changed. They all have Spanish speakers, and there is a lot more information about resources available.

MR. Farms in Boring, Oregon, with Mt. Hood in the background. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Doerr)

What kinds of community members have you met through your work with farming and the food systems collaborative?

I’ve met a lot of people since I’ve started volunteering here, and I made all these connections around my neighborhood. I talk to people and tell them what I’m doing and how I grow vegetables, and I bring them in that way. I’m building community through food. With Outgrowing Hunger, when I got started, we had two Latinos, and now we have 30 Latinos. I talk to them: “You can apply for this; you can get this resource.” I have WhatsApp, and when I learn of opportunities, I share.

One of those families was telling me they didn’t have enough money to buy food. This one woman said she tried to go to the food pantry, but they asked for all these documents. I told her, “I have some vegetables in my garden,” and she was so happy. I asked her why she didn’t have any money, and she said her husband was sick and it was just [her] working, and their rent was so high, and they have three small children. I connected her to Outgrowing Hunger, and she applied for that space in the garden, and she started growing her own vegetables.

What are your hopes for the future?

Oh, my goodness. So much. My dream is to grow my farm, to implement jobs for immigrants or anyone who wants to work. To produce more. Right now, it’s a family farm: my husband, my kids, my brothers, people in the community. I really want to build a program to give jobs to moms in the summertime. They can bring their kids and come to work. I keep thinking and thinking—and I want to do everything!

This interview was conducted in English and Spanish and has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

The post How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.

Tim Walz’s Bipartisan Approach to Agriculture and Conservation

Georgina Gustin, InsideClimate News — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 09:00:27 +0000

Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate this week, pictures of the Minnesota governor began to spread across social media—of Walz holding a piglet, of Walz on thrill rides at the state fair, of Walz and his rescue dog.

All of it coalesces into an image of a guy with rural roots and deep ties to agriculture.

Since Harris’ announcement, climate advocates have applauded her pick, pointing to Walz’s solid climate bona fides. Farm groups across the political spectrum, including those that work to shrink agriculture’s carbon footprint, have, too.

During his six terms in Congress, Walz was a member of the House Committee on Agriculture, where he was instrumental in ensuring that soil conservation measures made it into the 2018 farm bill. At the time, the farm bill—the massive piece of legislation that guides the country’s nutrition and farm policy—failed to acknowledge agriculture’s role in contributing to climate change, and barely hinted at its potential role in slowing it.

“Many bills he’s co-sponsored or led are about creating a future for rural communities where we can keep more farmers on the land, where we can allow farmers who are stewarding the land to succeed and make money.”

Walz, who spent his early years working on his family’s farm in rural Nebraska, found a political work-around of sorts. That year he introduced the Strengthening Our Investment in Land (SOIL) Stewardship Act, which boosted existing farm conservation programs and incentivized farms to adopt certain practices that improve soil health, ultimately making soils better able to sequester carbon.

“Even as short a time ago as 2018, the word ‘climate’ does not appear in the farm bill,” said Ferd Hoefner, who was policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition at the time. “He made soil health, through the SOIL Act, the acceptable thing one could talk about when one was trying to talk about climate mitigation through agriculture.”

Hoefner noted that the last time the term climate change appeared in a farm bill was in 1990, an indication of just how polarized and partisan the issue has become in farm policy debates since then. After that, it “was verboten to even mention the word,” he added.

The provisions of the SOIL Stewardship Act were ultimately included in that year’s farm bill. Farm policy observers also point to one of Walz’s biggest farm-related accomplishments, which was introducing bills in 2014 and 2018 that help small-scale, veteran and beginning farmers access credit and funds for land, equipment and crop insurance. Provisions of these bills made it into the final versions of those years’ farm bills.

The Land Stewardship Project, based in Minnesota, has long pushed against the trend of increasing consolidation in agriculture, which has seen the rise of ever-larger farms, mostly run by large corporate entities. This week the council applauded Walz’s record of working against this ongoing shift.

“What we’ve seen through his time in Congress and his time in the governor’s office is that issues around the future of agriculture and rural communities aren’t partisan—they cut across political lines,” said Sean Carroll, policy director at Land Stewardship Action, the organization’s political arm. “Many bills he’s co-sponsored or led are about creating a future for rural communities where we can keep more farmers on the land, where we can allow farmers who are stewarding the land to succeed and make money.”

Consolidation, Carroll noted, has exacerbated a system of farming that has become a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Large livestock facilities generate more liquid manure, which emits methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas. The crops grown to feed those livestock, mostly corn and soybeans, are especially fertilizer intensive. Agricultural land use, including fertilizer use, is the largest source of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas even more potent than methane. (While carbon dioxide is the most abundant greenhouse gas, methane is 80 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere, and nitrous oxide is 265 times more powerful.)

“The consolidation is what’s causing the climate problems from agriculture,” Carroll said.

Walz has had to balance the economic interests of his farm-heavy state with the climate and environmental issues caused by the agriculture industry, which generates about $26 billion for the state annually. Much of that money comes from emissions-intensive forms of agriculture, including concentrated animal feeding operations that, in Minnesota, primarily raise hogs, or row crop farms that grow corn for ethanol. Minnesota is home to 19 ethanol refineries.

“Gov. Walz is the perfect choice to serve as Vice President Harris’ running mate,” said Geoff Cooper, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association. “He brings Midwestern pragmatism and sensibilities to the ticket and would ensure rural America’s ‘flyover country’ has a strong voice in a potential Harris administration. Dating back to his days in Congress, Gov. Walz has always been a passionate and effective advocate for renewable fuels and agriculture. He has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the ethanol industry.”

Ethanol is facing increased criticism from environmental groups that challenge the purported climate benefits of corn-based fuel. Some research says ethanol’s carbon footprint is greater than that of gasoline.

But in corn-producing states like Minnesota, questioning ethanol spells political death, and Walz has had to tread a bipartisan path. In 2020, Walz, along with three Midwestern Republican governors, appealed to the Trump administration to reject the oil industry’s attempts to exempt small refineries from being required to blend biofuels into their mixes. (One of those Republicans, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, said Walz was “no leader” and called him a “radical” on social media Tuesday.)

“On biofuels he’s indistinguishable from all the other Republicans and Democrats in Midwestern states,” Hoefner said, “which is bowing at the altar of almighty corn.”

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, and is reprinted with permission. It has been updated to correct the name of the Land Stewardship Project.

The post Tim Walz’s Bipartisan Approach to Agriculture and Conservation appeared first on Civil Eats.

A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves

Lisa Held — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:09 +0000

Each year, 100,000 Americans die from coal and car pollution. And each year, 20 percent of deaths worldwide are attributable to fossil fuel use. Rob Jackson, Stanford climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project, keeps a long list of statistics like these—on the devastating health impacts of fossil fuels—ready to share.

“That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches people who won’t otherwise pay attention to climate.”

That intersection hits home in about 40 percent of U.S. kitchens, where Americans still cook over flames powered by natural gas. The week of Jackson’s book launch, many of those cooks were probably drenched in sweat, too: July 22 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

In the book, Jackson tells stories of measuring both the staggering greenhouse gas emissions gas stoves produce and the dangerous levels of air pollutants home cooks breathe in as they sauté and roast (even long after the burners are off).

Last year, some of those measurements, published in research studies, contributed to public awareness that quickly spiraled into what multiple media outlets branded “gas stove culture wars.” (Just last week, Senator JD Vance told his supporters Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves,” which is entirely false.) But Into the Clear Blue Sky is a solutions book written by a scientist, and Jackson approaches the phaseout of gas-powered home appliances with the same steady, measured urgency he applies to exploring decarbonizing steel and electrifying vehicles—two other important solutions in his book. Also, early on, he establishes a throughline: that the impacts of the climate crisis are unequally felt, and solutions need to be accessible and applicable to all.

Jackson spoke to Civil Eats about his groundbreaking research, the pushback against policies that could speed electrification, and how writing about climate solutions—gas stove phaseouts and otherwise—has left him angry and afraid, but also hopeful.

You set out to write about climate solutions, and you allotted two chapters to the food system—one on gas stoves, one on beef. Considering all the ways that climate change intersects with the food system, why those two?

For a couple of reasons. In the book, I highlight the opportunities for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere as probably our best short-term goal for climate action. And the two largest sources of methane in the world are food: primarily cows and rice paddies, and gas appliances in our homes and buildings.

We did the first studies looking at emissions from water heaters and have spent the last five years studying gas stoves—initially, purely for their greenhouse gas emissions, to see how much methane leaks into the air. We found that the leaks from gas stoves alone in the U.S. were responsible for pollution equivalent to half a million U.S. cars.

But as we were going into hundreds of homes measuring methane, we started measuring indoor air pollutants like NOx [nitrogen oxide] gasses, which triggers asthma, and benzene, which is carcinogenic. That opened a whole new field of study for me, because I realized every time I turned on a burner on a gas stove or started the oven, pollution levels shot up above health benchmarks, even when I had the ventilation hood on in my house.

You wrote that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t include methane leakage from gas appliances in their greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Is that still true, or has your research changed things?

It’s still mostly true. They do now include some emissions from gas stoves, but they don’t include the full set of emissions, including leakage. I began measuring methane from appliances in homes and buildings because it was the least-studied part of the gas supply chain, and I wanted to fill a fill a research gap there. Our research has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of gas appliances in our homes.

The largest source of emissions indoors is the furnace, because it burns so much more gas. But the furnace and the water heater are required to vent directly outdoors through a chimney or a pipe. I focus a lot on gas stoves because there’s no vent. Or there’s a hood that most people don’t use—and that surveys show often isn’t effective.

The levels of air pollutants you’ve measured in people’s homes are unbelievably high. In the book, you talk about how the industry knew about the health concerns more than 100 years ago, to the extent that their own experts said gas shouldn’t be used in homes without requiring hoods that vented to the outside, which didn’t happen. How much of this evidence on indoor air pollutants and the health implications is just emerging now and how much is new?

It’s a fascinating question. For example, there’s 50 years of measurements on NOx pollution indoors. There were meta-analyses done in the 1990s showing that stoves increased indoor NOx levels and that the likelihood of asthma and wheezing and different health outcomes increased if you lived in a home with a gas stove. So, that knowledge was well known 30 years before I ever thought about measuring gas stoves.

I think our instruments are better now, and we have a finer-scale resolution. And until we did it, no one had measured benzene emissions indoors from gas stoves. So, we’re still learning about the full set of pollutants that are generated indoors.

And I think we’re learning more now about not just the emission rates but the concentrations that people actually breathe. That’s the tricky part, because what you need to know for predicting health outcomes is how high the levels are—not just in the kitchen but in the bedrooms down the hall where people spend their time and sleep.

That was the biggest surprise of our studies for me—the fact that concentrations of pollutants rose so quickly in bedrooms down the hall and stayed above health benchmarks for hours after the stove was off. When you think about cooking meal after meal, day after day, month after month and these concentrations just recurring all the time in our homes . . . sometimes I think we would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, but we willingly stand over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants.

Have you done any of this research in restaurants?

We are doing that right now, literally. I have a part of my lab up in Pittsburgh doing measurements. We’ve done some in the Bay Area. We’re doing some in the Midwest, and we’re going to go to Washington, D.C. this summer and do some more.

Generally, [commercial] kitchens have industrial hoods, which are much better. However, they also have many more burners. And they have pilot lights, which are the most inefficient way that we burn. So, I worry about exposures where the concentration is building up at night after the restaurant closes and the hoods are off and these pilot lights are burning. I worry more about small kitchens . . . somewhere where maybe the ventilation is not so good.

We’re really trying to understand the risks in kitchens and, frankly, to do it more positively. We’re trying to work with chefs to promote the benefits of electrification. There’s an increasing number of chefs willing to speak out and say, “Yes, I can cook with electricity and there’s no reason not to switch now.”

In terms of electrification, you talk a lot in the book about how climate solutions need to be accessible to everyone. Switching to induction from gas can be really costly. How do you see the transition becoming possible for people at all income levels?

I do think the cost will come down over time. But I think of climate solutions [as having] two flavors: One is to use less of whatever it is that emits fossil fuels. The other is to decarbonize whatever infrastructure is left. And we can’t really cook less, so that’s not a realistic solution set for our homes.

So, I think we need to favor reach codes that require future construction to be all electric.

Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Assembly and Senate in New York passed the country’s first state-level bill requiring new homes and buildings be all-electric by 2026. Those bills make sense to me, because every time we plumb a new house or new building with gas infrastructure or fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in greenhouse gases for decades to come.

I don’t suggest that we need to go into every home and rip people’s stoves off the walls. We need an orderly transition, and the place to do that is when our stoves reach the end of their lifetime, to switch them out. Since I am fortunate and relatively wealthy, I chose to replace my gas stove with an induction stove before the end of its lifetime because I could. But the hundreds of homeowners we sample in Bakersfield and lower-income neighborhoods, they don’t have that option, and even if they can afford it, they rent. So, I worry the most about people in lower-income communities.

There’s also been a lot of pushback. Are you optimistic about these electrification laws moving forward?

The industry is powerful. The reach codes that Berkeley passed have been overturned. There were 100 cities and counties in California that had passed similar reach codes, and most of those are now moot. States like New York have taken a different approach, and I’m optimistic that states that want to act will find a way to incentivize the transition to electric appliances. But there have now been a couple of dozen states that have passed preemption laws to make such codes illegal. Though there’s tremendous pushback, I think induction stoves will win eventually, because they’re a better product. They’re more efficient. A child can’t burn their hand. But [with climate], winning slowly is the same as losing, as Bill McKibben likes to say.

On that note, my editor suggested I ask you about what gives you hope, and I felt myself having an emotional reaction. Like, “I don’t care about hope! I care about what’s possible. Brass tacks. What can be done—or not—to move the needle?” But you use the word hope a lot in the book, so I thought I should ask: Why?

I would say that hope and optimism are muscles that we need to exercise. My first homework assignment in any class is for students to go home and research things in the environment that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s lifespan and childhood mortality. It’s water and air quality. It’s a decline in global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. Then there’s a long list of targeted regulations that have saved us money and made us healthier.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline has literally made us smarter and made lead levels in our kids’ blood drop 95 percent. There’s the Montreal Protocol that saved billions of cases of skin cancers and cataracts. And there’s my favorite example—the Clean Air Act—that saves 100,000 American lives a year, a bipartisan bill at a 30-fold return on investment.

So, I think by acknowledging past successes we make future successes in climate more likely, because we can see a path to a better future. And I guess I believe strongly that it’s very easy in my world to sink only into the latest statistics of drought and disasters—but it doesn’t seem to motivate people.

So, it’s a sort of hope grounded in facts and history.

Yes, but the undercurrent is there, which is, you know, I’m afraid and angry, because we’ve wasted decades. We’ve sprinted right to 1.5°C—something that people thought was unfathomable 20 years ago—and we seem to be sprinting towards 2°C. So yes, I’m hopeful, but I’m also angry and afraid for all of us.

Given the urgency, do you think that this upcoming election could partially determine whether catastrophic outcomes are locked in?

I’m an environmental scientist, and at this point in my life, there’s only one party that seems to take climate and the environment seriously. It wasn’t always that way. My biggest regret is how politicized and polarized the environment has become. Republican administrations created the EPA and signed the Montreal Protocol. Even Margaret Thatcher, she once said something like, “We have treated the atmosphere like a dust bin.” She of course backtracked later in her career, but she was a chemist and scientist, and she understood.

I regret the fact that we are in a place where a Republican who mentions climate gets defeated in a primary by someone farther to the right. I don’t want to pick parties, but I’m deeply concerned about this election. We can’t afford another administration undoing climate rules. It isn’t just for the climate. It’s killing millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Let’s be frank about it.

$2 Billion for Farmer Discrimination. On July 31, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had successfully distributed more than $2 billion to 43,000 farmers who had experienced discrimination while attempting to secure USDA loans.

The announcement marked a historic moment in a long saga. Farmers have alleged discrimination in the agency’s loan programs for decades, and multiple lawsuits have been filed over the years by women, Indigenous, and Black farmers who said they were treated differently when applying for loans, driving many out of business.

In 2020, lawmakers set aside $4 billion specifically to compensate Black farmers for race-based discrimination, but the program was thrown out in the wake of lawsuits, many of which were filed by Republican officials who alleged discrimination against white farmers. So when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they authorized a new, race-neutral fund that would compensate any farmer who alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

During a press call announcing the news, Vilsack said the agency received 58,000 applications and ultimately approved 43,000. While the agency could not compensate farmers for losses or pain endured, he said, “I think it represents USDA acknowledging and responding to reported discrimination.”

Vilsack could not provide statistics on how many of the individuals who received funding were Black farmers, but said that analysis may become available in the future. He also pointed out that the states with the most farmers awarded funding were Mississippi and Alabama.

In addition to the payments, he said the agency has been working to root out and prevent future discrimination and break down barriers to access within its loan programs with, for example, “new processes that reduce the need for human discretion in loan decision-making.”

Many Democrats in Congress and advocacy organizations released statements applauding the USDA’s progress on the issue. “Today marks an important milestone for USDA and for our collective efforts to hold the Department accountable in addressing a history of acts of discrimination against perpetually marginalized agricultural producers and their communities,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, in a press release. The coalition was one of the cooperating organizations, along with others like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that helped the USDA get the word out to farmers about the application process.

Dangerous Drift. According to a report published last week by the Midwestern Prairie Rivers Network (PRN), herbicides sprayed primarily on row crops in Illinois are drifting far from targeted fields, damaging trees and other plant life. Researchers at PRN monitored symptoms of pesticide drift—such as curled leaves—and collected tissue samples from plants over six years. They found symptoms of drift during 677 out of 679 total visits to nearly 300 sites. Of 127 tissue samples taken from trees and other plants, 90 percent contained herbicide residues. Herbicides detected included 2,4-D, atrazine, dicamba, glyphosate, and seven others.

Many of the sites where researchers documented incidents of drift were more than 500 feet from the likely source of exposure, suggesting the chemicals are drifting significant distances. “Our monitoring and tissue sampling program indicates that current legal safeguards/protections and regulatory efforts are inadequate at protecting people and the environment from herbicide drift,” the researchers wrote.

At a press conference for the release of the report, co-author Kim Erndt-Pitcher said the results pointed to the fact that herbicides are playing a significant role in the decline of tree health across the state, and residents and farmers expressed concerns about potential risks to animals and their families’ health.

Patsy Hopper, an organic farmer and landowner south of Urbana, Illinois, said her land long produced a bounty of fruits and vegetables. At one point in time, she remembered harvesting 50 gallons of cherries in a season. “In the past few years, we’ve hardly had a harvest because of pesticide drift. The trees are dying,” she said. “This year, we had enough cherries for one pie.”

Farm-State Veep. On August 6, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, catapulting agriculture and other food issues into the 2024 presidential election in a new way.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Walz served on the Agriculture Committee. There, he played a role in three farm bill cycles, sponsoring various proposals focused on expanding on-farm conservation efforts and supporting beginning farmers and ranchers.

As Governor of Minnesota, Walz has advocated for biofuels, a key priority of commodity ag groups, and local advocates for small farms say he fought consolidation to keep more farmers on the land. He also championed and ultimately signed into law a universal school meals program in the state.

The post A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves appeared first on Civil Eats.

On TikTok, A Revival of Black Herbalism

Lacey Herbert — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 09:00:48 +0000

Growing up in a Black American family, I was steeped in the wisdom of natural remedies passed down through generations.

My childhood memories include my grandmother making garlic tinctures, boiling ginger tea, and delivering spoonfuls of elderberry syrup to me when I was sick. When I had the flu, she’d put slices of onions in my socks to “pull the cold out.” If someone had cramps, she’d brew them a soothing cup of peppermint tea.

“Herbalism is a study of plants and their medicinal properties. However, when it comes to practicing herbalism, it’s an art.”

She had no formal training, but my grandmother knew to use eucalyptus for inflammation and licorice for digestion—and they worked. It wasn’t until I started taking classes to get my certificate in medicinal plants from Cornell University last year, starting my own herbalist journey, that I began to connect what I was learning with what my grandmother had already taught me.

But these traditions didn’t begin with her.

Traditional medicine, or folk medicine, was once the dominant medical system in Africa. During chattel slavery, enslaved Africans brought their knowledge of medicinal plants to America, adapting their practices to the new environment. This legacy of plant medicine has not only survived, but also has become an integral—and rarely credited—part of Black American culture.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in herbalism, including on platforms like TikTok, where #Blackherbalist and #AfricanHolisticHealth have garnered over 64 million combined views. This movement reflects a broader celebration of the resilience and ingenuity of our ancestors.

Carmen Adams is a Black herbalist registered with the American Herbalists Guild as well as a community health nurse and the founder of Innergy Med Group, a practice that provides wellness plans that integrate holistic and herbal solutions for her clients. She began her journey by studying herbalism and naturopathic medicine to heal her acne, digestive issues, weight gain, and anxiety. Now, after years of helping clients and mentoring aspiring herbalists, Carmen shares her insights and expertise with her 220,000 followers on TikTok, hoping to empower, educate and teach people how to advocate for their health.

I spoke to Adams about herbalism’s historic connection to Black American culture, how social media is giving the practice new life, and why Black Americans haven’t always received credit for their contributions.

How would you define an herbalist?

Herbalism is a study of plants and their medicinal properties. However, when it comes to practicing herbalism, it’s an art.

An herbalist consciously works with plants, whether they’re live, dried, or otherwise. Maybe you’re someone who [forages], so you’re out in nature and you’re picking them. Maybe you’re a farmer interacting with plants, but you’re doing so to extract their medicinal properties. An herbalist may be spending time with plants, whether it’s breathing with them, using them to purify the air, or consuming them to benefit your physical “meat suit.” That’s how I would describe an herbalist, because not everyone has to be in a clinical setting. Not everyone’s mind works that way, and I respect that as well.

Can you share your personal journey into medicinal plants?

I’ve always known I’d work in health care. While on the pre-med track, I began learning things that didn’t quite feel in alignment—different things in reference to pharmaceuticals and policies. I learned that I was pregnant; that was the biggest mental change. I knew there were certain aspects I wasn’t going to incorporate into my personal journey. It pushed me to ask, “What now? What did my ancestors do?”

I remember getting sick as a kid. I had a really bad stomach virus. My mom was in the kitchen, making something her brother used to make for her. It had onions, garlic, ginger, all kinds of stuff. It smelled horrible. I remember taking it, looking at her, running to the front door, and throwing up on the welcome mat. However, from that moment forward, I felt better.

So, I sought out herbalism. Back then, there weren’t many courses. There were different herbalists acting as mentors. I was privileged enough to have a mentor by the name of Dulce King. She was a lovely Dominican woman. . . . Her depth of knowledge was invaluable. I wanted to take her mind and just shake it into mine. That was the birth of my love of herbalism and teaching.

What inspired you to start sharing your knowledge on TikTok?

I’m not a social media person. My assistant felt that people would benefit from learning from me, even if they weren’t clients or mentees. I gave it a whirl, and it just took off.

I’m just sharing my two cents, and if it resonates, beautiful. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I started to learn the different misinformation that was out there because it’s so easy to make money . . . I feel sometimes people can get a little drunk on that, which could cause them to overpromise a product that’s going to underdeliver, at best. I wanted to make sure that I share that herbs are [simply] a tool.

In my practice, sometimes we don’t even mention an herb. People may just need a place to vent or feel safe. Their inner dialogue was causing the nausea and anxiety; the peppermint tea wasn’t needed.

Some people use TikTok as an alternative to Google, so it’s important for people to disseminate information responsibly. What are your thoughts on that?

The fact that people use it as Google kind of scares me. Even though I believe self-diagnosing has its place, specialists are specialists for a reason. Anyone can get a TikTok account. Anyone can buy a book, regurgitate it, and then say, “This product can get you that result.” It’s disheartening because I’ve seen [social media remedies] hurt people.

For example, sea moss could be beneficial, but there are some cases where it is not beneficial. I’ve had clients come to me or put themselves in the hospital because [of] something that they saw online—someone promising how it benefited them without understanding certain contraindications.

Are there any herbs you had a relationship with as a child that you still use now?

Ginger, onion, garlic. Broths were pretty big.

One of the first cough syrups I ever made as an herbalist was a honey-onion cough syrup. [I was] learning about nature’s antibiotics and then, feeling spiffy, added garlic to it. [I remember] tasting it and thinking, “This reminds me of childhood. Why does this remind me of childhood?’

Things like that started coming back. I started making my own salad dressings but using my cough syrup as a base. Then it was like, “Ah, yes! Food can be medicine!” It just starts to click.

Are there any remedies that are popular among herbalists today that are safe to try?

There is no cookie-cutter answer to this. It’s out of my scope to diagnose, treat, or prescribe, so I’m simply sharing.

(For eczema and psoriasis), chickweed is a mild, nutritive herb that can be consumed internally and used externally as a fomentation, which is a fancy way of saying using a tea topically.

Nettle! In my personal life, I love it whenever I’m dealing with seasonal allergies.

Oh, and for menstrual cramps, red raspberry leaf coupled with ginger root. Bring some ginger to a boil and combine that tea on top of red raspberry leaves. Remove it from heat, let it steep, and consume that. The ginger is an anodyne or analgesic, meaning pain-relieving. It’s also blood-thinning and a circulatory herb. Red raspberry is touted for being a uterine tonic and a nutritive.

I have read that enslaved Black Americans used cayenne pepper in their shoes or on their feet to treat colds. Have you heard of this?

I have heard the remedy more times than you can believe! Cayenne is a circulatory herb that is also considered a diaphoretic herb, so it can increase your body’s temperature.

Putting cayenne in your shoes can burn, depending on if you have sensitive skin, so you will want to maybe use a carrier oil like olive oil, jojoba oil, or coconut oil. Even then, it feels like Icy Hot.

I’ve used it for camping. It kept my feet warm. So, I think [enslaved Americans] were attempting to increase body temperature to assist. Cayenne is a diaphoretic herb and can cause sweating, so if it’s coming from that place and that’s how that person responded, their body could positively be influenced.

Anecdotes like that are fascinating and important to me as a Black American. Are people holding tradition more closely now?

(More) than ever before. I’m 36. Thinking of my childhood, there was an undertone to religion or maybe they’d tie it to biblical times. Nowadays, people are dipping back into their roots, if they know what those roots are. But some are just going back to the basics and revering nature. That’s how it started with me.

I’ve seen a surge of Black herbalists, particularly among millennials and Gen Z. How has social media opened the door for Black people who want to celebrate these traditions but may not have had the family background or access to that knowledge?

It’s given a platform to everyone, melanated or otherwise. I do think it may be connecting more and more people within the diaspora. There are different cultures that look similar that are learning that they have similar thoughts for health and wellness, utilizing what the Earth provides. It’s a great opportunity to share knowledge and connect. I’ve had individuals join live [streams] and say, “I didn’t even know this was an option!” Stuff like that feels good to know, and it cuts across racial lines.

Why have the contributions Black Americans have made to herbal medicine been overlooked and undocumented?

At one point, it was illegal [for Black people] to read and write. They didn’t have the opportunity or know-how for publishing. Typically, storytelling [was how] things were passed down. All of those factors could be perceived as barriers to how this knowledge was traditionally shared.

What does healing mean to you?

Alignment of mind, body, spirit. Balance. It’s your inner dialogue, your stress-coping mechanisms. It’s pain, or lack thereof. It’s what you choose to consume visually, auditorily, or via digestion and spirit. It’s your connection to source, whatever that looks like, religious or spiritual. It’s where you draw strength from.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The post On TikTok, A Revival of Black Herbalism appeared first on Civil Eats.