And when these same farmers make a delivery to Argus Farm Stop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the staff treat them like minor celebrities: free coffee, shout-outs from the owners, the works. “They are like rock stars,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus’ co-owner, a tall, friendly businessman with a passion for local food. “It’s like, ‘Farmer John is in the house!’”

Argus represents an emerging business model, the farm stop, which connects consumers and farmers in a local food web. A farm stop sells food on consignment from nearby small and medium farms, landing it somewhere between a grocery store, a farmers’ market, and a food hub. Here, farmers deliver freshly harvested produce to a brick-and-mortar retail shop with a full staff. The farmers set their own prices and keep the bulk of the revenue.

Farm stops operate quite differently from typical mainstream grocery stores like Kroger or Albertson’s, which rely on industrialized food systems and complex supply chains. They are also distinct from a farmers’ market, which requires farmers to either be there for sales or hire someone to sell for them. With farm stops, retail consumers have better access to local food, and farmers can spend more time farming.

It’s a small but expanding niche. At least six farm stops operate in the Midwest, and many of them opened over the past decade, including Bloomington Farm Stop Collective, in Indiana, and the Lakeshore Depot, in Marquette, Michigan.

At Argus, the hope is to make life easier for farmers. Too many small farmers quit, Brinkerhoff says, because “there is not enough money and it’s too hard. We are trying to change that narrative: to make it sustainable, economically, to be a small farmer.”

A Niche for Smaller Farms

As a result, smaller farms are disappearing. From 2012 to 2022, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by almost 10 percent, according to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, while the average farm size increased 6.7 percent, from 434 acres to 463 acres. That has created a food system that may be more efficient, but is also less resilient. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the complex supply chains of large-scale systems proved vulnerable to shock, while smaller-scale operations were able to adapt and pivot. Such adaptability will prove essential as climate change continues.

In the meantime, the current industrial system is hard on smaller farm operators, who are forced “to be price takers instead of price makers,” says Kim Bayer, the owner of Slow Farm, which sells organic produce at Argus.

Farm stops can change the equation. Slow Farm, based on the north side of Ann Arbor, typically makes two deliveries a week to Argus from May to October: a small run on Wednesday, directly to the market, and a larger one on Sunday, for Argus’ community-supported agriculture program (CSA), with customers picking up their weekly boxes at the store. And, like all of Argus’ farm suppliers, Slow Farm earns 70 percent of the retail price for their food, at prices Bayer herself sets. That’s a significant difference compared to the average of 15 percent of retail going to growers who sell to supermarkets.

The model relies on a “mutual trust relationship” between the food stop and the farmers, Brinkerhoff says. “We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”  

Better Food, Better Access

In Michigan, corn and soy farming dominate the agricultural economy, and smaller vegetable farms are less common, says Jazmin Bolan-Williamson, the farm business coordinator at the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems. So large grocery chains in the region often fill their shelves with heavily processed foods that are transported from thousands of miles away.

Farms supplying Argus, by contrast, produce a wide range of crops, including heirloom varieties. All of it travels only a few miles to arrive on the shelf. The food is not only fresher, but its carbon footprint is lighter, another boon.

The benefits of farm stops extend to larger groups, too. Argus hopes to become as a single point of contact for school kitchens in the community, making it easier for them to source locally grown food. This creates a network of support for a resilient local food system. And not just in farm country. The model can also help create those networks in cities, too.

In Rock Hill, South Carolina, for example, FARMacy Community Farmstop provides quality food to the city’s lower-income residents. A farm stop’s flexibility, size, and community-centered focus are uniquely suited to help, FARMacy’s founder, Jonathan Nazeer, says.

FARMacy employs a pay-what-you-will system, where lower-income customers pay what they can and others pay above sticker price to compensate. The farm stop has received funding from the South Carolina Dept of Local Food Purchasing Assistant for produce at the market and in weekly boxes.

FARMacy also cultivates learning and gathering around food, Nazeer says. In the seating area outside the store, FARMacy hosts concerts, workshops, and cooking classes. Here, people connect more deeply with what they’re eating, while they create community. When people value and understand their food, he says, “we empower them to take charge of their health and feel good about how they are participating in this system.”

Paving a Path for Farm Stops

Farmers’ markets typically work under cottage food laws, which allow farmers to sell unregulated food as long as they are present for the sale. Farm stops, however, operate outside of this regulatory system, which can create some unusual challenges—and ad hoc solutions.

For example, in 2016, after receiving a complaint, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) cited Argus for selling eggs from small farms that hadn’t processed their eggs in a licensed facility. Under Michigan law, unlicensed egg producers can only sell their eggs directly to consumers. An inspector visited the farm stop and seized 90 dozen eggs, according to the MDARD.

Over the following weeks, Argus worked with the department, local farms and experts, and elected state officials to find a way for the unlicensed farms to sell directly to customers. Now, Argus merely holds the eggs (in a distinct refrigerator) but takes no money; customers pick up the eggs they’ve purchased from farmers.

“MDARD has been working in collaboration and partnership with Argus Farm Stop for many years,” says Jennifer Holton, a spokesperson for the department. “It is a success story in Michigan from a farmer perspective, in that they provide a way for farmers to get their products to an enthusiastic, supportive customer base in an economically viable way that respects the limited time farmers have for selling their products away from the farm.”

Other challenges are financial and practical.

Establishing and maintaining a farm stop takes a lot of time and money, says Michigan State University’s Bolan-Williamson. It can be tricky to find the right building for a market, and it can cost millions to build a grocery-ready facility from the ground up, she says.

Getting a bank loan could prove difficult, too. It’s likely a bank would want to see local interest in a farm stop before lending funds, Bolan-Williamson says. She suggests that farm stops hold town meetings, gather signatures or even seek donations as proof of that interest.

Despite these challenges, Brinkerhoff says, if you find the right niche, a farm stop can be entirely supported by consumer demand. He and his partners founded Argus roughly 10 years ago with $180,000. Argus now operates two markets and two cafés, employs 65 people, and partners with roughly 200 local farmers, food producers, and artisans. In 2023, the store made $6.5 million in sales.

Argus is now taking a leading role in expanding the movement. Its success, and its galvanizing effect on local farms, provide a beacon: In the past decade, the acres of farmland in Washtenaw County—where Argus is located — actually grew, according to the USDA census of agriculture.

In March, Argus held the first-annual National Farm Stop Conference in Ann Arbor. The conference hosted roughly 120 participants from across the country, including existing farm stops, representatives from communities looking to adopt the model, and policymakers hoping to understand more about it.

They’re learning from each other. Nazeer, who attended the conference on behalf of FARMacy, says different cities can adapt the model to their needs, and each has unique strategies to share. In fact, after the conference, Argus visited FARMacy to learn more about its approach.

Senior representatives from the USDA were also at the conference; they connected with Argus and expressed interest in using the model to grow local food systems.

Rebecca Gray, director of The Wild Ramp farmers’ market in Huntington, West Virginia, felt energized by the event. She says she recognized the chance to learn from successful, long-running farm stops, and appreciated how a span of a few days helped bridge the gap between politicians and small farmers. “It was a really great opportunity for these two groups of people to connect and learn about each other’s operations,” she says, and “for policymakers to see what their policy is actually doing.”

Besides hosting the farm stop conference, Argus also offers monthly hour-long webinars and sells three-day online courses for anyone interested in starting their own farm stop, plus private consulting.

Brinkerhoff is not looking to open more farm stops, but he remains committed to helping other communities do so. Farm stops are “efficient, effective, enjoyable, and affordable,” he says. “Any town that has a farmers’ market can do one.”

This article was updated to correct one of the sources of FARMacy’s funding.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/#respond Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:00:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57122 “Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds […]

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“Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds across Sheena’s face as she hand-cut the seaweed from the lines raised up from the water onto the deck.

She and Scott had worked quickly to stuff the kelp ribbons into giant bags. Now those bags were ready to be offloaded into a waiting truck and driven 100 miles southwest to their processor, Atlantic Sea Farms (ASF), near Portland, where many of the state’s kelp companies are based. Maine is the heart of America’s farmed seaweed industry, supplying half its harvest—well over a million pounds—last season.

Largely developed in Asia, seaweed farming is a new venture on American shores. One type in particular, kelp—a large brown algae with many species, including sugar kelp— has been hailed as an ecologically beneficial, nutritious superfood that can be farmed on both U.S. coasts—and could help fight climate change. These remarkable characteristics have helped the seaweed industry attract roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, from government, venture capital, and nonprofits.

However, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the global $9.9 billion market. And, according to farmers and kelp companies, the U.S. investment doesn’t yet address a range of logistical issues that challenge—some might even say threaten—the success of seaweed production.

A Highly Perishable Food

But for small farmers like himself, he says, kelp farming “wouldn’t be possible for us if we didn’t have a good business to deal with.” Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest seaweed aquaculture business in the country, has solved several challenges that seaweed farmers face in Maine and other states.

Transportation is one. For Lord, trucking kelp to Portland would be cost- and time-prohibitive. Obtaining the reliably productive, inexpensive kelp seed for the farm is another. But as part of the ASF co-op, he is one of 40 farmers that the company provides with kelp seed string—nylon or cotton strings inoculated with kelp spores—at the beginning of the season, in early winter. Farmers grow these out in the water, strung between buoys, until the fronds reach maturity in springtime. Then they sell the harvest to ASF, which picks up the kelp on the dock.

The second problem: Compared to other ocean harvests like oysters, lobster, or fish, kelp is infinitely more complicated to get onto store shelves. After reaching maturity, it must be harvested within three months, before the water becomes too warm and the seaweed begins to degrade. Harvested kelp is also incredibly perishable. Immediately after leaving the water, it begins to ferment, so must be chilled and processed to extend its shelf life—through freezing, fermenting, pickling, or drying—within a few days. And that requires space and expensive, specialized equipment that can resist the corrosive effects of salt water.

To date, leading American kelp companies–including ASF and Ocean’s Balance, also in Maine—have poured millions into equipment like industrial freezers and dehydrators. Coastal Enterprises, a nonprofit and lender in Maine, says that most of their loans to the kelp industry are for working capital operations and equipment. Other states with less-developed but emerging kelp businesses—like Alaska, Connecticut, and New York—need processing help even more urgently.

According to a recent paper by Connecticut Sea Grant, a national network of university programs dedicated to marine resources, kelp’s “use as a food product in Connecticut and in other parts of the U.S. is limited, because there is a need for post-harvest and marketing infrastructure.”

Maine: Building a Vertically Integrated Business

“This is the moment that they become inventory. Every bag has an individual tag that says the Julian date, weight, farm, kelp type, and farmer,” says Liz McDonald, seaweed supply director at ASF. Driving her 18-wheeler across New England to reach partner farmers, McDonald lives out of Airbnbs for the majority of harvest season and is a familiar sight at small docks and quaint harbors across the coast.

Once the Lords’ bags are all on board, McDonald drives nearly three hours to ASF’s building in Biddeford, Maine, tucked off I-95 next to defunct railway track. At the loading dock, workers immediately haul the bags of seaweed from the truck, moving rapidly and efficiently. During kelp harvest season, the scene is a little like the Olympic Village during the Games: Everyone’s been training for this singular stretch of time.

The Biddeford facility includes a fermentation room, closed to outsiders, as it contains proprietary machines; storage freezers; a packing room; a cultivation room for breeding kelp; a kitchen for recipe development; and offices upstairs for the marketing and communications teams.

“It’s not Instagram beauty like, ‘Look at this beautiful kelp harvest,’” says Briana Warner, CEO of ASF. But she’s visibly proud of the space, beaming as she gives me a tour of the newly built $2 million processing center. At every turn, the air is filled with the briny, spicy smell of the company’s signature Sea-Chi, a seaweed-based kimchi made with fresh kelp.

A former diplomat specializing in economic development, Warner knows that her company’s success is built on nitty-gritty details. “The reality is: Machines break. Every machine downstairs we had to create from scratch, because it doesn’t even exist in Asia . . . because they’re eating dried kelp,” she explains. “Every safety protocol, we’ve had to come up with.”

Early on in Warner’s tenure as CEO, the company almost went under due to processing issues. In February 2020, a deal ASF had reached to supply Maine-grown kelp to Sweetgreen, in a collaboration with celebrity chef David Chang, evaporated as the pandemic shut down the chain’s business. Back then, ASF had limited storage space and needed somewhere to store 240,000 pounds of kelp pouring in from its farms when the deal fell through. Warner tapped into her network of Maine businesses, and Bristol Seafood, a fish wholesaler based out of Portland, came to the rescue.

“They froze almost every bag of kelp,” says Warner, getting teary. Bristol gave her a bill for $3,000—far less than the true cost of their services—at the end of the season.

The event was clarifying for Warner. She plunged into fundraising for an ASF processing center and worked on consumer marketing. Now, the company has four products in every Whole Foods in the country, foods in national supermarket chains like Sprouts and Albertsons, and 20 ingredient partners like Thorne and Navitas.

For the 2023–2024 season, they harvested a record-breaking amount of kelp: 1.3 million pounds. “You can’t have this incredibly positive impact on the environment, on the food chain, on our partner farmers . . . unless you run a really good business,” Warner says.

ASF’s dedication to infrastructure also pays off for the consumer. When a shopper buys one of the company’s burgers, they can look up where the kelp grew, who harvested it, and when. This is a markedly different situation than with seafood writ large, where one-third of grocery store labels have been found to be wrong.

Traceability is the cornerstone of a larger shift toward the blue economy, a movement among coastal and ocean nations that equally supports workers’ rights, environmental concerns, and sustainability goals. It is a huge selling point for the millions invested in American-grown kelp.

For seaweed growers outside Maine, the logistics still have a long way to go.

Alaska: Dealing With Distance

Federal officials also bet on Alaska’s rapid transition to seaweed farming. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced $49 million to jump-start the state’s seaweed and shellfish industry, with a quarter of those funds earmarked for Alaska Native communities.

But for farmers and companies, the kelp boom hasn’t quite happened yet. In 2016, one of the first seaweed companies to open after legalization here went on a hiring spree and immediately started putting buoys into the water. According to former employees, they were expecting to hit 1 million pounds of harvested kelp in a few years. Instead, they’ve significantly reduced operations since then, although they do maintain a farm in Alaska. As for the EDA’s 2022 funding, it is still being allocated, and to an industry that’s just beginning to take shape.

Alaska’s mammoth size presents the biggest hurdle: At 663,268 square miles, it’s much larger than any other state and even most countries. Kelp-producing regions can be thousands of miles away from one another. Many of these coastal communities aren’t connected by road, and the only way to haul kelp from farm to processor is by boat. Even after kelp is made into a final product, it still has to be shipped to Seattle, 2,000 miles south.

“We’ve looked at chartering an Alaska Airlines plane,” says Lia Heifetz, laughing. Heifetz is the co-founder of Barnacle Foods, a vertically integrated kelp company known for its Bullwhip Kelp Hot Sauce. She isn’t kidding; in its early days, her company explored flying thousands of pounds of fresh kelp from Kodiak to its headquarters and processing facility in Juneau, a distance of 500 miles. Heifetz admits that the plan wasn’t cost effective—and came with quite a carbon footprint—so they dropped the idea.

Now in its eighth year of business, Barnacle Foods works only with farms within a 70-mile radius. The company still ships everything by boat, relying on commercial fishing vessels, thanks to relationships with fishers that Heifetz has built over the years. To process their kelp, Barnacle has slowly constructed a 3,000-square-foot production floor and additional warehouse. While Heifetz wouldn’t disclose how much they’ve invested in the facility, she points out that one machine, a “capper” for jars, cost $40,000. Other equipment includes container freezers, container refrigerators, and two forklifts.

“Some level of primary processing or stabilization needs to happen at any port [where] there’s a kelp farm,” she says, adding that a single processing company—and there are only a few others in the state—is unlikely to be able to serve thousands of miles of coastline.

Farmers and kelp companies say that a cohesive strategy at the state level, particularly around what types of kelp products to initially focus on—food, fertilizer, or bioplastics, for example—could help farmers and kelp companies build infrastructure more efficiently.

As the $49 million in federal EDA funds are being dispersed through the Southeast Conference’s Alaska Mariculture Center, up to $10 million will go toward infrastructure-related projects; other funds include the Native Regenerative fund, aimed at providing money for permitting, equipment, and lease fees for Native Alaskans; a Kelp Climate fund operated by GreenWave, a kelp nonprofit; and the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant, which can help address processing issues.

An additional challenge for Alaska kelp processing is the cost of energy, which varies widely. Each coastal community is isolated, often operating on its own electrical grid and using a variety of energy sources. Juneau has hydropower, which means Barnacle Foods has relatively low electricity costs, according to Heifitz. In other parts of Alaska, diesel generators can be the only source of electricity, a high-cost option that could deter some types of processing, like freezing.

Because of these expensive bottlenecks, farms have to make money in creative ways. “Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research,” says Brianna Murphy. A former commercial fisher, Murphy and her co-founder, Kristin Smith, created Mothers of Millions in 2021 to do just that, funded by a $30,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Their mobile kelp hatchery, built on a repurposed fishing vessel, means they can navigate straight to farms with spore-laden kelp ready for propagating, instead of waiting for the kelp to come by cargo plane and then working frantically to revive it. Murphy and Smith are kind of a one-stop shop for seaweed farmers: They also offer on-water processing capabilities, shredding harvested kelp directly from the water.

There’s no shortage of interesting and valuable kelp-farming projects in Alaska, including the Native Conservancy’s kelp program, founded to support Indigenous people in starting their own farms. (Native Conservancy founder Dune Lankard was recently featured in the PBS docuseries Hope in the Water for his traditional Eyak kelp cakes.)

Over the next several years, as the EDA grants begin to bear fruit, Alaska could edge closer to realizing the farming potential of its thousands of miles of coastline.

New York: Starting from Scratch

One determined New York oyster grower came up with her own solution.

“This is my bay, a tiny piece of a world that is besieged on every side with climate change and pollution,” says Sue Wicks, the founder of Violet Cove Oysters. Each day, Wicks motors 20 minutes from her house to her 2-acre farm on the Great South Bay, using a Pickerell clamming boat that was designed specifically for this body of water.

“With this little spot, I feel an opportunity, a space to do something tangible,” she says, looking out at her acreage, oyster cages bobbing in the distance as she checks the growth on her kelp lines. She plucks off a furl of young sugar kelp and chews it, enjoying its briny sweetness.

A former Women’s National Basketball Association star, Wicks became an oyster entrepreneur after retiring from professional sports, inspired to work on the waters that her family has fished for more than 10 generations.  Her ancestors could harvest shellfish by hand, but wild stocks have plummeted in Wicks’ lifetime, a consequence of warming waters and nitrogen pollution. After witnessing the decline of her families’ livelihood and pastimes—the traditions of clamming, oystering, fishing, and scalloping—she wanted to restore the waters that surrounded her house and hometown. In 2019, she began growing seaweed as part of a research project with Stony Brook University.

After receiving the state’s first commercial kelp farming lease for the 2023–2024 season, Wicks began construction on New York’s first processing center, a dehydrator. Supported by Lazy Point Farms, a New York-based nonprofit, the center cost around $50,000 to build, says Wicks, and is part of a public-private partnership with Suffolk County and the nearby town of Brookhaven. She’s already started using it for this season’s haul.

Wicks first dries her kelp near the water, on racks in the open air, where it shrinks to 20 percent of its original size. Then she moves the racks to a shipping container equipped with a heater exhaust fan and dehumidifier to finish drying completely. Everything is powered by solar, bringing the whole process as close as possible to net-zero emissions.

The shipping container can be converted into a mobile unit, she says, and it’s easily replicated. As for the dried seaweed, Wicks is experimenting with a hot sauce and a seasoning mix, in collaboration with Lazy Point Farms and available through the nonprofit’s website.

“We don’t have working waterfronts on Long Island anymore, and that makes it very difficult,” says Wicks. She hopes her processing center encourages other oyster growers to try kelp farming, since it gives them a way to create their own shelf-stable product, right after harvest. “The fisheries are part of our heritage. It is who we are. Our biggest success is getting other farmers in the water.”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/07/08/in-brazil-a-powerful-law-protects-biodiversity-and-blocks-corporate-piracy/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/08/in-brazil-a-powerful-law-protects-biodiversity-and-blocks-corporate-piracy/#respond Mon, 08 Jul 2024 09:00:26 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56852 This is the second of two articles about plant biodiversity and genetic resources. Read the first story here. But if you are in Brazil representing a company in search of new food, drugs, or cosmetics, the Jardim’s research center is of far greater significance than the meandering garden paths. Here, inside a former colonial villa, […]

The post In Brazil, a Powerful Law Protects Biodiversity and Blocks Corporate Piracy appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> This is the second of two articles about plant biodiversity and genetic resources. Read the first story here.

But if you are in Brazil representing a company in search of new food, drugs, or cosmetics, the Jardim’s research center is of far greater significance than the meandering garden paths. Here, inside a former colonial villa, the Jardim maintains what amounts to an inventory of the nation’s plant life, more than 65,000 samples.

Each one is a potential treasure trove for companies seeking new plant-based products. And each is now subject to a Brazilian law governing genetic resources, the Law on Access to Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge—known as the genetic heritage law—which is finally being implemented after almost a decade of political and logistical hurdles.

While data on the nation’s plant life is inventoried at the Jardim in Rio, the most powerful tool for implementing this ambitious new law resides in a locked chamber 600 miles away in the nation’s capital of Brasilia. There, in the basement of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, sits an extensive database for registering access to and paying benefits for the nation’s abundant quantities of genetic resources.

It’s called SisGen, shorthand for the National System for Genetic Resource Management and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Commercial enterprises must register with SisGen when they leave a region with a sample and when a “finished product,” in the words of the law, “is developed as a result of the access.” Scientists must also register their access and sampling of a plant if they intend to use it for research. In other words, all possible uses of the plant, including efforts to obtain patent protection for any product developed from it, must be registered.

Furthermore, the Brazilians add a requirement to block any return to the days of biopiracy: All those accessing the resources must have a Brazilian partner (many U.S. companies have Brazilian subsidiaries). For the Indigenous people who provided the know-how necessary to turn plants into commercial products, SisGen is a potentially key pathway to ensuring compensation.

Numerous U.S. companies, universities, and research centers are already making regular use of such ingredients. Among the companies that have recently registered the export of plant or seed samples are agrichemical giants like Bayer Crop Science (which bought Monsanto in 2018); the biotech firm Novozyme; smaller firms like ProFarm, a company that sells biologically based fungicides, insecticides, and seed treatments; and the U.S. subsidiaries of European companies like Givaudan, which develops plant-based snacks and meat alternatives.

Centers of Food Origin: Genetic Treasure Troves

It’s fair to say that most of the foods we eat in North America began their journey to our tables in one of these centers of origin. Corn originated in Mexico; potatoes in the Peruvian Andes; chiles in the mountains of Jamaica; apples in the rugged valleys of Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan Mountains; wheat in Syria and Lebanon; coffee in Yemen; peanuts, cashews, and pineapple in Brazil.

So, when new diseases strike, new pests emerge, and climate stresses increase on North American farms, scientists tend to look to places that are far from American farmland to find genetic resources in centers of origin that were never domesticated. There, plants haven’t had their survival characteristics bred out of them in favor of qualities like super-charged yields and other features of industrial agriculture.

For many years, Europeans and Americans took whatever they found in these and other biodiverse places without asking, or paying, anyone. For instance, when Dr. Moises Santiago Bertoni, an Italian-Swiss botanist, learned in the late 19th century about the stevia plant with the help of the Guaraní people in Brazil and Paraguay, he never had to acknowledge where or how he found the samples he took with him back to Switzerland.

Nor, a century later, did Cargill, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola or any other company have to provide payments or other benefits to the Guaraní community when they released stevia-enhanced products now worth more than $700 million in annual sales.

Who, finally, gets the credit and gets paid for any products that may result from the use of these traditional plants? That is a raging question in Brazil and other biodiverse countries where people are tired of paying for imported foods or drugs that originated from plants in their own home territories.

A UN Law for Protecting Biodiversity

In December 2022, in Montreal, at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, their efforts bore fruit. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which emerged from that meeting, was seen as a major step toward reckoning with how we value the Earth’s resources and the people most responsible for conserving them.

Americans have largely sidestepped these debates over genetic resources, because the U.S. is the only country, along with the Vatican, that has not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity. But the agreement will certainly impact the U.S., because it will play a role in shaping many of the foods, agricultural products, and drugs of the future, and many of the companies that develop and sell those products are global and have extensive markets in the United States.

The Montreal deal called for a global system to ensure that benefits are paid in return for providing access to living genetic resources and to the gene sequences within them that are increasingly providing the basis for new tastes, foods, and drugs. This is called, in U.N. shorthand, access and benefit sharing (ABS). Here, access means obtaining consent to access a nation or tribe’s genetic resources, and benefits means an equitable distribution of profits made from those resources. A U.N. working group of public officials and academics has been charged with devising the details for the system in time for the next Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Cali, Colombia, in October 2024.

After centuries of rampant biopiracy, Indigenous communities and their advocates hope that a sea change is at hand. And Brazil, with the most sophisticated system yet for ascertaining the value of genetic resources, is widely seen as a model for the world.

Political Drama and the Birth of Brazil’s Genetic Heritage Law

“Dilma was watching her impeachment on TV at the same time we were negotiating,” recalled Henry Novion, the former head of Brazil’s Department of Genetic Heritage, who co-authored the law. Later that day, he, two other government officials, and Rousseff’s legal adviser rushed to her office in the presidential palace to get her signature on the decree, which was the final step necessary to implement the nation’s new law governing its genetic heritage.

That eleventh-hour act, one of her final as president, would set into motion the unprecedented system that Brazil devised to track where its genetic resources are located and who was accessing them. It was also the first step toward the allocation of benefits for the insights that Indigenous and local people have long provided to outsiders about the characteristics of plants in their territories, what’s known as “traditional knowledge.”

The law calls for compensation if such knowledge, according to Novion, “adds significant value to the products’ functional characteristics . . . or its market appeal.” The new law replaced an earlier genetic resources law, passed in 2001, that put most of the responsibility for compliance on companies, had little enforcement muscle, and was widely seen, by Indigenous communities as well as the business community, as unwieldy and ineffective. Law 13,123, Novion said, was intended to correct those errors and give the regulations over genetic resources some teeth.

When Jair Bolsonaro was elected as president two years later, progress on implementing the new law—and many other environmental laws—was frozen. Novion stayed on at the department until 2020. He then spent two years working as an independent consultant for foreign governments—including Japan, Angola, and Mozambique—on their own rules governing genetic resources. Then, in February 2023, Novion got his old job back after Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who had served as president before Rousseff, returned to the presidency.

Also in 2023, Lula reappointed Marina Silva, the one-time Green Party presidential candidate and environmental leader, as his Minister of Environment and Climate Change. The new team set out to slowly but steadily shift Brazil away from its heavy reliance on selling commodities—many of them grown in deforested areas—to what Lula has called a “bio-economy,” which creates value out of Brazil’s bounty of genetic resources. At last, the 2016 law began to be implemented across the country.

The document itself is an extremely complicated 22-page piece of legislation. It requires that any company or research institution accessing the country’s resources must engage with a Brazilian partner, and must register their accessions with SisGen. More than 16,000 plant accessions have been registered so far this year, says Novion. When a commercial product is developed from those resources, 1 percent of the annual retail sales must be either provided to the local community or deposited into the National Benefit Sharing Fund. (In some instances, companies may opt to provide services that amount to less than that figure).

The funds are to be dispersed to support local and Indigenous communities’ biodiversity conservation efforts. Thus far in 2024, 9 million reales—roughly $1.6 million U.S.—have been collected for the fund, according to Maira Smith, a biologist with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change team, which is implementing the new law.

The program offers recognition and monetary compensation for conservation to three distinct Brazilian populations: Indigenous people living on the land long before the arrival of the Portuguese and other colonial powers; traditional small and subsistence-scale farmers who have lived off the land for long enough to develop their own knowledge of local genetic resources; and the Quilombolas, the Afro-Brazilian communities descendant from enslaved people who have been living in the tropical forests for generations.

The SisGen database represents the most substantive effort yet to identify the provenance of the country’s genetic resources, a key first step toward recognizing their ties to traditional knowledge. The global nature of farming and the mobility of seeds—which easily traverse national frontiers by means of wind, water, trucks or shipping containers transporting crops—means that the provenance trail is not always clear, however.

According to Novion, many crops grown in Brazil, like corn, soybeans, coffee, and sugarcane, did not originate there, and thus would not be subject to the genetic heritage law. But the many other plants that are clearly endemic to Brazil—açai, stevia, guarana are among the better-known examples—do qualify, and so companies that utilize them for any new products are subject to the registration requirements.

And it gets even more complicated, explained Novion: “If a plant emanating from an exotic, non-Brazilian source finds its way to Brazil and develops independent of human intervention into another related variety, then it, too, is a Brazilian genetic resource.”

Smith explained that the law includes some sharp enforcement tools that will be used with any foreign company or institution. “If there is an American company that does not comply with our legislation,” she said from her office in Brasilia, “we can reach them through their subsidiary industry in Brazil.”

Many global food and agribusiness companies with large Brazilian subsidiaries are subject to these rules, including Corteva, an agrichemical and seed conglomerate which until recently was a subsidiary of DowDuPont; Monsanto and its corporate owner, Bayer; and the food processing and commodity companies Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Cargill.

With potentially tens of millions of dollars’ worth of new plant-based products at stake, however, a number of major food and agribusiness companies launched a sustained campaign to weaken the measure as it made its way through the Brazilian Congress. Among the major lobbying forces were the Agricultural Parliamentary Front and the Pensar Agro Institute, which receive support from major international companies like Bayer, Syngenta, Cargill, and Nestlé, according to the Brazilian NGO De Olho Nos Ruralistas.

They succeeded in writing loopholes into the law big enough to steer an atmospheric river through.

Agribusiness Loopholes in the Genetic Heritage Law

Those making foods based on Brazilian plants must register with SisGen, but are exempted from seeking consent from communities or paying benefits. For example, if you’re looking to make a new facial lotion containing açai, you have to get consent from the local population and pay benefits; but if you’re making a new snack food with açai, no consent or compensation is required.

“We call this a juridical fiction,” says Naiara Bittenfeld, a lawyer for Terra de Cereitos, an organization that advocates for the land rights of Indigenous and local farm communities. As she sees it, the loophole lets many companies off the hook. “Traditional communities can always identify the [people] that produce knowledge. All knowledge has an origin.” She cites stevia as an example. “If Coca-Cola uses stevia in [products], then Coca-Cola needs to pay something. And they don’t need to ask the Guaraní for their consent to use it, though we know the knowledge about stevia comes from the Guaraní.”

Additionally, those seeking access to Brazil’s unique bounty of native seeds—defined in the legislation as “reproductive organisms”—have to pay into the benefits fund, but are exempt from having to obtain consent from local communities. The law states that, for seeds, there are “no recognizable sources” of traditional knowledge.

Soldati asserts that such provisions “violate one of the most important rights of Indigenous people, the right to be consulted about every subject that involves their lives.”

Maira Smith explains the government’s view: Because many forest communities have practiced agroforestry for centuries, traditional knowledge is shared by many people; knowledge and seed have essentially evolved together. “The traditional knowledge is contained inside the seed,” she says. That makes it difficult to identify any one community as the primary source of traditional knowledge. In such instances, payments are made into the National Benefits Fund, which makes grants to communities that protect their genetic resources.

For the past year, Soldati, supported by the U.N.’s Green Environment Fund, has been traveling to many of the biodiversity-rich communities that are far from the corridors of power in Brasilia to explain their potential rights under the law, and lobby for an expansion of protections. “We want to plant the roots of knowledge deep inside the soil,” he said.

In January 2024, Soldati and a coalition representing hundreds of Indigenous communities met with Minister Silva to discuss their concerns. Among their top demands, according to Soldati: Stronger enforcement of “prior informed consent” rules, and greater transparency to ensure benefits are paid. The current system requires navigating the complex SisGen database, and some of the information—like how much each company pays—is confidential.

The coalition also demanded government guarantees of access to their traditional tribal territories (many communities have been ousted from traditional lands by mining, ranching, and agribusiness interests), and government support for an Indigenous-run pharmacopeia of native plants that explains their history and uses. Those last two things are connected: Compiling such a guide would require revitalizing an effort, begun during Lula’s previous presidency, to clearly demarcate tribal lands.

Natural Resources as Property versus Relationships

By contrast, an Indigenous view, says Hardison, sees such “resources as part of their relationships with kin, with knowledge of their ancestors, and relationships with other animal beings.”

Daniele Manzella, a policy officer for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), says the current ABS negotiations involve synthesizing multiple perspectives: impulses to conservation, open scientific exchanges, Western science, traditional knowledge, and the rapidly expanding technologies for reproducing characteristics obtained from plant DNA. “It’s different souls,” he said, “competing with each other.”

The SisGen computer, containing all that information about Brazilian plants and their possibilities, is whirring away in the middle of these contradictions, translating the evolutionary relationship between humans and plants into Western concepts of intellectual property and mechanisms of financial recognition. “We are working with different knowledge systems,” says Smith, at the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. “We’re trying to encourage the flow of knowledge between the two systems.”

The Genetic Sequencing Twist

At the heart of these negotiations is an attempt to also address the new frontier for genetic resources: the digital information contained within each plant. Now that the genomes of hundreds of thousands of plants have been mapped, and the data entered into global gene banks, food and pharma scientists are able to identify gene sequences that contain desired characteristics—the “sweet” sequence in a stevia leaf, for example, or the sequence in a seed that may convey resistance to drought. In other words, they may no longer need the physical specimen to get what they’re looking for. Once identified, that sequence delivering a specific characteristic can be synthesized with a technology known as Digital Sequence Information, or DSI.

The practice, now pursued by many food and seed companies, poses a profound challenge. DSI offers the real possibility of disconnecting an organism from its origins. Manzella says that the quandary inherent in the U.N.’s asset and benefit-sharing work lies in trying to place the high-speed, highly technical science of genetic sequencing alongside traditional knowledge based on millennia of experience and life on, and from, the land. Never before have negotiators tried to find a common ground between the two.

At a meeting of the U.N. working group assigned to hammer out a benefit-sharing plan in advance of the November meeting, the challenges presented by DSI were central to the conversation. Such questions included whether such a system should indeed be global, or give individual countries leeway to devise their own ABS systems, such as the one that now exists in Brazil. Other contentious issues on the table: How do you identify the source pool of a set of chromosomes, and who do you pay? What to do if no specific community source for the material—either physical or chromosomal—can be identified, or the trail leads to multiple locations?

Proposals being considered include a subscription service to seed banks or gene banks, with the subscription fees going toward indigenous-led conservation of threatened genetic resources. Then the question: Who pays? What restrictions are placed on taking such resources and placing them behind an intellectual property paywall? How negotiators deal with such questions on a global scale will determine the shape of genetic resource use for decades to come.

A global agreement has the potential to begin reversing centuries of unhindered extraction by funneling millions of dollars toward long-ignored communities. It could also flounder under the pressures of companies, scientists, and nations that perceive the recognition of traditional knowledge, and even minimal profit sharing, as a threat.

Meanwhile, in the realm of actual plants, almost a decade after Brazil passed its groundbreaking genetic heritage law, the country is preparing to unlock the first round of grants from the National Access and Benefit Sharing Fund. The fund will be offering an initial amount of 1,250,000 reales, roughly U.S. $235,000, for which any of the more than 300 officially identified Indigenous and local communities may apply.

The first round of awards will be in November, according to Smith. Twenty-four communities determined to be “guardians of biodiversity” will each be awarded grants of 50,000 reales (U.S. $8,940) based on their work preserving their genetic resources. It will mark one of the first times that funds generated through the sharing of traditional knowledge will be sent back, by the government, to those who shared it.

An earlier edition of this article misstated the 2024 amount gathered for Brazil’s local and Indigenous biodiversity conservation efforts. That figure has been updated.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/08/in-brazil-a-powerful-law-protects-biodiversity-and-blocks-corporate-piracy/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/07/02/bringing-back-local-milk-ice-cream-and-cheese/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/02/bringing-back-local-milk-ice-cream-and-cheese/#respond Tue, 02 Jul 2024 09:00:21 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56817 The shop’s freshly churned ice cream—with surprising flavors like Foggy Pebbles, made with cereal-soaked milk, and Danish Butter Cookie—has been drawing crowds. Since taking over a long-shuttered creamery earlier this year, Jersey Scoops has given the sleepy downtown a much-needed boost; customers routinely spill over to the park across the road, cone in hand, creating […]

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At Jersey Scoops in Loleta, a small, unincorporated community in Northern California’s Humboldt County, the ice cream is as fresh as it gets. From pasture to parlor, its organic, butterfat-rich milk travels less than 10 miles, produced by a herd of Jerseys pasture-raised on the misty coast.

The shop’s freshly churned ice cream—with surprising flavors like Foggy Pebbles, made with cereal-soaked milk, and Danish Butter Cookie—has been drawing crowds. Since taking over a long-shuttered creamery earlier this year, Jersey Scoops has given the sleepy downtown a much-needed boost; customers routinely spill over to the park across the road, cone in hand, creating a potential reason for new businesses to fill the empty storefronts that once housed a cheese factory, bakery, and laundromat. Beyond Loleta, Jersey Scoops’ rainbow-labeled pints are making waves at local farmers’ markets, stores, and restaurants.

“We want to reinvigorate the community and revive Loleta’s dairy legacy.”

While revitalizing the community, Jersey Scoops adds a high-value outlet for a perishable product, strengthening the industry overall. But the owners of Jersey Scoops didn’t get here on their own; they leveraged a $60,000 grant from the Pacific Coast Coalition’s Dairy Business Innovation Initiative (PCC DBII) to secure both the space and equipment.

Despite the region’s history as a dairy powerhouse, locally made ice cream was previously nonexistent, says Thomas Nicholson-Stratton, who launched the venture with his husband, Cody. The ice cream shop is an extension of the Nicholson family’s sixth-generation, 120-acre farm in nearby Ferndale. Since taking over the dairy a decade ago and branding it Foggy Bottoms Boys, the couple has been bucking convention and helping their rural community navigate changing economic tides.

Foggy Bottoms Boys co-owners Thomas and Cody Nicholson-Stratton with their son at Jersey Scoops. (Photo credit: Will Suiter Photography)

“We want to reinvigorate the community and revive Loleta’s dairy legacy,” Nicholson-Stratton says of the 2,200-square-foot, eight-employee operation, noting the town’s history as a key producer of powdered milk. The scoops are also a platform for amplifying the dairy’s “very deliberate name,” he says, derived partly from the farm’s location on the foggy banks of the Eel River, but also reflecting its owners’ sense of humor: “We want to diversify the face of farming, because there are few places where young and queer people can see themselves in the field.”

The PCC DBII is one of four such initiatives across the country, funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service. The national program helps small and mid-sized dairy producers squeeze more value out of milk by diversifying their products and markets, reducing waste, and innovating packaging and processing. With family dairies drying up in droves—the U.S. has 39 percent fewer dairies than five years ago, despite the same number of cows producing 5 percent more milk—the support aids smaller players in countering the forces of an increasingly consolidated industry.

A crowd forms outside Jersey Scoops during its ribbon-cutting weekend. (Photo credit: Will Suiter Photography)

The DBII also aims to strengthen the economic health of small and rural communities, says project director Carmen Licon-Cano. Foggy Bottoms Boys ticks many of the initiative’s boxes, creating a local milk product, she says, while invigorating a struggling downtown and adding a fresh take on the industry. “They’re really a shining example of the program.”

Building From the Bottom Up

California, the nation’s leading dairy state, produces nearly a fifth of the U.S. milk supply, mostly on industrial farms in the Central Valley. These farms hold, on average, around 2,300 cows. (Herds in Wisconsin, the second-largest producer, average 177 cows.) Across the nation, mega-dairies are becoming the norm, as more farms mirror the Golden State’s confined animal feedlot operations (CAFO).

These highly productive operations maximize returns in an industry with crushing profit margins. However, critics highlight their outsized environmental impact, including excessive water use and pollution caused by concentrated waste, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. CAFOs also face scrutiny for animal welfare issues due to confinement and extreme production demands. Meanwhile, the perishability of dairy’s main product exposes the industry to supply chain disruptions. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, failed shipping logistics forced farmers to dump millions of gallons of milk.

“It’s difficult for small businesses like us to be profitable. A lot of people don’t understand why my cheese costs [four times more than] Walmart’s.”

The 2018 Farm Bill established the DBII to spur innovation in the dairy industry and address the downward trend in milk consumption nationwide, caused at least in part by the proliferation of other beverages, including plant-based milks. Since then, the USDA program, which is overseen by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former dairy industry insider, has added post-pandemic support, both financially and technically, for producers and processors.

The initiative aims to “uplift the dairy sector” and strengthen local markets, says Susan Pheasant, director of California State University Fresno’s Institute for Food and Agriculture (IFA), which hosts the Pacific Coast Coalition DBII. With $165 million in total funding to date, regional DBIIs address the specific needs of four individual markets—northeast, southeast, midwest, and west coast. The PCC DBII includes academic partners such as Oregon State University as well as industry groups like the California Dairy Innovation Center. In addition to piloting new equipment, recipes, and processing techniques, the universities facilitate worker training and certificate programs in cheesemaking, food safety, marketing, and other specialized areas.

Some regions have expanded their focus to include climate-smart ranching practices, including managed grazing and resilient cropping systems, which can mitigate the environmental and climate impacts of industrial livestock production. But that hasn’t been the PCC’s focus, Pheasant says. As the last DBII to be established, in 2019, the region has received significantly less funding, so it has only focused on dairy processing. The PCC’s relatively modest grants target small and mid-sized operations, she says, to create an equitable field for producers.

For smaller enterprises, however, even modest grants can be transformative, Pheasant says. One artisan cheesemaker, for example, used a $100,000 award toward a cheese cutter that creates precisely measured wedges, eliminating an onerous manual task and allowing them to tap a new market that operates on uniformity and volume. And, because family, minority, and women-owned businesses often face greater challenges in securing capital, the funding can be “a real game changer,” she says, enabling them to compete at a far greater scale. “It’s a story that gets replicated through these small producers,” she adds.

“As an artisanal creamery, we need products that can really differentiate us from larger [operations],” says Todd Koch, owner of TMK Creamery in Canby, Oregon. Half an hour outside Portland, the 50-acre family farm is known for its ice cream and freshly churned cheddar, made from the milk of 20 pastured-grazed cows and sold a stone’s throw away at the farm stand and in a few local restaurants.

Several years ago, Koch collaborated with Oregon State University to develop a vodka distilled from whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking. “Cowcohol” has become one of TMK’s signature products, enabling the creamery to diversify with a premium, shelf-stable offering while minimizing a costly disposal problem.

Using a $140,000 DBII grant, TMK Creamery is now developing a filtration system to fully extract their whey’s remaining lipids and proteins—which are fed back to the cows, another savings. “It’s difficult for small businesses like us to be profitable,” Koch says. “A lot of people don’t understand why my cheese costs [four times more than] Walmart’s.”

“We’re an important fabric of these rural communities.”

These innovations often have ripple effects. At Nico’s Ice Cream, in Portland, Oregon, owner Nico Vergara concocts his frozen treats using a specialized blender imported from New Zealand. The machine swirls scoops of fresh fruit into the cream—both sourced from farms in nearby Willamette Valley—to create “a light and airy, soft-serve-y texture,” Pheasant says. “It’s one of a kind.”

In just three years, the 25-year-old entrepreneur, who started off with a seasonal pushcart, has opened two shops and now distributes pints to about 60 grocery stores in Oregon and Washington. Using a $40,000 DBII grant, he’s acquired an additional fleet of machines and is working toward nationwide distribution. With flavors that nod to Vergara’s Latino background, such as chamoy, a pickled fruit-and-pepper sauce, and Tajín, a brand of chili and lime seasoning, the company aims to broaden its product line and cater to an increasingly diverse consumer market.

With a third store in the works, Vergara’s success reflects the country’s voracious appetite for dairy—and the industry’s capacity to satisfy it. Despite waning milk consumption, Americans still consume a lot of cheese, yogurt, butter, and ice cream. Between 2021 and 2022, the average annual consumption of dairy products rose by more than 12 pounds per person, to an average of 667 pounds. And though the science is inconclusive around the health impacts, dairy products remain a staple in food assistance programs as a source of protein and other essential nutrients.

As the ballooning demand continues to shape market forces, the shift towards fewer, larger farms is inevitable, says Charles Nicholson, associate professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With smaller-scale dairies harder hit by labor shortages and fluctuating milk prices, “this long-term trend would be hard to change with public policy or private initiatives [alone],” he says.

A few sleek Jersey cows from the Foggy Bottoms Boys pastures. (Photo courtesy of Foggy Bottoms Boys)

Nevertheless, the DBII and similar programs play an important role in supporting individual businesses and local communities, Nicholson says. And although his research found that diversifying milk production through more complex processing isn’t a sure path to profit, concentrating innovation close to the source tends to reduce the financial risks.

Ultimately, maintaining a diversity of production practices and locations bolsters resilience within the industry, Nicholson says, making it less vulnerable to disruptions in regional supply chains and climate-related issues. Consumers also benefit from greater access to a broader array of local and regional products.

The PCC also supports innovation through a larger lens, says PCC’s Lincon-Cano, providing office hours and technical assistance in equipment training and testing, as well as developing business and marketing plans. And by offering resources such as webinars and certificate programs in Spanish, the expanded access helps diversify the industry’s enterprise base, she says, which remains largely white despite the large number of Latinos in the greater workforce. Together, these strategic investments can contribute to a resilient, less consolidated system, one more closely tied to local economies and communities.

More Eyes Per Acre

As one of California’s oldest cheesemakers, Rumiano Cheese has a storied presence in the North Coast’s dairy shed. The company sources organic milk from 23 family farms, all of which pasture their herds within a 100-mile radius of the company’s Del Norte County cheese plant. “We’re an important fabric of these rural communities,” says Rumiano’s chief executive officer, Joe Baird, noting that many of the farms (including Foggy Bottoms Boys) supply them with milk. Many of these connections go back decades, he says, “so we don’t want to screw it up.”

Rumiano is using a $200,000 DBII grant to develop packaging for ready-to-serve and party-size cheese trays for the growing convenience market, which typically depends heavily on plastic. The funds will go towards retooling existing equipment to make new containers with more sustainable materials and less polymer, Baird says, and distinguish the brand from conventional competitors.

With industrial-scale operators flooding the market with “literally a billion pounds” of cheese, Baird says, innovation is vital to the survival of smaller producers. The diversity of players helps foster innovation, “just like tech and Silicon Valley,” he adds. Local dairy also supports the North Coast economy, which has been impacted by price collapses in cannabis, one of the region’s primary cash crops.

Smaller, family-run operations also have a deep commitment to their land and herds, Baird says. Organic and independently certified to meet animal welfare standards, these producers maintain regenerative practices, grazing cows in rotated paddocks to improve soil and pasture health.

These approaches often run counter to the commodity-driven model of CAFOs. Although pasture-based operations can vary in both size and practice methods, foraging requirements tend to limit herds to the hundreds, not thousands, says Steve Washburn, professor emeritus at North Carolina State University’s department of animal science and an expert in pasture-based and organic dairy production.

Run well, smaller-scaled systems have several advantages over confinement operations, Washburn says. Proper rotational grazing relies on pasture as the primary forage, cutting feed costs. Additionally, because cows spread manure uniformly across the paddocks, the waste enriches the soil and emits far less methane than it would decomposing in a collection pool.

Perhaps most importantly, the promotion of more small dairies creates a healthier agricultural ecosystem. The more dairies, the more farmer “eyes per acre,” Baird says, referencing Wendell Berry. “That’s why we’re so committed to supporting the viability of family-scale farms.” And without support for innovation, he adds, “this ecosystem is very much at risk.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/02/bringing-back-local-milk-ice-cream-and-cheese/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/06/24/look-what-nicola-twilley-found-in-the-fridge/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/24/look-what-nicola-twilley-found-in-the-fridge/#comments Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:00:05 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56576 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. Polemic proclamations aside, refrigeration speaks volumes about our food system, says Nicola Twilley, seasoned journalist and co-host of the podcast Gastropod. The ability to manufacture cold has shaped not […]

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A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Polemic proclamations aside, refrigeration speaks volumes about our food system, says Nicola Twilley, seasoned journalist and co-host of the podcast Gastropod. The ability to manufacture cold has shaped not just our diet and health, she argues, but our economy, landscape, and geopolitics. “Its fingerprints are everywhere,from the height [increases in] 19th-century army recruits to Irish Independence and women’s liberation.”

Her new book, Frostbite, plunges readers into the chilly depths of the cold chain—the refrigerated infrastructure that envelops our food as it moves from farm to table—and the far-reaching consequences of developing a food system utterly dependent on cold preservation, storage, and delivery.

As the cold chain continues to expand at a frenzied pace, however, it comes at a shiver-inducing cost, Twilley says—to our health, the socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape, and climate change.

Civil Eats spoke with Twilley about her book, how refrigeration has transformed our relationship with food, and the implications of feeding the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for manufactured cold.

What exactly is the cold supply chain?

It’s an interconnected network of refrigerated spaces, trucks, shipping containers, and air transportation. About three-quarters of everything on American plates passes through it, starting on the farm, extending to the supermarket, and ending at your fridge. The cold chain has created this vast artificial winter and the global food system that we have today—a world with out-of-season produce, [imported] meats, and Alaskan salmon that’s pin-boned in China, then sold in the U.S.

Can you explain the logistics of creating a cheeseburger entirely from scratch, and how the refrigerated food system makes that possible?

I tell the story of [open-data activist] Waldo Jaquith, who went off the grid with his wife in 2010 to test the limits of self-sufficiency. They built a home in rural Virginia, growing their own vegetables and raising chickens, and set off on a mission to make a cheeseburger—this sort of pinnacle of industrial food—from scratch.

He outlined the steps: He’d grow his own tomatoes, mustard plant, and wheat for the buns. It was the meat and cheese, though, where things fell down. In a pre-refrigeration scenario, you’d slaughter the cow in the cool winter months, but to make cheese at the same time as the beef, you’d need another [cow] that’s nursing [to get the milk and rennet].

Then if you want a tomato on your burger, that’s a late summer produce; if you want lettuce leaf, that’s spring or fall. Without refrigeration, none of those things can be ready at the same time. Sure, you could turn the tomatoes into ketchup and age the cheese. But when you think about how many cheeseburgers Americans eat, bringing those ingredients together in a pre-refrigeration world would have been like dining on a peacock stuffed into a swan—an incredible feat of food sourcing that requires a lot of preparation and planning.

So, the cheeseburger couldn’t have existed without our refrigerated supply chain, and they didn’t; the earliest records are from the 1920s.

Like so many innovations that we consider essential, including the internet, refrigeration comes at a steep price.

It’s a fascinating conundrum. Refrigeration has been seen as an unarguable benefit to society—without it, a third of everything [grown] used to go bad before it could be sold. Food waste has huge environmental and economic impacts on food security, water use, and methane emissions from rotting food, so on that level alone, it’s incredible.

Refrigeration allows apple farmers in Washington, for example, to store their annual harvest and spread out sales over the next year. Cold transport allows banana growers in Central America to access a huge export market. People now talk about eating seasonally without having any idea of how it used to be. Historians think that much of Europe used to be pre-scorbutic (a pre-scurvy condition due to vitamin C deficiency) right before spring, from the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. So, manufactured cold has given us the abundance that we have today, including sheer cool delights like cocktails and ice cream.

Still, a century of refrigeration has also revealed equally enormous downsides. For growers, the economic benefits aren’t so long term: Once the market opens up globally, the money and opportunities tend to go to whoever can do it for the absolute least, and that pushes prices and revenue down for everyone. Refrigeration has contributed to unsustainable monocultures that promote pests, diseases, and resource depletion; although we can have asparagus out of season in the U.S., exports from Peru are draining that country’s aquifer.

The global domination of bananas—the world’s most popular fruit—is made entirely possible by refrigerated shipping and [artificial] ripening. But through consolidation and dependence on a single crop, big plantations in Central America and the foreign corporations that run them have also [left a legacy of] political monoculture in the region.

There are also subtle downsides to taste and nutrition. Fruits and vegetables have been reshaped to fit into a refrigerated supply chain, and part of that has removed flavor—literally switched off genes responsible for producing it. There’s also evidence that nutrient levels have fallen as crops are bred for the cold chain. Yet as consumers, we’ve voted with our dollars to have [produce that’s] cold and sturdy—rather than tasty or healthy.

At the planetary level, refrigerant gases and the energy used for cooling are among the biggest contributors to climate change. Astonishingly, refrigeration hasn’t reduced food waste—it’s just moved it to the other end [of the consumption pipeline]. In overstuffing our fridges and supermarket shelves, we’re chucking a third of our food supply and [creating even more] greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the global cold chain keeps expanding—between 2018 and 2020, world [refrigeration] capacity increased nearly 20 percent. I think it’s a potential time bomb.

What is refrigeration’s role in transforming the beef industry?

A lot of the beef industry’s development was driven by the need to feed an increasing urban population. Historically, cattle would walk themselves to market—losing weight en route—and get slaughtered in the city. The cold chain allowed livestock to be raised far away from cities and put meatpacking plants in places where you could bypass pesky things like a unionized workforce. It took skilled butchering jobs away from urban stockyards and made [slaughterhouses] more dangerous.

In the big picture, I think refrigeration contributes to the detachment we have from our meat supply and what happens to these animals before they arrive on our plates. That fosters an approach that says, “I just want the cheapest price possible,” because essentially, that’s the only information we have about the meat.

It’s also led to massive industry consolidation, with four companies now controlling more than 70 percent of the U.S. beef market.

The cold chain only makes economic sense at a certain scale, one that tends to rule out small producers. Cattle farmers in New England, where land is more expensive, can’t compete with those in the American West, who have economic advantages that come with being big. That spurs consolidation: Along with gigantic industrial feedlots, meat processing plants capable of slaughtering thousands of cattle a day have become the norm.

What are the implications of the rest of the world rushing to build U.S.-style cold systems?

Currently, 70 percent of all food consumed in the U.S. passes through a cold chain, while in China, less than a quarter of meats and 5 percent of fruits and veg are sold under refrigeration. With mechanical cooling already responsible for [a significant portion of] global greenhouse emissions, the implications are you can’t build an American-size [system] around the world using current technology and stay within the 2-degree [Celsius global temperature] threshold of the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement. It’s literally not possible.

Conversely, reimagining and reinventing cold technology offers a lot of hope for building a better food system. Rwanda, for instance, is developing a National Cooling Strategy, the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. Although there’s a minimum size required to make refrigeration work economically, in a country where small-scale farmers make up nearly half the population, the system has to be implemented so that it doesn’t throw people off their land or lead to monoculture.

Meanwhile, how can we make the U.S. system more sustainable? The Biden administration is investing in developing a more resilient meat supply chain, for example, largely by decentralizing the industry. Will initiatives like that help? 

It’s obviously harder in the U.S., where we have an entrenched system. But there are so many advantages to making things smaller—the industry will definitely be more resilient if one E. coli contamination doesn’t shut down a tenth of your meat supply. While you need to have some level of aggregation, focusing on infrastructure like community refrigeration hubs can help bring the cost of the cold chain down and make [smaller producers] more competitive with agribusiness.

For perishable products, the mantra in the American food system is “the cold chain, the cold chain, the cold chain.” We refrigerate when we don’t need to. If the U.S. mandated salmonella vaccinations for chickens as the U.K. does, you wouldn’t need to refrigerate eggs. Also, there’s a company producing a permeable, edible coating for [harvested] produce that drastically slows ripening—essentially what cold does, with fewer impacts on flavor. Some European countries regulate supermarket size in order to preserve downtowns while curbing massive weekly shopping trips that encourage food waste.

There are solutions at all points along the chain that don’t require new technology. We’re dealing with an entrenched system, however, so we need regulation and incentives to make it work.

As you state, our country’s dependence on refrigeration is disproportionately high—the average U.S. fridge is 40 percent bigger than a French one, while 1 in 4 American households owns multiple units. What can consumers do to wean themselves off cold food?

Unplug that second refrigerator in your garage and recycle it properly to have the gases captured; you’lll find that it reduces food waste and electric bills simultaneously. And there’d be less wishful thinking if we shopped more frequently, in smaller amounts; we buy to fill the space you have. Go to the farmers’ market and buy what’s in season locally. Produce tastes better [that way], too—it’s not just some myth made up by Alice Waters (laugh).

Do you see any glimmer of hope in all of this?

Post-harvest science and technology is this Cinderella-like sector of research and development. There are people doing great work here, but almost nothing is being spent on it. If you want to enter a field that could transform the world, that’s a place where you’re needed.

There’s one striking aspect to note about our food system: It has only been refrigerated for a little more than a century. If it’s that recent, we can transform it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/24/look-what-nicola-twilley-found-in-the-fridge/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/06/18/how-specialty-recycling-companies-reduce-plastic-waste/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/18/how-specialty-recycling-companies-reduce-plastic-waste/#respond Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:00:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56628 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. Some food packaging is made of multiple layers of different materials fused together. While this increases durability, it also makes it difficult to recycle. “We’ve done a great job […]

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Some food packaging is made of multiple layers of different materials fused together. While this increases durability, it also makes it difficult to recycle.

“We’ve done a great job as a society of creating packaging that is efficient and appealing,” said Gerrine Pan, vice president of partnerships at Ridwell, a Seattle-based startup that helps consumers send less waste to landfills. “But our rate of packaging innovation has far outpaced our rate of being able to handle that material in the traditional waste management system.”

Launched in 2018, Ridwell is part of a small but growing group of specialty recyclers helping to educate consumers about reducing waste while collecting materials that traditional municipal recycling services won’t. Some offer memberships or subscriptions to residents for a monthly fee with bi-weekly pickups from their curbs or doorsteps, and a few also provide services to businesses.

Their reach ranges from regional to multi-state. Rabbit Recycling, for example, operates in the Philadelphia Metropolitan area, while the ReCollective offers services in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which includes Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Cary. Recyclops serves residents and businesses in more than 30 states and most major metro areas.

Ridwell now has 100,000 members in eight metro areas in seven states. Every two weeks, the company picks up multi-layer plastic food packaging, plastic clamshell containers, batteries, lightbulbs, and other hard-to-recycle materials from the doorsteps of members who pay $14 and up per month.

It was launched by a Seattle father and son who needed to recycle old batteries, but their garbage company wouldn’t accept them. After calling around to find a location that would take the old batteries, they offered to take along their neighbors’ dead batteries too as part of a “recycling carpool.” It turned into an ongoing weekend project with different materials collected and recycled every week, including electronics and Styrofoam.

Their list of participating neighbors, which became known as “Owen’s List,” eventually topped 2,000, underscoring great demand and confusion about the patchwork of local recycling rules in the U.S., which lacks a modern national standard. In a nation where recycling rules may vary county by county, not to mention state by state, just 32.1 percent of waste is recycled or composted.

Ubiquitous Food Packaging

Also, multi-layer plastics commonly used in food packaging often can’t be recycled because technologies are, unfortunately, largely designed to handle one type of plastic at a time.

“You can neither sort them out, nor can you separate out those layers to get them individually recycled,” Pan said.

As a result, the commodity market for plastic film waste is quite small, and even tinier for multi-layer plastic waste, Pan said. Most of it ends up in landfills.

The failures of the landfill diversion system inspired Ryan Smith to launch Recyclops in 2014. The Salt Lake City–based recycler got its start with apartment buildings before branching out to single family homes in cities without a recycling infrastructure. Recyclops uses a gig-worker model similar to DoorDash or Uber: Independent contractors lead recycling collections, allowing Recyclops to expand faster.

Recyclops’ business is now split between residential collection programs, mostly focused in rural areas, and enterprise-level solutions that reach most major metro areas. For example, the company works with a grocery delivery startup on a national packaging return program in which reusable ice packs are collected, washed, and sanitized, and insulated liners are recycled. It also runs a squeeze-pouch program for a baby-food brand.

In the 10 years since founding Recyclops, Smith has seen food packaging become more sophisticated and lightweight; using pouches, for example, can help to reduce shipping costs and environmental impact. Alternatively, some companies are going old-school, shifting toward traditional reusables such as glass.

“It’s a balance,” Smith said. “You’re weighing the environmental impact of manufacturing and shipping against recyclability. Businesses have to evaluate and weigh what they care about most. Where is the highest impact? And oftentimes, what we’ve seen is that there’s a trend toward maybe less recyclable but more sustainable.”

There’s also a push and pull between the packaging and recycling industries, Smith said. He points to plastic water bottles, which used to be much thicker.

“Now it’s more common to see super thin plastic water bottles,” Smith said. “The thicker plastic water bottles were way better for the recycling industry. There’s more plastic per bottle, which makes it easier to recycle and makes the whole system kind of work a little bit better, but you’re using twice as much plastic for no reason.”

Limited Recycling

“I’ve gone back and forth in terms of pushing for zero waste, and trying that is like a part-time job,” she said. “I’m young and not the wealthiest person in the world, so finding all the options and services that would make it affordable is really tough.”

Sue Frank, a retired Philadelphia librarian, said she happily signed up for a Rabbit Recycling subscription a few months ago out of frustration with her recycling options. She and her husband generate a lot of plastic food packaging waste from grocery shopping and a weekly meal delivery service.

“In the past, I just pretended I was recycling and put stuff in Philadelphia’s blue box and crossed my fingers,” Frank said. “Now I put it out happily, gratefully, confident that people will be taking time with it and trying to distribute it nicely.”

Ridwell gives users detailed instructions on what they can recycle through its service. This education has been one of the most positive aspects of a membership, said Eric Lerner, a community organizer who lives with his family in Alameda, California. His 11-year-old daughter is in charge of sorting.

“It makes us more thoughtful about all the different types of plastic that are used for packaging, which we probably wouldn’t think about if we were just dumping it in the garbage every two weeks,” Lerner said. “We get to do an inventory of our plastic garbage when we’re sorting it.”

Ridwell also shares educational text messages and case studies. “It’s good information and makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger than just recycling your own plastic,” Lerner said.

Ridwell’s service hasn’t made Lerner’s family feel more comfortable buying products in plastic packaging just because they’re able to recycle them. Instead, Lerner said they’ve become more thoughtful when they shop, bringing their own used plastic bags or cloth bags to the grocery store or farmers’ market.

Recycling, Reuse, and Upcycling

Ridwell partners with more than 200 organizations that will reuse or recycle the materials. Hydroblox, for instance, transforms multi-layer plastic into outdoor landscape drainage blocks, and Trex manufactures plastic film into composite lumber for decks and playground sets.

Rabbit Recycling co-owner Matt Siegfried estimates that his company recycles about 80 percent of materials, donates roughly 15 percent to nonprofits such as homeless shelters, and upcycles the remaining 5 percent to artists, including one who turned chip bags into sleeping bags for unhoused people.

“If we could get those numbers a little more even, I would be very happy,” Siegfried said. “That is a goal of ours.”

Recyclops’ Smith, in particular, has been fascinated by a rebound in the reuse of materials the company collects. Recyclops is partnering with a wine importer on a pilot program to reuse wine bottles that Recyclops collects and cleans.

“We’re taking wine bottles, and they’re getting washed and sanitized and then refilled and resold,” Smith said. “And we’re not alone in that reuse renaissance. It’s kind of like bringing back the milkman. . . . I expect over the next few years that we’ll see more and more reuse in food packaging. We’re definitely trying to make that a reality.”

Policy Solutions

The law aims to boost recycling of single-use plastic packaging and food service ware to 65 percent, trim sales of single-use plastic packaging and food service ware by 25 percent and ensure that all single-use packaging and plastic food service ware sold in California is recyclable or compostable by 2032.

“That’s an example of policy and advocacy that changes the landscape,” Pan said. “It also invites producers to the table to figure out how to manage that.”

In the meantime, she said people can reduce how much food packaging enters their home by buying in bulk, bringing their own bags, using reusables, and avoiding single-use when they can.

“Small actions do add up to big change,” she said. “Every household can make a difference.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/18/how-specialty-recycling-companies-reduce-plastic-waste/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2024/06/17/an-effort-to-reduce-plastic-waste-just-died-in-the-new-york-legislature/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/17/an-effort-to-reduce-plastic-waste-just-died-in-the-new-york-legislature/#comments Mon, 17 Jun 2024 09:00:56 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56582 Or perhaps it was the newspaper advertisements from pro-plastic lobbyists warning New Yorkers that “radical activists” were “about to ruin summer BBQ season.” Whatever the cause, a bill that would have fundamentally reshaped how single-use plastic waste is managed in the fourth-largest state went down to defeat earlier this month in the New York State […]

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In the end, it may have been fears that Kraft Heinz would remove plastic tubs of Cool Whip or individually wrapped processed cheese slices from grocery store shelves that defeated an ambitious packaging reduction and recycling bill in the New York State Legislature.

Or perhaps it was the newspaper advertisements from pro-plastic lobbyists warning New Yorkers that “radical activists” were “about to ruin summer BBQ season.”

Whatever the cause, a bill that would have fundamentally reshaped how single-use plastic waste is managed in the fourth-largest state went down to defeat earlier this month in the New York State Assembly after passing in the State Senate, as lawmakers completed their regular legislative session.

“Our posture is, whenever the Assembly comes back, we are going to try again, whether that is next January, or sooner,” said Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond Plastics, an environmental group that backed the legislation. “We have come this far; we are not giving up. Plastic pollution is not going anywhere and neither are we.”

The opposition to the legislation, which included provisions known as “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, will be ready, too. Typically, EPR holds producers of products responsible for their management through the product’s lifecycle.

“We are not opposed to EPR for packaging,” said Ken Pokalsky, vice president of the Business Council of New York State, a business lobby organization. “We are opposed to this bill, which has a lot of flaws.”

Bill Was Touted as a Model

Several years in the making, the proposed Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act had followed a “polluter pays” philosophy, putting the financial burden for managing packaging waste on the companies that generate it, rather than taxpayers or government agencies.

“It will take us away from single-use plastics that are obliterating our environment, our oceans or just being burned,” or sent to landfills, New York state Sen. Pete Harckham (D-Westchester), the bill’s main sponsor in the Senate, told Inside Climate News. Less waste also means fewer heat-trapping gases blamed for causing climate change, he said.

Beyond Plastics saw the bill as a national model, and the most comprehensive in the country. It sought to address not only recycling and waste reduction but also would have banned some of the most toxic chemicals found in plastic packaging.

Five other states have passed EPR laws for plastic packaging, from Maine in 2021 to Minnesota, the latest, earlier this year. Maine and Minnesota both left many of the details to be worked out by state agencies.

California’s bill, passed in 2022, is the most ambitious to become law so far—seeking to cut single-use plastic packaging and food service ware by 25 percent; recycle 65 percent of single-use plastic packaging and food service ware; and make 100 percent of single-use packaging and plastic food service ware recyclable or compostable.

But some critics, Beyond Plastics among them, worry that the California law allows for easy exemptions, gives the industry too much control over itself and may have left the door open to chemical recycling, which in some common forms environmental groups consider to be tantamount to incineration, not actual recycling.

“We need a state to do it right,” said Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional director during the Obama administration who got her start in environmental advocacy by successfully lobbying for New York’s state’s 1982 Returnable Container Act, known as the bottle bill.

Pokalsky agreed that lawmakers and environmental advocates alike won’t give up on a plastics packaging bill for New York. But he called for scrapping the language in the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act and looking to Minnesota’s approach as a model.

“We would like to see a different starting point,” Polasky said.

Time Ran Out in the Assembly

Harckham, whose district includes Westchester County and part of the Hudson Valley, navigated the bill through the Senate, where it passed 37-23 on Friday, after vigorous debate and some concessions. But even though advocates backing the bill had counted enough votes in the Assembly to carry it through, it nonetheless failed to get across the finish line, following a fierce push by the pro-plastics lobby.

“We won the battle but lost the war,” Harckham said in an interview on Tuesday. Undeterred, he praised his colleague and co-sponsor, Assemblymember Deborah J. Glick (D-Manhattan), who steered the bill through the committee process but then “ran out of time for a floor debate,” in the session’s final hours.

In a sign that last-minute lobbying worked, several cosponsors in the Assembly took their names off the bill, Enck said.

Harckham said he’s ready to go back to work on the bill either in a special session later this year if there is one, or during the next regular session that opens in January.

“There are lots of bills that take some time,” he said.

Lobbyists who opposed the bill complained Harckham wasn’t open to enough compromise, but there was some.

The legislation, for example, had previously required a 50 percent reduction in plastic packaging waste in 12 years, but that was lowered to 30 percent. And, an agreement allowing the state legislature to revisit the definition of recycling every three years would allow for technological advances to be regularly considered. Harckham said more than 99 percent of the farm operations in the state were exempted, following objections from farming interests.

Still, a robust industry coalition of state and national business and trade associations fought the bill, including Kraft Heinz, which told lawmakers in a memo that products like Philadelphia Cream Cheese, manufactured at a company plant in Lowville, New York, were threatened by the bill if it passed. The memo also featured pictures of other products packaged in plastic, including mayonnaise, Cool Whip, coffee and salad dressing, suggesting they might no longer be sold in the state.

Those ads warning of an end to summer barbecues sounded an alarm that there would be “fewer choices for burgers and hotdogs and chips by banning their packaging.”

Upstate Sen. Pamela Helming (R-Ontario), whose district includes the outskirts of Rochester, mounted a vigorous defense on the Senate floor Friday of plastic-wrapped frozen chicken nuggets, fish sticks and Tater Tots. “Some of these products are products that busy parents know their kids will eat,” she said.

Kraft Heinz did not return requests to comment on the legislation.

Enck described the claims of empty New York grocery shelves as false.

“This is a sign you are getting close when the companies start outright lying,” she said. The amount of plastic packaging can be reduced, she said, adding that companies would not stop selling their products in a market as large as New York, with a population of about 20 million.

A Siena College poll of 1,191 registered New York voters taken in the last month of the legislative session found the bill had widespread backing—77 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of Independents and 48 percent of Republicans.

Opponents of the bill included the American Chemistry Council, whose members manufacture plastic.

“New Yorkers should be relieved that this deeply flawed bill failed again and won’t be raising costs on New York’s families while undermining our goals of reducing packaging waste by including a ban on new recycling technologies,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, part of the ACC, in a written statement. “Moving on from this bill means it is time for all stakeholders to come together and craft a real producer responsibility bill—one that reduces pollution and promotes circular, sustainable solutions.”

This article was originally published by Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Click here for the Inside Climate News newsletter.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/17/an-effort-to-reduce-plastic-waste-just-died-in-the-new-york-legislature/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/06/10/zero-waste-grocery-stores-in-growth-mode-as-consumers-seek-to-ditch-plastic/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/10/zero-waste-grocery-stores-in-growth-mode-as-consumers-seek-to-ditch-plastic/#comments Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:00:24 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56509 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. “I’d be like, ‘Bring your own cup! I see you every day, you get the same drink. I can still do a pretty rosetta or heart on top of […]

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As a barista in San Francisco for almost a decade starting in 2007, Joseph Macrino hated all of the waste the coffee shop produced—the disposable cups, the lids, the sleeves. He’d give his regulars grief for not bringing in their own mugs.

“I’d be like, ‘Bring your own cup! I see you every day, you get the same drink. I can still do a pretty rosetta or heart on top of your latte, but bring your own cup. It’s such a waste!’” Macrino said.

When he moved to Los Angeles in 2016, he and his then-partner decided to open up the city’s first zero-waste grocery shop. Drawing inspiration from the bulk-food-heavy Rainbow Grocery Co-op, one of their favorite haunts in San Francisco, they opened the doors of re_grocery on Earth Day in 2020.

“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company.”

From neat bins, glass jars, and metal canisters, the certified B-Corp offers more than 500 refillable bulk goods including snacks, seeds and nuts, coffee and tea, oils and vinegars, cereals and grains, household items, and bath and body products. The store purchases in buckets and other containers they can return to the supplier for refill or recycle, and customers can bring in their own containers or cloth bags to stock up, or get reusable containers from the store.

In traditional grocery stores, plastic holds everything from apples to trail mix to detergent to water. “Plastic packaging is ubiquitous,” said Celia Ristow, who launched the zero-waste blog Litterless in 2015. (The site is down now, but will be back up this summer, she said.) “It’s cheap, it’s lightweight, if you need to ship, it’s non-breakable. So, there are some real advantages that you have to overcome.”

Yet given some of the shocking statistics—that 95 percent of plastic packaging is disposed of after a single use, that only 9 percent of the plastic ever produced has actually been recycled, and that 72 percent of plastic ends up in landfills or the soil, air, or water—some are trying to figure out how to sell food in a way that prevents plastic from being produced in the first place.

Since opening the first shop in Highland Park, Macrino has opened two additional re_grocery locations in L.A.—and has diverted 500,000 packaging items from the landfill. He would like to continue expanding, eventually to around 10 stores throughout L.A. and then more beyond that. And while the store currently offers delivery throughout the city and the shipping of non-perishables nationwide, he’s currently working to launch the shipping of bulk items nationwide as well, using compostable, biodegradable packaging.

“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company,” Macrino said. “It can be done—we’re doing it. But I want to make it bigger than this.”

The first iteration of minimal packaging in stores was the extensive bulk sections in the hippie food stores of the 1960s and ’70s, said Ristow, who currently works as the certification manager for the Total Resource Use and Efficiency (TRUE) zero-waste certification. TRUE is offered by Green Business Certification Incorporated (GBCI), the same agency that oversees LEED and other green rating systems.

The second iteration—stores like Macrino’s, which produce little to no waste at all—have taken hold over the last few years, Ristow said. When she began tracking zero-waste and refillery stores in 2015, there were fewer than 10 in the U.S. “It started to explode over the next five years,” she said.

Inside a re_ grocery store in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of re_grocery)

While California and New York are hotspots for zero-waste grocery stores, Ristow also sees them in more unexpected places, like small towns and rural areas, in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. “As this movement took off, the people who started these stores were ordinary citizens. It wasn’t a centralized movement. People said, ‘I think my community needs it,’ and so they began opening them where they lived,” Ristow said.

Larasati Vitoux, originally from France, opened the zero-waste grocery store Maison Jar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two years ago. European countries are generally at the forefront of efforts to reduce and recycle, and the zero-waste grocery store movement is much more developed there than in the U.S. After visiting her parents in Orléans, France, early in the pandemic, Vitoux noted that their relatively small town, with a population of just over 100,000, supported five zero-waste grocery stores. Meanwhile, in the entire city of New York, with a population of 8.3 million, Vitoux knew of only one, called Precycle.

She saw an opportunity and started to put together a business plan. Her community—home to many young families—immediately embraced her. Eighty percent of her customers are return shoppers, and most live within a 10- to 15-minute walk. “We opened in March 2022, and by the end of the year, for the holidays, we received a lot of cards from people telling us that we were the best thing that happened to the neighborhood that year,” she said.

Larasati Vitoux in front of Maison Jar. (Photo by Arnaud Montagard)

The business started making money within six months of opening, Vitoux said, and year-over-year sales increased by 50 percent between the first quarters of 2023 and 2024. Additionally, as of their second anniversary in March, the store had sold—in bulk—the equivalent of 1,420 bottles of olive oil, 1,820 jars of nut butters, 762 plastic-packed blocks of tofu, and 2,443 bottles of kombucha.

In addition to offering local and organic food without packaging, plus perishables like fruit and vegetables, eggs, and bread, Vitoux aims to promote a sense of community around ideas of sustainability. The store has hosted a soap-making workshop, speakers on climate change and eco-anxiety, vendor popups, and happy hours, where all items are 20 percent off for a two-hour stretch. (These are very popular, she said.) Maison Jar is also an electronic waste and battery drop-off location and serves as a pickup location for Green Gooding, New York’s first circular economy rental system, which offers people access to small appliances like air fryers, juicers, and popcorn makers.

As she continues building her business, Vitoux is working toward a TRUE zero-waste certification offered by GBCI. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s important to have a third-party certifier say you’re doing things the right way,” she said.

There are, however, a number of challenges to operating a zero-waste grocery store.

“I think the hardest part about it is the consumer wants Costco prices from their local mom-and-pop shop,” Macrino said. “For people owning a small business, it’s hard to compete against those humongous companies.” Re_grocery tries to pass on to consumers the savings that comes from sourcing in bulk. “We’re really trying to be competitive with our pricing as best as we can,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of options for us to choose from. We really are always looking for other suppliers to give us better competitive pricing.”

(Photo by Arnaud Montagard)

For Vitoux, New York City rent is very high, and because cleaning and refilling the bulk containers is work-intensive, she also has to invest a lot in her workforce. Plus, because the number of package-free stores in the U.S. is still relatively small, systemic supports like the ones present in her home country do not exist.

In France, after package-free stores started booming in the early 2010s, she said, the government developed rules and regulations for hygiene and sanitization to govern them. Additionally, a zero-waste business association offers training and support to store owners and supply chains for bulk products developed because of the increased demand. (The movement’s ideals are taking hold in the mainstream as well, she said: By 2030, the French government is requiring that grocery stores of more than 4,300 square feet devote at least 20 percent of their sales area to bulk items.)

“The trend in Europe, it was really kind of a grassroots-type of growth and then regulation and supply chain followed,” Vitoux said. “I think it could happen here.”

Ristow sees the bulk aisles of traditional grocery stores as a good option for people looking to cut down on waste without access to a full-on zero-waste shop. At the same time, she hopes that as the package-free grocery movement grows, stores will continue to “invest in the idea of being community sustainability hubs” and will also “find ways to welcome in a larger demographic, maybe people who are more price conscious or need to shop with benefits.”

Some of the most important work these stores are doing, she said, is developing an alternative model to traditional, plastic-heavy grocery stores. “We have to find alternatives that work before we can scale them,” she said.

Macrino, for his part, is committed to figuring out how to scale. “My goal now is how am I going to get this thing so big that I can get a store in every major city and really make a real impact sustainably?” he said. “I think it can be done. And I think we have the tools to do it.”

Ultimately, he hopes for a cultural shift. “Everyone needs to take a step back and think, ‘These short-term instant gratifications are really piling up, and we really need to rethink how we’re operating.’”

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