While working at Roche Brothers over the summer, a kitchen staff member told me that one supermarket generates food waste equivalent to the weight of a whale. This wasn’t very specific. It turns out that supermarkets in the United States generated approximately 43 billion pounds of food waste in 2008. Holding size constant, each grocery store generated 1.7 million pounds of food waste per store that year or the equivalent to approximately 45 24-foot cargo trucks. This is just in the United States!

Food waste is an environmental and humanitarian concern. Global food waste poses a major threat to all things living on this planet. Every year, approximately one third of food produced globally or 1.6 billion tons is lost or wasted. Food wasted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe each year could adequately feed the approximately 800 million people worldwide left starving each and every day.

Global food waste has extensive adverse effects. It accounts for almost ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Decomposing food releases a greenhouse gas known as methane and when food is wasted, so are all the resources and energy that went into the production of that food in the first place.

Over the last decade, the media and non-profits named consumers as the culprit for the majority of the food waste in the United States. Consumers are not the only ones at fault.  However, the media has turned its attention to food retailers and other actors along the supply chain as the cause and the solution to our global food waste problem. Food retailers have the ability to influence every part of the supply chain. Supermarkets are in a position to be a catalyst for change. However, despite their powerful position, they are doing the bare minimum, if that, to reduce their food waste.

There is some hope. Recently, a report came out that graded supermarkets in the United States based on what they are doing to reduce their food waste. Out of ten of the major supermarkets in the US, Walmart scored the highest and it has committed to achieve zero waste by 2025. Some of the ways Walmart plans to tackle food waste are by donating unsold food to local food banks and recovering inedible food through animal feed, composting, and anaerobic digestions.

Throughout the semester, I will examine the food system and the unique position supermarkets are in to put an end to food waste. I will also research food waste’s effect on climate change and other environmental and humanitarian concerns.

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Among the high-impact actions that we as individuals can take to reduce our environmental footprint—having one fewer child, living car free, taking fewer flights, eating a plant-based diet—shifting our food choices may be the easiest.  With our current global food system, the production of meat, dairy, eggs, and aquaculture use about 83% of the world’s farmland but provides only 18% of our calories.  As animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss, eating a plant-based diet—and thereby reducing the demand for and production of meat—can contribute to mitigating these dire environmental impacts of our inefficient global food system.  

Besides environmental reasons, there are other reasons to be vegan, too.  Billions of animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption.  On industrial farms, they live in filthy conditions, suffering a life of confinement and abuse.  What about eggs and milk? The dairy and egg industry exploit the female reproductive systems of cows and chickens, breeding and forcing them to produce more milk and eggs than their bodies would naturally provide.  Of little to no use for the dairy and egg industry, male calves and chicks are often killed immediately after birth.  

A global transition to a vegan diet could also alleviate hunger.  Globally, a third of croplands is used to grow livestock feed crops.  If humans consumed the crops directly rather than feeding them to farmed animals, 40% of all crops produced today would be enough to feed 9 billion people in 2050.  The land freed up from this global dietary shift could be reforested or used for human development.  

If you are concerned about the health implications of being vegan, a well-balanced plant-based diet has been associated with health benefits such as lower blood pressure and cholesterol, lower risks of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some types of cancer, and total mortality.  A global adoption of a vegan diet is projected to result in 8.1 million avoided deaths per year in 2050.  

Still, while a plant-based diet has gained popularity in some countries such as the UK, Germany, and the U.S., global meat production continues to rise.  It is imperative to deconstruct the structural barriers to creating a more vegan world.  How are the myths that endorse eating animals perpetuated? Are there effective initiatives that promote widespread dietary changes?  From the Impossible Burger to Tofurky, what role might food technology and plant-based food innovation play in leading towards more sustainable food consumption?  What kind of policies could help spark the transition to more plant-based meals? Will our collective future be vegan?  

Answers to these questions have a profound effect on not only what we eat but also human and environmental health for decades to come.  For my beat, I will explore these questions, examining the misconceptions and controversies surrounding veganism while highlighting strategies to create a greener world in which more people can thrive on nourishing plant-based meals. 

For most consumers, the story of food begins at the shelf of a grocery store. Although there are labels for ‘organic,’ ‘non-GMO,’ and ‘fat free,’ and few labels that tell us whose work and labor made our food available. There is a disconnect for consumers—not with where their food comes from or how it’s grown—but who made it happen, and the greater political, economic and socio-cultural drivers important to labor and the farming system.

This is an enormous oversight. The U.S. farming sector employs over 3 million seasonal and migrant farmworkers, 72% being foreign born–68% from Mexico and 3% from other South American countries.

Migrant farm workers face many obstacles in the U.S. farming system. Proper working documents are difficult to come by, meaning the industrial farming system has nowhere near the manpower it needs. This leads to individuals traversing borders under illegal and dangerous circumstances, opening the floodgates for mass exploitation and human rights violations. Farms are not accountable for providing livable wages and safe living/working conditions. Still, migrant farm workers covet these positions because the pay is much higher, earning anywhere from 3 to 10 times what they might make in their hometowns.

A rising tide of nationalism and deep structural racism in the US have made the challenges workers face much more urgent. The shift in the political climate has led to the touting of policies that ‘crack down’ on Southern and Central American migrants entering and working in the country without formal documentation. With the current administration’s border enforcement, the number of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border are at all-time highs. Ironically, the jobs migrants are getting entail hard manual labor that citizens don’t even want.

These issues take more than just labels to solve. We need to ask the deeper questions of what is really driving how these large and industrial farms work, what has led these migrant laborers to become so politically symbolic, and what can we do about it? These are all questions I will explore in my beat by diving into the economic, political and socio-cultural intersections of immigration/migration and food and farming systems in the U.S.

Sources: http://www.ncfh.org/uploads/3/8/6/8/38685499/fs-migrant_demographics.pdf

Housing policy, fossil fuels, and community gardening may seem unrelated, but too often they have one thing in common. When a housing policy not only groups together people of color, but also places those people in close proximity to particulate-matter pollution, that is racism and injustice in action. When oil pipelines bisect Native American reservations, that is racism and injustice in action. When communities of color in Oakland, California are forced out of their neighborhoods due to gentrification and separated from the food sources they rely on, that is racism and injustice in action. 

There is nuance in injustice. The intersections of poverty and race place people of color and people living below the poverty line in vulnerable environmental situations. However, in the United States, Black and Hispanic people disproportionately experience the burdens of environmental injustice, even when education and income are accounted for. At this point, race is a stronger determinant of whether a person will be exposed to pollution than poverty.  

In recent history, the protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline brought native issues of environmental injustice to the forefront of U.S. media. At face value, the choice to construct pipelines through Native American Reservations is an issue of environmental injustice. When looked at through the lens of environmental racism, the long history of land grabbing and marginalization of indigenous people in the United States can be further critiqued over its centuries of systematic disenfranchisement. 

Industry often functions at the expense of communities of color. The pollution resulting from industry can come in the form of atmospheric particulate matter pollution, the poisoning of water from lead pollution, and the ambient noise that results from increased industrial activity. All of these issues broadly affect people of color at disparate rates and can be solved by targeted policies that serve to protect marginalized communities from the effects of pollution.

Issues with elements of environmental racism serve as key examples of how powerful information can be in the fight against injustice. My exploration of environmental racism will reveal the history of the environmental justice movement, the dimensions of racism that exist in many facets of environmental injustice, and dig into recent studies pertaining to environmental racism.

Most people know that the vast majority of agricultural production in the United States happens in rural areas. Few know that three quarters of America’s hungriest counties are rural.

In the modern United States, urban hunger is more visible than rural hunger. Hungry urban populations are more geographically concentrated, and large crowds can often be seen waiting outside food distribution centers in the city. Marches, protests, and murals call attention to the food access barriers urban communities face. New small-scale urban agriculture movements visibly promote food access by adding vegetation back into the concrete jungle. Urban food justice movements have made headlines by moving past traditional food pantry models to promote local, fresh produce and to get urban residents involved with their food systems.

In contrast, the food insecure populations of rural and farming communities in the US are widely dispersed, and significantly less publicized. It is hard to imagine a farming community as hungry, when it is surrounded by extensive fields of commodity crops that feed and fuel the world. It is hard to imagine that the owners of a small-scale family farm are unsure if they will be able to put food on the table tomorrow, but many are.

Rural anti-hunger work is still largely based on a food pantry and food bank model, and some of the hungriest communities remain hours away from their nearest food distribution source. Rural food justice efforts to close this access gap face vastly different challenges, and have received much less media attention than their urban counterparts.

This semester, I will be exploring the untold stories of rural hunger in the United States, and of those fighting against it. What unique approaches have been adapted to meet the needs of rural food systems and to provide communities with the nutritious, affordable, and culturally affirming food they need? Why haven’t we heard about them before? What can rural food reformers learn from their urban counterparts? Has a focus on urban food justice movements left rural America’s hunger in the shadows?

Image from The Indian Express, ‘Few care for ban on plastic bags’ (December 29, 2014)

In case you have not kept up with the latest from the Kardashians, plastic straws have now been banned from the Kardashian household. With the theme for World Environment Day this year being that of Beat Plastic Pollution, eliminating single-use plastics has become a priority for global environmental action. This focus on plastics is not new: disposable plastic has long been targeted by environmentalists to encourage recycling and combat marine pollution. However, outright bans on single-use plastics are relatively recent, and so has the fervour at which campaigns against plastic are mounted – even reaching Hollywood.

But ditching disposable plastics is no longer just a personal choice for Hollywood stars. In some areas, it is now the law. Local governments in cities such as Seattle and New York have adopted bans on single-use plastics at a startling rate. These bans can be highly specific; the Wall Street Journal even called this the summer of straw bans. Bans on single-use plastics have also come into effect in more unlikely places. For instance, in June 2018, a ban on disposable plastics became enforceable in the Indian state of Maharashtra to public backlash. Concerns arose over how this would impact livelihoods: with plastic bags banned under the law, vendors of fish struggled to find alternative packaging that would be waterproof and reported a large loss in sales.

For my beat, I wish to investigate the unintended consequences of bans on single-use plastics across a variety of country contexts. Why were these bans on single-use plastics put into place so quickly, and did these bans achieve their aims? What happens when bans are implemented in countries as poor and large as India, where an informal recycling sector often relies on plastic for their livelihoods? Do these bans actually curb plastic pollution, or are they merely a cosmetic exercise that obscures the need for better alternatives to plastic? What are the unintended consequences of such bans, especially for people that have no choice but to rely on single-use plastics?

This beat will highlight stories such as the pushback on plastic straw bans from people with disabilities, and the struggle of small retailers in India to find alternatives to waterproof plastic packaging that can cope with the monsoon rains. Through such stories, I aim to show how policies around plastic need to incorporate the lens of environmental justice, so that we can not only deal with a material so embedded in our modern economy, but do so justly.