II’m thinking a lot about food waste this week. Maybe it’s the millions and millions of chickens, turkeys and laying birds that have been killed by avian flu. Big food companies like to brag about their efficiency, but these consolidated supply chains don’t necessarily create less waste. If large centralized chicken farms for companies like Costco test positive, the threat to the food system is clear. These issues arise at a time when, if global food waste were its own country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China and the United States, according to the United Nations Environmental Program. ‘environment.
Many policymakers and consumer advocates are now looking to the Farm Bill, due next year, as the next best opportunity to make substantive changes to policies that reduce food waste. This will be a major chance to institutionalize greater social, economic and environmental benefits. The timing could not be more critical: the most recent estimates indicate that we have only a few months left to thwart an environmental catastrophe in the decades to come.
— Chloé Sorvino, editor
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What’s new
Factory workers carve beef.
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How meat processing workers fight for safer working conditions. A new bill in Congress aims to close the huge power gap in the meat industry and make processing plants safer for workers, reports Errol Schweizer.
The Cuban bakery known throughout Florida. The Segunda Central Bakery exemplifies what happens when an independent company makes a name for itself for a certain specialty, in this case Cuban bread, reports Gary Stern.
Want to save the planet? Invest in better agricultural policy, not biotech meat. The biotech meat fantasy is a dangerous distraction from the entrenched politics that made conventional meat production so ubiquitous in the first place, writes Michele Simon.
Sometimes fried seafood is just what the doctor ordered on a Friday.
Chloe Sorvino
I taste early summer with this fritto misto of shrimp, calamari, Montauk fluke, shishitos and zucchini.
Chloe Sorvino leads food and agriculture coverage as a staff writer on Forbes’ corporate team. Her nearly eight years of reporting at Forbes have taken her to In-N-Out Burger’s secretive test kitchen, to drought-ravaged farms in California’s Central Valley, to burned-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, to a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France. His book, Raw Deal: Hidden corruption, corporate greed and the fight for the future of meatwill be published in December 2022 by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.
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