Search results: USDA meat

In a press release, the USDA says it is going to take action against Salmonella contamination of poultry in order to get closer to the national target of a 25% reduction in Salmonella illnesses.

Despite consistent reductions in the occurrence of Salmonella in poultry products, more than 1 million consumer illnesses due to Salmonella occur annually, and it is estimated (PDF, 1.4 MB) that over 23% of those illnesses are due to consumption of chicken and turkey…USDA intends to seek stakeholder feedback on specific Salmonella control and measurement strategies, including pilot projects, in poultry slaughter and processing establishments. A key component of this approach is encouraging preharvest controls to reduce Salmonella contamination coming into the slaughterhouse.

The North American Meat Institute says its members are happy to assist (Salmonella is a problem for poultry, not beef).

The National Chicken Council also pledged to assist with the pilot projects, but then put the onus of responsibility squarely on you.

Even with very low levels of pathogens, there is still the possibility of illness if a raw product is improperly handled or cooked. Increased consumer education about proper handling and cooking of raw meat must be part of any framework moving forward. Proper handling and cooking of poultry is the one thing that will eliminate any risk of foodborne illness. All bacteria potentially found on raw chicken, regardless of strain, are fully destroyed by handling the product properly and cooking it to an internal temperature of 165°.

The newly formed Coalition for Poultry Food Safety Reform, led by Center for Science in the Public Interest, welcomes the USDA’s announcement, but insists that USDA’s food safety oversight needs to extend from farm to fork.

Comment: The USDA’s jurisdiction starts at the slaughterhouse, but chickens coming into the plant are already contaminated with Salmonella.  This means prevention has to start on the farm, and poultry producers would have to institute procedures to keep their flocks free of Salmonella. They would much rather you cooked your chicken properly.

The latest big Salmonella outbreak is due to onions, an FDA-regulated food.

FDA’s traceback investigation is ongoing but has identified ProSource Produce, LLC (also known as ProSource Inc.) of Hailey, Idaho, and Keeler Family Farms of Deming, New Mexico, as suppliers of potentially contaminated whole, fresh onions imported from the State of Chihuahua, Mexico.

Keeler Family Farms issued a voluntary recall.   ProSource Produce LLC also issued a voluntary recall.

The CDC has the statistics:

Comment: I wrote about a previous onion recall last year.   Food safety lawyer Bill Marler asks: What did we learn – or not – from the 2020 Salmonella Outbreak linked to onions?  That investigation, as he emphasizes, identified probable causes:

• potentially contaminated sources of irrigation water;
• sheep grazing on adjacent land;
• signs of animal intrusion, including scat (fecal droppings), and large flocks of birds that may spread contamination; and
• food contact surfaces that had not been inspected, maintained, or cleaned as frequently as necessary to protect against the contamination of produce.

The FDA lists all the products that have been recalled so far.  It also displays their labels.  If you have onions from these companies, treat them like biosafety hazards.  If you can’t bear to throw them out, at least boil them and sterilize everything they could have contacted.

I’m seeing considerable confusion about the difference between cell-based and plant-based meat alternatives.

Cell-based products are not yet on the market, except in Singapore.  Plant-based products are everywhere, and I will deal with them separately tomorrow.

For an example of the confusion, Phil Howard’s op-ed in Civil Eats was first titled Giant Meat and Dairy Companies Are Dominating the Plant-Based Protein Market, but his informative diagram refers to cell-cultured meat and fish alternatives, those that start with cells of animal origin.  Civil Eats, ever careful, fixed the headline so it now reads, Op-Ed: Giant Meat and Dairy Companies Are Dominating the Plant-Based and Cellular Meat Market.  

Today, lets stick to cell-based, beginning with Joe Fassler‘s thoughtful analysis in The Counter: “Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.”

That science tells us:

• Manufacturers consistently miss targets for product release.
• Production costs are astronomical.
• Even if costs can be reduced, production volume can never match real meat.
• Producing cell-based meat to scale means keeping it free of contaminants (difficult, if not impossible)
• Fetal blood serum, a necessary ingredient, requires animals to be slaughtered.
• Cell culture facilities are resource-intensive.

In the meantime, here are some of the latest developments in regulation, image, and celebrity investment.

• USDA seeks comments on labeling cell-based meat: The notice, available in the Federal Register online, is a step toward establishing a regulatory framework for these products.
• Cell-based disruption: How many factories, and at what capacity, are required to supply 10% of the meat market?  If the cultivated meat industry were to set the ambitious target of supplying 10% of the global meat market, how much product would be required? How many factories, containing how many bioreactors, would need to be built? And where?… Read more
• Cell-based or cell-cultured: What’s the best name for next-gen seafood made from fish cells?
• With terminology ranging from cell-based to cell-cultured, cultivated, clean, and in vitro, how can consumer research help industry settle on one single term for next-gen seafood made from fish cells?… Read more
• Ad: How Aqua Cultured Foods plans to own the whole cut seafood analog space: Today Aqua Cultured Foods, a Chicago female-founded startup, announced their use of fermentation technology to create seafood alternatives with an incredibly realistic taste, texture, and nutritional profile…The company has developed whole-muscle cuts using biomass fermentation and a specific strain of fungi to deliver a high protein content comparable to cod, plus fiber and Omega-3s, without fat or cholesterol.
• Eat Just Raises $97 Million More to Fund Cultured Meat Production: The investment, which was part of a round announced in May that raised $170 million, came from new groups including Resilience Reserve, a venture capital fund, and existing backers like hedge fund UBS O’Connor and Graphene Ventures. This brings the round to $267 million, making it the largest ever for cultivated meat, which backers say will help to meet the world’s rising demand for animal products in a more humane and environmentally friendly way. Eat Just is also adding Dan Glickman, a former U.S. agriculture secretary, to its advisory board, and Jim Borel, a former executive at DuPont, to its board of directors.
• Leonardo DiCaprio invests in cultivated meat firms Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms:  Cultured meat innovators Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms have secured the backing of high-profile investor Leonardo DiCaprio, known for his Academy Award winning roles as well as his environmental activism…. Read more

And here’s a summary of the latest research on concentration and power in cell-based agriculure.

• Democratizing ownership and participation in the 4th Industrial Revolution: challenges and opportunities in cellular agriculture:  In this paper, we have sought to engage the nascent feld of cellular agriculture in conversation with the political economy of agriculture scholarship, namely, on the inescapable question of whether or not this emerging technology will further concentrate wealth and power in the global food system. Innovation without meaningful inclusion has led to inequality, distrust, environmental crises, and social disintegration, and the world’s biggest tech companies are well positioned to continue disrupting and absorbing traditional industries in the coming decades…Critically important and valuable innovation, including agroecological approaches to food production, also continues to come from non-industrial contexts.

I posted last week on meat-industry consolidation, an issue that has become so prominent that the White House is even talking about it.

The President understands that families have been facing higher prices at the grocery store recently. Half of those recent increases are from meat prices—specifically, beef, pork, and poultry. While factors like increased consumer demand have played a role, the price increases are also driven by a lack of competition at a key bottleneck point in the meat supply chain: meat-processing. Just four large conglomerates control the majority of the market for each of these three products, and the data show that these companies have been raising prices while generating record profits during the pandemic.

That’s why the Biden-Harris Administration is taking bold action to enforce the antitrust laws, boost competition in meat-processing, and push back on pandemic profiteering that is hurting consumers, farmers, and ranchers across the country.

Speaking for the White House, the director of the National Economic Council said:

When you see that level of consolidation and the increase in prices, it raises a concern about pandemic profiteering — about companies that are driving price increases in a way that hurts consumers who are going to the grocery store, and also isn’t benefiting the actual producers, the farmers and the ranchers that are growing the product.

The reactions

In a statement, Tyson’s Foods said “Tyson Foods categorically rejects the conclusions drawn earlier today by the Secretary of Agriculture and the Director of the National Economic Council in a White House press briefing.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently published a report detailing the drivers of consumer inflation in the food sector, none of which are related to industry consolidation or scale.”

Smithfield pointed to a statement from the North American Meat Institute.

And then there’s this @FarmPolicy tweet,

Interesting times, these.

Remember USDA’s Harvest boxes?

I posted about them at least nine times since 2018.  For example:

• The Trump Admnistration’s announcement of its forthcoming Blue Apron program.  This was widely derided, but USDA’s Sonny Perdue never gave up on it.
• What the Harvest Box program was supposed to do (help farmers, feed the poor)
• What the boxes actually looked like
• And the program’s end

I thought the program was ill conceived from the start.  Its idea was to collect food from farmers that could not otherwise be sold, and deliver it to private food banks for distribuiton.  There were three types of boxes: produce, dairy products, and meat products.

I worried, and for good reason, about:

• The enormous expense
• The complicated and burdensome logistics
• The burden on food banks
• Most of he money going to distributors rather than small farmers
• The lack of choice for recipients
• The unsustainable focus on charity

Now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on the program, “USDA Food Box Program: Key Information and Opportunities to Better Assess Performance,”

The program, it says,

• Used 243 contractors
• Delivered more than 176 million boxes of food
• Reached 78% of US counties, and 89% of counties with more than 20% of the population in poverty

By those standards, I guess, it was a success.

Did it help farmers?  USDA did not collect data on this point so we don’t know, but I don’t think it did.

The report does provide data on several points.

The astronomical overall expense

The absurdly high cost of each of the boxes

The switch from lots of small farmers to a few big ones

From photographs of the contents of the boxes, it’s hard to believe they would cost more than $10 to $20 at a supermarket.  Since so few small farmers were helped by the program, it would have been much cheaper and more efficient to give people coupons for the food or increase SNAP benefits.

But the real purpose of the program was to undermine SNAP.  Fortunately, it did not succeed in that purpose.

So many readers have asked me to comment on the recent study comparing the nutrient content of meat versus plant-based alternatives that I thought I better get to it.

For example, Andrew Wilder of eatingrules.com writes:

They conclude that there are nutritional differences…My first thought was “Duh!”… so I started wondering why they would even do this study…Surprise surprise, two of the authors have connections to the beef industry.  I also thought it was interesting that in the Abstract, they say “This has raised questions of whether plant‑based meat alternatives represent proper nutritional replacements to animal meat.” So they’re framing everything with the baseline that animal meat is “proper nutrition” which seems like a pretty obvious bias right out of the gate…

Indeed it does.  But the study is a bit more complicated than that, and definitely worth a look.

The study: A metabolomics comparison of plant‑based meat and grass‑fed meat indicates large nutritional differences despite comparable Nutrition Facts panels. Stephan van Vliet, James R. Bain Michael J. Muehlbauer, Frederick D. Provenza, Scott L. Kronberg, Carl F. Pieper & Kim M. Huffman. Nature Scientific Reports (2021) 11:13828.

The research question: Do plant‑based meat alternatives represent proper nutritional replacements to animal meat?

The method: The study compared 190 metabolites (chemical compounds capable of being used by the body) in meat and plant-based alternatives.

Result: Big differences.

Conclusion:  “In conclusion, metabolomics revealed that abundance of 171 out of 190 profiled metabolites differed between beef and a commercially-available plant-based meat alternative, despite comparable Nutrition Facts panels. Amongst identified metabolites were various nutrients (amino acids, phenols, vitamins, unsaturated fatty acids, and dipeptides) with potentially important physiological, anti-inflammatory, and/or immunomodulatory roles—many of which remained absent in the plant-based meat alternative when compared to beef and vice versa. Our data indicates that these products should not be viewed as nutritionally interchangeable, but could be viewed as complementary in terms of provided nutrients. It cannot be determined from our data if either source is healthier to consume [my emphasis].”

Competing interests: “S.V.V. reports a grant from the North Dakota Beef Association to study the impact of diet quality on the relationship between red meat and human health. S.V.V reports additional grant support from USDA-NIFA-SARE (LS21-357), the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture, and the Dixon Foundation for projects that link agricultural production systems to the nutritional/metabolite composition of foods and human health. S.V.V also reports having received honoria [sic] for talks linking food production systems to human health, which was used to support scientific research. F.D.P. reports receiving honoraria for his talks about behavior-based management of livestock. J.R.B., M.J.M., S.L.K., C.F.P., and K.M.H report no conflicts. S.V.V., J.R.B., M.J.M., F.D.P., S.L.K., and C.F.P. consume omnivorous diets; K.M.H. consumes a vegetarian diet.”

Comment: To the question of nutritional differences, duh, indeed.  Why would anyone not expect nutritional differences?  From the abstract and conclusion, the study appears to suggest that meat is nutritionally better.

But then, the authors throw in those hedge-betting comments.

Really?   If they can’t figure out which is better, why do this study?

Andrew Wilder’s analysis and mine too: the underlying purpose of this study is to demonstrate the nutritional superiority of meat and the lack of equivalence of plant-based substitutes.

As for the conflicted interests: My first reaction to seeing this study was to ask: “Who paid for this?”

But the reported conflicts are somewhat confusing.  The lead author has meat-industry funding to do studies of this type.  But most of the other authors report no conflicts, and one is a vegetarian.

Maybe the vegetarian was responsible for the hedging comments?

The White House issued a fact sheet on promoting competition in several business areas, one of them agriculture.

Over the past few decades, key agricultural markets have become more concentrated and less competitive. The markets for seeds, equipment, feed, and fertilizer are now dominated by just a few large companies, meaning family farmers and ranchers now have to pay more for these inputs. For example, just four companies control most of the world’s seeds, and corn seed prices have gone up as much as 30% annually. Consolidation also limits farmers’ and ranchers’ options for selling their products. That means they get less when they sell their produce and meat—even as prices rise at the grocery store…Overall, farmers’ and ranchers’ share of each dollar spent on food has been declining for decades. In short, family farmers and ranchers are getting less, consumers are paying more, and the big conglomerates in the middle are taking the difference.

In the Order, the President:

• Directs USDA to consider issuing new rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act making it easier for farmers to bring and win claims, stopping chicken processors from exploiting and underpaying chicken farmers, and adopting anti-retaliation protections for farmers who speak out about bad practices.
• Directs USDA to consider issuing new rules defining when meat can bear “Product of USA” labels, so that consumers have accurate, transparent labels that enable them to choose products made here.
• Directs USDA to develop a plan to increase opportunities for farmers to access markets and receive a fair return, including supporting alternative food distribution systems like farmers markets and developing standards and labelsso that consumers can choose to buy products that treat farmers fairly.
• Encourages the FTC to limit powerful equipment manufacturers from restricting people’s ability to use independent repair shops or do DIY repairs—such as when tractor companies block farmers from repairing their own tractors.

According to Politico

The rules seek to make it easier for the agency to challenge unfair and deceptive practices by meat processors and would allow farmers to more easily file complaints with USDA or sue under the Packers and Stockyards Act. People familiar with the order said it would also tighten the rules for so-called poultry grower tournament systems, in which contract farmers are paid more or less than their peers in the same area depending on how closely they meet buyers’ standards.

The agency is also moving forward with rules that seek to increase food access through alternatives to supermarkets, like local farmer’s markets, and increase consumer transparency about where meat is raised.

Lest anyone think these are trivial measures, take a look at the reactions.

The North American Meat Institute:

President Biden’s executive order calling for USDA to change the Packers and Stockyards rules will have unintended consequences for consumers and producers…Government intervention in the market will increase the cost of food for consumers at a time when many are still suffering from the economic consequences of the pandemic. These proposed changes will open the floodgates for litigation that will ultimately limit livestock producers’ ability to market their livestock as they choose. These proposals have been considered and rejected before and they are counter to the precedent set in eight federal appellate circuits.

Zephyr Teachout in The Nation:

He ordered the Department of Agriculture to use its full power under the Packer and Stockyards Act to break the stranglehold of distributors and other corporate giants that crush farmers and farmworkers…Biden has a chance to be the first trust-busting presidency in over 50 years—and we keep getting strong signals that he’s got it in his sights. That’s great news for workers, for small businesses, and for the small communities that have been left out in the collapsing concentration of our country for the last 50 years.

USDA Vilsack announces plans to boost competition:

Secretary Tom Vilsack said USDA will offer $500 million in grants, loans, and other assistance to help new meat and poultry processors enter the market, along with $150 million to support small plants that are already operating. The department will also move forward with a series of regulations to protect farmers and ranchers who work with large agribusinesses.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition applauds Vilsack’s action:

NSAC is also pleased to see that USDA will issue new rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act. As directed in the Executive Order, this new rule will make it easier for farmers to bring and win claims, stopping chicken processors from exploiting and underpaying chicken farmers, and adopting anti-retaliation protections for farmers who speak out about bad practices.

Will Biden’s USDA follow through?  That would be real progress.

I got a press release from the USDA last week: USDA Releases 90-Day Progress Report on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today published the 90-Day Progress Report on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry.

The report represents an important step toward in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad and shift towards a whole-of-department approach to climate solutions. The Order, signed January 27, states that, “America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners have an important role to play in combating the climate crisis and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by sequestering carbon in soils, grasses, trees, and other vegetation and sourcing sustainable bioproducts and fuels.”

This report is the result of a presidential executive order in January requiring the USDA to say how it plans to promote climate-friendly agriculture.  It pretty much summarizes what the USDA has been doing and intends to do more of in the future.

Actually, the USDA has a lot to say about climate change.  It just wasn’t allowed to, at least publicly, during the previous administration.

For example, the USDA published Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry in May 2016.

The agency has web pages devoted to climate-change topics; each of these comes with additional pages on sub-heading topics.

• Climate solutions
• Climate change
• Climate hubs (regions) 
• USDA agencies involved in climate change efforts
• USDA training programs in regenerative agriculture
• Research on climate change

It looks to me as though this agency is taking a lead role on climate change, at least in some ways.

But what about meat?  Politico notes that the Biden administration is keeping hands off that issue.

President Joe Biden is not going to ban red meat. In fact, his administration isn’t doing much to confront the flow of harmful greenhouse gases from the very big business of animal agriculture.

The Agriculture Department’s newly published “climate-smart agriculture and forestry” outline says almost nothing about how Biden aims to curb methane emissions from livestock operations. But environmentalists argue that any effort to shrink the farm industry’s climate footprint is half-baked if it relies on voluntary efforts and doesn’t address America’s system of meat production.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced the end of the Farmers to Families food box program.  As reported by The Counter,

The reality is the food box program was set up to respond to Covid. There were a lot of problems with it, a lot of problems,” said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in a congressional hearing on Wednesday. Over the last year, we’ve reported on many of those problems—namely high prices, uneven distribution, and lack of oversight.

This program, which has cost at least $5.5 billion to date, was ostensibly supposed to help farmers by buying their produce and provide food to people who needed it by distributing it through food banks and pantries.

I say “ostensibly” because its real purpose was to undermine SNAP.

Food boxes were one of three ways the Trump Administration acted to reduce SNAP enrollments and expenditures (the other two were enforcement of work requirements and invocation of the public charge rule denying residency and citizenship to people who used public benefits, even benefits to which all residents are entitled).

To review the history of this program:   In 2018, Trump’s Budget proposed to replace some of SNAP benefits with “Harvest Boxes”—along the lines of those provided by Blue Apron, apparently.   The proposal provided few details.  It was immediately criticized for its lack of information about logistics, composition of the boxes, fresh foods, and choice.

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue did not give up on the idea, however.  The Coronavirus pandemic gave him the excuse he needed to start the program, now called Farmers to Families.

This seemed reasonable in theory.  Distributors would collect unsold produce from farmers, pack it in boxes, and deliver the boxes to food banks.  Farmers would have income for what they produced; this would help people who lost their jobs during the pandemic.

In practice, small farmers were quickly dropped from the program, Black farmers were excluded, and people who got the boxes got whatever was in them—not always what was supposed to be in them.

Here’s what the USDA says the program delivered:

To date USDA contractors have delivered 157,996,398 of fresh produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats to disadvantaged Americans across the country

35.7 million food boxes invoiced in round one (May 15-June 30)

50.8 million food boxes invoiced in round two (July 1-August 31)

15.2 million food boxes invoiced in round two extensions (September 1 – September 18)

18.8 million food boxes invoiced in BOA Contracts (September 22 – October 31)

12.4 million food boxes invoiced in round four (November 1 – December 31)

25.1 million food boxes invoiced in round five (January 19 – April 30)

I say R.I.P.  The Biden Administration’s shoring up of SNAP is better policy for food assistance.

Assistance to small farmers is another matter entirely, and one that needs immediate attention.