Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

What Biden’s burger boondoggle tells us about partisan politics and spin-doctoring By Anna Lappe (Photo by SIphotography /iStock) Originally Published in The Magazine of the Sierra Club, on May 7, 2021 For a couple of days in April, my Twitter s tream was abuzz with alarmist “the libs are coming for your burgers” headlines. The social media fire was sparked by news outlets and rogue posters asserting that President Biden’s Earth Day pronouncement for climate action—which set an ambitious goal of cutting US greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030—included a command to strip America of its burgers. Fox News host John Roberts rallied viewers with this battle cry: “Say goodbye to your burgers if you want to sign up to the Biden climate agenda.” Meanwhile, an on-air graphic declared, “Bye-Bye Burgers Under Biden’s Climate Plan.” In fact, Biden’s plan included nothing of the sort. The false claim seems to have stemmed from a British tabloid alleging that Biden would soon be scolding Americans to cut their red meat habit down to a measly four pounds a year. While the story was outlandishly off—Biden’s plan largely focused on massive decarbonization of the economy and didn’t mention beef at all—the tabloid had tapped into the findings of a real 2020 University of Michigan study. The punchline of that research was that, yes, dietary change in the United States could be a powerful tool to lower the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Based on a large body of evidence of industrial animal agriculture’s climate footprint, particularly red meat, the researchers estimated that if Americans ate 90 percent less red meat and halved all other meat consumption, US greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 50 percent. In a retraction that aired several days after his burger fear-mongering, host Roberts even acknowledged as much. While the network was wrong about Biden’s meat-reduction demands, he said, the science was right: “Cutting back how much red meat people eat,” Roberts told Fox News viewers, “would have a drastic impact on harmful greenhouse gas emissions.” Despite the clear message embedded in this retraction—that eating less meat can reduce our climate impact—the damage had already been done: Those who heard the original spin were left believing there was truth behind Biden being pegged as a draconian hamburger-stealer-in-chief and were uninformed about the underlying takeaway: that by choosing to eat less meat, the typical American would benefit the climate, and their own health. What’s worse, the debate around reducing meat consumption became further positioned as something partisan , as opposed to, say, a matter of common sense. For years, advocates have been trying to sound the alarm that if we want to fix the climate crisis, we have to talk about food, and in particular, the environmental damage wrought by industrial-scale meat production. Although connected to nearly one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, food systems are not only a major climate crisis culprit; sustainable farming practices are a key part of climate resiliency and mitigation. So I was thrilled to see the University of Michigan study driving home the impact meat reduction could have—but much less than thrilled to see it misused as fodder for Fox News spin. Let’s be clear, this spin is not random; it’s a deliberate tactic: Politicize science so that common-sense decisions feel like partisan posturing. (And it’s not the first time it’s been spun around beef. Remember in early 2019 when Republicans seized on a comment made by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that “maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” to claim that her Green New Deal would outlaw hamburgers?) We’ve seen this spin strategy deployed to try to sideline individual climate action for years: Driving a Prius makes you a progressive. We’ve even seen it around the COVID-19 response: Donning a mask marks you as a Democrat. And now, we’re seeing it about the food and climate connection: Reaching for a lentil burger makes you a leftie. This spin is not random; it’s a deliberate tactic: Politicize science so that common-sense decisions feel like partisan posturing. And it’s not the first time it’s been spun around beef. Portraying these kinds of actions as partisan politics is a strategic means of sidelining their seriousness and silencing those who are uplifting the science behind them and pushing needed policy reforms. It’s also a way to keep the debate narrowly focused on individual action, not on a highly consolidated industry with undue influence on Capitol Hill that’s been working hard to thwart regulations. In one New York University study, researchers found that all 10 of the US-based meat and dairy companies they reviewed had contributed to efforts “to undermine climate-related policies.” But perhaps the ludicrousness of this spin is a sign of just how desperate the fossil fuel industry and its allies have become. That’s the take of my colleague Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media , who has been tracking the ways in which industry has used PR to fight climate action. Industry “knows climate action is popular,” Henn shared with me via email, “and that the public would be happy to ditch polluting fossil fuels in favor of clean, renewable energy.” He then added, with a semi-forgivable dad joke (his daughter is two months old), “when all you're left clinging to is a burger, you know your buns are on the line." The truth is simple. The amount of meat this country produces is out of whack—out of whack for our climate and for our health. The USDA estimates that we produce 222.4 pounds of red meat and poultry in 2018 for every man, woman, and child for domestic consumption alone—theoretically enough to have a burger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The University of Michigan study notes that about one-third of that ends up on our plates as the meat and poultry we eat—a total of about 133 pounds a year, among the highest in the world. From all food sources, the typical American is eating about twice as much protein as our bodies can use . In other words, we can cut back, way back, on meat consumption without worrying about our protein needs; in fact, we’d see health benefits. Overconsumption of meat, after all, carries worrisome health consequences—researchers have found red meat consumption to be tied with increased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers, among other illnesses. Not to mention the fact that processed meat has been declared “carcinogenic to humans” by the world’s preeminent cancer authority—and that plant-based foods are an ample source of protein. The overarching message is that an industrial meat industry that is allowed to operate virtually unchecked impacted our health and the environment. And, whether we are a Fox News watcher or an NPR listener, we all can make choices—including, yes, cutting back on burgers—that align with our and the planet’s health. So let’s not take the bait from the burger boondoggle and instead be aware of why and when the spin-masters are trying to spin us.

By Anna Lappé In a new book, the author discusses the implications of her research, the future of glyphosate, and how Bayer plans to keep selling Roundup. Originally Published in Civil Eats on April 21, 2021 In August, 2018, a judge for the Superior Court of San Francisco, California read the verdict in a first-of-its-kind case : A suit against agrochemical giant Bayer over the link between non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and the company’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, Roundup and RangerPro. On every count, the jury found Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) guilty. The court held that Bayer’s glyphosate-based weedkiller had caused the plaintiff’s cancer to develop, the company should have warned users of the health risks and failed to do so, and it had acted with “malice, oppression, and fraud” and should pay punitive damages. The total jury award: $289.2 million—reduced to $20.5 million on appeal. (Bayer will not appeal that $20.5 million Roundup verdict—the first Roundup verdict in the nation—to the U.S. Supreme Court, the company recently announced .) Veteran journalist and research director at public health advocacy group U.S. Right to Know Carey Gillam’s new book The Monsanto Papers offers an inside look at the legal fight that led to that historic verdict and an intimate portrait of the plaintiff at the heart of it, Lee Johnson. For the book, a follow-up to her first, Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science , Gillam pored over 80,000 pages of exhibits and documents and a 50,000-page trial transcript to reveal a chilling story of decades of doubt, denialism, and deflection that allowed glyphosate to become the most widely used herbicide in the world. It also profiles the legal advocates trying to hold the company accountable in the absence of government regulations doing so. I spoke with Gillam about the implications of her research, the future of glyphosate, and how Bayer plans to keep selling the controversial product. Tell us about the herbicide at the center of this story. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in these weed killers. Most people are familiar with Roundup as the brand name, a popular product to kill weeds in yards and gardens. Farmers use Roundup products to kill weeds in their fields and school districts and municipalities use it for a variety of reasons. It has become so ubiquitous that our government scientists have found glyphosate residues in rainfall. It’s commonly found as residues in the food we eat; it’s in the water we drink. So what the science tells us that it can do to our health and to our environment is a critically important issue. At the heart of your story is Lee Johnson, the first plaintiff to sue Bayer, which bought Monsanto and thus took on its glyphosate liability in 2018. What’s Lee’s connection to the weedkiller? Lee was a groundskeeper for a school district in Northern California. Part of his job was spraying these glyphosate-based weed killers around school grounds. He tried to wear protective gear as you’re supposed to do, but had been led to believe these products were safe. When he had an accident, and was doused in the weed killer, he didn’t worry about it too much because he had heard that these weedkillers were safe enough to drink. But soon after his accident, he developed a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It manifests in the skin and ravages a person from head to toe. It caused Lee immense suffering and led to a terminal diagnosis. My story follows Lee from before his cancer through that journey and, ultimately, to when he decided a way to make his suffering meaningful was to try to hold Monsanto accountable and to take the company to trial. In the book, you dive into internal Monsanto documents to tell the story of the tactics that the company used to shape the story of glyphosate. Can you describe those tactics? The foundation to this story is that for 40 years the company has been deceiving consumers, regulators, lawmakers, farmers, and people like Lee who use glyphosate. Monsanto has been actively working to manipulate the scientific record about the safety of this chemical. That was made very clear through thousands of pages of documents, many that I had obtained before the litigation and that became the source material for my first book, Whitewash , and then the thousands of pages that came out during litigation. There are so many examples. In these documents, Monsanto discusses ghost writing scientific papers to promote the safety of glyphosate. They also talk about funding front groups, using third-party organizations to both promote the safety of this chemical and lobby lawmakers and regulators, and to attack people like myself, scientists, or anyone pointing to evidence that indicated health problems with this chemical. They spent literally millions of dollars on these subversive campaigns to discredit legitimate, independent science and to promote their ghost-written, manipulated science. They did this over decades and you see that very clearly laid out in the documents. The magnitude of this story was hard to wrap my mind around. Yes, there have been so many victims: Lee Johnson was the first person to take Monsanto to trial , but now, in the United States, there are over 100,000 people who have sued Monsanto, alleging their non-Hodgkin lymphoma is caused by their exposure to Roundup. Can you explain why the use of Roundup has increased and how it is tied to genetically engineered seeds? Yes, genetically engineered crops, or GMOs, are linked very closely to glyphosate. Monsanto brought to market the very first genetically engineered crops in the 1990s. They weren’t designed to be more nutritious or grow better with less water; they were designed to be glyphosate-tolerant, so they could be sprayed directly with the herbicide and not die. Why did the company focus on engineering this trait? We see from their internal records that Monsanto’s patent on glyphosate was expiring in 2000 and the company wanted to hold onto market share. They wanted to make sure generic glyphosate products didn’t take over the market. It was quite ingenious. They could develop what they called Roundup-Ready seeds and sell those to farmers as a package deal: you plant your Roundup-Ready corn, soy, cotton, canola, or sugar beets and spray directly with Roundup herbicide. The weeds in your fields will die and your crops will not. Farmers loved it. It made their lives easier and the bonus, they were hearing, was it was safe enough to drink. The company said, “It has no impact on people or pets and it’s environmentally friendly.” With the release of these herbicide-resistant, genetically engineered crops, we saw glyphosate use skyrocket. It’s now the world’s most widely used herbicide. It went from about 25 million pounds or so used annually in the United States in the 1990s to close to 300 million pounds in 2015. That’s why we now see so much glyphosate in our creeks and rivers, in air samples, and in our food. You found internal documents that show how the company was working to discredit journalists and others who were raising questions about its safety—journalists like you. Yes, I had known that Monsanto was working to undermine me for years and discredit my first book, Whitewash . I was at Reuters from 1998 until 2015. They didn’t like that I was writing about the science showing harm associated with glyphosate and in those last several years, they worked really hard on my editors to try to get me pulled off the beat. I knew they were funding front groups trying to discredit me, but as I read the internal documents, seeing a spreadsheet with my name on it with an action plan and strategies to tear me down—that was eye-opening. My main thought was: If they do that to me—one little gal in Kansas who writes a book or two—imagine what they’re doing to the scientists who are trying to do thorough, independent research. Thanks to this court case, anyone can now read these internal conversations. Can you talk about how these documents became publicly available? Yes, one of Johnson’s lawyers, Brent Wisner, used a loophole in a protective order to get these papers out in the public. Monsanto wanted very much to keep secret these internal records—emails, text messages, things that were quite damning. While they had to give them to the plaintiff’s lawyers, they wanted to keep them sealed so journalists and members of the public couldn’t see them. The judge issued a protective order and it had certain criteria each side had to meet in order to keep the documents sealed. Wisner essentially found a loophole and used it to release them. It was a gutsy move; suffice it to say Monsanto was furious. The internal documents also reveal a coordinated effort by Bayer/Monsanto to try to discredit the highest-level international agency on cancer, which had ruled that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen. Yes, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is an arm of the World Health Organization. Their job is to analyze published peer-reviewed literature on different substances suspected to be carcinogenic and to assess the hazard. They looked at glyphosate because it was so widely used and because there was so much epidemiology and toxicology literature linking it to cancer, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. These were independent scientists at the top of their field, brought in from around the world, with no ties to any company or any activist group, and they determined glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen, with an association of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Typically, their rulings generally don’t make headlines around the world, but the glyphosate classification did, and Monsanto was ready with an attack plan . We saw the plan in their internal documents. Interestingly enough, they put it together before IARC made the decision. Monsanto discussed internally that they expected such a classification. They then went about trying to tear down these individual scientists. At one point, Monsanto involved U.S. lawmakers to get a hearing in the House of Representatives to look at stripping funding from IARC. Let’s talk about the Johnson verdict. What was your reaction when you heard it? I was watching the verdict read live from Australia, where I had been asked to speak about glyphosate. I actually didn’t believe [Johnson’s lawyers] could climb that hill, but the jury came back with a unanimous decision and $250 million in punitive damages because they were so outraged at the evidence of Monsanto’s deception. Where does it go from here? Bayer bought Monsanto in June of 2018 just before the Lee Johnson trial started, so the liability rests with Bayer and Bayer has been fighting back. There have been two subsequent trials . The company lost both of those as well, but they’ve appealed all the verdicts. They’ve lost all the appeals to date, but they’ve been successful in reducing the verdicts. In one of the other trials, the jury found that the evidence of Monsanto’s deception was so egregious they awarded $2 billion in punitive damages. But trial and appellate judges have reduced those awards significantly. Now, Bayer has decided they don’t want any more trials. Three losses were enough. They have agreed to pay $11 billion to settle the existing U.S. litigation. They also put forward a plan in which they would pay about $2 billion into a fund that would cover people who’ve been using Roundup, but who haven’t yet developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma, or just haven’t filed a lawsuit yet. This would be a way to try to accommodate those people. They’re going to send out notices to Home Depot and other places where Roundup is sold. They are trying to determine how to ward off future litigation because of course they want to keep selling their product. And Lee? Lee Johnson finally did get paid after my book went to print, but just a tiny fraction of what the jury had wanted him to receive and what they had ordered in their verdict. He wasn’t expected to live this long. His own attorneys thought that he might die before trial and Monsanto’s attorneys predicted he wouldn’t live beyond November of 2019. He’s still suffering, but he’s able to be with his family and see the impact he’s been able to make from this case and from his activism . Last time I was at Home Depot, I saw a huge Roundup display with no warning labels. They are talking about putting something on the label. They don’t want to put language that says it can cause cancer, but they’re thinking about something that provides a link to a webpage that talks about the science. So despite all this litigation they can’t be required to put a warning label on their products? They certainly could if the EPA was going to stand up to Monsanto. But we’ve seen for more than 40 years that the EPA has not done that. In the book, I share lots of internal documents and records from the EPA essentially saying, “Hey, we think you should put a warning label on it. This looks dangerous.” And we see Monsanto push back and bring political pressure, and then the EPA folds, time and time again. We are seeing other countries step up. Mexico has said that it plans to ban glyphosate. Thailand tried a couple of years ago. Bayer enlisted the help of the State Department and other U.S. officials to put the screws on countries talking about bans , so they wouldn’t. Thailand backed away after the U.S. pressure, but Mexico is saying it will go ahead with the ban, and other countries like Germany and France have gone ahead with it. The science is clear that pesticides like glyphosate are contributing to cancers and reproductive health harms and a whole array of problems. We need to speak out. We need to make food policy as important as foreign policy. This interview is based on a Real Food Media podcast interview , and has been edited for clarity and length.

Fifty years ago, my mother exposed the damage caused by our energy-intensive, environmentally devastating food production system. The struggle to change it continues. By Anna Lappé Anna Lappé and her brother cook with Frances Moore Lappé in their San Francisco home kitchen in the 1980s. “More than the particulars of my mother’s cooking, I remember the details of her political activism,” the author writes. Photo by Nick Allen / Frances Moore Lappé family archives Originally Published in Earth Island Journal , Winter 2021 Nearly every day since March, I’ve been waking up before the sun rises to get some quiet time before my daughters — third and sixth graders now — stumble out of bed. Another school day filled with Zoom, another weekend in semi-lockdown. In these morning hours, I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood. I close my eyes and picture our pale blue house on a windy street at the base of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights; the mural of The Beatles on a neighbor’s garage, John Lennon a blur as I whizzed by on roller skates; the glass jars of beans and rice and spices that lined our kitchen shelves. I’ve been thinking about those early years not just because I’m home so much more with my own kids but because over these past few months I’ve been helping my mother on a project: the 50th anniversary edition of her Diet for a Small Planet , a book she published just before I was born. A book that has shaped my life. My mother wrote the first edition of Diet for a Small Planet when she was just 26, having recently left a graduate program in social work to “go deeper” — as she has always explained it — to understand the “whys” behind the social problems she saw all around her. Her book went on to be read by millions, shaping our collective consciousness on food and hunger for five decades. Her beginner’s eye, she would say, was her greatest gift when she started on the book. At the time, the late 1960s, the “experts” (mostly White men) were ringing the alarm bells, claiming we faced imminent global famine. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb had just dropped. Images of malnourished children in unnamed African countries filled magazines and newspapers. Curious about the why behind these frightening proclamations, my mom dug into the data in the halls of the Giannini agricultural library at the University of California, Berkeley. What she discovered was, at first, unbelievable: The world was actually producing more than enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet. Indeed, many of the countries hit hard by famine were net exporters of food. The shocking data prompted more inquiry. If there was enough, then the question must change, from Why hunger? to Why hunger in a world of plenty? That line of thinking would shape the insight that runs through the pages of Diet for a Small Planet : The root cause of hunger isn’t a lack of food production, my mother has long said, the root is a lack of democracy, the lack of power to make a stand for what food is grown, where , and by whom . The result? As she detailed in the book: a food system driven by profit, no matter the cost to people or planet. It’s why the grain-fed beef industry was booming, taking land and resources that could have been used to grow food people eat directly to instead graze livestock and produce feed that together deliver to us, in usable calories, only a tiny fraction of calories relative to the resources used. So along with the political analysis, my mom included 140 plant-centered recipes to show that we could nourish ourselves without having to rely on industrialized meat production. Fifty years later, her book’s message is more needed than ever, as we see the consequences of an energy-intensive, environmentally devastating food production system on climate, water resources, insect populations, human health — and much more. Over the years, my mother would feel frustrated at times when, because of all those recipes, the book’s bigger message would sometimes be sidelined. Her proudest media moments were when she could pivot from a question like What did you have for breakfast? to discussing the roots of global hunger. She wanted her readers to tie the very practical questions — What should we put on our plates? — to the broader political ones she was raising. Over the years, as I’ve encountered countless people who have been influenced by my mother’s work, I’ve been happy to report to her that her readers get it. My mother’s life work was never just about what we wanted our plates to look like, but what we wanted the world to look like. Shortly after my mom agreed to do an anniversary edition, I was out to lunch with a friend. “Did I ever tell you that your mother’s book changed my life?” she asked. In sixth grade, she told me, her twin sister had gotten a copy of Diet for a Small Planet and devoured it. “Next thing I knew,” my friend said, smiling, “we were standing outside our local grocery store at 6 p.m. handing out leaflets about the United Farm Workers grape boycott! My entire life’s activism sprang from your mom’s work.” Over the years, I often got asked what it was like growing up with Frances Moore Lappé as a mom. Yes, I do remember the food: no white sugar or white rice. Carob chips instead of chocolate chips. Lots of beans. Froot Loops? Forget about it! But more than the particulars of my mother’s cooking, I remember the details of her political activism. I remember traveling to Guatemala, accompanying her on field investigations into the impact of US foreign policy in Central America; visiting farmworker organizers in rural Ohio where she was researching the injustices embedded in the design of how we produce food; logging long hours preparing fundraiser letters for the nonprofit she co-founded, the Institute for Food and Development Policy. These memories sit alongside, yes, homemade granola and copious rice and beans. For my mother’s life’s work was never just about what we wanted our plates to look like, it was about what we wanted the world to look like. As I have been helping revise the recipes for her 50th anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet — sorry, no more soy grits! — I’ve been separated from my mom by a country and Covid-19. When this is all behind us, it will be the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other. As I prepare another meal from one of the new recipes and sit down with my kids in my own blue house across the bridge from San Francisco, I feel a connection to the ongoing work of busting myths about hunger, exposing the misinformation peddled by those in power, and advocating for the more just and healthy food system that has been my mother’s lifelong project. THIS IS MY FINAL Digging Deeper column. When Annie Leonard, now leading Greenpeace USA, asked me to take over this space for her in 2015, I was beyond honored. It has been a dream to share my thoughts with all of you over the years under the amazing editorial hand of first Jason Mark and then Maureen Nandini Mitra and Zoe Loftus-Farren. I am excited to pass the torch to give another voice this page to share their ideas.

Since the 1950s, we have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste. By Anna Lappé Mr. McGuire had no idea how right he was when he told a young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: “I just want to say one word to you: Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.” Since the 1950s, we have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste. Most of it is single-use. Originally Published in Earth Island Journal, Winter 2020 That was 1967. The year Mike Nichols’ now-classic film made waves plastic was just taking off as an everyday consumer product. By 2017, the world would be producing 348 million metric tons of it every year. Since the 1950s, we have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste — the equivalent in weight to 25,000 Empire State Buildings. That’s a lot of plastic. And most of it is single-use, ending up in landfills or littering the environment — never to be reused or recycled. At our peak, we recycled only 9 percent of plastics; today it’s even less. What many don’t realize is that 99 percent of plastic is produced from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels. As the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) put it in their “Fueling Plastics” report: “Fossil fuels and plastic are not only made from the same materials, they are made by the same companies. Exxon is both the gas in your car and the plastic in your water bottle.” As the fossil fuel industry comes under scrutiny for its starring role in the climate crisis, many energy sector companies are quietly turning their attention toward plastics and emerging markets for the industry’s growth. As global energy markets shift toward renewables and electrification, the move toward plastic looks like a smart business decision for these companies. If trends continue, the consumption of oil by the plastics industry could account for as much as one-fifth of the world’s total oil usage within the next several decades, according to CIEL, making plastics a bigger and bigger climate burden. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050 emissions associated with plastics could account for 15 percent of the global annual carbon budget. These predictions make it clear: If we want to keep our planet to a limit of 1.5 degrees warming, we’ve got to take on plastics. Not doing so puts in jeopardy our ability to stabilize the climate. So, what can we do? My small city of Berkeley, California — home to just over 100,000 people — made headlines earlier this year when it passed the most aggressive municipal ban on single-use plastic foodware in local restaurants and businesses in the country. (The ban on plastic straws got the most ribbing.) Will changing how we sip in one small town change the world? Of course not, but it is a step in the right direction. The local ordinance was designed not just to ban plastic forks, spoons, containers, and yes, straws, only to have businesses replace them with some other throwaway materials. The effort “rejects throwaway culture altogether,” say Greenpeace’s Annie Leonard and The Ecology Center’s Martin Bourque, who developed and championed the policy, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. The policy requires that all local businesses make compost bins available, all takeout containers be made from 100 percent certified compostable materials, vendors charge 25 cents for all takeout cups, and all eat-in dining be in reusable foodware. The Ecology Center and other local leaders are also championing reusable alternatives for individuals. The Center even sells stainless steel boba tea straws. Bans on single-use plastic bags are another policy measure that’s taking off, despite industry push back. In the US, California and Hawai’i have joined 32 countries with bans on single-use plastic bags. Across the world, advocates are increasingly getting organized to tackle this global problem. The Plastic Pollution Coalition , an Earth Island project, boasts 1,000 organizations in more than 60 countries working to take on the industry. ExxonMobil may be hoping that McGuire is still right, but if we want a future for the planet, we better hope the future is not in plastics.

A decade after writing a book about agriculture's connection to climate change, Anna Lappé interviews the author of a new study that confirms we can’t bring down emissions without addressing the food system. By Anna Lappé Originally Published in Civil Eats on November 18, 2020 A new study published in Science offers a stark warning about the climate crisis: Even if we completely halted fossil fuel use in the near term, we would still blow through the carbon budget needed to avoid catastrophic climate change unless we change the trajectory of emissions from the global food sector. Although many have warned about the climate impact of modern food production and land use, this new science is soberingly clear, and it has garnered attention around the world. Without radically reducing emissions from agriculture, the research shows we won’t meet the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit average warming to 1.5°C – 2°C degrees. And yet, even those targets still position us to face some pretty extreme climate impacts. Civil Eats talked with Michael Clark, a researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors on the study, about the findings, what they teach us about collective action to move the needle on climate, and how we might build the political will to do so. Why does the food system have such a big climate toll? One of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems is meat, and within that red meat from ruminants: beef, sheep, goats, and—to a lesser extent—other livestock like pork. The reason why ruminants have a relatively large impact is two-fold: They’re particularly inefficient at converting grass into things we can eat; or, if they’re not being fed grass, converting soy or other feed into food for humans. This matters because you have to include the climate impacts of producing the feed we then give to cows and other ruminants. Another reason why ruminants are particularly high emitters is because during their digestive process, they convert their food into methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they then burp. The other large source of emissions within food systems is from fertilizer use —from how it is processed to emissions from application. Nitrogen naturally converts into nitrous oxide, which is one of the other very potent greenhouse gases. This I think has been a blind spot. We’ve disrupted the carbon cycle, but we’ve disrupted the nitrogen cycle, too. Exactly. Estimates are that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in the world—that is human sources of reactive nitrogen are at least as large as the amount of reactive nitrogen that is naturally available. Not ideal. Your findings paint a picture based on current trends. What trends did you track? Very broadly speaking, emissions from the food system are a function of what we eat, how it’s produced, and the size of the population. We looked at these three factors and trends to date and projected out if these patterns continue over the next several decades. What we found at a global scale is that the most important driver is changes in dietary habits; populations eating more food and eating a larger proportion of that food from animal sources, either meat, dairy, or eggs. Population growth is an important driver, but it’s not as important as dietary habit change. And while changes in food production—like having better management techniques and reducing emissions per unit of food—could counter those shifts, it would not be by a huge amount. Now, all this is at a global scale; for any single country, that global pattern may not match up. Diets are changing, but not uniformly. For instance, diets are not changing by a huge amount in the United States, but if you go to a place like China or Brazil, countries experiencing large economic transitions, there are massive dietary shifts happening and with them those emissions are going to be driven up. Do you feel the story of food systems emissions has been late to the game in climate change? Rightfully, a lot of the effort, focus, and political will has targeted emissions abatement through fossil fuels. That makes a huge amount of sense. But we’re getting better knowledge about the impact food has had on the environment—and the trajectory of emissions—and starting to see, thankfully, food becoming a bigger part of the conversation. Talk about some of the main levers for change. First, plant-rich diets: Let’s get into what you mean by that and why this diet shift makes a difference. We mean a reduction in meat, dairy, and eggs and an increase in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and so on. What’s critical here is that while the endpoint is similar for everyone in the world, the direction you might need to go to get there will be really different. In the United States, for instance, this shift in diets might mean a typical person eating much less meat and much more fruits and vegetables. The second thing I really want to stress is that these plant-rich diets are associated with pretty large increases in health outcomes. While for this paper we focused on climate, plant-rich diets have enormous co-benefits. Let’s talk about another lever for reducing food system emissions; what you and your co-authors call “healthy calories.” Approximately half the global adult population is eating too much or not enough. In certain countries the figures are even more extreme. For my co-authors and me, the healthy diet lever means—independent of a plant-rich diet—what proportion of calories are coming from fruit, vegetables, and other healthy sources of calories. We know that so many people are not getting the right amounts of food for a healthy diet. Similar to the plant-rich lever, this means in some places, eating a lot less, in other places, it will mean people eating more [healthy foods]. Food waste has gotten a lot more attention in the past few years—in part, I think, because the percent of food that is wasted is so high and because addressing food waste feels so doable. Yes, it’s pretty shocking: About one-third of all food that is produced remains uneaten, ether because it’s thrown away, rots, or otherwise doesn’t get to the people who want to eat it. The sources differ widely by country, sometimes it’s a lack of refrigeration, lack of storage, grain silos, and so on. In the United States, a family of four wastes on average $1,600 worth of produce a year . That’s a pretty big incentive to act. It always surprises people that if the emissions associated with food loss were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world . Let’s talk about what you are seeing in terms of policy responses. One of the joys and complications of working on a global study is that the policy responses are going to look very different wherever you are. We talked earlier about the climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use. One policy that has really been effective has been the 1991 European Union Nitrates Directive . Now, when it was passed, it was designed to reduce nitrogen runoff because agricultural sources of runoff were one of the main causes of water pollution in Europe. Since then, fertilizer applications per hectare have decreased by about half, yet crop yields have continued to increase as they were before. It’s just one example of a relatively large geographically scaled policy that is working. While it wasn’t specifically designed to address emissions, it most certainly has had emissions benefits. We can look at farmers choosing different production pathways. Like in some cases adding more crop rotations into their planning or using agroecological approaches, such as planting hedgerows, agroforestry, and more. Honestly, there really is a huge amount that can be done. But it’s important to stress that no single action is going to solve the problem. One of the big food-climate debates is about soil carbon sequestration and livestock. What do you think about those who argue for livestock’s ability to rehabilitate soils ? We know for sure we can be doing a lot better in terms of soil carbon storage. And we are seeing incredible results from a range of strategies, like some I mentioned: planting cover crops , intercropping, and silvopasture , planting hedges between fields that can prevent soil loss—and more. All of these can help sequester more carbon in the soil, but I think the key message should be: Soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution, but it isn’t the only solution. Now, for the debate about cows! The instances where I’ve seen cows or other ruminants’ potential to be net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—after accounting for methane emissions—is over short timescales, in certain conditions, on previously degraded land. So, yes, it may be possible for cows to play a helpful role, but in a limited way. How the cows are raised matters; but how many cows you’re raising matters more. Do you feel like any parts of your paper have been misunderstood as this complex story gets translated for the general public? I actually think the coverage has been good. There are basically three main points and I think the media has been capturing them well: One, food matters to climate and if we continue eating the way we are, it will result in catastrophic climate change; two, there is a lot we can do; third, everyone has a role to play—consumers, businesses, food processors, everyone. I know one question those who work on climate often gets asked is, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”—but, I feel I should ask the same of you. I’m laughing because it’s an uncomfortable question to answer. We are starting to move in the right direction, but honestly, we’re not moving anywhere close to as fast as we need to. We need to start acting now. It would have been great to have made these changes years ago, but we didn’t. Right. As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today. Exactly. __________________________________________________________________________________ This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

By Amrita Gupta, Anna Lappé & Daniel Moss (Photo from https://www.amritabhoomi.org/ ) Originally Published in Alliance Magazine, on November 8, 2020 Alongside a public health emergency, Covid-19 has unleashed a staggering spike in global hunger . More than a quarter of a billion people are expected to face acute food insecurity as a result of the pandemic. Among the hardest hit are Black, brown, and Indigenous small-scale food producers – and the consumers they feed – from countries already scarred by colonialism, import dependence, and the climate crisis. Yet, these are the very people who are leading movements to address the roots of hunger while responding to the disruptions wrought by Covid-19 Recognising the precarity of an industrial food system that drives farmers into debt and poisons their soil and water, these producers are increasingly embracing agroecology – a way of farming that coexists with natural ecosystems to produce healthy food. At the Agroecology Fund, we acted swiftly to support their mutual aid and solidarity responses to Covid-19 – channeling nearly $1 million through an emergency fund to 59 grassroots organisations across five continents earlier this year. In the process, we learned several key lessons on how to respond to an acute crisis, while deepening transformative change. Lesson 1: Take the lead from grassroots organisations and BIPOC communities Traditional grantmaking deliberations often place an onerous burden on grassroots groups with limited resources for funder engagement. Funders must make their decision-making processes more equitable and expedient. For this emergency fund, we simplified requests for proposals, and streamlined grant disbursements. But making funding processes more accessible is critical beyond moments of crisis. We stand with our peers calling for such transformations in philanthropic practices, including the US-based network HEAL Food Alliance, which urged food systems funders to do more to center racial equity and resource BIPOC communities who are already scaling critical solutions. Lesson 2: Support food sovereignty and food security Last month, the United Nations’ World Food Programme was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for providing food aid to almost 100 million vulnerable people globally. While a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is, food aid – too often consisting of imported genetically modified (GMO) grains, ultra-processed foods, and surplus commodities – actually undermines local economies and small food producers. For nearly a decade, the Agroecology Fund has prioritised food security without compromising food sovereignty – the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. Social movements like our partner, La Via Campesina, representing 200 million peasants worldwide, remind us that we can only end hunger by supporting the small producers who already feed the majority of the world’s population. Increasingly, governments and UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Environment Programme (UNEP) endorse principles of agroecology. It is becoming clearer to policymakers that strengthening local resilience means supporting communities to grow and distribute emergency relief in times of crisis even as they steward ecosystems and ensure a sustainable food supply through the year. Lesson 3: Invest in long-term resilience To some, addressing the Covid-19 hunger crisis may seem an impossible trade off between providing urgently needed handouts or investing in long-term solutions. Our emergency grantees show it’s possible to rapidly mobilise mutual aid while strengthening long-term food security in their communities. From the Philippines to Argentina, through interventions as diverse as online marketplaces and microcredit programs, our grassroots partners are helping their communities’ weather the crisis and build resilience. In Zimbabwe, when market closures left thousands of farmers stuck with perishable produce, our grantee Pelum Zimbabwe mapped local supply chains to reveal healthy food options to consumers and policymakers. In India, Amrita Bhoomi launched a producers’ cooperative so farmers could supply healthy, locally grown food at fair prices. Grantees we support have also been working to shape the policy response to the crisis. In Brazil, for example, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) has been advocating for public procurement sourced from agroecological farmers. Lesson 4: Tap the power of pooled funds Faced with the scale of today’s interlocking crises, collective action is essential. Pooled funds help individual donors move swiftly to make well-informed investments. Groups like ours – a pooled fund of more than 30 donors – and other networks including Thousand Currents and Grassroots International have deep connections to social movements that can help steer resources towards transformational change. As one of our fund donors said, ‘On my own, I would never know which grassroots groups in the Philippines or Brazil or Uganda to support to address the food crises unfolding there.’ Pooled funds also help generate positive peer pressure among collaborating organisations to give more. Promisingly, many of our peers are offering matching grants, disentangling donations from asset returns, and even initiating spend downs in response to this global crisis. Today’s challenges are immense; tomorrow’s will be no less so. We must work together to fund grassroots-led humanitarian relief and activism that builds toward lasting, systemic change, ensuring our charitable dollars function not as a Band-Aid, but as part of a global effort to eradicate the roots of hunger in all its complexity. Amrita Gupta leads communications at the Agroecology Fund and Daniel Moss is its executive director. Anna Lappé directs the food and democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is a member of the fund.

The World Food Programme’s Nobel prize is timely – but food security depends on radically transforming our food systems By Amrita Gupta, Anna Lappé & Daniel Moss | Agroecology Fund ARCHIVE PHOTO: A farmer harvests crops in a ricefield in Pulilan, Bulacan province March 3, 2016. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco Originally Published in Reuters on October 15, 2020 During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, as lockdown restrictions scrambled supply chains, the national peasant movement Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas set up an online farmers’ market and delivery system on Facebook, so urban dwellers in Manila could access locally grown grain, fruits, and vegetables. In Argentina, as thousands lost their jobs and homes, the grassroots organization Union de Trabajadores de la Tierra (Union of Land Workers), supplied vulnerable communities with fresh food. These “sovereign food canteens'', said UTT’s Lucas Tedesco, are powerful reminders that small producers “are the ones who feed our fellow citizen s.” In Zimbabwe, when markets shuttered and farmers’ crops were left to rot in their fields, the farmers’ organization Pelum Zimbabwe mapped farmers, transporters, processors, and other vendors, to connect them to consumers and demonstrate to Zimbabwean policymakers that better access to locally-grown healthy foods reduces hunger, and strengthens community resilience. With the pandemic leaving so many families uncertain about their next meal, the Nobel Peace Prize award to the United Nations’ World Food Programme is timely. COVID-19 has plunged millions around the world into poverty; global hunger is likely to double . By the end of 2020, the number of people facing acute food insecurity could swell to a quarter of a billion. But let’s be clear: We’ll never be truly food secure without radically transforming our food systems. Even as it acknowledged the honour, the UN agency, which provides food assistance to almost 100 million people worldwide, noted that aid is not a long-term solution. Gernot Laganda, head of climate and disaster risk reduction at the WFP, stated clearly : "You won't get to zero hunger with humanitarian aid alone.” As food systems funders supporting agroecology, we have seen that food handouts are not an effective antidote to hunger. Agroecology goes beyond tackling the incidence of hunger to uproot its structural causes. In recent months, we have seen clearly how movements for agroecology fostered networks of producers—in the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and beyond— able to feed themselves and their communities in this moment of crisis. By farming in sync with nature, agroecological farmers grow abundant and diverse foods, regenerate natural ecosystems, strengthen resilience to health and climate shocks, and bring healthy food to local markets. More than a set of farming techniques, agroecology is a movement for social justice, improving nutrition without compromising food sovereignty—the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. Agroecology resists the misguided Western policies that have impoverished smallholders worldwide, policies like promoting synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds through the Green Revolution historically, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa today. By directly empowering family farmers, agroecology diminishes the need for imported food aid - too often ultra-processed foods, surplus commodity crops, and GMO grains that are a boon to agribusiness while undermining small farmer livelihoods. In the past few years, agencies within the United Nations have publicly recognized the importance of agroecology to end hunger. In 2018, former U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General José Graziano da Silva issued an urgent challenge to the global community: “It’s time to scale up the implementation of agroecology.” We’ve been pleased to see that initiatives such as the World Food Programme’s Home Grown School Feeding Initiative link “school feeding programmes with local smallholder farmers” in 46 countries including Kenya, Honduras, and Haiti. But the agency must do far more to strengthen local food economies. In 2018, only one third of the 3.6 million metric tons of WFP’s total food purchases were characterized as “locally grown commodities,” and less than 4% of the organization’s food aid ($31 million) was purchased directly from smallholder farmers. (WFP data does not report what percentage may have been agroecologically produced.) This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is. We urge the WFP to seize this moment to embrace agroecology, and address the roots of hunger, learning lessons from the food leaders we’re funding in the Philippines, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and beyond. Private philanthropy alone cannot offer sufficient support to the vibrant, global agroecology movement. We need the WFP to play a lead role, deploying public resources to support innovative civil society organizations and government agencies. When we support humanitarian relief that builds lasting change, we ensure our dollars don’t just deliver one-time handouts, but drive a fundamental transformation of our food systems. Only then will we yank up the roots of hunger and seed a more peaceful, equitable, and resilient world

If companies are really committed to Black lives, their statements of support should include an honest reckoning with their own products and practices. By Anna Lappé Despite being aware that its talc-based powders might contain asbestos, Johnson & Johnson pushed these products in the United States and beyond, specifically targeting Black and Brown women. Photo by Austin Kirk . Originally Published in Earth Island Journal , Autumn 2020 In a virtual town hall in June, Coca-Cola’s Chairman and CEO James Quincy said: “Diversity and inclusion are among our greatest strengths … We must put our resources and energy toward helping end the cycle of systemic racism.” Dow Chemical’s Chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling similarly committed to being an “ally” helping overcome “systemic oppression.” And Johnson & Johnson’s Chairman and CEO Alex Gorsky stated, “unequivocally that racism in any form is unacceptable.” These three proclamations echo others penned by Fortune 500 companies since the public reckoning with police violence and systemic racism has swept across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May. But examine the impact of these companies on the lived experience of Black people and it’s clear these commitments fall far short of restitution. Consider Johnson & Johnson. Internal company documents have revealed that the company knew since at least 1957 that its talc-based powders could be contaminated with asbestos, a possible carcinogen, for which there is no known safe level of exposure. Despite these concerns, the company pushed these products in the United States and beyond, specifically targeting Black and Brown women. The company’s marketing plans included a race-based distribution model, moving baby powder samples through churches and beauty salons in African American and Latino neighborhoods, and seeking marketing agencies specializing in promotions to “ethnic consumers.” The impact is clear: A study of Black women who used these powders found they had more than a 40 percent increased risk of ovarian cancer compared to Black women who didn’t use them. Several weeks after its CEO’s Black Lives Matter statement, a Missouri court ruled Johnson & Johnson must pay $2.1 billion in damages to nearly two dozen women whose ovarian cancers were linked to its talc-based powders. Or consider Coca-Cola, whose CEO made a $2.5 million commitment in June to racial justice charities. Put aside, for a moment, that such a pledge is a paltry 0.27 percent of the company’s annual US advertising spend. The company could have used this political uprising to honestly reflect on how its business practices continue to harm Black communities. Its signature sugary drinks, for example, are a driving force behind one of the biggest public health crises of our time — diet-related illnesses like type 2 diabetes, kidney diseases, and heart disease — that disproportionately impact African Americans. Drinking as little as one 12-ounce sugary drink a day increases your chances of diabetes by 26 percent. A staggering fact made more worrisome in the face of findings that people with type 2 diabetes have a significantly increased Covid-19 mortality rate. When it comes to sugary drinks, Coca-Cola and its peers still disproportionately target Black consumers, particularly young Black people. Photo by Dreamstime. Yet a recent report on sugary-drinks marketing found Coca-Cola and its peers still disproportionately target Black consumers, particularly young Black people. As a result, Black teens have been seeing roughly 2.3 times as many ads for sugary drinks and energy drinks compared to White teens. Then there’s Dow, whose Chairman and CEO’s Black Lives Matter statement made no mention of the impact the company’s manufacturing plants and products have had on communities of color. Dow, one of largest petrochemical producers in Louisiana, for example, is one of the many corporations that have located toxic manufacturing facilities along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, home to many predominantly Black communities. The rates of cancer in the region are a staggering 50 times greater than the US average, giving the area the unwelcome name, Cancer Alley. Dow. Johnson & Johnson. Coca-Cola. These are just three of the many companies claiming allegiance with those fighting racial injustice around the country. But as the old cliché reminds us: Actions speak louder than words. If these companies were really committed to Black lives, their statements would have included an honest reckoning with their own products and practices, past and present, and a pledge to act on such a reckoning.

A new study shows that US families consume cancer-linked glyphosate in their food. The good news: going organic rapidly reduces levels Researchers found glyphosate in every participant, including children as young as four.’ Photograph: Alamy Originally Published on The Guardian , August 11, 2020 Never before have we sprayed so much of a chemical on our food, on our yards, on our children’s playgrounds. So it’s no surprise that Roundup – the world’s most widely used weedkiller – shows up in our bodies. What is perhaps surprising is how easy it is to get it out. A new peer-reviewed study , co-authored by one of us, studied pesticide levels in four American families for six days on a non-organic diet and six days on a completely organic diet. Switching to an organic diet decreased levels of Roundup’s toxic main ingredient, glyphosate, by 70% in just six days. “If my kids have this much of a change in their numbers, what would other families have?” asked Scott Hersrud of Minneapolis, Minnesota, a father of three who participated in the study. The answer to that question is increasingly clear: a big one. This study is part of a comprehensive scientific analysis showing that switching to an organic diet r apidly and dramatically reduces exposure to pesticides. That’s good news, but it raises a grave question: why do we have to be supermarket detectives, searching for organic labels to ensure we’re not eating food grown with glyphosate or hundreds of other toxic pesticides? Glyphosate was flagged as a potential carcinogen as far back as 1983 by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), yet use of the chemical has grown exponentially since, with the chemical giant Monsanto – purchased by Bayer in 2018 – dominating the market. Numerous reports have covered the internal company documents showing how Monsanto’s influence over the EPA succeeded in suppressing health concerns. In fact, rather than restricting the use of glyphosate, the EPA has raised the legal threshold for residues on some foods up to 300-fold above levels deemed safe in the 1990s. And unlike with other commonly used pesticides, the government has turned a blind eye for decades when it comes to monitoring glyphosate – failing to test for it on food and in our bodies. The agency’s slipshod regulation has led to a dramatic increase in exposure. Research shows that the percentage of the US population with detectable levels of glyphosate in their bodies increased from 12% in the mid-1970s to 70% by 2014. The new study paints an even more concerning picture. Researchers found glyphosate in every participant, including children as young as four. “I would love to get those pesticides out of my body and my family’s bodies,” said Andreina Febres of Oakland, California, a participant and mother of two. Parents have sound reasons to be concerned about their children’s exposure to glyphosate and other pesticides. While food residues often fall within levels that regulators consider safe, even government scientists have made it clear that US regulations have not kept pace with the latest science . For one, they ignore the compounding effects of our daily exposures to a toxic soup of pesticides and other industrial chemicals. Nor do they reflect that we can have higher risks at different times in our lives and in different conditions: a developing fetus, for instance, is particularly vulnerable to toxic exposures, as are children and the immunocompromised. Instead, US regulators set one “safe” level for all of us. New research also shows that chemicals called “endocrine disruptors” can increase risk of cancers, learning disabilities, birth defects, obesity, diabetes and reproductive disorders, even at incredibly small levels. (Think the equivalent of one drop in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.) Research has linked glyphosate to high rates of kidney disease in farming communities and to shortened pregnancy in a cohort of women in the midwest. Animal studies and bioassays link it to endocrine disruption , DNA damage , decreased sperm function , disruption of the gut microbiome and fatty liver disease . The pesticide industry’s success in keeping a chemical with known toxicity on the market is emblematic of a fundamental system failure. The US allows more than 70 pesticides banned in the European Union. And in just the last few years, the EPA has approved more than 100 new pesticide products containing ingredients deemed to be highly hazardous. Yet last year, it looked like glyphosate was going to be a success story of another kind – the kind where science wins. In the wake of the World Health Organization determination that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen , thousands of farmers, pesticide applicators and home gardeners filed lawsuits linking their cancer to Roundup. The first three cases were settled in favor of the plaintiffs, saddling Bayer with $2bn in damages (later reduced by judges). But this summer, while Bayer agreed to pay $10bn to settle an additional 95,000 cases out of court, the company again evaded responsibility: under the terms of the settlement, Roundup will continue to be sold for use on yards, school grounds, public parks and farms without any safety warning. Pesticide companies’ ability to keep profiting from products that poison us is particularly egregious given that we have a solution. Organic works. And not just for our health – research shows that a shift away from pesticide-intensive agriculture leads to significant improvements for biodiversity and other environmental benchmarks while also yielding enough to ensure a well-fed planet. We can look to the European Union for some hope. This summer the EU announced plans to halve use of pesticides by 2030 and transition at least 25% of agriculture to organic. But in the US, despite ever-growing demand for organic food, the government continues to favor the profits of the pesticide industry over our health, spending billions of our taxpayer dollars to prop up pesticide-intensive farming while organic programs and research are woefully underfunded. As this study shows, the end result is toxic chemicals in our bodies that don’t need to be there. A growing number of people are responding by buying organic, but what about the many who don’t have access to organic or can’t afford it? As long as we treat organic food as if it’s a shopping preference instead of a public good, we will miss the opportunity to fight for a desperately needed shift in how we farm – one that would ensure that no one is exposed to toxic pesticides from the food they eat. Kendra Klein , PhD, is senior staff scientist at Friends of the Earth-US, a national organization working to create a more just and healthy world. Anna Lappé is a national best-selling author and co-director of Real Food Media. Together, they have collaborated on Organic for All

Are humans truly destructive at our core, or is there another story to be told? By Anna Lappé The history of Easter Island has long been used to reinforce the notion that humans have an inexorable propensity for environmental devastation. Photo by Lee Coursey Originally Published on Earth Island Journal , Summer 2020 By Day 81 of shelter-in-place, I’ve had a lot of time to ponder human nature: I’ve read about corporate executives forcing meatpacking workers to toil shoulder-to-shoulder without any protections from Covid-19 and also about emergency room workers rushing into hospital rooms to save dying patients. I’ve heard about swindlers hawking defective personal protective equipment and chefs working seven days a week to transform restaurants into emergency feeding centers. I’ve seen my own daughters, ages 8 and 10, tease each other relentlessly and comfort each other in ways I never could. As this article goes to press, I, along with millions of others, have watched in horror as a police officer was captured on video extinguishing the life of George Floyd and have seen communities all across the country rise up to demand justice and fundamental change. A global pandemic and public reckoning of systemic racism serve as potent reminders that we’re all we’ve got on this tiny blue orb in the universe. And, so, amidst it all, I’ve wondered what do we really know about the nature of our nature? Are the violent cop and the illegal land grabber the true reflection of human nature, and the selfless humanitarian and rainforest protector the aberration? Or is it the other way around? I was thinking about all of this when I stumbled on the latest book by the Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman. (He’s the guy who rumpled the feathers of Davos elite last year by daring to suggest they should all be taxed a hell of a lot more). Called Humankind , Bregman’s book explores these thorny questions of human nature. As he describes in a May Guardian excerpt that went viral, Bregman knew when he started his book that he’d need to tackle one of the tentpole stories of the humans-are-ruthless narrative: Lord of the Flies . The 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning author William Golding tells the story of British schoolboys stranded on a deserted island. Whether you’ve read the book or not (I vaguely remember its details from high school English class), you know what happened next: It got ugly. By the time the boys are rescued, three of them are dead — and the narrator laments “the darkness of man’s heart.” But it’s a novel, of course, a made-up story. What would happen if a band of boys were really stranded on an island, all on their own? Would they descend into the chaos of Lord of the Flies? Those questions led Bregman on a quest to discover whether there was such a story out there, a real one. Ultimately, with some serious sleuthing — and good luck — Bregman discovered the tale of six boys marooned on an island in the South Pacific in the 1960s and discovered after 15 months by an Australian sea captain. What the captain found wasn’t the dark violence of Golding’s novel, but love and solidarity, boys who survived alone through shared work, song, and prayer for all those many months. On his Twitter feed, Bregman writes how he has been moved by the popularity of his Guardian excerpt: “Wow. Really overwhelmed with the response to my story about the real ‘Lord of the Flies’. So so happy that this extraordinary tale is finally - after 50 years! - becoming famous.” It makes sense to me why people are drawn to this story now: We are hungry to hear about the good in us at a time when there is so much darkness. We’re hungry for a story of self that speaks to our deeper kindness. We’ve certainly had enough of Lord of the Flies. At this moment of global pandemic, nested in the other global crisis of our time, climate chaos, there’s another narrative I’ve been thinking about — another one that needs a rewrite. If Lord of the Flies is the dominant tale of humans’ true relationship to each other, the sorry story of Easter Island is the tale we’re told about our true relationship with nature. And it’s not pretty. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard the history of Easter Island used to reinforce the notion that humans have an inexorable propensity for environmental devastation, a notion that makes the potential for us to solve climate change — or, frankly, any environmental crisis — seem that much more daunting. We can’t help it, we’re taught to believe, it’s just what humans do . The dominant theory of Easter Island — that mysterious speck in the southeastern Pacific Ocean dotted with more than 1,000 iconic tributes to deities — is that the native population decimated the island’s natural resources, driven by a need for food but also by a myopic, and ultimately deadly, obsession. In Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond writes, “Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used land for gardens and wood for fuel, canoes, and houses — and of course, for lugging statues.” Diamond was drawing on the archeological work of Paul Bahn and John Flenley who wrote Easter Island, Earth Island (just in case the metaphor wasn’t clear already). Bahn and Flenley write: “The person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he (or she) still felled it. This is what is so worrying. Humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” Whoa. Pretty dark stuff. This story — that humans are “genetically inborn” with a disregard for the environment around us — is certainly the prevailing message. But what if something else happened on that island so many years ago? Something that cracks one of the most powerful metaphors about human nature and ecological harmony. Indeed, a few years ago I stumbled on just such a history. Anthropologist Terry Hunt and archeologist Carl Lipo have a different theory about the island, its inhabitants, and those statues. In their book, The Statues that Walked , Hunt and Lipo argue that the archeological record reveals how the island’s palm cover was decimated not by “covetous natives,” but by an invasive rat. And timber wasn’t harvested to roll gargantuan statues along logs. Instead, the statues were moved upright, rocked on sturdy vines. They “walked.” What’s more, Easter Island’s barren, rock-strewn landscape isn’t a reflection of the Tragedy of the Commons. Rather, the rocks are remnants of a sophisticated food cultivation practice called “lithic mulching,” which uses carefully placed stones to prevent soil erosion and create micro-climates. Hunt and Lipo count 2,553 of these formations across the island. “These findings,” Hunt and Lipo write, “suggest that rather than a case of abject failure, [Easter Island] is an unlikely story of success.” The prevailing story — with its racist undertones of a barbaric Indigenous population driving itself to collapse — comes undone. (There’s a side note here: The native folklore on the island has long told tales of “chiefs and priests imbued with a supernatural power who simply ordered the statues to walk,” tales that had been widely dismissed as simply fantastical folklore. Now, the idea of teetering statues rocking along vines — walking — is backed up by the archeological record.) Human nature is messy, for sure, but for too long the dominant story of it in the Western canon of literature, archeology, and more has been written by one branch of the human family, codified in novels like Lord of the Flies and in histories like that of Easter Island . It’s a story that tells us we are innately ruthless, savage to each other and the planet. It’s a story many of us are still raised on. More than half a century after it was published, Lord of the Flies still finds itself in the ranks of the best young adult books of all time — a recent UK poll placed it third among books for students. From textbooks to random websites, we can find the dominant story of Easter Island still reinforcing this notion that the island is a microcosm of a planetary story of humans at odds with nature, unable to contain our destructiveness. I, for one, am ready for a new story. As I continue to shelter-in-place, and my Twitter scroll fills with more terrifying news of both the pandemic and the weather shocks of the climate crisis, I take solace in this other story of ourselves, one that need not ignore our darkest traits, but that lifts up the intrinsic kindness and environmental stewardship of the human family — a family to which we all belong. This essay has been updated.

People go hungry not from lack of food but from lack of political power. Photo from the OECD Originally Published in the Boston Globe , July 20, 2020 Today’s multiplying threats are truly scary — a deadly pandemic with vast economic losses, police murders reflecting endemic racism, a president trashing constitutional protections, and . . . oh yes, a pending climate catastrophe. So fear is inevitable, and, of course, it can ignite action that saves lives. But fear can also do the opposite. Fifty years ago, our world was also gripped by fear. Paul Ehrlich’s book “ The Population Bomb ” predicted “mass starvation” on a “dying planet.” The ensuing scarcity scare triggered a fixation on ever-greater production of food. Along the way, agribusinesses have warned that only their seeds and agricultural chemicals could save us. “Worrying about starving future generations won’t feed them. Food biotechnology will,” declared a 1998 Monsanto ad. As our fear-driven vision narrowed, we continued to perceive lack — even when our more-than-ample food supply has kept well ahead of population growth. We remain blind to how our food system, answering first to the demands of the wealthiest, generates vast waste — as the 83 percent of agricultural land used for livestock worldwide provides just 18 percent of our calories. Plus, there’s literal waste: A third of food produced never reaches our mouths. And has fear of scarcity ended hunger? Globally, almost 2,900 calories a day are produced for each of us. Yet, a quarter of humanity suffers from food insecurity, and a fifth of the world’s children are stunted, bringing life-long harms. Simultaneously, the fixation on production has brought the massive degradation of soil, water, biodiversity, and the climate — all needed to ensure healthy food for future generations. How could this happen? Why are we together creating a world that none of us as individuals would ever choose? Here is my theory: Fear has blocked us from taking the proverbial deep breath, then probing: Why are we here? As creatures of the mind, we see the world through frames of meaning that determine what we can see and what we cannot. With a frame fixed on production, we’ve not seen how our global, corporate-driven food system has turned our food supply into a health hazard. Today, noncommunicable diseases account for almost 70 percent of deaths — and diet is implicated in most of them. But we are not doomed. We humans are also learning creatures. Once aware of this vulnerability of our species, we can intentionally widen our lens. How? By asking why, then why again. It soon becomes clear that, as was true a half century ago, today people go hungry not from lack of food but from lack of power — the power to access food and the land to grow it. That lack of power arises from our brutal, extractive capitalism that celebrates the market as “free” when it is in fact driven by one rule: Do what brings highest return to existing wealth. Little wonder that the United States leads the world in daily calorie supply per person — almost 3,700 — and yet 40 million Americans worry about getting enough to eat. Or that economic inequality has become more extreme in America than in over 100 countries . Again, why? Why have we allowed ourselves to remain in this deadly trap? Part of the answer is that such profoundly skewed economic power corrupts political life. With a wider lens, we can see that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food but scarcity of democracy. In this process, fear is also used deliberately by those who benefit from economic injustice. It diverts the eyes of those harmed. Low-income white people, for example, don’t see the common ground they share with people of color who suffer even greater harm. Here is the good news. Fear can also provoke curiosity, pushing us to explore, and that requires courage. Getting curious about why our society has gone so far off track might lead us to examine fear of another kind of scarcity — fear that we citizens lack what it takes to create a democracy that answers to us instead of private wealth. We have been duly warned about what can happen if “we the people” lose confidence — and no one said this more starkly than Franklin Roosevelt. In 1938, he told Congress : “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” Note these four words: “if the people tolerate.” Roosevelt reminds us that there is nothing inevitable here. If fear of our own powerlessness is blocking us, we can prove ourselves wrong. We can choose to no longer tolerate the ongoing assault on democracy. We can discover that fear is not a stop sign. It can be a source of energy that we can use as we choose. (When fear sends my heart pounding, I reframe it as “inner applause” cheering me on . . . and sometimes it works!) This is a lot easier when we team up — just as millions of courageous Americans are discovering, as today they step out together to demand deep, systemic reforms. With democracy itself — necessary to tackle all of today’s threats — at stake, many are saying no to 40 years of denigrating the role of government and instead are demanding it become a tool to “promote the general welfare,” as our Constitution’s preamble defines the very purpose of our nation. Perhaps for the first time in our history, Americans motivated by a range of passions — from race to climate to food — are joining in a “movement of movements” for democracy itself. Its goal? Reforms ranging from protection of voting rights to removing the corrupting influence of money in politics. A sign of this awakening is the Democracy Initiative, which was founded in 2013 and now has 72 member organizations representing 45 million Americans. On board is Food and Water Watch , challenging our increasingly monopolized food system that threatens the health of our land and its people. In this moment of multiple threats, our future depends on everyday Americans moving from fear to empowerment, ensuring what FDR called “the liberty of democracy.” The Future of Food was produced by Globe Opinion. The advertiser had no role in the editorial content.

Originally Published on Earth Island Journal , March 8, 2020 When my father, Marc Lappé, died in 2005 at the age of 62 from glioblastoma, he left behind a wife, five children, two stepchildren, and an unfinished manuscript. In the wake of his death, while struggling to make sense of a world without him, I holed up in a writers’ retreat on the rocky coastline of Provincetown, Massachusetts to see if I could transform his rough ideas into something presentable — and publish what would have been his 15th book. The Pacific Declaration was fundamentally a call to apply the precautionary principle to genetic engineering. (Pictured: CRISPR gene-edited mushrooms). Photo by Penn State / Flickr. I never succeeded. But the central idea of his book has stayed with me all these years. Drafted at the dawn of the age of genetic engineering — long before the development of CRISPR technologies and new ways to alter life as we know it — the book’s message was simple: We’ve developed frameworks within and across nation states for protecting environmental integrity for future generations (think the US Endangered Species Act). Now, as we attempt to alter the genetic makeup of living beings, we need new strategies and frameworks for protecting the planet’s genetic integrity for future generations. He was writing as a scientist, an ethicist — and a parent. I have been reflecting on his insight from so many years ago on the 20th anniversary of “The Pacific Declaration,” a statement of the ethical principles for this era of genetic engineering that my father and two dozen scientists, ethicists, and authors crafted on another rocky coastline in Bolinas, California and published in October 1999. The Declaration states: “In recognition of the fundamental importance of our planet’s natural genetic heritage and diversity, and in acknowledgment of the power of genetic engineering to transform this heritage, [we] believe that the proponents and practitioners of genetic technologies must adhere to the principles of prudence, transparency, and accountability.” The document was fundamentally a call to apply the precautionary principle to our collective approach to genetic engineering. The authors noted that the burden of proof must be on those promoting genetic engineering to show that these technologies “contribute to the general welfare of consumers, farmers, and society.” And that they do so, importantly, “without compromising the viability of traditional agricultural practices, including organic farming.” The Declaration was also a call to bring democratic deliberation to decisions about regulation and research priorities: “In democratic societies, any decision to deploy powerful new technologies must be made with full public participation and accountability,” the Declaration states. And it was a demand for “food sovereignty,” the concept developed in the 1990s by the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina, that calls for farmer and community power over what food is grown, where, and how. The month after my father and others gathered to write this Declaration, I found myself getting tear gassed in the streets of Seattle. At the time, I was a graduate student at Columbia University, studying trade policy and globalization. Participating in the global action against the World Trade Organization — the so-called “Battle of Seattle” — felt like an appropriate extracurricular activity. The Seattle action was also intimately tied to the work of my father and his colleagues. For the massive demonstrations in November 1999 against the new global trade regime were also about the future of food and how genetic engineering would affect farmers and eaters all around the world. In the streets, I heard as much from the Teamsters and environmentalists as I heard from Mexican farmers calling for protections of their corn markets in the face of American genetically engineered corn imports. Since the Pacific Declaration was penned in 1999, commodity agriculture in the US has been remade by genetic engineering. The majority of US corn and soy grown today has been genetically engineered — most of it to be resistant to the toxic herbicide Roundup. And the impacts of genetic engineering can now be felt in communities around the world burdened with exposure to toxic pesticides used in concert with these crops, including the tens of thousands suffering from cancers thought to be linked to the weedkiller Roundup — with lawsuits pending against its producer, Bayer (which bought Monsanto in 2018). Today, despite the urging of scientists like those who penned the Pacific Declaration, there are no precautionary principles in the US regulatory system for these technologies. When my dad and his colleagues wrote the Pacific Declaration, it was a call for all of us to ask big questions of this new genetic age: Who benefits? Who is harmed? How do these decisions affect future generations? Twenty years later, these questions are just as pressing.