Eat This Newsletter 272: State-sponsored hunger
Hello
If there’s a common theme to today’s stories, it is how forces way beyond a person’s control influence what and how they eat.
Not Very Merry Widows
A fascinating article in Goya offers glimpses into the restricted dietary world of widows in India, especially in Bengal: What Women Can’t Eat.
What emerges, beyond the patriarchy’s strenuous efforts to protect itself with little regard for the lives of women, is a seemingly strange paradox. Upper caste women were much more severely constrained, forced into “a public performance of virtue”. Widows in poorer households were actually freer, because economic necessity pushed them into physical labour, which required sustenance rather than a display of privation. Maybe not so strange, because upper caste families had more resources that they would not want diluted by a woman remarrying.
The article contains mouth-watering descriptions of some of the dishes that widowed women created from the limited range of ingredients permitted to them. I found myself wondering whether, had widows been allowed to open restaurants, their food might have come to be seen as extremely attractive.
There was another article in Goya recently that I briefly considered linking to, until I came across this: “The banana has carved its winding path through history. Initially unfit for human consumption, it was domesticated through careful bio-engingeering in New Guinea”. To describe historically invaluable selection and domestication as “bio-engingeering” [sic] is to miss the point completely, devaluing the skill and wisdom both of early farmers and their modern counterparts.
Dairy Farms Chilled
I read just this morning that raids to kidnap and deport farm workers in the US have been scaled back, possibly even called off, as people belatedly realise the effects on the food supply. I hope that’s true. And for anyone who wants to understand the ins and outs of farm work in the US, I highly recommend this article on Cheap milk and immigration.
Mike McMahon, a New York dairy farmer, explains to a reporter why he willingly hires undocumented workers — “It’s difficult, dirty work most Americans do not want to do” — and how, for years, everybody involved was willing to turn a blind eye but not willing to do anything to fix the problems. A couple of things struck me.
First, although “employers have to pay taxes and Social Security on migrant workers … illegal workers will never get a Social Security benefit”. That sounds like the government is actually making on the deal.
Secondly, the money those workers are able to send home makes a real difference.
Workers make $15.50 an hour, plus overtime, which they all work, McMahon said. They live in free housing on the farm.
McMahon has twice traveled to Mexico to see where the money goes.
On the first visit, he said, he saw a small shack that housed eight children, two parents and two grandparents. On his second visit, he saw the new house with plumbing, electricity and internet. The family built a separate grandparent apartment.
“It was so awesome to see what they were able to do down there because of the money that they made here,” McMahon said, “and at the same time, the change they made in my life.”
Gleaning Better Data on Waste
Are you surprised to learn that the United States boasts an Association of Gleaning Organizations that “advocates for public support of gleaning and works with about 200 gleaning organizations to help them grow.” I certainly was, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been. That’s the least important thing I took away from an article in the newly rebranded Offrange: Gleaners Are Measuring America’s On-Farm Food Loss
So much of the talk about food waste, and especially the numbers lobbed back and forth, seems at best a little flimsy, at worst intended to foster personal guilt. So I was interested to learn how pilot studies made use of gleaners to measure the amount and state of crops left in farmers fields.
“They estimated that more than 30 million pounds of edible food could have been left in Tennessee fields in 2021 and 2022,” the article says. I remain unclear as to whether that’s 15 or 30 million pounds each year and whether 13,600 tonnes (or 6800 tonnes) is a lot or a little. By way of assistance, the article also says that another survey of “20 farms in South Carolina … found that 10 to 20 percent of the harvested crop was left behind and was edible.” That does seem like a lot.
Gleaning, of course, cannot solve the problem of on-farm waste, even though it can help to identify the details. The article looks at the many different ways in which crops become “waste,” a useful contribution to the discussion. And it looks forward to a much bigger study, coordinated by the Association of Gleaning Organizations, that will extend the surveys to as many farms as are willing to participate and that hopes to deliver results in Spring 2027.
Educational Debt
A man in Utah decided to pay off the meal debt at a local elementary school. That minimal effort turned, after a lot more effort, into “the Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation, which has raised over $50,000 and paid off the lunch debt of 12 Utah schools. His advocacy helped pass HB100, legislation that changed “reduced-price” lunch kids into “free” lunch kids and prohibited lunch shaming in Utah schools”.
Admittedly, and with no shame, that is a very feelgood story. It is also much more than that. I’m not even going to bother pointing to some of the more obvious questions the article raises. You can surely ask them yourself, possibly without even reading the article, although I really think you should.
Concentrated Attention
Here’s a useful addition to the episode with Jennifer Clapp on Farming’s Overlords. The people at Grain and ETC Group have issued a new report detailing the Top 10 Agribusiness Giants: Corporate Concentration in Food & Farming in 2025. The illustrations and tables make the actual numbers easier to grasp, although the story is essentially the same. Too few companies control too much of the markets in seeds, pesticides, fertilisers, farm machinery, animal pharmaceuticals, and livestock genetics.
Take care
