Hello

This ought to be the silly season, when the stories are all man eats dogfood. This week’s haul tells a very different tale, of the power of big industry to destroy anything and everything that threatens it.

Slaughterhouse One

In 2020, the European Union tried to change its farm and food policies with what it called the Green Deal, not least to increase environmental protections. Four years later, in the wake of farm protests against the proposed Mercosur Agreement with countries in South America, almost all of the proposals were dropped or considerably diluted. That was the result of a well-organised lobbying campaign by Copa Cogeca, Europe’s largest farm lobbying group, according to a new report from The Guardian and investigative journalists at Grilling.

One of Copa Cogeca’s victories was to sink any EU hopes of cutting beef consumption. The EU spends millions of euros on supporting red meat, and the Beating Cancer plan sought to reduce the opportunities to claim EU funds for red meat and alcohol. The proposal was dropped in 2024.

That’s particularly ironic because another report, in Le Monde, with investigation by Lighthouse Reports, shows that in France at least, most of the subsidies for livestock farmers ended up in the hands of one huge slaughter company, resulting in hardship for farmers and consumers alike.

The company in question is Groupe Bigard. Thanks to a series of mergers, Bigard is now the biggest slaughterhouse in France, responsible for killing more than one in three cattle in the country. Because many farmers have no suitable alternatives within reasonable distance, Bigard can dictate the price farmers get. And because it is also such a dominant player, it has also raised the price consumers pay for its products.

[N]ot only did the company’s profits increase five-fold between 2004 and 2023, but the main operating company’s profit margins more than doubled; and paid out €300 million in dividends over the last decade.

Small farmers have suffered disproportionately and yet nobody is lobbying on their behalf. Pekka Pesonen, the Secretary General of Copa Cogeca who masterminded the lobbying effort, is interested only in large industrial farmers. According to Grilled, Pesonen “told Politico in 2023 that it was not realistic to expect small-scale farming to survive: ‘the market just doesn’t reward this’.”

Bigard’s unfettered rise is yet another example of a competition authority asleep at the wheel, allowing consolidation that hurts both ends of the pipeline. Alas, the story is all too familiar in farming as in so many industries. Jennifer Clapp explained that when we talked about her book Titans of Industrial Agriculture.

Fat Chance

In the previous issue I linked to a piece by Thin Lei Win that shed some light on Commercial Determinants of Health, the idea that food companies (and others) use “strategies and approaches … to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health”. It’s probably just a coincidence, but blow me if The Guardian didn’t recently point out that “[o]besity reflects prices, advertising and access, not simply weak willpower”.

An editorial asks the UK government to put public health before food industry pressure. The piece was prompted by a report from parliament’s health select committee, and most of the arguments and proposed remedies are reasonably familiar. Industry lobbying, however, has effectively defanged every previous attempt to do something. Anything. (Can you see a pattern here?)

The country today welcomes a new Prime Minister. Will “pro-business” Andy Burnham be up to the task?

Don’t Mess with Nestle

I often link to pieces from Marion Nestle, because I trust her insights as an expert in nutrition and policy and know that no conflicts of interest get in her way. That cannot be said for Calley Means, an advisor to RFK Jr and the US Department of Health and Human Services. One has to wonder, then, why he is telling obvious porkies about Marion Nestle. As she notes, “I am not MAHA’s enemy”.

Nestle dismantles all Means’ untrue and misleading claims with ease and evidence, which leaves only the question of why he is making these claims.

“In making false charges, could Calley Means possibly be attempting to deflect attention from the difficulties MAHA is confronting in implementing its agenda?” Nestle asks, before noting that “MAHA’s agenda appears to be running up against the pushback that inevitably happens when you do something that might threaten food industry profits.”

Same pattern at work.

Big Iceberg Partially To Blame

It seems like maybe a culprit responsible for the latest outbreak of cyclosporiasis in the US has been identified: shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms, “probably the largest lettuce (and fresh cut produce) supplier in North America, if not globally”.

The quote is from Helena Bottemillar Evich’s recent newsletter. She points out that the Food and Drug Administration coyly did not mention Taylor Farms by name (why not?) and that by no means all the people who got sick had eaten at Taco Bell. Is Taylor Farms responsible for the other cases too? We may eventually find out, but then again, we may not. Cyclospora is a difficult pathogen to investigate, which has not been helped by staffing cuts across so many agencies. Here is an epidemiologist’s thoughtful and detailed take on all that.

And there are consequences. As Bottemiller Evich notes, “these outbreaks are so very bad for business. An outbreak like this could easily dampen lettuce consumption for a decade”.

As “evidence”, a cyber-chum recently commented, “Having a kosher hot dog for dinner instead of a salad, for health reasons.”

Makes sense to me.

Why we won’t eat the bugs

A fascinating paper in Science Advances has come up with an interesting explanation for why most western societies draw the line at eating insects: it’s not in our DNA.

Researchers in Spain looked for insect DNA in the dental plaque of 745 anatomically modern humans and compared it with the plaque from Neanderthals, chimpanzees and gorillas. The Neanderthals, chimps and gorillas all gave up large amounts of insect DNA, the modern humans very little, and that was especially true for more northerly populations. In addition, genes for the enzymes needed to break down the chitin of insect skeletons become noticeably less effective as you move away from the tropics, where eating insects remains relatively common today. The researchers conclude:

[I]nsect consumption was rare and likely unintentional in prehistoric Europe, at least since the Neolithic Revolution. This does not exclude intentional, sporadic insect consumption during (pre)history, especially during famines and epochs of nutritional emergency.

There’s a lot more fascinating discussion of how insect DNA can be a contaminant, rather than reflecting the diet of the specimens. The overall conclusion, though, seems to be that the reason we (westerners) don’t eat insects is because we don’t have the enzymes to digest them properly, possibly because we no longer needed them as we moved north from the tropics and insects became less abundant.

[L]ow chitin digestibility may have compromised insect consumption in prehistoric times and contributed to strengthen aversion beyond cultural and religious motivations.

But it’s OK, modern technology is here with a solution. Chitin is a valuable industrial resource, and industrial insect processing aims to siphon it off and add value to the revenue stream, leaving behind easy to digest insect protein.

I remain skeptical.

There’s another tantalising result. The insects most frequent in Neanderthal plaque are from the order Diptera, which includes flies and mosquitoes. Maybe fly maggots really were responsible for the mistaken idea that Neanderthals were very heavy meat eaters. And maybe Neanderthals did store meat in ponds and swamps, where mosquitoes lay their eggs.

Take care