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In this episode of Eat. Drink. Think., host Amy O’Neill Houck speaks with Chloe Sorvino, who leads food and agriculture coverage for Forbes Magazine.
Nearly a decade of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire and a century-old slaughterhouse business in Omaha.
In her new book Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat, Sorvino shares research on the consolidation and power of the meat industry and the backroom dealings behind it while talking with experts and those affected firsthand by working in and living near feedlots and slaughterhouses.
Here, she shares some of the backstory behind these experiences and we talk about the connections between meat production, industrial agriculture and the climate crisis—and the case for urgent systematic change.
“…unless these plants have a light being shone on them, they’re doing dark things.” – Chloe Sorvino
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Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat, by Chloe Sorvino
Chloe’s work at Forbes
Chloe Sorvino: Website | Twitter
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Full Transcript:
Amy O’Neill Houck:
Welcome to Eat. Drink. Think. I’m Amy O’Neill Houck. In this podcast from Edible Communities, a network of magazines published in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, we celebrate all things local and sustainable in the food world.
Today we’re speaking with Chloe Sorvino. Chloe leads food and agriculture coverage for Forbes Magazine, and she’s spent time on what she calls the “Billionaire Beat”.
Nearly a decade of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt out national forests logged by a timber billionaire and a century-old slaughterhouse business in Omaha.
She serves as a steward on the Forbes Union Unit Council.
Her work has also been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Fast Company and the Financial Times.
Armed with the access she’s gained over the years as a journalist, and with her deft skills as a researcher and synthesizer of raw data, Chloe crafted the new book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, And the Fight for the Future of Meat, out late last year from Simon and Schuster.
In Raw Deal, she catalogs the consolidation and power of the meat industry, and the backroom dealings behind it, while talking with experts and those affected firsthand by working in and living near feedlots and slaughterhouses.
She draws out the connections between meat production, industrial agriculture, and the climate crisis.
And she makes the case for urgent systematic change.
She also dives into the fermentation vats and other new realities of high-tech food, as the rush to create new climate-supportive ways to eat merges with the gold rush mentality of venture capitalists.
Chloe, welcome to Eat. Drink. Think.
Chloe Sorvino:
Thank you so much for having me.
AOH:
Absolutely.
CS:
That was awesome.
AOH:
Well, like the rest of us, you have to eat a few times a day.
It seems like, while you’re a person who leans toward plant foods, you’re adventurous enough to try whatever you’re served in the service of being a good guest, and in service of your writing.
Can you share some of the more interesting things you’ve eaten for the book, or for your stories?
CS:
Oh, absolutely. I love that question. Thank you so much for it.
Because I truly do have this kind of Supersize Me mentality when I’m doing reporting, but really it’s just because being a journalist is all about getting trust from who you’re speaking with. And I think there’s no better way to do that than eating the same food that they want to eat.
And so I really, from some of the fast food tastings that I’ve done over the years, tried out new products at Arby’s as I was trying to court this private equity billionaire white whale who’s rolling up a bunch of the different fast food brands in the country.
To, I’ve done a three-and-a-half hour mozzarella tasting with the largest, secretive mozzarella maker in the country, and also the largest whey maker.
And I’m kind of lactose intolerant, so I was stuffing a lot of the lactase pills and stuff in my body, taking shots of whey, eating all the different pizza. They make all the pizza cheese, they pretty much invented pizza cheese.
I ate a tomahawk steak fresh off the line in Omaha for this book.
And one of—a lot of the folks who’ve been reading it—one of the favorite anecdotes I’ve been hearing about is this scene in this steakhouse in Nebraska where I’m with the billionaire and a bunch of his slaughterhouse guys, and I’m the only one really who’s able to finish the steak. And I did that because I had to.
My reputation was pretty much on the line, especially after the waiter had handed me the tomahawk and everyone at the table got their own tomahawk, and he looked at me and said, “Little lady, are you going to be able to finish that?”
AOH:
Oh, you got little lady’d.
CS:
Oh, I got little lady’d. And I had to then, at that point, eat all of this. I’ve never eaten a steak that size ever again, but oh wow, it was buttery and fantastic.
Everything in between.
I had some of the best broth of my life while reporting this book via Cook’s Venture. They had been doing these tests on how to add sorghum and wheat and different types of crop rotations into the feed that they were sourcing locally. And I ended up doing a marathon day of cooking each of them to see how the wheat especially was showcasing, and how it was changing the taste.
I mean, you really taste a difference. But let me tell you also, the broth after, that was some of the best stock I’ve truly ever had. Such life-affirming, life-giving broth stuff. Wow. Liquid gold.
And everything between, I mean I started out as a kid doing a lot of gardening, but also was doing a lot of club sports and was nicknamed Mickey D’s, my club team, because I was eating too many McNuggets in between tournament games.
And so I’ve really seen the gamut of this food system.
But now I’m growing mushrooms in our apartment, often in New York City. I have a small terrace garden where I’m trying to add to what we do as much as possible, where worms are in the compost, and then that’s feeding my herbs and my lettuce. And then summer, the tomatoes and zucchinis and other things that I’m trying to grow, and fighting the rats day and day to do.
But I’m a very curious eater, and I think eating is a way that I experience my curiosity in general.
AOH:
Right. And speaking about what you eat, you share aloud some of your food concerns, which are aligned with those of other privileged eaters in the country hoping to do the right thing about our food buying and eating choices.
But also, you talk to chef Sophia Rowe about embracing nuance and rejecting dogma when it comes to day-to- eating. And you quote her saying, “There’s no such thing as good or bad food when you’re starving.”
You found some liberation in her takes on tackling tough problems while remaining sane about eating. Can you talk a little bit about that?
CS:
Absolutely.
She gave me, and so many other folks who really respect what she does every day, this freedom.
Because it’s become so didactic, so almost violent at times on social media, even. You have to be one or the other when in reality, life’s very gray.
And yes, there’s a way that voting with their dollars can matter. But we’ve really been beaten over the heads with this concept.
And at the end of the day, our $1 has so much less bearing than it does for that billionaire. And there’s a handful of billionaires and few small corporations that really dictate what we have access to in the first place.
And that’s really what we need to be refocusing this guilty atmosphere on. There’s too much guilt put on consumers.
And there’s so much insecurity, and food waste, and hunger in this country that was just such a … It’s horrifying to understand how deep and how structural it really is and how it really could be fixed.
And so I really appreciate Sophia Rowe talking about how it’s not just about acai bowls that are being imported from the Amazon and with a lot of plastic.
It’s about how much.
There’s way too much meat being consumed around the world, especially in America.
And while factory farming really needs to come to an end, and we have to really completely change how meat is made, there is a place for actual, scientifically-based rotational grazing, adaptive moving through different fields.
And there are some land that has been so degraded through monoculture, and pollution, and industrial farming that they really wouldn’t be able to produce food without some of this, hooves and manure and these natural processes.
And so again, I think what we are, the classic meat and potatoes meal, or meat-heavy meals every day, that’s something that’s really not going to be part of the future.
But it’s really about, how do we all get there together? And how do we take the blame off of each other?
AOH:
Early in your book you quote Temple Grandin, one of the world’s experts on sustainable slaughter, saying something I heard her repeat at a keynote in Edible Communities’ annual Edible Institute last fall. She said, “Big is not bad, big is fragile.”
And yet your book outlines and illustrates the major downsides of big when it comes to our food system, including near monopolies among producers, and a new term to me, monopsonies when it comes to buyers.
Big can be bad if it’s corrupt.
Can you talk a little bit about the corruption in the meat market, and if you think Temple is right.
Can there be big without bad?
CS:
Yeah, I so love that quote, and I’m glad that she is keeping this message out there.
She really came to that from these organic conversations that I was having as I was in New York, walking around the couch in my apartment through really the pandemic’s darkest days. And I asked her some of these big questions, and these were her answers. That “big is not bad, it’s fragile.”
And while I think maybe she and I differ on how big will be maintained in the future, I also do agree that there’s unfortunately not enough time to start from scratch.
The climate crisis is here, it’s only getting worse. And we right now don’t have enough time, resources, or capital to really completely build entirely new supply chains, entirely new plants.
And so there will be a place for big in the future, but it has to work completely differently as I was talking about.
But also within these regional systems that really need to be way better supported. I want to see completely different regional infrastructure that big corporations have gutted from local communities over the past five decades.
And so Temple comes from that interesting part of Colorado, where JBS has created a massive foothold.
And there’s a lot of different types of corruption in the book, and different lawsuits and allegations of price fixing and really horrible violations of human rights and other worker abuses.
But when you talk about the kind of hidden corruption that a lot of the book is focused on, it comes back to JBS, and this wild saga of these billionaire brothers trying to turn their small family butcher into this massive global operation.
And that’s exactly what they did. They’re now billionaires, they now have control over the world’s largest meat company.
And they’ve been doing that as their meat has been tied to deforestation in the Amazon. Lots of other pollution and worker abuses and issues in the U.S.
But then also, the actual funds that were used to acquire iconic assets in the U.S., and kind of take over the U.S. meat industry, become such an entrenched player that’s now almost impossible to extricate out of it.
It was a lot of it through preferential treatment to different loan offices gotten through bribes and kickbacks.
A massive kickback and bribery scheme that had so many different forms, and different politicians that were being paid off, that only at one part of it even touched three different presidents in Brazil. And so the book goes into how this bribery scheme really worked, how it was directly used to acquire distressed assets in the US.
That because the US meat market was already so consolidated, there really weren’t enough other buyers to begin with. And so it made it extremely vulnerable.
So when you talk about big is bad, we have this massive consolidation, and JBS was able to actually exploit that, and target because of how consolidated it had already become, and how the American consumer, and American regulators, and bankers, and loan officers, and farmers, and the entire system were already structurally being built around only supporting those.
And pushing out these smaller players and smaller infrastructure, regional infrastructure, canneries, hugely important parts of this country that could really take hold if we were able to invest in it now.
AOH:
And have you heard reactions to your book from folks inside the meat industry, or maybe the Department of Ag?
CS:
Yeah, I mean it’s been a great reaction honestly.
I mean, I was not trying to be the most media shut-in, writer shut in person possible, but I expect for the worst, hope for the best. I mean, it was a very intense process to go through. And I wanted to make sure that the standards of this book were extremely high. And so I spent a lot of time off the record with a lot of people inside these industries.
And I’ve heard no complaints. I had some amazing reactions. I got an email actually last week while I was on a reporting trip from a farmer who had actually successfully transitioned his farm to his son. And he told me that he had actually read it twice, that’s how much he liked it. And so I was like, wow.
AOH:
That’s great. And it’s riveting in the detail and the scenes about the corruption and what’s happening with the planet, and it’s also just so rich in data and detail.
So I think that it probably appeals well to both nerds and foodies alike.
CS:
Yeah. I mean, I’m an investigative journalist through and through.
For the JBS stuff alone, I spent months just in document land, digging very deeply into thousands and thousands of pages of different lawsuits, and testimony to investigators. Or reading the government reports in Brazil and in the U.S., talking with these lawyers, talking to the folks who actually were hot on the trail to figure out this bribery saga to begin with.
And again, that’s only part of the JBS stuff.
There’s a lot of different price fixing allegations and worker abuses that I also felt deserved a lot of time. And so most of the past two years that it took to write this book were spent just deeply investigating.
AOH:
Towards the end of the book, you discuss a lesser known middleman in the food system: contract food manufacturers.
And some of those producers got extra attention recently, due to the discovery that they’re employing underage immigrant workers.
At the same time in Minnesota and Iowa, there’s a push to lower age minimums for young workers instead of increasing protections for minors.
Do you think corporate reliance on these contractors will shift with this attention?
CS:
I think that was a huge embarrassment, but unfortunately this is an extreme example of how hidden these workers are, and that’s by design.
Because there are problematic, or sketchy, or potentially dangerous things happening in many of these plants. I get the alerts about the amputations or the folks falling into vats constantly.
And a lot of the children that were part of this big reveal actually even were found to be working in JBS plants.
And I found it very notable that the government, as they were investigating, kind of took the blame off these corporate actors, which would have been seeing very small, young children in these plants working multiple shifts.
I mean, this was not a one-time deal. These were long-term contractors.
And I think that is unfortunately just how these regulations and government work hand-in-hand with the meat industry.
Because at the end of the day, all they really want is continued access to the cheapest meat possible, and they’re going to turn away at these abuses or the environmental degradation because simply, that’s all they care about.
AOH:
Yeah, it was so challenging for me as a parent to see these children not only in the work that they’ve been forced to do, but then once the light is shined on them, they’re in a different kind of danger all of a sudden because of their immigration status.
And instead of people kind of swooping in and caring for them now, they’re at risk in another way.
CS:
Yeah. Let’s talk about the immigration aspect of the meat industry.
The meat industry pays some of the lowest wages in this country, and targets some of the most vulnerable workers in this country.
Immigrants, refugees, people of color, people who may be very fresh in this country, have nowhere else seemingly to turn. Or again, they are being targeted many times.
Part of this book went into very little-known allegations of wage subjugation and worker manipulation financially, to keep these very vulnerable workers at some of the lowest paying jobs because they found the labor force to be the only way that they could continue to keep their profit margins high. Which is, again, absurd.
And it became a crazy scheme where executives were meeting in Florida, and deciding they wanted to go on dolphin boat cruises to discuss this scheme, or tiki drink experiences.
And the difference between the white collar workers and the workers who are really shoulder-to-shoulder on the line can’t be understated. And that also it’s separated out in the plants for a reason.
Now, again, this is nothing that the average American consumer is seeing, but let’s take it a step further. Because there are so many different hidden dangers in these plants.
Not only financial subjugation, but also just actual violence. I write a lot about human rights abuses, racism, systemic issues, sexual harassment.
But then there’s also even other hidden costs that I uncovered through this research.
Probably one of the craziest ones that I never even really understood is that, talk about these children, right? They’re so young, they’re not adults. They really can’t make the decision to work in these plants for themselves. And they could get a superbug just from one shift.
Now, this gets into the whole antibiotic resistance question.
But when I found out that any single worker on one shift, or taking a job for one summer, or one transitory period of trying to get their feet in America on a steady footing, they could get a super bug.
And what that really means is, it could exist inside of them forever. They may never end up having that ignite, but it also could ignite in a few weeks, in a few days, or in a few years or a few decades.
And they could get pneumonia or another disease later on, and then all of a sudden that inflammation ignites this superbug, and then all of a sudden they have an antibiotic-resistant disease that often craters very quickly.
And this is just another way that workers in this meat industry are being hurt. And it’s very little tracked.
AOH:
And you even mentioned hunger as one of the problems.
I know you profiled somebody who said, “I can’t afford the chicken that I’m creating here.”
CS:
I would love to talk about that actually, because that interview really has stuck with me ever since I did it.
It was in March of 2020, and I actually had the great excitement and joy to actually meet Michael Foster this past weekend at South by Southwest after … So I’ll go back, but I had reached out to him. He was at a Wayne Farms plant that did not have PPE. Had Saran-wrapped dividers.
These folks were still completely shoulder to shoulder on the line. No one was taking care, no one was taking any precautions whatsoever. And these workers, they’re being pushed to stay on the line working even if they are sick.
And so I did an interview with Michael Foster, who his mom had worked at that chicken plant. And was actually, after many, many years, only given $300 hundred as a thank you. And he had worked in that plant for years and years, and had only made $11 an hour.
And he had this very visceral interview that we did over Zoom, and it was right in front of his house. And he wanted to do it there because he wanted to show people where he lived. And he wanted to say that he felt so honored that workers were being told they were essential, but also that’s not how they were being treated. They were being treated the exact opposite.
And when he said that, “We’re day in, day out on the line, but we don’t have chicken in our freezers right now. And our company didn’t even have the decency to offer to give us chicken for our freezers, and our freezers are empty.”
I mean, it shaped every single interview I did since then and continues to. And it was really powerful.
I met him this past weekend, and actually really had never had the full understanding of how actually impactful that interview publishing was.
But the president of the union where he was represented told me that the actual interview saved lives, and they were on stage talking about how that specific interview, the next day there was PPE rolling out.
There were masks being handed out, the Saran-wrap was going down. There were temperatures being checked, and that was the first time in the many weeks of the pandemic that actually was happening.
And so I mean, unless these plants have a light being shone on them, they’re doing dark things.
And it takes heroes like Michael Foster to stand up, and speak up, and not be afraid of whatever retribution there could be.
And there was retribution. He ended up having to leave the plant.
Now he actually works for the union broadly, and was actually down in Bessemer for a really long time with his daughter, just trying to be at that stoplight Amazon was trying to move. And trying to get in touch with any workers who wanted to support any way they could.
So the story of Michael Foster unfortunately was a horrible pattern. And poultry workers, and meat planting workers in particular, especially in the plants that aren’t unionized, have some of the lowest salaries and benefits of any profession.
And these are very skilled jobs. The industry likes to think about it sometimes, sometimes trying to make people think that they are not skilled. They are extremely, extremely skilled jobs.
AOH:
Do you have a sense for the percentage of these slaughterhouses that are union-represented?
CS:
Yeah, so it’s biggest in beef and then it goes to pork. Chicken is the least unionized and the worst.
I believe it’s around a third of all chicken, I think UFCW does around 80 or 70% of beef and pork or so. So it’s a majority of those plants. And chicken, it’s a bit less.
And it really, again, depends on what type of company it is, and how they’re owned, and the whole thing.
AOH:
I want to shift our thinking a minute towards the climate. I recently had journalist Tamar Haspel here on Eat. Drink. Think.
And she’s particularly skeptical of food miles as a driver of climate change. Tamar says there might be lots of reasons to eat local, but the climate isn’t necessarily one of them.
And you say something similar in your book.
And I quote, “Local meat isn’t always better for the environment, nor is it always ethically superior.”
But you go on to say, “It is important to invest in food distribution that has the shortest distance to reach us at home from the farm.”
Can you talk a bit about the reasons behind that?
CS:
Absolutely. Yeah. Tamar is wonderful. And I think there’s real value in that, not just from the environment but also from the worker’s perspective.
But a small farm might be struggling far more than a farm that has long-term contracts with the big firm, or something that’s more in the industrial supply chain, simply because those are the types of farms that have been squeezed out over time.
And it’s a hard business that they’re in, and it’s structurally stacked against the organic, or the local, or the regional folks.
And so I really wanted to write in the book about why local is best supported from the financial perspective and the structural perspective in that way.
Because I’m turning 30 this year, I’m young, and there has been a decade-plus of a lot of excitement around local food and farmer’s markets, but it’s also been extremely disappointing.
And I want to see more acknowledgement of that kind of culpability.
Because there’s been, as you said it earlier, a lot of privilege put into folks thinking that just going to a farmer’s market every once in a while is enough, and we really need to do a better job of taking a more active and real role in the food system else it’s not going to scale.
I mean, there’s a reason that local food is just such a tiny, tiny percentage of the total food that’s produced in this country.
And so I think that has to be acknowledged from that perspective. Because these are all businesses, and while there are such a great business case for making sustainable solutions and that being best for the business long-term, it also takes a lot to make those decisions. And it takes a lot to get there.
Otherwise, I think there are just simply ways that, because of the way subsidies work, because of the way regulations work, that some of the centralization of big food can do a better job.
I’m not saying they actually do, but they potentially could. And I’m hoping that’s kind of what we’re able to eventually tap into on a more democratic basis.
AOH:
You say our power as consumers is remembering that food, drinks, wine, grain, alcohol, weed, all of it comes from the ground.
This is in the context of high-tech meat replacements and their lack of transparency about sourcing.
How does remaining connected to where our food comes from give us power?
CS:
Because Americans have no idea where their meat comes from, and that’s exactly how it’s hurting us. And it’s also making others rich, and it’s not going to stop until we have a deep understanding of how we’ve been swindled in this way.
And I think there’s also a lot of privilege to be able to take the time, and effort, and understanding where food comes from. But it could be as simple as joining a CSA, or joining a co-op. Obviously there’s far more expansive, or there’s so many different ways to go with this.
A great one is I think also running for a local school board to try to influence institutional purchasing for public school lunches, or public hospitals, or public nursing homes.
A huge, huge, huge amount of dollars that are spent right now is only going to industrial food because it’s just centralized, it’s easiest, it’s cheapest, and that’s how they’ve always done it.
And there’s just been this concerted effort over the past 60 years, as corporate control, and consolidation, and people have become billionaires from our food system and profiting off of it, that they’ve also eclipsed and tried to hide how bad monoculture has made our soils.
How much water has been polluted because of industrial row crop farming and synthetic agriculture.
And we’re simply never going to be able to combat it without remembering and also reframing our expectations because of that.
I don’t like apple season for my CSA. I wish I lived in Florida, and could have access to pineapples and mangoes. When I get that fourth bag of apples, I’m like, help me, someone please.
But at the same time I try to actively reframe for myself constantly that this is where you live, this is what you can have access to. This is what you’ve already paid for. This is what your farmer is expecting, and you don’t need more.
AOH:
Yeah, I thought about that idea a lot while I was reading. And scale was something I thought about too.
Because as you tell it, the giant corporate food system so often comes across as rife with dangers to the mere humans in its wake. And once it kind of comes to solutions, you offer up the idea of re-regionalization.
Can you talk us through the benefits of a complex regional food web, and any of the examples that you explored?
CS:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think re-regionalizing the food system is a way to ensure that communities can survive crisis, and climate crisis in particular, in dignity.
Because at the end of the day, I’ve spoken with the billionaires, they’ve told me when it’s raining gold outside, we’re walking around with buckets. And they’re not going to be the ones to save you.
On top of that, the actual, just back to the biggest fragile point, the consolidation is going to have massive climate bottlenecks.
There will be floods, there will be extreme weather events that take out some plants that, at the end of the day, will impact how people get food.
Again, when there’s already so much food waste.
But also hunger is based around access, not just insecurity. It’s really an access problem.
And so I talk about re-regionalizing the food system because there used to be this amazing network of canneries, and local plants, and different ways to preserve. But preserving that gives a little bit more convenience, but not this insane convenience that we’ve begun to expect that’s led to that overabundance you see in grocery stores.
I think when you talk about local meat in particular, these farmers and ranchers are working so hard just to get this amazing product done right, and farmed right, and packaged right that they often don’t want to do much more to it.
But if we could just have that next step of processing, have the local hunter, the deer producer able to get a sausage made, or have access to more communal infrastructure like that can be super powerful.
And will lend resilience, will lend access.
I write a lot about too, how we don’t have universal food access in this country. Which is insane, especially when we have universal healthcare and universal access to energy and education. But we don’t have universal access to food.
And a public food sector could work very much within the system of market demand.
Unfortunately, we’re in this late capitalistic system where we don’t really have time to create an entirely new situation. We have to work as quickly as possible within the confines of how these markets already work.
But universal food access, a public food sector could add a different way of purchasing, to balance out that imbalance of power from these billionaire-backed meat packers that are amassing so many profits. And at the same time, it empowers regional producers and folks like the CSA networks.
And when I talk about regional producers, I’m not just talking about CSAs.
I really think we need a patchwork of systems laying on top of each other, especially around leveraging the parts of this business that are really hard for producers. I’m really into food hubs, and especially food hubs that work within a CSA system. And I think that’s a great way to build and rebuild.
But I’ll be honest, it’s very difficult. And I say that from even having personal experience. The book came out three months ago, I had been a member of our local neighborhood CSA for a really long time. And they were so excited about the book, and know that me and my sister are pretty much the only people who are buying most of the products from their food hub, as I’m trying to practice what I write about.
And they had this period of, starting last month, where they had … It’s like the three months where we, unfortunately again, we’re in New York, we can’t have all year round access.
So there’s a summer system that ends in November, then there’s a winter three months, and then there’s this awkward period where I have the struggle of figuring out where I’m getting my food between February and April. And they asked me point-blank if I would help give them an extra distribution spot in New York City.
And I said, absolutely. It’s probably also mostly going to be my stuff for my sister’s 25 bag pound of flour anyway. And it was on Valentine’s Day. I got married a few months ago, so it was my first married Valentine’s Day. And I was like, husband, I love you. We’re going to have a great Valentine’s Day. But I have this CSA distribution center also happening today. I’m not sure how many people are going to come, not sure who’s going to be there. I’m not sure when they’re showing up. I’m not sure what our apartment’s going to look like based on how much is going to be there, but we’ll see how it goes.
And I was so excited. I was like, I’m ready to do this.
Turns out they have a crazy guy working for them, and they just simply never showed up. And the farmer was freaking out, and they now have been actually having to completely change what they’re actually even able to do for these next three months. And so it takes everyone working every day in the system by the hardest, upstream, uphill battles, David and Goliath like to the max. But there are so many people who are excited about doing that. And they all keep me optimistic.
AOH:
Can you define what a public food sector is?
CS:
Yeah, so it can be as kind of minimal or as expansive as it can be.
Public food sector, really just think about it like a buying arm of the government. It could work quite locally. It could work overlapping with credit systems, or local municipalities, or states. It could work federally.
You could say that not a public food sector, but an example of universal food access is what’s happening in terms of public school lunches and breakfast. And obviously there’s been a lot of debate around that. But in the pandemic, there were universal public school meals for the first time, and that was a step towards that.
West Virginia and Maine were both states in 2021 that added the right to food into their state constitutions, which is another way to think about this.
But a public food sector is really a way to think about how to make that work in reality. And it’s really just a department. Or it could be warehousing that’s owned by the government to hold food.
It could be only used for emergency response in a climate crisis, or it could look like how it looks in South America and other parts of the world where there are cafeterias where everyone from all walks of life will go and have a great meal and it’s completely normal. It’s completely part of their society.
So really, it could be as expansive or as limited as we are.
AOH:
And you mentioned a couple of times in the book that you think food companies shouldn’t be publicly traded.
Can you talk a little bit about why that is, as well as about public benefit corporations and how they might be a step in the right direction?
CS:
Yeah, absolutely. Being publicly traded means that that company, its board, its owners are responsible to their shareholders. And that means that they have to have, by law, they always have to be trying, at all their best to their ability, grow and profit and give returns back to their shareholders as much as possible.
And while I’m not a software reporter, I’m not going to talk about what that means for the tech world, although I think we’ve seen a lot of crazy things that have come out of that.
But in the food world, we can only eat so much. We can only grow so much.
And those constraints, coupled with a mentality that you must continue to add margin, or add return, or grow, or keep giving more and more dividends over time, and many of these companies have been publicly traded for decades, it’s created this completely unsustainable system where food is now having to be cut, right?
Nutrition, health, climate, these are all corners that are being cut because they’re, at the end of the day, the overall goal of simply profiting. Simply giving as much back to their shareholders as possible.
And it’s really created a dynamic that’s hurt people across the supply chain. Consumers, workers, pretty much everyone.
AOH:
You mentioned too with venture capital, the idea that the investor is planning their exit at the same time that they’re coming in can only be damaging to the idea of creating a long-term source of food.
CS:
Absolutely. I can tell you how many times I had investors slapping me on the back saying, almost salivating like, “Oh, it’s like the early days of the internet.”
Just telling me how excited they were to profit, to get that exit.
And let me tell you, most of those conversations were happening when they had just made their first investment, or when they were just looking at this space and trying to figure out what they were investing in.
And there was just this past decade in which the food industry really took a turn into this kind of late capitalistic bubble. But I can explain really how that happened and why.
Essentially, in short, it’s because a lot of these software investors in Silicon Valley had made a crazy amount of money. All those funds rolled over. These funds typically roll over between three to five years, three to seven years. And that’s why these investors are often looking for an exit, looking for a sale of their stake within three to five years. And they’re looking for a significant return on that.
So there was just this period where there’s a lot of money going in, and they thought that … They didn’t understand, there’s only one stomach.
They thought we could get a tech return, a tech multiple, a tech valuation off of these companies that just simply are not the same thing. And it’s led to a lot of bankruptcies. It’s led to a bubble bursting, and it’s led to a lot of wasted time and resources when we simply don’t have any time to waste.
AOH:
And what about public benefit corporations?
CS:
Yes, yes. I think public benefit corporations are an answer to what I’m suggesting.
And I’ve spent a lot of time with Matt O’Hayer of Vital Farms, which was pretty much the first food company to go public with that distinction. And it was extremely hard for them to get that to happen.
So being a public benefit corporation means, it’s actually a specific tax designation that gives a founder, or a board, or investors the ability to push back on that need to only profit. And it gives them leverage against the potential sale of a company that maybe wouldn’t be to the right buyer. Or if investors want to end up going public one day, and they were saying private.
But it also is a tool that’s actually created for publicly traded companies to use to kind of take this into consideration.
Now, Tyson is not a public benefit corporation, but again, there are more and more out there. ButcherBox is a benefit … Well it’s actually, so a public benefit corp is the strongest aspect of this.
There’s also the B Corp certification run by B-Labs, an independent organization, and that is also now gaining steam and has a similar amount of teeth. I think the legal taxes as an issue are quite strong, personally. But there’s a lot of scrutiny with the organization, the certifications which come with that. And so there’s very high standards that had to be met to make that designation to begin with.
And it’s growing a lot. You’re starting to see it on labels even in the grocery stores.
AOH:
And the B Corp is, it’s a different process to get it, right? It looked like me, like it costs more and it’s…
CS:
Yes, it’s completely different. And so ideally you’d be both, right? And Vital Farms, for example, is a public benefit corp tax wise, but also has that B Corp certification. Obviously that does cost, again, a lot of money. But I think it was really important for them to do before they went public.
And Matt O’Hayer said it was pretty much the only thing he wanted to do, because he was really worried about the long-term vision otherwise.
It’s a way to ensure that the original mission, hopefully, can get there. It’s a way to put your money where your mouth is. Because everyone is talking about climate, but no one is really making the actual major changes that we need.
AOH:
And one of the climate crisis side effects that I hadn’t heard too much about before your book is the decrease in soil’s capacity to store carbon as the soil warms. And it’s kind of a feedback loop.
And you also mentioned, at the same time, that our food supply is becoming less nutritious.
Can you talk about that?
CS:
Yeah. Climate change is hitting us from all angles, but the actual heating of this planet makes crops less nutritious, lower levels of all the important nutrients that we want to see in our food to begin with. And it is completely reducing the potential of sequestering carbon in the soils.
And so I wanted to be very specific in the book. I didn’t use the word regenerative, I didn’t go into the whole carbon, the decarbonization, and sequestering, and soil debate that much. Because there’s a lot of science on both sides.
There is no doubt of what farmers like Will Harris of White Oak Pastures have done, and how they’ve been able to completely re-energize the local economy around them. And also rehabilitate soils that had been so severely degraded from monoculture and row crop farming over generations and generations.
And while there are studies that they have published about how much carbon has been put back in the soil, and you can see it teeming with life as they say, at the end of the day there’s just so much we don’t know about how that will long-term be stored.
And that’s why there’s a lot of long-term questions that I have as a journalist that I’ll be exploring throughout my work the next few years, I’m sure, around all these efforts around carbon credits, and particularly selling the carbon credit future around soil health.
AOH:
And speaking of nutrition, at one point you interviewed Chef Dan Barber who’s doing some work on seeds, and you two discussed the relationship between nutrition and flavor.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
CS:
Yes. So he really blew my mind with his barley back in 2019 when it was first coming out, and he was first to get it that the breed kind of perfected. But really what he’s learned through all of his work with seed breeders, regional seed breeders that are each trying to find specific strains or breeds that work in specific areas, and that have again a way to re-regionalize and kind of help this food economy flourish, they found out that nutrition is so deeply tied to how it’s growing, but also to the flavor, and the color, and how it looked. That all really is part of this.
It’s all a part of different layers of an ecosystem, really. And so think about that. His carrots have triple, or even more beta-carotene than the typical grocery carrot. It looks completely differently, it also tastes completely differently.
Industrial agriculture and seed consolidation, there’s so few people groups that are selling seeds anymore. It has stripped flavor nutrition from our foods.
And we all think that bananas don’t have seeds anymore, and there’s only one type of banana, and that’s completely the opposite of the case.
But right now, the alternative to the barley that he served me would be an organic barley at Whole Foods that pretty much would otherwise could even be fed to livestock, which it is what it is. But it’s just really no differentiation or diversity within even sometimes the kind of premium, organic parts of this industry.
And that’s because there’s just been fewer and fewer seeds being saved and bred naturally for flavor and health. They’ve been bred for quick growth, and efficiency, and as fast and cheap as possible. And also easy to pick.
AOH:
You talk a bit about in different aspects of the book, about the intellectual property around food.
The idea that breeding stock of chickens, or seeds, or Monsanto Roundup Ready corn, all of that is somebody’s intellectual property, and maybe adds to the fragility of our food system.
CS:
Absolutely. I think about that so much, pretty much every day around the debate around lab-grown or cellular agriculture or meat that is really here, because it’s about to start getting sold in grocery stores and restaurants within the next few months.
But there is a small handful of a few investors that are making these investments in these startups solely because they think they will be the only ones to eventually have the intellectual property one day.
And when you’re trying to hoard those types of previously natural systems, that were like a tale as old as time, open sourced, it’s just, it’s a money grab. It’s a land grab, it’s a power grab.
And my chapter is called The Lab Grown Power Grab for that reason.
But it’s not just in the lab-grown meat world, it’s obviously also in the plant-based on these synthetic biology alternatives. It’s also in some of the new breeds that are out there, and how there’s 99% of our chicken only from two breeds to begin with in this country, which is such a mind-blowing stat for me to think about.
AOH:
Would a right to food include some legislation about intellectual property that would protect people from access to food because somebody wants to just own it?
CS:
I would love to see that. And in my conclusion, I write about how if lab-grown could become part of that public food sector, I think that could be an admirable way to actually scale this technology.
Because right now there’s, aside from this intellectual property debate, which it’s hand-in-hand with an accessibility problem.
Because the same investors that are investing to own the intellectual property are also investing in a lot of the more super high-end products. The steaks, not the ground beef. And they’re often doing that because they think there’ll be a higher price point, and the bankers of the world will want to try this more than the average mom.
And that’s why there’s also insecurity and accessibility baked into how this is currently being built. And lab-grown meat has had decades and decades of an open sourced history. And just in the past few years, there’s been a rush and a race to really own it for the future.
And a public food sector working within that could be a great way to create local access, and also work with other alternatives in a broader system.
I was on a few panels at South by Southwest this past weekend, and we did some really cool interviews around wastewater treatment plants, and how they can use yeast for synthetic biology.
And essentially use fermentation to then create a mycology, a mycelium, a fungi-based ingredient which is approaching, that’s going to pretty much help bring the cost down for almost all of these other alternatives.
And at the same time, those plants can be co-located with other plants, like a lab-grown or the actual mycelium producer, or the food producer, or several different types of these alternatives that do need heat, clean water, but also these other ingredients.
AOH:
Is there other technology or ideas from your recent conference that got you excited?
CS:
Definitely the co-location was the best for me. Because it was explained to me very specifically. A producer in LA, or even a chicken producer, because chicken houses take a lot of energy, take a lot of heat, a chicken house plus a fungi producer could each work within the actual LA wastewater treatment infrastructure.
And that could be then moved to Dallas, that could be moved to Omaha, that could be moved to Indianapolis. And I think that’s a clear way that infrastructure can be leveraged that’s already existing, and then work within that system that we have to work within.
AOH:
Raw Deal is a mix of urgency about the need to course correct our food system and reality check about where we stand.
“Existing structures need to change,” you say, “While at the same time, there’s just not time to start from scratch, or burn it all down, or do a hard reset on capitalism.”
How should the average eater balance potential paralysis from the existential nature of these crises with the need to act?
CS:
Yeah. The balancing act is really hard, and I think there are good days and bad days.
But the more we can engage, the more we can be angry and share that with politicians, with local foraging organizations, local CSAs, local grocery stores that aren’t corporate-owned or getting ensnared in the Kroger and Albertson’s merger that potentially is happening, the more we can do that.
There’s a sense of belonging and community that I think relieves a lot of anxiety, that a lot of people think about when they think about how stressed it will be to get food in the future.
And I think the real problem is that right now, the top corporations, the top meat packers are not throwing everything they’ve got at this problem.
It is such a massive problem that we face, and they’re sitting on billions and billions of dollars and barely pilot testing their way to making even remotely substantial goals or investments in testing things now. But we need to test things now because we pretty much have these next few years to work out the kinks, and make these investments, and make the big risks before the climate gets worse.
Because 2030, we’re already going to be having such significant problems that it’s going to continue to exacerbate the inequality, the inequity, the accessibility problems, and the pollution and health problems that we get from this food system.
And so I think about the Farm Bill a lot because it’s happening, the debates going on right now. And there’s a lot of different types of folks that are trying to get in on it, but also trying to make it clear that this is funding for the next five years.
And many, and including myself, would say that these are the most crucial five years we have left.
AOH:
Wow. Well, that seems like a fitting place to wind up. I think that at the very least, probably everyone who’s listening can think about what their representative might be thinking about the Farm Bill, and reach out and do one small step in that way.
I often think that people just get overwhelmed by the level of concern that’s going in everything that we’re doing right now.
CS:
Yes. And I hear that for sure.
AOH:
No, yeah. But I think that the urgency about it was so palpable in your book, and repeated, and important. So I really appreciated that part of it.
Chloe, thank you so much for joining us.
CS:
Thank you so much for having me. Your questions really just let me talk about everything I wanted to talk about, so I really appreciate it. They’re really thoughtful.
AOH:
Oh, thank you. And I think that I probably had 20 questions more than I could have asked you. I feel like we didn’t talk about lab-grown meat very much.
CS:
I didn’t even get to monopsony. You teed me up and then I didn’t even talk about monopsonies.
AOH:
Yeah, so there was a lot more to say. It’s really such a deep well of really interesting topics, and you’ve done a really great job. So thank you very much.
CS:
Thank you. Thank you so, so much. Really appreciate it.
AOH:
We’ve been listening to journalist and author Chloe Sorvino.
Thank you for joining us today at Eat. Drink. Think. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to pick up your local Edible magazine. You can find show notes for today’s episode at ediblecommunities.com.
