Organic Distributor Cuts Waste with Liquid Composter

“Organic produce distributor Ace Natural, Long Island, N.Y., has solved what do with fruit and vegetables that are past their prime and no longer suitable for customers. Before, the company collected and wrapped the outdated produce on pallets and refrigerated it so it wouldn’t rot while waiting for the weekly trip to an outside composter. Now Ace Naturals feeds the produce to a liquid food composter, which breaks it down into a liquid that’s drained into the company’s sewer lines, eliminating trucking costs and freeing up warehouse refrigeration space.” – Chris Koger, the Packer

The death of the “Big Food” era is imminent after the industry’s biggest lobbying group crumbles

“A succession of high-profile, global companies have terminated their memberships with the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA)—the self-professed “voice of the industry”—rapidly undoing some 110 years of work the trade association had done to amass influence in US politics. In July 2017, as first reported by Politico, the Campbell Soup Company decided to leave GMA by the start of 2018, saying the trade association no longer represented its views. Three months later, the world’s largest food company, Nestlé, announced it was following suit. Then the floodgates opened, with Dean Foods, Mars, Tyson Foods, Unilever, the Hershey Company, Cargill, the Kraft Heinz Company, and DowDuPont all opting to leave, as well.” Read more online here at Quartz.

Statewide Coalition Applauds Historic Commitment in State Budget to Increasing Healthy Food Grown on New York Farms and Served in K-12 Schools

“When signed by Governor Cuomo, the new state budget will make K-12 schools that purchase 30 percent of their lunch ingredients from New York farms eligible to receive a state reimbursement of $0.25 per meal—four times the amount that is currently provided per meal. The 2018-19 State Budget also doubled state funding for Farm to School grants to $1.5 million. According to a recent report by American Farmland Trust and the New York Academy of Medicine, K-12 schools spends over $400 million to buy food for 1.7 million schoolchildren across New York annually.” Read more online here published by the American Farmland Trust. 

Pea Protein: Is it a Better Alternative to Meat and Dairy? Yes, we think so. 

Pea protein has made it’s way into many people’s diets, whether they are veggie lovers or not. Specifically with the surge of alternative ‘milk’ products made by companies like Ripple and Bolthouse Farms, which, in addition to offering plant-based eaters another alternative, take some of the market share away from soy, almond and dairy (which are sometimes considered water-intensive and big carbon-footprint industries). In either case, the new split-bean derived protein has most notably made its debut in plant-based burgers which consumers agree (along with the company Beyond Meat) “looks, cooks, and satisfies like beef,” of course, sans the health risks including heart disease and the carbon footprint of raising most mainstream meat (ahem, enter CAFOs here).

Yet, there are concerns by public health and food policy advocates about whether the pea protein made in or outside the United States is getting soaked with chemicals somewhere along the way in processing. According to Civil Eats, the risk might seem not as high as when the product, or pea isolate, is coming from the U.S. However, it “may be more difficult for consumers to verify claims made by manufacturers from China and Europe—especially around their organic standards. (Canada grows more than three-quarters of all split peas imported by the United States.)” 

In any case, companies like Nestlé and Cargill are getting into the pea business and so, questions about environmental sustainability and scalability have arisen and will continue to get asked. Such as whether or not the the addition of peas into industrial farms can actually improve their sustainability. This notion has mainly to do with the fact that peas and other legumes which “grow in concert with bacteria in the soil” help to take nitrogen from the air and feed it to the plant as a natural fertilizer. Very important and crucial for not only mitigating climate change, but ridding ourselves of the need for pesticides!

When peas are grown as a rotational crop, the nitrogen created by the peas (and other beans, legumes/cover crops) keeps the soil healthy and reduces the need for nitrogen-based chemical fertilizer which is applied and then runs off into the groundwater supply). See more on regenerative or ‘climate-smart’ agriculture as a means for mitigating dirty water run-off and carbon-sequestration. Read more from Civil Eats here. 

one key point to note: is it scalable? will our industrial food system begin to diversify?

Marion Nestle, author and professor at New York University, says that, although pea crops are certainly more sustainable, it’s not going to be scaled up anytime soon. As reported by Civil Eats, “soybeans have been paired with corn on most Corn Belt farms since they were made popular by Henry Ford the 1930s and the nation is covered with billions of dollars worth of farm infrastructure designed around storing, processing, and transporting them. American farmers planted around 90 million acres of soybeans in 2017, compared to just 1.1 million acres of field peas. Some surveys suggest soy’s 2018 acreage could match the 91 million acres of King Corn planted in 2017. This dynamic means domestic soy will most likely always remain less expensive than peas for the consumer. In the end, however, a nutritionally balanced and economical diet may require Americans to seek out proteins from more than just one source, says Nestle.”