Food policy experts Sarah Hackney and Jamie Fanous have advice for those who feel overwhelmed or unsure about how to make a difference. Hackney is the coalition director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) in Washington, D.C., where she works with grassroots organizations to advocate for federal policy reform to advance the sustainability of agriculture, food systems, natural resources and rural communities. Fanous is the policy director at one of these organizations, a California-based nonprofit called Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). Together, Hackney and Fanous offer guidance on simple steps that we can all take to create positive change around us, in ways both big and small.

Join CSA programs and support food cooperatives 

Besides doing the research to elect officials who advocate on behalf of these priorities, the best thing we can do to support farmers year-round is to be just as conscientious about how we vote with our dollars. “Sign up for a CSA, go to the farmers market or co-op, purchase your produce from farmers directly. Go the extra mile to do that,” says Fanous. “If you’re going to a big box store, the produce is probably not from a small-scale farmer or a local farmer, so it’s really not supporting local economies. Joining a CSA program is a great way to build a relationship with your farmer and know where your food is coming from.”

Educate yourself and amplify your actions

For those looking to engage more deeply in food policy advocacy, Hackney and Fanous recommend tuning into social media platforms and newsletters from a mixture of national agricultural organizations, such as NSAC, and local ones, such as CAFF. 

“NSAC is one of the best places to get into the nerdy details of food and agriculture policy,” says Hackney. “We have a very active blog and a weekly e-newsletter where we highlight big food and ag policy news from D.C., along with free analysis you won’t find anywhere else.”

When it comes to understanding issues closer to home, Hackney says, “There are over 150 member organizations within NSAC, most of whom are state or regionally focused, and all of whom work in relationship with farmers and eaters in their communities. Almost all of them have active websites and social media accounts and some specifically have farmer- and consumer-led volunteer teams that help review and develop policy ideas both at the local and national level.” She recommends checking out the membership lists of a coalition such as NSAC or one of its peers, such as the HEAL Food Alliance, to see if there’s an active member organization in your state or region. 

Call Congress

Once you start following political and agricultural news, you may come across the occasional public request for citizens like yourself to contact local representatives in Congress to advocate for or against certain bills. 

“We share calls to action at key junctures in the policy process when there are opportunities for folks to make their voices heard directly with lawmakers,” says Hackney. “It’s absolutely possible for individual calls, emails and messages to make a difference: Lawmakers track and monitor who’s reaching out to them on issues that matter locally. When it comes to shifting food and farm policy toward more sustainable, equitable outcomes in our communities, we need those voices. We’re up against entrenched, well-resourced corporate interests and lobbying firms, and one of our best tools to push back is our willingness to speak up as voters, eaters and community leaders.”

“If organizations like CAFF or others ask—make the phone call. It makes a big difference,” says Fanous. “We very rarely ask people to make calls to their members, but when we do, it’s serious and we need that support. If you can’t make the call, repost the request on social media to give it more life.” 

Vote every chance you get

Besides the four-year presidential election cycle, there are congressional elections every two years, as well as annual state and local elections. Register with Vote.org to receive notifications about upcoming elections so that you never miss a chance to vote. 

“The coming 2024 election cycle may shape the fate and contents of the still-to-be-reauthorized farm bill,” says Hackney. The so-called “farm bill” should be passed by Congress every five years and pertains to much more than just farming. This package of legislation defines our food system, determining what we eat by how we use land, water and other natural resources. 

“Congress didn’t reauthorize the 2018 Farm Bill on time last year, instead opting to extend the old bill,” explains Hackney. “If Congress doesn’t complete the reauthorization process on the bill before the fall, that could shift farm bill passage timing into 2025, which means potentially new and different lawmakers sitting on the committees that draft the bill and new lawmakers in leadership positions to drive the process. While the farm bill is intended to represent the needs and issues of farmers and communities and families nationwide, the representatives and senators who sit on the House and Senate agriculture committees, who themselves only represent a slice of the country’s landscape and electorate, get to do the lion’s share of shaping that bill.”

If you’re not sure whether to vote yes or no for a particular bill, Hackney has advice: “If there’s a bill that focuses on an issue you care about, you can look up its authors and cosponsors—these are the lawmakers willing to go on the record with their support for a bill.” Keep an eye out for the names of politicians who are familiar to you and try to determine if their values align with yours, then use their judgment to guide your own. 

“For example, at NSAC, we’ve been organizing for several years around the Agriculture Resilience Act. It’s a bill that would address climate change by reshaping much of the US Department of Agriculture’s programming toward climate change action,” says Hackney. “It would increase resources and support for practices on farms that build diversity of crops and livestock, integrate perennial crops, keep the soil covered and integrate livestock into the landscape—all highly effective climate and agriculture solutions that can reduce emissions and build resiliency. Lawmakers who’ve endorsed this bill are essentially telling us: I support tackling the climate crisis by finding solutions through sustainable agriculture and food systems. You can find a bill’s cosponsors by using free, publicly available websites like congress.gov or govtrack.us.”

Diversify your approach 

“If we could fix our food and farm system by simply voting with our forks or making one quick call to Congress or growing our own food, we’d be there already,” says Hackney. “The truth is it takes action on multiple fronts—especially if we want to get to the root causes of the problems in our food and farm system. That means both doing what we can with our individual food choices—within our means and our communities—to support food and farm businesses operating on values of sustainability and equity and choosing to engage politically to improve food and farm policy.”

The post How to Be a Food Policy Advocate in Your Community  appeared first on Modern Farmer.

These ingredients are endlessly diverse, including spent grains from beer production, ripe fruit that is too small for supermarket standards and cacao pulp from the process of making chocolate bars, but they share a similar origin story. In the past, these ingredients were lost somewhere in our food supply chain; now, pathways are being created to ensure they reach consumers. 

While other cited trends tend to center on a specific single ingredient or nutrient, the “upcycled” trend is unique in that it shifts the focus from personal to planetary health and longevity. “For the first time, the majority of the world is able to witness the real effects of climate change around them and they are looking for ways to help,” says Caroline Cotto, co-founder and chief operating officer at Renewal Mill, a California-based company that produces baking mixes with upcycled ingredients. “As more consumers look for sustainable foods in the marketplace, upcycled foods rise to meet that demand.”

“It’s this growing awareness that the take-make-waste systems that we’ve all participated in for the last 70 years are making people hungry and making the environment unlivable,” says Anna Hammond, founder and chief executive officer at Matriark Foods, a New York-based company that produces pasta sauces and vegetable broth with upcycled ingredients. “Solving for wasted food is one of the easiest things that almost everyone can participate in to mitigate climate change.” 

According to research from ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food waste, 38 percent of food in the US was wasted in 2022. That’s 235 million tons of meals that went uneaten, despite the fact that one in eight Americans is food insecure. And it’s not just the food that goes to waste; that year, uneaten food accounted for 6.1 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and 22 percent of all freshwater use in the US.

[RELATED: The Staggering Scale of Food Waste, Explained]

“Food waste happens literally at every part of our global food supply chain,” says Cotto. “It happens when we leave unharvested food on fields due to cosmetic imperfections; it happens when we improperly store food during transport; it happens through byproduct production at food manufacturers; it happens when grocery stores overorder and throw out food they can’t sell or when restaurants make too much and can’t serve it all; and, in fact, the majority of the wastage still happens in our own homes.” 

Avoiding food waste in our kitchens is a crucial first step toward reducing our carbon emissions, water usage and overall impact on the environment.

“There are lots of things we can do to reduce food waste,” says Cotto. “Don’t over purchase. Make a list before you head to the grocery store. Eat leftovers or find ways to repurpose them into delicious new meals. If you’re headed out of town but still have stuff left in your fridge, find ways to gift to your neighbors and freeze everything you can for when you’re back. Compost whatever you cannot eat.” 

In addition to carefully and consciously eating all of the food that we buy, opting to purchase upcycled foods allows us to amplify our individual efforts by supporting climate-friendly producers that have an even greater environmental footprint. This is especially important for institutions, such as schools, hospitals and corporate offices, where the effect is even more powerful. 

In two reports on food waste in the United States published in December 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency highlighted upcycled foods as a key tool for addressing the climate crisis. 

Hammond came to this conclusion on her own several years prior, leading her to found Matriak Foods. There are “three questions that we always ask ourselves in everything we do,” says Hammond. “Does this mitigate food going to landfills and the negative environmental impacts of that? Is this good for small- and mid-scale farmers? Does this create greater access to healthy food for more people?” 

These questions are embodied in each of Matriark’s products, including its classic tomato basil pasta sauce. “We work with a roaster of tomatoes who [because of the way his machines work] was throwing out anywhere from 1.5 to 3 million pounds of tomatoes a year,” says Hammond. “We’ve developed a food-safe, compliant way to capture those perfectly ripe tomatoes and puree them into the base of our sauces.” Each carton of this sauce—which is packaged in Forest Stewardship Council-certified materials—diverts 0.4 pounds of food from a landfill and saves 50 gallons of water. 

Anna Hammond is founder and CEO at Matriark Foods, which upcycles ingredients for tomato sauces and broths. (Photo: Jessie YuChen/Matriark Foods)

Renewal Mill also partners with other food producers—in its case, the makers of plant-based milks, such as soy milk and oat milk. It collects the leftover pulp from this process, then dehydrates and mills it to be transformed into shelf-stable gluten-free flour. It sells this flour on its own and in vegan baking mixes for brownies, cakes and cookies. Since its founding in 2018, Renewal Mill has diverted more than 700,000 pounds of food waste and avoided more than one million pounds of carbon emissions. 

Both Matriark Foods and Renewal Mill belong to the Upcycled Food Association (UFA). “This organization’s first directive was to create a formal definition of upcycled food,” says Cotto, who serves as a board member at UFA. “The definition decided upon was: Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains and have a positive impact on the environment.” 

This definition serves as the foundation for the Upcycled Certified program, which has since certified nearly 500 products that span the spectrum from sweet to savory. In December 2023, an independent, third-party food verification company, Where Food Comes From, Inc., acquired the Upcycled Certified program, enhancing its perceived credibility and broadening its reach. 

Upcycled baking mixes from Renewal Mill. (Photo courtesy of Renewal Mill)

“You can shop for upcycled food across almost every aisle of the grocery store and for every meal,” says Cotto. “Look for the Upcycled Certified logo on packaging to help identify which products are reducing food waste.” 

Renewal Mill and Matriark Foods products can be bought online in individual packages or wholesale via their websites, where they also provide information on finding products in stores, including certain Whole Foods locations. To find more upcycled products and ingredients, shoppers can check out the UFA website’s list, which includes food and beverages, home and personal care products, and pet food options. 

Cotto points out that you can upcycle at home, too. “If you make your own beer or plant-based milks at home, don’t throw away the pulp. It can be repurposed into bread. Use fruit and vegetable pulp left over from juicing in muffins. Use the rinds of cheese to make rich and flavorful soup bases. The possibilities are endless!”

The post This is the Year to Eat More Upcycled Foods appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Joyce and Travis Miller had long lived among hickories in the woods of Clarke County, Virginia and had retired from their careers before ever tasting hickory syrup. Twelve years since then, they’ve founded their own operation, Falling Bark Farm, and are two of just a few hickory syrup producers in the world today. 

This later-in-life endeavor was a natural next chapter for the Millers, who had always been interested in feeding themselves from the land through gardening, hunting and foraging. Travis had worked in the grocery business for 30 years, as well as in a reclaimed lumber facility, so it wasn’t a huge leap to making food from trees. 

In 2011, having just entered retirement but looking for a way to keep busy and keep earning some kind of income, Travis and Joyce asked themselves: “What could we take to the farmers market?” 

Joyce and Travis Miller. (Photo courtesy of Falling Bark Farm)

They had heard from a neighbor about hickory syrup and, given their proximity to many hickory trees, decided to give it a go. The Millers ordered 48 empty glass bottles and began researching the syrup-making process, which has roots in Native American culinary and medicinal practices. (Hickory bark is extraordinarily high in magnesium and has been historically used as a health supplement.)  

“When we started out, we would go into the woods ourselves to harvest bark,” says Travis. Unlike with maple syrup, where a hole is drilled into a maple tree to extract its sap, hickory syrup is made with the bark of a shagbark hickory tree that is collected after it has fallen to the ground. No harm is done to the tree. 

To make the syrup, the Millers scrub the harvested bark clean, then toast it on an open flame grill to enhance the flavor. Next, they simmer the bark in water on their home kitchen stovetop to make a hickory extract. This is combined with turbinado sugar and, as with the making of maple syrup, a hydrometer is used to test the syrup’s density and determine its sweetness. 

No additives, thickeners or dyes of any kind are added. Falling Bark Farm does, however, offer some naturally flavored hickory syrups, including a syrup infused with whole vanilla beans, another aged in bourbon barrels borrowed from a nearby distillery and a “Woodland Spice” variety made with cinnamon, cardamom, clove and allspice that is especially popular around the winter holidays. 

“We’re bottling one at a time and everything’s done by hand,” says Travis, explaining that he and Joyce continue to do everything themselves, even as the business has grown to approximately 3,000 gallons of syrup a year. “It’s a little crazy at times, but we’re holding it together.” 

The Millers bottle their hickory syrup by hand. (Photo courtesy of Falling Bark Farm)

While the Millers still sell their hickory syrup in person at about a half dozen events annually, after their first year as vendors at local farmers markets, they’ve focused primarily on sales through their website and local businesses. 

“The type of product we have is not like a loaf of bread where you consume it during the week or a bottle of wine that might be shared and finished in a single sitting. After four or five weeks at a farmers market, you’ve reached the regular attendees and then the consumer needs time to use the product,” explains Travis. “We got into doing selective private labeling for significant historical locations, like Monticello and Mount Vernon. That’s been a big bonus for us because it also taps into tourism, not just local consumers.” 

Demand for Falling Bark Farm’s hickory syrup has grown to the point that the Millers are no longer harvesting their own bark from just around their land. “Some of our bark comes from the timber industry, where the log has been harvested and, at that point, there isn’t any value to the bark,” says Travis. “We’re taking a waste product and turning it into something that people enjoy.” 

In this way, the Millers are a midway point in a sustainable system that honors all that the hickory bark has to offer. After they have made syrup, they pass along the bark to a local barbecue business that uses it to prepare the smoked foods on their menu. 

The tree’s bark is collected after it has fallen to the ground. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Falling Bark Farm’s hickory syrup itself has found its way onto the menus of many restaurants throughout Virginia and surrounding states, becoming a star ingredient in a broad range of dishes and drinks. With its golden-brown color and thick, slow-pour consistency, hickory syrup is similar in appearance to maple syrup and can also be used as a sweetener in foods and beverages, but it has an aroma and flavor all its own that is slightly smoky and earthy with a hint of molasses. 

The Millers have been surprised by the diversity of dishes and drinks that customers and clients have prepared with their hickory syrup—everything from savory meals of grilled salmon and roasted lamb shanks to side dishes of baked apples and cast iron skillet grits with ramps to craft cocktails and beers—and by the community that has flourished along with their business. 

“One of the best things about making the syrup has been all of the people that we’ve met,” says Joyce. “We’ve been overwhelmed with kindness.” 

The post Meet the Virginia Retirees Making Sweet and Smoky Syrup from Fallen Bark appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The motivation behind the astonishing array of fruits and vegetables at Norwich Meadows Farm has always been, first and foremost, flavor.

“We grew up eating very flavorful produce,” says Kurdieh of himself and his wife Haifa, who were both raised in the Middle East. Kurdieh was born in Los Angeles, but spent his early years living in several different countries abroad, including Jordan, where he met Haifa while attending high school. After relocating to the United States, they wanted to share the tastes of their childhood with their new community. “An aspect of our culture is hospitality, so we want people to be able to enjoy what we enjoy.” 

What began in 1998 with a few types of Middle Eastern vegetables grown in their backyard garden has since expanded into what Kurdieh refers to as “an international endeavor that is way bigger than our culinary heritage” and builds on the cultural identities of all 40 or so members of their farm team, as well as partnerships with farmers around the world. As their farm community gains new members, new seeds from their native countries, such as Korea and Italy, are added to the vast collection now cultivated at Norwich Meadows Farm.  

Zaid and Haifa Kurdieh met while attending high school in Jordan. (Photo: Brant Shapiro)

These partnerships include years-long collaborations with two seed companies: Tokita Seed Company in Japan and Row 7 Seed Company in New York, both of which were established in 2018 and guided by the same goal: to grow the most flavorful food possible. With Tokita, Kurdieh became a participant of the Oishii Nippon Project, which seeks to preserve heirloom seeds cultivated for hundreds of years in Japan by sharing these seeds with growers everywhere. With Row 7, Kurdieh joined a team that includes chef Dan Barber of the Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Blue Hill and plant breeder Dr. Michael Mazourek of Cornell University to develop dazzling new crops. 

Nowhere else beyond the borders of Norwich Meadows Farm will you find a field of negi (an allium similar to scallions that has grown in Japan for centuries) one season and a field of koginut (a squash developed in the US and first made available for sale just five years ago) in another. 

For Kurdieh, this balance between tradition and innovation—and the crop diversity that has flourished along the way—is both a business decision and a personal preference.

Norwich Meadows Farm relies on a variety of revenue streams that cater to buyers big and small, but its most significant source of income depends on its presence at farmers markets around New York and New Jersey. Among these is the Union Square Market in New York City, where home cooks and some of the world’s most famous chefs shop side by side. 

“People can get almost everything at our stand,” says Kurdieh. “And every week there’s something new. Having all that variety makes us stand out.”

Farmers markets are Norwich Meadows Farm‘s most significant source of revenue. (Photo: Brant Shapiro)

“Variety” applies to both the extensive range of produce available—everything from berries and beans to ginger and greens—and the numerous kinds of any given crop, all of which are grown organically. Depending on the season, customers might encounter 80 varieties of tomatoes, 40 kinds of peppers, 25 types of beans or a dozen different kinds of potatoes.  

Kurdieh explains that this approach to farming is also a risk mitigator. With so many different crops growing, the failure of one does not result in the failure of the farm as a whole. This is especially important as Norwich Meadows Farm experiences increasingly erratic weather patterns linked to the climate crisis. 

“Overall temperatures are up, but the swings are much more pronounced and that has killed crops for us,” he says, citing an unusual period of freezing temperatures during a recent winter that destroyed half their garlic crop.   

Crop diversity helps to mitigate the risk of adverse weather. (Photo: Brant Shapiro)

The advantages of biodiversity justify the enormous challenge of keeping track of more than a thousand unique crops at a time—particularly while Norwich Meadows Farm is currently understaffed due to a labor shortage affecting the entire agricultural sector—but it is the excitement of exploration and experimentation in the fields that underpins the business, which has come to be considered a trend leader in the food industry. 

“Working with chefs and breeders and other people is very, very rewarding, especially when you can help make new fruit and vegetable varieties that are more healthy and more tasty,” says Kurideh. “It makes the demanding nature of this business a lot more palatable and fun.” 

The work of farming has never been easy, so finding the fun in it is essential. For the Kurdiehs, the pursuit of flavor is what makes it all worth it, and for those who have the fortune of tasting what grows at Norwich Meadows Farm—whether it is the first season or the thousandth season for a particular plant variety—the delight of biting into a perfect piece of produce at its peak is timeless.

The post Meet the Flavor-Focused Farmers Cultivating More Than a Thousand Crops appeared first on Modern Farmer.

While Indigenous communities have gathered ramps for countless generations, the last two decades have seen a marked increase in people from all backgrounds seeking them out on forest floors, farmers market stands and restaurant menus. The widespread fascination with ramps reflects a growing general interest in local, seasonal ingredients that could positively impact our national food system; however, without a deeper awareness of sustainable foraging practices and the consequences of the climate crisis, it could do more harm than good. 

Dr. Michelle Baumflek, a research biologist with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, has been working with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians since 2016 while also collaborating on a long-term study of ramps pioneered by ecologist Dr. Joan Walker. Research from these collaborations indicates that the ramp populations in the southern Appalachian region have declined by about two percent in the past 20 years. That percentage may seem small, but the fallout could be felt in a big way in the region’s forests and beyond. 

Ramps are an important part of the ecosystem of the forest floor. (Photo: Ethan Frisch)

“Ramps play an important role in forest nutrient cycling,” Baumflek explains. “They take up nutrients in early spring as they grow, and when the leaves die back, they return some nutrients to the ecosystem. Ramps will flower after the leaves are done for the season—usually in June or July—and, at that time, they provide food for their pollinators, which include several species of bees.” 

The recent decline in ramps is due to a variety of factors that may include both overharvesting and climate change. “Ramps are often found in rich cove habitat, which are relatively moist areas that have fertile organic soils,” says Baumflek. “Climate change may impact rich cove habitats in several ways, including shrinking cove habitats and increasing invasive species, which may affect ramps.” 

While addressing the climate crisis requires large-scale change at the institutional level, the issue of overharvesting is something that can be resolved by educating individuals to be conscious consumers of ramps. 

Unlike other popular foraged foods, such as mushrooms and even other types of onions, which may be ready to harvest in as little as two weeks, ramps take around seven years to reach maturity. Frequent foragers may see that the plants cannot keep pace with the dramatic rise in demand for ramps, but home cooks and restaurant chefs may not have this awareness. 

Without the bulbs, harvested ramp leaves wilt quickly. (Photo: Alyssa Melendez)

Michael Farrell works with a small team of foragers that harvests ramps from 10,000 acres of forested land in New York and Vermont that he oversees as CEO of The Forest Farmers, an agroforestry business geared toward conserving mature forests while generating sustainable income for farmers. For a while, these ramps were sold at farmers markets in New York City, but, by 2020, Farrell grew concerned about depleting the ramps on this land. It was around this time that he began working with Ethan Frisch, co-founder of the spice company Burlap & Barrel, and forager Omar Thelwell. 

“There are two different types of ramps here,” says Thelwell. “They’re all beautiful and fragrant and have green leaves, but the stems differentiate them—one is white and one is purple.” 

Thelwell travels from his home in Jamaica each year to harvest ramps, apples and other crops in the US. As with most wild edible plants, ramps must be harvested by hand. “You bend down and with a knife or scissors, you cut the leaves. The bulb stays in the ground so that it grows back the next year,” says Thelwell. It is a simple process, but not common practice. 

Forager Omar Thelwell travels to the US from Jamaica to harvest ramps. (Photo: Ethan Frisch)

“Almost all the ramps that are sold in the marketplace come with the bulbs,” says Farrell. Imagine, for a moment, the last time you saw ramps—whether at a market or on Instagram—and you are likely to envision the full plant, from the fringe of roots at the base of the pale bulb all the way up the thin stem to the pointed tip of its leaf. 

Ramps, as a member of the Allium family, are a perennial plant, meaning that their bulbs can produce new life each year, so long as they have the right growing conditions. Harvest just the leaves and the bulb will regrow the following spring, but take the whole bulb and you will not find any ramps on that patch of land again. 

Although harvesting only the leaves is the most sustainable choice, people expect to buy the plant wholly intact, and without the bulbs, harvested leaves wilt quickly, which is less appealing to customers.

Farrell and Frisch worked together to address these problems by developing a unique method for harvesting and drying the ramps leaves, creating the first dried ramps product available for commercial retail. 

“You get all the flavor and all the nutrition from the ramp greens,” says Farrell. “And we get to keep the forest full of ramps for decades to come.”

It is critical that all ramps enthusiasts adopt this longview mentality, along with an understanding that these wild onions may exist in the public eye for just a few weeks each year, but they must be allowed to exist in the forest all the other days of the year, too. For Baumflek, this also means recognizing the ecological and cultural importance of ramps and, when foraging, acting from a place of “respect and reciprocity—understanding that people are in relationship with ramps and with the forests in which they grow, and that we need to take care of each other.” 

The post For Ramps, A Sustainable Future Depends On Leaving The Bulb Behind appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“The nomenclature changes with the marketing decisions of industry actors,” says Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, author of Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food, who notes that these actors—including food startups and environmental nonprofits—choose their words carefully in the hopes of winning consumer acceptance. (Wurgaft prefers “cultured meat” due to its relatively neutral proximity to the technology that defines it.)

In 2013, Dutch scientist Mark Post presented the first cultured meat product, a hamburger made possible by the financial support of American entrepreneur Sergey Brin. A decade later, cultured meat (by any name) still is not for sale on supermarket shelves. 

It is also still pending approval by the United States Department of Agriculture, despite some confusion in the media over the matter. In November of 2022, Upside Foods, a cultured meat producer based in Berkeley, California, received what is known as a “No Questions Letter” from the United States Food and Drug Administration. Wurgaft explains that this has since been “treated as regulatory approval in the media, when in fact it means that the FDA simply doesn’t have any questions to ask about the process.”  

A cultivation room at Upside Foods’ Engineering, Production & Innovation Center. (Photo via Upside Foods)

With or without government approval, leaders in the field continue to doubt the scalability of cultured meat. The result, Wurgaft says, is a “bizarre situation in which we have plants in the Bay Area shutting down while others are opening saying they will have a product very soon.” 

Nevertheless, a State of the Industry Report published in February by the US-based nonprofit organization The Good Food Institute reported that the cellular agriculture industry now comprises 156 companies working in 26 countries and is expected to continue growing, thanks to the investment of $896 million in 2022. 

The industry, however, will not continue its growth in Italy, which, as of March 27, 2023, has taken action to become the first country to formally ban cultured meat products within its national borders. In a press release about the ban, the Italian government claims it is acting in the interest of “preserving the agricultural and culinary heritage” of Italy.  

In the weeks since the announcement of the ban, its opponents—both in Italy and around the world—have vocalized their support for cultured meat on the grounds that it offers meat without slaughter and the reduction of pollution associated with industrial animal agriculture. While inspirational, the promises of the cultured meat industry remain aspirational. They also tend to omit the fact that this form of food production is not entirely harmless. Cultured meat makes no claims of being wholly vegan, but its proponents rarely advertise the details of its creation, which requires blood from a cow fetus in addition to cells from a live animal. Research by Frontiers also demonstrates that, while the production of cultured meat may produce less methane than conventional animal agriculture, it could produce more carbon dioxide in the long term. 

Despite ongoing obstacles, the original goals associated with cellular agriculture continue to spur startups to experiment with every kind of meat, from steaks to chicken nuggets to sashimi-style seafood, with the intention of replacing meat eaten both in the home and while dining out. “In terms of impact, numbers and scale, the ideal would be to undercut the forms of cheap meat seen at places such as McDonald’s so that we can work against the incredible environmental and animal cruelty footprints of the meat industry worldwide,” says Wurgaft.  

When it comes to making the most sustainable and ethical decision, Wurgaft points out that vegetarian sources of protein, such as chickpeas, will always be the better option in comparison to all types of meat products; however, this fact is rebuffed as “naive” when brought up in the discourse around cultured meat. “There’s this story about what is realistic to expect from the global population.” 

The “realistic” expectation is that the worldwide consumption of meat will continue to increase in line with a globalized version of the meat-centric Western Diet. It is precisely because of this global dietary trend—which manifested in the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome in 1986—that Carlo Petrini founded the Slow Food Movement. As with the ban on cultured meat, the movement embodies the Italian tendency to favor tradition over innovation. 

Farmers Alessandra Rellini and Stefano Pinna make Italian-style cured meats with pastured pork sourced from their farm. (Photo courtesy Agricola Farm)

Farmers Alessandra Rellini and Stefano Pinna sit squarely at the center of this discourse in more ways than one. Rellini and Pinna are Italian immigrants, born and raised in Northern Italy, who relocated to Vermont, where they co-own Agricola Farm. They raise a variety of livestock, including close to 200  pigs, which they butcher at a facility near the farm to produce Italian-style cured meats. 

“It’s a love-hate relationship with my traditions,” says Rellini. “In one sense, I love the way that Italy preserves certain traditions—it’s what makes me feel alive and connected to other generations of Italians. At the same time, innovation and evolving is part of our human nature.” 

“I don’t think our culture will disappear,” adds Pinna. “But I can see that my generation and younger generations are getting too far from food production.” 

Rellini and Pinna have many practices in place to ensure the health of both the pigs and their farmland, including minimizing the use of commodity crops such as corn and soybean as feed in favor of fresh pasture when possible and following a rotational grazing plan that involves moving the pigs every two weeks and seeding cover crops on fields after grazing. 

Alessandra Rellini and Stefano Pinna raise their pigs on pastureland. (Photo courtesy Agricola Farm)

Among Agricola Farm’s selection of cured meats is lonzino, a product similar to the more popular prosciutto. With a recorded history of production on the Italian peninsula dating back to the eleventh century BC and a Protected Designation of Origin label that limits production to a certain area within Italy and requires the meat be aged for a minimum of 400 days, prosciutto is precisely the kind of product the Italian government is seeking to protect. Rellini and Pinna uphold similar traditional practices on American soil in the making of all their products, including the lonzino, which is aged for four months. Add to this the 12 to 16 months of the pig’s life before slaughter—more than twice as long as the life of most commercially raised pigs—and the result is two years of skill, hard work and care put into a single product. A portion of cultured meat, by comparison, can be grown in as little as two weeks. 

Faster, however, is not necessarily better, especially if it encourages an even greater increase in global meat consumption. Rellini points out that Italian cured meats, which are deeply flavorful because of the long curing process, are “a great way to consume meat because you don’t have a whole steak—you have a few slices and it’s satisfying.” 

While Rellini and Pinna state that they would not eat cultured meat, Rellini says, “I see a problem with banning it. Sometimes, as Italians, we are too quick to block change.” 

With the world’s population expected to surpass 9 billion people by 2050, there is no doubt that our global food system will need to change to adapt. The question of whether the most ethical and sustainable solutions can be found in the past, by carrying on historic farming traditions like Rellini and Pinna, or in the future, by inventing new means of food production, will be determined as much by consumers as by countries—and it all comes down to culture.

The post Italy’s Ban on Cultured Meat Raises Questions About Innovation Versus Tradition appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For most of the world, sap season comes and goes as invisibly as the sap that flows beneath a tree’s bark. For Hall, whose family has been producing syrup from the woods on this plot of land since 1635, his wife Bonnie and other farmers in the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada, this transition between winter and spring is a season in its own right. 

Very little about the process of sugaring (harvesting sap from maple trees) on Maple Breeze Farm has changed in the last four centuries, but this season the Halls are facing unprecedented challenges as a result of global changes in weather patterns and the marketplace. 

“Sugaring is very weather dependent,” explains Hall. “And this year, we didn’t have any winter.” 

Just a few degrees makes all the difference—too many warm days in February and there will be less maple syrup for all the months to follow.  

The winter season spanning 2022-2023 was the warmest on record for Connecticut, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Using information provided by the Northeast Regional Climate Center, the NOAA reported the average regional temperature for the season as 31.9 degrees Fahrenheit, 5.2 degrees warmer than normal.  

For the Halls, the consequences of this warm winter are immediately evident in the minimal yield from this sap season: less than forty gallons of maple syrup, about half of last year’s seventy-four gallons. 

The Hall’s sugar shack.

As the climate changes, pushing ideal sugaring conditions to the north and threatening maple syrup production in the region, having diversified sources of income bolsters the long-term financial sustainability of farms such as Maple Breeze.

A recent Frontiers survey of more than 100 American maple syrup producers (more than half based in New England) reported that only 12% declared maple sales as their primary source of income; for nearly half of participants, maple sales account for no more than 5% of annual income. The Halls’ primary revenue, for example, comes from other agricultural ventures, including sales of pork, beef, lamb and eggs from animals raised on their farm.

At the scale of a single farm, the impact of slightly warmer weather may seem small, but for the U.S., which valued the production of maple syrup in 2021 at $134 million, the movement of a great portion of this industry across the Canadian border would be a substantial economic loss. 

Whether or not the livelihood of farmers like John and Bonnie depends on maple syrup, sugaring is an integral part of New England culture and plays a role in the local economy not only as an agricultural good but as a driver of regional tourism. Of those surveyed by Frontiers, 86% said that maple products are an important component of local tourism. 

The Maple Syrup Producers of Connecticut Association hosts Maple Weekend each year. On these two days, residents and travelers alike are invited to visit sugar shacks throughout the state to see how maple syrup is made and to buy maple products. This year’s Maple Weekend was scheduled for March 18 and 19th—two full weeks after sap season had finished for most producers. As weather patterns change, it may become harder to connect agricultural events with tourist attractions, impacting the economic stability of both sectors. 

During sap season, when there is a briefly perfect balance of freezing nights and cool days, the Halls have about a thousand taps (spouts that act as a funnel from which the sap flows) in maple trees ranging from twenty-five to four hundred years old. To avoid overstressing their trees, the Halls tap just once each season and work according to natural cycles. Part of this means continuing traditional sugaring practices that originated with the Indigenous populations of North America, rather than transitioning to the use of modern tools that would expedite the process. 

“We’re not into the latest technology,” says Hall, who points to images in a farmers catalog of machines that quickly vacuum sap from trees. “All of our sap runs out of the tree with gravity.” 

About fifty gallons of sap are needed to make just one gallon of pure maple syrup. Although some producers have switched to gasoline-fueled machinery, the Halls boil their sap over fire as their family has done for generations, using wood from trees that have fallen on their farm. As the sap boils, the liquid condenses and takes on a darker hue. 

The Halls practice the traditional method of boiling their sap over a wood fire.

The syrup is labeled for sale in accordance with a standardized grading system based on color, ranging from Golden to Amber to Dark to Very Dark. Every bottle of Maple Breeze Farm syrup is graded Dark. “The darker you go, the stronger the maple flavor is,” says Hall. A spoonful of the Halls’ syrup is a testament to this fact—it is as rich in flavor as it is in color, not only sweet but slightly earthy, redolent of the soil and bark from which it came. 

Maple Breeze Farm products are available for purchase only at nearby farmers markets or from their farmstand, as is often the case with artisanal maple producers, who do not generate the quantity necessary to stock supermarket shelves. Additionally, face-to-face interactions offer a chance to explain not only what makes their syrup special but also why it may seem expensive compared to others. 

At more than a dollar an ounce, Maple Breeze Farm syrup still does not fully reflect the amount of labor distilled into each bottle and the cost of materials, which has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic and the subsequent supply chain crisis. “We’re not in it for the money,” says Bonnie Hall. “I don’t think we sell anything for a profit.” 

Commercial producers in places such as Vermont and Quebec are able to drive down the price of syrup while increasing their profit margin by packaging it for wholesale and sourcing from many different farms.

When it comes to branding maple syrup from numerous farms under one label, Bonnie comments, “It’s not illegal, but to us it’s immoral. Our syrup has our name on it. It’s our trees. It’s our story.” 

A bottle of Maple Breeze Farm syrup.

In some ways, it is this close connection with maple trees and the sugaring tradition that is most at risk for New Englanders. For the trees and the traditions to be preserved for generations to come, action must be taken at the individual and industry levels with consideration for environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Farmers like John and Bonnie are doing their best on the frontlines of climate change to care for their land, while also participating in politics to influence decisions that affect local ecosystems. As the situation grows more dire, institutions in the area are starting to lend their support by investing resources into innovative opportunities. The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment launched the Maple Education and Extension Program last year with the specific intention to help New England’s maple syrup makers develop more sustainable production methods and adapt to the effects of climate change. 

For the Halls and other farmers in the Northeast, the future will depend, as always, on continuing a careful conversation with their trees and their community.

The post For US Maple Syrup Producers, Climate Change and Competition Threaten a Way of Life appeared first on Modern Farmer.