Real Meat, and the Right To Raise It

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The nutrients in animal foods touch nearly everything: mood and brain health, a healthy pregnancy, strong bones, a working immune system, a healthy heart. Most of them are hard to get anywhere else, and nearly all of them are richest in meat, eggs, and dairy from animals raised the old way, on pasture. Tryptophan and DHA feed the brain. Choline and B12 matter enormously in pregnancy. Cholesterol and saturated fat, so often cast as villains, are the raw materials the body uses to build hormones and fight infection.

But getting meat that’s actually good for you starts with how the animal was raised and treated. Animals on pasture live the way they’re built to live. Animals in industrial systems often don’t, and the transport alone, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, is “the most stressful and injurious stage in the chain of operations between farm and slaughterhouse.” The farther an animal has to travel to a distant, overbooked slaughterhouse, the worse that toll becomes.

So it matters how it’s raised, and who’s allowed to raise it.

Getting real, pasture-raised meat depends on farmers having the right to raise and process it themselves. New Hampshire tried to make small-scale, on-farm processing easier this year with HB 396, a bill that would let farmers slaughter and sell a limited number of animals right from their own land. The governor vetoed it. The legislature can still override that veto, and every state should be moving in the same direction, because the fewer places farmers can process their own animals, the fewer farmers we have raising them the right way in the first place.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State Legislators to Recognize Farmers’ Right to Process Their Own Animals!

Read “Better Meat for Better Health”

TOXIC FREE FOOD ACT

FDA’s New Additive Notice Rule Sounds Good, but It Is Not Enough

Organic Consumers Association:

The FDA announced this week that food companies will be required to notify the agency when they decide a new lab-grown, synthetic, or genetically engineered chemical ingredient is safe. Some headlines are calling this a major reform that closes the so called GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) loophole. It does not.

Companies will still decide for themselves when they intend to take advantage of the generally recognized as safe loophole to the Food Additives Law. The FDA isn’t changing that. It’s only asking to be told about the ingredient after the fact, and it still can’t say no. A company can still sell a product before it ever tells the FDA anything, or while a notice is just sitting there, unreviewed.

The agency’s own acting commissioner admitted as much, saying this proposal doesn’t give the FDA premarket approval power. And the confidentiality rules that keep most safety data hidden from the public will remain in place. Packaging chemicals, the ones that leach into your food, were left out of the rule completely.

Nutritionist and public health advocate Marion Nestle summed up the reaction: “That’s ALL??? What took them so long for something so simple and obvious?” OCA shares that sentiment. This is a step in the right direction, but we are skeptical that it will bring about real change, since companies are still avoiding the FDA’s food safety regulations. As Peter Lurie of the Center for Science in the Public Interest put it, “mandatory without enforcement is not mandatory at all.”

Rosa DeLauro has proposed best legislation. Her Toxic Free Food Act would end self-certification and force the FDA to actually approve new ingredients before they end up in our food. That is what closing the loophole should actually mean, and it’s a bill OCA would be happy to endorse.

The comment period on the FDA’s new rule is just opening now, and it runs through early December. We will be sending out an action alert soon with an easy way for you to submit your own comment.

To learn more, read “New GRAS Rule Falls Short on Food-Additive Safety, Consumer Advocates Say” from Civil Eats.

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Support the Work Behind This Week’s Stories

The same story repeats itself. Regulators write new rules that sound like reform but leaves the food industry policing itself. A state legislature passes something helpful for family farmers, and a governor kills it under pressure from industry. An industry spends decades selling toxic sludge to spread on our farmland, calling it fertilizer.

But that isn’t the whole story either. Farmers in New Hampshire are still pushing to win their right to slaughter their own animals. A documentary that took five years to make is about to reach an audience the sludge industry never wanted it to reach. Scientists keep publishing the research that proves what we have been saying for years about glyphosate and the dependency of our food system on a myriad of chemical inputs and fake food. That’s the positive story here, people who refuse to accept that this is just how it has to be.

OCA exists to dig up these stories, connect the dots between movements and struggles that don’t always seem connected, and give you the opportunity to do something about it, a legislator to call, a comment to file, a bill to back. That work costs money and it never runs on its own.

Can you please help us move to a healthier, more just food system, starting from the soil and ending at your dinner table?

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

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USDA WATCH

More Ultraprocessed Foods Could Carry GMO Labels After Court Ruling

by Sarah Zimmerma, Food Dive:

“The court’s ruling tees up a major rewrite of the U.S.’ bioengineered labeling rule, which for the first time mandated companies to disclose when they used genetically modified ingredients. It’s also a significant win for consumer advocacy groups and the grassroots ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement, which has lobbied vigorously against pesticide use in foods.

Highly refined oils, which are predominantly used in ultraprocessed foods, have remained exempt from labeling requirements because these ingredients often do not have detectable levels of genetic modification following processing.

The Center for Food Safety, which led the lawsuit against the USDA, argued that the original rule’s exemption of highly refined ingredients meant that the vast majority of processed foods in grocery stores would be allowed to circumvent labeling requirements. Around 70% of all GMO food ingredients were exempted from disclosure requirements under the current rule, CFS said, vastly undercutting the impact of the label.”

The ruling — and the GMO label more broadly — reflects how more consumers do not want toxins in their food, and that is a bipartisan movement now.