“There are two primary reasons for the recent uptick in announcements of tainted food. One, the US food system has become extremely complicated in recent decades: There are more imported foods now as well as more highly processed foods, which creates more opportunities for disease to enter the food system.
Two, the government has better and faster tracing capabilities, thanks to legislation around food safety modernization. That makes it easier for the Food and Drug Administration, one of the bodies that investigates such outbreaks, to track problems to their source. It also makes it easier for companies to recall tainted products before they spread further into the food system and sicken large numbers of people. (The US Department of Agriculture oversees recalls of meat, poultry, and eggs as well, but it’s not subject to this legislation.)”
“Some of the most valuable farmed species, like salmon and trout, are carnivorous and must be fed wild-caught fish when farmed. Farmed shrimp, along with a number of omnivorous fish species, are also fed wild-caught fish. All told, some 17 million of the 91 million metric tons of wild-caught fish are diverted to the aquaculture industry annually.”
His plans increase the deficit, which is inflationary.
Large and broad tariffs are inflationary.
A massive crackdown on illegal immigration will also be inflationary as without cheap labor, making products will be more expensive or won’t happen here at all–particularly agricultural goods and housing.
Trump wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been in favor of lower interest rates, which will increase inflation.
“The concept of nutritional and ingredient labeling is even more complex in the alcohol space since the TTB uses a pre-approval system for alcohol labeling, meaning that alcohol producers have to submit their proposed labels to the agency for approval before the product ever hits the market. No approval, no market access. This is in marked contrast to most food labeling, which the Food and Drug Administration enforces after a product goes to market.”
“Several other states have gestation crate bans, but the California and Massachusetts laws are unique because they outlaw not just the use of crates within those states’ borders, but also the sale of pork produced using gestation crates anywhere in the world. Both states import almost all of their pork from bigger pork-producing states (the top three are Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina), so the industry has argued that Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 unfairly burden producers outside their borders. California in particular makes up about 13 percent of US pork consumption, threatening to upend the industry’s preferred way of doing business for a big chunk of the market.
The California and Massachusetts laws also ban the sale of eggs and veal from animals raised in extreme cage confinement. Both industries opposed Prop 12 before it passed but have largely complied with the law; neither has put up the fierce legal fight that the pork industry has, led by Big Meat lobbying groups like the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, and the American Farm Bureau Federation.
House Agriculture Committee chair Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who introduced this year’s House Farm Bill last month, touts “addressing Proposition 12” as a core priority. The legislation includes a narrowed version of the EATS Act (short for Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression), a bill introduced by Republicans in both chambers last year to ban states from setting their own standards for the production of any agricultural products, animal or vegetable, imported from other states.
The Farm Bill language has been tightened to focus solely on livestock, banning states from setting standards for how animal products imported from other states are raised. It is less extreme only in comparison to the sweeping EATS Act, but also more transparent about its aim to shield the meat industry from accountability. At the Farm Bill markup on May 23, when the legislation passed committee, Thompson urged his colleagues to protect the livestock industry from “inside-the-beltway animal welfare activists.”
The provisions slipped into the Farm Bill may have consequences that reach far beyond the humane treatment of animals. They “could hamstring the ability of states to regulate not just animal welfare but also the sale of meat and dairy products produced from animals exposed to disease, with the use of certain harmful animal drugs, or through novel biotechnologies like cloning, as well as adjacent production standards involving labor, environmental, or cleanliness conditions,” Kelley McGill, a legislative policy fellow at Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program who authored an influential report last year on the potential impacts of the EATS Act, told me in an email.
House Republicans have been trying to use the Farm Bill to overturn public preferences on animal welfare for more than a decade, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella reported last year, ever since the far-right former Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced the precursor to the EATS Act in 2013. What may seem more surprising, at first blush, is that the factory farm industry’s campaign to force animals back into immobilizing cages has drawn support from a broader swath of authorities, including the Biden administration.”
“DeSantis came out in support of Florida legislation that would ban the sale of lab-grown meat in the state.
“I know the Legislature’s doing a bill to try to protect our meat. You need meat, OK? We’re going to have meat in Florida,” DeSantis said during a Friday press conference. “We’re going to have fake meat? That doesn’t work. We’re going to make sure to do it right. But there’s a whole ideological agenda that’s coming after, I think, a lot of important parts of our society.””
…
“like many attempts to curb vegan alternatives to meat and dairy, DeSantis’ support for these bills is also aimed at protecting animal farmers from competition—even if such competition is basically hypothetical.”
“Northern Gaza is where the IDF began its initial ground invasion in October; Israel targeted Gaza City as a Hamas stronghold. Though much of the population has been displaced to southern Gaza, there are still thousands of civilians in the area, and they have not had adequate aid distribution in around two months, Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, told Vox.
“The biggest obstacle has simply been that the Israeli government has, for the most part, denied aid groups access to that part of the territory,” he told Vox.
The UN organization that is usually in charge of distributing aid to Palestine, UNRWA, cannot operate in the area for safety reasons. And aid workers have said they’ve found trying to work with Israel to get aid into Gaza all but impossible.
After a UNRWA and World Food Program aid convoy “coordinated with the Israelis,” according to Konyndyk, it was fired upon by Israeli troops. “There’s no confidence amongst professional humanitarians that they can actually have safe access into the north and that they won’t be targeted.”
Israel has also accused UNRWA of being in league with Hamas, and that accusation led many countries, including the US, to pause financial contributions to the organization. Aid distribution is challenging and requires significant coordination; without that, it’s easy for a situation in which people are starving and under significant duress to spiral out of control and turn violent.
Such infrastructure once existed in Gaza — via UNRWA and with the cooperation of Hamas civilian police — but that has been devastated by Israeli assaults and, in the case of UNRWA, an effort to undermine the organization.
“The best way to get humanitarian aid into Gaza is to stop the fighting,” Brian Finucane, senior adviser in the US policy program at the International Crisis Group, told Vox in an interview. “Based on reports today, in recent weeks, the breakdown of any sort of order in Gaza is even complicating that further and that Israel itself is contributing [to] that in no small part, including by targeting the police inside Gaza.”
Hagari said during the press conference that a private contractor was coordinating the aid distribution, although he did not name the contractor. Vox reached out to the IDF and to Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) for more information but did not receive a response by press time.
As part of potential ceasefire negotiations, the US is pushing for increased humanitarian access in Gaza, but so far has not backed up that rhetoric with meaningful action like pausing the flow of weapons to Israel or proposing a ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council. So despite the concerted efforts of diplomats and humanitarian workers, Finucane said, “They don’t have much to work with if the US bottom line is unconditional support for this catastrophic conflict.””
“the Cuban-American haven of Miami is unwilling to concede the fight, claiming that Tampa’s Cuban sandwich is not authentic. The Miami preparation of the sandwich is more traditional, while Tampa’s includes salami—an Italian meat. This is explained by the droves of Italians who moved to Cuban-dominated communities in Central Florida after the lynchings of Italian-Americans in New Orleans throughout the 1890s.
The evolution of the Cuban sandwich exemplifies how Florida’s historical embrace of immigrants has created new delicacies we can all enjoy together.”
“Desperate Palestinians have begun attacking Hamas security forces as tensions grow in Gaza over chronic shortages of food, water and medicine.
In rare acts of defiance, Gazans hurled rocks at Hamas police who tried to jump a queue for water”