Food in the News

Orange juice, which mainly comes from Florida oranges, will be increasing in price – again – because of a huge drop in the Florida orange crop.  The primary cause is a disease of orange trees called citrus greening, but unusually cold weather this winter is also affecting the current orange crop. During the pandemic, moreover, the demand for orange juice has been increasing. A gallon of juice that cost a restaurant $8 before the pandemic and $12 last week has now gone to $20, according to an article in the Washington Post last week. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/01/29/orange-juice-prices-skyrocket/)

Breakfast cereals and other pantry staples recently increased in cost by as much as 20% after General Mills, maker of many popular cereals, increased prices. Given that many people in the US at all income levels rely on cereal as a center of breakfast, this makes a difference! General Mills announced late last year that it would be "raising prices in mid-January on hundreds of items across dozens of brands. They include Annie's, Progresso, Yoplait, Fruit Roll-Ups, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charm's, Wheaties, Reese's Puffs." (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/23/business/cheerios-grocery-prices-general-mills/index.html)

Avocado prices have soared, and evidently, avocados in the form of guacamole are an essential element of the Super Bowl, so this affects our society in a very alarming way. "A year ago, the United States had record shipments of avocados coming from Mexico. This year, despite consistently high demand, shipments are more in line with the five-year average. There just aren’t enough to meet demand, which has driven prices higher. Avocados are 100 percent more expensive than they were a year ago." This is one example in a large number of price increases of fruit and vegetables. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/07/grocery-produce-inflation-guacamole/)

Food prices are in the news all the time. Besides packaged foods and produce, meat and dairy prices have been covered extensively as they have been rising throughout the past year or more. Global grain supplies increased in 2021 and will increase slightly again in 2022, according to FAO, but costs are going up so prices will go up. (https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/)

Workers in the food industry are deemed essential, but treated unfairly. Just one of many examples – at a strike at an ice-cream cake factory in California, "The dispute centers on food workers, hailed as heroes early in the pandemic, who are struggling to cope with spiraling costs of living as the company that employs them posts billion-dollar revenues." (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/05/us-cake-workers-california-rich-products-corporation)

The behavior of Big Agriculture has consequences in many areas of concern. One area is cruelty, both to workers in processing plants and to the animals they slaughter and process. Another area of concern is damage to the environment from animal farming. For example, in their short and brutal lives, chickens eat a lot of grain and soybeans, so Tyson Foods, a major producer of chicken meat, controls vast areas of agricultural land.

In an article today, I read this about the land Tyson controls:

"Tyson Foods utilizes between nine and 10m acres of farmland – an area almost twice the size of New Jersey – to produce corn and soybeans to feed the more than 2 billion animals it processes every year in the US alone, according to new research. ... the scale of farming needed to produce animal feed contributes to many of the environmental problems of large-scale agriculture. These issues include changes to soil and the natural flow of water, the way solar energy relates to the earth, and disruption of plants and animals. Pollution from fertilizers and pesticides are another big concern, and the risks of contaminating drinking water and harming ecosystems."

While Tyson pledged several years ago to address issues of sustainable agriculture in the land it relies on, the pledges have largely been unfulfilled. (https://southeastagnet.com/2019/06/10/animal-activist-groups-target-tyson-contract-growers/, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/09/us-poultry-giant-tyson-farmland-twice-size-new-jersey-feed-animals)

Along with the many economic dislocations of the last two years, the food supply and food prices have been a major source of worries, especially among people whose food budgets are limited, but also among people who worry about the welfare of everyone, not just their own well being. Among the factors besides price that appear in food news stories, are the scarcity of labor in food markets, the abuses of labor in industrial food processing, the impact of climate change and local weather on food production, the increasing cost of transportation of food, and the increasing burden on food banks and other organizations to help people in need. 

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.