Until the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians largely ignored scientists’ health warnings about the meat industry. We must use the knowledge we already have to transform our agricultural and food systems, or face the prospect of a prolonged epoch of contagion, fear, and economic stagnation.
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From a viral pandemic to the movement for racial justice to the worsening climate crisis, Senator Cory Booker says the massive challenges facing the US right now are all tied to a “savagely broken food system”. And last week, his most recent challenge to that system gained new momentum, when a coalition of 300 farm, food, and environmental advocacy organizations sent a letter to Congress urging legislators to pass a bill that would eventually eliminate the country’s largest concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos).
In this preliminary report, researchers from Singapore and Ireland said laboratory work has shown that the SARS-CoV-2 can survive the time and temperatures associated with transportation and storage conditions in the international food trade. Chicken, pork and salmon samples contaminated with COVID-19 showed no decline in the virus level after 21 days in both refrigerated and frozen storage conditions.
Even as thousands of their employees fell ill with COVID-19, meatpacking executives pressured federal regulators to help keep their plants open, according to a trove of emails obtained by USA TODAY. The emails show how a major meatpacking trade group, the North American Meat Institute, provided the U.S. Department of Agriculture with a draft version of an executive order that would allow plants to remain open. A week later, President Donald Trump signed an order with similar language, which caused confusion over whether local health authorities could close plants due to COVID-19 outbreaks.
An outbreak of African Swine Fever threatens to keep German pork locked in the European Union with China, South Korea and Japan all banning shipments, a major setback in an already challenging year for meat producers following COVID-19 outbreaks at plants.
About seven months after COVID-19 cases started to spread in this JBS facility, the world's largest meat producer is receiving a $15,615 fine from OSHA. While JBS is saying the citation is without merit, critics are calling it too small and offensive to the workers who died as a result of the outbreaks.
If the world is to meet its target of limiting global warming to “well below” 2C, some degree of diet shift will be necessary, scientists say. If it is to strive for the most optimistic target of keeping warming to 1.5C, changes to diet may be even more crucial. In this interactive Q&A, Carbon Brief explores how greenhouse gas emissions from meat, dairy and other diets compare, as well as whether changes to the production and transportation of meat could help to stem its climate impact.
Plant protein foods—like lentils, beans, and nuts—can provide vital nutrients using a small fraction of the land required to produce meat and dairy. By shifting to these foods, much of the remaining land could support ecosystems that absorb CO2, according to a new study appearing in the journal Nature Sustainability.
In a time when we’ve experienced an actual pandemic-induced meat shortage along with an executive order aimed at keeping slaughtering plants open, the idea of meat availability playing a role in the election isn’t so far fetched. In fact, it’s happened before. With Mike Pence accusing Kamala Harris of trying to take meat away, Paul Shapiro examines the role of meat shortages in elections.
Malnutrition and food insecurity are perennial issues in the small, landlocked nation, where more than half of the population live below the poverty line. The coronavirus, which has infected nearly 5,500 people and killed more than 170, has only exacerbated food shortages as many livelihoods have been curtailed by confinement measures. For mice hunter Bernard Simeon, from Malawi's central Ntcheu district, the pandemic has brought new complexities to his poverty-stricken life.
New Zealand suspended shipments of live cattle after a vessel carrying more than 5,800 cows sank during rough weather on the way to China, leaving dozens of sailors missing and dead animals floating in the sea. The large cargo ship called Gulf Livestock 1 was traveling from Napier, on the eastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island, to an international seaport about 170 miles from Beijing.
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