After Sale, Valley Proteins Workers Continue Fight For Workplace Justice

Valley Proteins, the Virginia-based rendering company at the center of an ongoing union organizing effort and a large class action lawsuit over alleged wage theft, has been sold. On Dec. 28, sustainable food processing multinational Darling Ingredients, headquartered in Texas, announced it was acquiring the privately owned Valley Proteins in a $1.1 billion deal.

But current and former Valley Proteins employees are fighting to ensure that the sale doesn’t provide cover for a company they say has long fostered a toxic and abusive work environment that has led to exploitative, unsafe conditions across its plants — a point driven home by the deaths of two workers over the summer.

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15,000 Pounds Of Powdered Milk Delivered To Cuba

On January 15, 2022, the organizations Puentes de Amor, The People’s Forum and CODEPINK are sending a cargo plane loaded with 15,000 pounds of powdered milk from Miami to Cuba. Representatives of the organizations are traveling to Cuba with the shipment. The aid will be received by the Martin Luther King Center in Havana. It will be distributed to pediatric hospitals in Havana.

Since the pandemic and the disruption of food supplies it has caused, there has been a shortage of powdered milk in Cuba, which is normally given out by the state—for free—to children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with medical needs. Due to the reluctance of U.S. companies and banks to deal with Cuba for fear of running afoul of U.S. sanctions, Cuba buys imported milk—at an inflated cost—from places as far as New Zealand and Uruguay.

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Not Everyone Is Feasting

As the COVID pandemic upended the economy in the spring and summer of 2020, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and became ever more vulnerable to hunger. In consequence, the country’s network of food banks saw a sudden spike in usage.

Just prior to, and at the start of the pandemic, food banks distributed 1.1 billion pounds of food in the first quarter of 2020. By the fall of that year, they were handing out 1.7 billion pounds.

Since then, that dizzying increase has leveled off or fallen somewhat in many places, but that doesn’t mean the country’s no longer suffering an epidemic of food insecurity. To the contrary: Large food banks around the country are still reporting far higher levels of need — and of food distribution to attempt to meet that need — than was the case prior to COVID.

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These Tortilla Workers Walked Out And Won A Day Off Work

Chicago — Food production workers at El Milagro, one of Chicago’s most popular tortilla companies, join with community allies for a Day of the Dead vigil Nov. 2, 2021, in honor of five coworkers who died after contracting Covid-19 on the job. With candles and sugar skulls outside the company’s flagship taqueria in the Little Village neighborhood on the city’s Southwest Side, workers and supporters spoke about their ongoing standoff with management — and their demands for justice on the job.

“We’re here to remember our coworkers, friends and loved ones who have passed on from Covid-19,” Guillermo Romero said at the vigil. “We’ll never forget them. But we continue in this fight, for ourselves, for our dignity and to get respect.” Romero has worked at the company for 16 years.

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Bridging Cultural And Political Gaps Through Indigenous First Foods

A city isn’t the most likely place for an Indigenous crop revival. But across the greater Portland area in Oregon, municipalities like Metro and the City of Portland have been partnering with organizations and tribes to promote Native American land access and cultivation of first foods, the term used for traditional local foods that have nourished Indigenous people for centuries.

In a city park, a drained lakebed, an old grazing lot, and along an urban creek, first foods are returning to areas where they once flourished before the land was covered by farms and urban sprawl.

The partnerships are historically significant, considering Portland didn’t even allow Native Americans to live within city limits until 1920.

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Cutting Food Waste: A Lesson In Climate Awareness And Environmental Literacy

Baltimore, MD – As a “farm to school specialist” in the Baltimore City public schools, Anne Rosenthal splits her time between an office and Great Kids Farm in Catonsville, a 33-acre plot of land, complete with forests, a stream, greenhouses and a barn with animals, owned and operated by the school district.

“A lot of students have never had the opportunity to plant a seed or a small plant, or harvest straight from plants and taste farm-fresh produce,” Rosenthal said.

When kids have that first experience of “picking a cherry tomato off the plant and putting it in their mouths,” she said, “they’re much more apt to be excited to see that cherry tomato on their school lunch tray.”

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How Big Corporations And Bill Gates Took Over The UN Food Summit

This September 23, the United Nations holds its Food Systems Summit in New York.

Under the guise of the UN system, and despite sleight-of-hand language about “equal opportunities,” this summit represents a hostile takeover of world governance by corporate forces and the billionaire elite.

Today, social movements are standing up for democracy and against big capital’s devastation of their lands, farms, and communities.

The United Nations is based on the idea of multilateralism, where states seek peaceful solutions on the basis of equality and respect, replacing the colonialist institutions that preceded it.

That’s why for decades, the United States government has instead pushed for things like G-7, NATO, and other forms of control over geopolitics.

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Local Market Shows The Strength Of The Nicaraguan People

Going to the popular market in one of Nicaragua’s Pacific towns is to feel the immense strength of the Nicaraguan people and to discover the real lives that exist behind the lies that the mass media tell about our country. I go to the market and see the stalls full of fresh vegetables and local fruits, I ask for some pieces of ginger and the young woman tells me proudly: “they are today’s, they were cut today… smell them, they are fresh!”.

What pride, when in a world where it is a luxury to consume fresh, local products, Nicaragua is full of healthy food for local people to enjoy. I carry on walking and a vegetable seller very kindly says to me “how beautiful your child is, children are so beautiful, you have to take care of them… you must have realised, things are different, …where haven’t I been?

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The Incalculable Cost Of Cheap Chicken

The average American consumes more than 100 pounds of chicken meat annually—or 8 billion chickens a year, nationwide. It should come as no surprise then that as the pandemic unfurled across the United States a year ago, poultry disappeared from store shelves as panic-stricken Americans hoarded food in response to reported shortages. While Americans turned to cooking during unprecedented times, there was a human cost for this comfort.

What happens to workers inside poultry plants, where the chickens Americans cook for dinner are slaughtered, processed, and packaged, by and large goes unseen by consumers. The everyday dangers of food production and processing rarely make headlines—until a deadly virus spreads or a tragic accident claims workers’ lives.

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A French McDonald’s Is Now A Food Bank After Staff Resisted Shutdown

At one McDonald’s in Marseille, France, everyone eats for free. Locals don’t pay a dime — or euro — for food there because the location is now a food bank.

The restaurant originally opened with government backing in 1992 in a majority-Muslim neighborhood grappling with poverty and eventually employed 77 people, according to Vice. One of them was manager Kamel Guemari, who had been working there for more than 20 years since starting as a 16-year-old, according to NPR.

The location was one of six franchises that frequently changed hands. In 2018, its franchiser said he would sell his five other locations to a fellow McDonald’s franchiser. This particular store, however, would be sold on its own and turned into a halal restaurant, NPR reports.

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Declaration Of The Counter-Mobilization To Transform Corporate Food Systems

The only just and sustainable path forward is to immediately halt and transform corporate globalized food systems. The first step on this path is fully recognizing, implementing, and enforcing the human right to adequate food. While foundational, the right to adequate food is indivisible from other basic human rights, such as the right to health, housing, safe working conditions, living wages, social protection, clean environments, and civil-political rights including collective bargaining and political participation, which collectively should be central to any food system process.

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UN Food Systems Summit: Here Is Why We Are Boycotting It

Yet, the organised peasant and indigenous movements from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas that collectively represent most of the world’s small-scale food producers have called for a total boycott of this summit. In April this year, scores of scientists, researchers, faculty members, and educators who work in agriculture and food systems, also issued an open call to boycott the event. To understand why social movements and scientists are staying out of a UN-sponsored summit, it is important to know how the world’s food system works today.

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Lake Erie Advocates Launch Billboard Against ‘Factory Farms’

Digital ads now showing on electronic billboards across Toledo and elsewhere in the state are part of a local campaign taking aim against concentrated animal feeding operations.

Mike Ferner, coordinator for Lake Erie Advocates, said during a news conference Thursday morning the ads showing an iconic photo of a glass of green Lake Erie water and cows and hogs on so-called “factory farms” are meant to provoke discussion.

“Nothing happens until we start talking about it, and that’s why we’ve kicked off this campaign to start the conversation about banning factory farms,” Mr. Ferner said. “When enough people demand that, it will happen, thousands of farmers will be able to go back onto the land that they’ve been kicked off of by this industry to produce the meat, milk, and eggs that we need just like they did a mere 20 years ago.”

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Scheer Intelligence: Something’s Rotten In The Science Of Food

Leading nutritionist Marion Nestle has spent much of her long illustrious career writing about what we eat and the science of food. The James Beard award-winner and author of the blog Food Politics has written a whopping 14 acclaimed books on subjects related to nutrition, including “Soda Politics” and “What to Eat.” And yet, “Unsavory Truths: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, ” a book journalist Robert Scheer calls one of her most important books to date, has gone largely ignored by mainstream media. On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Nestle joins Scheer to discuss some of the shocking revelations  the author uncovered about the links between food science and the incredibly powerful food industry. 

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Weaponizing Science In Global Food Policy

Santa Cruz, CA – In July, the United Nations will convene “Science Days”, a high-profile event in preparation for the UN Food Systems Summit later this year. Over the course of two days, the world will be treated to a parade of Zoom sessions aimed at “highlighting the centrality of science, technology and innovation for food systems transformation.”

Nobody disputes the need for urgent action to transform the food system. But the UNFSS has been criticized by human rights experts for its top-down and non-transparent organization. Indigenous peoples, peasants, and civil society groups around the world know their hard-won rights are under attack. Many are protesting the summit’s legitimacy and organizing counter-mobilizations.

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