Food (Waste) Freedom
2022-06-13 · Guest: Baylen Linnekin (Author of Biting the Hands that Feed Us) · 52:48
Government regulation of food and SB 1383
Bob Zadek and Baylen Linnekin discuss the intrusive nature of government regulations on food, focusing on California’s SB 1383, the inefficiencies of school lunch programs, and the absurdity of food labeling and grading. They explore how these policies often exacerbate the problems they aim to solve, such as food waste and hunger, while advocating for market-based solutions and increased food freedom.
Topics: Food Freedom, Food Waste, California SB 1383, School Lunch Programs, Food Labeling, Raw Milk, Regulatory Capture, Market Solutions
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Baylen Linnekin
Introduction to Food Freedom [00:16]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. This morning’s topic is freedom. It often is freedom, but this morning we are talking about a very special type of freedom, and that is food freedom. It’s not giving freedom to the food—the food’s going to be eaten. It’s giving freedom to the eater to be able to select what we want to eat, when we want to eat it, at the price we want to pay for it, and with the flavor that we want.
In an insidious but pervasive way, government has invited itself to our dining room table and has a profound influence on all of those elements of food freedom. And sometimes it is painfully apparent, others it is far less apparent. But it is there, trust me, both in terms of the quality, the taste, and perhaps the most important, the cost. How this all works so that you can be a more informed shopper, more active in what your government does, I’m happy to welcome back to the show one of my very favorite guests, Baylen Linnekin. Baylen is the author of Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food Systems More Sustainable.
Why I’ve asked Baylen to join us this week and not any other week, although I would love it to be every single week, is because California is at it again. And to paraphrase, as California goes, in most cases regretfully, so goes the country. California has decided that we are not giving enough free food to the homeless. And California could solve the problem by increasing taxes—ugh—using the increased tax revenue to buy food and hand it out to the homeless. Direct, obvious, accomplishes the goal, but politically painful because it involves spending money by either raising taxes or diverting revenue to another source. California, in its insidious way that governments do business, has found a way to feed the homeless and have other people pick up the tab. California gets the credit for feeding the homeless, if that’s what they’re going to be doing, and without raising taxes so they don’t get the detriment.
California’s SB 1383 and the Food Waste Problem [03:39]
Bob Zadek: To explain to us the big picture on food freedom and why we don’t have it, or why we don’t have enough of it, and what’s going on in California and in the country, I welcome Baylen to the show again. Thank you for joining us this morning. The subject this morning, at least to start the show—we’re going to go very deep into food freedom—but the subject is California’s SB, Senate Bill 1383. It’s a perfect example of explaining so much of what is going on in government’s relationship to food that I select that as this week’s poster child. So first tell us, why did SB 1383 get your attention?
Baylen Linnekin: Well, first of all, I want to say it’s a pleasure to be back. So SB 1383 is one of those well-intentioned laws that is backfiring. If I can back up and just describe the problem: dual problems. There are lots of homeless people in California, as most people know, and there’s a lot of food waste, meaning food that doesn’t end up getting into someone’s mouth and either ends up in a landfill or just in, you know, some a pile in someone’s backyard that’s not composted. And so that’s the problem, is we waste about 40% of our food from field all the way to fork, and that there are people who are hungry who could use that food.
And so California thought, “Aha, we’ll just pass a law and wave a magic wand and we’ll force businesses and local governments to work together to get that food into people’s hands.” And, you know, that sounds nice.
Bob Zadek: Yeah, I want to convert what you just said into a “government-ese.” You say they want California wants local governments and food purveyors to—and your very nice phrase was—“work together.” I’m going to translate that. California wants local governments and food purveyors to spend their money solving California’s feeding the homeless problem. That’s what “working together” means when we speak of it in this context. Please go on, I will translate as we go along when necessary.
Baylen Linnekin: I completely agree with you and your turn of phrase was certainly more artful than mine. The California lawmakers came up with an idea, which is: let’s solve the problem of food waste and get more food to hungry people, which sounds nice, but let’s not really come up with any details about how it’s going to work, let’s not offer any funding to the best of my recollection. They’re trying to cut food waste and feed the homeless—again, admirable goals—but in doing so, it’s as if they had said, “Here, local governments and businesses, solve the problem of homelessness by January 2022. Go, now figure it out.” And that’s never a good idea, just to foist a problem onto the little guy and then tell them to figure out how to solve it.
Bob Zadek: So what was the solution in 1383? Obviously it’s a law, so it compels people to do something or forbids people to not do another thing. What was the compulsion and what was the prohibition, if any?
Baylen Linnekin: There’s a good LA Times article from December that outlines things, and it requires supermarkets—I’m quoting here—and other big food providers to divert as much as a quarter of edible food now destined for dumps, landfills, to food banks to feed the needy. It tasks cities and counties with formulating local plans with a statewide goal of recovering 20% of edible food by 2025. That latter part was a quote from Reuters. And large grocery stores and food wholesalers have to comply immediately. Restaurants and cafeterias, other smaller places, will have to comply soon. And all of them could be fined if they don’t comply.
And again, there’s no real infrastructure, there’s no real plan, there’s no real expertise that I’m aware of that’s being offered, and there’s no say that the state actually has any expertise to offer. So it’s a mess. And cities are complaining and towns, restaurants, food banks are even complaining that they’re getting fewer donations, which of course is the exact opposite of the intent of the law. And this is where I believe you come in and tell the audience about unintended consequences.
Bob Zadek: That’s exactly right. Cue the moderator, is that what you just said? Basically. Okay, now, so the test is, is the measure of success how much in increased donations are received by food banks from the purveyors and the restaurants and the retailers? That is an area—a geographic area—will flunk the test if period A over period B doesn’t show a certain increase? Is that how the state will determine if the plan is working?
Baylen Linnekin: So I don’t think that this is one of those instances where the state is really going to look into—you know, so many laws tell people to do things but then they never assess whether people are actually doing those things, and I think this is one of those laws. Certainly people who don’t comply are being fined, but I suspect that it’s going to take some private researchers or university people at UC Davis or somewhere to come in and actually assess the program. But I don’t think that this bill came with any sort of assessment mechanism.
Defining Food Waste [09:23]
Bob Zadek: Now, I had to bite my tongue for a few seconds when you used the phrase, “The focus of this is twofold: on the one hand to eliminate food waste, and the other is to redirect food that is presumably edible into somebody who can edit eat it.” That was my play on words. The homeless, or rather, to be politically correct—we always strive to do that—the unhoused, to use an understatement. You have written virtually an entire book on the concept of food waste. And I’m confused about when and how food is wasted. What does it even mean to waste food?
And I’ll pose my question for the benefit of our audience by a very simple hypothetical, but it frames the issue quite nicely. In my home, I pay for water usage as I use it. If I turn on my faucet in the sink and allow it to run, and the water comes out of the tap and into the drain and wherever water goes when it hits my drain, in that activity I have purchased water, paid the price that the seller wants me to pay for it, and once I purchase water, I am allowed to do with that water anything I darn well please. I own the water, or I rent it, whatever it is, it’s my water. And if I enjoy the sound of running water and I don’t happen to live near a babbling brook, but I live near a babbling kitchen faucet, I can let the water run and my life will be, by my standards, enhanced. Have I just wasted water? It’s given me pleasure. And if I have wasted water, then that means that the government has an interest in not only that I pay for things, that I use things for its intended purpose according to a government mandate. So tell me how the word “waste” applies to our conversation.
Baylen Linnekin: Sure, I think the food analogy, or the water analogy rather, works to some extent but not to the same extent, and I’ll explain why before I go into why food waste is a legitimate problem. There’s a finite amount of water on this planet. There’s been the same amount of water on this planet since the last comet hit. And of course water levels vary—we’ve had ice ages, California has a drought—and so, you know, the water that’s available to us changes, but the water that is on this planet is finite and is consistent. So you can’t really waste water per se, even though when I was a kid, I’d leave the faucet running for a couple seconds, I’d hear about how I’m wasting water. But no one really ever told me as a kid that I was wasting food.
Now, food waste is different because food waste refers to food that was produced, whether it was grown in a field or in a plant or whatnot, that was produced specifically for the purpose of having humans consume it. And so the waste happens when that food is grown or produced otherwise and doesn’t actually make it into a person’s mouth; instead, it goes into a landfill.
Bob Zadek: Baylen, I’m going to come as close as I ever come to declaring war on a guest. You said when the producer—I’ll say farmer, although it could be a farmer, rancher, it could be a factory, could be anything, but I’ll say producer—when the producer produces food, the food is produced so it can be eaten. I disagree. The producer of food produces food for one reason: so it can be sold. And it doesn’t care whether the buyer buys the crop and destroys it, or buys the crop and eats it, or buys the crop and resells it. So when you say it’s a waste of food not to eat it, whoever is wasting is doing something with something that it owns. Either correct me, deflect my brutal attack, or help put a little flesh on these bones. I still don’t understand the concept of wasting food if whoever does whatever they do with food, whether it’s eat it, throw it at a politician, or throw it away, they are doing with something they own in a way that they’re allowed to do. Where’s the waste?
Baylen Linnekin: So, I’m not an economist, and I’d like to point that out whenever cornered on a question of economics as I have been here. Of the people I’ve known in the food business, whether that’s restaurateurs, whether that’s farmers, whether that’s grocers—and I’ve known brewers—I would say, in fact, that they certainly want to sell you whatever they’re growing or producing. There’s no two ways about that. But I also think that they sincerely care that you not only purchase what they’ve bought but also consume it. I suppose it’s, you know, pick a giant Unilever or some giant food company, does Kentucky Fried Chicken care if you eat every single piece of chicken in their bucket? Maybe not. But if these are food producers who also are concerned about the environmental impact of food waste, which I think most food producers are, then I do think that they care, not just about the sort of bottom line, bottom dollar, but also about whether you’re using that food. And they want you to not only consume it, they want you to, you know, buy more of it, so they’ll produce more of it.
My argument is less an economic one and more experiential one that I have from just having spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of food producers of all sizes. I do think they care. I think they want your money, but they also want to know—want the Yelp review, they want you to tell your friend how much you liked it, they want you to basically become a return customer. And if you are buying things from them once, maybe you’re not coming back. But if you buy something and you actually consume it and enjoy it, you become a return customer. So I think there’s some economics to it in there. And certainly, I defer to you on the economic angle.
Bob Zadek: The difference is, you preface your comment by saying you’re not an economist, therefore you were very stingy about offering an economic viewpoint. I am also not an economist, but I am generous in offering my economic views. That is one of perhaps many differences between us. The fact that I’m not an expert doesn’t prevent me from having an opinion and sharing it with anybody who vaguely would be interested.
Now, so I think the point I’d like to make is that the issue which is couched in terms of, in this SB 1293 and other similar legislation, is stated to be preventing food waste. But I dare say, if there were no homeless people or hungry, deserving but poor people, if everybody had enough to eat and the restaurants and the purveyors were discarding food they had no use for, we would not be doing a show on this subject. Nobody would care. It’s just the byproduct of being alive. You throw stuff away. And while of course it’s a good idea to recycle, of course it’s a good idea to build compost because it’s a valuable economic use of a product, and the product may be at a low cost because nobody wants it. But the issue of wasting food, and it’s only true of food perhaps, is not the real issue. Nobody would care. It’s just a cost borne by somebody. Somebody paid money for something and didn’t use it. Somebody bears the cost, who cares? But it’s only when somebody else could use what one person is discarding, rather than appealing to the generosity of the person who doesn’t use it, we mandate: you must take something you don’t want and you must use it for a socially advantageous purpose. That’s probably what’s going on.
The Scope of Food Waste and Government’s Role [18:28]
Bob Zadek: Now, in your book, you talk about food waste writ large. Tell us some of the major takeaways from your book about A, food waste, and the role that government plays in the food being wasted—and I use “wasted” in the ways we have been using it in the show. It is food that could be used to the benefit of somebody, but it is not. And that’s what we define as waste. And give us some examples of how, instead of the government solving the problem, the government is not the solution but is the problem itself. Just give us a few examples so the audience can develop a way of thinking and a way of understanding these transactions.
Baylen Linnekin: Sure, yeah. As I talk about in the book, just the hard numbers about food waste, I think I mentioned earlier in this conversation that around 40% of the food that we produce with the intent of being eaten is wasted. And that amounts to about 40 million tons every year in this country. And it goes to waste either in the fields or during processing, in transit, at the store, and/or once you or I bring the food home and either, you know, throw it down the garbage disposal or in the trash. The value of that is around $165 billion a year, which is about 10% of the money Americans spend on food that gets wasted. And then there are environmental impacts which are pretty staggering. Methane is the most potent greenhouse gas, or one of them, far more so than carbon dioxide. And that’s generated in landfills when food is anaerobically broken down versus aerobically broken down.
And so you’ve got, you know, think of all the inputs: there’s water, there’s fertilizer, there’s pesticides, there’s fuel, there’s wages—all those things that a business has to put in in order to get some food grown. Those things, whether the food goes to waste or not, end up happening. And what I talk about a lot in my book is just the concept that we Americans waste a lot of food, but the government encourages us to do that, and in some cases forces us to do that, through completely moronic policies. And I’m certainly happy to give a few examples. So, you know, the government in California’s case, in this SB 1383, they’re trying to crack down on food waste. But frankly, government’s contribution to food waste is so great that this attempt by California is just a drop in the bucket. And there are much better ways to get rid of government programs or amend them in some ways so that government itself is not contributing to food waste or basically forcing Americans to waste food.
School Lunch Programs and Food Waste [21:18]
Bob Zadek: One of the large issues you mention in your book requires a little walk down memory lane. We may remember that Michelle Obama devoted a lot of attention to school lunches. And school lunches get a lot of attention in your book. One learns a lot of stuff about the ugly underbelly of the school lunch program and how it both contributes to food waste and, as a nice convenient byproduct, also harms the food intake of the students who it’s designed to protect. So tell us why you selected—I’m sure you selected it because of its scope—tell us about school lunches and why school lunches were worthy of a bit of ink in your book.
Baylen Linnekin: Yeah, so this is an issue that I’ve written a lot about even before the book and since the book, devoted several pages in the food waste chapter in the book to discussing it. School lunch waste has always been a problem. I threw away food as a kid in public school, most people do, and the problem with school lunch in this country is many-fold. And we could start with the subsidies that often are paid to industry, to farmers, to grow certain crops to excess, and hence those foods that are produced in excess by farmers are then given to kids in school lunches. And I think dairy is one good example of that.
Under the Obama administration, Michelle Obama, you’re correct, championed school lunch reform very early on in the administration, and that turned into the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was a law that Congress passed which basically said that schools should be serving, quote-unquote, “healthier” food to kids. And so swapping out flavored milk for skim milk, or full-fat milk for skim milk, making sure that fruits and vegetables are served and whole grains and other things. And I’m not a nutritionist—another thing I’m not, I’m not an economist, I’m also not a nutritionist. I’m a handsome guy, though, I will cop to that. Anyway, so not a nutritionist, but, you know, did the Obama administration’s rules on paper improve the potential quality of foods that are served to kids slightly? Probably, sure. But those rules also contributed massively to food waste.
And if we look at the school lunch program, it’s been hemorrhaging since I think at least the 1960s. I talk about this in my book. Participation, even though obviously the population of the United States has, I don’t know, doubled since the 1960s, something like that. So far fewer kids are taking advantage of the school lunch program even though in many cases it’s free or there’s a reduced lunch option. Frankly, because the food sucks. And so that’s what we’re left with. What happens? Kids throw their food away. Oftentimes they’ll take it and just walk over to the trash if there’s nothing in it. And schools only get credit for meals they serve, so kids are encouraged to take the food even if they’re not going to eat it, and then that food just goes into the landfills.
And so this is absolutely a problem. The Trump administration, as soon as they came in, their USDA amended things and the food went back to the pre-Obama era approach. But the food, like I said, it sucks either way. It sucked under Obama, it sucked under Trump, and it still sucks under Biden. And there are ways to, like California did, to try to combat food waste and hunger. And I proposed one such way called “Opt Out of School Lunch,” which I detail in the book as well, where you kind of have two different—you know, when I was a kid, I occasionally ate school lunch, but otherwise I’d make my own brown bag lunch, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you know, some carrots and Doritos and a can of soda or something like that. So you can bring your own lunch.
And frankly, there are kids whose families either can’t afford it or can’t be bothered. And so those kids, I proposed in this “Opt Out of School Lunch” approach, should eat food provided by restaurants, grocers, and others who have excess food. Part, you know, have local school districts partner up with restaurants and ask them to figure out ways to get the excess food to students who are in need. And so it would reduce food waste immeasurably, and I suspect it would improve the quality of food that kids are eating immeasurably as well. And the costs of, I think, well, $1 of every $3 that a school receives in order to feed a student from the federal government, only $1 goes to actual food. So whether lunch or breakfast or even dinner, roughly a dollar is spent on a meal for a kid. And you’re not going to get very good food with a dollar. But $2 of that $3 goes to overhead. It goes to pay the salaries of school lunch employees, menu setters, cooks who work off-site, you know, electricity and repairs for ovens and things like that. And that is incredibly wasteful and completely pointless. The space, the cafeteria space in a school, could be used for better purposes: learning, for example. And so this is a whole kind of wholesale and holistic re-envisioning of the school lunch program that I’m proposing to eliminate waste and actually use it as a way to combat waste. And will it happen? I don’t know, but I’ve proposed it about a decade ago, and I’m certainly hearing from people who think it’s a good idea, but I’ve yet to hear of even a school system implementing the idea. And that’s unfortunate because I think this is an area that’s really ripe for changing the narrative around school lunches and food waste.
Food Labeling and Grading Standards [27:38]
Bob Zadek: On this other subject of food freedom, I introduced our topic today using the word, if not emphasizing the word, freedom. Government has profoundly intruded in our right—if it is indeed a right, I think most people believe it is—government seems to be encroaching upon our right to eat what we wish and to select in the stores products that we want to buy. And part of that process of the government intrusion is their insane involvement in labeling, both in terms of the quality of the product—you discuss apples as a good example in your book, and of course we can go on to apples and meat and almost every food product is graded. And it always—and I’d like you to speak a bit about grading and how grading serves to mislead the public and, in the grading process, it prevents edible food—food that would cure somebody’s hunger—from ever finding its way to the grocer shelf.
So when one looks at meat grading, I think the grades are—I can’t recite them from memory, but like the worst grade of meat is called something like “Choice.” Well, why isn’t it labeled “Garbage” or “Barely Edible”? But it’s labeled “Choice,” a positive-sounding word. So, but that’s government. Government dictates the words to be used in labeling food products. That was just a pet peeve that I had. But tell us on the subject of grading, how the process of grading and setting standards denies products that are edible, that will provide food to people, it prevents those products from finding their way to the marketplace.
Baylen Linnekin: You’re correct. Hundreds of different food products that we can buy in this country that are regulated by the USDA and/or the FDA are graded. And whether that’s dairy or eggs—you know, you’ve got Grade A eggs—you referred to “Choice” meat, which is actually the best quality that one typically can purchase at a grocery store because the USDA “Prime” meat usually goes to restaurants, although if you go to a high-end butcher or grocer, you’ll find some USDA Prime offerings. And there are at least a couple grades, I think, below that. And because I don’t see those things sold, I don’t recall what they are off the top of my head.
But these grades are arbitrary and they were established as a result of work between big business and USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, I think. And the premise is, yeah, that certain fruits—let’s say the apple you mentioned, an apple that’s, what is it, the McIntosh that has that like kind of red on top, green and then kind of a hodgepodge color on the bottom—that apple, for example, a Grade A apple would be one that has, you know, 40% brightness in its red coverage. And carrots, the top grade there, they have to be at least an inch in circumference. And who established this? Why the hell would anyone care whether a carrot has an inch of circumference or an inch and a half or three-quarters? Well, it’s because businesses want to grow—yeah, they want fields of uniform food, and it just facilitates their grip on your grocer’s shelf.
And so sure enough, grocers—there’s no rule that says anyone has to purchase or sell only graded foods—but people who pick food in the fields are told by growers, “Listen, leave the skinny carrots in the fields, we can’t sell them because, let’s say, Walmart won’t buy grocer won’t buy food.” And I think Walmart’s changed recently, actually, that they do buy some “ugly fruit,” as the kind of dawn of—
Bob Zadek: Is that the grade?
Baylen Linnekin: Yeah, it’s not the grade, but it’s the term for fruit that doesn’t make the grade. It’s a private industry term. And there’s actually, I think, even an “Ugly Fruit” company now that’s kind of capitalized on the marketing of ugly things. But you have people working in the fields who are told, “Don’t pick that,” by grocers who pass that information on and it gets to the farmer. And so that food’s wasted, it’s left to rot in the field, which is why you have gleaners—and I’ve done some of this with blueberries—who go into the field and pick blueberries or carrots or whatever, just pick up the things that otherwise would be left to rot and give those things to people in need. And so it’s this kind of government’s encouraging the waste through their grading scheme. And there’s no objective difference in quality between the quote-unquote “ugly fruit” and the stuff that makes this top grade. And frankly, in most cases, food that’s bred for how it looks, for its kind of visual or physical characteristics, almost always tastes worse than food that’s bred for flavor.
And so when you go to a farmer’s market, you don’t usually see the one-pound Grade A bag of carrots for sale. You see some smaller carrots that might have, you know, some bends to them or—I remember when I was a kid there were the polyploidy strawberries that were like three times the size of a normal strawberry. Those things generally taste really good. And it’s certainly, you know, there’s some subjectivity in taste and I can accept that. But the rules don’t make for better food and they do encourage, promote, and cause, frankly, food waste. And so eliminating all of these grades—and again, they’re confusing, too. I cite in my book a study from like a congressional study from like 1974 that said that these grades, because they’re not uniform, because they really have no kind of objectivity to them, they just confuse consumers, they drive up prices, they cause waste, and there’s really nothing to like about them. So, you know, if you want to buy fruit and vegetable, meat that are completely uniform and that’s your bag, then I encourage you to stick with it. But the rest of us shouldn’t have to suffer by these rules that clearly do nothing but keep entrenched interests in place while also causing food waste.
The Inconsistency of Government Mandates [34:42]
Bob Zadek: Baylen, I’m struck by something. We started our show talking about California SB 1383, which legislates that producers, that purveyors and restaurants cannot throw away food. They must, under penalty of fine or who knows what else, they must find a way to get that food to the homeless or to the unfed, whatever the label is. And yet you just now, two minutes ago, explained that producers, farmers, leave food that is edible—maybe ugly, as the phrase you used, the term of art—it may be ugly, but it’s edible. What’s interesting is, but that farmer isn’t required to see to it that the ugly food they don’t harvest finds its way to the homeless. It’s kind of—either you and I have discovered a new perfect piece of legislation for California, not that they’re wanting for legislative ideas to be sure, but it’s the same issue.
And the question is, you have said that food lying on the ground and never being harvested is being wasted. But it’s not being wasted; a farmer has decided that the marketplace will not reward him sufficiently for harvesting that, so he doesn’t harvest it. It doesn’t make economic sense. Since that ugly food lying on the field will rot, wouldn’t it, shouldn’t it, wouldn’t it be a good idea for the same government who wants to feed the homeless to make an offer and buy all that? It would be, I think, very cheap for the harvest. It’s not going to be marked up by a middleman and retailers, and the food would be cheaper. And the government can, if it feels an obligation, a political obligation, to feed the homeless, well, there’s the food and it’s kind of cheap. Now, because I always look for, at least on this show, market solutions, and isn’t that an example of how the market itself, if allowed to operate, could eliminate food waste?
Baylen Linnekin: Bob, I think you’re onto something. So when I was in the course of writing the book, I traveled to Portugal and I met with a group there called Fruta Feia, which translates not surprisingly to “Ugly Fruit.” That’s Fruta Feia, “Ugly Fruit” in Portuguese. And this is a nonprofit that got some money from a private foundation and came up with almost exactly the solution you decided. They’re not giving the food away to people, but they are paying the farmer less than market value for a lot of the food. They’ll go into either go into the fields and actually glean, which I mentioned earlier, meaning that they’ll go and pick up the food for the purpose of giving it to people who are in need. And they then—so they, you know, let’s say they give the farmer 40 cents on the dollar for what they otherwise would be throwing away. They then sell it to people in need for 50 cents on the dollar. They’ve, you know, got to recoup their operating costs and they’ve made sure that people who want fresh produce but who might otherwise not be able to afford it have it. And this didn’t require any government intervention whatsoever.
And they’ve recreated that approach in, I think when I was in Lisbon, they they were just there, but they’ve recreated it in several cities to the best of my recollection, Porto and maybe a couple others. And right here in Seattle where I live, I mentioned I’ve gleaned before, I volunteered with a nonprofit called FareStart, which is a culinary education hub that tries to place people who are down on their luck in restaurant business jobs. But they also have a, you know, they teach people to cook by going out and actually recovering food that would be wasted, including in fields, like I said, I’ve picked blueberries there. And then they’ll make desserts and other things with those blueberries. So there certainly is no shortage of interest in the private sector in finding ways to address this problem. And as I point out in the book, as you rightly just noted, there just is the problem that the government gets in the way or mandates things that it shouldn’t be. And that’s not the only problem. I’m not suggesting that waving a magic wand will solve all of the problems, but it would solve a lot of them. And we wouldn’t be in this boat if we would simply stop government-mandated food waste and stop forcing people to adhere to unworkable regulations around preventing food waste. You’re catching the problem too late. And as you note when you said why not have people go into the fields and pick those carrots and sell them? Yeah, that’s the solution.
Regulatory Capture and Food Labeling [40:11]
Bob Zadek: Now, we could spend the entire hour that we allocate to this conversation to labeling. And Baylen, you didn’t spend a lot of time in your book, but you do spend a lot of time in your writing in Reason magazine and the like, talking about the product of what is called in economics “regulatory capture,” where the government operates to protect the industries it is supposed to regulate. And apropos of this morning’s topic, there is so much insanity in food labeling. Just the other day, I recall reading about the current flap, which is representative, which is now almond milk. There is now, I think, legislation or hearings or something, a movement—I’ll call it a movement, you may correct me—where the government is starting to, maybe FDA, to prohibit purveyors of almond milk from calling it milk because the argument is consumers might be confused and think that an almond is a cow or something like that, even though there’s probably a lot of differences between an almond and a cow biologically, I would venture a guess. So tell us about, and with examples if you choose to do so because they are insane and therefore in their way quite humorous, of how all this labeling, especially in the dairy industry, with government regulating with great precision what can be called yogurt or almond milk or stuff like that, and it’s in a way that no consumer outside of a pen itself would care.
Baylen Linnekin: Yeah, it’s part of the issue is standards of identity, which is that other labeling issue, which is that basically the standards of identity for food established government-approved recipes for different foods. And they almost always differ from the actual dictionary definition of the thing. So first of all, they’re kind of running or flying in the face of common sense. So what, you know, if you look up milk in the dictionary, certainly cow’s milk is going to be one of the options, possibly even the first, or just the, you know, lacto-something-or-other secretion of a mammal is probably more likely to be the first definition. Milk has never been the province only of cows. All mammals—I don’t know, maybe platypuses are outside of it—but 99.9% of mammals, including humans, produce milk.
But milk also has very commonly been known as something that is produced from things like almonds, the secretion when you squeeze something. And so people understand what milk is, they understand what butter is. And so when the government regulatory capture, as you mentioned, when the government decides to define things, typically it’s just they’re handed the definition from big business, large food businesses, and then they accept that. And then everyone who wants to compete against them has to come up with some special name for their food. It’s why there’s, you know, that cream cheese competitor is Neufchâtel, I think it’s called at grocery stores. And I’ve never bought that before because what the hell is that? But it frankly, you know, it probably has 6% less fat than cream cheese. Americans and frankly people around the world are smart enough to understand that almond milk is not from a cow, just like they’re smart enough to understand that cow’s milk is not from an almond. And you know what? We all have a First Amendment right, including food producers, to say honest things about their food. And almond milk is in fact almond milk.
And there are definitely efforts around the country, typically led by dairy farmers groups, and there’s meat producers as well who are angry about competition from vegan and/or cell-cultured meats. And they can be as angry as they want, but everyone has a First Amendment right to label their food products honestly. And this is really a matter for courts to determine if someone’s lying. It’s not something that the USDA, the FDA, state governments should be concerning themselves with. And so it’s a free speech thing as much as it’s a common sense thing. And standards of identity is one way that the government gets away from both free speech and common sense.
The Raw Milk Controversy [45:01]
Bob Zadek: The last topic we probably can cover—we’re running out of time—is the government, the state and local governments, for a time and maybe continuing through today, were out of their minds in raiding with SWAT teams and preventing humans from drinking raw milk. There were raids on farms in California, people were arrested, there were SWAT teams involved. Is that still going on? And can you—we have about a minute or so for this topic—can you share with our audience just because how outrageous it all is, what was going on with the raw milk controversy?
Baylen Linnekin: Yeah, there was an FDA raid on a raw milk farmer, an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, about 10 years ago. And then more recently in—it was either Santa Monica or Venice—the Rawesome raw food co-op was selling raw milk. And raw milk’s legal in California, but I think it wasn’t certified. So the government gets itself in a tizzy over raw milk, which is just unpasteurized milk, which is sold in virtually every other country on Earth. You can buy it in a vending machine on the highway in Germany. But due to a court ruling in the ’80s pushed by Ralph Nader’s group, Public Citizen, the FDA was forced to ban raw milk. And once it was forced, it became the most zealous raw milk banner around. And so we’re stuck with this.
There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been armed raids recently in this country, but raw milk’s legal status is tenuous and the FDA is always pushing states, particularly those that allow its sale, to stop allowing that sale. And so the raw milk battles are not over. Perhaps the guns are holstered for the moment.
Bob Zadek: I remember in Venice—I think it was Venice—it was a SWAT team. And you had a bunch of people in gingham dresses and aprons sitting around drinking raw milk, having a nice time, having a social event on the weekend, and that was worthy of a SWAT team, as I recall. Now, raw milk is just unpasteurized. Everybody knows it’s unpasteurized, and people make a decision that either the taste or the food qualities of unpasteurized milk is more to their liking. It’s food freedom, and the government, for reasons that cannot be defended under any government or any express governmental powers, just had decided we will deny that freedom to people who happen to like raw milk. And once again, they’re not hurting anybody, and for sure not themselves, at least not intentionally, so they ought to be allowed. But we had, as an example of the denial of food freedom, the insane attack on raw milk sellers and raw milk consumers.
Hope for the Future: Cottage Food Laws [48:51]
Bob Zadek: Now, as we wind down, Baylen, what do you see the likelihood is government growing and freedom receding? Is there any reason for hope of sanity? Is there any reason to hope that the free market will elbow its way back into the production, sale, and use of food, or is it the proverbial slippery slope and we’re on the downside?
Baylen Linnekin: I’m going to take—that’s a great question—I’m going to take the opportunity to plug a study I’m wrapping up for Reason Foundation, where I’m a senior fellow, on there are three kinds of food laws around the country, and one of them exists in all 50 states. And there’s cottage food laws, the other is food freedom laws, and the other, which is kind of the least common but I think has a bright future, they’re called micro-enterprise home kitchen operations laws. And these laws all regulate the sale of home-produced foods. So, you know, the bake sale is the most obvious one, but it includes also people’s, you know, ability to make some chili and sell it to their neighbors online or in person, to have a supper club at their house, to sell baked goods online to people in other states. There are all different options around this. And these laws are spectacular in many cases, and I think they’re really a game changer because they’re allowing people to buy homemade foods from people in their community.
And I think it’s desensitizing people to the notion that, you know, the government needs to be between me and every food transaction. And I think that’s a good thing because government doesn’t ensure safety or quality in many cases, and what we know does ensure those things is the relationships you have with the seller, knowing who your farmer is, knowing who your food producer is. And so I think that that’s a really, really hopeful sign. And New Jersey just became the 50th state to have a cottage food law in place. There’s a growing number of states with food freedom laws—Wyoming was the first and it’s got some incredible provisions that allow the sale of most homemade foods. And then these micro-enterprise laws, there’s one in California that was the kind of most recent big one to be adopted, a couple have been on the books and kind of flown under the radar for some time in Utah, just passed one. So these laws, these home kitchen laws, I think are a great way to just popularize the idea that deregulation is not a bad thing when done thoughtfully, and it’s something that I think unites people across typical partisan and ideological divides. And I’m very excited about that.
Bob Zadek: It sure does, and it also promotes entrepreneurship. It’s kind of a low-tech gig economy. People can take a capital asset, their kitchen, and their own skill and earn money, which enhances their well-being and their neighbors who are the customers. And people who buy and sell from each other get along better. So it’s good on all counts, and I’m delighted you picked that as a positive step as a way to end our show because it encourages all the things, Baylen, that you and I, as I just have mentioned, hold dear.
This is Bob Zadek. We have spent an hour with Baylen Linnekin. Baylen is a leading food and law and policy author, he is a scholar, a faculty member, he is associated with the Reason Foundation, and of great importance, he has written Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable. Baylen, thank you so much for your time.
Baylen Linnekin: Thanks, Bob.
Bob Zadek: And thank you so much to our friends out there for letting us into your minds for the last hour. Thank you so much and have a good day.