This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.” Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. > One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the > very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies. “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue. Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data. “We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.” But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.” This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’” > “This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything > better available to us.” Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.” These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said. A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.” > “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological > barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.” Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.” Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote. Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. > Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry > downplay known risks of plastic pollution. In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman. But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said. “I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data. Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.” “I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said. Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place. “We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.” > “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.” Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used. Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution. The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.” Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.” In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies? Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.” “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers. Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”

New dietary guidelines announced Wednesday by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. crank up the dials on red meat and full-fat dairy. The now-inverted food pyramid prominently features a steak, an entire chicken, and whole milk up top, relegating carbs to the bottom point—minor real estate compared to the portion they occupied before. Untethered from scientific research, the new recommendations seem more aligned with a burgeoning source of dietary advice: hypermasculine influencers. The fairly recent obsession with protein isn’t limited to men. “Protein has sort of become like a default or de facto good food, because it hasn’t been vilified in the same way that these other nutrients have,” says Charlotte Biltekoff, a professor at UC Davis who studies food and culture. It’s a buzzword in wellness corners around the internet. Yet the new guidelines basically ignore menopause influencers discussing the benefits of cottage cheese in favor of the red-meat-forward “manosphere.” Protein-maxxing obsessives can be found throughout MAGAville, ranging from Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—with his “all beef” diet—to the so-called Liver King. Alongside fitness shakes and supplement powders, these kinds of dudes are often peddling the notion that a high-protein diet is essential for masculinity. > “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein. I do worry about the longer > term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” The association of gender with certain foods isn’t new, but the wholehearted embrace of these perceptions is a more recent phenomenon, says Elaine Power, a dietician and professor at Queen’s University who studies food, gender, and health. In studies about a decade ago, when people were asked if they thought foods were gendered, they’d say no, “but then you show them a salad, and they say, of course that’s women’s food. You show them a steak, and that’s men’s food.” Her subjects, in other words, would initially deny that such perceptions existed. However, Power says she’s not sure she’d get that result if she repeated the experiment today. And these perceptions affect what men eat. A 2023 study titled “Healthful Eating as a Manhood Threat” found that men often avoid foods viewed as feminine, often favoring meat. This seems to have particularly affected young men, a greater proportion of whom—recent research suggests—have been eating meat daily and taking protein supplements. When asked why, many cited their desire for a more muscular physique, the baseline of the aesthetics advertised by macho influencers—some of the most notable of whom have been embroiled in steroid controversies. The ripped physiques influencers use to hawk carnivorous diets are hard to come by, of course, and consuming extra protein is often completely unnecessary. “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein,” Power says. “I do worry about the longer term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” Besides being terrible for the climate, excessive meat consumption has negative health effects, including an increased risk of cancer and heart disease, even in young people. While the American Heart Association praised the new pyramid’s suggestions to limit highly processed foods, the group stated its disagreement with the emphasis on meat and RFK’s aim of “ending the war on saturated fats.” The contents of the pyramid are simply recommendations, with little to no direct policy influence. They may eventually be used to redesign school and other institutional lunches, but right now, “there’s no little to no infrastructure to act on this kind of dietary advice,” Biltekoff says. What’s more, the admonition to avoid processed foods and eat home-cooked meals are inaccessible to many. “This is just another set of ideals that become moralized,” Biltekoff says. “Eating real food becomes a part of identity and status, and it becomes a way of signaling or symbolizing certain kinds of class-based and race-based identities and reinforcing social hierarchies rather than addressing them.” And to the boys and men in the thrall of protein-maxxing, these new guidelines are just an affirmation that they’re headed in the right direction.

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government.  “Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.” After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations.  This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.   This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

A landmark study on the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the controversial herbicide Roundup, has been formally retracted by its publisher, raising new concerns about the chemical’s potential dangers.  Federal regulators relied heavily on the study, published in 2000 by the science journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, in their assessment that the herbicide is safe and does not cause cancer. Indeed, the paper, which concluded that “Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans” was the most cited study in some government reports. But the journal’s editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, said he no longer trusted the study, which appears to have been secretly ghostwritten by employees of Monsanto, the company that introduced Roundup in 1974. Officially, the paper’s authors, including a doctor from New York Medical College, were listed as independent scientists. Van den Berg, a professor of toxicology in the Netherlands, concluded that the paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal studies and ignored other evidence suggesting that Roundup might be harmful. >  “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown > under the bus.” In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Since then, Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to people who claim it gave them cancer.  In 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency released an updated safety assessment on glyphosate that again determined that it was safe and did not cause cancer. This EPA report is often cited in news reports that contend glyphosate is “fine” and important for modern food production. But those reports failed to mention that the 2020 EPA health assessment was overturned in 2022 by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The “EPA’s errors in assessing human-health risk are serious,” the judges wrote, and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”—a type of cancer. The court told the EPA it needed to redo its human health assessment, meaning the agency now has no official stance on glyphosate’s risk to people. It is expected to release an updated safety report next year.  During the first Trump administration, Monsanto executives were told they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration,” according to an internal Monsanto email cited in a Roundup lawsuit in 2019. Monsanto had hired a consultant, according to court documents, who reported back that “a domestic policy adviser at the White House had said, for instance: ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’” On Tuesday, the US Solicitor General asked the Supreme Court to consider a case that could help shield Bayer from further lawsuits. The company’s stock soared by as much as 14 percent on news of the Trump administration’s help in the case. Two states—North Dakota and Georgia—have passed laws this year that help shield Bayer from some cancer lawsuits arising from Roundup use. There is a push to enact similar laws in other states and on the federal level.  In July, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker introduced the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to push back against these new laws, and ensure that “these chemical companies can be held accountable in federal court for the harm caused by their toxic products.” Zen Honeycutt, a key voice in the Make America Healthy Again coalition, has endorsed the legislation. Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the glyphosate debate has become a key sticking point between President Trump and his MAHA base. “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus by this administration,” Donley said. “He’s alienating a crucial voting bloc.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Shoppers have long sought ways to make more sustainable choices at the supermarket—and for good reason: Our food system is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of emissions from agriculture come from raising cows on industrial farms in order to sell burgers, steak, and other beef products. Beef production results in two and a half times as many greenhouse gases as lamb, and almost nine times as many as chicken or fish; its carbon footprint relative to other sources of protein, like cheese, eggs, and tofu, is even higher.  If you want to have a lighter impact on the planet, you could try eating less beef. (Just try it!) Otherwise, a series of recent lawsuits intends make it easier for consumers to discern what’s sustainable and what’s greenwashing by challenging the world’s largest meat processors on their climate messaging. Tyson, which produces 20 percent of beef, chicken, and pork in the United States, has agreed to drop claims that the company has a plan to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to stop referring to beef products as “climate smart” unless verified by an independent expert.  > “Even if you were to reduce [beef’s] emissions by 30 percent, it’s still not > gonna be a climate-smart choice.” Tyson was sued in 2024 by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a nonprofit dedicated to public health and environmental issues. The group alleged that Tyson’s claims were false and misleading to consumers. (Nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice represented EWG in the case.) Tyson denied the allegations and agreed to settle the suit.  “We landed in a place that feels satisfying in terms of what we were able to get from the settlement,” said Carrie Apfel, deputy managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food and Farming program. Apfel was the lead attorney on the case. According to the settlement provided by Earthjustice, over the next five years Tyson cannot repeat previous claims that the company has a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or make new ones unless they are verified by a third-party source. Similarly, Tyson also cannot market or sell any beef products labeled as “climate smart” or “climate friendly” in the United States. “We think that this provides the consumer protections we were seeking from the lawsuit,” said Apfel.  The settlement is “a critical win for the fight against climate greenwashing by industrial agriculture,” according to Leila Yow, climate program associate at the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on sustainable food systems.  In the original complaint, filed in DC Superior Court, EWG alleged that Tyson had never even defined “climate-smart beef,” despite using the term in various marketing materials. Now Tyson and EWG must meet to agree on a third-party expert that would independently verify any of the meat processor’s future “net zero” or “climate smart” claims.  Following the settlement, Apfel went a step further in a conversation with Grist, arguing that the term “climate smart” has no business describing beef that comes from an industrial food system.  “In the context of industrial beef production, it’s an oxymoron,” said the attorney. “You just can’t have climate-smart beef. Beef is the highest-emitting major food type that there is. Even if you were to reduce its emissions by 10 percent or even 30 percent, it’s still not gonna be a climate-smart choice.” A Tyson spokesperson said the company “has a long-held core value to serve as stewards of the land, animals, and resources entrusted to our care” and identifies “opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain.” The spokesperson added: “The decision to settle was made solely to avoid the expense and distraction of ongoing litigation and does not represent any admission of wrongdoing by Tyson Foods.”  The Tyson settlement follows another recent greenwashing complaint—this one against JBS Foods, the world’s largest meat processor. In 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging the company was misleading consumers with claims it would achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.  > Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy.” James reached a $1.1 million settlement with the beef behemoth earlier this month. As a result of the settlement, JBS is required to update its messaging to describe reaching net-zero emissions by 2040 as more of an idea or a goal than a concrete plan or commitment from the company. The two settlements underscore just how difficult it is to hold meat and dairy companies accountable for their climate and environmental impacts.  “Historically, meat and dairy companies have largely been able to fly under the radar of reporting requirements of any kind,” said Yow of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. When these agri-food companies do share their emissions, these disclosures are often voluntary and the processes for measuring and reporting impact are not standardized.  That leads to emissions data that is often “incomplete or incorrect,” said Yow. She recently authored a report ranking 14 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies in terms of their sustainability commitments—including efforts to report methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. Tyson and JBS tied for the lowest score out of all 14 companies. Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy,” said Valerie Baron, a national policy director and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to the Tyson settlement. Baron emphasized that increased transparency from meat and dairy companies is a critical first step to holding them accountable.  Yow agreed. She argued upcoming climate disclosure rules in California and the European Union have the potential to lead the way on policy efforts to measure and rein in emissions in the food system. More and better data can lead to “better collective decision making with policymakers,” she said.  But, she added: “We need to actually know what we’re talking about before we can tackle some of those things.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys—factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable. “It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché—a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.” So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid. > On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect > world, surely we can come up with better symbols. Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why. Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story—aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all? Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day. In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves—but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming. But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better. “It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, a board member at PEAK Animal Sanctuary in Indiana and an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me. > I’ve come to love Thanksgiving as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings—a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols. Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year. In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote: > The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 > grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize—you guessed it—the breast, > one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and > become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, > combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary > factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk. > > Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that > they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially. > > Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, > co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey > giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male > turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a > syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the > henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted > the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor. > > > Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a > day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” > he had ever done, Mason wrote. In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food…They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds. From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.” On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods. When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration—of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year. I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event). To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays. Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years—I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own. The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food. (If it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey.) “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence. These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about our shared values—and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had, I’ve found, in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine. I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.  I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat. Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it’s starting with pork because it’s a large market and products like bacon are fat-rich, but its technology is “cell-agnostic,” meaning it could create beef and chicken, too. Lab-grown meat ballsMatt Simon Honestly, Mission Barns’ creations taste great, in part because they’re “unstructured,” in the parlance of the industry. A pork loin is a complicated tangle of fat, muscle cells, and connective tissues that is very difficult and expensive to replicate, but a meatball, salami, or sausage incorporates other ingredients. That allows Mission Barns to experiment with what plant to use as a base, and then add spices to accentuate the flavors. It’s a technology that they can iterate, basically, crafting ever-better meats by toying with ingredients in different ratios.  So the bacon I ate, for instance, had a nice applewood smoke to it. The meatballs had the springiness you’d expect. During a later visit to Mission Barns’ headquarters across town, I got to try two prototypes of its salami as well—both were spiced like you’d expect but less elastic, so they chewed a bit more easily than what you’d find on a charcuterie board. (The sensation of food in the mouth is known in the industry as “mouthfeel,” and nailing it is essential to the success of alt meats.) The salami slices even left grease stains on the paper they were served on—Dawn’s own little mark on the world. I was one of the first people to purchase a cultivated pork product. While Mission Barns has so far only sold its products at that Italian restaurant and, for a limited time, at a grocery store in Berkeley—$13.99 for a pack of eight meatballs, similar to higher-end products from organic and regenerative farms—it is fixing to scale up production and sell the technology to other companies to produce more cultivated foods. (It is assessing how big the bioreactors will have to be to reach price parity with traditional meat products.) The idea is to provide an alternative to animal agriculture, which uses a whole lot of land, water, and energy to raise creatures and ship their flesh around the world. Livestock are responsible for between 10 and 20 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions—depending on who’s estimating it—and that’s to say nothing of the cruelty involved in keeping pigs and chickens and cows in unsavory, occasionally inhumane, conditions. > “I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef > burger.” Getting animal cells to grow outside of an animal, though, ain’t easy. For one, if cells don’t have anything to attach to, they die. So Mission Barns’ cultivator uses a spongelike structure, full of nooks and crannies that provides lots of surface area for the cells to grow. “We have our media, which is just the nutrient solution that we give to these cells,” said Saam Shahrokhi, chief technology officer at Mission Barns. “We’re essentially recapitulating all of the environmental cues that make cells inside the body grow fat, [but] outside the body.” While Dawn’s fat is that of a Yorkshire pig, Shahrokhi said they could easily produce fat from other breeds like the Mangalitsa, known as the Kobe beef of pork. (In June, the company won approval from the US Department of Agriculture to bring its cultivated fat to market.) Fat in hand, Mission Barns can mix it with plant proteins. If you’re familiar with Impossible Foods, it uses soy to replicate the feel and look of ground beef and adds soy leghemoglobin, which is similar to the heme that gives meat its meaty flavor. Depending on the flavor and texture it’s trying to copy, Mission Bay uses pea protein for the meatballs and sausages, wheat for the bacon, and fava beans for the salami. “The plant-based meat industry has done pretty well with texture,” said Bianca Le, head of special projects at Mission Barns. “I think what they’re really missing is flavor and juiciness, which obviously is where the fat comes in.” But the fat is just the beginning. Mission Barns’ offerings not only have to taste good, but also can’t have an off-putting smell when they’re coming out of the package and when they’re cooking. The designers have to dial in the pH, which could degrade the proteins if not balanced. How the products behave on the stove or in the oven has to be familiar, too. “If someone has to relearn how to cook a piece of bacon or a meatball, then it’s never going to work,” said Zach Tyndall, the product development and culinary manager at Mission Barns. Lab-grown salamiMatt Simon When I pick up that piece of salami, it has to feel like the real thing, in more ways than one. Indeed, it’s greasy in the hand and has that tang of cured meat. It’s even been through a dry-aging process to reduce its moisture. “We treat this like we would a conventional piece of salami,” Tyndall said.  Cultivated meat companies may also go more unconventional. “I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger—what would happen if you did that?” said Barb Stuckey, chief new product strategy officer at Mattson, a food developer that has worked with many cultivated meat companies. “Mixing species, it’s not something we typically do. But with this technology, we can.”  Of course, in this new frontier of food, the big question is: Who exactly is this for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it’s divorced from the cruelty of factory farming? Would meat-eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile? Mission Barns’ market research, Le said, found that its early adopters are actually flexitarians—people who eat mostly plant-based but partake in the occasional animal product. But Le adds that their first limited sale to the public in Berkeley included some people who called themselves vegetarians and vegans.  There’s also the matter of quantifying how much of an environmental improvement cultivated fat might offer over industrial pork production. If scaled up, one benefit of cultivated food might be that companies can produce the stuff in more places—that is, instead of sprawling pig farms and slaughterhouses being relegated to rural areas, bioreactors could be run in cities, cutting down on the costs and emissions associated with shipping. Still, those factories would need energy to grow fat cells, though they could be run on renewable electricity. “We modeled our process at the large commercial scale, and then compared it to U.S. bacon production,” Le said. (The company would not offer specific details, saying it is in the process of patenting its technique.) “And we found that with renewable energy, we do significantly better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.” Whether or not consumers bite, though, remains to be seen. The market for meat alternatives in the US has majorly softened of late: Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based products like burgers and sausages, has seen revenues drop significantly, in part because of consumers’ turn away from processed foods. But by licensing its technology elsewhere, Mission Barns’ strategy is to break into new markets beyond the United States. The challenges of cultivated meat go beyond the engineering once you get to the messaging and branding—telegraphing to consumers that they’re buying something that may in fact be partially meat. “When you buy chicken, you get 100 percent chicken,” Stuckey said. “I think a lot of people go into cultivated meat thinking what’s going to come onto the market is 100 percent cultivated chicken, and it’s not going to be that. It’s going to be something else.”  Regardless of the trajectory of cultivated fat products, Dawn will continue mingling with llamas, soaking up the sunshine, and getting belly rubs in upstate New York—even as she makes plants taste more like pork. 

The Trump administration is thinking about your family. This may come as a surprise, given that dozens of states and a coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and religious groups had to sue to compel the Department of Agriculture to release funding Congress set aside to keep food assistance (SNAP benefits) flowing to America’s poorest during a crisis, like the ongoing shutdown. (The agency now says it will comply, if only partially.) Yes, this administration is thinking about your family—but in ways that are largely unhelpful and somewhat creepy. Republican administrations have long obsessed over the integrity of the conventional nuclear family. From Ronald Reagan to Bush 43, presidents have engaged in quixotic (and expensive) campaigns to boost the marriage rate. The Trumpists, with Vice President JD Vance taking the lead, have a slightly different focus: They want to convince us to make more babies. Never mind that they aren’t taking care of the children we already have. The pro-natalist movement is neither new nor restricted to conservatives, but the current iteration is a logical product of the Trumpian flirtation with blood-and-soil nationalism. The administration seeks to promote a culture of motherhood, educate women on how to get pregnant, and take one more shot at increasing the marriage rate—all in an attempt to counter leftist cultural changes that conservatives claim are responsible for smaller families and declining birthrates. It’s all red meat to the Great Replacement theorists in the GOP base. > Trump’s big bill will reduce the after-tax income of the bottom income > quintile—the poorest fifth of American households—by an estimated 3 percent. This push for natalism includes scattershot economic components. The administration has sought to prioritize funding for roads in places with higher birth rates, and to reserve a portion of federally funded scholarships such as the Fulbright for parents. More importantly, it intends to compensate mothers for giving birth. The wildly unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which Trump signed into law in July, guarantees each newborn a $1,000 “Trump account” and encourages parents to contribute up to $5,000 a year until the “baby” turns 18—at which point it changes into something like an individual retirement account. The law also increases the child tax credit and indexes it to inflation. Such initiatives are broadly popular and have at least some bipartisan appeal. (Democrats pushed for an expanded child credit under President Joe Biden last year, but Senate Republicans, who aimed to portray their rivals as, to quote Vance, “anti-family and anti-child,” killed the bill to deny the Democrats a win. Subsidies for college and retirement savings have proved popular with both parties, even though the benefits flow overwhelmingly to the rich.) The average cost of raising a child in the United States is well over $15,000 a year, so every little bit helps. Still, as sociologists and coauthors of the recent book Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood Since 1980, we were underwhelmed by the giveaways in Trump’s big bill, which takes a lot more than it gives—a fact underscored by the administration’s eagerness to withhold those food stamp benefits. The baby bonds and child tax credit are weak sauce when held up against the bill’s drastic cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which are to be accomplished largely through work requirements. Beneficiaries with children 14 or older are now required to work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. And while that may sound reasonable, the real purpose, as Mother Jones has documented, is to impose new bureaucratic hurdles—think bewildering web portals and DOGE-decimated tech support conjoined by red tape—so onerous that tens of millions of otherwise eligible Americans will simply give up. When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said as much in its analysis of the legislation, Trump and his congressional allies predictably responded by attacking the messenger. The Republicans’ justification of work requirements to ensure that only the “truly needy”—the deserving poor—get government support, harks back to the Reagan-era war on government support for families. During the 1980s, bloviation about “welfare queens” and “government dependency” helped shift the political rhetoric away from economic policies that actually improve the lives of families with children—who make up more than one-third of SNAP recipients. (Curiously, neither the OBBB nor the shutdown has imperiled WIC, a separate program that provides limited additional assistance to new mothers.) > While government assistance has become less important for single mothers > overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom. The GOP’s supposed pro-natalist policies, meanwhile, grievously fail to account for the broader needs of families with children. The Yale Budget Lab calculated that Trump’s big bill will cost the bottom income quintile—the poorest fifth of US households—about 3 percent of their after-tax income when you factor in lost Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Those families will owe a little less tax on earned income but lose a lot more thanks to the spending cuts. In addition, the Trump tariffs, which amount to a regressive sales tax, will fall hardest on families struggling to make ends meet, costing those bottom-quintile families about $1,000 more per year, according to the budget lab’s latest estimates. Contrary to the pro-natalist rhetoric, the administration’s policies will wreak particular havoc on the lives of single mothers, who raise almost a quarter of the nation’s children. In the book, we show that family structure has a deep and abiding relationship to poverty. Not all single-parent families are poor, of course, but incomes within the single-mother category have grown increasingly unequal. This isn’t because a new, large class of uber-rich single moms has emerged, but rather because our nation has created a new underclass of uber-poor ones. Federal policy has much to do with this. In the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, many women successfully transitioned from government aid into the booming job market of the late 1990s, abetted by an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives cash back to low- and middle-income workers. But wealth and income inequality, accelerated by decades of Republican “trickle-down” tax cuts, became even more pronounced as the bull economy petered out with the recessions of the 21st century. And although some single mothers thrived in the workforce, others didn’t earn enough to qualify for the EITC, and could no longer count on federal cash welfare. Now, with the passage of Trump’s signature legislation, many won’t qualify for Medicaid or food assistance either. Why would any politician who claims to care about families support this? Well, Congress has taken Trump’s side in an ideological war over how the US government approaches its obligation to America’s children. The administration’s position is that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to have more kids, preach the merits of marriage (between an actual man and an actual woman), and give couples a little cash to start a family. Pro-natalism will, they believe, lead to economic growth and prosperous families that are solely responsible for their children’s welfare—if families are struggling, it’s because the parents aren’t working hard enough. > When it comes to alleviating poverty, offering tax cuts to families who don’t > earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it. This theory of prosperity supplants the older social democratic ideal: that the purpose of family policy is to guarantee all children a minimum quality of life, and to help ensure they can achieve their potential in a capitalist society that inevitably leaves some families behind. Hardly a leftist, Benjamin Disraeli, who served two stints as Britain’s prime minister during the 1800s, articulated this ideal when he wrote that “power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the People.” As we demonstrate in Thanks for Nothing, many single mothers do manage to make it in the labor market. Today mothers have more job experience and are more likely to work even when they have young children. They also have more education, and thus better jobs. Yet a subset of single mothers have fallen behind, especially the increasing proportion who have children out of wedlock. Surveys show that many would like to be married, but that’s just not always a viable option in communities of unemployed and under-employed men. The median income for never-married mothers has remained essentially stagnant over the past 40 years, while the bottom 10 percent of this group has seen shrinking incomes and today basically has zero work income. While government assistance has become less important for single mothers overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom. The level of support was never great, but it provided essential subsistence. The bill Congress passed in July will make the lives of these women and children even worse, and the administration has made clear that it will make no effort  to remedy that. Mitigating family poverty requires federal action, not just reliance on the labor market as it’s currently constituted. The conversation lawmakers should be having involves debating which policies might actually make a difference. A universal basic income? The wage subsidies proposed by conservative think tanker Oren Cass? Or perhaps the refundable child tax credits proposed by then-senator Mitt Romney in 2019? Reagan was not wrong when he praised the effectiveness of the EITC as an anti-poverty tool, but it’s clear that the labor market has failed many single mothers and their children. Offering tax cuts to families who don’t earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it. Until the government can muster up real, honest discussions on how to support all American families, it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration’s policies moving anyone, except maybe MAGA trad wives, to procreate.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment, and pasture destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, more than a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted from the flood.  From there, the costs of rebuilding continued to climb. Because the flood had ravaged the surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who were grappling with damages of their own and could no longer afford to buy local food. All the while, Ver Mulm kept applying to emergency USDA loans and disaster relief programs—only to be denied again and again as the tiny operation confronted burdensome application issues and eligibility restrictions.  Because of the steep costs of recovery, the farm has fallen behind on its bills, and caring for a bigger herd became too expensive. Now, Orange Creek Farms is down from 40 cattle to just four. All told, the flood put the business in a “really, really bad spot,” according to Ver Mulm. So in April, almost a year after the flood, she made a last-ditch effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she was hoping could help them offset their losses and keep the business afloat.  When the government shutdown began more than a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of the remaining workforce and brought most services to a sudden halt. Ver Mulm still hadn’t heard back about her application—and now the waiting is itself becoming the problem. As the shutdown nears a historic, yet grim, milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it has already created financial losses of at least $7 billion for the US economy. Battling some of the most consequential impacts of these losses are those who grow and sell the food we eat—especially the farmers and ranchers also dealing with the compounding effects of extreme weather and an eroding federal safety net.  Approximately 20,000 Department of Agriculture staffers have lost their jobs this year—a rapid and radical transformation of the agency resulting in administrative struggles, overworked employees, and significant delays in processing of payments and financial assistance applications. This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts expect to result in further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened beginning Thursday, October 23, with two staffers reinstated per office, to help farmers get access to $3 billion in aid from existing programs, though further details about what programs, payments, and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear.  All the while, small farmers and ranchers have spent the last 10 months facing off against mounting pressures wrought by major administrative changes to food and agriculture policy that have exacerbated the nation’s exceedingly volatile farm economy. The impact on producers, whose businesses require advance planning—in a time of the year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, buying seeds and other resources, and shoring up winter reserves—will only grow the longer the shutdown persists. And so will the broader economic and societal ripple effects unfurling nationwide: The Trump administration initially declared that it would not tap into billions of dollars in emergency funding that Congress set aside to maintain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during times of crisis. Without that funding, the USDA said that SNAP benefits, used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to afford groceries, would be suspended on November 1. (SNAP is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.) Last week, after more than two dozen states—and, separately, a coalition of local governments, nonprofits, and religious groups—sued the USDA, two federal courts ruled that the department must tap into those contingency funds to cover at least some of the SNAP benefits for November. On Monday, the Trump administration said it would comply, but would not fund the program further—and that there would be only partial payments this month.  Prior to the rulings, Secretary Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while stating (falsely) that the department did not have the legal authority to distribute the agency’s contingency funding. In a Friday press conference, she criticized SNAP, remarking that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the purview of the Biden administration, became “so corrupt.”  The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment.  Meanwhile, Hill policymakers have continued to sling accusations across the aisle in their budget standoff over federal healthcare. Trump has urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, though many GOP senators remain in support of the rule. If Congress is still at an impasse come early next week, it would mark the longest shutdown in US history. Every day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty to farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staffers will be facing after all the time spent furloughed, compounded by the already-strained workforce, will translate to further bottlenecks.  Over the last year, Ver Mulm has drained her savings to stave off having to sell the farm, living off of credit cards. Now, her credit score is shot, and Orange Creek Farms is on the cusp of insolvency. And with each day that passes with the government remaining in limbo, the small window to save their farm gets smaller. Ver Mulm is emotionally preparing herself for what’s to come—a growing likelihood that her family will soon need to close the chapter on feeding their community. “We’ve exhausted all of our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.”  This story was updated from the original version to reflect the latest news related to the emergency SNAP funding.

Normally, the 42 million Americans who rely on food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) begin to receive money they can use to purchase certain groceries on the first day of each month. But today, amid the 32-day-and-counting government shutdown, those funds weren’t there for the vast majority of recipients. (Governors in Virginia and Vermont pledged to use state funds to keep the program going for their respective residents, though both said brief delays were probable as they worked out technological challenges.) This is the first time in the program’s 61-year history that this has happened. Not because there have never been long government shutdowns, but because past administrations (including the first Trump administration) used contingency funds to keep SNAP operating while Congress worked out its budget disputes. After the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a memo indicating it would not use the contingency funds during this shutdown, more than 20 states sued, arguing that withholding already appropriated funds was illegal. A handful of cities and several nonprofit organizations filed a similar suit Thursday. On Friday, two judges indicated support for their arguments. In Rhode Island, US District Judge John McConnell issued an oral decision, affirming the plaintiffs’ argument that the Trump Administration “needlessly plunged SNAP into crisis,” and therefore has to use the reserve funds. “There is no doubt that the six billion dollars in contingency funds are appropriated funds that are without a doubt necessary to carry out the program’s operation,” McConnell said, according to NBC News. In a separate federal ruling Friday, US District Judge Indira Talwani wrote that the 20-plus states “are likely to succeed on their claim that Defendants’ suspension of SNAP benefits is unlawful.” These rulings will not protect SNAP benefits forever. While $9 billion is needed to cover November benefits alone, there is only estimated to be between $5 and $6 billion dollars in reserve funds. President Donald Trump has since asked the courts for guidance on how to proceed with limited funds. “Even if we get immediate guidance, [funding] will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Friday. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding.” In the meantime, food banks—like the one I visited in the greater Washington, DC, area earlier this week—have seen demand skyrocket as the 1 in 8 Americans who normally count on SNAP continue to face uncertainty about how much money will be deposited onto their debit-like benefits cards, and when. For this, the administration places full blame on Democrats, stating on the homepage of the USDA’s website that “Senate Democrats have now voted 13 times to not fund the food stamp program…Bottom line, the well has run dry.” But the latter part is not quite true. Contingency money for SNAP exists. Trump chose not to use it—at least, not until the courts made him.