Tag: food

USDA cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks

The Agriculture Department has axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending.

Roughly $660 million that schools and child care facilities were counting on to purchase food from nearby farms through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program in 2025 has been canceled, according to the School Nutrition Association.

State officials were notified Friday of USDA’s decision to end the LFS program for this year. More than 40 states had signed agreements to participate in previous years, according to SNA and several state agencies.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which supports food banks and other feeding organizations, has also been cut. USDA notified states that it was unfreezing funds for existing LFPA agreements but did not plan to carry out a second round of funding for fiscal year 2025.

In a statement, a USDA spokesperson confirmed that funding, previously announced last October, “is no longer available and those agreements will be terminated following 60-day notification.”

The spokesperson added: “These programs, created under the former Administration via Executive authority, no longer effectuate the goals of the agency. LFPA and LFPA Plus agreements that were in place prior to LFPA 25, which still have substantial financial resources remaining, will continue to be in effect for the remainder of the period of performance.”

The Biden administration expanded the spending for both programs to build a more resilient food supply chain that didn’t just rely on major food companies. Last year, USDA announced more than $1 billion in additional funding for the programs through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a New Deal-era USDA fund for buying agricultural commodities.

The Trump administration’s move to halt the programs comes as school nutrition officials are becoming increasingly anxious about affording healthy food with the current federal reimbursement rate for meals. As food costs have risen in the last few years, more people are turning to food banks and other feeding organizations to supplement their increased grocery bills.

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Trump’s DOJ Launches Investigation Into Soaring Egg Prices

The Department of Justice under President Trump has officially launched an investigation into the staggering surge in egg prices, which is expected to rise by more than 40% in 2025.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the DOJ has sent letters to major egg producers, demanding they preserve documents related to their pricing discussions with customers and competitors, as well as communications with Expana—formerly Urner Barry—a business publisher that tracks egg prices.

The investigation appears to be focused on determining whether major egg companies colluded to restrict supply and artificially inflate prices while raking in record-breaking profits.

The Biden administration’s economic disaster has already led to a crippling increase in food prices that have burdened American families. When Biden took office in January 2021, the average cost of a dozen eggs was just $1.47.

Fast forward to December 2024, and that same carton costs $4.15—a nearly 200% increase, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.

Now, with some stores pricing a dozen eggs at $10 or higher, the Trump administration is stepping in to determine whether corporate price gouging has worsened the crisis.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest data indicates that the national average price of eggs has soared to an alarming $6.85.

According to ABC7, one company that has greatly benefited from this crisis is Cal-Maine Foods, the largest producer of fresh eggs in the United States.

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US Scours World For Egg Supplies After Biden’s “Insane Slaughter Of 150 Million Chickens”

The Biden-Harris regime’s questionable handling of the nation’s food supply chain—leading to the culling of 150 million egg-laying chickens amid the avian flu crisis—has led to nationwide supply disruptions and record-high egg prices. There were no visible countermeasures Biden officials put in place to offset the loss of domestic production, and the out-of-control culling only created an epic disaster for consumers. Now, the Trump administration is left to manage the fallout, scrambling to secure global egg supplies in an urgent effort to stabilize prices. 

On Thursday, Elon Musk wrote on X, “It’s true. There was an insane slaughter of 150 million egg-laying chickens ordered by the Biden administration.” 

The mass culling of chickens infected with avian flu—or at least what the prior administration claimed—was part of the USDA’s “stamping-out policy.” Whether depopulating entire commercial flocks was the right approach remains to be seen.

According to Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, the previous administration’s approach was simply “to just, you know, kill chickens.”

Speaking to CBS last month, Hassett stated, “They spent billions of dollars randomly killing chickens within a perimeter where they found a sick chicken.”

On Tuesday night, Trump told a joint session of Congress that “Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control. The egg price is out of control. And we’re working hard to get it back down.”

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Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Encourages Americans to Raise Their Own Chickens at Home

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recommended that Americans raise their own chickens to help deal with the soaring prices of eggs.

The newly confirmed official in the Cabinet of President Donald Trump made the recommendation on “Fox & Friends Weekend” Saturday to anchor Rachel Campos-Duffy.

“I think the silver lining in all this is how do we, in our backyards — we’ve got chickens, too, in our backyard — how do we solve for something like this?” Rollins said, according to a report from Mediaite.

“And people are sort of looking around thinking, ‘Wow, well, Maybe I can get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”

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A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals, CR’s Tests Find

With the holiday season approaching, many of us will be indulging in a favorite treat: chocolate. Yet despite dark chocolate’s reputation as a healthier sweet, it can also be contaminated with lead and cadmium, two heavy metals linked to serious health problems, as many people learned from Consumer Reports’ testing last year.

Now CR has the results of our new tests on heavy metal levels in other kinds of chocolates and foods made with it.

In chocolate products, the lead and cadmium are concentrated in the cocoa (or cacao), the ingredient that gives chocolate its distinctive flavor. Dark chocolate tends to have higher levels of cacao. But other chocolate products contain cacao, too, in varying quantities—from cocoa powder, which is essentially pure cocoa, to milk chocolate, which can have very little.

CR’s experts wanted to see whether other cacao-containing foods posed a risk, so we tested 48 different products in seven categories—cocoa powder, chocolate chips, milk chocolate bars, and mixes for brownies, chocolate cake, and hot chocolate. We also added a few more dark chocolate bars to our test. Products came from big name brands such as Hershey’s, Ghirardelli, and Nestlé; national retailers like Costco, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and Whole Foods; and specialty makers such as Droste and Navitas.

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Study: Majority of EBT-Eligible Food Products Are Ultra-Processed

We’ve all been there: you’re waiting in the checkout line at your local Save money. Live better™ Walmart, or wherever fine groceries are sold, and in front of you is a family of four — all obese if not morbidly so — with a cart chock full of Dr. Thunder (Walmart’s Dr. Pepper knock-off) and Hot Pockets and stuff like that.

“EBT,” they say when the cashier reports their bill.

Then you realize — with a disparate mix of revulsion, empathy, and helplessness — that you have just subsidized their slow-burning suicide and the homicide of their equally fat children.

One advocacy group recently attempted to quantify this phenomenon.

Via GoCoCo (emphasis added):

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has come under increasing scrutiny for how its benefits are spent. Critics point out that the program may be “encouraging families to eat highly processed, unhealthy junk food” rather than nourishing them with wholesome options. This concern prompted us to conduct a detailed investigation into the foods eligible for purchase with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards (which deliver SNAP benefits) at one of the nation’s largest grocery retailers…

Our analysis of more than 13,000 SNAP-EBT eligible products reveals a stark nutritional reality. The vast majority of items that SNAP recipients can buy are highly processed. Notable findings include…

62% of EBT-eligible products studied are ultra-processed foods…

Nearly half (47%) of the products contain artificial flavorings…

8% of products contain additives that are banned in California or in California schools…

Over 160 products contain Red Dye No. 3, which has been recently banned by the FDA.

Of course, one of the biggest reasons this mass-scale human tragedy is allowed to play itself out is the influence of big food lobbyists in Washington (and at the state level) who bribe politicians and policymakers to include ultra-processed foods manufactured by mega-corporations like Nestle, Coca-Cola, et al. in the EBT program.

Often, these lobbyists go as low as weaponizing accusations of racism against anyone who objects.

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Your Vital Role in the Decorporatisation of the Food Chain

I am starting this article with information that will make you aware of the provenance for around 90% of all foods that you purchase while shopping at leading super and hypermarkets chains. This raises the important topic of decorporatisation of food.

The reality of what your food choices mean – on the ground – may never have occurred to you. But the reality is that by making supermarket chain stores your first choice for food purchases you have unwittingly become complicit in the creation of vast desert like tracts of land heavily sprayed with toxic agrichemicals.

The soils on these superstore supplying farms have been rendered devoid of life. The crops grow only because of heavy applications of synthetic nitrogen salts.

No worms, no insects, no life. No enriching soil borne microorganisms or microflora. They have been wiped-out by the products of Big Pharma and the weapons of the agrichemical corporation war chest.

The farmers using them have been made to believe that they are being ‘progressive’ and ‘efficient’ by adopting this government and corporate led intensive chemical regime, designed to replace time honored benign traditional farming methods.

Exactly the same tragic story prevails in the livestock sector. Unless you are stipulating organic, your pork and poultry purchases originate in animal concentration camps. Vast sunless sheds in which antibiotics and other drugs are prescribed prophylactically to keep their recipients alive for the three to five months which is the maximum duration of their tragically short existences.

No doubt you will also not realize that by shopping in the predatory supermarkets you have become a causative agent in the death of the small and medium sized family farms that still have respect for crop rotations, the use of natural farm animal manures and humane outdoor livestock rearing.

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President Trump Dismantles Fake News Media’s Narrative for High Egg Prices: ‘I’ve Been Here for Three Weeks’

President Donald Trump immediately addressed the media’s latest fixation on skyrocketing egg prices, a crisis they’ve been quick to blame on his recent return to the White House.

As Trump arrived at Palm Beach International Airport on Sunday en route to the Daytona 500, he was immediately questioned by reporters about the record-high egg prices, a topic that has been sensationalized by media outlets looking to blame his administration.

“Well, there’s a flu. Before I got here, it was already at an all-time high,” Trump said.

“I’ve been here for three weeks. I have had nothing to do with inflation. This was caused by Biden. I had four years of virtually no inflation. So I’m just taking over. But I’ll tell you what, this country has made more progress in the last three weeks than it’s made in the last four years, and we’re respected again as a country.”

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Teens Who Eat Ultraprocessed Foods Have Lower Muscle Mass

A revelation from recent research highlights that consuming higher amounts of UPFs elevates the risk of developing low muscle mass by 60% in young and middle-aged adults.

Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, this study draws attention to the growing concern over UPFs infiltrating modern diets and their tangible impact on muscle health.

Low muscle mass, a key indicator of sarcopenia, is characterized by a significant reduction in muscle size and strength.

This condition not only limits your physical capabilities but also increases the likelihood of metabolic disorders and raises your risk of mortality. Maintaining adequate muscle mass is key for overall health and functional independence as you age.

The study analyzed data from 10,255 adults aged 20 to 59 and found that 7.65% of participants were classified with low muscle mass. Individuals in the highest quartile of UPF consumption derived an average of 55.7% of their daily calories from these foods, compared to 54.62% in those with normal muscle mass.

According to the researchers, “Our study underscores a significant linear association between higher UPFs consumption and an elevated risk of low muscle mass in adults.”

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Grocery Chains Ration Eggs After Mass Chicken Slaughter For Bird Flu

The Democrats have been running the “what about egg prices?” line of attack against Trump hot and heavy lately, making the argument that egg prices are still astronomical and growing despite Trump promising to bring them down and having a full three weeks to reverse five years of economic sabotage by his predecessor.

What they conveniently leave out of the egg price narrative is that the Public Health™ authorities have been busy slaughtering poultry by the hundreds of millions for at least three years now.

Via CBS News (emphasis added):

Whether it’s ducks or chickens, since the current strain of bird flu, H5N1, reached the United States in 2022, over 148 million birds have been ordered euthanized. 

“It’s a staggering number, there is no doubt,” said Jodie Guest, a professor of epidemiology with Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “But it is, and always has been a policy across administrations, with the USDA, that this is how they handle infections like this among poultry. And as we’ve seen bird flu move [across] species, it becomes even more important to try to contain that infection in the flocks that it’s in, so that we don’t continue to see spread.”

Now major grocers have begun limiting egg purchases due to these shortages.

Look at the deceptive framing by even allegedly conservative Fox Business.

Via Fox Business (emphasis added):

Costco, Kroger and Whole Foods are among the growing list of grocers that are putting a purchasing limit on eggs as supply shortages persist. 

Companies started imposing limits on the product as the shortage caused by outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)*, or bird flu, persists, causing a frenzy among shoppers. Droves of viral videos have surfaced in recent weeks, showing shoppers stockpiling eggs. One video posted on TikTok claimed that an entire section of eggs at a Costco was gone in less than 10 minutes.

Amazon-owned Whole Foods posted signs on its shelves notifying customers that customers can only buy three cartons of eggs at one time. 

“We are currently experiencing difficulty sourcing eggs that meet our strict animal welfare standards,” a sign posted at one of its stores in New York City read.

*It wasn’t bird flu that killed hundreds of millions of chickens — it was the Public Health™ response to the alleged bird flu positives (scared up through inaccurate and often fraudulent PCR testing). This is the exact same scam they ran with COVID: lock everyone down, destroy the economy and society, and blame a virus instead of draconian government policy.

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