"These technologies are not about feeding the world"
A food industry veteran on GMOs, food tech, fair wages and the need for a new food economy
I first came across Errol about three years ago, during an event on food technology where we were amongst a group of speakers. It was held on Clubhouse, the voice-only app that became very popular during the pandemic lockdown. What happened to it, by the way?
Anyway, I was struck by his deep knowledge of the food industry as well as his eloquent insights, and started following his work on Forbes, where he writes thoughtful pieces on the welfare of farm workers, the supply chain crisis, retail food pricing, regenerative agriculture, alternative proteins, and more.
As you can imagine, we have a lot of topics of common interest. So we stayed in touch and I’m glad to be able to share his thoughts this week. And no Thin’s Pickings again, since this issue is also quite long.
Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, Errol Schweizer grew up in a community centre. By his own admission, he has “probably worked every kind of crazy blue collar job - construction, landscaping, maintenance, warehouse logistics” as well as side jobs in the food service industry since he was 18.
“Line cook, grill cook, sandwich maker, clean up… I know how to run one of those industrial dishwashers. It just helped me pay the bills. I was lucky I was able to go to college,” he said.
It was during his university days at Binghamton in Upstate New York that he got into grocery retail. That experience took him to Whole Foods, where he spent 14 years, working his way up from stocking shelves and ordering products to vice president of grocery at the Austin, Texas, branch. In the process, he helped create strict procurement and sourcing standards for organic, non-GMO, fair labour, humanely raised animal products and plant-based foods in the process.
At one point, while at Whole Foods, he came close to eliminating all GMOs from the supply chain. He is still angry it didn’t happen.
“We had consensus from all the regional buyers across the multiple product teams… and it was quashed and I will never fucking forgive him for that. We had negotiated commodity and ingredient contracts… and someone who will remain nameless said, “No, we can't do that. It's too risky”.”
Since he left the company in 2016, the Austin-based “adopted Southerner” has been consulting for a number food-related businesses while wearing multiple hats, including as a board member of the Non-GMO Project, presenter and co-founder of The Checkout podcast, contributing to Forbes, and most recently as a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
Last week, I managed to steal an hour from his busy schedule to talk about all things food systems, including his long-standing resistance to GMOs and his healthy skepticism of food tech. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get into the food industry?
A: When I went up to Binghamton University, there was a sort-of hippie punk-rock food co-op on campus and I started hanging out there - helping out, stocking the shelves, making a nuisance of myself, ordering product and occasionally sourcing stuff from local farmers. That was like in the mid 90s before I knew of Whole Foods stores.
I was a biology major and pre-med so I also worked as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician). It wasn't for me. I did immunology research for a while, then environmental science. I just didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. After school, I worked for a series of nonprofit jobs: food and environmental justice and some tenant organising, some student organising. Some things I did better at than others. I kept trying new jobs.
I grew up at a community centre, so I was always imbued with the sense of dysfunctional family. Like, you love everybody but they drive you crazy. It was actually my wife who suggested I go work for Whole Foods. She knew that I loved working at that food co-op years ago.
I thought it was too bougie. I'm a trashy kid from the Bronx. I was like, “This is not for me. They are not servicing people like me.” But I went in there and I kind of got that dysfunctional family vibe. It wasn't what I thought it was. It wasn't this elitist, glitzy thing, just a bunch of hippies and punks and musicians who needed a job and that's who Whole Foods used to hire. And they hired me.
At the time my daughter was a newborn and my wife was working two or three jobs to help pay the bills. So I had to get my shit together.
Then I realised I may be able to move up. I had health insurance - employee-based health insurance in the United States its own form of authoritarianism but once you do get it, you don't want to let it go no matter how bad you're abused or exploited - so I stuck with it.
It was very hard at Whole Foods to even talk to people about unions. Pathologically anti-union culture. At the same time, I loved it because it had a very social democratic atmosphere. They gave great benefits. The pay rates were pretty good. There was a lot of opportunities. Whole Foods did not have a culture of data and analytics. I was one among a cohort of folks around my age who were coming up in the company at the time, like 15 years ago, who were like, “Let's react better to the data”.
At the time, customers in Whole Foods were buying organic and wanted fair labour made products. They were really anti-GMO and wanted minimally-processed food. So it worked out for me, because they were buying what I was selling. I didn't feel I had to compromise too much other than working at a non-union Corporation.
Out of any national chain, (Whole Foods) has been doing more, but they're very careful about how far they push things, because they know they also have to compete on price with Walmart and Target and Costco. One of the reasons I left around 2016 was that I got pushed out. Now it's all part time employees and it’s hard to rise higher unless you're in a white collar job. All the labour savings were invested in their prices to make certain Items more competitive.
They sacrificed their employees in order to get a little cheaper on price so they wouldn't be elbowed out of the market. If folks think that's what will get people in the door at Whole Foods versus showing the true cost of product…. That’s why we need to change the economics.
Q: After you left, why did you decide to pivot to the podcast and the writing, instead of joining another grocery chain?
A: I've always been a writer since high school. I published an underground comic magazine. In college, I edited two alternative newspapers. I worked for a whole bunch of alternative media. But I took a big break from that - I just had no brain space to write during my Whole Foods years.
So when I left Whole Foods (in 2016), I started consulting. I am a primary caregiver for family members, so I decided I did not want to jump right in to a full time gig. Consulting is a hustle, as all freelancers know. You don't get rich doing it, but you can make a living if you continue to put yourself out there, add value, and folks appreciate your work.
The media stuff happened during Black Lives Matter and in a pandemic when I was grounded. A colleague friend and neighbour of mine here in Austin is Evan Driscoll, who is a longtime organic food movement person. We've been talking about collaborating for a while so we decided, “Hey, let's start a podcast”. Like every other white men in Austin in lockdown (laughs). But we did it differently, centering the folks in the food industry and also do my own editorials, which are like audio essays on a particular topic.
Then the Forbes thing came up because I have a good friend who's in PR who loves my critiques of the food industry. She introduced me to somebody at Forbes, who are super supportive. They said, “You are a subject matter expert and you have a unique perspective", which is probably an understatement.
I've written probably over 40 pieces now and it's been great.
Q: So how do you choose what to write, because they are very different from what I’d imagine to be a typical Forbes story.
A: When I was at Whole Foods, I was a merchandiser, a Category Manager. So that's a bit of economics, a bit of anthropology, a lot of sociology. You have to pay attention to trends, the news cycle, what people are saying and doing. We had a media monitor that we read every day. I opened it the first thing I got to the office. I still do that. I read a lot more journalism articles than I do books.
Then occasionally I get an idea - something’s pissing me off or this is in the news and I have a unique take on it. So the main themes I've written about centres the perspective of the essential workers in the food system - the folks stocking the shelves, the cashiers, folks with a critical take and not just cheerleaders - and put them in the driver's seat. I speak to folks who deserve to to be recognised as the essential heroes they are.
I occasionally get hate mail. Who cares? You know, I used to get death threats when I was at Whole Foods for supporting halal food.
The editors have mostly been supportive. They will occasionally get complaints if I haven't crossed all my T's and dot all my I’s or from the companies that I've criticised. If they have a good point, if I've misinterpreted something, I'll change it. Otherwise the critics can go pound sand.
The other themes are food economy and the political economy of food systems, and while I didn't expect them to take off, some of my most popular pieces are on food technology.
Q: Speaking of food tech, you’re one of the first to write critical pieces around alternative proteins, particularly cell-based meats. Tell me about your thought process when someone tells you, “This is the next great big solution that will solve everything”.
A: It's just me applying the same critical thoughts to new technology that I had to when I was at Whole Foods. I'm not holding food technology to a higher standard. I'm holding it to the same standard. It's not even the standard that I hold CAFOs or factory farm agriculture.
I guess it's important for folks to know their playbook. They just imported the playbook, the same set of talking points that the current spate of GMOs have been marketed since the mid 90s, which I've been writing about since 1996-97, because I was biology major and I came across that stuff in class.
And I've stayed involved because I believe in autonomy, I believe in personal freedom and personal choice, and that stuff (GMOs) takes that away because it is a technology that does not want to be labelled, does not want to be advertised, and it's a technology that occurs further back in the supply chain away from the consumers.
It's heavily marketed to farmers and also it is tied directly to chemical intensive agriculture, which I have been very much against since I had any thoughts about food, especially from a food worker perspective, who is bearing the external costs of that. So in terms of food tech, I just apply the same rigour, the same set of questions, consistently. No double standards here.
It’s the same set of talking points with just some new talking heads. Unfortunately, some of the same talking heads, like a bunch of Monsanto people, now work in (the alt protein) sector. In the food industry, particularly the natural products space, there is a code of honour around food transparency and ethical marketing and attributes. Even when you have folks who are not as ethical, they eventually get called out.
So for me as a buyer, as a merchant, and now, as a journalist, (these rhetoric) stick out like a sore thumb. I’m not saying I'm against technology. I've always supported innovation.
My team launched Beyond Meat, (non-dairy) Daiya, (organic dairy-free milk) Ripple. My team launched a half dozen other nationally placed plant based alt-protein products. If there’s anybody in the industry who can call BS, it's going to be me, and it will be me. And if you don't like that, just don't click on the link.
Q: What about the argument that we need these alternatives because livestock farming in rich countries is not sustainable and this is how to feed the world?
A: Sure it's an eco-modernist ideology. It's whether you buy into the eco-modernist perspective. Some people do and they're very passionate about it and they make some really good points.
I’m not an Alice Waters-style pastoralist. I'm still an industrialist. I am still about finding scale and replicability at some level, but I'm also very, very firm about local, regional sourcing, fair prices for farmers, and fair working conditions and wages for farm workers.
So in terms of the technology itself, there's a few things. Who's making the decisions? Who's deciding what is innovation and where it needs to go? Who's funding? Where's the money coming from and what do they want out of it? That money is not free, folks.
If you're getting investment at seed stage for this sort of stuff from a VC, they're wanting to turn one penny into 100. They have a formula for deciding how you're going to do that for them. They have terms that protects their interests. I've worked with plenty of VCs and I'm not impressed with how they make bets on things but they also know that most of what they make bets on will fail.
Also, who's the owner, who's governing the organisation, who owns the IP? A lot of this food tech, and taking this a logical extreme, if these guys succeed and corner the market on a commodity, that's a whole different scale of concentration and monopoly power than cornering the market as just a supplier of that commodity.
We now have four major grain companies - the ABCD - and we have a handful of meat suppliers. What if somebody controls the IP for meat? To me, that's a magnitude greater problem. Eco-modernists - and there are some great eco-modernists - are very much about some government or public control over the IP.
There's a part of that I agree with, but you’ve got to keep in mind that food imperialism and the domination of food industry and the food trade is still being performed by governments, not just the private sector. So it's not a cure-all just to have public ownership in these technologies.
In terms of your initial question, when somebody says that, here's the only stat I will give them - 25+ years into the introduction of GMOs into the American food system, 75% of grocery workers are food insecure. I thought these were supposed to feed the world. They literally can't even “feed” grocery clerks. And here's why: one thing has nothing to do with the other.
These technologies are not about feeding the world. They're about leveraging guilt and paranoia about food systems collapse in order to enrich the few who own the IP and then dominate the marketplace.
Food insecurity in the industry is the result of low wages, poor working conditions, consolidation, etc, which I've written about. So they were supposed to feed the world, they literally can't even feed the people stocking their shelves. Like I said, the twain shall never meet. They have nothing to do other than the over-corporatisation and consolidation of the food industry. Once again, who's making the decisions? Who's selling the technology? Who owns the IP?
What does a food technology regime look like if it were to be driven by food system workers, cashiers, folks in the fields, folks milking the cows? I don't have that answer. Why don't we ask them? That's the thing about eco-modernists. You're still making the same mistake as the VCs and the corporate tech bros. We can still have food tech, but we need to look at who is benefiting and who owns it over the long term as opposed to these magic bullets.
It's an easy way out from solving really complex problems that need much more collaborative solutions than just a quick fix.
Q: You said earlier that GMOs take away personal choice. My issue with GMOs is the IP regime. I just don't think GMOs can work unless that is resolved, but there is a massive push to adopt them in Africa and Asia, as a solution for food insecurity against climate-induced harvest failures in the future. What are your criticisms and issues against GMOs and your involvement with the Non-GMO Project?
A: First of all, I find the genetic engineering technologies really cool and interesting. I just think we need a whole lot more accountability and social controls around them, because of what they can do. Obviously a lot of the transgenic crops we have now are built around chemical-intensive agriculture. Also, a lot of the cisgenesis technologies… we just don't know what some of the externalities or other problems are gonna be and those folks are just really dishonest about it.
If you read risk assessment reports or ESG reports from some of these companies and what they're actually telling their investors, that really will scare the shit out of you when they're saying these are biohazards or that there may be risks if you give us money. They tell the investor class this because once again, we live in capitalism, and they're having to tell the capitalists, the holders of capital, what they'll do with their money.
So that to me is really important. Non-GMO Project is a wonderful group. I've known them since they started. We build out supply chains at Whole Foods - I mean, I'm a marketer by extension but I'm a supply chain, logistics procurement person. In order to put a little butterfly label (to signify there are no GMOs) on something, at Whole Foods or other retailers and natural grocers, you have to create supply chains to ensure that Monsanto seeds weren't in the supply chain.
We were testing organic tortilla chips and were finding 30% GMOs! We had to make sure that our suppliers were sourcing non-GMO certified seeds and also (ensure it’s GMO-free in) the bin, the railcar, the silo, and then when it gets to the manufacturing plant, are they doing a segregated run just on that? Make sure that if they're sourcing GMO for another supplier, that there’s no commingling.
Organic does this already, which is great, but organic looks backward through the supply chain to make sure you got all your paperwork in order. Non-GMO certification looks forward from the point of production. Sometimes even two or three steps below before the plant production.
When I was a merchant, we had to perform for Wall Street, but it took off because customers decided they wanted it and we would see huge growth when we put products through the certification, through the supply chain rigour, and then started marketing and saying 99% of the products with this label don't have GMO.
Then we assured the organic community that these are actually organic plus Non-GMO verified. Those are actually the best sellers.
But we've just created a line in the sand. We haven't won anything. The non-GMO market is like maybe 6% of the US packaged food supply chain and the organic market is around 5% and less than 1% of U.S. farmland. The new USDA Farm Census is really depressing, like we've lost a lot of ground.
The consumer still wants the stuff, but the overwhelming pressure is CAFO factory farm, industrial, chemical-intensive GMO agriculture in this country. This is imperial production, even though up to 90% of consumers have an organic product in their pantry. It's bonkers. It's not even giving people what they want. (THIN: Non-GMO Project has said their verified items saw steep growth between 2019 - 2021.)
The supply side is being driven by the agrochemical industry and the revolving door relationship with the USDA and with the government. Don't even get me started on the dysfunctional FDA who are just so removed from what consumers actually buy and eat.
For me, it’s about agroecology and fair trade, a fair labour based regenerative system, but you can't do that unless you have some protection. Some sort of fence for your own product. Without non-GMO (certification), literally everything would be GMO and there would be so little organic at this point because there’d be so much contamination from pollen, from intermingling in the supply chain and in manufacturing. That is what is behind that seal.
For now, I think we've got a little safe space but I constantly feel like we're losing ground even though the consumer is going the other way and saying we want more and more of this stuff.
Q: What do you think the rest of the world can learn from the US Food Systems? What about the other way around?
A: The US is just so screwed up. Obviously, the main thing to learn is to not let UPFs (ultra-processed foods) and GMOs take over your your diet. I mean, UPFs are 60% of calories here in the US, GMOs are in 80% of processed food. Diet-related illnesses probably costs about $600 billion. So the health related costs of the US food system are about equal to the average annual US retail sales.
On the one hand, we've eliminated most forms of starvation and malnutrition. On the other, we have huge food insecurity among the working poor, which has to do not with food availability - because we throw away like 30% of our food in the US - because of geography, wages, working conditions, even the lack of sidewalks to grocery stores.
There's so many aspects to why the US is so ass backwards in so many things. They've designed a food system that works for their shareholders’ benefit, as opposed to how do we create a food system that supports human needs and well-being, that supports the wages and better working conditions, and an upward mobility of people working in the food system, which I have been very lucky to have experienced.
I’m an anomaly. They either come in white collar, and stay white collar or they come in blue collar and stay blue collar. So I'm well suited to look at inequality, power and ownership and governance.
Finally, the other crazy thing is that the US consumer is running polar opposite to policy. Here, study after study showed they want more sustainable products. They want more organic, more non-GMO, fair trade, all workers to be treated and paid well. They want regenerative when they understand what it means. They want all the good stuff.
By the way, they also want Oreos, Doritos, sour gummy worms and ice cream. But maybe we just need those in moderation. They’re a snack once in a while. It shouldn't be a subsistence diet.
Q: You know, I was just reading Marion Nestle's blog on how the cuts to SNAP funding (the government’s anti-hunger programme for low-income families) had an impact on the Kraft Mac & Cheese which is an ultra-processed food (UPF).
A: I love Professor Nestle. But that is so dystopian that SNAP cuts hurt mac and cheese sales and that's what folks can afford. SNAP pays for maybe 30% of what somebody actually needs to eat in a month and it is just a huge subsidy for the grocery industry, most of which are going to Walmart and Kroger.
But I think she gets it backwards. It's not that Kraft Mac & Cheese is so cheap. It's that carrots and fresh foods are too expensive. But also nobody's gonna eat a pound of carrots. This is why I'm talking about regionalised processing or food prep. You want people to eat more carrots? Put it in a format that is easy accessible for them. Make it more affordable. bring the price down. Fresh produce should be free.
We can make all fresh produce free for less than half the price of what we paid to increase the (U.S.) military budget in the last four years. I'm all for keeping Kraft Mac & Cheese cheap if that's all people can buy, but give everybody $1,000 a month for food. It'll go right back into the economy, create productivity, create jobs, and people will be healthier because they'll have the money to buy actually good food. By the way, I love mac and cheese. Just add a little frozen broccoli.
Q: Speaking of which, last question. Do you see yourself as somebody who's interested in food beyond just the political economy and the systems? As in, do you consider yourself a foodie?
A: The whole foodie thing is funny because I think Whole Foods cursed the world by popularising that term. We were reviewing 2,000 products a year, across over 1,000 different brands. It was exhausting. So when somebody tells me about a hot new restaurant or a hot new food trend, I react with initial scepticism and doubt.
I'm open-minded enough to try everything I can that doesn't make me sick, I pay attention to trends, but if it were up to me, I would probably just eat Chinese or Vietnamese food every night. Or northern Thai or northern Indian like Gujarati cuisine. And Mexican is one of the greatest food cuisines in the world. I've tried Burmese food a couple times. In general I just dislike white American food.
So I'm not a foodie. I'm a habitual eater.
Q: Well, the definition of foodie to me is not somebody who's snobbish about food but somebody who just enjoys food.
A: Oh, I enjoy food. I love fresh food. So I guess I'm a foodie by your definition, but you know, the food snobbery just drives me crazy.
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