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The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market
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BY ALEXANDRA TALTY • July 31, 2024
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It was nearly sunset on a breezy May afternoon when Scott Lord and his wife Sheena pulled into Port Clyde, Maine, on the Eva Marie. The hull sat low in the water, weighed down by 2,500 pounds of sugar kelp. The Lords had been out on the water since 5 a.m. That day, they’d been out to their four-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds.
Scott and Sheena had worked quickly to stuff the kelp ribbons into giant bags. Now those bags were ready to be offloaded into a waiting truck and driven 100 miles southwest to their processor, Atlantic Sea Farms (ASF), near Portland, where many of the state’s kelp companies are based. Maine is the heart of America’s farmed seaweed industry, supplying half its harvest—well over a million pounds—last season.
Largely developed in Asia, seaweed farming is a new venture on American shores. One type in particular, kelp—a large brown algae with many species, including sugar kelp— has been hailed as an ecologically beneficial, nutritious superfood that can be farmed on both U.S. coasts—and could help fight climate change. These remarkable characteristics have helped the seaweed industry attract roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, from government, venture capital, and nonprofits.
However, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the global $9.9 billion market. And, according to farmers and kelp companies, the U.S. investment doesn’t yet address a range of logistical issues that challenge—some might even say threaten—the success of seaweed
production.
Read the full story, the latest in our in-depth series, “Kelp's Tangled Lines.”
This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.
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‘Shelf Life’ Peeks Into the Nooks and Crannies of the Cheesemaker’s World
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BY NICOLE J. CARUTH • July 30, 2024
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“Milk is one of the simplest things in nature,” says Jim Stillwagon, an eccentric cheesemaker standing in his cluttered kitchen somewhere in the Pyrenees. “When a child vomits on your shoulder, those are the earliest vestiges of cheese.”
Stillwagon’s strange philosophical musings on curd set the tone for Shelf Life, a new documentary about the parallels between cheese aging and human aging. Produced by Robyn Metcalfe and directed by Ian Cheney (whose films include King Corn and The Search for General Tso), Shelf Life premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, where it won the award for Best Cinematography in a Documentary Feature.
Filmed in more than six countries over three years, Shelf Life takes us inside the work spaces of artisan cheesemakers and specialists to observe them at their craft: through the halls of underground cheese vaults in Vermont. Under the microscope with a cheese microbiologist in California. Behind the scenes of the World Cheese Awards in Wales. Into a children’s classroom in Japan for a cheese-making lesson. And to the cheese-laden dining-room table of an award-winning cheesemonger in Chicago.
Wonderfully diverse in scope, the film lets us visit an archeologist’s dig site in Egypt to learn about cheese in the afterlife, observe a traditional hand-pulled cheese practice in Tbilisi, Georgia, and descend into the shadowy basement stacks of a cheese librarian in Switzerland. Metcalfe calls this remarkable cast of characters “the poets of the cheese business.” Read the full story.
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Hunger Doesn’t Take a Summer Break. Neither Do School Food Professionals.
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BY LISA HELD • July 29, 2024
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While students are done with classes for the summer, school districts and nonprofits across the U.S. are busy assembling meal packages, operating distribution sites, and serving free food to children in their communities.
Driving it all is a policy change members of Congress, led by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and John Boozman (R-Arkansas), quietly tucked into a December 2022 spending bill. In addition to authorizing a program that would put extra funds into low-income parents’ pockets for summer groceries, the lawmakers changed a longstanding provision that required schools to serve summer meals communally, eliminating the requirement for rural areas.
While it may seem like a tiny detail, school food professionals and child hunger organizations have long argued that in the past, requiring children to show up and sit down to eat had prevented them from reaching many food-insecure
households during the summer months. That was especially true in rural areas, where families are spread out and transportation options can be limited. In low-income districts like Caroline County—where all kids eat free during the school year—kids were likely going hungry as a result.
This summer, then, marks a turning point. Read the full story.
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Read Up On Our In-Depth Series and Investigations
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Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
In this investigative series, we examine whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals, and whether the influence that chemical companies wield in the halls of power makes it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit
analyses.
Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons Wield Unprecedented Influence Over Food, Policy, and the Planet
In this investigative series, we take a detailed look at Walmart and its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows.
Injured and Invisible
This five-part series deeply reports on an often unprotected, unseen workforce. Our investigation offers a deep dive into worker risks, including acute injuries and long-term illness, and the corporate behavior that sometimes obscures those harms from public view.
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