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Editors' Note
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Thank you to all of those who helped celebrate all of our recent successes on Giving Tuesday, and to those who have been participating in NewsMatch. We have just a few weeks left until December 31, 2023 to match your donations, dollar for dollar. Your contributions help support our award-winning reporting, and stories like today’s latest installment in our
ongoing Walanthropy series, in which 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.
Contributor Alice Driver traveled to Honduras with photographer Jacky Muniello to bring us gripping reporting on the Indigenous Miskito lobster divers who support the $46.7 million spiny lobster industry, exported almost entirely to U.S. markets. In recent years, roughly 4,000 Miskito lobster divers have been disabled; many are paraplegic or quadriplegic. At least 400 have died.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights recently found Honduras responsible for the lack of safety standards for fishing companies operating in its waters. But in the U.S., the same fishery was touted as a success story. One of the Walton Family Foundation's inaugural fishery improvement projects (FIPs), an investment to "fix" spiny lobster fishing in Honduras, was rolled out in partnership with Darden Restaurants, the former owner of Red Lobster, at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative to much fanfare.
Walton's own consultants have found that FIPs necessarily depend on pressing foreign governments to comply with reforms. Despite the continued risk of injury to lobster divers, early efforts at improving the fishery did not address the safety of divers, and the focus appears to have been to simply maintain a steady supply of lobster.
This deeply reported investigation includes first-person accounts from the divers whose lives have been forever altered to bring cheap lobster to the American market. Driver, together with Associate Editor Christina Cooke and former Staff Reporter Gosia Wozniacka, won a James Beard Award this year for their 2022 investigation on animal agriculture workers, and today’s story is equally powerful—please read it and share with your communities.
If you appreciate this type of in-depth, investigative work that shines a light on the American food system, please consider making a donation to Civil Eats this giving season. From all of us at Civil Eats, thank you.
~ The Civil Eats Editors
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Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster
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By ALICE DRIVER • December 6, 2023
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Honduran spiny lobster is a $46.7 million industry, exported almost entirely to U.S. markets. While some of the lobster is cage-caught, it is cheaper to rely on divers. But dive boats and the processors that buy their catch do not invest in training or equipping divers. In the remote region with few jobs, the owners of the lobster boats save money at the cost of the divers, paying poverty wages, offering no protective gear, demanding an unsafe number of dives per day, and sometimes offering divers drugs to
increase their tolerance for pain and weariness. When divers are injured, most dive boat owners do not want to pay for their care.
Most divers in the region always dive without a wetsuit, air gauge, or depth gauge. If their air runs out and a diver has to ascend quickly or dive beyond the 130-feet limit for single-cylinder diving, they could get decompression sickness, also called the bends. Of the 9,000 divers in the region, 97 percent have suffered from the bends after ascending too quickly and breathing compressed air that contains nitrogen gas, which can accumulate in the diver’s body tissue. Trained divers make safety stops while ascending, the length of which are usually calculated by their dive watch, taking into account their maximum depth. If divers are not taken to a decompression chamber within 24 hours of getting the bends, they can suffer numbness,
impaired coordination, paralysis, and cerebral disorders.
The U.S. companies that import spiny lobster and the U.S. organizations that are active in fisheries in Honduras try to avoid the labor rights issues inherent in lobster diving. They say that they only source from and work with cage-caught lobster. Some, including the Walton Family Foundation and Darden Restaurants, the former owner of Red Lobster, have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to turn this lobster into a success story. For the people that live here, it isn’t. Read the
full story.
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Our 2023 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide
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By THE CIVIL EATS EDITORS • December 5, 2023
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At Civil Eats, we immerse ourselves in food and agriculture books throughout the year to deepen our knowledge, stay up to date, and produce robust coverage of the books making an impact in the food and ag space. And every year ahead of the holidays, we ramp up our reading to offer you a holiday book guide that we hope can aid you as you select gifts for your loved ones—and yourself.
In this 2023 Holiday Book Guide, you’ll find reviews of memoirs, personal essays, histories, science writing, journalism, cookbooks, guidebooks, and photo collections—written by our editors, staff writers, and freelance contributors. In addition to our top picks for holiday giving, you’ll find a roundup of our recent book coverage.
We hope it will prove useful for your holiday giving—and offer wisdom and inspiration to you and yours this holiday season. Read the full story.
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Can Agriculture Kick Its Plastic Addiction?
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By NAOKI NITTA • December 4, 2023
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Plastics are tightly woven into the fabric of modern agriculture. Black polyethylene “mulch film” gets tucked snugly around crop rows, clear plastic sheeting covers hoop houses, and most farmers use plastic seed trays, irrigation tubes, and fertilizer bags.
These synthetic polymer products have often been used to help boost yields up to 60 percent and make water and pesticide use more efficient. In China, for example, research shows that plastic field covers keep the soil warm and wet in a way that boosts productivity considerably; an additional 15,000 square miles of arable land—an area about the size of Switzerland—would be required to produce the same
amount of food.
But plasticulture, or the use of plastic products in agriculture, also comes with a wide range of known problems. Plastic contaminates fields at a much greater scale than it does our oceans, posing an acute threat to soil health and food security. Research shows that as the chemicals from degrading debris leach into the soil, their persistence decreases crop productivity while snaking up the food chain, appearing in earthworm guts and even human placentas.
In the larger scope, agriculture accounts for a small slice of the plastics pie—less than 3 percent of the annual 440 million tons produced worldwide. Yet their pervasive use—along with farmland, plastics cover everything from individual seeds to bales of hay and packaged produce—has allowed them to plant themselves deeply in our food supply. “Relatively speaking, it’s a small volume,” says Philip Demokritou, vice chair of Rutgers University’s environmental occupational health and justice department and author of a recent international report on plastics in agriculture. “But it carries the highest risks.” Read the full story.
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The latest from Walanthropy:
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Op-ed: Walmart's Outsized Catch
Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation have relied on a debatable definition of “sustainable” seafood that allows it to achieve its sourcing goals without fundamentally changing its business model.
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Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What's Changed?
We talk with Elizabeth Sturcken for an up-close look at the sustainability alliance between the environmental nonprofit and the retail behemoth.
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Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’
Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the potential to remake the marketplace.
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The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire
Walmart’s annual revenues are larger than the GDP of Sweden; its founding family are prolific philanthropists. Their nexus is poorly understood.
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Stay tuned for more reporting on Walmart and the Walton Family's unprecedented influence over food, policy, and the planet.
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