Fungi are everywhere, even if we can’t see them. There are between two and four million known species of fungi on Earth with thousands more discovered every year, and we’re increasingly recognizing their ability to address plastic pollution, climate-warming greenhouse gases, and environmental toxins. Below the soil, mycelium breaks down organic matter, and mushrooms are the fruiting body that rises above ground. Some are toxic, some are medicinal, and many have specific cultural importance. The mushrooms below are just a few of the many that have proven benefits to human health. If you’re foraging and harvesting mushrooms yourself, remember to use caution and consult foraging guides to make sure you’re collecting the right species, and doing so in a way that isn’t harmful to the ecosystems you find them in.
General Health Benefits of Mushrooms
Mushrooms are high in vitamins and minerals like calcium, iron, magnesium, niacin, potassium, riboflavin, selenium, and zinc, and are good sources of protein and fiber. They also have numerous other benefits for brain, heart, and gut health, and are even showing anti-cancer properties — long believed in traditional medicine — in emerging research.
Brain Health
A 2018 study conducted in Singapore found that participants who ate two cups of mushrooms each week were 50% less likely to develop MCI: that is, mild cognitive impairment, which includes difficulty with language and memory. The study lasted from 2011 to 2017 and involved 663 participants, who ate six common mushrooms including button, shiitake, and oyster mushrooms.
Heart Health
Mushrooms have multiple features that make them beneficial for heart health and for lowering your risk of heart-related illnesses. A high intake of sodium is associated with high blood pressure and hypertension, which can cause stroke and heart diseases. Mushrooms are naturally low in sodium — a cup of white mushrooms has only five milligrams of sodium, but they can reduce the need for salt in meals while maintaining flavor. Thus, mushrooms are a great substitute for meat — even partially — in some recipes if you’re hoping to decrease sodium levels in your diet. They are also a great source of potassium, which helps reduce the impact of sodium and relieve blood vessel tension, all of which is beneficial for blood pressure.
Gut Health
Besides their high concentrations of fiber, mushrooms provide other benefits to the gut. They are high in polysaccharides — a type of carbohydrate that helps the body grow healthy bacteria — and also act as “prebiotics,” a type of fiber that cannot be digested by the body, but is stored and fermented in the large intestine by bacteria. As a prebiotic, mushrooms stimulate the growth of microbiota in the gut.
Vitamin D and Immune Health
Mushrooms have gotten increasing attention for their immune system benefits, with their concentrations of Vitamin D being one of the many factors. In fact, mushrooms are the only sufficient produce and non-animal source of vitamin D. When mushrooms are exposed to UV light, they become higher in Vitamin D. Vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium, which is important for bone and immune health. It’s also considered a “shortfall nutrient,” meaning it’s common for Americans not to reach their recommended intake.
Cancer Prevention
Given their concentrations of ergothioneine — an antioxidant/amino acid that works to prevent and slow down damage to cells — there’s some evidence that mushrooms can decrease your risk of cancer. A review of a relatively small number of cancer studies between 1966 and 2020 found that consuming 18 grams of mushrooms per day could reduce the risk of developing cancer by about 45%. The study found that any variety of mushrooms was helpful, but shiitake, oyster, maitake, and king oyster have especially high concentrations of ergothioneine.
Five Super Beneficial Mushrooms
While fungi as a whole have tons of awesome health benefits, these mushrooms are especially known for their medicinal properties, and many have been used in traditional medicine throughout history.
Shiitake
A basket of freshly picked shiitake mushrooms at Le Saut aux Loups restaurant in Loire Valley, France. Tim Graham / Getty Images
Growing on fallen logs, Shiitake mushrooms have a long history in East Asia as both a source of medicine and food. Shiitake are high in vitamin B6, which is important for the formation of red blood cells and proteins. B vitamins in general help with cell growth, thus aiding hair, skin, and nails. Shiitakes are also high in eritadenine, a compound that can reduce cholesterol levels. That in combination with their inflammation-reducing beta glucans prevents cholesterol from being absorbed. So, if you’re struggling with high cholesterol, add some shiitakes to a stir fry, noodle or pasta dish, sauce, or over rice for a delicious and healthful meal.
Chaga
A chaga mushroom growing on a birch tree trunk. Ksenia Shestakova / iStock / Getty Images Plus
The first known use of Chaga was in 17th-century Russia, and now it’s famous for its immune system benefits. Chaga grows on birch trees in colder climates, and looks more like a rock than a mushroom. Its woody texture makes it a better candidate for tea or capsules than actual cooking, but it does nothing to diminish its benefits. It contains polysaccharides (that healthy, bacteria-growing carbohydrate) that help the body produce lymphocytes — white blood cells that help with immune response to infection. They also contain oodles of antioxidants — just one cup of chaga tea has the same level of antioxidants as thirty pounds of carrots.
Reishi
Reishi mushrooms growing in a forest. James Mahan / iStock / Getty Images Plus
The history of reishi’s use in traditional Chinese medicine is long — its first records were from the Han Dynasty. Like many other mushrooms, their beta glucans and glycoproteins boost the immune system. Some research also points to reishi’s anti-allergy properties due to its ability to inhibit the release of histamines, which cause cells to swell and result in typical allergy symptoms like sneezing and runny noses. By reducing dermal oxidation, reishi protects your skin from wrinkling and other symptoms of aging, while also benefiting energy levels.
Lion’s Mane
A lion’s mane mushroom on a tree trunk. Arterra / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Lion’s mane doesn’t look like your typical mushroom with a distinctive round, smooth cap — instead, it’s characterized by the tons of long, thin, pale strands hanging from a central body that looks, of course, like the head of a lion. In Chinese medicine, the mushroom was traditionally used for treating stomach problems with its strong anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties, particularly those relating to the spleen and the gut. It was called the “spirit plant,” and was believed to promote longevity. Lion’s mane also has strong neurological benefits, and early research shows that it protects against neurological damage and prompts nerve-tissue growth. It stimulates NGF — standing for nerve growth factors — which are proteins that protect neurons and help new ones grow, and thus helps nervous systems. Therefore, it could be beneficial for people with MS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.
Turkey Tail
Turkey tail mushrooms. Arterra / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Like Lion’s mane, turkey tail looks just how the name suggests, like a flared turkey’s tail. The mushroom is greatly beneficial to the immune system, especially with its high concentrations of polysaccharides and triterpenes that have immunomodulating benefits. Turkey tail also contains PSK — a cancer drug used in Japan — and PSP: two beta-glucans that regenerate white blood cells, and create and support T-cells, macrophages, and NK (natural killer) cells, all of which support the immune system.
The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it would funnel $3.46 billion toward upgrading the country’s aging electric grid — marking its largest-ever investment in that part of the United States’ energy network.
The funding, which comes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that President Joe Biden signed in 2021, is intended to prepare the grid for more renewable energy capacity as the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels, and to prevent blackouts caused by increasingly severe climate disasters.
Between 2011 and 2021, the country experienced a 78 percent increase in weather-related power outages compared to the previous decade. Twenty percent of these outages were caused by hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires.
“Extreme weather events fueled by climate change will continue to strain the nation’s aging transmission systems,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. She added that the new funding would “harden systems” and “improve energy reliability and affordability.”
The new funding targets 58 projects across 44 states that, cumulatively, are expected to leverage $8 billion in federal and private investments in grid expansion and resiliency. Many of these projects involve building new “microgrids,” groups of dispersed but interconnected energy-generating units that can provide electricity even when the larger grid is down. For example, a solar microgrid involves lots of rooftop solar panels all feeding into a common pool of electricity — usually stored in a battery that serves as a source of backup power during an outage.
The funding also will also support the development of several large-scale transmission lines, including five new lines across seven Midwestern states. These lines help carry electricity from place to place, allowing clean energy to be generated in rural areas, where land tends to be more plentiful, and delivered to population centers.
Other projects involve more general upgrades to accommodate greater loads of electricity or improve emergency monitoring systems. Altogether, the DOE says the projects will help bring 35 gigawatts of renewable energy online, equivalent to roughly half of the U.S.’s utility-scale solar capacity in 2022. This will contribute to President Biden’s goal of moving the country’s electricity generation away from fossil fuels by 2035. As of 2021, the power sector accounted for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The Energy Department highlighted the selected projects’ commitments under Justice40, a Biden administration initiative that promises to direct at least 40 percent of the benefits of federal investment in infrastructure, clean energy, and other climate-related projects to disadvantaged communities, often defined as those that are low-income or that have been disproportionately exposed to pollution. According to the Energy Department, 86 percent of the projects contain labor union contracts or will involve collective bargaining agreements, and the agency says they will help “maintain and create good-paying union jobs.”
Many of the projects also have a specific focus on improving grid reliability for rural or low-income households. For example, one project in Oregon aims to upgrade transmission capacity and bring carbon-free solar power to remote customers on the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation. Another project in Louisiana will create a backup battery system that could reduce energy bills for disadvantaged communities.
Wednesday’s announcement allocates just some of the funds included in the Energy Department’s broader, $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program, which is expected to fund more grid resiliency projects in the future. Meanwhile, experts say funding to upgrade power grids needs to double globally by 2030 in order to facilitate the transition from fossil fuels to technologies powered by electricity — electric vehicles instead of gas cars, for example, or heat pumps instead of furnaces. Otherwise, a report released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency warns that aging electric grids could become a “bottleneck for efforts to accelerate clean energy transitions and secure electricity security.”
One-third of American kitchens have gas stoves — and evidence is piling up that they’re polluting homes with toxic chemicals. A study this summer found that using a single gas stove burner on high can raise levels of cancer-causing benzene above what’s been observed from secondhand smoke.
It turns out gas stoves have much more in common with cigarettes. A new investigation by NPR and the Climate Investigations Center found that the gas industry tried to downplay the health risks of gas stoves for decades, turning to many of the same public-relations tactics the tobacco industry used to cover up the risks of smoking. Gas utilities even hired some of the same PR firms and scientists that Big Tobacco did.
Earlier this year, an investigation from DeSmog showed that the industry understood the hazards of gas appliances as far back as the 1970s and concealed what they knew from the public. The new documents fill in the details of how gas utilities and trade groups obscured the science around those health risks in an attempt to sell more gas stoves and avoid regulations — tactics still in use today.
The investigation comes amid a culture war over gas stoves. Towns across the country have passed bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings, and the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission is looking into their health hazards. The commission has said it doesn’t plan on banning gas stoves entirely after the mention of the idea sparked a backlash last December. That same month, a peer-reviewed study found that nearly 13 percent of childhood asthma cases in the United States were linked to using gas stoves. But the American Gas Association, the industry’s main lobbying group, argued that those findings were “not substantiated by sound science” and that even discussing a link to asthma was “reckless.”
It’s a strategy that goes back as far back as 1972, according to the most recent investigation. That year, the gas industry got advice from Richard Darrow, who helped manufacture controversy around the health effects of smoking as the lead for tobacco accounts at the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton. At an American Gas Association conference, Darrow told utilities they needed to respond to claims that gas appliances were polluting homes and shape the narrative around the issue before critics got the chance. Scientists were starting to discover that exposure to nitrogen dioxide — a pollutant emitted by gas stoves — was linked to respiratory illnesses. So Darrow advised utilities to “mount the massive, consistent, long-range public relations programs necessary to cope with the problems.”
The American Gas Association also hired researchers to conduct studies that appeared to be independent. They included Ralph Mitchell of Battelle Laboratories, who had also been funded by Philip Morris and the Cigar Research Council. In 1974, Mitchell’s team, using a controversial analysis technique, examined the literature on gas stoves and said they found no significant evidence that the stoves caused respiratory illness. In 1981, a paper funded by the Gas Research Institute and conducted by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little — also affiliated with Big Tobacco — surveyed the research and concluded that the evidence was “incomplete and conflicting.”
These studies didn’t just confuse the public, but also the federal government. When the Environmental Protection Agency assessed the health effects of nitrogen dioxide pollution in 1982, its review included five studies finding no evidence of problems — four of which were funded by the gas industry, the Climate Investigations Center recently uncovered. The EPA, which was investigating whether it should tighten nitrogen dioxide standards outdoors, called for more research to reduce the “uncertainties” of health effects, and didn’t strengthen the standards until more than a quarter-century later.
Today, as public opinion starts to turn on gas stoves, utilities continue to deploy techniques that mirror the tobacco industry’s. Last year, the gas industry hired a toxicologist to testify at a public comment hearing over gas stoves in Multnomah County, Oregon. Julie Goodman questioned the research around the health concerns of stoves and pointed to a review showing little reason for worry, but she did not mention that she was hired by the local gas utility NW Natural. Goodman told NPR that the views were her own and argued that scientists aren’t necessarily biased in favor of their funding source.
In response to the reporting from NPR and the Climate Investigations Center, Karen Harbert, the American Gas Association’s CEO, acknowledged that the gas industry has “collaborated” with researchers to “inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances.” Harbert claimed that the available science “does not provide sufficient or consistent evidence demonstrating chronic health hazards from natural gas ranges” — a line that should sound familiar by now.
The ability of corals to adapt to and survive changes in their environment, such as the recent record warming of sea surface temperatures associated with the climate crisis, appears to be more complex than scientists previously thought.
In a new study, researchers made surprising discoveries about a common Caribbean coral species that could help efforts to protect corals from bleaching and other damaging effects of climate change.
“Global ecosystems are undergoing unprecedented structural and functional changes as atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature continue to rise in the Anthropocene. One ecosystem that is particularly vulnerable to these changes is coral reefs, because most reef-building corals are found in the tropics and already live close to their upper thermal limits,” the researchers explained in the findings of the study. “A small temperature increase, as little as 1°C above the maximum monthly mean temperature for a period of 4 weeks, or 4°C heating weeks, can lead to the breakdown of the symbiotic relationship between the cnidarian animal host and their intracellular photosynthetic dinoflagellate algae. This phenomenon is commonly known as coral bleaching.”
The research team was led by assistant professor of biological sciences Carly Kenkel at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. In order to find out if coral populations that have been able to survive in higher temperatures could pass on their heat tolerance to their offspring, the team focused on Orbicella faveolata, mountainous star coral, USC Dorsife said.
The scientists were surprised to find that the offspring of a less heat-tolerant population fared better under exposure to high temperatures than those from a heat-tolerant population.
The findings contradict the commonly held belief by scientists that the offspring of corals that are heat-tolerant should be tolerant too.
“The study findings have significant implications for how we think about saving coral reefs,” Kenkel said in the press release. “It’s not as simple as just breeding more heat-tolerant corals.”
The study, “Performance of Orbicella faveolata larval cohorts does not align with previously observed thermal tolerance of adult source populations,” was published in the journal Global Change Biology.
Coral bleaching due to rising ocean temperatures weakens coral, making them more vulnerable to disease.
In order to find out which corals would be able to more readily handle increased temperatures, the research team collected coral reproductive cells, or gametes, from two coral reefs in the Florida Keys. One is located closer to shore and the second farther out.
The team used a controlled environment to breed the corals, exposing the larvae to simulated conditions of heat stress. After measuring how well the corals survived, as well as their gene activity, they were surprised to find that the larvae of the population known to be less heat tolerant had better survival rates and fewer signs of stress. This suggested that coral offspring’s ability to handle higher temperatures could be influenced by a number of factors, including if and how often their parent corals have bleached before or encountered other environmental stressors.
The scientists said more research was needed, since they focused on a specific coral species, while different species could have distinct responses. Factors other than temperature also affect reefs in the wild that were not present in the controlled laboratory setting.
The team hopes to delve more deeply into how corals adapt and pass on their resilience to offspring, taking into account how their history and relationships with other marine life, as well as overall reef health, affect them.
Kenkel said the preservation of corals may need an approach that is more comprehensive.
“Instead of focusing solely on breeding more heat-tolerant corals, we might need to consider other factors affecting coral survival and more diverse interventions,” Kenkel said in the press release, including their genetic diversity, as well as the external stressors that affect their overall health.
“We believe that this study opens up promising avenues for future research, which is critical to the success of reef management and restoration practices for this charismatic Caribbean coral species,” said first author of the study Yingqi Zhang, who contributed to the research while a Ph.D. student in Kenkel’s USC Dornsife lab, in the press release.
The main driver of the extinction of plant and wildlife species around the world is habitat loss. In the U.S. alone, approximately 650 species have become extinct or are “missing in action,” according to the National Wildlife Federation.
This week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) removed 21 species from the Endangered Species Act (ESA)’s list of threatened and endangered species due to extinction. Delisting was based on “the best available science” for each species, a press release from USFWS said.
Most of the species were listed in the 1970s and 80s and had low numbers or were likely to have already been extinct at the time they were listed.
“My heart breaks over the loss of these 21 species,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a press release. “These plants and animals can never be brought back. We absolutely must do everything we can to avert the loss of even more threads in our web of life.”
USFWS proposed the delisting of 23 species due to extinction in September of 2021. However, USFWS removed the delisting of the Hawaiian plant Phyllostegia glabra var. Lanaiensis, an herb that is part of the mint family, following public comment, the USFWS press release said. Recent surveys identified new habitats that were potentially suitable for the species, which has no common name. The delisting proposal also included another species, the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose extinction status has been the subject of scientific debate.
The newly delisted 21 species emphasize the ESA’s importance in trying to protect species before their declines become irreversible. Human activity is the number one driver of species decline and extinction due to habitat loss, overuse, invasive species and diseases.
“Federal protection came too late to reverse these species’ decline, and it’s a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it’s too late,” said USFWS Director Martha Williams in the USFWS press release. “As we commemorate 50 years of the Endangered Species Act this year, we are reminded of the Act’s purpose to be a safety net that stops the journey toward extinction. The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act’s protection.”
The ESA has been credited with preserving 99 percent of species that are listed from extinction. More than 100 species have been delisted or reclassified to threatened due to recovery or improved conservation status. Because of the collaborative efforts of Tribes; conservation organizations; governments at the federal, state and local level; and private citizens, hundreds more are stable or improving.
However, around one million species could be lost if action is not taken quickly to protect habitats, curb the use of fossil fuels, reduce pollution and halt the exploitation of species and the spread of invasive species.
The Hawaiian birds that were delisted and declared extinct experienced decline due to the decimation of their forest habitats to make way for agriculture and development, and were directly affected by the introduction of mosquitos carrying avian diseases.
“Few people realize the extent to which the crises of extinction and climate change are deeply intertwined,” Greenwald said in the Center for Biological Diversity press release. “Both threaten to undo our very way of life, leaving our children with a considerably poorer planet. One silver lining to this sad situation is that protecting and restoring forests, grasslands and other natural habitats will help address both.”
Plants and animals are the cornerstones of healthy ecosystems, which provide all the sustenance and most of the medicines humans rely on.
“It’s not too late to stop more plants and animals from going extinct, but we have to act fast,” Greenwald said.
Outside of the royal palace, in Oslo, seven Sámi youths waited to speak with King Harald V of Norway. They wore gáktis, their traditional clothing, and on the lawn, near the neoclassical building, a lávvu stood — a temporary Sámi dwelling that resembles a teepee. Just after noon, the youths were granted an audience with the king.
The meeting was the culmination of several days of protests in Oslo that captured the boldness of young Sámi activists as well as the obstacle they face: challenging the government of Norway to respect its own laws and the rights of Indigenous Sámi people. To date, they have been unsuccessful.
The protests have been fueled by frustration and anger over the $1.3 billion Fosen wind farm, the largest wind project in Norway on the nation’s central-west coast. Exactly two years before protests began, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the wind park had been built illegally in Sápmi, the traditional territory of the Sámi, and violated the rights of Sámi reindeer herders as well as the cultural rights of the Sámi peoples. In the wake of the ruling, the Sámi parliament of Norway demanded the wind park be torn down and the land restored for reindeer herders. However, in the years since, Norwegian officials, including those at Statkraft, the state-owned power company responsible for the project, have refused to remove the turbines, instead opting to negotiate with impacted communities in the hope that the park will continue to produce energy.
For the Sámi, that means the only authority left who may help them is King Harald V.
According to Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen, one of the seven youths to meet with the king and a Sámi organizer, there was no other option.
“We have set up lávvus on Oslo’s main street,” said Hætta Isaksen. “We have occupied the parliament for a whole day. We have blocked Statkraft and closed down 11 ministries. What more can we do?”
The act of meeting with the king is grounded in history. In 1997, King Harald issued an apology for Norway’s treatment of Sámi peoples. “We must regret the injustice the Norwegian state has previously inflicted on the Sámi people,” King Harald said. “The Norwegian state therefore has a special responsibility to create the right conditions for the Sámi people to be able to build a strong and viable society. This is a time-honored right based on the Sámi’s presence in their areas going back a long way.”
Hætta Isaksen said that they had inherited the fight from their ancestors, and that while the king made no promises and carried little power to influence state leaders, the meeting was important. “We have been met with arrogance all week,” she said. “But to meet Norway’s highest leader, who understands us, [it] gives us strength to continue.”
The latest demonstration began last week, on the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling, when 14 Sámi activists, including Mihkkal Hætta, who has been living in a lávvu outside parliament for a month, began a sit-in. By the end of the day, police carried activists out of the building, but no arrests were made. By Friday, activists blocked the entrances to 11 government ministries and Statkraft until they were carried away by police, and through the weekend, campaigners continued to march through Oslo.
However, the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has refused to heed Sámi demands. Earlier this year, Petroleum and Energy Minister Terje Aasland officially apologized to reindeer herders in Fosen and acknowledged that the wind park constituted a human rights violation, but has maintained that “demolition of the wind farms in their entirety is not a likely outcome.” Statkraft has also committed itself to reaching an agreement with reindeer herders that doesn’t require the removal of the wind park, as has Norway’s prime minister.
“We are having conversations about mitigating and are trying to find a solution,” said Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. “Those who run those negotiations, and the reindeer herders are present, and I hope it can lead to a solution.”
Sámi rights defenders say neither apologies nor negotiations matter.
“It is simply political reluctance that stops the wind turbines from being demolished,” said Petra Laiti with the Saami Council’s Human Rights Unit. “What Nordic infrastructure projects in Sápmi call ‘green energy,’ to the rest of the world looks exactly like traditional colonialism.”
Almost 98 percent of Norway’s electricity comes from renewable sources like wind and hydropower. With a population of roughly five million people, Norway produces around 154 terawatt-hours of electricity each year. According to Statkraft, that’s enough energy to power 15 million homes in the United States for a year. In 2021, almost 26 terawatts of electricity were exported from Norway, mostly to Denmark.
“It is important for international observers to note that the image of Norway as a fair country governed by the rule of law is shattered: the true image is what we see today,” said Elle Rávdná Näkkäläjärvi, a member of the Norwegian Sámi Association’s Youth Committee. “With two years of ongoing human rights violations, we see that Norway, as a democratic state, is not functioning.”
For now, the Fosen Wind Park is still producing energy for the state, and Sámi organizers have vowed to continue fighting.
“It has been incredibly emotional to be here today and see all the youth fighting,” said 75-year-old Niillas Aslaksen Somby. “They are probably as optimistic as we were back then.”
In 1979, Aslaksen Somby was one of seven hunger-strikers that fought to stop a hydroelectric dam being built in Sápmi. Known as the Alta Action, Sámi leaders and activists also occupied a government building while Aslaksen Somby lost an arm during a failed act of sabotage to destroy a bridge on a construction road to the dam’s proposed site.
“Almost everyone who did the hunger strike with me back then are now resting in their graves,” said Aslaksen Somby. “But the fight for Sámi rights lives on.”
“Like most consumers, I thought of food as, well, just food. I came to realize that food is one of our most personal and political daily acts.”
Katherine Miller, in “At the Table”
The spotlight
If you’re like me, you spend a considerable portion of your day thinking about food. We all must eat — so, whether we identify as food-obsessed or not, we all interact multiple times a day with the complicated web that is our society’s food system.
A vast network of growers, processors, transporters, policymakers, content creators, and others contribute to this system that feeds us and occupies our minds. And it’s a system that is both vulnerable to and partially responsible for the hazards of our changing climate. That means that the people who have power over our food system have an opportunity to shape not only what and how we eat, but also our climate future. And a group of people with considerable power in the food world, as well as cultural clout and sway, is chefs.
“For decades they’ve been leading on the plate,” says Katherine Miller, an author and food-system advocate and the former vice president of impact at the James Beard Foundation. “Like, there is a reason we all eat kale, right?”
When she was working with the James Beard Foundation, Miller (who was recognized on our 2017 Grist 50 list) helped launch the Chef Action Network, a nonprofit that offers bootcamp trainings and support for chefs who want to use their influence for social causes. She found an audience of natural leaders who were hungry to build their skills outside of the kitchen to become agents of change.
“There’s only so much you can do on the plate. I think chefs want to figure out how to go beyond that — and that ultimately will take them into a policy world that is very complicated,” she says. Miller wrote a book, out last month, to help demystify that world for chefs and other would-be food-system advocates who want to make their voices heard. At the Table: The Chef’s Guide to Advocacy offers numerous examples of chefs who have found creative ways of using their platforms to raise funds and awareness and influence policy for issues they care about, as well as resources for those who are still figuring out the best way to become advocates.
We caught up with Miller to chat about some of the themes in the book, the unique skills that chefs can bring to the climate fight, and how anybody can participate in efforts to shake up the food system for the better. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What made you want to write this book — and frame it as a call to action?
A. I’d been working with chefs in the food system for about 10 or 11 years. When I left the [James] Beard Foundation, there were probably somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people on the waitlist for the Chef’s Bootcamp for Policy and Change. I kind of knew at that point that there was no way any one organization was going to reach all of those people who were curious about how they might become advocates.
When you look around the country, there are dozens of culinary schools and hundreds of thousands of independent restaurants. So, you know, I really — all pun intended — had a little bit of a hunger to reach the broader audience of chefs who were curious about advocacy. And it is a book that’s written for chefs and includes examples of all types of chefs who have done advocacy — but I kind of hope that if you’re an eater, or if you’re someone who is curious about the industry or has a certain viewpoint about restaurants and food, that it might pique your interest about how leaders in a particular industry can step up.
Q. From your experience running the bootcamp and your knowledge of the industry, would you say there’s a growing number of chefs who want to do more advocacy work?
A. I definitely think so. [Chefs are] deeply embedded into all of our communities. On practically every street corner, there’s a restaurant — whether it’s a mom-and-pop shop, or it’s fancy fine dining, or it’s a wine bar — they are everywhere. And I think there’s a growing trend of chefs who want to be seen as something more than just that person who plays with sharp knives and makes delicious food. I think they really are stepping up and responding to this time in our history that is demanding leaders to lead.
But they don’t know how to do it. These are people who are typically used to sort of barking orders and people falling in line in the kitchen — advocacy requires a different style of leadership. You don’t get to walk into a congressman’s office and yell at them, right? Really the job here as a chef or a community leader is to: One, make that decision that you want to lead. And two, learning how to do that effectively is the same as going to culinary school and learning how to make delicious food. There are skills and temperaments and things that you need to exercise to be an effective advocate.
I see every day that chefs are asked to do these things, and they really feel like they have a responsibility to step out of the kitchen and use their voice.
Q. For chefs who don’t have the time or the desire to start an organization (like World Central Kitchen or Zero Foodprint), what are some creative ways they can use their existing businesses and platforms for advocacy?
A. I think chef advocacy, and actually all of our advocacy, happens sort of in three places. It’s the stuff that’s closest to home — so for chefs, that’s the plate. It’s the way we form authentic, and not transactional, relationships with local organizations. And then it’s the longer-lead policy stuff.
And you can do all of those things at once and at varying degrees; it doesn’t have to be linear. You can dip into policy and then dip into community. But I do think it requires focus. What I always talk to chefs about as they start their journey is, what is the thing that means the most to you?
We started auditing restaurants to see how much they were giving [to charity], and restaurants were giving on average about $50,000 a year — but they were giving it to dozens of causes. If you were a $50,000 donor to any one organization, you would be, like, the top donor at the organization, right? You would have a totally different relationship with that organization. My first thing to anyone who wants to step into advocacy is to pick the issue that is closest to your home or your heart, or the thing that you feel the most passionately about, and focus on that.
And then the other is, don’t go create your own nonprofit. Please don’t form a new nonprofit, because there are plenty of experts out there who have done the research, built the infrastructure. As a chef or a leader, your job is to accelerate change.
Q. Speaking of homing in on a particular issue, do you think chefs are uniquely positioned to address climate change and the many ways it intersects with our food system?
A. The food system is one of the number one contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. I think that chefs, they sit in the middle of this giant food system as an ambassador and as a translator. And they also very practically deal with it every single day.
About five or six years ago, we started working on food-waste reduction. Globally, we waste a tremendous amount of food. The estimates range, but it’s about $1,500 a year that [an average household] is just throwing away — and that was happening in the restaurant industry. In a business that has such narrow margins, the idea that they were throwing away thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars of value was something that hadn’t occurred to them. And some of it hadn’t occurred to them because the system’s not set up — there’s no composting in their city [for instance]. But we really saw movement among chefs to build those sort of three pieces of advocacy.
So you look at somebody like Steven Satterfield, or Mourad Lahlou, or Tiffany Derry — they were three of the many chefs who started to do stuff differently in their restaurants. Steven always tells this great story about how he would save up all of the liver from the chickens that he got from his farmer. And when he got to a certain point, he would make this delicious chicken liver mousse, and he would juice [leftover] kale stems and make a gelée. And he would reuse the previous day’s brioche — he would make this beautiful chicken liver pâté with a kale gelée and brioche toast, and he would charge like 14 bucks for it [at Miller Union in Atlanta]. So it was like, found value on the plate and no waste.
But then he also put operations in place in his kitchen around composting, working with the city in Atlanta, all these pieces. And then he came to Washington, D.C., a number of times and helped secure the funding for the Farm Bill in 2018 that was the pilot project for food-waste reduction.
Chefs are so uniquely positioned to be able to tell that story of why that matters. They’re able to demonstrate it on the plate. They have access to their city officials, so they can talk about local and regional solutions like composting and digesters — and they can really help make a more effective case to policymakers.
Q. Climate impacts also threaten our food system in a number of ways. Do you think chefs are feeling that, and becoming more aware of the need to adapt?
A. I definitely see a growing trend among chefs and restaurants, from a small and independent perspective, who are prioritizing their local and regional food systems first. If there are silver linings in COVID, it was this illustration that some of our larger food system breaks, but our farmers next door are still there, our producers are there, our fishermen are there. There was really a reintroduction to that local food system, and I see that lasting.
Q. For readers who aren’t chefs themselves, what do you recommend they do to support or encourage advocacy for a more just, sustainable food system?
A. I think, much like chefs, our first steps start with our pocket books. If you value businesses or policies or decisions that have an impact on climate, go support restaurants that are sourcing more locally and regionally. If you’re a home cook, find a community-supported agriculture deal near you.
Use your money in the same way with restaurants as you would with any other part of your life: Make sure that it reflects your values. I think that’s number one. Number two is make sure that they know that’s why you’re there.
We always talk about this related to policymakers — that policymakers are people, too. And so you always have to thank them for the meeting, thank them for the time. Do the same thing with a chef or a restaurant. We have been locked in this really extractive world with chefs and restaurants, like they are there for our pleasure, and so we rarely say thank you.
Q. What are some of the key things you hope people will take away from the book?
A. I have been really struck by the number of people who have said to me, “I didn’t realize that food was a system.” And that the restaurant itself is a hub [within that system]. Restaurants are employers, they’re purchasers, they’re training grounds, they’re community influencers, they’re the place where the politicians come to have dinner.
Like climate change, our food system is so complicated and really hard to understand, and it’s built off decades and decades of policy decisions. And you can’t rip it out like a rose bush — you actually have to figure out how to redirect the root. And so my hope is that this book makes it a little easier to understand a hugely complicated system and all the things that go into it.
Explore: our Future of Food issue, including the “Climate Future Cookbook” of recipes (and drabbles!) inspired by current trends toward more sustainable eating (Grist)
A parting shot
Silo, a zero-waste restaurant in London, hosted an invasive-species dinner series this summer. The meals focused on turning invasive plants and animals into trendy dishes, with the hope that eating them could help to cull their populations. Here, a chef prepares a crayfish tartlet.
This story was originally published by LAist and is republished with permission.
Tucked along Bandini Boulevard in the city of Vernon are the headquarters for Baker Commodities Inc., a company that employs 900 workers across the U.S. and is home base for some of the grisliest industrial work in the country.
Behind the nondescript walls of its campus along the L.A. River sit machines used to grind, cook, and press leftover pieces of cows, pigs, and chickens. These remains — and, sometimes, entire carcasses — are delivered on semitrucks from butcher shops, grocery stores, restaurants, slaughterhouses and livestock farms. A worker then pushes them into a pit with a tractor and, through a process called rendering, they’re turned into fats, meat and bone meal, and hides.
These materials are recycled to make scores of everyday products, including soap, pet food, makeup, and leather goods. The long-running industry plays important roles in reducing food waste.
For decades, residents in surrounding neighborhoods have complained of putrid dead animal smells. In 2017, community pressure compelled the local agency that oversees air emissions, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), to adopt a rule to mitigate odors from Baker and a handful of other rendering plants. Among other requirements, the rule forces these companies to post signs indicating where residents can report odor issues — a demand some plants lobbied against. Then, in September 2022, the agency shut down Baker, citing repeat violations of its odor mitigation rule.
At the time, community members and elected officials celebrated the closure as a win. But what many don’t know is that the company has partially reopened and is waging an intense legal battle against AQMD. After AQMD shut it down, Baker filed a lawsuit against the AQMD in L.A. County Superior Court. Baker claims the company was not in violation of the odor mitigation rule and that it was treated unfairly. Baker also demands that the shutdown order be tossed out and aims to bar air regulators from shutting it down in the future.
Baker Commodities Inc. in Vernon, California.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
LAist spoke with dozens of local residents and reviewed odor complaint records, violation records, notices to comply, and inspection reports to piece together how the rendering of dead animals at Baker has impacted surrounding communities.
We found that since the odor mitigation rule went into effect in 2017, AQMD has issued 12 violations and five notices to comply to Baker. Eight of them were for violating the odor mitigation rule. The rest were for failing to comply with permit conditions and other requirements. Three of the violations are still pending.
LAist also found 111 odor complaints identified by the person reporting the smell or by AQMD as being tied to Baker between August 2019 and late last week. These complaints came from homes, local schools, and businesses near Baker’s headquarters.
In addition, Baker failed to store animal remains within four hours of delivery, leaving them out to fester and violating AQMD’s rules, according to the agency’s attorneys — and it did so six times between August 2019 and January 2022. An AQMD inspector reported Baker violated AQMD rules that require surfaces exposed to animal matter to be washed down at least once per working day, according to his sworn written statement filed in Baker’s court case. The inspector said he saw strings of animal matter dangling on grates at the company’s headquarters.
Plus, in Baker’s unloading zone for animal remains, broken concrete or asphalt was present in March and April 2022, according to AQMD’s attorneys — a problem that officials at the agency say can cause water to pool and smells to fester.
We should note that Baker has disputed AQMD findings in the latter three items in court filings.
The Baker Commodities Inc. facilities include multiple buildings.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
In the year since AQMD ordered Baker to shut down, residents say the odors are less intense and less frequent — and AQMD complaint records associated with the company show a dramatic drop in reported smell problems. The shutdown lasted nearly nine months, until the company petitioned the hearing board and was granted permission to work in a limited capacity, doing trap grease and wastewater treatment — but not rendering animals.
Many community members were worried to learn from LAist that the court may allow the company to fully reopen and return to rendering livestock and poultry without making long-term changes to the way they operate.
A long track record of problems, a fierce fight to stay in business
A review by LAist also uncovered details of the steps Baker has taken to try to get back to running at full scale in Vernon. The rendering company submitted 125 legal filings in its battle against AQMD over a 12-month period, arguing that it’s in compliance with the odor mitigation rule. In that time, it’s had two law firms working the case, which calls for $200 million in damages from the government agency for lost revenue, the disclosure of trade secrets and other items. Its current legal team at DLA Piper — a top-ranking, multinational law firm — includes Angela Agrusa, who specializes in brand-crisis litigation and has represented comedian and actor Bill Cosby and Chipotle, among others.
“The fact that Baker Commodities would come at an agency that is really intended to protect the public’s health is not just unfortunate, but it is despicable,” said Angelo Logan, who grew up in the nearby city of Commerce and returns weekly to visit his mother. Logan currently serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and learned of the litigation from LAist.
Cudahy Councilmember Elizabeth Alcantar, who lives about 3 miles away from Baker, was also unaware of the legal fight until LAist’s reporting.
“It’s absolutely concerning to see that happen,” she said.
Alcantar grew up in Cudahy and says she and her family have endured the stench of rotting flesh for as long as she can remember. She was shocked to hear Baker is pursuing legal action that will cost taxpayers money, instead of addressing community concerns.
“It’s going to take AQMD’s time and funds away from what they should be doing, which is enforcement,” Alcantar said of the litigation, explaining that the community has been under duress for years due to foul odors. “[W]e are here, simply wanting to breathe clean air.”
Baker’s assistant vice president of public relations and legislative affairs, Jimmy Andreoli II, declined multiple interview requests. Agrusa, Baker’s lead attorney, did not respond to our requests for comment.
In an emailed statement Andreoli said, “While we cannot comment on active litigation, we are dedicated to finding sustainable ways to support California’s food production and restaurant industries with continued strict adherence to local, state, and federal environmental laws.”
“Some of our business operations have been approved to resume,” said Andreoli, who is the grandson of Baker’s 96-year-old CEO, James Andreoli. Jimmy Andreoli II added that they look forward to finding long-term solutions with AQMD.
Baker’s lawsuit against AQMD is still pending. Later this month, if a settlement isn’t reached beforehand, an L.A. Superior Court judge is scheduled to decide whether the rendering company can reopen at full capacity. The judge will also rule on the $200 million in damages Baker is seeking, as well as its call to keep AQMD from shutting it down in the future.
If Baker succeeds in court, interviews with community members suggest it could further erode the relationship between the city of Vernon and local residents across Southeast L.A., many of whom are grappling with odors on top of other environmental issues.
A company with big problems
Many people who live in or near Vernon have no idea that they live close to four rendering plants that process everything from fat, to livestock, to the remains of cats and dogs. The city, which is just 5 square miles in size, is also home to at least 40 meat processors, which buy meat from slaughterhouses to prepare items found at grocery stores, like sausages and steaks. There are also six slaughterhouses within 1 mile of Vernon’s city limits.
A view into a parking lot at Baker Commodities Inc. in Vernon.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
At some places, silos and smokestacks hint at what’s happening inside, along with flocks of seagulls hovering far from shore. But, for the most part, these businesses are tucked behind bland metal sheets and concrete walls.
Baker itself is sandwiched between the L.A. River and several train tracks. The rendering company has been in Vernon since the 1940s. But after AQMD determined that Baker blew a deadline to seal off its rendering operations to keep potential odors from escaping in spring 2022, the agency’s legal counsel moved to shut it down.
AQMD’s hearing board, which enforces the agency’s regulations, gathered to vote on the shutdown in September of 2022. Before reaching a decision, the board held a hearing, which LAist found little media coverage of at the time. It provided a rare look inside Baker’s headquarters.
Over a span of three days via Zoom, attorneys for both parties peppered an AQMD inspector with questions.
In 2022 inspector Dillon Harris testified that he visited Baker nine times. He documented hooves and other animal bones strewn across the floor, overflowing from a large trash bin. He spotted a trough with built up blood, animal fat, and wastewater. He said he saw staff dumping sludge — a thick, pancake batter-like mix of liquid and solid animal remains — from trucks into open-air pits. Baker, he said, also left equipment doors and panels open, which are supposed to be kept shut to trap possible smells, and employees dumped expired clams, shrimp and ground beef into an exposed container.
The Darling International Inc. rendering plant in Los Angeles, near Vernon.
Helou Hernandez / LAist
During the hearing, dozens of photographs capture Baker’s facility.
[Caution: these links go to images of the photos displayed on video in hearings]
In them, rib cages can be seen among a heap of animal parts, pools of blood-colored liquid are shown in multiple locations, a drain is backed up and surrounded by dead animal debris. Harris, the inspector, also captured images of raw animal material leaking out of the rendering equipment. Baker has argued that photos shown during the hearing should be sealed from the public’s view because they contain trade secrets that competitors can now access.
The Andreoli family, which has owned Baker since the 1980s, spoke at the hearing and disputed Harris’ findings. Jimmy Andreoli II said he visited the Vernon facility a week earlier and saw “a wash truck that was moving throughout the facility and washing down various roadway surfaces.”
Baker attributed some of the inspector’s findings to human error. Jason Andreoli, who was identified at the hearing as Baker’s general manager, said the company put up signs reminding staff to keep the doors closed. “And we also put a policy in place that if they are left open, there’s gonna be disciplinary action,” he said.
Several hearing board members appeared mystified by Baker’s claims that the company was in compliance with AQMD rules.
“Every picture virtually that we see is of equipment that is absolutely filthy,” said the late Dr. Allan Bernstein, one of the hearing board’s voting members who died last spring.
Seagulls on a concrete square in the L.A. River next to the Darling International Inc. rendering plant.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
“It’s mind-boggling to sit here and see anyone try to defend this position when we’re all looking at these pictures with our eyes,” he added.
During closing statements, AQMD attorney Daphne Hsu said she understood the magnitude of shutting down the company. “We don’t ask a facility to stop operating lightly,” she said, noting Baker could have proposed a timeline to come into compliance. Instead, she said, the company chose to dispute the agency’s findings.
“Baker must be in compliance before it restarts,” Hsu added. “The community has waited long enough.”
The hearing board voted 4 to 1 to shut down Baker. That’s when the court battle began.
‘I had to step away because I almost vomited’
When AQMD implemented the odor mitigation rule in November 2017, rendering facilities that had to comply were given 90 days to meet basic standards. The goal of the rule was straightforward: to keep potential odor sources contained and protect people living nearby. The rule requires steps like washing down surfaces at least once a day and repairing cracks in the asphalt to keep pools of odorous bacteria from forming.
“As they’re bulldozing and pushing all these raw carcasses, [the animal remains get] smeared across asphalt and concrete, and odors start developing,” explained Wayne Nastri, AQMD’s executive officer, in an interview with LAist. “What the rule actually intended to do was to control the process the whole way, to minimize [animal remains’] exposure to the air that would generate those kinds of odors.”
The now shuttered Farmer John facility in Vernon, CA.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
AQMD gave renderers subject to the rule up to three and a half years to install enclosures, or bring all their operations into a closed system indoors, to keep odors from drifting off site. Some asked for extensions before they finished the work, but, according to AQMD, Baker is the only one that has not complied. In its lawsuit, Baker repeatedly argues it is in compliance.
When Harris, the AQMD inspector, checked out Baker for the first time after the rule went into effect in 2018, he remembers being disgusted.
“I had to step away because I almost vomited,” he said in a sworn written statement filed with AQMD’s response to Baker’s lawsuit.
Recalling the inspections he conducted at Baker in 2022, Harris added that: “The odor at the facility smells intensely of rotting animals.”
His work boots, he explained, were so soaked through with the smell of rendering that he couldn’t use them at non-rendering facilities. In one of Baker’s rendering plants at its Vernon campus, he said “rotting odor emanates from all sides.”
L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s district includes Vernon — she advocated last year for Baker’s shutdown.
“It was clear that Baker Commodities had long violated air quality rules and had done little to nothing to come into compliance,” she said in an emailed response to questions from LAist. “It was time for [AQMD] to uphold the rules they had on the books and protect the community from this company.”
Nastri, AQMD’s executive officer, declined to speak on Baker’s lawsuit, citing pending litigation. Court filings show AQMD has hired two outside law firms to work the case, in addition to the agency’s in-house attorneys. They’ve filed a cross-complaint against Baker, demanding that the rendering company pay $10,000 per day for each of its violations.
Nastri confirmed to LAist that Baker has committed the most violations out of any of the rendering plants in its jurisdiction.
Cristina Garcia, a former state assemblymember who represented parts of southeast L.A., photographed at Huntington Park High School where she once taught.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
The air pollution agency’s rules “are there to ensure that we have a level playing field,” Nastri said. “And to all those companies that are making the investments, that are operating in conditions that they’re supposed to operate, it’s unfair if we were to let others who do not make those investments and seek to profit off of the lack of compliance — that’s just wrong.”
“We are very consistent and very strong in our enforcement approach,” he added. “And so long as those companies continue to violate those rules or regulations, we will go after them. Period.”
How odors impact community members’ daily lives
Residents of Southeast L.A. County, as well as Boyle Heights and unincorporated East L.A., have put up with rendering plant odors for years. And Baker is not alone — odor complaint records reviewed by LAist show the three other nearby rendering plants have also generated concerns.
So have other businesses. The city of Vernon is home to just 222 residents and is almost exclusively industrial — nearly 600 of its businesses handle or store hazardous chemicals, according to a city report. Local residents have lodged complaints with AQMD about strong garbage odors from trash collection companies, as well as nauseatingly sweet smells from flavor and fragrance suppliers. One resident complained their neighborhood reeked of “melting Jolly Ranchers.”
Soil remediation work underway in a southeast L.A. residence.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
Shifting wind patterns near Vernon add to the challenges. According to Terrence Mann, AQMD’s deputy executive officer of compliance and enforcement, an odor can start off in Monterey Park, “then, just a few minutes later,” pop up in Huntington Park — about 11 miles away.
Interviews with local residents , as well as odor complaint data obtained through public records requests, show that people living in the area encounter the smells at dinner time; on their way to school; at work; on the playground; and during class.
Sometimes the stench comes and goes. But sometimes it persists for hours, or even several days. When it’s especially pungent, it can be stomach-churning. Community members also report getting headaches, as well as an itchy, burning sensation in their eyes and throats.
In interviews with LAist, affected residents often used phrases like “dead animal” or “rotting carcass” to describe these odors. Still, most of them have no idea where the stench comes from. Some local residents who’ve driven in Vernon past the now-shuttered Farmer John slaughterhouse, which is renowned for its pig murals, told LAist they’d always assumed the smell was coming from there.
“It wasn’t just that there was a smell — we all live in cities [that] have smells — it’s that it was a stench,” said Jackie Goldberg, Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board president. She fielded complaints from teachers and parents at schools near Baker and joined other elected officials in a letter demanding that rendering plants take greater accountability for odors in January 2022.
Maria Monares, a community member who has made complaints about the odor in her neighborhood.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
The smell was so bad it made it impossible to get through the day’s lessons, she said. Students were putting their heads down, asking to go home.
“It impacts your body,” she added. “You feel it in your eyes, you feel it in your throat, you smell it, you get headaches, your eyes burn. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for kids in particular.”
In the months leading up to AQMD’s shutdown action, former state Assemblymember Cristina Garcia wrote her own letter to the agency, detailing her experience teaching math at Huntington Park High School in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
“The smell is so strong, putrid, and nauseating that my students could not focus,” she wrote. “[A]nd now, 20 years later, it is insulting that we are still dealing with the same problem.”
Without working air conditioning in her classroom, Garcia had to choose between shutting the door and windows to keep the odors out, or letting the stench in to get some ventilation. “And the hotter it got, the worse that smell would get,” she told LAist. “It was a constant struggle.”
Baker’s lawsuit was news to Garcia when she found out about it from LAist, but not a surprise. She said communities in Southeast L.A. have long been plagued by environmental justice issues and recalled that the now-shuttered Exide battery recycling plant spewed lead in the area for decades, then had its bankruptcy case settled in federal court.
“[Baker feels] that they could win and they could squeeze the agency on behalf of their bottom line, instead of on behalf of the public,” she said.
Dora Gómez and her two children have lived in the city of Vernon for eight years in an affordable housing complex built on land donated by the city. Gómez said the smells have been a persistent issue. When they occur, she shuts her windows and avoids going outdoors. She also bought an air purifier and has routinely purchased scented wax melts to ward off the stench.
Signs outside the former Exide facility.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
Gómez had no idea four rendering plants circle her home in a 4-mile radius. She said she often thinks about leaving the area, but she pays less than $1,500 per month for a two-bedroom apartment and the rents in surrounding neighborhoods are not within her budget.
“It’s not a great place to raise your kids,” said Gómez, who said she worries about health effects from Exide in addition to the smell problems. Her apartment building has been flagged by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control for soil remediation after contamination from the battery recycling plant. “They’ve already been exposed to lead for all these years, it just makes you think like, you know, what else is in the air?
Maria Monares has lived in East Los Angeles, about 3 miles north of Baker’s pressers and grinders, for over three decades. Her children, who are now grown, attended Eastman Avenue Elementary School, just across the street from their home. Monares’ neighborhood has also been subject to rendering plant odors, a “horrible smell” that she compares to the stench of “death” and “burning bones.”
Aside from being unpleasant, the odors can be embarrassing, she said. Sometimes, the stench rolls in when she has company. Visitors will scrunch their faces in disgust and ask: ‘What is that?’
Over the years, Monares and her husband have lodged multiple complaints to AQMD. In some cases, the agency has sent inspectors out to her home. They’ve come, smelled what she’s smelling, asked questions, and taken notes. Then, the air quality got better. And when the odors returned, she and her husband got back on the phone.
“Us calling and bugging, hopefully it helps,” she said.
Businesses near Baker have also filed odor complaints with AQMD. Public records reviewed by LAist show that one company described a “horrible, putrid smell” that they said was coming from Baker. The “smell penetrates into our facility and many employees complain … Some feel nauseous,” it added.
But pinpointing an odor’s source can be difficult.
“The biggest challenge is that all of [the rendering companies] are located in close proximity to each other,” said Mann, with AQMD. “That’s part of the reason why our agency took the lead and created [the odor mitigation rule implemented in 2017],” he said, explaining that the agency now aims to proactively identify violations at rendering companies instead of waiting for complaints to come in before it takes action.
Nastri, AQMD’s executive officer, noted that, in recent years, there’s been an overall drop in odor complaints associated with rendering plants in the region. In 2021, he said, AQMD received nearly 400 complaints. As of Oct. 2, the agency reported 84 complaints so far this year.
Still, he added, “success would be the ultimate elimination of those complaints.”
Rendering’s role in mitigating climate change
Agriculture industry experts agree that rendering plays an important role in reducing waste. Humans don’t eat every part of the animals they consume, so “a tremendous volume of unused animal meat gets left over from our livestock and our poultry operations,” said Christine Birdsong, undersecretary at the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
By repurposing animal remains — like using fats for biodiesel, instead of extracting carbon from fossil fuels — renderers across the country “reclaim the carbon” from 56 billion pounds of unused animal parts each year, Birdsong added. Renderers also minimize waste by transforming those remains into a myriad of “really valuable ingredients” used in everything down to the gelatin casings of medicine capsules, she said.
Dilia Ortega, Youth Program Coordinator at Communities for a Better Environment, photographed near the now closed Exide plant. This is a stop in the “Toxic Tours” lead by Ortega and other members of Communities for a Better Environment.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
“I have never seen any other industry that is more involved in recycling,” said Frank Mitloehner, a professor and air quality specialist at UC Davis’ animal science department. “I mean, literally, nothing goes to waste.”
Mitloehner said rendering plants are especially significant when livestock farms experience mass die-offs, often due to the spread of disease or extreme heat. “You’re not allowed to compost [animals], you’re not allowed to burn them. There’s no other way of dealing with that,” he said.
“Thank God we have people to work in [rendering plants],” Mitloehner added. “Because if we didn’t, we would have a serious disposal issue.”
Some community members frustrated with rendering odors don’t dispute the importance of the recycling work that’s done at Baker.
Dilia Ortega grew up in Huntington Park and now lives in South Gate. She works as a youth program coordinator for Communities for A Better Environment, a nonprofit that’s advocated for clean air, soil, and water in California’s working-class neighborhoods since the late 1970s.
Ortega grew up smelling rendering odors. On her way to school, she’d instinctively cover her mouth and nose when her bus drove past Vernon. Today, her role at work puts her in contact with hundreds of students in Southeast L.A. Year after year, she told LAist, they identify dead animal smells as an ongoing issue in their neighborhoods.
When AQMD was weighing whether to shut down Baker last fall, Ortega shared these insights during public comment at the three-day hearing. She underscored that she was not advocating for a permanent closure. She just wants the company to abide by the rules.
“We understand that they provide a necessary service,” she said. “But it cannot be done at the expense of our quality of life.”
Risks to public health
Jill Johnston, associate professor of Population and Public Health Sciences at USC, noted that strong odors don’t just diminish local residents’ quality of life, they can also impact their health.
Rendering plant emissions can contain chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten egg, as well as chemicals that contain sulfur dioxide, she said. Some of the symptoms community members have reported — including itchy eyes and runny nose — can be caused by these chemicals. Rendering plant emissions can also exacerbate asthma symptoms, making it harder for residents to breathe, and elevate their blood pressure, Johnston said. Chronic exposure to these odor producing chemicals can also affect their cardiovascular systems.
The City of Vernon seal.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
We shared our findings regarding Baker with Johnston, including what we learned through interviews with community members and our review of AQMD’s violation records.
She said they point to “the need for more stringent enforcement of the standards, to ensure that these violations don’t persist.”
Johnston said the density of meat-related facilities in the region is also concerning and could pose a “potential cumulative burden” on nearby communities.
“Even if everyone individually is in compliance,” she explained, “when you’re exposed to so many, the health effects can be greatly amplified.”
Eleni Sazakli, a researcher at the University of Patras’ public health laboratory in Greece, specializes in studying the impact of rendering plants on local communities. She noted that odors can disrupt lives and social relationships. Even hanging laundry out to dry becomes an issue, because the wet cloth picks up the smell, she said.
Odorous chemicals produced by rendering plants can also irritate the throat and nose and “produce headaches, nausea, fatigue and sleep disturbances,” Sazakli added. Some even have the potential to cause cancer.
Pointing to the role rendering plays in reducing waste, Sazakli nevertheless maintained that rendering is “an environmentally friendly industry” that should be sustained.
“But we have to follow very strict guidelines in their operation,” she added, and “adopt the best available technologies that we have in our hands.”
What’s next for Baker’s employees
In its suit against AQMD, and on its company website, Baker warns that the shutdown could impact “about 200 people,” including “more than 100 union-represented employees.”
But when Baker asked AQMD’s hearing board for permission to resume its trap grease and wastewater treatment processes in April 2023, the company’s Jason Andreoli said no staff had been cut.
The City of Vernon Civic Center and police station.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
“[W]e haven’t even let go of any of our employees,” he said at the hearing. “These people are family. ”
Bertha Rodríguez, a spokesperson for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, confirmed that none of the 32 union members employed by Baker have lost their jobs.
Martin Perez, who works for Teamsters Local 63 and started a petition to reopen Baker, also told LAist that none of its members have been laid off. During the April hearing he said Baker had been good to its employees.
“Not only did they pay their wages, they paid their health and welfare [and] their pension contributions,” he said at the time.
The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 501, which also has union members who work at Baker, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
LAist posed the question of jobs to Goldberg, Los Angeles Unified’s school board president, and four Southeast L.A. officials who all complained to AQMD about rendering odors. All agreed that jobs are important. All maintained that the plants need to be in compliance.
“We did not want [Baker] to close, because it employed many of the people that I represent,” Goldberg said, referring to her role on the school board. “But we did want them to run their business following the regulations that they’re required to.”
“I would love to see it reopen,” she added, “but I don’t want it to reopen if they’re not going to be closely monitored and closely regulated.”
Rendering companies “need to adhere to the established regulations,” said South Gate mayor Maria del Pilar Avalos, who lives about 6 miles from Baker. When the rendering odors have been especially pungent, they’ve made her eyes burn. They’ve also caused her family members to forgo day-to-day activities, like walking their dog, she said.
Still, Avalos believes the rendering companies and local residents can coexist. “We need to see how we can utilize our 21st century technology to address those quality of life issues, so that it’s a win-win for the companies as well as for our communities,” she said.
In Vernon, plans for a moratorium on rendering plants go nowhere
In response to community concerns, Vernon’s website says the city is considering steps to strengthen local control over rendering. These include plans to enact a moratorium on building new rendering plants, along with increased fines for facilities that are not in compliance with AQMD’s odor mitigation rule.
A rare residential street in Vernon, which is almost exclusively industrial.
Samanta Helou Hernandez / LAist
But Angela Kimmey, deputy city administrator, said the city won’t be enacting the moratorium. The other plans are in “various stages of development,” she said. Vernon aims to encourage business growth and demonstrate that rendering plants and local residents can coexist. To this end, Vernon hosted a tour of a rendering company that’s in compliance with AQMD last summer, inviting regional and southeast L.A. elected officials to come along.
Vernon is also focused on helping facilities come into compliance, Kimmey said.
Vernon Mayor Crystal Larios added in an emailed statement that the city wants “to support our business community,” but recognizes that it has to do its part to shift toward supporting greener commerce, like data centers, green hydrogen, and the electrification of transportation.
“These types of green commerce will not only help existing businesses sustain future growth but heavily reduce the impact on air quality, minimize the number of trucks, and overall decrease the carbon footprint,” Larios said.
LAist requested an interview with Larios multiple times over a four-week period but received no response. Kimmey, who relayed the emailed statement, said the mayor was unavailable.
Hahn, the L.A. County supervisor whose district includes Vernon, told us she was disappointed to see that Baker hasn’t used available state funding to build enclosures that would contain the smells and protect community members from exposure.
Baker “doesn’t seem to think the rules should apply to them,” she said.
“We need the South Coast AQMD to be strong and hold companies accountable,” Hahn added. “I think it is important for residents in Southeast L.A. to know that, unfortunately, this fight isn’t over.”
The Jane and Ron Olson Center for Investigative Reporting helped make this project possible. Ron Olson is an honorary trustee of Southern California Public Radio. The Olsons do not have any editorial input on the stories we cover.
