A new report envisions federal food spending as a force for good

Think about all the food the federal government purchases every year: for the National School Lunch Program‘s free meals for children, the produce distributed to low-income seniors through the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, every dish served on-base to military personnel and every food basket distributed to emergency zones as foreign aid.

Without even accounting for reimbursement schemes and food assistance programs like SNAP, direct food purchases from U.S. producers accounted for roughly $9.1 billion of the federal budget in 2022. It’s a staggering volume — and one that is directly tied to the country’s industrial food system. But what exactly does its foodprint look like?

A new report uses the available data to fill in the full picture of federal food purchasing — greenhouse gas emissions and land use, but also pesticides, worker rights, animal welfare and public health. In trying to account for these various impacts, it becomes clear that making changes to federal food procurement could make a real and positive difference.

“By the start of the Biden administration, there had already been a decade’s worth of proof of concept for the idea that institutional food purchasing could really change the food system,” says Chloë Waterman, co-author of the report and senior program manager for Friends of the Earth. “[The goal of the report] was to start thinking about the mechanisms that the federal government has to implement these strategies.”

Digging into the data

The report, “Measuring and Modeling Climate, Environmental, and Social Impacts of Federal Food Procurement,” marks the first-ever attempt to calculate the carbon footprint of federal food spending.

The authors estimate that a single year of federal food purchasing represents greenhouse gas emissions totaling 14,683,200 metric tons of CO2, including 5,781,800 metric tons of methane. The Federal Good Food Purchasing Coalition, made up of food justice, labor, environmental and other organizations, produced the report.

Turning the tide

A shift to values-based food purchasing that benefits the environment, public health, farmworkers and animals isn’t going to happen overnight. For decades, the federal commodity procurement system has focused on purchasing the lowest-price products, according to Waterman, and has awarded contracts to the largest agribusiness corporations without strings attached. But the report suggests several policy recommendations that would help the government transition toward a more values-aligned approach.

A baseline level of transparency and accountability is necessary, the report argues; as a first step, more work must be done internally to assess emissions and other impacts of federal food purchasing, including how procurement choices impact U.S. farmers and food chain workers. To combat the dominance of big agribusiness and its often-harmful practices, the authors recommend that more budget be allocated to organic foods and products that have been otherwise third-party certified. The massive amounts of money spent on food procurement could also make a real difference for small- and mid-size farms, especially those owned and operated by people of color and other socially disadvantaged groups — another reason to diversify contracts and move away from the few massive suppliers currently in play.

One specific, achievable and widely impactful change, the authors note, would be to focus on one of the main culprits both for emissions: meat.

The report found that shifting purchasing toward plant-based foods would have “quantifiable benefits” in terms of greenhouse gas reductions, land and water use, animal welfare and cost. In fact, replacing 50 percent of beef purchases with plant-based protein sources would result in a 15 percent reduction in federal food purchasing-related greenhouse gas emissions and cut total food-related carbon costs by 20 percent, according to the report. There would also be a 16 percent reduction in land use and 5 percent reduction in water use.

“We propose that our government uses a ‘less and better’ approach to meat purchasing,” Delwiche explains. But while the goal is to transform food procurement practices throughout the federal government, Delwiche notes that individual institutions can still have a significant positive impact on the environment, even taking decentralized and immediate actions like replacing chicken with chickpeas in salads, swapping beef for black beans in burgers or cutting the portion sizes of meat and poultry in dishes. For an institution that spends $37 million annually on food procurement, Delwiche’s calculations showed that replacing just 20 percent of beef purchases with plant proteins would reduce carbon emissions by 8.7 million pounds — equivalent to taking 855 passenger vehicles off of the road every year.

“Shifting to more plant-based foods [can] help the government cover the increased costs that are associated with higher quality, values-aligned foods,” says Waterman, noting that a move toward more beans and tofu would free up money for the USDA to buy grassfed beef from local, independent farmers.

“We hope that the report will make the case to the Biden administration to prioritize this strategy of values-aligned food purchasing and climate-friendly food purchasing,” Waterman continues. “We’re not asking them to make new commitments; we’re asking them to follow up on the commitments they have made by leveraging their own food purchasing…and leveraging public food purchasing dollars to support the values that we want to see reflected throughout the food system.”

Top photo by Joshh/Adobe Stock.