Episode #290
Zephyr Teachout: Reorganizing Food Systems For Real Food

Zephyr Teachout argues that reorganizing food systems requires confronting the concentrated corporate power that controls grocery shelves, distribution networks, farm equipment, data, pricing, and access to markets. When companies such as Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart dominate food distributors and become private regulators, they decide which products reach consumers and which farmers survive. Drawing inspiration from the farmers’ movements of the 19th century, Zephyr explains how education, unlikely alliances, and democratic action can begin moving food and economic power back into local hands.

Zephyr Teachout’s main stage talk at Churchtown Dairy in September 2025 appears here in full:

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Zephyr Teachout spoke at the Saving Real Organic Conference at Churchtown Dairy in September of 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Our next speaker is Zephyr Teachout. Like all the speakers today, she’s a great inspiration to me, and she’s taught me a lot – both in personal conversations and through her book. I’ve only read one, but I’ve read it a number of times – “Break ‘Em Up.”

Dave Chapman 0:17
Zephyr, the first farm I worked on, she worked on, just ten miles away from me, and it was ten miles away from her. She was a little later than me, a decade or so. She’s a tremendous champion for antitrust and anti-monopoly activity in this country, and I’ll let her speak the rest. Welcome, Zephyr Teachout.

Zephyr Teachout 0:51
Good afternoon. Oh my gosh, Dave and Linley, you guys put on the most extraordinary conference. Isn’t this amazing? I don’t always do this – I’m serious. Thank you, Abby, so much for having us. I promise you, I will talk about farming; I’m just going to talk about a few other things first. I’m going to talk about corruption, concentration, censorship, and democracy.

Zephyr Teachout 1:30
The most basic choice any society makes is how to organize power. Today, we organize power in a very toxic way – a way that is designed for sickness and corruption. We, as a country, in 1996, when we already had a radically concentrated media market with just about fifty firms controlling media, decided to pass the 1996 Telecom Act.

Zephyr Teachout 2:03
As a result, we allowed Sinclair to roll up local stations around the country, and we allowed one company to own ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, Searchlight, Blue Sky, FX, National Geographic, Hulu, Freeform, Maker, BAM, Touchstone, Hollywood Records, and about eight more. That company, of course, is Disney.

Zephyr Teachout 2:30
The result of that radical concentration is corruption and censorship. We have a media system so incredibly concentrated that the head of the FCC tried to censor Disney for hosting a critic of the President – and almost got away with it.

Zephyr Teachout 2:57
At that same time in Clinton’s presidency, in the 1990s, we passed a law giving tech platforms immunity for the harm they caused. As a result, we have tech platforms that are addicting children and adults, who then say they are not responsible when the choices they make lead to suicide and depression. They are not responsible when a kid from Long Island is delivered… Is that a bird?

Zephyr Teachout 3:27
You’re all looking up. They’re not responsible when a kid who never searched for suicide gets over 900 suicidal videos delivered to him on TikTok. They just wrote the algorithm. Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to find healthy alternatives to tampons? There have been different efforts over the last few years, but it’s the same problem in diapers. You know there’s a diaper duopoly, right?

Zephyr Teachout 4:02
They hiked up prices during COVID because they own the market – Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark. Procter & Gamble also dominates in the Tampax empire, and when healthier alternatives without the same metallic, dangerous substances come along, they buy them and crush them.

Zephyr Teachout 4:23
Then it uses that dominance – not just in diapers and tampons, but in razors and toiletries – to go to Walmart and big grocers and say, “We need your prime shelf space, or we’re out. We need you to stock all our products.”

Zephyr Teachout 4:53
Now they sit on top of the market, set prices, and the prices have gone up 40% for tampons, stealing money from half the population every day as people bleed out. When the state legislature passes a law requiring schools to provide menstrual products for free, the states take both the cost and the unhealthy products that come with them – and give them back to Procter & Gamble.

Zephyr Teachout 5:24
Let’s imagine you have a small, independent store that says, “Ah, my neighbor, this entrepreneur, has just come up with an amazing, healthy, all-cotton tampon. I want to stock it.” They risk Procter & Gamble ripping away the razors and toilet paper that bring people into the stores, so they say, “I cannot speak to you.”

Zephyr Teachout 5:49
But, of course, P&G isn’t even at the top of the pyramid. That belongs to big tech. P&G has deals with AI and Google Analytics, and very big deals with one of the biggest grocers in America – Amazon – where you get Amazon credits for purchasing P&G.

Zephyr Teachout 6:07
You want to talk about UnitedHealth Group, the insurance monopoly that sits on top of our health market? In just 15 years, here are a few of the companies we allowed UnitedHealth to buy: Ramsey, Metro Health, Healthwise, HealthPartners, AmeriChoice, Touchpoint, Oxford, PacifiCare, Sierra Health, Health Net, Logistics Health, ExcelHealth, and a dozen more.

Zephyr Teachout 6:34
We just watched as this company rolled up aspect after aspect of doctors’ practices across the health industry, then killed people through denials, maximizing cruelty, using its incredible power to force itself on people who don’t want to sign up.

Zephyr Teachout 6:58
Eliot, I’m going to talk more about merchandisers, but let’s start with one part. Eliot mentioned the merchandiser who wanted to take what is organic and make it mass – not about what is organic. So, we have to look at the structure of merchandising. We allowed Whole Foods to buy Wellspring, Fresh Fields, Allegro, Wild Oats, and dozens of others – and that was before Amazon bought it.

Zephyr Teachout 7:28
Two days ago, you guys were in the news. One of the biggest grocery stores in America, Whole Foods – otherwise known as Amazon – got the President to agree to a $2.5 billion fine (what it makes every two days) to avoid a trial that would have brought out documentation of all the ways it tricks people into signing up for Prime and keeping them there.

Zephyr Teachout 7:59
That, of course, happened after Jeff Bezos gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and received major favors from the Defense Department through the AWS Cloud contract. Whole Foods’ Amazon is a great example of what happens when we allow private companies to govern our society. I loved so much about Hugh’s speech today – it was incredibly brilliant – but I want to suggest a different way to think about regulation.

Zephyr Teachout 8:28
There is not regulation and deregulation. There is private regulation, which we have right now, and Amazon is privately regulating all of you through Whole Foods, because Amazon is deciding what counts as “responsibly grown” and what counts as “no antibiotics ever.” Whole Foods became the private, unaccountable regulator of what was healthy food through all these rollups.

Zephyr Teachout 8:59
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned a long time ago that all power tends to form into a government of and in itself, and that industrial power should not sit in the hands of an oligarchy. He was talking about steel, but he could have been talking about food and information.

Zephyr Teachout 9:21
From 1980 to 2020, we allowed hundreds of thousands – 500,000 in the U.S. – domestic mergers, more globally, and that concentration of power led to humiliation and fear, a system of tyrants and corruption. You know about the ownership of the two companies that own farm equipment.

Zephyr Teachout 9:45
My timer never started, which may mean we’re here for a while – but I’d love to know where I am on time. Sorry, ten minutes in? Okay, thanks. Don’t worry, I won’t stay here all afternoon; you’ve got Marion coming.

Zephyr Teachout 10:11
You know about how John Deere concentrates and then surveils. But looking beyond, we have to remember the timber monopoly that consolidated so no one could build a home, the concentration in big finance cartels that drives up homebuilding prices, the duopoly in kidney dialysis centers that kill people as prices rise, and the rollups of local nursing homes by private equity that are leading to terrible working conditions for nurses, disease, and death.

Zephyr Teachout 10:48
Then, when you die, if you want a funeral home that is local, connected to the community, with fair prices and dignity, you will find that the funeral home industry has been rolled up and monopolized. Of course, it’s even worse with AI and Big Data.

Zephyr Teachout 11:06
I want to talk about that some more, but first, one part. Because of Big Data, these companies that we have allowed to govern us now can take a granular look at each of you and try to maximally squeeze you.

Zephyr Teachout 11:26
You just got a divorce, so you’re in more debt – you’ll probably take less pay because you can’t change jobs right now. Oh, I’m Instacart. You just ordered Tylenol. That means you’re probably not price-sensitive because you’re rushing to make sure your kid gets treated for her sickness. So, we’re going to make you pay a little more for your yogurt.

Zephyr Teachout 11:57
Highly personalized surveillance pricing, which Uber, of course, is the great innovator in, is now on the verge of reaching beyond Uber and into every aspect of our food. Let’s look at Uber to see the future we’re facing. We have Uber collecting intimate data on every driver – where they live, their emotions, how fast they brake, how they turn, what their history is, and where they like to stop.

Zephyr Teachout 12:34
It takes that data and, in a black box, delivers different driver pay to each of you. If this was six Uber drivers, you’d get different wages for the exact same ride. On the other hand, there’s reporting that suggests Uber increases your prices if your cell phone battery is low.

Zephyr Teachout 12:57
You are somebody who needs to rush somewhere, and your phone is about to die. You’ll take a $50 ride instead of a $20 ride, because otherwise, you’ll be stuck on the side of the street. Uber is using its combination of monopoly power, AI, and data to massively squeeze both the drivers and the riders. If we don’t act now, this is the future of food and the future of our entire economy.

Zephyr Teachout 13:27
You know how bad it gets? Last year, it turned out that Uber was actually shutting drivers off – just disappearing them from the app – rather than complying with the New York City law that required them to pay minimum wage. They said, “Well, we only need so many drivers at this time.”

Zephyr Teachout 13:47
I met a driver who I brought together at an event with regulators – a driver who was crying. He had just buried his wife, but he came begging the regulator to do something about this because he said, “I wake up in the morning, and I go sit in my car, and I don’t know when the app is going to turn on, and I can start making money, and I can start driving.”

Zephyr Teachout 14:10
Once you allow that kind of concentration, you allow the censorship of Disney and the censorship of the driver.

Zephyr Teachout 14:20
Now let’s return to merchandising. What does this have to do with real food systems? Well, everything. Because, as Eliot said, we don’t have a merchandising system that actually allows for this. We don’t have a free, open, and local market. Instead, in groceries, three stores control almost 50% of the market: Walmart, Kroger, and Costco. In Oklahoma, 50% is Walmart alone. These are governing entities.

Zephyr Teachout 14:53
If you think, “Oh, but we’ll go online, and online sales will be open and free,” you have three companies – Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart – that dominate, control, and govern 70% of online sales. None of this is a fact of nature. All of these are the result of very specific choices we, as a society, made.

Zephyr Teachout 15:15
We made choices to allow illegal mergers for those 40 years. We made choices to allow predatory pricing, below-cost pricing, and cross-subsidization in firm after firm. We made a choice to stop – we literally just stopped – enforcing a major federal law that makes it illegal for any distributor to charge a different price to the small and the large grocery store.

Zephyr Teachout 15:49
When that law was on the books, the big retailers started owning 25% of the national market. In the 1930s, it was enforced for forty years. In the 1970s, they were still at 25%. They didn’t shrink, but they didn’t grow. We stopped enforcing it, and we saw this massive, immediate consolidation because the local grocers couldn’t survive.

Zephyr Teachout 16:30
We have decided to allow kickbacks. We have allowed big suppliers to give kickbacks to grocery stores, shutting out the local, healthy alternative. Because we have allowed this, we have allowed the collection of power in society in just a few that do not brook dissent.

Zephyr Teachout 17:00
Monopolies represent tyranny. This is a democratic question. We’ve understood this for hundreds of years. In the same letter that Thomas Jefferson suggested the First Amendment, he also suggested a constitutional amendment against monopolies. They decided against it because it was so obvious that monopolies were alien to a vision of free government – they would obviously not be allowed.

Zephyr Teachout 17:38
The result is corporate monopolies destroying communities. We know this is a five-alarm political crisis – a crisis of corruption. It’s a crisis of allowing the kind of economic bedrock that allows for dissent.

Zephyr Teachout 17:56
When we think of the great moments of dissent in our country, think about how essential the Black pharmacists and the Black drivers were in the civil rights movement. Imagine the civil rights movement today, but you’re turning to Uber and Caremark. We actually have fewer Black-owned groceries today than we did in 1976 because of the radical concentration of power.

Zephyr Teachout 18:27
We’ve also lost 30% of the independent pharmacies, and there’s been a radical centralization. I’m using radical in the other way than you are, Emily – the bad way, right? I agree, radical is good.

Zephyr Teachout 18:41
Every pathology that I described is the result of a political choice. That means everything that I described can be directly attacked with a different political choice. I’m going to mention just a few, but let me start with where I see it.

Zephyr Teachout 19:03
I learn so much every time I come to this conference, but I think real food requires open markets that are decentralized and local. Real food requires rules that favor producers and communities, not scale and not capital. It requires short supply chains, diverse sources of credit, neutral infrastructure – whether that’s cold storage, slaughter capacity, or milling – and, most importantly, neutral distribution systems.

Zephyr Teachout 19:45
It requires dignity and wages up and down the supply chain, and it does require a democratized information system. Here’s what states could do now. Again, it’s not everything, but we’ve got to start to act and recognize that if these are all results of choices, we can make different choices.

Zephyr Teachout 20:05
Any state right now can ban kickbacks – no secret payments from distributors to retailers. You can do that. New York already bans slotting fees in alcohol. We could do the same in grocery. We can do this. Think of what that does when you are then fighting a big distributor who is using their kickback power to control the shelf. You have at least a fighting chance at that shelf if you ban kickbacks from the big distributors.

Zephyr Teachout 20:35
I’m calling those “kickbacks” on purpose, as opposed to discounts. Ban discrimination. Cisco and Procter & Gamble can’t charge the corner store more than the chain. As I said before, this is already federal law. It wasn’t enforced. It was mocked by Robert Bork, by Obama’s enforcers, as well as Bush’s. They said, “What is this little law on the books? We shouldn’t enforce this.” But we can ban this, not just at the federal level, and require enforcement.

Zephyr Teachout 21:07
I’m working right now on trying to pass a state and city-level law to ban price discrimination. This is something you can do in every state. You can ban the price games that make schools, hospitals, and community institutions pay more. You can ban foreign-owned corporations from pumping money into Super PACs, and you can do that even if the foreign ownership is 5%. That affects most big conglomerates.

Zephyr Teachout 21:37
You can stop subsidies. I know many people here have talked about that. Right now, one of the big political fights is that utilities do not have to hand big tech subsidies – massive subsidies that the people are going to pay in building out their data centers. We can block mergers. You can rewrite the rules. Minnesota just passed a law changing the rules on when a hospital merger can go through. You can do that for every food system – ban mergers, and then you can start to undo that.

Zephyr Teachout 22:15
You can ban surveillance pricing – forbid the use of intimate data to set prices or wages. Of course, ultimately, this is all in the service of a bigger rethinking. We need to rethink corporate law. We need to rethink the building blocks and the core errors of the structure of power that we have in our society.

Zephyr Teachout 22:36
But as Hannah Arendt, one of my favorite political philosophers, says, what we can do right now is begin natality. We can begin, we can create something new, and by acting, we are creating.

Zephyr Teachout 22:52
Two hundred fifty years ago, when the British government granted the monopoly to the East India Tea Company, that law designed to block open markets led to the Tea Party, arguably led to the American Revolution – leading what historian Gordon Wood calls “the initial spur of the revolution was a democratic protest against the spirit of monopoly.”

Zephyr Teachout 23:27
The spirit of monopoly is, as we started with, always tied to the spirit of corruption. But to me, the most important revolution, the one that I take my inspiration from, is the farmers of the 19th century who, in the wake of the second American constitutional moment – the one in the 1860s – came together and built a democratic movement demanding to fulfill the democratic promise.

Zephyr Teachout 23:57
I’m talking about the farmers who organized under the National Farmers Alliance and the People’s Party. The book that changed my life, Lawrence Goodwyn’s book “Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America” – an incredible book. They were like you are, facing this technological revolution.

Zephyr Teachout 24:17
There it was industrialization, railroads, and the telegraph. The prices were in the basement. They were facing this reorganization of society as the railroads and the corporate form organized regions from the top down, working with East Coast finance to crush the small farmer.

Zephyr Teachout 24:39
At first, just like you guys, they tried self-help. At first, they came together and said, “Let’s get a fertilizer-buying co-op.” This is literally what they were doing – to share costs in purchasing. “Let’s sell collectively.”

Zephyr Teachout 24:56
That wasn’t enough. Then they went to the South. The Democratic Party was the hegemon, so they went to the Southern Democratic Party and tried to convince them of their demands, and that didn’t work.

Zephyr Teachout 25:07
Then they really built the movement through education. They rode circuit from Grange to Grange Hall, from church basements to schoolhouses, building an infrastructure of understanding. They built extraordinarily across race lines.

Zephyr Teachout 25:26
Black populists and white populists came together to fight for the rights of farmers. They told the stories about how railroads were discriminating against the small farmer. Ida Tarbell, in her book, says, “Everywhere I went, everybody was talking about price discrimination.” They made that the center of American politics.

Zephyr Teachout 25:55
They built a communication system of 40,000 lecturers going town to town, just telling the truth, like Hugh was earlier today, about what is happening. This is how the system works. Now, the horrific story is that the Democratic Party saw them as such a threat that the thing they brought to crush them was Jim Crow and massive segregation. Only by separating white and Black farmers could they crush the spirit of the populist movement.

Zephyr Teachout 26:31
Northern financiers, Du Bois talks about in his incredible book “Black Reconstruction in America,” worked with Southern elites to destroy it. But so much of what they gave us did live on. They got us to require railroads to treat all people alike.

Zephyr Teachout 26:49
They built the whole idea of common carriage. They demanded neutrality in the telegraph and the telephone. They got the direct election of senators. And by the way, they were against the Electoral College before it was cool.

Zephyr Teachout 27:05
They left us this living memory of what it takes to move a continent-sized democracy – not just moments of outrage about Trump this, Trump that – but actually looking at the structures of power that enable this kind of corruption to have it.

Zephyr Teachout 27:21
So, what does this story demand of us now? It demands that we build real educational systems, and Dave and Linley are doing that with the podcast and with the convening. Part of the reason I’m talking about media is that if everybody is in their own silo fighting against power, we’re not going to win.

Zephyr Teachout 27:38
We actually need to have alliances with a small musician who is totally shut out of being able to reach the market because of Ticketmaster. We need to make alliances with a small pharmacist who can’t give people the prescriptions they need. When a big retailer gets slotting fees from your local grocer, your carrots are put to the back, and the small retailer is hurt.

Zephyr Teachout 28:11
We need to break up, in other words, not just Monsanto – although we need to break up Bayer-Monsanto, DuPont-Dow, Walmart, Amazon, Whole Foods, Costco, Instacart, and all of those – but we need to recognize that that also means breaking up Disney and Sinclair and restructuring society.

Zephyr Teachout 28:34
The alliances we want to build may seem really hard and weird because you guys are busy. You’ve got stuff to do. We’ve got to make “organic” be a real word again, instead of this fake, lawless use of the word.

Zephyr Teachout 28:48
But when you are doing that, you can’t stop doing that, because that is a way to take on power. You can’t stop that. But when you are doing that, recognize the opportunities for alliance with efforts to break up Ticketmaster, Caremark, and UnitedHealthcare. That is actually how we have a chance as a society to come together and really decide what kind of democracy we have.

Zephyr Teachout 29:15
Of course, this moment is different. It’s not about industrialization. I think a lot of it is about control of information. The downsides of this moment are obvious and great, and it can feel daunting, but we have no business whining.

Zephyr Teachout 29:34
We can whine a little bit, but we have no business whining, because the alliances we are talking about – this is not anywhere near as hard as the alliances between poor white farmers and poor Black farmers in North Carolina in 1892. That’s true difficulty. That’s facing lynchings and direct political violence.

Zephyr Teachout 29:59
Right now, while we still have the spark and the capacity to come together, to convene, and to join, to begin, we need to make those alliances now to totally rethink how we allow information, communication, energy, and food to be controlled at the local democratic level.

Zephyr Teachout 30:24
All I’m going to say is, it may seem hard, but if Eliot Coleman can make a fertile field out of a sandy spruce forest, we can make a democracy out of an oligarchy.