Tracking Transformation: Food Systems Are Falling Short—But a Path to 2050 Exists

We're excited to share the latest research from the Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI), a global effort we co-chair alongside Lawrence Haddad of GAIN, Mario Herrero of Cornell University, and José Rosero Moncayo of FAO. For those unfamiliar with our work, the FSCI is a collaborative research initiative that brings together experts from every major world region, spanning academia, UN agencies, and civil society, all united around a single mission: to monitor whether the world's food systems are actually moving toward being healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable. Since our founding, we've tracked 50 core indicators across five themes—diets and nutrition, environment and production, livelihoods and equity, governance, and resilience—publishing annual reports that aim to hold governments and institutions accountable to the promises made at events like the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. You can learn more about our full initiative, our team, and our history here.

This year's flagship analysis, published in Nature Food and accompanied by our 2026 policy report, represents a major methodological leap forward for the Countdown. We want to give special thanks to lead author Bianca Carducci, who drove this work from literature review through analysis and drafting, along with the many collaborators who contributed data updates, review, and expertise across our extensive network. In previous years, we could tell you whether an indicator was trending in a good or bad direction, but we couldn't say how good is "good enough."

This year, we fixed that. For 44 of our indicators, we established two types of reference points: targets and benchmarks. Targets are fixed goalposts drawn from existing international commitments, human rights conventions, or theoretical minimums and maximums—things like the SDG commitment to universal access to safe drinking water. Benchmarks, on the other hand, are relative and empirically grounded: for each indicator, we looked at how the best-performing 20% of countries were doing—globally, within their region, and within their income group—and used that as a realistic peer-based standard. This distinction matters because targets tend to be aspirational and often the same for every country, while benchmarks acknowledge that countries face different starting points and constraints, offering a more attainable near-term goal even as we keep our eyes on the bigger, more ambitious targets.

Beyond simply comparing where countries stand today to these reference points, we wanted to understand the pace of change. So we calculated each country's historical rate of progress since roughly 2015, using something called the compound annual growth rate—essentially, how much an indicator would need to change every year, compounding annually, to get from where it is now to where it needs to be. We did this for two future horizons: 2030, the SDG deadline, and 2050, a longer runway that allows for more gradual but sustained improvement. This let us classify countries into categories like "on target," "moderate progress," "marginal progress," "stagnating," or "regressing," and—critically—to calculate exactly how much faster each country or region would need to move to close the gap by each deadline.

So what did we find? The headline result is sobering: of the 30 indicators with global targets, only one—mobile phone subscriptions—has been met, on average, at the global level. For nearly every other indicator, current rates of progress are simply insufficient to hit global targets by 2030. Some indicators aren't just moving too slowly; they're moving in the wrong direction entirely, including civil society participation, agricultural water withdrawal, and food systems emissions. When we ran the numbers on what it would take to close these gaps by 2030, the required annual changes for many regions were, frankly, unattainable—the kind of growth rate that has essentially never been sustained in the real world for that indicator.

But there's a more hopeful part of this story. When we compared countries to regional or income-group benchmarks rather than the more ambitious global targets, performance looked considerably better, since these benchmarks are calibrated to what peer countries have actually achieved. And when we extended our timeline out to 2050 instead of 2030, many targets and benchmarks that looked impossible suddenly became achievable with steady, sustained effort. Vegetable availability is a good example: hitting the benchmark by 2030 would require punishing annual increases in most regions, but by 2050, the necessary pace drops to something far more realistic. The same pattern held for governance indicators like the open budget index and social capital index. This is really the core message of our 2050 pathway: transformation is still possible, but only if we start accelerating now and maintain that momentum without disruption from shocks like funding cuts, conflicts, or pandemics.

Not everything brightens with a longer timeline, however. Food systems emissions change remains a serious outlier—even by 2050, most regions would still need to cut emissions by more than 30% annually to hit the target, an essentially infeasible rate absent transformative policy shifts and investment. Similar infeasibly steep trajectories were required for indicators like child labor, the affordability of a healthy diet, and food price volatility. These are the indicators we believe deserve the most urgent attention from policymakers, donors, and researchers, since business-as-usual trajectories simply will not get us there.

We built this analysis not to be discouraging, but to be useful. Accountability requires knowing not just whether we're moving in the right direction, but whether we're moving fast enough—and our hope is that this target-and-benchmark framework gives governments, funders, and civil society a much sharper tool for prioritizing where investment and policy attention are most urgently needed. We invite you to explore all of the underlying country-level data yourself at the Food Systems Dashboard, where you can see exactly how your country or region stacks up against these targets and benchmarks, both now and on the path to 2050.

The Quiet of Ferragosto

Ferragosto arrives like a held breath. In Italy, it settles over the country in early to mid-August, when the heat is thick (thanks to this fifth heat dome, because apparently Mother Earth is done being subtle) and the light and its photons feel almost physical. The cities loosen their grip. People disappear to the sea, the mountains, village homes, distant places, and long lunches that stretch well into evening. Ferragosto is not just a holiday here. It is a cultural instruction to stop. That instruction has old roots.

The name comes from the Latin Feriae Augusti, the “rest of Augustus,” created by Emperor Augustus in 18 BC as a month of respite after the labor of the harvest. In ancient Rome, this was a season of recovery as much as celebration. Horse racing was a big thing (still celebrated in Siena in the Palio on August 16th). The social order paused, if only briefly, so the body and the land could recover from abundance. I love that Ferragosto began with the recognition that rest belongs to the agricultural calendar. It was not seen as an interruption of productivity but instead, a part of it. A field or parcel of land cannot be endlessly demanded of, and neither can a person.

As the centuries turned, the holiday changed shape, as holidays do when cultures, empires, and religions pass through them. The Catholic Church eventually aligned Ferragosto with the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrated on August 15th. The Virgin Mary, assumed body and soul into heaven, became a figure of protection and intercession. In many parts of Italy, especially in older rural traditions, prayer for abundance and prayer for harvest were never far apart. The sacred and the seasonal lived side by side.

And then, in the twentieth century, the holiday was transformed again. Under Mussolini, Ferragosto became a vehicle for mass leisure and political theater. The regime organized the Treni Popolari di Ferragosto (the People’s Trains), offering heavily discounted travel so working-class families could reach the coast, mountains, or cities for a day or a few days. For many Italians, this was the first time they left their towns for a holiday. It was propaganda, absolutely, but it also widened access to experience. It changed the shape of Italian summer life. There is something telling in the fact that these trains did not include food. Families brought their own packed meals in a communal style. Ferragosto is, in this way, deeply about food — not only eating, but planning, carrying, sharing, and pausing over it. Food as occasion and memory.

Today, Ferragosto still marks the center of the Italian summer. For many, the entire month of August is off or “chiuso” and sometimes, the holiday even stretches a wee bit into September. Entire cities empty out and the familiar noise recedes. In Bologna, where I live, the silence in the streets feels almost startling. The students, who are the heart of this city, are gone. The usual current of movement thins. A city that is normally busy, porous, and alive becomes strangely open yet arcadian. I can hear my own footsteps. I can hear my mind clicking. I can hear the cicadas. There is a particular loneliness in that stillness and emptiness, but also a kind of mercy. It reminds me a bit of the early days of COVID when we walked the silent streets.

not a soul in san stefano, bologna

With this quieted emplacement, I am not being pulled in every direction. The city is not demanding anything of me. The air is still enough to notice my own thoughts. And that, to me, is one of the rarest gifts this quiet can give: not stimulation, not ambition, not efficiency, but space.

And in a world that worships output, the Italian summer pause feels almost radical. In the United States, and in many places like it, rest is often treated as something to be earned, or apologized for, or compressed into whatever remains after work is done. We speak constantly about productivity, optimization, improvement, momentum. Initiative! But Ferragosto asks different questions entirely: what if the point was not to keep going and instead do very little at all? What if a society could be measured not only by what it produces, but by how well it rests?

I think that is why Ferragosto feels so beautiful to me. It is not only because it is old, or because it is Italian, or because it comes with delicious meals and long afternoons. It is because it honors a truth we keep trying to outrun in that our bodies need recovery, that seasons need pause, and that life is not made better by constant striving.

Sometimes the most nourishing thing we can do is eat something simple, lie still, and let the day pass over us. Ferragosto understands that. And perhaps, if we listened closely enough, so could we.

Piazza Maggiore è vuota.

Has Nutrition Been Lost in the Shift to Food Systems?

I was having a lovely catch-up with my good friend and colleague Stineke Oenema, the former Executive Secretary of UN Nutrition, and we were discussing the current “positioning” of nutrition. Nutrition has always been important. The problem is that it rarely stays at the center of global development attention for long.

For decades, the international agenda has moved in waves. In the mid-20th century, the priority was food security: preventing famine, increasing yields, and making sure countries had enough to eat. Later, nutrition emerged more explicitly as a development goal in its own right. The first 1,000 days framework helped focus attention on a critical period in child development. The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement created a political platform (RIP David Nabarro). Nutrition-sensitive agriculture pushed the idea that farming should do more than produce calories — it should improve diets.

Now the dominant frame is food systems. That shift has brought real value. It has helped connect production, trade, diets, health, climate, and resilience. It has broadened the conversation in useful ways that take on the holistic nature of food as an interconnected system that should not be dealt with as isolated activities without consequences. But it also raises an uncomfortable question: when nutrition is absorbed into a bigger agenda, does it gain strength — or lose visibility?

That question matters because nutrition has never been a narrow technical issue. It is multi-causal and deeply political. It depends on food, yes, but also on health services, clean water, sanitation, education, income, social protection, and care. No single ministry or institution can fix it alone. That complexity makes nutrition harder to govern than many other development priorities. It is everyone’s concern, which too often means it becomes no one’s responsibility.

And yet the case for nutrition has never been stronger. Every country in the world faces some form of malnutrition. In some places the challenge is undernutrition and stunting. In others it is micronutrient deficiencies. Elsewhere it is overweight, obesity, and diet-related disease. Often, all of these coexist. Malnutrition is not just a problem of the past—it is a defining feature of the present.

It is not all terrible. In the just-released State of Food Insecurity Report, also known as “the SOFI,” produced annually by FAO et al, they show that global progress on reducing stunting, wasting, and overweight among children under five years of age is improving, but “marginally.” Yet, the data suggests that child stunting has declined substantially in Africa. The region is also on track to achieve the child overweight and wasting targets, with projections indicating that both targets will be surpassed by 2030. Asia is on track to meet the 2030 goal for stunting (which is a 40 percent reduction in the number of children under five years of age who are stunted). That is incredible!

However, not all is quiet on the western front either. Progress on reducing undernutrition is mixed when looking at regions, countries, and within pockets of countries, and meeting the 2030 targets shows there is still a lot of work to do (look at all that red in the SOFI graphic below). Some countries are really struggling. Anemia among women is getting much worse. We worked on a Lancet Hematology Commission this past year to draw more attention to anemia, which has devastating consequences for women. Obesity among adults continues to increase, but perhaps the GLP-1 drugs may halt some of this rise, eventually (that is, if they become widely available, cheap, and don’t cause known/unknown harms).

Analysis from SOFI 2026 report (FAO)

The stakes are rising. Conflict, climate change, inflation, tariffs, and geopolitical shocks all affect food prices and food access. When prices rise, households do not simply buy less food — they often buy less nutritious food. Diet diversity declines. Women and children are often hit first and hardest. In other words, shocks to food systems, and many other systems, are also shocks to nutrition. This is why nutrition cannot be treated as a sub-theme within broader debates on food, climate, or geopolitics. It sits at the intersection of all three.

The danger today is not that nutrition has disappeared from the agenda. It is that it is being folded into other priorities without enough explicit attention of its own. Food systems are important, but food systems do not automatically produce healthy diets. A system can be efficient, resilient, and climate-smart and still fail to improve nutrition. Unless nutrition is named, measured, financed, and held accountable, it can easily be assumed rather than delivered.

That is the lesson from nutrition’s history. The issue gains ground when it is attached to a larger political narrative — but it only stays visible when it remains a distinct objective. The 1000 days agenda worked because it was specific. SUN worked because it created a coalition and a sense of urgency. While SUN has brought countries together around nutrition, participation has not become universal and countries committing to SUN appears to have slowed. Nutrition-sensitive agriculture mattered because it tried to make nutrition everyone’s business. But each time the field broadened, the risk of dilution grew too.

Maybe we nutritionists aren’t needed anymore – undernutrition is slowly coming down, and now, GLP-1s are the “saviors” of the obesity pandemic…I think you all know I am being a bit sarcastic here, but truly, what is next? Will another report or a global meeting that focuses solely on nutrition help? Likely not. Even more so, is international development dead? I really hope not…but it ain’t lookin’ so good for 2030 if things stay as they are.

So, what comes next? Right now, with the current world order, I have no clue, my friends. Perhaps it is One Health. Perhaps it is climate-nutrition links. Perhaps it is a stronger focus on resilient diets, commercial determinants of health, or the health consequences of food environments. Maybe it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. Whatever the next frame is, it should not replace nutrition. It should protect it.

Because nutrition is not a luxury issue to be revisited when the world has time. It is foundational to human development, resilience, and equity. If the world is serious (which is questionable at the moment) about reducing poverty, improving health, strengthening food security, and building climate resilience, then nutrition must remain visible — not just as part of the conversation, but as a priority in its own right.

The next global agenda post 2030 should not have to rediscover nutrition all over again. It should learn how to keep it there. 

Food Bytes: June 2026 Edition

Here we are. Smack dab in the middle of Europe’s second heat wave here in Bologna. My years of living in Tucson with a swamp cooler and in NY without any AC have trained my body well, but as the years go on, tolerating the heat gets a wee bit harder. According to Rothko, we are Orange, Red, Orange, 1961. I’ll take that and fester in it for a while. But in all seriousness, the world keeps signaling to us that something is off. This “Omega heat dome,” where Europe remains ill-prepared, is the latest example. The Po is drying up, which is bad for agriculture. A high-pressure system has trapped hot air over South Asia, creating a prolonged heatwave. Wildfires are poppin in America’s west and Europe’s east. Already, the heat is putting pressure on food supplies (good article on Bloomberg) along with Trump’s unnecessary war with Iran.

And now, we see the World Meteorological Organization has confirmed the rapid development of a new El Niño cycle in the Pacific Ocean. Meteorologists note it is already beginning to shift global moisture and temperature baselines, setting the stage for a highly volatile summer. The Grist has a timely article on the potential impacts the world is likely to see. Data suggest that in South Asia, and India in particular, El Niño weakens the seasonal monsoons, and because India is the world's largest rice exporter, a failed or weak monsoon could severely diminish rice yields and trigger global export restrictions or bans. In Southern Africa, the pattern typically brings hotter, much drier conditions, threatening staple crops like maize and risking a spike in regional malnutrition. While parts of South America (like Peru) face heavy rain and flooding that can wipe out infrastructure, the southern United States is projected to face a much wetter-than-normal year, risking crop-destroying floods from California to the East Coast.

As I always ask my students when discussing extreme events, is the world ready?

With all this heat, it does get hard to sit in front of one’s computer, plunk down on the couch, and read, but on the other hand, it is hard to do much else. So herein lies what I have been reading for the last month. Got through about 4 books so far (see picture on the left). My goal is to read 10 books over the summer months. I have provided reviews of these here, here, and here. All are good reads, with only one related to food. I haven’t had a chance to review Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, but she certainly captures me not only in her writing but also in how she positions herself in the world. Some say she is the modern Joan Didion. I say she is solely Rebecca Solnit.

Bored? Try this FoodGuesser which gives you a dish or food and you have to guess where it is from. Today’s was surf ‘n turf. Uhhhh…..who else would be so decadent to both steak and lobster on one plate…

Beyond books, I found some of these reports and papers worth some time digging into:

First up, the Global Nutrition Report. It was nice to see a full report again after several years of getting lost in goal tracking that didn’t seem to track all that much…The findings of the 2026 Global Nutrition Report land at a critical juncture, providing a necessary, evidence-based framework for navigating the intersection of climate change and malnutrition. It tells us plainly that our celebrated 'win-win' development narratives are often illusions on the ground. As we shift towards integrated, climate-resilient approaches, the report rightly emphasizes that our policy choices can no longer be treated as separate, single-sector decisions. The 2026 Global Nutrition Report lands not as a comfortable endorsement of ongoing efforts, but as an intellectual disruption to our collective “siloed complacency” and the seductive trap of "win-win" developmental narratives. For too long, the multilateral system has acknowledged the intersections of climate, health, and nutrition only implicitly—treating them as adjacent portfolios rather than as a single, co-dependent polycrisis.

The Global Justice Report (lots of “globals” here)…is a really important report led by the World Inequality Lab. The report outlines a roadmap spanning from 2026 to 2100 that aims to reconcile global economic prosperity with planetary boundaries. The report argues that climate survival and deep decarbonization are impossible without a drastic reduction in wealth inequality. It proposes radical systemic changes—such as a massive "Global Justice Fund" financed by heavy taxes on billionaires, a transition to a two-and-a-half-day work week (YES!!!!), and reduced material and red meat consumption—with the goal of capping global warming at 1.8°C while doubling the incomes of 89% of the world's population. Thomas Piketty, the world-renowned French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, brings his trademark expertise in wealth and income inequality to the project. It is dreamy and bold, and worth a read of a utopian world that seems very far off at the moment…

On reports, and this one doesn’t have “global” in the title, is the At the Crossroads: Food in an Age of Uncertainty by Systemiq. This is an interesting report that conducts a foresight analysis (see figure below) of how escalating geopolitical fractures, climate volatility, and artificial intelligence are converging to disrupt the global food system. The report is highly effective at diagnosing system vulnerabilities—notably exposing concentrated supply risks, such as the fact that just four crops occupy 50% of global cropland and that a staggering 30% of global fertilizer trade passes through a single chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz (a very timely notion indeed). Critically, however, the report functions more as an academic exercise in "futures thinking" than a concrete action plan. While it sharply rejects simple "system efficiency" in favor of holistic structural resilience and issues urgent warnings about ultra-processed food addiction, its conclusions call for "honest dialogue" and "step-changes in global coordination" rather than outlining enforceable regulatory mechanisms or specific corporate mandates. Ultimately, it serves as an excellent diagnostic tool for identifying systemic risk, but it soft-pedals the aggressive, legally binding political battles of food policy and systems.

Stylized scenarios and trends, Systemiq

Some other good peer review articles that I came across:

  • The long and winding road of stunting reduction since the 19th century (P.S. that is not the name of the article…). Some good lessons for LMICs still dealing with stubbornly high stunting prevalence, particularly from Japan.

  • Was the Lancet series on ultra-processed foods not sufficient? Well, AJPH has you covered with a whopper of a special issue on UPFs and public health. If you don’t have time to read the 18 articles, you can read Lindsay Smith Tallie and Ashley Gearheardt’s summary on their new Substack, Unjunked, to get the highlights, or this NYT article. If you want to see what to do about it, get involved with Fedup! movement.

  • The WHO has published its estimates on the hazards of foodborne illnesses. The results are scary, and I don’t think the global food system community talks enough about food safety. They show that as of 2021, foodborne transmission of the 42 hazards they studied caused 866 million illnesses and 1.52 million deaths. Of those hazards, inorganic arsenic, lead, and non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica caused the most damage, particularly among young children and in Africa and South-East Asia.

  • A review of countries worldwide shows that 64 have implemented sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, covering 3·. billion people, with Asia leading the way.

  • Love this paper, which links the lack of clean drinking water to food insecurity (and vice versa) and to food safety issues. Good read!

  • A timely paper understanding the impacts of trade on the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus. In the paper, they construct WEF networks to quantify trade-driven changes. High-income countries achieve stronger WEF synergies that promote gains across all three aspects, whereas low-income countries face many trade-offs, with food-centered competition over water and energy driving them. This is why I always argue for the “energy bros” out there to consider food…

  • While not food-related, an important read on how “commitments to stronger international cooperation are being strained by rising authoritarianism, weakening multilateralism, aid cuts, and growing misinformation” when it comes to infectious disease spread (with the recent cases of Hantavirus and Ebola). These same issues will hinder efforts to address food insecurity and malnutrition. 

  • The Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health–Lancet Commission on health, conflict, and forced displacement: health in a world of crises and impunity outlines a comprehensive strategy to reform the global humanitarian system amid escalating modern crises (see Figure below) by demanding an end to legal impunity, a total inversion of power toward localized decision-making, and a complete restructuring of how emergency health funding is distributed to affected populations. Boom.

Timeline of humanitarian health crises, reforms and milestones, 1863–2025 (Spiegel et al 2026)

Some other tidbits and interesting reads across media:

  • Who knew ranch dressing would be popular?

  • I was just visiting London and Brighton, and yes, I had fish and chips goddammit. But is England ready to move away from cod? Bloody hell!

  • A wonderfully philosophical long read in the Guardian about whether ecosystems can malfunction, in which the author argues that ecosystems only "malfunction" when humans co-opt them for specific goals.

  • Innovation on how to run a restaurant (don’t charge for food) in Minneapolis (we got your back, friends!).

  • The Economist argues that feeding the world will require new technology. Um, Duh! But is AI the game-changer? I remain skeptical.

  • What have we learned about GLP meds? It’s the wild, wild west, ya’ll! But clearly, this may prove to be a game-changer in tackling obesity.

Well, my hands are starting to sweat, making it hard to type. I will leave you an album that came to mind recently and that I had not listened to in a good long time: the self-titled Violent Femmes album that came out in ‘83 in my junior high days. The Violent Femmes are an American folk-punk band from Wisconsin. Such an original sound at the time. We were kind of obsessed with this album for a hot minute, and somehow, it fits with summer, the heat, frustration, etc. A funny side story: the group was busking in Milwaukee on a street corner, and the guitar player for the Pretenders happened to be walking by, heard them, and invited them to open for their show that night. Hot damn!

Archive Appetizer: Chiara Barzini's Aqua

I read Chiara Barzini's Aqua with great intrigue, having the pleasure of knowing the author. This familiarity added an extra layer of warmth to an already captivating narrative, in which Barzini famously lets fate set her course on a winding road trip with two of her best pals, exploring the historic (and somewhat insane) Mulholland Aqueduct project to bring water from the mountains 233 miles away to Los Angeles.

The book also intrigued me because water and food insecurity are inseparable. When access, availability, and basic rights to these resources are challenged, they don't just spark wars—they become weapons.

This sense of fragile, manufactured illusion becomes even more striking when you look at the fundamental absurdity of California’s water crisis. Aqua uncovers an inescapable truth: a massive, sprawling civilization was erected in a region that has always been fundamentally water-deprived, operating on the hubristic assumption that nature could be humanely engineered to solve the deprivation, a la John McPhee’s The Control of Nature.

Today, a toxic cocktail of long-term systemic mismanagement and climate change has pushed the city — and, moreover, the state — to its breaking point, painfully echoing the "Limits to Growth" theory—the reality that infinite consumption cannot sustain itself on a finite planet. Watching a metropolis like Los Angeles constantly lurching from one catastrophic drought (or wildfire or atmospheric river phenomena), along with various infrastructure failures, makes it feel less like a series of modern emergencies and more like an inevitable destiny. It is a stark reminder that when you build an “empire” on a landscape which is inherently a semi-arid, Mediterranean ecosystem, the crisis isn't an accident; it's inevitable.

Her voice shines through in several standout ways. She highlights the vibrant, nostalgic energy of 1960s and 70s hippie-cult California through a personal lens—not just as an observer, but as someone whose own identity is deeply entangled with its myths, its magic, and its modern fractures. This history is established by her injection of intimate personal anecdotes, seamlessly weaving her roles as a mom, a daughter, a friend, a wife, and a writer into the larger geographical crisis. You can see how much the beloved Joan Didion influenced her writing and psyche. There are so many great bits about the culture of Los Angeles - from the movie Chinatown, Father Yod of the Source, to the Manson murders.

As one reads Aqua, her yearning for a Los Angeles that no longer exists, much like its water security, “drips” from the pages. In the book, it seems she is beginning to reckon with that loss. I wrote about yesteryear California back in 2024, when we spent part of the summer in Los Angeles (and so did my partner in his blog). As I wrote: “We always thought we might return to live on the West Coast, but our vision of what we think California should be is over, finished. It went in another, less interesting and unauthentic direction long ago.” It is hard to admit when your home is no longer your home, and Barzini, in her journey to trace the aqueduct that quenched LA, seems to be realizing that through various moments she witnesses and personally experiences. Barzini admits to being wooed by Hollywood, the fame, the dazzling and glossy illusion of the American Dream. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit captures this ethos, describing a "glittering, amnesiac Los Angeles"—a city devoid of communal memory that eagerly incinerates its own history for the sake of perpetual reinvention. Reading Barzini, one feels a distinct melancholy as she comes to terms with the fact that those pipe dreams will never be realized.

For example, what genuinely broke my heart was her side story regarding the screenplay adaptation of her previous novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake. Watching her recount her agonizing experience with the Hollywood movie machine—which ultimately culminated in a crushing rejection from a famous director—was nothing short of visceral. She lays bare the fickle, cold-hearted nature of an industry that treats artists as largely disposable, and while the outcome itself wasn't terribly surprising given how Hollywood operates, it was brutal to read someone navigate that system (and one she is already connected with). Yet, it serves as a powerful thematic anchor for Aqua, mirroring the broader reality of California itself: a place built entirely on beautiful, mirage-like illusions that so often leave people “parched.”

However, looking at the book objectively as a non-fiction reader and a scientist, I found a couple of areas where I craved a bit more depth. When diving into complex regional water security and access issues, I generally prefer a heavier reliance on hard facts and thorough citations (and maybe more interviews with experts), whereas Aqua leans much more toward an impressionistic, narrative style, leaving some data points feeling a bit sparse or even anecdotal.

Given that Barzini considers Rome and Los Angeles her two homes, the narrative misses a powerful opportunity to undertake a deeper, more rigorous comparative lens—one that fully unearths how water scarcity and failed dreams uniquely intersect across these two landscapes. Exploring how both of these grand worlds grapple with their own structural and cultural droughts could have elevated the book's narration to even greater heights.

Archive Appetizer: The Last Great Dream

As many of you dear readers know, I am working on a book about the U.S. counterculture movement and its impact on food systems. For me, summer is all about reading, and I am trying to read some books to help with my writing.

So, I took on The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties by Dennis McNally. The book explores the generational and cultural evolution that transformed mid-century American bohemianism into the full-blown counterculture movement of the 1960s.

Rather than viewing the “hippie movement” as a sudden, overnight cultural explosion, McNally argues that it was the result of a slow, multi-layered accumulation of artistic and social grassroots resistance and endurance. The narrative traces this evolution across major cultural hubs such as San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, showing how small groups of brave societal outsiders gradually built an alternative arts universe that eventually altered mainstream American consciousness. This decentralized network served as a breeding ground for new ideas.

The heart of the book details the interconnectedness of various multi-disciplinary underground movements that flourished in the shadow of post-WWII conformity. McNally weaves together a tapestry of micro-histories, illustrating how beat poetry, avant-garde classical music, experimental theater, jazz, and the underground press all cross-pollinated. Iconic figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, John Cage, and Lenny Bruce are highlighted not just for their individual brilliance but also as foundational pillars of a shared philosophy. This philosophical foundation rejected rigid traditional American values—such as aggressive consumerism, militarism, and puritanical social structures—in favor of creative expression, communal living, radical peace, and expanded consciousness through psychedelics.

The book's chronological arc begins with the roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance in the 1940s and 1950s, steadily builds through the early 1960s as these disparate artistic movements coalesce, and culminates in the defining mass gatherings of 1967. McNally positions the historic Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park and the legendary Monterey Pop Festival—which launched icons like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—as the peak flowering of this "last great dream." In doing so, he captures a unique, fleeting moment of powerful idealism before the era's commercialization set in, providing a definitive, un-nostalgic roadmap of how a few fringe outcasts successfully reshaped modern global culture.

What was great about the book is that McNally spends time on lesser-known nodes—like the Venice Beach boho hub, London fashion designer Mary Quant, or the avant-garde experiments at Black Mountain College (such a fascinating place)—he constructs a much truer, more diverse map of how the movement actually formed. He also dismantles the notion that the hippie movement was an overnight explosion. Instead, he shows how it was a slow, multi-decade evolution.

Because McNally tries to weave together beat poetry, jazz, experimental theater, electronic music, and the underground press across multiple cities, the narrative frequently fragments. Fascinating subplots or complex figures are often squeezed into a few paragraphs or pages before the book rapidly shifts focus, leaving the reader with a text that occasionally feels more like an "Underground 101" encyclopedia than a deeply analytical history.

McNally states that these bohemians created the sixties, but he occasionally overlooks the deeper socio-economic analysis that explains why these fringe artistic movements successfully broke through to the mainstream, while earlier bohemian movements remained isolated. Lastly, the book focuses intensely on the era's cultural and artistic theater, which means the heavy, gritty political machinery of the 1960s gets pushed to the sidelines. The civil rights movement, the intricate anti-war political organizing, and the structural backlash from institutional power are treated as background noise rather than forces that actively shaped—and were shaped by—the bohemian-to-hippie pipeline.

Archive Appetizer: The role of universities in global health, climate, and equity

This publication, Combating converging crises: The role of universities in global health, climate, and equity, stemmed from a Bellagio Rockefeller convening that we authors participated in—which, as it happened, took place right during the 2024 US election when Donald Trump won. Witnessing that massive political shift in real-time heavily underscored the urgent premise of our paper: universities are currently facing a perfect storm of intense political polarization, funding cuts, and escalating climate-driven health risks like extreme heat, infectious diseases, and widening social gaps. In a world increasingly crowded with misinformation and scientific denialism, academic institutions cannot afford to be passive observers. They must actively step up to defend objective truth and champion public solutions where climate, health, and equity collide.

To guide institutions through these turbulent times, our piece outlines four interlinked responsibilities for the modern university. First, they must fiercely safeguard scientific discovery and act as a public shield against misinformation. Second, to weather unpredictable political and financial shifts, they need to diversify their funding by building deeper, more resilient partnerships with local communities, industries, and governments. Third, they must practice what they preach by taking institutional responsibility for their own environmental footprints, actively cutting their own greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining rigorous ethical standards. Finally, they need to completely overhaul education, breaking down old academic silos to arm the next generation of leaders with the cross-disciplinary skills required to solve real-world crises.

Ultimately, these recommendations offer a practical survival guide and call to action for higher education during deeply fragile political moments. By shifting away from isolated ivory towers and transforming into dynamic, collaborative engines of change, universities can maintain their status as trusted, evidence-based spaces for global cooperation. For communities navigating the future of our health, environment, and food systems, this perspective serves as a timely reminder that tackling tomorrow's overlapping crises requires a bold, united, and socially responsible academic ecosystem.

What the world contains

As the summer solstice nears, I feel the tug. The urge. The pressure to do things differently. Read 10 books! Swim every day! Have meeting-less workdays! I scheme in grandiose ways, convinced this will finally be my "summer of quiet," carefully crafting elaborate to-do lists (therein lies problem #1). I tell myself I’ll finally live and work on my own terms, freed from the weekly teaching schedules and the usual semester onslaught. Everyone else is on holiday, right? The emails will slow down…yes?

In one sense, it’s all true. But after fifty-four years on this grand planet, you’d think I would have learned by now. Summers come and go, just like the seasons and the years. And sometimes, they just aren't the summers of your life.

Back in August 2019, I wrote a blog entry titled "Su-Su-Summertime Sadness." In it, I confessed:

“My summers always haunt me. The could’ves, the should’ves, the would’ves. I could have done more with my summer, or I could have done less. I should have done what the Italians do and taken a whole month off to celebrate Ferragosto.”

I even put together a playlist to mark the end of the season, which only succeeded in draining the last of my ambition.

I mean, WTF.

I think this notion of “this is going to be the best summer ever” starts back in elementary school or junior high. Remember those days? Once you finished whatever house and yard chores your mom left for you, the rest of the summer was yours. You went swimming sans sunscreen until your hands were shriveled-up prunes (they were different times, my dear readers). You rode your bike with your amigos down to the 7-Eleven for a Smarties candy necklace, washed it down with a Slurpee, and played kickball into the depths of the night with the neighborhood kids until you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face.

Total freedom.

We made our own lunches and were entirely on our own. No longer mandated to eat cafeteria school “lunches.” My personal favorite? Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup with Lays sour cream and onion potato chips crumbled on top. Variant B was Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup, sprinkled with Ruffles cheddar-and-sour-cream potato chips. All of it was washed down with a Pepsi and finished off with a Ding Dong or a Ho Ho. Honestly, it is incredible that I am still alive…(don’t hate me Carlos Monteiro!). We were, after all, living that middle-class suburban American life (think 80s: ET, Poltergeist, Sixteen Candles, ya’ll).

I used to beat myself up for not being "productive" enough during the summer. But lately, as some of you know, I’ve been practicing “niksen.” It’s a Dutch term that means intentionally doing nothing without a purpose or a deadline—just gazing out the window, taking in the scenery, and letting your mind wander. The Italians, of course, have elevated this to an art form.

This art form is known as dolce far niente—the sweetness of doing nothing (Yes, it was popularized by Eat, Pray, Love, but let’s look past that, dear readers). Come summer, they take oziare (to laze about) quite literally. Most of the country shuts down for the entire month of August so everyone can head to the beach, the mountains, or all’estero (abroad) for some R&R. This whole phenomenon is called Ferragosto. Technically, it’s just one official holiday on August 15th. But in true Italian fashion, they looked at one day and thought, “Why not take the whole goddamn month?”

Perché no?

The tradition dates back to 18 BC with the Feriae Augusti, when Emperor Augustus declared a period of rest for agricultural workers. Fast forward a couple of millennia, and it’s still the best excuse on the planet to completely unplug.

I am still working on my niksen (or oziare) skillzzz, but I think I’m finally getting the hang of it. I also promised myself I’d travel less, and boy, have I delivered. One can rarely find Jess Fanzo at a conference anymore. I did make an exception to attend UN Nutrition Week in Rome. I genuinely enjoyed many of the sessions, but my god... the UN really needs to jazz it up. The format is stuck in the past: static panels, formal posturing, dry delivery, and zero audience interaction. The core content is incredibly important, but there has to be a better way to communicate global messages than having a row of people make disconnected, five-minute statements. The irony is that this meeting couldn't have come at a more crucial time. And there were so many fantastic experts in the room who understand deeply how to scale nutrition to the places where it is needed most. Nutrition is chronically underfunded, and global food crises are mounting. Rather than slipping into insular navel-gazing, this forum needs to expand. We need to invite more than just the usual UN crowd and build real, inclusive bridges across different sectors.

From Rome, we took a short trip to visit friends in Napoli—one of our absolute favorite places in Italy, even if the city is beautifully, brilliantly insane. The food alone is worth the chaos. As a pescetarian, Naples is pure heaven. The ultra-fresh mozzarella di bufala that practically weeps when you cut into it, bowls of spaghetti alle vongole packed with local clams, and my god, the wood-fired pizza.

But beneath all that incredible food and vibrant street life, there is a haunting uncertainty to Naples. You can't escape the looming presence of its geology. The entire region sits on a massive, restless volcanic system—from the ominous silhouette of Vesuvius to the steaming, sulfurous bradyseism of the Solfatara craters, constantly reminding you of the earthquakes bubbling just below the surface.

Vesuvius beckons…

While we were there, we watched the gorgeously shot Pompeii Under the Clouds. It’s a film that somehow does nothing but everything all at once—capturing the beautiful, eerie reality of a defiant city that lives, eats, and thrives completely in the shadow of a ticking clock.

..So, remember that ironclad promise I just mentioned about traveling less? Well, the rest of this summer will feature a quick trip to Brighton—to see our good buddy Lawrence Haddad and his family—followed by an Annual Review of Nutrition editorial meeting in London. Then, it's off to Kraków and Warsaw, Poland, for the 10th Annual Conference on Agricultural Statistics. And this year, for the first time, I am actually using up my Ferragosto card — we will spend all of August in Napoli caring for our friends’ place (with a f*#* off view), visiting the islands, amongst the rumbles. And come fall? I am jetting off to much farther-flung places, including Ethiopia and Indonesia. I swear I am still practicing my niksen... I might just have to do it from an airplane seat.

All of these reflections, contradictions, and journeys just leave me thinking about how incredibly lucky I am, how lucky many of us are. And how many of us are not. It is so easy, so privileged for me to say this, right? Particularly in a time when there is so much darkness, so much hate, so much strife in the world. The United States. Gaza, Lebanon, Iran. Sudan. Ethiopia. Ebola. Epstein. The list goes on and on. I recently came across a beautiful piece in The Atlantic written by Alan Lightman, titled "The Ordinary Miracle of Existing." He captures this exact feeling of existential gratitude perfectly:

“Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time. And, as the Buddhists always emphasize, everything is impermanent. Everything passes away. The ancient cities of Sumeria and Egypt are long gone, as are the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire; Port Royal of Jamaica; the English coastal village of Dunwich. All gone. All that we see around us today will one day be gone. Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time. It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all.”

Striking, isn't it? Especially when you consider how much we try to pack into our brief flickers of summers, of seasons, of well, years. He goes on to note:

“Little by little, we humans gain an understanding of what the world contains. We socialize, we read, we travel, we experience. But, in hindsight, our perspective remains highly limited.”

What the world contains. What the world contains is ultimately a mirror of how we choose to move through it. It forces us to ask: how do we want to live the days we are given? When we realize how small our vantage point truly is, the pressure to "do it all" gives way to a deeper desire to simply live well. It's a humbling reminder as we all head into this summer solstice. We explore as much as we can, we chase the perfect summer, and we try to find moments to simply be. Our perspective is only ever a tiny slice of a massive, beautiful picture—but how lucky we are to get to see it at all.

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. ET on April 6 during the Artemis II crew's flyby of the moon.

Book Review: Food Intelligence

While traveling to North Carolina and away from the daily grind of work, I was finally able to read a book—a miracle in itself! I chose Food Intelligence, co-authored by Kevin Hall and Julia Belluz. The fact that the book is written equally by both takes a bit of getting used to, especially since they use the third person when referring to themselves. I am not sure it totally works, but I am also not sure how else one would co-author such a book.

The book is incredibly informative, particularly regarding Dr. Kevin Hall’s research. Hall is a biophysicist and was a senior investigator at the NIH until 2025. He is renowned for his highly rigorous "metabolic ward" studies, which often house participants in clinical settings where every calorie, movement, and biological secretion is precisely measured.

Kevin spent years at the NIH conducting clinical trials to study metabolism, weight loss, and the impact of specific foods (particularly ultra-processed foods) on body weight. In one of his most famous studies, he found that when people ate ultra-processed foods, they spontaneously consumed about 500 extra calories per day and gained weight. Conversely, when on an unprocessed diet, they lost weight. He argues that the energy density and hyper-palatability of these foods—driven by the processing itself—trigger weight gain, rather than just "too many carbs" or "too many fats."

In fact, he has conducted trials comparing low-carb and low-fat diets, finding that a low-fat diet actually resulted in slightly more body fat loss than an equal-calorie ketogenic diet. In essence, "a calorie is a calorie" is a fairly accurate rule. However, he notes that the old "3,500-calorie deficit equals one pound of weight loss" rule is not linear. He also studied contestants from The Biggest Loser and showed that, even years after the show, their metabolisms had slowed significantly more than expected for their new body size. This "metabolic adaptation" (or "starvation response") persisted even when they regained the weight.

His departure from the NIH (which clearly happened after the book was published) was highly publicized and controversial, as he cited a breakdown in scientific integrity and political interference as his primary reasons for leaving. It sounded like he was in the middle of several trials at the time, which is a real shame for the field.

While the book is an excellent primer on metabolism, I wish it had tackled GLP-1 drugs head-on. These medications are the "missing link" for much of Hall’s research. By mimicking natural hormones, drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro do three things:

  • Mute "Food Noise": They signal the hypothalamus to dampen the brain's reward centers.

  • Slow Digestion: They delay gastric emptying, so you feel full longer.

  • Stabilize Blood Sugar: They manage insulin and glucagon to prevent the spikes that drive hunger.

This leads to a natural calorie deficit and—most importantly—a shift away from the ultra-processed foods Hall spent his career studying.

The authors lean heavily into the "toxic food environment" theory—the idea that our system, not our willpower, is the problem. I agree 100%. But it leaves me wondering: if we "solve" the hunger signal with a pill, will we still have the political will to fix the food system? Or will fixing the environment become a non-issue once the price of these drugs drops? We are in the middle of a massive "live experiment."

In the final chapters, they pivot to the wider food system. I was interested to see how a biophysicist and a journalist would frame the food system’s contribution to nutrition and metabolism. While they got the big picture right, the analysis felt a bit shallow. It didn't feel like it added much to the book's core value, and they seemed to throw softballs at potential solutions to the issues Kevin witnessed and analyzed during his trials.

Overall, Food Intelligence is a truly interesting read about the state of weight-loss research.

Archive Appetizer: Is Peru consuming a healthy and sustainable diet?

We conducted this study, led by Katherine Curi-Quinto, to assess how closely the diets of Peruvian adults align with the global EAT-Lancet Healthy Reference Diet (EAT-HRD) and to identify the sociodemographic factors associated with adherence to it. This research is important because current food systems are primary drivers of environmental degradation—accounting for approximately 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of freshwater use—while failing to provide healthy, affordable diets for a large portion of the population. In Peru, where agriculture accounts for 80% of freshwater use and dietary patterns are linked to a double burden of nutritional deficiencies and obesity, understanding these disparities is essential for developing sustainable, locally adapted food policies.

To carry out this assessment, we performed a secondary analysis of cross-sectional data from the 2017-2018 National Survey of Food and Nutrition Surveillance by Life Stages (VIANEV). Our study involved a sample of 875 adults aged 18 to 59 years from the Coast, Highlands, and Jungle regions, using 24-hour dietary recall data to analyze their food and beverage intake. We used the Planetary Health Diet Index (PHDI) to quantify adherence; it evaluates 15 dietary components on a scale of 0 to 140 to determine how closely an individual's diet aligns with healthy and sustainable standards.

Our results showed that the mean PHDI score for Peruvian adults was 68.8 out of 140, reflecting generally low adherence to sustainable dietary guidelines. We found a significant imbalance in food consumption: while fruit intake was high, consumption of other plant-based foods, such as nuts and whole grains, was extremely low, and animal-source foods, such as poultry and eggs, reached 250% of recommended levels. Furthermore, our analysis identified that female sex and living in poverty were significantly associated with higher PHDI scores. Finally, we observed marked regional disparities, including excessive tuber consumption in the Highlands (780% of the recommendation) and high meat intake on the Coast.