Diversifying Our Diets, Post COP 15

This is a cross-posted blog from the Berman Institute of Bioethics’s Global Food Policy and Ethics (GFEPP) blog. It was written by Leslie Engel, MPH, a Science Writer Consultant for the GFEPP.

COP 15—shorthand for the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity—wrapped up in late December with ambitious goals to address the rapid and stunning losses to our natural world. Included within the targets for 2030 is the conservation of 30% of the world’s land, oceans, and waterways; a 50% reduction in food waste, and a “significant” curtailment in overconsumption and waste generation.

The critical role food systems play in meeting these targets was acknowledged during Food Day, a mini-conference within the two-week convening. The day was devoted to discussions on “transforming food systems to address biodiversity loss and achieve food security and nutrition for all by 2030.” As the organizers noted, “food production is the biggest driver of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss: 70% of freshwater withdrawn, 30% of global GHG emissions, 80% of deforestation and the degradation of many other precious habitats such as wetlands and grasslands.”

In the U.S., recent events have underscored how intensive agricultural practices and climate change are interacting to create a troubling feedback loop with dire environmental consequences. A severe drought, coupled with overuse, has reduced the Colorado River to a trickle in places. Americans rely heavily on the river, with one in 10 depending on it for drinking water. The rest of us are making salads with it: 70% of the Colorado River Basin is used for agriculture and over 90% of our winter vegetables are grown in Arizona. 

And we are not the only species relying on it. The river that carved the Grand Canyon also sustains life for a huge variety of unique creatures and ecosystems that will disappear without it. A manager at Glen Canyon Dam described it as a “doomsday scenario” in a recent Washington Post article. 

California’s Central Valley, where 25% of our food is grown, is experiencing similar conditions, the January deluge notwithstanding.

Let’s pause here for a deep breath.

It’s heartening that the international community was able to come to a consensus on protecting the world’s ecosystems. How do we translate the momentum generated in distant conference rooms to our everyday lives?

Here’s one idea: this year, let’s step out of our culinary comfort zones. 

Seventy-five percent of the world's food comes from only 12 plant and five animal species. It’s a startling statistic but think about that salad you ate for lunch. Was it so different from the one you had yesterday, last month or last spring? We can support the environment, our personal health and ultimately, a more sustainable future by diversifying our own palates. 

To jumpstart, here’s a veggie-centered recipe, sans lettuce, the leafy green that science journalist Tamar Haspel once described as a “vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table.” Instead, this colorful and low-waste winter salad features nutrient-rich, cool-weather crops that you may be able to source locally or regionally, including:

• Radicchio, native to Northeast Italy and currently grown in similar climates within the U.S throughout the winter months.

• Millet, a highly nutritious and drought-resistant cereal grain that you’ll be hearing more about. The FAO has declared 2023 the International Year of Millets to draw attention to the potential of this small but mighty grain to feed the world in the face of climate change. 

• Winter squash, a great two-for-one deal since you get the flesh and the seeds as a future snack. Keep the veggie peeler in the drawer; squash skin is edible.

• Hazelnuts (aka filberts), which are less intensive to grow than other nuts. If possible, use hazelnuts grown in Oregon. 

• Citrus, currently in season

Radicchio, Millet and Roasted Winter Squash Salad with Hazelnuts and Orange Vinaigrette
Serves 4 generously/Costs approx. $3 per serving (based on current food prices in a New York City)

• 1 medium winter squash (about 2 lbs.): delicata, kabocha, buttercup, almost any type will do, except spaghetti.

• 1 cup millet

• ½ lb. radicchio (of any variety), torn into bite-sized pieces

• 2 large navel oranges: use one for zesting and juicing, and the other for the salad.
  I used cara cara oranges here for their lovely pink hue, but any navel-type orange works.

  • 1 tsp orange zest (zest the orange before squeezing it)

  • ¼ cup freshly squeezed orange juice 

• ½ cup raw hazelnuts

• Olive oil

• Optional soft herbs like parsley, mint, tarragon or chives (a great way to use up any herbs you may have lurking in your fridge)

Roast Squash

Arrange racks in the middle and bottom sections of the oven. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Cut squash in half and scoop out the seeds (save for roasting!). Slice squash into one-inch pieces, place on a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with 1 tbsp olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast on top rack 25-30 minutes until caramelized and tender. Flip squash halfway through cook time to ensure even roasting.

Prepare Millet
Meanwhile, add millet to a medium saucepan over medium heat. Toast millet 4-5 minutes until slightly golden and fragrant. Carefully pour in 2 cups of water, 1 tbsp. olive oil and ½ tsp. salt. Stir everything and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until tender, about 15 minutes. Allow to steam for five minutes with the lid on, then fluff with a fork. Spread on a sheet pan or plate to cool. This last step is optional but prevents the grains from sticking together too much. Adapted from thekitchn.

Toast nuts

Place hazelnuts on a rimmed baking sheet. Roast on bottom oven rack for 7-10 minutes, shaking pan once, until nuts are lightly browned and fragrant. Roughly chop nuts once cool enough to touch. If your nuts still have the papery husks attached, don’t worry about removing them. They’re perfectly edible.

Make Dressing

Combine orange juice, zest and ½ tsp salt in a small bowl. Slowly whisk in ¼ cup olive oil. Taste dressing and add more salt and a grind of pepper, if you like. Set aside.

Assemble Salad

Tear radicchio into bite-size pieces. Add to a large bowl and drizzle in half the dressing. Gently massage radicchio leaves with your hands. Add squash and 1 cup millet to the bowl, then gently mix to combine ingredients. Taste the salad and add additional dressing, salt, and pepper if needed.

Slice off the stem and navel ends of the second orange to reveal the flesh and create a stable base for cutting. Using a sharp knife, “shave” off the peel, following the shape of the fruit and preserving as much of the flesh as possible. Then slice the flesh into thin rounds. 

Top salad with citrus rounds, nuts and optional herbs. Buon appetito! 

A note about leftovers: 

• The salad is best when eaten the day you make it, but radicchio’s crisp leaves are forgiving, so the wilt factor is minimal compared to more delicate salad veggies. Store in the fridge and bring to room temp before eating. 

• Any remaining dressing can be refrigerated for a day or two. Bring to room temp before using.

• Leftover millet can be eaten for breakfast like Cream of Wheat or used as a base for grain bowls. It also freezes well for future use. 

For more information on the joys of winter vegetables, check out this informative guide from FoodPrint. 

Grocery Delivery Services: A Mixed Bag

This is a cross-posted blog from the Berman Institute of Bioethics’s Global Food Policy and Ethics (GFEPP) blog. It was written by Leslie Engel, MPH, a Science Writer Consultant for the GFEPP.

Americans have more ways than ever to shop for the ingredients needed for their meals. This was not always the case. Prior to the first self-service grocery store opening over a century ago, shoppers had to rely on clerks to retrieve and package items for them. Since then—aside from the invention of scanners and self-checkout—the grocery shopping experience has remained largely unchanged. It’s an industry ripe for disruption, and tech companies have seized upon this.

Rowan Freeman, Unsplash License

Enter grocery delivery services. These companies make lofty promises—to eliminate the hassle of grocery shopping, meal planning, preparation, and even the act of cooking itself—while also being good for you and the environment. And more Americans than ever are now using them.

I worked as a recipe manager for a leading grocery delivery startup whose mission is to make healthy eating easy by using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict customer food preferences. As a professionally trained chef with a background in public health, I was fascinated with the ability of such services to seamlessly deliver top-quality, nourishing, and sustainable products and recipes to customers, potentially as another avenue to improve health and wellbeing through home cooking. However, as I developed yet another recipe involving ground beef, I began to question how healthy this industry really is, both for ourselves and for our food system.

Convenience, for a price
Convenience, safety, and accessibility are the main appeal of these delivery services. This was especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many consumers turned to delivery to avoid in-person shopping. In theory, this means that more people will have better access to food, especially those with health, mobility, or other constraints. However, convenience comes at a price, and grocery delivery services pass this cost onto consumers in the form of markups, service, and delivery fees. Additionally, increased food costs due to inflation likely render this convenience financially out of reach for those most in need.

Reduction in greenhouse gas emissions?
There’s some evidence that grocery delivery could be more environmentally friendly than hopping into the car because it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. A study in Washington State demonstrated that it may be more efficient for a fully stocked truck to deliver to multiple households in the same neighborhood rather than individuals driving to the store themselves. But this is a best case scenario. The biggest emissions reductions would require households to cluster their orders together and forgo specific delivery times, thus reducing the convenience factor and the main selling point of such services.

Tim Mossholder, Unsplash License

Reliance on California’s Central Valley
Twenty-five percent of our nation’s food is produced in the Central Valley of California. The area is so integral to business that the company I worked for hired someone specifically from the region to oversee produce sourcing. But its agricultural future is in peril: water is scarcer than ever, severe droughts related to climate change have diminished groundwater stores and decimated crops, and intensive farming practices exacerbate the problem.

Crop failures or shortages were a huge sourcing and supply chain headache with trickle down effects. Customers often complained about receiving an inferior product, or one not as uniform as what they were accustomed to. Receiving a last minute vegetable “swap” presented a whole new set of customer challenges: I don’t like the cauliflower that replaced my broccoli! And how am I supposed to cook this?

The end result was often wasted food, as evidenced in the customer comments I analyzed. Food wasted at the household level is especially egregious because it squanders all the resources that went into growing, processing, packaging, and shipping it. In the U.S., between 73 and 152 metric tons of food is wasted somewhere along the supply chain annually. About half of that waste is happening at the household or food service level. And worldwide, food waste contributes 8% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, making it a significant contributor to climate change.

Technology
When customers rated a product or recipe, it became a data point used to further refine the AI, which then “decides” what product or recipe will go into their next delivery. You’ve no doubt seen the effectiveness of this technology in eerily relevant pop-up ads. Similar to how AI learns which ads you are most likely to click on, it can also learn which foods you’re going to enjoy or not. Like that hamburger? You shall receive more ground beef! It becomes a feedback loop designed to retain customers and increase profits, but not necessarily improve your health or the environment.

Looking Ahead
I still believe that grocery delivery services and the technology that drives them are the way of the future and can be a positive force within the food system. AI can potentially be used to improve diets, not just increase profits; researchers have harnessed this technology to help people grappling with obesity and diabetes to eat better.

To improve access for everyone, the U.S. government should make it easier for grocery delivery companies to accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).The USDA is currently piloting a program that enables SNAP recipients to purchase groceries online from select retailers. Incentives should also exist for companies to waive delivery and service fees for SNAP recipients.

In addition, produce should be sourced regionally when possible. Shorter transit distances from farm to fridge mean less greenhouse gas emissions and fresher, more nutritious produce with a longer shelf life that’s less likely to be tossed. Fresh Direct offers a selection of local produce and more services should follow suit. The increased demand could help boost struggling regional agriculture and decrease demand on the imperiled Central Valley. Finally, the biggest thing missing from this new grocery shopping experience are people. AI may be “filling” your cart, but humans still harvest, process, pack and deliver everything we eat for low wages in unsafe working conditions. The pandemic has revealed that the meatpacking industry will go to great lengths–at the expense of humans–to maintain production and profits. Most recently, dozens of children were found to be illegally working as sanitation workers in meatpacking plants. By further alienating ourselves from where our food comes from, we’re less likely to see the value in the people behind the scenes making sure your fridge is full.

Leslie Engel, MPH, is a Science Writer Consultant for the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program.

Understanding human water turnover in times of water scarcity

This writing was originally published in Cell Metabolism in their February issue.

Water covers 70% of the planet; however, only 3% is freshwater, which the global population depends on to drink, irrigate crops, and for our sanitation and hygiene. Water is central to almost all human activity and endeavors and, most importantly, the homeostasis of our bodily functions and health. We know that access to both adequate quantity and quality of water drives optimal health. Still, when in shortage or contaminated, it can cause deleterious effects on various health outcomes, some more known than others (1).

While there is substantial research understanding the health effects of insufficient water intake, there are measurement uncertainties in how much water people consume, retain, and excrete as well as a paucity of evidence on the influence of physical, metabolic, and environmental factors on water homeostasis in the human body. A recent study by Yamada et al. published in Science provides further insight into the determinants of water turnover (WT) or the water processed and used by the body (2). The largest study of its kind, they sampled 5,604 people living across 23 countries across diverse regions of the world ranging from 8 days to 96 years old. They examined whether age, body composition, physical activity, socioeconomic status, and geographical attributes of various regions impacted WT. They did this by having subjects consume 100 ml of water, of which 5% was deuterated. This isotope tracking allowed the investigators to measure WT in a highly accurate and precise way.

Predictably, WT was highest in neonates and decreased with age, positively correlated with free mass, total energy expenditure, and physical activity, and negatively correlated with percent body fat. Interestingly, where people live, and their livelihoods matter for WT as well. WT was higher in those living in hotter and more humid places and higher altitude areas. People with traditional livelihoods, such as hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, had higher WT than those working outside agriculture. Furthermore, people living in countries characterized as having a low human development index (HDI)—a comprehensive composite index that measures the different dimensions of human development, including standards of living, life expectancy, and education—had higher WT than those living in countries with middle- and high HDI, even after adjusting for physiological and environmental factors.

While some of these results may not be surprising regarding age and biology, they present clear warning signs of vulnerability when considering looming global scenarios, trends, and shocks to water security, with poor populations disproportionately suffering the most severe consequences (3). The world is already grappling with water scarcity—the availability of water depends on an intimate dance between a region's water demand and water supply. As it stands, 4 billion people live with severe water scarcity at least one month a year, with nearly half of those people living in China and India. Half a billion live with severe water scarcity all year round (4). Distressing still, 784 million people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water (5). The figure below shows how these numbers break down by the four major country income groups, and climate change will likely worsen this situation.

Figure 1: Number of people (millions) without access to safe drinking water, 2020

Legend: Each bar represents the surface (drinking water directly from a river, dam, lake, pond, stream, canal, or irrigation canal), limited (drinking water from an improved source for which collection time exceeds 30 minutes for a roundtrip including queuing) and unimproved (drinking water from an unprotected dug well or unprotected spring) sources of drinking water by country income classification. Source: World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, 2021

Climate change will have significant impacts on how much water is available as well as its quality. Already, water systems that provide freshwater to human populations are drying up and polluted from overuse and runoff, much of this coming from agriculture and other anthropogenic forces (6). Water ecosystems around the world will also continue to be strained and stressed. For example, since 1900, approximately 68% of wetlands have been lost, which are essential ecosystems that purify drinking water systems, among many other functions (7). In addition, extreme weather events related to climate change, such as changes to precipitation and severe drought, as well as the melting of glacier ice, is and will continue to impact water resources. There will also be a decline in the quality of water sources due to anthropogenic and natural factors, along with an increased demand for water due to higher temperatures and evaporation rates. As a result, water insecurity under "business as usual" climate scenarios will worsen (8).

Human demand for water worldwide has increased six-fold over the past century and continues to rise at around 1% per year due to the growing population and global economy (9). At the current consumption rate, by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may face water shortages (10). What will be the consequences for those vulnerable populations living in countries of low HDI given their increased demand for water? Even a slight imbalance in the delicate homeostasis of WT could put these populations at disproportionate risk for various health disparities, along with constraints on access to improved water safety and quality.

We are just beginning to understand the importance of how water is cycled through the body and how to measure it. Yamada and colleagues shed further light on the factors influencing how water is used and excreted in the body. One gap they highlight is the inability to measure the influence of water coming from food on WT. For those who work in food security, it will be necessary to understand how the quality and diversity of diets contribute to and potentially further protect water homeostasis in distinct biological, sociodemographic, and geographical contexts. Understanding this relationship could spur joint policy action among communities concerned with food and water security. With climate disruption continuing to threaten the quantity and quality of food and water sources, scientific and geopolitical collaboration has never been more urgent.  

References

1.     Popkin, B.M., D’Anci, K.E., and Rosenberg, I.H. (2010). Water, hydration, and health. Nutr. Rev. 68, 439–458.

2.     Yamada, Y., Zhang, X., Henderson, M.E.T., Sagayama, H., Pontzer, H., Watanabe, D., Yoshida, T., Kimura, M., Ainslie, P.N., Andersen, L.F., et al. (2022). Variation in human water turnover associated with environmental and lifestyle factors. Science 378, 909–915.

3.     Dell’Angelo, J., Rulli, M.C., and D’Odorico, P. (2018). The global water grabbing syndrome. Ecol. Econ. 143, 276–285.

4.     Mekonnen, M.M., and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2016). Four billion people facing severe water scarcity. Sci. Adv. 2, e1500323.

5.     World Health Organization and UNICEF (2021). World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. https://washdata.org/data/household#!/dashboard/new.

6.     van Vliet, M.T.H., Flörke, M., and Wada, Y. (2017). Quality matters for water scarcity. Nat. Geosci. 10, 800–802.

7.     Davidson, N.C. (2014). How much wetland has the world lost? Long-term and recent trends in global wetland area. Mar. Freshw. Res. 65, 934.

8.     IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press).

9.     Water, U.A.U.N. (2020). United Nations World Water Development Report 2020: water and climate change (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

10.   World Wildlife Fund. (2023). Water Scarcity https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/water-scarcity#:~:text=Billions%20of%20People%20Lack%20Water&text=By%202025%2C%20two%2Dthirds%20of%20the%20world's%20population%20may%20be,and%20economic%20decline%20may%20occur.

Food Bytes: January 2023 edition

Food Bytes is a monthly blog post of “nibbles” on all things climate, food, nutrition science, policy, and culture.

A little warm-up

Are you doing dry, damp, or wet January? Me, semi-dry…I have a good excuse, though. My lovely partner and I had to celebrate with a bottle of prosecco because I have accepted a full professorship at Columbia University’s new climate school, where I will lead their Food for Humanity initiative. I am sad to leave Johns Hopkins, but alas, change is good. I start in June, so get ready Gotham…

I also quit Twitter after 12 years. Felt good. I should have done it years ago…No toxicity! More time! Less self-promotion!

Let’s get the political stuff out of the way…

Is globalization over? The elite will again meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for some strained global discourse. When I say elite, gathering of the world’s 0.001 percent. Every year one asks if Davos has relevance or are these elitists more and more out of touch with what is truly happening in countries and communities. This NYT article on how Davos will confront the new world order says it all:

“The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, finds itself navigating troubled waters. Long the affluent symbol of a globalizing world where the assumption was that more trade would bring more freedom, it now confronts international fracture, ascendant nationalism and growing protectionism under the shadow of war in Europe and sharp tensions between the United States and China.”

I am sure climate change and food security will be on the agenda, but again much of it will be talking, among the elite few, with little action. As it stands, with the global food security crisis, rich countries have fallen short in providing much-needed assistance with increasing risk of hunger and, for some countries, such as Somalia, starvation. Sci Dev wrote an important piece on global starvation looming and rising food prices (see graph below. It deserves attention.

As the world tenses, doing nothing is not good enough, and flying to Davos in your private jet pontificating about poverty is getting tiresome.

If Davos doesn’t get you depressed enough, take a gander at the World Economic Forum’s global risk report. One word: polycrises.

Let’s confront the scary stuff…

California’s “atmospheric rivers”—these doom terms, I tell ya — yield all kinds of chaos for the Californians. The damage due to these intense storms and flooding is estimated to cost the state 30 billion. It is ironic, though, that droughts are a major issue and all roads point to these torrential storms as not helping, but perhaps they will contribute to the necessary snowpack in the long term. What hasn’t been discussed much in relation to storms is the potential damage to crops. California is a massive horticulture producer in this country, growing nearly half of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables in the United States. California’s agriculture also matters to the world because its products are exported to approximately 200 countries. Why is this such as issue? This is why:

“The rains are critical in breaking the worst drought in the US southwest in 1,200 years. The dryness has hurt crops across California’s Central Valley, one of the world’s largest agriculture economies, put large cities under stress, threatened water supplies for many smaller communities, and contributed to some of the largest and deadliest wildfires in state history. Dwindling flow in the Colorado River bordering California has also put hydroelectric supplies in danger.”

There is some hope, though. According to Civil Eats, farms that practice regenerative agriculture seem to weather the storms through innovation.

Let’s give a shout-out to great science…

The AI DALL-E’s rendering of when I asked for “her?” to draw an abstract painting of the Mediterranean diet.

• Some colleagues at GAIN and Cornell just published this fantastic review on how animal-source foods—meat, fish, eggs, and dairy—can play an important role globally in ensuring healthy and sustainable diets.

• Another paper by Amanda Woods and colleagues makes the case for resilience in food systems management and governance.

• Remember that pesky EAT-Lancet Commission report that came out with a planetary diet (very similar to a Mediterranean diet, in my opinion…so what’s the big deal)? Yah, I am guilty of having been a commissioner. Since its publication in 2019, it has been cited about 6,000 times (no joke), and much science has followed. Take this article showing that 86 nations representing 51% of the global population can secure a nationally sourced EAT-Lancet diet from a land-availability perspective. That leaves 3.7 billion living in countries without enough land to source a planetary health diet. I guess trade is important after all!

• Loved this Nature piece on the importance of indigenous knowledge for food security. This line. YES. “I am under no illusion about what it will take to achieve true collaboration at scale — both at the individual and systemic level. Yet in my interactions with Indigenous people and local communities, people’s generosity and willingness to work collaboratively has impressed me again and again.”

• A modeling study published in the Global Food Security Journal from a multi-country collaboration examined the impact of the Ukraine-Russia war on food security. Their model show that food trade would decrease by 60%, wheat prices will increase 50%, and severe food insecurity would increase 30% in 2023. Dire.

• A study in the Lancet Planetary Health examined 83 Food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) for their inclusion of environmental sustainability. Of the 83 they examined, only 37 mention ES and of those, none really emphasize why it is important, and how diets can be made to be more sustainable. My question is, who cares about FBDG? Does anyone follow them?? Yes, I get it, they inform public procurement, but they don’t really help individuals with dietary guidance. If you want a snarky take on the United States guideline, listen to this Maintenance Phase podcast (hands down the best podcast on poking holes in nutrition and dietary science).

Still baking, after all these years…

I am still baking, and it has become a relaxing ritual. This weekend? A castelvetrano olive, rosemary, whole wheat sourdough. My prettiest loaf yet! I followed this recipe more or less.

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Food Bytes: October 2022 Edition

Food Bytes is a monthly blog post of “nibbles” of information on all things climate, food, and nutrition science, policy, and culture.

It’s been a long while since I posted a Food Bytes edition, and so much has happened in the food space in the past year. First, a UN Food Systems Summit happened, but I remain quite unclear on what was achieved or what will come of the year-long work leading up to the event. Second, a devastating conflict between two breadbasket countries trudges on, putting food security concerns back on the geopolitical agenda. Third, extreme weather events, many related to climate change, unrelentingly warn us that our ability to feed a world of 8 billion (yikes) is precarious and precious. But science is there to nudge us, generating new knowledge on why we and every other species are here, what accelerates us, what destroys us, and where we are heading. Charles Mann wrote in The Wizard and the Prophet (a stellar book about William Vogt and Norman Borlaug’s discordant visions to feed the world):

Another thing this book is not: a blueprint for tomorrow. The Wizard and the Prophet presents no plan, argues for no specific course of action. Part of this aversion reflects the opinion of the author: in our Internet era, there are entirely too many pundits shouting out advice. I believe I stand on firmer ground when I try to describe what I see around me than when I try to tell people what to do.

I resonate with these sentiments. Even though science is plagued by warts, hiccups, and flaws, catalyzing evidence and data to help describe the world matters because it helps us understand nature, people, and the planet. With that background in mind, this month’s Food Bytes is all about highlighting the science community’s observations and uncertainties of a changing world and what it means for food systems and climate change. I purposely do not highlight the work of my team and collaborators, but if you are curious about when we do, you can look here.

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Source: McKay et al. SCIENCE 9 Sep 2022 Vol 377, Issue 661 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950

Let’s get the dark stuff out of the way. A paper by David Armstrong McKay and colleagues updated data showing that holding at 1.5°C will trigger multiple climate tipping points. What are these tipping points? Things like ice sheet “collapses,” forest “diebacks,” and permafrost “abrupt thaws” (see the figure to the right). These terms are downright scary but very plausible under different modeling scenarios. Okay, onto more uplifting news — KIDDING! Another study has shown that over the last 40 years, the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world, also known as Arctic amplification. These are massive global shifts that will further warm the planet, creating all kinds of chaos. What does it mean for us wee creatures living in our humble abodes? Well, the news is not totally uplifting on that front either. We are and will be deeply impacted by climate — and no one is immune. Research by Sylvia Blom and colleagues showed that repeated, extreme heat shocks impact early child nutrition — both chronic and acute malnutrition. They show that in 5 West African countries, a 2 °C rise in temperature will increase the prevalence of stunting by 7%. As the two latest 2022 Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change Reports on adaptation and mitigation, also known as the IPCC, argue, we still have time to act, although when you read it, you may want to have a nice glass of scotch in hand. While the window remains open, it is closing, and fast. We need to make massive changes to the way we live, much of that involving our use of resources. A recent Nature Sustainability paper showed that no country meets basic needs—such as nutrition, sanitation, and access to electricity—for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. To meet needs, we need to use resources somewhere between 2-6 times more to meet everyone’s needs. Gulp. Just take a look at the difference between the United States (a) and Sri Lanka (b) in the figure below. Blue wedges show social performance relative to the social threshold (blue circle), whereas green wedges show resource use relative to the biophysical boundary (green circle). The blue wedges start at the center of the plot (which represents the worst score achieved by any country), whereas the green wedges start at the outer edge of the blue circle (which represents zero resource use). Wedges with a dashed edge extend beyond the chart area. Ideally, a country would have blue wedges that reach the social threshold and green wedges within the biophysical boundary. Look at the inequities comparing the two countries!

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Source: O’Neill, D.W., Fanning, A.L., Lamb, W.F. et al. A good life for all within planetary boundaries. Nat Sustain 1, 88–95 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4

The research and science in understanding the impacts of climate change on food systems and vice versa are growing exponentially. It is hard to keep up with the literature and weed out the noise. One area that deserves more attention is the impact of food trade on global greenhouse gas emissions and the environment—particularly land-use change—a significant source of emissions coming from food and agriculture. A study showed that 27% of land-use emissions and 22% of agricultural land are related to international trade (2004-2017)—food products consumed in a different place from where they were produced. The largest land-use emission transfers come from Indonesia and Brazil to China, the U.S., and Europe. A PLoS paper examining the future of trade shows that if we keep managing and governing global trade as is, food systems will be misaligned with dietary health and sustainability outcomes.

Perhaps one solution is through changing agriculture subsidy policies. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published their annual SOFI report and highlighted the need to transform agriculture subsidy programs around the world towards those that generate and produce healthier food products. Marco Springmann at Oxford modeled the impacts of subsidy policies that focused on nutritious foods and found multiple benefits across both environment and health. I am really uncertain about the political appetite to change subsidies. Talk about vested interests… Speaking of priorities, Ben Davies and colleagues argue that making big transformative policy changes across food systems is wonderful, but don’t do it “on the backs of the rural poor.” Although there are 2.7 billion people engaged in small-scale food production and 1.1 billion people concomitantly living in extreme poverty while working in agriculture, they are often ignored in the “transformation” story.

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Affordability of a healthy diet grouped by five different food system typologies, showing transition of food systems. Source: Ambikapathi, et al Nat Food 3, 764–779 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00588-7

Positive transformation of food systems is not easy as history suggests. As Ramya Ambikipathi shows in a recent Nature Food paper, food systems have shifted from predominantly rural to industrialized and consolidated systems. Historically, incomes have risen faster than food prices as countries have industrialized, enabling a simultaneous increase in the supply and affordability of many nutritious foods. Evolving rural economies, urbanization, and changes in food value chains have accompanied these transitions, leading to changes in land distribution, a smaller share of agri-food system workers in the economy, and changes in diets. While the affordability of a recommended healthy diet has improved over time, food systems overall are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all. Another fantastic paper by Jeff Waage and colleagues in Lancet Planetary Health shows the complex and risky relationship between agriculture and infectious disease, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries that are undergoing rapid food system transitions. They remind us that lessons can be drawn from COVID-19 and the rise of zoonotic spillover events within food systems should be prioritized (and minimized) on the political agenda.

Ensuring that everybody gets access to and consumes a healthy diet will remain a global challenge. The metrics, indicators, and data in understanding what people eat and why are improving. Just check out the Global Diet Quality Project, which collects dietary quality data in the adult population across countries worldwide using the Gallup poll and provides tools to monitor diet quality within countries. Wow. I hear rumblings of a global report coming out soon, so stay tuned. There has been a whole range of papers coming out on diet quality. Victoria Miller at Tufts University is on a roll. In one recent Nature Food paper, she examines diets across 185 countries from 1990 to 2018 using the Global Dietary Database (estimates and modeled). Their assessment shows that diet quality is modest at best but varies significantly depending on where you live, how old you are, and how much education you have. No surprises, but good to see more data emerging from this database. Miller and colleagues also published a more specific paper examining the consumption of animal-sourced foods worldwide showing that meat consumption is lower or higher than optimal intakes depending on the population. Another Miller paper published in JAMA examines the association of specific dietary factors with coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes using a systematic review. The table below summarizes the relative risks of the associations of nutrients with heart disease and diabetes events. Bottomline? Eat your fiber.

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Source: Miller et al JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(2):e2146705. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.46705

Another emerging area gaining significant traction with scientific consensus is ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a term loathed by the food industry and a handful of nutritionists. The majority of those working in nutrition epidemiology and public health largely agree that UPFs—food-like substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats that also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers—are detrimental to human health across a bolus of outcomes. Many people argue that these foods should be regulated, avoided, and minimized in the global food system. If you want to hear more about this ongoing debate, check out this BBC podcast and this online debate with some heavy hitters in the space like NIH’s Kevin Hall, Marion Nestle, and Mike Gibney. The next frontier for these foods is their environmental impact. While a handful of papers argue that these foods have a significant environmental and climate footprint, the evidence is scant, and much more needs to be done in this space.

The question is, are alt-meats in this category? The pace of science in this space is hard to keep up with as there is a lot coming out in the grey literature (see the IPES report and the OECD report as examples) along with peer-reviewed publications, but some of what is available often bends towards ideology and less science. Same with plastics. There is deep concern about microplastics showing up all over the place, including food, but the evidence and impact of these plastics on health outcomes need much more exploration. So while Mr. McGuire told Ben in The Graduate, that the future lay with one word, plastics, we may need to re-examine that advice in light of the fragility of our world.

Custodians of our memories

If you want to read a food book this year, read Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by BBC food journalist Dan Saladino. The book is about the rich biodiversity found around the planet and how humans have used that biodiversity to feed the world's population. Saladino illustrates how important this diversity is for our nourishment and sustaining the vast cultures and traditions that humans have passed on from one generation to the next. Not only is Saladino a wonderful storyteller, but the story he is telling is one of the most important in food systems today. He writes:

"We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature; we can't continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems. It isn't working. How can anyone claim it is when so many humans are left either hungry or obese and when the Earth is suffering?"

Saladino structures the book across the main food groups — fruits, vegetables, grains, cheese, meat, seafood, alcohol, stimulants (coffee and tea), sweets, and wild foods. He discusses the importance of these food groups and their role in food security. He provides us with lush, visceral vignettes of particular places, exceptional people, and distinctive cultures uniquely trying to grow, raise, and nurture certain traditional varieties of these foods. You get a glimpse of how the hunter-gatherer Hadza hunts for honey in Tanzania. You learn how sheep meat, known as Skerpikjot, is preserved in the fragile ecosystem of the Faroe Islands. You feel the pressure of how Sicilians grow the vanilla orange amid the weight of the Cosa Nostra. You sympathize with the Syrians amid a protracted conflict who attempt to preserve their traditional sweet, Halawet el Jibn, made of war-threatened ingredients like pistachio. You realize that winemaking began in Georgia using traditional pots, known as Qvevri, a practice not done anywhere else in the world.

These stories are wonderful, but they are punctuated with startling and tragic statistics:

• 50% of all our seeds are in the hands of 4 companies.

• Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by humans, only nine remain major staples today.

• Three crops—rice, wheat, and corn—provide 50% of all our calories.

• 70 billion chickens (of roughly the same breed and ironically named "chicken of tomorrow") are slaughtered annually.

• 30 million bison roamed the great plains of the United States, all to be decimated at the hands of the white settlers.

• 95% of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow.

• 90% of soybean grown in North and South America is genetically modified.

• 50% of all the world's cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company

• The giant Pacific bluefin tuna is down 97%. Yes, 97%.

• Only 2% of farmers are African American.

• We only consume 2% of barley that is grown. The rest is used to make beer or fed to animals.

• Speaking of beer, 25% of beer is produced by one brewer.

You learn about the heroes, like Vavilov, who spent and gave their lives conserving and preserving precious seeds, specific varieties, preservations, and processing of foods as a way to say, "remember us." We were here. They were and are the custodians of the biodiversity across the planet. They are also the custodians of our memories and humanity.

As Saladino escorts you around the world, I imagined these vignettes being turned into a beautiful documentary demonstrating the vast diversity that exists on the planet—as humans, as foods, and as cultures. As Saladino expressed, we must embrace diversity in all its forms: biological, cultural, dietary, and economical. Having more diversity across the range of agriculture systems and landscapes is vital. Capturing all this diversity on film, as the book does, could be a way to preserve these moments, memories, and the history of it all. So, we never forget what we once had.

While the book is inspiring, every chapter ends with a common tragic theme – and I am not giving anything away because it is in the book's title: Extinction. You realize how fast these ways of life, these foods, these cultures, and traditions are disappearing. Our world and food systems are transforming at a speed that is hard to comprehend and capture, and the loss along the way is disturbing. There are many reasons for this extinction, but the major ones are agricultural change, loss of habitats, disease, economic forces, hangovers and continuations of colonization, and conflict.

As Saladino expressed, these endangered foods will not become the mainstay of diets, nor should they. But they have essential and assorted roles to play; if we don't use them, we will lose them. In reference to a chapter on O-Higu, a soybean grown on the island of Okinawa made into unique tofu, "O-Higu might be an insignificant bean. But to many Okinawans, after colonialism and occupation, its return feels like an act of resistance and a celebration of who we are." Many traditions in holding onto these foods are worthy; they involve intimate knowledge, special skills, and lots of care and labor. It is not a simple path forward.

Our world and food systems are transforming into a homogenized vat of staleness. For many, saving these foods and the biodiversity that makes up these foods and our diets is not worth the effort as we move through the world at warped speed. Some argue that this savior complex is romantic and precious, and we should instead focus on the potential for technology and innovation. Growth, growth, growth. Call me sentimental, but I worry about solely following this path and what is lost along the way.

Last night, I watched Chris Marker's visceral Sans Soleil film. In it, the narrator said something that sticks with me:

When filming this ceremony, I knew I was present at the end of something.

Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them.

This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I want to witness the traces. I want to remember. What is the point of living in this world without cultures and all the food that punctuates those cultures? We must, as global citizens, decide what kind of world we want to live in and figure out what is worth saving. To me, it is the whole lot. I want to save it all—every food, every human, every animal, and every piece of culture. This is what makes our world interesting. As Saladino said, "the Hadza remind us that there are many ways to live and be in the world." I am hanging onto my hopes that the incredible array of people curating these endangered foods will remain the custodians of not only our memories but of our food traditions for the future.

We may not have a choice but to consume alternative proteins

Climate change is having profound impacts on the ability to grow both foods for humans and feed for livestock. Growing food and feeding livestock, in turn, exacerbates climate change. Livestock raised for beef is responsible for 6 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions largely in the form of methane. Livestock is also the number one driver of deforestation around the world, reducing the chances for large forest biomes to serve as carbon sinks.

While these stresses continue to rise if no significant action is taken to mitigate climate change, demand for meat is rising all over the world. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, beef consumption has been steadily rising over the last few decades, and as people become wealthier, the more meat they consume. And people, well, like meat!

Some tech companies have come up with a solution—alternative proteins—which include lab-grown meat, plant-based meat, single-cell proteins from yeast or algae, and edible insects. The lab- and plant-based alternative innovations mimic the taste, smell, and texture of meat and could be significant disruptors, eliminating the need for people to raise or consume animals.

As of now, the products available for consumers are mainly plant-based proteins like Impossible Burger and Beyond Beef. Data suggests that these foods are tasty to most consumers and have lower environmental footprints and greenhouse gas emissions than beef. They also have benefits for those who care about animal welfare.

They are however under scrutiny about their health properties and cost. Some argue these foods are overly processed, with a lot of artificial ingredients to get them to a state of palatability. Beyond Burger has approximately 25 ingredients whereas beef has just one ingredient – muscle tissue. They are also costly. One Impossible burger in Washington DC’s Founding Farmer restaurant costs $17.50 as compared to the all-beef cheeseburger at $14.50.

The products in the R&D pipeline – such as lab-grown meats – will have to undergo significant regulation by governments and there is the issue of scale. In the film, Meat the Future, the company Upside Foods (formerly known as Memphis Meats), which is using cells taken from an animal to grow meat, is challenged in making enough products at scale to feed the world’s growing population. While these are hurdles, there are some glimpses of promise. Those that have tried these products are pleasantly surprised at how similar they taste to the real thing and issues of scale are just temporary roadblocks.

Yet, will consumers accept and embrace these foods? The backlash against genetically modified foods shows early signs of what may come as companies begin to get lab-grown meats to market. Many consumers may argue these foods are fake and may be hesitant about their food being “grown” in Petri dishes. 

The big issue is, that we may not have a choice but to eat lab-grown meats. It will be very difficult to raise livestock in a hotter world. Not only will feed and water be scarce, but hotter climates wreak havoc on the health of the animals. These projected adverse effects will put premiums on the price of meat in the grocery store.

So while the world can be picky for the time being, these new foods may become our mainstay survival foods because they may be the only option. To ensure these foods are affordable, accessible, and acceptable to consumers all over the world, and not just curious rich people, several things need to happen.

First, companies producing these foods need to ensure transparency in how these foods are produced, and their impacts across a broad range of outcomes, particularly health and nutrition. There is a need for transparency regarding their nutritional content that is easy for consumers to understand and find. Companies should take lessons from how genetically modified foods were communicated and the fears and doubts they have raised among consumers.

Second, for those products that have unhealthy ingredients with losing palatability, the companies should work hard to reformulate the products to decrease the content of sodium and unhealthy fats. They should also work to fortify these foods with adequate micronutrients.

Third, these foods should be low cost, or real meat should be more expensive, keeping with the true costs to produce beef. As the demand for these alternatives increases and more companies come on board with new products, as with any economies of scale, the price will come down.

Last, while the innovation for these new foods is tempting, there are many traditional foods such as legumes, insects, and algae that have important nutritional value, particularly protein, have low environmental footprints, and do not require raising animals. These traditional foods, while traditional, may offer low-cost, low-resources alternatives to shiny and new future foods.

The World’s Food System Is Too Dependent on Wheat

This opinion piece was originally posted on the Bloomberg Opinion.

The Ukraine war highlights how reliance on a few big staple crops threatens food security and global nutrition.

Stunned by Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Europe is scrambling to diversify its energy supply — from piped Russian gas to liquified natural gas, more renewable power and nuclear power. In the same way, and for much the same reason, the ongoing war should push countries to shift and diversify their food supply — to make it more secure and, at the same time, improve nutrition worldwide.

Russia and Ukraine together supply 30% of the world’s wheat. This is why the war has caused wheat prices to skyrocket, along with the prices of many other food commodities. From February to March, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Association’s Food Price Index leapt 12.6% to an all-time high. This threatens people around the world with unprecedented food insecurity.

It also highlights the need to reform the global food system, which now leaves too many people dependent for nourishment on just a handful of mass-produced grains, including wheat, rice and corn.

To deal with the immediate shortages, farmers in the U.S., India, Canada and elsewhere will have to plant more wheat. And people worldwide will have to replace wheat with rice and other available grains. In the long term, though, this crisis provides an opportunity to change the face of agriculture and reduce the world’s dependency on wheat and other big staple crops.

Accomplishing this shift will be politically challenging. Many countries have entrenched agriculture subsidies that support big commodities including corn, rice, wheat, oils, sugar and soy, and ensure that they are grown at massive scale using uniform farm production practices. In the countries that grow two-thirds of the world’s crops, governments provide $540 billion a year in agricultural support. The U.S. alone spends $16 billion annually on farm subsidies, 80% of which goes to the largest 10% of farms.

This paradigm has many flaws. After all, there will always be risks in relying too heavily on one grain or just a few. It makes it difficult to address disruptions in supply caused by conflicts, protracted crises and fragile states — as the conflict in Ukraine makes clear. And in addition to geopolitical problems, there is the age-old but now growing threat of bad weather.

Heat waves, droughts, floods and cold spells can devastate wheat, corn, soy and rice crops. Because of climate change, extreme weather has already reduced harvests enough to push food prices up to their highest levels in 40 years. Climate change also increases the risk that such extreme weather events might occur at various locations in the same season. This phenomenon of “multiple breadbasket failures” stands to compromise billions of people’s access to food.

Subsidies for the big crops also neglect the need to promote healthy diets. Take wheat, for example. Whole unrefined wheat is a major source of starch and energy, as well as protein, vitamins (notably B vitamins), dietary fiber and phytochemicals. But demand for wheat has been rising globally because of its unique gluten properties, which make it also an ideal component of bread, noodles, pasta, cookies, crackers and many other baked foods and snacks. These highly processed foods, which now constitute a significant share of the world’s diet, are depleted of healthy nutrients and contribute to poor health.

Over the past 50 years, farm subsidies, supported by complementary research and development efforts in agriculture-dependent countries, have made rice, corn and wheat the world’s most dominant crops, accounting for two-thirds of global food-energy intake. Alternative staples such as sorghum, millet, rye, cassavas, sweet potatoes and yams haven’t disappeared — at least not yet — but they have become steadily less important.

To encourage a more diverse and resilient food supply, countries should begin reorienting agriculture subsidies toward fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes and other nutritious foods. A recent study suggests that if half of all agriculture subsidies worldwide were repurposed to support the growing of foods that benefit human health as well as the environment, it could increase the cultivation of fruits and vegetables by as much as 20% and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture by 2%.

Shifting agriculture subsidies is no easy lift. Many farmers depend on them to support their livelihoods, and many would consider it incredibly risky to make major changes in what they grow. But with climate change increasing and geopolitics unstable, change is becoming more and more necessary. And if people are to avoid chronic health problems such as diabetes and heart disease, they need assistance from the food system to adopt more nutritious diets. The global disruption caused by the war in Ukraine should prompt governments to reconsider their efforts to influence the crops farmers grow and move toward encouraging a more diverse food supply.

The Ukraine-Russia Crisis fuels deficits of fertilizers for sub-Saharan Africa

While there is a significant concern about the availability and world prices of wheat, safflower oil, and corn commodities produced by Russia and Ukraine, Russia is also the largest global exporter of fertilizers and fertilizer ingredients such as potash, ammonia, urea, and natural gas for making nitrogen-based fertilizers. Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, is the leading producer of potash-based fertilizer, and combined, Russia and Belarus provide 42% of potash fertilizer globally. With the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis, Russia has now suspended its fertilizer exports, and additional sanctions against Russia and Belarus are further disrupting the movement of fertilizer supplies around the world. Already, prices of fertilizers have surged – tripling price.

The worry is that food-producing countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where almost half of their potassium chloride comes from Russia and Belarus, will struggle to meet major crop yields that rely on fertilizers. This could further exacerbate food deficits in some countries with significant food insecurity on the continent. Already, sub-Saharan Africa is 21% food insecure according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and with compromised food production, this could make matters worse for some populations and some countries this coming season and into next year. Hunger and food insecurity have already been rising on the continent due to the COVID19 pandemic and climate change with 46 million more hungry in 2020 compared to 2019.

While governments are scrambling to reduce their dependence on fertilizers imports coming from Russia and Belarus, it will be difficult to ensure fertilizer is available, affordable, and distributed to the most vulnerable farmers in the near term. One solution could be for development donors and investment banks to create a mechanism to provide emergency funds to countries within sub-Saharan Africa who need assistance, or perhaps a fund specific to fertilizer that involves contributions from industry and development agencies, through the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program. However, both could be too slow and bureaucratic to fill the immediate needs of farmers.

While food aid is not the most sustainable solution, putting in place safety nets is critical. Governments in food-deficit countries of sub-Saharan Africa must introduce and step-up social protection programs that provide cash and food to vulnerable households to cushion the short-term impacts of high food prices and to protect smallholder farmers from taking on the brunt of fertilizer costs. Donor countries should support agencies such as the UN World Food Programme to provide food assistance to countries that want and need support.

In the long-term, there is a solid argument for sub-Saharan Africa, and the world, in fact, to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers. The problem is, organic fertilizer is not readily available to be distributed globally. While this will not solve immediate needs, governments should invest in research and development that examines the scaling up of organic and biofertilizers, increasing efficiency of chemical fertilizers (less drop per crop), and producing more nutritious, less environmentally intensive crops and animals in environmentally sustainable ways. 

If history has taught us anything, the Ukraine-Russia crisis will not be the last one we see in the next decade. Protecting the most vulnerable and re-orienting the world’s agriculture system towards one that is producing a different food basket with less environmentally intensive inputs makes sense. Let’s start with Africa.

The mavens

Food is everywhere. You can find it in almost every store and street corner (whether someone can afford it is for another blog entry). There are food blogs, food podcasts, food documentaries, food travel shows, food cooking shows, food apps, food zines, food mags, food porn…I could go on and on. People tweet, post, and hyperbolize about food, and are watching more cooking than actually doing cooking. Go figure.  Food in and of itself has become entertainment. It is less about people eating healthy and spending quality time on preparing and sharing food, and more about bragging rights. It has become a vehicle for snobbery and status but also, social aggression and competition. In a New York Times piece alluding to food as high art, “Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.”

Much of the mainstream food system writing and pontificating is from authors who do not have traditional training in science and instead are journalists or writers, some coming from the cooking/restaurant sector. Many chefs are now TV stars in their own right and authors of famous books—and not just cookbooks. Many of these writers act as advocates and have developed celebrity status personalities. They often write about nutrition issues in a more ideological sense, taking parcels of select data to tell their story. The debates on the health of organic foods, GMOs, and industrialization have all been written about: less on the science, more on a belief system of what the food system should ideally look like, but usually only does so for the few elite. They have become the mavens of the food world.

“Nutritionism”— a reductive understanding of nutrients as the key indicators of healthy food—has created much confusion for consumers, leaving journalists, such as Michael Pollan—author of the infamous Ominovores Dilemma—to feed the public digestible answers to the most vexing global food system problems. Pollan along with many other writers (think Bittman, Waters, Petrini, Andres) have effectively opened a new dialogue about food systems, how we (un)consciously eat food, and how the individual can not only eat healthier, nutritious foods but within a healthier food system as well. It took someone like Michael Pollan to distill the complexity of nutrition science into one, simple message that resonated with the public: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Many of these food journalists argue that the nutrition field and nutrition scientists have largely failed the global population, leaving people utterly confused and lost in the swampy, ultra-processed junk food abyss.

Pollan, who has now moved onto the world of psychedelics, further explained:

“In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help. But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to ”let food be thy medicine” is ritually invoked to support this notion.”

Gary Taubes, a science writer/journalist, and low carb diet advocate argues:

“The 600,000 articles — along with several tens of thousands of diet books — are the noise generated by a dysfunctional research establishment. Because the nutrition research community has failed to establish reliable, unambiguous knowledge about the environmental triggers of obesity and diabetes, it has opened the door to a diversity of opinions on the subject, of hypotheses about cause, cure, and prevention, many of which cannot be refuted by the existing evidence. Everyone has a theory. The evidence doesn’t exist to say unequivocally who’s wrong.”

Tit for tat, scientists also poo poo on these journalists and find their prose problematic. First, some scientists argue that the Pollans of the world interpretation of science is filled with individual dietary purity. Their idea is to bring food systems back into one’s control, into one’s environment. This is such a difficult prospect for so many people around the world, particularly for those who are suffering from hunger or are struggling to make ends meet and have no voice, no agency. Second, some scientists call these food journalists “agri-intellectuals” who boast more about what should be considered healthy and sustainable production systems without a lot of thought about how farms really operate, and farmer families’ daily struggles, inequities, and the difficulties in earning a living growing food. And last, some find their writing just disconnected from reality and instead, drowning in Americana-centric, navel-gazing arguments with a lack of focus on the perverse political and structural systems that underpin how our globalized food supply is governed that can’t be unraveled by growing your own herb garden.

Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was largely responsible for the Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America said:

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Yikes. I wouldn’t go that far Norman…but I see your point. I think…While Norman wasn’t referring to journalists per se, he was referring to lobbyists/advocates/policy wonks that also take the “I know what’s best” high road. The point is, while we scientists can complain all we want about who is shaping decisions and the psyche of the general public, we too need to get better at messaging. We need to be savvier at influencing. We need to use the evidence in ways that convince others to take action and make a change.

I wish I could write as convincingly as Pollan does. I truly do. Wouldn’t it be cool if journalists and scientists got together, shared science, ideas, and information, and wrote joint articles and books? The incentive structures would need to change, but the output could be powerful. Now that would be mavenizing!