Food Bytes: January 2024 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

Things are off to a great start this new year. New York City finally got a bit of snow after 700 days without the fluffy stuff. It wasn’t much, but it was something. This absence of wintery weather further reinforces the idea that we live in a hotter world for any doubters out there…

It reminds me of a song, we, Sound Furies, wrote several years ago called 6-year snow on our 2nd album 3.3 x 3.3 = S.S.. The lyrics go something like this:

last night it snowed though it's almost summer
it hasn't snowed here for 6 yrs
maybe it was the silence, like a blanket in the night
we don't know why we had this dream

we got up and danced, to the silence of the snow
and then we really woke up at home

Here are some curated and random updates for January’s Food Bytes:

My friend and colleague Glenn Denning, a professor at Columbia University, wrote a fantastic book last year, Universal Food Security, and he is featured in Time magazine on how to feed the world sustainably.

Over the holidays, I read the 2023 Best American Food Writing curated by Mark Bittman, also a professor at Columbia. I loved the story, Is the Future of Food the Future We Want? by Jaya Saxena, written initially for Eater. Speaking of the future of food, is Grubstreet trying to make Steve Ells the found of Chipotle look like a serial killer? Check out what he is up to now…

I am now reading Mark Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster. Who knew how essential oysters were to New York City’s economic growth? If you like oysters, eat up - they are rich in zinc. I have lots of time for Mark’s writing on food history.

Far and Wide published an article on the best thing to eat in every country. There aren’t many surprises. For Italy, they chose Bolognese. Speaking of bivalves, I would have chosen spaghetti alla vongole myself…

This past week had a lot of reporting looking back at 2023 and the impact climate change is having. It was clearly the hottest year and summer particularly on record. Just look at this graph to the right. Not sure anyone needs more convincing but if they do the new Ripple and colleagues paper hits home: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up.” YIKES…

About 60 food system experts published the Food Systems Countdown paper and report. I was really proud to get this out in the world. I hope it is now used…Speaking of data, it was great to see Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World featured in the NYT. I loved this quote from her:

“The role of science is not to dictate policy. Science identifies the problems. It can identify potential impacts. It doesn’t dictate solutions. The role of science is to say, “If you do this, this is the outcome.” It should not say, “This is what you ought to do.” Even in the book, I try to tread that line quite carefully. I’m trying not to be superprescriptive. We live in democracies. We need to make democratic choices. We move into dangerous areas if we try to undermine democracy in order to tackle these problems.”

Here are a couple of other interesting articles/reports I read over the last two weeks:

  • World Dev paper on forecasting acute malnutrition among children using environmental conditions (precipitation, temperature, vegetation) and lethal and non-lethal conflict activity as predictors. Punchline? These conditions matter.

  • Arid regions are going to get even drier. It's not optimistic for pastoralists and the animals they roam with, who are already significantly constrained. It is estimated that 25% of the world is living with drought.

  • UNEP put out a report, What’s Cooking, that assesses the state and future of alternative proteins. It's a worthy read on the growth and demand of these products.

  • There are so many great articles in the Global Food Security journal. I enjoyed this article by Elizabeth Bryan at IFPRI on gender inequalities and strengthening women's agency to create more climate-resilient and sustainable food systems. Punchline? Women matter. A lot.

  • Systems Change Lab put out a State of the Climate report. It presents a roadmap across the various sectors contributing to and could be a solution in mitigating climate change. They show how far we are off track (see the figure). Punchline? It ain’t pretty. My New Year's resolution is to try to be more positive. This report did not help.

I want to leave you with two videos. The first is the Winterkeeper in the Guardian. This lovely video is about the winter caretaker in Yellowstone National Park who has lived there for 50 years. What a life of a person who has lived tranquility and appreciation in kinship with nature. Oppenheimer seems to be sweeping the movie award season, and it is worth watching the real Oppenheimer to better understand his views later in his life about whether the atomic bomb was necessary. Have a watch.

Hey Academics, Don’t Get Caught Up in the Drudgery

Academics face an interesting conundrum. With every paper, every research project, and every class you teach, you become more and more of an “expert” on a topic or discipline. If you are lucky, that expertise is tapped by many – students, organizations, peers.

But often, that tapping is done “for free” (and by free, I mean financially but also without care, respect, or thought on one’s time and life). I will always go to the ends of the earth to give all my energy to students and write letters of recommendation, etc. What gets my goat is when organizations solicit your ideas and knowledge without pay or acknowledgment.

Let’s first talk about reviewing journal articles. I must get at least ten emails daily asking me to peer-review manuscripts (many from predatory journals) without any immediate reward or incentive. To be clear, I am a big advocate of the peer-review process when it works and is robust – it is an essential part of the scientific process. That said, reviewing manuscripts takes a ton of time to do thoroughly and thoughtfully, and reviewing is always unpaid. Having no financial ties makes sense because once you start to monetize the process, the purpose of peer review is tainted. Serving as an editor of a journal is even worse. The honorarium payment does not nearly cover the time one must commit to ensuring the journal is stellar.

There is a multitude of reviewing requests—reviewing organizations’ reports, books for publishing houses, grant proposals submitted to funding organizations, and people’s accomplishments (tenure cases and other hires). Most of these requests to review are unpaid, and if they are paid, the payment is a very small token honorarium. What irks me is the timeframe expected to review – usually a week or two. Now I understand the need and importance of reviewing—as academics, our grants get funded, and manuscripts get published depending on the process. As academics, we honor, value, and understand the peer review process. The thing is, it has become a complete deluge of work outside the day-to-day activities that require our paid time, sometimes with little respect for how long things take to do at a level that is considered high-quality and with the workloads put upon us.

Even for organizations that pay for consultancy time – the amount paid does not match the work output. What was five days of paid consultancy takes more like ten days of one’s time. Often, the rate is relatively low (compared to the daily rate of your salary). And even when consultancies are over, one often doesn’t get the credit or acknowledgment on the final product. I have had some UN consultancies that were pathetically underpaid, way too much work, and with zero outcomes or credit. No fun...

Academics have a heavy and unique workload. For many working in research positions, you have to raise more than 50% of your salary by applying for grants (in public health schools, the amount a professor needs to raise can be as high as 80%!). Applying for grants through large university systems takes an insane amount of time, paperwork, emails, and thinking time. We have to manage teams, teach (one of the most important things we do), and serve on university and external disciplinary committees and advisory groups. We do research – which takes dedication and detail-oriented attention, particularly if you work internationally. I work about 100 hours a week. Probably a quarter of that is responding to the 300 emails that hit my inbox daily. Yup. No joke. All of this work is rewarding, and I love it. It is truly an honor to be in academia – being exploratory, describing the world and why it is the way it is, and learning from students. I really don’t have a boss. Total freedom. But the thing is, that freedom can be quickly squashed when one says “yes” to too much of this other stuff. I don’t think there is any other job or industry where you are not paid to your contributions to knowledge, or a job where you have to raise your salary. Can you imagine someone from the private sector giving their time and expertise without pay? A lawyer? A doctor?

So what to do? I admit I am in a privileged position – I am a full professor with tenure and can say no to most things I don’t want to do. I get serious joy out of saying no (which, by the way, is usually an unacceptable answer to the asker, resulting in five or six emails. Dude, no means no.). But it wasn’t always that way, and that is not the case for early career faculty and researchers. They have to do these unpaid, time-consuming tasks to show they are contributing to the world of knowledge and science, getting experience doing such things, and working towards promotion and tenure. But it is just too much.

My advice to my younger self? Be picky. Turning down one opportunity to review for Nature will not make or break your career. In fact, saying no may save it. Cherish your time and work only on the things you enjoy, and projects that move you towards tenure and promotion. Focus on doing fantastic work that contributes to the field. Serve on a few committees, but only ones that deeply interest you. Review 2-3 high-impact papers a year but not more (and definitely don’t support anything evenly seemingly predatory). Only be on grant proposal reviewing committees when the work is right in your wheelhouse; the process would help you become a better grant writer. Don’t review books – they are a waste of time, and the $200 in books they promise you nowhere near matches the time it takes to review them. It’s okay to turn things down. Be punk rock about it. Because when you come up for promotion and tenure, tenure committees will not count how many committees and articles you reviewed for journals. Instead, they will count the articles you wrote, how you contributed to them, and if you have influenced and informed your field in meaningful ways. This is what matters. So spend your energy doing great discovery research and cutting-edge science you care about. Don’t get caught up in the drudgery.

'Coz I'm the tax man

I get asked a lot about whether taxing soda is effective. There has been a lot published on taxing food and beverages that are deemed bad for us. So what gives? Does taxing soda have any impact on our health? This is my take on the science, but first, let this jig run through your head….

Should five percent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman

I'll tax the street
(If you try to sit, sit) I'll tax your seat
(If you get too cold, cold) I'll tax the heat
(If you take a walk, walk) I'll tax your feet

TAXMAAAAAAAN!!!

Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are nonalcoholic beverages containing added caloric sweeteners. In addition to carbonated soft drinks or sodas, SSBs include energy and sports drinks, less-than-100-percent fruit or vegetable juices, ready-to-drink teas and coffees, sweetened waters, and milk-based drinks. SSBs are widely consumed worldwide, and the retail sales of these beverages have been increasing over the last decade. Their consumption has been associated with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other detrimental non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Because of their unhealthy nature, the World Health Organization has included a range of policy priorities, including SSB taxes, to help countries combat NCDs and improve the overall health of the global population.

Taxes on SSBs have been introduced in 118 countries, with 105 at the national level and 13 at the subnational level, covering 51% of the world’s population. Most SSB taxes are implemented using excise taxes (88%), with a handful of other countries implementing them through mechanisms such as import taxes, differential Value-Added Tax (VAT), Goods and Services Tax (GST), or regional sales tax (see the figure below). These excise taxes occur mainly as tax pass-throughs, in which the price increase of the taxed product falls on the consumer. In the U.S., for example, 70% of SSB taxes are passed onto consumers through higher-priced SSBs.

Types of SSB taxes being implemented around the world

In a systematic review and meta-analysis of 62 empirical studies of SSB taxes across 45 countries, the majority of SSB taxes were implemented as a tax pass-through. While the impacts were heterogeneous across the countries, the demand for SSBs was sensitive to tax-induced price increases, with a mean reduction in sales of SSBs by 15%. The sales resulted in no substitution towards healthier, untaxed beverages (e.g., bottled water). Another review argued that SSB taxes provide no substantive changes to dietary or purchasing behavior due to the lack of substitution towards healthier alternatives. Another study found that while SSB taxes modestly reduced the purchases of some taxed beverages in the taxing jurisdiction, consumers respond to the taxes by increasing cross-border shopping, in which they go outside the taxing jurisdiction and buy those same taxed beverages at a lower cost. However, taxes may spur downstream effects on other industry responses and policies, including reformulating products to reduce sugar consumption in those beverages, as was seen with the graduated sugar tax implemented in the UK.

Of the tax policies around the world, 73% are implemented in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), with the highest in South Asia. However, LMICs face many challenges in implementing SSB taxes, including a lack of political will and resources, weak national capacity to implement policies, large informal food sectors, and substantial influence of the food and drink industry on policy development.

The question remains whether SSB taxes can result in healthier dietary patterns and reduce the health implications accompanying excess consumption of these products – particularly NCDs. Most of the evidence — particularly from  Nakhimovsky et al., 2016; Niebylski et al., 2015; Teng et al., 2019; and Thow et al., 2014 — suggests that SSB taxes have impacted the purchases of taxed products to varying degrees, but not necessarily long-term and impactful behavior change towards healthier diets and improvements in health. One potential reason may be that the SSB taxes translate to only a 5 to 22-kilocalorie reduction per capita daily. This is insufficient to have a meaningful impact on disease outcomes. Some researchers suggest that one way to deal with this is to raise the current tax rates from the current approximate 5% to 20%. This would also be aligned with the WHO’s recommendation for at least a 20% tax on SSBs. Several countries, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have substantive (50-100%) excise taxes on SSBs, which are more in line with the taxation rates of tobacco.

The question is whether other foods, particularly red meat, should be taxed due to their significant implications on the environment and contributions to climate change. While consuming red meat in high amounts can contribute to NCDs, red meat is also a source of important nutrients. If a tax on red meat makes them prohibitively expensive for those who already struggle to afford these foods, it could put these nutrient-dense foods even further out of reach for the world’s poor. Thus, a “carbon tax” on red meat might be appropriate in wealthy countries with strong social protective measures and in countries with disproportionately high levels of red meat consumption.

Ran my fingers across the world

On the eve of a new year, we are meant to reflect on all that we accomplished (and didn’t) and put forward our hopes and goals for the new year. I find this hard to do as I get older because time seems so warped, and change is hard to measure. When I reflect back to 2023 to see what has changed for me, I am left with blurry memories and vague recollections, much like the three years of living during the pandemic. But there were some bright spots and standout moments.

Our last New Year’s Eve was spent crisscrossing most of Italy, ending in the heel, also known as Puglia (where my family is from), with the idea that we wouldn’t return for a long while. Not that we don’t love Italy, but we spent almost six years living there, and maybe it is time to see other places if we do decide to travel. I had just learned I was granted tenure at Columbia University and would join the new Climate School faculty in July of 2023. Exciting. Now comes the hard part – we had to sell our house and downsize our belongings to snuggly fit into a smaller Columbia-subsidized apartment in NYC. Offloading a house in the middle of a housing crisis with high interest rates is stressful and borderline nightmarish, but we managed to do it. Plus, moving just sucks. No matter how often you do it (and for us, we are at 25 times), it is just a massive hassle. So, the first half of 2023 was one significant stressball transition phase.

Things fell into place once we got to NY in June. We live in the Upper West Side, where I have worked for a long time and where we have lived before, so it all seems routine and familiar. Are we too comfortable and normalized? God forbid that we get too comfortable. It may be time to move to another borough and start another walkabout MaPhattan project. Brooklyn beckons, but the ever-evolving NYC landscape is unpredictable, and it is hard to know where to move that won’t become overly gentrified or where you are not participating in such a predictable path.

On the work front, I published, in collaboration with many stellar scientists, 18 papers, the final one being the Food Systems Countdown Initiative paper and report. I started a new job as a Professor of Climate and Food at Columbia’s Climate School and as the Interim Director of the International Research Institute of Climate and Society. It has been an interesting adjustment since leaving Hopkins, with a lot of my team going on to spread their wings in other institutions. The Food Systems Dashboard is going strong along with other various projects.

On a personal note, we, the Sound Furies, finished our fifth album, Times Edit. My favorite song is Mandelbrot’s Coastline. I traveled a hell of a lot less and will continue on that path in 2024. What I will do in 2024 is spend some time curating and sharing all the photos I have taken on my 60+ country travels. 2023 was filled with ordinary experiences — I got COVID, which sucked. I walked an average of 5.8 miles per day, up from last year, which was 5.2 miles. I tried out the Peleton (there is one in my building) and found it ridiculous but effective. I ate red meat maybe five times and tried my best only to take public transport (maybe got in a taxi/uber 4-5 times) if walking wasn’t an option. I continue to bake sourdough…I decided I like folk music (maybe it’s my age) and succulents (maybe it’s my age). We celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary. I turned 52. We ate in 55 restaurants since arriving in NYC (hey, don’t give me shit, I’m in the food business).

Looking to 2024, the new year brings the opportunity to turn over a new leaf, improve, and make a change. But change is ruthlessly tough, and we are often hard on ourselves when we don’t make those changes “successfully.” And I must admit, I am worried about the changes to come. The poem, What they did yesterday afternoon, by Warsan Shire has been running through my head:

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”

Almost half of the world will be voting for new leaders in 2024, and democracy looks pretty fragile to me. I worry about the U.S. elections, as I am sure almost every American does, and the results will impact future decisions about our lives and goals. I am also profoundly concerned about the lack of action on mitigating climate change, what that will mean for everyone, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, how much they will need to adapt, and with what resources.

But as the late Sam Cooke beautifully sang, a change is gonna come – the question is, are we ready for whatever comes? Because things don’t always change for the better, but they do change. Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, wrote, "Incremental change can happen quietly, and change is rarely straightforward. Victories slip by unheralded while failures are more readily detected.” I will remain hopeful in 2024 as I run my fingers across the world. I am going to remain hopeful. Not because I think everything is going to be okay. But hope for the possibility that the change that is coming pushes us forward to a more sustainable future.  

Lending order to the world

Robert Rundstrum said that creating maps is fundamental to lending order to the world. I geek out over maps, dashboards, and overall visuals of how data can be creatively displayed. So much so that I co-lead the Food Systems Dashboard with our friends at GAIN, which gives a complete view of food systems by bringing together data from multiple sources. The Dashboard allows one to compare food system drivers and components across countries and regions, gain insights into challenges, and identify actions to improve nutrition, health, and environmental outcomes.

Dashboards are maps, and often, they are displayed as maps. Maybe my obsession with maps comes from how much time I spend walking with my better half, stepping across geography step by step. As Rebecca Solnit said,

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.”

I use “maps” loosely as most data displayed, whether a bar graph, histogram, or geographical map, is a record of a diagrammatic representation of how we exist or how we perceive our existence through time. Mere representations of an ever-changing reality of where we have been and where we are going.

Some argue that we are in a heightened state of data map overload, with an insane amount of dashboards displaying all kinds of data. Are we suffering from “death by dashboard?” But I, and I think many others, appreciate dashboards. Just look at the success of Our World in Data, or how everyone, every day, all the time, tuned into the Johns Hopkins COVID Dashboard as the pandemic grew (they stopped collecting data this past March. They knew when “to fold ‘em.”

There are some new food-related maps and dashboards that are pretty cool. Check out The Food Twin tool. This tool visualizes a model designed to predict where food is grown and connecting that food to where it is consumed in the U.S. The data moves, showing the vast network of how food is produced and consumed. Speaking of networks, the Global Food Systems Network map visually represents the relationships among stakeholders involved in food systems-related efforts worldwide. Some other cool maps are out there, including the World Food Map, which displays the most commonly consumed foods in each country.

Let’s thank our farmers for the incredible diversity of foods available around the world. But they are dealing with significant risk. The Agriculture Adaptation Atlas maps climate risks and identifies solutions for farmers. Lastly, the new Clim-Eat dashboard shows a range of food system technologies that show great promise in improving food security while mitigating or adapting to climate change.

From the Agriculture Adapation Atlas: Showing heat stress of livestock in sub-Saharan Africa

Beyond food, so many exciting projects are trying to display data to ensure it is accessible to everyone. Vivid Maps displays all kinds of data. For example, here is a map of what the boogeyman looks like worldwide. What the hell is the Jersey Devil? Seems apropos. Or, how cats migrated to Europe…Some useful information, some…not so much.

But this map, Native Digital Land, is fantastic. It is a searchable map of Native territories, languages, and treaties. You can click on the map across the Americas and other areas to see which Indigenous tribes lived there and their histories. Just looking at the United States is incredible and devastating. This is a collaborative endeavor and will consistently change as more Indigenous peoples interact and provide historical information to the map.

Native Digital Land, showing the Native American territories of the United States

And if you really want to geek out, Oculi Mundi has put out a collection of antique maps that are stunning. Just check out this “Anatomy of the Ceasars map.” They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. The site is just so beautifully done, and all open access—such a beautiful thing.

From Oculi Mundi



Food Bytes: November 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

I thought I would write up the November Food Bytes before the onslaught of publications leading up to the COP28 climate meeting takes place. Here is the roundup!

Some interesting articles and books:

The great “godfather of climate science,” Jim Hansen, also a Columbia colleague, has put out a paper with colleagues arguing the planet may be warming faster than previous estimates have indicated by measuring “climate sensitivity” – measuring the earth’s warmth via atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Global CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts per million in the pre-industrial age. Now, they are above 400 ppm. Not everyone agrees with this paper, but no matter, Hansen is sending us clear warnings.

We are more and more worried about how resilient our food systems are in the face of extreme events and shocks, be they climate, environmental, or political. This paper examines the impacts of crop yields related to several agriculture input shocks – nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, machinery, pesticide, and fertilizer. Industrialized agriculture systems depend on these inputs, and often, they are imported from other countries. When combined, as you can see in the figure, some areas showed decreased yields for some but not all crops. The yields of barley, maize, potato, and wheat decreased heavily in the western United States. Barley, maize, millet, potato, sorghum, and soybean yields all decreased in northern Argentina, while barley, maize, potato, and wheat. To some extent, sugar beet also saw large yield decreases in Central Europe. Rice yields, in turn, decreased heavily in Thailand, Vietnam, and the southern part of India.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00873-z/figures/3

My friend Bill Dietz, the Director of Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at George Washington University, and I just published a paper on how the U.S. agri-food sector can contribute to climate change mitigation. The paper is timely for the upcoming COP28 meetings. The U.S. needs to step up!

A new book on the political economy of food system transformation co-edited by Danielle Resnick and Johan Swinnen has been jointly published by IFPRI and Oxford University Press. The summary follows: “The current structure of the global food system is increasingly recognized as unsustainable. While the need to transform food systems is widely accepted, the policy pathways for achieving such a vision often are highly contested, and the enabling conditions for implementation are frequently absent.” Check it out and download it for free here.

Some interesting reports:

Every year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, also known as FAO, releases two flagship reports: the SOFI and the SOFA. The SOFA just came out this past week and focuses on the “true cost of food.” That means they assess the hidden environmental, health, and social costs of producing our food. What is their final assessment? Global hidden costs of food amount to 10 trillion dollars, with low-income countries bearing the highest burden of hidden costs. Yikes.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food released an interesting analysis in this report calling for food systems to wean off fossil fuels. Wouldn’t that be nice….They argue that food production, distribution, processing/packaging, storage, and sales consume about 15% of all fossil fuels generated annually. They argue that the fossil fuel industry holds a lot of sway with governments, making it difficult to “extract” (sorry for the pun) their influence or hold them to account.

A report by the group I-CAN, which looks at the integration of climate and nutrition, came out. It is interesting…nothing new…and much built on the long scientific publications already out there, but I supposed putting it in a layperson report gets the message out there.

Some interesting listens:

Vice did an “expose” on how the Italian mafia has taken over food systems in Italy. Having lived in Italy and interested in Italian deep food traditions, I watched it. The document is not well done, with much speculation and little evidence beyond a few interviews. If it is even true, I wasn’t convinced by this documentary.

John Oliver’s Halloween episode focused on the issues of child labor related to producing chocolate – focusing on Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where roughly 60% of it is produced. A lot of the material is borrowed from Netflix’s Rotten series. Still, the message is clear that many children (1.56 million) are engaged in cocoa production stemming from insufficient wages paid by massive confectionary companies to smallholder farming families working or owning cocoa farms, leaving them in gut wrenching poverty. Such a tragedy. I don’t think John Oliver adds much to the debate – if you want a quick watch, go to the Netflix episode.

In their usual snarky, pick-it-to-pieces style, Mike and Aubrey of the fantastic Maintenance Phase podcast sink their teeth into Ozempic, the weight loss diabetes treatment drug. It's well worth listening to the latest.

I'll just stay here

I write this blog, having been recently infected with COVID. The first time was in May of 2022. This time around, I am a little worse for the wear, but it allows me, through a foggy haze, to contemplate this pesky and resilient virus on its almost fourth anniversary since hearing about its emergence in Wuhan.

I traveled on a plane five times since March 2020, when most of the world shut down from COVID-19. Three of the trips were to Italy — Bologna, Puglia, and Bellagio. The other two were to Seattle and Switzerland. To put this globetrotting footprint into perspective, I would travel on average about ten international flights a year before the pandemic. In those three and a half years, my average was 1.5 trips a year. Don’t get me wrong. The ability to travel and see the world is truly a privilege. We travel to find ourselves, to discover new places, and to understand humanity. I was fortunate to travel to some very faraway places before social media, iPhones, and Instagram, in which everywhere and everything is distilled down to a “been there down that” disposable, bragable moment. They were the best times of travel - conveniences but without the crowds.

From the paper by Ripple et al 2023

I share my travelogue history during the pandemic with you because the one thing COVID-19 forced upon many of us was to stay put. While I don’t think the world has deeply reflected enough about the impacts of the pandemic on our society (particularly the loss of life and suffering), the lessons learned, and the murky path forward, the world did pause (and was truly quieter), and this respite did wonders, at least temporarily, for Mother Earth. Just look at these figures of air transport and greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2020 and the dip. A flight from London to New York is about 1,000 kg (1 ton) of carbon dioxide. There are crude and somewhat flawed comparisons to relate this footprint to other activities like household electricity consumption, driving a car, and eating hamburgers. Just know, this is a lot. To put the flight emissions into perspective, the U.S., on average, produces about 16 tons of carbon a year (the world average is 4). The world needs to move towards 2 tons per year by 2050. Travel is a significant component of the U.S.’s emissions.

As I see it, my time of heavy travel is over. It is now the next generation’s turn to see the world and for the world to see them while they can. It will get more complicated to travel. It already is. It will become less fun and full of hassle, and it will further exhibit inequities. There will be places that will be incredibly difficult to travel to — too hot, too dangerous, too constrained.

When I think about the limits of travel and time spent over these last four years, this spoken word song Nirvana, comes to mind. It is told by Tom Waits — a master singer-songwriter who croons conversational late-night stories through songs — on his Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards album. Waits poignantly, but always in keeping with his guttural delivery, recites a poem of the same name by Charles Bukowski about a young man who, for a moment, is lost in the magic of a cafe in a small town he is passing through. At one point, the man thinks: “I’ll just sit here, I’ll just stay here.” But he doesn’t. He boards the Greyhound bus once again and moves on, and no one, except him, even noticed the magic of that somewhere town.

In the Nirvana story, the weary traveler longs for a place to call home and hang his hat. He seems lost and is searching for the magic that life has not yet offered him. That is why we travel, yes? I sought after that magic when I journeyed — that place where one can say, “Everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful there.” And while through all of my travels, there have been many experiences, instances, and glimpses of beauty and enchantment, it gets harder for me to want more. Instead, I will embrace the magic I picked up along the way and “just stay here.”

Food Bytes: October 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

 

It is hard to find the time to read, let alone write about what you read. One of the things about reading scientific literature is that you have to weed through many journals’ tables of contents to find the nibbles and nuggets that are worth your time. Sometimes, you get lucky and find some gems; other times, you don’t get further than the abstract. Regardless, if you don’t have LinkedIn or X, spoon-feeding your biased and “like-minded lemur” content, the never-ending search for quality papers is laborious and time-consuming.

Enter documentaries and podcasts. I find myself more and more listening to them to get a synthesis of a topic or a deep dive into an issue or scientific discovery. There is no shortage of food podcasts, but most focus on cooking and gourmandery. But a few goodies discuss the politics of food and the history of food. I try to add them to the Resource section of The Food Archive. I found this particular episode of the podcast, “What You’re Eating,” fantastic on the confusion of egg labels. The host lays out the issues and clarifies where your eggs come from and how to understand the labels on those confusing cartons better.

Two food documentaries worth the watch are Poisoned and How to Live to 100, Wherever You Are in the World. Let’s take Poisoned first, about how “unsafe” the U.S. food supply is, although often touted as being one of the most secure. The documentary starts with the contaminated burgers from Jack in the Box, which killed and sickened a slew of people. After lawsuits and regulations, getting sick from E. coli-contaminated hamburger meat is hard now. It shows that it works once governments can set their mind to something and put in strict and enforced regulations. Enter vegetables. After watching the show, I am not sure I will ever eat romaine lettuce again…much of it is grown right next to concentrated animal feed operations (where beef is raised in the U.S.). The manure runs off into waterways,  and the water from those said waterways irrigates the nearby lettuce crops. And then bingo! You’ve got severe contamination issues. It is worth watching to understand how food is produced in this country, how it is regulated, and how you can be safer with food in your kitchen.

How to Live to 100 is hosted by Dan Buettner, who wrote Secrets of the Blue Zones. He has been studying why, in some places, people live such long lives – sometimes beyond 100 years. He travels to Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California — where more people live significantly longer than average. He summarizes some of their secrets to longevity into four basic mantras. Keep in mind these populations all get to their winter years in different, contextualized ways, and it is never that straightforward why someone lives a long life and others die too early. Dan argues these four lifestyle changes help:

  • Make movement a habit

  • Have a positive outlook

  • Eat wisely

  • Find and connect with your tribe

There are a lot of valuable lessons in this documentary (sans Dan showing himself riding his bike for 1/3 of the docuseries. Why do documentarians always have to show themselves so much? I digress…). One lesson is that no matter how long you live, you can live your best life and one of high quality. A lot of that centers around food. And wine. Yay!

The NY Times Magazine had two fantastic articles last week. David Wallace-Wells wrote a piece on the financial responsibility for climate change and how difficult it is to figure out the historical tally of damage. The price of historical emissions and removing carbon would cost $250 trillion. The U.S. alone has accrued a climate debt of $2 trillion. By 2100, $100 trillion. This shows how daunting it will be to turn around the damage we have done and will continue to do without serious action on climate change.

Another NY Times Magazine article focuses on young migrant kids from Central America who work night shifts in slaughterhouses – a dangerous, low-paying job – with very little compensation or legal status. They are often too tired when they get to school after working long, laborious hours all night, and often, they get maimed, injured, or exposed to terrible toxins that stay with them for a lifetime. It is a tragic story but so important to read to understand why younger kids and teens are trekking up to the U.S., what they face along the way and when they get here, and the fine line to ensuring their freedom. While it seems we have come a long way from the days of The Jungle, written in 1906 by Upton Sinclair of the Chicago slaughterhouses, this article makes you pause. Your heart will break for Marcos Cux.

And for some self-promotion, my team and colleagues published a few papers in the last six months that may be of interest to Food Archive readers:

  • Challenges and opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of food reformulation and fortification to improve dietary and nutrition outcomes: This article is about how reformulation and fortification face numerous technical and political hurdles for food manufacturers and will not solve the issues of increased consumption of ultra-processed foods. You can’t make junk food healthier at the end of the day…

  • Harnessing the connectivity of climate change, food systems, and diets: Taking action to improve human and planetary health: This paper presents how climate change is connected to food systems and how dietary trends and foods consumed worldwide impact human health, climate change, and environmental degradation. It also highlights how specific food policies and actions related to dietary transitions can contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation responses and, at the same time, improve human and planetary health. While there is significant urgency in acting, it is also critical to move beyond the political inertia and bridge the separatism of food systems and climate change agendas currently existing among governments and private sector actors. The window is closing and closing fast.

  • A global view of aquaculture policy: This article shows that government policies have strongly influenced the geographic distribution of aquaculture growth, as well as the types of species, technology, management practices, and infrastructure adopted in different locations. Six countries/regions are highlighted – The EU, Bangladesh, Zambia, Chile, China, USA, and Norway. These case studies shed light on aquaculture policies aimed at economic development, aquaculture disease management, siting, environmental performance, and trade protection. 

  • Riverine food environments and food security: a case study of the Mekong River, Cambodia: Rivers are critical, but often overlooked, parts of food systems. They have multiple functions supporting the surrounding communities' food security, nutrition, health, and livelihoods. However, given current unsustainable food system practices, damming, and climate change, most of the world’s largest rivers are increasingly susceptible to environmental degradation, with negative implications for the communities that rely on them. Rivers are dynamic and multifaceted food environments (i.e., the place within food systems where people obtain their food) and their role in securing food security, including improved diets and overall health.

Barriers to a just, sustainable dietary transition

As world leaders meet to discuss grand global challenges, like climate change, over champagne cocktails this week here in NY, my friend and colleague, Chris Barrett and company asked to write about what I think are the main barriers or challenges to a just, sustainable dietary transition. Hmmmm. Where to even start?

The overarching major challenge is the inequities in the ability of many people to access (physically, economically, and socially) what is considered healthy, safe, and sustainable diets. Ironically, many of these same people are the food producers for the world. Accessing these diets and adapting will only get more complex if we stay on a business-as-usual course in the context of climate mitigation and adapting to climate-related extreme weather events.

There are many reasons for this lack of access that could cut across inefficiencies across food supply and environments and demands for specific kinds of food that put the world on a dangerous course. However, there are a few barriers that I would like to highlight. This summary focuses on food systems. However, many systems and sectors are responsible for meeting this goal, such as health, economics, education, and urban/rural development.

The first challenge is unrealistic goal and recommendation setting. Goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals provide a universal road map for how we want the world to be in seven years. Still, not every goal is relevant, meaningful, or a priority for every country. Recommendations for food system transformation are often made as generalities, not articulating who is responsible, for what, and by when. They also do not indicate how these recommendations can be translated into action ‘on the ground’ in the context of established interests and constrained budgets.

The second challenge is data gaps. High-quality analytical methods and tools to collate, curate, and analyze data across food systems; integration of data sets across disciplines; and new empirical research to solve the grand challenge of sustainable development (Fanzo et al., 2020). These data gaps bring about difficulties in navigating unintended consequences or trade-offs. While there are many gaps across food systems science, I focus on diets here.

We remain unclear on what people consume, why, and their barriers to accessing healthy, sustainable diets. Global dietary intake data that are nationally and subnationally representative remain sparse. Most countries do not consistently and systematically collect individual dietary intake data, and the existing data are often based on models relying on household expenditure and consumption survey data, food balance sheet data, or data from subpopulation nutrition surveys. Although these modeled estimates may give us a sense of dietary intake and patterns of consumption, they are an uncertain substitute for robust, representative individual dietary intake data reflecting recent consumption patterns at a national level, particularly in low- and middle-income contexts. Collecting robust longitudinal dietary data would allow researchers and policymakers to understand better how diets change over time and why.

The third challenge is the politics across food systems governance. As one example, the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) and its stock take in July 2023 is not without uncertainties and controversies, with rumblings of it all being grandiose political wonk talk. With summits, there are always questions about impact. Will all stakeholders be included? Will the needs of the vulnerable and marginalized be prioritized? Will there be a sense of urgency to scale up investment? Will there be any accountability mechanism to track commitments and hold those to account who fall behind? If this is the mechanism for food systems change and for governments to engage, these questions are critical to understand and act on.

While addressing effective governance is a sticky issue, more and more, we as researchers must engage in this space if we are to see evidence come to bear in policy- and decision-making.

Building Stronger Food Systems in the Face of Global Shocks

I recently wrote a report for the Farm Journal Foundation on the current global food system crisis and the U.S.'s role in supporting small-scale producers by ramping up agricultural development assistance. A summary is below, and the full report can be found here.

Over the past few years, the world has faced a series of unprecedented shocks that have pushed farmers and our global food system to the breaking point. The COVID-19 pandemic, international and regional conflicts, including the war between Russia and Ukraine, and extreme weather events caused by climate change have come together to create a true “polycrisis” – significantly impacting food, fertilizer, feed, fuel, and finance available to farmers. These challenges have been extremely difficult in their own right, but worst still, they have left humanity vulnerable to any future “black swan” moments that could have severe and far-reaching consequences for global food supplies.

Recent shocks have led to high food prices and worsening hunger and malnutrition around the world. This polycrisis has disproportionately negatively impacted small-scale producers and people living in low-income, food-deficit countries who spend most of their incomes on food. Smallholders generally have low levels of agricultural productivity, high exposure to climate change and other threats, scarce assets, and poor access to information, technology, markets, and services – increasing their vulnerability to shocks.

Because Russia and Ukraine are major crop producers and fertilizer suppliers, a key input to help smallholder farmers increase their crop yields, the war between the two countries has significantly impacted global food and nutrition security. Trade bottlenecks, initially caused by the COVID-19 pandemic but compounded by the Russia-Ukraine war, have further exacerbated the crisis. Structural challenges to food systems in developing countries, including farmers’ lack of access to markets and finance, poor storage and transportation infrastructure, which contribute to food loss and waste, and persistent disempowerment of women in agriculture, mean that countless farmers and food producers were already teetering on the edge of survival; additional burdens stemming from the polycrisis have pushed many into disaster. Consumers around the world have also faced enormous pressure, as disrupted agricultural supplies have led to rising food prices and lower availability and affordability of nutritious foods. New research has shown that even modest increases in the prices of staple foods leads rapidly to negative nutrition impacts from deteriorating diet quality as low-income families shift away from more nutritious and expensive foods, including vegetables, fish, and eggs, in order to afford the increased costs of rice, wheat, maize, or other dietary staples.

A global map of the number of people with acute food insecurity, mid-2022

Through its whole-of-government Feed the Future initiative, the U.S. has an important role in enabling farmers and food systems in developing countries to withstand shocks better. Supporting global food and nutrition security is in America’s best interest both from an economic and national security standpoint. Studies show that U.S. investment in international agricultural development, research, and innovation benefits both developing countries and U.S. producers and consumers, far exceeding its costs.

Key Recommendations

Agricultural research and development (R&D) can help developing countries address their own unique challenges and shore up local food systems to withstand shocks better. Unfortunately, there have been significant decreases in inflation-adjusted U.S. and multilateral investment in food systems R&D to countries and universities in recent years, and important institutions, including CGIAR have seen fluctuations in research funding.

The U.S. government is uniquely positioned to lead investments in international agricultural research by virtue of its unparalleled capacity from the federal, university, private sectors and to generate benefits that would simultaneously help smallholder farm families around the world and American farmers and ranchers. The U.S. can strengthen its portfolio by providing additional resources to initiatives such as CGIAR, U.S. Feed the Future Innovation Labs, and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), and by partnering with institutions with long histories of designing and delivering research for development overseas, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Within this context, the U.S. should consider targeting additional research funding toward the following areas to increase impact:

  1. Climate change adaptation and mitigation: The impact of climate change on agriculture is expected to intensify in coming years, and more investments are needed to improve smallholder resilience, productivity, and incomes. Areas that need increased research investment include drought-resistant crop varieties, better on-farm water management and improved irrigation, more precise fertilizer application, and additives to cattle feed to improve feed efficiency and/or reduce enteric methane emissions.

  2. Soil health and nutrient management: More research is needed into solutions that can reduce global dependence on Russian fertilizer. The U.S. should consider investing in R&D and partnering with the private sector to develop and scale up green fertilizer, biofertilizers, fertilizer alternatives, and innovations that boost fertilizer efficiency and nutrient uptake.

  3. Crop diversity and nutrition: Low productivity, high production risks, and insufficient diversification towards producing more nutritious foods are critical drivers of the elevated cost of healthy diets, especially in low-income countries. More research should focus on developing sustainable and scalable production methods for various crops, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, improved forages for climate-smart animal nutrition, and where appropriate, biofortification and fortification of crops and food. In addition, more research is needed to improve the affordability of animal-source foods, such as fish, eggs, and dairy, that would enhance both nutrition and livelihoods.

  4. Access to markets and finance, especially for women: Research could focus on how to address barriers to smallholders’ access to credit and market information, ways to develop new market linkages, innovative financing models, and partnerships with development banks to expand lending to farmers, and how to improve farmer organizations’ capacity to negotiate with buyers.

  5. Supply chain infrastructure: Inadequate food storage, poor road infrastructure, limited food preservation capacity, and the lack of physical access to food markets, especially for perishable foods, lead to significant food losses and inefficiencies along supply chains in many developing countries. Innovations focused on the infrastructure needs of small-scale producers and strategies developed to address those needs could help attract additional investment on-farm and across the entire food system.

  6. Local capacity building: Giving voice and agency to local producers allows for their participation and leadership in R&D funding and prioritization decisions. Without their engagement from the start, adoption of technologies and other R&D tools produced could be futile. It is also critical to ensure that R&D investments do not cause unintended negative consequences, burdens, or harms, particularly for women who already face significant hurdles.