Enjoy every sandwich

This year has been filled with highs and lows, and “it ain’t over.”

The highs were both personal and professional. First, the highs, because those are easy. I joined the Scaling Up Nutrition’s Executive Committee and serve as its co-Chair. I also joined the systems-wide CGIAR Integrated Partnership Board. I believe in both of these organizations and their mandate to improve nutrition and food security for the most vulnerable, and it is a pleasure to contribute to both. I also was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and launched the Food for Humanity Initiative at Columbia’s Climate School. It's all great stuff, with many people’s hands on my back pushing me forward. Please, reader, do not take this as me bragging, but these moments of feathers in the cap helped me get through the lows…So my advice is, find your feathers to put in your cap.

Now, the lows. I lost two good friends and mentors this year and one who served as a support mechanism for my most valued mentor. My colleague Cheryl Palm died of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease this past April – she died swiftly and tragically. She was an amazing woman, scientist, and mentor to me. She taught me the ins and outs of African agriculture, and her laugh was infectious. Richard Deckelbaum also passed away this October. He was my first “boss” in academia – and he convinced me to come to academia after years of working in international development. He was a mensch – just the kindest guy in the world. John Gallin was the husband of my mentor Elaine Gallin, when I was at the Doris Duke Foundation, and he was a fantastic scientist who spent a career at NIH. All three leave big holes in the world.

To add to the lows, my parents were hit hard by Hurricane Helene. They live near Asheville, North Carolina, and the flooding/dam breaks caused the loss of their car, their home, and a good amount of their possessions. Starting over in your late 70s is hard, but they are resilient folk. They are alive, safe, and rebuilding. I am in awe of them.

It seems the world is ever more fragile, with significant wars, famines, and now a very contentious U.S. election just a few days away. Deep down in my gut, I must say, I am filled with an undertow of dread and fear of the unknown and known.

This year has been filled with joy, sadness, and loss. It got me thinking about how important it is to keep perspective. When Warren Zevon, the singer-songwriter, was dying of lung cancer, he visited the David Letterman show. David asked Warren if he had any life lessons. Warren said, “Enjoy every sandwich.”

Damn straight.

Food Bytes: October 2024 Edition

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

There is much to catch up on in this month’s Food Bytes. The fall season here in the U.S. always brings a lot of productivity. There seem to be more meetings, more papers, and more output. We just finished the UN General Assembly and Climate Week in New York. I love seeing so many friends and colleagues come to town, but it is exhausting. There are so many “side” events. We hosted a Bollinger Convening at Columbia’s Climate School that brought together some of the best people in the food systems field, including the President of Malawi, the PM of Haiti, and the First Lady of Brazil. Good times were had by all, but I deeply wonder if all the time, money, and greenhouse gases spent flying to NY actually amount to meaningful change. There were swanky events where people were nibbling on gourmet hors d'oeuvres, drinking champagne cocktails, and pontificating about solving poverty through quick tech fixes…It is a bit nauseating, to say the least. The same goes for COP, Davos, etc. As one of my colleagues said, “Just say you want to bring all your friends into town and have a big party. But don’t think you will solve the world doing so.” Point taken. Ollie Camp at GAIN did an excellent re-cap for those who couldn’t make it to Gotham. For an even briefer re-cap, all the food-focused events seem to be honing on two topics: (1) regenerative agriculture (what exactly is it?) and (2) the livestock conundrum. The UN produced a Pact for the Future with 56 actions for a global transformation protecting present and future generations. Is this the next set of Sustainable Development Goals?

Reports

The Tilt Collective, a new initiative focusing on plant-based foods, made a big splash at Climate Week. It will be interesting to see where they go. They have a report to explain their plan further, and the CEO, Sarah Lake, summarizes her modus operandi on a Tedtalk that can be found on the Tilt homepage. The Gates Foundation also released its Goalkeepers report and had a splashy event at Climate Week, focusing on nutrition. They argue that “No other global health problem requires a larger-scale solution than malnutrition.” I tend to agree…

Speaking of nutrition, the World Bank released their much anticipated Investment Framework for Nutrition. They argue that scaling up nutrition interventions to address undernutrition globally will require an additional $13 billion annually over the next ten years (2025-2034). This would mean $13 per pregnant woman and $17 per child per year under five years. This investment could avert 6.2 million deaths in children under age five and 980,000 stillbirths over the next decade.

Food systems are garnering attention from less traditional UN bodies. UNDP released a white paper on food system transformation. I'm not sure it says much more than what we already know. UNEP has a rich interactive site called the Journey of Food. The most depressing report of all is the WWF’s Living Planet Report. The average size of wildlife has decreased a staggering 73% since 1970. Most of that is driven by habitat loss (see the figure to the right showing the drivers of species loss in North America), mainly from agriculture. Read the report — it is depressing but critically important for our planet and us.

Science papers

It is getting hard to keep up with food-climate-nutrition scientific output these days because there is just so much of it. This is a good problem to have. Here are some highlights of what I have been reading over the past two weeks.

  • Nature Food’s September issue is rich in sustainable diet science. I appreciated Loken and colleagues' paper on the importance of culture to diet health and sustainability.

  • If you want to double down on your doomsday depression about the state of the planet, Ripple and colleagues deliver yet again! Bottomline? We are so screwed.

  • Emmerling and colleagues have a fantastic paper in Nature Climate Change that examines the relationship between climate change and inequality. The scientists model that by 2100, climate impacts will increase inequality by 1.4 points of the Gini index on average. If we stay within the Paris Climate Agreement to stay below 1.5 °C, long-term inequality increases by two-thirds but increases slightly in the short term. It's so great to see this topic getting some attention.

  • Last, the Lancet published the Earth Commission report. In it, they “quantify safe and just Earth-system boundaries and assess minimum access to natural resources required for human dignity and to enable escape from poverty. Collectively, these describe a safe and just corridor essential to ensuring sustainable and resilient human and planetary health and thriving in the Anthropocene.” It is a long read but worth it.

  • The Food Compass, out of Tufts University, has published its second paper, improving on its nutrient profiling system that assesses the healthfulness of diverse foods, beverages, and meals. Their score, named FSC grouped foods into three categories: foods and beverages scoring ≤30 are those to be minimized, foods and beverages scoring 31–69 are those to be consumed in moderation, and foods and beverages scoring ≥70 are encouraged. They found that among all products, 23% scored FCS ≥70; 46%, FCS 31–69; and 31%, FCS ≤30. Most beverages (54%) and animal fats (92%) scored ≤30; whereas most meat, poultry, eggs and dairy scored 31–69. Most products within seafood, legumes, nuts, vegetables and fruits scored ≥70 (82%, 80%, 89%, 63% and 53%, respectively. Nothing too shocking no?

Media

Of course, our favorite media outlets are always generating some food journalism.

  • This BBC piece is balanced about the ultra-processed nature of plant-based alt foods. Thanks for sending it my way Hermano Herrero!

  • The FT has highlighted this notion that the US has reached peak obesity. Is it behavior change or ozempic?

  • The scorching and dredging of the Amazon is happening, and the potential devastation to ecosystems and those who depend on its mighty waters is for realzzzz. Brings me back to the piece I wrote about rivers.

  • The hippie-dippie Erowon-esque food crazes won’t die, and the city of Los Angeles leads the way in blisfull ridiculousness. This New Yorker article captures the insanity well.

  • Love tuna? So do I but should we be eating so much of it. The NYT fishes around for the deets.

  • Speaking of tuna, I started watching the series, Omnivore, curated by the chef, Rene Redzepi. Each episode focuses on a singular food or ingredient. The first is on tuna. Great watch about the importance of food across many cultures.

And that’s about all she wrote for this month. Just some final closing words. This month was not the easiest for many people. Some parts of the world are in intractable conflict. My parents lost just about everything in Hurricane Helene, and my good friend Richard Deckelbaum passed. And the U.S. election has me filled with much dread. Yesterday, I turned 53 and have much to be grateful for. My parents are alive and okay. Richard led a long, amazing life. And people are out there fighting the good fight for democracy, climate action and the world's wellness. I am filled with hope. And not the kind of hope that is a belief that everything was, is, and will be fine. It is the kind of “hope” about the possibilities and the actions for our future.

Food Bytes: September 2024 Edition

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

The chaos of the semester has begun along with the long lead-up to climate week here in NYC. Many side events are happening around the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and Climate Week. Do all these events amount to something tangible? It is unclear in my mind’s eye, but I do love seeing food experts and friends converge in Gotham.

So let’s get started. If you are coming to NYC next week, please do join us at Columbia for the Bollinger Convening, where we will highlight the importance of evidence, research, and data (although you wouldn’t believe they matter if you watched the U.S. presidential debate - cats? dogs?) in addressing hunger and malnutrition. We are also hosting a Forward Food & Fashion event. Join us!

So first, the most depressing. Sudan’s famine situation is worsening to a catastrophic level. Absolutely devastating. Let’s hope this is high on the agenda at the UNGA and that leaders act swiftly. While some argue that Gaza is also experiencing a catastrophic famine, others disagree — the debate played out in the American Journal of Nutrition. Michael Fakhri, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, also weighed in.

Some papers I am reading this week:

  • Simone Passarelli and colleagues performed a modeling exercise to estimate micronutrient intake and adequacy worldwide. They found that 5 billion people do not consume enough iodine (so much for iodized salt!), vitamin E, and calcium. At least half of the world does not consume enough folate, iron, and vitamin C. We still have a long way to go to ensure people get access to nutrient-dense food products.

  • Yi Yang and colleagues recently published a paper in Science on how climate change could amplify the environmental impacts of agriculture. They found that not only will it do so, but it will also reduce the efficacy of agrochemicals and their loss into ecosystems and increase soil erosion and pests. This will reduce productivity, leading to land expansion and clearing to grow more food inefficiently, threatening biodiversity and accelerating greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. They nicely demonstrate the interconnected feedback loops.

  • Speaking of climate change and Science magazine, a fascinating article examining climate policies that achieved significant greenhouse gas emission reductions. What an undertaking. Between 1998 and 2022, they examined 1500 climate policies across 41 countries. They found 63 successful policy interventions that reduced emissions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes of CO2. It is a shame they did not examine agri-food policies. Pricing, regulation, and subsidies had different impacts across sectors, but bundling of policy interventions greatly mattered. Important lessons for food-climate policy.

  • A new study in Lancet analyzed dietary questionnaires from more than 200,000 adults in the United States to examine their consumption of ultra-processed foods and related it to their chance of developing cardiovascular disease. They found that those who consumed the most ultra-processed foods were 11% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 16% more likely to develop coronary heart disease compared to those who consumed the least amount of ultra-processed foods. Which foods were the worst offenders? Sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meat, poultry, and fish (e.g. bacon, hot dogs, breaded fish products). But still, some worry that demonizing foods can be stigmatizing.

  • I am totally biased here, but my colleague Shauna Downs just published a paper in Appetite that examined meat (red, unprocessed, and poultry) and seafood consumption patterns, the factors influencing their consumption, and how these differed based on socioeconomic variables among a US population. One interesting finding is that critical factors influencing red meat reduction were health and price, while environmental sustainability and animal welfare were less important, particularly among certain socio-demographic groups. She also wrote this piece on how communities along the Mekong River in Cambodia are seeing their food access shrink as the climate worsens.

Other nibbles:

  • Did you know methane is getting rising faster than ever? No wonder with the massive demand for meat.

  • The European Food Trails project just released a Food in Cities podcast in collaboration with Slow Food. I'm looking forward to listening.

  • Speaking of podcasts, we at the Columbia Climate School’s Food for Humanity Initiative are starting our own podcast, the Food Pod for Humanity. It will be a limited series on topics highlighting the interdependencies of climate change and food systems. The first series is on food waste.

  • Speaking of Columbia’s Climate School, check out this inspirational story about one of our new students from South Sudan.

  • World Wildlife Fund’s new Great Food Puzzle interactive site is pretty awesome.

  • The Atlantic published a report saying that we are a country of snacking, and less on eating wholesome meals. Gee, I wonder who encouraged that?

And just on a personal note, I have always loved These Days by Jackson Browne. I was so happy to see the NYT highlight the song. As I age, lyrics like this just hit me right in the gut: “Don’t confront me with my failures/I have not forgotten them.” Beautiful, and written when he was just 16.

The Archive Appetizer: What's in a name?

There is a lot of confusion about how to define food systems, let alone what to call them. People refer to them in many different ways. Is it singular or plural? Are they local or global? Should there be an “a” or a “the” in front of it/them? I appreciate this delineation of names and definitions by Kelly Parsons and Corinna Hawkes:

  • The Food System: the interconnected system of everything and everybody that influences, and is influenced by, the activities involved in bringing food from farm to fork and beyond. 

  • A Food System: the food system in a specific locality or context. 

  • Food Systems: The totality of different types of food systems in different localities and contexts (i.e. multiple forms of “a food system”). This idea of multiple food systems acknowledges the huge diversity of food systems at different scales with differing characteristics. For example, industrial systems at a global scale and alternative systems at a local scale.

Then there is the referring to food systems as “our food systems.” Hmm. This possessive stance is problematic because, in reality, we, the eaters (which, by the way, is everyone in the world), don’t own these systems. That is very clear with the plethora of research showing that if anyone owns them, it is the large, trans-national companies also known as big food or big ag, that control a good portion of inputs, land, crops, and the processing, distribution and retail of foods and beverages sold around the world. So maybe we need to stop using the term “our food system”, or contrary, let’s start a movement and take back food systems and ensure they are doing what we want them to do — be good for both eaters and the planet.,

Food Bytes: Aug 2024 Edition

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

It’s been a while, well, the whole summer, since I have written a Food Bytes blog. This summer was full of guilt-free laziness, ice cream eating, and beach combing. Witness the delicious vanilla Mr. Softee cone. On those sticky, hot, humid dog days of summer in NYC when nothing seems to be going right, this will do me just fine. But ketchup-inspired ice cream? That’s a hard no for me. Oh, but there was plenty of consumption of this on those long summer nights and some earlier “draft”ernoons. Pizza always comes to mind when discussing NYC and food in the same breath. Did you know NYC has gone through 4 evolutions of pizza making? Forgeddaboudit. Call me crazy, but I am still focused on the first evolution, and I’m stickin’ to it.

We saw lots of good music over the summer including DIIV at the beautiful Brooklyn Paramount, Jessica Pratt, OFF! (with the legendary Keith Morris), and Horse Lords in central LA. I also found myself not reading many scientific articles over the summer. Why do that to oneself when days can be spent lollygagging on grassy knolls? Instead,…wait for it…I read books! What a concept. But this week, I did manage to catch up on some light reading, and here are some highlights.

The New York Times has a new series of op-eds, “What to Eat on a Burning Planet.” A real picker-upper on the title alone. David Wallace Wells started the series with an op-ed on how food supplies will change and how climate change threatens the ability to continue to generate the yields needed to feed a growing population. There are a host of other good op-eds worth the read.

The Economist, a British weekly news magazine, hasn’t always given nutrition and food much attention, but lately, they seem to have changed their tune. I am a big fan of the Economist — this idea that you don’t know who the writers are behind the stories, their bravery in calling things as they see them, and, of course, the fantastic writing. They have paid homage to food and nutrition in three great articles.

  • They call for big food to contend with ultra-processed foods. They say, "If pressure from governments ratchets up, the food industry will have to do more than tweak its recipes or roll out new product lines. Companies would have to completely overhaul their manufacturing processes.”

  • They also focused on the idea that small investments in early child nutrition can make the world smarter and that undernutrition across the world persists. This is not new to those working in international nutrition, but it is nice to see broader attention to the topic.

  • At the same time, obesity is rising and seems unstoppable. The Economist argues that drugs (like the GLP-1 class) and taxes won’t be enough. The question is, why don’t we have more solutions that work, and why has no country been able to stop this trend? Don’t say it is willpower, please….

A lot is happening in the ongoing debates of livestock and meat production and consumption — one of the most juggernaut issues in food systems. Here are some highlights:

Source: Herzon et al 2024 Nature Food

  • The Good Food Institute—a nonprofit organization that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, particularly meat, dairy, and eggs—released a report that argues if Americans replaced 50% of their animal consumption (meat and dairy) with plant-based foods, 47.3 million fewer acres of cropland would be needed to grow that plant protein. Let’s see how that goes down with the livestock sector.

  • According to Vox, environmental NGOs help greenwash the livestock industry’s climate impact. They use the example of the World Wildlife Fund and their relationship with McDonalds who are part of a round table on sustainable beef (with WWF accepting millions from McDonalds to assist in the roundtable collaboration. Yikes.

  • More and more studies are better articulating the impacts of red meat consumption on non-communicable disease outcomes. This meta-analysis further confirms that a higher intake of red meat and processed meat increases the risk of type 2 diabetes incidence. A microsimulation model estimated that a 30% reduction in both processed meat and unprocessed red meat intake could lead to 1,073,400 fewer occurrences of type 2 diabetes, 382,400 fewer occurrences of cardiovascular disease, 84,400 fewer occurrences of colorectal cancer, and 62,200 fewer all-cause deaths over a 10-year period among an adult US population.

  • The evidence is building…maybe leading to more statements such as this. The question is, how? These authors suggest downsizing livestock herds and for those that remain in existence, ensuring they are sustainable and present a framework (see figure above) for how sustainable livestock systems fit into a safe operating space.

  • And what we don’t talk about enough is animal and human welfare associated with our unlimited appetite for animal meats. Michael Holtz wrote an illuminating and devastating account about working in a Dodge City meatpacking plant during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. I also highlighted the issue of young immigrant teenagers working in dangerous conditions at slaughterhouses in a past Food Bytes post.

Food prices, cost, and affordability are hot topics these days. Kamala has made minimizing food price gouging part of her future economic plan if she were to become president-elect. Some disagree with her strategy. The FAO’s State of Food Insecurity Report released its latest data on food affordability. While the number has come down this year from 3.1 to 2.83 billion people who cannot afford a healthy diet, it is still shockingly high and inequitable across regions of the world. FAO says: “In 2022, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet dropped below pre-pandemic levels in the group of upper-middle- and high-income countries as a whole, while the group of low-income countries had the highest levels since 2017.” But still, food prices continue to rise, pushing up the cost of a healthy diet year on year. In 2022, costs went up 11% in just one year. A group out of IFPRI suggests that the cost and affordability of healthy diets need more investigation into their accuracy and if assumptions of these metrics skew what is actually affordable. Their analysis argues that the EAT-Lancet diet is not affordable for 2.13 billion people, not the 3.02 originally reported. I am not an economist or a specialist in this topic, so I cannot agree or disagree with these findings. However, I am a scientist, and opening debates and discussions on metrics is a healthy pursuit to get to the truth. In another paper published in Nature Food, authors analyze per capita budget shares for food and an additional 12 raw food categories, including ultra-processed food and beverages, across 94 countries from the period 1990 to 2019. They found that food expenditures are not the same worldwide, and low-income food demand does not necessarily mirror high-income demand. Of course, budget allocations align with income levels, food trade and production, and culture. Check out this figure to see how much it diverges across low to high-income countries.

Source: Liang et al 2024 Nature Food

A few other Bytes: This paper on the climate-food-migration nexus by Megan Carney is a doozy but so important. Hulsen et al. published a paper on how local food environments impact children’s diets. They did this work in Malawi and found significant differences between rural and urban food environments, and that, of course, access to more variety of foods in these markets has positive impacts on children’s diets. The New York Times has highlighted a study on tipping points that may just put the fear of god in you. Die-offs! Collapses! Ghostly coral reefs! Seriously, these are scary outcomes if we do nothing about climate and the science on tipping points has momentum. Speaking of tipping points, has Italy’s marine ecosystem reached one, and the result is blue crab invasions and infestations? In the worst-case scenario, tipping points could lead to massive destruction of precious ecosystems, food insecurity for billions, and, in some cases, famines. The world has witnessed cataclysmic famines in the past. The question remains as to why Gaza and Sudan have not been declared as famine states. NPR explains. Declaring a famine is not so simple…but it doesn’t mean inaction and complacency.

And if you need some recommendations on keeping up with the latest food systems news, if you don’t read and support Civil Eats, do so. If you were a fan of The Counter and were devastated when they closed shop, have no fear. Grist has come to the rescue, and their food reporting is awesome.

And for those of you who tear up every time you hear Gillian Welch’s Time (the Revelator), she and her partner, David Rawlings, have a new album out. It may just help you laze away the last days of summer. Enjoy!

The Archive Appetizer: Climate services servicing nutrition

The Archive Appetizer is a short musing on a topic, distinct from our longer regular blogs and monthly Food Bytes posts. Let’s get started.

Since coming back to Columbia, some of our research has taken on a new focus of climate services. What exactly are climate services? I like this definition published by the Climate Service Journal (it seems like a legitimate source, in my opinion). They define climate services as:

“The transformation of climate-related data (from the past, present or future) - together with other relevant information - into customized products such as projections, forecasts, information, trends, economic analysis, assessments (including technology assessment), counselling on best practices development and evaluation of solutions and any other services in relation to climate that may be use for the society at large.”

How climate services are generated, translated, transferred and used.

Climate change and climate-related extreme events have multiple negative effects on global public health including food insecurity, infectious disease burden, malnutrition, and diet-related non-communicable diseases. Today, there is a growing recognition that public health and nutrition practitioners (PHNPs) need access to climate services to be better equipped and tackle more effectively the complex health challenges of climate disruption for the populations they serve. However, evidence suggests that local PHNPs rarely use climate services efficiently or effectively to prevent malnutrition and provide better health care to the populations in which they serve. This is a critical gap, as these PHNPs are responsible for designing and implementing health-nutrition program interventions when and where they are most needed.

We have started a project that is designed to address this gap directly. In this project, we posit that targeted climate services that focus more intentionally on improving nutrition and health programming have the potential to lead to even more significant improvements in health outcomes. Bringing together a transdisciplinary team of climate and public health, nutrition, and policy experts, the project will be conducted in Ethiopia and Indonesia, where multiple forms of malnutrition and infectious disease are endemic and where risks of climate stress are recognized and well documented.

Stay tuned….

But I’m Over That Now

I usually don’t take a vacation in the summer because of the expense and the crowds, but I went against the grain, and we took a trip to America’s great western expanse. My partner and I spent many years growing up in the West, and it has always been a place that resonates in our genes. Our holiday started in Santa Fe and the four corners, and then onto California: Santa Barbara, Pismo Beach, Solvang, and then a long stint in Los Angeles. Compared to the east coast, you just can’t beat the nature that the West has to offer. We had our fill of hiking and oceanscapes, plenty of wildlife (Humpbacks! Coyotes! Pelicans!), and great seafood and Mexican food. We tried as much as possible to travel without relying on a car (I recommend the sleeper Amtrak from Albuquerque to Los Angeles), but it wasn’t easy.

Maybe Jim Morrison was right in that “the West is the best” back in 1965, but it hasn’t held up. My partner’s blog says it all. We always thought we might return to live on the West Coast, but our vision of what we think California should be is over, finished. It went in another, less interesting and unauthentic direction long ago. As Farhad Majoo wrote, “It’s the end of California as we know it. I don’t feel fine.” But I’m over that now. As you can surmise from some of my past blogs, I think I’ll just stay right where I am.

On the trip, I read a few books that resonated well with the Western scenery. The first, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh, who wrote the book during the most constraining lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, will leave you spent, sad, and seething. He begins by describing how the colonial forces of the Netherlands, under the guise of the Dutch East India Company, purposefully and systematically eliminated the indigenous peoples living in the Banda islands, an Indonesian archipelago, to monopolize the nutmeg trade.

He further discusses the historic brutality of colonists on different landscapes through a process called “terraforming” and how that long history has contributed to the climate crisis we face, some disproportionately. He relates this genocide of the Banda people to other peoples, like the Western colonial forces in North America that obliterated Native American tribes and their way and essence of living. I was reading this book as we drove through the beautiful Navajo Nation. Witnessing places like Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly leaves you awestruck, wondering, who deserves to watch over this land for all of us and future generations? They do.

Driving through their vast lands was devastating and inspiring, and I kept thinking about how this landscape is, at the same time, untouched and brutally altered. The Ken Burns’s documentary, An American Buffalo, punctuates how much has been forcibly taken from the Indigenous Peoples of this land. The Native Peoples. If you do watch the documentary, which I highly recommend, be prepared to be heartbroken over the long, dark history of “how the West was won.” As Dayton Duncan wrote in the New York Times:

“The story of what happened to the buffalo was a triple tragedy: for the animals, who were mercilessly slaughtered by the millions to feed an insatiable industrial demand for their hides; for the vitality of the Great Plains ecosystem that depended on them; and perhaps most profoundly for Native people, who were simultaneously dispossessed of their homelands, confined to reservations and deprived of the animals that had fed their bodies and nourished their spirits for untold generations.”

I also read Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Both books were written in 1951 but still resonate with the perils of oceans today. Carson’s book was part of an ocean trilogy, and in this book, she dug into the science to help untangle the mysteries of the deep oceans. She mentions how the world was getting warmer, and sea levels were rising, but both were part of a “normal” process. Little did she know what was coming... I wouldn’t recommend them unless you like reading historically about what knowledge we knew then, as compared to what we know now.

On our holiday, I spent much time staring at the great Pacific Ocean – its vast blueness, mystery, and fierceness. While these books are a bit on the old side, it is fascinating to read how both authors were meticulously describing what we knew about oceans at that time. I still feel we know too little, and interestingly, many of us who work on food systems pay little attention to oceans. Instead, we spend a lot of time focusing on the land. This is ironic, being that land covers only 29% of the earth, whereas water covers 71%.

Yet, oceans and waterways matter a lot for food security. According to FAO, in 2022, the world produced 185 million tons of aquatic animals, and the net worth of the trading of aquatic food products was $195 billion. Even more so, 62 million are employed in the sector. This industry is nothing to sniff at!

Interestingly, in the past couple of years, aquaculture surpassed capture fisheries for the first time, contributing 51% of total fish production. But we have to figure out how to ensure both aquaculture and fisheries are managed in environmentally sustainable ways, and we must begin to care for our oceans and waterways if we want to ensure we have a rich biodiversity of blue foods in the future. My colleagues Roz Naylor, Safari Fang, and I wrote a paper reviewing six countries’ aquaculture policies and what could be learned from them. In these case studies—covering the EU, Bangladesh, Zambia, Chile, China, USA, and Norway—we highlight the need to find the right policy balance between semi-subsistence farms, small and medium enterprises, and large-scale commercial operations, particularly in low-income settings. The cases also highlight the importance of addressing aquaculture disease pressures and misuse of antimicrobials in many parts of the world and the challenges of establishing nutrition-sensitive aquaculture policies and incorporating aquaculture directly into food policy and global food system dialogues and action.

While in California, I ate plenty of blue foods, especially bivalve foods. Oysters, clams, crabs—you name it, we ate it. Did you know Pismo is the clam capital of the world? Bivalves are delicious, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable. I got my fill, and now I can go home.

Global and local perspectives on food security and food systems

This piece was originally published as a commentary in Communications Earth & Environment.

Policymakers worldwide are paying more attention to the whole food system—production, processing, distribution, consumption, and the link to food security and farmers’ livelihoods. For example, in 2021, the United Nations Food Systems Summit opened the dialog between stakeholders from multiple fields and encouraged national actions to transform the food system. Most recently, the 28th Climate Conference of Parties resulted in a Declaration on sustainable agriculture, resilient food systems, and climate action. While these political commitments are essential foundations of change, research is needed to provide a scientific basis to support policy decisions and help design solutions that fit community needs.

Recent shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict in Europe, and the impact of climate change, are pushing global food systems to breaking point. Around 42% of the world’s population cannot afford a healthy diet that meets nutritional needs. We are witnessing political attention on food systems, with the United Nations hosting the Food Systems Summit in 2021, which brought together more than 100 countries and represented an opportunity to strengthen food system resilience. Yet, we must address challenges that inhibit progress.

The first challenge is to provide equitable, physical, economic, and social access to healthy, safe, and diverse diets. Solutions across food supply and demand have been proposed and implemented to address access constraints across local contexts. Some examples of solutions include homestead gardening, biofortification, reformulation of food products to remove unhealthy ingredients, taxes on sodas and highly processed foods, front-of-the-pack labeling to signal the healthfulness of food products to consumers, national food-based dietary guidelines, and food-related safety nets. However, many of these solutions have not been scaled sufficiently to have multiplier and positive impacts.

The second challenge is to address the power asymmetries in food policy and politics. Private companies involved at every stage of food supply chains are increasingly concentrated and wield significant economic and political power. Some companies continue to generate massive profits at the expense of public health and environmental sustainability, leading to a lack of trust from the other stakeholders. The disaccord jeopardizes an inclusive momentum to galvanize the transformation of the global food system.

Data are needed to assess the performance of food systems, determine where and how to intervene, and assess unintended consequences or trade-offs of tried solutions, which constitutes the third challenge. Sixty food system experts have developed the Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative to guide and hold public and private sector decisions to account. The Countdown monitors 50 indicators across food systems related to diets and nutrition, climate and environment, livelihoods and equity, governance, and resilience. The indicators can track the holistic nature of food systems, align decision-makers around crucial priorities, incentivize action, sustain commitment, and enable course corrections. The Countdown shows that no single region has a monopoly on food system success.

Every region and country have room for improvement, and countries can learn from each other. Governments must step up and restore the power balance and play a more active role in shepherding food systems in positive directions. Investment in place-based solutions is critical to understanding what works, where, in what context, and for whom.

Climate-resilient communities are nutrition-resilient communities

This piece was originally published as a commentary in Nature Climate Change.

Climate change and nutrition are closely interconnected. Climate variability, which includes year-on-year variations in climate and longer-term climate trends, can disrupt both health and food systems, leading to increased food insecurity, reduced access to quality diets, and worsened burdens of malnutrition, particularly for vulnerable populations, including women and children.

While the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit made some advancements in integrating climate change actions into food system transformations, nutrition, more specifically, is still not mainstreamed into the larger climate change agenda or global commitments made at the annual global COP meetings. At the same time, the field of nutrition has yet to fully consider climate-responsive adaptation strategies in its core policy and programming.

One first step towards more engagement between climate and nutrition communities is for climate scientists to provide climate information (such as weather and climate variability forecasts and projections) to health practitioners delivering nutrition interventions through the public health sector. By providing them with information that is easy to understand and use, practitioners will be better equipped to tackle the complex health challenges that come with climate disruptions for the populations they serve.

It is unclear how local nutrition practitioners use climate information in their day-to-day decision-making. Understanding this uncertainty is critical, as these practitioners are responsible for targeting health–nutrition program interventions where and when they are most needed, including reaching the most vulnerable populations in resource-constrained settings. Such climate information includes

(1) risk assessments for better targeting of actions,

(2) early warnings of extreme events, and

(3) long-term planning and preparedness to improve the design of short- and long-term adaptation strategies that target timely nutrition interventions throughout the health system.

Some examples of cost-effective interventions that aid the public health sector in adapting to climate variability and change include stockpiling supplements and therapeutic foods to treat acute malnutrition and prioritizing the management of infectious disease treatments that ultimately impact nutrition outcomes (that is, deworming medicines, materials, and oral rehydration salts). In addition, ministries of health can leverage climate information for planning and preparedness, such as strengthening capacity, resources, and infrastructure to assist communities in adapting better to near- and long-term events. Last, timely digital technology of early warning systems (that is, climate forecasting information) should be scaled up and reach communities disproportionately impacted by climate change. These technologies should complement the outreach of community health workers to ensure that households have fundamental services such as access to an environment that enables breastfeeding, clean drinking water, and safe, sufficient, and diverse foods.

Equipping public health nutrition practitioners with knowledge, confidence, and motivation to incorporate climate information into their daily work has multiple benefits. First, the climate science community can better respond to health system needs by co-generating and co-translating climate information that is understandable and actionable and ultimately supports climate adaptation and resilience. Second, better use of this climate information will ensure that health practitioners have the skills and abilities to construct public health nutrition programs that are more climate resilient. Last, with more targeted programs, nutritional needs can be better prioritized and served among communities coping with and adapting to a changing climate.

Food Bytes: May 2024 Edition

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

Well…the semester is over, and Columbia went out with a bang. Despite the chaos and heartbreaking controversy that has ensued on campus, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed teaching this semester and getting to know all the Climate and Society Masters students at Columbia’s Climate School. What a pleasure and privilege it is to interact every day with the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and revolters. Teaching is all-consuming if you want to do right by the student. Thus, my blogging has been less frequent, and I missed the April Food Bytes. I don’t think I need any excuses as to why. But I did manage to get in a bit of reading, listening, and watching. Check out some Bytes that I consumed…

I read The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner in just a few days. If you love literature and consider yourself a gourmand, Garner nicely meshes the two worlds with humor and personal tidbits about his life. What a pleasure to read about his obsession with both food and books. I like this quote by the New York Times (which must have been strange for this reviewer to write, being that Garner is the book critic for the NYT), “Garner’s early appetite for everything from Bugles to blue crabs was matched by his equally wide-ranging appetite for literature, encompassing Miami Herald sports columns, scavenged copies of Oui magazine and the novels of Robert B. Parker.”

I listened to an eight-part series podcast, Fiasco, about the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in America. It focuses on: “the early years of the crisis when a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence. It looks at the mystery and missteps around identifying and treating a new, contagious disease, and what it took to get the public — and the government — to care.” While nothing related to food, it is such a fantastic and profoundly moving series that highlights the importance of engaging and mobilizing communities to advocate for their rights, particularly those who have been stigmatized and marginalized. It is a story of constancy. The food systems world could learn and adopt many lessons from this historic movement and what it means to fight for a cause when it threatens the very existence of life.

A few interesting reports have emerged and are worth the read. I will highlight three. First, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) published Land Squeeze. The report focuses on how farmland is being purchased for the purposes of what is called "green grabbing,” but they argue it is resulting in massive land inequities (see figure below). Much of the land is being used for extractive industries rather than agriculture. IPES-Food has become known for its criticism of the “go big or go home” approach to food systems, and I don’t blame them. The concentration of power is scary, to say the least, and frankly, I am not sure if we will see an end to this consolidation. Are there any examples of where David won against Goliath? Tobacco is one example — maybe — and some of the lessons on how to stymy the tobacco industry can be used in food systems, but at the same time, they are very, very different in scale, scope, and outcome. I will write about this more in a coming blog post on The Food Archive.

The second report, the World Resource Institute’s Towards Better Meat, is a fantastic report unpacking the pros and cons of organic, grass-fed, and conventional production of meat. [I am also a massive fan of Richard Waite. He was one of my favs to follow when I was on the good ol’ days of Twitter/X. Alas, Elon squashed all that.] In their analysis, they compare these management practices across a range of environmental, social, and economic factors across different animal systems - comparing chicken and eggs, beef, and other animal foods. Bottomline? Benefits depend on what outcome one is looking at and which animal system. Check out the figure below. It looks at “total carbon costs,” which include on-farm emissions as well as carbon opportunity costs. Interestingly, grass-fed, organic, and free-range beef and dairy production systems had higher overall climate impacts per gram of protein than conventional systems in more than 90% of cases. The WRI makes the claim that this is because of higher land use requirements. The whole report weighs these different outcomes and each system has strengths and trade-offs. There is no “silver bullet” system, sorry to say.

The last report is the World Bank’s Recipe for a Livable Planet. It is their answer to the various 1.5-degree roadmaps emerging. If FAO did one, why can’t they? Yet, why do I feel the World Bank is always two steps behind… One interesting message that you hear less about, but the Bank did some analysis, is that 3/4 of food system emissions come from low-and middle-income countries, including 2/3 from middle-income countries (see figure below). They argue that “mitigation action has to happen in these countries as well as in high-income countries to make a difference.” They argue for three actions: repurposing subsidies to encourage low emissions, (2) using digital technologies to improve information for measurement and reporting, and (3) leveraging institutions that include smallholder farmers, women, and Indigenous groups, “who are at the front lines of climate change.” Nothing too new here in these recommendations, but I am sure there will be some controversies kicked up with regard to middle-income countries needing to accelerate their mitigation potentials.

That’s all for now folks. I hope everyone has a relaxing and safe summer. It’s going to be a scorcher. I leave you with my Summertime Sadness playlist to breeze and eaze you into this cruel summer.