Food Bytes: February 2025 Edition

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

Someone recently asked me, “How do you have so much time to read?” I don’t, but these days, I find myself reading more as a deliberate form of escapism. Amid the current state of affairs, I need to remind myself that a collective continues to believe in science, evidence, and data, and the art of generating and sharing knowledge is not lost. So thank you—scientists, educators, and data generators—for all that you do to keep our world informed. Shine on you crazy diamonds! Let’s round up what The Food Archive is reading and listening to in the here and now.

The cost of food, is at the forefront of everyone's mind, including coyotes hanging out in grocery stores in Chicago. Much speculation exists about how the U.S. administration’s tariffs will impact food. For now, let’s put that debate on pause and, again, focus on the generators of evidence. The fantastic Eat This Podcast by Jeremy Shiffman has a recent episode that discusses Bennett’s Law with economist Marc Bellemare — this notion that people eat more nutritious foods (including animal source foods) when they have more disposable income. It is a great conversation, and Marc argues that his latest paper somewhat proves the “law.”

Speaking of cheap food, did you think that McDonalds restaurants could be “pretty”? The lore of design is bringing people to McDonalds. And for those who don’t like the corporate notion of McDonalds flooding fast food to the masses, it seems you lost. Is the New York Times being paid by McDonalds for these article placements? For some deeper dives into fast food, there is always the classic Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, but I recommend two more nuanced reads — Franchise: The Golden Arches of Black America by Marcia Chatelain, who won the Pulitzer Prize and White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation by Naa Oyo A Kwate. Both are worth the time.

Analysis by Politico on the hidden costs of food systems to diets in Italy.

Fast food has changed diets, and for some cultures, diets are disappearing (I snatched up the URL in case this trend continues). An interesting article in Politico argues that the Mediterranean diet is a lie, at least in Italy. Having lived there five years, I was always pleasantly surprised that traditional regional cuisines were preserved and revered, however in the confines of how a Mediterranean diet is defined, I didn’t see many diets from the north to south classically fall within that dietary pattern. Italians consume a lot of meat and cheese. The Politico article argues that the hidden costs of the Italian food system and diet do not fare well for health outcomes. Check it out. Speaking of Italian diets, I guess pasta is not a refined or ultra-processed food. Whew. I guess I can continue to eat my spaghetti ala vongole every Friday and not die at 55… The Japanese diet, a fish-dominant diet, is changing too. According to Grist, veganism is increasing.

Some lovely and alarming science is being generated about how our agricultural system will feed the world. According to colleagues at Tufts University (hey Will!), while food supplies are, in aggregate, fulfilling calorie needs, they are not fulfilling healthy calorie needs. Food availability of fruits, veggies, legumes, nuts, and seeds (the core makeup of a healthy diet) falls short worldwide. Regionally, there are considerable disparities in the supply of animal foods. We also have issues with water. This article in Nature Comms by scientists across the world (hi Kyle!) examined blue water, which is surface and groundwater often used for growing crops. They looked over time from 1980 to 2015 in China, India, and the US. They found that demand has risen significantly for blue water by 60%, 71%, and 27%, respectively, for a handful of crops, largely alfalfa, maize, rice, and wheat, and this rise in demand has created issues of scarcity and stress. Good times! According to Carbon Brief, we shouldn’t just be worried about water either. Extreme weather is destroying crops around the world. Check out their map and analysis (see below). According to colleagues at Purdue University (hi Tom!), all hope should not be lost. They examined the impacts of improved crop varieties since the early 1960s and argued that these crop improvements resulted in lower land use change, greenhouse gas emissions, and cropland expansion. Let the debates begin! And what is a summary of feeding the world and improving crop varieties without AI. A new outfit, Heritable Agriculture (sounds so down homey!…), wants to use AI to predict genetic changes to improve crop yield, taste, nutritional value etc, etc. No need for future Borlaugs of the world!

Map developed by Carbon Brief on extreme weather events impacting crops in 2023-2024

Food systems remain political monoliths, and many newly published papers focus on how to get over political inertia. Two new papers by Costanza Conti unpack top-down and bottom-up approaches to transforming food systems and how to better integrate or consider justice in strategizing, implementing, and monitoring food system transformations. A paper by Patrick Caron argues in a new Nature Food commentary that disagreements stymy action on food system transformation. He and several others have begun the Montpellier Process, which “promotes safe spaces for risk-taking, where citizens, decision-makers, economic players, and academics can compare their perspectives, share knowledge, address controversies, learn from one another, and explore potential solutions.”

Speaking of politics, a timely paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, including Editor-in-Chief Chris Duggan, argues that dismantling USAID and the withdrawal from the WHO by the current U.S. administration is catastrophic for global nutrition and health. In their conclusion, they wrote:

“The events of 2025 have dealt a catastrophic shock to international nutrition research, programs, and cooperation. Nevertheless, there are important questions about the status quo. The present crisis has drawn into sharp relief the global health and nutrition communities’ reliance on US funding. In addition, there have been growing calls for more equitable systems of scientific collaboration and programmatic decision-making.”

Here we are readers, …I believe we need to make some hard pivots based on these new realities and strategize in very different ways. Meanwhile, those of us in research and academia will keep the lights on, diligently documenting what we see in the world, why the world is the way it is, and what we can do about it, at least, scientifically speaking.

See ya’ll in March!

Food Bytes: January 2025 Edition

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

Here in NYC, we are settling into a deep freeze. I sort of like it. The air is a bit more electric and crisper. Clean. Silent. And when the sun shallowly crosses over the landscape and warms you up a tad, you feel so grateful. For those of you, dear readers, who know how this archiver spends her time, I eat a lot of clams (note the header change on the Food Archive). This time of the year has some of the best bivalve eating. This archiver also spends time with her better half making dark and sad music as part of the Sound Furies. It seems that with each passing year, we get less and less snow on the East Coast. It reminds me of this tune we recorded in 2019, but my better half wrote the lyrics when he was young, living in northern California., sleeping in his ‘67 mustang.

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

Enough pontifications about weather and clams. Let’s get into this month’s Food Bytes. I always like to start the monthly round-up with a few recommended books I have been reading. Here we go. An Immense World by Ed Yong is a fascinating view of how animals perceive the world through their specialized and adaptive senses. Douglas Brinkley’s whopping 600-page read, Silent Spring Revolution, provides a historical deep dive into the beginnings of the environmental movement in the United States in the 1960s. He articulates how presidents and scientists charted a course for protecting the environment (it is my background homework for a book I am working on that I allude to here). This was a time when presidents were presidential (yes, even Tricky Dick is looking good compared to what we are dealing with now…) and worked to preserve the planet instead of watching it all burn. Delano by John Dunne (Joan Didion’s husband) is about the California grape strike led by Cesar Chavez and his sacrifices to ensure that migrant laborers get a fair shake. Again, this book is incredibly timely with the present-day shifts in U.S. “policies” to deport immigrants—the very same people who are keeping us well fed and food secure. And last is Rachel Kurshner’s short story collection, The Hard Crowd. She just oozes cool.

Book reading by the food archiver

Food and cooking

There has been a deluge of articles and media attention on ultra-processed foods. Let’s start with that and then get into real food stories.

The change in attribution of sugar-sweetened beverages to diabetes (T2D) and heart disease (CVD) incidence across regions from 1990 to 2020.

  • Ah the lovely world of ultra-processed foods (UPFs). These foods are high in sugars, salts, or unhealthy fats and have additional ingredients such as additives, preservatives, and many other hard-to-pronounce ingredients that make them taste good and allow them to sit on shelves for decades. Many scientific articles are trying to attribute UPFs to various deleterious health outcomes, and the evidence, while varying in quality, is building. Enough so that policymakers are taking note. Research suggests that almost 60% of the American diet comprises these foods. Yum. The New Yorker put out an article trying to understand why that is. It is a good read that tries to unpack the evidence. One thing that comes up is that not all scientists agree on the impacts of UPFs on health.

  • A Nature Food article delves into how governments have responded to regulating UPFs. Most government action has been on consumer education, mainly labeling food products rather than eliminating or regulating the companies that make these foods.

  • It is not only foods we are talking about. There are also ultra-processed beverages. Using the Global Dietary Database, this Nature Medicine paper shows that in 2020, 2.2 million new diabetes cases and 1.2 million heart disease cases were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages worldwide. Between 1990 and 2020, the most significant increased attribution of these drinks to diabetes and heart disease was in sub-Saharan Africa! However, sales of these beverages, particularly soda, are rising (see the figure to the right). Great…

  • Onto real foods. I highly recommend this New Yorker article on the secret history of risotto and the rules that govern how to make this delicious dish whose origins sit on the Po River (a river very constrained by climate change).

  • Speaking of iconic foods and their origins, those who have lived in NYC for decades likely remember this Indian restaurant enclave in the East Village. You know, the one with all the Christmas lights. Well, in typical warp-speed fashion and the brutal world of restaurant ownership in this city, the Indian restaurant hubs have moved to other parts of Manhattan and, more so, Queens. But still, this one restaurant in the village keeps shining on. Funny enough, my former college roommate lived above this place in the late ‘90s. It is (not)safe to say she had a roach problem.

  • Then we have tortillas. I wish we had a tortilleria in our hood, but alas, we have to buy the Mission brand tortillas, which taste like cardboard. As this article in the Atlantic suggests, they have lost their magic.

  • Last, but not squarely in food, the Lancet published a commission to find ways to measure obesity better. With all the kicked-up controversy regarding body mass index as a sufficient measurement tool to delineate overweight and obesity, it’s good timing. Here is a nice infographic that summarizes their recommended diagnostic.

Climate change

Let’s move on to a lighter topic: climate change! In all seriousness, we are in a scary time. This past year, 2024, was the warmest year on record, and the average global temperature was more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, with 11 months of the year exceeding 1.5°C. To make matters worse, the current U.S. administration has pulled out of the climate accord and plans to “drill baby drill.” This trend and these political decisions fuel our motivation to fight the good fight and ensure the world moves towards mitigation and adaptation solutions, with or without the United States.

  • The Economist published a well-balanced article on the potential and limits of technology to mitigate climate change through the livestock sector. It is nice to see the International Livestock Research Institute’s work (based in Kenya and Ethiopia) highlighted—who partner with some of the poorest in the world who are tending to animals for their livelihoods.

  • One issue is to ensure that those countries and populations struggling with undernutrition still have options and choices to consume animal-source foods, particularly in places where access is incredibly and unfairly limited. The Netherlands Working Group on International Nutrition and Clim-Eat put out a brief on animal-source foods in low- and middle-income countries that nicely summarizes the broad evidence. My only gripe is that they should cite the original peer-reviewed publications and evidence toiled over by scientists as opposed to the reports that summarize the said evidence.

  • Grist, a fantastic climate/environment/food reporting outfit, wrote a worrisome article about how many farmers and farm workers now need to work at night due to extreme heat. conditions Farming is already hard enough, and now this.

  • Speaking of great journalism, Civil Eats has summarized a set of articles of their “best climate reporting” of 2024. Check it out.

  • I have lots of time and space for Kyle Davis’s work. In this paper in Science Advances, he and colleagues use high-resolution data on forest cover in Nigeria and find that 25 to 31% of annual forest loss is linked to climate variability. They also find that changes to forest cover have positive associations with dietary diversity, whereas cropland expansion does not. There is much to think about adaptation-wise regarding how the world manages land and forestscapes.

  • I always have to throw in a critique of the EAT-Lancet Commission. In this paper by Klapp and colleagues published in the Lancet Planetary Health, they articulate a justified framework of shortcomings (see figure below) that the Commission did not address in the first report in 2019 with the hope that these issues will be taken up by the Commission when the 2nd report comes out in the fall of 2025. What I can say at this stage, Anna-Lena, is that we cover some, but not all, of these crucial issues. It looks like a third Commission may be in order!

Current shortfalls of the planetary health diet from a plant-forward perspective by Klapp et al, LPH 2025

Food Systems and Farming

Alignment between food system transformation and degrowth

  • This paper in Nature Food by Matt Gibson and some of my favorite colleagues Constanza, Daniel, and Mario (yay, Cornell!) presents a fantastic notion that in the political momentum that we must “transform our food systems,” there is also this notion that we have also to consider downscaling of excess production and consumption among high-income countries and overconsuming individuals. The figure to the right shows the alignment (or misalignment) between the goals and objectives of degrowth and food systems transformation.

  • But some argue that big farms don’t need a lot of transformation and should stay the course of how they are being managed. This article ruffled a lot of feathers. The title, “Sorry, but this the future of farming,” is snarky and reeks of know-it-allism. Anyone who comes to the farming conversation as having THE solution is suspect. This article is the last in the NYT’s series on “What to Eat on a Burning Planet” — a mix of low and high-quality articles with some half-truths. Go to the bottom of this article to see the series.

  • Let’s get to some farming articles. This paper in Nature Communications argues for the importance of including genomics research and development of what are called underutilized crops, but also called neglected crops or opportunity crops—into breeding strategies, cutting-edge research, capacity building, and representation that some major crops like maize, rice and what get.

  • A slew of experts published this paper in Nature Food to highlight the importance of small-scale fisheries (SSF). In this mapping exercise, they estimate that SSF provides 40% of the global seafood catch worldwide. This 40% provides roughly 2 billion people with 20% of their dietary intake of six crucial micronutrients. Half of these SSF are women, and many are employed in Asia. Africa supplies the largest catch. This is a fantastic article for those interested in blue foods.

  • I love this Soil Atlas that comes out each year by the Heinrich Boil Stitlung/EU. This report is chock-full of great case studies and figures arguing for better care and management of soils worldwide to promote resilient agriculture and mitigation of climate change. Called the global silent crisis,” 1/3 of soils are degraded globally, and 40% of those soils reside in Africa.

Self-promotion (sorry!)

I always have to be a bit self-promotional. The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI) has published its third annual paper in Nature Food and Policy Report. The highlights?

The FSCI interactive tool on the Food Systems Dashboard

  • Over the past two decades, meaningful progress has been made in improving food systems. Of the 42 indicators examined, slightly fewer than half (20) changed in a desirable direction from 2000 to 2022.

  • Most of the FSCI tracked food system indicators interact with other indicators, either directly or indirectly, meaning that change in any one area of food systems is likely to affect others and that unlocking change may require coordinated action across multiple dimensions.

  • Certain indicators related to governance and resilience are key leverage points — and could be critical because of their influence and dependence on other aspects of food systems, and change in them can affect many other indicators.

One cool thing we did was put the indicators and their interactions on the Food Systems Dashboard. You can play with the FSCI data in all kinds of ways. To get yourself oriented, you can find the indicators here, all the data globally and by country, the country profiles of the FSCI data (for example, Kenya), and last, the interaction tool (which is pretty neat).

We’re screwed, but some more than others. And that is not fair…

  • The scary annual World Risk Report just came out and it just got a bit scarier this year. Gee, I wonder why…we are so screwed.

  • Reuters published a heartbreaking collection of journalism entitled “Starving World.” Just devastating but worth taking the time to read.

  • With avian flu sparking and spreading, this article in Nature Reviews Biodiversity is a warning call about pathogens and planetary change.

Food Bytes: December 2024 Edition

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

I am here in Gotham City, writing my final blog post for 2024 in the quiet. This is one of my favorite times of the year. Not because it is Christmas and New Year’s, but more so because the whole world pauses. Less email, less bustle, less stress. The opportunity to not have to click on that Zoom link for a week or two is just pure bliss. My posts as of late have gone from reflection to angst to dread, but at this moment, dear reader, I am feeling “set” — like a voluminous beehive hairdo or a delightful buttery pound cake. I am ready to take on whatever 2025 brings, as I hope you are.

This is my last Food Bytes of 2024. I managed to publish 9 (not 12) this year. I learn a ton gathering up material for the monthly Food Bytes as it forces me to do some reading, listening, and watching to highlight the prolific content being put out in the world on food systems, climate, and nutrition. I feel incredibly fortunate to work in an area so rich and doused with science, politics, culture, and controversy. This area of chosen work would be dull without those elements all jumbled together and needing constant teasing apart. So here it goes…my last Food Bytes of 2024. Hang onto your hats, guys and gals, for a very interesting 2025…

Let’s start with obesity. There is so much coming out related to obesity prevalence and trends, as well as the new GLP-1 anti-obesity class of medications (formally known as glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists). Earlier this year, the NCD Risk Factor Collaborators published a paper in the Lancet showing the obesity and undernutrition trends among adults and children. They showed that we have moved from a world paralyzed by undernutrition to a world of obesity, with some countries struggling with both forms. One in 8 people are obese - or 1 billion people suffer. Many of you know this story of the nutrition transition and the double and triple burdens of malnutrition, but the overall picture over the last 30 years is quite staggering. Check out the circular bar plots of the changes in the underweight burden (the blue bar's length shows prevalence) and obesity (pink/red bar) among women in 1990 and 2022.

Another paper just released, again in the Lancet, showed in the United States, between 1990 and 2021, the percentage change in the prevalence of obesity in adults was 123.6% in men and 99.% in women. They forecast that by 2050 if current trends continue, the total number of adults with overweight and obesity will reach 213 million. And I am not even reporting on teen prevalence. Wowsa. Yet, JAMA just published results that found that the prevalence of BMI and obesity in the United States decreased in 2023 for the first time in over a decade. Some pontificate it is because of the GLP1 inhibitors, others because of COVID-related deaths (obesity being a heightened risk factor for morbidity and mortality associated with COVID).

The difference could be that the Lancet paper by the Global Burden of Disease 2021 US Obesity Forecasting Collaborators didn’t investigate trends beyond 2021. In contrast, the JAMA authors showed a decline in 2023 specifically. Also, we don’t know the future of the GLP-1s. Currently, they are cost-prohibitive for many living in the United States and, moreover, the world. One report estimated that if half of U.S. adults with obesity took these drugs, it could cost the healthcare system $411 billion per year. The inequities in who has access to these drugs are staggering.

These medications certainly help people lose weight, with various studies showing reductions in body weight somewhere between 10-25%, as well as other benefits for those struggling with diabetes and cardiovascular disease, to name a few. I worry that we still know so little about obesity, its drivers, and the potential ramifications of medicalizing the challenge into one silver-bullet solution. I also fear that the scale-up of these drugs gets food systems and industry “off the hook.” Why stop making ultra-processed foods and ensuring food environments are healthy for people when they can easily take these drugs? But RFK Jr is going to solve all that, right? Don’t hold your breath. I appreciated this commentary by Francesca Celletti and colleagues in JAMA on where we are at in our understanding of obesity:

“The seriousness of the crisis is now widely recognized. Yet there are many challenges that continue to hinder a successful national and global response. Perceptions and attitudes toward obesity, including the debate about whether obesity represents a risk factor or a disease, are widely divergent. Efforts to address the stigma associated with obesity have, in some cases, evolved into a narrative that obscures the importance of obesity-related morbidity and mortality. Compared with other noncommunicable diseases, there remains a lack of knowledge on the associated biological and genetic factors, and there are inconsistencies in the appreciation of the effect of obesity on other noncommunicable diseases and the overall burden of disease. There is limited evidence on long-term management interventions and their effectiveness among populations most at risk and in low-income settings in relation to issues such as access and adherence.”

Speaking of nutrition trends, the Global Burden of Disease Group published their analysis on global, regional, and national progress towards achieving the six nutrition-related Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets by 2030. The picture ain’t so rosy. These are their high-level results: “In 2030, we project that 94 countries will meet one of the six targets, 21 countries will meet two targets, and 89 countries will not meet any targets. We project that seven countries will meet the target for exclusive breastfeeding, 28 for child stunting, and 101 for child wasting, and no countries will meet the targets for low birthweight, child overweight, and anaemia.” Looking at current trends, the authors show that in 2021, seven countries had already met two of six targets (Georgia, Mongolia, South Korea, Peru, Rwanda, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico). What are they doing right? Case studies, anyone?

Diets heavily weigh into dietary outcomes, and as the SDGs stand, there is no target or monitoring of a dietary indicator, such as dietary diversity. SDGs. One of the juggernauts of our diets is how much animal source foods we should or could consume that benefit our health and the planet. A PNAS special feature delves into this quandary in what I think is quite a balanced set of papers showing all the angles and issues. We contributed a piece laying out the biological nutritional vulnerabilities stemming from high micronutrient needs per calorie among infants and young children, women of reproductive age, pregnant and lactating women, and older adults, particularly older women, and the importance of nutrient-dense foods coming from both plant and animal-source foods. Speaking of nutrient-dense foods, some colleagues from the Blue Foods Assessment published a paper in the Environmental Research Letters that assessed nutrition-sensitive climate risk to five essential micronutrients across production systems. By mid-century (2041–2060), we estimate that 75% of calcium, 30% of folate, 39% of iron, 68% of vitamin A, and 79% of vitamin B12 produced in primary food products will face frequent climate extremes globally. Nearly 50 countries are projected to face high domestic climate risk for two or more micronutrients during this period. Check out the figure below.

Speaking of the climate crisis, I have written before about tipping points, but some scientists argue the framing is distracting and confusing. Regardless, people are fatigued and confused by all the terminology: diebacks, atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones. Grist calls it “alert fatigue”. The question is, does the fatigue translate into inaction? The scientists in that Nature paper argue that urgency and the terms and definitions to illustrate that urgency do not always translate into political commitments. And sadly, people are being left behind. Did you hear about Cyclone Chido on the French island of Mayotte? Neither did I. People are dying from climate-related extreme events, and we aren’t even able to count the dead or notice. Unless you live in a rich country… We are really on the edge here, and leaders seem to be shrugging their shoulders. Look at this year’s various COP events - climate, biodiversity, and dry lands. Were any binding and bold commitments made? Nope. And science is under ever more scrutiny and openly ignored and disregarded by some. This title says it all: Good COP, Bad COP, science struggles under a year of environmental summits. As this editorial argues in the Lancet Planetary Health, somebody has to move first. As the editors wrote: “…The absence of consensus on the world stage should not hold back individual countries from moving rapidly away from fossil fuels and benefitting from this. Keeping warming below 2°C is still possible, and actions that limit warming to almost any degree will be beneficial, but some have to do the right thing and decisively move first.”  The question is, who will be brave enough?

But we scientists keep churning. The IPBES Nexus and Transformative Change assessment summary reports have been released (my hermano, Mario Herrero, one of the lead authors says the very long reports are coming soon). First, what is IPBES? It is the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. It is similar to the IPCC in that it sits at the interface between science and policy and is meant to spur evidence-based political action. The Nexus report argues that we need to holistically tackle biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks, and climate change because these five areas interact, cascade, and compound each other, and addressing them separately is counterproductive, redundant, and inefficient. The Transformative report focuses on the underlying causes of the biodiversity crisis, the drivers of change, and available options and argues for a “whole of society” approach. Overall, their analysis is not a chipper one. Half of the world lives in areas hit hard by food and water insecurity and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity is in massive decline. And delaying action will be catastrophic. Action in these areas could unlock trillions of dollars in economic growth and jobs. The figure below is worth a lot. It shows a wheel of interconnected challenges (different colors) and barriers (different 637 letters) to transformative change.

We continue to push out sound data to inform policymakers across food systems. The Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative will publish its 3rd annual paper in January, so stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, a few of us at the Columbia Climate School wrote a piece for IFPRI’s Impact group on food system data gaps and the future potential to measure food systems data with new big data technology.

As you may know, I am a big fan of rivers. This poem, Rest, Like a River by Leena Danawala is a fitting way to close out 2024:

I like the idea of a river yawning:

its mouth a vast open width,

just a symptom of fatigue.

I think of how it wraps its length

around itself, serpentine and sure;

how its waves rock back and forth,

a cradle on an unsteady floor.

on days like today, when the

spring fog has melted into my bones,

or when time seems to stop or slow,

I think of my spine as that river

and curl into myself like the letter “c.”

breath floating downstream,

body swaying like the currents of the sea.

Food Bytes: November 2024 Edition

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

There are these supposed stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Last week, I quickly skipped to stage 4, and today, I am squarely in stage 5 — acceptance. Acceptance does not mean agreement or approval. It means affirmation that this is the reality (which is looking more and more like some dark dystopian sci-fi novel), and I am willing to work within that reality, keep fighting the good fight, and find a path toward all that is good in the world. Julian Aguon, a climate activist, wrote that Indigenous peoples “have a unique capacity to resist despair through connection to collective memory and who just might be our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual respect – for the earth and for each other.” Give me more of this and less of the sci-fi, please! Alas, we trudge on, and we keep listening, watching, and reading amazing stuff coming out in the food systems and climate space. Here are some highlights.

What I am listening to:

Beyond filling my earbuds with doom and gloom to match my current mood, I probably won’t listen to many more podcasts in 2024. These were the highlights this year:

Fuel to Fork: Hosted by Table Debates, IPES, and The Future of Food Alliance, this podcast explores how fossil fuels are deeply entrenched in our food systems.

Food Pod for Humanity: A bit of a self-promotional plug. Brought to you by the Columbia Climate School's Food for Humanity Initiative, the Food Pod for Humanity curates a limited series on topics that highlight the inter-dependencies of climate change and food systems. This first series focuses on food waste. My colleague Jochebed will take you on a journey!

BBQ Earth: Brought to you by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this podcast explores the ethical and political challenges surrounding meat production and consumption. It's a fantastic limited series. I hope they do more.

The Only Thing That Lasts: Hosted by Ambrook Research, this series delves into “the mysteries of American farmland.” It is so nuanced about the histories of land tenure and rights in the United States and how historical decisions and actions shape modern-day farming in the U.S. Wonderfully curated, it is very much worth a listen.

What I am watching:

I watched several food/water documentaries over the last few months. Nothing knocked my socks off. First, Food Inc. 2 is more of the same, following the first that came out in 2008 with the usual suspects—Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, etc. My gripe is that they don’t engage any scientists—just journalists with dreams of a better food system. Lovely and nice, but not grounded in the data and evidence realities. Did they need to do a part 2? Probably not. The Grab is a good watch on Hulu about the control of water. I know less about this space, but it is a compelling watch. Again, not many scientists were interviewed. Is there a pattern here? Last but not least is Poisoned on Netflix about the history and current concerns of the safety of our food supply. You won’t ever eat romaine lettuce again. It's a pretty timely documentary with RFK Jr poised to lead the Department of Health and Human Services…WHAT??? You can’t make this shit up…again, think sci-fi…

What I am reading:

Speaking of dystopian, let’s get the big and heavy stuff out of the way. Does anyone notice how little we are hearing about the on-going climate meetings—COP29—in Baku? It's a pretty sad state of affairs, I’d say. Meanwhile, the scientists keep cranking out the calls for “the window is closing” and “we are basically screwed” science. I guess policymakers either aren’t listening (check out the chart to the right) or don’t give a rat’s ass. Speaking of rats, my neighborhood in NYC has some of the highest densities of the lil’ critters. I digress. Some new reports and papers have doubled down on the “we’re screwed” sentiment, rightfully so.

  • Our friends Ripple and colleagues have released their annual state of the climate paper. The title says it all: “perilous times on planet earth.” Do you think they are talking about climate or something more dark and insidious? Gulp.

  • Our other friends of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change released their annual paper. The title is: “facing record-breaking threats from delayed action.” Did I say I stopped drinking? Maybe now is not the time…

  • Climate tracker just released their report arguing that “As the climate crisis worsens, warming outlook stagnates.” Alright, someone give me the cyanide pills and shovel.

Let’s move on to some more uplifting papers on food systems, climate, food security, and nutrition/diets:

Hawkes et al 2024 Nature Food

  • Obesity is way up in America. Ooops, I promised uplifting. Sorry!

  • Corinna Hawkes of FAO published a nuanced paper (that was a culmination of her and co-authors' thinking over several years) that argues we need a dose of reality injected into policymaking and interventions related to food systems. To do this, they designed a tool that brings together the multi-faceted realities people face daily when engaging and making decisions about food choices (the realities are shown to the right). Super useful. Love this paper. The figure to the right shows the tool depicting the 12 realities.

  • This fantastic paper by Nicole Blackstone and colleagues highlights the need to consider the social dimensions of our food system - the workers, the animals, and the communities. We often remove human and non-human animals from our plans to transform food systems. Shwoopsies….

  • A few us got together and wrote a post about how important it is for nutrition and climate communities to come together. Check it out.

  • The great David Nabarro has published all the efforts of his team at N4D to promote dialoguing as part of the Food Systems Summit back in 2021. 1,600 people got together to engage in food systems discussions. The question is, what did all this dialoguing result in? He has some lessons learned in the paper and highlights how important it is to engage people with vested interests and allow them to network and organize.

  • Speaking of policy, a smaller team of the Food Systems Countdown Initiative published a paper on policy coherence for food systems transformations. Check it out. Speaking of political economy, this book by Danielle Resnick and Jo Swinnen of IFPRI is a must-read.

  • This paper, published in Lancet Planetary Health, argues that agroecology is essential to transforming food systems. Bring on the never-ending debate!

  • The fantastic yet depressing State of Food and Agriculture Report was published by FAO and led by Andrea Cattaneo. Following the 2023 report, this year, they further refined the global hidden costs of the food system. The costs exceed 10 trillion bucks! Unhealthy dietary patterns account for 70% of those costs. They also did an interesting analysis using the Food Systems Dashboard food typologies (Thank you for using them!). They found that industrial and diversifying food systems account for the highest global quantified hidden costs (amounting to 5.9 trillion 2020 PPP dollars), with health hidden costs dominating the price tag.

  • There is much to say about this paper by Tian et al. in Nature Food. In it, they use an expenditure database to evaluate 201 consumption groups across 168 countries. They found that the top 10% of consumers breach 31-67% of 6 planetary boundaries, and if they include the top 20%, it increases to 51-91%. There is hope, though. If these 20% of consumers did a good deed and changed their consumption patterns, they could reduce their environmental footprint by 25-53%. Check out the figure below to see the inequities of populations and their impacts on environmental/planetary boundaries.

The footprints of the six environmental indicators and the shares of each global expenditure decile in the total footprints in 2017. Bar and doughnut pie chart refers to the per capita footprints and the percentage share of each global decile in the total footprints, respectively. The expenditure level of each decile group increases as the colour deepens. The red circle represents the level of per capita boundaries. Tian et al. 2024 Nature Food

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.