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.

Food Bytes: February 2024 Edition

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

As I write this, snow is floating across New York City, deeply settling me into a wintry, sedate state. Lately I have been dreaming about feeling the sun on my skin, eating juicy peaches, and wearing flip-flops…I do this every year. I yearn for crisp, cold days during the dog days of summer, but then, the blue winters come along, I long for heat, long days, and not having to spend 20 minutes layering clothes just to get out the door. That said, nothing beats homemade, hearty soups that my better half cooks up that last for several meals and doubling down on double-feature movies in the evenings. Speaking of food, let’s get to what the food world has been up to this past month – there is a lot to cover.

Scientific papers

This paper, “Health-Environment Efficiency of Diets Shows Nonlinear Trends over 1990-2011” by Pan He is getting lots of traction. They developed an indicator and applied it, as Kate Schneider (lead author of the Food Systems Countdown paper) wrote, “that builds on long-observed correlates of increasing levels of development, that is, the co-occurrence of ‘bads’ (for example, rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from greater animal-source food consumption, rising risk of diet-related non-communicable disease) and the ‘goods’ (for example, the decline in child and maternal malnutrition, increased incomes and more education). With this health–environment efficiency metric, the authors sought to understand how efficiently food systems use environmental inputs to generate health outcomes.”

They show that as countries economically grow and “develop,” they tend to see improvements in health and nutrition outcomes (reductions in undernutrition). With continued development, they see animal-source food consumption increase, with concomitant environmental degradation. This is not surprising, but it is interesting to see this indicator used to prove further the nutrition transition and how critical it is to consider planetary health with human health through our food systems. The figure to the right shows the change in dietary efficiency along with socio-economic development.

Rachel Gilbert and colleagues (including my buddy, the great Will Masters) published a fantastic paper in World Development that looked at food imports and their retail prices across 144 countries. They found that lots of food is traded worldwide, and almost half face tariffs (at a rate of 6.7%). Which foods had the highest tariffs? Vegetables, fruits, and animal-sourced foods. Where? Low- and middle-income countries, but they only account for a small portion of the cost of the diet per day. Most of the food prices consumers pay are domestic value add-ons once the foods have arrived in the country. I think I got that right…

Although this paper came out in 2023, it is an important one by Matias Heino and colleagues. The paper shows the impacts of combined hot and dry extremes as well as cold and wet extremes on major crop commodity yields (of course…)— maize, rice, soybean, and wheat—between 1980 and 2009. They show that co-occurring extremely hot and dry events have globally consistent negative effects on the yields of all inspected crop types. Extremely cold and wet conditions reduce crop yields globally, too, although to a lesser extent, and the impacts are more uncertain and inconsistent. Check out the figure to the left.

Biodiversity is in free fall, which can impact both nature scapes and people. We know that agriculture and urbanization are two of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. This paper by Awaz Mohamed et al examined how much natural habitat is needed to ensure humans have access to the benefits of biodiversity, such as diverse food production (soil, pollination, etc.), high water quality, homeostatic climate regulation, and improved green spaces. They find that benefits significantly decline when habitat area falls below 20%–25% per km2, and 2/3 of agricultural and urban areas fall below this level globally.

Reports

The Food Systems Economic Commission finally came out. It was a long time coming. The report assessed one specific science-based transformation pathway for food systems, which could benefit both people and the planet. This pathway is called the Food System Transformation (FST). Estimates of those benefits, measured as reductions in the unaccounted costs of food systems, amount to at least 5 trillion USD per year. When the full effects of a global food system transformation on incomes are factored in, estimates of its benefits rise to 10 trillion USD annually. See the figure to the right that shows this power of transformation.

Podcasts

I listened to two really good podcasts this past week. The first is hosted by Ambrook Research (I highly recommend receiving their weekly newsletter). It is called The Only Thing That Lasts, and in the first episode, they delve into the potential loss of U.S. farmland (spurred by the fear that Bill Gates seems to be buying it all up).

The other podcast is Barbecue Earth, a six-part podcast about meat as a commodity, the powerful industry behind meat, and a major reason our planet is overheating. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosts it. The first focused on hogs…It will make you think twice about putting bacon on your egg cheese sandwich.

Media, Social and Otherwise

Eater has made life easier for you by guiding you where you should eat in 2024. Interestingly, neither New York nor London is mentioned. Good for them. But have no fear New Yorkers, this guy has been flaneuring around Gotham attempting to eat a meal representing every country in the world. He is almost there…

This will get some agronomists riled up. Here is a webinar hosted by the Rodale Institute (which has a certain world view of food systems) on the differences between organic versus conventional agriculture systems – and how these “stack up” from agronomics, carbon footprint, and economic perspectives. Guess what the conclusion is? :)

TV and movies

We have been watching season 4 of True Detective with Jody Foster and the awesome Kali Reis. It is filmed in a fictional town, Ennis, Alaska (although filmed in Iceland). It is assumed that we are in the far northern reaches of Alaska, where the community experiences complete darkness. It is inspired by North Slope Borough, a town on the northernmost point of Alaska, approximately 50% of which comprises indigenous populations. In the show, the water is contaminated (likely from mining operations), but of course, I always notice the diets. There are lots of highly processed, packaged foods, which makes some sense because of the remoteness. In real life, in many of these indigenous communities, their traditional diets are healthy but are disappearing. Much work has been done to understand how diets have changed in the northern territories of Canada and Siberia. In Northern Alaska, among the Inupiat, the Yup’ik, and other traditional communities, many elderly are trying to preserve their traditional diets. Still, conserving these dietary patterns is getting harder and harder for various reasons.

Art Meets Food

Curious to know the most iconic food paintings? Check this out. The Normal Rockwell one is just downright creepy, but I always have time and space for Edward Hopper (who lived down the road from one of Columbia University’s campuses in Nyack, New York).

 The Clash has a song, “Lost in the Supermarket.” It’s a great song, and I think many of us can relate when entering these goliath spaces meant to nourish us. As Joe Strummer sang,

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for a special offer
A guaranteed personality

Last thoughts

Our good friend Cheryl Palm passed away this past month from a rare and devastating disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She was a giant in the world of food systems and made massive contributions to land-use change, degradation and rehabilitation, and ecosystem processes. Here is a lovely tribute from our Earth Institute friends at Columbia University. I love this photo of her in her younger years, full of life. That is how I choose to remember her.

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.

Ran my fingers across the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”

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

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