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.

Bodies upon the gears

The years between 1965 and 1974, also known as the long sixties, were a decade in which the U.S. and the world were in great turmoil, witnessing a complete cultural shift led by the “baby boomer generation.” America had just emerged from a Great Depression and two devastating world wars that toppled and reorganized world order. As a result, it arose as the world's foremost economic, political, and military power with a resulting illusion of great prosperity and hope for the future. But things began to unravel slowly. Just a few years prior, the young, charismatic President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas. His assassination shocked the nation and ended the optimism and innocence many, especially the youth, felt for the country’s future.

By 1965, the U.S. entrenched itself in what was to be a senseless war in faraway Southeast Asia, where we had very little business engaging in, a commonly held view around the world. Then came more nonsensical assassinations. The first was in 1965, when Malcolm X, an American Muslim minister and human and civil rights activist, was killed while giving a speech in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City (where Columbia University’s medical campus now sits). Just three years later, American Baptist minister, one of the most prominent civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., and a president’s brother and the former U.S. Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, were both gunned down in hotels in Memphis and Los Angeles, respectively. Then, from 1972 to 1974, the Watergate scandal plagued the country, leaving citizens wholly untrusting of its government and the lengths it would go to cover up crimes, no matter how inconsequential or considerable. The darkness fully engulfed the country when former president Nixon resigned from office before a certain impeachment because of the scandal.

Times were, to put it lightly, unhinged, and the country was fractured. Protests were an everyday occurrence. Students were being injured or killed on campuses for demonstrating, sometimes by the National Guard, the very institution meant to instill peace and protect citizens. On the other side of the world, young men were sacrificing their lives for a war without cause. Sound familiar? Indeed…

Many young people bucked convention by attempting to create a new future on their terms—an authentic counterculture movement. They took risks—running away from home to protest in the streets, joining a commune, or getting lost in the haze of the Haight. Even before the dark days of ‘68-69, students mobilized in incredible, organized, and purposeful ways. Check out Mario Savio, a student activist and leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement in the video below making a speech in 1964 on the Berkeley campus named "Bodies Upon the Gears" (also known as the Operation of the Machine). His speech is highly relevant today.

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Dark days can breed creativity, and these times sparked new ways of thinking and living on this shared planet. Young people fought for a different and new world. A big part of that new world was about food and the beginning of climate and environmental justice movements. Some within the counterculture movement were deeply concerned about the direction of U.S. agriculture, its impacts on health and nature, and how the industrialization of the food system was moving more and more towards unhealthy, processed foods controlled by transnational conglomerates. These large-scale industries also spouted environmental contaminants and pollutants into ecosystems, further damaging the environment. There were also deep concerns about the unfailing violation of civil rights and the systemic social injustices domestically and abroad, much of that revealed through the U.S. food system. Democratizing food was a way to potentially address these myriad challenges and find a new, equitable future better for humans and the planet.

The counterculture movement explicitly used food to ignite a social revolution. They returned to the land and started communes to grow their food in organic, wholesome ways. They opened neighborhood co-operatives to sell and provide these foods to their communities. They (the Black Panthers) started safety net programs to feed children living in impoverished neighborhoods.

Putting the long sixties in the context with our world today, we are once more living in a highly polarized, fractured country, with significant loss of life on the domestic front due to everyday gun violence and shootings, drug and alcohol addiction, and unhealthy lifestyles. Our political position in the world is also uncertain, with increasing animosity and frustration towards America’s tactics to ensure its power and relevancy in a globalized society. At the same time, climate change is barreling down on the world because of powerhouse countries’ inability to commit seriously to mitigating global warming over the last 40 years. Diet and diet-related risk factors are now the top killers of disease and death in the country and the world. The U.S. is in the middle of a public health crisis with obesity and non-communicable diseases. For the first time, Americans’ life expectancy is one of the worst among high-income countries. Our food systems are unsustainable and fraught with fragility. So are the environment and the natural resources that agriculture depends on. The rights of citizens, particularly food system workers, marginalized groups, and women, continue to be violated across food systems and every other system.

They say one should study the past to know the future. In the world of food policy, where I spend my professional days, we keep repeating the past, reinventing the wheel of history, and not learning from what came before. Every so often, debates surface on how to feed a growing world, particularly when extreme weather events or conflicts spur food shortages, food price increases, and famines. Questions arise as to why our global food system is so fragile, why we trust international trade, and why we depend on just a handful of crops to feed the world. In addition, there are questions about tipping points related to population growth and climate change. Whether technology and innovation can keep pace or whether we are headed for a collapse. But on we go, with quick fixes that never entirely repair the problem but instead put band-aids on wounds that never entirely heal. That is why the challenges we face today as a global community are even more difficult. Food systems and a raging, changing climate show how fragile our society is and how much we could lose.

The counterculturalists wanted to transform food systems 60 years ago. Maybe their attempts at a social revolution did not work out as they envisioned. Still, they tried to create the foundation for a new society built on sustainable food systems that benefit human and planetary health, community cohesion, and global citizenry. They gave us enough to learn from, adopt, and adapt about how to better govern food systems and the environment while looking out for each other. They tried. Maybe it’s time to pick up where they left off and move forward.

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.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live

This is the first prose from Joan Didion’s essay White Album. In the essay, Didion describes the moment she could feel the ‘60s “snapping” as she and her husband watched Robert F Kennedy’s funeral on TV from their veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.

It is uncanny how those times, the late 60s into the 70s, seemed calamitous but inspiring. The counterculture and protest movements were steadfast and resilient. Presidents were still presidential. There was hope for a better tomorrow with a dash of healthy resistance and revolution against “the system.” But Joan felt the tension of the snap. Comparing then to now, depending on what story you are telling yourself, many of us are feeling not only the snap but a full-blown break, and we seem to be sliding down the precipice of the break. The question is, how far down will we go…

In Didion’s essay, she goes further. She writes,

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

We work with what we know, value, and believe within the constructs of our lives. These constructs are very different depending on who you are, where you come from, your skin color, your creed, caste, and gender. Your living and lived experience. Yet, we tell ourselves stories—fiction, non-fiction, fairytales, and horror. But many of the stories we hear and tell are informed by the pods, bubbles, and clusters where we associate and engage — for better or worse.

  • We tell ourselves stories in order to deceive: It won’t be that bad. We have systemic and institutional checks in place.

  • We tell ourselves stories in order to survive: We’ve seen this rodeo before. We just have to wait it out.

  • We tell ourselves stories in order to feel sane: But there is nothing sane about any of this. Something is deeply, deeply wrong.

Dear reader, you may be wondering why I shyly refer to storytelling and self-counseling. Let me enlighten you on The Food Archive’s current storyboard: She lives in the United States and is sensing the country’s political state unraveling. But it isn’t just that. It is world order overall, and the shifting winds towards isolationism. It is climate change and the many extreme events impacting so many people, particularly and disproportionately those least responsible for the warming of our earth. It is the lack of political will and wherewithal for industries to do the right thing beyond profit-mongering. It is the dizzying speed of AI, media, and technology—the mis-, dis-, and malformation that surrounds us and our robotic tendencies to let “it/they/them” manipulate and control our every move. And of course, I am profoundly concerned about people’s food security today, tomorrow, and in 2050.

We are leaving 2024 in a very complex, dizzying state of change. Even if you are gleefully happy about the turns happening in the United States, our planet and our place in it is precarious. This poem by Warsan Shire keeps 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.”

Joan Didion felt the same way in 1968, but alas, we are still here, plodding along…So there is that. At least, that is the story I am sticking to.

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: 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!

But I’m Over That Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global and local perspectives on food security and food systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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