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

Enjoy every sandwich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn straight.

Food Bytes: October 2024 Edition

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

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

Reports

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

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

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

Science papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Bytes: 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.

Life lessons from Willie

In my first year at Columbia University as a Professor at the new Climate School, it has truly been a pleasure getting to know the graduate MA students in Climate + Society. While the past few weeks have been disquieting on campus (and let’s see if the students have a graduation), it is that time of year when they come to me for advice on potential jobs and careers. Students want to discuss life advice on how they can carve out a path that is meaningful personally and professionally. The funny thing is, at 52, I am still trying to figure that out. I often say, “My plan was not to have a plan.” That may not be all that helpful in practical terms…

Copyright: © MARK SELIGER

But there is a person who I find quite helpful as even I continue to navigate what I want to be when I grow up. I recently watched the four-part documentary on Paramount called “Willie Nelson and Friends.” Now, let me tell you that I am not a huge fan of Willie Nelson’s music. I appreciate many aspects of him, his talent, and his voice, but I don’t partake, so to speak. My perception of Willie before watching the series is that he is considered the pot-smokin’ punk rocker of the country world. And after watching the series, I realized he is so much more. Why am I digressing to Willie about career advice? Well, because he has some lessons to teach us on how to work and live well, and you can seamlessly do both. I feel quite strongly about these three lessons and I try to make headway towards them.

Lesson number one: Only do work you enjoy. Willie spent a long, long time trying to accommodate what Nashville and the public wanted to hear and wanted him to be. He started off in the Air Force and held many remedial, random jobs, even moving to Washington state before settling in Nashville, where he pursued singing and songwriting. But his persona, his look, his music—while appreciated—never launched him into superstardom in Music City. It wasn’t until he started pursuing the kind of music he wanted to listen to, dressing the way he was comfortable, and living the life he was meant to live in his home state of Texas that he truly came into being quintessential Willie. He describes himself as the “Ol’ Cotton-Pickin’, Snuff-Dippin’, Tobacco-Chewin’, Stump-Jumpin’, Gravy-Soppin’, Coffee-Pot-Dodgin’, Dumplin’-Eatin’ Hillbilly From Hill County.” Remember, Willie came from stark poverty and abandonment. There is a part in the documentary where he says, “Freedom is control in your own life. I have more control now than in the past, and I'm learning the value of saying no.” While we all have to do things we don’t enjoy in our jobs, most of your time should be spent doing projects and work you truly take pleasure in. As Willie said, “We create our own unhappiness.” There are estimates that we spend 1/3 or more of our life at work. How to make the most of those 100,000+ hours? I know this all seems basic and privileged, but being authentic and true to (and honest with) yourself is at the core for everyone. Willie does it. So can we.

Lesson number two: Keep on, keepin’ on. Willie is 90. He struggled for a long time to find his voice and purpose, but he found it. He had many personal losses, heartbreaks, and health scares (and owed the U.S. government 32 million buckaroos for a stint), but he was able to take all the lows that life dealt on the chin and kept pushing on. He remains incredibly prolific with 152 albums. Now, maybe there isn’t enough self-editing going on there, but he has this urge (and enjoys) writing and composing music, collaborating with different genres of music, and touring. Part of his stamina relates to lesson one. If you love what you do, you want to keep doing it. In the documentary, Willie says, "It's hard to believe it was 60 years ago I wrote a song 'Funny How Time Slips Away.’ I was only 27, and I really didn’t know what I was talking about."

Number three: Be collaborative and find your tribe. Willie has collaborated with just about everyone in country music, and in other genres. His relationship with Ray Charles, for example, was exceptional. Everyone “in the business” has nothing but nice things to say about him. Willie Nelson Family’s motto is: “Don’t be an asshole. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t be a goddamn asshole.” This ethos is what enabled him to start Farm Aid, which is an incredible endeavor started in 1985 to “build a system of agriculture that values family farmers, good food, soil and water, and strong communities. Our annual music and food festival celebrates farmers, eaters, and music coming together for change.” Willie is always on the road, bringing his tribe with him. His band is made up of immediate family (including his sister and sons) and some of the same members for the last 50+ years. At the core is knowing who you are, figuring out what you love, and who you want to do it with.

Well, maybe there is a number four. Pay your taxes because the IRS will always catch up to you….

Food Bytes: March 2024 Edition

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

“All of my work is directed against those who are bent on blowing up the planet.” —William S. Burroughs

That just about summarizes it for me. I can’t even begin to fathom what the world will look like here in the U.S. come Jan 1st 2025 (along with the other 4.2 billion people voting for their democracy this year), but I will continue to hang onto the small glimmers of hope for a humanity that doesn’t want to watch the world burn. On a lighter note, let’s get into some food bytes.

Lately, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts while walking to work. There are a few that are worth a listen. Although an older podcast, Everything is Alive is witty. It brings to life everyday objects. For you foodies out there, Louis the Can of Soda (“That's my evaluation of humanity. A chronic search for potency”), Jes the Baguette, and Vinnie the Vending Machine are pretty hilarious. I also listened to the BBC Food Programme’s Herb and Spice Scam. Yes, your oregano is full of olive leaves…and the BBC Food Chain’s Why We Love Dumplings. First off, the host, Ruth Alexander, has the most soothing voice. She really should do some nighttime readings on the Calm app. Second, dumplings hold a unique place in society. Every country/culture has them as part of their staple cuisine: gyozas, wontons, ravioli, pierogis, samosas, khinkali, and empanadas, to name a few (see the photo of these Cuban varietals I recently took at the Isla Diner in Hoboken). Just delish.

As I have mentioned in past blogs, there is the 6-part Barbeque Earth by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is just outstanding. I highly recommend it. Stay tuned for more podcasts by Ambrook Research’s The Only Thing That Lasts podcast on America’s farmlands, indeed a very precious resource. The first episode wondered if farmland is running out in the U.S., spurred by fears that Bill Gates is gobbling it all up (he owns about a quarter of a million acres of it). The second episode dives into the creation of U.S. farmland.

As far as major media stories go, this long read by the New York Times on India’s sugar cane fields and their impacts on families, particularly women and children, is disturbing and tragic. Worth the read before you open that next can of ice-cold Coke.

Lately, many reports have pulled together evidence on the links between climate and nutrition. Per my usual spiel, there has been so much research over decades showing the various links between climate change, variability, extreme weather events, and deleterious nutrition outcomes, but it sometimes takes a large-scale report to draw attention to the topic. Here are just a handful that have come out in recent months:

  • Emergency Nutrition Network’s report: Exploring new, evolving and neglected topics at the intersection of food systems, climate change and nutrition: a literature review.

  • Stronger Foundations for Nutrition’s report: An Evidence Narrative on Climate Change and Nutritious Foods. They also put out a database of climate-nutrition evidence. I was happy to see our team listed with other great researchers, such as Marco Springmann, Sam Myers, Andy Haines, and Matthew Smith.

  • ANH Academy’s evidence map: Intersections of climate change with food systems, nutrition, and health: an overview and evidence map.

Speaking of food and climate reports, a few are worth your time.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report in the last two weeks titled The Unjust Climate: Measuring the impacts of climate change on the rural poor, women, and youth. The report highlights how the climate crisis is particularly unjust for rural women. This statistic stood out: A 1° C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 34% reduction in the total incomes of female-headed households relative to those of male-headed households. Extreme weather events also undermine the incomes of the female-headed households relative to those of male-headed households. Check out this figure on the right that shows just one additional day of extreme temps or precipitation is associated with 1.3% and 0.5% reduction in income for women. This may not seem like a lot, but this reduction translates to an annual income loss of 8% with heat stress and 3% with floods.

A new report by Helen at Harvard Law School, Options for a Paris-compliant livestock sector, argues that global emissions from livestock must drop by 61% by 2036 to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement. One of the authors, my colleague Matthew Hayek at NYU, is also an author of a Nature Food paper just published that criticizes the FAO’s Achieving SDG 2 without breaching the 1.5 °C threshold: A global roadmap report, arguing that the FAO doesn’t sufficiently address the shift away from the production and consumption of animal-sourced foods - particularly livestock. While the FAO report does set some milestones to reduce emissions and the growth of livestock, according to the authors of the paper, FAO doesn’t really articulate how. They also criticized FAO’s aquaculture target. FAO’s history with livestock is long and sorted. If you want to read a fascinating controversy about another report on livestock FAO produced in 2006 (Livestock’s Long Shadow), check out this piece by the Guardian. Le sigh…Can’t we all just get along?

On a lighter note, and maybe less controversial food system topic (famous last words…), the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils — also known as VACS (no, this is not a vaccine project) — a project initiated by Carey Fowler in the U.S. State Department, has released its first report and list of 20 potential crops to expand on (see figure on the left). In full disclosure, I worked with Cynthia Rosenzweig’s AgMIP team here at Columbia and NASA GISS on some of the findings. Who doesn’t love traditional, indigenous, neglected crops — now called opportunity crops — and their potential for Africa and the world? AgMIP also released an awesome dashboard called the VACS Explorer to map the resilience of these crops in the face of climate change.

Speaking of data, I am a big fan of Our World In Data’s (OWID) Hannah Ritchie, who has a new book out, Not the End of the World. I hope she’s right. I am not sure how she can muster up any positivity looking at the data - as they say, the data don’t lie!! She consistently feeds the OWID with amazing food and climate data. Her latest is on weather forecasting. She highlights their importance but also how the quality is improving to predict extreme events and trigger early warning systems better. At Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society — also known as IRI — we have been generating these types of data for decades that serve many sectors, including agriculture, public health and energy sectors.

It is so hard to keep up with the scientific literature on food systems these days. There is just so much evidence being generated. This paper stood out a bit for me. It tries to establish a strong link between biodiversity loss and our diets. They argue, and I agree, that most eaters don’t have a clue about the potential impacts of their diets on the rich biodiversity that we are losing around the world. In the paper, they estimate the biodiversity footprint of 150 popular dishes worldwide. Of course, beef dishes have high biodiversity footprints = not good…as compared to vegetarian dishes, but there are exceptions! The authors noted that chana masala has a high biodiversity footprint. Drats. The figure below shows the top 20 dishes with the highest biodiversity footprint across three different biodiversity indicators — species richness, threatened species richness, and range rarity using different scenarios for the way food is grown/raised: a) feedlot-grown locally produced, b) feedlot-grown globally produced, c) pasture-grown locally produced, and d) pasture-grown globally produced. Plot symbols and colors represent diet and dishes’ region of origin, respectively. Ingredients in the bar chart correspond to the main ingredient in terms of weight in a dish in the top 20 dishes with the highest biodiversity footprints. Looks like green chile stew fairs a bit better than other dishes. Whew!

Top 20 biodiversity footprint dishes from around the world

A few more fun tidbits for this month’s Food Bytes. Did anyone watch the Oscars? It was pretty boring with Oppenheimer dominating, but I did notice that everyone walking the red carpet looked especially thin and fit. Celebrities are known for trying the latest fad diets and having substantive budgets for expensive trainers and personal chefs, but clearly, this was the Oscars on Ozempic. Let’s see how this all plays out, but I do fear there are reasons to be skeptical about the weight loss drug’s long-term impacts on health. As always, The Maintenance Phase podcast is spot on with its Ozempic episode. Dary Mozaffarrian, former Dean of the nutrition policy school at Tufts, wrote an interesting piece in JAMA arguing that a food-as-medicine intervention should be paired with Ozempic prescriptions. And then there is Oprah who continues to shape the conversation about weight loss and her latest journey using these GLP-1 agonist drugs.

While we are on the topic of celebrity nonsense, Erewhon (nowhere spelled backwards) is just plain silly. But celebrities and the “LA set” flock to it in droves. This piece by Kerry Howley of the Cut is so worth the read: “Erewhon’s Secrets: In the 1960s, two macrobiotic enthusiasts started a health-food sect beloved by hippies. Now it’s the most culty grocer in L.A.” The New York Times claims it’s the “hottest hangout.” Yes, this is the place where Kourtney Kardashian has branded her 'Poosh Potion Detox Smoothie’ for a cool $22 and Saba balsamic vinegar costs $50. With the fiasco of Wegmans opening in NYC (with massive queues around several blocks), let’s hope Erewhon doesn’t decide to come eastward.

Source: https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=16-P13-00020&segmentID=5

Speaking of hippies, I have been working on a book about how America’s 1960s counterculture movement used food systems to ignite a social revolution and ultimately failed. The American counterculture movement, born during the fertile but tumultuous late 1960s to early 1970s, recognized a similar looming storm and tried to redirect its path. The mounting political, social, and cultural challenges (limitations on natural resources, industrialization, pollution, inequities, population growth) influenced an entire generation to work toward rebuilding food systems into a more ethical “ecological utopia” of balance, stability, and food consciousness. Back-to-the-land communes, food co-ops, the first Earth Day, Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Program, Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Worker’s Association, and the Diggers’ free food experiments in the Haight Ashbury were all attempts to break the status quo and democratize food systems. They approached food and environmental issues as foundations for building an ideal society while simultaneously providing nourishment and wellness for the human population and the planet. They radicalized and politicized food as a medium for social revolution. While some of their individual battles prevailed, their revolution was defeated. Why did their vision fail, and why did we not heed their canary calls when we still had a fighting chance to fix the system? This story is about the short-lived influence of the counterculture hippie movement, why they clung to food and environment as their raison d’etre, and why we’re still fascinated by their history but struggle to learn from it in these darker, more dangerous times. So, stay tuned as I continue to scroll away.

Reminds me of one of the Sound Furies song’s we recorded a few years ago, V-Dubbed.

in the back of a ’66 VW
for a last cigarette can i bug u?
in her birthday suit under the trenchcoat
Patty Hearst doubled as her scapegoat

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.

'Coz I'm the tax man

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

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

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

TAXMAAAAAAAN!!!

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

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

Types of SSB taxes being implemented around the world

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

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

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

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