Food Bytes: March 2025 Edition

March 16, 2025

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

Spring has sprung here in Gotham City, as the Sound Furies sung in Pishon. Yet the air feels heavy and unsettled. The political landscape may be fraught, the trajectory uncertain, but we cannot succumb to despair. Ben Okri wrote in his poem, Arequipa:

To discover
You still have
A world
To make
At sunset
Sobers
The stones.

They may try to dismantle, to divide, to darken the days ahead—but they cannot take the sunrises and sunsets from us. They cannot take our will to build, to dream, to make the world better. And so, dear readers, we keep going.

Onto some interesting news and fantastic science (yay for science being essential…) produced over the last month.

In the news and media:

Grist pontificates how the US government's wobbly tariffs will impact food prices and your grocery bill. Bottom line? It ain’t good. IFPRI modeled how tariffs would impact trade flows. Bottom line? Again, it ain’t good. Their modeling suggests that imposing 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada will cause food exports to the U.S. to decrease by 46.4% and 60.5%, respectively, with impacts across a range of imports, including fruits and vegetables, processed foods, and meat and fish. Maybe food, like eggs, should never have been cheap…
With all these rampant food price increases, maybe we will have to start eating lab-grown meat, but don’t hold your breath if you live in Mississippi.
But if you are eating vast amounts of meat, according to Vox, you can blame universities. Hell, we are catching all the heat these days - Bring. It. On. Yet, the same news outlet also blames pharmaceutical companies.
Another hit to food systems brought on by the new administration is the 1 billion dollar cuts to farmers supporting school meals and food banks. Sorry for those farmers who thought he had your back.
Novo Nordisk (the makers of Ozempic) has started a foundation and is beginning to fund large-scale global health research. It is too bad that the head of their obesity program is a paid advisor to confectionary company Ferrero, along with relationships with McDonalds and Nestle. Talk about conflicts of interest…
The Economist is calling out Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed’s claims that the country has become the breadbasket of Africa.
Speaking of agriculture, no one seems to agree with what regenerative agriculture is exactly.

There are so many wonderful tributes to the great Joan Gussow, who passed away at 96 - yes, good nutrition does pay off. She was a pioneer, started the discipline of “sustainable diets,” and spent her life at Teachers College at Columbia University. She inspired many at the university and across the world.
I was so pleased to see Flow win the Oscar for Best Animated Series - a film of hope amid climate change. It seems pets can’t get enough of it either.
On climate change, perhaps it’s time for better labels that inform us of the greenhouse gas footprint of foods.
And a shoutout to Timor Leste, one of my favorite countries. There are always fits and starts with new democracies. I am keeping my fingers crossed for them.

Among scientific publications:

Around the third or fourth month of the year, peer-reviewed scientific publications kick it up a notch. The slowdown of the holiday season is in the rearview mirror, and the pace of what is put out the world seems to have a bit of a boost. This month is no exception, making it hard for me to highlight a handful. I selected a few more unique papers that I thought were enjoyable reads.

The first focuses on avocados. This paper in World Development goes deep into cartels' control of the avocado industry in Mexico. Often touted as “green gold” because of the insanely high demand for avocados north of the border, media has reported that cartels have an inkling to get in on the action. But why do so if drugs are in high demand? This paper looks into whether declining drug revenues have led cartels to go into other agricultural commodities (beyond poppies for heroin). The author found that declines in heroin demand increased homicides among agriculture workers in the avocado industry, along with robberies of trucks carrying avocados for shipment.

Two interesting reflection manuscripts. One by the great Tom Reardon on bucking conventional wisdom using some of his long-standing work done in Asia and Africa on rural nonfarm employment, processed food demands, the role of small and medium-scale enterprises in food supplies, and the supermarket revolution/growth in Asia. The other is by colleagues led out of Vrije Universiteit Brussel that we should not forget history in planning food system transformations, particularly those working on future scenarios. Using three cases in Mozambique, Holland, and Bangladesh, they articulate the importance of taking a historical lens to scenario building.

Heat maps of total agri-food mass flux (kg) across transportation modes by flow type at FAF scale. a–c, Agri-food mass flux by highways, d–f, agri-food mass flux by railways and g–i, agri-food mass flux by waterways. Domestic agri-food mass flux (a,d,g), export agri-food mass flux (b,e,h) and import agri-food mass flux (c,f,i).

I am so thrilled to see more studies that are not just examining the impacts of climate on crops or agriculture but go beyond the farm gate to better understand climate shocks and change in the middle of the supply chain - storage, transport, processing, packaging, and retail. This study in Nature Food maps the transportation of food commodities throughout the U.S. by examining highways, waterways, and railways. They look at cost, carbon emissions, and what they call “path redundancies” (the existence of alternative paths). They find that highways are highly redundant to waterways, cost much more, and emit 60x more carbon. Waterways are the opposite in terms of cost and emissions. Railways are somewhere in the middle. Most food in the US is transported on trucks on highways using diesel fuel. It’s time to start using the vast number of waterways better in the U.S.

Great paper in Global Food Security by Preet Lidder and colleagues at FAO on the importance of innovation and technology in transforming rural places. This sentence resonated with me: “Quick technological fixes are unlikely to succeed; resilient and inclusive rural transformation will come from long-term research and innovation processes that incorporate critical inputs from local and traditional knowledge and are underpinned by supportive policies and social and institutional reforms.” Amen to that, sister. The paper discusses how technology can be used responsibly for lasting, equitable change.

Speaking of rural places, there is a land grab gold rush, and this paper in the Journal of Peasant Studies tries to unpack who is rushing, why, and where. Disaggregating the “who” is not easy - it is not always just a country and is often shadow companies or corporations with international interests. The default is to look at foreign land investors, but these authors also see domestic buyers within countries. Bangladesh has the highest percentage of domestic land deals, but Argentina, by far, has the highest number of both domestic and international (foreign) deals. What is the number one cause/use of these deals? Food. Who dominates in the buying of land? Private companies.

Spatial variation in sediment retention (t/year) benefit by watershed and fisheries catch (kg/year) and seafood meals (number/year) benefits by moku provided by agroforestry restoration

Another interesting paper published in Ocean Sustainability put empirical evidence to this notion of bicultural approaches. These approaches “emphasize the reciprocal restoration of both ecology and culture, elevate indigenous and local knowledge and rights, and align with the call for more just and equitable nature-based solutions.” They use Hawaii as their geography and show that restoration of forests through agroforestry increases sediment retention by 30%, nearshore fishery production by 10%, and cultural connection (as measured through biodiversity conservation and food security benefits).

Love this paper examining the trends of food retail environments and their associations with obesity. In the study, the authors dissected retail sector trends over the last 15 years (2009 to 2023) using 97 countries. Not surprisingly, chain outlet density has increased over time, out-competing non-chain outlets. This is happening rapidly across low- and middle-income countries (speaking of history and Tom Reardon, he described this a while back with the supermarket revolution). They correlate the growth of chain retailers with the sales of unhealthy food products as well as obesity prevalence.

Global changes in the current total cropland area within the SCSs in crop groups. GMC = General Circulation Models (of which there are 8) SCS = safe climate space

Finally! A paper that models the impact of climate change on crop yields that goes BEYOND maize, rice, and wheat. This paper in Nature Food modeled 30 major food crops under different global warming scenarios ranging from 1.5 to 4C. In low latitude areas (i.e., the global south), there will be shifts in the ideal locations to grow these foods, and crop diversity would decline ~50% on croplands around the world between 2 to 3 global warming scenarios. However, in higher latitudes, farmers could grow more diverse foods. This paper argues that we may need to shift northward if we want to keep demand with the pace of growing food and a diversity of foods. The authors state: “Alarmingly, we find that the largest adverse effects on current crop production are observed for crops and crop groups that are important elements of the food supply in their current major production areas…Furthermore, we show that the four global staple crops (wheat, rice, maize, and soybean) face some of the largest reductions in cropland area within the SCS, which underlines the need for diversifying crop production.” This study is more motivation to start looking at different crops and protecting the diversity of the global food basket.

Well, that’s all for this month’s Food Bytes folks! Keep watching those sunrises and sunsets and keep on keepin’ on.

Food Bytes: July 21 - Aug 25

August 25, 2019

Food Bytes is a weekly blog post of “nibbles” of information on all things food and nutrition science, policy and culture.

Took a bit longer to get up the next Food Bytes entry due to summer holidays. So here it goes.

Summer is going out with a roar. The Inter-Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced their outstanding report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Lots of media coverage followed. Diet recommendations were made (reducing beef, taking on a more flexitarian diet etc). If we want to live in this changed climate, we need to adapt. The saber-toothed tiger had a less flexitarian diet and we know what happened to them…

Speaking of adapting, scientists found a “stature gene” among Central African hunter gatherers, also known as pygmies. This short gene gave them an advantage in Africa’s hot, humid rainforests. I was really hoping this gene hopped across the Atlantic to Italians, or even more so, short Italian American women living in DC to help explain my enduring squat-ness, but alas, no such luck. While on the topic of luck, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, you should also stay away from cereal that has corn as the main ingredient if you want to have an environmentally friendly diet. So better forget about your Froot Loops and Trix and reach instead for your Lucky Charms.

Farmgate value of global vegetable production by income groups of countries, average 2012–2013, current US dollars (Source: Schreinemachers et al 2019 GFS Journal)

Let’s continue with the climate onslaught shall we? This article talks about the beginning of the end of the livestock industry. But is that really so? Don’t underestimate the chicken man. And do you know how much of a carbon footprint you consume with your diet? BBC provides a calculator - do the math and you will quickly be blanketed in a quilt of guilt. It ain’t just beef that you gotta worry about…

Sam Myers of Harvard published a great piece in the WaPo on how increased CO2 in the atmosphere will “zap” nutrients from key crops. He argues that 175 million people could become zinc-deficient, 122 million would not be able to get protein, and 0.5 billion would have iron-deficiency-related disease. So now we need to worry not only about getting enough food to feed 10 billion, but the quality of those foods in fulfilling our nutrient needs. And the declines in nutritional quality are happening in real time. A study examining 43 “garden” crops in the U.S. found declines of 6 nutrients - protein, calcium, iron, phosphorous, riboflavin and vitamin C - since 1950. The food supply already can’t keep up. Mario Herrero and colleagues found that our current food supply does not produce enough fruits and vegetables, and in the course of the next 30 years, that supply will worsen. If everyone were to follow the WHO recommendation of 400 g/person/day of fruits and vegetables, 1.9 billion people would not have the access to these foods – the food supply just cannot keep up.

But a recent article in the Global Food Security Journal argues that vegetables hold a lot of economic power. Yeah sure. That is, if we can produce them. And then people want to eat them. They suggest that governments will need to increase their investment in farm productivity including improved varieties, alternatives to chemical pesticides, and the use of protected cultivation. There is also a need for better post-harvest storage of veggies, food safety and market opportunities. To tap the nutritional power of vegetables, consumers need to know how vegetables contribute to health, be able to afford them, or be able to grow them themselves. God speed to those New Yorkers living in 300 square feet of space with no windows and definitely, no outdoor space.

The recent paper by Eker and colleagues, published in Nature Sustainability, adds to the sustainable diet literature and evidence base, examining how consumer diet shifts can contribute to mitigation of climate change. Utilizing scenario assessments, the authors model the impacts of different compositional and behavioral dietary shifts among the global population on environmental footprints. Compositional dietary shifts included average meat consumption, flexitarian (more plant-based), vegetarian, and vegan dietary patterns. As other studies have shown, changes in diet composition towards more plant-based diets, have implications on the environment. However, more significant shifts, by a large swatch of the world’s population, towards vegetarianism would need to occur to see impacts on greenhouse gases and other environmental measures (such as land use). The paper is unique in that it models the behavioral dietary shifts among consumers and their impacts. The authors found that younger populations (ages 15-45) respond to social norm behaviors, that is, as the world moves towards more vegetarian type diets, the change towards those diets is more rapid.

They argue that the values a society holds among peer groups can outweigh the influence of scientific facts. This was evident in that behavior shifts in response to health or climate risks were not as significant as motivators of behavior change. Secondary education attainment (a predominant proportion of the world’s population) and self efficacy and identity among women were also important motivators of dietary behavioral change. This study argues that for us, as individuals to make an impact on the environment through our diets, significant shifts need to be made by a large segment of the world’s population. These shifts require a movement towards a vegetarian type diet to reap both environmental and health benefits. Much of this change would happen through peer influence (think social media), through women’s agency, and through those with a secondary school education. The change, would need to happen on a grand, transformative level as called for by the EAT-Lancet Commission report in early January 2019.

Fires in the Brazilian Amazon. Source: NYTIMES

Foreign Policy well articulates the findings from the EAT Lancet and the IPCC report here and argue that the global food crisis is here. Now. Live. I also was on the Bloomberg Daybreak America’s show to discuss the impacts of the food system and diets on climate change. Check out the show here (segment starts at 1:22:50). Scientists have been forecasting their warnings for 40 years - they were right and no one listened. Maybe people (and governments) will start paying more attention and take some serious action. The NOAA show that July 2019 was the hottest month on record since they started recording temperatures. Speaking of heat, the Brazilian amazon fires are getting lots of attention right now. The NY Times shows a time scale of problem. It should be noted that these human induced fires are mainly done to prepare agriculture lands. And they occur every year, around the same time in the Amazon. The article makes three points on why these fires are different. (1) There were 35 percent more fires so far this year than in the average of the last eight years. (2) There has been a rise in deforestation in recent years, after a long period of decline. (3) While a large majority of the fires were on land that had already been cleared of forests many others are burning with particular intensity that are “deforestation fires.”

While we are discussing trees, it seems a banana fungus, known as “Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4)” has been devastating plantations in Asia and now the Americas. It is supposedly impossible to eradicate and can live in soil for 30 years. The economic upheaval cannot be overstated. Speaking of loss, a study out of Santa Clara University found that one-third of edible produce (like tomatoes, sweet corn, artichokes, watermelon, cabbage, strawberries and kale) remains unharvested in the fields. Reasons? Field/harvest stability, weather, pests and plant diseases, labor availability, market prices, and buyer specifications for how produce should look and feel like.

I just can’t keep up with all the latest food trends. Did you know McDonalds has jumped on the podcast bandwagon? Yeehaw. Virtual restaurants are on the rise, meaning that they are digital-only establishments that don’t need a dining room or waiters. They rely on people ordering their food from apps. But kickin it back to ol’ school, this article gives ode to the Waffle House, started in 1955 in Avondale Estates Georgia. You just can’t replicate that with an app. Oh, how I reminisce of those bygone days. Can you believe Woodstock happened 50 years ago? I just bought this book: Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman. Bring on the tempeh. Seems all things hippie are back in style. Keep an eye out for a blog dedicated to 1968-1969 and how it influenced our food ways.

Delving further back into history, the New York Times has an excellent piece on the “barbaric history of sugar” that fueled slavery in the United States. By the mid-19th century, the U.S. had 125,000 slaves working on sugar plantations! Fast forward to today, we are now trying to figure out how to reduce, remove or tax this “white gold” in the food supply. Forty countries and 7 cities have a sugar tax. The Economist highlights a study showing how to optimize sugar taxes without regressive effects. They suggest that: “In the real world, if taxes in one place get too high shoppers will arbitrage the rules by traveling to buy soft drinks elsewhere. Taking this into account they reckon that the optimal rate for cities is 0.5 cents, although a more efficient system would be a state or national tax to control America’s sugar rush.”

Impact of climate change on crops, water and income in Timor-Leste. Source: Bonis-Profumo et al 2019.

Here is just a few cool papers, reports and books that came out in the last few weeks:

Association Between Plant-Based Dietary Patterns and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. There is a strong inverse dose response association between plant-based diets and risk of type 2 diabetes This association was strengthened when healthy plant-based foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and nuts.
Soft condensed matter physics of foods and macronutrients. This article discusses the importance of physics in understanding the texture, taste, and composition of foods. It is an atom-colliding article of food science and matter physics. Get your genius on.
Ravaged landscapes and climate vulnerability: The challenge in achieving food security and nutrition in post-conflict Timor-Leste. This article focuses on the fascinating Timor-Leste - an agrarian society that won independence in 2002 and is struggling to achieve food security and reduce undernutrition as the country modernizes. The economy depends on fossil fuel revenues and oil reserves are dwindling. A review of climate, agricultural, and nutrition data reveals high weather vulnerability, low agricultural productivity, and slow dietary and nutritional progress. But solutions exist. Agricultural sector actions can make important contributions to poverty reduction, food security, dietary diversity, micronutrient sufficiency, and overall nutrition. Agriculture can be made to be more nutrition- and gender-sensitive with a focus on mixed farming systems, biodiversity, climate-smart practices, and access to inputs, training, and technologies for farmers to enable sustainable and healthy rural livelihoods. Ultimately, productivity levels must improve to support the availability of sufficient and nutritious foods.
Gene-environment interplay: what do our genes say about dietary choices? Those of us who work in public health often forget about epigenetics and the way our genes play out in our diets and health status. The authors say: “Diet is not just dictated by guidelines and individual choices, but also by availability and accessibility. Therefore, future studies that investigate the relationship of gene expression and a healthy diet in individuals exposed to a similar environmental milieu—for example, in accessibility, inducements, and the socioeconomic construct—are needed to understand the gene–environment interplay at the community level. These results can leverage genetic expression analyses to provide early biological footprints of an unhealthy diet environment, in order to facilitate the investigation of social factors that influence prevalences and outcomes of disease processes, such as food deserts and food swamps.”
Trends and Correlates of Overweight among Pre-School Age Children, Adolescent Girls, and Adult Women in South Asia: An Analysis of Data from Twelve National Surveys in Six Countries over Twenty Years. The researchers found that overweight children had significantly higher odds of having an overweight mother and were more likely to come from wealthier households, live in urban areas, and have more education.
Modernization of African Food Retailing and (Un)healthy Food Consumption. In Zambia, two-thirds of the households use modern and traditional retailers simultaneously, but richer households are more likely than poorer ones to use supermarkets and hypermarkets. Use of modern retailers is positively associated with higher consumption of ultra-processed foods, after also controlling for income and other socioeconomic factors. However, the use of traditional stores and kiosks is also positively associated with the consumption of ultra-processed foods, suggesting that modern retailers are not the only drivers of dietary transitions. Interesting!
The SDG of zero hunger 75 years on: Turning full circle on agriculture and nutrition. In this paper, Derek Byerlee and I look back to the pioneering 1943 UN Conference on Food and Agriculture in Hot Springs, Virginia where the first international commitment to ending hunger was made. Despite these good intentions, however, the agricultural and nutrition communities largely went their separate ways for the next 50 years. Following through on the conference’s balanced approach of “more and better food” would have resulted in better nutrition for all. Today, the SDGs have once again put nutrition and agriculture together at center stage. Despite some important gaps in knowledge, financing, and implementation capacity, we are finally in a better position to shape food systems in a way that ends hunger and all forms of malnutrition.
Technical Brief: Economic Evaluations of Multi-sectoral Actions for Health and Nutrition. This is a fantastic brief by the AHN Academy. This is a fantastic brief by the AHN Academy to “created to advance knowledge and scientific understanding among the global research community of economic evaluation methods and metrics related to costs and benefits of agriculture, food and livelihood strategies for nutrition and health.” They examine different types of economic evaluations and move towards standardizing a set of metrics to economically assess nutrition.
The Political Economy of Food. Jody Harris and colleagues at IDS just published this IDS Bulletin that examines the issues of power across food systems. It looks at the various active players, relationships, activities, and institutions that play a major role in shaping food systems and power inequities. This was a much needed publication and I plan to use it in my class on food policy.