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

Diversifying Our Diets, Post COP 15

This is a cross-posted blog from the Berman Institute of Bioethics’s Global Food Policy and Ethics (GFEPP) blog. It was written by Leslie Engel, MPH, a Science Writer Consultant for the GFEPP.

COP 15—shorthand for the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity—wrapped up in late December with ambitious goals to address the rapid and stunning losses to our natural world. Included within the targets for 2030 is the conservation of 30% of the world’s land, oceans, and waterways; a 50% reduction in food waste, and a “significant” curtailment in overconsumption and waste generation.

The critical role food systems play in meeting these targets was acknowledged during Food Day, a mini-conference within the two-week convening. The day was devoted to discussions on “transforming food systems to address biodiversity loss and achieve food security and nutrition for all by 2030.” As the organizers noted, “food production is the biggest driver of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss: 70% of freshwater withdrawn, 30% of global GHG emissions, 80% of deforestation and the degradation of many other precious habitats such as wetlands and grasslands.”

In the U.S., recent events have underscored how intensive agricultural practices and climate change are interacting to create a troubling feedback loop with dire environmental consequences. A severe drought, coupled with overuse, has reduced the Colorado River to a trickle in places. Americans rely heavily on the river, with one in 10 depending on it for drinking water. The rest of us are making salads with it: 70% of the Colorado River Basin is used for agriculture and over 90% of our winter vegetables are grown in Arizona. 

And we are not the only species relying on it. The river that carved the Grand Canyon also sustains life for a huge variety of unique creatures and ecosystems that will disappear without it. A manager at Glen Canyon Dam described it as a “doomsday scenario” in a recent Washington Post article. 

California’s Central Valley, where 25% of our food is grown, is experiencing similar conditions, the January deluge notwithstanding.

Let’s pause here for a deep breath.

It’s heartening that the international community was able to come to a consensus on protecting the world’s ecosystems. How do we translate the momentum generated in distant conference rooms to our everyday lives?

Here’s one idea: this year, let’s step out of our culinary comfort zones. 

Seventy-five percent of the world's food comes from only 12 plant and five animal species. It’s a startling statistic but think about that salad you ate for lunch. Was it so different from the one you had yesterday, last month or last spring? We can support the environment, our personal health and ultimately, a more sustainable future by diversifying our own palates. 

To jumpstart, here’s a veggie-centered recipe, sans lettuce, the leafy green that science journalist Tamar Haspel once described as a “vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table.” Instead, this colorful and low-waste winter salad features nutrient-rich, cool-weather crops that you may be able to source locally or regionally, including:

  • Radicchio, native to Northeast Italy and currently grown in similar climates within the U.S throughout the winter months.

  • Millet, a highly nutritious and drought-resistant cereal grain that you’ll be hearing more about. The FAO has declared 2023 the International Year of Millets to draw attention to the potential of this small but mighty grain to feed the world in the face of climate change. 

  • Winter squash, a great two-for-one deal since you get the flesh and the seeds as a future snack. Keep the veggie peeler in the drawer; squash skin is edible.

  • Hazelnuts (aka filberts), which are less intensive to grow than other nuts. If possible, use hazelnuts grown in Oregon. 

  • Citrus, currently in season

Radicchio, Millet and Roasted Winter Squash Salad with Hazelnuts and Orange Vinaigrette
Serves 4 generously/Costs approx. $3 per serving (based on current food prices in a New York City)

  • 1 medium winter squash (about 2 lbs.): delicata, kabocha, buttercup, almost any type will do, except spaghetti.

  • 1 cup millet

  • ½ lb. radicchio (of any variety), torn into bite-sized pieces

  • 2 large navel oranges: use one for zesting and juicing, and the other for the salad.
    I used cara cara oranges here for their lovely pink hue, but any navel-type orange works.

    • 1 tsp orange zest (zest the orange before squeezing it)

    • ¼ cup freshly squeezed orange juice 

  • ½ cup raw hazelnuts

  • Olive oil

  • Optional soft herbs like parsley, mint, tarragon or chives (a great way to use up any herbs you may have lurking in your fridge)

Roast Squash

Arrange racks in the middle and bottom sections of the oven. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Cut squash in half and scoop out the seeds (save for roasting!). Slice squash into one-inch pieces, place on a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with 1 tbsp olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast on top rack 25-30 minutes until caramelized and tender. Flip squash halfway through cook time to ensure even roasting.

Prepare Millet
Meanwhile, add millet to a medium saucepan over medium heat. Toast millet 4-5 minutes until slightly golden and fragrant. Carefully pour in 2 cups of water, 1 tbsp. olive oil and ½ tsp. salt. Stir everything and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until tender, about 15 minutes. Allow to steam for five minutes with the lid on, then fluff with a fork. Spread on a sheet pan or plate to cool. This last step is optional but prevents the grains from sticking together too much. Adapted from thekitchn.

Toast nuts

Place hazelnuts on a rimmed baking sheet. Roast on bottom oven rack for 7-10 minutes, shaking pan once, until nuts are lightly browned and fragrant. Roughly chop nuts once cool enough to touch. If your nuts still have the papery husks attached, don’t worry about removing them. They’re perfectly edible.

Make Dressing

Combine orange juice, zest and ½ tsp salt in a small bowl. Slowly whisk in ¼ cup olive oil. Taste dressing and add more salt and a grind of pepper, if you like. Set aside.

Assemble Salad

Tear radicchio into bite-size pieces. Add to a large bowl and drizzle in half the dressing. Gently massage radicchio leaves with your hands. Add squash and 1 cup millet to the bowl, then gently mix to combine ingredients. Taste the salad and add additional dressing, salt, and pepper if needed.

Slice off the stem and navel ends of the second orange to reveal the flesh and create a stable base for cutting. Using a sharp knife, “shave” off the peel, following the shape of the fruit and preserving as much of the flesh as possible. Then slice the flesh into thin rounds. 

Top salad with citrus rounds, nuts and optional herbs. Buon appetito! 

A note about leftovers: 

  • The salad is best when eaten the day you make it, but radicchio’s crisp leaves are forgiving, so the wilt factor is minimal compared to more delicate salad veggies. Store in the fridge and bring to room temp before eating. 

  • Any remaining dressing can be refrigerated for a day or two. Bring to room temp before using.

  • Leftover millet can be eaten for breakfast like Cream of Wheat or used as a base for grain bowls. It also freezes well for future use. 

 

For more information on the joys of winter vegetables, check out this informative guide from FoodPrint. 

Custodians of our memories

If you want to read a food book this year, read Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by BBC food journalist Dan Saladino. The book is about the rich biodiversity found around the planet and how humans have used that biodiversity to feed the world's population. Saladino illustrates how important this diversity is for our nourishment and sustaining the vast cultures and traditions that humans have passed on from one generation to the next. Not only is Saladino a wonderful storyteller, but the story he is telling is one of the most important in food systems today. He writes:

"We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature; we can't continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems. It isn't working. How can anyone claim it is when so many humans are left either hungry or obese and when the Earth is suffering?"

Saladino structures the book across the main food groups — fruits, vegetables, grains, cheese, meat, seafood, alcohol, stimulants (coffee and tea), sweets, and wild foods. He discusses the importance of these food groups and their role in food security. He provides us with lush, visceral vignettes of particular places, exceptional people, and distinctive cultures uniquely trying to grow, raise, and nurture certain traditional varieties of these foods. You get a glimpse of how the hunter-gatherer Hadza hunts for honey in Tanzania. You learn how sheep meat, known as Skerpikjot, is preserved in the fragile ecosystem of the Faroe Islands. You feel the pressure of how Sicilians grow the vanilla orange amid the weight of the Cosa Nostra. You sympathize with the Syrians amid a protracted conflict who attempt to preserve their traditional sweet, Halawet el Jibn, made of war-threatened ingredients like pistachio. You realize that winemaking began in Georgia using traditional pots, known as Qvevri, a practice not done anywhere else in the world.

These stories are wonderful, but they are punctuated with startling and tragic statistics:

  • 50% of all our seeds are in the hands of 4 companies.

  • Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by humans, only nine remain major staples today.

  • Three crops—rice, wheat, and corn—provide 50% of all our calories.

  • 70 billion chickens (of roughly the same breed and ironically named "chicken of tomorrow") are slaughtered annually.

  • 30 million bison roamed the great plains of the United States, all to be decimated at the hands of the white settlers.

  • 95% of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow.

  • 90% of soybean grown in North and South America is genetically modified.

  • 50% of all the world's cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company

  • The giant Pacific bluefin tuna is down 97%. Yes, 97%.

  • Only 2% of farmers are African American.

  • We only consume 2% of barley that is grown. The rest is used to make beer or fed to animals.

  • Speaking of beer, 25% of beer is produced by one brewer.

You learn about the heroes, like Vavilov, who spent and gave their lives conserving and preserving precious seeds, specific varieties, preservations, and processing of foods as a way to say, "remember us." We were here. They were and are the custodians of the biodiversity across the planet. They are also the custodians of our memories and humanity.

As Saladino escorts you around the world, I imagined these vignettes being turned into a beautiful documentary demonstrating the vast diversity that exists on the planet—as humans, as foods, and as cultures. As Saladino expressed, we must embrace diversity in all its forms: biological, cultural, dietary, and economical. Having more diversity across the range of agriculture systems and landscapes is vital. Capturing all this diversity on film, as the book does, could be a way to preserve these moments, memories, and the history of it all. So, we never forget what we once had.

While the book is inspiring, every chapter ends with a common tragic theme – and I am not giving anything away because it is in the book's title: Extinction. You realize how fast these ways of life, these foods, these cultures, and traditions are disappearing. Our world and food systems are transforming at a speed that is hard to comprehend and capture, and the loss along the way is disturbing. There are many reasons for this extinction, but the major ones are agricultural change, loss of habitats, disease, economic forces, hangovers and continuations of colonization, and conflict.

As Saladino expressed, these endangered foods will not become the mainstay of diets, nor should they. But they have essential and assorted roles to play; if we don't use them, we will lose them. In reference to a chapter on O-Higu, a soybean grown on the island of Okinawa made into unique tofu, "O-Higu might be an insignificant bean. But to many Okinawans, after colonialism and occupation, its return feels like an act of resistance and a celebration of who we are." Many traditions in holding onto these foods are worthy; they involve intimate knowledge, special skills, and lots of care and labor. It is not a simple path forward.

Our world and food systems are transforming into a homogenized vat of staleness. For many, saving these foods and the biodiversity that makes up these foods and our diets is not worth the effort as we move through the world at warped speed. Some argue that this savior complex is romantic and precious, and we should instead focus on the potential for technology and innovation. Growth, growth, growth. Call me sentimental, but I worry about solely following this path and what is lost along the way.

Last night, I watched Chris Marker's visceral Sans Soleil film. In it, the narrator said something that sticks with me:

When filming this ceremony, I knew I was present at the end of something.

Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them.

This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I want to witness the traces. I want to remember. What is the point of living in this world without cultures and all the food that punctuates those cultures? We must, as global citizens, decide what kind of world we want to live in and figure out what is worth saving. To me, it is the whole lot. I want to save it all—every food, every human, every animal, and every piece of culture. This is what makes our world interesting. As Saladino said, "the Hadza remind us that there are many ways to live and be in the world." I am hanging onto my hopes that the incredible array of people curating these endangered foods will remain the custodians of not only our memories but of our food traditions for the future.

The World’s Food System Is Too Dependent on Wheat

This opinion piece was originally posted on the Bloomberg Opinion.

The Ukraine war highlights how reliance on a few big staple crops threatens food security and global nutrition.

Stunned by Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Europe is scrambling to diversify its energy supply — from piped Russian gas to liquified natural gas, more renewable power and nuclear power. In the same way, and for much the same reason, the ongoing war should push countries to shift and diversify their food supply — to make it more secure and, at the same time, improve nutrition worldwide.

Russia and Ukraine together supply 30% of the world’s wheat. This is why the war has caused wheat prices to skyrocket, along with the prices of many other food commodities. From February to March, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Association’s Food Price Index leapt 12.6% to an all-time high. This threatens people around the world with unprecedented food insecurity.

It also highlights the need to reform the global food system, which now leaves too many people dependent for nourishment on just a handful of mass-produced grains, including wheat, rice and corn.

To deal with the immediate shortages, farmers in the U.S., India, Canada and elsewhere will have to plant more wheat. And people worldwide will have to replace wheat with rice and other available grains. In the long term, though, this crisis provides an opportunity to change the face of agriculture and reduce the world’s dependency on wheat and other big staple crops.

Accomplishing this shift will be politically challenging. Many countries have entrenched agriculture subsidies that support big commodities including corn, rice, wheat, oils, sugar and soy, and ensure that they are grown at massive scale using uniform farm production practices. In the countries that grow two-thirds of the world’s crops, governments provide $540 billion a year in agricultural support. The U.S. alone spends $16 billion annually on farm subsidies, 80% of which goes to the largest 10% of farms.

This paradigm has many flaws. After all, there will always be risks in relying too heavily on one grain or just a few. It makes it difficult to address disruptions in supply caused by conflicts, protracted crises and fragile states — as the conflict in Ukraine makes clear. And in addition to geopolitical problems, there is the age-old but now growing threat of bad weather.

Heat waves, droughts, floods and cold spells can devastate wheat, corn, soy and rice crops. Because of climate change, extreme weather has already reduced harvests enough to push food prices up to their highest levels in 40 years. Climate change also increases the risk that such extreme weather events might occur at various locations in the same season. This phenomenon of “multiple breadbasket failures” stands to compromise billions of people’s access to food.

Subsidies for the big crops also neglect the need to promote healthy diets. Take wheat, for example. Whole unrefined wheat is a major source of starch and energy, as well as protein, vitamins (notably B vitamins), dietary fiber and phytochemicals. But demand for wheat has been rising globally because of its unique gluten properties, which make it also an ideal component of bread, noodles, pasta, cookies, crackers and many other baked foods and snacks. These highly processed foods, which now constitute a significant share of the world’s diet, are depleted of healthy nutrients and contribute to poor health.

Over the past 50 years, farm subsidies, supported by complementary research and development efforts in agriculture-dependent countries, have made rice, corn and wheat the world’s most dominant crops, accounting for two-thirds of global food-energy intake. Alternative staples such as sorghum, millet, rye, cassavas, sweet potatoes and yams haven’t disappeared — at least not yet — but they have become steadily less important.

To encourage a more diverse and resilient food supply, countries should begin reorienting agriculture subsidies toward fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes and other nutritious foods. A recent study suggests that if half of all agriculture subsidies worldwide were repurposed to support the growing of foods that benefit human health as well as the environment, it could increase the cultivation of fruits and vegetables by as much as 20% and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture by 2%.

Shifting agriculture subsidies is no easy lift. Many farmers depend on them to support their livelihoods, and many would consider it incredibly risky to make major changes in what they grow. But with climate change increasing and geopolitics unstable, change is becoming more and more necessary. And if people are to avoid chronic health problems such as diabetes and heart disease, they need assistance from the food system to adopt more nutritious diets. The global disruption caused by the war in Ukraine should prompt governments to reconsider their efforts to influence the crops farmers grow and move toward encouraging a more diverse food supply.

Food Bytes: Aug 26 - Aug 31

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

Have you ever wondered which cuisine the world craves? Turns out, Italy. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Italy is the largest exporter of their cuisine followed by Japan, Turkey and Mexico — Órale! Who is the largest importer, meaning, their food just sucks? You guessed it Sherlock. America. F!@#%* yah! China and Brazil don’t seem so keen on their local cuisine either. They follow the U.S. on importing other country cuisines. Funny. Brazil’s food based dietary guideline boasts harnessing its local cuisine. We guess people just don’t read those pesky guidelines…

Dari Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman wrote a timely op-ed piece in the New York Times that diets are now the number one risk factor killing Americans, costing the U.S. health care system billions each year. They provide a range of solutions and signify that governments and food and beverage industries need to be held accountable. While unhealthy diets continue to kill so many, politicians completely ignore the issue. As America moves towards what will be a contentious, decisive election year, they suggest that “every candidate should have a food platform, and every [presidential] debate should explore these positions.” Not sure this rhetoric will be high on the Trump “make American great again, for real this time” re-election campaign because the “Potus” just ain’t really that into food. Unless you consider consuming fast food a gourmand type diet.

Another op-ed piece in the New York Times by Catherine Kling urges that producers who cause “nutrient pollution,” in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus coming from agriculture fertilizer and manure run-off, should be required to pay for the cleanup. She suggests that state government regulations should be enforced to ensure that farmers reduce nutrient pollution. Wonder how livestock ranchers feel about that? Gee, take a guess.

IFAD and Bioversity just put out a great guideline on supporting nutrition-sensitive neglected and underutilized species (NUS) and wild edibles (check out Figure 2 particularly). The guideline is led by the great Stefano Padulosi at Bioversity who has some deep experience working on NUS value chains in many parts of the world. He is also the “Rocket Man.” What are NUS you ask? Here is how they define it in the guideline:

Many are the synonyms which have been used since the mid-1980s to refer to NUS, including minor, under-used, under-exploited, under-developed, orphan, promising, lost, alternative, traditional, niche crops, crops of the future, future smart food. In reality, all these terms are often context-specific and loaded with heavy cultural meanings and not easily understood in the same way by everybody. The term “Neglected and Underutilized Species” might not be the ideal expression and may not be appealing to people.

There is so much focus these days on diet and the food system footprints on climate change. It is seriously having its moment. But in the back of our mind’s eye, we hark back to an article published in 2017 in Environmental Research Letters, that indicated that largest impact an individual can make to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint is to have one less child. Check out this graphic to the right. Powerful. This action is followed by living car free. Diet is further down the list of impacts. Food for thought…

Interestingly, they didn’t model reducing food waste by individuals. The World Resources Institute (WRI) has just released a global action agenda on reducing food loss and waste by 2030. It is a really practical guide to setting targets, honing in on who should take action and what scalable interventions are available. Everything WRI puts out is pretty stellar and this is another data rich, practical guide to tackle one of the most important issues of the food system.

What if all Americans ate less meat? Not necessarily eliminating meat completely, but just much less? By the way, American are already slowly and steadily decreasing their beef consumption since the 1980s. In the Nature journal Scientific Reports, scientists tested this idea. By replacing 25% meat with plant alternatives dominated (strangely) by soy, green pepper, squash, buckwheat, and asparagus, Americans can eliminate pastureland use while saving 35–50% of their diet related needs for cropland and 330 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, but increase their diet related irrigation needs by 15%.

These advertisements on the left for PETA Vegan guides are all over DC (note the elephant in the background just to remind you that yes, DC is the capitol of the U.S. and the district lives and breathes politics. You can’t get away from it. It will smother, suffocate and slowly destroy you). Where were we? Oh yeah. We picked up the guide and thumbed through it. Some of the recipes didn’t look so tantalizing, and much of what was recommended wasn’t all that healthy. There were lots of photos of faux meat mimicking fried chicken fingers, hotdogs, and meatballs doused in sticky sauce, as well as lots of cakes. Is it possible to promote sustainable, healthy, and animal cruelty free vegan diets for those who choose to go that route PETA? That can’t be too hard can it? While it was an A for effort, maybe version 2 of the guide will feature more healthy foods and less overly processed, junk food.

In other news, with Uber Eats and other gig economy food deliveries on the rise, so is the toll on the drivers delivering food. They are risking their lives in places like South Africa. Tragic. And just to deliver the ultimate convenience to our dinner table.

Venezuela. Talk about a free fall into despair and chaos. Because of the turmoil, food security and the deeper issues of consistent insecurity have taken a big hit. Venezuelans lost an average of twenty-four pounds in body weight. Nine out of ten live in poverty. Roughly one in ten have left the country.

A paper just published in the Lancet hits right at the heart of the trade war between the U.S. and China. The authors feel that it is time to reshape trade policies towards those that favor sustainable food and nutrition systems. They argue there are three starting points for public health actors to take up this agenda.

  1. Recognize the fundamental and front-line nature of trade policy as both a barrier and potential catalyst for health.

  2. Engage more effectively and with the right stakeholders to push for policy space within trade and investment agreements.

  3. Reach beyond trade to promote a development discourse that makes explicit the nutrition imperative — nutrition is crucial to achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Food Archive holds a special place in its heart for special focus issues that scientific journals put out. That is, when journals hone in on a hot topic and publish a complementary set of articles on the topic to show different facets and perspectives on the topic.

Here are some recent highlights:

In the last food bytes post, the hard to watch unfold Brazilian Amazon fires were highlighted. This piece highlights that forest fires are happening all over the world, many in biodiverse hotspots, making climate change all that much worse. Very sad not only for forests but for those who live among and depend on them. The map on the right shows fires over the last year. Look at southwest Africa and Southern Africa. Look at Madagascar (think lemurs…) and Southeast Asia. Wah!!

One place prone to massive forest fires (the 2018 fires were the most devastating in the state’s history) is California but every day it finds a way to rub its beauty in our face. Geez, okay Cali, you win.

Speaking of California, and to keep the whole Woodstock vibe going, let’s just end with a little Joni Mitchell, because she sings about omelets and stews and well, because this has to be one of the best albums ever recorded. Click below to hear her beautiful song, California.

Oh the rogue, the red red rogue
He cooked good omelets and stews
And I might have stayed on with him there
But my heart cried out for you, California
Oh California, I'm coming home
Oh make me feel good rock'n roll band
I'm your biggest fan
California, I'm coming home

— Joni Mitchell

 

 

Food Bytes: Weekly Nibbles from Mar 4 - 24

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

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released their annual report. This year focuses on water: From Scarcity to Security: Managing Water for a Nutritious Food Future. There are lots of nuggets on the links of water to food and nutrition. Definitely worth a read.

IFPRI has also launched a new book: Agriculture for improved nutrition: Seizing the momentum. I contributed a chapter on biodiversity and its importance for food and nutrition security.

I always like what Bee Wilson writes. She recently wrote a great piece in the Guardian on how modern food is killing us. The grape story is an interesting analogy of how our food system has changed.

I just can’t help myself, but the EAT Lancet continues to get press. This article hones in on how it spurred a global debate. Great. It did its job. Keep debating! The Guardian is going a bit nuts on the diet side. They also published a recent piece on “peak beef.” And the Hopkins HUB, published an article on proteins of the future where they warn us to “get ready for a menu of lab-grown steaks, "bleeding" plant burgers, and cricket smoothies!”

Speaking of animal source foods, eggs seem to be bad for us once again. The nutrition science field is just one big teeter totter. This JAMA study shows that eggs increase cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality.

If Africa doesn’t have it tough enough these days, my heart goes out to Mozambique with the cyclone devastation, the armyworm seems to be eating its way across the continent destroying staple crops like maize. Let’s hope R & D can be ramped up quickly with solutions.

I am a closet Chipotle lover and Tamar Haspel outlines the woes the chain has been dealing with.

Two other interesting papers came out last week. One is unpacking stunting - faltering of linear growth in children. The other is a paper in the journal I edit, Global Food Security, on the use and interpretation of dietary diversity indicators in nutrition-sensitive agriculture literature.

In the world of food ethics, with colleagues at Hopkins and Columbia University, we published two papers. The first is in the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics. The chapter focuses on three key ethical challenges in the nutrition public health sphere: the prioritization of key actions to address the multiple burdens of malnutrition, intergenerational justice issues of nutrition-impacted epigenetics, and the consequences of people’s diet choices, not only for humanity but also for the planet. In the second paper, we unpack the meaning of nutrition and demonstrate that a standalone right to adequate nutrition does indeed exist in international human rights law as a sum of other rights. This right to nutrition is, essentially, the sum of the human rights to food, health, education, water and sanitation, a healthy environment, information, political participation, and social security, along with rights ensuring adequate protection of and nondiscrimination against specific groups, such as women, children, and indigenous peoples.


Food Bytes: Weekly Nibbles from Jan 8 - 20

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

Sorry to burst some bubbles out there, but it seems soda and junk food taxes may work. Mexico took the lead a few years back and introduced a tax of 1 peso per liter on all beverages that contain added sugar. Turns out, soda purchases are down, particularly in those consumers that consume more soda. They are also substituting for healthier products like water and diet soda. Time for a worldwide scale-up it seems. Viva Mexico! Literally.

But that doesn’t stop soda companies from trying to find new consumers, in new ways and in new places. Where markets wane, there is always another market. A BMJ study shows that Coca Cola has had their eye on China. They have infiltrated this massive market by “cultivating political relationships and strategic localization of products and marketing. Through a complex web of institutional, financial, and personal links, Coke has been able to influence China’s health policies.”  China is now Coke’s third largest market by volume. One word. PERVERSE.

But not all is going wrong on the Asia front. Singapore continues to innovate. When we think of Singapore, we think great food, great shopping and now, great urban farms. Comcrop is a 600-square-metre farm on the roof of one of the malls in Singapore that is growing leafy greens and herbs to sell in nearby bars, restaurants and stores. Is the farm going to feed all of Singapore? No but what a great way to use the urbanscape. Hint hint New York.

Across Europe and in Belgium in particular, there is a controversial ban on the way animals are being slaughtered in accordance with the traditional ways in Muslim halal and Jewish kosher doctrines. According to the Belgium government, the justification for the ban is to ensure certain regulations of animal welfare. The issue has been taken to the courts, but it does make tensions rise, particularly with this populist trend we see marching across Europe, making it difficult for certain populations to be observant to certain traditions.

Just a few other random food tidbits:

This is a cool snapshot of food guidelines around the world. The Qatar one is totally random. Why the scallop shell?

Duke University’s World Food Policy Center has a new food podcast with some leading experts pontificating on all things food. The Andrew Prentice podcast is a goodie.

And the Lexicon just put out a great site on 25 forgotten foods as part of their REDISCOVERED FOOD INITIATIVE. Check out the map below and peruse their website.

 

25 Forgotten Foods