Food Bytes: September 2024 Edition

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

The chaos of the semester has begun along with the long lead-up to climate week here in NYC. Many side events are happening around the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and Climate Week. Do all these events amount to something tangible? It is unclear in my mind’s eye, but I do love seeing food experts and friends converge in Gotham.

So let’s get started. If you are coming to NYC next week, please do join us at Columbia for the Bollinger Convening, where we will highlight the importance of evidence, research, and data (although you wouldn’t believe they matter if you watched the U.S. presidential debate - cats? dogs?) in addressing hunger and malnutrition. We are also hosting a Forward Food & Fashion event. Join us!

So first, the most depressing. Sudan’s famine situation is worsening to a catastrophic level. Absolutely devastating. Let’s hope this is high on the agenda at the UNGA and that leaders act swiftly. While some argue that Gaza is also experiencing a catastrophic famine, others disagree — the debate played out in the American Journal of Nutrition. Michael Fakhri, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, also weighed in.

Some papers I am reading this week:

  • Simone Passarelli and colleagues performed a modeling exercise to estimate micronutrient intake and adequacy worldwide. They found that 5 billion people do not consume enough iodine (so much for iodized salt!), vitamin E, and calcium. At least half of the world does not consume enough folate, iron, and vitamin C. We still have a long way to go to ensure people get access to nutrient-dense food products.

  • Yi Yang and colleagues recently published a paper in Science on how climate change could amplify the environmental impacts of agriculture. They found that not only will it do so, but it will also reduce the efficacy of agrochemicals and their loss into ecosystems and increase soil erosion and pests. This will reduce productivity, leading to land expansion and clearing to grow more food inefficiently, threatening biodiversity and accelerating greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. They nicely demonstrate the interconnected feedback loops.

  • Speaking of climate change and Science magazine, a fascinating article examining climate policies that achieved significant greenhouse gas emission reductions. What an undertaking. Between 1998 and 2022, they examined 1500 climate policies across 41 countries. They found 63 successful policy interventions that reduced emissions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes of CO2. It is a shame they did not examine agri-food policies. Pricing, regulation, and subsidies had different impacts across sectors, but bundling of policy interventions greatly mattered. Important lessons for food-climate policy.

  • A new study in Lancet analyzed dietary questionnaires from more than 200,000 adults in the United States to examine their consumption of ultra-processed foods and related it to their chance of developing cardiovascular disease. They found that those who consumed the most ultra-processed foods were 11% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 16% more likely to develop coronary heart disease compared to those who consumed the least amount of ultra-processed foods. Which foods were the worst offenders? Sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meat, poultry, and fish (e.g. bacon, hot dogs, breaded fish products). But still, some worry that demonizing foods can be stigmatizing.

  • I am totally biased here, but my colleague Shauna Downs just published a paper in Appetite that examined meat (red, unprocessed, and poultry) and seafood consumption patterns, the factors influencing their consumption, and how these differed based on socioeconomic variables among a US population. One interesting finding is that critical factors influencing red meat reduction were health and price, while environmental sustainability and animal welfare were less important, particularly among certain socio-demographic groups. She also wrote this piece on how communities along the Mekong River in Cambodia are seeing their food access shrink as the climate worsens.

Other nibbles:

  • Did you know methane is getting rising faster than ever? No wonder with the massive demand for meat.

  • The European Food Trails project just released a Food in Cities podcast in collaboration with Slow Food. I'm looking forward to listening.

  • Speaking of podcasts, we at the Columbia Climate School’s Food for Humanity Initiative are starting our own podcast, the Food Pod for Humanity. It will be a limited series on topics highlighting the interdependencies of climate change and food systems. The first series is on food waste.

  • Speaking of Columbia’s Climate School, check out this inspirational story about one of our new students from South Sudan.

  • World Wildlife Fund’s new Great Food Puzzle interactive site is pretty awesome.

  • The Atlantic published a report saying that we are a country of snacking, and less on eating wholesome meals. Gee, I wonder who encouraged that?

And just on a personal note, I have always loved These Days by Jackson Browne. I was so happy to see the NYT highlight the song. As I age, lyrics like this just hit me right in the gut: “Don’t confront me with my failures/I have not forgotten them.” Beautiful, and written when he was just 16.

Food Bytes: October 2023 Edition

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

 

It is hard to find the time to read, let alone write about what you read. One of the things about reading scientific literature is that you have to weed through many journals’ tables of contents to find the nibbles and nuggets that are worth your time. Sometimes, you get lucky and find some gems; other times, you don’t get further than the abstract. Regardless, if you don’t have LinkedIn or X, spoon-feeding your biased and “like-minded lemur” content, the never-ending search for quality papers is laborious and time-consuming.

Enter documentaries and podcasts. I find myself more and more listening to them to get a synthesis of a topic or a deep dive into an issue or scientific discovery. There is no shortage of food podcasts, but most focus on cooking and gourmandery. But a few goodies discuss the politics of food and the history of food. I try to add them to the Resource section of The Food Archive. I found this particular episode of the podcast, “What You’re Eating,” fantastic on the confusion of egg labels. The host lays out the issues and clarifies where your eggs come from and how to understand the labels on those confusing cartons better.

Two food documentaries worth the watch are Poisoned and How to Live to 100, Wherever You Are in the World. Let’s take Poisoned first, about how “unsafe” the U.S. food supply is, although often touted as being one of the most secure. The documentary starts with the contaminated burgers from Jack in the Box, which killed and sickened a slew of people. After lawsuits and regulations, getting sick from E. coli-contaminated hamburger meat is hard now. It shows that it works once governments can set their mind to something and put in strict and enforced regulations. Enter vegetables. After watching the show, I am not sure I will ever eat romaine lettuce again…much of it is grown right next to concentrated animal feed operations (where beef is raised in the U.S.). The manure runs off into waterways,  and the water from those said waterways irrigates the nearby lettuce crops. And then bingo! You’ve got severe contamination issues. It is worth watching to understand how food is produced in this country, how it is regulated, and how you can be safer with food in your kitchen.

How to Live to 100 is hosted by Dan Buettner, who wrote Secrets of the Blue Zones. He has been studying why, in some places, people live such long lives – sometimes beyond 100 years. He travels to Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California — where more people live significantly longer than average. He summarizes some of their secrets to longevity into four basic mantras. Keep in mind these populations all get to their winter years in different, contextualized ways, and it is never that straightforward why someone lives a long life and others die too early. Dan argues these four lifestyle changes help:

  • Make movement a habit

  • Have a positive outlook

  • Eat wisely

  • Find and connect with your tribe

There are a lot of valuable lessons in this documentary (sans Dan showing himself riding his bike for 1/3 of the docuseries. Why do documentarians always have to show themselves so much? I digress…). One lesson is that no matter how long you live, you can live your best life and one of high quality. A lot of that centers around food. And wine. Yay!

The NY Times Magazine had two fantastic articles last week. David Wallace-Wells wrote a piece on the financial responsibility for climate change and how difficult it is to figure out the historical tally of damage. The price of historical emissions and removing carbon would cost $250 trillion. The U.S. alone has accrued a climate debt of $2 trillion. By 2100, $100 trillion. This shows how daunting it will be to turn around the damage we have done and will continue to do without serious action on climate change.

Another NY Times Magazine article focuses on young migrant kids from Central America who work night shifts in slaughterhouses – a dangerous, low-paying job – with very little compensation or legal status. They are often too tired when they get to school after working long, laborious hours all night, and often, they get maimed, injured, or exposed to terrible toxins that stay with them for a lifetime. It is a tragic story but so important to read to understand why younger kids and teens are trekking up to the U.S., what they face along the way and when they get here, and the fine line to ensuring their freedom. While it seems we have come a long way from the days of The Jungle, written in 1906 by Upton Sinclair of the Chicago slaughterhouses, this article makes you pause. Your heart will break for Marcos Cux.

And for some self-promotion, my team and colleagues published a few papers in the last six months that may be of interest to Food Archive readers:

  • Challenges and opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of food reformulation and fortification to improve dietary and nutrition outcomes: This article is about how reformulation and fortification face numerous technical and political hurdles for food manufacturers and will not solve the issues of increased consumption of ultra-processed foods. You can’t make junk food healthier at the end of the day…

  • Harnessing the connectivity of climate change, food systems, and diets: Taking action to improve human and planetary health: This paper presents how climate change is connected to food systems and how dietary trends and foods consumed worldwide impact human health, climate change, and environmental degradation. It also highlights how specific food policies and actions related to dietary transitions can contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation responses and, at the same time, improve human and planetary health. While there is significant urgency in acting, it is also critical to move beyond the political inertia and bridge the separatism of food systems and climate change agendas currently existing among governments and private sector actors. The window is closing and closing fast.

  • A global view of aquaculture policy: This article shows that government policies have strongly influenced the geographic distribution of aquaculture growth, as well as the types of species, technology, management practices, and infrastructure adopted in different locations. Six countries/regions are highlighted – The EU, Bangladesh, Zambia, Chile, China, USA, and Norway. These case studies shed light on aquaculture policies aimed at economic development, aquaculture disease management, siting, environmental performance, and trade protection. 

  • Riverine food environments and food security: a case study of the Mekong River, Cambodia: Rivers are critical, but often overlooked, parts of food systems. They have multiple functions supporting the surrounding communities' food security, nutrition, health, and livelihoods. However, given current unsustainable food system practices, damming, and climate change, most of the world’s largest rivers are increasingly susceptible to environmental degradation, with negative implications for the communities that rely on them. Rivers are dynamic and multifaceted food environments (i.e., the place within food systems where people obtain their food) and their role in securing food security, including improved diets and overall health.