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:

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• 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.

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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: May 2024 Edition

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

Well…the semester is over, and Columbia went out with a bang. Despite the chaos and heartbreaking controversy that has ensued on campus, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed teaching this semester and getting to know all the Climate and Society Masters students at Columbia’s Climate School. What a pleasure and privilege it is to interact every day with the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and revolters. Teaching is all-consuming if you want to do right by the student. Thus, my blogging has been less frequent, and I missed the April Food Bytes. I don’t think I need any excuses as to why. But I did manage to get in a bit of reading, listening, and watching. Check out some Bytes that I consumed…

I read The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner in just a few days. If you love literature and consider yourself a gourmand, Garner nicely meshes the two worlds with humor and personal tidbits about his life. What a pleasure to read about his obsession with both food and books. I like this quote by the New York Times (which must have been strange for this reviewer to write, being that Garner is the book critic for the NYT), “Garner’s early appetite for everything from Bugles to blue crabs was matched by his equally wide-ranging appetite for literature, encompassing Miami Herald sports columns, scavenged copies of Oui magazine and the novels of Robert B. Parker.”

I listened to an eight-part series podcast, Fiasco, about the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic in America. It focuses on: “the early years of the crisis when a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence. It looks at the mystery and missteps around identifying and treating a new, contagious disease, and what it took to get the public — and the government — to care.” While nothing related to food, it is such a fantastic and profoundly moving series that highlights the importance of engaging and mobilizing communities to advocate for their rights, particularly those who have been stigmatized and marginalized. It is a story of constancy. The food systems world could learn and adopt many lessons from this historic movement and what it means to fight for a cause when it threatens the very existence of life.

A few interesting reports have emerged and are worth the read. I will highlight three. First, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) published Land Squeeze. The report focuses on how farmland is being purchased for the purposes of what is called "green grabbing,” but they argue it is resulting in massive land inequities (see figure below). Much of the land is being used for extractive industries rather than agriculture. IPES-Food has become known for its criticism of the “go big or go home” approach to food systems, and I don’t blame them. The concentration of power is scary, to say the least, and frankly, I am not sure if we will see an end to this consolidation. Are there any examples of where David won against Goliath? Tobacco is one example — maybe — and some of the lessons on how to stymy the tobacco industry can be used in food systems, but at the same time, they are very, very different in scale, scope, and outcome. I will write about this more in a coming blog post on The Food Archive.

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The second report, the World Resource Institute’s Towards Better Meat, is a fantastic report unpacking the pros and cons of organic, grass-fed, and conventional production of meat. [I am also a massive fan of Richard Waite. He was one of my favs to follow when I was on the good ol’ days of Twitter/X. Alas, Elon squashed all that.] In their analysis, they compare these management practices across a range of environmental, social, and economic factors across different animal systems - comparing chicken and eggs, beef, and other animal foods. Bottomline? Benefits depend on what outcome one is looking at and which animal system. Check out the figure below. It looks at “total carbon costs,” which include on-farm emissions as well as carbon opportunity costs. Interestingly, grass-fed, organic, and free-range beef and dairy production systems had higher overall climate impacts per gram of protein than conventional systems in more than 90% of cases. The WRI makes the claim that this is because of higher land use requirements. The whole report weighs these different outcomes and each system has strengths and trade-offs. There is no “silver bullet” system, sorry to say.

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The last report is the World Bank’s Recipe for a Livable Planet. It is their answer to the various 1.5-degree roadmaps emerging. If FAO did one, why can’t they? Yet, why do I feel the World Bank is always two steps behind… One interesting message that you hear less about, but the Bank did some analysis, is that 3/4 of food system emissions come from low-and middle-income countries, including 2/3 from middle-income countries (see figure below). They argue that “mitigation action has to happen in these countries as well as in high-income countries to make a difference.” They argue for three actions: repurposing subsidies to encourage low emissions, (2) using digital technologies to improve information for measurement and reporting, and (3) leveraging institutions that include smallholder farmers, women, and Indigenous groups, “who are at the front lines of climate change.” Nothing too new here in these recommendations, but I am sure there will be some controversies kicked up with regard to middle-income countries needing to accelerate their mitigation potentials.

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That’s all for now folks. I hope everyone has a relaxing and safe summer. It’s going to be a scorcher. I leave you with my Summertime Sadness playlist to breeze and eaze you into this cruel summer.

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: February 2024 Edition

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

As I write this, snow is floating across New York City, deeply settling me into a wintry, sedate state. Lately I have been dreaming about feeling the sun on my skin, eating juicy peaches, and wearing flip-flops…I do this every year. I yearn for crisp, cold days during the dog days of summer, but then, the blue winters come along, I long for heat, long days, and not having to spend 20 minutes layering clothes just to get out the door. That said, nothing beats homemade, hearty soups that my better half cooks up that last for several meals and doubling down on double-feature movies in the evenings. Speaking of food, let’s get to what the food world has been up to this past month – there is a lot to cover.

Scientific papers

This paper, “Health-Environment Efficiency of Diets Shows Nonlinear Trends over 1990-2011” by Pan He is getting lots of traction. They developed an indicator and applied it, as Kate Schneider (lead author of the Food Systems Countdown paper) wrote, “that builds on long-observed correlates of increasing levels of development, that is, the co-occurrence of ‘bads’ (for example, rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from greater animal-source food consumption, rising risk of diet-related non-communicable disease) and the ‘goods’ (for example, the decline in child and maternal malnutrition, increased incomes and more education). With this health–environment efficiency metric, the authors sought to understand how efficiently food systems use environmental inputs to generate health outcomes.”

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They show that as countries economically grow and “develop,” they tend to see improvements in health and nutrition outcomes (reductions in undernutrition). With continued development, they see animal-source food consumption increase, with concomitant environmental degradation. This is not surprising, but it is interesting to see this indicator used to prove further the nutrition transition and how critical it is to consider planetary health with human health through our food systems. The figure to the right shows the change in dietary efficiency along with socio-economic development.

Rachel Gilbert and colleagues (including my buddy, the great Will Masters) published a fantastic paper in World Development that looked at food imports and their retail prices across 144 countries. They found that lots of food is traded worldwide, and almost half face tariffs (at a rate of 6.7%). Which foods had the highest tariffs? Vegetables, fruits, and animal-sourced foods. Where? Low- and middle-income countries, but they only account for a small portion of the cost of the diet per day. Most of the food prices consumers pay are domestic value add-ons once the foods have arrived in the country. I think I got that right…

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Although this paper came out in 2023, it is an important one by Matias Heino and colleagues. The paper shows the impacts of combined hot and dry extremes as well as cold and wet extremes on major crop commodity yields (of course…)— maize, rice, soybean, and wheat—between 1980 and 2009. They show that co-occurring extremely hot and dry events have globally consistent negative effects on the yields of all inspected crop types. Extremely cold and wet conditions reduce crop yields globally, too, although to a lesser extent, and the impacts are more uncertain and inconsistent. Check out the figure to the left.

Biodiversity is in free fall, which can impact both nature scapes and people. We know that agriculture and urbanization are two of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. This paper by Awaz Mohamed et al examined how much natural habitat is needed to ensure humans have access to the benefits of biodiversity, such as diverse food production (soil, pollination, etc.), high water quality, homeostatic climate regulation, and improved green spaces. They find that benefits significantly decline when habitat area falls below 20%–25% per km2, and 2/3 of agricultural and urban areas fall below this level globally.

Reports

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The Food Systems Economic Commission finally came out. It was a long time coming. The report assessed one specific science-based transformation pathway for food systems, which could benefit both people and the planet. This pathway is called the Food System Transformation (FST). Estimates of those benefits, measured as reductions in the unaccounted costs of food systems, amount to at least 5 trillion USD per year. When the full effects of a global food system transformation on incomes are factored in, estimates of its benefits rise to 10 trillion USD annually. See the figure to the right that shows this power of transformation.

Podcasts

I listened to two really good podcasts this past week. The first is hosted by Ambrook Research (I highly recommend receiving their weekly newsletter). It is called The Only Thing That Lasts, and in the first episode, they delve into the potential loss of U.S. farmland (spurred by the fear that Bill Gates seems to be buying it all up).

The other podcast is Barbecue Earth, a six-part podcast about meat as a commodity, the powerful industry behind meat, and a major reason our planet is overheating. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosts it. The first focused on hogs…It will make you think twice about putting bacon on your egg cheese sandwich.

Media, Social and Otherwise

Eater has made life easier for you by guiding you where you should eat in 2024. Interestingly, neither New York nor London is mentioned. Good for them. But have no fear New Yorkers, this guy has been flaneuring around Gotham attempting to eat a meal representing every country in the world. He is almost there…

This will get some agronomists riled up. Here is a webinar hosted by the Rodale Institute (which has a certain world view of food systems) on the differences between organic versus conventional agriculture systems – and how these “stack up” from agronomics, carbon footprint, and economic perspectives. Guess what the conclusion is? :)

TV and movies

We have been watching season 4 of True Detective with Jody Foster and the awesome Kali Reis. It is filmed in a fictional town, Ennis, Alaska (although filmed in Iceland). It is assumed that we are in the far northern reaches of Alaska, where the community experiences complete darkness. It is inspired by North Slope Borough, a town on the northernmost point of Alaska, approximately 50% of which comprises indigenous populations. In the show, the water is contaminated (likely from mining operations), but of course, I always notice the diets. There are lots of highly processed, packaged foods, which makes some sense because of the remoteness. In real life, in many of these indigenous communities, their traditional diets are healthy but are disappearing. Much work has been done to understand how diets have changed in the northern territories of Canada and Siberia. In Northern Alaska, among the Inupiat, the Yup’ik, and other traditional communities, many elderly are trying to preserve their traditional diets. Still, conserving these dietary patterns is getting harder and harder for various reasons.

Art Meets Food

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Curious to know the most iconic food paintings? Check this out. The Normal Rockwell one is just downright creepy, but I always have time and space for Edward Hopper (who lived down the road from one of Columbia University’s campuses in Nyack, New York).

 The Clash has a song, “Lost in the Supermarket.” It’s a great song, and I think many of us can relate when entering these goliath spaces meant to nourish us. As Joe Strummer sang,

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for a special offer
A guaranteed personality

Last thoughts

Our good friend Cheryl Palm passed away this past month from a rare and devastating disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She was a giant in the world of food systems and made massive contributions to land-use change, degradation and rehabilitation, and ecosystem processes. Here is a lovely tribute from our Earth Institute friends at Columbia University. I love this photo of her in her younger years, full of life. That is how I choose to remember her.

Food Bytes: November 2023 Edition

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

I thought I would write up the November Food Bytes before the onslaught of publications leading up to the COP28 climate meeting takes place. Here is the roundup!

Some interesting articles and books:

The great “godfather of climate science,” Jim Hansen, also a Columbia colleague, has put out a paper with colleagues arguing the planet may be warming faster than previous estimates have indicated by measuring “climate sensitivity” – measuring the earth’s warmth via atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Global CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts per million in the pre-industrial age. Now, they are above 400 ppm. Not everyone agrees with this paper, but no matter, Hansen is sending us clear warnings.

We are more and more worried about how resilient our food systems are in the face of extreme events and shocks, be they climate, environmental, or political. This paper examines the impacts of crop yields related to several agriculture input shocks – nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, machinery, pesticide, and fertilizer. Industrialized agriculture systems depend on these inputs, and often, they are imported from other countries. When combined, as you can see in the figure, some areas showed decreased yields for some but not all crops. The yields of barley, maize, potato, and wheat decreased heavily in the western United States. Barley, maize, millet, potato, sorghum, and soybean yields all decreased in northern Argentina, while barley, maize, potato, and wheat. To some extent, sugar beet also saw large yield decreases in Central Europe. Rice yields, in turn, decreased heavily in Thailand, Vietnam, and the southern part of India.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00873-z/figures/3

My friend Bill Dietz, the Director of Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at George Washington University, and I just published a paper on how the U.S. agri-food sector can contribute to climate change mitigation. The paper is timely for the upcoming COP28 meetings. The U.S. needs to step up!

A new book on the political economy of food system transformation co-edited by Danielle Resnick and Johan Swinnen has been jointly published by IFPRI and Oxford University Press. The summary follows: “The current structure of the global food system is increasingly recognized as unsustainable. While the need to transform food systems is widely accepted, the policy pathways for achieving such a vision often are highly contested, and the enabling conditions for implementation are frequently absent.” Check it out and download it for free here.

Some interesting reports:

Every year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, also known as FAO, releases two flagship reports: the SOFI and the SOFA. The SOFA just came out this past week and focuses on the “true cost of food.” That means they assess the hidden environmental, health, and social costs of producing our food. What is their final assessment? Global hidden costs of food amount to 10 trillion dollars, with low-income countries bearing the highest burden of hidden costs. Yikes.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food released an interesting analysis in this report calling for food systems to wean off fossil fuels. Wouldn’t that be nice….They argue that food production, distribution, processing/packaging, storage, and sales consume about 15% of all fossil fuels generated annually. They argue that the fossil fuel industry holds a lot of sway with governments, making it difficult to “extract” (sorry for the pun) their influence or hold them to account.

A report by the group I-CAN, which looks at the integration of climate and nutrition, came out. It is interesting…nothing new…and much built on the long scientific publications already out there, but I supposed putting it in a layperson report gets the message out there.

Some interesting listens:

Vice did an “expose” on how the Italian mafia has taken over food systems in Italy. Having lived in Italy and interested in Italian deep food traditions, I watched it. The document is not well done, with much speculation and little evidence beyond a few interviews. If it is even true, I wasn’t convinced by this documentary.

John Oliver’s Halloween episode focused on the issues of child labor related to producing chocolate – focusing on Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where roughly 60% of it is produced. A lot of the material is borrowed from Netflix’s Rotten series. Still, the message is clear that many children (1.56 million) are engaged in cocoa production stemming from insufficient wages paid by massive confectionary companies to smallholder farming families working or owning cocoa farms, leaving them in gut wrenching poverty. Such a tragedy. I don’t think John Oliver adds much to the debate – if you want a quick watch, go to the Netflix episode.

In their usual snarky, pick-it-to-pieces style, Mike and Aubrey of the fantastic Maintenance Phase podcast sink their teeth into Ozempic, the weight loss diabetes treatment drug. It's well worth listening to the latest.

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.