Food Bytes: October 2024 Edition

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

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

Reports

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

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

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

Science papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Bytes: 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: Aug 2024 Edition

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

It’s been a while, well, the whole summer, since I have written a Food Bytes blog. This summer was full of guilt-free laziness, ice cream eating, and beach combing. Witness the delicious vanilla Mr. Softee cone. On those sticky, hot, humid dog days of summer in NYC when nothing seems to be going right, this will do me just fine. But ketchup-inspired ice cream? That’s a hard no for me. Oh, but there was plenty of consumption of this on those long summer nights and some earlier “draft”ernoons. Pizza always comes to mind when discussing NYC and food in the same breath. Did you know NYC has gone through 4 evolutions of pizza making? Forgeddaboudit. Call me crazy, but I am still focused on the first evolution, and I’m stickin’ to it.

We saw lots of good music over the summer including DIIV at the beautiful Brooklyn Paramount, Jessica Pratt, OFF! (with the legendary Keith Morris), and Horse Lords in central LA. I also found myself not reading many scientific articles over the summer. Why do that to oneself when days can be spent lollygagging on grassy knolls? Instead,…wait for it…I read books! What a concept. But this week, I did manage to catch up on some light reading, and here are some highlights.

The New York Times has a new series of op-eds, “What to Eat on a Burning Planet.” A real picker-upper on the title alone. David Wallace Wells started the series with an op-ed on how food supplies will change and how climate change threatens the ability to continue to generate the yields needed to feed a growing population. There are a host of other good op-eds worth the read.

The Economist, a British weekly news magazine, hasn’t always given nutrition and food much attention, but lately, they seem to have changed their tune. I am a big fan of the Economist — this idea that you don’t know who the writers are behind the stories, their bravery in calling things as they see them, and, of course, the fantastic writing. They have paid homage to food and nutrition in three great articles.

  • They call for big food to contend with ultra-processed foods. They say, "If pressure from governments ratchets up, the food industry will have to do more than tweak its recipes or roll out new product lines. Companies would have to completely overhaul their manufacturing processes.”

  • They also focused on the idea that small investments in early child nutrition can make the world smarter and that undernutrition across the world persists. This is not new to those working in international nutrition, but it is nice to see broader attention to the topic.

  • At the same time, obesity is rising and seems unstoppable. The Economist argues that drugs (like the GLP-1 class) and taxes won’t be enough. The question is, why don’t we have more solutions that work, and why has no country been able to stop this trend? Don’t say it is willpower, please….

A lot is happening in the ongoing debates of livestock and meat production and consumption — one of the most juggernaut issues in food systems. Here are some highlights:

Source: Herzon et al 2024 Nature Food

  • The Good Food Institute—a nonprofit organization that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, particularly meat, dairy, and eggs—released a report that argues if Americans replaced 50% of their animal consumption (meat and dairy) with plant-based foods, 47.3 million fewer acres of cropland would be needed to grow that plant protein. Let’s see how that goes down with the livestock sector.

  • According to Vox, environmental NGOs help greenwash the livestock industry’s climate impact. They use the example of the World Wildlife Fund and their relationship with McDonalds who are part of a round table on sustainable beef (with WWF accepting millions from McDonalds to assist in the roundtable collaboration. Yikes.

  • More and more studies are better articulating the impacts of red meat consumption on non-communicable disease outcomes. This meta-analysis further confirms that a higher intake of red meat and processed meat increases the risk of type 2 diabetes incidence. A microsimulation model estimated that a 30% reduction in both processed meat and unprocessed red meat intake could lead to 1,073,400 fewer occurrences of type 2 diabetes, 382,400 fewer occurrences of cardiovascular disease, 84,400 fewer occurrences of colorectal cancer, and 62,200 fewer all-cause deaths over a 10-year period among an adult US population.

  • The evidence is building…maybe leading to more statements such as this. The question is, how? These authors suggest downsizing livestock herds and for those that remain in existence, ensuring they are sustainable and present a framework (see figure above) for how sustainable livestock systems fit into a safe operating space.

  • And what we don’t talk about enough is animal and human welfare associated with our unlimited appetite for animal meats. Michael Holtz wrote an illuminating and devastating account about working in a Dodge City meatpacking plant during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. I also highlighted the issue of young immigrant teenagers working in dangerous conditions at slaughterhouses in a past Food Bytes post.

Food prices, cost, and affordability are hot topics these days. Kamala has made minimizing food price gouging part of her future economic plan if she were to become president-elect. Some disagree with her strategy. The FAO’s State of Food Insecurity Report released its latest data on food affordability. While the number has come down this year from 3.1 to 2.83 billion people who cannot afford a healthy diet, it is still shockingly high and inequitable across regions of the world. FAO says: “In 2022, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet dropped below pre-pandemic levels in the group of upper-middle- and high-income countries as a whole, while the group of low-income countries had the highest levels since 2017.” But still, food prices continue to rise, pushing up the cost of a healthy diet year on year. In 2022, costs went up 11% in just one year. A group out of IFPRI suggests that the cost and affordability of healthy diets need more investigation into their accuracy and if assumptions of these metrics skew what is actually affordable. Their analysis argues that the EAT-Lancet diet is not affordable for 2.13 billion people, not the 3.02 originally reported. I am not an economist or a specialist in this topic, so I cannot agree or disagree with these findings. However, I am a scientist, and opening debates and discussions on metrics is a healthy pursuit to get to the truth. In another paper published in Nature Food, authors analyze per capita budget shares for food and an additional 12 raw food categories, including ultra-processed food and beverages, across 94 countries from the period 1990 to 2019. They found that food expenditures are not the same worldwide, and low-income food demand does not necessarily mirror high-income demand. Of course, budget allocations align with income levels, food trade and production, and culture. Check out this figure to see how much it diverges across low to high-income countries.

Source: Liang et al 2024 Nature Food

A few other Bytes: This paper on the climate-food-migration nexus by Megan Carney is a doozy but so important. Hulsen et al. published a paper on how local food environments impact children’s diets. They did this work in Malawi and found significant differences between rural and urban food environments, and that, of course, access to more variety of foods in these markets has positive impacts on children’s diets. The New York Times has highlighted a study on tipping points that may just put the fear of god in you. Die-offs! Collapses! Ghostly coral reefs! Seriously, these are scary outcomes if we do nothing about climate and the science on tipping points has momentum. Speaking of tipping points, has Italy’s marine ecosystem reached one, and the result is blue crab invasions and infestations? In the worst-case scenario, tipping points could lead to massive destruction of precious ecosystems, food insecurity for billions, and, in some cases, famines. The world has witnessed cataclysmic famines in the past. The question remains as to why Gaza and Sudan have not been declared as famine states. NPR explains. Declaring a famine is not so simple…but it doesn’t mean inaction and complacency.

And if you need some recommendations on keeping up with the latest food systems news, if you don’t read and support Civil Eats, do so. If you were a fan of The Counter and were devastated when they closed shop, have no fear. Grist has come to the rescue, and their food reporting is awesome.

And for those of you who tear up every time you hear Gillian Welch’s Time (the Revelator), she and her partner, David Rawlings, have a new album out. It may just help you laze away the last days of summer. Enjoy!

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.

Food Bytes: March 2023 Edition

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

So much going on in food and nutrition these days that it is hard to keep up. In looking at what has been published in the last month, three areas dominate ultra-processed foods, climate change, and blue foods. Let’s take each and highlight the latest and the greatest.

Ultra-processed foods: What are ultra-processed foods (UPFs), may you ask? Basically, junk food. But we scientists have to come up with fancy terms and categorize everything. UPFs are a very broad category of foods that generally are made from highly processed, industrialized ingredients not found in the home or in restaurant kitchens. These foods are designed to be hyper-palatable, often conveniently ready-to-eat, shelf-stable, transportable, strongly marketed, and, ultimately, highly profitable. More and more research shows that these foods are detrimental to various health outcomes (obesity, diabetes, cancer, morbidity, mental health, etc.) and could be potentially addictive and environmentally destructive. California, which always leads in food governance (blame it on the hippies), is growing worried about what exactly these foods contain. They are considering banning a number of staple ingredients found in these foods. I cannot even begin to source the sheer amount of literature coming out demonstrating the impact of these devilish foods, but here, here, and here are a few good systematic or meta-reviews. This Wired layperson article is a good summary. If you want to read two people who lead in the science of UPFs, read Carlo Montiero or Kevin Hall. Regardless of all the science coming out, their sales are increasing across almost every region of the world. Why? Well, they are cheap, have a long shelf life, are easily stored and transported for long periods of time, and are damn tasty.

IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, 2023: Key Summary Figure

Climate and food: Hard too to keep up with everything going on. The most significant update is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, has come out with a synthesis report on how much time we have left before the world falls apart. They are surprisingly and cautiously optimistic, arguing that there is still time to address climate change before things start “gettin’ hot in here.” Food is heavily featured in this synthesis report, thanks to our AgMIP friends at Columbia University. They argue that food security and nutrition are and will continue to be significantly impacted, particularly in resource-constrained settings and among smallholder farmers. They also offer a range of mitigation and adaptation strategies, including agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) options with reduced deforestation in tropical regions, shifting to sustainable healthy diets, reducing food loss/waste and intensifying sustainable agriculture (they even mention urban ag!).

When I asked Google’s new AI system, Bard, what was the latest science published in “food systems” in the last week, this is what they spit out:

Here are some recent research on food systems:

  • A new study found that the global food system is responsible for about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the food system's emissions are mainly caused by the production of meat and dairy products, as well as the transportation of food.

  • A new study found that the global food system is also responsible for about one-third of all water use. The study, published in the journal Nature Water, found that the food system's water use is mainly caused by the irrigation of crops, as well as the production of meat and dairy products.

  • A new study found that the global food system is also responsible for about one-third of all land use. The study, published in the journal Nature Land, found that the food system's land use is mainly caused by the production of crops, as well as the grazing of livestock.

These are just a few of the recent research on the global food system's impacts on the environment. The food system is a major contributor to climate change, water pollution, and land degradation. These impacts are likely to become more severe in the coming years, as the global population continues to grow.

Not too shabby, but a bit outdated (and they don’t provide any citations). Interesting how AI is set to become such a game-changer, and yet, as an expert, asking Bard to do a bit of research, it is pretty generic and lacks scientific nuance, which can be dangerous…Here are some even more recent papers out this week on food systems and climate from a flawed human perspective:

  • Ivanovich and colleagues at Columbia University (see a pattern?) published a paper in Nature showing that if we continue on our current food consumption patterns, this will add 1 °C to an already warm planet by 2100. Most of this warming is driven by what is called high methane foods (methane is another toxic greenhouse gas) like livestock, dairy, and rice (yes, we cannot blame it all on those cute cow creatures). If we made some of the changes mentioned in the IPCC report above, we could cut 55% of that warming.

  • Another paper, again published by Columbia University peeps (they are on a roll), called for more studies to better show how the food security of households and communities is impacted by climate-related shocks. They argue that most studies only examine food production and availability, not access or utilization.

  • And last, and this is self-promotional, a few of us put together an analysis trying to understand if the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet was adequate in nutrients (we didn’t look at environmental impacts or other health impacts, and we are not suggesting to do so). This particular analysis shows that the diet is inadequate in vitamin B12, calcium, iron, and zinc. The EAT-Lancet may not be happy with these results but this is what science is all about — debating on a level playing field, DISproving one’s hypotheses, and not being wed to ideologies. I am not sure right now that everyone at the so-called proverbial table looks at science similarly and instead holds fast to their worldviews, which worries me. But a lot is at “steak.” The EAT-Lancet Commission part has been downloaded over 6,000 times in 4 years. That is pretty insane. So to go against that, dissect it, calls to do it better next time around, or at least look carefully at the data, in which multiple people analyzing the dataset, is, well, what science and the pursuit of truth is all about. But putting one’s arm out to be potentially severed. Bottom line: This paper is about the trade-offs that are par for the course with a grand food systems transformation.

Showing tradeo-offs of policy bundles: Crona et al Nature 2023.

Blue foods: More and more, and this is long overdue, blue foods, aka seafood, aka aquatic foods, are getting more attention. The Blue Foods Assessment highlighted their importance from multiple angles - important contributors to a nutritious diet, some species’ environmental sustainability, their risk of climate threats, and contributors to livelihoods. Some fantastic articles have emerged recently, including a fantastic paper by Christina Hicks and colleagues examining the injustices associated with aquatic food systems. Another paper summarized the BFA around 4 policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints, and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. However, trade-offs always exist, just as above. The figure shows these — the question is, what trade-offs are we willing to live with? And last, on blue foods, the great Roz Naylor at Stanford published a policy landscape paper in Food Policy (thanks, Chris Barrett!) on aquaculture. I had the pleasure of working with her on this. Through a series of case studies, she presents a state-of-play on how aquaculture is playing out globally, and again, where those policy priorities elicit trade-offs that can be detrimental to the environment or nutrition. Check it out.



Food Bytes: October 2022 Edition

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

It’s been a long while since I posted a Food Bytes edition, and so much has happened in the food space in the past year. First, a UN Food Systems Summit happened, but I remain quite unclear on what was achieved or what will come of the year-long work leading up to the event. Second, a devastating conflict between two breadbasket countries trudges on, putting food security concerns back on the geopolitical agenda. Third, extreme weather events, many related to climate change, unrelentingly warn us that our ability to feed a world of 8 billion (yikes) is precarious and precious. But science is there to nudge us, generating new knowledge on why we and every other species are here, what accelerates us, what destroys us, and where we are heading. Charles Mann wrote in The Wizard and the Prophet (a stellar book about William Vogt and Norman Borlaug’s discordant visions to feed the world):

Another thing this book is not: a blueprint for tomorrow. The Wizard and the Prophet presents no plan, argues for no specific course of action. Part of this aversion reflects the opinion of the author: in our Internet era, there are entirely too many pundits shouting out advice. I believe I stand on firmer ground when I try to describe what I see around me than when I try to tell people what to do.

I resonate with these sentiments. Even though science is plagued by warts, hiccups, and flaws, catalyzing evidence and data to help describe the world matters because it helps us understand nature, people, and the planet. With that background in mind, this month’s Food Bytes is all about highlighting the science community’s observations and uncertainties of a changing world and what it means for food systems and climate change. I purposely do not highlight the work of my team and collaborators, but if you are curious about when we do, you can look here.

Source: McKay et al. SCIENCE 9 Sep 2022 Vol 377, Issue 661 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950

Let’s get the dark stuff out of the way. A paper by David Armstrong McKay and colleagues updated data showing that holding at 1.5°C will trigger multiple climate tipping points. What are these tipping points? Things like ice sheet “collapses,” forest “diebacks,” and permafrost “abrupt thaws” (see the figure to the right). These terms are downright scary but very plausible under different modeling scenarios. Okay, onto more uplifting news — KIDDING! Another study has shown that over the last 40 years, the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world, also known as Arctic amplification. These are massive global shifts that will further warm the planet, creating all kinds of chaos. What does it mean for us wee creatures living in our humble abodes? Well, the news is not totally uplifting on that front either. We are and will be deeply impacted by climate — and no one is immune. Research by Sylvia Blom and colleagues showed that repeated, extreme heat shocks impact early child nutrition — both chronic and acute malnutrition. They show that in 5 West African countries, a 2 °C rise in temperature will increase the prevalence of stunting by 7%. As the two latest 2022 Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change Reports on adaptation and mitigation, also known as the IPCC, argue, we still have time to act, although when you read it, you may want to have a nice glass of scotch in hand. While the window remains open, it is closing, and fast. We need to make massive changes to the way we live, much of that involving our use of resources. A recent Nature Sustainability paper showed that no country meets basic needs—such as nutrition, sanitation, and access to electricity—for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. To meet needs, we need to use resources somewhere between 2-6 times more to meet everyone’s needs. Gulp. Just take a look at the difference between the United States (a) and Sri Lanka (b) in the figure below. Blue wedges show social performance relative to the social threshold (blue circle), whereas green wedges show resource use relative to the biophysical boundary (green circle). The blue wedges start at the center of the plot (which represents the worst score achieved by any country), whereas the green wedges start at the outer edge of the blue circle (which represents zero resource use). Wedges with a dashed edge extend beyond the chart area. Ideally, a country would have blue wedges that reach the social threshold and green wedges within the biophysical boundary. Look at the inequities comparing the two countries!

Source: O’Neill, D.W., Fanning, A.L., Lamb, W.F. et al. A good life for all within planetary boundaries. Nat Sustain 1, 88–95 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4

The research and science in understanding the impacts of climate change on food systems and vice versa are growing exponentially. It is hard to keep up with the literature and weed out the noise. One area that deserves more attention is the impact of food trade on global greenhouse gas emissions and the environment—particularly land-use change—a significant source of emissions coming from food and agriculture. A study showed that 27% of land-use emissions and 22% of agricultural land are related to international trade (2004-2017)—food products consumed in a different place from where they were produced. The largest land-use emission transfers come from Indonesia and Brazil to China, the U.S., and Europe. A PLoS paper examining the future of trade shows that if we keep managing and governing global trade as is, food systems will be misaligned with dietary health and sustainability outcomes.

Perhaps one solution is through changing agriculture subsidy policies. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published their annual SOFI report and highlighted the need to transform agriculture subsidy programs around the world towards those that generate and produce healthier food products. Marco Springmann at Oxford modeled the impacts of subsidy policies that focused on nutritious foods and found multiple benefits across both environment and health. I am really uncertain about the political appetite to change subsidies. Talk about vested interests… Speaking of priorities, Ben Davies and colleagues argue that making big transformative policy changes across food systems is wonderful, but don’t do it “on the backs of the rural poor.” Although there are 2.7 billion people engaged in small-scale food production and 1.1 billion people concomitantly living in extreme poverty while working in agriculture, they are often ignored in the “transformation” story.

Affordability of a healthy diet grouped by five different food system typologies, showing transition of food systems. Source: Ambikapathi, et al Nat Food 3, 764–779 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00588-7

Positive transformation of food systems is not easy as history suggests. As Ramya Ambikipathi shows in a recent Nature Food paper, food systems have shifted from predominantly rural to industrialized and consolidated systems. Historically, incomes have risen faster than food prices as countries have industrialized, enabling a simultaneous increase in the supply and affordability of many nutritious foods. Evolving rural economies, urbanization, and changes in food value chains have accompanied these transitions, leading to changes in land distribution, a smaller share of agri-food system workers in the economy, and changes in diets. While the affordability of a recommended healthy diet has improved over time, food systems overall are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all. Another fantastic paper by Jeff Waage and colleagues in Lancet Planetary Health shows the complex and risky relationship between agriculture and infectious disease, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries that are undergoing rapid food system transitions. They remind us that lessons can be drawn from COVID-19 and the rise of zoonotic spillover events within food systems should be prioritized (and minimized) on the political agenda.

Ensuring that everybody gets access to and consumes a healthy diet will remain a global challenge. The metrics, indicators, and data in understanding what people eat and why are improving. Just check out the Global Diet Quality Project, which collects dietary quality data in the adult population across countries worldwide using the Gallup poll and provides tools to monitor diet quality within countries. Wow. I hear rumblings of a global report coming out soon, so stay tuned. There has been a whole range of papers coming out on diet quality. Victoria Miller at Tufts University is on a roll. In one recent Nature Food paper, she examines diets across 185 countries from 1990 to 2018 using the Global Dietary Database (estimates and modeled). Their assessment shows that diet quality is modest at best but varies significantly depending on where you live, how old you are, and how much education you have. No surprises, but good to see more data emerging from this database. Miller and colleagues also published a more specific paper examining the consumption of animal-sourced foods worldwide showing that meat consumption is lower or higher than optimal intakes depending on the population. Another Miller paper published in JAMA examines the association of specific dietary factors with coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes using a systematic review. The table below summarizes the relative risks of the associations of nutrients with heart disease and diabetes events. Bottomline? Eat your fiber.

Source: Miller et al JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(2):e2146705. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.46705

Another emerging area gaining significant traction with scientific consensus is ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a term loathed by the food industry and a handful of nutritionists. The majority of those working in nutrition epidemiology and public health largely agree that UPFs—food-like substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats that also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers—are detrimental to human health across a bolus of outcomes. Many people argue that these foods should be regulated, avoided, and minimized in the global food system. If you want to hear more about this ongoing debate, check out this BBC podcast and this online debate with some heavy hitters in the space like NIH’s Kevin Hall, Marion Nestle, and Mike Gibney. The next frontier for these foods is their environmental impact. While a handful of papers argue that these foods have a significant environmental and climate footprint, the evidence is scant, and much more needs to be done in this space.

The question is, are alt-meats in this category? The pace of science in this space is hard to keep up with as there is a lot coming out in the grey literature (see the IPES report and the OECD report as examples) along with peer-reviewed publications, but some of what is available often bends towards ideology and less science. Same with plastics. There is deep concern about microplastics showing up all over the place, including food, but the evidence and impact of these plastics on health outcomes need much more exploration. So while Mr. McGuire told Ben in The Graduate, that the future lay with one word, plastics, we may need to re-examine that advice in light of the fragility of our world.