The Leading Voices in Food – Détails, épisodes et analyse

If you feel like your grocery budget just doesn't buy you as much as it once did, you're not alone. According to U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices rose 11. 4 percent last year alone - the highest annual increase in 23 years. The ongoing pinch at the grocery store has been in the news of a lot of media outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Times Magazine, Forbes, and so many others. Our guest today, food economics and policy professor David Ortega from Michigan State, is going to walk us through the food price inflation phenomenon.

Interview Summary

We've been hearing a lot about food price inflation. Can you tell us how food prices have changed over the last four to five years, and how that compares to the recent past?

Definitely. So, I think it's always really important to define what food inflation is so that we're all on the same page. We hear this word a lot and we've been hearing it for a number of years now. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over a period of time - so how fast prices are changing or increasing in a given period. The time frame here is very, very important. Now, compared to last year, food prices are only up 2.1%. And this is for all food, which includes food at home and food away from home. Now groceries, food at home, are up 0.9% compared to last year. And menu prices at restaurants, or food away from home, are only 4.0% higher. Now if you're listening to this, you're probably thinking, ‘well, how can this be given how expensive things are at the grocery store?’ And that's because you are likely thinking about how food prices have changed since the start of the pandemic, right? So, over the past five years, food prices have increased around 26%. And so that's the cumulative effect of inflation that we're all very familiar with at the grocery store.

Wow. You talked about the recent past, and in particular, about the time since COVID. How has this looked historically if you take a longer time frame?

Yes, so if we look at a few years before COVID, food prices generally increase around 2% or so, year over year. Now in the summer of 2022, we experienced double digit increases in food prices. More than 11%, year over year. And that was the highest rate of increase in around 40 years, since the late 1970s and early '80s. So now that's a significant spike and departure from what we would consider to be normal. But the rate of increase has come down to almost pre pandemic levels, which is really great news. But remember the rate of inflation is the rate of increase, so because that rate has come down, it doesn't mean that prices are decreasing necessarily.

They're just not growing as fast as they were before.

Correct.

I have some ideas, but I really want to hear you talk about it. What has led to this significant increase in the last four and a half years or so?

It's really been a convergence of factors. It's not just one particular thing, but really all these factors coming together and sort of compounding on each other. We saw increases in labor costs, and then as we go through the timeline, we had Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. And that really sent commodity prices surging for things like wheat, other grains, as well as vegetable oils. And it wasn't just the invasion alone, but we had countries responding with export restrictions on things like palm oil that really just exacerbated the situation. We also have the impacts of climate change. The summer of 2022, and for a few years leading up to then, there was this mega drought in the West and the plain states that affected anything from lettuce prices to the price of meat. Something that we're experiencing to this day. We also have the bird flu outbreak, now the largest outbreak in U. S. history. Egg prices have been through a bit of a roller coaster ride, and we've been hearing a lot about increases in egg prices. That's primarily due to the high path avian influenza outbreak, or the bird flu outbreak.

Now, those are all what I would consider, for the most part, to be supply side factors. But we also have demand factors at play. And that is, that when we look at consumer spending on food, especially over the past two to three years, it's been much higher compared to before the pandemic. Even when you adjust for inflation. Now, this is likely attributed to households. Some of them accumulated savings. We had the fiscal stimulus payments from the government that injected cash into the economy. For a period of time, some households, we could splurge at the grocery store. We've seen, and the data from USDA shows, that consumer spending on food both at home and away from home is much higher in recent years than prior to COVID. So again, it's a combination of both supply side and demand side factors that have contributed to the significant rise in food prices.

This is a really important point that it's not a single factor, but it's this mix of things, which also makes it really difficult to talk about how to disentangle it. And I definitely want to hit on that. But before we get there, I want to know what has the impact of these significant price increases on consumers been?

The first thing that I want to point out is that food price inflation doesn't impact everyone the same. It's really low-income households that are hurt the most by these price increases. And that's because they spend a higher share of their income on food. When we look at the poorest 20% of American households, they're spending over a third of their income on food, compared to the average American household that spends roughly 10 to 12%. Now, when we look at industry data, we see that as a result of inflationary pressures, individuals are making shorter and more frequent trips to the grocery store. They're doing more price comparisons. They're turning and buying more of the private labels, the store brands, that sell at a much more affordable price point. And they're buying fewer premium items. So less of the stocking up that we saw at the beginning of the pandemic. But this in turn can also fuel an increase in the price of those conventional or cheaper items. And that's something that I found in the research that I've done on egg and poultry prices. When prices increase, consumers switch to the cheaper, more conventional items. And that increase in relative demand can put upward pressure on prices. So, we've seen this also reflected in the way that consumers are shopping for food and the prices that they're seeing.

I think this is really critical for us to appreciate that while it is an often talked about issue, price inflation, and it does hurt lots of people, but appreciating that lower income folks are facing this at a much harder way is important. And, having spent time working with the charitable food sector and understanding the experiences of the individuals there, you're regularly hearing people talk about the high price of food and how they're trying to navigate it. And the role that these food pantries can play in helping meet that need, but it just still it's a grind. It becomes really challenging.

Yeah.

Recent economic data actually shows that food price inflation is moderating. So, it's not as hot as it once was. But consumers are still experiencing sticker shock at the grocery store. What's going on here?

So, coming back to the earlier part of the conversation, people are really feeling the cumulative effects of inflation. And again, that's why I find it very important to define inflation as the rate of increase in food prices. Well, the average consumer at the grocery store shopper, they don't really care about the rate of increase. They care about the price level, right? When you see that eggs are $3-4 a dozen that's going to catch your attention. When we look at the last 4, 4.5 years, food prices are up 25%. That's a significant increase.

Now, another reason for this disconnect in terms of what the economic data is telling us and how consumers feel about food price inflation, is the nature of food prices in our interactions with them. We see food prices on a weekly if not more frequent basis. We know when prices are going up. We encounter food prices, we go grocery shopping, much more frequently than we get a haircut or we buy a plane ticket. We see these prices rise. Now, it's also important, coming back to this discussion on the percent increase versus the price level, a 2% increase today is a higher dollar amount than it was a year ago, and certainly 5 years ago. Because the base has increased. It's not just in the consumer psychology. It's when we look at the price level and the increase. Prices are increasing more in terms of a dollar amount today than they were in the past. And so because of this, in many ways, the grocery store has really emerged as the face of inflation here in this country. And it really has impacted just about everybody over the past four or five years.

As someone who hasn't had a haircut in probably 10 years, I really do know that prices have changed fairly quickly when it comes to food. But I don't know what's happening at the haircut. But I really appreciate this. And, but I think the thing that a lot of people struggle with in this conversation is, but inflation is coming down. We've just heard these reports and why aren't food prices going down? But you've made it clear. It was almost like we've reached this high level. It is hard for it to roll back. I mean, we don't expect prices to actually fall, do we?

When we look at specific items, right, it's not uncommon to see, say, the price of eggs decrease when we have a period of low bird flu activity. But by and large, when we look at food as a category, say groceries, there have been some periods in the recent past where food prices decreased, say, 1-2% year over year. But we shouldn't expect prices to decrease to the level that they were before COVID. And that's because the nature of prices. They generally increase from year to year. And that's a good thing as long as they are moderate increases. And as the data have been telling us for a couple of months now, we're looking at food price increases in the neighborhood of what they were prior to the start of the COVID 19 Pandemic.

This is helpful. And it kind of makes me think of something we were talking about earlier. And so I want to ask you this last question. There's been some conversation in policy circles about addressing this problem of food price inflation. What are your thoughts on how policy could be used to make a difference in this situation?

That's an excellent question. We're coming up on an election and there's been proposals on both sides floating around and I appreciate the focus on an issue that is affecting consumers. But we have to look at the policies and what economic theory can tell us about what's going to happen.

The first thing I'll say before I even get to that is that the President of the United States, policymakers, have very little control over food prices, especially in the short term. We really have to look at sort of the longer time horizon. How can we make our food system more resilient to future shocks? Investing in crops that are drought tolerance, right? That climate change is one of the factors that's going to be with us from here on out into the foreseeable future. We have to make those investments now so that we have a much more resilient food system in the future.

In terms of coming back to policies, we have to look at economic theory. There's been proposals to ban, say, a price gouging at the federal level. That's something that I think we have to look at very carefully because there could be some unintended consequences. This is just straight out of Econ 101. Other candidates have proposed tariffs across the board. We've seen what happened when we had the trade war with China back in 2018. It leads to even higher increases in food prices because food producers, food manufacturers, rely on inputs oftentimes from abroad. And so now they're facing higher prices, they're going to be passed on to the consumer. As we look at policies, I think it's really important to look carefully at what some of the outcomes may be so that we don't run into some unintended consequences.

BIO

David L. Ortega is a professor and the Noel W. Stuckman Chair in Food Economics and Policy at Michigan State University. His research program focuses on understanding consumer, producer, and agribusinesses decision-making to better inform food policies and marketing strategies. Dr. Ortega provides timely analysis of forces and events affecting the agricultural and food sectors. He has been called to provide expert testimony before federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Senate and House agriculture committees. He is a frequent contributor to food price inflation reporting at The New York Times and NPR, and is regularly interviewed by prominent media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, PBS, USA Today, CNN, Forbes, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Newsweek, and the Detroit Free Press, to name a few. Dr. Ortega earned his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Purdue University.

When we talk about problems with food insecurity and the food system, we tend to reference challenges at the national or international level. And of course, work at that level really needs to be done. But increasingly, there is a unique focus on regional food system strategies and right sizing solutions to best fit those unique characteristics of a particular locale. In today's podcast, we will talk with Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York. She leads the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the No Kid Hungry campaigns across the state of New York.

Interview Summary

Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you with us on the show today. We've done several podcasts with No Kid Hungry staff in the past and discussed topics like your Summer EBT Playbook for state governments. I'm really interested to learn more about your work in the state of New York.

Thank you so much for having me, Norbert. We have been so lucky to have No Kid Hungry on here to share the stories. And I'm excited to give you some updates about what we've learned with Summer EBT, and to talk about how things look in New York these days.

So, can you help our listeners understand more about No Kid Hungry New York as an organization? What is your approach to addressing childhood hunger?

No Kid Hungry is a campaign of Share Our Strength. And I have the honor and privilege of representing the organization across the state of New York as we work to create solutions, to draw more attention and awareness, and to help connect more kids and families with meals. We believe that every kid needs three meals a day to grow up healthy, happy, and strong. But too many children, and I know we'll talk more about this, are missing those meals. We really take an approach of working directly with communities. I don't know the right answer for each community. But my job and really my privilege is to work with school districts, with elected officials, with community organizations to look for challenges and work together to overcome them and really change systems.

I can appreciate that local communities look very different and appreciate if you're talking about New York City versus upstate New York. Can you tell us a little bit about how you all think differently about the cities versus the more rural areas of New York State?

I appreciate that question. I think all of my colleagues can hear me say, we almost run two different campaigns in New York. Because the approach in New York City, where there is one school district in five boroughs, but a large concentration of students, the largest school district in the nation, versus the rest of the state, is different. But ultimately, the challenges are the same. How are we communicating with families? What solutions are out there that we can implement? We really focus on listening, sharing tools, sharing toolkits, thinking about, in some communities, what they need are materials translated in different languages, so families understand that SNAP benefits are available, or summer EBT benefits. Or as in other communities, it's how can families get to a centrally located place to pick up meals? We really spend our time learning and listening and sharing these programs so that they can find the solutions that work best.

This is wonderful. I grew up in Georgia, I should just note. And I grew up in rural Georgia versus Atlanta. And we always talked about two Georgias, the Atlanta region versus the rural areas. And I can appreciate just how different some of those challenges are. But you're right, the central issue of access to food is similar and how you address those issues will look different in those regions.

I want to span out and talk about some national data that just has come out. USDA has reported food insecurity rates in the U.S. and we saw that hunger actually increased. And we see that for childhood hunger, food insecurity in general, it has risen since the 2019 pandemic. Why is this happening for children?

It's a challenging time. I think something that came out of the pandemic was right away, people said, families are struggling with hunger. What can we do? The stories on the news. We saw it no matter where you were in the country, with the lines to pick up food. And we saw government responded very quickly. There were expanded SNAP benefits. There were no cost school meals provided to every child across the country. We saw pandemic EBT implemented. We also saw the expanded child tax credit. At a time when families were facing tremendous challenges, there was that support from the government. But many of those programs have now ended. And in these economically challenged times, incomes haven't changed. Some people are still dealing with an unemployment crisis. We hear a lot from families as well that they're underemployed. There may be a job, but it's not that same income. And without these expanded government programs, families are facing challenges.

How is this looking specifically in New York State? Are there specific challenges happening in the state?

I think so, and we have specific challenges in New York, but as we talked about earlier, I think we see every state is facing that. In New York State right now, hunger rose for child food insecurity. We're looking at one in five children in New York State. If we look at New York City, it's one in four children could face food insecurity this year. I often say that hunger hides in plain sight because I hear from people, well, they have a house. Well, with a set budget, they're paying to keep that roof over their heads, they're paying for their electricity bill, and what is the number that can shift in the budget, unfortunately? It's for food. We did a survey earlier this year, and four in five families in New York State found that it became harder to afford groceries. Their incomes just were not remaining at the same levels. And in those surveys, when we dig in a little bit, it was highest in rural communities and parents of school aged children. They are fighting hard for their families, but with all these economic challenges, as a society, we have to do more to help them.

Thank you for sharing those insights. And I remember early in the pandemic, some colleagues at Tufts and I did a qualitative study talking to families who were using little free pantries. Those ‘lending library boxes’ where people were putting food and one of the stories that we heard that kept coming up was. It was about price inflation, which was interesting because this was at the early part of the pandemic, and we did worry what happened to those families as inflation increased. And this was before some of those policies came into place about summer EBT and other food assistance programs. But now that those programs have gone away and inflation is starting to let up, but it's still a challenge for families. I really appreciate the way the campaign is thinking about these issues. You've already mentioned earlier that the No Kid Hungry team has worked on the summer EBT playbook as you prepared for a national launch of that program. Could you first just give us a brief overview of what the playbook is and then how has the rollout gone in New York State?

Even to take it back a step, Summer EBT was a new program launched this year. Every state was eligible to opt into this program, which provided a grocery benefit for eligible children and families. Before this, it was available in certain states that were part of a pilot, and No Kid Hungry had been advocating for this to be nationwide. We also knew that there was going to be a short amount of time for this program to launch. So, what we did was bring all our tools and resources together, our staff members, and we said, what do states need to implement? We partnered with organizations like Code for America, like APHSA, and to really see what is this? So, is it tools to get the word out about the program? Is it about implementation? Is it connecting states that face similar challenges to learn from each other? What the state agencies did this year to implement this program in year one, in about six months, was pretty unbelievable. And we also hope that as we're learning from this, we're going to see even more exciting changes in year two.

In terms of New York and summer EBT, we have been seeing so thrilled to see the uptake of the program, the outreach and awareness for summer EBT in New York. In August, Governor Hochul convened an event to celebrate the launch. We had members of Congress, we had No Kid Hungry, we had families there talking about this program. We heard from families how challenging the summer months have been and how this made that difference to get meals to kids.

We've been working with the New York City Council on doing trainings for staff members. So many people trust their local elected official’s office to get answers. How do I get a new card? How do I check my balance? We are learning a lot, we're seeing materials in different languages, and again, what we're excited to do is recap year one, and how do we learn more and make it even easier for families to access in year two?

This is amazing work, and I, I know it's really a challenge when folks, if you will, leave money on the table. And so, helping people connect to the resources that they have legal rights to is a critical role that you all are playing. What do you hope will happen as you learn from the playbook as it was applied in New York? What do you hope to share with other states in this process?

We want to show other states our best practices, what worked really well, what's something that we would tweak a little differently. We also want to make sure that those states that weren't able to opt in this year, because there were more than 10, I think about 15, that did not opt in. We want them to see what they can do and how they can use this program to connect kids with meals. But also, this money is reinvested in local communities. Families are using it at grocery stores, at local markets. In New York, we're really excited to see how they're using it at green markets, getting those fresh fruits and vegetables, supporting agriculture. This program while it addresses hunger, it's also an economic engine. And we want to make sure everybody understands that and are using those dollars in a valuable way.

I want to ask you a last question, and it's sort of a big question about child hunger. So, what is the outlook of child hunger in New York, and what gives you hope about addressing this challenge?

One of the things that gives me tremendous hope Is when we did our survey of New Yorkers, 93 percent of New Yorkers believe that solving childhood hunger should be a bipartisan issue. They don't see the politics of this in New York. We have seen that increasing the SNAP minimum benefit is a bipartisan solution. We have seen no cost school meals for all children has bipartisan support. I think we see New Yorkers recognize they want to make a difference. We get questions all the time. How can I help? We have media outlets sharing the deadlines, putting the updates out for families. We see elected officials in New York State that are paying attention to what's happening in their backyards and their local communities. And they want to make a difference. I hope that what we are seeing in New York translates into other states, translates to the federal level. There is an excitement right now around school meals, and we're hearing a different dialogue. It's something that people like you and I, we know the difference it makes, but I'm hearing from family, from friends, 'Rachel, I read this story on School Meals," tell me about this. My hope is the excitement, the enthusiasm and the interest really changes the conversation and helps us drive forward solutions that will ensure that someday there is no kid hungry.

BIO

Rachel Sabella has been a respected advocate, strategist and leader for nonprofit organizations for more than 20 years. She has been the Director of No Kid Hungry New York, a campaign of Share Our Strength, since 2018. In this role, Ms. Sabella works closely with stakeholders across New York State to ensure children have access to the nutrition they need to grow and thrive. She oversees grant-making, awareness building, programmatic and advocacy priorities for No Kid Hungry New York and manages relationships with state and local policymakers. Since March of 2020, she developed and oversaw a strategy to distribute more than $9 million in emergency grant funding to organizations across the state of New York and Puerto Rico to connect more kids and families to meals. She has led successful advocacy campaigns at both the city and state levels on issues including expanding access to school meal programs and SNAP in order to connect more New Yorkers with meals. Ms. Sabella also serves as a member of the NYS Council on Hunger and Food Policy and was appointed to Mayor-Elect Eric Adams’ transition team. Prior to this role, Ms. Sabella served as the Director of Government Relations and Policy for the Food Bank For New York City. During this time, she led advocacy campaigns to grow and strengthen resources for anti-hunger programs, which led to unprecedented support for food pantries and soup kitchens in New York City. Her advocacy efforts also led to the creation of 25 school-based pantries that distribute food, menstrual and hygiene products, and household cleaning supplies to families in need.

Today we discuss a new and provocatively titled book written by Southwestern Law School professor Andrea Freeman, an expert on issues of race, food policy, and health from both legal and policy perspectives. The book's title, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground, the Politics of Food in the United States from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, has been called the first and definitive history of the use of food in the United States law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control. Freeman argues that the U. S. food law and policy process has both created and maintained racial and social inequity. She documents governmental policies from colonization to slavery; to the commodities supplied to Native American reservations. She argues that the long-standing alliance between government and the food industry has produced racial health disparities to this day.

Interview Summary

Let's talk about the title of your book. What are you trying to communicate?

So 'ruin their crops on the ground' is a paraphrase of what George Washington ordered his troops to do, to try to displace Indigenous people and take over their land.

That's a pretty powerful image to think about that. So, in your book, you use the term food oppression. Can you explain what you mean?

Yes. So I originally started writing about food oppression as the alliance between corporations, the food and agricultural industries, and the government that [00:02:00] create stark health disparities on a racial basis, sometimes gender and class. And as I've come through thinking about this over the years, I'm also using it to describe the way that food has always been used as a tool of subordination by the U.S. Government in history.

An interaction between the industry and government isn't inherently oppressive. How does it come to be that way? I mean, it could be good, good for the public, it could be bad, but why does it, how does it become oppressive?​

Yeah, I agree that the problem with the food industry is that the desire to make profits is in conflict with the nutritional needs of people that the U.S., Government programs focus on nutrition are supposed to be serving.

Let's go back to some of the earlier times. You've written about the role that food played in slavery. Could you explain?

Absolutely. So, enslavers were very careful about the portions and the type of food that they gave to people. the people that they enslaved. And they would write pamphlets and advise each other. Hoping to find a balance to give enslaved people enough food to be able to work and be alive, but not enough to give them the energy to revolt or perform acts of resistance that they inevitably did. And then food was used to create hierarchies within enslaved peoples. It was used to, I don't know, take away pleasure, really, from life to oppress people in so many ways. And so, not just from the content of the food, but even the way that food was delivered. So, instead of eating on plates, food might be poured into a pig trough or scattered on the ground, right? There are so many ways that enslavers used food to try to degrade and subordinate people through either the portions or the content or the delivery.

Food is such a fundamental and kind of elementary form of reinforcement. You could imagine it being used to punish particular individuals and reward others.

Absolutely. And the law backed up the way that enslavers used food. And even when enslaved people wanted to grow their own food, and perhaps sell it to gain some advantage, the law prevented that. Enslavers might just take over those gardens. Steal the food. Use it for their own purposes. That was all perfectly legal. And the law tried to protect other enslavers from having enslaved people come and steal their food by having some laws in place that said, you must give adequate provisions, which looked like something that might protect enslaved people, but in fact was only to protect other enslavers.

Going back to the title of your book, it makes reference to the Trail of Tears. And people have highly varying levels of knowledge of what the Trail of Tears refers to. In North Carolina, it's a really important and tragic part of the state's history for the native individuals living in the western part of the state. But could you tell us more about how food figured into this, what it was and how food figured in?

Of course. So the United States wanted the land that Indigenous people were living on. And they designated a part of the country that covers Oklahoma and some states around there and called it the Indian Country or Indian Territory. And to try to force indigenous people to move to that land and to make a journey across the country that was so dangerous, and ended up killing maybe half of the people who made that journey, they destroyed the food sources of people. They had no choice at all. They were starving. They either had to go or die there with no food. And food played into the promises that were made by the United States government of rations that would be given along the way and when people arrived. However, in reality, the rations were gone by the time many people arrived. Or they were bad meat or they were just inedible. And so, they caused not only people to move, but then once they arrived, caused many more deaths. Either along the way or once they were there. A lot of it was unfamiliar food that couldn't be cooked or digested. Food played a major role in the Trail of Tears and what happened both before and after that journey.

And the quality of the land for agriculture that they were forced to settle on was part of the picture too, wasn't it?

 Yes. Some of it was good and some of it was absolutely terrible. And people were given no choice about where they were going to end up.

Let's fast forward to more current times. The U. S. Department of Agriculture has created several very important nutrition programs with the stated aim of improving nutrition. But you've raised some concerns. Please tell us why?

Yes. If we just think about that journey that began with the Trail of Tears and with George Washington's order. And then the role that food rations have played in the relationship between the United States and Indigenous people. The rations that were first introduced in trying to force that move, then played a role in many elements of this policy. For example, rations were taken away if parents would not give up their children to the federal Indian boarding schools. They were taken away as a punishment if Indigenous people engage in their own cultural and kinship practices under the Code of Indian Offences.

And so, rations played a huge role, and they continue to do so. They have now transformed into what is the food distribution program for Indian reservations. Which is another system whereby the United States is providing food to Indigenous people who are living on reservations, do not have access to many food sources at all, and so, are in need of nutrition. But the contents of the food that are given out through this program don't reflect the needs of the people who are receiving it. They reflect the needs of the agricultural industries and the surpluses that the USDA is responsible for getting rid of because of federal subsidies through the Farm Bill.

You've written as well about food marketing. Tell us what your thoughts are on that?

Food marketing is so important because it really defines in our society who eats what. It tells us a story that is rife with racial stereotypes and kind of propaganda about food. And it also determines the food landscape in many ways. When I think about race and marketing, marketing first of food really just employed a lot of racist tropes. Because marketing was directed only to white people. And, you know, racism was something that sold. We've seen that change and become more subtle over the years to the present where we even see food marketing taking on anti-racism as a form of what's called woke washing, to try to gain consumer dollars by adopting a certain political position.

The issue of who is targeted by marketing is enormously interesting, complex, and highly important. I'm glad to see you addressing that in your book. Let me ask one final question before we wrap up. How is the U. S. Constitution involved in this?

I have a theory as a constitutional law professor that the way that the United States has dealt with food in a way that creates racially disparate outcomes violates both the 13th amendment and the 14th amendment. So, let me explain. The 13th Amendment says that anything that comes out of slavery as a vestige, or a badge or a marker of slavery is not allowed. And that means that policies that began back then, that continued today with discriminatory harm are prohibited under the13th Amendment. I talked a little bit about how during slavery food was used to oppress and subordinate. And that caused health problems. Very racially disparate health problems where enslaved people suffered from illnesses and conditions and deaths associated with food and malnutrition at much higher rates than white people. That was explained away by constitution and genetics, but that was all lies. In the present, we still have those disparities and they're still due to deliberate policies that create this oppression, the food oppression that I talked about in the beginning. The 13th amendment should not allow that kind of food discrimination in the same way that it doesn't allow housing discrimination. Now, under the 14th amendment, all people should be treated equally by the government. But what we have is food policy that treats people differently based on their race. In the case of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), that's quite clear. In some other cases, like public school lunches, you have to kind of take a step back to understand how there are racially disparate effects. But the same commodities that the USDA is responsible for getting rid of, that they do through the Indian reservation program are being sent to schools. And these are public schools where in many districts, there are many more Black, Latina, indigenous students than white students. For example, where I am in LA, that's 94 percent of the public-school population. And the government is using that program to get rid of very unhealthy food that is making kids who go to public schools sick. And that is unequal treatment under the law. It should violate the 14th Amendment.

You know, I'm not an expert on constitutional law, but this is the first time I've heard this argument made and it's really an interesting one. Do you think there would be a day when we would see legal action based on this theory?

I think it's possible. I don't think that legal action would be successful in our present moment of jurisprudence. But I think that framing is really important for people to think about and to understand what is happening. And I think that sometimes thinking about things as unconstitutional can provoke social action. Social movement. It can allow people to think about injustice in a certain way that creates resistance. So, I think it's important, even if we can't bring a case today, on that basis.

BIO

Andrea Freeman is a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. She is a national and international expert on the intersections between critical race theory and food policy, health, and consumer credit. She is the author of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan 2024) and Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press 2019), in addition to book chapters, law review articles, and op-eds. Skimmed is currently in development for a documentary with Topic Pictures. Her work has been featured in publications including the Washington Post, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Huffington Post, USA Today, The Root, Yahoo! News, The Atlantic, NPR Shots Blog, Pacific Standard, The Conversation, Medium, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and National Library of Medicine, and she has done interviews with news outlets and programs including CBS News, PBS News Hour, The Takeaway, Here & Now, Point of Origin, Newstalk Irish National Radio, Heritage Radio Network, The Electorette, Hawaii Public Radio. She studied food inequality in the UK as the 2020-21 Fulbright King's College London U.S. Scholar. 

Empowering Women in AgriFood Tech: A Conversation with Amy Wu of From Farms to Incubators - In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson speaks with Amy Wu, the creator and content director of From Farms to Incubators. Amy shares her inspiring journey in highlighting and supporting women, particularly women of color, in the agri-food tech industry. Learn about the origins of her groundbreaking documentary and book, her vision for a vibrant community of women innovators, and the crucial role of education, mentorship, and policy in advancing women's roles in this sector.

Interview Summary

I have a great set of questions for you. So, the first thing, could you just tell our listeners a little bit more about From Farms to Incubators?

Sure. From Farms to Incubators is a special initiative and project that tells the stories of women in this fast-growing field known as ag tech, sometimes interchangeably used as Agri food tech as well. The mission of it is really to get more women involved in ag tech through storytelling, through resources, and also through education and training. I also would describe it as a multimedia content platform. I actually came to this as a journalist and as a storyteller that uses storytelling to amplify the voices of women leaders and entrepreneurs in this field. It's also a documentary and a book and also a website where we archive their stories and their biographies as well.

Thanks for that overview, and you just talked about the book and the documentary From Farms to Incubators: women innovators revolutionizing how our food is grown, which uses storytelling to highlight women innovators and how women innovators in the Agri food tech are doing their best. But there's also a movement and the community and this multimedia platform. Why did you expand from the book and documentary into this larger network?

That's a really good question. Briefly, as some context, I kind of fell into this project. It was a bit of serendipity. I was a reporter in Salinas, California, which is the vegetable salad bowl of the world. Ag is a huge industry, a 10 billion industry. And I was covering government and agriculture. And I observed that there were not a lot of women at the helm of the table, whether it be at farms or also in this growing field of ag tech as well. So it started off as a documentary. I got a grant from the International Center for Journalists, and then ultimately I got another grant from the International Media Women's Foundation to do a short documentary to profile three women who are entrepreneurs in ag tech. It was great. It was at the time in 2016, which now was ages ago, I guess. It was really hard to find women in ag, in this field of ag tech, women creating the innovations to tackle some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, especially under climate change. So, it could have ended there because the documentary turned out to be very, very well received. It's screened at hundreds of places, and I would have panels and discussions and the women would look at each other like, 'my gosh, I didn't know there were other women doing this too. Can you connect us? We'd love to convene further.' And then educators, community leaders, agribusinesses, investors just didn't know they existed as well. So, what happened was the stories kind of multiplied and multiplied as the more that I collected them. And then I decided to put it into a book profiling about 30 women in this growing field.

And to answer your question, Norbert, why is it continuing is that I saw a real need for women to have a community, women in agriculture and innovation and food systems to have a community to connect with one another, to potentially build friendship, build collaboration, build partnership, creating a collective vision sometimes and a place for them. I didn't plan on it. So, I guess the storytelling connects them. We've also have resources like a database that connects them and the goal is really so that they can have a community where they can build more. They can either build out their own startups. They can build their careers, build their professions. And then it kind of grew more legs. Now we're also extending into the area of education and training to try to get younger women, young people, youth. To see that agriculture, hey, may not be traditionally sexy. I mean, tractors and overalls are still what a lot of people think about it, but there are so many other opportunities in the food system for young people as well, especially since we all have to eat. So, how are farmers going to be producing the food for 10 billion people in 2050, right? Who's going to produce the food? How are we going to do it? Especially under the auspices of climate change, the weather's getting crazier and crazier. That's sort of why it has expanded from the stories all the way to what it is today.

This is a great story and I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the women and their innovations. And if I may, I would like for you to actually even explain a little bit about what you mean by the ag food tech or Agri food tech as you're talking about these women.

Broadly defined, is any kind of innovation that makes it easier, frankly, for farmers to do their work, to grow more efficiently, and to also increase [00:06:00] their yield. I can give some examples of what innovation is. Blockchain addresses food safety, really. It traces everything from the seed to all the way on the shelf, right? So if there's any safety issues, it's used to trace back, where did that seed come from? Where was it grown? What field was it in? And that really helps everybody in the food systems a lot more, right? We have sensors connected with drones. I forgot to mention robotics as well, which is a fast-growing area of ag tech. Everything from self-driving tractors to laser scarecrows to another level of robots that are picking specific kinds of fruits and vegetables that's tackling labor challenges. I don't foresee that ag tech necessarily is a replacement by the way of people. It's actually offering more opportunities because we need people who are very knowledgeable that kind of innovation.

And then you also asked a bit about the stories of the women in ag tech, for example, in the film and in the book and so forth. Soil sampling is a fast-growing area of ag tech. There's the story that I have in the book and also in the movie of two young women who are Stanford PhD graduates. Who created a soil testing kit that makes it easy for farmers to just test their soil for diseases, for pests, and soil testing is traditionally, you know, very, very expensive for most farmers actually. Not easy for farmers to get access to it and to get the data, but the soil testing kit that they created makes it a lot easier for farmers, small farmers even, to access it. And why is that important is because the more knowledge, the more data that, and analytics that farmers can get, the more that they can make smart decisions about how much to fertilize, how much to irrigate.

And that connects with the yield and their success. You know, another company that I can think about, another amazing woman. I just like her story, the story of AgTools and the story of Martha Montoya, who was actually an award-winning cartoonist. And she doesn't come from agriculture at all, and that's actually something that I want to highlight is a lot of these women are not farmers and don't come from agriculture. But she was a award winning cartoonist. I believe she was also a librarian and she fell into the food industry, and saw a need for having more data, offering more data and analytics to farmers. She created a system a little bit like a Bloomberg for farmers, where they can get real time data immediately on their phones, on their watches, so that they can get second by second data to make decisions on specific crops.

Those are a couple of the stories that are in the book, but really what I want to highlight is that all of the innovation that they are creating addresses some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, whether it be labor issues,lack of water, some areas of our country are becoming more wet, others are becoming more dry, drones that are actually doing the irrigation now or drones taking photos to give more data to farmers as well on what is their land look like. You know, it could also be human resources related as well to manage staff. So mobile apps to manage staff on cattle farms. I mean, how big are the cattle farms sometimes, you know, 50,000 acres. So, it's really to save money and to create efficiency for farmers.

If farmers are able to do their work more efficiently, they're able to generate greater profits, but it also allows for food prices not to rise. This has really big implications. Thank you for sharing those stories. And I love hearing about some of the individuals, but here's the question. I mean, why focus on women? What's important about what women contribute to this? And also, why are you also considering race as an important lens in this sector?

Well, I would say, why not women? Because women have already been contributing to the global food system, whether in the production end or the decision makers at the head of the dinner table for thousands of thousands of years, arguably. So what I discovered is that their stories, their contributions, existing contributions were not being celebrated and were not being amplified. And I actually discovered that a lot of the women that I connected with were a bit shy about even telling their story and sharing it like kind of like, 'what is my contribution?' And I'm like, 'well, why aren't you sharing your story more?' So the goal of it really is to document and celebrate their contributions, but also to inspire. As I said, young women, next generation, all of us have daughters, nieces, granddaughters, you know, and then future generations to consider opportunities in a field where we need people. We need people who are smart and you don't have to be from a generation of farmers. You could be in science, engineering, technology, and math. You could just be passionate about it and you could be in the field. So that's the first aspect of it.

And in terms of the lens of gender and race, there are not enough women in terms of just the startups in ag tech right now, only 2 percent of the billions of dollars being invested in ag tech startups. Only 2 percent are going into women led companies. It is very, very little. It is a problem that is deep rooted. And it starts with [00:12:00] funding. One problem is where is the funding coming from. Venture capitalists, traditional avenues of funding, where it is traditionally male dominated. So, there are many studies that show that investors will invest in companies where they connect with those who are leading the companies, right? So similar gender, similar backgrounds, similar stories. So, we're really looking to have a paradigm shift and move the needle of sorts and say that if there are more investors, there are more board members who are from a diversity backgrounds, then there will be more funding for women and those who are traditionally not leading agriculture, not in the leadership positions, not in the decision-making roles, right? There is a problem. There is a, what is a grass ceiling, not just glass ceiling, but grass ceiling.

I hear you. I hear you. Now this is really fascinating. I know from colleagues who are in agriculture that there is this demand for more agricultural workers throughout the Agri food system. And if there is a demand, we're saying that our colleges that produce the potential workers aren't meeting those demands. One of the ways we can see that change is by having more women and more people of color join in. And so, this is a critical thing. And I would imagine also the experiences that people bring may be a critical part of coming up with new innovations. Diversity can do that. This is exciting that you're exploring this.

I love what you're saying Norbert. I know I wanted to touch upon that about what you just noted is that it's also to create a pipeline, right? Education training is just so critical. And it makes me so happy to see that there are more and more programs at universities and colleges that are addressing programs in food systems, in agriculture, and increasingly in ag tech. So, whether it be courses or programs or certificates or eventually minors and majors, developing the pipeline of talent is really important and having mentors and mentees, which is something that now we're working on. This fall we'll have launched a menteeship program for women and for young people interested in ag tech and the first collaborator is the UC Merced in California. So, thanks for bringing that up. We have a couple of young people ready at the starting gates. Really excited.

I will say just on a personal note, I was active in 4 H for most of my youth and that's the way I got involved in agriculture. So, touching or reaching out to folks in their youth is critical to get them excited and help them to make the connection so that they can do that work further. I'm glad to hear this work. In your view, what are some of the ongoing challenges and opportunities that women face in the ag tech sector or the Agri food sector? What are some of the things you're observing?

Well, a continued challenge is having a place at the table, meaning at the leadership and decision-making level. And actually, as I noted earlier, the access to funding and not just the money, but the access to resources, meaning could be legal operational. Just how to get their startups or get their ideas out there. One example that I'm seeing that's again positive is that there's a growing number of incubators and accelerators specifically in food tech or ag tech that are is actually looking for candidates who are women or who are from underrepresented communities. The first thing is that they have a great innovation, of course, but the next thing that the incubators and accelerators are looking for is to have a diversity of perspectives. And to have representation, so seeing a lot more of that, whether it be. Individual accelerators, or even once at the university, right? Universities and colleges and the governmental level.

The other challenge is access to farmers and connecting them with the farmers themselves. Cause farmers are very, very busy and that's highlighted and bolded. Increasingly just dealing with this chess game that's very hard to play with the weather, but also with their own resources. It's expensive being a farmer, equipment, labor. They don't often have the time, frankly, to beta test some of the innovations coming out. So how best to connect innovators with the farmers and to have them communicate with each other: like this is the innovation. This is how it's going to help your problem. Educating the farmers and allowing them to see that this is how it's going to address the problem that I have. So, the two are still kind of separate and access to each other is still, I would say, a major challenge. But right now, some of the solutions are, as I've noted, networking at conferences and convenings. Also, under the grant programs sometimes under the National Science Foundation or USDA, they are allowing more collaborative initiatives where you have educators, where you have policy, where you have the innovators, where you have the young people. Increasingly, seeing more and more of those kinds of projects and initiatives happen. So hopefully everybody will have a seat at the table and that would help women out a lot in the field as well.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing those. And I love the fact that you're looking at not just identifying issues, but also trying to find ways of connecting folks to help overcome those challenges that women and women of color are facing in the marketplace. And it's the connections that are really critical. I appreciate you highlighting that. So, what is your ideal vision?

Oh, one more thing I forgot to note is that in terms of connecting, there's also a database - a women in Agri food tech database, and I, and at least four or five other women in the field have been working on for at least four or five years now. We now have more than a thousand members. It's an open-source database where you can click on a form, put your name there and information takes a few minutes and then you're added to this database where the women can be connected to each other as well. So that's another resource.

Yeah. And I mean, even just having peer mentors, not just mentors who are above you and they've like solved all the problems, but having people to go along with you as you're developing and as they are developing can be a critical part. I know as an academic, that's important for me and has been important for me. And I can imagine the same is true in this space as well. So, I'm so grateful to hear about this work. Yeah. What is your ideal vision for women in Agri food tech in the next, say, five years? And how will the digital network for from farms to incubators play a role in achieving that goal or those goals?

So, my dream - it always starts, I think, in the dreaming phase and then connecting that with also resources along the way. But if I could wave my magic wand, I would say that. We would have a lot more women in leadership and thought decision making positions in ag tech to the point where maybe we won't even need something like From Farms to Incubators anymore because they'll be already equal. The stories will be out there. So, it might be questionable as to why we have a special subgroup or network for this now. How to get to that vision, I think is the three components of increasingly having more stories, and the women tell their stories at public outreach. You know, it could be at conferences, it could be in their own communities, sharing their story out to the community of farmers, of local government, of schools, local schools and colleges and universities, gardening clubs.

The second component is education and training, building a pipeline. A vision that I have is actually having a campus. A virtual, and also in-person campus where women, especially from women in underprivileged communities will have the opportunity to have training and to be connected with mentors and the rock stars in the ag tech and Agri food tech field. Where they will also be able to have a project and initiative and test it out and have something to add to their portfolio. To have classes and people who are teaching those courses as well, ultimately. And then also to just build up a hub of resources. Like I mentioned the database. I mentioned that we'd like to extend it to having resources where folks can easily access internships, fellowships, granteeships, where they can be connected to funding. If they need help with legal, HR, just all components of everything that's needed to have a successful organization.

And it doesn't have to just be their own startup. It could be a job database of where we have larger organizations and companies that are building up their own ag innovation or food innovation center as well. So that is the vision. It's a big vision. It's a big dream. So we're going to have to kind of break it down into components. But I think taking it step by step is the way to go kind of like climbing Everest or doing a long distance swim.

Yes, I can see where you're trying to go in this vision and I'm interested to know what, if any role policy could play and help advance that vision.

Yeah, so what role could policy play in advancing this vision? Currently, when it comes to diversity inclusion in the ag tech field or even in agriculture, there is somewhat a lack of policy in a way. But then also with individual organizations and corporations, obviously, there is the movement of diversity inclusion. But also, I think it's very much with the hiring practices with HR. I think it's up to individual organizations, whether they be small, larger ones, governmental, to look at their own hiring practices. To look at who they are, how are they crafting the language when they look for a job, when they look at their leadership team, are there ways to further diversify it and when it comes to, gender, ethnicities, people who come from a rural area, urban. I mean, we all come with, from a diversity of perspectives and stories. I think a lot of it will come down to hiring practices and advancing this vision and with the individuals who are already working at those organizations to be more thoughtful and conscious about giving those who don't have a place at the table, a place and a voice at the table, giving everybody a chance. Because we have some amazingly talented and knowledgeable people who just traditionally in agriculture don't have families and generations who come from an ag background. But they do come with so much that they could offer. I would say that those are a couple of examples of that as well. And maybe, more discussion about policy is really needed on a larger level when it comes to farmers, when it comes to government leaders, when it comes to innovation leaders as well. And when it comes to educators and schools. I think the more the merrier when it comes to bringing folks at the table to open it up for discussion on solutions.

I appreciate this. And, this idea of not just welcoming people so that they get in the door, but also creating change. Environments and spaces where people are actually welcomed once they're there. That it becomes a place where folks can be themselves and bring all of who they are to the work that they're doing. This is critical.

Yes, absolutely. I want to touch upon that. My own story is I don't have an agricultural background myself. But when I first , landed in a place like Salinas, very much sort of an outsider because I'm not from there anyway, but also not in agriculture and then being a woman and being, you know, a Chinese American woman too, you know, I, I did feel that there was a challenge to kind of break into certain circles and to be welcome. Even despite my passion and enthusiasm, there was a little bit like, 'what is she? Why? Why? What? She, she doesn't know anything.' But I felt like it was the people who in the beginning, it was just a couple of people who were like, 'Hey, this is somebody who really wants to tell the story of what we're doing. Give her a chance.' You know, having advocates, frontline advocates made a huge difference. So that's what I'm hoping for, more frontline advocates.

Amy, I want to pick up on a personal story out of this. I did my graduate training out at UC Davis, at University of California, Davis. And I worked on dairy policy, which I do not have a dairy background. And it was great to have a mentor who actually helped me. Who introduced me to a number of folks and working through extension and the California Department of Food and Ag. Folks made space for me, and they understood that I was interested in this particular policy and trying to understand what it meant. And I actually got to learn so much. It was because people just said, okay, we'll give you a try. And I did the best I could. I'm grateful for that. Creating these spaces is not hard. It's not impossible. It can be done. I'm really appreciative of your efforts to keep furthering that story.

I love that story. And indeed Norbert it's like what you said, creating the space and even, even in the beginning and just having a couple of folks just to make space. And then I think the space is going to grow from there.

I fully agree. I've got one last question for you. And it's, sort of related to the vision, but just also thinking long term. What impact do you hope your work will ultimately have on society.

I hope that my work will create a bit of a shift ultimately. I mean, that's a rather large goal, but it's not just myself. As this project has grown and extended and expanded. It's really a joint team effort. I mean, along this journey, I've met folks who are mission aligned. And they also see the value in this, and they believe in something similar. Whether it be that they contribute their story, whether it be that they help write the stories, whether it be that they come be a guest speaker, and they share their career, and then they end up connecting with the younger person, every person counts in this. In making a shift. And it might take generations to completely have a paradigm shift, but I think that just moving the needle a bit is ultimately the goal, certainly. And in terms of the bigger picture of things, I'm hoping that it will continue to spark a discussion and ongoing conversation about the importance and the value of bringing different voices and people who traditionally were not given a space at the table when it comes to the food systems and agriculture. But who brings so much talent, so much to the table already. How we can make greater space for them as well, and how we can incorporate their talent and create a better food system for everybody. We all eat and we're looking at 10 billion people in 2050. So, looking at the people who are making those contributions and telling their stories and especially for those who traditionally have not had their voices told, I think is really, really important. I just keep the fire going, I guess.

BIO

Amy Wu is an award-winning writer for the women’s Ag and Agtech movement. She is the creator and chief content director of From Farms to Incubators, a multimedia platform that uses documentary, video, photography, and the written word to tell the stories of women leaders and innovators in Agtech. It has a mission of highlighting women in food, farming, and farmtech, especially women of color. From Farms to Incubators includes a documentary and a book that spotlights women leaders in Ag and Agtech. The documentary and stories have been screened and presented at SXSW and Techonomy. The initiative was awarded grants from the International Center for Journalists and International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund. Amy was named on Worth magazine’s “Groundbreakers 2020 list of 50 Women Changing the World” list. Since 2018 she has served as the communications manager at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in Hurley NY where she runs the website, digital newsletter, and social media. Prior to starting From Farms to Incubators, Amy spent over two decades as an investigative reporter at media outlets including the USA Today Network where she reported on agriculture and Agtech for The Salinas Californian. She’s also worked at Time magazine, The Deal and contributed to The New York Times, The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from New York University, and master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

In today's discussion, we will explore the application of debt relief to large investments in environmental sustainability, which can also support local development, including more resilient food systems. This is particularly timely, given the juxtaposition of enormous debt burdens with increasing environmental commitments by developing countries. Debt for relief swaps, such as financial forgiveness for cash strapped countries if they invest those funds to support global environmental goods, have been around since the 1980s. However, they haven't achieved their full economic or environmental potential, says Duke University Economic and Environmental Policy Professor Alex Pfaff. Smart reforms to improve debt relief programs can allow nations to help themselves and fulfill commitments to preserve the planet. Pfaff and colleagues described needed reforms in a recent analysis in a policy forum for the journal Science, also summarized in Foreign Policy magazine. His co-authors are sustainability expert Elizabeth Losos and conservation professor Stuart Pimm from Duke University. They note that global society has now learned lessons, not only from past debt for nature swaps, but also decades of evaluation of climate change of environmental and development policies.

Interview Summary

I have to say, having read particularly the Science piece, it is clear and it's very straightforward and accessible. But the other thing, it's hopeful. And I think in this moment of climate concerns, it's great to know that there's some ways to possibly move forward. I'd love to hear some more about this. If you don't mind, would you just describe a debt for nature swap? I gave a little bit, but I'd love to hear your consideration of it.

What you said is right. And I'll just agree with you first that we're definitely in a time when doing the right things could help a lot. One of my motivations is a little bit of fear in there, which is, if we don't take the opportunity we look back later and regret it. Which is one of the reasons why we're out there trying to bother people to do what we think would be more effective.

So, coming to the definition. A debt for nature swap, as you said is like it sounds. It's an agreement to forgive debt that countries owe on one condition - that they invest part of that money in some form of investment in nature. It's often been conservation. That was often thought of in terms of species or biodiversity at the time. But nowadays that would include thinking about storing carbon because of climate concerns, and then linking to your use of the term resilience in agriculture - for sure this also could be thinking about a climate adaptation.

Can you give us some examples of countries that have done this? What does this look like on the ground?

Yes, and the history, as you say, is that it started in the 1980s. And we really want to tip our cap to Tom Lovejoy who invented this at a time when, again, as you laid out, but it, at that time, was also true. There was huge amounts of debt and huge concerns about conservation, and it was a pretty simple idea. That it is a potential source of money to invest where the countries can help themselves, as you said, by getting rid of really quite crippling debt - tremendous amounts of interest are being paid on those debts - but also be helping the globe by investing in nature. So countries recently done, for instance, Ecuador has done a very big one recently. Belize has done one that's quite well spoken of. Those are different sized countries, different sized problems, which, as you can imagine from your own work, the institutions matter a lot. But there's been a long string and a long history of willingness to try. And I guess the last thing is that willingness started to go down when, as you summarized, it wasn't really working for the debtors who weren't really getting that much relief in their point of view for a lot of time bargaining. And it wasn't really working perhaps for nature. It wasn't having necessarily the impacts that one might have hoped. So, I think the question now is can we reform them? Because we do still have a big debt problem and we have some big nature problems.

Thank you for sharing that. And it's really fascinating to know that this is not a new idea. It's been around since the 80s. And this hope that I mentioned earlier suggests that there can be ways to make this debt for nature swap work better. I would love to understand what you want readers to take away from the reforms that you all suggest in the article.

Yes, and the punch line at the high level is it makes sense. It hasn't worked as done to first order. Of course, some things have worked. But simple reforms based on things that we have learned over the last few decades could make them work a lot better. So that's the high level. To get a little more detail the four things we say in those articles are the following. You gotta raise the scale. It has to be consequential relative to the scale of debt. Otherwise, it's not worth it for those countries. I think, and we think, and I'll give you the third condition in a moment, but I think for those countries also you have to emphasize local choice and sovereignty. Because there's a real sense of, geez, why are these conservation NGOs coming in telling us what to do in our country? I think there's clear gains to be had from letting local actors decide how to achieve global goals.

Now, the next thing you say is why if they are choosing, well how are they going to be oriented towards achieving global goals? So that's our third condition. You actually have clear measures of outcomes, and you only give relief conditional on measured improvements. That's a huge difference. That really has been more of a process bargain in the past. You will allocate some money to protected areas. Okay, that's fine, but there's actually a very famous fund which allocated money to Brazil. People have shown that Brazil just pulled the money out and spent it on other things that they were spending and just replaced it with the external money. So, then funding [for nature conservation] didn't go up. Or you could say, draw many new protected area circles on a map. Okay, but drawing things on a map doesn't really necessarily get you anything at all. And even defending a place that wasn't going to disappear doesn't get you anything because it wasn't going to disappear. So, there are many stories that in evaluations like I do of environment and development policy, we’ve seen a lot of things that sound sensible but don't really do that much in the end. Great, fine, here's a nice combination. We're going to measure the outcomes. But then you can do whatever you want, right? You can do whatever you want. If for you, you want to expand energy access, but you want to invest in renewable energy, great. A different country wants to stop using agriculture in a particular area and move it to another area, right? Another country wants to intensify agriculture and raise productivity even while leaving space for forests, and the knowledge, the preferences and the right to choose that I think and we think are naturally left with the countries in question who 1) has more information, and 2) are probably the right source of priorities for what matters locally, and if they don't find it interesting. These deals aren't going to happen again. You might then say, why are we just doing what they want? Because you're only giving relief when you measure actual global goals. Once you do that, once you switch to measuring outcomes, you should let people choose what's sensible for them.

Last thing, once you're measuring, as I've mentioned, there's a bunch of different goals you could imagine, right? If I get two NGOs, they don't even have the same goals for species. Forget climate change, forget climate adaptation. There are all these things that people would like to be helpful with. So take, for instance, a project that might save old forests. That probably helps with water quality downstream. It probably provides habitat for species, it definitely stores carbon, and when blocking rainfall that comes torrentially with climate change, it probably helps resilience and washing out of soil for agriculture. What's our last point? When you're counting outcomes, add together all the good ones, because then a project like forest gets points for all four of those. And you do this stuff that's efficient on multiple fronts instead of going left hand, right hand in an uncoordinated fashion. So those are our four suggestions.

That's really helpful. And having spent time with international trade and issues on regulations, one of the things that I've learned is permitting or allowing sovereignty and allowing nations to make decisions, one is politically important, but on the sort of economic side of it, there is something critical about countries knowing their own costs and own, if you will, demands. And allowing them to make those determinations is critical for an efficient and actually politically feasible approach. Is that a fair assessment?

I agree completely. You know agriculture much better than I do. But that description to me fits perfectly. You can come in and say you've got all sorts of good ideas. And even things that are good ideas won't go across because you came in and said them in an annoying way. And then, as you said, [local] folks have better information on what their costs are, better information on local benefits, they could probably design a locally incentive compatible version of what you thought you knew was good. It might have been kind of good but with the local information and interest, it becomes better and then thus more likely to happen. And that's better for the globe as well. I completely agree.

This is great. You've mentioned agriculture a couple of times, and I'd like to hear a little bit more about how you think debt for nature swaps can affect the food and agricultural systems in a country. Especially given the agricultural practices have some significant impacts on the environment and or can be affected by the environment, and particularly climate change.

Completely. Yes, I think it's because of that. Exactly. So, if I had to think of why this environmental resource paper is a fit in agriculture, it's because of what you said. That agriculture bumps up against the environment, so to speak, makes use of nutrients in the soil, sometimes involves the clearing of the land, and bumps up against the public. As climate changes, it really changes the ability to do agriculture in terms of temperature, rainfall, all those things. So, I think just for instance, if we go across all the World Bank labeled low-income countries of the world, the priority on climate adaptation under rainfall shifts versus climate expansion into forests, which could be replaced by climate intensification through more fertilizing and more pesticide use, so that agriculture takes less room but has higher yield. Those priorities are going to vary massively. I think agriculture is a fantastic sector, and it's not been a surprise that you said the things you did to think about the value of measuring the global goal and allowing the local choice.

In some places over fertilization is a huge problem. Not only do you not get more productivity, but you waste money, and you ruin water supply. Some places, pesticide use is an issue and is drifting across and killing plants and other fields. Some places, it's not. And who's the expert on that? Probably the local agricultural extension agents, right? And the local ag agency. So, to me, agriculture is a fantastic, illustrative sector. Not the only one, but an important one. Where the kind of things you said about the value of local information and choice come through in making a big financial swap like this potentially work for everybody.

Thanks for this example. It is great to hear this piece that did have a clear environmental focus, recognize that there is a place for the food system to be a part of that conversation. So, thank you for sharing that. You know, the debt for nature swap is a useful financial tool to support environmental causes, as I just said. And as an environmental economist, how do you use a market-based approach to address environmental challenges? And what, if any, drawbacks do you see to this approach?

In a way this is a form of market-based approach. I agree with you. It's certainly about prices and incentives. And looking around the world, I'm not sure if this is why I'm an economist, but I certainly do think people respond to incentives and that's important. That said and you said drawback. First, I'll just go with alternative to start. Prices are not the only thing people respond to, right? Institutions matter a huge deal. Even the set of opportunities that are available tend to be constructed in ways that are not price or market driven. You know, prices are wonderful. If you have a hundred identical firms and you're trying to figure out who has the lowest marginal cost of reducing carbon emissions. Fab, let them figure it out. Market will do well. Maybe not as fabulous in thinking about the distribution of rights locally between indigenous groups, small farmers, and large multinational corporations, right? Maybe that's not really a market price thing. And we might even get around to values. There are times when people don't really want to operate in a price space. And they're going to have to deal with incentives. But think about preexisting values on conservation, and when those are achieving the same goals as a price would, you don't have to try to wander in with a new market. I think that's fair as well.

I think of incentives as one super important tool. Far from the only one and somewhat in the spirit of our discussion of local knowledge. The right tool blend is an important part of the story as well.

Alex, I have to say, you've ventured in some spaces I'm really happy to hear you talk about. This idea of incorporating values and recognizing that the local knowledge matters - this is not something that we, as economists in our modeling world alone can solve the problem. It is going to take talking to people and learning their needs and learning even the bits about their culture to say what works for them in this moment. So, thank you for sharing that.

You're welcome for that.

In your analysis, in the team's analysis, you all argue for key reforms for debt for nature swaps. What other approaches would you consider to address these large environmental concerns?

I think ‘other’ but also complimentary. I'm in the sense that these are very high-level transfers, right? Here's a bunch of money. Please do something right. And as I said earlier, if we tell them what to do, we don't have a great track record. So, now we're going to maybe measure, right? One of our suggestions is to measure the outcomes. How are they going to get to those outcomes, right? So, there's a whole bunch of tools on the environment and the development policy side, which are also part of the source of learning over the last three or four decades. There's been a real push in a lot of fields, not necessarily to only be like medicine and do randomized control trials, etc., but there is some of that. But also just collect some data on what happened. Please try to figure out if when you do a policy, it actually achieves something.

Besides values, my meta story these days is we have to allow that learning is a good thing. There's a lot of people who seem to not want to even want to ask whether what they did worked because somehow, it's embarrassing. And I feel like we have to move as a world to the humility of learning by doing. And that's just what everybody does. And that means when I did something, half of them worked and half of them didn't. It's a really good idea to learn as fast as you can which ones didn't. So that's a super general speech, not quite to what you asked, but it applies to every tool I've ever known.

So, regarding protected areas - do they always have impact? No. I have a lot of work on that. Can we start to, over 30 years point, to where they have impact? Yes. Could we have measured outcomes? We could have, but we didn't back then. So, could we still use traditional tools like use a protected area, but look at past studies of when they had impact and start to see that it makes sense when they did and when they didn't? Yes. Same thing for payments for ecosystem services and any number of other tools.

BIO

Alexander Pfaff is a Professor of Public Policy, Economics and the Environment at Duke University. He studies how economic development interacts with natural resources and the environment. His focus is designing environment and development policies to support choices by individuals and groups that protect nature, reduce damaging environmental exposures, and improve livelihoods.

We've recorded a series of podcasts on the microbiome and its wide ranging impacts. But boy is this a field that moves rapidly. As soon as you think you've covered much of the territory, along comes some new and exciting findings, and this is the case today. We're going to describe research done by our guest, Dr. Ibrahim Javed. He has done innovative work on links between the gut microbiome and the brain, particularly focused on Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Javed is an Enterprise Fellow and National Health and Medicine Research Council Emerging Leadership Fellow in Clinical and Health Sciences at the University of South Australia.

Interview Transcript

So let's begin, if you wouldn't mind, with an explanation from you about what the gut brain axis is and tell us how it's important.

Yep. Now we see a lot of, a lot of researchers around the globe building on investigations around the gut brain axis. But if we, if we investigate what this gut brain axis actually is, It's kind of like a bi-directional communication between two organs in our body, the gut and the brain. And when we particularly talk about gut, we have our stomach and our different portions of the intestine.

What we're actually interested in is the microbiome and all those small little things living inside the gut. There are around 100 trillion microbes in the gut, which is three times more than the number of cells in our body. So, we are kind of like more microbes than, than human cells. And they communicate with different organs in our body and how they communicate with the brain that we can describe it as a, as a gut brain axis. And then this whole gut brain axis thing was somehow kind of invisible to us. We were just looking at it as a fecal material or waste coming out of our body. But now we see a lot of importance to these gut microbes. They help us in a lot of daily things that we do. They shape our behavior, our response to stress, our immune system, and then how we respond to different medicines, and how we do our daily tasks. So, they have a lot of roles in that. They help us digest food, that's their main obvious function. But now we are more. getting more and more information about them, that how they are integrated with a lot of different things in our body. So, kind of like they are partners in our life.

That's a very, very nice explanation. Can you tell us about the importance of microbial diversity?

Yep. So microbial diversity, we can, we can refer to, to as a composition of all those bacteria, viruses, and fungi to some extent that, that live in, in our body. Digestive track and, and in a lot of other animals as well. And this diversity is very crucial in maintaining the gut health and on overall well-being of, of humans. And, and this microbiome whole thing is like, it is obviously associated with a lot of health benefits and, and how we develop disease, but it's also right from the beginning of life they help us in developing our brains. They help us mature the brain system and the immune system. Obviously, they help us in digesting food.

So, generally, we can actually divide them in two portions. One, we can call them a good gut bacterium. They help us with all these things. And then they are bad gut bacteria, which are kind of like kept within a within a bay. They are kept under control by this good gut bacteria with the help of the rest of our body. And in somehow in some conditions with the age or with the dietary habits or environmental factor or lifestyle, if they overcome and, and they take over the control in the gut, that's where the thing starts going haywire.

When I was growing up, microbes were a bad thing. You didn't want to have microbes. And now, now we hear that there are good microbes and now you're talking about the balance. There are still bad ones, but good ones. And the balance of those two was a really important thing. Let's talk about how bad bacteria find their way to the brain. How do they get access?

So, as we discussed, they are kept within the bay or kept under control by good bacteria and also by other different immune systems in the body. We have different checkpoints, like we have different barriers or three different compartments, the gut and the blood and the brain. And we have barriers that separate out these compartments and these barriers are very tightly controlled, very good health cells tightly integrated with each other and they police that whole things what need to go across and what does not need to go across what we need to stop it within that compartment. If we have adverse environmental factors, or poor dietary habits and these bad gut bacteria overcome, they produce a lot of different molecules to communicate with each other. And they produce a lot of different molecules to take over the good bacteria. And these molecules, they can get across those barriers, and specifically if they can get into the brain (that's what we are researching), they can do a lot of different bad things in the brain. They can do that by hijacking this gut brain axis. And this compartmental thing is one pathway that they can get from gut to the blood and then from the blood to the brain. But there is also a direct highway that connects gut to the brain and that's our enteric nervous system. These are specific nerves or neurons, for example, vagus nerve, they're quite famous. It's a direct link between the gut and brain. This nerve system helps us in a lot of different daily tasks without us even knowing about it, like digestion and heart rate and respiration, and emptying the stomach. And these are kind of like a pathway for bidirectional communication. So, a lot of molecules go up and down across these highways and the bad gut bacteria can actually hijack it and they can put their stuff into this highway and they can send it across the brain.

It's a very, very nice explanation you have of a very complicated process, and I find it absolutely fascinating. So, you've spoken about how bad bacteria can be opportunistic pathogens and can trigger problems or enhance the progression of existing problems. How does all that work?

So, we are investigating bad gut bacteria in connection with dementia and Alzheimer disease. We are specifically working on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and E. coli and they are quite common, like a lot of school kids. They know about these bacteria. They are quite commonly studied in high school microbiology.

So, these bacteria produce some molecules which help to make biofilms around them. They kind of build a castle around them to protect their colonies and for their own survival and they keep surviving then until they get an opportunity to expand their castles and build more biofilms. These molecules are quite similar in terms of their structure and in terms of how they communicate. With some proteins which are not related to bacteria anyhow, they are produced in the brain to do some normal stuff in the brain, but they also aggregate in Alzheimer disease using the same mechanism as the nature that these bacteria use for these proteins to make their biofilms.

Based on this common similarity, if they can somehow see each other, or if those gut bacteria can send those proteins or aggregate of those proteins across the brain through using those highways. They can induce the aggregation of those normal, naive, working, innocent proteins, which we have in our brain that have nothing to do with the bacteria. But if they can be accessed by those bacterial proteins, they go haywire and, and they trigger the onset of the disease, or if there is already going on, that they can actually accelerate that whole process. And this is a concept, actually, we have seen that concept before in prion disease, whereby eating infected food that have those prion particles, they can actually go from gut to the brain, and they can induce the normal prion protein in the brain to start making aggregates in a similar way.

Are there interventions that can stop the pathogenic bacteria from in the gut that might in turn affect the brain?

We should focus more on preventive measures. We can focus on maintaining a good diversity within the gut of having or supporting those good bacteria in that fight and keeping them healthy and alive as we age. Because as we age over the period of life, we keep losing those good bacteria. If we can have all those good things of exercise, balanced sleep, and more importantly, good food and a balanced variety of food. Then we have a lot of different varieties to support that variety of gut bacteria in the gut.

So that's, I think, the most important preventive measure to keep that balance intact. But of course, in the future as a therapeutic intervention, we are moving towards developing microbiome therapies where we can modulate those compositions. If that composition is not in a very good situation, we can actually modulate that by using probiotics and prebiotic dietary factors or some microbial compositions like yogurt and a lot of other foods. We can modulate that to inoculate those bacteria which are missing in the gut and, and try to achieve that balance and, and that balance will accelerate the effectiveness of the medicine which we are taking for any other disease.

The advice we've heard from some of our other guests is to eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. You know, consume things, you mentioned yogurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, and things like that. Sound like they're very good for enhancing the health of the microbiome. Is there anything else beyond that that might be relevant for the brain in particular?

For brain health, there are some antioxidant foods. For example, we have Curcumin, and some senolytic compounds. We cannot call them drugs because they are kind of like a food supplements. They are available in any pharmacy and super stores by a lot of different names. Mostly these are polyphenolic compounds. They are usually available in green tea and in green tea extracts. They are quite well known for their healthy and antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects. Research around the globe has shown that there are good effects directly on the brain by these polyphenolic compounds. So, these are green tea extracts, quercetin and, and some other galectin compounds.

BIO

Dr Ibrahim Javed is currently an Enterprise Fellow (Senior Lecturer) and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Clinical and Health Sciences, University of South Australia. He is also an adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland. He completed his doctoral studies at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2020 and postdoctoral research at AIBN, The University of Queensland. He joined the University of South Australia in 2023 where he is now directing the laboratory of Gut-Brain Axis, Aging and Therapeutics. Research in Javed’s lab focuses on the gut-brain axis and its implications for aging and Dementia. His research team is working to unfold the specific role of bad/pathogenic gut bacteria in the aging paradigms and Dementia associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. His team has discovered and published the molecular details of how bad bacteria in the gut can trigger a younger onset (aged under 65) and accelerate Dementia and how the brain can develop Dementia when fighting with microbial biofilms in the gut – the infectious etiology of Dementia. With this research trajectory, his vision is to develop a multifaceted therapeutic intervention for aging-associated diseases and Dementia. 

Food companies market their products in a great many ways. Connecting their brands and products to sports and major sporting events is one such way and is drawing a lot of attention now. The reason is that the Summer Olympics are underway, which trains attention on the relationship between the International Olympic Committee and its longest running sponsor. Coca Cola has been a sponsor of every Olympics since 1928. So, it's intuitively obvious why sponsorships would be important to the Olympics because They get lots of money in the door and it's reliable.

It's been happening since 1928. But let's talk about why this relationship is so important to companies, Coca Cola in particular, and what the public health impact of that might be. Today's guest, Dr. Marie Bragg, has contributed some of the key studies on this topic. She is Assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she also serves as director of diversity initiatives. She holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the marketing department at the NYU Stern School of business; directs the NYU food environment and policy research coalition; and she's also a Food Leaders Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Interview Summary

It's really nice to talk to you about this because it's an important issue and not a lot of science has been done on this over the years and you've contributed a lot of it. Let's talk about the issue of sports marketing and can you tell us a little bit more about what that is broadly and what's, what are some of the forms it takes?

You just mentioned one of the main areas of sports marketing with sports sponsorships. And so that's where a company like Coca Cola partners with an organization like the Olympics. And really is paying for the rights to have that famous Coca Cola logo or its products to appear at sporting events or in commercials that are involving the Olympics.

In terms of how much of it there is we know, for example, the world cup is one of the most watched sporting events in the world, along with things like the Olympics. The world cup, for example, has 5 million viewers. And so that's a lot of exposure for these brands, but it's not Sports sponsorship partnerships like that, there's athlete endorsements, and those dates back as far as to 1934, as one example, when baseball player Lou Gehrig first appeared on the box of Wheaties cereals.

There's a special place that athletes have always had in our society, and I think it comes through with these sorts of partnerships. But if we fast forward to today, our lab has even seen these kinds of partnerships appear in video games. And so, Nintendo had M&M's a race car game a few years back, and NFL Madden, which is a popular video game even has things like the Snickers player of the game appear within the video game, just like real NFL games. What this means is that these pictures of brands and products are peppered throughout kids experiences when they're playing video games. And then finally, if, and probably for anyone who's, been in a supermarket, when there's a major sporting event going on, like the Super Bowl or March Madness, it appears on products too in supermarkets.

It's peppered throughout our everyday experience in ways we might not always see or appreciate if we're not paying attention.

Marie, I like to do sports trivia with some friends of mine, and you've just given me a great question about Lou Gehrig and the Wheaties box in the 1930s. So that's a nice benefit of this podcast. So aside from that, why sports? I mean, companies could attach themselves to lots of different things, but why did they choose sports and why is that such a valuable connection for them?

One factor ties back into what we were saying about visibility. If there are millions of people watching a sport event, it means that there's a lot of time for brands to be able to have high visibility for whatever they're endorsing or sponsoring in that moment. On another level, I think on a deeper level, our society has a special relationship with sports and professional athletes.

Professional athletes are their own sort of unique category of celebrities that people love to follow and admire. That means that when a brand associates themselves with a sports organization like the Olympics or a professional athlete, they're buying into a special idea of what it means to be cool, to be fun, and to feel good about to feel good about the brand because when people are watching sports, they're excited.

If we think of other categories of life where there are maybe a high number of viewers to a specific televised event, like a presidential debate, that we don't see a lot of sponsorships around that. And maybe it doesn't evoke the same feelings that a sporting event does.

I'm expecting that this kind of relationship or attachments or symbolism of the sponsorship of sports might be especially powerful for children. I know if you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, a lot of them will say they want to be a baseball player or basketball player, football player, something like that. Does that make sense?

I remember reading an article once that said, a dad was playing catch with his kid, and had spent all these hours with his kid working on pitching. And the dad made the point in the article, my kid doesn't want to grow up and be me as a baseball player. He wants to grow up and be ARod.

And so, this idea that we can spend all the time that we want with our kids and they still hold these celebrity athletes on such a pedestal is something that I think ties into why this is valuable for companies. It's kids who are engaged in sports or attending sporting events who are the next generation of consumers for these products. If they can get the attention and the brand loyalty of these children early on in these positive, exciting environments, it helps them secure the next generation of purchasers.

We'll talk about how important brand loyalty is in a minute, but let's talk about how valuable these connections are to the company. I guess one indication of that is how much a company like Coca Cola is willing to pay to be a sponsor of something like the Olympics. What kind of numbers do you know about in that context?

The companies don't usually disclose the exact numbers, but in 2008, NPR published an article that estimated that Coca Cola spent about 70 million to sponsor the Beijing Olympics. If we think about it, that's stunning given sponsoring an event is just one part of their massive advertising machine. More recently the Wall Street Journal estimated that Coca-Cola and a really large dairy company in China partnered and spent a combined, estimated $2 billion with a B, $2 billion for a 12-year Olympic sponsorship deal that will run through 2032. It's really incredible to think about that as just one slice of what they're doing, but with such a massive amount of money attached to it.

It really sort of begs the question what they are get out of it and what do they see as the value. I know there are branding opportunities, and again, we'll come back to that in a minute, but there's also sort of this goodwill part of it, isn't there. The Olympics are a great thing. No reason to question that. The fact that a company like Coca Cola would sponsor a good thing probably gives them a good company glow, doesn't it?

My colleague Bridget Kelly in Australia did a study on this topic of sort of the glow that sponsorship produces. In her study, she showed that about 68 percent of kids in the sample could remember the sports sponsor and thought the sponsors were cool and generous. And they wanted to sort of pay back the favor by purchasing the products of that sponsor. There is something really special to to that relationship in the minds of kids.

Wow. That's an impressive finding. So, speaking of findings, you've done some research on these sports sponsorships yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've done and what you found?

Some of our work in this area has documented how food and beverage companies associate themselves with sports on the sponsorship side. Athletes and supermarkets with product partnerships. And in one of our studies that tied into sports sponsorships, we looked at the 10 major sports organizations that had a lot of viewers. So, things like the NFL, the NBA, and then we wanted to categorize what kinds of groupings, the sponsors belonged to an automotive brand. Ford motors was one of the largest categories. But food wasn't very far behind. We saw about 19 percent of sponsors were associated with food and beverage brands, and it was for mostly unhealthy items.

In the sports sponsorships, we're not. Seeing a lot of water being featured. It's a lot of sugary beverages you know, chips and things like that. We're not seeing much fresh fruit. And then when we did the same thing with athlete endorsements, one of the things that stood out about that study, which looked at a hundred athletes to get a sense of what are they endorsing and how healthy is this stuff and how much are people seeing it. The most striking finding for me from that study was that 93 percent of the beverages that were endorsed by professional athletes were sugary drinks. And we know that athletes need to drink a lot of water to sort of fuel themselves. And maybe sometimes they do need some sort of sports drinks for long workout days, but we saw a lot of sodas in the mix too and the other thing is that most kids don't need lots of sports drinks in their diet, but that's what is sort of being promoted through these through these endorsements, and so that really stood out to me about that study.

We also in a couple of these studies found that young people are often seeing more ads for this than adults. It's not even though it may be sort of targeting general audiences. A lot of times young people are really seeing a lot of these, including the forms of ads that pop up on YouTube because we know kids are really into social media. It's really across the board of all of our research. We find mostly unhealthy products being promoted through these partnerships with sports.

I remember back over the years that this issue comes up in the press occasionally and athletes get called out, specific athletes will sometimes get called out for promoting these kinds of foods. And, and I remember there being a couple of cases, although I don't remember the names of the athletes involved, where they've refused to do this kind of thing and they've made public statements about that. What's your recollection about that?

We were really excited one time with our athlete endorsement study that came out a couple of years later. Brita water filters issued a press release and I remember getting a lot of messages about it telling me to go and look at what was posted online. Brita had cited our study that most beverages promoted by athletes are sugary beverages.

And that's why we're so excited to partner with Steph Curry to promote Brita water filters. I framed that press release and shared it with all our team members who worked on those projects because it was an example of choosing a healthy beverage over some of these sugary drinks that are so commonly promoted.

So maybe there will come a day when LeBron James or athletes like that start advertising cucumbers or radishes or something.

And I wish cucumber producers had the same budgets as these sugary drink brands because it's really hard for some of the healthy stuff to compete with some of these major fast food and sugary drink companies.

For sure. Let's talk about the issue of branding, why a company like Coca Cola wants its brand image, that famous Coke logo out there in front of as many eyes as possible. Give me just a minute if you will. And I'd like to describe something that I've heard. Sort of observed over the years. It's my anecdotal impression that if you ask random people, are you a Coke or a Pepsi person? You'll get an immediate and definitive response. People know whether they're a Coke or a Pepsi person. But if you do research, you find that people can't very often tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. And, going back as, as long as 1949, there are scientists who have done these kinds of studies on whether consumers can distinguish those two beverages, doing blind taste tests. A typical finding is that people aren't any more accurate than chance. And there was a fascinating brain scan study done much more recently, of course. When Coke and Pepsi were given to people and they didn't know which they were receiving, the brain scan showed similar brain activity for the two beverages, again, suggesting that people can't distinguish the difference. But when people knew they were drinking either Coke or Pepsi, there was a brain activity advantage. For Coca Cola, which of course is all about more marketing, bigger company, that kind of thing, I'm assuming. So based on this, it looked like Coke hadn't won the taste war, but the branding war. So why in the heck would people feel so strongly that they can tell the difference between these beverages when they probably can't?

Now my own two-bit theory on this is that no one wants to feel like they're a pawn of marketing. So, it'd be hard to admit that they favor one brand over another because then they would feel manipulated. They must believe in their own minds there's an objective difference. My theorizing aside, tell us about the power of a brand as opposed to a product and how the Olympics is such a golden opportunity for the Coca Cola brand.

When we think about a brand, it's really a combination of feelings, ideas, and the emotions that we tie into what it means to be part of that brand. And as people, and especially as young people, for let's say teenagers, they’re in an identity development stage where it's important for them to be adopting brands that are important to them, in part to distinguish themselves from their parents, to fit in with peers, and to start to have a sense of who they are as a person.

And one of the ways to do that is to associate with what you like for music, but another piece is brand. So, are you a Coca Cola or a Pepsi person? A Nike or Adidas person. That comes with all sorts of adjectives about what it means to be on one side or the other. When we think about Coca Cola as a brand linking up with the Olympics, it's an opportunity to potentially borrow, not only get their brand out there, but potentially borrow from the brand of the Olympics as well.

In our field, there's something called brand image transfer. This is the idea that when two companies or organizations partner together, the brand feelings we have about one might bleed over into the other and vice versa. It’s one of the things that's always fascinated me about this topic, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too, is this idea that the sports may have a sort of health piece to their brand identity. So, the Olympics have people at the peak of their, their sport. And my question has always been, what does that do to the way people feel about Coke in terms of its healthfulness? And is there some brand image transfer that's happening back and forth that's particularly beneficial for Coca Cola because of the health component?

You reminded me of something. Tell me if you think this is an interesting parallel. When I was a boy in public high school growing up in Indiana, I don't think there were any soft drink machines in my school, maybe one in the teacher's lounge or something that I never saw, of course, but there wasn't much. And then when my son, many decades later, was a student in a school, public high school in Connecticut, he and I walked around the school and counted the number of soft drink machines, and he was of course embarrassed to be walking around the school with his dad. But aside from that, I think we found something like 13 or 14 or 15 machines. I don't remember the exact number, but it was striking. And I've heard people speculate that the companies don't care that much about what's being sold in those machines because. It's not a huge profit center for them and they must split the profits with the school somehow, but it's all about the branding. And even the students who aren't buying anything from the machines walk past them probably many times a day. So, what's getting imprinted doesn't have much to do potentially with. A specific type of product, but it's just that company's main image. Does that make sense? And why those school sponsorships have been so important?

It does, and it's really, there's really an emphasis on wanting a sort of 360 level of involvement in young people's lives because if a brand can get themselves in front of kids at school, at a sporting event, in a movie, in a video game, on social media, they're immersing themselves in a way that allows the brand to keep itself top of mind.

And that's what starts to get people to be aware of it, build brand loyalty, reach for the product because it's, they, with so many ads, the ads are all competing for attention but being immersed in schools is just one aspect of that idea of having involvement in as many areas of kids’ lives as possible.

I think in addition to all the machines, there were tables outside that had. Coca Cola umbrellas, and then the football stadium had a scoreboard that had Coca Cola that featured prominently on it. It was like complete corporate capture. It was amazing how many exposures the typical student in that high school in Brantford, Connecticut would have had. And that's just in school. I mean, think about all the other things added to that. That's amazing, isn't it?

One of the things that interested me about this work was because when I played soccer and ran cross country and track as a kid, everything. There were so many instances where everything was sponsored. There were so many instances where unhealthy food products were linked with sport. So, we were the Snicker state champions of the state of Florida for soccer. I was a Wendy's high school nominee, not a winner. Let's be clear. And every brand. I have so many patches at home with fast food or sugary drink logos on them, right alongside.

And then probably not coincidentally, I remember when I was a young kid, and we were painting a piece of wood in the backyard. And I drew the Coca Cola logo with a soccer ball and a basketball next to it. Looking back, first, what an odd kid I must have been to draw Coca Cola’s logo, but to your point, I was really immersed in it and Coke was top of mind.

The kind of sports sponsorships that you talked about being exposed to when you were young. That kind of thing's happening outside the U.S. a lot too, isn't it?

It is. So, the sports sponsorship outside the U.S. – one of the big ones that comes to mind if McDonald’s sponsorship of the World Cup. We see a lot of international presence with brands, whether it’s through social media, and the way they sort of take local culture and tailor it to sports marketing. I remember being on a trip to Trinidad with my family. My mom's family is from Trinidad. And there was a Coca Cola bottling plant, I think it was. And alongside the perimeter was a painted fence and it had the Coca Cola logo and the Trinny flag and then a painting of a soccer ball and steel drums. So, there was this infusion of the culture alongside the Coca Cola logo. And that really, I think, accelerated my interest in understanding how these brands are capitalizing on the good feelings that people have towards their own culture.

It can be challenging to do anything about this and challenging, especially you regulate advertising in the U.S. because of protections provided for commercial speech through the first amendment. What can be done about the ads promoted through these unhealthy sports sponsorships?

One of the things I think we need more research on is the extent to which these kinds of ads might be contributing to a sort of misunderstanding about the health profiles of products. And so, I think that would help us better understand for kids, do they start to really think that some of these sugary drink products are healthier than water, for example.

That's just a random example but I think that will help us understand what's at stake when it comes to the impression that it's making on young people. And there's a little bit of work in this area, but more is needed. And then I think too about how as a society, there's policy regulations to it too, but that's very hard to do because of commercial speech protections. I will say one of our colleagues Nick Freudenberg has talked about how we should have an open mind with whether there's a possibility to move the needle on commercial speech protections. And so that's something I'd love to keep exploring with people on what that could look like it, and if it was possible to any extent.

And then the other thing that's always been on my mind is the idea that for some products being associated with and became a public relations liability. If we think about the way professional athletes used to endorse tobacco products and would be standing in their uniform with a cigarette in their mouth. Then that sort of became uncool. Not good for their brand. Not good for their look, and they moved away from it.

Will the same thing happen to sugary drinks and junk food partnerships. And I think sometimes we see glimmers of that. There was the famous video, years ago after a soccer game, when one of the world's most famous soccer players pushed away a sugary beverage and said agua in response. And it affected the market shares at that moment. I think there are instances like that, that we can think about in terms of getting some momentum behind the way athletes themselves identify with these products.

In that context, do you think parents could be an important advocacy voice? Let's just say that parents rose up and said to the local high school, we don't want Coca Cola stuff blasted all over our school. And they're pushing that. Coca Cola retains the right, because of the First Amendment to market its products, but local schools would have the right not to sign contracts and therefore deprive the company of those kind of marketing opportunities. Do you think parents might ever feel mobilized enough incensed enough to do something like that?

I think parents are a key factor in this issue of sports marketing to kids because companies care a lot about what parents think. Even though kids have a ton of pester power, where they nag their parents to purchase things, parents are also in many cases, especially for young kids, the gatekeepers of all these purchases. Companies know not to make parents too angry about something because of the risk of not purchasing their products. I think if parents got vocal about it, whether it's on social media or by getting involved in petitions that might be going around that's one way to get companies to start paying attention to these things because I think it getting them out of schools, for example, seems to me to be a common sense start to it and but many parents might not be thinking of this in the way, that how deeply it might be affecting their diet, their kids diets.

Bio

Dr. Marie Bragg is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine where she also serves as the Director of Diversity Initiatives. She holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Marketing Department at the NYU Stern School of Business, and directs the NYU Food Environment and Policy Research Coalition, which includes 56 faculty who study food and sustainability across 14 departments in 8 schools at NYU. Dr. Bragg’s research examines unhealthy food marketing practices that target youth and communities of color. Her current NIH-funded grants assess how advertising on social media affects the preferences and food choices of adolescents. Dr. Bragg is a Food Leaders Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and has testified on three public policies in New York City that aimed to create a healthier food environment. Since 2008, she has mentored more than 100 students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty members. Dr. Bragg earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Yale University.

Today we're talking about who has access to full-service supermarkets in America's cities, suburbs, small towns and rural communities. According to The Reinvestment Fund's "2023 Limited Supermarket Access Analysis Report," 8.5% of people in the US live in areas with limited access to full-service supermarkets. This means that families must travel further to get fresh foods, and it creates a barrier to adequate nutrition. This is the 10th year The Reinvestment Fund has published the "Supermarket Access Report," which provides data and context about grocery store access across the country. Here to discuss the latest figures is policy and analyst Michael Norton.

Interview Summary
 

This is a really interesting and kind of nuanced topic, so I'm happy we can talk about it in some detail. Why don't we just start off with kind of a broad question. What do we know now about areas of limited supermarket access in the US?

Kelly, I think the big thing to take away at the very beginning is that the share of people living in places that would be considered low access is roughly the same as it's been over the past 10 years. We have about 8.5% of the population living in low-access areas across the country. That's pretty consistent to what it's been for over a decade. But what's important is that how low-access areas are distributed across the country varies quite a bit. And where they exist, the density of the populations where they exist, really informs the kinds of interventions that are available for addressing these needs. These vary considerably in different parts of the country and at different geographic scales. And what I mean by that is suburban areas, rural areas, and then some of the most remote areas across the country. So we do have a sort of consistent number or share of people. The actual number has gone up a little bit because the population has continued to increase. They become distributed in different ways that follow different kinds of development patterns, on the one hand. But then also places where you end up getting patterns of residential and racial segregation in more developed parts of the country.
 

It's so interesting. So, given that the average has stayed essentially the same over the 10 years you've been doing the reports, have there been pressures pulling in either direction that might have changed over the years? So, for example, are there pressures that are making access to full-service supermarkets less likely? Are they pulling out of some places, for example? And might that offset by some positive developments in other areas? So, while the average stays the same, the contours look different?

I think the way to think about that is that we see a lot of expansion of low-access areas in the big metro areas that are expanding the fastest. So, the biggest increases in populations living with limited access are in big state in the South and out west in places like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, where you have these large metros that are growing at a really rapid rate. And the reason for that is that oftentimes residential development will show up before commercial development. So, in those kinds of places, food retail is trailing behind residential development. And probably those places are going to be well served by the time we update this analysis again in four or five years because of what those development patterns look like, right? So, when you're building more houses in more urban and remote areas, there's still folks who are first in buying out in those places. They're still going to have to go a long way to get their groceries for a few years until supermarket identifies this as a place where there's going to be enough demand for us to put one of our Krogers or Targets or Walmarts or what have you. But we've also seen, and this is more common in urban places, is the expansion of these low-access areas that have smaller populations, right? And so these are places with between 1,000 and 5,000 residents where folks are still having to go disproportionately far to get access to a full-service grocery store. Sometimes this is because stores have pulled out in these places because of limited demand, historically. And that limited demand is mostly because folks don't have as much income to spend on their groceries, right? And we see these little areas popping up within metro areas and even in some close-in suburbs and places across the country. And so you have sort of these bigger LSA areas, which have at least 5,000 residents on the outer edges of a lot of metros and in some within the cities, but mostly within the cities. It's these smaller, limited access, low population areas. And this differentiation of the type of low-access area is something that we introduced in this update to our analysis that previously wasn't available. It provided a really nice nuance to understanding what limited access to supermarkets looks like going forward, both within urban places, suburban places, and in some of these really remote parts of the country.

So, based on this research, what does it tell us about the future of insecurity in the United States?

I think what it really tells us is that it depends on where you live and what kind of community you live in and what that's going to look like. I think the ability to provide a little bit more nuance around who has access and when they have limited access, what about their community is going to inform the response to ensuring that folks are able to get what they need. In places where they are these traditional sorts of limited supermarket access areas where you have at least 5,000 people, they can become pretty good candidates for operating a full-service store, right? But when you think about urban parts of the country where you've had central business districts or neighborhoods sort of hollowing out in different places and local supermarket is closed, but there aren't enough people there living to support a full-service store, different kinds of interventions are required, right? And then in these really remote parts of the country where you don't have very many residents, but you have at least a thousand, but people are living a long way away from each other, how do you serve those places? Because some of them, these are very small towns, right? And there are people who have been living there and if the grocery store closed, then they have to drive 35-40 miles to the next town, right? That becomes a real challenge for their general way of life. I think really thinking about the future of food access and food insecurity in this country really has to have a geographic nuance to it in thinking about the appropriate responses that are going to meet the needs of people living in different parts of the country.

So, how does your study inform investments do address food insecurity?

Reinvestment Fund has a very active retail portfolio, both on our lending side, and Reinvestment Fund is also the national fund manager for USDA's Healthy Food Finance Initiative. These two avenues through which we make loans to increase access to fresh food and through USDA's HFFI program are opportunities to innovate. The USDA's Healthy Food Finance Initiative is both a grant-making and a lending program that is designed to identify innovative responses to access to fresh food in these different types of areas. So, we're able to use the results of these analyses to identify places where you can align the kinds of programs that people are proposing. Whether that's a small format store in a city where their primary supermarket has closed, whether it's a mobile market that is serving folks who live very far distances from their nearest food retailer, or whether it's setting up a aggregation site that is not just food retail but sometimes is attached to a healthcare center or a hospital where people are also making regular trips. These become opportunities for us to support innovative approaches and also try out different things. Once you start to get some information from successful programs that are coming out of the grant program, as they become investible and scalable at a store level when you become ready to take on debt to expand your operation or open a store in a place that typical operators aren't willing to go.

So, let me ask you a question about the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. With politics being so partisan these days, is this a partisan issue as well, or is there bipartisan support for things like this?

This is the good news part of access to fresh food. It really is a bipartisan issue. Healthy Food Finance Initiative was created under the Obama Administration, was expanded under the Trump Administration and has been expanded even more under the Biden Administration. Each subsequent farm bill has expanded the capital available for the Healthy Food Finance Initiative, with the goal to try and figure out how do we meet the food access needs of everybody in this country in a way that provides a signal to private market operators that they can be successful in these places.

That really is a bit of good news, and I'm really happy to hear that. But I also wanted to ask you, are there options aside from full-service supermarkets to help address some of these matters you're discussing?

Absolutely, absolutely. And these are things like smaller format stores, almost like a corner store but that operates like a healthy food market. And these are really appropriate in places where there are limited access, low population, and sort of filling in pockets inside urban communities and close-in suburbs. There are mobile market options that are popping up in different places. Food aggregation hubs that will be cited within the center of a low-access area where people can come to a central location and having purchased food online that shows up and then people can come and pick it up. There's expanding delivery options to more remote parts of the country. So, there is a wide diversity of models that are proliferating beyond just bricks and mortar traditional grocery stores. It's really the job of HFFI to seed these initiatives, identify the ones that are doing really well, and then work with the folks who created them and then others to scale them down the road into places that are not served by food retailers.

I think you've helped answer the next question I was going to ask, which is how does this research help policy makers and practitioners think about addressing food insecurity in their community? There's a fair amount of tailoring that could go on where you're trying to meet the needs of a specific community.

That's right. And I think one of the things that's important to keep in mind is the role that financial institutions like Reinvestment Fund play in making this possible. So, Reinvestment Fund is a community development financial institution, which is best understood as like a nonprofit bank. And these exist across the country and are more or less active in different markets, but they're really focused on working in a very deliberate, hands-on way with our borrowers to create access to fresh food in places where it's not going to be easy, right? Because if it was easy, all the big food retailers would be there, right? So, we have to be patient. You have to find someone who's willing to take a chance operating the store, to help them develop their business plan, help them identify all of the ins and outs that go with standing up a food retail business, and then work with them throughout the process of them sort of getting access to capital and making their business work. And that work is a lot more work than what is required to finance a new grocery store that is run by Target or run by Walmart, Krogers or something like that. This is a critical role that the CDFI industry is playing and increasingly recognized at the federal level as a resource for deploying public subsidies through the private market into the hands of operators who are going to make it work in places where traditional food retailers and capital just won't go.

Let me ask a big-picture question. and this is a little complicated in my own mind. So, we're sort of defaulting in a way to the idea that full-service supermarkets providing access to such things for more people is a good outcome. And from a social justice point of view, it's unquestionably true that people who live in different sets of financial circumstances should still have access to things that people in better financial circumstances have. But in terms of nutritional outcome, having access to a full-service supermarket brings a lot more than just the healthy foods. And in today's modern full-service supermarket, the highly processed, less healthy options must outnumber the healthy ones 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 50 to 1? I have no idea what the number is, but it's enormous. And so, providing government support and financial incentives for a big store to come in is providing access to a lot more than healthy foods may have adverse nutritional outcomes rather than positive ones, unless you're just sort of agnostic about the type of food that people are getting access to, that any food is better than nothing if you have food insecurity. But I wonder how one might address that. And whether one could think about providing resources that were structured differently to encourage smaller stores, for example, that focus on more healthy options and fewer of the less healthy ones. And then you might get the social justice part addressed at the same time you're having a better nutritional outcome.

Kelly, that's such a good question, and one that we wrangle with all the time. Because there is actually fairly limited evidence to suggest that access to fresh food is going to lead people to make healthier choices about what they consume. One of the sort of operating assumptions is that in the absence of access, you're not going to make healthy choices. And once there is at least access, the possibility for making healthier choices increases from, zero to something, whatever it is that is going to be motivating individuals how they go about making choices for the foods that they consume. And it is a very tricky relationship that folks in the food industry grapple with all the time as well in the medical profession. I think from a grant-making standpoint and a financing standpoint, Reinvestment Fund's position is always that whoever is receiving support through our programs or from our lending capital is offering a selection that meets what you would consider healthy food retail options, right? That there is an assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh produce, fresh meats and dairy, in that also with the understanding that almost all food retailers are also going to offer less healthy options. That is a constant tension within the field. And figuring out how to encourage behavioral change by consumers is sort of beyond the ability of HFFI to move. What we can do is ensure that the organizations and the individuals who we support are offering a variety of healthy options for the patrons that are coming into their locations.

BIO

Michael Norton, Ph.D., serves as Chief Policy Analyst at Reinvestment Fund, and supports all research related to Reinvestment Fund’s organizational goals and mission. In this role Dr. Norton works closely with a range partners, including small non-profit organizations, local and national philanthropies, private companies, colleges and universities, school districts, federal, state, and city governments and agencies. His work leverages nearly a decade of experience as researcher and project director to develop data driven solutions – solutions that meet the unique needs of Reinvestment Fund and our key stakeholders in the public and private sectors. Dr. Norton completed his doctoral studies in the Sociology Department at Temple University, where his research examined the relationship between secondary mortgage market activity and neighborhood change in the Philadelphia region at the turn of the 21st century. Prior to joining Reinvestment Fund in 2015, Dr. Norton served as a Senior Research Associate at Research for Action in Philadelphia. In this role, he led and co-led a range of mixed-methods evaluations of educational reform initiatives and policies at the local and state levels.

Nonprofit organizations can play a very important role in building healthy communities by providing services that contribute to community stability, social mobility, public policy, and decision-making. Today we're speaking with Kathy Higgins, CEO of the Alliance for Healthier Generation. The Alliance is a nonprofit organization, a well-known one at that, that promotes healthy environments so that young people can achieve lifelong good health.

Interview Summary

Kathy, it's really wonderful to reconnect that you and I interacted some when you were in North Carolina and head of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, and then you got called upon to be the CEO of the Alliance, a really interesting position. It's really wonderful to be able to talk to you again. Let's start maybe with a little bit of the history of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Can you tell us a bit about how it got started and over the years, how it's evolved?

We've existed for almost 19 years now. We celebrate our 20-year anniversary next year. And we were started by two vital public health forces: the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton and also the American Heart Association. They came together 20 years ago and began discussing childhood obesity and what could a leading public health organization do to really work in systems change across the country at a local level. It is those two organizations that we look to as our founders and who helped us advance our work.

It's a time flies story because it seems like just yesterday that the Alliance was created. There was a lot of excitement at the time for it, and over the work. It's done some really interesting things. So, in today's iteration of the Alliance, what are some of the main areas of focus?

As I mentioned, we are a systems change organization. What we do is take a continuous improvement approach to advancing children's health. So, we are working typically in schools or after school time and certainly in communities to work on policy and practice change that are about promoting physical activity and healthy eating. And then addressing critical child health and adolescent health issues, which as we know, were exacerbated with the pandemic. Things like food access and social connectedness are just so important. Quality sleep, which our children are not getting enough of, or other things like vaping and tobacco sensation and on time vaccinations. Another thing that we know is that the pandemic had a dramatic impact on families and children on time vaccinations. So, this is the work that we do and working with the policy and practice change so that there there can be opportunity for healthy environments for the children.

I think most everybody would probably agree that the targets that you're working on, healthy diet, physical activity, smoking, vaping habits and things like that are really important. But people might be a little less familiar with what you mean by addressing systems. Could you give some examples of what you mean by that?

Right. What we know is that in United States, in fact, every public school must have a wellness policy and areas that need to be addressed. But what we'll do is work with the school in making sure that those policies are best suited for the families, the community, and the school, and what they want to do to support the health of children from a collaborative and supportive role. What we know is that we can create great change when that occurs. We work with more than 56,000 schools across the United States, and one of the things that we know is that our approach is really reflected in the America's Healthiest Schools recognition program each year.

It's interesting to hear you talk about schools as an example of system change. And boy, working with 56,000 schools is pretty darn impressive. And it allows for out-sized influence of an organization like yours because if you can affect things like these school wellness policies and that gets multiplied across a ton of schools, it can really affect a lot of children.

Exactly. We will work school to school, but we also work in districts and that allows us then to make even a bigger impact in the number of schools that we're reaching with these changes. It also brings the community together because then they're all operating under the same principles or the same focus areas of the work that they're committed to doing. What we do see is that we're able to assist them in implementing what are typically best practices in all sorts of topic areas. Whether it's strengthening the social emotional health and learning environment for the children, but also focusing on staff wellness. The whole notion, Kelly, of putting your oxygen mask on first before assisting others is something that has been incredibly important to us. We've certainly been very supported to do that work from a variety of funders. The other area that we've been able to make great strides in is this increasing of family and community engagement, which has been really significant for us. We've been honored to have Kohl's as a major supporter of our work. Their investment and then reinvestment and then once again, another reinvestment, really helped us engage with strategies that focused on increasing family wellbeing. So really then our three-legged stool becomes the school environment, the family environment, and the community environment, which we find is just really effective.

So can we talk a little bit more about the community engagement and why is it important and how do you go about making it happen and what sort of impacts do you see it having?

I think I may have mentioned already that we do use a continuous improvement model that we find is just really effective for when we're working in the school or school district level. It allows us to serve in a role of being a convener and bringing people together. What we know now is certainly after COVID that schools are no longer for walls of learning. They have a central role to the health of the community because of the services that they're providing or the services that families need them to provide. So, when we're working with a school, we're able to convene the right people that are in their community. They may be in the same zip code, they may be down the street, they may be across town. But they haven't come together around the same table to start to address issues that they may have prioritized that are impacting a host of things. It could be impacting attendance rates, it could be impacting academic achievement. And we're really able to work with them to dismantle the barriers to what would lead to success. To give a couple examples in North Carolina, in fact, we work in both Bertie and Roberson County and on vaccination adherence, and also making sure that the children that may have deferred their well-child visits or their age-appropriate vaccinations during COVID that we've worked with convening just as mentioned, the right players, the right people in the community to come together. And in both those counties we've been able to have nearly 250 students that are healthy back to school and fully vaccinated as they should be and that they deserve to be and as their families wanted them to be, but the time the resources just wasn't there or convenient enough to do. And so, this really has allowed the community to have a great win. It's a great example of just the importance of sitting down together, looking at the data and thinking about how we can all make a difference.

Kathy, what you've reminded me of as you've been talking about this is that there's sort of a sweet spot that you've attained. If all you paid attention to were best practices, you'd say, well, okay, everything that works in these other places is going to work in your place, which of course might only be partially true. But if you only work locally, then you'd miss the opportunity to be learning what's happening elsewhere that might help you. And you're kind of at the intersection of these things, aren't you?

Thank you for saying that. That's exactly where we sit - at that intersection. Sometimes we feel in a continuous improvement model that there's a no wrong door, so to speak. And so, when we're engaging with a school, school community, a community, or even a school district, that we're able to sit with them in proximity and talk through what are the issues that they're facing, where their children are most at risk, and what is it that they are working to prioritize. Because we also know that if we can move them through a process and achieve success and really answer the question, is anyone better off? So to really be outcomes focused. Then, what we know is that there are other opportunities for improvement that we can continue that work. Part of the success here is just pausing and celebrating what good work this community is doing together. This school is doing together.

Tell us if you will, a little bit about how the work of the Alliance is funded, because I know you draw support from a number of quarters. You mentioned Kohl's, but overall how is the work funded?

Thanks for asking. You know, one of the things I did mention to start with is the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton, specifically with his leadership supporting the health of children and families and the Heart Association. But the significant financial supporter and strategic supporter at the time was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They really put significant resources behind the creation of Healthier Generation. But the other thing that they did is put their brightest minds and public health leadership behind the creation of why we would exist and what would be the pillars of our organization that would serve well to make a difference. So having a technology backbone, which allows us to have an action center. Meaning that any school, any teacher, any administrator, any parent can access our training and our tools for free. Through our website, we have marketing and communication that follow best practices for how to create change and how to communicate change to the audiences that we're reaching out to our subject matter expertise and then measurement and evaluation. And it's this ability that really attracted funders like Kaiser Permanente. While schools have been central to our work, this digital platform really allowed our action center to help and support this access of no cost assessment tools, trainings, resources. Kaiser Permanente has been a key supporter of our work since 2013. I mentioned Kohl's as well, as such a significant supporter allowing us to reach 10 million families since the inception of our work together with them. Del Monte Foods is another significant supportive of ours. They allow us to implement the America's Healthiest School Awards program. I would be lost if I didn't mention Mackenzie Scott. She wanted to invest in whole child health equity and we were identified as an organization that was worthy of her funding and definitely was the largest single gift from a philanthropist that we've ever received. So, we were so grateful for that, that call called.

That's wonderful affirmation. No question. It's nice to hear you have such a broad base of funding because that's a sign that people are thinking you're doing things right. I'm not sure I'm in a the best position to be completely objective about this because over the years I've received funding from through Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a number of projects. But it's amazing how often their imprint comes up when you talk about organizations that are doing creative work and you go back to the beginnings and Robert Wood Johnson was often there doing these things when nobody else was. And it's really wonderful to see the long-term consequence of that investment that they made. Well, let's talk about some new work you're doing in the schools. I know that a relatively new effort of the Alliance involves the expansion of resources in terms of a playbook in the schools. Can you explain what that's all about?

Oh yes. This was really born out of the pandemic environment and our need and the schools need to know better guidance on the work that we can do to create healthier environments when so many demands are being put on us. We all know what happened to the food service staff of any school. They became the food service staff of the community during the COVID years. Kohl's wanted us to partner with selected communities across the country to implement what would be really a new family engagement strategy to support children's health and developing. What we call and refer to as our Healthy at Home playbook for schools to forge stronger relationships with families. We know that when schools and the families are working together and schools are understanding what families need, and families are able to be in a position to be heard and communicate what their needs are, that together they can really make a difference. We've been pretty excited the collection of resources. They're both in English and in Spanish on topics such as nutrition, staying active, mental wellbeing, social emotional health and stress and we've been pretty excited to have that implemented.

I could see how you'd be excited about that. So, let me ask a final question. The word policy has come up several times. Is it part of the purview of the alliance to argue for policy changes? You mentioned schools. So, for example, would the Alliance be in a position to argue for tighter nutrition standards in schools or even something beyond the schools, like something dealing with food marketing directed at kids or front of package labeling or really anything like that?

We stay out of the advocacy and lobbying lane, but we do focus on the small P policy change in schools so that we're helping schools manage their policies. But the area where we've had success is in creating a difference. We had a great partnership many years ago with McDonald's and worked with them on changes that they were committed to making in their healthy meals. And what we know is when McDonald's makes a big shift, so goes the market. Our body of work was the removing of sugary sodas from the menu board so that you would have to opt for that versus low fat milk or water and adding the sliced apples. I think that might be one of our hallmarks of the work that we've done over the years: sliced apples, carrot sticks, the GO-GURT that was being offered. And then removing either the higher sodium or higher fat items from the leaderboards so that they have to ask for them in order to have them as part of the Happy Meal. That was some significant work that we were able to do. And the other work we did in our early years was getting the three soda manufacturers, whether Pepsi and Coke and Dr. Pepper to agree to come together and remove sugar sodas from our public schools and replace it with a better price point of water. And it's something I know President Clinton is very proud of because I think a 90% of schools were on board with that work after about a three-year period. I think it really made a difference.

Bio

Kathy Higgins, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, is a national expert on health care and philanthropy, having previously served as the president and CEO of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation. Higgins leads Healthier Generation’s team of nearly 100 professional staff across the nation working to make the healthy choice the easy choice for all children. Prior to taking on the role of Healthier Generation CEO in January 2019, Higgins spent more than 30 years at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, where her roles span leading public health engagement, corporate communications, community relations, and corporate affairs. In 2000, Higgins led the launch of the Blue Cross NC Foundation. As president and CEO of the Blue Cross NC Foundation, Higgins led unprecedented growth, including the strategic investment of more than $150 million into North Carolina communities through more than 1,000 grants to improve the health of vulnerable populations, support physical activity and nutrition programs, and help nonprofit groups improve their organizational capacity. Higgins was also a significant advocate in Blue Cross NC’s early adoption of Healthier Generation’s decade-long innovative insurance benefit program, designed to encourage clinicians to extend weight management and obesity prevention services to kids and families. Higgins holds a bachelor’s degree in education from West Virginia Wesleyan College and completed her master’s work in community health education from Virginia Tech. She currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina and is the mother to twin boys.

Is it possible to decarbonize agriculture and make the food system more resilient to climate change? Today, I'm speaking with agricultural policy expert Peter Lehner about his climate neutral agriculture ideas and the science, law and policy needed to achieve these ambitious goals. Lehner is an environmental lawyer at Earthjustice and directs the organization's Sustainable Food and Farming Program.

Transcript

How does agriculture impact the climate? And I guess as important as that question is why don't more people know about this?

It's unfortunate that more people don't know about it because Congress and other policy makers only really respond to public pressure. And there isn't enough public pressure now to address agriculture's contribution to climate change. Where does it come from? Most people think about climate change as a result of burning fossil fuels, coal and oil, and the release of carbon dioxide. And there's some of that in agriculture. Think about tractors and ventilation fans and electricity used for pumps for irrigation. But most of agriculture's contribution to climate change comes from other processes that are not in the fossil fuel or the power sector. Where are those? The first is nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And it comes because most farmers around the world and in the U.S. put about twice as much nitrogen fertilizer on their crops, on the land, as the plants can absorb. That extra nitrogen goes somewhere. Some of it goes off into the water. I'm sure your listeners have heard about harmful algae outbreaks or eutrophication of areas like the Chesapeake Bay and other bays where you just get too many nutrients and too much algae and very sick ecosystem. A lot of that nitrogen, though, also goes into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. About 80% of nitrous oxide emissions in the U.S. come from agriculture. Excess fertilization of our hundreds of millions of acres of crop land.

Quick question. Why would, because the farmers have to pay money for this, why do they apply twice as much as the plants can absorb?

Great question. It's because of several different factors. Partly it is essentially technical or mechanical. A farmer may want to have the fertilizer on the land right at the spring when the crops are growing but the land may be a little muddy then. So they may have put it on in the fall, which is unfortunate because in the United States, in our temperate area, no plants are taking up fertilizers in the fall. Also, a plant is like you or me. They want to eat continually but a farmer may not want to apply fertilizer continuous. Every time you apply it, it takes tractor time and effort and it is more difficult. So they'll put a ton of fertilizer on at one point and then hope it lasts for a while, knowing that some of it will run off, but hopeful that some will remain to satisfy the plant. There's a lot of effort now to try to improve fertilizer application. To make sure it's applied in ways just the right amount at the right time. And perhaps with these what's called extended release fertilizers where you put it on and it will continue to release the nutrients to the plant over the next couple of weeks and not run off. But we have a long way to go.

Okay, thanks. I appreciate that discussion and I'm sorry I diverted you from the track you were on talking about the overall impact of agriculture on the climate.

I think what's so exciting about this area is that everyone cares about our food. We eat it three times a day or more and yet we know very little about where it comes from and its impacts on the world around us. It's wonderful to be talking about this. The second major source of climate change impact in agriculture is methane. Methane is another greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide. About 30 times more powerful over a hundred years and about 85 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Which is I think the policy relevant time period that we're looking at because we're all trying to achieve climate stability by 2050. And where does methane come from? A little bit comes from rice, but the vast majority of it comes from cows and from manure. Cows are different than you and me. They can eat grass, and their stomachs are different, and release methane. Every time they breathe out, they are essentially breathing out this potent greenhouse gas methane. This is called enteric methane and it's the largest single source of methane in the United States. Bigger than the gas industry or the oil industry. The other major source of methane is manure. Our animals are raised in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations. They're not grazing bucolically on the pasture, they are crammed into buildings where there may be thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of these animals. Those hundreds of thousands of animals produce a vast amount of manure, whether it be say pigs in North Carolina or dairies in many States, or cattle or chicken. All our meat nowadays is grown in these concentrated areas where you get concentrated manure and that is often stored in these lagoons. These big pits of poop basically. And that, as it decomposes in this liquid environment, what's called anaerobically , releases a tremendous amount of methane. That's the second largest source of methane in the country after the cows belching. So you have nitrous oxide and you have methane. And then the third way agriculture contributes to climate change, which is different say than the fossil fuel sector, is by changing the land itself. Agriculture uses a tremendous amount of land. Think about it. When you go around, what do you see? You see agriculture uses about 62% of the contiguous United States; 800 million acres of land for grazing; or almost 400 million acres of land for cropland. Healthy land before it's been used for agriculture has a tremendous amount of carbon in the soil and in the plants. Just think about a forest with all the rich soil and the rich vegetation. When that is cleared to be a cornfield, all that carbon is lost and essentially it goes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. And that soil after that can't absorb any more carbon. Healthy soil is absorbing carbon all the time and most agricultural soils are not. So that release of carbon when you convert land to agriculture and that continuing inability to sequester carbon is another major way that agriculture contributes to climate change. So these three ways: nitrous oxide, methane and carbon from soil are all important contributors to climate change that don't really fit most people's model of what drives climate change - burning coal or oil and releasing carbon dioxide. But the bottom line is if we don't address agriculture's contribution to climate change, no matter how successful we are in reducing our fossil fuel use, we are very likely to face catastrophic climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is so significant. Far more than the indicated by many figures. We can't achieve climate stability without addressing agriculture as well. Agriculture drives about a quarter or a third total green climate change.

Given how important this is, why don't people know more about it? And does industry play a role in that?

Industry plays a big role, as does politics. Industry - and by industry we mean the food industry. And you've covered this before. It's very concentrated industry where usually two or three or four firms control the market, whether it be for seeds or retail or beef or chicken or pesticides. It's a very, very concentrated industry with tremendous political power. They have done their best to ensure, first of all, the agriculture industry doesn't even have to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Every other industry has to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The big polluters have to report. On the other hand, agriculture was able to obtain a rider in Congress. That's an extra provision on a budget bill starting about a decade ago that prohibits EPA from requiring agricultural facilities to report greenhouse gas emissions. So unlike most areas, agriculture doesn't even have to report their emissions and industry certainly wants to keep it that way. Also, as I was explaining, agriculture contributes to climate change in a way that is different than what we normally think about. I think that added complexity has just meant it is harder for people to understand. And third, there's a tremendous amount of mythology in agriculture. People think or would like to think that their food comes from this nice family farm with a few animals and a few diversified crops on the hillside. And that in some sense was the reality 50 or 100 years ago, but now it's not the reality. While there's still lots of small farms like that by number, those produce very little of our food. Most of our food is produced in these gigantic animal factories that I mentioned earlier or in gigantic monoculture chemical-dependent agricultural operations. So, we have this disconnect between what is the mythology of agriculture and where our food comes from and the reality of it. People really don't want their myths disrupted.

Given the importance of these issues, what are some of the main ways that the impact of agriculture on climate can be changed?

That's another exciting part of this. That there's a lot of things that can be done to reduce the impact of agriculture's contribution to climate change. And we know this because there are a lot of producers who have piloted these programs, who've implemented these programs and these practices on their own operations to reduce the climate impact. And they've been successful. So these can be, for example, rotating crops instead of having the same crop year after year after year, which really depletes the soil. You can have different crops in different years and each crop puts a little different in the soil and takes a little different from the soil. As a result, very often you end up needing less artificial pesticide and fertilizer, both of which contribute to climate change. You can manage your animals different. You can manage your manure differently. For example, if manure is treated and handled dry, as opposed to in these wet manure lagoons, it produces very, very little methane. Instead of producing tremendous amounts of methane, it produces almost none. So, if we manage manure differently, we can significantly reduce methane emissions. And of course, there's what we think of as the demand side. In the same way that we think about LED light bulbs or more efficient cars as part of our energy transformation, we can use our land and food more efficiently. We waste a tremendous amount of food. Maybe 30-40% of the food we produce is wasted. That's crazy. It's all the effort and the greenhouse gases from producing the food are wasted if the food is wasted. Even worse, the food is dumped into a landfill for the most part where it releases more methane. And it's inefficient. We have a system that very heavily subsidizes meat production, but meat uses, particularly beef, a tremendous amount of land because cows need a lot of land the way their biology requires land and time. So we have almost 800 million or 700 million acres of land devoted to cattle grazing that could be storing carbon. Then it takes about 15 pounds of grain to get a pound of beef where people can eat the grain directly much more efficiently. So there's a lot of practices that we can do at every stage of the process to reduce the climate impact of agriculture. The challenge is that it's only on a couple percent of American cropland or very little portion of our food is produced that way.

So Peter, let me ask you a question about that very point you're on. We've recorded a series of podcasts on regenerative agriculture. Some of the most interesting podcasts we've done from my point of view. And they've included scientists who've studied it, policy people who look into it, but also farmers who have done this. I'm thinking particularly, well, three names pop into mind, but there are more. So Nancy Ranney, who ran a ranch in New Mexico for cattle, Gabe Brown, a regenerative farmer in North Dakota, and Will Harris from Georgia were all people we spoke to. I got the sense in each of those cases that these people were converting to this new model of farming because of what they cared about. It was their own passions that led them to do this and belief that a different system of agriculture was going to be important for the future. They were doing it for that reason, rather than any incentives from the government or policies that were encouraging, things like that. So there will be a small number of such people who would do it because they're passionate about it. I'm assuming that number will grow, but never fast enough to really do anything to scale like we really need it. So I'm ultimately you're going to need policies in place to ensure these things happen in more and more farms. Are there particular policies that are oriented this way that you think might be especially helpful?

Kelly, you are spot on. I know Nancy and Gabe and Will, and they're terrific. They are pioneers and they are showing that we know this works. We're not looking at ideas that might work. We are looking at practices that we know work because of what they and others like them have done. As you said, they're doing it because they believe it's the right thing. We'll get some farmers that way, but we need policy to move from 2% of American crop land to 92% of American crop land. So, how do we do that? One is the current farm bill is very important. The farm bill is the most important environmental law nobody's ever heard of. It dates back to the depression. It's renewed every five years. Congress is debating it right now. It was supposed to be renewed last year, but they couldn't get their act together. So they may or may not be able to reauthorize it this year. But the farm bill in one section provides a tremendous amount of money for nutrition assistance. And you've probably talked about that, what we call the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In another part of it, it provides tremendous amounts of subsidies to farmers, about $20 billion a year of subsidies to farmers. Right now, those subsidies really are not designed to encourage farmers to adopt the practices that you talked to Nancy or Gabe or Will about. These practices that I was talking about earlier and that sometimes are called regenerative, sometimes agroecological, organic farming is often a part of that. These $20 billion of subsidies though, could be redirected, reshaped somewhat and not necessarily radically, but reshaped and focused on encouraging farmers to adopt these practices that can help mitigate climate change. And importantly, the same practices, and as I'm sure the folks you've talked to said, also help them be more resilient to climate change. They can better help the producer better withstand floods and droughts and temperature extremes. So there is a tremendous upside from this. We are already spending $20 billion a year on farm subsidies. Let's start spending it more intelligently in a way that really addresses our needs.

Do you see signs that things are moving in that direction?

I wish I did. There are some signs that we're moving in the right direction. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed a couple of years ago, was the first time Congress ever linked agriculture and climate change. In the 2018 Farm Bill, there's no mention of climate change. And when we were working on that with members on the Hill, there was really no overt conversations about climate change. Fortunately, things have changed. So, a step forward is that we're talking about climate change. And in the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress provided $20 billion to go to programs that are established under the Farm Bill. So, 20 extra billion dollars to these Farm Bill conservation programs and required that that money be spent on practices that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, essentially help us mitigate climate change. And that, again, was the first time Congress linked agriculture and climate change. Super important. Part of what's going on now on the Hill is a fight to ensure that money that the Inflation Reduction Act provided stays. There are those in Congress that would like to raid those funds and put them to other purposes, which we think would be a big step backwards. So that was really great opportunity. As to the Farm Bill money itself, there's definitely some conversations, particularly among the Democrats, to ensure that all of the Farm Bill programs are a bit more climate-focused. But we're far from consensus on that. So, we're making a bit of progress, but right now Congress is, I think it's fair to say, not at its most functional. And so the type of policy discussions we need, and an honest discussion of how can we help American farmers shift to practices that are better for them, for the communities, upwind and downwind and around them, better for climate change resilience and climate change mitigation. We're really not yet having that conversation as robustly as we need. Hopefully we'll be able to get to a place where the politics will allow us to have that. And frankly, this podcast and other conversations are really important to educating people so we can have that conversation.

When you're trying to make policy advances, having public support for it can be a real asset. Do you see signs that the public is becoming more aware of this, that they're urging their political leaders to move on this front?

For sure. The public is very much concerned about climate change. Every poll shows that. And people are concerned about it both as citizens and as consumers. So, if you follow the food marketing world, what you see is that many surveys show that consumers are very interested in the climate impact of their food choices. And far more than was the case a couple of years ago. And they want to know how can I buy food? How can I eat food that is climate friendly, that helps us stabilize the climate? And industry is responding to that. Now, some industry is responding to that by deceptive advertising. You may have seen that the New York Attorney General recently sued JBS, the world's largest beef company, for misleading statements about the climate-friendliness of their beef. So some companies are talking more than they're doing, but others are trying to respond to consumers' interest in more climate-friendly food. You see a growth in plant-based foods, plant-based milks, because plant-based foods have a much, much lower climate impact than meats, particularly beef. And so consumers are interested in that, and that market is responding. And I think you'll see more of that in governmental procurement as well. Governments that are trying to think about how can we, say New York City, reduce our climate footprint while a big part of a city's climate footprint is the food it purchases, say for New York City schools. And a city can take action by trying to buy lower climate impact foods. And that would be foods produced in a way that you've talked about with regenerative practices and also lower climate impact, such as more plant based. So, I think we're seeing a lot of progress on that for sure.

So Peter, related to this, what would you think about some kind of labeling system on food products that gives an environmental score, let's say?

I personally like the idea of labels. I'm not an expert by any stretch. I do remember that not too long ago, New York City required restaurants to label or have on the menus the calorie content of food. And that provision was later adopted by the Affordable Care Act and now is required of chain restaurants. And Trump tried to roll that back. So we litigated to try to preserve that and get that requirement reinstated in the Affordable Care Act successfully. And during that, I learned that labels really make a difference. Calorie labeling on menus does in fact help people make more informed choices and often better choices. And there's no question, again, I'm not an expert. You probably know much more, but for example, the added sugar labels make a difference and others. So I think as a whole, labels can make a big difference. Now, environmental footprint is a complicated multifaceted issue because something may create harm to water. It may create harm through toxic, say pesticide residue, or it may have a big climate footprint. How do you put all of that into a simple label? It's a complicated question. But I do think there's interest in having particularly climate, the climate impact food be identified on the label. And perhaps we will move in that direction.

Bio

Based in New York, Peter Lehner is the managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food & Farming Program, developing litigation, administrative, and legislative strategies to promote a more just and environmentally sound agricultural system and to reduce health, environmental, and climate harms from production of our food. Peter is one of the leading experts on the impact of agriculture on climate change and is the author of Farming for Our Future; the Science, Law, and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture. From 2007–2015, Peter was the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the NRDC Action Fund. Among other new initiatives, Peter shaped a clean food program with food waste, antibiotic-free meat, regional food, and climate mitigation projects. From 1999–2006, Peter served as chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s office. He supervised all environmental litigation by and against the state. He developed innovative multi-state strategies targeting global warming and air pollution emissions from the nation’s largest electric utilities, spearheaded novel watershed enforcement programs, and led cases addressing invasive species, wildlife protection, and public health. Peter previously served at NRDC for five years directing the clean water program where he brought important attention to stormwater pollution. Before that, he created and led the environmental prosecution unit for New York City. Peter holds an AB in philosophy and mathematics from Harvard College and is an honors graduate of Columbia University Law School. Peter is on the boards of the Rainforest Alliance and Environmental Advocates of New York and a member of the American College of Environmental Lawyers. He helps manage two mid-sized farms and teaches a course on agriculture and environmental law at Columbia Law School.