In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson is joined by food and nutrition policy economists Will Masters and Parke Wilde from Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy. The discussion centers around the concept of the least cost diet, a tool used to determine the minimum cost required to maintain a nutritionally adequate diet. The conversation delves into the global computational methods and policies related to least cost diets, the challenges of making these diets culturally relevant, and the implications for food policy in both the US and internationally. You will also hear about the lived experiences of people affected by these diets and the need for more comprehensive research to better reflect reality.

Interview Summary

I know you both have been working in this space around least cost diets for a while. So, let's really start off by just asking a question about what brought you into this work as researchers. Why study least cost diets? Will, let's start with you.

I'm a very curious person and this was a puzzle. So, you know, people want health. They want healthy food. Of course, we spend a lot on healthcare and health services, but do seek health in our food. As a child growing up, you know, companies were marketing food as a source of health. And people who had more money would spend more for premium items that were seen as healthy. And in the 2010s for the first time, we had these quantified definitions of what a healthy diet was as we went from 'nutrients' to 'food groups,' from the original dietary guidelines pyramid to the MyPlate. And then internationally, the very first quantified definitions of healthful diets that would work anywhere in the world. And I was like, oh, wow. Is it actually expensive to eat a healthy diet? And how much does it cost? How does it differ by place location? How does it differ over time, seasons, and years? And I just thought it was a fascinating question.

Great, thank you for that. Parke?

There's a lot of policy importance on this, but part of the fun also of this particular topic is more than almost any that we work on, it's connected to things that we have to think about in our daily lives. So, as you're preparing and purchasing food for your family and you want it to be a healthy. And you want it to still be, you know, tasty enough to satisfy the kids. And it can't take too long because it has to fit into a busy life. So, this one does feel like it's got a personal connection.

Thank you both for that. One of the things I heard is there was an availability of data. There was an opportunity that seems like it didn't exist before. Can you speak a little bit about that? Especially Will because you mentioned that point.

Will: Yes. So, we have had food composition data identifying for typical items. A can of beans, or even a pizza. You know, what is the expected, on average quantity of each nutrient. But only recently have we had those on a very large scale for global items. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of distinct items. And we had nutrient requirements, but only nutrient by nutrient, and the definition of a food group where you would want not only the nutrients, but also the phytochemicals, the attributes of food from its food matrix that make a vegetable different from just in a vitamin pill. And those came about in, as I mentioned, in the 2010s. And then there's the computational tools and the price observations that get captured. They've been written down on pads of paper, literally, and brought to a headquarters to compute inflation since the 1930s. But access to those in digitized form, only really in the 2000s and only really in the 2010s were we able to have program routines that would download millions and millions of price observations, match them to food composition data, match that food composition information to a healthy diet criterion, and then compute these least cost diets. Now we've computed millions and millions of these thanks to modern computing and all of that data.

Great, Will. And you've already started on this, so let's continue on this point. You were talking about some of the computational methods and data that were available globally. Can you give us a good sense of what does a lease cost diet look like from this global perspective because we're going to talk to Parke about whether it is in the US. But let's talk about it in the broad sense globally.

In my case the funding opportunity to pay for the graduate students and collaborators internationally came from the Gates Foundation and the UK International Development Agency, initially for a pilot study in Ghana and Tanzania. And then we were able to get more money to scale that up to Africa and South Asia, and then globally through a project called Food Prices for Nutrition. And what we found, first of all, is that to get agreement on what a healthy diet means, we needed to go to something like the least common denominator. The most basic, basic definition from the commonalities among national governments' dietary guidelines. So, in the US, that's MyPlate, or in the UK it's the Eat Well Guide. And each country's dietary guidelines look a little different, but they have these commonalities. So, we distilled that down to six food groups. There's fruits and vegetables, separately. And then there's animal source foods altogether. And in some countries they would separate out milk, like the United States does. And then all starchy staples together. And in some countries, you would separate out whole grains like the US does. And then all edible oils. And those six food groups, in the quantities needed to provide all the nutrients you would need, plus these attributes of food groups beyond just what's in a vitamin pill, turns out to cost about $4 a day. And if you adjust for inflation and differences in the cost of living, the price of housing and so forth around the world, it's very similar. And if you think about seasonal variation in a very remote area, it might rise by 50% in a really bad situation. And if you think about a very remote location where it's difficult to get food to, it might go up to $5.50, but it stays in that range between roughly speaking $2.50 and $5.00.

Meanwhile, incomes are varying from around $1.00 a day, and people who cannot possibly afford those more expensive food groups, to $200 a day in which these least expensive items are trivially small in cost compared to the issues that Parke mentioned. We can also talk about what we actually find as the items, and those vary a lot from place to place for some food groups and are very similar to each other in other food groups. So, for example, the least expensive item in an animal source food category is very often dairy in a rich country. But in a really dry, poor country it's dried fish because refrigeration and transport are very expensive. And then to see where there's commonalities in the vegetable category, boy. Onions, tomatoes, carrots are so inexpensive around the world. We've just gotten those supply chains to make the basic ingredients for a vegetable stew really low cost. But then there's all these other different vegetables that are usually more expensive. So, it's very interesting to look at which are the items that would deliver the healthfulness you need and how much they cost. It's surprisingly little from a rich country perspective, and yet still out of reach for so many in low-income countries.

Will, thank you for that. And I want to turn now to looking in the US case because I think there's some important commonalities. Parke, can you describe the least cost diet, how it's used here in the US, and its implications for policy?

Absolutely. And full disclosure to your audience, this is work on which we've benefited from Norbert's input and wisdom in a way that's been very valuable as a co-author and as an advisor for the quantitative part of what we were doing. For an article in the journal Food Policy, we use the same type of mathematical model that USDA uses when it sets the Thrifty Food Plan, the TFP. A hypothetical diet that's used as the benchmark for the maximum benefit in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is the nation's most important anti-hunger program. And what USDA does with this model diet is it tries to find a hypothetical bundle of foods and beverages that's not too different from what people ordinarily consume. The idea is it should be a familiar diet, it should be one that's reasonably tasty, that people clearly already accept enough. But it can't be exactly that diet. It has to be different enough at least to meet a cost target and to meet a whole long list of nutrition criteria. Including getting enough of the particular nutrients, things like enough calcium or enough protein, and also, matching food group goals reasonably well. Things like having enough fruits, enough vegetables, enough dairy. When, USDA does that, it finds that it's fairly difficult. It's fairly difficult to meet all those goals at once, at a cost and a cost goal all at the same time. And so, it ends up choosing this hypothetical diet that's almost maybe more different than would feel most comfortable from people's typical average consumption.

Thank you, Parke. I'm interested to understand the policy implications of this least cost diet. You suggested something about the Thrifty Food Plan and the maximum benefit levels. Can you tell us a little bit more about the policies that are relevant?

Yes, so the Thrifty Food Plan update that USDA does every five years has a much bigger policy importance now than it did a few years ago. I used to tell my students that you shouldn't overstate how much policy importance this update has. It might matter a little bit less than you would think. And the reason was because every time they update the Thrifty Food Plan, they use the cost target that is the inflation adjusted or the real cost of the previous edition. It's a little bit as if nobody wanted to open up the whole can of worms about what should the SNAP benefit be in the first place.

But everything changed with the update in 2021. In 2021, researchers at the US Department of Agriculture found that it was not possible at the old cost target to find a diet that met all of the nutrition criteria - at all. Even if you were willing to have a diet that was quite different from people's typical consumption. And so, they ended up increasing the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan in small increments until they found a solution to this mathematical model using data on real world prices and on the nutrition characteristics of these foods. And this led to a 21% increase in the permanent value of the maximum SNAP benefit. Many people didn't notice that increase all that much because the increase came into effect at just about the same time that a temporary boost during the COVID era to SNAP benefits was being taken away. So there had been a temporary boost to how much benefits people got as that was taken away at the end of the start of the COVID pandemic then this permanent increase came in and it kind of softened the blow from that change in benefits at that time. But it now ends up meaning that the SNAP benefit is substantially higher than it would've been without this 2021 increase. And there's a lot of policy attention on this in the current Congress and in the current administration. There's perhaps a skeptical eye on whether this increase was good policy. And so, there are proposals to essentially take away the ability to update the Thrifty Food Plan change the maximum SNAP benefit automatically, as it used to. As you know, Norbert, this is part of all sorts of things going on currently. Like we heard in the news, just last week, about plans to end collecting household food security measurement using a major national survey. And so there will be sort of possibly less information about how these programs are doing and whether a certain SNAP benefit is needed in order to protect people from food insecurity and hunger.

Parke, this is really important and I'm grateful that we're able to talk about this today in that SNAP benefit levels are still determined by this mathematical program that's supposed to represent a nutritionally adequate diet that also reflects food preferences. And I don't know how many people really understand or appreciate that. I can say I didn't understand or appreciate it until working more in this project. I think it's critical for our listeners to understand just how important this particular mathematical model is, and what it says about what a nutritionally adequate diet looks like in this country. I know the US is one of the countries that uses a model diet like this to help set policy. Will, I'd like to turn to you to see what ways other nations are using this sort of model diet. How have you seen policy receive information from these model diets?

It's been a remarkable thing where those initial computational papers that we were able to publish in first in 2018, '19, '20, and governments asking how could we use this in practice. Parke has laid out how it's used in the US with regard to the benefit level of SNAP. The US Thrifty Food Plan has many constraints in addition to the basic ones for the Healthy Diet Basket that I described. Because clearly that Healthy Diet Basket minimum is not something anyone in America would think is acceptable. Just to have milk and frozen vegetables and low-cost bread, that jar peanut butter and that's it. Like that would be clearly not okay. So, internationally what's happened is that first starting in 2020, and then using the current formula in 2022, the United Nations agencies together with the World Bank have done global monitoring of food and nutrition security using this method. So, the least cost items to meet the Healthy Diet Basket in each country provide this global estimate that about a third of the global population have income available for food after taking account of their non-food needs. That is insufficient to buy this healthy diet. What they're actually eating is just starchy staples, oil, some calories from low-cost sugar and that's it. And very small quantities of the fruits and vegetables. And animal source foods are the expensive ones. So, countries have the opportunity to begin calculating this themselves alongside their normal monitoring of inflation with a consumer price index. The first country to do that was Nigeria. And Nigeria began publishing this in January 2024. And it so happened that the country's national minimum wage for civil servants was up for debate at that time. And this was a newly published statistic that turned out to be enormously important for the civil society advocates and the labor unions who were trying to explain why a higher civil service minimum wage was needed. This is for the people who are serving tea or the drivers and the low wage people in these government service agencies. And able to measure how many household members could you feed a healthy diet with a day's worth of the monthly wage. So social protection in the sense of minimum wage and then used in other countries regarding something like our US SNAP program or something like our US WIC program. And trying to define how big should those benefit levels be. That's been the first use.

A second use that's emerging is targeting the supply chains for the low-cost vegetables and animal source foods and asking what from experience elsewhere could be an inexpensive animal source food. What could be the most inexpensive fruits. What could be the most inexpensive vegetables? And that is the type of work that we're doing now with governments with continued funding from the Gates Foundation and the UK International Development Agency.

Will, it's fascinating to hear this example from Nigeria where all of the work that you all have been doing sort of shows up in this kind of debate. And it really speaks to the power of the research that we all are trying to do as we try to inform policy. Now, as we discussed the least cost diet, there was something that I heard from both of you. Are these diets that people really want? I'm interested to understand a little bit more about that because this is a really critical space.Will, what do we know about the lived experiences of those affected by least cost diet policy implementation. How are real people affected?

It's such an important and interesting question, just out of curiosity, but also for just our human understanding of what life is like for people. And then of course the policy actions that could improve. So, to be clear, we've only had these millions of least cost diets, these benchmark 'access to' at a market near you. These are open markets that might be happening twice a week or sometimes all seven days of the week in a small town, in an African country or a urban bodega type market or a supermarket across Asia, Africa. We've only begun to have these benchmarks against which to compare actual food choice, as I mentioned, since 2022. And then really only since 2024 have been able to investigate this question. We're only beginning to match up these benchmark diets to what people actually choose. But the pattern we're seeing is that in low and lower middle-income countries, people definitely spend their money to go towards that healthy diet basket goal. They don't spend all of their additional money on that. But if you improve affordability throughout the range of country incomes - from the lowest income countries in Africa, Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, to middle income countries in Africa, like Ghana, Indonesia, an upper middle-income country - people do spend their money to get more animal source foods, more fruits and vegetables, and to reduce the amount of the low cost starchy staples. They do increase the amount of discretionary, sugary meals. And a lot of what they're eating exits the healthy diet basket because there's too much added sodium, too much added sugar. And so, things that would've been healthy become unhealthy because of processing or in a restaurant setting. So, people do spend their money on that. But they are moving towards a healthy diet. That breaks down somewhere in the upper income and high-income countries where additional spending becomes very little correlated with the Healthy Diet Basket. What happens is people way overshoot the Healthy Diet Basket targets for animal source foods and for edible oils because I don't know if you've ever tried it, but one really delicious thing is fried meat. People love it. And even low middle income people overshoot on that. And that displaces the other elements of a healthy diet. And then there's a lot of upgrading, if you will, within the food group. So, people are spending additional money on nicer vegetables. Nicer fruits. Nicer animal source foods without increasing the total amount of them in addition to having overshot the healthy diet levels of many of those food groups. Which of course takes away from the food you would need from the fruits, the vegetables, and the pulses, nuts and seeds, that almost no one gets as much as is considered healthy, of that pulses, nuts and seeds category.

Thank you. And I want to shift this to the US example. So, Parke, can you tell us a bit more about the lived experience of those affected by least cost diet policy? How are real people affected?

One of the things I've enjoyed about this project that you and I got to work on, Norbert, in cooperation with other colleagues, is that it had both a quantitative and a qualitative part to it. Now, our colleague Sarah Folta led some of the qualitative interviews, sort of real interviews with people in food pantries in four states around the country. And this was published recently in the Journal of Health Education and Behavior. And we asked people about their goals and about what are the different difficulties or constraints that keep them from achieving those goals. And what came out of that was that people often talk about whether their budget constraints and whether their financial difficulties take away their autonomy to sort of be in charge of their own food choices. And this was something that Sarah emphasized as she sort of helped lead us through a process of digesting what was the key findings from these interviews with people. One of the things I liked about doing this study is that because the quantitative and the qualitative part, each had this characteristic of being about what do people want to achieve. This showed up mathematically in the constrained optimization model, but it also showed up in the conversations with people in the food pantry. And what are the constraints that keep people from achieving it. You know, the mathematical model, these are things like all the nutrition constraints and the cost constraints. And then in the real conversations, it's something that people raise in very plain language about what are all the difficulties they have. Either in satisfying their own nutrition aspirations or satisfying some of the requirements for one person or another in the family. Like if people have special diets that are needed or if they have to be gluten free or any number of things. Having the diets be culturally appropriate. And so, I feel like this is one of those classic things where different disciplines have wisdom to bring to bear on what's really very much a shared topic.

What I hear from both of you is that these diets, while they are computationally interesting and they reveal some critical realities of how people eat, they can't cover everything. People want to eat certain types of foods. Certain types of foods are more culturally relevant. And that's really clear talking to you, Will, about just sort of the range of foods that end up showing up in these least cost diets and how you were having to make some adjustments there. Parke, as you talked about the work with Sarah Folta thinking through autonomy and sort of a sense of self. This kind of leads us to a question that I want to open up to both of you. What's missing when we talk about these least cost diet modeling exercises and what are the policy implications of that? What are the gaps in our understanding of these model diets and what needs to happen to make them reflect reality better? Parke?

Well, you know, there's many things that people in our research community are working on. And it goes quite, quite far afield. But I'm just thinking of two related to our quantitative research using the Thrifty Food Plan type models. We've been working with Yiwen Zhao and Linlin Fan at Penn State University on how these models would work if you relaxed some of the constraints. If people's back in a financial sense weren't back up against the wall, but instead they had just a little more space. We were considering what if they had incentives that gave them a discount on fruits and vegetables, for example, through the SNAP program? Or what if they had a healthy bundle of foods provided through the emergency food system, through food banks or food pantries. What is the effect directly in terms of those foods? But also, what is the effect in terms of just relaxing their budget constraints. They get to have a little more of the foods that they find more preferred or that they had been going without. But then also, in terms of sort of your question about the more personal. You know, what is people's personal relationships with food? How does this play out on the ground? We're working with the graduate student Angelica Valdez Valderrama here at the Friedman School, thinking about what some of the cultural assumptions and of the food group constraints in some of these models are. If you sort of came from a different immigrant tradition or if you came from another community, what things would be different in, for example, decisions about what's called the Mediterranean diet or what's called the healthy US style dietary pattern. How much difference do this sort of breadth, cultural breadth of dietary patterns you could consider, how much difference does that make in terms of what's the outcome of this type of hypothetical diet?

Will: And I think, you know, from the global perspective, one really interesting thing is when we do combine data sets and look across these very different cultural settings, dry land, Sahelian Africa versus countries that are coastal versus sort of forest inland countries versus all across Asia, south Asia to East Asia, all across Latin America. We do see the role of these cultural factors. And we see them playing out in very systematic ways that people come to their cultural norms for very good reasons. And then pivot and switch away to new cultural norms. You know, American fast food, for example, switching from beef primarily to chicken primarily. That sort of thing becomes very visible in a matter of years. So, in terms of things that are frontiers for us, remember this is early days. Getting many more nutritionists, people in other fields, looking at first of all, it's just what is really needed for health. Getting those health requirements improved and understood better is a key priority. Our Healthy Diet Basket comes from the work of a nutritionist named Anna Herforth, who has gone around the world studying these dietary guidelines internationally. We're about to get the Eat Lancet dietary recommendations announced, and it'll be very interesting to see how those evolve.

Second thing is much better data on prices and computing these diets for more different settings at different times, different locations. Settings that are inner city United States versus very rural. And then this question of comparing to actual diets. And just trying to understand what people are seeking when they choose foods that are clearly not these benchmark least cost items. The purpose is to ask how far away and why and how are they far away? And particularly to understand to what degree are these attributes of the foods themselves: the convenience of the packaging, the preparation of the item, the taste, the flavor, the cultural significance of it. To what degree are we looking at the result of aspirations that are really shaped by marketing. Are really shaped by the fire hose of persuasion that companies are investing in every day. And very strategically and constantly iterating to the best possible spokesperson, the best possible ad campaign. Combining billboards and radio and television such that you're surrounded by this. And when you drive down the street and when you walk into the supermarket, there is no greater effort on the planet than the effort to sell us a particular brand of food. Food companies are basically marketing companies attached to a manufacturing facility, and they are spending much more than the entire combined budget of the NIH and CDC, et cetera, to persuade us to eat what we ultimately choose. And we really don't know to what degree it's the actual factors in the food itself versus the marketing campaigns and the way they've evolved. You know, if you had a choice between taking the food system and regulating it the way we regulate, say housing or vehicles. If we were to say your supermarket should be like an auto dealership, right? So, anything in the auto dealership is very heavily regulated. Everything from the paint to where the gear shift is to how the windows work. Everything is heavily regulated because the auto industry has worked with National Transportation Safety Board and every single crash investigation, et cetera, has led to the standards that we have now. We didn't get taxes on cars without airbags to make us choose cars with airbags. They're just required. And same is true for housing, right? You can't just build, you know, an extension deck behind your house any way you want. A city inspector will force you to tear it out if you haven't built it to code. So, you know, we could regulate the grocery store like we do that. It's not going to happen politically but compare that option to treating groceries the way we used to treat the legal services or pharmaceuticals. Which is you couldn't advertise them. You could sell them, and people would choose based on the actual merit of the lawyer or the pharmaceutical, right? Which would have the bigger impact. Right? If there was zero food advertising, you just walked into the grocery store and chose what you liked. Or you regulate the grocery store the same way we regulate automotive or building trades. Obviously, they both matter. There's, you know, this problem that you can't see, taste or smell the healthiness of food. You're always acting on belief and not a fact when you choose something that you're seeking health. We don't know to what extent choice is distorted away from a low-cost healthy diet by things people genuinely want and need. Such as taste, convenience, culture, and so forth. Versus things that they've been persuaded to want. And there's obviously some of both. All of these things matter. But I'm hopeful that through these least cost diets, we can identify that low-cost options are there. And you could feed your family a very healthy diet at the Thrifty Food Plan level in the United States, or even lower. It would take time, it would take attention, it would be hard. You can take some shortcuts to make that within your time budget, right? And the planning budget. And we can identify what those look like thanks to these model diets.

It's a very exciting area of work, but we still have a lot to do to define carefully what are the constraints. What are the real objectives here. And how to go about helping people, acquire these foods that we now know are there within a short commuting distance. You may need to take the bus, you may need carpool. But that's what people actually do to go grocery shopping. And when they get there, we can help people to choose items that would genuinely meet their needs at lower cost.

Bios

Will Masters is a Professor in the Friedman School of Nutrition, with a secondary appointment in Tufts University's Department of Economics. He is coauthor of the new textbook on Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Before coming to Tufts in 2010 he was a faculty member in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University (1991-2010), and also at the University of Zimbabwe (1989-90), Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (2000) and Columbia University (2003-04). He is former editor-in-chief of the journal Agricultural Economics (2006-2011), and an elected Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition (FASN) as well as a Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). At Tufts his courses on economics of agriculture, food and nutrition were recognized with student-nominated, University-wide teaching awards in 2019 and 2022, and he leads over a million dollars annually in externally funded research including work on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy (https://www.anh-academy.org), as well as projects supporting government efforts to calculate the cost and affordability of healthy diets worldwide and work with private enterprises on data analytics for food markets in Africa.

Parke Wilde (PhD, Cornell) is a food economist and professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Previously, he worked for USDA's Economic Research Service. At Tufts, Parke teaches graduate-level courses in statistics, U.S. food policy, and climate change. His research addresses the economics of U.S. food and nutrition policy, including federal nutrition assistance programs. He was Director of Design for the SNAP Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP) evaluation. He has been a member of the National Academy of Medicine's Food Forum and is on the scientific and technical advisory committee for Menus of Change, an initiative to advance the health and sustainability of the restaurant industry. He directs the USDA-funded Research Innovation and Development Grants in Economics (RIDGE) Partnership. He received the AAEA Distinguished Quality of Communication Award for his textbook, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan), whose third edition was released in April 2025. 

The gut is in the news. It's really in the news. Catapulted there from exciting developments coming from laboratories all around the world. Links of gut health with overall health are now quite clear and surprising connections are being discovered between gut health and things like dementia and Alzheimer's. But how does the gut communicate with other parts of the body in ways that make it this important, and where does the brain figure into all this? Well, there's some interesting science going on in this topic, and a leading person in this area is Dr. Diego Bohorquez. Dr. Bohorquez is the associate professor of medicine, of molecular genetics and microbiology and of cell biology at the Duke University School of Medicine.

Interview Transcript

Diego, your bio shows that you blend work in nutritional biochemistry, gastrointestinal physiology, and sensory neurobiology. It took me a little time to figure out just what these things are, but what this represents, to be a little more serious, is a unique ability to understand that the different parts of the body, the gut and the brain in particular, interact a lot. And you're in a very good position to understand how that happens. Let's dive in with the kind of a basic question. What got you interested in this interaction of the gut with the brain and why care about it?

Yes. Kelly, I think that that's all technicalese for saying that we are at the interface of food, the gut, and the brain. Apart from the fact that we are what we eat and if we truly believe that then food will be shaping us. Not only our body, but also like our belief systems, our societal systems, and so on and so forth. I don't think that that is anything new. However, what is new is the ability of the gut to guide our decision making. And it was interesting to hear in your introduction that now the gut is all in the news. In 2005 when I came to the United States, and I was at North Carolina State University, and I joined a graduate school. I remember taking a graduate course in physiology in 2007. And when the professor opened the session on gastrointestinal physiology, he said the gut is one of the most misunderstood and mysterious organs. It has almost as many neurons as the spinal cord, or more. But honestly, we don't give a lot of respect to the gut. We only think that it does some digestion and absorption, and we judge it more for the value of its products of digestion than what it does for the entire body.

And fast forward almost 20 years later now, partly my laboratory and other laboratories that have entered this field since some of our discoveries started to emerge, it's very clearly showing that the gut not only has its own sensory system that is behind what we call gut feelings. The gut feelings are actually real. But it actually can influence our decision making. Like specifically, we have shown that our ability to choose sugars and consume sugars and feel sugars and choose them over sweeteners, it can be pinpointed to a specific set of cells in the intestine called neuropod cells and specific receptors in those cells. And the intestine is right after the stomach. And this is where these cells are exposed to the surface of the gut and detect the chemical composition of food to guide our decision making.

Let's talk about that a little bit more. So, you've got this axis, or this means of communication between the gut and the brain going on. And let's talk about how it affects what we eat. You just alluded to the fact that it's pretty important. What does it tell us? What to eat, how much to eat? What we like to eat? When we're hungry, when we've had enough? How does this affect our eating?

We are beginning to understand how much it affects this eating. And obviously we are departing from understanding, right? And an understanding is cognitive. In the 1500s is when the idea of 'we think therefore we are,' came online. And we needed to think things before we actually will understand them. But well before thinking them, we actually feel them. And you probably have noticed that. If anybody offers you maybe a cup of water at 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, it will be very welcome. Especially with it's a little bit warm. If they offer you a steak at 5:00 AM you will run away from that. But in fact, you'll create distress I think unless you are like severely jet lagged. And a lot of those feelings not only come from the experience, but even if you blind are blindfolded, your gut will be able to evaluate what you just ingested.

And it is because the intestine, it is the point where those molecules in the meal or in the drink, will be either absorbed to become part of who we are, or will be excreting and expelled. And that absorption of who we are is dependent on the context. Like for instance, the part of the month, morning versus afternoon, health status, age, will influence specifically like at the molecular level, what it is that we need to continue to thrive.

It sounds like there's lots of potential for the gut and its interaction with the brain working in concert with the rest of the body. Things are in balance and working like they should be. But there are lots of things going on out there that disrupt that. Tell us more about that and how it affects eating. For example, the levels of obesity have risen so much in the past decades. How does the gut figure into that, for example. Could there be environmental things like the microplastics or exposure to toxins like pesticides and things that might be affecting the gut that throws the system off?

I think that that is a very timely question for the days. Over the last 10 years, we have documented that the gut has its own sensory system. And in fact, it's one of the most ancient sensory systems. At the very beginning, 600 million years ago, when cells started to coalesce into animals, multicellular organisms, they needed to eat. And they needed to not only find the food but create a sensory representation of the food. What do I mean by that? Eating algae is very different than eating bacteria, for instance. And the gut needed to have these sensors to be able to rapidly create first a representation, this is bacteria. And then put out the molecules to digest that bacterium or those bacteria. And then ultimately absorb them, turn them into metabolites and continue to thrive, right? Perhaps reproduce, coalesce and so on and so forth. This is a very important concept because our reality, the reality that you and I are having right now, it is guided by our senses. And we have multiple senses. Like for instance, we are able to communicate partly because of the sound that is going through our ears. And then there are inner hair cells that are picking up those waves. Passing that information to the brain, decoding it, and then the brain coalesces with everything else and saying like, 'okay, Diego, you're in a podcast. Make sure that you say something hopefully reasonable, right?' What the gut is doing, as a true sensory system, is also detecting the food that we have ingested, creating a rapid representation. It's not the reality itself. It is a representation of the reality. Because when we eat an apple, ultimately the gut, what it's doing is creating a representation that was an apple and not an orange. And then telling the brain, look, you're going to get some glucose, some fiber, a little bit of a skin. And you may need to adjust it with water, right? And then that will trigger the desire to, 'oh, maybe I should have also a cup of water.' Why does that have to do with, the societal issues that we are facing? Since the 1970s, we learned to disentangle the sensory experience of food, not only as humans or scientists, but also that was extrapolated to the society. So, if you go and look, and it is not a secret, it has been very well documented. For instance, the ability to put artificial sweeteners out there. It has really changed the health landscape. And it was just a normal progression of how it is that we humans think. We thought well, people consume sugars because they're sweet. If we take out the calorie and we just leave the sweetness, it will be totally fine because it's benign. You're not consuming anything else. However, the gut, you have promised the gut something sweet. That it has always, or almost always, invariably, been associated with a nutritional value. Then the gut is fed this information that is skewed. Then it has to go and adjust. And we actually have demonstrated that in the laboratory that when the neuro pods detect a non-caloric sweetener, they actually release a different neurotransmitter that communicates to the brain that artificial sweeteners have arrived at the gut, as opposed to glucose, which triggers the release of glutamate. And that glutamate is essential for the organism to know that we have consumed sugar.

Is it safe to say then that the body has evolved to be able to have effective signaling and feedback systems with things that are found out there in nature, like sugar or an apple or an orange. But when you start introducing things that don't exist in nature, like the artificial sweeteners, then bad things can happen.

Yes. Because imagine right now your brain will swap the reality and you will transport yourself or the beach. You may not even have the clothing ready to confront the breeze of the beach, right? Or the salt. You would have not been prepared, right? We evolved around nature because nature was there before us. Therefore, we had gradually adjusted to what nature had to offer. Eventually we introduced fire, and we were able to transform simple or complex carbohydrates into something digestible. And then the body had the ability to adjust to it. And not only the body, but also the microbiota in the gut. Now we are talking about like the transformation of foods. And especially I think in the last 30 years we have been able to transform those foods. Beverages have sweeteners now. We have energy drinks that have a composition of vitamins and other things. And while those things individually perhaps are not innocuous, we haven't explored what is the conglomerate effect on long-term health.

When we talk about these things being added to foods, I mean, there are whole classes of things like colorings and dyes and artificial sweeteners and things. And then there are processing things that go on, like extrusion and different things that take something like wheat or corn and turn it into something that the body is not accustomed to dealing with. Is the body incapable of perceiving what these things are? Does it get send out wrong signals? Why should we be worried about these things?

I don't think that we should be worried necessarily because that's alarming, right? But we should be aware, certainly, that the body keeps tabs on it. Something very simple. If you rub water on your skin versus if you rub oil on your skin, your brain already starts to perceive that substance as different. Now, imagine the gut is going to know exactly the same thing. It knows what water is. It knows what oil is. It knows what carbs are. It knows what protein is. And depending on what it has been fed for, thousands of years, it will be able to create that representation as I alluded to. And therefore, if there is a foreign composition, it's going to have to adjust to the situation. And that is how you can end up altering the composition of a regular body. Because like, for instance, in nature if you go and look at native populations that live very close to nature, you know, the body composition is in a certain form. But in cities where you're exposed to foods that have been transformed, the body composition is very different. And I'm not talking only about body weight, but also height, shape, you know.

That certainly makes sense. You know, something that's been in the news a lot lately are the GLP1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound and they have very powerful effects on appetite, satiety, and weight regulation. How is the gut brain axis involved in this?

I would like to make a couple of points in there.The first one is that glucagon-like peptide is obviously is very similar to glucagon. Glucagon is produced in the pancreas. Glucagon-like peptide is actually produced in the gut. And it is produced by these neuro pod cells that also produce some neurotransmitters. And it is produced in response to specific nutrients like glucose. And it is a signal glucagon like peptide 1. It is a signal for not only adjusting insulin release, but it is also a signal for coordinating what has arrived in the gut. It does affect motility. Eventually it is thought that goes into the bloodstream and affects the nervous system. However, and I said it is thought because the brain also produces glucagon-like peptide. There are cells in the skin. There are cells in the urethra. There are cells in the bladder. There are cell cells in the spinal cord in the choroid plexus that is exposed to the cerebral spinal fluid that also produces some of these peptides as signaling molecules. And I have to make that clarification because traditionally it has been thought to be a signal from the gut, per se. But these are just signaling molecules. The second part is that the arrival of Ozempic, I thought that it was obviously a very important step not only scientifically, but also societally. Why? Because up until 1980s and I have thought with many colleagues especially in medicine. And they will say like, when an obese patient will arrive in the office, first of all, there was not a lot of options. One of the recommendations is - are you doing enough dieting or exercise? And if the patient was like, you know, I'm not eating even a lot, but I'm gaining weight. Or it was perhaps psychosomatic because we didn't have the molecular language to be able to explain what was going on. I think that Ozempic clearly has shown that when we are affecting a set of receptors in the body, perhaps in the gut, it's changing many different things. Not only like food intake, but also alcohol intake and how people feel. I think that is definitely a breakthrough. Where are we going from here? I think that this is the beginning of a long conversation in which we are going to be looking for options not only to reduce the amount of food, but actually to steer food choices from the gut. Because the gut is still as an external surface. And that's what I've mentioned that the discovery that these neuro pot cells can guide our food choices, I think that is very attractive for future options on how we are going to steer decision making.

So, let me ask a final question. You partly just answered it, but where do you see this field going? What are you excited about and what do you think the next frontiers will be?

I think that I'm a little bit more close to nature. I think that on moving forward, there's all obviously a lot of technologies and molecules that are going to be developed to perhaps treat some disorders. Not only related to the body, but also to the mind. Chronic depression and so on and so forth. But I think a lot of these elements have already been explored in nature. And if we look back anthropologically, people were solving the issue of medicine with their environment. In fact, what we call metropolitan medicine evolved largely from natural medicine. And in fact, today, 80% of the world, they still rely directly on plants and other compounds that are directly from plants for healthcare. I think that there is a lot to learn in there and a lot to merge, especially with the new technologies on diagnostics. And I think that that's a very exciting area to keep nature in mind. And when I said nature is like our relationship with environment, right?

Bio

Diego V. Bohorquez is an associate professor of medicine, associate professor in molecular genetics and microbiology, associate professor of cell biology, associate research professor in neurobiology, and an associate professor in pathology at Duke University's Department of Medicine. Bohorquez is a gut-brain neuroscientist and holds a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University. His research focus is to unveil how the brain perceives what the gut feels, how food in the intestine is sensed by our body, and how a sensory signal from a nutrient is transformed into an electrical signal that alters behavior.

Interest and grave concern have been mounting over the impact of agriculture and the food choices we all make on the environment, particularly on climate change. With natural weather disasters occurring much more frequently and serious threats from warming of the atmosphere in general, it's natural to look for places to make change. One person who has thought a lot about this is our guest today, Dr. William Dietz of George Washington University. He's been a prominent voice in this space. Bill, you're one of the people in the field I respect most because our relationship goes back many years. Bill is professor and director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University. But especially pertinent to our discussion today is that Dr. Dietz was co-chair of the Lancet Commission on the global syndemic of obesity, under nutrition and climate change. Today, we'll focus on part of that discussion on beef in particular.

Interview Summary

Bill, let's start out with a basic question. What in the heck is a syndemic?

A syndemic is a word that reflects the interaction of these three pandemics that we're facing. And those are obesity, under nutrition, and we've also called climate change a syndemic insofar as it affects human health. These three pandemics interact at both the biologic and social levels and have a synergistic adverse impact on each other. And they're driven by large scale social forces, which foster clustering and have a disparate impact on marginalized populations. Both in the developed and equally important, in the developing world. Here are a couple of examples of syndemics. So, increased greenhouse gases from high income countries reduce crop yields in the micronutrient content of crops, which in turn contribute to food insecurity and undernutrition in low and middle income countries. And eventually the reduction in crop yields and the micronutrient content of crops is going to affect high income countries.

Beef production is a really important driver of the climate change, and we're a major contributor in terms of the US' contribution. And beef production drives both methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and in turn, the consumption of red and processed meat causes obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, and cardiovascular disease. And finally, obesity, stunting and nutrition insecurity occur in the same children and in the same population in low- and middle-income countries.

Okay, so we'll come back to beef in a moment, but first, help us understand the importance of agriculture overall and our food choices in changing climate.

Well, so I think we have to go back to where this, the increase in mean global surface temperatures began, in about 1950. Those temperatures have climbed in a linear fashion since then. And we're now approaching a key level of increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. The increase in mean surface temperature is driven by increased greenhouse gases, and the US is particularly culpable in this respect. We're it's second only to China in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions. And on a per capita basis, we're in the top four with China, India, and Brazil and now the US. And in the US, agriculture contributes about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, and about 30% of fossil fuels are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. But when you look at the actual contribution of car use among the fossil fuel use, it's pretty close to the contribution of greenhouse gases from agriculture. The important point here is each one degree increase centigrade in air temperatures associated with a 7% increase in water vapor. And this is responsible for the major adverse weather events that we're seeing today in terms of increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, the droughts. And I learned a new term from the New York Times a couple of days ago from the science section, which is atmospheric thirst. I had trouble understanding how climate change would contribute to drought, but that same effect in terms of absorbing moisture that occurs and drives the adverse weather events also dries out the land. So increasingly there's increased need for water use, which is driven by atmospheric thirst. But that increase in air temperature and the increase in water vapor, is what really drives these storms. Because in the Pacific and in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, this increase in air temperature is associated with an increase in water temperature, which further drives the increase in the severity of these storms.

Thanks for that background. Now let's get to beef. You and I were not long ago at the Healthy Eating Research conference. And you gave what I thought was a very compelling talk on beef. We'll talk in a minute about how much beef figures into this overall picture, but first, tell us how beef production affects both climate and health. And you mentioned nitrous oxide and methane, but how does this all work?

Cattle production is a big driver of the release of methane. And methane comes from cow burps. The important thing to understand about methane is that it's 80 times more powerful than CO2 in terms of its greenhouse gas emission.

And that's because it has a very long half-life when it gets up into the atmosphere?

Well, actually it's interesting because the half-life of methane is shorter than the half-life of nitrous oxide. So, it's an appropriate target for reduction. And the reduction has to occur by virtue of reduced beef consumption, which would reduce beef production. The other piece of this is that nitrous oxide is derived from fertilizer that's not absorbed by plants. And the application of fertilizer is a very wasteful process and a huge percent of fertilizer that's applied to crops is not absorbed by those plants. And it washes into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico. But also, increases the genesis of nitrous oxide. And nitrous oxide is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than methane. About 260 times more powerful than CO2 with a very, very long half-life. So, as a target, we really ought to be focused on methane, and if we're going to focus on methane, we need to focus on beef.

You could imagine people who are opposed to these views on climate change making fun of cows burping. I mean, are there enough cows, burping enough where the methane that's coming out is a problem?

Yes. Maybe a better term that we can use is enteric fermentation, which is in effect cow burps. But enteric fermentation is the major source of methane. And nitrous oxide, the same thing. The agricultural system which supports cattle production, like the feedlot fattening from corn and wheat. The genesis of nitrous oxide is a product of fertilizer use and fertilizer use is a real important source of nitrous oxide because of the amount of fertilizer which is not absorbed by plants. But which washes into the Mississippi River and causes the dead zone in the Gulf, but also generates an enormous amount of nitrous oxide. So, between those two, the enteric fermentation and the origin of nitrous oxide from fertilizer use, are a lethal combination in terms of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And it's important to know that those greenhouse gas emissions are associated with important declines in crop yields. Crop yields have declined by about 5% for maize for wheat, for soybeans, and somewhat less for rice. These crop yields have yet to affect the US but are clearly a problem in the Global South.

In your talk, you cited a paper by Scarborough and colleagues that was published in the Journal Nature Food that modeled the environmental impact of various diets. Could you please explain what they found?

This was a really nice study of four diets in the United Kingdom. Actually it was five diets. They looked at vegans, vegetarians, low meat eaters, medium meat eaters and high meat eaters. And looked at the contribution of these diets to the genesis of methane, nitrous oxide, and also importantly, land use and water use. And the most expensive, and the most detrimental environmental impact of these diets, were the among the high meat eaters. These were substantially greater than than the genesis of for example, methane by vegans. For example, high meat eaters generated about 65 kilograms per day of methane compared to vegans, which generated only four kilograms per day of methane. And when you reduce beef, and there were two lower categories, these measures come much more into line with what we'd like to have. The low meat eaters generate about half of methane that the high meat eaters generate. This is also true for their genesis of nitrous oxide. And importantly, the land use among vegans and vegetarians is about a third of the land use required for the production of beef. And water use by meat production is about twice that generated by the water use by the production of plant-based diets. I think these are important data because they, they really reflect the importance of a lower meat consumption and higher plant-based diet. Not just in terms of greenhouse gases, but also in terms of land use and water use.

Not to mention health.

Not to mention health. Yes. I think it's important to continue to remind ourselves that beef consumption is associated with a variety of chronic diseases like obesity, like diabetes, like colon cancer and like cardiovascular disease. So, there's this double whammy from beef consumption, not only on the climate but also on human health.

In your talk that I heard it was interesting to see how you interpreted this information because you weren't arguing for no beef consumption. Because you were saying there could be tremendous benefit from people going from the high beef consumption category to a lower category. If you could take all the people who are consuming beef and drop them down a category, it sounds like there would be tremendous benefits. People could still have their beef but just not have it as often.

Right. I think that's an important observation that we're not talking about the elimination of beef. We're talking about the reduction in beef. And the Eat Lancet Commission pointed out that protein consumption in the US was six times what it should be in terms of human needs. And a lot of that protein comes from beef. And there's this belief, widespread, popular belief that beef is the most important source of protein. But comparisons of plant-based diets and plant-based proteins have an equivalent impact and equivalent absorption pattern like beef and are equally nourishing.

That's a really important thing to make prominent because people are thinking more and more about protein and it's nice to know there are various healthier ways to get protein than from a traditional meat diet.

Well, one of the, one of the important reports from the dietary guidelines advisory committee was to reclassify lentils, beans and peas as proteins rather than vegetables. And I think that's a, something which has not been widely appreciated, but it gives us a real important area to point to as an alternative protein to beef.

Bill, on this calculus, how important is the way the cattle are raised? So, you know, you have big cattle farms that might have a hundred thousand cattle in a single place being raised in very close quarters. And it's industrial agriculture, the kind of the epitome of industrial agriculture. But more and more people are beginning to study or experiment with or actually implement regenerative agriculture methods. How much would that help the environment?

That's kind of a complicated question. If we just start with beef production, we know that grass fed beef has a healthier fatty acid profile than feedlot fat and beef. But the total generation of greenhouse gases among grass fed beef is greater because they're fostered on land for a longer period of time than those cattle which are committed to feedlots. My understanding is that most of the cattle that go to feedlots are first raised on grass and then moved to feedlots where they're fed these commodity products of corn and wheat and, and maybe not soy. But that feedlot fattening is a critical step in beef production and is associated with overcrowding, antibiotic use, the generation of toxic dust really. An enormous amount of fecal material that needs to be adequately disposed of. It's the feedlot fattening of beef is what adds the adverse fatty acid content, and also contributes to the local environment and the damage to the local environment as a consequence of the cattle that are being raised.

Appreciate you weighing in on that. Let's talk about what might be done. So how do we go about increasing awareness, and the action, for that matter, in response to the contributions of beef production to climate change?

It begins with understanding about the contribution of beef production to climate change. This is not a well understood problem. For example, there was a study of 10 major news sources a couple of years ago which asked what the major contributions were of climate change. And they surveyed a hundred articles in each of 10 sources of information, which were popular press like New York Times, Washington Post, etc. And, at the top of that list, they characterize climate change as a consequence of fossil fuels. Whereas a recognition of the contribution of the agricultural system was at the bottom of that list and poorly covered. It's no surprise that people don't understand this and that's where we have to start. We have to improve people's perception of the contribution of beef. The other thing is that I don't think we can expect any kind of progress at the federal level. But in order to build the critical mass, a critical focus, we need to look at what we can personally change. First in our own behavior and then engaging family, peers and organizational networks to build the political will to begin to generate federal response.

Now, this brings up a really critical point that I'm not sure we have the time to do this. I don't think we are facing the whole issue of climate change with the kind of emphasis and concern that it deserves. I mentioned at the outset that the mean surface temperature is increasing rapidly. And the expectation was, and the goal was to achieve no greater than a 1.5 degrees centigrade increase by 2050. Well, in 2024, there was already a report that the mean surface temperature had already increased in some places by 1.5 degrees centigrade. So there has to be an urgency to this that I don't think people, are aware of. Youth understand this and youth feel betrayed and hopeless. And I think one of the important characteristics of what we can personally change, in engaging our family and peers, is a way of beginning to generate hope that change can occur. Because we can see it if it's our family and if it's our peers. Another important and critical strategy at the institution and state level is procurement policies. These, I think, are the most powerful tool that we have to change production at the municipal or local level, or at the state level. And we were part of an effort to get the HHS to change their procurement policy for their agencies. And although at the very last minute in the Biden administration, they agreed to do this, that's been superseded now by the changes that Trump has instituted. Nonetheless, this can be a local issue and that's where local change has to occur if we're going to build political will from the ground up.

Bill, tell me a little bit more about procurement because a lot of people don't even think about that term. But it turns out that the federal government and local and state governments buy lots of food. How is it that they buy lots of food and how they could have sway over the food environment just by their purchasing decisions?

So, let's take schools. Schools are a logical place. They have large contracts with vendors and if they set standards for what those vendors were supplying, like insisted on alternative proteins in at least some of their meal services that would have a big impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from school meals. And would have a positive impact on the health of students in those schools. This is known as value-based purchasing. Purchasing of products related to values that have to do with not only greenhouse gases, but also animal husbandry and fair workers' rights, and strategies like that. These are possible. They should be beginning in our universities. And this is an effort that we have underway here at George Washington University. But there are even better examples where universities have used plants as a default option in their cafeterias, which has, shown that when you do that and when you make the plant-based option the only visible choice, people choose it. And, in three universities, Lehigh, Rensselaer at Polytech, and Tulane, when they made plant-based options the only visible option, although you could ask for the alternative, the choices went up to 50 to almost 60 to 80% when the plant-based option was offered. And these were things like a lentil olive and mushroom spaghetti, which has a very low greenhouse gas emission. In fact, the net effect of these choices was a 24% reduction in greenhouse gases on days when the default was offered. These are practical types of initiatives. We need to increase the demand for these options as an alternative to beef.

Bill, I like how you're approaching this from kind of the big top level down, but also from the ground up. Because you talk about things that the federal government could do, for example, but also how important individual choices are. And how people can work with their families and friends and have an inspirational effect by changing their own behavior. Those sorts of things make me hopeful. But let me ask, how hopeful are you? Because I'm hearing from you this sort of dire picture that we might be too late, and that the climate change is happening so rapidly and that the social change needed to overcome that is painfully slow. But on the other hand, you're speaking some optimistic things. So how do you feel overall about where this is going?

I'm moderately hopeful. And moderately hopeful because I think young people are engaged. And we need to address the hopelessness that many of them feel. They feel betrayed by us. They feel like the adults in this country have let them down and have not focused enough. That's understandable. Particularly now given the distractions of the new administration. And I think we're in a real crisis and things all of a sudden are very fluid in terms of national initiatives. They've been dominated by the Trump administration, but I think that's changing. And I think that the kind of despotism that led to the station of troops in California, in Los Angeles, is a case in point of overreach of the government. The kind of ICE activities really deserve resistance. And all of that, I think, plays into this notion that we're in a fluid time. This is not a time that people are necessarily going to focus on beef consumption. But the fact that all of these climate changes, clearly a major issue at least for those who admit it, means that we need to begin and continue to build the political will for changes in beef consumption as well as changes in transportation policy. I think that actually beef consumption is an easier target then changes in transportation policy, which is driven by the way our communities are constructed. And in many cases, the only way to get from one place to another is by car, which means that we're going to have a continued dependence on fossil fuels. I don't think we can say the same thing about beef consumption because if we institute reductions in beef consumption, I think we can have a very immediate and longer-term impact on greenhouse gas emissions and therefore on climate change.

Bio

William (Bill) Dietz is the Director of Research and Policy for the Global Food Institute and a Professor in the Department of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences. Dietz is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) and serves as a consultant to the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions. He also is the Director of the STOP Obesity Alliance at The George Washington University. He served as Director of the The Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention & Wellness until June 30, 2024. He is Co-Chair of the Washington, DC Department of Health's Diabesity Committee, a Commissioner on the Washington, DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education's Healthy Youth & Schools Commission, and Chair of its Subcommittee on Physical Activity. Dietz is also Co-Chair of The Lancet Commission on Obesity.

Did you know that each year the average American family of four loses $1,500 to uneaten food? What's more, consumer food waste is the largest category of waste sent to landfills. When food is wasted, so is the land, water, labor, and energy that were used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing and disposing of the discarded food. So why does household food waste and plate waste happen? We have two guests today to help us explore this topic. First, Dr. Roni Neff from Johns Hopkins University. Roni studies wasted food, food system resilience, and climate change through a public health lens. Second, we have Dr. Brian Roe from the Ohio State University. Brian focuses on food waste and behavioral and consumer economics.

Interview Summary

 

This podcast is co-sponsored by the Recipes Food Waste Research Network Project, led by American University, and funded by the National Science Foundation (2115405).

 

Norbert: So our first question is to you, Roni. Could you help us understand why food goes uneaten, and why do you avoid using the term food waste.

 

Roni: Great questions. So I'd like to give a simple answer, but the reality is that waste of food is caused by a whole mess of reasons, all intersecting and reinforcing each other. It's become part of the fabric of how we operate as a society. It's part of the functioning of our food system, and it's our way of life. That makes it challenging to address, and it's also what makes it very interesting. So Brian and I were on a National Academy of Sciences panel recently that closely reviewed the literature on consumer waste of food. We actually identified 11 distinct factors that shape it. Let me summarize it in two main buckets. First, our food system pushes us to waste through upstream policy and marketing factors that provide us with an overabundance of food. They encourage us to buy or take more than we need, and they leave us with misperceptions about what food is good quality and safe to eat. The second is that even as we don't like wasting food, with everything else that we care about, it doesn't necessarily rise to the top of our minds or priorities. So we waste because we forget, we change our plans. We choose not to eat foods we don't want. We take the path of convenience. I don't say that to blame or shame us, because we all do it, and our society and our norms push us there. And if you think you don't, try tracking what you throw out for a week and you'll see it. But also, shame isn't productive. The trick is to put in place strategies to help us.

 

I want to say one other thing about drivers from a public health perspective. In consumer surveys that we've done, the top two reasons that people give for throwing out food are concern about food safety and concern about eating food that's good quality. Of course we don't want anyone eating unsafe food, but actually the food is often perfectly safe. And sometimes the problem is a lack of knowledge of how to tell it is okay or risk aversion. Date labels play an important role, and we need a national standardization. But also its messages. We in public health have pushed this idea that freshness is the way to convince people to eat healthfully. That's a disservice. When it's cooked into a meal, you often can't tell the difference if it was frozen, if it was a little wilted, it tastes just as good and it saves us money. Let me also answer your question about why I avoid using the term food waste. I prefer the term wasted food because it puts the emphasis on the idea that this is food, it's not waste. If we catch it before it's too late, we or someone else could eat it. And especially as we get to talking about recovering food that's good for people to eat, it's food, and using the word waste can be harmful.

 

Norbert: I really do appreciate that definition. That helps us reframe how we think about this challenge that we face and how we can do something differently.

 

Brenna: Brian, let's transition to you for a minute. Can you tell us about the economic decision people make when food is wasted?

 

Brian: It's not actually just one decision, right. If we think just even at the household level, it's a whole bunch of decisions. There is this great article a few years back by Laura Block and some of her co-authors, and she talked about the squander sequence, which I think is a very apt description of what's going on, even in small segments of the food supply chain like the household. We're thinking about our own situation. We're thinking about the first economic decision, how much food do I bring in to the home at any given point. And you know, there's a big fixed cost. You're getting yourself organized. Maybe you're taking yourself to the store, you're setting up your online food delivery. So you're making decisions and tradeoffs about do I buy a few more items, a few larger sized items, et cetera. You have to make tradeoffs about how much to acquire and bring into the home. Sometimes we lean to the side of safety and buy a little bit more food than we need. And then we're in our homes, we have all this food there, and we're thinking about how much do I prepare, and who's going to be at the table in a particular situation. And again, we're making tradeoffs about what types of food do I want to prepare, how much do I prepare, is that item, like Roni was saying, is it on the cusp of having a date on its label that's getting close, do I add that or not. So there's decisions being made there about how much to actually put onto the plate. And then there decisions about do I finish my plate or I'm trying to lose weight as well. So maybe I don't eat all the food on my plate, particularly if I'm at a restaurant, and they serve me very large portions. Then I have to make decisions about do I want to wrap that up and bringing that home with me. Or if I'm at home, is there enough there to actually put into the refrigerator. And then of course we're sitting there, it's Thursday night, and maybe friends stop over and want to go out to dinner with us. But yet we had food there sitting in the fridge that we were planning to prepare. And we have to make those decisions about tradeoffs, about the spontaneity of the moment, and kind of the perceived fun of that versus what do we do with the food that we've already have that might then go unused in our refrigerator.

 

So there's this whole sequence of decisions that have to be made, and we're always being tugged by risk aversion, whether we want to make sure there's enough food, it's safe enough, whether we want to not embarrass ourselves socially by not having enough food on hand. Then there's the convenience of, rather than dealing with all those small bits of leftover in the fridge and whether we can do something clever with them to make those interesting, or just pack it in and order a pizza instead. So there's just all this whole sequence of decisions that have to be made.

 

Brenna: That's really interesting, Brian. I know in our house there are lots of layers of questions in terms of how we go through our food, so thank you for saying that in a bit more detail so people understand deciding to waste is not typically a simple decision on the part of consumers, but it's one hopefully we can impact. That brings me to my next question. There have been a number of interventions suggested to reduce food waste. Which ones do you think would be most effective?

 

Brian That's a good question, and I don't think there's overwhelming evidence yet, as we've talked about amongst ourselves, and we know there's just limited good data out there upon which to make these decisions, and even less data to help us evaluate past interventions. But as I've thought about this, and I kind of think about that whole squander sequence that we just talked about, and I kind of reflect on some modeling that economists have done in the past thinking about sequential decision processes. There's this idea of a weakest link technology, where it's the weakest link that reduces the ability for us to do well. So in the case of food waste, you have to not only do one decision appropriately, but every point in that process of bringing the food into the back of the house until it gets into somebody's stomach you have to execute in order for that food to actually be ingested and therefore not wasted. In those models, what's shown is that those last steps are sometimes the most crucial and the most valuable to making sure that the end goal - that is getting the food eaten rather than wasted - takes place. I think focusing on helping consumers at the very end of that process is very critical. And I've seen this very clever intervention that was put out there by, of all people, Hellmans. They're a Unilever company and they make the mayonnaise. They have this very clever kind of gamification where they do a "fridge night." They kind of challenge people to go into their fridge and make one more meal with the food in their refrigerator each week. They've got an app that supports it, and it helps build confidence among consumers to be able to go boldly into the refrigerator and create a recipe that they think will be used and useful and enjoyed by their family. So I think being at the very end of that process is important - so you can make mistakes earlier in that big squander sequence, but there you can kind of play catch up at the end and put together something that will be used and reduce waste at that front. So that's the one that's really struck me recently as being very intriguing and I'd love to see even more evaluation of that intervention and how it works out in the field.

 

Brenna: Absolutely, I'm very curious to know how many people are using that app. It's an interesting concept.

 

Roni: Yes!

 

Brenna: Roni, what perspectives would you like to add in terms of effective food waste reduction interventions?

 

Roni: Sure, so I would echo all the things that Brian said, and I'll take it from the opposite end. On the one hand, there are things that are very kind of simple and direct. The flip side of that is that there's a lot of evidence from a lot of domains of behavior change for a very multifaceted type of intervention and hitting it from as many angles as possible at once. So a lot of the countries where they have been having really good success, often there's consumer education combined with policy change, and people are hearing about it in schools and they're hearing about it in communities. So as big and as broad as we can get in terms of how we intervene, it seems like we might be most likely to help shift the lever at a broad perspective as well.

 

Norbert: Thank you for this conversation on interventions, the ways that policy makers, organizations, communities can actually make a change. So Brian, I have a question for you. You have talked about this example of the gamified app, of sort of like a "Chopped" version online, but I'm wondering how do researchers evaluate if these interventions actually work, and what kind of measurement is really needed?

 

Brian: Yeah, and just for our listeners who don't know, Norbert and Brenna do awesome research in this area as well, and are very good experts on measurement as well. So you'll be familiar with a lot of these approaches, and Roni as well, but yeah, measurement is always a trick. Because people really don't like to mess around with the things that they no longer want. So measuring waste is always a tricky endeavor and there are different ways to go about it. You can do the very kind of nitty gritty, and try to collect it maybe at the curbside, or maybe convince consumers or processors to collect it in their own buildings, and then have you and your research team go out and dig through it and measure it and weigh it in all sorts of ways. That can be very effective. In the household setting, sometimes, though you don't get everything because things go down the sink or into your pet's bowl, or maybe into a compost bin that goes someplace else, so sometimes you miss things there. You can also beg people to measure their waste blow-by-blow, day-by-day through some type of diary. We can try to do things to help them ease the burden of doing this, maybe with a photo-based app or something like that. Or you can do what a lot of people do, and I do some of this myself, which is to ask people to remember types of food and the amounts of food that they wasted over a particular period, perhaps over the course of a week. That can be very effective. But typically, people are forgetful or might be a bit shy about reporting things that they've wasted. So a lot of studies suggest that typically people underestimate the amount of waste that they create when using that approach. So there's probably no perfect approach to doing this, but just understanding the pros and the cons, the strengths and weaknesses of each of those measurement approaches is kind of critical for the researcher to understand what's the best way that they can go in and evaluate an intervention or get a baseline or understand trends over time.

 

Norbert: Thanks Brian. I have got to say this sounds so messy. And yes, I mean literally messy, going in through people's trash, but you really made a really compelling point about how difficult this is, and that there are an array of ways that researchers have tried to measure this. Where do you think concerns for how people want to be perceived fits into this difficulty of measuring, when asking people or trying to even measure physical waste, when people know that they're being evaluated?

 

Brian: Yeah, there can be what's known as reactivity to a measurement approach. The sociological Heisenberg effect, if you will. And so that's where some of the passive measurement approaches, such as doing curbside audits of an entire neighborhood for example. So you don't have to worry about privacy concerns because you've mixed 40 different households together in one collection of garbage gives you a baseline so that then when you go to the household level, you can kind of estimate the amount of underreporting or reactivity that might be there. There's some tricks of the trade to be able to back out how much under reporting there might be.

 

Norbert: Roni, I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to understand how is wasted food a critical question at the intersection of nutrition, climate change and household economics?

 

Roni: Great question. So climate change and food security, including nutrition security, are at the top of our list of our most pressing global challenges. As food prices keep rising, households are feeling this strain. So we care more and more about what we can do to stretch the food dollar. The beauty of focusing on wasted food is that it's one single lever that moves the needle on these multiple issues. It's not the solution to any of them, and there can be trade offs, but let's look at the potential impacts.

 

From a climate perspective, the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change estimated last year that about eight to 10% of our total global human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are coming out of wasted food alone. Not only is it impactful, but wasted food supports the urgency of rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Experts have focused particularly on methane, which is one greenhouse gas, and it's short-lived and it's powerful, and it's key in wasted food, because it comes both from our food production and from food that's decaying in landfills. So cutting waste of food has been recognized as a key climate strategy because it helps us get to that rapid reduction.

 

When it comes to nutrition and food security, there's this intersection because the same strategy, in many cases, can address waste of food and improve food security. So for example, some shared risk factors for poor nutrition and waste would include large portion size and oversupply. Then, when you think about like efforts to bring in healthier food like in school meals, unless the food tastes good enough, the kids won't eat it. So you lose on both nutrition and waste. Then as we turn to household economics, as was mentioned in the introduction, we're spending about $1,500 a year for a household of four on food that we're not eating. So preventing that waste extends our food dollar. Also knowledge that we might, waste of food could also, it does also lead some households to not purchase healthy or perishable foods, especially if they have lower incomes. So it advances nutrition to have strategies to reduce that waste. So one other reason why wasted food is a critical question at the intersection of all these issues is that many of the solutions that advance change on these issues are politically fraught. Generally speaking, wasted food is not. Left or right, like none of us like waste. Everyone is a fan of saving money. So I see where working on wasted food is an opportunity to address these issues with less of those kinds of political challenges and many collateral benefits.

 

Norbert: Roni, thank you so much for that commentary on the political nature of addressing this. I mean, that is something that lots of people can get behind, and I appreciate how politically fraught our moment is, and I appreciate the way you framed this, and I'm really grateful for you raising the concern of families from low income households and the challenge of food waste and nutrition access and food security. Thank you so much for bringing those together, because I think that's an under-discussed topic. So Brian, I want to hear your impression or thoughts about the intersection of nutrition, climate change and household economics. So how do you see wasted food as critical to that question around that intersection?

 

Brian: Yeah, Roni touched on so many great points there. Some others I'll amplify are that, yeah, really, it's an accessible topic that people can connect with on many different levels, whether it be the nutrition, whether it be on the environment, climate change, whether it be on municipal issues. Nobody likes to build more landfills. Nobody wants to be by a landfill, and what is 20% of most landfills, it's typically wasted food. So even at the municipal level it can be something of a rallying point, and something that provides meaningful benefits at that level. At the system level, I think another thing that goes unappreciated is we talk about nutrition, and most people want to focus on, for example, food recovery that is taking food, that might have not found an immediate home in the food system, recovering that, and then redirecting it to others in the food system that might need it. More fundamentally, if we can right size the food system, if we reduce our wasted food from say the one third that we see now down to even 20%, that means we can also push down food prices at an aggregate level. That really helps nutrition, because we know families in need who have difficulties finding the food they need, oftentimes it is a financial issue. Bringing down food prices through reduction of waste can have large positive implications for everybody, including those who are really struggling to meet their financial needs and get stressed by their food budgets. So I think those systematic issues are really something we have to appreciate as well.

 

Bios

 

Roni Neff is an Associate Professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's department of Environmental Health & Engineering and Center for a Livable Future. She received her AB from Brown University, ScM from Harvard, and PhD from Johns Hopkins. Previously she worked for 10 years in public health practice and policy at the community, municipal and national levels. She edited the widely-used textbook, Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Public Health, Environment, Equity. Her team has just published the guidebook, Food System Resilience: A Planning Guide for Local Governments, developed in partnership with 5 U.S. cities.

 

Brian Roe is the Van Buren Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Roe attended the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he received a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Economics. Roe went on to receive a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. Prior to his employment at Ohio State, Roe worked on policy issues surrounding food safety and health information disclosure as a Staff Fellow at the US Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic deeply impacted the US food chain and has heightened attention on nonprofit food pantries and soup kitchens. Today's guest argues that sometimes the people most in need of food face the most challenges in getting it because of food pantry operating procedures. Our guest, Alana Stein has conducted research on these issues at the University of California at Davis.

Interview Summary

 

I'm really happy you could talk to us about these important issues because these food banks and food pantries and other enterprises like this are really important at any time but especially when there's a crisis on the food system like the pandemic created. So let's dig into the work that you've done on the barriers to assistance. Now you published a paper recently in the journal "Social Currents" about this. So could you explain to our listeners how you went about doing your research?

 

The research for this project actually took place before the pandemic and started as a public scholarship project at the request of the food bank. They wanted to know more about the barriers people experience trying to access their services and particularly for people experiencing homelessness. I did over 200 hours of participant observation at the programs of the food bank working as a volunteer, focusing my observations on two produce-focused distributions that the food bank operated. I also did 21 in-depth interviews with food assistance clients, focusing primarily on interviewing people experiencing homelessness.

 

It's interesting to think about these qualitative methods of interviewing people and what can be learned from them. So given that you did these in-depth intensive interviews, what are some of the barriers that you found in accessing these food assistance programs?

 

So the food amounts really varied from week to week. The clients who came through the distribution first had a lot more choice about which foods they could take. This meant people started waiting in line the night before to try to get the earliest spots in line. Sometimes clients would be offered 10 loaves of bread. Other weeks, clients wouldn't be offered any bread at all. So clients really faced a lot of variability and not knowing what types of food they would get or what sorts of food would be available and the amounts that would be available. Not everyone could even eat the bread to begin with, such as if people had gluten intolerance, and some people also had diabetes, which was really forcing them to watch how many carbs they were taking in.

 

Some of the people also faced barriers with their lack of kitchens. A lot of times, these produce-focused distributions would hand out items like large squashes that were supposed to be a lot of the food that people were receiving. But people experiencing homelessness who didn't have a kitchen weren't able to use the squash. They weren't able to prepare it. It needs to be cooked and needed to be cut. Other issues even when things were more readily available to eat, such as yogurts were sometimes available, is people without kitchens didn't have spoons or utensils to really help with eating. You could ask volunteers for a spoon. That wasn't something that was regularly advertised, but you had to know to ask, and also, sometimes, the volunteers still said no.

 

Particularly in California's hot summers, it was also difficult for people to store the food, particularly if they didn't have access to refrigeration, and it was just difficult to get your food from a weekly food distribution without having access to food and times in between. There were also barriers around the scheduling and locations of the distributions. So most programs occurred during standard business hours and were only open for a few hours a month, which made it difficult for clients who worked or had other time constraints to access them. Clients had difficulty getting to distributions that were located all over town and then carrying the food with them, especially if they did not have a car. Clients also had trouble accessing information to learn about food distributions and changes to them, and the places that did have information on distributions, like the social services office and food bank website, often were outdated. Some of the distributions also had a heavy security or police presence. So one of the locations for the food distribution I observed was directly across the street from the police office, and you actually had to go under a sign that said probation in order to access the food assistance. People from groups that have historically been targeted by the police, such as people of color and people experiencing homelessness, were more affected by this barrier. Some of the distribution sites also weren't wheelchair accessible. All these barriers were just things that really compounded and impacted people.

 

In your paper you mentioned that many people face not only a single barrier but many barriers, and you just kind of put this into a coherent picture in just a little bit of time. It's really very daunting, isn't it? These issues that people face, and like the issue of the police presence, I hadn't even thought about that. That sounds very significant then. Sounds like, again, we get back to that issue that I mentioned in the introduction that the people who may most need the help may face the most barriers, and that's pretty much what you found in your paper, wasn't it?

 

There are a lot of barriers involved in accessing each program, but for the people who had the most need, they often needed to access multiple programs in order to meet their food needs since they couldn't just meet their needs with the available food from one program. So trying to access multiple programs in and of itself added barriers. But then, people with dietary restrictions and who lacked regular access to a kitchen, particularly people experiencing homelessness, couldn't eat, store, or prepare many of the foods, which made it even more important to arrive early to have the greatest choice and to attend multiple programs. However, when people experiencing homelessness tried to arrive early the night before the distribution, they ran the risk of attracting police attention for being in a place where overnight camping was not allowed. As people faced other hardships in their life, they struggled to be able to access the programs. Another example, one woman who was housed I interviewed struggled to attend the distributions when she had to take her brother to chemotherapy. She took a chance each week on whether or not she would make it in time to get any food because the program didn't allow them to set aside food for people, even if they attended regularly and had other barriers to coming.

 

Well, these are agonizing choices people face, aren't they? So in your paper, you mentioned the concept of operationalized inequity in this system. What do you mean by that?

 

When I'm thinking about operationalized inequity, I'm thinking about how the programs are structured and how these programs structures were not set up to accommodate different circumstances. If we think about treating everyone equally, we give everyone the same exact treatment. But, if we think about treating people equitably, we're really meeting people where they're at and recognizing the hardships that they face, the historical inequalities that they faced. So even though there was some choice, everyone roughly was treated the same at these programs, but that didn't mean they were treated equitably. And in the cases where volunteers did use discretion and make exceptions for people, they often did not do so in ways that accommodated the clients that were the most in need. They often did so in ways that accommodated the clients that they said were their favorites.

 

So if nonprofits are in business to serve people in need, why are some of them operating in this way?

 

So most food banks focus on the amount of food that they distribute as a key metric. This encourages food banks to focus on distributing more pounds of food each year rather than really focusing on how they can better serve populations that face the most hardships. So rather than taking people's actual circumstances into account, programs were more built on assumption that they could have a one size fits all model. There's a cultural assumption that often underlies this narrative, and that's the assumption that if people really need the food, they will find a way to make it work, but that's a really problematic narrative. It doesn't account for the many other hardships that people face. People aren't generally one-dimensionally facing food insecurity. They're also facing many other hardships that go along with poverty, and it takes away people's dignity and does not recognize the basic human right to food.

 

There are so many daunting issues that the organizations need to face in this and that individuals face in accessing what these organizations have to offer. So what are some of the ways that come to your mind about how these food pantries might better serve the clients?

 

While I focused on one food bank, other scholars who work in studying food banks have recognized many of these same barriers to accessing food assistance and organizations across the country. So I really encourage food assistance organizations to think about how their programs are structured and the barriers that clients may face, particularly the most disadvantaged clients. Another way to potentially recognize more barriers is to include the voices of people with lived experience with food insecurity and other hardships in program design. Food assistance organizations should also think about how they can build flexibility into their programs while also training staff and volunteers about biases and discrimination so that this flexibility is applied equitably. One good thing that has come out of the pandemic is that food assistance organizations have realized so many new ways that they can structure their programs rather than just continuing with the ways things have already been done. I've been excited to see home delivery programs and programs that provide clients with cash and vouchers, allowing them to have more choice and options. I think the pandemic really showed food assistance organizations that they can change to accommodate clients' needs and do things in ways that didn't seem possible before the pandemic.

 

Bio

 

Alana Haynes Stein is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research uses theories of political economy, stratification, and organizations to study inequalities in the food system. In her research, she pulls on the methods of ethnography, in-depth interviews, geospatial analysis, content analysis, and network analysis. Alana's dissertation focuses on the resources, practices, and decision-making of U.S. food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research focuses on understanding how the privatization of food assistance and food bank networks impact access to resources. Her mixed methods dissertation employs geospatial analysis to examine food bank resources in relationship to demographic characteristics, and she uses in-depth interviews with food bank leaders coupled with archival research to compare the programs and practices of different types of food banks. 

Today we're speaking with Roland McReynolds, Executive Director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association which is a member-based farmer-driven, non-profit organization based in Pittsboro, North Carolina, that helps farmers and consumers in both North and South Carolina grow and eat local organic food.

Interview Summary

 

So why don't we begin with this. Can you help listeners understand what the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association does?

 

So our vision is a sustainable regional food system that is good for all consumers, good for farmers, good for farmworkers, and good for our ecosystems. So to achieve that vision, we work with farmers and with communities to advocate, educate, and build connections that support sustainable food systems in the Carolinas, centered on local foods and organic agriculture. We do that by working and consulting directly with farmers to help them implement organic practices in their operations and to help them expand their market opportunities. We work with food hubs and other sorts of food businesses to strengthen their operations so that they can become reliable market outlets for small farms and improve their competitiveness and ability to connect with values-driven buyers. We provide education and training both for farmers and the public. For instance, we host the largest organic farming and food system conference in the Southeast which this year is actually taking place in downtown Durham, November 6 through 8, 2022. We also run a farm incubator facility in Concord, North Carolina to help new organic farmers learn the trade and become successful in moving into organic farming as a career. We do consumer outreach, such as our Piedmont Farm Tour event here in the Piedmont Triangle area in North Carolina and K-12 agriculture education. We do a lot of advocacy educating state and federal policy makers on the needs and concerns of sustainable farmers. And, training people at the local level on how they can be effective advocates for healthy and just food systems.

 

Thank you for that description in this sort of remarkably broad portfolio you have. I can imagine how busy you folks are! But let me ask a question of kind of a national scope. Are there other organizations like this around the country, and is there a coalition of such groups?

 

Absolutely. Many states have sister organizations, like Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, serving their communities and their regions. One national umbrella group that we're a part of is the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which acts as a lobbying voice for our sector in Washington DC. Their members span all the way across the country. So similar types of organizations that we work with are in states everywhere, like the Northeast Organic Farmers Association in New England, Community Alliance for Family Farms in California, and everywhere in between.

 

So let's go back in time and speak about how the association got started. So what were its origins, why did people think there was a need for this, and who are the members?

 

Essentially, it was a group of organic farmers and gardeners who got together back in 1979 seeking to practice organic farming, and to gain opportunities to learn about how to grow organically. And who wanted to see a food system that was re-centered on communities and relationships and shifted away from a commodity mindset of the cheapest food grown using practices that were focused on extraction from the natural world. These were farmers and gardeners who wanted to work with the natural world and work with their neighbors to create a different vision for a food system. This is the late 1970s, and this was during the "Get Big or Get Out" mindset in agriculture. In fact, existing agricultural institutions, universities, companies, were really actively hostile to organic. It was really to create that peer-to-peer learning opportunity for farmers across North and South Carolina that CFSA originally began. Over the years, the initial project of the organization actually came to be an organic certification agency. Back before there was the green organic seal that we have in the grocery stores today, the organic label was something that was locally defined. There wasn't a national program. So these farmers got together and decided and collectively created organic standards for helping them to manage their farms in a way that was beneficial to the environment that promoted healthy living soils. And over time, as we've expanded, and as the movement has expanded, those farmers recognized the need for policy advocacy and policy change to promote more sustainable food and farming systems, and to expand our services so that we can encourage and promote new farmers to get into organic agriculture and local food.

 

Now that you explained the origins of the organization, I was first going to say it was the beginnings of a trend for people and farmers to become more in touch with one another through things like farmer's markets and local produce programs and farm-to-school programs, things like that. But it wasn't a new trend. It was sort of the restoration of what existed before when people were more in touch with the farmers who grew their foods, and that connection between farmers and their communities is a really interesting one. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on the role that farmers can play in addressing economic and social justice issues in their communities.

 

Absolutely. A really great example of how the sustainable agriculture and sustainable farming community in the Carolinas is doing just that today is our FarmsSHARE Program which was developed as a COVID response by Carolina Farm Stewardship Association back in 2020. Initially, we saw with the pandemic and the public health controls that were being put in place, saw restaurants closing and especially those farm-to-table restaurants that were buying food from small local farms in our region and across the country. So those farmers all of the sudden lost a market, and they already had crops in the ground ready to sell, and the restaurants were laying off their workers. And, you know, this predominantly is people working in the kitchens and in the service industry who tend to more likely come from oppressed backgrounds, and they didn't have money because their jobs were getting cut off. So our FarmsSHARE program initially was created to provide CSA-style boxes from those small farms to those restaurant workers who were unemployed, or underemployed, as a result of the pandemic. Thanks to some very generous funding from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of North Carolina, CFSA was able to buy that food from those small farms. They then worked with local food hubs to have it packed, and then the food hubs delivered the food to the restaurants that they used to sell to so that the workers could have this free, fresh, healthy food. As the pandemic has evolved and revealed to a wider population, the realities of food insecurity in our communities across North and South Carolina, FarmsSHARE evolved to address people throughout society who are in need of fresh, healthy food. So the way FarmsSHARE works right now is that we provide funding to food hubs for them to purchase food directly from small farms, package that up, again, into CSA-style, (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes. And then take that to food pantries in their own communities and senior centers in their own communities so that small farms are, through this program, feeding people in need in their backyards. This is a great example of what happens when we marshal many small farms to work together to address the injustices in the food system in their own communities, and bring healthy food made in harmony with nature to the people that deserve it.

 

Well, it's a great example of ingenuity. It's a great example of the resilience of a local food system and how people can come together in times of crisis, and the FarmsSHARE program you talked about is really interesting. Do you think that the lessons have been learned about how these food systems can be resilient so if something like this happens again, let's hope it doesn't, but if it does, that we'll be able to respond even more quickly and effectively?

 

I think we have an opportunity to help people learn that lesson. I mean, there's no doubt we have seen examples of fragility of the national and international food systems as a result of COVID, and we've seen examples of local food systems being resilient. As a professor and instructor, you probably appreciate that learning doesn't just happen from experiencing it once. We have to keep pushing and keep sharing those examples. This is really where the role of policy becomes vital in terms of ensuring that our society learns these lessons. The Farm Bill is coming up, which is the massive five-year legislation that Congress brings about every few years that guides food and agriculture policy in this country. That is a crucial opportunity for advocates of resiliency in our food system to make sure that these lessons actually get ensconced in policy. That policies that direct and incense the production and distribution of food in this country are built to be resilient instead of to be commodified.

 

Well, so let's talk about the Farm Bill. We'll turn our attention a little bit from the local picture to the national one. So this is an enormous and enormously complex piece of legislation and, as you said, it's coming up for renewal. So what do you think the legislation can do to help support local and regional food systems, and what do you think the policy reforms might be for the 2023 Farm Bill?

 

It really is a crucial opportunity, and one of the places that can start is in food procurement policies within USDA programs. So when it comes to food purchasing that the government does for relief to address food insecurity, the primary metric for making those purchases, is how cheap is the food? We need to change that mindset. We need to change policy to allow for these systems to prioritize community development and supporting farmers as well as supporting communities. So, for instance, there is a proposed bill that's out there in Congress right now, the Fresh Produce Procurement Reform Act, that is an example of policy that we'd like to see incorporated into the next Farm Bill that would lower the barriers for small farms to participate in these feeding programs. And would allow the agencies that run these programs to make decisions based, not just on getting the cheapest possible food and calories for people who need it, but to actually allow them to get fresh and healthy food and do it in a way that builds community instead of extracts from communities. That's a crucial area of reform. Incenting, agroecological and conservation practices, and promoting more research on organic practices is also something that is a critical opportunity in this upcoming farm bill. There is so much that farmers do that is shaped by the policies that the farm bill puts out. The Farm Bill, as it exists right now, eliminates most of the risk for very large farms to just grow corn and soybeans, and to not worry about the environments. Changing those incentive structures, making it possible, and in fact, desirable for farmers to work in harmony with nature as a primary focus and as a primary benefit of their operations has to be a part of the kind of reform that's needed.

 

Bio

 

Roland McReynolds has served since 2007 as the Executive Director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA), a member-based, farmer-driven non-profit organization based in Pittsboro, NC that helps farmers and consumers in the North and South Carolina grow and eat local organic food.  He is an attorney, receiving BA and BS degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and his JD from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law.  Roland directs CFSA's programs and policy advocacy work at the state and federal level, and has served on the USDA's Fruit & Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee; the Policy Committee of the Organic Farmers Association; the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition's Organizational Council; and the Advisory Boards for the North Carolina A&T State University College of Agriculture and Environmental Science and the North Carolina State University Department of Crop and Soil Science; among other boards and committees.  Carolina Farm Stewardship Association is the oldest and largest organic farmers organization in the Southeast. CFSA hosts educational conferences and events on sustainable agriculture and local food systems; provides training and direct technical assistance to local organic farmers; runs a training farm for new organic growers in Concord, NC; coaches food councils on effective policy advocacy; and represents organic and local food systems stakeholders with state and federal legislators and agencies. In response to COVID, CFSA has been operating a program called FarmsSHARE, a CSA-style food box program that addresses food insecurity in the Carolinas by purchasing food from small farms at a fair price and distributing that food to people in need through a statewide network of community-based food hubs. For more information about CFSA, visit www.carolinafarmstewards.org.

 

Pioneer, path breaker, field builder. These are all descriptions that apply to our guest today, Dr. Marion Nestle. Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health emerita at New York University. She has been a major force in food policy for decades, partly because she is a brilliant communicator and a prolific author. Her groundbreaking book, "Food Politics," has been published in several editions. Another book, "Unsavory Truth: How The Food Companies Skew The Science of What We Eat," is a classic. And this just begins the list. But today we're talking about Marion's newest book, which is a memoir called, "Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics". It offers an unprecedented look into the life, the thinking, and the passions of one of the top figures in the field.

Interview Summary

 

You've had an amazing journey to get to where you are. People know a lot about what you've done at the point where you became an academic started publishing, and things started showing up in the field, but an awful lot happened before that that led up to the academic part of your life. I'd like to have you tell us a little bit about that, if you would.

 

I called the book "Slow Cooked," because it took me forever to develop a career. In looking back on it and in writing this book, I realized that I was a woman of my time. I grew up in the 1950s when expectations for women were extremely low. Women weren't expected to do anything except get married and have children, which I did. I was fulfilling societal expectations. I worked very hard and was pretty unhappy about all of that because doors seemed so closed. I grew up in New York, and my family moved to Los Angeles when I was 12. I went to an academic high school where everybody went to college, but you were not expected to do anything or to use your college education to create a career. You were expected to find a husband, get married, and have children, and that is what I did.

 

So then what led you from that to the academic world?

 

Well, I wasn't very good at being a housewife, and I found it hard to be home with young children all the time. I had a lot of growing up to do, and my poor kids and I grew up together. But I stayed home with the children for a couple of years and it was not a happy experience. I think that was the time in my life when I was close to being clinically depressed. I had friends who said, "You have just got to go back to school." Well, I didn't know what else to do. I thought that was probably good advice, I had very good grades as an undergraduate. So, I was able to get into a graduate program and went back to school when my children were six months and two years old and somehow survived that. Looking back on it, I don't know how I did. That was the beginning of a long, slow progress towards a career. I went to graduate school because I wanted to make sure I had a job at the end of it. I trained to be a laboratory technician and got a job when I finished college. But even in graduate school, I didn't take what I was doing very seriously. I wasn't treated as if I was a serious student. I was told that the only reason they were giving me a fellowship was because no men had applied that year. I thought, "Well, nobody's going to take me seriously, I'm not going to take myself seriously either. I'm just going to do this." And at the end of it, I knew I would have a job.

 

So what happened that got you interested in academic life, and food issues in particular?

 

The transition was on my first teaching job. I went to Brandeis University as a postdoctoral fellow. By that time I was divorced and remarried. My husband had a job in Boston. I got a job as a postdoctoral fellow with Brandeis. That led to what I call the swimming pool epiphany, which was a realization in a moment that I could not have an academic career as a bench scientist and handle two young children at the same time. There were women who could do that, but I was not one of them. I was a bench scientist, and working in a developmental biology laboratory. My kids had swimming lessons at Brandeis on Saturday morning. I stayed home with them, because my husband had his own job. He was an assistant professor at Harvard, and he had to work on weekends to keep up with his work. One day there was a much longer swimming lesson for some reason, so much longer that I thought, "Well, I'll just go to my lab. And there won't be anybody there, and I might actually be able to get a little work done." I walked into my lab on a Saturday morning and everybody was there, everybody! The lab director, his wife, the lab technician, the graduate students, the other postdocs, everybody was there except me. I didn't even know that people were there on Saturday morning. I thought, "Oh, okay, this is why everybody treats me like I'm not getting any work done." And, "Oh, okay, THIS IS WHY I'm not getting any work done." That was the end of my lab career. I started looking for a teaching job right away. I knew I couldn't do it. So I took a teaching job at Brandeis, and learned how to learn, which was very useful. On my last year at Brandeis, I got handed a nutrition course to teach. As I like to describe it, it was like falling in love and I've never looked back.

 

That is so interesting. And What happened after Brandeis?

 

Well, after Brandeis, my husband got a job at UCSF in San Francisco. I went along as an accompanying spouse, not really realizing the terrible political position that I was in - because I had gotten a job because I was my husband's wife. The job seemed fantastic, I was a halftime associate dean for human biology programs, and then the other part of my time I was teaching nutrition to medical students. I was able to keep that going for eight years, until it and the marriage fell apart at the same time. Then I went to public health school, and actually got credentialed in nutrition. I did a master's in public health nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley. And then, when the UCSF job ended, I went to Washington for two years with a very fancy title: Senior Nutrition Policy Advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services. There I edited the 1988 Surgeon General's report on nutrition and health.

 

That was a landmark report. But there's a question I'm dying to ask, what was it about nutrition that made you fall in love with the field?

 

Oh, it was so much fun! It was so much more fun than molecular biology and cell biology. For one thing, the papers were so much easier to read. When I first started teaching undergraduate nutrition, I could give undergraduate students original research papers in nutrition and they could critically evaluate those papers - almost without knowing very much about science. They could see that the number of study subjects was very small, that the studies weren't very well controlled, that there were all kinds of other factors that could've influenced the outcome of those studies. I thought this is just the best way of teaching undergraduate biology I could think of, because everybody could relate to it in a very personal way. It was really fun to teach. Still is.

 

You're a very gifted communicator. So I can imagine how you would enjoy teaching. You've had an interesting journey through the nutrition field itself, having started at kind of the basic level, with a biological background, teaching about research papers in the field, and then transitioning to having this major focus on the policy side of things. I'm imagining that time in Washington you just discussed was pretty influential in that. Is that right?

 

Oh, it certainly was. You know, I took the job because I was told, "If you're interested in nutrition policy, this is the place to be." I was in the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which is responsible for a large number of very important public health initiatives. And I thought the Surgeon General's report was really worth two years of my time. I ended up writing most of it, and certainly editing a great deal of it. It was an education in how politics works. I had come from Berkeley, where we didn't really understand the difference between Republicans and Democrats. We thought both of them were mainstream, and didn't really get it. Oh, I learned the difference very quickly. It was an education in how Washington works; what you can say and what you can't say; how you get things done politically; how you try to work across bipartisan lines, but how difficult that can be. Also, I met people in agencies who ended up being extremely helpful in later stages of my career. If I had a question, I knew who to ask. I was on committees, I was just really involved in a great deal of nutrition-policy activities in Washington during that two-year period. It was a very steep learning curve, and one that I consider immensely valuable.

 

And was it during that period where you came to develop a richer view of the influence of food industry on the way food policy decisions are made?

 

On the first day of my job in Washington, I had just arrived from California. The director of the office I was in explained that even if the research showed that eating less meat would be better for health, the Surgeon General's report could never say "Eat less meat." Because that was a politically impossible statement. The Department of Agriculture would complain to Congress, and the report would never be able to come out. That was, as I am fond of saying, no paranoid fantasy. It was absolutely true. An enormous part of my job in Washington was to fend off the Department of Agriculture official who was most interested in making sure that the Surgeon General's report did not say one negative word about red meat. And of course, it didn't. It said, "Eat less saturated fat," and you were supposed to know that saturated fat is a euphemism for meat.

 

The role you played was really phenomenally important, and that document that you worked two years on was really very important at the time. So what did you do after that?

 

Well, I discovered quite early in my time in Washington DC that I was not suited for a Washington DC career. I tend to be outspoken and say what I think, and that's really not acceptable in those circumstances. I was constantly getting my boss in trouble for things that I said. I discovered quite quickly that in addition to the Republican and Democrat split in Washington, there was a split between people who liked New York better than Washington, and those who liked Washington better than New York. I quickly discovered that going to New York would be going home, in a sense. I started looking for jobs in New York right away. After a year or so, the job chairing the Home Economics Department at NYU came up. I applied for it, and happily got it.

 

Boy, that term - home economics - really brings you back, doesn't it?

 

It does, and I thought it was hilarious, because here I was with a degree in molecular biology, and another one in public health nutrition. I was coming to chair a Department of Home Economics. Couldn't believe they still existed. I had been hired to change the department into something more appropriate for the 20th, if not the 21st century. And I didn't realize how hard that was going to be. But it was actually the only job I got, so I was happy to do it. It was in New York; it was in The Village; it was at NYU. Which was, at the time, kind of a third-rate institution, but with a commitment to improve dramatically. Which it did very, very quickly, over the next several years. It was very exciting to be part of that development. And of course, eventually the department shifted from home economics to food studies and nutrition, which is what it is now.

 

When you bring up home economics, it reminds me of being in high school in South Bend, Indiana, where the girls went to home economics classes and the boys went to shop class and learned to do woodworking and things. What a difference there is today.

 

I was happy to learn how to cook. I think they should bring cooking back. It's a great thing to know how to do, and it certainly improves the quality of food that you eat at home. That's where I learned to cook - in home economics, in junior high school. But the home economics department that I inherited had 25 different home economics programs run by five faculty. It was so absolutely amazing, and there was much work to be done to kind of clean up some of that. Fortunately, I had a lot of administrative help, because the university was improving rapidly, and it wanted that department to improve too.

 

You're so right about cooking and how important the skill it is. I do a lot more cooking these days than I do woodworking or using a drill press. I wish I could have gone with the girls into that home economics class back then.

 

Well, I wish I could've gone to the shop, I would've loved to know how to fix cars.

 

Ahh, there you go. So at NYU, you created, I think, what was the first university program in food studies, is that right?

 

The first one called "Food Studies." There was a program at Boston University in gastronomy that had been kicked off by Julia Child and Jacque Pepin, but I knew that gastronomy would not work at a rapidly-improving university that took its academics very seriously. But there were, at NYU, a great many programs with "Studies" in their title. And I thought if we had food studies, we could get away with it. And we did. We were very, very fortunate in being able to do that, because a program in hotel management that the department ran was being taken away from us and transferred into another school. And it was an extremely lucrative program, and everybody felt very sorry for losing the income from that program. And so, when we came up with the idea of food studies, once people got over the initial question, "What's that?" And we were able to explain to them that food is a multi-trillion-dollar-a-year industry; the major public health problems in the world are connected to food; agriculture is connected to food; climate change is connected to food - in fact, practically any problem you can think of is connected to food in some way. Then we were permitted to go ahead and do that. We were very, very fortunate in creating a new field, because the "New York Times" wrote about the program the week after New York State approved it. The most amazing thing happened! We had people in our offices that afternoon holding up copies of the clipping and saying, "I've waited all my life for this program." In a sense, we created the program that many of us wish we could've taken when we went to school, because it's a program about food and culture. It now has agricultural components in it, although it didn't at the beginning, but it does now. It's kind of food and everything. Our students love it, they all come into the program wanting to change the world through food, and I'm greatly in favor of encouraging them to try to make the world better through food. I think it's a great way to do it.

 

I found the same thing in my teaching. The students are so keen on these issues, they get more sophisticated and knowledgeable every year. Interest in food and climate change, like you said, is just booming. And boy, it's really heartening to know that there are so many young people interested in taking on this issue. And thanks to you and others who started those early programs that really paved the path for everything that exists today. Let me ask you about your book "Food Politics", which is really a classic. What inspired you to write that?

 

I had gone to a meeting at the National Cancer Institute in the early 1990s, and it was about behavioral causes of cancer, mostly cigarettes. This was my first meeting with the main anti-smoking physicians and scientists who were taking extremely activist positions against smoking. They did slideshows, and the slides showed cigarette-company marketing in remote areas of the world: the jungles of Africa, and the high Himalayan mountains. One of the presentations was about marketing to children, and showed pictures of the Joe Camel ad everyplace where kids hang out. I was kind of stunned by it. Not because I didn't know that cigarette companies marketed everywhere, and marketed to children. I did know those things, but I had never paid any attention to it. I had never systematically thought about it. Cigarette advertisements and advertising was so much a part of the landscape at that time that it was unnoticeable. It just kind of disappeared into the woodwork. I walked out of those presentations thinking, "We should be doing this for Coca-Cola!" We nutritionists should be looking at the companies that are marketing products that are not particularly healthful, and looking at how they're doing it. So, I started paying attention. I started looking at food-industry marketing, fast-food marketing, soda marketing everyplace I went. And I started writing articles about it. In the late 1990s, I had a sabbatical coming up, I needed a sabbatical project, and by that time I had figured out that NYU valued books. I had been trained in molecular biology, where the only thing that's valued is original research in very prestigious journals. But NYU values books, it's very humanities-based. So, I thought I could take those articles and put them together into a book. That's where "Food Politics" came about. It was a little bit more complicated than that, but that was basically the origin of "Food Politics".

 

It is one amazing book, and it had so much influence on generations of students, and researchers, and advocates. And I thank you for writing it. It really has had a big impact.

 

Well, thank you for that. I have to say, I thought I was just stating the obvious.

 

Well, obvious to you, maybe, because you had the insight to look into these things before other people did. You really were a pioneer there. A lot of people believe that the job of an academic is to do their research, do their scholarly work, do their teaching, and then that's it. Not to go out and try to change the way the public thinks about things, talk to the press, try to change policies, and do things like that. The thought is, once you stray into that territory, you're biased toward a certain point of view and you lose your objectivity as a scientist. Now, I certainly don't believe that's the case, and boy, if anybody epitomizes that sort of philosophy, it's you. How did you sort that through in those early days, as your work was moving into the advocacy arena?

 

Well, I think there were two things that happened. One was that I went into a department that did not have laboratories. So laboratory science was out of the question. I had to find something to do as an academic where I could publish in scholarly journals. And yet, I wasn't doing original kinds of research, so I had to solve that problem. But the other was the miracle of NYU: they hired me as a full professor with tenure. I had tenure! I could do anything I wanted without fear of reprisals, or without fear of being fired because I was saying something that would offend someone. I have to say, never in my 30 years at NYU did anybody ever suggest that I keep my mouth shut. So it was absolutely the right place for me, and, I guess, the right time. But I had, I guess, they are biases. I had them for the beginning. I think it would be better if people ate more healthfully. I think it would be better if we had a food system that was better for climate change. I think it would be better if people ate diets that reduced hunger, and reduced their risk of chronic disease. I think those are values that are really important. To be able to do work that promotes those values made perfect sense to me. You know, I realize that I'm looked at as incredibly biased. I never get appointed to federal committees, and I have not been invited to the forthcoming White House conference, because I'm considered much too controversial. I've always found it ironic that people who work for food companies or who think that food-company marketing is perfectly appropriate are not considered biased. That's the world we live in.

 

You know, it's interesting how the academic world construes the concept of impact, and journal articles, and how many times people cite your articles. The outside world might look in on that definition of impact and just think it's ludicrous. You think of impact in a different way, and I do as well. If you're able to harness the work that occurs in the academic world in order to create the kind of social changes that you're talking about you really are kind of maximizing the potential of what exists inside the academic world. Do you agree with that?

 

Oh, absolutely, it's publish or perish, and I quickly discovered that food studies was a wonderful umbrella for the kind of work that I wanted to do. And it valued books, it values articles, opinion pieces. I mean, the way I describe my work is I write heavily-footnoted editorials. These're opinion pieces that're backed up by large amounts of science. I think that's a valuable contribution. I'm not able to measure the kind of impact that I have. I have no idea what it is, and I don't know how to measure it. But I'm doing the kind of work that feels good to me. I'm doing work that I feel good about and I feel is worthwhile. I hope that other people will pick it up, and that students will follow in footsteps. And one of the reasons for writing the memoir was to encourage students, no matter what field they're in, to get some idea that they can do these kinds of things, it's okay. You can get paid for it!

 

That's not to mention changing public opinion or putting pressure on political leaders to do things outside of industry influence, and things. You know, it reminds me of an op-ed you and I wrote together in the "New York Times" some years ago, on the World Health Organization and the stance it was taking on sugar. Those things need to be made public, people need to know about those. And sometimes academics are in a pretty good position to highlight some of those really important issues.

 

Oh, absolutely, and all of that research skill that we have, all of those references and citations give a credibility to the kind of work that we do that is pretty unimpeachable. You know, I'm often attacked for my opinions. But never on the research that backs them up, which is kind of interesting. You may not like what I say, but I've got evidence to back it up.

 

Yes! Speaking of attacks, over the years, I've had so many of these sort of things. Some really nasty and threatening and some a little more humorous. I remember somebody once sent me a letter that said they wished a pox on my house. I wasn't sure what I was to do with that. Like, I mean, should I go to Home Depot and buy a pox detector? I didn't really know what to do. Heck, you must've had a ton of that kind of stuff. Has that ever bothered you?

 

Well, you would be amazed at how little of it I've gotten. I mean, there was one right at the beginning when "Food Politics" came out, there were a lot of attacks. "Doesn't she know anything about personal responsibility," and "Who is she to tell people what to eat," and that kind of thing. And then the famous letter from a lawyer saying I maligned sugar by saying that soft drinks contain sugar, when I, of all people, should've known that they don't contain sugar, they contain high-fructose corn syrup. Which I thought was hilariously funny, because high-fructose corn syrup is a form of sugar. But nothing ever came of it. I've heard remarkably little overt criticism or that kind of thing. What I have heard from people is I talked to one person who said he was hired by a soda company to track every single thing I was writing and then develop positions that the soda industry could use to refute what I had said. But I didn't know anything about that until that confession later on. I was kind of amazed. He got paid to do that! Yeah, I thought that was pretty good.

 

That's so interesting, so you're creating jobs. Back to that time you were in government, working on the Surgeon General's report, you were noting a lot of influence by the food industry on nutrition guidelines, nutrition policies, etc. If we fast-forward to today, do you think nutrition guidelines, nutrition policies, are less influenced by the food industry?

 

Absolutely not. Of course they're still influenced. You can look at it in the dietary guidelines. They still talk about salt, sugar, and fat. They don't talk about the foods that those substances come from. They're still very cautious about advising less of any particular agricultural product, because the pushback is enormous. The meat industry is enormously influential over government policy. I mean, we have government agencies that are captured by corporations. We see this in many, many fields, but it's certainly true in food. Everybody is worried about the FDA these days because of its cozy relationships with food companies. I just did a blog post this week on user fees. I don't think the FDA should be getting its money for doing inspections of food corporations from the corporations it's inspecting. They can't possibly do that in an independent way. The Department of Agriculture has long been infamous for working for the meat and dairy industries. The food industry likes the perks it gets, doesn't want them changing, and it uses the political system in the way that all corporations use the political system. I think there's more recognition of food-industry influence over what we eat and how we eat, and that's very gratifying.

 

Are there things you think could be done to lessen this influence, if you could wave the magic wand?

 

Yes, get rid of Citizens United to start with, so that corporations can't buy elections. I think there's a lot we could do. I think we need an agricultural system that is focused on public health, not on growing commodities that feed animals and fuel automobiles. I think one of the greatest travesties in the food system is that 30 or 40% of United States corn is used to make ethanol. That's just shocking. In a world in which food is a really big issue, we should be growing food for people, not for automobiles, and not nearly as much for animals. You know, and I think there're all kinds of policies that would promote public health in a way that we really need promoting. We need universal school meals; we need a healthcare system, that would be nice; and we need an agricultural and food system that is focused on reducing hunger and reducing chronic disease, particularly obesity-related chronic disease, which the government doesn't want to touch. Because touching it means putting some limits on what food companies can do. I don't think that food companies should be permitted to market junk food, especially to children.

 

 

Bio

 

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, in the department she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She holds honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky and the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.

She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley. Previous faculty positions were at Brandeis University and the UCSF School of Medicine. From 1986-88, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health. Her research and writing examine scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice and its consequences, emphasizing the role of food industry marketing.

She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books, several of them prize-winning, most notably Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002); Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (2003); What to Eat (2006); Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, with Dr. Malden Nesheim (2012); Eat, Drink Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics (2013); and Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) in 2015. She also has written two books about pet food, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008) and Feed Your Pet Right in 2010 (also with Dr. Nesheim). She published Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, in 2018.  Her most recent book, with Kerry Trueman, Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health, was published in September 2020.  Her forthcoming book with University of California Press is a memoir to be published in 2022.

In July, 2022 food giant Kellogg lost a court challenge of the United Kingdom's high sugar cereal rule. The multinational food company had argued that the UK government's inclusion of their serials among and I quote, less healthy foods is unfair because it doesn't take into account the milk that is usually added to the cereals. The UK court dismissed the claim and is enforcing regulations, is limiting the promotion of foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar in UK supermarkets as part of their efforts to curb obesity. Here to speak with us today about the implications of this ruling is Anna Taylor, executive director of The Food Foundation in London.

Interview Summary

 

So let's start with this. Can you explain the ruling that Kellogg objected to and then what the ruling itself makes happen?

 

Sure. So in the UK we've been having a series of measures being gradually introduced to try and prevent obesity, particularly childhood obesity. And one of those sets of regulations were around controlling the promotion of unhealthy foods in two aspects, one, controlling the position which those products hold in the supermarkets and particularly regulating the high impact parts of the shop. Things like the checkout or the isle end and controlling whether or not foods that are high in fat, sugar salt could be placed in those locations. And the second aspect was applied to a similar set of foods around whether they could be sold to customers in volume based promotion. So like multi buys where you would two get one free, that kind of idea. These regulations are being developed and they are applied to a sub series of categories of foods which contribute a lot of calories and sugar to children's diets. So things like biscuits and crisps and pizza and chocolate and so forth, and also breakfast cereals and only products within those categories that are classified as being high fat, sugar and salt food, using what the UK has as a nutrient profile score, would be eligible for these restrictions. But, Kelloggs sued the government on the grounds that the breakfast cereals that it sold were actually served with milk, and therefore the nutrient profile score should be applied to a whole meal. IE, the cereal and the milk included, which would have tipped many breakfast cereals into not being classified as high fat, sugar and salt foods. However, the court ruled against them. They took the government to court on four counts, and all four counts were rejected by the court. And obviously the public health community were very relieved that that was the outcome, the ruling was really unequivocal in explaining the consequences of an unhealthy weight for children, what that means for their long term health and the links of course between sugar consumption and calorie consumption and the knock on impacts on obesity and excess weight. We were all delighted with the outcome.

 

So I'm assuming, because the industry bothered to take this to court, that they're expecting this to harm their sales. Is there any sense of how impactful this might actually be?

 

The impact assessments in the UK come into this as billions, in terms of public health, savings to the health service, savings to social care costs and so forth. But I think in the UK, to some extent, we're a little bit of an outlier; certainly across Europe, in that we buy a lot of food on promotion. About 40% of what we buy tends to be on promotion and the modeling and the work with expenditure data seems to suggest that that leads us to buy 20% more calories than we otherwise would. So this whole connection between promoting things, particularly foods which can be stored easily at home and where you think - well, I can get something extra now - and sort of in anticipation that you won't eat it immediately. In fact, with these foods, because of their close connection to our appetite and the fact that they don't suppress our appetite as much mean that we eat them more quickly. So we end up then buying more and the companies call this the expandability of the category. It is a food category that if you put it on promotion, you can actually expand the size of the market essentially. So it's not surprising that companies are pushing back. We were just emerging from the pandemic, and the Department of Health and Social Care was under immense pressure during the pandemic. We had seen a huge spike in childhood obesity in the UK through the first year of the pandemic. So this was a strategic move by Kellogg's, but I think there wasn't a lot of support for it in the media - perhaps this is the best way to say it.

 

This is heartening on a number of levels. First that the original regulation was passed. Then second that it prevailed in the court and third that the projections of its impact are so great. Another way that things like this can sometimes be historic is that they open the doors to other such action. I'm thinking, for example, of in the United States when New York city was the first jurisdiction to require calories on restaurant menus. A lot of people, including me and my colleagues, fought hard for that - not knowing really what the impact would be on people's dietary choices. But thinking it was historic because it was a sign that a City Health Department, in this case in New York, expressed jurisdiction over the long term consequences of food. Not just the short term food safety type things that health departments usually get involved in but the chronic conditions produced by long term consumption of things like sugar, fat and salt. So it was historically important in that sense. And I'm wondering if this ruling and the way the court came out on this might be similar in some ways, that it could open the door to other things in the future that could be equally or even more important.

 

The decisions around these kinds of regulations in the UK are made through the political process, government, parliament and so forth. I think we haven't yet seen a lot of evidence sort of referencing back to the court ruling in making a case for even stronger measures to be introduced in the policy frame. In fact, we're seeing at the moment, that this is reflection of the sort of politics in the UK at the moment. We've actually seen this week that our new prime minister, who came into power the week before last, has requested a review of a whole slew of obesity prevention measures that have been introduced in the UK. Including these ones around promotions. In fact, the regulations on promotions that were due to be introduced on multi buys have been already delayed a year on the grounds of the cost of living crisis. I think it still feels here in the UK that these measures are fragile, that the narratives around nanny state and the role of government intervention in the food system, the sort of private realm is still very politically contentious. It's become a kind of wedge issue if you like, for a much bigger debate about the size of government and the role of the state, food has become a sort of way into that much bigger political conversation. I think we'll know in time how significant the ruling was. It would've been extremely significant if you had gone the other way, because you can imagine, for example, you might say, well, I sell chocolate spread. You normally eat it with bread. And therefore my chocolate spread ceases to become an unhealthy product. And furthermore, things like advertising restrictions and so forth will no longer apply to it. You can imagine it opens a floodgate of potential precedence to the use of the nutrient profile model to classify foods as being less healthy or more healthy. So that would've been incredibly damaging and would I think have had a very detrimental set of sort of long term consequences in terms of how you design policy around the food environment. So I think we've yet to see the real positive impact of it but I think it's probably very fair to say that had it been a different ruling, we'd be already seeing much more severe negative effects of it.

 

Thanks for that context, it's very helpful especially seeing it in the broader political context, which is exactly what's happening in our country as well. So let me ask this, so efforts by many parties are usually needed to bring about outcomes like this. And I'm wondering in the case of this action in the UK, what happened either visibly or behind the scenes to make this possible?

 

There's a huge amount of work that goes on, both in the public sphere with the public around, I suppose trying to create a bigger political space for government action in obesity prevention. To some extent, that work really got ahead of steam in the lead up to the introduction of the sugary drinks tax that came in the UK. And, around which there was a sort of major documentary which Jamie Oliver did and which was sort of tipping point I think for public engagement and a recognition by parents that sugar was really hidden everywhere. They felt in some ways manipulated by the system and unaware of the ways in which sugar was appearing everywhere. Suddenly it got a kind of potency in the public realm, which I hadn't had to date. We are very steeped in now, in the conversation about, well, how do we make sure that these measures are protected, that they're not rolled back and indeed that the government feels emboldened to take further steps. That's everything from huge amounts of engagement with parliamentarians right across the political sphere. I imagine in many places as I said before in the UK, this is an issue that people very instinctively think they don't want the government telling them what to eat. Nobody does. They see these kinds of interventions as if it were the government telling them what they need to eat. And so we're doing huge amounts of work with MPs around how we frame these issues in the context of long term health of the nation and the economic productivity and so forth. There's work with parliamentarians, there's work with the public. We do quite a lot of polling work to understand how the public are feeling on issues and tracking that on an ongoing basis, huge amounts of work with the media trying to make sure that there's a sort of drum beat of evidence and stories and real life experiences, which bring attention to the issue. The political economy around these issues is really, really difficult. It's hard for government to act in these areas. The implementation of some of these regulations is tough. Trying to define an isle end in a supermarket becomes the business of teams of civil servants. You know, this is not easy stuff to actually implement. The potential workarounds by businesses are so massive and loopholes and unintended consequences, it's a difficult area to also actually design the right types of regulations. I think we're making progress but it always feels sort of two steps forward, one step back, that kind of sense of stuttering progress really. And if you look at it in a long term frame, then sure, we are on the right track but the urgency of the issues are now so intense that we're just not moving fast enough.

 

Thanks for that background. So just as the final question, what additional policies are priority for you right now?

 

At the moment, we're focusing on trying to get the commitments which the government have made not get rolled back. So included in this are, as well as promotions, regulations around advertising of junk food up to 9:00 PM on television broadcast. So sort of blanket ban on advertising of junk food up until nine o'clock in the evening on TV and online. So that's at the moment planned, but delayed. We don't want it to be ditched. We are also putting a lot of energy at the moment into trying to get a set of measures in place to protect the very poorest households who are really struggling in the context of the cost of living crisis. We've got rising levels of food insecurity. And we know at the moment that the food system really if you've got very little money, your options for eating healthily are narrowed even further. And so we're trying to get the government to invest in expanding things like free school meals and preschool programs so that children from disadvantaged backgrounds at least have a guarantee of one decent meal a day.

 

Bio

 

Anna Taylor has led The Food Foundation as the Executive Director since 2015. Prior to this role, she worked within the foundation's Department for International Development. Anna has worked at multiple international organizations such as Save the Children and UNICEF, and has been at the forefront of international leadership on nutrition, supporting programs in a wide range of contexts in Africa and South Asia. Anna also previously worked for the UK Department of Health. In 2014, she was awarded the OBE for her work to address the global burden of undernutrition. She did a MSc in Human Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1994. In May 2017, Anna became a member of the London Food Board to advise the Mayor of London and the GLA on the food matters that affect Londoners. She is a Board member of Veg Power and an advisor to the International Food Policy Research Institute. She served as Chief Independent Adviser to Henry Dimbleby for the development of the National Food Strategy published in 2021.

 

Soul food has played a critical role in preserving black history, community and culinary genius and has also been a response to centuries of food in justice. Today we're speaking with author, Dr. Christopher Carter about these new book entitled, "The Spirit of Soul Food." Chris Carter is a professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego and also a pastor in the United Methodist church.

Interview Summary

Chris, I can't tell you how much a pleasure it is to talk to you again. You were a very important figure in a meeting we held at Duke University with experts from around the country on food and faith issues. It made me appreciate more than ever how much work has gone on, how rich the thinking is in this area and how important work of this type is. It's really nice of you to join us.

That was an amazing conference for establishing connections. And, just as you said, seeing that there's so many people that are connecting food and faith on a broader level, it was just really exciting.

 

I'm glad you found it that way. So let's talk about your book. So you began your book with a really interesting statement and I'm quoting here, "I did not want to write this book." Tell us why not?

 

Yes, that is definitely an odd way to start a book that I have been working on for about 10 years. For me, it was really more about this particular version of the book. I had submitted a few earlier drafts throughout the review process and while they were all received well by the publisher, some of the reviews were coming back not as good as I would like them to or not as well appreciated as I thought it could be. There was something missing. I think one of the reviewers noted they felt as though I was being too critical, particularly the food ways of black culture and the ways in which I was being critical. And that wasn't my intention, as a black man I'm talking about the food my people eat. I'm from Louisiana, Mississippi and so my culture is very much steeped in the book. What I realized was that in order to do justice to my arguments and to fully explain how my reasoning has evolved, I had to be vulnerable. I had to talk about my own experience growing up impoverished, and talk about the experiences of my grandfather growing up in the Jim Crow south as a migrant farm worker. I had to talk about the experience of my paternal great-grandfather who was Spanish and was an overseer in the ways in which they had a particular kind of position of power in plantation. It required a lot more vulnerability than I initially wanted to disclose. I think the book is richer for it, and it allowed me to weave compassion in the book in a way that I think is unique. But, that's not the book I set out to write, Kelly. It definitely pushed me in ways that I anticipate and I'm grateful for it but definitely was not easy.

 

Well, I for one very much appreciate the fact that you took the risk and went and wrote the book. I think it is a really important contribution. So let's talk a little bit more about what you address in the book. So one of the things you do is you wrestle with a complicated relationship between food and agriculture and black culture. So what if anything did you discover in your own research for this book that changed the way you think about this intersection?

 

I think one of the most powerful things for me that discovered in this research was the fact that Africans were enslaved because of our agricultural acumen. That was really  world changing for me. Growing up, you know, my grandfather had a garden, but it really was like a small farm in his backyard. My family migrated from Louisiana, Mississippi, respectively, to Michigan and they lived in a tiny town called Three Rivers. He had this pretty good size backyard because everybody had lots of space on properties because we were in the country. So I grew up with a particular kind of appreciation for how to grow food but not necessarily knowing that that's a part of or associating it with my identity in any kind of positive connotation. In my research and visiting plantations down south, I was able to connect with the scholars and residents at a few of these particular plantations. What I learned were the ways in which plantation owners were very specific in the tribal affiliation of the slave they were trying to purchase to it depending on the product they were growing. That just utterly transformed my notion in understanding of agriculture and spirituality that I'll talk about in a moment, because I think I grew up with this impression that black people were enslaved because of our physical capacities. I think that's a lot of what the myth is: that we're very strong people and that we can have a high level of endurance. We can work really hard, or whatever. This idea that we were enslaved because we had a particular kind of skill set and knowledge and acumen that otherwise would have prevented the colonizers from actually being able to produce food really was in a unique way like empowering. It helped me realize the traumatic relationship we can have to agriculture and to growing food within the black community because of the history and legacy of enslavement. That enslavement in and of itself, or plantation work in and of itself, is just a part of the story, but it's not the only aspect of the history and legacy of food and agriculture for black community. That was important. It tied to spirituality in as much as what I have come to also realize, that the ways in which the particular kinds of foods we eat - many of them are distinctly West African. They are kind of celebratory practices. We have come from this kind of tradition as well and that we have inherited these and they've been passed down. There's this way in which food has been this binding agent for us to preserve parts of our culture and identity in the midst of a particular kind of marginalized existence in America. That has allowed us to, the words of my ancestors to make a way out of no way. So that really did, I think, change the way I thought about that intersection because I no longer had to think about it as purely oppressive. I could see the liberatory nature found within our ability, reclaiming our ability to connect to the land, to grow food and to be serious about our food ways. That is a way to me to do honor to my ancestors now having done the research and written the book.

 

That is absolutely fascinating. And, it reminds me of the book, "The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead where he talks about some similar things, about the importance of agricultural expertise among the people who are enslaved.

 

I absolutely love that book and you are 100% spot on. Particularly in the very beginning of the book, for those of you who haven't read, he talks about the fact that many of the enslaved had their own little gardens. The gardens were on the side of their cabins where tons of people stayed. Those were crucial for them to be able to provide food for themselves, and also some sense of identity and sustainability. So that's an excellent connection that you're drawing that I kind of whole heartedly support it.

 

In your book you chose to make a theological argument for food justice. So why did you decide to include religion? I know it is obviously important in your life and your profession, but why do you think religion belongs in this sort of discussion? What's the primary theological issue that prevents Christians from various backgrounds, conservative or liberal for that matter, from making food justice a central part of their ministry?

 

There are a couple of reasons why I decided to include religion. I think the first one really is that as a person who thinks theologically. I am an ordained United Methodist Elder, I'm currently a pastor at Westwood United Methodist Church. So it's hard for me to disentangle those identities. I think just from the way in which I interpret the world. And so one is just to be transparent about the ways in which I'm even approaching the topic. But, also talking about race in the ways in that do require me to talk about religion. So much of the construction of race in America is tied to the role religion played in not only helping to facilitate the creation of racial categories, but to assigning them a particular kind of hierarchy that grew out of a theological hierarchy. So for me, if I were going to talk about some of the moral issues and moral challenges within our current food system, I kind of had to talk about religion because religion was a big aspect or really important part of how we got to the problem in the first place. That leads naturally to the second part of your question: the kind of primary theological issue. It really is what I was just mentioning in terms of how religion was used to justify this kind of oppressive hierarchy of being. And by that I mean the ways in which we give certain forms of being human more privilege, right? So whether it be male privilege over female privilege black over white or able bodied over disabled. I mean all the other various ways that we go about being human. Among the challenges, I think we have the primary challenge with respect to taking environmental justice or food justice seriously from theology is we have a broken. The technical term is theological anthropology. That's just a fancy way of saying our understanding of what it means to be human is radically disconnected from the land. Our understanding of the relationship between God and humans, humans and humans, and humans and non-human nature is fractured. We have prioritized this way of being human that separates us from anything that's material, right? That separates us from anything that is necessarily connected to work. And so when you say what it needs to be an ideal human is to be a kind of upper middle class, white Anglo-Saxon, protestant, heterosexual male - if that's your ideal version of being human, then all other people are going to strive to model those particular kinds of ways, right? Of being in the world and seeing them as the ideal. So that doesn't allow for the plurality of the human experience. Really my argument tries to take seriously the Eucharistic call that's in Christian theology - this idea that either male or female, June or Greek or slavery or free - we're all created in the body of Christ. And to exclude someone from the body of Christ by putting these boundaries on the ways in which they have to be human is an affront to the idea of Eucharistic solidarity, the idea that we are all part of the same body of Christ. The challenge that I try to cross in the book is, how do we understand and develop a new way of being human as modeling our lives after Christ? I talk about this idea of being human as practice or in Methodist terms, as I said I'm a Methodist pastor, we call this sanctification or Christian perfection. It is this idea of being human as a process, a goal, something we're always striving towards rather than it's just assumption that it's just the way we are, right. So it's really about preserving and aiming towards particular kinds of ideals of solidarity, ideals of love and ideals of interconnectedness that I believe can transform the ways in which we engage the world particularly from ecological and food perspective.

 

It is my impression you're speaking about this mainly from a Christian point of view. And one thing that was interesting from that conference that we both attended on food and faith several years back was how there were pretty distinct similarities across religious traditions and the way food, helping people in need with food and things like that existed. Those similarities were really fascinating. It seems to me, but I want to see what your opinion on this, that more and more people are aware of this. They are more aware of the connections between food and faith in general, but specifically how it applies in the different religious traditions. Do you see that interest and awareness increasing as I do?

 

I do. I will tell you probably my second most popular class at the University of San Diego is my introductory course called Religion and Food. Now on one hand, it's popular because it's probably the only class where you're going to get to do a lot of cooking. Some students really love to cook. So for them they are like, "hey, this is great. Part of the class is going to be eating food, sign me up, you know." So that's one part of it. But, I think underneath that what students realize, I have students multiple religious traditions, and I talk about how we use food to make meaning. How eating food is a meaning making practice, right. Through their food, they are able to then explain and construct their own identities and where they come from, with their particular stories, their ethics and their values around what they are eating or what they are not eating and why they eat in these particular ways and how it's tied to their traditions. I think there is a growing appreciation for food in American culture and particularly the spiritual dimensions when it's made explicit to people. They understand it almost immediately because we all have certain things we eat every holiday, right. We all have certain things that we eat because this is how grandma used to make it. And that is sacred, righ?. There's something sacred about that. So it's helping them tease that out a little bit so they can begin to understand how it connects with their broader sense of self. It's a really exciting course. And to your point, Kelly, I think people are really starting to understand how this connection is spiritual in regardless of our religious traditions.

 

It's good to hear your perspective on that. So back to your book, so you end your book by suggesting three theologically grounded principles for eating in ways that align with values of love, justice, solidarity, and interconnectedness. Can you share a little bit more about those principles?

 

This for me is kind of the culmination of the whole project. I try to identify as a practical theologian and obviously that is just a fancy way of saying, I don't want to disconnect my academic work to the realities of what's happening on the ground with people. I think it's part of the reason I still am a pastor. So, I try to make arguments and suggestions that I think people actually can apply. The first principle that I talk about is what I call soulful eating. That is really eating in a way that recognizes and takes seriously the kind of theological, moral commitments we are to have with non-human animals and non-human nature. So that means taking this kind of assessment of where do we procure our food from? Like where does it come from? Who is growing it? Are these people being paid fair wages? Are they being treated humanely? Taking seriously as the fact that if you look at factory farms and where those plants are located, how they just do so much ecological harm, particularly to communities of color and poor and rural communities. What I suggest as soulful eating really is a way that tries to eat in a way that does no harm, right. I argue for, at its best, that for me this is a kind of practical veganism, right? This is a way of trying to opt out of systems that we know cause harm not only to our planet, but to people, right. That the people that either work in these places or the people impacted in those environments who live by those factory farms are disproportionately harmed. How can we opt out of those systems? I recognize that is not possible for everyone. Again, I grew up impoverished, so that wasn't possible for me. And so I talk about trying to, in the second part, give justice for food workers. How people who are of privilege work towards creating the kind of capacities and spaces to provide means for people who are low income and poor, to access food in ways that does justice not only for them, but also to those who grow the food. So by this, I mean things like what Heber Brown is doing at the Black Church Food Security Network is a perfect example of the work I think religious organizations can be doing, where they connect with farmers to basically have more or less these kind of food hubs, right. The church literally becomes a hub where people can come and purchase food where there is low overhead because the point isn't to make a bunch of money, the point is to provide a service. So that they're getting more than selling their food to just a grocery store. You want to make sure that you're compensating the employees that run the business, right, the drivers and whoever, and other than that, that that's really it. It is really about keeping things low cost as possible because you are keeping the dollar, it's staying within that community that's marginalized quite honestly. Whether it's doing that, whether it's stopping at a CSA or a Co-op, those are some of the ways in which we can talk about eating in ways that addressed justice for food workers. The last one is caring for the earth. That ties together with the other two, in as much as again how might, particularly if you're looking at churches for instance, how might we turn church land into farmland. Like again, I grew up in semi-rural West Michigan. Our church had literally has acres of grass that we mowed. What could we also do with that land? Even if we didn't necessarily want to farm it, you know, we could have hired someone or let someone actually do something with that to actually grow food and provide food for the community. It doesn't necessarily have to be food for people. It could be a cash crop. I mean, there are multiple ways in which we could use our land more efficiently. I think this needs to be thought and taught in schools of theology, especially, so clergy can make this connection. Understanding the ways in which again this is kind of a spiritual practice. All this to me is bound together through the lens of cooking. I talked in the previous answer about the importance of cooking for me. I think it has a spiritual practice for us to really tell our stories, to demonstrate our values, so that people can begin to understand who we are and whose we are by the things that we eat and kind of reclaiming the kitchen as a sacred space rather than thinking about cooking as a kind of chore, which often I think in American culture we're taught to move so fast and get things done really quickly. If we slow down, I mean, I do this with my three-year-old son. I include him in the kitchen when I'm cooking probably three to four days a week. I talk to him about his great-grandmother he would never have a chance to meet when I'm making something that she taught me how to make because I want him to know her through this meal and to carry on that particular kind of tradition. Those are the three practices, probably the thing that always gets people jumped out is the veganism stuff. I try to do a good job of explaining in the book that it is much more of a practical veganism that doesn't recognize that everybody can't do it. It is much more about a goal of trying to eat in ways that do no harm. That really puts the burden on organizations and people like myself to provide the framework so people can eat in ways that align with their values so they can actually have access to good healthy food.

Bio:

Christopher Carter is an assistant professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego. He is also a pastor within the United Methodist Church and has served churches in Battle Creek, Michigan, and in Torrance and Compton, California.

Today, we're speaking with geologist David Montgomery, co-author with Anne Bikle of a new book called "What Your Food Ate." Very interesting title. David is professor in the College of the Environment at the University of Washington and earlier had been awarded a MacArthur fellowship. You may already be familiar with him through his acclaimed book called "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations." Dr. Montgomery has long argued that the root of good health begins with dirt, a factor that we ignore at our peril.

Interview Summary

 

Well, I really admire your work, and this work in this area is so important. We've recorded a number of episodes around the issue of regenerative agriculture, and it's been impressive how much interest there is in this topic, which I think, only a few years ago, wasn't very well known to most people but now is becoming more part of the general discussion, which I see as a very positive development. Let's begin with your interest in dirt. So what is the condition of the Earth's dirt?

 

Well, sad to say, not very good in terms of our agricultural soils in particular. That's something as a geologist, that's what got me interested in soils is looking at the long history of human interaction with our landscapes and soils and ended up writing a history of farming about how it had degraded farmland around the world over the course of centuries. The short answer is that we have degraded something between about ¼ to 1/3, probably, of the world's potentially viable agricultural land to the point where it's not terribly useful for agriculture. The UN's 2015 Global State of the Soil report concluded we are losing about a third of a percent a year of our ability to grow food on this planet due to ongoing soil loss and degradation. So the physical erosion of the soil and the degradation of its fertility as manifests through the loss of soil organic matter. And, that 0.3% a year number doesn't sound like a big deal on a year to year basis. But think about that over the rest of this century, and it adds up to almost another 1/3 of the world's farmland taken out of production at a time when we really need all hands on deck or all acres on deck, as it may be, to feed the world as our population keeps growing. So, we face a fundamental challenge this century of how to sustain agriculture on a degrading resource base. Our other choice is to think about trying to improve, enhance and restore the soil. That is where regenerative agriculture comes in and where my interest has really grown beyond just looking at the sad experience of past civilizations that degraded their land. And to thinking about possible solutions that will allow humanity to continue intensive agriculture to feed the world well into the future.

 

So what are some of the factors that have driven the erosion and the degradation?

 

One of the biggest factors that contributed to the loss of topsoil in societies around the world was tillage, the act of plowing. That seems a little odd to hear at first because isn't that something that farmers do? It helps to provide weed control. It helps to prepare a seed bed for planting, but it also leaves the ground bear and vulnerable to erosion by water and wind until the next plants come in, whether it's a crop or whether it's weeds. If you leave the ground bare and vulnerable, you get the erosional situation like we saw in the Dust Bowl where great clouds of dust blew off the American Midwest when we plowed up the plains when the next drought came in. The same kind of thing happened in slower motion in societies in the past, mostly in response to rain rather than wind, but erosion that proceeded faster than the rebuilding of the soil gradually stripped off the top soil from regions around the world that people depended on to grow their food. And in the modern world, we can actually degrade soil faster with the combination of tillage, the over application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, which also contribute to decline in soil organic matter, and the concentration on monocultures can also reduce the release of exudates that plants produce and drip into the soils to feed microbes around their roots. That combination is all resulted in degradation of soil organic matter and the loss of topsoil, soil erosion in many parts of the world. So the very foundation, if you will, of modern conventional agriculture, intensive tillage, lots of agrichemical use, and monocultures has helped to undermine the native fertility of the farmland that future generations globally are going to depend on for their food. So one of the questions I've been wrestling with and how I got into looking at regenerative agriculture was how could that process be turned around? How could we actually sustain intensive farming and not degrade the land? Is it possible to actually engage in intensive farming that could improve the health of the world's soils? That started to turn me into an optimist when I ran into farmers, interviewed farmers, and studied their farms where they had indeed done that.

 

It is impressive to hear those stories. We've had a number of such farmers doing podcasts, and it's very inspiring to talk to them. So let's just take one piece of what you said, the use of tillage. You hear the term no-till farming. What does that mean? What does that look like?

 

- [David] Yeah, so that would be farming without plowing, and so the challenge is how do you get the seeds into the ground? How do you prepare a field for planting if you still have the remains of last year's crop on it, the so-called crop residue? Over the last century, people have invented new and different farm implements and machines, and there are no-till planters that can actually put seeds down into the soil in narrow little trenches that get good contact between the seed and the seed bed but don't require essentially inverting the soil. They don't rip it all up. They just disturb a little narrow slot to actually get seeds in the ground. What that also allows is keeping the residue from a prior crop as essentially a mulch. If you knock it down, if you kill any weeds that were there physically and knock them down, crimp their stems, you can convert them into mulch that can help keep moisture in the soil, but it also protects the soil from erosion. No-till farming is a way of farming that minimizes the physical disturbance of the soil, and you need different equipment to do it and a different mindset to do it, but it's very feasible to do, and there's lots of different ways to do it. Some farmers use a lot of herbicides to control their weeds in no till. That is the conventional way to do it, but there's others who are pioneering different techniques that don't require the use of a lot of herbicides to do no till. The basic idea of no till is to minimize the disturbance of the soil, and why is that important? Because it enhances the beneficial aspects of soil biology. It allows the natural soil ecology that really evolved in the last 450 million years since plants colonized the continents to work. Soil microbes have these partnerships that evolved between plants and life and the soil that are mutually beneficial. And if you disturb the soil physically, you disturb a lot of the fungal partners that crops are trying to invest in with some of their early growth.

 

I know the regenerative agriculture approach wasn't called this going back hundreds of years but been used by populations around the world, including Native Americans, but if we fast forward today, do you think that this holds promise for being done on a broad enough scale to really make a social difference?

 

Yes, I really do. What is different today is that in the past, these practices of crop rotations and of planting legumes in and amongst crops to get nitrogen into the soil, those are not new ideas. They have been traditional ideas in many societies around the world because they worked to help sustain the fertility of the soil. But, what I think we really have the opportunity to do now is to combine some of that ancient wisdom with the modern technology that allows us to do no till at scale. And, to minimize our use of not only physical disturbance from adopting no till but also to minimize the chemical disturbance that comes with the overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides. Combining the modern technology with ancient wisdom can allow us to basically expand the realm of regenerative practices to very large-scale farming because unless we all want to become farmers, we're not going to be able to do small-scale regenerative farming and feed the world. Even though most of the world's population is fed by small-scale farmers, those of us in the westernized world relying on very few people to feed very many of us. I've been on regenerative farms that are up to 20,000 acres in the US; big, large mechanized farms that have done an amazing job at rebuilding the fertility of their land. I've also been on very small-scale subsistence farms in equatorial West Africa that are regenerative that have done an amazing job at rebuilding the fertility of their land. Those three general principles of minimizing disturbance, growing cover crop, always keeping living roots in the ground to provide exudates to feed the microbes, and to grow a diversity of plants. That recipe is a combination of principles that different kinds of practices would need to be used on large farms or small farms or high tech farms and manual labor subsistence farms, but the general underlying philosophy of cultivating the beneficial life in the soil underpins all those. And that's how I tend to look at what I would call regenerative agriculture, are farming practices that are tailored to the size of the farm, the environment, the climate, the crops that farmers want to grow, the technology they have access to, but that prioritizes building the health of the soil as the foundation for the farm.

 

It's nice to hear such a positive outlook on this. You are painting the picture saying that it can be done. Do you think it can be done in a way that can compete cost wise with traditional approaches to farming?

 

Absolutely, and that was a big focus of what I wrote about in "Growing a Revolution." If you could tell a farmer that you could cut their fertilizer costs, cut their diesel costs, cut their pesticide costs as much as in half, they all start looking at you like going, "Yeah, tell me more. How would you do that?" That's one of the key attractions, I think, of regenerative agriculture. Once the soil is restored to a healthier state, you don't need as much fertilizer. You don't need as many pesticides, and you don't drive tractors around as much if you're doing no till. What are three of the biggest costs on modern farms in north America? Well, fertilizer, diesel, and pesticide. And so if you can teach farmers a different way of farming that starts with a different way of looking at the soil and adopting a different series of practices that allows them to harvest as much while spending less to do it, it's a recipe for a more profitable farm. And for what I've seen in the experience of the pioneering regenerative farmers that I've interviewed, once they've restored fertility to their land, their yields are comparable to, if not better than, their conventional neighbors, and their expenses are less. That's what started turning me into an optimist on this is I've seen a lot of growing interest in farming communities simply because farmers are pushed to the wall and looking for ways to cut costs.

 

That's so exciting to hear that, and then, of course, at some point government could subsidize these sort of approaches to make it even more cost effective because of the environmental benefits.

 

There are all kinds of add-ons in terms of benefits, less offsite nitrogen pollution, greater on-farm biodiversity, enhancements to rural economies, and also differences in what gets into the food that we grow that could potentially benefit human health.

 

I have a million questions to ask you. We've talked about the vitality and health of the soil. Let's talk about the vitality and health of what's being grown in the soil, that is the nutrient quality of the foods. In the book, you note that produces significantly less nutrient dense than in the past. How much is this true, and how less dense is it?

 

Yes. That's a great question. So one of the things we really delved into in "What Your Food Ate" because it is a central question to thinking about, well, does soil health mattered to human health? And the conclusion we came away with in diving into the peer reviewed literature and doing some of food testing of our own, was that there's three key areas where the nutrient density, shall we say, of food has suffered over the last half century. And that's in terms of mineral micronutrients, phytochemicals, and the fat profiles of our meat and dairy. So how does that work? Well, in terms of mineral micronutrients, a lot of plants partner with fungal communities in the soil to actually trade sugars and fats and proteins. Plants will drip those out of their roots to feed microbes in the soil in exchange for those microbes, particularly fungi, giving back things like zinc or copper or iron mined from the soil. It's literally an underground economy but where both partners benefit from the exchanges, and conventional agricultural practices disturb those relationships. We're not talking so much about the major nutrient composition of foods as much as the micronutrients. Plants have different gene pathways where if they're grown in very nitrogen-rich environments, they shut down their exudate production. So they stop feeding their microbial partners. Their microbial partners aren't on the job to give them the mineral micronutrients that they need and that turn out to be very important for our health, too, when we eat them. Plants also make what are known as phytochemicals in response greatly to environmental stimuli, some of which are microbes in the soil. And so the communities of life around their roots are actually key partners in terms of making things that we don't often consider nutrients in the nutritional sciences, but they're important for maintaining human health, things like antioxidants, anti-inflammatories. Those are examples of the functions phytochemicals can serve in our bodies, and our farming practices have disrupted them. How much they have disrupted them? There are studies that show differences on the orders of 50 to 100%, others that are more like 20%. Most of the studies and the testing that we did as well make it look like it's more like around 20%-ish. It's modest but very real differences in these compounds that the medical sciences have shown are fairly beneficial to promoting human health in our diets.

 

So can I assume from what you're saying that there's research now showing that if you use better soil practices a la regenerative agriculture, that the nutrient quality improves?

 

Yes, it's a nontrivial difference. And the other difference, even bigger, is looking at the ratio of the composition of fats in meat and dairy in terms of the omega-6 and omega-3 fats. To make a very simple generalization, omega-6 fats in our bodies are instrumental in initiating inflammation whereas omega-3 fats are instrumental in quelling or reducing inflammation. It turns out that what we get in terms of the fat composition in our meat and dairy products very much depends on what the cows ate that produce that meat and dairy. Cows that grazed leafy green plants, actually grazing out in a pasture, they eat a lot of omega-3s because that's what's in the leaves of plants because omega-3s are central to photosynthesis. Omega-6s are a very rich in seed sources. They serve different purposes in seeds. Cattle that are on a feed lot diet of seed-derived feeds are rich in omega-6s, and our diet has gone from having just a few more omega-6s than omega-3s in our diet 100 years ago. Now we're awash in omega-6s from that change in our meat and dairy and also the addition of seed oils to processed foods. That trade we write about in the book that translates through, we think, to essentially how so many of us are dealing with chronic maladies that are rooted in chronic inflammation.

 

Another way to really move this along might be for consumers to begin requesting products that are grown in such a way, and so I'm wondering about your opinion on whether a poll from consumers might help here. Do you think there could come a time when that would be the case?

 

I absolutely do, in fact. I just noticed in Anne and my own buying habits. So we started doing this research and learning what it was we did along the way, our buying habits have changed. So we're buying 100% grass fed meat and dairy when we can. We've tried to connect with farmers whose practices we really like in terms of the produce we can buy at farmer's markets here in Seattle where we live. Now the average consumer faces a challenge today in terms of what's labeled as what in a grocery store, but it's our hope that people will start thinking more about these connections, start asking questions, ask the produce manager at your store, "What are the farms doing that you're getting the produce from?" I could definitely see a world in the not too distant future where consumers may be armed with the ability to know what the analyses of different batches of produce coming in.

 

And I wonder if the first movement here might not be from institutions, that a school system or a hospital or the procurement part of a city or county government, if they made purchasing decisions based on nutrient quality and, of course, the practices used to grow the food could make a big difference.

 

I think that is a tremendous idea that I think could be very impactful, and I think you're right, that that could be where you might see some of the biggest pieces of movement. There is also been some corporations that have been interested in trying to move towards adopting and advertising that they have adopted regenerative sourcing in some of their ingredients. I really see three areas that need attention in terms of advancing regenerative agriculture. Consumer demand is one, as we have been discussing. The inherent farmers' incentives in terms of economics that we discussed earlier is another. The third is in terms of rethinking our agricultural subsidies and policies to actually reward farmers who are rebuilding the health and fertility of their land. Those who are reinvesting in the future of America, quite literally, instead of continuing to subsidize conventional practices that frankly degrade the fertility of the land and the ability of future generations to feed themselves. If we could get all three of those areas lined up working towards the same goal of making what we call regenerative agriculture today the conventional agriculture of tomorrow, that could literally change the world in the coming decades. It's not going to happen fast, but I think it's something that could be done over the course of two or three decades at a time when we really need the change.

 

Well, especially if the right research got done at the right time. For example, I could imagine going back to school systems. Let's say that a school system changes its buying practices and ends up buying more nutrient-dense foods and then proves that there are beneficial outcomes for the kids, like better performance in school and more attention and things like that. Then you could see a lot of adopters coming pretty quickly.

 

Yes, I would love to see a lot more research along those lines done. We tried to connect the dots in "What Your Food Ate" from soil health to crop health to animal health to human health, but there's a lot of space between those dots and a lot of work that needs to be done, but it's a very promising area and a new way to think about those connections.

 

Could we talk about livestock for another minute? You mentioned this earlier, and it sounds like there's a lot of promise using these techniques for livestock production. Most people think of plant production here, but livestock are really important as context as well. Are there places where livestock and plant-based agriculture are interacting with each other in this context?

 

Yes, some of the farmers I visited were reintegrating animal husbandry into their cropping operations and having their cattle graze off their cover crops and then manure their fields. I came from a position where I had long thought of cattle in particular as harmful to the land through gully formation and erosion from overgrazing. The farmers that I visited who have used cattle to rebuild the fertility of their soils were really grazing in a very different manner, in a different style that enhanced the fertility of their land as a result of reintegrating them. I think one of the big inadvertent mistakes of 20th century agriculture was essentially separating animal husbandry from cropping and encouraging farmers to specialize in one or the other. Now we have the perverse situation where we grow a whole lot of corn using practices that degrade the fertility of the land to feed cattle and feed lots who then are full of omega-6s that degrade our health when we eat them. It makes no sense in terms of large-scale agricultural policy unless you are thinking with the mid-20th century mindset of maximizing efficiency and industrializing and separating those corners of agriculture. What we inadvertently did is we broke some of the biological and ecological connections that helped keep the land fertile and that were result of the integration of animal husbandry and cropping practices. That's another example, I think, of the value of potentially reintegrating some elements of ancient wisdom with modern science to think about doing things a little differently.

 

Let me end with this question, and I want to see if I'm reading you right. It sounds like if you look at the world's situation with dirt agriculture, it is a pretty dire picture, getting worse quickly, and it could go really badly if nothing is done, but it also sounds like you're very optimistic. There is a lot we know about what can be done, a lot of it is being done, and the signs for the future are positive. Am I reading that right?

 

I am optimistic about this. I struggle with how much of that optimism is a choice rather than a logical extension of what I know. But I think we know enough now about techniques that can rebuild fertility of the land and restore it that it's feasible to see a path forward where we could do that at scale with very positive results that could also put a lot of carbon back in the world's agricultural soils, which would have ancillary climate benefits. It's not going to solve the climate problem. That's a fossil fuel issue primarily, but it could help. Back when I wrote "Dirt" in 2007, I think it was, there was hardly anybody talking about soil health and the long-term importance of reinvesting in the world's agricultural soils to rebuild their fertility, and now almost every farming conference I go to or get invited to speak at, that's one of the big topics of discussion among farmers. And there's now discussion at policy level in terms of the new Farm Bill that climate activists are interested in. There's a lot of very broad, I think, public support and interest coalescing around the idea that one of the smartest things we could do for the future of our own species and for the health of the planet is to reinvest in the health and the fertility of our agricultural soils.

 

Bio

 

David R. Montgomery is a Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. He studies the evolution of topography and the influence of geomorphological processes on ecological systems and human societies. He received his B.S. in geology at Stanford University (1984) and his Ph.D. in geomorphology from UC Berkeley (1991). Current research includes field projects in the Philippines, eastern Tibet, and the Pacific Northwest of North America. In 2008 Montgomery received a MacArthur Fellowship. His books, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, King of Fish, and The Rocks Don't Lie have all won the Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction. Montgomery's Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson award for Literary Science Writing. His latest work with W. W. Norton, What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim our Health, published in 2022.

 

We've done many podcasts on the topic of regenerative agriculture, which is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to farming and ranching that enriches and restores the environment while also producing more nutrient dense food. Today, we are speaking with Anna Aspenson of the Croatan Institute about the need for financial investment in regional food production, and processing infrastructure, such as meat packing, grain milling and malting and produce canning, or even freezing facilities. Interview Summary

So Anna, a recent report that you and others at the Croatan Institute recently released is entitled Investing in Regenerative Agriculture, Across Value Chains. And I thought this was really interesting. And in this report you argue that there's a missing middle as you call it in the country's food processing infrastructure. Can you explain what you mean by this middle infrastructure and why do you advocate for investment there?

Great question, Kelly. When we refer to middle infrastructure, really what we're talking about is anything between the regenerative farm and the consumer. So that can really be anything from a processing plant that cuts, cleans and packages a product. It's the storage of that regenerative product. It can be a company that aggregates for larger volumes to reach larger markets and it is marketing regenerative products and distributing to those retail locations. So grocery store to a school, to a hospital and even the customer's front doorstep.

We talk a lot about the missing middle in agriculture, and that's referring to mid-scale agriculture. We have smaller farms, we have large, more conventional farms and there isn't a lot of regenerative farms that are that mid-scale size. So the missing middle of infrastructure is that it's the infrastructure that helps to widen markets for regenerative farms so that they can reach larger scales. And so that more people can have access to those regenerative products, which are typically flavorful, healthful, and good for the land, good for the environment. We wanted to focus on the investment piece because at Croatan Institute, we focus a lot on pathways to new economies pathways for the economy to work more for human health, for ecological resilience and for social and racial equity.

In 2019, we wrote a report called "Soil Wealth, Investing in Regenerative Agriculture, Across Asset Classes." And that really looked at how we can move more aligned capital to the regenerative agriculture space. But it's not just farms. Regenerative is all about systems and it's all about how farms can work in community and can work for not just the land, but also the general social, relational cultural system that the farms typically lie in, right? We are humans, we live in society, we live in systems. We live in these complex ecological systems. So when we refer to soil wealth, we are talking about soil health, but we're also talking about community wealth and how we can gain more social benefit, more wealth building from regenerative systems.

So wondering if you wouldn't mind helping to paint a picture for us of what a farm like this might look like. So how big would in middle size farm be and what would be some examples of things that such a farm might produce?

So we looked at a number of different regenerative infrastructure businesses and capital providers in this space. We looked at over a hundred, we talked to over 30. So there's tons of examples in the report. But one example that we looked at is a collection of infrastructure businesses in Minnesota. So we looked at companies like Lawrence Meats, Tree Range Chicken, Other Half Processing, and they serve infrastructure for regenerative farms that are grass fed, grass finished ranchers who are creating these regenerative products and need reliable markets to bring those products to consumers. So they all work together in harmony to move those products to the consumer in a way that respects the farmer that makes sure that they're getting the profit and the revenue that they really need to keep their operations moving and expanding.

People are learning more and more about regenerative agriculture, but don't understand those steps that occur after the food is produced and you're helping bring that alive, so I appreciate that. So let me ask another question. So it's natural for investors to want to reduce their risk as much as possible when they're making an investment. What are some of the things that investors should take into consideration about this middle infrastructure space and the companies that surround it, especially when thinking about farms or consumer facing product brands?

Absolutely, part of the reason and the motivation behind this report is that we've seen a lot of interest in investing in things like agricultural technology or consumer facing brands. Those are the types of companies that really work well with the venture capital equity model. They might have higher margins, lower capital expenditures, middle infrastructure is almost the opposite. There's a lot of capital expenditures, lower margins. However, we're seeing that investors are really opening their eyes to impact and not just profit and revenue, which is extremely essential, but also these other benefits that middle infrastructure can provide. And so, some ways to de-risk those types of transactions that investors might be maybe more wary of or less familiar with is to really meet businesses where they are. So middle infrastructure has a lot of unique business models that focus and really bake in those social and ecological benefits and missions. Though investors can work with those businesses to create new and innovative forms of capital that are patient that focus on the long term and can be flexible with where that business is in their stage of development. So one example is this concept that we call integrated capital, which is a term by RSF social finance. And that essentially means that you're using various forms of capital to meet different needs of the business. So anything innovative with debt equity or somewhere in between as well as non-financial resources. So technical assistance, business development, workforce development, policy work, anything that can help really build out that system and help that business make more connections and enrich their business models in order to de-risk those transactions.

So I'd like to ask a question, this may beyond the scope of the work you were doing, but I'm just wondering. Are there signs that consumers are showing an interest on products growing in a regenerative way? I mean, certainly people are using farmer's markets and more people care about organic and things like that. What about the term regenerative in particular? Is it something that consumers know about or people making purchasing decisions based on this?

We certainly have seen an increased interest in regenerative and consumers looking for products that are not just sustainable and good for the environment, but also social and economic benefits of regenerative business. I think that one of the challenges for middle infrastructure is that those farms are really taking in risk and transitioning to regenerative. They're very complex systems that are very knowledge heavy. There's a lot of peer and community learning that is necessary for regenerative agriculture brands and middle infrastructure are a great way to show consumers the benefits of those products in order to increase demand and therefore, infrastructure. There's lots of new labels and brands, and we can expand those markets. Hopefully we'll have more regenerative farms with rich connected value chains.

Isn't it also true that if a farmer takes land that hasn't been used in a regenerative fashion and tries to turn it into a regenerative farm, that that process takes some time and some investment and some risk on the part of the farmer that goes beyond the normal risk of weather and pests and things like that, is that true and is having a solid infrastructure ready for their products once they start getting produced a really important part of the financial security of the farmers?

One thing about risk is that we typically think black and white: this thing is risky and therefore investors might be wary of it because of the lower margins because it's seen as risky. But we've gotten to a point where with climate change and with the increasing challenges and the extremes of climate that we're seeing, we really need to start looking in the long term. So maybe there is short term risk, but it's really helpful for investors to understand that risk and to change the way that they're providing capital in order to think with that long term mindset. The whole purpose of middle infrastructure is to bake in that resilience to increase connections and redundancy so that there is increased resilience.

So in your report, you highlight organizations that have had success as middle infrastructure companies. Can you talk a little bit more about some of these examples?

We highlighted businesses across different types of agricultural crops. East Denver Food Hub, for example, is one that's been incredibly successful in baking in the missions of regenerative. So for example, in the early months of the pandemic, they were able to maintain purchasing contracts that were essentially their original funding for their business and able to provide healthy nourishing regional products for food boxes in the early months of the pandemic. Another innovative business that we looked at is Seal The Seasons out of North Carolina. So right downtown from you all that works in frozen fruit and frozen vegetables. So really what we keep seeing is these really innovative business models that have a mind to niches, to filling in a space in the value chain and working together with their community. I think at the core of that is this idea of relationships and enhanced business contracts that really build out the value in a reliable way.

You know, it's interesting that you mentioned Seal The Seasons because I buy their products and that they're really wonderful. It's nice to see that they've come so far and to see their products out there. And you're really helping show us that having that infrastructure is so important, actually getting these things out into the marketplace. So let me end with this question. What's the final take home message you'd like to give for investors wanting to support regenerative agriculture?

Good question, I think at the core of it, we really want and are hoping that investors can jump in, start somewhere. We've shown through this report, that these types of businesses, although they're unique, although they're innovative, these businesses are profitable and it takes a lot of coordinated effort. But if investors can really embrace that type of cooperative collaborative mindset and start to also work with these businesses in their innovative spaces to create new capital solutions, then we can really start to build these systems that we haven't really had in the US post colonization. We haven't had a food system that is coordinated and built around equitable access to quality foods that generate nutrients for communities and the environments we have to start somewhere. So let's jump in.

What can be done to reverse racialized marketing of unhealthy foods to Black Americans? What if healthy eating could be seen as a radical act, or even as a form of Black activism and liberation? Today, we're talking about these issues with Dr. Shiriki Kumanyika about a new campaign called Operation Good Food and Beverages. This is an advocacy movement developed by and for Black youth who want to reclaim healthy food as part of Black lives. Shiriki is an emeritus professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and research professor at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health.

Interview Summary

 

I long admired the work you've done on food and beverage marketing, particularly around the issues of targeted marketing. And then still, you do even more worth admiring and along comes this new campaign that you call Operation Good Food and Beverages. Can you tell us about it?

 

This campaign is really the culmination of my efforts to do something about the marketing of unhealthy foods in general. But to Black communities in particular, I think first and foremost, it's a call to action to make healthier foods and beverages more available and promoted in Black communities, especially Black youth. It has some educational or motivational elements to it because the call to action is contextualized in a broader message about good food. And, how young people like to have good food, how it makes them feel, and that the messages are in one place on the website. We are more than food companies think we are. You know we're much more than that. So it's a positive campaign. The main elements: our website with various resources, and two social media accounts. One on Instagram and one on TikTok. The main audience is youth, but we also hope to reach parents and others in Black communities Including celebrities and allies of Black communities and anyone who really sees this as an opportunity to send a positive, but somewhat different message to the food sector about marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages.

 

So before we dive in and learn a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of this, why did you decide to focus on marketing to youth, and in particular, on Black youth specifically?

 

Well, there are a lot of reasons for choosing youth. I think the most positive reason is the increasing role of youth in various social justice movements, and in raising their voice. There's a lot of energy in the generation that we were targeting here: Generation Z. Those are sort of late teenagers and maybe early college age. So that's one reason. Youth are really great messengers, I think, for a positive message that relates to them and relates to their communities in general. The reason, in terms of food marketing, is that it is kind of a perfect storm. There's a whole body of work that talks about the sensitivity in the adolescent years to identity formation issues, role models that they see, and perhaps a particular responsiveness to ads in Black youth. Seeing themselves positively represented, perhaps and helping in that way with identity formation, but linking this to some of these unhealthy products that they see in the media. So there are really a lot of reasons that Black celebrities are really prominent among people marketing these foods and beverages. And so we thought, considering that these diseases really start at a young age, then we would work with youth in terms of prolonging their lives and keeping their risk factors down.

 

That certainly makes sense. So tell us what youth will encounter when they interact with this program. What does the program consist of?

 

So the program consists of a website as the sort of main home base. It's called Operation Good FB, and it is meant to create a very positive picture of foods and beverages that youth might want. As well as mentioning what the problem is, but not dwelling on the negatives of the problem and the negatives of the associated disease burdens. Because we really want it to be very uplifting and positive experience. The social media sites then have similar posts. The youth posts on those sites messages about good food and beverages. And the first thing you see is an opportunity to click and sign a petition. That is one of our key action items. It's directed to the National Restaurant Association. It urges the National Restaurant Association to encourage their members to make healthier options available on the main menus that would appeal to teens. This is building on the progress they've made with healthy options for younger kids through the Kids LiveWell program. So those are the main elements. There are different things that people can do in terms of using social media and so forth, but it's the website, two social media accounts. And the petition is critical for showing that there's a broad base of support for what we're asking.

 

Oh the petition is a really interesting idea. Would you envision, at some point, expanding it to other parts of the food industry beyond the Restaurant Association?

 

At this point, I can't say because the petition is asking for the National Restaurant Association to meet with the Council on Black Health, which is our organization that is sponsoring Operation Good Food and Beverages. For that particular association, it's relatively clear what the ask is. It's very concrete. They have a lot of members. Those members have menus that directly relate to children and youth. Because we know through some CDC data about fast foods on any given day that one in every three children is eating at a fast food restaurant. So it's very concrete. For the packaged food industry, which is also relevant, the ask is not as clear. I think we're interested in seeing progress in the other types of foods, but they're not as clearly targeted to youth. So if there's a way to expand it, I would love to do that. But right now, to get action and to season success, we're focusing on the National Restaurant Association and things that they can do. And hopefully they'll be inclined to do.

 

It makes sense to start with the restaurant sector. It'll be interesting to see over time if the petition has the effect that you hope it does whether other parts of the industry could be brought into the fold as well. So what do you hope will be different if you're successful? What will change?

 

Well, I have high hopes. I think at minimum, a new conversation that would be picked up widely in the public health and social justice communities, and in the broader consumer communities, this it's not an issue that's talked about a lot in the consumer community and the public health. Messaging, although powerful and well-backed by evidence about the need for change, has just not been that effective in creating changes that would affect a broader audience. So some progress focused on the younger children.

 

I hope that we could have a new conversation and one that's more positive than we've seen before. Because we think that people respond to positivity. And so if you're always sort of bashing and saying, "This are the problems in the Black community and this is what you're doing wrong," we don't think that that's necessarily going to be effective. So I hope that we can shift the conversation somewhat to what we do want to see - to the solution as opposed to continually emphasizing only the problem. And ultimately, I would like to see what we're asking for. We would like to see the good foods promoted. They're a small part of advertising budgets overall, as I'm sure you know. We would like to see this balance really shift as a part of expressed demand, but also as a part of understanding in the industry that the current practices are really not representing what consumers want to the level that they could. So I think that's what we'd like to see. You know, changing the world is a big deal, but if we can get it started and other people pick it up, maybe some of the celebrities will pick it up and use their celebrity power, then we can have a change in the food marketing conversation and eventually in the food marketing.

 

Well, you could only imagine the boost that would occur to this if some celebrities got involved. Another question I had as I was doing the introduction for this, we mentioned that Black youth had been involved in developing this program. Can you explain how that process unfolded and how that was important in determining the final content?

 

Well, the youth involvement is critical. We're working with youth from a group cohort, Smiles MD, which is in Baltimore, Maryland, and it's associated with Johns Hopkins University. And our sponsor was the Bloomberg Initiative at Johns Hopkins. So what they did, they set us straight from the very beginning about what they wanted to see in food and what their generation likes to see in the media. They like positive representations. They have very creative ideas about how to think about this. And as we go forward we are hoping that they can really connect with a larger network with youth organizations holding some web interactive sessions on social media and connecting directly with other youth who can spread the word within this generation even more broadly.

 

So they've been key because even though I've been studying this issue for a long time, I'm far from Gen Z, and we want to reach that group. And they do see things differently. The social media component is definitely something that they are looking at much more than the traditional media, for example.

 

Oh, I could only imagine the ingenuity of it must have come from youth getting so engaged in this. So let me ask you one final question. How can people participate if they want to join in and be part of this?

 

Well, there are many different ways people can participate. We would like everyone to start with the website and take a look at the petition, sign it if they're on board with the ask, which are very positive, use the tips and recipes themselves, but then help to spread the word using social media kit that's downloadable from the website. Spread the word among their networks if they are in touch with youth organizations who could, as a group, really broaden the campaign, post on the social media and so forth, show that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who think that the marketing mix could change.

 

Bio:

 

Shiriki Kumanyika, PhD, MPH, MS is a Research Professor in the Department of Community Health & Prevention at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health and Professor Emerita of Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts from Syracuse University, an MS in Social Work from Columbia University, a PhD in Human Nutrition from Cornell University, and a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. Over more than three decades, Dr. Kumanyika has led or collaborated on research related to obesity, sodium intake, and other aspects of diet and lifestyle and chronic disease risk reduction. Several of her studies have evaluated behavioral interventions to facilitate healthy eating and weight control in Black children or adults in clinical or community-based settings. Her research during the past 15 years has focused particularly on identifying ways to combat the effects of racialized, targeted marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages on food-related attitudes and practices of Black Americans.  Dr. Kumanyika is the founding chair of the Council on Black Health, a research and action network dedicated to improving Black Health nationwide. She is a past president of the American Public Health Association and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

 

 

I was at a professional meeting recently and I heard an inspiring and insightful and forward-looking talk by journalist and author Roger Thurow. Roger was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 30 years, 20 of them as a foreign correspondent based in Europe and Africa. Roger has written a number of books including one on world hunger and another what I thought was a particularly important book entitled The First 1000 Days, A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children and the World. Now comes a new book on farmers around the world and how they are coping with the unprecedented changes they face. It was hearing about his book that inspired me to invite Mr. Thurow to this podcast and thankfully he accepted. His new book is entitled Against the Grain: How Farmers Around the Globe are transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet.

Interview Summary

I really admire your work and have loved the new book and what I've read before. So, let's talk about something that you speak about: the wisdom of farmers. And you talk about their wisdom in the context of modern agriculture. What do you mean by that?

Farmers of the world, particularly the small holder farmers, indigenous farmers, family farmers as we know them in this country, they're really bold and pioneering in what they're doing. And these farmers, kind of around the world as we go on this journey around the world in the book, they've seen their efforts to earn a living and feed nourish their families and communities turn against. So, while conforming to the orthodoxies of modern industrial agriculture practices: the monocropping, the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides and insecticide chemicals, the land expansion, at the expense of savannas, forest wetlands, biodiverse environments. In the face of this, they've really witnessed their lands degrading. Their soils depleting. Their waters dwindling. Their pollinators fleeing. Their biodiversity shrinking and becoming less diverse. Their rains becoming ever more mercurial., Their temperatures ever hotter. And their children and families and their communities becoming ever more hungry and malnourished.

So, they've really seen the future of their own impacts on the environment, and then the impacts of changing climates, of more extreme weather conditions. They've really seen this future. They've experienced, lived it, and it's ugly what they see and what they've experienced on their farms. So, that's their wisdom, and they'll really tell us that it doesn't have to be that way if we listen. That such a future isn't inevitable. Because out of their desperation, you know, these farmers have begun farming against the grain. So, there's the title of the book Against the Grain of this modern agriculture orthodoxy to reconcile their roles as both food producers and nourishers of us all, and stewards in the land. They're pushing forward with practices like agroforestry, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, kind of whatever one calls it. Farming with nature instead of bending nature to their will, which is what we too often done and with kind of the larger modern industrial agriculture techniques. So, farming with nature as opposed to against it as they strive to both nourish us all and heal our planet.

Give us a sense, if you will, about how important these small farmers are to the world's food supply? So how important are these?

They're really important. Extremely vital for the global food chain, certainly for their own families and communities, and their countries. In a lot of places, say in Africa, in many of the countries, on the continent, it's the small holder farmers that are producing the majority of the food. In their communities and in their countries and across the continent. Still not enough. Africa then must become a substantial importer of food. But these small holder farmers are so key and the more success that they have in feeding their communities and families, the more success we all have then in this great goal of ending hunger and malnutrition.

Equally important, these farmers are the stewards of the land. And they're on the front lines of these environmental challenges. The threats from the changing climate and more extreme weather conditions. They're the first impacted by it, but they also increasingly see, and that's what stories in the book are about, how they see that their own actions are then impacting their environment and their climates. And this is why they're so important for all of us is that they find themselves at the center of what I think is this great collision of humanities two supreme imperatives. One, nourish the world, so nourish us all. That's the one imperative. And then the other imperative, kind of colliding with that, is to preserve, protect, and heal our planet from the very actions of nourishing us. So, these are these two colliding forces. You know as I think we already know agriculture and land use activities are responsible for about a third of the greenhouse gases impacting our climate and weather patterns. And the greatest impact of this then is felt by the farmers themselves. And they see what's happening to their soils and the depletion of their soils. Their lands being so terribly degraded by their very actions of nourishing their families and then contributing to nourishing us all. I think that's why they're so important for us. I mean, there's certainly kind of the canaries in the coal mine of climate change. Of these environmental challenges that we're all facing. And how they're then able to adjust their farming, as we kind of see in the book and that's this wisdom again. How can we learn from them and what are they seeing in their own situations. They're then having to adjust because they have no other options. They either have to adjust or their farms will continue to degrade and their children and their families increasingly malnourished and hungry.

Roger let's talk through this issue of colliding imperatives just a bit. The fact that protecting the planet and nourishing people are colliding in your view, suggests that these two priorities are competing with one another. How is that the case?

Some of the techniques of the monocropping, which is basically planting one crop on the same plot of land year after year, after year, season after season, right? And by doing that, these crops that are pulling nutrients out of the soil, many of the crops don't put nutrients back in. Some of them do. They'll restore nitrogen they'll put other nutrients in. But with the mono cropping, it's kind of the same depletion that goes on. And, has been particularly practiced in this country, and the bigger farmers and more commercial farmers, because it's more efficient. You are planting one crop, you have the same technique of kind of the planting and tending for that. And the harvesting, kind of the same equipment for that. You don't need to adjust practices, your equipment for various other crops that you're growing on that land. And so, there's an efficiency for that. You have then the price stability if there is any price stability in farming from that crop. That can be a weakness if the price collapses and you're so dependent on that. And so, the farmers are seeing, yeah, that's where the degrading and the weakening their of their soils comes from. So, what's their response to that when their land's degrading? When their soils become weak, it's like, oh, we need additional land then to farm. So they'll go into the forest, they'll cut down trees. And now there's virgin soil. They do the same practices there. And then after a number of years, well that land starts depleting. They keep looking for more. As you do these things, then with the soils depleting, the land degrading, becoming really hard, well, when the rain comes, it's not soaking in. And it just kind of runs away as the soil becomes almost like concrete. Farmers aren't able to plant much there anymore or get much out of the ground. And then so what happens then if the water isn't soaking into the soil, the underground aquifers and the underground springs they become depleted. All of a sudden, the lakes and the ponds that were fed by those, they disappear. The wildlife, the pollinators that come because of that, they go. The bushes, the plants, the weeds that are also so important for the environment, they start disappearing. And so you see that in their efforts to nourish their families and to nourish all of us, it's having this impact on the environment. And then that drives more impacts, right? As they cut down trees, trees drive the precipitation cycle. Tthen the rains become ever more mercurial and unpredictable. Without the trees and the shade and the cooling and the breezes, temperatures get hotter. And also, as the rains disappear and become more unpredictable. It has all this effect. And so, the farmers in the book, they're seeing all this and they recognize it. That by their very actions of cutting down trees to expand their land or to go to a different crop. Because again, that's what the commercial agriculture is demanding, so maybe its sugar cane is coming to the area. Well, sugar cane doesn't get along with trees. And so, the farmers in this one part of Uganda that I write about, they're cutting down all their trees to plant sugarcane. And then it's like, wow, now that the trees are gone, now we see all these environmental and ecosystem results because of that. And so that's where this collision comes from then of being much more aware, and sensitive in their practices and responding to it. That they are both nourishing their families and then also being even better stewards of their land. And they're not doing any of this intentionally, right? It's not like they're going 'we have to do all this to the land, and you know, what do we care? We're just here for a certain amount of time.' But no, they know that this is their land, it's their wealth, it's their family property. It's for their children and future generations. And they need to both nourish and preserve and protect and heal at the same time.

Well, you paint such a rich picture of how a single decision like mono cropping has this cascade of effects through the entire ecosystem of an area. Really interesting to hear about that. Tell me how these farmers are experiencing climate change. You think of climate change as something theoretical. You know, scientists are measuring these mysterious things up there and they talk about temperature changes. But what are these farmers actually experiencing in their day-to-day lives?

So along with the monocropping, this whole notion that then has expanded and become kind of an article of faith through industrial and modern agriculture orthodoxies, is to get big or get out, and then to plant from fence post to fence post. And so, the weeds and the flowers and plants that would grow along the edges of fields, they've been taken down to put in more rows of crops. The wetland areas that have either been filled in. So, it was a policy here, the USDA would then fund farmers to fill in their wetlands. And now it's like, oh, that's been counterproductive. Now there's policies to assist farmers to reestablish their wetland. But kind of what we're seeing with climate change, it's almost every month as we go through the year, and then from year after year. Every month is getting hotter than the previous months. And each year then is getting subsequently hotter. As things get hotter, it really impacts the ability of some crops in the climates where they're growing. So, take for instance, coffee. And coffee that's growing, say on Mount Kenya in Africa. The farmers will have to keep going further and further up the mountains, to have the cooler conditions to grow that type of coffee that they grow. The potato farmers in Peru, where potatoes come from. And potatoes are so important to the global food chain because they really are a bulwark against famine. Against hunger crises in a number of countries and ecologies in the world. So many people rely on potatoes. These farmers, they call themselves the guardians of the indigenous of the native potato varieties. Hundreds of various varieties of potatoes. All shapes, sizes, colors. As it gets warmer, they have to keep moving further and further up the Andes. Now they're really farming these potatoes on the roof of Earth. As they move up, they're now starting to then farm in soils that haven't been farmed before. So, what happens? You start digging in those soils and now you're releasing the carbon that's been stored for centuries, for millennia. That carbon is then released from the soils, and that then adds to more greenhouse gases and more impact on the climate and climate change. It kind of all feeds each other. They're seeing that on so many fronts. And then the farmers in India that we write about in the book, they know from history and particularly the older farmers, and just the stories that are told about the rhythm of the monsoon season. And I think it was the summer of the monsoon season of 2022 when I was doing the reporting there for that particular part of the book. The rains came at the beginning, a little bit. They planted and then they disappear. Usually, the monsoons will come, and they'll get some rain for this long, long stretch of time, sometimes particularly heavy. They planted and then the rains went away. And as the crops germinated and came up, well, they needed the water. And where was the water and the precipitation? They knew their yields weren't going to be as big because they could see without the rains, their crops, their millet, their wheat crops were failing. And then all of a sudden, the rains returned. And in such a downpour, it was like, I think 72 hours or three days kind of rains of a biblical proportion. And that was then so much rain in that short of time than added further havoc to their crops and their harvest. And it was just that mercurial nature and failing nature of the monsoons. And they're seeing that kind of glitches and kinks in the monsoon happening more frequently. The reliability, the predictability of the rains of the seasons, that's what they're all finding as kind of the impacts of climate change.

You're discussing a very interesting part of the world. Let's talk about something that I found fascinating in your book. You talked about the case of pigweed in Uganda. Tell us about that if you will.

Amaranth. So here, we call it pigweed. That's a weed. Yeah, destroy that. Again, fence post to fence post. Nah, so this pig weed that's growing on the side or any kind of weeds. The milkweed, so I'm from northern Illinois, and the milkweed that would kind of grow on the edges of the corn fields and other fields, that's really favored by monarch butterflies, right? And so now it's like, 'Hey, what happened to all the monarch butterflies that we had when we were growing up?' Right? Well, if you take out the milkweed plants, why are the monarch butterfly going to come? So those pollinators disappear. And they come and they're great to look at, and, you know, 'gee, the monarchs are back.' But they also perform a great service to us all and to our environment and to agriculture through their pollinating.

And so, the pigweed in Africa - Amaranth, it's like a wonder crop. And one of these 'super crops,' really nutritious. And these farmers in this area of Uganda that I'm writing about, they're harvesting and they're cultivating Amaranth. And they're mixing that in their homemade porridge with a couple of other crops. Corn, some millet, little bit of sugar that they'll put in there. And that then becomes the porridge that they're serving to the moms, particularly during their pregnancies to help with their nutritional status. And then to the babies and the small children, once they started eating complimentary food. Because the malnutrition was so bad and the stunting so high in that area that they figured they needed to do something about that. And the very farmers that this program from Iowa State University that's been working with them for 20 years now, first to improve their farming, but then wow, the malnutrition is so bad in these farming families. What can we do about that? Then it was, oh, here's these more nutritional crops native to the area. Let's incorporate them into farming. This crop is Amaranth. Basically, neglected in other parts of the world. Destroyed in other parts of the world. That is something that's actually cultivated and harvested, and really cared for and prized in those areas.

It's a really interesting story. Let's turn our attention to the United States, which you also profile in your book. And there was a particular farmer in Kansas named Brandon that you talk about. And he said he was getting divorced from wheat. Tell us about that.

Yes, thank you. That's a really interesting story because he's standing there kind of on the edge of his farm, looking at the wheat crops across the road that his neighbor was planting and he had some himself. And he's saying, yeah, I need to get a divorce from wheat. Because of the impact that that was having on the environment. Again, the planting of the wheat, you know, year after year. It's the wheat belt of our Great Plains, which then is legendarily known as the breadbasket, not only of America, but the breadbasket of the world. This wheat is particularly good and appropriate for the label of Breadbasket because it's really good for breads, baking materials. But he's looking at here's the impact it had on his soil. The organic matter on the soil has been dwindling. In the season that the wheat is underground, and the topsoil is uncovered, then you have the problems with erosion. He's seen the impact over time of the year after year after year of growing the wheat. What's interesting, he says, you know, I need to get a divorce from wheat. Well, it's his relatives, because he's a fifth descendant, of the Mennonite farmers from what is now Ukraine - one of the world's original grain belts, who brought their hard red winter wheat seeds with them when they came to the Great Plains in the 1870s. They're the ones that wed Kansas, the Great Plains, the United States to wheat. So now this farmer, Brandon-I-need-to-get-a-divorce-from-wheat, well, it's your ancestors and your descendants that wed us to that. There's kind of historic irony that's taking place. But along with the wheat seeds that came, then also came the plowing up the prairie lands for the first time. And wheat is an annual crop. It's planted year after year one harvest. With each planting, the soil is disturbed, releasing carbon that had been stored, that had been stored in the soil for millennium when they first started plowing. Carbon along with methane released by agricultural activities is, again, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

And in addition, you know, this annual plowing exposes the soil to erosion. You know, relentless erosion with the wind and the rain in the plains. That's what eventually led to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Some environmental and conservation agricultural practices come along because of that, but now that continues. And Brandon himself is seeing the impact as he measures the organic matter in the soil. These are the microorganisms in the soils that naturally work with the soils to grow the crops to feed us all. The nutrients in the soil are weakened and depleted, which then results in the need for more and more chemical enhancements and fertilizers, particularly nitrogen and all the rest. And then you see the runoff of the nitrogen into the water system. And so, yeah, he's seen the impact of all of this, and he's like I need to do something else. And so, he's taken a rather radical step than of planting and growing perennial crops, which you plant one season and then they'll grow for three or four years, maybe more and longer. He has some cattle, so he is able to graze that on those perennial crops. One in particular called kernza, which is an ancient intermediate wheat grass. Has some of the properties of wheat. And so the Land Institute in Kansas then is also working on perennial crops and how can they then be cultivated and harvested also as crops that we all eat.

And so Kernza is very high in protein. There's all sorts of breads and pasta, pastries, that you can make with it. Cereals. It's a good ingredient for brewing. There's Kernza beer. And there's promise with that. And then so these perennial crops, then it's like, okay, so we don't have to plow every year. We plant, they grow, they provide a cover crop, but they also provide food for all of us. So perennials, good for our nutrition, good for the soils, good for the environment.

You know, we've recorded a series of podcasts with farmers who've been doing regenerative agriculture. And the kind of story that you talk about Brandon, quite similar to what you hear from some of the other farmers. Farming was in their family for many generations. They were accustomed to a particular type of industrial agriculture. They saw it harming the land, thought it bad for the planet, and decided to really retool and do things entirely different. And they're making a go of it, which is really exciting. Roger, I wanted to ask you about Native Americans. As you write about their agriculture, spirituality, kinship, and how all these things come together. Tell us about that.

Exactly. Thank you. And so, if you go travel a little bit further in our great plains from Kansas up to South Dakota, and the Sicangu Lakota communities in the southern part of South Dakota close to the Nebraska border. They're trying to reestablish their food sovereignty and the agriculture practices of the Native Americans destroyed, as we tried to destroy them and their communities. By taking of their land, forced relocations, the Trail of Tears, the Trail of Death, in various parts of the country, from various of the Native American communities. And they realize that, as you and the researchers at Duke, know really well, the health impacts that has had on the Native American communities and the high rates of diabetes and obesity, the shortened life expectancies in those communities. And one of the main factors then is their food pathways, and their nutrition being disturbed through all this. So how can they reestablish their food sovereignty? The emphasis on the crops that they used to grow, particularly the three sisters' crops, the maize, the beans, the squash. And then that they would have crops and taste and nutrients that were so vital to their systems traditionally. To recapture that in various growing projects that they have. And then also, with the Sicangu Lakota, they are trying to reestablish the buffalo herd, which was basically decimated from upwards of 30 million or more size of the herd basically down to several hundred with the intentional slaughter of the buffalo in order to really oppress and impact the Native American community. So vital not only to their food sources and nutrition, but basically everything. Clothing, tools - so using every inch of the buffalo. And then spiritually. And as they explain their approach to regenerative agriculture, they would put a picture of a buffalo as the very definition of regenerative agriculture. Just by the way that the buffalo grazes and then moves around. It doesn't graze to the soil it leaves something behind. Then the grasses grow quicker because there's something that's left behind. They leave things behind for other animals. The way that they migrate, and then kind of knead the soil as they go along. That also helps with the soil. So, all these regenerative agriculture, regenerative soil, healthy soil healing practices of it. And then they also say, look the spiritual nature of things that the buffalo represents their kinship. Their kinship of the people to the buffalo, to their land, to the environment. And to them, regenerative agriculture isn't just about food, about soils, about the cultivation and the planting, but also about this kinship. It is a kinship and a spirituality of kind of all of us together. We're all combined on this global food chain. And so that whole kinship element to regenerative agriculture, I think is also really important for us to all understand.

Getting back to your original question about the wisdom. This is the wisdom of these farmers, these indigenous farmers, small holder farmers, family farmers. Like Brandon, the small holder farmers of African, India and Latin America are learning so much about their crops that we have so much to learn from.vIt's inspiring to think that some of the remedies that people are coming up with now in the face of all these challenges actually have historic roots that go back thousands of years is pretty inspiring. And it's nice to know that the resurrection of some of these techniques might really make a difference in the modern world.

Roger, there are so many questions I'd love to ask you. And I'd urge people to read your book Against the Grain to further explore some of these issues. But I wanted to end with something. Are you hopeful that things will change in a positive direction?

I am. I'm also concerned that we need to recognize the need to both nourish and heal. Recognize that this collision is looming, but it's already happening. And I think my hope, and cautious optimism I guess, then comes from the farmers themselves. They're very resilient, and they have to be, right? If you'd asked them the question about where their hope comes from or their optimism or their motivation and inspiration to keep going, it's they don't have any other option. I mean, this is their land. This is what they do. They're farmers, they're nourishing their families. If their families are to be nourished and to end the effects of poor nutrition as we see in this country, which is then common around the world, they need to adjust.

So Abebe, a farmer Ethiopia this is kind of where my hope and inspiration comes from. And he begins the book. He's at the outset of the book and in the prologue. His land in Ethiopia was utterly degraded and you couldn't plant there anymore. They had already cut down trees, moved into areas that had been forested. The humble forest in the area had basically disappeared, in kind of the greater area of where Abebe lives. The bigger kind of ecosystem, environmental changes that then come from that, or the disappearance of a forest. And he had been following then the practices and the orthodoxies of modern agriculture. He realized that that was then behind the degradation of his land and the soil. He couldn't plant anymore. And the World Food Program, the Ethiopian government, other kind of NGOs, were then seeing, look these farm communities, these families, we're going to have to be assisting with food assistance forever because their lands are so degraded. They're not able to nourish their families from them unless we do something to restore and heal the land and bring the land back. And so, Abebe and his family and many others in his community, the kind of wider neighborhood and in this area, the humble forest, a lot of them, they stop farming on their land and they're given assistance saved by the World Food Program, kind of food for work. And they set about rehabbing their land. Kind of terracing their land so it'll hold the water. Digging shallow water pans to collect the rain so it then soaks into the soil, into the ground, and then regenerates the underground springs and sources of water. Planting grasses, bushes, letting kind of the land heal and regenerate itself.

After a number of years, they see that happening. They move back to the land, and now he has this wide diversity as opposed to planting say corn every year or other mono cropping. Now he has this wide, wild, riotous array of different crops and vegetables and fruit trees. Some of the staple crops that he's grown also in rotation. Working with trees that have then grown up. Springs, a little pond has reformed that he didn't even know was there had come up because of the conservation the water. And he says, you know, my land, which once was dead, he's living again. Right? A profound statement and a realization from this farmer of this is how we can bring it back.

So again, as I say, they've seen the future and it's ugly, right? He's seen his land degraded. He couldn't nourish his family anymore. He then does these practices, takes heed of this. I need to heal my land at the same time as farming it. And now his land is living again. So that to me is kind of a wonderful parable. So again, the wisdom of the farmers. It's through the stories and the wisdom of Abebe, that kind of the hope comes forward.

Bio

Roger Thurow is a journalist and author who writes about the persistence of hunger and malnutrition in our world as well as global agriculture and food policy. He was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for thirty years, including twenty years as a foreign correspondent based in Europe and Africa. In 2003, he and Journal colleague Scott Kilman wrote a series of stories on famine in Africa that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. Thurow is the author of four books: Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (with Scott Kilman); The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change; The First 1,000 Days: A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children – And the World; and, Against the Grain – How Farmers Around the Globe Are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet. He has also been a senior fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, as well as a Scholar-in-Residence at Auburn University's Hunger Solutions Institute.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, much of the US was in lockdown. Many people had lost jobs or could not work from home during that time and struggled to pay their bills. Shortages of food and other basic necessities were common. Many people needed help during this time. Charitably-funded volunteer staff organizations like soup kitchens and food pantries suddenly found themselves on the front line of a massive ongoing food relief emergency. Many of them did heroic work. We're speaking today with the co-authors of a new report titled, "The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on US Hunger Relief Organizations, from August and November of 2020." Gizem Templeton is a researcher at Duke University's World Food Policy Center. Alison Cohen, formerly of WhyHunger, is a research consultant on the project. And Suzanne Babb is the director of US programs at WhyHunger.

Interview Summary

 

So Gizem, let's begin with you. Can you tell our listeners about the survey itself and what WhyHunger hoped to accomplish through this work?

 

Gizem - Sure, Kelly. So as a research partner for WhyHunger, we wanted to survey hunger relief organizations, which are food banks, food pantries, soup kitchens, as well as hunger advocacy organizations during the pandemic in the summer of 2020. Our goals were twofold. First, we wanted to document what was happening in terms of pandemic impact and response. And second, we were interested to see what programmatic policy and food system recommendations they had for the future. All in all, over 240 hunger relief organizations from 39 states responded to our survey.

 

It was important to understand the impact on hunger relief organizations because these organizations are mostly dependent on charity donations of cash and food. Their operating budgets change from year to year. And, they're staffed largely by volunteers who tend to be older individuals. So as you can imagine, the COVID-19 pandemic created a range of daunting challenges for them.

 

You may probably recall the many media stories with photos of long lines of people trying to get food during the summer of 2020. The hunger relief organizations in our survey said that demand for food and other services increased significantly. We heard that people who used to donate money were coming in to get food themselves. And also, that many families were struggling simultaneously with job losses, housing issues, and reduced access to food. Hunger relief organizations did everything they could to stay open. And we saw a lot of innovation to meet the demand, in this survey.

 

I mean, there is no question that hunger relief organizations gave their all for our society during the pandemic, but in their own words, they also questioned the country's dependence on charitable donations to keep people fed. And survey responses highlight a need to strengthen the national social safety net and to focus on the root causes of hunger.

 

So Gizem, how did the hunger relief organizations grapple with these tremendous challenges during the pandemic?

 

Gizem - Yes, so first, all but two of the organizations who responded to our survey were able to remain open. But all of them had to make big changes very quickly to keep up with an almost overwhelming demand for food and new safety practices as more was learned about COVID. And we saw shifts to curbside pickup of food, some home delivery, and a few organizations were even able to offer client transportation for housebound individuals. Some hunger relief organizations made a shift to online ordering.

 

I would say the biggest challenge they faced was the loss of volunteers due to COVID risk. And they had to suspend some programming as a result of that. Many surveyed organizations said some of their volunteers and staff contracted the virus during this time. Another challenge was not enough refrigeration space for perishable food and storage for shelf stable food as the volume of food coming in increased to meet the demand.

 

And a big challenge, I would say, the organizations at times struggle with a lack of communication and coordination from the government that would've allowed them to prepare for changes to regulations, safety protocols, and federally sponsored programs like the Farmers to Families Food Boxes.

 

In terms of what helped them meet the demand, I would say philanthropic funding was key. Charitable funding for emergency food surged during this time and partnerships within and outside of the hunger relief world and increased local coordination were also big contributors to success.

 

It is clear that the hunger relief organizations did incredible work to support our society during this chaotic time. But we have to ask ourselves, does it make sense in a country as wealthy as ours that so many people had to turn to charity in order to have enough food?

 

So Alison, in your view, what were the most surprising and the most troubling and even the most hopeful things that you uncovered in the survey?

 

Alison - Well, I think the survey uncovered both troubling and hopeful things given that the entire emergency food system was thrown practically overnight into crisis mode. Because of the pandemic, we witnessed every single hunger relief organization pushed to its limits. And the ways in which the system was taxed during this time is not surprising given that for many working families, the local food bank has become a kind of free grocery store that helps to plug the holes in household finances year round.

 

For many decades now, the rate of food insecurity has not fallen below 11%. Food insecurity is, unfortunately, a way of life for far too many households. And as Gizem said, a majority saw an increase in need.

 

What we need to pay attention to is the way in which this increase in need was confounded by other issues that for many, were not experienced by or visible to hunger relief organizations before the pandemic. For instance, these organizations struggled with the government's response to the pandemic, particularly the inconsistency and unpredictability of the response. The government, of course, was dealing with this magnitude of crisis for the first time itself. More than 70% of HROs said that in order to fill the gaps in government support, they turned to their own forms of communication and coordination with funders, local farmers and growers and other stakeholders, other community organizations.

 

This survey was unique in that we queried first responders, so to speak, to a food security crisis unlike anything we've experienced in the US at that scale. And our findings in the survey add to the reports and stories in the media, those that we all heard and saw, of the miles long lines of cars waiting in parking lots to receive food and the millions of people who found themselves needing a food bank for the very first time in their lives. And all of that exposed how inadequately we, as a society, are addressing the economic precarity of a majority of American households. And therefore, how in sufficiently we are working to end hunger in food insecurity in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

 

But Kelly, it wasn't all doom and gloom. There was a lot of hope, I think, that came through in the survey. And what I found particularly hopeful is that hunger relief organizations overwhelmingly embrace the both end of their missions. That is to ensure that folks who need it get healthy food now and to ultimately end food insecurity. And based on their responses, they have a multifaceted understanding of what it will take to do both and what the role in it should be. And I think that's an incredibly hopeful point and something we should pay attention to.

 

Well above 60% of hunger relief organizations identified dependence on volunteer staff, dependence on individual and corporate donations as issues to be addressed. They also cited lack of government support and solutions to address the root causes of hunger such as unaffordability of healthy food, low wage jobs, unresilient food supply chains, and they called out as problematic the persistence of inequitable access to healthy food is a manifestation of structural racism in the food system.

 

But their clarity on where the deficiencies are in the system doesn't end there. They have a strong vision for what they want to see happen and their role in it. These organizations are calling for increased sustainable and more flexible funding so they can get healthy food to people in the most dignified way possible. They're also calling for a stronger social safety net. They want to see the increases that were legislated during the pandemic become permanent features of the social safety net, including universal free school meals. And they're also advocating for snap changes such as more flexibility and broader access. And they're calling for the descaling of government food nutrition programs. Instead, advocating for programs that address the intersections of food security, affordable housing, mental health, living wages, and childcare among other issues.

 

One respondent wrote in the following response, which was repeated by other respondents in their right end responses as well: "People need living incomes, ones that make it possible to provide both food and shelter. Emergency food network should not be used to prop up an inadequate system of income support."

 

You know, Allison, as I'm listening to you, it's so clear that this was an enormous challenge with so many implications for looking back on what was done and thinking about the future and what might be done. So it's really helpful to have you talk about some of the permanent changes that could help for us stall or even avoid such a terrible crisis should something like this happen again.

 

So, Suzanne, let me ask you. The report presents the perspective that the US relies too much on charitable food, but if there's philanthropic support out there for the charitable food system, why is this such a problem?

 

Suzanne - Well, there are couple of reasons for that. I think, firstly, the charitable food system cannot meet the need. I think then it's important to think about what the charitable food system is based on, and although it has the best of intentions and is trying to fill a need, the majority of the system props up this dysfunctional system that relies on corporate waste. And far too often, these corporate donations are highly processed, filled with high fructose corn syrup, and are lacking in nutrition. And this helps to contribute to increased rates of chronic disease like diabetes and heart disease that disproportionately impact low income and BIPOC people. Also, the corporations that benefit from these tax write-offs in the process are notoriously the low wage employers who don't pay people enough money and whose staff rely on food stamps and charitable food to feed their own families.

 

Another reason is that the right to healthy and nutritious food is a basic human right and governments bear responsibility to their citizens to fulfill these human rights. But the US has slowly reduced its role in fulfilling that responsibility, and instead have been putting it in the hands of charitable organizations that have been vulnerable, always relying on donations and volunteers. And this is just not a sustainable system.

 

The US hasn't codified the right to food federally. There's one state, the state of Maine that has done so in their constitution in 2021. And there are other states that are organizing and strategizing to do the same. I think, lastly, it's important to remember that hunger is a symptom of poverty and poverty is a created condition. And the government has played a role in creating this condition and has a responsibility to be a part of the solution.

 

Thanks, Suzanne. So Alison, let me ask you one final question. The report offers up quite a wide range of recommendations for hunger relief organizations, also for philanthropy and for the federal government. Can you provide examples of organizations who are already implementing some of the recommendations? Could you talk about these and the opportunities that you see for a sustainable change?

 

Alison - Yes, yes, I'd love to. And I think that's a really important part of the report and there's much more in the report than I can say here during the podcast. So I would encourage folks to really take a look at the report, to hear more details, and to learn about very specific organizations and actions and activities that are happening.

 

So first, as Suzanne mentioned, yes, there's a historical over-reliance on the charitable food system and that has gotten out of balance. Hunger relief organizations, philanthropy, and the government all have a role to play in correcting that imbalance. Some 50 years ago, these organizations were designed to be temporary and crisis related, but what's emerged is a system that continues to need more and more bricks and mortar to mediate what has become a stagnant and alarming rate of food insecurity. And as we see in the results of the survey, many hunger relief organizations are expanding their strategies to include helping clients get access to government nutrition programs and policy and advocacy to improve federal nutrition programs. And a smaller, but I think growing subset of these organizations are beginning to address root causes of food insecurity such as low wages, poor working conditions, structural racism is a part of their mission.

 

For example there's a soup kitchen called Neighbors Together that has been operating in Brooklyn, New York for more than 30 years. About 10 or so years ago, they began engaging clients in determining their own advocacy agendas through what they called their community action program. Their participants, all of whom are patrons of the soup kitchen, identified insufficient wages and barriers to safe and affordable housing as primary reasons they required ongoing food assistance. So they organized others in their neighborhood and are currently advocating with the city of New York and the state of New York to implement policies that address housing and wages.

 

And in Washington State, the state's largest independent hunger relief agency known as Northwest Harvest is working to shift public opinion and change policies and practices that perpetuate hunger, poverty, and disparities while advocating for a right to food framing for statewide policies. They're one of the states that is really engaged in hoping to amend their constitution to include the right to food as Suzanne mentioned earlier.

 

And one last example, and again, the report contains many others, is the Black Church Food Security Network. Their mission is to ensure food security in Black communities by addressing racial and economic injustices. And they do this by co-creating sustainable local food systems in partnership with Black churches, Black farmers, and Black business owners. It's really remarkable.

 

So as the COVID-19 crisis continues to reshape public life around the globe, it's not over yet, unfortunately. The results of this survey strongly support the fact that we have an opportunity to organize and protect everyone's most basic human rights, nutritious food. And really, not just in response to COVID-19, but as a springboard to a social and political economy that puts people and planet first.

 

Bios

 

Gizem Templeton is a Research Associate at the World Food Policy Center at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. She earned her PhD in Food Science and Human Nutrition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation focused on the use of nanotechnology in peanut allergen and acrylamide detection while utilizing a biodegradable corn-based sensor platform. She is a native of Turkey and has been living in the States since 2011.

Alison Cohen is a former Senior Director of Programs at WhyHunger.org. She has more than thirty years of experience supporting grassroots-led organizations in rural and urban communities around the world in strengthening social movements that address the root causes of hunger. She is currently coordinating a process to build a national movement for the right to food. She holds a master's degree in sociology from Virginia Tech.

Suzanne Babb is Senior Co-director of U.S. programs at WhyHunger.org. She develops and oversees the implementation of WhyHunger's domestic strategies: Transforming the Emergency Food System, Black Food Sovereignty and Labor and Economic Justice. Suzanne helps to convene and support regional and national networks and alliances of emergency food organizations working to ensure the right to food by addressing the systemic inequities resulting in hunger and poverty. Additionally, Suzanne supports the growth of BIPOC led food sovereignty organizations, networks and alliances by mobilizing resources and providing technical support to aid in the creation of legislation, infrastructure and institutional structures grounded in equity and justice. Originally from Montreal, Quebec, Canada Suzanne has many years of experience working on community development

Today, we're talking to Dr. Jasmine Ratliff, who goes by Dr. Jas, and is an applied food systems research and policy specialist, and co-executive director of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. She believes that your zip code should not determine your life expectancy and that building relationships are essential to creating a sustainable and just food system.

Interview Summary

 

So let's begin with this. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about The National Black Food and Justice Alliance and some about your work there?

 

Yes. The National Black Food and Justice Alliance is a coalition of organizations. So we're not just one organizations. We represent multiple others, about 50 now, and we are committed to building Black leadership and Black food sovereignty.

 

Those are really important goals, and not easy ones to reach for sure. So let's dig in a little bit about how you go about doing that. Let's start with kind of your vision. How do you envision food justice and how do you think about the term food sovereignty?

 

I work at the Alliance. And at the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, we focus on Black food sovereignty and self-determining food economies, and specifically land justice. And we approach these through a lens of healing and organizing and resistance against anti-Blackness. And all of the work that we do is in pursuit of food justice. So I have a couple definitions. Founding executive director Dara Cooper defined food justice as a process whereby communities most impacted and exploited by our current corporate-controlled, extractive agricultural system shift power to reshape, redefine, and provide indigenous, community-based solutions to accessing and controlling food. And that includes the means to produce food that it is humanizing, fair, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, environmentally sound, and just. That's how I feel about food justice and it leads us right into food sovereignty. So I know you mentioned it's an overall long goal, and we borrow this one from La Via Campesina, but food sovereignty is the right for peoples to define their own food and agricultural systems, instead of food being subject to international market forces - as we all know food is so globalized. So sovereignty is absolutely our ultimate goal and it can't be achieved without confronting actual governance. So we work to ensure that Black people not only have the right, but the ability to control our food.

 

It really helps to have those definitions. And let's talk just a little bit more about this. So you talked about decision making, needing to reside in the community where the issues are occurring and you mentioned power transfer. Can you just give us some examples of where the system doesn't support these kind of things? Like how is the current system not empower people, and how does it strip people of decision making about their own food systems?

 

Yes! I didn't actually plan to share this one, but I will. A lot of people refer to your geographic location, and I know in my bio you mentioned this, but your zip code shouldn't determine your life expectancy. And right now that does. We don't have the autonomy to create the environment around us. It's so saturated with capitalism and other things that don't put people first. So I think food apartheid instead of the food desert reference is a real way that people are disenfranchised and not in power. And that's also a definition from Dara Cooper, that it's the systemic destruction of Black self-determination to control our food. This includes land, resource stuff, and discrimination, hypersaturation of destructive foods and predatory marketing in a blatantly discriminatory, corporate-controlled food system that results in our communities suffering from some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes of all time. Many, like I said, use the term food desert, but food apartheid is a much more accurate representation of the structural, racialized inequities that are perpetuated through our current system.

 

Okay, thanks. There's a lot in there that needs to kind of get disentangled. So let's talk about some possible advances in solutions. And I know in this context, food co-ops come up a lot. In your mind, how do food co-ops become a tool for not just providing healthy food for communities but also to make movement on racial and economic justice?

 

Yes, I think co-ops are about collective power. They're not just a non-extractive way to exchange goods and services, but they're about the collective buying power, the collective political power, and especially the collective people power. It's a way that you can actually, in person, in real life, practice democratic governance. And you can create shared principles and values and shared wealth and authority and it's not concentrated in just the hands of a few, or just the people who are making decisions. And it's not just an economic sense. I really listen to all our members who are in the process of building of even a retail store, grocery, co-op, and it's about a political space. It's more than just groceries. So they're a pillar of our community. And then especially in the Black community, co-ops have always been built out of necessity. I love Dr. Monica White's "Freedom Farmers" book, when she describes Fannie Lou Hamer, when it describes food as a political weapon. We know we can control our food systems and the means of production when we create these places of distribution, and we can use them as a tool to build towards freedom. So I'm excited to be doing that work with the Alliance.

 

Well, it's exciting to me. And when you talk about food co-ops being more than groceries, let's explore that a little bit more if you wouldn't mind. So if you walked into a food co-op, you'd get a picture of things, groceries, but you're building a picture here that talks a lot more than just those things. So there's community empowerment, there's community engagement, there's wealth creation in the community. But I'm saying these things and you're the one who really knows them. So tell us a little bit more about what's there besides the groceries.

 

Yeah, there is absolutely community. There's spaces for people to learn together about healthy products. There can be a cooking class attached. When I think about these things, I'm speaking about specific co-ops. One in Dayton, Ohio, Gem City, they have a doula co-op and a health room where maternal health access can be made available. There's also just the vibe. There's the music that you hear. There's the people that you see. It's like not only providing jobs, but it's providing living wage jobs that are able to provide upper mobilization. So it's, like I said, more than groceries. It's a vibe. It's community. It's all the things that you could imagine, but sometimes people outside of the community aren't able to imagine that. Like investors and things. If there isn't a grocery store there for the past 50 years, why would someone bring one there now? But when the community knows that this is something that they need and they're putting their all into it, they'll build it for 10 to 12 years before they even see a store. So I'm excited to actually go into one of the co-ops in Detroit and they're groundbreaking this weekend, so I know that they'll be building it really soon and I can open the doors and be their guest.

 

So my background is being a researcher and the researcher ordinarily looks at a situation like this and says what kind of outcomes can be measured? And one thing that the researchers might automatically think about would be what are the health outcomes in the community from having healthier diets? But you're talking about a lot more than that, even intangible things like morale of the community, the engagement, the happiness, and then of course there's the economic development. So it sounds like there's an awful lot involved in these efforts, isn't there?

 

Absolutely. And organizing them, you never know what you'll get when you bring the community together. And beautiful things are born especially when they have control. And it's about participatory budgeting as well and everyone being clear where the funds are going, and it feels good to be a part of something that you can see the effort, the fruits of your labor.

 

So I'm assuming that your theory on this is that if the solutions for these very significant food problems come from within the community itself, you're going to get more buy-in, better morale, and ultimately better solutions. Is that correct?

 

Absolutely, right on.

 

Let me ask a final question about farmers, because they're obviously a really important part of this. Could you talk about the institutional and systemic harm that Black farmers and landowners have experienced and how your Alliance is going about addressing this?

 

I'm sure a lot of people have heard the statistic about the land that Black farmers no longer have control over. We think back into the 1920s when there were nearly 1 million Black farmers in the United States, and now we're less than 1% of farmers, but more so the land that has been taken away. It's said to be between more than 15 to 19 million acres. And I say land that's been taken away because land has never been lost. You can lose your keys. You can't lose land. It's been Black communities, systemically disenfranchised, and has been this way for decades. And it's interesting to see it continue to play out even today with the debt relief for Black farmers, lawsuits that are still going on. The Alliance is supporting that. But more importantly, we're building an alternative. We're looking to remove land from the speculative market. We have a goal of 15 million acres to do such where it will be in perpetually hands of Black land stewards to continue to build for Black food sovereignty. So that's our resource commons, and that is actually democratically governed by seven of our members on our Resource Commons Council. We're looking to have our first piece of land this year and to continue building and purchasing and removing the land from the speculative market. We are also hosting land stewardship trainings throughout the United States with our members and resourcing them to ensure that we're not only having land to steward, but also having stewards.

 

 

Bio:

 

Dr. Jas is an applied food systems research and policy-based specialist. She partners with academic research teams, anchor institutions, philanthropic foundations, and community-based organizations to identify root causes of and develop innovative solutions to food system challenges. Dr. Jas received her master's degree in Community Planning from Auburn University and Ph.D. in Integrative Public Policy and Development from Tuskegee University. As a New Orleans native and farmer, she has developed a unique perspective when it comes to food and the effects that it has on communities. Dr. Jas believes that your zip code should not determine your life expectancy, and building relationships are essential to creating a sustainable and just food system.

Twitter - https://twitter.com/nbfja
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Website - https://www.blackfoodjustice.org/

Today, we're talking with the President of North Carolina Farm Bureau, Shawn Harding. Farm Bureau is the state's largest farming organization is often referred to as the voice of North Carolina agriculture. In this interview, we'll explore the diverse ways this vital association supports North Carolina farmers and growers. I might also say that there are Farm Bureaus in all 50 states, and from what I understand, North, it's a special pleasure to have Shawn with us.

Interview Summary

 

I was mentioning before we went live that our center has had a nice relationship with Farm Bureau over a number of years. And one thing that was especially, meaningful to us is with your predecessor, Larry Wooten, and several of his colleagues took us on a tour of farms in Eastern North Carolina. And that was very eye opening and a very moving experience for us to get to talk to farmers and understand a little better. So, I appreciated the work of Farm Bureau before, but especially, after that. So, let's begin. You became President of the North Carolina Farm Bureau nearly two years ago. And anyone in the agriculture world knows a Farm Bureau but others may know less. Would you mind telling us what Farm Bureau does?

 

Yes, certainly. As you mentioned earlier on, we often refer ourselves as the voice of agriculture because that's what we do. We spread the message of farmers and agriculture. And, you know, what's interesting is our organization started 1936 by farmers who felt like they needed a voice. And in 1936 there were a lot of people on the farm. Now, very few people on the farm, very few people that really understand agriculture. So, we feel like our mission to be that voice for agriculture is more relevant now today than ever before. And we try to stay core to that mission and just spreading the word of our farmers and agriculture and what they do.

 

I thought I heard that North Carolina Farm Bureau was the second largest in the country. I don't know if that was correct then or still is, but what explains why North Carolina has such a robust Farm Bureau presence?

 

Well, in 1936 a group of farmers got together and started this organization and really their mission was just to help farmers but also help rural people to any kind of issues they had. And in 1953, believe it or not way back then they were having trouble getting insurance. And so, we started an insurance company. In order to buy insurance from North Carolina Farm Bureau you had to be a member. And so, you joined and you were able to participate in our insurance company. And it was very successful very helpful for our rural families back then. And thankfully, we've been very successful over the years proud of our insurance company. And that's one of the reasons that we have such a large membership in North Carolina. We just crossed 600,000 members for the first time in our state, which does make us the second largest Farm Bureau in the nation. And so, certainly we have many members who have no connection to agriculture but just enjoy and appreciate our insurance company. So, we're proud of that but anyone can join North Carolina Farm Bureau. $25 membership. And if you want to support farmers and support our mission certainly anyone can join. Tennessee Farm Bureau is the largest Farm Bureau, our neighbors to the west. And so, we're looking at how long before we could be number one, but we'll see how that goes.

 

Well, good luck. And 600,000 is pretty impressive, I must say. So, I'd like to talk about one particular part of the work that you and your colleagues are doing, your Young Farmer program. And I recall hearing from Bert Pitt in Edgecombe County saying that the average age of farmers in North Carolina is around 67. And farming is so critical to the future. I'd like to hear about the kinds of support and recognition that your Young Farmer program offers to newer generations of farmers.

 

Thank you for asking about that program. It's really near and dear to our hearts. I'm a product of the Young Farmer program. Actually, Larry Wooten was a product of the Young Farmer program. And so, we use it as a leadership development program in our organization, but it's more than just leadership development. Farming can be a very isolated occupation and sometimes you can feel like you're just out there on your own and don't have any support. So, one of the great things, I think, our Young Farmer program does, it brings young people together. As you said, there's not a lot of them in agriculture. And so, it brings them together and they really get to support each other to see, hey, we've got some of the same issues. We're dealing with some of the same things. And so, it's a real support system for our young people in agriculture. And as you mentioned, I mean, that's vital with the age of farmers now, but I'm excited, I'm excited about the future. I see young people getting involved in agriculture that are first-generation farmers. So, I think, I often say when I was coming along, it maybe wasn't cool to be in agriculture, but now it's a very cool and hip thing to be involved in agriculture. And that's exciting to me to see young people coming in that haven't had a history in it.

 

It's nice to hear that optimistic note in your voice. And boy, that would be great if young people really do come in with a kind of enthusiasm that you're seeing in them. So, that's great. You mentioned your own experience in farming. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? What kind of a farm did you grow up on and what kind of farming did you do yourself?

 

Sure, absolutely. I grew up in Eastern North Carolina, in Beaufort County. A little town called Chocowinity and my grandfather was farming and my father actually, came into farming in the seventies. And so, we grew up on a farm, typical Eastern North Carolina farm that was a tobacco and grain operation. That's kind of what most everybody did a little bit of. And we were small farmers and just enjoy that life. Went to NC State after high school and studied agriculture. And unfortunately, I lost my father the last year of college. And so, you were talking about the age of farmers and certainly, it's difficult to get started in agriculture as a young person, but I had that opportunity right out of college. And so, started farming early, again, going back to tobacco and grain and doing those kind of things. And working with my brother on the farm. We had a partnership, things were going well. And then we came into the nineties and challenges in the tobacco industry. We had the tobacco buyout that came along in 2004. About that time, my wife had started a little side operation with strawberries and I just I looked at it as an opportunity to change what we were doing on the farm. I saw how many people loved coming to the farm to pick strawberries and learn about what we did in agriculture. And I just thought, I think this is the future. So we stopped growing tobacco. We became a strawberry farm. And then of course, added to the strawberries with blueberries, blackberries, all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and just went direct to the consumer. And thankfully, we were very blessed to be successful in that. The opportunity to be Farm Bureau President obviously, came along and and I thought it was a great opportunity for me but also for my children. I have two boys and back on the farm now that are running the farm. Again, giving them an opportunity to start at a younger age in agriculture, and also giving me an opportunity to do something that I love. And that's lead this organization and talk about farming. So, that's a little bit of my story and how I got to where I am and just love agriculture and love what I'm doing.

 

At the time we're recording this, we're about to enter the full swing of the strawberry season. So, I was really excited to hear you talk about strawberries. More than that, it's interesting to hear about the transition of your farm and the historical things that shape that. So, let's get back to Farm Bureau. And I know that Farm Bureau does a lot to bring agriculture concerns to policy makers, both at the state level in North Carolina and the national level. And that helps farmers prepare to make the case for North Carolina agriculture. Could you talk about the advocacy programming that you do?

 

It's really one of the top line things that we're involved in. I mentioned that we're the voice of agriculture and that can mean a lot of different things. As I said, we want to share with the public about what farmers do. And part of that public is our legislators who many have been separated from the farm for several generations and don't really understand modern agriculture. So, quite a task there. And so, we stay involved in that. I'm very proud of our advocacy efforts. The other part I would say on that is certainly we have a lobbying team here at Farm Bureau but what we do, what is special about Farm Bureau is we use the term grassroots operation you mentioned we're in every county in North Carolina. And we encourage our volunteer farmers to advocate for what they do. What we found is when you walk in an office as a lobbyist and then they expect you to be at a certain place, but when you take an actual farmer to a legislator, to a Congressman, to a Senator, they appreciate that. And so, we really challenge our young farmers, our women, all our farmers, all our volunteers, to be involved in advocacy for what they do. And that's what I'm proud of as an organization. Our policies come from our people. So, I sit in this role as President, but I don't set the policy for the Farm Bureau. Our people set the policy. And so, we have a policy development process that we go through every year and they really tell us what's important to them. So, I think it's a really fascinating process that was drawn up many years ago and it works really well.

 

I can see how farmers would be such important advocacy voices. When we were doing the tour of farms that I mentioned before, we found the farmers to be talented, passionate but also very humble people. So, you can see how they would have a special role in this. It was interesting to hear you talk about that. I'd like to ask you also about regenerative agriculture. We've done a number of podcasts with farmers and others from around the country involved in regenerative agriculture. And they've talked about techniques such as diverse, no-till, rob crow techniques, mob grazing for livestock and other things to improve the environment and produce food at the same time even though to improve the nutrient profile in food and to help be more resilient in the face of changing weather conditions. So, how do you think North Carolina itself is poised to deal with regenerative agriculture and those advances?

 

I'm, of course, very biased. I believe we have some of the best farmers, in the country, in the world, at North Carolina that are resilient, adaptive and always looking for the right thing to do. And so, when talk about climate change and how agriculture can be a part of that then I think we're at the forefront of it. Many people think about this issue and we all have opinions and things we feel like we ought to do and need to do. And that's great, but I don't think people really think about nobody deals with the climate more than farmers. We deal with the storms, we deal with cold, the heat, everything that comes along with it. So, we're on the front lines of this and certainly, we're ready to look at practices that will help the climate change issue. And I think, farmers are always ready to do that, that with a caveat also, always of saying we have to stay in business. We have to have practices that will keep us on the farm so that we can do the positive things we need to do. But we certainly feel like there's a lot of great research going on right now to say, here's some things that we can do to help reverse this climate change issue and agriculture can play a big role in that. And so, I think our farmers stand ready to be on the front lines of that issue.

 

That sounds really impressive because you're talking about the influence of climate on the agriculture world and then in turn the influence of agriculture on climate and that relationship arrow going in both directions is such an important part of the overall picture that we're facing in the future. So, it's nice to know that North Carolina farmers, in particular, are focusing on that. And speaking of that, the farm bill is such an important piece of legislation nationally, and obviously, for North Carolina farmers as well. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what North Carolina needs from this important piece of legislation.

 

Well, certainly when you think about the farm bill that's coming up, we will be engaged in that heavily. Have staff members here that are already working on it now to try to say, you know, what's our priority. I think if we want to talk about priorities in the farm bill and for the last couple of farm bills, I think this has sort of been the direction our country has gone is crop insurance. We've just said, agriculture's such a volatile business to be in with climate again as we talked about and storms that the safety net that needs to be there for our farmers with crop insurance is a really important piece for us. And so, we'll continue to talk about that as we head into this farm bill negotiation, the next bill, because that really is what helps keep our farmers on the farm when these devastating weather events happen. And we certainly feel like that's important for our country. We've all seen what's happened the last few years with just turmoil around the world. And so, we say food policy is good security policy, and so, we need to have a good food security policy. And that starts with keeping our farmers on the farm and being successful. And that obviously, crop insurance is the biggest part of that farm bill that we'll be looking at.

 

I'm happy you mentioned the vulnerability that farmers face because I think most people who don't dive deeply into agriculture don't realize the number of vulnerabilities that farmers have. There are the weather vulnerabilities we talked about today. There are unexpected market fluctuations. There are complicated relationships with the companies that buy their products. All kinds of things go on in that world that make it a very precarious position that farmers are in. And it's amazing that they're able to tolerate that and still prevail generation after generation. So, it says a lot about the kind of mindset and personalities of farmers doesn't it?

 

We often talk about it's a love, it is a passion. You mentioned seeing that with some of our farmers and it has to be. I mean, just this year, we've seen prices for inputs rise by three times. And certainly, prices of commodities have risen. And some people are saying, well, that equals out. But what I'm trying to tell the general public is we just tripled the risk that we're putting in the ground. With the seed this spring. We just tripled the risk, the seed, the cost of fertilizer. And we don't know what we'll get out of it. So, that's what agriculture is. You mentioned that it's a lot of volatility, but we do it, we love it. I think most farmers feel like it's their responsibility to help feed the world. And so, we want to continue to do that. So, we appreciate the partnerships and people understanding what we do, but there's a lot of risk in it. Absolutely.

 

I was impressed on the farm tour we were doing with some of the things that you just mentioned. One, was how passionate the farmers were about their work and how much they felt they were performing a very important service for the world, but also how many generations of a family there tended to be on farms and how the farmers felt that they wanted to turn the farm over to children in better shape than they had inherited it themselves. It was very interesting way of thinking. So, that passion I must really impress you all the time, too.

 

Absolutely, and as I mentioned my story, I'm sort of living it. I go home now every other weekend, see my boys and the pride they have in growing our things and selling it to local consumers. And there is a pride that goes along with that just to see that, to see your, leaving the next generation in a better place. And that's what our farms and farmers are trying to do to just leave it better than we found it. And that goes with our families. But it also goes with our land. You know, the water the air, the soil, that's how we make our living. So, we're trying to leave it better than we found it.

 

Bio

Shawn Harding was elected president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau in December 2019. Harding grew up and farmed in Beaufort County. He previously served the Farm Bureau in various roles, including president in Beaufort County, member of the state board of directors and state public policy director. He is a graduate of the Agricultural Institute, part of NC State University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

So why is the food history of a community so important? And can Durham's food history be applied to other places? Who owns land, who can grow food and make a living doing so, and who has access to food, any food, least of all healthy food? The answers are deeply influenced by historical policies and practices. These in retrospect, clearly exacerbated, supported, and even created food related calamities, the dual burden communities face of both food insecurity and diet related chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity. Understanding these practices is important in creating change. And in understanding that conditions imposed on neighborhoods rather than personal failings of residents explain what we see today.

This is a story about Durham, North Carolina. These days, Durham is famous as one of the South's foodiest towns and known for its award-winning chefs, thriving restaurant scene, and reverence for even the most humble foods served with down-home charm. But Durham, just like the rest of North Carolina, like other states and other countries, has discouraging any high rates of food insecurity. This is juxtaposed to high rates as well of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related chronic diseases. It is helpful of course, to know how things are now, but a more complex and highly important question is how we got here. Enter history. What can be learned from a detailed historical analysis, in this case of Durham, and how relevant is this information to other places?

 

The Duke World Food Policy Center worked with historian, Melissa Norton to write a report titled, "Power and Benefit On The Plate The History of Food in Durham, North Carolina". This recording is an abridged version of that report and features documented historical quotes from the relevant periods in history as read by contemporary voices.

 

Let's go back to the beginning. Durham, North Carolina is the ancestral home of the Occaneechi, the Eno, the Adshusheer and the Shocco indigenous peoples. Before European colonizers came, land was not something that people owned. Instead land and its natural resources were shared so that everyone could benefit.

 

"To our people land was everything, identity, our connection to our ancestors, our pharmacy, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands, were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself. It was a gift, not a commodity. It could never be bought or sold."  Robin Kimmerer, Potawatomi Nation.

 

Durham's tribes and clans supported themselves through hunting, foraging and communal farming. They managed the habitat for fish, fowl and other wild animal populations. They used controlled fires to clear land, had complex farming irrigation systems and created a network of roads for trade and exchange. When European settler colonists came into North Carolina life for indigenous people changed dramatically. At first, they taught colonists how to forage and clear land, what to plant and how to care for crops. The colonists came to North Carolina believed that they had the spiritual, political and legal blessing of Pope Alexander the sixth through the doctrine of discovery. This decree labeled indigenous peoples as subhuman because they were not Christian and treated their land as available for the taking.

 

"The Indians are really better to us than we are to them. They always give us rituals at their quarters and take care we are armed against hunger and thirst. We do not do so by them, generally speaking, but let them walk by our doors hungry and do not often relieve them. We look upon them with scorn and disdain and think them little better than beasts in humane shape. Though if we're examined, we shall find that for all our religion and education, we possess more moralities and evil than these savages do not." John Lawson, English settler colonist in North Carolina, 1709.

 

Settlers forced native people off ancestral homelands and took possession of the stolen land and its resources. As a result, many indigenous people left to join other tribes, some hid in order to remain in the area. And some were forced into assimilation programs or enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean.

 

Going back to the early colonial settlers, most were small scale farmers who grew corn, fruits and vegetables and commodities such as tobacco, wheat, and cotton for their own use or to barter. As farms grew from the 1500s through the 1800s, colonists brought West African people by force to use as free farm labor. West Africans brought seeds from their homelands and foods such as hibiscus, yams and sweet potatoes, watermelon and bananas and millet, okra and sorghum became a permanent part of the Southern food culture. Food was an essential connection to home, to community and resiliency. Indigenous and enslaved African people interacted and exchanged practical and cultural traditions.

 

"My name is Alex Woods. I was born in 1858. In slavery time I belonged to Jim Woods. My Missus name was Patty Woods. They treated us tolerable fair. Our food was well cooked. We were fed from the kitchen of the great house during the week. We cooked and ate at our home Saturday nights and Sundays. They allowed my father to hunt with a gun. He was a good hunter and brought a lot of game to the plantation. They cooked it at the great house and divided it up. My father killed deer and turkey. All had plenty of rabbits, possum, coons and squirrels." Alex Woods

 

In 1854, the development of the North Carolina railroad transformed agricultural markets. The farming economy shifted from fruits, vegetables, and grains toward large scale cash crops, such as tobacco. The railroad stop in Durham became the center of the city. By the time the civil war began in 1861, nearly one out of three people in Durham county were enslaved. A quarter of the area's white farmers legally owned enslaved people. Cameron Plantation was the largest plantation in the state with 30,000 acres and 900 enslaved people.

 

To be self sufficient, create security and build wealth. People needed to own land. The federal government passed the homestead act of 1862 to create new land ownership opportunities. As a result in the west 246 million acres of native people's land were deeded to 1.5 million white families.

 

That same year, the federal government also passed the moral act. This established North Carolina State University in Raleigh as a land grant university to teach white students practical agricultural science, military science and engineering. 29 years later in 1891, North Carolina Agriculture and Technology University in Greensboro was established to serve black students, but the institutions were never funded equally.

 

In 1865, the civil war ended at Bennett Place in Durham with the largest surrender of Confederate troops. Reconstruction occurred in the subsequent years from 1865 to 1877. During this time, Durham struggled with its own political, social and economic challenges. One of which were the circumstances faced by formerly enslaved people who were freed with no land, no jobs, no money and no citizenship rights. Historians estimate that more than a million freed black people in the country became sick for malnutrition, disease and near starvation. And tens of thousands of people died.

 

Listen to the words of Martha Allen, a young black woman at the time.

 

"I was never hungry till we was free and the Yankees fed us. We didn't have nothing to eat, except heart attack and Midland meat. I never seen such meat. It was thin and tough with a thick skin. You could boil it all day and all night and it couldn't cook. I wouldn't eat it. I thought it was mule meat. Mules that done been shot on the battlefield then dried. I still believe it was mule meat. Them was bad days. I was hungry most of the time and had to keep fighting off them Yankee mans." Martha Allen

 

In the years after the war, a few people had cash, but landowners still needed farm labor, poor farmers and families of all races struggled. Landowners began hiring farm labor through share cropping and tenant farm contracts.

 

"The Negros have as their compensation, a share of the crops that shall be raised one third part of the wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco, syrup, peas, sweet potatoes and pork. But the seed wheat is to be first passed back to the said Cameron, the hogs to be killed or pork shall be fattened out of the corn crop before division. The said Cameron is to have the other two thirds of said crops." Cameron share cropping contract 1866.

 

Sharecroppers work plots of farmland, and then received a fraction of the crop yield for themselves as payment. For newly freed black people. Many of whom worked the same land, lived in the same housing and worked under the close supervision of the same overseers sharecropping felt like slavery under another name.

 

In 1868 and 1877 North Carolina passed the landlord tenant acts, which legalized the power imbalance between landowners and sharecropping farmers. For poor farmers there was simply no way to get ahead. And so-called black codes, laws enacted throughout the south in the 1860s and beyond denied black people the right to vote, to serve on juries or to testify in court against white people. With tenant farming, workers paid rent to landowners and kept all the proceeds from the crops.

 

"We lived all over the area because we were tenant farmers, very poor living on the land of the owner who was of course, white. We used his mules and he paid for the seed and the tobacco and the stuff that we planted. Of course, as I look back now, I know how they cheated us because we never had anything." Theresa Cameron Lyons, 1868, on growing up in a black tenant farming family in Durham County.

 

North Carolina politics during this time was dominated by white supremacist ideology and by efforts to keep blacks from voting and from holding political office. In 1896, the US Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal treatment of blacks was legally permissible. This created the legal basis of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow. From 1896 to 1964 Jim Crow laws imposed racial segregation on nearly all aspects of life, including schools, transportation, and public facilities. These laws institutionalized economic, educational and social disadvantages for black and indigenous people, such court sanction exclusion combined with violence and intimidation from white people created severely hostile living conditions for North Carolina's black people. As a result, registered black voters in North Carolina plummeted from 126,000 in 1896 to only 6,100 in 1902.

 

As the year 1900 dawned, more than half of the US population were farmers or lived in rural communities. Durham County was still largely farmland, but there was incredible urban growth in the early decades of the 1900s. This too had an impact on Durham's food and the community.

 

Demand for tobacco and textile factory workers was growing in Durham. Although only white workers could work in the textile factories. Both black and white migrants found work in Durham's Liggett Myers and American tobacco factories. Black workers had the lowest pay, most backbreaking jobs in the factories and were paid less than the white workers.

 

Outside the factories black women had more job opportunities than black men, but as cooks and domestic servants. And they also held some administrative positions. As people traded farm life for the city, they had to adjust to a new way of life. This meant living off wages in the new cash economy and the crowded close quarters of urban living.

 

Textile mill owners in the East Durham Edgemont and West Durham areas built subsidized mill villages to provide housing for white workers close to the factories. Each mill village had its own churches, schools, recreation centers, and stores.

 

"Yeah, it was a complete store. They'd have very few wise work in the mills. They would have a man that went out in the morning, they'd call it taking orders. He'd go to all the houses and the woman of the house and tell him what she wanted. He'd bring it back in time to be cooked and served up for what they called dinner, which is of course lunch. And he'd go do the same thing in the afternoon. Have it back in time for a good supper."  Zeb Stone, 1915, a white business owner from West Durham, North Carolina.

 

Many textile workers had grown up on farms and knew how to garden and raise chickens, pigs, or even cows in their yards. Families preserved extra garden produce and meals for the winter. Home canning became popular and increased during World War I and later in World War II, as food shortages meant rations for canned food. The federal government urged people to rely on produce grown in their own gardens called victory gardens and to share resources with neighbors.

 

Six predominantly black neighborhoods developed in Durham, along with black churches, schools and businesses, people form close relationships with each other. And even though the yards were often small, many black people also maintained gardens, kept chickens until the local government banned livestock in the city limits in the 1940s. Buying from black businesses meant investing in the whole black community. Community leaders preached how each dollar spent would flow in a wheel of progress throughout black Durham. Neighborhood grocers were owned by and for people who lived in black neighborhoods, here's what longtime Durham state representative Henry Mickey Michelle has to say about growing up in the Hayti area of Durham.

 

"We didn't have to go across the tracks to get anything done. We had our own savings and loans bank, our own insurance company, our own furniture store, our own tailors, barber shops, grocery stores, the whole nine yards." Durham state representative Henry Mickey Michelle

 

Black and white farmers came to Durham's urban areas to sell fresh produce on street corners and created popup farm stands throughout the city. Many came to Hayti, Durham's largest black neighborhood and to the center of black commerce that was dubbed Black Wall Street. Durham established the first official farmer's market then called a curb market in 1911 to connect county farmers with urban consumers.

 

The federal government helped farmers stay informed of developments in agriculture, home economics, public policy, and the economy. The Smith Lever Act of 1914 launched cooperative extension services out of the land grant universities. In 1914 extension services for Durham County's white people began and services for black communities started in 1917, hoping to draw young people into farming.

 

Segregated schools in Durham offered agriculture training. Programs for the future farmers of America served white students and new farmers of America programs served black students.

 

By 1920 farmers comprised 50% of the population in Durham County outside the city core. Nearly half of these were tenant farmers. Arthur Brody, a black man who made his home in Durham had this to say about his family's experience.

 

"My granddaddy had 50 acres of land. They said he was working for this white family and the man took a liking to him. And back then land was cheap. And that man told him, Robert, what you ought to do is buy an acre of land every month. He gave him $12 a month. So he bought an acre of land a month, a dollar a month for a year. And he bought that farm with 52 acres of land in it. And he built his house out of logs. I remember that log house just as good I can." Arthur Brody

 

Black families were beginning to acquire farmland. Although black owned farms were generally smaller and on less productive land than white owned farms. At its peak in 1920, 26% of farms nationally were owned by black farmers.

 

The shift to industrialized agriculture concentrated on just a few crops, created new pressures for farmers, especially small scale farmers who were already struggling with the depressed economy, depleted soil, outdated farming tools and the constant demand for cash crops, black and white farmers alike struggled with a lack of fair credit and chronic indebtedness. Here is what the Negro Credit Unions of North Carolina had to say about the farm credit system in 1920.

 

"Perhaps the greatest drawback to the average poor farmer, struggling for a foothold on the soil and trying to make a home for himself and family in the community is the lack of capital. If he buys fertilizer on time, borrows money or contracts to be carried over the cropping season, it is usually at such a ruinous rate of interest that few ever get out from under its painful influence. The man who owns a small farm as well as he who rents one has long been victimized by the credit system." Negro Credit Unions of North Carolina brochure

 

In Durham, life still followed the seasonal cycles of farming. There were special times for communal rituals, such as berry picking, corn shucking and peach canning. Mary Mebane described growing up in a black farming community in Northern Durham County in this way.

 

"Berry picking was a ritual, a part of the rhythm of summer life. I went to bed excited. We didn't know whose berries they were. Nobody had heard about the idea of private property. Besides the berries wild, free for everybody. The grown people picked up high and the children picked low. We children ate them on the spot, putting purple stained fingers into our mouths, creating purple stained tongues while the grown people wiped sweat and dodged bumblebees." Mary Mebane

 

Many black Durhamites joined in the great migration of black people to cities in the North and Western parts of the country. More than 6 million black people left the South between 1917 and 1970. Those who stayed found themselves caught between traditional farming culture and an increasingly modernized urban world and black farmers had the further burden of discrimination in federal farm lending programs, which hampered their ability to sustain, adapt and expand their farming.

 

In the 1930s, the country was grappling with a great depression and the dust bowl. The textile industry was hit hard by the reception and white textile factory workers struggled. Families survived on cheap fat back, flower beans and their own homegrown produce. Through bouts of unemployment or underemployment. Hunger was never far off. Durham's black working class occupied the bottom rung of the economic ladder even before the great depression. Poverty and food insecurity increased to such an extent that black Durhamites were six times more likely to develop pellagra than whites in 1930. Pellagra is a disease caused by niacin deficiency. It was the leading cause of death in the city after tuberculosis. Nurses counseled Durham's black residents to eat green vegetables and fresh milk, but they were told that economics not lack of knowledge led to poor eating habits.

 

As one black patient remarked: "We would like to do everything you say, but we just haven't got the money."

 

During the great depression, the food situation became so desperate that the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration and charities such as the Red Cross began distributing food relief. The supplies staved off hunger to some extent, but black and white residents were both complaining the food wasn't what they would normally eat. Here an unemployed white textile worker in East Durham described his family's struggle with the emergency relief rations during the great depression.

 

"I go around to the place that the WPA distributes commodities and the last time they gave me four packs of powdered skim milk, five pounds of country butter, three pounds of navy beans, 24 pounds of flour. That was grand flour to mix awful bread. I've tried every way I could think of to cook it. And it ain't been able to do anything with it yet. That stuff just ain't fitting for a dog to eat, but I have to use everything I get. One of the boys gets up early every morning and goes out and picks berries for breakfast. They with butter do make the flour eat a lot better. He wants to pick some for preserves, but we can highly get sugar for our needs right now. But there is something about us that keeps us hoping that in some way, the future will take care of itself." Unemployed white textile worker in Durham during the Depression

 

Over time federal, state and local Durham aid efforts shifted toward training and getting people new jobs, but black men and women did not get the same opportunities as Durham's white residents. In 1933, the federal government passed the agriculture adjustment act later known as the farm bill. This legislation raised market prices and paid farmers to rest soils depleted from intensive farming. But this created new problems for small farmers already struggling to survive. Davis Harris reflects on the changes these policies caused in the black farming community of Northern Durham County.

 

"The federal government started paying farmers to put their soil in what they called the soil bank. At the time the US was producing more grain than they needed. So they asked farmers in order to preserve the land and soil, if they could just let the soil rest. And if you did that for 10 years, the people like me growing up who got public jobs, it was difficult to go back to the farm because you get accustomed to getting paid every month. And to go back to once a year was difficult, almost impossible. And then the farmer's equipment gets obsolete and the facilities get obsolete and there is no help. So I see that as a turning point because you've lost all your resources, your equipment, your facilities, and your workforce, and the farmers are 10 to 12 years older. So a lot of the farmers had to get public jobs so they can get enough credit to draw social security." Davis Harris

 

Black land owners also contended with private property laws that put them at a very real disadvantage. Black families had little reason to trust institutions and were far less likely to have a will than white families. So when a property owner died without a legal will, their property passed to all their direct heirs as partial shares. A form of ownership transfer called heirs property. Over several generations property ownership became increasingly unclear as dozens or even hundreds of heirs could own a small share. Heirs were then more vulnerable to land speculators and developers through a legal process called partition action. Speculators would buy off the interest of a single heir. And just one heir, no matter how small their share, and this would force the sale of entire plot of land through the courts. Black farm ownership peaked between 1910 and 1920, and then dropped dramatically due to the changing farm economy, discrimination and coercive means. From 1910 to the 1930s, the total number of farms in Durham declined dramatically. But black farmers lost their land at more than twice the rate of white farmers.

 

Willie Roberts, a black Durham County mechanic and farmer was interviewed in the 1930s and had this to say about the tensions of the time: "We got some mean neighbors around here. They hate us 'cause we own, and we won't sell. They want to buy it for nothing. They don't like for colored people to own land. They got a white lady, Ms. Jones on the next farm to say that I attacked her. I hope to be struck down by Jesus if I said or did anything she could kick on, it's all prejudiced against a colored family that's trying to catch up with the whites. They hated my father because he owned land and my mother because she taught school and now they're trying to run us off, but we're going to stay on."

 

In 1942, many young men were serving in world war II and black agricultural laborers were leaving farms as part of the great migration to Northern and Western states. So the federal government enacted the Bracero Program to address severe farm labor shortages. This allowed contract laborers from Mexico into the country to fill the labor gap. Where you live, determines where you buy food and what food is available. And Durham's black urban residents were grappling with Jim Crow laws and with segregation.

 

"In all licensed restaurants, public eating places and weenie shops where persons of the white and colored races are permitted to be served with and eat food and are allowed to congregate. There shall be provided separate rooms for the separate accommodation of each race. The partition between such rooms shall be constructed of wood, plaster or brick or like material, and shall reach from the floor to the ceiling…" The code of the city of Durham, North Carolina, 1947, C13 section 42.

 

Segregation and racial discrimination meant that opportunities for home ownership, loans, and neighborhood improvements favored white people, discriminatory policies and practices also impacted access to nutritious foods and to restaurants and resentment was building.

 

A black woman recalls her childhood experiences during this time: "When I was a child, the Durham Dairy was a weekly stop on Sunday evenings as part of our family drive, we would park, go into the counter and then return to the car with our ice cream. After my father finished his, we would drive around Durham while the rest of us finished our ice cream. I had no idea as a young child that the reason we took that ice cream to the car was because the Durham Dairy was segregated and being an African American family we were not allowed to eat our ice cream on the premises. I was shocked to learn as an adult how my parents had been so artful in sparing this ugly truth from me and my younger siblings."

 

As early as the 1920s, Durham's white homeowners had to agree to racial covenants on their suburban home and land deeds, such covenants explicitly prevented black ownership and restricted black residents in homes, except for domestic servants. This practice was legal until 1948. The National Association of Real Estate Boards code of ethics at that time directed real estate agents to maintain segregation in the name of safeguarding, neighborhood stability and property values. The industry practice known as steering remained in effect until 1950.

 

"A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing in a neighborhood members of any race or nationality whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood…" National Association of Real Estate Boards code of ethics

 

The great depression stimulated the country's new deal, social safety net legislation, including the social security act of 1935, which offered benefits and unemployment insurance. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 created the right for workers to organize. However, agricultural and domestic workers positions held predominantly by black people during the 1930s were specifically excluded from these programs, losing out on both fair pay and labor protections.

 

Historian Ira Katznelson wrote extensively about the impact of these policy decisions on the country's African Americans: "Southern legislators understood that their region's agrarian interests and racial arrangements were inextricably entwined. By excluding these persons from new deal legislation it remained possible to maintain racial inequality in Southern labor markets by dictating the terms and conditions of African American labor."

 

The federal government also recognized home ownership as one of the best ways to stabilize the economy and expand the middle class. The homeowner's loan corporation, a government sponsored corporation created as part of the new deal developed city maps and color coded neighborhoods according to lending risks, these maps became the model for public and private lending from the 1930s on. In Durham and elsewhere, red lines were drawn around black, mixed race and the poorest white neighborhoods, the effects of redlining now close to a century old had profound effects that are still felt to this day. Over time these maps discourage investment in home ownership and also business development in these areas ringed in red and encouraged and supported these things in white neighborhoods.

 

By defining some areas as too risky for investment lending practices followed, poverty was exacerbated and concentrated and housing deserts, credit deserts and food deserts became a predictable consequence. Redlining maps also shaped lending practices for the GI Bill Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. The GI Bill made mortgages available to World War II veterans with little or no down payment. And with very low interest rates. The aim was to create financial stability and the accumulation of generational wealth for those who would serve the country through home ownership. However, most homes were in suburban neighborhoods, primarily financed by the federal government. Between redlining lending practices and real estate covenants restricting black buyers, home ownership simply wasn't possible for the vast majority of the 1 million plus black World War II veterans. Between 1935 and 1968, less than 2% of federal home loans were for black people. The GI Bill also did not issue home loans on Indian reservations, which excluded many Native American veterans.

 

In the late 1950s, Durham received federal money for a local urban renewal program to clear slums and blighted areas through the Housing Act of 1949. The city chose to demolish a large section of the Hayti area, the city's largest and most prominent black neighborhood and home to most black owned businesses. This changed everything. City officials cited the poor physical conditions of Hayti as the reason for demolition. The land was then used to build North Carolina highway 147, a freeway connector.

 

Louis Austin editor of the Carolina Times wrote in 1965: "The so-called urban renewal program in Durham is not only the biggest farce ever concocted in the mind of moral man, but it is just another scheme to relieve Negroes of property."

 

Hayti's destruction included a significant part of the neighborhood's food infrastructure, such as grocery stores and restaurants. What was once a thriving and resilient food economy where wealth remained in the community became a food desert.

 

Nathaniel White, formerly a Hayti business owner in Durham had this to say about the destruction of the Hayti neighborhood: "Well, I think we got something like $32,000 for our business. As I look back on it now, if you're going to drive a freeway right through my building, the only fair thing to do is to replace that building. In other words, I ought to be able to move my equipment and everything into a building. If they do it like that, you will be able to stand the damage. Now, the highway department has a replacement clause in their building, but the urban renewal had what they call fair market value, and that won't replace it. And that's where the handicap comes. Just say, you give them $32,000 that probably would've bought the land or whatever, but it wouldn't put the building back and everything like that."

 

In the 1950s, Durham built federally funded housing projects for low income families. But by the late 1960s, public housing in the city was almost exclusively for black people and clustered in existing black neighborhoods. This further reinforced patterns of residential segregation, Durham's lunch counters and restaurants became rallying points during the civil rights movements. North Carolina's first protest was at Durham's Royal ice cream restaurant in 1957.

 

Virginia Williams, a young black woman at the time was a member of the Royal Ice Cream Nine who staged the protest: "None of it made any sense, but that had been the way of life. And that's the way the older folk had accepted it. And so I guess I was one of them who thought, if not us, who, if not now, when. So the police officers came and they asked us to leave. I remember one of them asking me to leave and I asked for ice cream. And he said, if you were my daughter, I would spank you and make you leave. And then I said, if I was your daughter, I wouldn't be here sitting here being asked to leave."

 

In 1962, more than 4,000 people protested at Howard Johnson's Ice Cream Grill in Durham. The struggle to desegregate eateries intensified in 1963, when protesters organized sit-ins at six downtown restaurants on the eve of municipal elections, hundreds of people were arrested and protestors surrounded the jail in solidarity. And in the weeks that followed more than 700 black and white Durhamites ran a full page ad in the Durham Herald newspaper. They pledged to support restaurants and other businesses that adopted equal treatment to all, without regard to race. The mounting public pressure resulted in mass desegregation of Durham Eateries by the end of 1962, ahead of the 1964 federal civil rights act that legally ended segregation.

 

Although civil rights wins brought about new political, economic and social opportunities for black people, desegregation didn't help black businesses. They suffered economically because black people began to explore new opportunities to shop outside their neighborhoods, but white people didn't patronize black owned businesses in turn.

 

In 1964, the federal government passed the Food Stamp Act as a means to safeguard people's health and wellbeing and provide a stable foundation for US agriculture. It was also intended to raise levels of nutrition among low income households. The food stamp program was implemented in Durham County in 1966. A decade later the program was in every county in the country.

 

From 1970 through the 1990s, urban renewal continued to disrupt and reshape Durham central city. As both white and middle class black residents left central Durham for suburban homes, banks and grocery stores disappeared. Textile and tobacco factory jobs were also leaving Durham for good. Thousands of workers became unemployed and the domino effect on home ownership, businesses and workplaces disrupted much of Durham's infrastructure and its community life.

 

From 1970 through the 1980s, the availability of home refrigerators and microwaves also changed how families stored and cooked their food. Durham already had higher numbers of working women than the national average. As a result, convenience foods, foods from restaurants, prepared meals at grocery stores and microwavable foods from the freezer were in demand.

 

Like many Americans, Durham residents had become increasingly disconnected from farming and food production, both physically and culturally. Food corporations now used marketing in the media to shape ideas about what to eat and why. The food system became dominated by increasing corporate consolidation and control. And by large scale industrial agriculture emphasizing monoculture. Corporations were fast gaining political and economic power and used their influence to affect trade regulations, tax rates, and wealth distribution.

 

In the 1980s, the federal government passed legislation that boosted free market capitalism, reduced social safety net spending and promoted volunteerism and charity as a way to reduce poverty and government welfare. These policies negatively impacted Durham's already historically disadvantaged populations. Nonprofit organizations began to emerge to deal with the growing issues of hunger and food insecurity and nonprofit food charity became an industry unto itself. More than 80% of pantries and soup kitchens in the US came into existence between 1980 and 2001.

 

The H-2A Guest Worker Program of 1986 allowed agricultural workers to hire seasonal foreign workers on special visas who were contracted to a particular farm, but workers did not have the same labor protections as US citizens.

 

That same year, the US launched the war on drugs to reduce drug abuse and crime. Low income communities were disproportionately targeted when Durham's housing authority paid off duty police officers to patrol high crime areas, particularly public housing developments. Hyper policing, drug criminalization, and logger sentencing for drug related offenses caused incarceration rates to rise steadily. Durham's jail and prison incarceration rates from 1978 to 2015 rose higher than anywhere else in North Carolina.

 

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Chuck Omega Manning, an activist and director of the city of Durham's welcome program. "Being totally honest, high incarceration rates for people of color is very detrimental to our health. Even in the Durham County Jail, you have a canteen that's run through a private company who only sell certain things like oodles of noodles that are not healthy. And then in prisons, you don't get to eat vegetables unless it's part of your dinner. And even then it's oftentimes still not healthy because of how it's cooked. But if you don't work in the kitchen, you don't get to decide, you just get it how it comes and you pray over it and eat it. But then over time, people get institutionalized in the system. And when they return home, they continue to eat the same way because they're used to it. And the financial piece only enhances that because you have individuals coming home, looking for employment, trying to do something different. And there are just so many barriers even with food stamps. So it almost feels like you're being punished twice. And it's very depressing."

 

In the 1990s, Durham wanted more investment in the downtown area. Instead of the factory jobs of the past, the downtown area shifted to offer low paying service jobs and high paying jobs in research and technology. Wealthy newcomers were called urban pioneers and trailblazers and purchase properties in historically disinvested city areas.

 

Low wage workers today cannot afford new housing prices in Durham, in most cases, or to pay the increasing property taxes. Many people are losing their homes through when increases, evictions and foreclosures. Gentrification has also changed which food retailers exist in the local food environment. Sometimes this creates food mirages where high quality food is priced out of reach of longtime residents.

 

The North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA of 1994 also changed Durham and North Carolina. Farmers from Mexico and Central America driven out of business by the trade agreement immigrated to places like North Carolina, looking for agricultural and construction jobs. Durham's Latino population grew from just over 2000 in people to 1990, to nearly 40,000 in 2014, one out of three Durham public school students was Latino in 2014. Today, 94% of migrant farm workers in North Carolina are native Spanish speakers.

 

In 1996, the federal government made changes to the nation's food assistance security net. It dramatically cut SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps and limited eligibility to receive benefits and the length of benefits. In Durham, SNAP benefit participation rate decreased by 14% between 1997 and 2001 despite a 2% increase in the poverty rate.

 

Durham's Latino Credit Union opened in 2000 at a time when three quarters of Latinos did not bank at all. Over the next 20 years, Latinos developed and operated restaurants, grocery stores and services across Durham. This provided the Latino population with culturally resident food, community gathering spaces and jobs.

 

Processed foods had become a central part of the American diet by the early two thousands. And the vast majority of food advertising promoted convenience foods, candies, and snacks, alcoholic beverages, soft drinks and desserts. In addition, companies did and still do target black and Hispanic consumers with marketing for the least nutritious products contributing to diet related health disparities, affecting communities of color.

 

During the great recession of 2007 to 2009, job losses, wage reductions and foreclosure crisis increased the number of people struggling to afford and access enough nutritious food. As a result, SNAP participation rose dramatically in Durham.

 

In 2008, the farm bill included language about food deserts for the first time. A food desert was defined as a census track with a substantial share of residents who live in low income areas and have low levels of access to a grocery store or to healthy affordable foods in a retail outlet. Today some scholars describe such places as areas of food apartheid. This recognizes the outcomes of past policy decisions that disinvested in disadvantaged populations and locations, the cumulative effects of living under food apartheid have profound impacts on the health, wellbeing, and life expectancy of people of color and the poor.

 

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Latonya Gilchrist, a Durham county community health worker: "I've suffered a lot in this body for a lot of people it's genetic, but I feel like, and this is my personal feeling based on what I've experienced and my whole family. It's the role of food deserts and the cost of food, not being able to have a community grocery store and what I'll say for Northeast Central Durham or the East Durham area where I grew up, we always had corner stores that sold everything we didn't need. And very little of what we did need. Back when I was a child growing up, potato chips cost 16 cents a bag, and you could get potato chips all day long and all night long, and people could get beer and wine in the neighborhood, but you couldn't find fruits and vegetables until my daddy started selling them on a truck. So diseases come about genetically, but it's increased or enhanced through living in poor poverty stricken neighborhoods."

 

Durham foreclosure spiked during the great recession of 2008 and were disproportionately located in historically black neighborhoods. Owners in high poverty neighborhoods have been targeted for high cost subprime loans by lenders through a practice known as reverse redlining. As neighborhoods gentrify and longtime residents get displaced, there is an increasing spatial disconnect between services and amenities and those who utilize them and need them the most. Food, housing and retail gentrification are closely intertwined.

 

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Eliazar Posada, community engagement advocacy manager of El Centro in Durham: "Gentrification is affecting a lot of our community members and not just affecting the youth, but also the families, unless we can find ways to subsidize housing or find a way to make gentrification not so dramatic for some of our community members. The youth are not going to be staying in Durham if their parents can't stay."

 

Durham's people of color and low income people overall have disproportionately high incidents of diabetes. In a 2016 survey in the Piedmont region, 16% of respondents with household incomes, less than $15,000 reported having diabetes compared to only 6% of residents with household incomes of more than $75,000. By 2017 black patients were 80% more likely than white patients to have diabetes in Durham.

 

In Durham County in 2019, the average hourly wage for food preparation and serving jobs was $10.83 cents an hour or $22,516 annually before taxes. Such wages are all been impossible to live on without government assistance. The fair market rent for a two bedroom housing unit in Durham in 2018 was $900 a month or about $10,800 a year.

 

Food inequality is a lack of consistent access to enough food for a healthy, active life is caused by poverty, the cost of housing and healthcare and unemployment and underemployment. It is also impacted by the interrelated forces of home and land ownership, political power, economic resources, structural racism, gender oppression, and labor rights. Durham's communities continue to build community solidarity and mutual aid as people lend money, time and other resources trying to make sure everyone can access adequate and healthy food.

 

In a remarkable feat of resilience the Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation was awarded official recognition by North Carolina in 2002, following 20 years of organizing and sustained advocacy. They purchased a 250 acre plot of land just outside of Durham County and planted an orchard of fruit bearing trees for collective tribal use. This is the first land that the tribe has owned collectively in more than 250 years.

 

Durham's black farmer's market emerging from 2015 to 2019 is also a testament to community building through food. The market supports local black farmers and makes healthy eating attainable for individuals living in some of Durham's food apartheid areas. Market organizers are challenging social norms, classism and racism, and believe that healthy living should be possible for everyone.

 

So why is the food history of a community so important? And can Durham's food history be applied to other places? Who owns land, who can grow food and make a living doing so, and who has access to food, any food, least of all healthy food? The answers are deeply influenced by historical policies and practices. These in retrospect, clearly exacerbated, supported, and even created food related calamities, the dual burden communities face of both food insecurity and diet related chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity. Understanding these practices is important in creating change. And in understanding that conditions imposed on neighborhoods rather than personal failings of residents explain what we see today.

 

A few pieces of this history are specific to Durham, the role of tobacco and textiles, for instance, but most of the fundamental influences on the economic and food conditions are broad social attitudes and practices around race and poverty. And from federal, economic, agriculture and housing policies that have affected urban rural areas in every corner of the country, there is hope from local ingenuity to change food systems and from people in local, state and federal policy positions who are working to reverse inequality and to re-envision the role of food in supporting the physical and economic wellbeing of all people, learning from the past is really important in these efforts.

Today, we're talking to a change management leader, a person who is advancing social justice through food co-ops. Darnell Adams co-leads Firebrand Cooperative, a new consultancy helping nonprofits, cooperatives, and other socially responsible organizations throughout the US. In a recent article, she wrote for "Nonprofit Quarterly" that a food co-op isn't a luxury item, but the lifeblood of their communities.

Interview Summary

 

So let's jump right in. You've written that a new wave of leaders is organizing in communities, Black communities, Latinx, Indigenous, rural, immigrant communities, and communities lacking in wealth overall. How have your experiences led your work in supporting economic development through food?

 

Yeah, it's such an interesting journey I've been on. So I'm going to step back just a minute to say how I landed in the places that I've started to work. Certainly my interest in food is shaped by my experience in the world and my childhood experiences. My mother, who is an immigrant, my father, who's an immigrant - their relation to food and the African diaspora. I grew up understanding what food meant in terms of identity, in terms of nutrition, etc. So I had my own thoughts about food certainly from those experiences, and also had my own business as a caterer for many years. I had that understanding of what it means to be a small business, and launching a business and all of the trials and tribulations of doing that. And in the process of running that business I came to find a location where I could situate that business in a way that was affordable to me using a shared kitchen space that was located in Boston, Massachusetts. Then I really started to develop a broader understanding of some of the economic considerations, not just mine, but many of the producers were having in terms of how to run a viable business, and what supports were needed or missing in their experiences. It's kind of a long story and I won't get into it how it happened, but it so happened that at a certain point, I began a new career as managing director of that shared space kitchen. That was a whole leap in terms of thinking about not just my small catering business, but supporting many businesses, whether they be food trucks, caterers, producers of something that was a shelf staple product or something like that. Many of those business owners were immigrants, many were women or otherwise not having the amount of capital to be able to just open up their own spaces.

 

Tell us a little bit more, if you would, about the kitchen itself and what kind of work it did?

 

Oh, sure. So the kitchen, and there are now several across the country, but at that time, there were very few of them. It was a shared space that was initially run by a CDFI - a community development funding institution - who was able to obtain funding to open up a kitchen space knowing that there were many people who wanted to run food businesses, or start a food business, but were unable to because of the cost of actually renting out a space. They needed space to use and that would be inspected by inspectional services and given the green light to work and sell their products. So the kitchen did actually aid some caterers and other people who were working underground in their own houses, not being certified, etc., and therefore not able to expand their business. The idea of shared kitchens is really, really important. Certainly it was the way that I was able to launch my business and able to run it for some years because it was affordable to me. And at that one location was able to grow the business and actually move the location to a bigger space. I have a really long story there, but it's CommonWealth Kitchen in Boston and it is still thriving. They were able to actually buy the building recently, and the space that is still producing quite a lot of businesses that are thriving and also moving into their own spaces. The kitchen is able to give the support, not only just the physical space, but the technical assistance that's necessary to launch a business, to have a business thrive, and then maybe that businesses can move on to have their own spaces. This is really important in terms of thinking about the whole ecosystem of what I would say the food system needs in many communities. But also in terms of what individually someone might actually need in terms of being able to thrive in the food business.

 

Well, you can see how this would be so powerful as a means of helping people get launched. And a topic that we could talk about another day might be how can these things be put in more places with more support so more people, their businesses could be facilitated by it. But let me turn our attention to the issue of food sovereignty. So I know you've done a lot of thinking about food sovereignty, especially in Black communities. What sort of efforts are you seeing?

 

Yes, this actually leads me to cooperatives as one of the kind of efforts that I'm seeing in Black communities. And, if we kind of would follow the storyline, in some ways in my experience. The shared kitchen really did open my eyes to the power of collective resources, that no one person in that kitchen was able to afford having their own facility, but together, along with supportive fundraisers, etc., who are able to have a place that was actually thriving and meeting needs. And so upon me leaving that job, I was really kind of struck with what are other ways in which people are creatively thinking about collective capital and all the ways capital can be defined. And there was an opportunity with a food co-op in Boston, the Dorchester Food Co-op that was looking for a project manager to administer some of deliverables for a grant that they had. That was my entrance into the cooperative world, and realized that cooperative economics, an understanding of what people were doing in developing a co-op and all the things that it took, actually really very much aligned with my experience in general. And my philosophy in terms of how people have more entryways, more opportunities to actually take control and ownership of their own economic development. So it's not always groups from the outside looking at a community and then saying, well, we know how funds should be applied or how businesses should be created. Instead, particularly in a cooperative movement, it's the community themselves are saying, we understand exactly what we need in terms of goods and services. We actually will define for ourselves both what leadership looks like and what ownership looks like. So in terms of food sovereignty movement in Black communities and others as well, this incredible growth in terms of thinking - let's look at what joint ownership looks like as a different way to create sovereignty and to keep money in a community. But also money in working in the ways that are consistent with our needs. So certainly food co-ops. Lots of work around land loss, Black land loss for farmers, and creating land trusts. Again, this idea, while not cooperative, is still looking at kind of a collective way of ownership that keeps land off the speculative market. Also just supporting the farmers that are there, both in rural areas and in urban farming. So there is kind of a whole landscape where people are really thinking very deeply and working very hard on all the aspects of food sovereignty, from growing to shopping to workers.

 

So can you explain some of the opportunities that get created through these kind of efforts and how these opportunities help create social justice?

 

Yes. This is what's so incredibly exciting and certainly keeps me motivated to work with the folks that I'm working with. The opportunities are pretty broad. And I kind of mentioned a few of these before in terms of thinking about what ownership looks like in a very different way, in which kind of the language of ownership sometimes can get overused. And if you kind of dig deeper, it's not real ownership. So for instance, in terms of food cooperatives, the business is actually owned via shares by its members. In which case, for food co-op, typically that is the community members who are buying a share of the business. Not like being an owner of a quote unquote, a member of a big box store, where you get some money back and you say, okay, well, I'm a member of this club, but you have no ownership. There's no share that is given to you. You're not a shareholder. In the case of cooperatives, certainly you are. And so really kind of rethinking about, like, well, it's not that for goods and services that are might be absent in a community that we need to wait for another entity to come and offer to us what they have, and it may or may not be a match for what we actually really need. But as owners, the folks who are actually going to benefit from the existence of the business, from the profits of the business, by the goods and services that are being delivered, that ownership really does take a whole different sort of meaning that a lot of people are accustomed to. And then there's also the opportunity for leadership also in ways that I think are certainly opportunities that many people may not have had before, and I can certainly speak from my experience that as the project manager of the cooperative, that stepping into that role required leadership and vision in ways that I had not encountered before when I was working for another entity, and I was staff doing what I needed to do, but because it's a grassroots effort, because the systems and the processes, all of that are things that are kind of created by the entity, it meant all the ways to experience all sorts of different levels of leadership and consideration that in many cases would not be something that people would experience.

 

Right, so, I mean, you're painting a really wonderful picture of how many people in a community can play different roles and develop leadership abilities that are possible through these, so those are some of the opportunities. What are some of the challenges, and what do you think such groups need most?

 

Right - I'm certainly, you probably can tell by my description of things, very much enthusiastic about the opportunities and the vision for many of these efforts. Particularly the food cooperatives that are happening all across the country in Black communities, and the challenges are also real. So some of that is certainly capital, and I can kind of outline a bit on some of the struggles there and the ways that it can be deployed that would be helpful to some of these organizations. So in terms of capital, one thing is really on some basic level, kind of unknowing in many ways from where groups who might be able to provide capital and even understanding what a cooperative is and how it works. So it's kind of the general idea that, well, cooperatives are out there. I think maybe they sell granola and things, but beyond that, not a kind of deeper understanding of kind of inner workings of a cooperative and how their money might actually be aligned to other social justice issues that they might be funding. So it's like just the awareness and saying, okay, well, this seems to make sense in terms of, yes, if I'm thinking more about nutrition, about any number of things, but say nutrition, food access, economic development, having a better and more refined understanding of what cooperatives offer might actually kind of bridge that gap between the funders and what's needed in order to create a cooperative. Secondly is the amount of time it takes to develop a cooperative, which can be years. It definitely requires a lot of people taking a lot of time that is often voluntary, but can also kind of stretch them out of time that it takes for people to develop these co-ops in their communities because they're trying to fit it in amongst all the other things that they're trying to do in their lives. They're not paid for it necessarily, so I think a certain amount of funding, even just for a paid project manager to kind of move forward what is a complicated business, to kind of shorten the length of time so the delivery of goods and services can happen in a more rapid fashion to actually address some of the issues that we're seeing in Black communities. So that is a couple things there, which is the time it kind of can take, and also lack of capital resources that some of these groups have, and then trying to certainly work around that.

 

 

Bio

 

Darnell Adams, of Firebrand Cooperative, is a dynamic leadership coach, facilitator and business strategist, who has over two decades of experience working with nonprofit, for profit and cooperative businesses. She has been personally recognized in "Bold Thinkers Who Are Shaping Our City'' by Boston Magazine's Power of Ideas and as a Social Innovator by the Social Innovation Forum accelerator program. She develops and facilitates strategic plans, special projects, and workshops, providing expertise and training on an array of topics including implicit bias, power and equity. Darnell has presented to government officials, university administrators, and industry leaders to create social and economic change. Darnell has a Master of Education from Harvard University and is a Certified Leadership Coach.

Today, we're exploring an agricultural innovation in the state of Qatar in Western Asia. Qatar is a wealthy, densely populated country located on the Northeast coast of the Arabian peninsula and leads the world in liquified natural gas exports. But the country's desert climate is harsh and the agriculture there is challenging. That's where shipping containers, artificial light and vertical farming techniques come into play. Our guest today is horticulturalist Mohamed Hassouna from the Qur-anic Botanic Garden in Qatar. He and his partners at the University of Arizona are developing a shipping container vertical farming model as a way to expand local food production.

Interview Summary

 

So first let's set the stage for our listeners. Could you describe the agricultural challenges in Qatar given the country's dry climate?

 

Thank you for your introduction. Qatar, as other countries located in the Arabia peninsula and also in the Arabian states, are facing very harsh weather conditions. Particularly in Qatar, the weather here is hot desert weather characterized by sparse precipitations and high summer temperature experienced with high humidity, high solar radiation and poor soil additionally to strong winds. And this limits the agriculture sector to the months of October to April. Every year, this is the agriculture season here from October to April then the temperature is fine and can allow for producing vegetables. Also the land, the Arab land, suitable for agriculture is very limited. The last inventory here in the state estimated that there is only 60,000 hectares available for the agriculture sector. Also, we have a challenge with water. Water scarcity. The agriculture sector here in Qatar consumes 90% of the available water for the state. A big challenge is also that the agriculture sector consume about 36% of the available water in the aquifer. And as I told you, we have very minimum amount of rain every year. It's about 80 millimeters on average, every year. So production of agriculture in Qatar is difficult.

 

Well, the picture you paint is really striking and I can imagine those challenges. So what role could your Botanic garden play in addressing food security in the country, closing the food security gap for communities, and also attending to the environment?

 

Yes! The Qur-anic Botanic Garden is an active member in the community development sector in Qatar Foundation. It takes the issue of community awareness and education from school students to housewife to training even professionals to engage in the investment in agriculture. We established at the Qur-anic Botanic Garden an extra curriculum educational program for school students - from early stage to especially secondary schools students - to learn about the challenges of food security in Qatar, and what are the technologies they can learn. Students are leading the future here in Qatar. Without students being aware about the challenges facing the food security and the agriculture production, we cannot guarantee a future outlook of food security. Also the Qur-anic Botanic Garden has been partnered with Qatar Development Bank, and this is the official bank assigned to develop industry like also agriculture sector. So, anyone from Qatar who would like to take a loan to invest in the agriculture sector, we have the mission to train them on the latest technology of horticulture practices. They can use or they can establish greenhouses or they can establish other modern system for a production of vegetables. Either in their homes or in farms outside. Also Qur-anic Botanic Garden established a hotline for household people. There is now community farming in Qatar. People would like to plant their own vegetables in their home. The hotline is answering all their inquiries about seed selections, seedlings, how to prepare soil, how to make pesticides.

 

So let's talk a little more deeply now about vertical farming. Can you describe what that is?

 

Vertical farming involves growing crops in controlled indoor environments with precise lab nutrients and temperatures. In vertical farming, plants are stacked in a layers that may reach several storage unit stories - from personal community scale vegetables or herbal growing to vast building for commercial production of a wide range of crops. Due to the pressure for agriculture land, this makes us look to maximization for food production. Model technology like vertical farming is increasingly something we are turning to for greater crop yield.

 

I'm envisioning in my mind what the vertical farming could look like. And I'm thinking that in order to produce enough food say to feed a population, you need an awful lot of containers and an awful lot of technology to accompany those containers. Can that be done on a large enough scale?

 

Before we answer this, we need to go through the pro and cons for vertical farming. If we can speak first about advantages of vertical farming, we can say that vertical farming can ensure crop production year round in desert harsh weather regions like Qatar or other countries in the Arabian Peninsula. And also a controlled growing condition in a vertical farm allow production without chemical pesticides used when needed to deal with any problems from insects. Also, because crops in vertical farming are growing under controlled environmental conditions, they are safe from extreme weather events, such as drought, high temperature, severe winds that also we are facing here. Hydroponic growing techniques used in vertical farming use about 70% less of water than normal agriculture. So, growing the crops indoor reduces the use of tractors and other machinery that also produce a lot of CO2 and this is could be a climate friendly industry. So this is some advantage behind vertical farming that can give us strong signal to say yes, vertical farming can feed a lot of people around the world. Especially in the area that have these two main challenges, availability of vertical soil and a scarcity of water.

 

Oh, it's so interesting to hear you speak about this. So it sounds like you're optimistic that the technologies can continue to develop and that the vertical farming approach could really help contribute to national food security in your country. But so what do you think are the main opportunities there and what do you think the main challenges are?

 

Thank you for this question, Kelly. Indeed, I'm optimistic about this industry. Cost of land and building for vertical farming is not easy and it's not also available for all countries and for all people. It needs solar isolation, it needs air conditioners. It needs precise lighting. It needs operation computers. So it needs also specific types of nutrients to be introduced in the cycle of production for fertilization. Here, you bring all the inputs of production cycle. In what you add to the water or to directly to the plants. So the cost is high on the energy side also. You use high amount of energy at a time we are calling everyone to reduce the use of energy and avoid production of CO2. Also, you're aware of expansion of organic agriculture everywhere in the world. So, there are now questions about vertical farming certification. How we can certify or how we can consider merging between organic agriculture and vertical farming. As I said, we use all chemical nutrients in vertical farming to provide the plant with sufficient amount of all of other nutrients required for production. In this case, organic agriculture certification cannot be applied. And scientists in USDA and FAO and many other organization are looking to find a way they can provide a product from vertical farming certified under organic agriculture systems. Two points now, the limited number of crop species in vertical farming. Also, you cannot produce these tall plants that you can grow everywhere or creeping plants that grow everywhere in the field, in the natural field. So you are limited with this layers of a production. So mainly you produce leaves and produce and herbal plants. So we have limited number of crops. Still, also pollination. In natural, we have a bees that make pollinations for the production of vegetables, even for fruits, every, everything. But here, we doesn't have a pollination so we need to go with artificial pollination and this also extra cost to have a special type of bees that you need to put inside the glass houses or inside the building you produce in to secure pollination to complete the cycle of production.

 

Bio

 

Mohamed Hassouna is a Horticulturist at the Qur'anic Botanic Garden (QBG), a member of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. He joined Qatar Foundation in late 2010. He guides and supervises agricultural laborers, coordinating work schedules and performing evaluations, and prescribes fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and other compounds required for plant care and development. And, he contributes to QBG's continual education-based conservation programs targeting the Qatari community, especially in the fields of food security, forestation and plant propagation. He is an alumnus of the Advanced International Training Programme on Plant Breeding & Seed Production and Plant Genetic Resources at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden – Classes of 2008 and 2013. He is finalizing a Master of Science degree in Sustainable Agriculture & Environment and in addition holds a Higher Diploma – Graduate Education – in the same field and a Bachelor of Science degree in Agriculture Sciences & Education, which he gained while studying in Egypt.

Today, we're going to talk salt with Dr. Michael Jacobson, former president and co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Dr. Jacobson is one of the authors of an important article published recently in the journal Hypertension. The article comes to a startling conclusion that delays in implementing voluntary sodium reduction targets by the food and restaurant industry may result in nearly 265,000 preventable deaths between 2017 and 2031.

Interview Summary

 

So Mike, you've been a hero of mine for decades and I really admire the work you've done on so many different topics. And you and I have written a thing or two over the years which has been a great pleasure for me to do, but on things like soda taxes and nutrition policy, but you've also had a really long standing deep interest in the issue of salt. So let's start with the following question. Tell us why salt is a problem.

 

The main concern about too much salt is that it contributes to high blood pressure. That's a major cause of heart attacks and strokes, kidney disease, and probably some other problems both here in the United States and throughout the world. In almost all cultures, people are drinking/eating excessive amounts of salt far more than what the World Health Organization or the Department of Health and Human Services here in the United States recommends. Hypertension experts have been concerned about excess salt for decades and decades. Back in 1969, there was a White House conference on food, nutrition, and health and one of the recommendations was to reduce sodium intake. Mostly sodium chloride, but also some other ingredients in food besides salt and nothing was done. I first got involved in this in 1977 when a newly minted nutritionist came to Center for Science in the Public Interest, Bonnie Leaman. And I asked her to look into salt and what she found was very disconcerting. It seemed like a wide range of hypertension experts was encouraging people to consume less salt and some people were urgent government action. So in 1978, the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to restrict levels of sodium and packaged in restaurant foods and require warnings on foods that contained excessive amounts of sodium. Almost nothing was done and the next 45 years or so is just a history of inaction by the most responsible health officials in the country. And similar inaction was occurring worldwide. And there've been Institute of Medicine reports, World Health Organization reports and a whole bunch of things like that. But Americans are consuming today just about the same amount of sodium as we were consuming 10, 20, 30 or more years ago. It's really a sad tale about government in action and we can talk about some of the reasons why that's happened.

 

I'd love to hear some of that and boy, it's pretty disheartening that the scientific evidence has been around so lot, but so is the inaction. So I'd like to get to the why of this in a minute, but let me ask you a question first. Does the problem mainly come from how you and I, and everyone else, uses a salt shaker on foods at home or in restaurants, or is it salt added by the industry to foods that people buy?

 

Well 100 years ago, it probably would've been the salt shaker, but now the vast majority of foods that we eat come in boxes and cans. They come in freezer cases at grocery stores and restaurants. We get about a third of our food from restaurants and that's really the culprit - and it should make it easier to solve this problem. But instead of having to persuade 330 million people to put down the salt shaker, the government could set limits on the amount of sodium in different packaged foods. Or it could require warning notices on foods to contain excessive amounts of sodium and let me just give you a few examples. This is from my book, Salt Wars, of some restaurant meals and to give you just a benchmark. The government recommends that people consume no more than 2300 milligrams of sodium per day, 2300 milligrams. It's about a teaspoon worth of salt. So compared to the 2300 milligrams, if you get a spicy chicken sandwich with fries and chicken soup at Chick-fil-A, you're getting 50% more than that. You're getting 3,800 milligrams of sodium. A roasted turkey breast sandwich at Jason's Deli, 4,200. At Chili's restaurant, honey chipotle crispers and waffles, 4,700, twice as much as the recommendation. At an AMC movie theater, you can get a soft pretzel with more than three times as much sodium. So the amounts are just outrageous and that reflects that it's cheap and easy to add salt to a food and most people like the taste of salt, it's built into us genetically and the portions at restaurants are gargantuan. So that's turned restaurant food into a major problem for sodium.

 

Mike, I think you've started to answer the question about why these changes haven't been made. It sounds like industry is probably having pretty powerful sway over the lack of action that legislators have had in the past on this issue. Is that true? Are they just thinking we don't want to make this change because people will like our products more if they're high in sodium?

 

Yes, and they're afraid that if their company lowers sodium, a competitor might not lower sodium. And that's actually an advantage of having mandatory limits but the issue is the same as getting lead out of gasoline, getting DDT off of farms. Anytime there's a big corporate interest, big financial interest in the status quo, those companies, those industries don't want to change. It can be expensive to change - maybe you need new machinery, a new processes. In the case of salt, though, you hardly need to do anything. Obviously, if a company wants to lower sodium, it needs to taste the food before it sends it out on the marketplace. And it might have to replace some of the salt with other seasonings, add or more vegetables or more chicken, depending on the food. But it's not rocket science at all. It should be something that companies can do and some companies have really made an effort. Remember, nobody's saying get rid of all the salt. The government recommends that we reduce sodium intake from about 3,400 milligrams a day down to about 2,300. So that's a one third reduction in intake. And some companies are meeting the FDA's recommended limits right now, other companies are not. But it's something that companies just need to say "we're going to do it." And usually they can change the food so that there's no difference in taste whatsoever. And there's one little trick that more and more companies are using is to replace table salt with potassium salt. Replace sodium chloride with potassium chloride, which isn't quite as salty as sodium chloride, regular salt. It's a great replacement and you can replace maybe a third of the sodium in a packaged food simply by using potassium chloride, and that extra potassium is really beneficial in reducing blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease, especially for people who already have high blood pressure.

 

So Mike, help me understand something. If it's pretty easy to make these changes for the industry and you say that you can do it in ways that don't make taste of the foods deteriorate, why in the heck aren't the companies doing it? You think for no other reason to stay out of the way to litigation might be a good reason to do this, but certainly they could score some public health points by doing this. Why aren't they doing it?

 

They certainly could. It takes an effort. They have to assign people. At a big company like ConAgra or General Mills that makes hundreds of products, that means they have to do it methodically. It's going to take some time and time is money. So maybe they have to hire some extra food technologists, extra dieticians, extra chefs to figure out the right combinations. So there is some expense, it's not totally free. I talked to ConAgra many years ago about trans fat and they said, when they got rid of trans fat from their foods, partially hydrogenated oil, they also looked at sodium. They found out that in some of their foods, they were using far too much salt and the extra salt wasn't even detectable. It wasn't making foods saltier. It was just a waste. And so they were able to cut back on sodium in some of their products like Chef Boyardee. No effect on taste and they saved a little bit of money to boot. And I mentioned potassium salt. Campbell has been using potassium salt in tomato soup. Their regular red label, condensed tomato soup probably their number one seller over the decades, and they didn't tell anybody. Nobody noticed, they just reduced sodium by I think it was about a third. So the government has known this. Everybody's known that companies could lower sodium, but the government, I think, was afraid to act because of members of Congress who are so anti-regulatory. And then food and restaurant companies in their districts might lobby them to stop the government from interfering with their businesses and that's all happened. They put pressure on legislators. It happened in the 1980s, it happened in the 2010s very recently. I can't emphasize this enough. Excess sodium is causing as many as 100,000 premature deaths every year. That's an unbelievable number, year after year after year, but it's silent. Obituaries don't say he died from eating too much salt, people just accept it and that a heart attack might occur one year or 10 years earlier than it might otherwise have done, but it's just happening in the background so silently.

 

So Mike let's loop back to your paper and hypertension and also your book, Salt Wars. I'm happy you mentioned that and I'll mention it again at the end. So it sounds like there's a clear case for action and that the government has done something on this. The FDA has proposed some voluntary targets. Could you talk to us about that and what's kind of the history of the FDA and what the heck's taken so long?

 

First, the major health authorities around the world have said for decades people are eating too much sodium. You've got to cut back, especially in packaged foods. So that's the World Health Organization, American Heart Association and others, but that's indisputable and you're right. The government has done something. We have nutrition labels now so people can compare one food to another. And I urge listeners go to the grocery store, look at salad dressings or soups or breakfast cereals or packaged meats. Almost every category of food will show a range of sodium levels. And in most categories, you can lower sodium by 25% or more simply by switching from one good tasting brand to another. So we got nutrition labels but that hasn't had an overall effect on sodium consumption and probably hasn't had much effect on industry. So in 2010, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying that past efforts to lower sodium intake have been a failure. And now it was time for the Food and Drug Administration to set mandatory limits on sodium in packaged foods in 2010. The Food and Drug Administration immediately said it wasn't going to do mandatory limits, but would come out with some voluntary targets. It took six years for the FDA to come out with voluntary targets in 2016. That was near the end of the Obama Administration and the administration wasn't able to finalize the proposed targets. So we go into the Trump years and that's when Congress stepped in and they told the FDA that it could not move forward with some of the targets that it was proposing or it would lose its funding. So that had an effect, but surprisingly, although the Trump Administration was vehemently anti-regulatory, but the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, was in touch with reality. He was probably the only regulator in the government who was, and in 2018, he said the single most important thing to improve nutrition is to lower sodium levels and that the FDA was going to finalize those voluntary targets in 2019. Well, a few months later, Commissioner Gottlieb quit and the FDA under Trump didn't do anything. It took the Biden Administration not quite a year in October 2021 to finalize those voluntary targets. And so now we have to see will they work? And I'm skeptical that even these modest targets, which give industry two and a half years to lower sodium by an average of about 12%, I'm skeptical that they're going to have much of an impact. I don't see any real effort by the Food and Drug Administration to educate the public or to pound on industry's door and say, you got to lower sodium. I don't know if they're meeting with the big food companies and trade associations, but at least there's some movement and we should be grateful. But that over four year delay in finalizing the proposed voluntary targets has been deadly and that's what our paper calculates how many unnecessary deaths will have been caused by that four and a third year delay in finalizing those targets. And as you said earlier, it's roughly a quarter of a million unnecessary deaths between 2017 and 2031.

 

It's so discouraging to hear that. Now we face another period of some years that will be necessary to prove that the voluntary guidelines won't be met by the industry and then there will be a long process of talking about whether government should do anything, that'll depend of course, on who's in the White House. So, oh boy, it doesn't sound like anything's going to happen soon.

 

Not going to happen soon. So the FDA set targets for April 2024. It won't get the data on the effectiveness of the targets until probably 2025, 2026. And then what's it going to do if industry didn't do much? Then surely that would set the stage for mandatory limits, but to get those mandatory regulations will take many more years, probably five more years. And it's distressing how long it takes government to act on anything that touches somebody's interests, landowners, banks, food manufacturers. I've urged the Food and Drug Administration to immediately start developing mandatory limits and or warning notices for food packages so that if the targets are not met in 2024 or 2025, the FDA could immediately propose these stricter regulations and hopefully get them adopted within a couple of years, but to wait three years or four years before building that hammer to require action is naive.

 

So let me ask you this. So often the case that public health innovation does not begin in the United States and other countries are way out ahead of us on some of these things, is that true in the case of sodium and are there examples from other countries of things that have been done?

 

Well, the Britains consume about as much sodium as we do, but back in 2005 or so, the British government said people are consuming too much salt. And so it came up with voluntary targets that served as a model for the Food and Drug Administration 10 years later. And so the British government published these voluntary targets and it simultaneously mounted a major public health campaign, urging the public to read labels and reduce their sodium intakes to choose the lower sodium brands. And it also called out major companies that were lowering sodium and major companies that were not lowering sodium. So it really created an issue. And then it more quietly met with the big companies and tried to persuade them to lower sodium. And when the government looked five years later or so, it discovered that there'd been a 10 or 15% reduction in sodium intake. And remember, we don't have to stop consuming sodium, we need to make a about a one third reduction in sodium. And so that the British government got people down about one third of the way that they wanted to go. But then the government changed hands, there's been a conservative government in there and the campaign has just fallen by the wayside, but you could look at other countries. Turkey of all countries has set limits on sodium in bread, one of the major sources of sodium. South Africa has set limits on sodium, mandatory limits in bread, breakfast cereals, potato chips, cured meats, and a bunch of other categories. Israel and Chile have taken a different route. In Mexico, they require warning notices on foods that are high in sodium. So you can go around the world and at least 30 countries, maybe more have adopted either voluntary or mandatory programs to reduce sodium intake and that's partly because of the World Health Organization taking a very strong stand on this and other countries are looking at a place like Britain. Finland has achieved very significant reductions in sodium. So the examples from around the world show that it's feasible to make these really modest reductions in sodium levels and in packaged foods and people are perfectly content. I don't know if any consumer outrage about lowering sodium because people don't know the difference. It tastes just the same.

 

It's nice to hear some optimism in your voice when you talk about what's happened in other countries and let's hope that they will form models for the US to follow when the political will finally comes. So right now, what can consumers do? Is there anything?

 

Yes. The easiest thing is when you're shopping, look for lower sodium brands of just about any category of food. Jesus, there's a huge difference between Swiss cheese that's rated really low in sodium and Muenster and mozzarella and other cheeses, cheddar cheese. So just read labels carefully and you could make major reductions. At restaurants though, it's really tough because just about every meal is loaded with sodium. So the main trick I think is to use less condiments, less salad dressing, don't eat salt, avoid soup, which is just a salt bomb and then bring half of your meal home. Split the high sodium meal at least over two days, rather than eating it all at once. And then at home just when you're cooking, use less salt, use light salt where the sodium content is about half the usual and Martin and other companies make light salt. So it's within somebody's control, but it takes so much effort to compare all these labels when you're going to the store to always be adjusting the recipes that we use from cookbooks. So it'd be so much easier, so much more helpful if the food industry said, okay, we're going to really take this on, make a major public health contribution to the country.

 

Bio

 

Michael Jacobson holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from MIT and has dedicated his life to advocating sound nutrition and food safety policies. He co-founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was its long-time executive director, and now serves as Senior Scientist. He has written numerous books and reports. He's been honored with such awards as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Hero Award (2010), the American Public Health Association's David P. Rall award for advocacy in public health (2011), and the Food Marketing Institute's Esther Peterson Consumer Service Award (1992).

 

So what percentage of the world's children do you believe suffer from physical or mental stunting due to nutrition and food shortages? How lasting do you think these effects are and what can be done? Today's guest is Sharman Russell, author of the new book, Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It. Among the reviews for the book, The Sunday Times of London said "Every page holds a revelation."

Interview Summary

 

So Sharman, let me begin with sort of a fundamental question. So we led with that issue about how many of the world's children face these hunger malnutrition stunting issues. And you note it in your book that almost one in four children in the world suffers from physical mental stunting in response to malnutrition and hunger, especially in the early years of life. One thing that's noteworthy about your book is that you emphasize successful approaches or solutions to ending this kind of childhood nutrition. A lot of people make note of the problem, but finding solutions is a whole different thing all together. But with this issue being so longstanding and complex why do you think there's reason to be hopeful?

 

You know, I have been writing about hunger and malnutrition for the last 20 years, and I would never have been drawn to this subject, to this story, if it wasn't a hopeful one. I also happen to think that hope is the best strategy if you want to achieve something. Hope generates action, and hopelessness does not. For me, this sense of hope is about the last 20 years. At the end of the 20th Century, we finally began to understand the role of vitamins and minerals in the human body and in preventing and treating childhood malnutrition. By the turn of the century researchers had developed this wonderful, precisely fortified food medicine, these convenient packets of a peanut buttery paste, that children love, that don't need refrigeration or clean water, that can be given by parents in the home. And at the same time, importantly, we realized there isn't a single approach to ending childhood hunger. Many different things have to happen. Women need to be empowered. Families need good sanitation. They need to be protected from diseases of parasites that aggravate and even cause malnutrition. So we know what to do now. And we also know that for every dollar invested in nutrition, society gets back $16. So we have the motivation. We have the resources. That's pretty hopeful!

 

I'm really happy to hear the optimism in your voice. But let me ask a question, a lot of hunger is driven now by climate change and, of course, by political unrest and things. So there's the knowing what to do about hunger and what people might be fed to help offset the problem. But what about these things going on outside of the nutrient part of it? Is there reason to be optimistic on those fronts?

 

Those are real challenges. There's no doubt. We have to remember that nearly a quarter of the world's children are stunted, damaged because of lack of nutrients. Most of them live in peaceful countries. So while war and conflict is horrible, and what we're seeing now is absolutely horrible, most children live in peaceful countries. So those are the ones that we can start ending childhood malnutrition right now. The UN Food Systems Summit, last September determined that an additional 33 billion a year for 10 years on improved food systems could end the majority of hunger not caused by war conflict. And they were talking about all hunger, not just childhood malnutrition. So that's enormously hopeful, 33 billion a year for 10 years! I sometimes use the analogy that Americans are now spending 90 billion a year on their pets and pet products. And I think we should love our pets. Of course, we should love our pets. The important thing is we have the wealth right now to do this.

 

Right, and you're talking about worldwide expenses. So America wouldn't have to be the only country contributing.

 

We wouldn't, we shouldn't be. You know, I think the pandemic really showed us how relatively easy and important it is to spend money on public health. And that's what we can do pretty easily!

 

So many of your books are about nature and the environment. And you say often in, Within Our Grasp, that the goals of the environmentalist and humanitarian are aligned. What do you mean by that?

 

You know, in the book I sometimes say, I often say we come from the earth. Literally we are made up of the periodic table. We take in food and nutrients, and we turn that into who we are. I also say that in a world of 7.9 billion people, we have become the earth. And, and that's particularly true in terms of population growth. When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, environmentalists were very concerned about population growth, but I don't think we understood then the connection between that and poverty. Today, we know that when families believe their children are going to survive and flourish, they tend to have smaller families. When women have access to education and employment they tend to have smaller families. Ending population growth is about ending poverty. You know, in so many ways, the environmentalist and the humanitarian want the same thing. We both want clean air and clean water. We both want sustainable agriculture in the form of agroecology and agroforestry. We both can see that if wildlife is going to thrive, the people living next door to wildlife have to thrive. And of course, as you mentioned we both want and demand action to mitigate global warming. Because right now that is causing so much suffering to the very people who contribute to it the least.

 

You know, it's another optimistic note, isn't it that if the humanitarian and environmentalists can come together, then there's an opportunity for larger coalition strength in advocacy numbers and things like that to call for change. Have you seen any evidence of that kind of things occurring?

 

Oh, I do, I have. Absolutely, the programs I saw in Malawi were almost always combining the effects on the environment with empowering women with childhood malnutrition, with getting things to market. Really we do understand. And that is the most hopeful thing that this has to be holistic, that there has to be an approach to this that includes all these important factors, and that doesn't just focus on one thing.

 

You know, another theme of yours is that empowering women is crucial to ending childhood malnutrition. What does that look like?

 

You know, one example I think would be from a program I saw in Malawi in Southeastern Africa. And I want to say like so many successful programs there, this one was run by Malawians. So they wanted to end childhood malnutrition by creating more prosperity among their smallholder farmers, encouraging them to include more diverse crops and more drought tolerant crops. And that was great. But after a few years they didn't really see a decrease in childhood malnutrition because in making a household more prosperous, this was between the city or in the country, doesn't necessarily help women and children, if women don't have a say in what to do with that extra money. So the reality too, for many women around the world is that they have all the responsibility for cooking the meals, cleaning the clothes, keeping the compound clean. And that's enormous work when you don't have running water or electricity. And they have all the responsibility for the care of children and they have half the responsibility for farming and gardening. So these women are exhausted. They're sometimes too tired to eat properly if they're pregnant or to breastfeed which is so important to the health of the young child. So in this case, this program in Malawi started working at the level of the family. They had this lively form of community theater about sharing household chores and family relationships. They had public cooking classes in which the men participated. Some of this was fun, but it was also hard work. It took time, but eventually it was successful.

 

You know, it's a very, very positive story. And I'm happy to hear that. And given that you mentioned Malawi, in particular, how is childhood hunger in a wealthy country like America, similar or different to a place like Malawi and other places with less wealth?

 

Yeah, there are similarities. We have to certainly look at child hunger here in America. I'll just talk about America. Childhood malnutrition here is mainly about children under the age of five being overweight or obese. And that's a form of malnourishment and it can lead to serious adult diseases. And this is true worldwide all over the world we are seeing an increase in being overweight or obese in young children. Here in America, we have some mineral and vitamin deficiencies. The CDC estimates that 15% of American pregnant women are iron deficient. 15% of our toddlers are iron deficient. That's really important because iron deficiency is so tied to neurological development. We have children who are food insecure, who don't know when their next meal will be. I live in New Mexico. During the pandemic one in three children we're at risk of being food insecure. But in poor countries, all of this is so much more serious and life threatening. More than 40% of women and children worldwide are anemic, not just iron deficient. Children can go blind because of a lack of vitamin A. Their growth falters because of a lack of zinc. More than 7% of the world's children are wasted, too thin for their age, more than 22% stunted, physically, mentally. So this is the kind of suffering that we don't see in wealthy countries.

 

Thanks for that explanation. So let me end with one final question. If you were the czar of this in the United States government, what sort of actions would you take first, let's say?

 

Oh, wow, if I were the czar. You know, certainly I would increase aid as much as possible. I think of aid more as reparation, especially in terms of global warming. We are so much the cause of the problem, and they're bearing the brunt of it. I would turn to those countries and say how can we help you? You know, there is that idea of decolonizing aid which I believe in strongly. We have to look at them and say, what do you need from us? How can we help? What do you want us to do? You're in charge, these are your countries. How can we serve you? So we can't put conditions on them. We can't make aid serve our purpose.

Poor nutrition is the leading cause of health issues in the United States, with nearly three in four American adults being overweight or obese, and obesity in children and young people being equally concerning. Today, we're talking with Dr. Sara Bleich, the new Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity at the Food and Nutrition Service at the US Department of Agriculture. Dr. Bleich is leading the department's overall effort to tackle food and nutrition insecurity in the United States.

Interview Summary

 

Sara, it's always wonderful to chat with you, and doing so in different roles that you've been in. So last time we spoke, you were doing full-time work as a professor at Harvard, and now you're in this vital position at USDA. I mean, personally, I can't think of anyone more capable and qualified for this kind of work. And so I'd like to begin by asking if you could explain the purview of your work at USDA.

 

I'd be happy to, and thank you. It's really kind of you to say that. And I do want to just underscore that for me, it really is an honor to have the opportunity to serve in this role and to help some of these populations that I care a lot about. And I do feel like so many folks in the public health community have been so generous with their time, their expertise, and have given really valuable feedback, so just really want to say thank you to those of you who are listening. You know who you are. You've really been a wonderful sounding board.

 

So in terms of my transition to federal government, at the start of the Biden administration, I took a leave. I was previously at the Harvard School of Public Health, this was in January of 2021, and I spent the first year as the Senior Advisor for COVID in the Office of the Secretary. And now, in the second year of the administration, I have this new hat, which you mentioned, which is serving as the Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity, and this is within the Food Nutrition Service. So what's really interesting for me is that both of these jobs are brand new to USDA, so it's been really fun to sort of craft them and have the opportunity to sort of start fresh and take on these new responsibilities in very important areas. Now, one thing that they both have reminded me of is just how much I love federal service. This is my second tour of duty in government, and I honestly thought, the first time around, that I wouldn't like it so much, but I have fallen in love with federal service, I really love working at USDA, it's such a fun place to work, and I think that's largely because it has such a broad and diverse mission, so it touches the lives of 330 million Americans every day. I don't know of another job where you can have that sort of impact. So for me, it's great to be back. It's great to have an opportunity to serve, and it's especially nice to be able to do it in a topic area that I have worked on in my professional life, from the academic side, for so many years.

 

The enormous impact that this federal work has is clear, from what you just said, and everybody knows this, and in any administration, the country really relies on the service of people like you who are willing to take on these important tasks, so I'd like to say how much I appreciate you doing that. So it's heartening to know that the USDA is making nutrition security a key priority, and it's noteworthy that the term food security has become food and nutrition security. Can you explain why this transition has occurred in terminology and how is nutrition security being operationalized?

 

Great question. Really glad you asked it, because we are hearing a fair amount of confusion about the concept of nutrition security itself. And then how does it differ from the longstanding efforts at USDA to address food insecurity. So let's start with, first of all, what is nutrition security? So the concept is designed, or aims, to help us better recognize the coexistence of food insecurity and diet-related diseases and disparities. So specifically, what nutrition security means is consistent access, availability, and affordability of foods and beverages that promote wellbeing and prevent disease, and in some cases, treat disease. And this is particularly true among racial/ethnic minority populations, lower-income populations, and rural and remote populations, which includes tribal communities. Now, at USDA, nutrition security builds on and complements our efforts around food security, but it's different in two distinct ways. The first is that it, it being nutrition security, recognizes that we're not all maintaining an active healthy life that's consistent with federal recommendations, and the second is that it emphasizes taking an equity lens to our efforts. So put simply, you can think of nutrition security as having consistent and equitable access to healthy, safe, and affordable food. Now, many listeners may be aware of this definition, and may realize that it directly builds on the JAMA commentary by Dr. Dari Mozaffarian, my assistant, Dr. Sheila Fleischhacker, and Chef Jose R Andres, that came out a little over a year ago. So right now, what we're spending a whole lot of time doing, and that's why it's such a privilege to be on this podcast, is really trying to clearly articulate that definition of nutrition security to a broad range of audiences to really try to get everyone on the same page about what we're doing and how it is a complement to these long-standing efforts around food insecurity.

 

I'd like to explore this concept just a little bit more. So if you go back to when the country really started to take hunger seriously, in the 1960s, if the term security had been used back then, it probably would've been calorie insecurity, wouldn't it? There was an effort just to get food to people, irrespective of what it was, because they just needed to get more calories in them. But that's given way to a much more sophisticated concept that, if I'm hearing you right, not only do you want to get food to people, but the kind of food that specifically promotes health.

 

That's exactly right. So what we know right now about burden of disease in the US is that every year, about 600,000 people die because of diet-related conditions. Those are preventable deaths. So the burden of disease looks very different than it did 40 or 50 years ago. And so at USDA, now, what we're concerned about is not just giving people calories or food that fills up their fridge, but we want to give them calories or food that is also going to promote their health and their wellbeing, and that is the critical pivot, and the point that we're at right now, with all the messaging that we're doing, with how we're positioning the programs, and how we're prioritizing action as we move forward.

 

Sara, when we began the podcast, we talked about the very high rates of obesity in the country, and now you're talking about food insecurity, which people used to refer to as hunger, and a lot of people would see these as the opposite ends of the same spectrum, that they're somehow different and disconnected from one another, but they're not. Would you care to comment on that?

 

Food insecurity and obesity are definitely related. They often coexist. So we know, for example, that both food insecurity and excess body weight, which you can think of as obesity, they tend to be aggregated among historically disadvantaged populations. So communities of color, low-income populations. And because these two conditions coexist, it's really important to think about how do we use the power of the federal nutrition assistance programs to help move people out of food insecurity and toward nutrition security. And the power of the federal nutrition safety net is that it has a number of programs which are designed to do both. So, for example, if we look at SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formally known as food stamps, it helps about 41 million Americans - in fact, more than 41 million Americans, afford food each month. There's strong evidence which suggests that it pulls people away from food insecurity, so it lifts families out of hunger. But what we also know is that with the historic reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan, which is the calculation that underlies the size of the SNAP benefit that increased the benefit amount by 21%. This happened back in the fall of '21. What that does is, it puts healthy food within reach for so many participants who are on SNAP. So we view this change to SNAP, this reevaluation, which is the first permanent increase in over 45 years, we view this as core to our nutrition security efforts because it allows families to actually purchase food and put those foods within reach that are going to promote their health and their wellbeing.

 

Thanks for that explanation. So it sounds like some of your work lies at a very interesting intersection of two important priorities of the current administration. So on one hand, you have USDA Secretary Vilsack's goal of promoting and elevating nutrition security, which you've discussed, but also the President's goal of advancing racial equity. So what things are happening at this particular intersection of USDA?

 

Well, first I'll say this is an exciting time to be in government because there is so much focus on core issues that matter a lot. And so a key reason why the Secretary of Agriculture, which is Secretary Vilsack, the key reason why he is so passionately focused on nutrition security is really due to the pandemic, and the President's goal of advancing racial equity. So what we all know is that COVID-19 brought health disparities and the vital need for access to healthy food right up to the forefront. There's a study, which many listeners may be familiar with, which estimated that nearly two thirds of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States were due to four diet-related conditions: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure. And so for this reason, given the disproportionate impact of COVID, its impact on diet-related conditions, and we know that it really disproportionately impacted communities of color, equity is central to our work to promote and elevate nutrition security. And so just to keep us all on the same page, let me just quickly say what we mean by equity: everyone having an equal opportunity to live the healthiest life possible, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they make. But when we talk about equity that also dovetails with considerations around the context in which we live. This means we also have to consider structural racism, and this is how we bring in the racial equity lens. So structural racism is not just individuals having prejudices, but it's also when racism gets produced and reproduced by laws and by rules. It becomes embedded in the economy, and so therefore, confronting racism requires that we don't just change how individuals think, but we also start to transform policies. In our efforts to build awareness around nutrition security, we are also making very concerted efforts to explain how structural racism is real, it reaches back to the beginnings of US history, and it stretches across our institutions and economy. So we emphasize that structural racism harms health in ways that can be described, measured, and dismantled. And this is a really important needle to thread as we think about nutrition security, because social disadvantage is not random. It has real roots that we need to acknowledge, and then address wherever possible. So for example, we know that there are disparities in diet-related conditions that have existed for decades, and those are associated with structural limitations to retail food outlets that sell healthier foods, among a whole host of other longstanding historical inequities. And this is where the work of nutrition security comes in, where we at USDA, and hopefully, all the listeners of this podcast, can really make a difference.

 

So I would challenge you all to lean in and ask yourself how can you be part of the solution. And maybe that's asking a critical research question, maybe it's trying to help connect eligible individuals with the federal nutrition assistance programs, but there are so many opportunities to promote and elevate nutrition security. And the key, going back to your question, is that the President cares about this, the Secretary of Agriculture cares about this. This is a window of opportunity to really make a difference in people's lives. And so I think that we really want to lean in as much as possible and take advantage of it.

 

This work is really important, so following up on something you just said about ways that people can engage with this process, so what kind of things are you seeing on the horizon, and what are the best ways for people who might be listening, to engage?

 

So I think it's going to depend on the lane that you sit in. If you're listening to this podcast and you're a researcher, I would ask yourself, "Given the data that I've collected, given the data that I plan to collect, could I do a secondary analysis that might help me understand some of the impacts of the COVID flexibilities that have happened during the pandemic?" For example, there was a temporary increase to the SNAP benefit, and then that became a permanent increase. There have been hundreds of waivers that have been issued which have made the programs more easily accessible. So for example, with WIC, you don't have to go in in person, you can do meetings over the phone. There are all sorts of things, all sorts of program modifications that have happened, and USDA doesn't have the bandwidth to do all that evaluation. So I'd say if you're a researcher, look at how your existing data, your existing portfolio, may be able to answer other important questions.

 

Second, if you are industry, or if you're somehow in the private sector, ask yourself, "What could I do to lean in on this?" For example, there is a waiver that's allowed, it's called the SNAP Incentive Waiver. Retailers can apply for this and it allows them to incentivize SNAP participants to purchase things like fresh fruits and vegetables, and whole grains that are in alignment with the dietary guidelines for Americans. This has been around for a few years, and it's a really nice way that retailers could take advantage of an existing waiver to try to help promote healthy eating purchases among SNAP participants. Which, again, covers about 41 million Americans each month. There are so many different ways to think about leaning in on this particular issue. And I would say that one of the things that we have really tried hard to do over the past several months is that we at USDA are trying to really clearly define our role. How we are trying to make a difference - with the hope that it makes it obvious how others can do complementary activities, because yes - we are investing tens of billions of dollars towards this portfolio. We are very serious about it. This is a top priority. But USDA alone cannot solve the problem of diet-related diseases and disparities. It is going to take a whole-government, if not whole-country approach. And so this is where creative ideas about how to make a difference, leveraging existing resources, is where many of you who are listening can make a difference.

 

Thanks for that. By the way, this focus on equity and this idea that the whole country can engage to help address these issues feels very optimistic, and just like there's hope for the future of really addressing these problems in a fundamentally different way. So back to your career: you've been in both academics and in federal service, as you mentioned earlier. So what makes you passionate about nutrition security as an issue, and do you have advice for people that might be interested in federal service?

 

I love questions like this, largely because when I was starting off my career, it would've been so helpful to hear what motivates people. So for me, my north star is that I've always wanted to help historically underserved populations, communities of color. How do I help them achieve a better quality of life? I'm from inner-city Baltimore. I have a twin sister and an older brother. My parents still live in the same house that I was raised in, and they were public school teachers, they're now retired, and when we were young, our family received food stamps, now SNAP, we received WIC, we received school meals. So I've always been very motivated to give back to the communities that have given me so much. And I think that our current reality is that every child and every person in this country doesn't have an equal opportunity to live a healthy life. And that's not the way that it should be. So every day, I am very, very motivated to ask myself what can I do to help push us in that direction, and push us in a meaningful way. I think the challenge is always, you can push hard but you want to push hard on things that are moveable, where you can actually make a difference. Because everything is all about timing and you want to just be very strategic about where you're going to make investments or put your energy in an area. Because this is where there's an opportunity. And I would say that if we can achieve nutrition security, it is going to change people's lives. Diet-related diseases are preventable. Hundreds of thousands of people a year don't have to die from them. And that's particularly true among communities of color. I think that many of you listening probably feel the same, but these are things that need to change. As I mentioned earlier, I do think we are at a moment where there's a window of opportunity to make a difference. And I would say, more practically, if you're interested in federal service, I would strongly encourage you to just throw your hat in the ring and apply. So you can either go through the career staff route, you could go through the political route. If you go through the career staff route, the Food Nutrition Service at USDA is going to be hiring about 450 people in the not-too-distant future, and that process has started, so I would look at usajobs.gov and see what looks interesting. And I would also consider some of the political jobs, thinking about different fellowships that would allow you to insert yourself. I never expected to love government so much. I never expected to come back again, this is my second tour of duty, but I have just absolutely loved it. And then personally, it's such a pleasure to be able to work on the programs that I was able to benefit from as a child. So for me, it motivates me. I find it very exciting. And I think that for those who are in research and that choose to spend some time in government, I truly think it will make you a better researcher, because what it will teach you is that not every important question is urgent, and what are the urgent questions on which you should really focus your energy.

 

Speaker Bio

 

Sara Bleich, PhD was named Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity for the Food and Nutrition Service in January 2022. Since joining the Biden-Harris Administration in January 2021, Bleich has served as Senior Advisor for COVID-19 in the Office of the Secretary. Previously, she served as a Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research centers on food insecurity, as well as racial injustice within the social safety net. She is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. From 2015-2016, she served as a White House Fellow in the Obama Administration, where she worked in USDA as a Senior Policy Advisor for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services. Bleich holds a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in psychology from Columbia University.

 

Today's podcast is part of our Regenerative Agriculture series. I'm speaking with Mark Muller, Executive Director of the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF). The RAF seeks to foster the economic policy and knowledge conditions that support land stewardship, climate solutions, racial equity, adjust economy, and thriving rural communities.

Interview Summary

 

So Mark, your paths and mine have intersected over the years in very pleasant ways, and I've admired the work you do. And when you went to work with the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, I thought, "Boy, this is a perfect match." And I'm so happy that you and the Foundation are part of the same picture now. So I'd like to ask, first if you could tell our listeners about the Foundation, and what does the organization hope to accomplish? Because the Foundation itself says that regenerative Ag is not a new idea, that it's difficult to define, it's grounded in community, and it's a journey. So I'd love to hear you explain how all this comes together into a coherent idea.

 

So the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, we are an intermediary funder, which means that we received grants from RV Family Foundations. Our founding entity was the 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation. And the idea is that we can utilize those funds more efficiently by having a solid knowledge-base of what's going on - on the ground in regenerative Agriculture. And so that we can re-grant those dollars to be more effectively used around the country. I was brought on about 18 months ago with the intention of trying to diversify our funding, to continue our great relationship with 11th Hour Project, and then to find other funders to step up in a bigger way. And I'm thrilled to have several that have joined. And what I really like for us to do is be the bridge between the nonprofit community, and the funder community. And trying to find different ways that we can all work together more effectively, to move advanced regenerative Agriculture.

 

Is the concept of regenerative agriculture nebulous and difficult to define? Does the field kind of agree now on what it is?

 

I noticed a couple of podcasts ago you had a great conversation with Samantha Mosier around this topic. In my mind, and the reason why on our website we talk about it being a journey, is because it is such a difficult to define concept. And there is a lot of pressure, from an industry and a marketing perspective. You really want to have a clear definition, like what we have for organic. In my mind, I am comfortable in the discomfort of not really having a clear definition. And what I feel like is it is a little presumptuous of us to think that we can define what a truly regenerative Agriculture is. It is a journey that we're going to continue learning about, and there are steps that we can take. And it appears that there are practices that we can document saying, "Yes, these appear to be pretty strong regenerative practices, but we have an awful lot to learn in terms of what a truly regenerative landscape is, and how agriculture fits into that. So I prefer to talk about it as a journey, and not like a specific destination that we know that we're going to.

 

We've recorded a number of podcasts thus far with some farmers and ranchers who are living this day-to-day, with some scientists who have been looking at it, some people who pay attention to the policy part of it. And I know your Foundation will incorporate people who do all those sort of things. So let me ask kind of a big picture question then. So how do you think the regenerative agriculture can become part of the solution for addressing the climate crisis?

 

Yes, great question. One of my motivations is to try to figure out how regenerative Agriculture can be recognized as a key part of the solutions that we need to have to address this climate crisis. And agriculture has come up quite a bit right now, the Glasgow COP meetings are going on. And one of the issues that I'm really trying to highlight is that regenerative Agriculture can do a very good job of sequestering carbon, and providing those benefits, in terms of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that we have in our atmosphere. That is one of the many benefits that we can receive from a truly regenerative Agriculture. And what I feel is undercounted is the benefit that can be provided through providing a more resilient landscape. We know, regardless of how well we do over the next decade on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, we are dealing with a climate crisis that will continue to get worse. We need to have a landscape that could be resilient to the flooding, and the droughts, and the other impacts that will be happening. A truly regenerative Agriculture can provide that. And so part of the reason I'm trying to look at regenerative Agriculture as, yes, incorporating practices on our existing crops, such as corn and soybeans here in the Midwest. And, however, to get to the truly resilient regenerative Agriculture, we need to have a far greater diversified landscape. We need to have more perennials on the landscape, there are many other things that need to happen. But by doing that, we can be part of the solution, both for the mitigation of greenhouse gases, and then also for the resiliency that we need to have in our landscape.

 

So you mentioned the international climate meetings that have occurred recently in Scotland. I'm wondering if you happen to know how much agriculture was discussed in those meetings, and whether regenerative agriculture had much visibility?

 

Yeah, it is discussed. I have not attended that meeting, but I can't say that I'm paying as much attention as I probably should to it. But agriculture is obviously a key component, both for the economic reasons that it's such an important driver for so many economies. And then also for the landscape impacts of it, that agriculture is the primary way that we use much of our landscape. But I would say overall, the conversation has tended to be much more around power production, and then transportation and buildings. And down the line, we eventually get to conversations about agriculture specifically. And because of the reasons I mentioned about the landscape benefits from a truly regenerative Agriculture, I do believe and I do hope that it will become a much broader part of the conversation as we move forward.

 

So if you ask the public, what kind of things are contributing to the climate change, my guess is that not a lot of people will mention agriculture. It's a growing number, for sure, there's increasing awareness, but my guess is it's not a big percentage of people think about that. And they do think about transportation, and coal-burning power plants, and the generation of energy and things like that. Do you see any shift in public opinion, and what does that look like to you?

 

Yes, I believe that there is more recognition of perhaps the larger food system, and the impacts of the food system that it has on climate change. If we look at the entire food system, including the processing, the production, the transportation of the grains and the foods, we are a very large chunk, some estimates around 30%, of the entire greenhouse gas emissions output. I do believe that's getting more widely recognized as the concerns about climate change increase. And for those of us in the regenerative Agriculture sector I think there's a lot of excitement about how much can be reduced by having, not only regenerative Agriculture on the field, but also more regenerative economic systems that surround agriculture.

 

I agree, I'm optimistic as you are on that front. So let's get back to the Foundation. So I know the Foundation is focused extensively on racial equity over the past few years. So why is that what are you doing?

 

Yeah, that is a great point. And I have to say, when I started this job about 18 months ago, I came in thinking, "Oh, it'll be really nice if we could put in a stronger racial equity lens into regenerative Agriculture." I live in south Minneapolis, and so obviously the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd really kind of shook many of us up, in recognizing, for me, it felt like, "I'm not sure if it's just a nice thing to put racial equity into regenerative Agriculture." It has to be completely infused in it. And we cannot get to a truly regenerative system without not only providing the healthy soils and clean water, but I do believe that the farm worker justice, and racial equity lens, and the really hard conversations to have about land ownership, they have to be part of the component too. Part of the reason I say that is because when we looked at what happened here in Minneapolis, and we looked at what happened to our public safety systems, these systems break down if we ignore these racial equity issues for too long I can't help but look at our agricultural landscape, and see that we have somewhere around 96% of the land is operated and owned by white farmers and land owners. It's an untenable situation. And so I do really strongly feel that we need to provide a way of addressing this issue, just as much as we have to address these soil and water issues that we have.

 

So Mark, tell me about restoring regenerative agriculture?

 

Yeah, this is a program that I'm thrilled about. And I have to say I was so impressed by the REF Board, when we started having conversations about how we can infuse a greater racial equity lens. They set aside what would end up being $500,000 for grants to organizations that are led by Black, indigenous, and people of color. We started the process of looking how we would do that. And I have a lot of gratitude for a friend of mine, Brett Ramey, who's with the Iowa tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, and Brett agreed to help us with this process. And Brett really kind of hammered on the importance, of not only the distribution of funds to these BIPOC organizations, the importance of having a participatory grant-making process, and having the decisions made by a committee of Black, indigenous, and people of color. And so we went through this process, it was far longer than I had thought, I really wanted to get this done in a couple months. And it took, well, a good eight, nine months for it all to happen. And it was a far better process, because we did really infuse the decision-making process to be of all people of color. The process was called restoring regenerative Agriculture, and that was brought up by the selection committee. In part because there was some real tensions about the term "agriculture" in many indigenous communities. The restoring regenerative Agriculture, it really emphasizes that regenerative Agriculture is in part, the great stories that we've heard over the past 30 years, of largely white farmers that have been really innovative, and learned how to incorporate systems that reduce chemical use and increase yields. And there's a much longer story to be told about how traditional ecological knowledge was a key component of that work. And there's a much broader story to be told about how these efforts have taken place in so many communities; indigenous communities, African American communities, Latino communities. There is a lot of knowledge being built and utilized throughout, that is much broader than what we normally think of as regenerative Agriculture. And our hope is that this granting process continues this process of us thinking more broadly about what is truly regenerative Agriculture.

 

I'm not sure I'm using the right word here, but it almost sounds celebratory, that there's a celebration that the practices used in the past, going way back to the very beginning of our country, were important. They were ecologically sound, they were good for the environment, good for human health, and now they're getting rediscovered. And that that should be celebrated, rather than saying, "Oh, this regenerative Agriculture is a new thing."

 

Yes, I think you said that well, Kelly. It is, hopefully is, a celebration of the thousands of years of innovations and creativity that have taken place on the landscape, and a way of honoring and promoting a continued use of innovation by all sorts of different people. I always get frustrated when we talk about innovation as being inside of the seed companies, and the large corporations that are involved in agriculture. They do have a role in innovation. There is far more innovation opportunities in the small-scale farmers that are using innovative practices, that are really listening to the land, really listening to how the plants are growing. And I also have to say that there's a lot of opportunity in these farming communities that have traditionally been outside of the commodity system here in the United States. As we know from some of the historical racism that we've dealt with, many African American farmers have been excluded from the corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice; the primary commodities that we have in the United States. And thereby have had to be incredibly innovative, in terms of how they grow, and make a living off the land. Honoring that innovation, and celebrating what has happened, and incorporating that into our broader perspectives, provides an awful lot of opportunity.

 

So Mark, you spent a good bit of your career dealing with policy-related issues, and have been a real leader in that arena. So let's talk about the Farm Bill. So organizing around the Farm Bill is beginning in earnest for the anticipated 2023 reauthorization. So what do you think are some of the key issues regarding regenerative Ag?

 

Yes, and I do remember, I believe I first met you, Kelly, when we were having some conversations about US farm policy in the Farm Bill, and the impact on public health, as we are learning more and more. So it is such a broad system, it has so many impacts on so many parts of our society. So for this forthcoming Farm Bill, one of the issues that I had been focused on is the conservation title of the Farm Bill is the second largest title. The largest program in the conservation title is something called the Conservation Reserve Program, sometimes called the Set Aside Program. And we have taken up to 40 million acres of land out of production to provide conservation benefits. I have always had very mixed feelings about this, and I have to say, in full disclosure, I am part owner of a family farm in Dubuque, Iowa, area. And we are in the CRP programs, so I benefit from this program. However, the challenge is it doesn't change how people farm, it doesn't create a pathway for farming more innovatively. What it really does is rewards farmers for putting in conservation practices, taking aside, putting in grasses, things like that, to provide wildlife benefits, water quality benefits. But often what happens after the 10-year program, the farmers put it right back into the same corn and soybeans that it has been in, without changing those practices at all. So I'm particularly interested in finding the programs in the Farm Bill that don't just provide some temporary environmental benefits, but actually provide long-term changes to how we farm. And thereby sequester far more carbon in the system long-term, provide much more water quality benefits and things like that.

 

Recently I was asked to review a forthcoming book for American Scientist magazine. The book was entitled, Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes us Sick. I did the review, and now that the book has been published, I'm delighted that its author, Murray Carpenter, has agreed to join us. Mr. Carpenter is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and has been featured in places like NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

Interview Summary

So, let's start with your career overall. Your journalism has covered a wide range of topics. But a major focus has been on what people consume. First, with your book Caffeinated and now with Sweet and Deadly. What brought you to this interest?

My interest in caffeine is longstanding. Like many of us, I consume caffeine daily in the form of coffee. And I just felt like with caffeine, many of us don't really discuss the fact that it is a drug, and it is at least a mildly addictive drug. And so, I became fascinated with that enough to write a book. And that really led me directly in an organic fashion to this project. Because when I would discuss caffeine with people, mostly they just kind of wanted the cliff notes. Is my habit healthy? You know, how much caffeine should I take? And, and in short, I would tell them, you know, if you don't suffer from anxiety or insomnia and you're consuming your caffeine in a healthy beverage, well, that's fine. But, what I realized, of course, is that by volume, the caffeinated beverage people consume most of is sodas. And so that led me to thinking more about sodas because I got a lot of questions about the caffeine in sodas. And that led me to realize just the degree to which they are unhealthful. We've all known sodas not to be a health food, but I think that the degree to which they are not healthy surprised me. And that's what led me to this book.

Yes, there's some very interesting themes aren't there with addiction and manipulation of ingredients in order to get people hooked on things. So let's talk about Coca-Cola a bit. Your book focuses on Coca-Cola. It's right there in the title. And certainly, they're giants in the beverage field. But are there other reasons that led you to focus on them? Other than that, the fact that they're the biggest?

They're the biggest and really almost synonymous with sodas worldwide. I mean, many people don't say 'I want a pop, I want a soda.' They say, 'I want a Coke.' I quote a source as saying that. You know, what that means is you want a sugar sweetened beverage. And it's not just that they're the most successful at this game, and the biggest. But as I started doing this research, I realized that they have also been the most aggressive and the most successful at this sort of disinformation that's the focus of the book. At generating these health campaigns, these science disinformation campaigns, we should say. This is not to say Pepsi and Dr. Pepper have not been at this game as well, and often through the American Beverage Association. But it is to say that I think Coca-Cola has been the most sophisticated. The most invested in these campaigns. And I would argue the most successful. And so, I really think it's a league apart and that's why I wanted to focus on Coca-Cola.

That makes good sense. So, in reading your book, I was struck by the sheer number of ways Coca-Cola protected their business interest at the expense of public health and also the degree to which it was coordinated and calculated. Let's take several examples of such activities and discuss exactly what the company has done. And I'd love your opinion on this. One thing you noted that Coke acted partly through other organizations, one of which you just mentioned, the American Beverage Association. There were others where there was sort of a false sense of scientific credibility. Can you explain more about what Coke did in this area?

Yes, and one of the organizations that I think is perhaps the exemplar of this behavior is the International Life Sciences Institute. It's a very successful, very well-funded group that purports to you know, improve the health of people, worldwide. It was founded by a Coca-Cola staffer and has, you know, essentially carried water for Coke for years through a variety of direct and indirect ways. But so front groups, the successful use of front groups: and this is to say groups that don't immediately appear to be associated, say with Coca-Cola. If you hear the International Life Sciences Institute, no one immediately thinks Coca-Cola, except for people who study this a lot. The International Food Information Council, another very closely related front group. This is one of the ways that Coke has done its work is through the use of front groups. And some of them are sort of these more temporary front groups that they'll establish for specific campaigns. For example, to fight soda taxes in specific areas. And they often have very anodyne names, and names again that don't directly link them to Coca-Cola or a beverage, the beverage industry. And the reason that this is so important and the reason this is so effective is journalists know if they were saying, Coca-Cola says soda isn't bad for you, of course that raises red flags. If they say, the International Life Sciences Institute says it's not bad for you, if they say the International Food Information Council says it's not bad for you. The use of front groups has been one of the very effective and persistent, strategies.

It almost sounds like the word deception could be written the charter of these organizations, couldn't it? Because it was really meant to disguise Coca-Cola's role in these things from the very get go.

That's right. Yes. And the deception runs very deep. One of the things that I happened onto in the course of reporting this book, Sweet and Deadly, is Coca-Cola two different times, organized three-day seminars on obesity in Colorado. These two attendees appeared to be sponsored by a press organization and the University of Colorado. They were funded and structured entirely at the behest of Coca-Cola. And it wasn't until after people had attended these seminars and reported stories based on the findings that they'd learned there. Much, much later did people find out that yes, actually these were Coca-Cola initiatives. So yes, deception, runs deep and it's a huge part of their public relations strategy.

It's like reputation laundering, almost.

Well, it is, and, you know, I make frequent analogies to the tobacco industry in the book. And I think one of the things that's important to remember when we're looking at tobacco and when we're looking at Coca-Cola, at the soda industry writ large, is that these are industries that are producing products that science now shows unequivocally are unhelpful. Even at moderate levels of consumption. So, in order for the industry to continue selling this product, to continue leading, they really have to fight back. It's imperative. It's a risk to their business model if they don't do something to fight the emerging health science. And so, yes, it's very important to them.

You know, it's easy, I guess, to ascribe this kind of behavior to ill meaning people within these organizations. But it's almost written into the DNA of these organizations. I mean, you said they have to do this. So, it's pretty much be expected, isn't.

It is. I think young people when they hear something like this, they often shrug and say capitalism. And, yes, there's something to that. But capitalism thrives also in a regulated environment. I think that's maybe a little bit too simplistic. But the aspect of it that does apply here is that Coca-Cola is in the business of selling sugar water. That's what they're there to do. Granted, they've diversified into other products, but they are in the business of selling sugar water. Anything that threatens that business model is a threat to their bottom line. And so, they are going to fight it tooth and nail.

So how did Coca-Cola influence big health organizations like the World Health Organization and any equivalent bodies in the US?

Well, so a few different ways. One of the ways that Coca-Cola has really extended its influence is again, through the use of the front groups to carry messages such as, you know, a calorie is a calorie. Calories and calories out. That's, that's one of the strategies. Another is by having allies in high places politically. And sometimes these are political appointees that happen to be associated with Coca-Cola. Other times these are politicians who are getting funding from Coca-Cola. But, yes, they have worked hard. I mean, the WHO is an interesting one because the WHO really has been out a little bit ahead of the more national bodies in terms of wanting soda taxes, et cetera. But there's a subtler way too, I think, that it influences any of these political entities and these science groups, is that Coca-Cola it's such an all-American beverage. I don't think we can overstate this. It's almost more American than apple pie. And I think we still have not sort of made that shift to then seeing it as something that's unhealthful. And I do think that that has, sort of, put the brakes slightly on regulatory actions here in the US.

Let's talk about the Global Energy Balance Network, because this was an especially pernicious part of the overall Coca-Cola strategy. Would you tell us about that and how particular scientists, people of note in our field, by the way, were being paid large sums of money and then delivering things that supported industries positions.

Yes. This was a Coca-Cola initiative. And we have to be clear on this. This was designed and created at the behest of Coca-Cola staffers. This was an initiative that was really an effort to shift the balance to the calories outside of the equation. So energy balance is one of these, sort of, themes that Coca-Cola and other people have, sort of, made great hay with. And this idea would be just calories and calories out. That's all that matters. If you're just balanced there, everything else is to be okay. We can talk about that later. I think most of your listeners probably understand that, you know, a calorie of Coca-Cola is not nutritionally equivalent to a calorie of kale. But that's what the Global Energy Balance Network was really trying to focus on. And yes, luminaries in the field of obesity science, you know, Stephen Blair at the University of South Carolina, Jim Hill, then at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Center, the Global Energy Balance Network funded their labs with more than a million dollars to specifically focus on this issue of energy balance. Now, what was deceptive here, and I think it's really worth noting, is that Coca-Cola developed this project. But once it developed the project and gave the funding, it did not want to be associated with it. It wasn't the Global Energy Balance Network 'brought to you by Coca-Cola.' It appeared to be a freestanding nonprofit. And it looked like it was going to be a very effective strategy for Coca-Cola, but it didn't turn out that way.

So, we'll talk about that in a minute. How much impact did this have? Did it matter that Coke gave money to these several scientists you mentioned?

Well, I think yes. I think in the broader scheme of things that every increment of scientific funding towards this side matters. You know, people talk about the science of industrial distraction or industrial selection. And, you know, partly this is this idea that even if you're funding legitimate science, right, but it's focused on this 'calories outside of the equation,' it's sucking up some of the oxygen in the room. Some of the public conversation is going to be shifted from the harmful effects of a product, say Coca-Cola, to the benefits of exercise. And so, yes, I think all of this kind of funding can make a difference. And it influences public opinion.

So how close were the relationships between the Coca-Cola executives and the scientist? I mean, did they just write them a check and say, go do your science and we will let you come up with whatever you will, or were they colluding more than that?

And they were colluding much more than that. And I've got a shout out here to the Industry Documents Library at the University of California at San Francisco, which is meticulously archived. A lot of the emails that show all of the interrelationships here. Yes, they were not just chatting cordially - scientists to Coca-Cola Corporation. They were mutually developing strategies. They were often ready at a moment's notice to appear at a press conference on Coca-Cola's behalf. So, yes, it was a very direct, very close relationship that certainly now that we see the conversations, it's unseemly at best.

How did this all come to light? Because you said these documents are in this archive at UCSF. How did they come to light in the first place and how did shining light on this, you know, sort of pseudo-organization take place?

Well, here we have to credit, New York Times reporter, now at the Washington Post, Anahad O'Connor, who did yeoman's work to investigate the Global Energy Balance Network. And it was his original FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that got a lot of these emails that are now in the industry document library. He requested these documents and then he built his story in large part off of these documents. And it was a front-page New York Times expose and, Coke had a lot of egg on its face. It's then CEO, even apologized, you know, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And you know, the sort of a secondary aspect of this is after this funding was exposed, Coca-Cola was pressured to reveal other health funding that it had been spending money on. And that was, I think over a few years like $133 million. They spread their money around to a lot of different organizations and in some cases the organizations, it was just good will. In other cases, you had organizations that changed their position on key policy initiatives after receiving the funding. But it was a lot of money. So, the Global Energy Balance Network, it is sort of opened a chink in their armor and gave people a view inside the machine. And there's something else that I'd love to mention that I think is really important about the Global Energy Balance Network and about that initiative. As Coca-Cola seems, and this became clear in the reporting of the book over and over again, they seem always to be three moves ahead on the chess board. They're not just putting out a brush fires. They're looking way down the road. How do we head off the challenge that we're facing in public opinion? How do we head off the challenge we're facing in terms of soda science? And in many cases, they've been very, very effective at this.

Were Coca-Cola's efforts mainly to influence policies and things in the US or did they have their eyes outside the US as well?

I focused the book, the reporting of the book, really on Coca-Cola in the US. And also, and I just want to mention this tangentially, it's also focused not on non-nutritive sweetened beverages, but the sugary beverages. It's pretty tightly focused. But yes, Coca-Cola, through other organizations, particularly the International Life Sciences Institute, has very much tried to influence policy say in China, for example, which is a huge market. So yes, they've exported this very successful PR strategy globally.

So, the corporate activities, like the ones you describe in your book, can be pretty clearly damaging to the public's health. What in the heck can be done? I mean, who will the change agents be? And do you think there's any hope of curtailing this kind of dreadful activity?

Well, this is something I thought about a lot. One of the themes of the book is that the balance of public opinion has never tipped against Coca-Cola. And we talked about this earlier, that it's still seen as this all American product. And we see with other industries and other products. So, you know, Philip Morris, smoking, Marlboro. Eventually the balance of public opinion tips against them and people accept that they're unhealthful and that they've been misleading the public. The same thing happened for Exxon and climate change, Purdue pharma and Oxycontin. It's a pattern we see over and over again. With Coca-Cola, it hasn't tipped yet. And I think once it does, it will be easier for public health advocates to make their case. In terms of who the change agents might be, here we have a really interesting conversation, right? Because the foremost change agent right now looks like it's RFK Jr. (Robert F. Kennedy), which is pretty remarkable and generates an awful lot of shall we say, cognitive dissonance, right? Because both the spending of SNAP Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds for sodas, he's opposed to that. He has just as recently as the week before last called sugar poison. He said sugar is poison. These are the kinds of very direct, very forceful, high level, initiatives that we really haven't seen at a federal level yet. So, it's possible that he will be nudging the balance. And it puts, of course, everybody who's involved, every public health advocate, I think, who is involved with this issue in a slightly uncomfortable or very uncomfortable position.

Yes. You know, as I think about the kind of settings where I've worked and this conflict-of-interest problem with scientists taking money and doing things in favor of industry. And I wonder who the change agents are going to be. It's a pretty interesting picture comes with that. Because if you ask scientists whether money taints research, they'll say yes. But if you ask, would it taint your research, they'll say no. Because of course I am so unbiased and I'm so pure that it really wouldn't affect what I do. So, that's how scientists justify it. Some scientists don't take money from industry and there are no problems with conflicts of interest. But the ones who do can pretty easily justify it along with saying things like, well, I can help change the industry from within if I'm in the door, and things like that. The universities can't really police it because universities are getting corporate funding. Maybe not from that particular company, but overall. Their solution to this is the same as the scientific journals, that you just have to disclose. The kind of problem with disclosure as I see it, is that it - sort of editorializing here and you're the guest, so I apologize for intruding on that - but the problem with disclosure is that why do you need to disclose something in the first place because there's something potentially wrong? Well, the solution then isn't disclose it, it's not to do it. And disclosing is like if I come up and kick you in the leg, it's okay if I disclose it? I mean, it's just, there's something sort of perverse about that whole system. Journals there, you know, they want disclosure. The big scientific association, many of them are getting money from industry as well. So, industry has so permeated the system that it's hard to think about who can have any impact. And I think the press, I think it's journalists like you who can make a difference. You know, it wasn't the scientific organizations or anything else that got in the way of the Global Energy Balance Network. It was Anahad O'Connor writing in the New York Times, and all the people who were involved in exposing that. And you with your book. So that's sort of long-winded way of saying thank you. What you've done is really important and there are precious few change agents out there. And so, we have to rely on talented and passionate people like you to get that work done. So, thank you so much for sharing it with us. Let me just end with one final question. Do you see any reason to be optimistic about where this is all going?

I do. And I've got to say maybe you're giving scientists a little bit of short shrift here. Because, as the science develops, as it becomes more compelling and a theme of the book is that soda science really, over the past 15, 20 years has become more compelling. More unequivocal. We know the harms and, you know, you can quantify them and identify them more specifically than say, 15 years ago. So, I think that's one thing that can change. And I think slowly you're seeing, greater public awareness. I think the real challenge, in terms of getting the message out about the health risks, is that you really see like a bifurcated consumption of Coca-Cola. There are many people who are not consuming any Coca-Cola. And then you have a lot of people who are consuming, you know, say 20 ounces regularly. So, there is a big question of how you reach this other group of people who are still high consumers of Coca-Cola. And we know and you know this well from your work, that soda labeling is one thing that works and that soda taxes are another. I think those are things to look out for coming down the pike. I mean, obviously other countries are ahead of us in terms of both of these initiatives.

One of the things occurred to me as you were speaking earlier, you mentioned that your book was focused on the sugared beverages. Do you think there's a similar story to be told about deception and deceit with respect to the artificial sweeteners?

I suspect so, you know. I haven't done the work, but I don't know why there wouldn't be. And I think artificial sweeteners are in the position that sugary beverages were 10 to 15 years ago. There's a lag time in terms of the research. There is increasing research showing the health risks of these beverages. I think people who are public health advocates have been loath to highlight these because they're also a very effective bridge from sugar sweetened beverages to no sugar sweetened beverages. And I think, a lot of people see them as a good strategy. I do think there probably is a story to tell about the risks of non-nutritive sweeteners. So, yes.

I can remind our listeners that we've done a series of podcasts, a cluster of them really, on the impact of the artificial sweeteners. And it's pretty scary when you talk to people who really understand how they're metabolized and what effects they have on the brain, the microbiome, and the rest of the body.

Bio

Murray Carpenter is a journalist and author whose stories have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, NPR, and PRI's The World. He has also written for the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and other media outlets. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Colorado and a Master of Science in environmental studies from the University of Montana, and has worked as a medical lab assistant in Ohio, a cowboy in Colombia, a farmhand in Virginia, and an oil-exploring "juggie" in Wyoming. He lives in Belfast, Maine. He is the author of Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us and Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spread

So there's much talk these days about weight stigma, in fact, we recorded a number of podcasts ourselves on the topic, and I believe it's very important, but this is our first podcast on another form of stigma. One that is powerful, often overlooked, and highly important to address. Our guests today are Matthew Garza and Nick Cuttriss. Matthew is Managing Editor at The diaTribe Foundation. And the dia in diaTribe derives from diabetes. The foundation's mission is to, and I'm quoting here, "to improve the lives of people with diabetes, prediabetes, "and obesity, and to advocate for action." I've served on an advisory board for diaTribe, and very much admire their work. Nicolas Cuttriss is a pediatric endocrinologist, and is founder of the ECHO Diabetes Action Network, and also has served on an advisory committee for the diaTribe Foundation. Matthew and Nick have been integral to a novel and welcome program on diabetes stigma that launched recently, that can be seen at the website, dstigmatize.org.

Interview Summary

 

So Matthew, let's start with you. So can you explain what is diabetes stigma, and how does it relate to stereotypes around food and obesity?

 

Mathew – Absolutely. So in general, we know that stigma refers to the experiences of exclusion, rejection, prejudice, that blame and shame that people unfairly experience based on some characteristic or perceived difference. And in this case, that's diabetes. And this might look like negative attitudes towards people with diabetes. It might be hurtful or insensitive jokes made at their expense. And in some cases, it can even be outright discrimination. While there are many forms that diabetes stigma can take, such as being singled out for wearing a visible diabetes device, like a continuous glucose monitor for example, or an insulin pump, it could also be the stigma that's associated with having a chronic condition that does require, in some cases, daily medication. What we're seeing is that most of the research actually shows that the bulk of the stigma associated with diabetes stems from the misunderstanding that poor choices and unhealthy behaviors are the sole cause of this condition. And that people who have been diagnosed with diabetes somehow brought it on themselves. And this is attributed to both people with type 1 and type 2. And the stigma comes from lots of different sources. So it can be external from the media in shows or on the news. It can come from your friends and your family, from coworkers, healthcare professionals in a clinical setting. And sometimes it can even happen within the diabetes community. We often see that in defending themselves from the harmful stereotypes associated with diabetes, that people with type 1 can sometimes unintentionally redirect that stigma back onto people with type 2. And in regards to how this form of stigma specifically relates to food and obesity, it really goes back to what I was saying that unless you have diabetes or unless you know someone close to you that has diabetes, a lot of time, your only real knowledge of the condition is that it's connected to eating too much sugar, right? Or eating too much junk food, and that that somehow caused this. And a lot of times, it's associated with obesity or having excess weight. And then, on top of that, especially in America, we have this culture that there's this really problematic assumption that health is primarily a matter of individual responsibility. And this creates this stigmatizing narrative that blames people with diabetes for bad choices, and it sets up this us versus them. And it makes us treat people with diabetes differently because somehow they did this to themselves. But all of these beliefs oversimplify this really complex biological condition. And it overlooks all of those other, the systemic factors, such as environmental and socioeconomic context that people live in. Their access to healthy food options, to healthy grocery stores, for places to exercise. And so the more that we can kind of separate out diabetes from these misconceptions about food or sugar being its only cause, I think it's the better that we can support people and make sure that everyone is getting the care that they deserve.

 

Boy, have you painted a detailed picture of that and I appreciate it, and I can imagine that navigating this world of stigmatizing events must be especially difficult for children. But let me ask you, overall, what are the negative impacts of diabetes stigma?

 

Mathew - Absolutely, so there's so much research that I think still needs to be done to get a picture of the prevalence, the impacts, and the interventions that can address diabetes stigma. And thankfully, we've had some really great leaders in the field who have started to lay the groundwork to show all of this. And we see that diabetes stigma, and especially the language that we use to talk about diabetes has extremely negative effects. People with diabetes report feelings of fear, embarrassment, blame, anxiety, low self-esteem as a result of experiencing stigma. And this can translate into really harmful mental health conditions such as depression or higher levels of stress that drive unhealthy behaviors and can increase a person's risk for developing even greater health complications. You know, I know that Rebecca Puhl has touched on this a lot in her research on weight bias that we have this idea that potentially having this stigmatizing attitude will somehow motivate people. And in this case, motivate people with obesity or excess weight to improve their current habits. But actually, it has the opposite effect, and it causes things like harmful disordered eating or leading people to avoid physical activity altogether. And in the same vein, we see it happening with diabetes as well, that the stigma associated with the condition actually leads to worse self-care and worse diabetes management. So for example, we've talked to people, and seen in the research that they report injecting insulin only in public restrooms or at home, that they might choose to make an unhealthy food choice to avoid declining what is being offered to them. And even manipulating their glucose logs or lying about the management that they're doing just to avoid criticism from significant others or from healthcare professionals. And specifically, when the stigma is from healthcare professionals, it can actually inhibit people from seeking the necessary care that they need. One of the really concerning things that we've seen recently is that the research shows that people with diabetes fear being exposed for having diabetes or being labeled as disabled. And it discourages them from being open about their diagnosis in a way that is also influencing those who might be at risk, because it's acting as a barrier overall to awareness about the condition and to prevention. And it's increasing those feelings of isolation right after a diagnosis. And so the sheer breadth of all of these negative effects is why we believe that addressing diabetes stigma is such an essential missing element of effective diabetes care.

 

Well, in a very short time, you've mentioned a number of very troubling consequences, and you can see how these things would feed on each other and you'd have this cascade of negative effects that could really impact just about every part of a person's life. So Nick, let's turn to you. So research on both diabetes and weight stigma has shown that people often report feeling stigmatized in healthcare settings. So what experiences are common in these settings, and how can healthcare professionals advise people on the relevant issues like lifestyle change without making stigma worse?

 

Nick - So Matthew touched on it earlier in terms of stigma around when people are diagnosed with diabetes, they are blamed and shamed "that it's your fault." But then, it's also perpetuated after diagnosis, and healthcare professionals putting blame and shame on patients for, quote, "being uncontrolled." And there's a marker, the A1C, which many healthcare professionals use. And we report EDIS rates in terms of quality improvement. And A1C less than 9% is how the health system separates out between people who are, quote, "controlled or uncontrolled." And the majority of people living with type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes have A1Cs that are greater than 7%, and they're not able to meet the targets. And so we, as healthcare professionals, need to become more explicit in working to overcome these implicit biases we label our patients as uncontrolled and perpetuating this stigma. A couple examples of what we can do in the healthcare professional setting is focusing on our language. And diaTribe has a great resource on their website, or you can look at the dstigmatize.org website to watch a couple video clips and really understand how language matters. So not labeling someone as diabetic, but they're a person living with diabetes before diabetic. They don't have good or bad blood sugar control. Their numbers are high, their numbers are low. Using descriptives, not saying, "Let's test someone's blood sugar," but checking someone's blood sugar. They're not on trial for their diabetes. And I think us as healthcare professionals need to realize when the majority of people living with diabetes aren't able to meet targets, it's not their fault. It's our fault. It's the delivery of healthcare that's failing, and it's not the patients who are failing. And we need to be more empathetic to them. And then, when it relates to obesity, similarly, when almost 50% of adults in the US are obese, and more than half are obese and overweight, we need to stop labeling them as obese and their fault when it's the majority of people who have this. I just had a colleague in the healthcare professional arena come to me last week, he said, "Nick, you know what? They put obesity on my diagnosis, I'm so upset." And this is someone who is trying to address their weight and get newer medications that help address the weight. But the healthcare professionals said, "No, you need to try more." So I think we need to change our approach of how we label our patients, and how we approach them with this blame and shame.

 

Well, and it's easy to see how people who feel stigmatized and have difficulty in the medical settings with the healthcare professionals they're interacting with would be more likely to avoid care, and that could exacerbate their condition. So let me ask this, do you see any signs that this issue is being addressed in the medical profession? Does it come up in med school training? Is it part of continuing education? Is it on the radar anywhere?

 

Nick - I wish it was more systematically. I think maybe at some institutions where there are champions for people living with diabetes, where a student might get a lecture, but unfortunately, I don't see it there. And I think that's what's so exciting about diaTribe dStigmatize initiative is really to get more broader reach and get the basics. So in medical school, we get into all these details in terms of cause of diabetes and medications. But I think if we could just back up on the humanistic level and know how to talk to people with chronic conditions, we'll train the next generation of leaders much more humanistically and have better outcomes if we can focus on the basics of how to interact with people living with chronic conditions, and getting rid of this blame.

 

It sure would be nice to see some of those things happen. So I'd like to ask a question of both of you. So it's clear that addressing diabetes stigma is a complex challenge. So what does diaTribe think needs to happen to begin combating this problem? And, Matthew, let's start with you.

 

Mathew - Thank you both so much for mentioning dStigmatize; that's what we're really excited about. We just launched this online resource that we hope is going to be the first step, because when we started to look at what is the landscape of resources out there for someone who wants to make sure that they are able to understand what the problem is and how to address it, there really was no centralized location. So what we wanted to do is bring resources together to make it a one-stop shop that anyone who wanted to learn about how to identify this form of stigma, why it might be harmful, or hear the real life stories from people with diabetes, about their condition, and about how stigma has affected them, that they would be able to do that in this one place. And we launched this resource primarily because we think that there's two very essential first steps that we need to take. And the first is that in order to address this public issue, we have to shift away from that really pervasive blame and shame mindset, right? So we want to reframe the way that people are thinking about diabetes, so that it's viewed as this complex, but manageable condition that nobody asks for. And not that it's somehow a failure of personal responsibility. So part of that has been that we've been really grateful that so many members of the diabetes community have been so open to sharing their stories because it's really helping us paint a picture of what diabetes actually looks like, and the ways that stigma affects people on a day-to-day basis. And then, the second part that our website really addresses is that language. And so leaders like Jane Dickinson, Susan Guzman, and Jane Speight have all been really key in making sure that language is seen as one of those tenets when it comes to addressing diabetes stigma, that the words that we're using to talk about diabetes currently lack that kind of awareness, and consideration, and even empathy at times. But because language matters and it has real impacts on the way that people with diabetes view themselves, how healthcare providers view people with diabetes, and how the general public views them, we wanted to create very specific language guidance directed at people who might write, or talk, or communicate about diabetes in some way, that encourages them to use words and phrases that are neutral, that are nonjudgmental. And at its very core, that are based on the facts, and actions, and physiology or biology that can actually help people, right? We want to get away from using all those terms that Nick was talking about like bad glucose levels or controlling their diabetes, because those just aren't actually factual when it comes down to it. Looking forward, dStigmatize is just the first step. We think that there's so many other initiatives aimed at getting more research funding to really explore this issue and its impacts. We think that there's the potential for media advocacy campaigns, similar to what GLAD did at the beginning of the LGBTQ Civil Rights Movements in addressing the negative representation of people who are LGBTQ in the media that a similar thing could be done because there's so many negative portrayals of diabetes and inaccurate portrayals in the media. And then, finally, the campaigns that influence the general public's attitudes towards diabetes. One of the key next steps might be influencing healthcare providers' interactions because like both of you said, we know that the research shows that this is a key area where people are experiencing stigma. And this is also a group that I think truly wants to make sure that their patients are feeling empathy, and that they're able to help them in any way that we can. And so I know that this actually is a very specific intervention that Nick has been doing a lot of work around and can speak to the importance of.

 

It's a very comprehensive effort you're discussing. So Nick, what would you like to add to that?

 

Nick – Yes, so, I'm a hyperspecialist in pediatric endocrinology, and there's just not enough adult endocrinologists or pediatric endocrinologists to care for people living with diabetes. And we just need to recognize that frontline healthcare professionals have more of an opportunity, more touch points to make a difference than a specialist like me. And we really must do everything to support frontline healthcare professionals in overcoming diabetes stigma. So as founding director of the ECHO Diabetes Action Network formed to combat system failures in our society in how we educate clinician and approaches to medical management for people with diabetes. And we're seeking to democratize diabetes specialty knowledge, so they can reach frontline healthcare professionals and power underserved populations living with diabetes. So an example of the efforts to target frontline healthcare professionals and improve care, we've launched a monthly educational series focusing on diabetes and disparities in the primary care setting. And then, the initial focus was attention to CKD and diabetes, and we're going to be moving focus areas moving forward. And we'll do a block on cardiometabolic issues, and obesity-related diabetes disparities. And then, also, we'll collaborate with diaTribe on launching one for addressing diabetes stigma and behavioral health, just to name a few. So for more information, feel free to visit echodiabetes.org, and join us for being a champion for people living with diabetes in the primary care setting.

 

Bios

 

Matthew Garza is the Managing Editor of DiaTribe. Matthew Garza joined the diaTribe Foundation in 2020 after graduating with honors from Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering where he majored in Biomedical Engineering and minored in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. As an undergraduate Matthew was heavily involved in research, working in the Hopkins Translational Tissue Engineering Center. His research focused primarily on stem cells, three-dimensional matrix scaffolds, and surgical outcomes for transgender patients. He has a passion for understanding more about the socioeconomic determinants of health and how they affect health outcomes, primarily for the LGBTQ population. Matthew swam for the Hopkins varsity swim team and was the president of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee and Hopkins's Athlete Ally chapter. He enjoys swimming, running, hiking, and backpacking in his free time and he will never turn down the opportunity to eat good food or listen to good music.

 

Dr. Nicolas Cuttriss is a social entrepreneur and a practicing pediatric endocrinologist and public health professional with a unique dedication to health disparities and improving the quality of life of people living with diabetes. He currently serves as Founding Director and CEO of the ECHO Diabetes Action Network after serving as Director of Project ECHO Diabetes and Project ECHO Diabetes in the Time of COVID-19 at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford, Dr. Cuttriss served as the first pediatric endocrinologist for the University of New Mexico Project ECHO Institute ENDO teleECHO clinic to democratize diabetes specialty knowledge by empowering primary care providers to care for patients with complex diabetes who lack access to routine diabetes specialty care. Clinically, Dr. Cuttriss founded and serves as Medical Director for ENDO Diabetes & Wellness, a medical practice specializing in diabetes and telehealth where he also supports and consults with medical groups and hospital systems around the country to address barriers to routine diabetes specialty care. Dr. Cuttriss also serves as co-Founder & Chairman of the Board of AYUDA (American Youth Understanding Diabetes Abroad), a 501c3 global health volunteer organization that empowers youth to serve as agents of change in diabetes communities aboard.

Today, we're going to explore one way that young people in North Carolina are working to improve their local food system. The Food Youth Initiative is a program based in the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, which is housed at North Carolina State University. Now we'll be talking with the Program Coordinator, Bevelyn Ukah, and the Program Partner, Ree Ree Wei, of Transplanting Traditions Community Farm.

Interview Summary

 

Great, well it's good to have you, and as I was explaining before we actually went live on this, we've done, I don't know, 150 podcasts or so, but this is the first one that specifically deals with youth in the food system and the role they can play, so I'm really happy to hear from you about what seems to me to be a very innovative program. So, Bevelyn, let's start with you. Can you tell us what the Food Youth Initiative is and talk about your work there?

 

Bevelyn - Yes, the Food Youth Initiative is a program of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems. It sometimes challenges me to call it a program, because it's more so a network of youth groups across the state that are doing food justice work in their areas. So as the Network Coordinator, my job is being in relationship with them, listening to the work that they're already doing in their own communities, and finding as many ways as possible to make sure that they're connected to each other's work. All the youth groups that are a part of the network, about eight now, are all doing various things that are connected to the food system. What makes it that much more powerful is when they come together because they're able to exemplify different entry points on what food, and food systems, and food justice looks like.

 

You know, community organizations are very often doing quite creative work, but work in isolation and don't get the chance to connect up with other community organizations to share ideas, and strategies, and things. I'm imagining this is a very powerful experience. Have you found that to be true?

 

Bevelyn - Yes, I have found that to be true. And I would love for Ree Ree to answer this question as well. It's always awkward when bringing people together. And youth tend to be super honest about how they're feeling in their bodies. So when bringing these youth groups together from these different walks of life, the first day or the first few experiences are a little bit awkward. And it's one of the most powerful witnessings that I see over and over again, how a bit of time and a bit of tools and resources can get people talking and moving. How it completely shifts the trajectory of how these youth can learn from one another. I think that the first step in bringing youth together is to make sure that there is a validation that the work that they're doing is innovative. And the work that they're doing is important. That it actually pushes against the grain of how the rest of food systems work looks. And once we start to name that and identify that, it's super powerful in terms of the transformation that takes place when youth come together.

 

Thanks for that explanation. Ree Ree, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. It sounds like something pretty magical happens when the youth from different groups get to come together and share things. Has that been your experience, too?

 

Ree Ree - Yes, that has in my experience. Being part of FYI, and I started out as a youth with Transplant Traditions Community Farm back in 2013, it was very new. And very awkward, and very weird to be able to be in a space of I want to do something as a youth, but I feel very uncomfortable. But over time, having that physical connection, being able to see each other in person, and network, and share out changes perspectives, and youth confidence and youth visions for their future. I can say that I am a testimony to the work of FYI and TTCF Youth Program. I have learned skills that are beyond what I thought that I needed. Over time, I built a lot of skills and learned why my voice as a young person matters. Why collective working together matters, and that is unique about this. One youth group inspires another youth group, and different food systems and food justice work, it's very interconnected.

 

It's nice to hear from both of you on your perspectives on that. Ree Ree, let me ask you a follow-up question. I know there's a lot of interest in this concept of youth justice, and how does youth justice connect to food and environmental justice?

 

Ree Ree - Yes, there are these expectations and societal norms that youth are supposed to do this, and this, and this, and that. And sometimes adults and even society put youth in a box. But when we were talking about youth justice, we are able to create a space for them. And that's what FYI is really good at it, and being able to be say, "Okay, we are going to work on food justice or environmental justice," and, "Here, this is your space." And food work gets to be creative. They get to come up with things they want to do, and giving them the autonomy for them to be able to say, "I want this, because I see this, and this is what I can do," even though this youth might feel like they're unable to do it, but over time, that space, giving youth that autonomy, oftentimes there's not room for youth to be able to do that. And especially the work that FYI does and Transplant Tradition do is that we centers around where youth are able to have the decision making of how they want to strategize about this project. What goes on this picture, that type of thing. So when youth are given the space and the voice, they're able to see the connection between food and environmental justice and how work that they're doing is not just on a surface level; it goes deeper and they're connected. Youth are able to address these different generational issues that their ancestor experienced.

 

You're giving voice to something really important, and I could see how this would be such a powerful experience for the youth that you work with. And let's talk a little bit more about the particulars of the program. So Bevelyn, I know that one part of the project overall, the initiative is the Mural Project. Would you describe what that's about?

 

Bevelyn - Bringing youth together is the important part, but the strategic planning that we put into the process of how we bring youth together is really important. And our theory of change acknowledges that for systems change to be possible, we need to work on multiple levels, including a policy level. We need to be able to educate ourselves and our communities through storytelling and other forms of expression. We need to be able to act and create models or create spaces that offer this reimagination of how our food system and our society should look like. And as we've been talking about, it's also important for us to build relationships and to be able to maintain those relationships, because ultimately what we're trying to create or continue is an ecosystem that brings a sense of belonging, for not only the youth participants, but also for the communities in which they live.

 

And so the Mural Project is heavily connected to the education part, the storytelling part of our theory of change. Every year, when we bring youth together, there are multiple skills that are being developed. We've focused on storytelling from different mediums and different forms. In the past, we've done photography and made sure that youth had access to really nice cameras, and that they could go around their communities and take photos. And they had a few exhibits. We also created a traveling exhibit for the youth to be able to own this exhibit and be able to use whenever they're doing presentations. We've worked on public speaking in the form of learning how to write monologues and sharing them. We did that at the Durham Art Council some years back. We've done a whole compilation of poetry and worked with a poet who worked with us for a whole week. And so right now we're creating a mural that is centered around community stories, around food and environmental justice. We have youth coming from Transplanting Traditions, and Chapel Hill, Pupusas for Education, which is based in Durham, and then A Better Chance/Better Community, youth and adult allies are coming together to form this experience.

 

It's an eight-month project where they have been learning about one another, relationship building, but also building their knowledge base on the root causes of food injustice and lack of accessibility to healthy, culturally relevant food, and also learning about root causes of climate change in ways that we can galvanize ourselves to shift this narrative, to be more connected to our natural environment and to be more ecologically conscious. That was a first phase. And the second phase we're in right now which is where youth are gathering together in Durham over the next three months to work on a storytelling project, get to know one another, but to work on a storytelling project where they will be going out into the community and creatively offering opportunities for people to talk about their experiences around climate, environmental justice, and food. They will bring those back to our hive, I guess I'll call it, in forming, designing a mural that expresses those stories and that mural will be on a food truck. Pupusas for Education has offered a food truck for us to paint on over the next few months, and it will be unveiled on June 11th at Transplant Traditions Community Farm. And I will say that that unveiling will be a party and everyone is invited.

 

That sounds so lovely. I can imagine how meaningful an experience this would be to the youth. The food truck idea is a really good one. Yeah, I can't wait to see this. It just sounds so neat.

 

Bevelyn - Yeah, we're really excited about being able to have a mobile mural that people can see all over the place. It's more accessible this way.

 

It represents a collective effort of a lot of different people, so it just sounds so nice. So I'd like to ask both of you kind of a follow-up question, and, Ree Ree, let's start with you. What kind of impact do you think the youth are having in their communities?

 

Ree Ree - Sometimes they feel like they don't, but it's a huge impact. They are the voices and they're the ones that are speaking up and publicly saying it out loud to the community that these issues are important, and they're being impacted at a very young age. And they're even impacting folks directly or indirectly one way or another. Like our youth group, they are doing tutoring, and they don't realize that is a huge impact to the direct causes of literacy issues. And the other bigger impact that they're having is they're addressing things that not many people are aware of, like food justice, environmental justice, climate just- Like why are we changing the narrative from seeing things as an issue to, "Okay, it's an environmental problem." Now let's flip the narrative to, "Okay, we're fighting for environmental justice or food justice." They are using their own voices and their bodies, and being able to say, "We are doing this work and we need you all to listen to us because these issues are going to continue."

 

You know what it reminds me of is the early days of seat belts, where there were a lot of adults that were reluctant to wear seat belts, but education programs started happening in schools. Youth then came home with the message, and adults were listening to the pleas of the youth to wear seat belts, and it really made a difference. And I could see that same thing kind of happening here. Bevelyn, does that make sense to you, and what kind of impact are you seeing youth having in their communities?

 

Bevelyn - I think that's a really great example, the marginalization of youth voices. It's very intentional. Historically, anytime there's been large-scale transformations, those societal transformations have been led by youth. For social transformation, younger generations have the juice. I think it's really, really important for youth to be able to share their own stories and talk about what they're doing. And at the same time, part of my job is to share as much as possible the actual activities, the actual things that youth are doing to shift our food system. So earlier, when I was talking about the theory of change, when I was talking about policy, education, replicable models and networks, I was more so speaking from the perspective of how we're building out our programs within the Food Youth Initiative, but ultimately, each of these youth groups are already working in their communities on all of those levels to make changes. And one example is Poder Juvenile Campesino. They've been doing a lot of work on farm labor rights, specifically building awareness around the challenges, not only that farm workers experience, but that farm worker youth experience, as our policy in the United States allows for children to be in our fields with very little protection. A lot of these youth are farm laborers themselves, and so they're not just advocates. These experiences directly impacts them and their families. And then Ree Ree's already talked about education and storytelling. Transplanting Traditions youth have been heavy advocates for the farm and for the farmers, as a lot of the farmers may have challenges around speaking English or even accessing certain systemic resources. And so, to be able to openly talk about the importance of recultivating home in the United States in Chapel Hill, that story has heavily been told by the youth of the farm. I can go on and on about the replicable models and networks, but I just wanted to be super clear that we're not just throwing these words around, climate justice, food justice, environmental justice, that the youth that are a part of this network are doing groundbreaking work in their communities. So I heavily encourage folks to continue to follow us so that you can continue to educate yourselves about the high impacts work that is being done.

 

It sounds like with the youth having voice and carrying messages forth is important to both the people who are speaking the message and the people who are hearing it, so you can see really important impact occurring with this, couldn't you?

 

Ree Ree - Yes, and I see in some ways, like something I have learned being part of the youth program that I have learned over time, is that the impact is both on a personal level and also at the big P, on a policy level, on a public level, so it impacts folks directly and indirectly in a way where it leads to cool things, like being able to address for policy changes. And they're able to learn how to advocate for themselves personally. So that's sometimes the impact that sometimes people don't often realize, youth also are learning how to advocate for themselves, which is like big things that, and especially a lot of youth that we have worked with and learning about you are able to advocate for yourself, you have that autonomy. Especially for BIPOC youth and being able to empower them, just tell them, "You can do both of these on a personal level and on a policy level."

 

So one final question for you both, what sort of support do you need to continue this kind of work? Bevelyn, how about you first?

 

Bevelyn - You mentioned earlier that there hasn't been a direct interview about youth in the food system. I believe that there's little awareness about the impacts that youth make on our food system. And therefore there are minimal resources for continued programming and continued network development around youth, and so I'm looking to do more intentional work around fundraising, as opposed to grant writing, because we're able to have a lot more freedom to support youth needs and to be able to identify blind spots that I think that grant makers are having in the process of creating financial opportunities for youth to be able to soar in this work.

 

And Ree Ree, what about you? What do you think? What kind of support is needed to continue this kind of work?

 

Ree Ree - Yeah, I think the type of support that's needed is from all kind of level, being able to, one, like listen to youth. Oftentimes adults have biases about youth. Listen to them, listen to their story, make time, being very intentional about learning about what youth are doing and giving time for that instead of making judgment. And the other thing is to follow the different youth groups of all of FYI network. It'll be really cool to be able to see what they're up to and why their work are, and it's very unique in a way that they're addressing these social issues on a local level. And the other thing is that all of our youth group, they're doing these intentional work that sometimes staffs are limited. We rely on volunteers and contractor peoples to be able to really do these meaningful work, to really continue to support and uplift youth, so on a fundraising level, to support that and reach out and donate.

 

Well, thank you both for being with us. This work is really exciting, innovative, and I'm glad that we can play a role in letting our listeners know about it. So, thanks so much for being with us.

 

Bevelyn - So, Ree Ree's really humble, but Ree Ree was 13 when she started with Transplanting Traditions, and about 14 or 15 when she was one of the co-founders with other youth groups of the Food Youth Initiative network, and essentially she hired me. I applied for the job and she hired me at maybe 15 years old. She went through the program, went to Guilford College, studied Human Relations, came out of college, and is now the ED at Transplanting Traditions. And so I just wanted to also name that career trajectory, that to me is so powerful of how when youth are supported and when they have intentional relationships, how many possibilities open up to young adult's leadership within these powerful food justice spaces.

 

For more information about the Food Youth Initiative: https://cefs.ncsu.edu/youth/food-youth-initiative/

 

Bios:

 

Bevelyn Afor Ukah works as a consultant to train youth and adults in building skills that encourage equity, organizational efficiency, cultural connection, and collaboration. She coordinates the Food Youth Initiative Program (FYI), a program of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS), which engages youth that lead food justice work across North Carolina. She also co-coordinates the Racial Equity in Food Systems initiative at CEFS, which develops a shared understanding of language, history and race.  She serves on the Transplanting Traditions Community Farm Board, the National Rooted in Community Board and the NC Climate Justice Collective. 

 

Ree Ree Wei is the Executive Director of Transplanting Traditions Community Farm. She moved with her family from a refugee camp in Thailand to South Carolina in 2006 and later resettled in Chapel Hill. Ree Ree first joined the TTCF community in 2013 as a youth intern with the TTCF youth program. After graduating from Chapel Hill High School she became the Youth Program Coordinator, coordinating food justice activities for refugee youth participants.  Ree Ree continued to work with TTCF while in college as a cultural consultant and interpreter, and she graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC as Bonner Scholar with a degree in Community and Justice Studies and Forced Migration and Resettlement Studies. In the winter of 2021, Ree Ree joined the TTCF team as the Business Development Coordinator, supporting farmers to find innovative strategies to reach long term business and income goals. 

Much attention has been paid recently in both scientific circles and in the media to a drug for weight loss newly approved by the FDA. A flurry of articles in the media hailed this drug as a breakthrough. This was prompted by the publication of a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine addressing the impact of this medication in a large clinical trial. Today's guest is one of the authors of that paper. Another flurry of media attention occurred as the drug became available, with news that supply couldn't keep up with demand. Dr. Thomas Wadden is the Albert J. Stunkard Professor and former Director of the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is one of the most highly regarded experts on treatments for obesity, having done some of the most important research on very low-calorie diets, a variety of medications, bariatric surgery, intervention in primary care settings, and more.

Interview Summary

 

You and I grew up together in this profession, having spent some early years together working on treatments for obesity. You're one of the people in the field I admire most, both for the quality of your work and the breadth of your knowledge across various treatments for obesity. So let me begin by asking something regarding our former mentor, Albert Stunkard. So one of the most famous quotes of all time in our field came from Mickey Stunkard in 1959, no less, way before the field was really paying attention to obesity. He wrote that "most obese persons will not stay in treatment. Most will not lose weight. And of those who do lose weight most will regain it." There was a stark honesty to this, and it motivated Stunkard to help overweight people. So if we fast forward to today, do you think this is essentially still true?

 

Well, first, let me say that Dr. Stunkard's statement sounds somewhat critical. Today, we might say stigmatizing people with obesity. You know, they won't stay in treatment, they won't lose weight, they'll regain it. And Stunkard, as you know perhaps better than anybody, was an extremely compassionate, empathic person. To clarify that, he knew that the limitations to success were with the treatments available and not with the people who had obesity. So to answer your question, the first two parts of Stunkard's statement that people won't stay in treatment and people won't lose weight were probably no longer true by the early to mid-1980s. And pioneers like yourself showed that if you gave people a structured program of diet and physical activity, and most importantly, if you gave them behavioral strategies to improve their treatment adherence, then 80% of people would stay in treatment for 16 to 26 weeks. They'd lose an average of 6% to 10% of their weight. So what remained, however, and remains today, was that people have trouble maintaining the weight loss. And that's something that still challenges us.

 

Well, it's nice to start on that optimistic note with the hope that people will go into treatment. Let's talk about the drug. So what is the new drug, and how does it work?

 

Well, the new drug is called semaglutide. It comes in a dose of 2.4 milligrams and is injected subcutaneously once per week. The drug at the retail level is known as Wegovy. Some people will know about semaglutide for the management of type 2 diabetes. It is used at a dose of 1.0 milligrams and it's called Ozempic. So Ozempic was approved first many years ago. Now, semaglutide is a glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist, and that's a mouthful. But glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1 for short, is a naturally occurring hormone that is released by the body when food, particularly carbohydrates, hits the stomach. GPL-1 is released by cells in the small intestine, and it does several important things. First, it signals the pancreas to release insulin to pick up the glucose that's coming in. And then it also slows gastric emptying, which as you know, leads to greater feelings of fullness. And then finally, these GLP-1 receptor agonists are hitting a part of the hypothalamus that stimulates fullness or what's known as satiation receptors, so people feel full earlier when they're eating and don't eat as much food. I think you may remember, Kelly, that naturally occurring GLP-1 has a very short life when it's released. It's active for about two to three minutes, so you have a temporary feeling of fullness. But these new drugs, semaglutide 2.4 milligrams, have a seven-day half-life. So people are feeling greater fullness and less hunger sort of around the clock, and as a result, they are just eating less. And to use your terms, they are less responsive to all the cues in the toxic food environment that are saying come on, it's time to eat more. It's time to have a large serving of ice cream or sugar-sweetened beverages, whatever it is. People don't seem to be as vulnerable to the toxic food environment.

 

I really appreciate that you've taken a pretty complex subject, namely the physiology of this drug, and made it come alive in terms that most of us can understand. So thanks for that. So before you talk about the weight losses that the drug produces, you mentioned that some treatments are producing weight loss of 5-6% of body weight. Can you place that in context for us? I mean, is that enough to produce medical benefits? Are the people losing weight happy with that degree of weight loss?

 

Sure, most individuals who go through a behavioral treatment program will lose about 7% to 8% of their weight on average. And those weight losses are associated with significant improvements in health. The landmark study in this area is the Diabetes Prevention Program published in 2002. People with pre-diabetes lost seven kilograms, about 7% of their weight, and they exercised 150 minutes per week. And those individuals with pre-diabetes reduced their risk of developing diabetes over 2.8 years by 58% compared to the control group. So that's a really important finding that modest weight loss, and modest physical activity prevents the development of type 2 diabetes. And weight loss is also going to improve blood pressure, and it can improve sleep apnea, so modest weight losses have benefits. But two things. First, larger weight losses have greater improvements in health. That's important to know. It's in a linear relationship there. The more you lose usually, the better the health improvements. And two, most people seeking to lose weight want to lose about 20% of their body weight. So if you're a 200-pound female, a 250-pound male, you want to lose 40 to 50 pounds, respectively. And so, larger weight losses are highly desired.

 

So how do you deal with that psychologically when somebody's goal is far beyond what treatment typically produces? Can people come around to the fact that the smaller weight losses are really good for me, and I've accomplished a lot even though I may not get to my goal?

 

Well, I always tell people, I know you want to lose 40 pounds. So let's start with the first 15 to 20. Let's focus on that because you have to go through 15 to 20 to get to 40, and let's see how you feel after you've lost the initial weight. And I can't promise you you're going to get to 40 pounds for potential genetic or biological reasons, but let's try to achieve what we can achieve and focus on larger weight loss. And many people are more satisfied than they'd imagined with a more modest or moderate weight loss, even though the dream is to lose more than that.

 

Okay, so back to the drug then. This big clinical trial you were involved with, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, can you quickly explain the trial and tell us what you found?

 

There were four big clinical trials of this medication that were presented to FDA for approval, but the seminal paper published in New England Journal treated about 1,961 participants. And everybody got lifestyle modification every month with a dietician for 15 to 20-minute visits. And then on top of that, half the participants got assigned semaglutide 2.4 milligrams, and the other half got a placebo. And they were followed for 16 months. And the reason it's a 16-month trial is that you have to introduce the drug slowly over four months to control gastrointestinal side effects. So as you start to take this drug, you're likely to experience a little bit of nausea. About 45% to 50% of people do so. So some patients, about 20%, will experience vomiting. Constipation and diarrhea also occur in response to the drug. So if you slowly introduce the drug, you can prevent some of those symptoms. And so it's not till four months that you're on the full dose of the drug, and that's why they run the trial for 16 months, so people have been on the drug for one year. And so what happens at the end of these 16 months is that the participants who get lifestyle light with placebo lose 2 1/2 percent of their weight. That's about what we'd expect. Those who get semaglutide, lose 15% of their body weight. So a remarkably robust weight loss. And when you break it down a little bit further, what happens is that 69% of the people on semaglutide are losing 10% or more of their weight. And then 50% are losing 15% or more of their weight. So that's a substantial loss. And this is something that I'd never seen in this kind of a trial. One-third have lost 20% of their body weight. And those weight losses are cumulative. So the 69% who lost 10% of their weight include the people who lost the 15% and 20% of their weight. But as you well know, those are substantial losses where the average loss is 15%, and that's achieved by 50% of the people. That is double what we get with our best behavioral treatment, and it's about double what you get with most weight loss drugs.

 

Yeah, that's pretty darn impressive to double the impact. I mean, most people will be excited with a a little bit of improvement. That's a lot of improvement. So certainly, we have to take note based on that. When you talked about the side effects, you were talking about the fairly immediate side effects of beginning to take the drug. And then it takes four months for people to get up to the full dose. Are there side effects that exist beyond those four months?

 

Well, most people will be through those gastrointestinal side effects within the four months. But, if you go out to 16 months, there will be a small percentage of people who have nausea, diarrhea, et cetera, throughout the trial. And you try to help those people with their side effects by doing things like chewing their food more thoroughly, eating smaller meals but more of them, and drinking more water. All of that can help them control their nausea if it's persistent. I think that the most serious side effect, Kelly, is that about 4% of people will develop gallstones or need to have a gallbladder removed. That is just a consequence of the large weight loss. Anytime you have large weight loss, whether it's from a very low calorie diet, from bariatric surgery, or these medications, you will find that a small percentage of people have gallstones and will need attention.

 

And what about the fact that people need to get this by injection? Are people able to do that okay, or is that a deterrent for people using it on a broad scale?

 

It's an excellent question. I can tell you that I have injected myself on several occasions just to see what it's like. You find a fat fold in the stomach and inject yourself. The needle is so small that you can't feel it. So once people try it, there's really very little hesitancy. I think certainly some people would think, "I don't want to be injecting myself with this thing," They may not even come in, but once you try it, there's no problem. And right now, there is an oral version of Ozempic. It's called Rybelsus. So it's the same medication for type 2 diabetes but in oral form rather than sub-q injection. And a trial is currently underway to see if we can make an oral version of semaglutide injectable drug, and I think that's going to prove acceptable. So that barrier should be eliminated over time.

 

So what happens if people stop taking the drug?

 

I think you know the answer. People who stop taking the medication are vulnerable to regaining their weight. And some people would say, well, that illustrates the drugs a failure because you take it and you lose weight, and you regain it, and you're no better off. But I am on a medication for high blood pressure and on a medication for high cholesterol. I can assure you that if I stop taking those medications, my cholesterol and blood pressure would go up. So this speaks to a very important issue which we have to look at obesity is probably a majority of persons as being a chronic health condition for which they're going to need long-term ongoing care and you would need to take these medications indefinitely just like I take my hypertensive or cholesterol medication indefinitely.

 

You know, the description of the cholesterol and blood pressure drugs is a great example. And I think this really speaks to the issue of obesity stigma, doesn't it? Because if you have these blood pressure, cholesterol drugs, and lots of others, if people are taking them and they're effective and then they stop taking them and then the medical condition comes back, it's even more evidence that a drug works. But in the case of some of these obesity drugs, people say, well, if you stop taking it and you regain the weight, it's proof the drug doesn't work. So how do you think that might be bound up with kind of general social attitudes about people with obesity?

 

It's such an important point. So persons with obesity are still stigmatized, as you, Rebecca Puhl, and many people have shown. And there's just so much unrelenting stigmatization of people saying, you know you should be able to control your weight by exercising more, cutting down on what you eat, push back from the table. You see, it's your problem, your shortcomings in self-control. So people with obesity are stigmatized. Similarly, obesity medications are stigmatized. Anytime I give a talk to physicians, I'll ask how many would consider prescribing an obesity medication? And only about 10% of hands go up at most. Then I'll ask, would you prescribe a drug for hypertension or cholesterol? Everybody's hand goes up, and I say, what's the difference here? And people invariably say, well, people should be able to control their eating and exercise with their willpower. And I say, well, it's an illness, it's a disease partly caused by this toxic food environment, so why are you treating that differently? You allow diabetes medications. That's caused by eating behavior to some extent. So I think you're correct. There's this profound stigmatization of people with obesity and of the medications. And I think that view is beginning to change. One of the most important things about this new medication semaglutide, and there'll be a new drug from Eli Lilly called tirzepatide, is that doctors, endocrinologists, and primary care physicians, are comfortable with these glucagon-like receptors because these are diabetes drugs that they prescribe. They're willing to prescribe that long-term. Now they may be willing to recognize obesity disease, which requires long-term treatment. They feel comfortable with the drug and that it's not going to have adverse side effects. So I hope this is a turning point in stigmatizing persons with obesity and obesity drugs.

 

Tom, how much does the drug cost, and is it covered by insurance? And what about people on Medicare and Medicaid?

 

This medication, if you go to your pharmacy and ask for it, I think is currently priced at about $1,300 per month. And so that is a very high barrier to the vast majority of people who would want to take this drug. It's possible, and I hope that the price will come down, but I haven't seen any indication of that. Some insurers and some employers cover the medication so that some people will benefit from it. But I think, as you know, Medicare and Medicaid do not cover any obesity medications at this time. There's a very important piece of legislation in the Senate and in the House called the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, and part of that bill is to get Medicare to cover obesity medication. So even though they've got a terrific new medication, most people who would benefit from it, and particularly people of color who have higher rates of obesity, minority members, will have a very difficult time getting this drug to use it appropriately.

 

You mentioned that Eli Lilly may be coming out soon with a competitor drug. Do you think the competition will reduce the cost?

 

I would hope it would reduce the cost, but I can't say that I have any advanced knowledge of that or any assurance that that will happen. Eli Lilly has put a lot of money into producing their medication. Their medication tirzepatide looks like it will be as effective as semaglutide if not more effective by two or three percentage points. So I think probably the best bet for having a cost reduction is that another medication very similar in its mechanisms of action to semaglutide, it's called liraglutide 3.0 for obesity. It is a GLP-1 receptor agonist, it's just not as effective, it produces an 8% weight loss, it's going off patent, I believe in 2023 or '24 and when it goes off patent, I think that there will be generics to at least make that drug available at a very reasonable cost. I believe that that drug currently is at about $600 to $700 per month, but it should come down dramatically when it goes off-patent, and there are generics.

 

And for people who have health insurance, are insurers covering the drug?

 

A smattering of people are covering the drug. I don't think there's universal coverage. If you're under Blue Cross Blue Shield or whatever your company may be, remarkably, the University of Pennsylvania is covering some of these medications, which I'm delighted to see. But you would have to check your insurance plan carefully. For people who do have coverage, there are coupons to get your costs down to as little as $25 a week. So it's really worth looking into. And I know that Novo Nordisk, which manufactures semaglutide, is trying to work with insurers to get more to pick up the coverage of the drug. Let's hope that they reach some insight that'd be important to reduce the cost of this drug to make it more available to people who really need it.

 

Let me ask a big picture question to end our conversation. So where does this drug fit in the broad scheme of various options for treatments for obesity and how would someone or their physician know if this medication would be a good option to pursue?

 

Sure, if we follow just the FDA guidance and the guidance of expert panels, this drug is appropriate for people who have a body mass index of 30. So you can go, and your doctor will measure your weight, calculate your height, and tell you what your BMI is. So at a BMI of 30, you're eligible for this drug if you've tried diet and exercise, which just about everybody will have, and you haven't been successful with that alone. I think that the drug is most appropriate for people with a body mass index of 30 or greater who have significant health complications, meaning they have type 2 diabetes or hypertension, or sleep apnea. If the drug's going to be limited in availability because of it's cost, I would try to get it to the people who have the most benefit in terms of improving their health. That's the primary reason to seek weight reduction, I think. Technically, to address your question, the drug's available to people with a body mass index of 27 who have a comorbid condition such as hypertension or type 2 diabetes. And if you've got a BMI of 30, you would like to get this drug to people who have the highest BMIs and have the greatest benefit to health. Those individuals with higher BMIs at 35 who have a comorbid condition are eligible for bariatric surgery, which is the most effective obesity treatment. If you look at the most popular surgical treatment right now, it's called sleeve gastrectomy, where you remove 75% of the stomach so you can't eat as much food, and it does have improvements in appetite-related hormones such as ghrelin, the hunger hormone. That is dramatically suppressed by the operation so people are less hungry, have less desire to eat. And so that operation produces about a 25% reduction in body weight in one year. And at three to five years, people still have 20% off. So a person who's got a BMI of 35 or more with a comorbid condition such as type 2 diabetes wants to talk with his or her physician and see if they might benefit from bariatric surgery. If the doctor and patient don't think that's the option, you would like to consider an obesity medication to help you just control your feelings of appetite, hunger, and satiation, to make it easier to eat a lower calorie diet, to make it easier to want to get out there in physical activity. So that is the big picture of the options: Diet and physical activity for people who have overweight and obesity without health conditions. And then you add medications for people at a BMI of 27, 30, or greater who have health complications. And then you add bariatric surgery when medications don't work.

 

Bio

 

Thomas A. Wadden, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as director of the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders from 1993 to 2017 and was appointed in 2011 (through 2021) as the inaugural Albert J. Stunkard Professor in Psychiatry. He received his A.B. in 1975 from Brown University and his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1981 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wadden's principal research is on the treatment of obesity by methods that have included lifestyle modification, very-low-calorie diets, physical activity, medication, and surgery. He has also investigated the metabolic and psychosocial consequences of obesity and of intentional weight loss, the latter as represented by findings from the 16-year long Look AHEAD study. He has published over 500 scientific papers and book chapters and has co-edited seven books, the most recent of which is the Handbook of Obesity Treatment (with George A. Bray). His research has been supported for more than 35 years by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

 

Interview Summary 

So I've been an admirer of your work for a number of years now and really perceive of you as a pioneer doing important community-rooted work. So let's start with grounding this conversation for our listeners. Would you share your thoughts on problems with the current food system?

Sure. I think there are multiple problems with the current food system. Beginning with that, we have great inequities within the food system because of the existing inequality in American society, based on economic standing and based on so-called race. And, to some extent, based on geographies - some people have great access to highly nutritious food. Others don't have so many opportunities. So, for example, in the city of Detroit, where I live, we have a few grocery stores; in fact, we actually have about 70 grocery stores. But most of those are independent smaller stores that don't offer the robust selection that we see from national stores. So the problem in Detroit is twofold: 1) that is the lack of stores, and 2) even if the store exists a few miles from you, if you don't have an automobile, you still don't have access. So these are just a couple of examples.

 

So we have great inequity in the food system that impacts the health of communities. The second major problem with the food system is that workers within the food system are really exploited and not paid fair wages. So we have food that is subsidized in a sense; subsidized by the exploitations of farmworkers and people working in meatpacking plants and what have you. And so, even though most people would, I suspect, think that they're paying a high price for food, the reality is we're not really paying the actual value of food. And we're externalizing some of those costs.

 

The third problem with the food system is the environmental degradation that it causes. The industrial food system that produces the majority of food in American society is heavily dependent upon pesticides and herbicides, dependent upon huge amounts of water, huge machinery, and the use of diesel fuels. Farms have to be huge farms for them to survive. And so there are all kinds of problems this causes for the environment, both the runoff of the pesticides and the herbicides into the water systems. And the creation of dead zones - problems created by herding cattle and pigs into small areas and trying to process the waste from that. And the system is not sustainable. We simply can't continue to feed the Earth's population using the same kinds of methods that have been used for the last 60 years or so. So those are three of the major problems with the food system. There are many others as well.

 

When you think about a system so embedded in the American economy and so embedded in the way we've constructed racial barriers and inequities in our country, it's hard to think that you could produce big change in this. And people, when they think big changes might automatically think about big government top-down Washington or state-driven initiatives and things like that. I'm sure there's a role for those things, and I've worked on some things, but there's also tremendous room for local ingenuity. And very often, I know, at least in the public health arena, what starts locally becomes national before long. And that's really where the innovation begins. And that's exactly what you've done. So let's shift now and talk about some of the work that you're doing. I know that you've done crowdfunding campaigns to help black farmers buy land in Detroit and advocated for urban farming, local food, and local growers, particularly during the pandemic. So what are your current efforts?

 

First of all, I agree with your framing that as we think about how we change the food system - looking at a top-down approach becomes very difficult. There's been a number of efforts to make a Farm Bill that is more just than equitable. But I don't know that we've seen really significant systems-wide changes due to the Farm Bill. But we can do these things on the local level that create examples of the larger change that can come about. And it can help to shift people's consciousness about how they perceive and relate to the food system.

 

So we've been doing some of that work in the City of Detroit via the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network for the last 15 years or so. I'll start with the effort you just mentioned - the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. Urban agriculture will not place rural agriculture, but it certainly can supplement it. Urban agriculture grows food closer to where we have population density centers and thus requires less burning of carbon to transport food long distances. When people eat food in closer proximity time-wise to the time it was harvested, they're going to get food that is better for them and has more nutrients. So we don't think that urban farming will replace rural farming. We believe that urban farming is a good supplement, and there are some things that we can grow in urban areas, such as Brassicas, collard greens, kale, tomato, and all kinds of things. But we're not likely to see wheat fields, and we're not likely to see herds of cattle in the city of Detroit.

 

We've been working with the Detroit Black Farmers Land Fund, which is really an initiative coordinated by three organizations in Detroit: our organization, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, and a group called Keep Growing Detroit. And so, we've come together to jointly administer this fund. So far, we've given away more than $70,000 to about 40 Detroit farmers who have been trying to buy land. Just as in rural areas, obtaining land can often be very difficult for farmers, particularly in a city like Detroit, where we see a tremendous amount of gentrification. Wealthy folks are coming in, buying huge tracts of land, and driving property values up. And so farmers in Detroit often have a hard time owning the land that they're farming on or finding land even that they can purchase to farm on. So the Detroit Black Farmers Land Fund is an effort to assist Detroit's black farmers in obtaining land. This year, it's altered slightly, and grants were also given to building infrastructure. So it's one thing to have an acre of land in a city or two acres or whatever the case may be. But, still, you also need infrastructure on that land, hoop houses, fencing, water, and all kinds of things that allow you to grow food robustly. So that's one of the things that we're very excited about. The second anniversary of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund is coming up in June of this year. So I'm looking for that continuing to expand. Also, that effort has inspired other folks in other parts of the country. Particularly in Michigan, where we see in the neighboring county, Washtenaw County Black Farmer Land Fund, which, of course, is influenced by the work they saw happening here in Detroit.

 

The second thing that we do and perhaps that our organization's best known for is that we operate D-Town Farm, a seven-acre farm in a city-owned park in the city of Detroit where we grow more than 40 different fruits, vegetables, and herbs. And probably more important than the amount of food that we produce, we're planting seeds in the consciousness of Detroiters about the role that urban agriculture can play as we rethink what the city of Detroit can be and as we rethink how we improve public health. So at D-Town Farm, we do lots of tours for school groups, university groups, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, who are being exposed to urban agriculture often for the first time. And they're able to see the techniques that we use and can hear the ideas that drive the work we do at the farm. We do large-scale composting. Soil health is the most important factor in making sure that we have nutrient-dense food. So we do large-scale composting to regenerate the nutrients in the soil at our farm. We also have three hoop houses that we use for season extensions. We also have public events at D-Town Farm, designed to get children and families to come to the farm who might not necessarily be ready to volunteer and put their hands in the soil, but who are interested in being outdoors and learning about the possibilities of urban agriculture. So we have a number of events throughout the year, such as something in April we call the Bio Blip, where students from the University of Michigan who are studying in the School of Natural Resources come out and bring magnifying glasses, microscopes, specimen bags. They lead a group of about 100 children. They identify all the fauna, flora, and fungi at the farm. And it's wonderful, by the way, to see children from the city out at the farm, reconnecting with nature. We have a harvest festival every fall where we have close to 1,000 people who visit the farm. We have workshops, speakers, food demonstrations, tours of the farms, live music, a farmer's market, and all kinds of things that can expose the public to the great potential of urban agriculture.

 

We also have a youth program called the Food Warriors Youth Development Program that functions at two sites in Detroit. One site is a church, and that site functions on Saturday mornings and is open to any children in the city of Detroit between the ages of seven and 12. The second site is the school site on the east side of Detroit, and that program is only open to students who are enrolled at the school and it functions as an afterschool program. So at both sites, we have raised beds. And we teach the children how to build those raised beds, how to cultivate the food, and how to harvest the food. Then they also learn about food justice concepts. Our organization thinks that our culture is very important. And that African American people have gone through a process caused by our enslavement that has intentionally disconnected us from our traditional culture. We think it's very important that we reconnect children of African descent with traditional African cultural concepts. As well as giving them an understanding of the role that African Americans have played in the development of agriculture.

 

And then the third major thing that we're doing is the Detroit Food Commons, a new 31,000-square-foot building that we're building on Woodward Avenue, the main street of Detroit. It's about a $20 million project. The Detroit Food Commons will house the Detroit People's Food Co-op, a cooperatively owned grocery store, which we also initiated. Although we initiated and continue to influence it, it's an independent body with its own board. And that board regulates what will happen inside that grocery store. The first floor will be the cooperative grocery store. Still, we'll have four shared youth kitchens on the second floor of the building, about a 3,000-square-foot community meeting space, and office space for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. So again, we're looking forward to the opening of this in June of 2023, and we think want to be a game-changer in Detroit on several levels. One, it is a cooperatively owned business that pushes back against the gentrification that we're seeing in Detroit, where generally, very wealthy white men lead all of the development that we see happening in Detroit. And then we're supposed to see that as progress because we can walk into these edifices that wealthy white men have created and spend our money there where the community has really no ownership. And there's very little circulation of wealth within our community. The cooperative ownership of the grocery store, on the other hand, does provide for ownership by community members. We currently have 1,437 member-owners of the Detroit People's Food Co-op. That's one reason it's important, the cooperative ownership structure and how that pushes back against the typical style of development that we see happening in Detroit. It will also be a game-changer, though, because of the neighborhood that we're building in, which is called the North End. It has a tremendous lack of access to high-quality food. And so it's going to provide high quality, often locally-grown food for residents of that community and Detroiters in general. There's a vast number of people who live in the suburbs north of Detroit who work in Detroit and leave the city each day, driving down Woodward Avenue. We're also hoping that an audience will shop at the Detroit People's Food Co-op before going back to their homes in the suburbs. The third way it will be a game-changer is to provide a consistent retail outlet on a scale that was previously unavailable for local growers. And so, we are very much conscious of our role in helping to catalyze the urban agriculture movement by providing this consistent retail outlet.

 

Malik, that's a jaw-dropping array of things you and others in Detroit are doing, and I can't tell you how inspirational it is. Let me bring up one in particular, and it has to do with your focus on youth. Given your background as an elementary school principal, I could see why that would be a focus for you. But you could see how involving youth in this would help address the issue of getting people interested in farming and interested in other parts of the supply chain. As I imagine as the Commons comes online, youth being involved in that might give them ideas for becoming food-related entrepreneurs. The space that you have upstairs could be used for youth to develop ideas and for new businesses and things like that. I could imagine inspiring a whole new generation of people to think about these food-related activities as a viable career path, and I'm just wondering, have you seen signs of that so far?

 

Since we started 15 years ago, we've seen a tremendous interest on the part of young people in being involved in the food system. We have something in Detroit, for example, called the Detroit Food Academy, which is a nonprofit that trains people for jobs within the food system. They learn a wide array of fields and areas within the food system where there are employment possibilities. We have a number of farms in Detroit that are encouraging children to anticipate those farms. We have some children, in fact, who have created value-added products that they're selling at various fairs and the farmers' markets throughout the city of Detroit. So yeah, we do see an increasing interest. Part of what we're setting out to do is first to help people think about the food system because the average person, people who aren't food activists, don't even use that term, the food system. That's not how they think about food. They're thinking about, "I'm going to the grocery store to buy what I want. I'm going to cook dinner, and I hope I like the way it tastes," and that's the kind of framing the average person has about food. So part of what we're trying to do with both children and adults is getting them to think about this broader system that provides food and all of the kind of steps in it from the seeds to the planting of those seeds, the cultivation of the crops, the processing of crops, the aggregation of crops, the distribution, the retail level, the post-consumer level. We want people to think about all of that and then think about how they begin to develop agency within it so that they don't just see themselves as subjects that this more powerful system is acting upon, but they see themselves as having the agency to actually shape that food system as it impacts their community. And so that's part of what we've been trying to do with the work of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, working in a number of areas both in policy and farming, in retail, trying to get people to really conceptualize what this food system is and that they have the right and the responsibility to help shape how that food system impacts them. So, yeah, we're seeing interest by youth, and we are hoping that the kitchens on the second floor will inspire not just youth entrepreneurs but also adult entrepreneurs. And there are a number of people in Detroit who participate in what we call the shadow economy, people who are making money in ways that are outside of the laws of the society. For example, you have a number of people who are preparing chicken dinners and fish dinners or perhaps soups and cakes and selling them. The kitchens on the second floor of the Detroit Food Commons allow those entrepreneurs to go from being underground shadow economy food entrepreneurs to actually coming into the legitimate legal economy by having a licensed kitchen where they can prepare their foods. So we are definitely looking to stimulate the local food economy both for children and adults.

 

Let's talk a bit more about that. So in some of your beginning comments, you mentioned low wages as one of the fundamental problems in the food system. Are you hopeful that this series of activities will provide better pay opportunities for people?

 

I'm hopeful, but I also want to acknowledge that it's a very difficult problem. And even as we look at the Detroit People Food Co-op and how to make that cash flow positively, as we look at the performance and all of the expenses, the wages that we're scheduling to pay employees are certainly not what we would like to pay. And so we're strategizing on how with very thin margins in the grocery industry, we can be fairer and just to the workers who will work in that store, but this is not a unique problem that we have. In fact, I would say that the major dilemma facing the food movement in American society is figuring out how we pay workers within the food system a fair and just wage while, at the same time, we make sure that we have food that is available and affordable to everyone in society, regardless of their race, income, or geography. It's a very difficult nut to crack, and I'm not absolutely positive that it can be done within the current economic system, but it's certainly something that we have to strive for and that we have to strategize on. I don't think there's an easy answer to that, but it's the question that we have to constantly put in front of us. For me, the obvious answer, though, is that we have to marry the struggle for food justice with the struggle to eliminate poverty. The answer to this problem is not cheap food per se. The answer to the problem is paying the true value of food but making sure that everyone has the income which is necessary to buy high-quality food.

 

Let me ask about the importance of community ownership of these things. So let's just say hypothetically that all the activities that you're talking out were being put in place from Washington or the state of Michigan, let's say, as opposed to a very community-involved effort. What's the symbolism of that, and what difference do you think it makes in the way people think about these things?

 

Well, I think it makes a huge difference, and again, part of what we're trying to instill in people is a sense of agency. I think it's true to say that in American society in general and in Detroit in particular, people have been locked into a lethargy where they think that people who are more powerful are in charge of structuring their lives, that the educational system is responsible for teaching our children, for example, and that doctors are responsible for maintaining our health. And in many ways, we've ceded responsibility for our own lives to these forces that we perceive as being more powerful and particularly in a place like Detroit, where, over the last 20 years or so, we've had the imposition of what the state of Michigan calls emergency managers. The largest or most well-known in the position of the emergency manager was in Detroit just before the city declared bankruptcy. The governor essentially suspended the powers of all of the elected officials and appointed one individual who was the emergency manager of Detroit. These powers superseded all the powers of the elected officials, so essentially, democracy was put into a coma in the city of Detroit. So I'm saying that in a situation that both intentionally disempowers people and also where people cede responsibility because they perceive these more powerful forces as being more qualified to run the systems that impact our lives, people have given up; in many cases, their agency over defining not just the food system that impacts their lives but defining all of the systems that impact their life. And so we're very concerned about developing a sense of community self-determination that every community first decides what their own goals and aspirations are and then decides how they reach that as opposed to external forces coming in and dictating to communities how they should move and develop, and so that's really at the core of what we're doing. So having these community-based projects that mobilize community members and ignite within them this sense of agency both within the food system, and then we're hoping that also as people see that we can exert control over the food system, they begin to look at other aspects of their lives as well and how we can, as a community, begin to exert control over those things. So having said all that, that's not to say that state and federal governments don't have the responsibility of behaving in a way that facilitates justice, equity, and access to high-quality food for all of their citizens. Still, I certainly don't think that we should put the majority of our efforts into that and that we shouldn't wait until those governmental entities act to make things better. We have the right and the responsibility to act on our own behalf while, at the same time, pressuring and urging the government to act in a responsible way.

 

That makes perfect sense. And I'd imagine another virtue of the community ownership part of this is that the initial innovation breeds more innovation because more and more people think that they can have the agency that you're talking about, come up with new and creative ideas. So I could imagine this building on itself over the years.

 

Yes, absolutely. I think that mobilizing people to solve their own problems certainly stems from innovation. The challenge is that often, very creative, innovative people in communities like the community I live in don't have the resources to implement those innovations. So we have to always look at that side of the equation also. How do we better resource communities so that the people who have the lived experience and who are most impacted, and who have this tremendous creativity, have the resources that are necessary to bring these ideas to scale, so they have a larger impact?

 

Bio:

Malik Yakini has been involved in the Black liberation movement throughout his adult life. His resume includes more than 20 years as principal of a K-8 African-centered school in Detroit along with founding the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which works to build self-reliance, food security, and justice in Detroit's Black community. His connection to food work began about 20 years ago, when he began gardening on a small plot of land at his Detroit home to ensure he had access to fresh food. With few full-scale grocery stores in urban neighborhoods and just one national chain located in Detroit, Yakini saw the need to expand this work to community gardens and to teach young people to get their hands dirty. In 1999, he developed a food security curriculum as principal of Nsoroma Institute, an African-centered school that operated in Detroit from 1989 to 2014.

 

Today, we're speaking with leaders of the San Diego Food System Alliance, about their far reaching 10 year vision for a healthier, more sustainable and more just food system in San Diego County. Our guests today are Elly Brown and Sona Desai, co-executive directors of the Alliance, who can speak about how this work is grounded in both community needs and evidence based research. It's an inspiring story of relationships, the transformational potential of food sovereignty and the belief that people can create a better food system when they work together. Welcome to the leading voices and food podcast.

So Elly let's begin with you. Could you describe to our listeners what the San Diego Food System Alliance is and how did this organization come to be?

Thanks for having us today Kelly. We're excited to talk about regional food systems work with you today and about San Diego's work. And as you know, Duke holds a really special place in my heart having attended graduate school there over 10 years ago. And it kind of feels like serendipity to talk about our work here in San Diego region around our food system. But on many levels the work has influenced my post MBA journey. Really the unlearning and the relearning, new ways of being, new ways of working together, and new economic systems that we can really nurture together in this region. And Sona, who's here with me - she's an incredible, humble thought leader and partner and has really inspired me in this work. So I'm glad that she can join us today together. And so to share a little bit about San Diego Food System Alliance. The Alliance was started a decade ago in 2012, and we are diverse and inclusive network guided by our newly-developed common agenda San Diego County Food Vision 2030. And really our mission is to cultivate a healthy, sustainable, just food system in our region of San Diego County. And we work to promote collaboration, influence policy and catalyze transformation in the food system here in our region of San Diego. And which really is the unseated land of the Kumeyaay, Luiseno, Cahuilla, and Cupeno people. And I think it's really important to recognize that as we're doing this work. Because we are all guests here and we need to recognize and honor the hosts or the original land stewards of this region. So that's who we are and what we're doing, and happy to share a little bit more as we go along.

Thanks very much. So Sona, let's turn to you now. The alliance has recently done some pretty extensive strategic planning that we discussed and I know you've had input from a large number of stakeholders in this process. Could you describe how this has all worked and how you gained input and what the plan consists of?

Yes, absolutely. Thanks again Kelly. And thank you Elly for your co-leadership in this work. So yes, we recently launched San Diego County Food Vision 2030, which we call a plan and a movement for transforming our region's food system over the next last 10 years. Developing food vision 2030 was a two year process. And we began this in the summer of 2019, and it culminated last summer in 2021. So the process itself included a pretty comprehensive literature review. We also did over a hundred interviews with key stakeholders within the community. We held several focus groups and then had, which you alluded to a sweeping community engagement process.

Our goal when we started food vision 2030 was to center the needs and aspirations of our community, especially those that are historically left out of these planning processes. So to meet this goal, we were very intentional about cultivating very deep and trusting relationships with community based organizations, and businesses across San Diego County, particularly those that were rooted in communities that had historically been disinvested in and those elevating the needs of essential food system workers. To guide the process of developing food vision 2030 and to ensure community participation, we first started with creating a steering committee that represented these voices and included leaders of these communities that could help us mobilize participation and engagement across the communities during the two year planning process. In collaboration with these partners, we designed the community engagement strategy. It included several forums, neighborhood convenings across the county, and of course unfortunately, the launch of this community engagement process was slated for March 2020, and it coincided directly with the statewide COVID 19 lockdown.

Despite those circumstances we remain committed to ensuring that community voices were centered in this process. We re-strategized with our community partners. We did a lot of research on the digital divide and collectively developed an accessible, interactive, customized digital experience that was tailored to 12 priority historically disinvested communities as well as farmers, fishermen, farm workers, food workers and independent restaurateurs and retailers. Through that process we engaged nearly 3000 San Diegons, and 60% of the voices came from those 12 priority communities and essential food system workers. It resulted in a common vision that includes three goals, 10 objectives, and several strategies for transforming our food system in San Diego County. The three goals are to cultivate justice, fight climate change, and build resilience. And the 10 objectives reflect priorities across the food system, including things like preserving agricultural lands, supporting the viability of local farms, fisheries and food businesses, strengthening food value chains, elevating wages and working conditions, expanding nutrition and food security, improving community food environments, scaling up food recovery efforts, and increasing BIPOC leadership throughout the food system.

San Diego County food vision 2030 is a shared vision. It's our community's vision. And really our intention moving forward is to help guide collective action and have the vision, mobilize and inform planning policy program and investment opportunities throughout our region.

Sona I'm really happy to hear about this because not only do you have a very ambitious set of goals, and the only way that one could possibly even imagine reaching those goals is to have a broad base of constituents who are working together on them, and you've managed to do that. But I also really appreciate you discussing the process of establishing these trusting relationships which isn't easy, it takes a long time but is critically important. Thank you for that. So Elly, I know from an earlier discussion that we had that your organization is working on five primary pillars.

I want to share that before we began the creation of this new common agenda food vision 2030, we conducted two internal strategic planning processes. First, we created the Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion Roadmap, the JEDI roadmap. And second, we also created an operating strategy, and these two planning processes were really essential for us to hone in on who we are, what we do, and how we steward food vision 2030 forward as an alliance. And the JEDI roadmap really spells out our vision for racial equity and a lot around the how, but the operating strategy resulted in five pillars that helped to crystallize what we do to steward food vision 2030 forward. So these five pillars are: 1) build networks. Really our role in cultivating nurturing a diverse and inclusive network that's actively participating in the movement around this new vision, collaborating, learning, sharing together; 2) influence policy. Our primary focus is on the local level where we have the most influence. And we really are leaning towards moving towards community led organizing efforts around policy advocacy. And 3) is shift culture. So supporting our network and San Diegons in their education and awareness, to become better active participants towards cultivating a sustainable just food system. And 4) is increased capacity. So here we do a little bit more on the groundwork to actively support groups in their contribution towards a sustainable just food system. And one of the examples is the local food economy lab, which Sona I think will share a little bit more of. And lastly our 5) is operating strategy pillar is the nurture organizational health and viability.

 

So this is our work around culture, democratic governing management models, as well as viability matters for the organization. And lastly, I think one of the most important elements of our operating strategy also is our accountability and governance system. In addition to the board of directors for 501 we have a 21 member food vision 2030 stewardship committee consisting of majority organizers from communities that are most marginalized by our industrialized food system. These are what Sona has spelled out, the BIPOC neighborhoods across San Diego County, tribal communities, food farm workers, small farmers and fishermen, and BIPOC owned food businesses in our region.

 

What an accomplishment to bring together all those parties, and each of the pillars is really interesting. Sona I'd like to ask you about one of them in particular that has to do with the internal structure and environment of your own organization. Can you say more?

 

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for asking about that Kelly because it's the heartbeat of our organization and really what will allow us to have impact in the region. So as Elly mentioned, we see nurturing the health of our organization as absolutely foundational to our work and essential for transformational impact. While fundraising and resource development are clearly critical for sustaining the health of our organization, the structures of how we are organized, how we make decisions, and how we care for one another are equally essential. Over the past few years we have started allocating more time, capacity and intention toward creating internal policies that move us towards structures that reflect our core values of respect, inclusivity, health, collaboration and justice. This work has included working with a justice equity diversity inclusion consultancy organization, and developing an internal JEDI committee of staff board and alliance members. And together we developed a statement on justice as well as a detailed roadmap to ensure that we're actively working toward our vision of becoming an anti-racist organization and to help hold ourselves accountable.

 

We've also worked on our human resource HR handbook and policies. We have re-established our job descriptions and recruitment strategies, and also looking at our compensation structure. In addition to this, we also recognize that we need to be able to have a staff that is able to bring their whole selves to this work. And so we've really been working to cultivate a space for that and creating time and space for rest and reflection for our staff. And this is an ongoing work and we are beginning this and we have a lot that we can do as we move forward. But we have come to recognize that this is the work. This is the work. This is essential for our individual collective health and wellbeing. Another thing that we're starting to look at is outlining a vision toward moving toward becoming a less hierarchal and more democratic organization. So as part of this journey we transitioned to a co-executive directorship at the alliance late last year. We're also working now as a team to create a stronger culture of self-management. And as part of this effort, we're exploring various ways to create greater clarity and streamlined decision making across the organization. We're creating, experimenting and piloting with team structures to help hold one another accountable rather than a traditional supervisor employee type of relationship. And I think overall we believe that building equitable policies and procedures to govern our organization will ultimately foster an inclusive culture, and support our ability to retain greater diversity within our team and broader organizational network.

 

You're doing a lot of imaginative things and one of them that Elly mentioned earlier was the local food economy lab. Sona, could you say a little bit about what needs you identified that led to the development of this?

 

So we actually just had our kickoff call with about 50 partners yesterday for the local food economy lab. And this emerged through the food vision 2030 process. We heard consistent themes from small and mid-size farmers, fishermen and food business owners around limited technical assistant and business support services, to ensure their success in an increasingly competitive and consolidated marketplace, and this need that we heard was amplified across communities of color. So in particular, we heard the need for more equitable, customized and wraparound one-on-one and peer to peer services, especially lack indigenous and leaders of color. By wraparound services what we heard was that there's more than just a business plan that's required for a food business to be viable. Sometimes they also need to be able to combine that with bookkeeping support or marketing support or access to capital or infrastructure. And so by wraparound, we're really seeing that the lab could be a place where we could provide some of these needs. And of course, another theme that we saw a lot of last year was fractures across the food supply chain. And there was a huge need to try to meet demand locally from local producers and local food business owners. And so that's another area where San Diego County has a lot of opportunity to build infrastructure for the local movement and distribution and marketing of food. And then I guess one other theme that has really shaped the idea of the local food economy lab, is we've been hearing a lot more interest in community wealth building models and the idea of inclusive economic development. So we actually researched economic models like cooperatives and community land trust, employee ownership, and did develop a report building community wealth in San Diego County's food system. So this idea of the lab was really to create a space that merged all of these needs and opportunities and to provide, you know, one-on-one technical assistance, business support to farmers, fishermen, food businesses, primarily people of color, and to increase connections between local producers and local markets in the region. And then finally to elevate community wealth building models.

 

Bios

 

Elly Brown, Co-Executive Director - As the Co-Executive Director of the San Diego Food System Alliance, Elly Brown oversees the nonprofit administration and resource development domains, ensuring that the Alliance is achieving impact towards its mission. Elly began her journey at the Alliance as a part-time consultant in 2015. Since then, the Alliance has blossomed into an expansive network of over 150 multi-sector organizations and advocates with a $1m in operating budget. Elly is a first generation American, having spent the majority of her life in San Diego and Japan. Elly enjoys the ability to contribute her business and consulting skill set to a cause she loves—food and community. Elly's fondest memories of her childhood involve visiting the countryside of Japan, eating cucumbers and momotaro tomatoes off the vines from her grandfather's farm.

Sona Desai, Co-Executive Director - Sona Desai has been working to advance sustainable and equitable food systems for more than 20 years. She has a background in organic farming, food marketing & distribution, farm business development, and is recognized nationally as a leader in food hub and community food systems development. Before joining the San Diego Food System Alliance, Sona was the Director of Food Systems Development at the Leichtag Foundation where she provided thought leadership, research, and food and farm based consulting services to advance the Foundation's food system strategy. She also served as the Associate Director of Coastal Roots Farm in Encinitas. As the Co-Executive Director of the San Diego Food System Alliance, Sona provides strategic and management support for the organization, strengthens support services for small-scale sustainable food producers and fishermen in the region, provides consulting services to advance economic development in the food system and leads diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Much has been written and said about ultra-processed foods, first in scientific circles and now more broadly in the media. This concept is relatively new, but what is even newer in this discussion is how such foods figure into the issue of food and addiction. Our guest, Dr. Ashley Gearhardt is doing pioneering work on this. So, we eat a lot of these foods. A paper published several months ago, found that as much as 80% of all calories consumed in the US and in Canada come from such foods. Such diets are high in added sugar, in fat and saturated fat and low in fiber and key vitamins and minerals. We've recorded earlier podcasts on ultra-processed foods, most notably with Dr. Carlos Monteiro, who created the term. But now let's talk addiction. Ashley Gearhardt is Associate Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Michigan and as a leading expert on the issue of food and addiction.

Interview Summary

So, let's start by you telling us what is ultra-processed food?

 

Well, I'll start with the scientific definition which is foods composed of mostly cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives. But in layman's term, I think the easiest way to have a feel for what ultra-processed foods are, they're the sorts of baked goods and sugary treats and salty snacks that are on our shelves. That when you look at the ingredient list, you kind of can't pronounce or understand many of the ingredients in that food substance. That's a big way for me that I tell that something's ultra-processed.

 

You've made very interesting parallels between these ultra-processed foods and cigarettes. Can you explain that?

 

Yes, absolutely. So, with cigarettes, one of the things that's really surprised me is that we know nicotine is the addictive agent in cigarettes. But I think something that surprised me recently is we're all probably consuming nicotine every single week. Nicotine is in things like tomatoes and eggplants. But of course, we're not getting hooked on eggplants and tomatoes and consuming them to excess. It was really when Big Tobacco got involved and they were able to take the tobacco leaf which has high levels of nicotine and process and optimize it so that it gave us naturally extreme levels of nicotine that were absorbed really rapidly into the system. And they did that through manipulating the nicotine leaf, but also putting additives in there. Things like bronchodilators that let the smoke to get into the lung more rapidly and to hit the brain. And they added all these different flavors and tastes with sugar and cocoa being the most popular. So, really industry got in and ultra-processed the tobacco leaf that led it to be the perfect delivery device for nicotine in a way that made it addictive.

 

And I think about the same thing with our foods. When I think of naturally occurring foods that have sugars and fats that we enjoy, we find reinforcing, like berries and nuts, people just don't seem to develop a compulsive relationship with those foods. It's really when industrial processes get involved and it amps up the level of that reinforcing ingredients of the sugar sugars and the fats, but then it also ultra-processes it into these packages that just delivers it so rapidly into our body and into our brain, and adds all these unique flavorants and additives that further amplify the rewarding nature of things like sugar and fat. So, the way the companies are manufacturing the foods then makes them maximally palatable, but then they interact with the brain in interesting ways too.

 

So, how would you know if these ultra-processed foods are addictive?

 

I think one of the things that's a misunderstanding at times about addiction is that there's some sort of magical brain signature that if the brain just does this, we know something's addictive. And that is not the case. Scientifically, we haven't figured out what that would be. What we've done to figure out whether something's addictive or not is really to look mostly at the behaviors of the people who are consuming it. And so again, going back to cigarettes. What really led people to consider these substances as not just a bad habit, but truly addictive, was how compulsively people were consuming them. You know, that people wanted to quit desperately and they couldn't, even in the face of some really stark negative consequences like a lung cancer or emphysema. People come out of the hospital wanting to stop smoking and then start smoking right away. And we know as well that these substances impact our mood and our pleasure experiences. They'll often help us feel a little less stressed, help us feel more pleasure. And we'll work hard to get them and we enjoy them. If we know that doing a certain behavior will get us something like an addictive drug, we're willing to do it over and over again.

 

And that was really, when we looked at cigarettes, the three core criteria that we used to decide that cigarettes were addictive in the Surgeon General's report. They trigger compulsive behavior, they were really pleasurable and reduced negative feelings and they were reinforcing. Meaning they left us coming back for more.

 

And when I look at these ultra-processed foods, it's clear to me that they meet all of those behavioral signatures. That people want to cut down and they can't. Even in the face of something like having bariatric surgery and having your stomach fully rewired, about 30% of people are regaining the weight within a couple years. And they report that the cravings for these sorts of foods is one of the biggest obstacles. It's these ultra-processed foods. They are impactful in giving us a hit of pleasure and helping us feel a little less bored and a little less stressed. Those are some of our major motivations for using them. And they're very reinforcing. When we look at animal models, ultra-processed foods and the ingredients in those foods are arguably as reinforcing - meaning animals will work for them as much as they would for something like cocaine and definitely more than nicotine.

 

So, all of those factors together really strike me as fitting the bill for something that is addictive. And then when we bring the brain into it, we're starting to understand from looking at the dopamine system which is kind of the core system that gets activated by addictive drugs, the degree to which fats and sugars - which are elevated in these ultra-processed foods - can cause the dopamine system to release. It's actually a pretty similar magnitude to what alcohol and nicotine can do. So, all of these factors combined really lead us to see some really strong parallels, which to me, makes the case that these unique, novel, highly-processed substances should be considered addictive.

 

What you're saying is very persuasive and another issue that's come up in the context of drug addiction is tolerance. That people might need more of the drug over time in order to get the same reward. Is there any evidence of that in the context of food?

 

You know, it's been really hard to study in humans, because unlike other drugs of abuse, we're getting exposed to these sorts of foods from the time we're one or two years old. So, if I try and look at even a teenager, I don't have like that baseline to say, oh, this is how they used to respond to it and now they respond to it differently 18 years later. So, we've really kind of had to look at our animal models to help us get some information about tolerance. And in the animal models, we do see that exposure to the ultra-processed foods and the ingredients that are so heightened in these foods like sugar and fats cause changes in the reward system of the brain that is consistent with tolerance. I mean, look at those animals, they start binging on more and more and more of those foods over time, which also suggests they're becoming tolerant to the effects. To me, I see some parallels in what we see in our society. Just looking at the fact that our portion sizes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the amount of sugar is going up and up and up and salt is going up and up and up, suggests that the same amount of food or the same amount of sugar, just isn't quite doing it for us. So, then we're amping it up and taking something a little sweeter or eating more of it to get the fix that we would've had previously.

 

Well, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, to take those animal intake curves that show increasing consumption of the rewarding foods and project from that what human weight trends would look like over time and then see how closely those lines parallel each other. I bet they'd be pretty close.

 

I bet they would as well.

 

And you know industry says, in defense of things like large portion sizes, that 'we're just giving consumers what they want.' And other critics say, 'heck no, you're driving that consumers are eating so much by increasing portion sizes.' It's quite possible both are true and both could be being driven by this common effect on the brain of these highly reinforcing foods.

 

Absolutely. You know, we have a sense that the ultra-processed foods, in addition to being really tempting and rewarding and really activating your drive for wanting more and the industry will say that, they're trying to create foods that have maximum craveability that inspire more-ishness, that you want more and more and more. I mean, these are all code words for addiction without saying it, but then they also seem to not be as effective at triggering our satiety signals. So, the food itself and the way that they're engineered, leads us to want more and more and more and to not have those signals that it's time to stop because we're feeling full.

 

So, how do these foods make trusting our intuitions about what we're eating more challenging?

 

The intuitive eating movement, I think has a lot of really wonderful things about it, of kind of connecting with yourself more. However, my one concern about it is that if you're trying to intuitively eat ultra-processed foods, it's not an even playing field. They trick your brain into wanting more. They're not signaling hunger and satiety signals in the way that normal, minimally processed foods do. And we see in my lab that it's really, really hard to distinguish when you're hungry, because you need calories, and when you're hungry, because you're tempted by reward. I have this simulated fast food restaurant lab and we'll bring people in, we'll kind of randomize people. And say, half of them will go into this kind of normal blank lab space and we'll ask them how hungry are you and 'meh, not that hungry.' And we'll randomize these other group of people to come into our fast food restaurant lab where it smells like French fries and there's all the cues of the restaurant and everything is kind of setting you up. And they'll say, 'oh, I'm really, really hungry.' And the only thing that changed is that that one group is in that acute environment. So, their reward systems are kind of perked up and it's hard to distinguish that fact that you're now desiring food from I'm actually calorically deprived and I need calories. So, I think we have a hard time as humans, knowing when we're truly hungry and when we're being tempted by ultra-processed foods.

 

Over the course of human evolution, body weights have been pretty healthy for populations, for the most part. And that's been true for century after century. Then all of a sudden in a very short period of time, body weight in basically all other countries has really skyrocketed. And it's pretty hard to argue that people have changed in some fundamental way or that biology has changed in fundamental ways. What really seems to have changed are the food and physical activity environment, and you're narrowing down exactly how those changes have been made and how ordinary biology that works well under normal circumstances, fails under abnormal circumstances and that's how we're living today.

 

Absolutely correct. And I think one thing that people sometimes don't understand is that drugs of abuse, addictive drugs, they are hijacking the system that was designed so we would be seeking out food and calories and making sure we were eating enough. And those drugs of abuse are so novel and potent that they can get in and take that system and start to shift the drive towards those drugs rather than things like food and sustenance and things we need for survival. Now, these ultra-processed foods that are novel, chemical substances that really just popped up since the 70s and 80s, really, they are working on that same reward sustenance system and they're on overdrive. So, they don't even have to hijack this system. They just have to amp it up higher than it typically is by normal foods to start to trigger this loss of control, this compulsive seeking, this hard time stopping yourself even when you know it's not good for you.

 

And what's really interesting to me about the timeline, if we kind of say, it's 70s, 80s, 90s, this is this time where we really feel like the food environment changed so drastically, that's also when big tobacco really got into food. Philip Morris and R.J Reynolds were the biggest producers of the sort of processed foods that we're talking about today, in the 80s. And they really used the same playbook, the same scientific strategies. Their know about how to develop and market and create these addictive substances like cigarettes to make them so optimized and apply that to the development of their food portfolios.

 

 So, when we talk about ultra-processed foods, I think of them in my mind, much more as a similar substance to something like a cigarette, than an apple, or a salmon filet, because the process that creates them and the consequences for our brain and our psyche and our biology is much more similar to that cigarette than it is for those other sorts of foods, even though they all give us calories.

 

So, what do we know about how these ultra-processed foods affect children and adolescents?

 

To me, that's one of the most concerning spots about this. And I would say that research is really just beginning. We know that that is the dominant source of calories for adolescents and children, when we are looking at the United States, that ultra-processed foods is where they're getting most of their caloric intake. And our lab, we assess this addictive profile, the like classic signs of addiction with eating and we do that with these ultra-processed foods, and we do that in adults. And the current estimates is that about, anywhere between 15% to 20% of adults in the United States would meet this kind of diagnostic level of addiction to these ultra-processed foods.

 

What's concerning is that we see about 15% of children and adolescents are showing that same addictive profile. Our research finds that this is a profile that's associated with a harder time maintaining a healthy body weight, failure to respond to typical treatments, to help reduce obesity that it's associated with mental health concerns like depression and difficulties with inhibitory control. Seeing this in kids and teens, in many ways is not surprising, because you're not exposed to things like alcohol and cigarettes from the time you're one to two years old. Whereas in contrast with children, by the time a kid is two years old, a major part of their diet are ultra-processed foods. And we really don't know. We're in the middle of the experiment to understand how does that impact a developing brain that would be more vulnerable to addictive substances and how does that set them up for a lifetime of struggling to maintain a healthy relationship with food?

 

Again, the animal models are very concerning. The animal models suggest that young, early exposure to those sorts of ingredients in ultra-processed foods and ultra-processed foods is particularly likely to change the brain and adolescent and young rats in a way that makes them vulnerable, not only to show an addictive profile with a those foods, but also to be more sensitized to the addictive properties of things like stimulants and alcohol. So, it is not an issue that might just be in the realm of food, but might also be setting people up to be vulnerable for other addictive substances as they get more exposure to them in adolescence and early adulthood.

 

Now, what you're talking about is really concerning, especially in light of how much marketing of these ultra-processed foods goes on that's directed at children and adolescents, and almost all of it is for the least healthy foods in the company's portfolios. So, you think about kids getting bombarded by these inducements to eat these things, they're engineered to taste really good and their biology starts getting hijacked at an earlier age such that tolerance may develop and they need more of the foods over time, it's really pretty bad.

 

Yes. And you know, we've even done some work around withdrawal where I think people often think of withdrawal as really physical, with people like shaking or vomiting or sweating. That actually isn't often how withdrawal from addictive drugs presents. It's often, if you think of cigarettes more psychological. It is irritability and depression and kind of agitation. So, we've been looking at that in adults, what happens when people are trying to get off these foods and eat a healthier diet and people are reporting those same clusters of symptoms that we see with withdrawal from other addictive substances and it follows kind of the same time course, that it often starts in about 24 hours, it peaks in that first week where it's really severe and hard and then slowly starts to taper off. And the more withdrawal people are experiencing, the more likely they are to fail at their weight loss attempt.

 

Now, when we started to do this work, we thought, well, wait, this wouldn't just be happening with adults, we would expect this with children too if this is playing a role. So, we asked parents who had tried to cut their kids junk food down in the past year and asked them about the signs of withdrawal and they reported that, yes, their children had that experience, it followed the same time course as typical withdrawal syndromes and that children whose parents had addictive eating themselves were more likely to experience withdrawal. So, I just think for parents how challenging that is if you're trying to help your child and maybe help yourself simultaneously move away from these ultra-processed foods, that if it's triggering this aversive withdrawal syndrome that makes your child far harder to parent and while you're also feeling that way, it really sets people up to fail.

 

So, let me ask you one final question. How do we reduce the harm that's associated with these ultra-processed foods?

 

You know, I think if there's one lesson we've learned from addiction over and over again, is that while we need to have good treatments and we need to provide people with psychoeducation, if we don't address the environment, our treatments aren't powerful enough to overcome that. So, again, cigarettes is our best example. We knew so much and we were developing nicotine gum and we had treatments out there that were available, but what really helped us turn back the tide was by addressing the environment around cigarettes through policy, by things like restricting marketing and taxation and restricting vending machines that children could so easily access. So, I fundamentally believe that for this same change to take place in the context of the harms of these foods, it's going to have to take policy initiatives that focus on giving us an environment that allows us to have a fighting chance. And it's even more relevant in the context of food because you don't get to opt out of eating. So, you have to go into the grocery store that's dominated by ultra-processed foods. My students here in college, they have to go into the dining hall that's dominated by ultra-processed foods and that environment that's so dominated by that, I think really works with our biology in ways that really mimics what we see with addictive substances that makes it hard for us to eat in a healthy, nourishing way.

 

Bio

 

Ashley Gearhardt, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Science area at the University of Michigan. She also earned her B.A. in psychology from The University of Michigan as an undergraduate. While working on her doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale University, Dr. Gearhardt became interested in the possibility that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process. To explore this further, she developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) to operationalize addictive eating behaviors, which has been linked with more frequent binge eating episodes, an increased prevalence of obesity and patterns of neural activation implicated in other addictive behaviors. It has been cited over 800 times and translated into over ten foreign languages. Her areas of research also include investigating how food advertising activates reward systems to drive eating behavior and the development of food preferences and eating patterns in infants. She has published over 100 academic publications and her research has been featured on media outlets, such as ABC News, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

In today's podcast, we're talking about ultra-processed foods. Our guest today is Trish Cotter from the global public health organization Vital Strategies. She's the author of a new commentary published in the BMJ Global Health calling for warning labels on ultra-processed foods.

Interview Summary

 

First I'd like you to tell us, what our ultra-processed foods? And how do you think they're affecting health?

 

So as you mentioned in the introduction, I lead the food policy work for Vital Strategies. Our team supports partners and governments to introduce high-impact policies aimed at creating a healthier food environment. Now, these policies that we focus on are taxes on sugary drinks and junk food, restrictions on marketing of unhealthy food, especially to kids, and front of package labels on foods that are high in fat, salt, and sugar. The common denominator amongst all these policies is ultra-processed foods. So your question, what are ultra-processed foods? They're foods that you can't make at home in your home kitchen. In fact, as you said, this debate about whether they're even foods at all, and you'll find them on the supermarket shelf, packed full of them, soft drinks, breakfast cereals, ice creams, frozen prepared dishes. They're products that go through many manufacturing steps which alter the food from its natural state, and they're quite literally torn apart and put back together again with the addition of a cocktail of preservatives and flavors and colors. And what we get at the end of it are products that are packaged, ready to eat, hyper palatable. Some research is indicating that they're addictive and ultimately leading to long-lasting consequences on a person's health.

 

So you're completely in agreement there with some of our other guests who have spoken about ultra-processed foods and noting the dangers of them. Why do you think the public has remained unaware of the risk of these foods?

 

One of the reasons is that the term itself is relatively new. It's coined by Brazilian professor Carlos Monteiro in about 2009, and while the research community's quite familiar with it and have been researching it over this period of time and increasingly so, there's been limited data about the public's understanding of ultra-processed products. So part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Food Policy Program, Vital Strategies supported some studies in Brazil and Colombia in 2017 and '18, which included several questions on public perceptions of ultra-processed foods or products. And what we found was clear evidence of the food and beverage industry's success, really, at marketing these products where we saw a significant number of people associate them with satisfying cravings, being tasty, bringing happiness and joy, and you can all understand what those products are. Also, they associate them with family, social gatherings, children, ease, and even breakfast and physical activity. So the evidence also was really enlightening in that we found was that, while people aren't really familiar with the term, they recognize the group of products as harmful. So it makes sense to them that this scary sounding word, ultra-processed products, could be harmful.

 

What are your thoughts on the food industry involvement in food environments and food policies?

 

So look - unhealthy products, unhealthy diets are responsible for an estimated 11 million preventable deaths each year, and with this at the forefront of our minds, we cannot forget that food and beverage companies' first responsibility is to their shareholders, not our health. So let's have no illusions about why they may seek to be involved in food policy. The industry also has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of continuing to freely promote thousands of individual products that they have us believe are tasty and convenient, but in fact, as we've described, they're full of nasties and harmful to our health. So while there are thousands of individual harmful products, they cannot be really targeted by public health policy. But the minute they become known as one, for example, ultra-processed foods or a collection of foods that are high in fat, salt, and sugar, governments will find ways to regulate them, and that's when we'll see large corporations flex their muscles. Letting the industry engage in policy solutions usually leads to ineffective or weakened policy at best. They're part of the problem, and while they need to be part of implementing the solutions, they cannot be part of the policy making. Health policy is for health experts. That process can't be muddied by commercial interests.

 

You've just answered this question, but it's an interesting one to talk a little further about. When an industry feels under threat from litigation or regulation, legislation, one thing they typically do is say, "You don't need the police us. We'll police ourselves, and we'll come up with these self-regulatory efforts, and we'll abide by this, or we'll create that standard." They do a lot of that kind of thing. It doesn't sound like you're optimistic.

 

Absolutely, and in fact, I'm less than optimistic. I'm convinced, and we've seen lots of examples worldwide, that voluntary agreements don't work. And of course that's what the industry will propose because that's what they can live with, and that's how they will continue to go on the path of least resistance. But it's incumbent on governments and public health practitioners to respond decisively and to implement strong mandatory policies so that we can advance the public's right to healthy and nutritious food because the fact that over 50% of the calories that they're consumed in US, for instance, ultra-processed means that these companies have just gone ahead and managed to take over our food environment without any opposition, and it's time they were held to account.

 

I agree with you entirely. All you have to do is read about how other industries have responded under these circumstances to know what the food industry was likely to do. And yet we still let them do it. For example, marketing foods to children - they created a self-regulatory effort that then the field has to spend a lot of time proving doesn't work. But now those things have been proven, and so the time to expect industry to change on its own seems to have long passed. So I agree with you that coming up with better regulations makes perfect sense. Let me ask you about obesity rates during COVID. Then I'd like to come back and ask about ultra-processed foods in particular. So the rates have risen in some parts of the world during COVID, obesity rates, that is, including the United States. What's your take on this?

 

I think that COVID-19 really exposed the vulnerabilities in our food system. And what it did was accelerate an already alarming trend in our global weight status, I guess, is the way to describe it. But also what happened is that, throughout the pandemic, many people were faced with food insecurity for the first time in their lives, and almost all of us have seen shifts in availability and supply. So when there's no food available, hardly any food available, any food is better than no food, and one of the things that the industry did so well during the pandemic is capitalize on it. They used that opportunity to really lift their corporate social responsibility profile. One of the things we must do is not blame the individual who often have very little control over their food environment. We think we're making our own decisions when we are purchasing food, but really, someone else is pulling the strings. Many times, a large food or beverage company has made that decision for us before we even get to the supermarket by setting prices, designing products that are easy and convenient and that look good, look tasty and nutritious, but in reality, they're something quite different. And even before the pandemic, worldwide palates and brains have been trained to crave these unhealthy foods, and we know that the industry has invested millions upon millions in formulating and marketing them to be highly desirable. So the person who's the consumer is very much like a puppet.

 

It's an interesting way of thinking about it and deadly combination of vulnerable biology, industry exploiting that biology, and the heavy marketing of foods makes for a pretty powerful picture. So what are some of the possible solutions? What do you think that public health community and policy makers and advocates and others can do to raise awareness?

 

Well, I think we really have a responsibility to warn consumers about the harms of ultra-processed foods. At the moment, they're in the dark. So what could we do really is the question. What could we do to warn them? The first thing in our favor is that the term ultra-processed food, as I said earlier, is really unfriendly, and people can conceive that these products as being unhealthy, and most recognize them in our research as being harmful. So we can use this to our advantage to fight against industry marketing efforts. Just like the marketing industry builds a brand around a product, the public health community needs to build meaning around this term ultra-processed to alert consumers about its harms. We can also look at past movements like tobacco control and see where the public health community has achieved huge policy wins in strong public understanding of the consequences of consuming a dangerous product. Raising awareness is incredibly important. We've spent over 50 years educating the public on the harms of tobacco. We're going to need to do that for this category of products. We can also add information about the level of processing to food packages and warn about the products that are ultra-processed. Evidence shown that and our own consumers to make healthy decisions through clear front of package labeling really has a positive effect. We know that most shoppers spend 10 seconds or less selecting each food and beverage item. They need quick and easy ways to select the healthiest foods to avoid unhealthy foods. A number of countries, particularly Chile, Mexico, have introduced front of package warning labels in an effort to address poor diets. If in these examples we could further strengthen the warning labels by adding the descriptor, "This food is ultra-processed," we would be further educating the community about which foods are safe to consume and which aren't.

 

That raises a very interesting point that I know these warning label systems that you're talking about tend to score foods according to being high or low in particular nutrients. So foods high in sugar, for example, would get a poor score. And I think the point that you're making, that's very well taken and others have made as well, is that there's something about these ultra-processed foods that is damaging beyond the fact that they carry lots of bad nutrients with them. It's the processing itself that is part of the reason our human biology is being thrown off. So if that's the case, then labeling these would be very interesting. It might be pretty simple to take these existing labeling systems and just add an additional criteria for giving a food a poor score. It sounds like you're optimistic that this could occur given that it's occurring in some countries already.

 

Yes, I do agree with that. The opportunity here is that when industry reformulate their product as they do in some countries if they're able to reduce the levels of fat, salt, and sugar in their products to avoid with the label, it doesn't stop the product from being ultra-processed. So what we are trying to avoid is the situation where we see no labels on ultra-processed products, so no warning labels for fat, salt, and sugar, but the product remains ultra-processed and, therefore, it's still harmful. So this is one proposal that might help mitigate that. It might help the public continue to understand that it's not just the fact of these single nutrients that are harmful, but it's the whole product that can be dangerous to people's health.

 

Bio:

 

 

Trish Cotter is the global lead for the Food Policy Program at Vital Strategies. She has extensive experience aligning strategic communications to achieve policy and behavior change outcomes across several areas of public health including food policy, tobacco control and cancer prevention and screening. Trish is the lead author of a new commentary published in BMJ Global Health: 'Warning: ultra-processed' — A call for warnings on foods that aren't really foods. She holds a master's degree in public health from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia

 

Are there models for livestock production that support both farmers and communities? Today, we're going to explore the complex nature of relationships between farmers and nearby communities and the impact of industrial agricultural practices, such as CAFOs, stands for concentrated animal feeding operations, on those relationships. Our guests today are policy advocate Sarah Carden with Farm Action and community organizer Monica Brooks from the Maryland State Commission for Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities.

Interview Summary

 

Sarah, let's begin with you. Can you tell us what is a CAFO?

 

Sarah: Sure. Let's begin with the USDA definition. The USDA defines a CAFO as an intensive animal feeding operation in which over 1,000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year. When we say animal unit, we mean the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of live animal weight. So a CAFO can house anywhere from hundreds to millions of animals. CAFOs are a part of the industrial agriculture system, which is controlled largely by multinational corporations. These corporations have been able to externalize their true costs - meaning they pass their production and distribution costs onto other entities. For example, farmers raise animals for corporate integrators according to a very strict contract in which the integrator has all the power and can set the terms of the agreement to maximize their own profits. In this relationship, the farmer is responsible for financing everything that depreciates in value, buildings, manure from animals, farm equipment. Meanwhile, the integrator owns the only thing that actually appreciates in value: the animals. CAFOs include both open feed lots for cattle, as well as huge buildings with no windows where livestock and poultry are confined, often in boxes or stalls. They produce huge amounts of animal sewage. Even the smallest CAFO produces an equivalent amount of waste as 16,000 humans. CAFO waste is usually not treated to remove pathogens and emits hazardous chemicals, such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane. CAFOs destroy the air quality around them with particulate that carries disease-causing bacteria, fungus, or other pathogens. Animals frequently die in CAFOs, and their carcasses often, in large numbers, must be dealt with. Infestations of flies, rats, and other vermin are commonplace around CAFOs and, therefore, around CAFO neighbors.

 

So Sarah, thanks very much for that description, and I'm really happy that you address that issue of the integrators, the big agribusiness companies that control so much of the food supply chain, and so many people think the farmers are at fault for what goes on in these operations, and it's discouraging how little control they have over it in many ways and, in fact, over their own livelihoods. So it was helpful to have your description. So Monica, can you describe what it's like to live near CAFOs?

 

Sarah: Sure. Unfortunately, residents who have to live near CAFOs experience everything from an enormous amount of flies to ammonia in the air that can cause burning in the throat, burning in the skin, coughing, asthmatic conditions, not to mention all night and all day, you're surrounded by large tractor trailers that are going up and down your highway at all hours of the night, lights flashing through your windows. You have feathers and all kinds of things on your property, and lastly, the main thing that happens is many of these people are on well water. Their wells lose water every time a CAFO moves in next door. So I'm talking about people who have actually had to, at their own expense, redig their own wells repeatedly just to have water for their families.

 

So it sounds like there are a number of things that range from being, I guess what you might call a nuisance to major things that could have big influences on health. And I know there's an epidemiologist at Duke who's done some very interesting work on the health consequences of living near CAFOs, and they're really pretty significant, significant an understatement, actually. So let's talk about activity on the ground and what happens in communities. So can you talk about what happened in your community when you found out that a number of CAFOs were approved to be built and what happened?

 

Monica: What of the things we've discovered in these rural communities, when you have a large industry, an agricultural industry as what we have here, is the agricultural industry seems to be able to get licensed to do things that the community may not approve of but the community is not informed. We found out that 13 football-size field CAFOs were coming to a small plot of land near our home, which was actually slotted to be placed on top of what's called the Paleo Channel, which is our source of water. We're on well water. And so our county thought, "This is a good idea for us to put 13 large CAFOs with manure that's going to be coming out particulate matter, ammonia, nitrates on top of the source of water for residents." There was this very tiny blurb in the paper about it. That was it. There were no hearings. There was no information disseminated to the community at all. When we got wind of it, we came together as a community, people who never knew each other before, all different walks of life, and we had to fight this on our own. We didn't receive local support. We attended every council meeting. We spoke, we testified, we had town halls. You name it, we had it, until we received some support from some outside coalitions, Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Food and Water Watch, and some attorneys for Earth Justice who were able to come alongside of us to give us that emphasis that we needed, and yet it took us three years in order to prevent this project from coming. We were successful and basically literally wearing down the prospective CAFO owner. However, it would've been really nice for us to have support from our legislators and our representatives, but you know what? This was a great opportunity for the citizens to show that there is power when we come together. There's power, and we can bring about change and to go for what we want and in spite of us possibly being underdogs.

 

So Monica, do you have any advice or guidance for other communities who might be facing this kind of pressure from the big corporate agriculture interests?

 

Monica: Yes, I want to encourage you to know that, first, you're not alone. Don't be afraid to speak out. Mobilize your community. Connect with your neighbors. First go to your elected officials, and do whatever you can to ensure that these CAFOs don't come to a neighborhood near you. You can do town halls. You can do protests. You can write letters. You can make all the noise in the media that you want. These kinds of things are what helped our community to become successful in fighting, but you can do it. Don't be afraid to ask for outside help. There are several organizations all across the country that help in matters just like this, and you can be victorious. You can help get laws changed. You can help to bring better air and water and quality to your neighborhood.

 

Monica, thanks for that, and it's really nice to know that community voices can be heard and that there are specific ways of making sure that takes place. So Sarah, back to you. Are there my models for livestock production that you believe support both farmers and communities, and would any alternative to CAFOs be able to feed enough people?

 

Sarah: Yes, and I'd like to echo what my colleague Dee Laninga said in a previous interview, and this is very important: "Industrial agriculture is not currently feeding the world. Smaller farms are doing that. The industrial Ag model is focused on producing feed for livestock, not food for people. It exports its meat products to wealthier countries, not to the world's hungriest."

 

So to answer your question about alternatives, they do exist. They have just never been given the same legislative, regulatory, and financial opportunities as big agribusiness. We need to prioritize policies and lending practices that will. So we need to deepen our local food economies, expand regional meat processing capabilities, give independent producers more pathways to the consumer. Robust local and regional food infrastructure includes things like convenient food hubs that distribute the wares of local producers, independent processing plants that serve local farmers and provide region with local sustainable healthy meat, community supported agriculture networks that provide the freshest produce from farm to nearby table, farmers who sell directly to consumers at markets, co-ops, and roadside stands, and grocery stores that recognize the fact that customers want to see the names of nearby farms in the produce, meat, and dairy sections. If industrial agriculture interests were required to internalize their costs and mitigate these risks, they would not be economically competitive with these alternatives. So if alternatives instead were prioritized in our policies, we could have a food system that not only stimulates the economy and operates within fair markets but also positively impacts health outcomes, the environment, and our social fabric.

 

 

Bios:

Sarah Carden (she/her) joined Farm Action in December 2021. As Policy Advocate, she focuses her efforts on raising awareness and advocating for policies that meaningfully reform the nation's food and agriculture system. Sarah holds a B.A. in Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. She has been working on food system reforms for over a decade and brings expertise in local food systems and distribution networks, agriculture, non-profit development, and food entrepreneurship. Sarah has also worked as an organizer on two presidential campaigns and one congressional campaign. Sarah lives with her husband and their two young children on their organic vegetable farm.

Monica Brooks is a private citizen who serves on the Maryland State Commission for Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities.

 

Today, we're going to explore industrial agriculture and what that means to farmers and ranchers, to farm workers, to corporations, and consumers. Our guest today, Adam Zipkin, serves as council to New Jersey Senator, Cory Booker. He advises Senator Booker on issues related to food policy, agriculture, and animal welfare. Booker has been deeply engaged in legislation such as the Farm System Reform Act, Black Farmers Act, and the Climate Stewardship Act.

Interview Summary

Now, the work that you and your colleagues are doing, and of course, Senator Booker, is really important, groundbreaking work. So I'd like to dive in and talk about that. So first, could you tell us about the work that you and Senator Booker are doing - focused around the area of agriculture?

I was with Senator Booker when he was Mayor Booker in Newark, New Jersey. And when he was mayor, we saw up close how a lot of communities in Newark were food deserts. We did a lot at the city level to try to address that where we had communities where people just didn't have access to healthy foods and to fresh fruits and vegetables. So we would try to attract new supermarkets and started growing a lot more produce in the city. But ultimately, we realized that the scale of the problem was just bigger than any one city could solve on its own.

Then, when we came to the Senate, Senator Booker and I traveled and met with farmers, and went to rural communities, not just in New Jersey, but around the country. We went to Duplin County, North Carolina. And there, the Senator saw just how these massive factory farms, large CAFOs, were really hurting the local communities - primarily low-income communities, communities of color - with air pollution, water pollution, and health impacts. As we started working on the 2018 Farm Bill, we traveled to Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and met with farmers and ranchers there. What the Senator learned was that the same broken food system that was really hurting people in Newark was really a broken system nationally for all of us.

So Senator Booker started working on legislation to try to change the system. And he introduced the Climate Stewardship Act, which is focused on investing in farmers and ranchers as part of the solution to climate change; and using existing voluntary USDA conservation programs and targeting dollars to regenerative Ag and soil health practices where we can reduce emissions and increase carbon sequestration. He introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which is a bill to comprehensively address the terrible history of discrimination by USDA against black farmers over the past century. Another really important bill that Senator Booker introduced was the Farm System Reform Act, which is a bill that would put a moratorium on new large factory farms and phase out large factory farms. It really comes up with sort of a blueprint to transition us from this current industrial model that is failing us on so many levels to a more regenerative system.

That work is impressive and ambitious in scope. I wish you the best of luck with it. It's interesting to me that you happened to mention Duplin County, NC. So my colleagues and I at the World Food Policy Center did a tour of farms in eastern North Carolina several years back, and Duplin County was one of the places we went. And I just so happened to look up numbers for Duplin County. Now, this goes back several years, so I'm not sure how current they are. But if I remember, the annual production in that county - the counties in North Carolina aren't all that big, by the way, we have 100 of them - but Duplin County's annual production of hogs is 2 million hogs. And in addition to that, 5 million turkeys and 69 million chickens. And this is a single county. So the scope of the industrial agriculture, and of course, the consequences of it are really pretty impressive. So it's interesting you happen to go to that county as well. Let me ask about a report that was published by a group called Farm Action. They published this in 2020. It was entitled "The Truth about Industrial Agriculture." What was it that interested you about this report and how has it influenced your thinking and your work?

So Farm Action is one of the stakeholders that our office has worked with a lot, and we consider them to be a really important voice on these issues. The report that you mentioned, "The Truth about Industrial Agriculture," is a report that really does a great job of going through all of the ways in which our industrial meat production system is harming all of us. It shows how it's a system that is really hurting independent family farmers who are forced to try to compete with a system that externalizes all of its costs. We're seeing independent family farmers driven into bankruptcy and forced to sell or be foreclosed on. We're seeing how this current factory farm system hurts the environment through the air pollution, and water pollution. And how it's really dangerous for public health, both in the impacts locally on neighbors with respiratory diseases like asthma, but also, the pandemic risks that we face from large factory farms and the way that the system is so harmful to workers. These were things that Senator Booker and I had learned about and were motivating us in bills like the Farm System Reform Act. But this report just does a great job of consolidating all that information and laying it out and also goes through and dispels a whole bunch of myths about the current system.

Can I ask you a question about your perception of public opinion? So Americans, for decades, have spoken, in a way. They wanted food available all the time in their supermarkets in an abundant amount at the lowest possible cost. And the way to deliver on that, the hope that Americans had, was to have industrial agriculture. So do you think Americans are thinking differently about it now? Are you sensing a shift in public opinion or awareness that might be leading the general public along the lines of what you're talking?

I do think there's starting to be a shift. I think there's been some polling in the last few years that show that the public does want these factory farms to be better regulated. And, there is growing support for putting a moratorium on new, large factory farms. I think that part of what's really important about reports like this and about bills like the Farm System Reform Act, and having advocates and Senator Booker and others out there talking about these issues and raising awareness about these issues, is I think that, the more that the public learns, the more public opinion will be supportive of bills like the Farm System Reform Act. Because I think that, currently, the industry tries to keep the system as opaque as possible, right? They try to pass these Ag gag laws at a state level that will punish people if they just try to take pictures or show the public what the conditions are like for animals and workers inside of these factory farms. So I think that public opinion is, I think, shifting and I think that, collectively, we're working to try to accelerate that.

I'm a bit curious about your impression to see if it was consistent with mine. When we were doing the tours of farms that I mentioned, we visited some industrial-sized agriculture operations and the CAFO units and things. And it was our impression in speaking to the farmers that they weren't making a lot of money from this, that the big companies were, the big companies that are referred to as integrators, but the farmers weren't. And they looked like they were having tremendous risks because they bore most of the risks the companies didn't and their profit margins were very low and they had to work extremely hard under difficult circumstances. And so I think that, if there is any perception among the public, that it's the farmers themselves who work in these places that are making a lot of money. That didn't seem to be consistent with what we were doing. But I was wondering what your impressions were?

I think that's exactly right, Kelly. We've met with contract farmers out in the field. We've also had contract farmers come to meet with us in Washington. And the first thing that struck us was how scared they were to even be talking to us because they were telling us that if the big integrators, if these big companies that they were contracting with, if they even found out that they were talking to us, that they could get punished by them. Like you said, a lot of these contract growers, if they were just having to live on the farm income, they would be at or below the poverty line, right? So they're forced to have family income from off the farm just to keep their heads above water. And a lot of them, what we heard from them, wished they had never gone down this road, where they were forced to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars to build these barns and these manure lagoons and these systems. And now, they've taken on all this debt and they feel like they're trapped and they just can't get out. So one of the things that we do in the Farm System Reform Act, in addition to putting the moratorium on new CAFOs, is to provide $10 billion a year for 10 years to give voluntary buyouts to farmers to contract growers that want to transition out of this industrial model to a more regenerative model. Whether it's using their barns to grow vegetables or mushrooms or to do pasture-based livestock or other types of regenerative agriculture to just help them get out.

Oh, that's impressive. It's really nice that you're sensitive to the needs of the people that are working so hard. So back to the report that we were referring to, how do you hope that government agencies and elected officials will use information?

I think it's a really important report for Senate offices and House offices to have at their fingertips and to be able to really learn about the system. Because other than the senators or the members of the House of Representatives who are actually on the agriculture committees and focus on these issues day to day, there are a lot of members of Congress, just like there's a lot of members of the public, that have no idea really, of what is going on in the current system. They've heard a lot of the industry talking points because there are well-funded campaigns to get their myths out there. There are also a lot of the dollars spent on lobbying by these big, consolidated, multinational companies. So I think that this report really can help raise awareness amongst members of Congress, both in D.C. and at the state level as well, where we've seen some bills similar to the Farm System Reform Act introduced in various states. And, I think that just having all this consolidated into one report and just laying out how, really, the current system benefits these big companies and their shareholders and really no one else. Sort of rural communities, the environment, animals, workers, independent farmers, all really are being hurt by this system, and having the report and having the sort of myths and the truths about some of the beliefs, I just think it could be really helpful. Because we need to add cosponsors to these bills and build momentum.

I think in addition to what you were saying, and those are all really important points, that the average consumer going to the store to buy chicken, let's say, may not be thinking about the welfare of people who live in rural areas or the environmental damage done by some of these operations. But in fact, everybody does get affected by this, by things like antibiotic resistance and overall damage to climate, and there are just so many things that ripple through our world that really nobody's unaffected by it, are they?

That's exactly right. I think that the report really, by focusing on all of the negative, externalities from these factory farms, that these big meat-packing companies, they don't absorb those costs, right? Instead those costs are being paid, whether it's by our healthcare system, or by the local communities, or the damage to the environment, through the water pollution where people's local streams and creeks are polluted and their Wells where their families have been drinking water from these wells for generations. And now, they've been poisoned. So all those are costs that don't appear when you're just paying the price at the supermarket, but that all of us are paying. I think the report does a great job of laying that out.

So if the kind of policies you're talking about, and let's say other related policies, actually get enacted, what does a transition look like as we change from industrial to other forms of agriculture?

Look, this system has been built over many decades and is massive in scale. And so it's not going to change overnight, which is part of why, in the Farm System Reform Act, we put in an immediate moratorium on new large factory farms but we phase them out between now and 2040, right. We recognize it's going to be a transition period that's going to take time. But I think the voluntary payments I mentioned, where we're helping to financially assist the farmers to transition to this new system, I think creating a system where we are paying for the types of practices that are beneficial from an environmental perspective and a climate change perspective, sort of transitioning to where the workplace is, right. Right now, these meat-packing workers are exposed to terrible working conditions. I mean, COVID-19 sort of tore the lid off of this system in terms of, what we don't usually get to see, the public got a view of these meat-packing plants and the conditions and how they became COVID-19 hotbeds and workers were getting sick and dying and creating COVID hotspots in their local communities. And so I think that the transition is where we start to create a system that, rather than benefiting just these big corporations, is benefiting rural communities, independent farmers, workers, and just getting started doing that.

So what is success?

I think success looks like starting to align our public subsidies with the type of food system that we want to create. Because one thing we haven't even talked about is the ultimate impact of our current system on the people that are eating the food, right. In our country, right now, we're seeing an explosion of diet-related diseases, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, certain types of cancer, all preventable diseases. That's sort of the end result from this system. And so I think that success will be where, right now, our dietary guidelines say we should be eating 50% or more of our diet should be fruits and vegetables, but less than 2% of our federal Ag subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. So I think aligning our public investments with the outcomes that we want to see. And then, ultimately, success is a system where rather than being part of the climate change problem, our food system is part of the solution by absorbing more carbon than it is generating. And a system that treats workers fairly and treats animals more humanely and has positive economic and environmental impacts on the rural communities. I think transitioning to that, ultimately, is success.

I just finished a book called "The Poison Squad," and it is a book about how really broken our food system was at the turn of the century, in the 1900s. And how there was just a decades-long fight by policy makers and the public and advocates to change the system. And they were successful over time. I think it gave me hope that collectively we can now fight that same fight and hopefully have a system that ultimately reflects our values.

Bio:

Adam Zipkin currently serves as Counsel to United States Senator Cory Booker. In this role, Adam advises Senator Booker on issues related to food policy, agriculture and animal welfare. Before his employment in the Senate, Adam was Deputy Mayor for Economic Development for the City of Newark, New Jersey. Prior to working in City Hall, Adam operated a law office primarily devoted to providing pro bono legal services to Newark residents in need, with a focus on providing representation to low income tenants. In 2006, Adam received the "Pro Bono Attorney of the Year" Award from Essex County Legal Services, Volunteer Lawyers for Justice Program in recognition of his service and dedication to meeting the legal needs of indigent persons.

So there's a big question out there that's being asked over and again: do massive multinational corporations have an outsized control of our food system, and what does this mean for all of us? Disruptions in food supply chains recently have highlighted the vulnerabilities of an industrialized agriculture system that according to some does not benefit farmers, farm workers or even consumers. Today, we're going to explore a new report from the organization Farm Action entitled "The Truth About Industrial Agriculture: A Fragile System Propped Up By Myths and Hidden Costs." Our guest today is Dee Laninga, senior communications manager for Farm Action.

Interview Summary

 

So first, can you tell our listeners about Farm Action and what it does?

 

Absolutely. We are a small but I think pretty mighty nonprofit working to transform the food and farm system into something that works for everyday people rather than a handful of powerful corporations. And to do that, we do our own independent research, we do policy development, advocacy campaigns, we leverage political expertise on the Hill and that's all to educate people and advance policies that will democratize our food system. The thing about working on food system reform is that what we eat and how it's grown or raised intersects with just about every aspect of human life, health and nutrition, racial and social equity, indigenous rights, workers' rights, environmental justice, even economic competition. So by pushing Ag policies that create a more fair and inclusive food system, we're really able to move the needle on a lot of today's urgent issues. And that mission seems to be resonating with people a lot right now. Earlier this month we were reached out to by "The Hill," the top us political newspaper, they wanted to run a profile on the organization tracing our origins and showing how we've been able to influence the Biden administration. So what we're finding is that the way that new stories are spreading and catching on about the effects of corporate consolidation and industrialized practices that proves to us that people are really ready for change, they're ready to see a breakdown of corporate control.

 

I Agree with you by the way and it seems to me that more people, not just the advocacy groups who've cared about this issue for quite a while, but general public thinks about these issues a lot more than it used to and more and more people care about where their food comes from, the story of their food if you will. Would you agree that?

 

I would 100% agree. And what's so striking is that it seems like one of the last areas where you can reach people from across the political spectrum. Everybody cares about their food, everybody cares about the health of their families, even everybody cares about farmers and wants to see them succeed and do well. So it feels like one the places in our somewhat deeply divided society that we can still come together and talk about solutions.

 

So let's dive into the report entitled "Truth About Industrial Agriculture."

 

So I should probably first define industrial agriculture. So Farm Action defines it as a corporate controlled system, one that relies on extractive mechanized food production practices that prioritize excessive profit over people, animals, and the environment. For decades, the corporations that benefit from these practices who really put them in place have been controlling the public conversation and the policy debate by using their economic and political power to spread myths that defend the system. So after defeat after defeat to reform the system we felt like it was past time to change the narrative, tell the truth and raise awareness of the harms that industrial Ag does to the farmer, rural communities and eaters everywhere. So defining the problem we felt would be the first step towards the solution and people need to know about the widespread impacts of our brittle, vulnerable, consolidated, industrialized system. Following major breakdowns and the ones you alluded to earlier Kelly in our food supply system in the early months of the COVID pandemic, we produced this report to show how industrial agriculture causes problems for everyone. It's not just an issue for farmers or even for people who live near factory farms. Our industrialized food system is negatively affecting anyone who eats food and we really need to do something about it quickly. So the report was meant to address that.

 

Let's talk about one word in particular that you mentioned and it's extractive. Tell me what you mean by that?

 

Absolutely. So extraction - that is a process by which corporations have been able to externalize their costs. They are passing the burden of their production and distribution on to other entities who have less power. So that would include farmers, rural communities and taxpayers. They've had wealth extracted from them through this process.

 

And would also applied to extraction from the land like over use of land by monoculture in ways that aren't restoring the land and regenerating it?

 

Yes, absolutely. The soil health has been vastly depleted in Iowa and other states. Phil Potts' excellent book, "Perilous Bounty" documents this process of how the wealth of the soil, the health of the soil has been extracted by corporations for maximum profit.

 

What are some of the key findings of your report?

 

So the big ticket item that I hope listeners would take away from this conversation is that far from being the sort of inevitable savior of all of us, industrial Agriculture is just an economically flawed system that only survives due to two factors. The first would be the wildly successful marketing campaigns that are based in myth that convince decision makers and the general public that these big corporate, industrialized food production practices are our only option. And then the second fact keeping the system afloat is that these corporations have been able to externalize their true costs, meaning they pass their production and distribution costs on to other entities who have to then shoulder that burden. So the farmers that grow or raise animals for them and have to foot the bill for equipment and farm infrastructure, so that would include the people who work for their companies in dangerous conditions with low pay and few to no benefits, consumers who have to pay higher retail prices at the grocery store, taxpayers for infrastructure repair and environmental cleanup. And then of course, rural residents who live near industrialized operations and have to pay vastly higher healthcare costs as a result of the air and waterborne pollutants put out by factory farms. A recent report found that while US consumers spend 1.1 trillion on food each year, the true cost, which takes into account the impact industrialized food production has on the environment, on human health, on workers and more it's actually three times that amount. So it actually costs us more than $3 trillion annually to produce and distribute food in an industrialized way.

 

Okay, so what are some of the myths that you're hoping to counter?

 

I think the myths are a really accessible and memorable entry point into this research because they're going to feel really familiar to a lot of people. So for instance, the myth that rural economies would collapse without the presence of industrial Agriculture. Or that the chemicals associated with its methods are totally safe or that the so-called efficiency of these huge vertically integrated operations, that that's the only thing standing between American families and sky high food prices. These corporate talking points about the benefits of their own system, they've been around for so long and are so pervasive that they've really entered the public discourse as fact or like common sense that you don't even question. But when you look really hard at the facts, the myths just fall apart and that process is really eye-opening for a lot of readers. We have a blog series on our farmaction.us website that unpacks each of these myths in detail with real life examples and links to sources that just makes it super accessible for just the everyday reader. And then we've also posted these blogs in a weekly #MythBusterMonday series on our Facebook and Twitter and that's been able to help us get sort of bite sized pieces of the research and really break down the myths and get them into the hands of the public.

 

So let me ask the final question, which maybe is the most important of all. So is it really possible to feed the world without industrial Ag?

 

That is such a powerful myth and that has had just incredible staying power, but there's a couple of things here to address that myth. One, industrial agriculture is not in fact what's feeding the world. Our research shows that smaller farms are currently meeting 70 to 80% of the world's food needs and these farms could double or triple their production without adopting industrial farming methods. And then the second thing I want to mention is that the output of industrial Ag in the US doesn't even go to the world's hungry. Farm output around the world is rising so other countries don't necessarily need our goods. And then US meat exports are not going to those nations with the highest level of hunger or food insecurity and those countries are predominantly in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. And instead we see that US meat exports go primarily to developed and rapidly developing nations that have growing economic middle classes that can afford to pay global market prices for meat.

 

And I would just say that to anyone who's curious about what goes into the food you find on any given grocery shelf, I really encourage you to check this report out and share it with people you know. There's just so much at stake if we keep going down this industrialized consolidated road for our food system and so much to be gained from change. So we really appreciate this chance to talk with you about it and thank you so much.

 

Bio:

 

Dee Laninga joined the Farm Action team in April of 2021 to raise awareness about the organization's core issues and drive engagement toward equitable, sustainable, and family farm-centered solutions. Dee draws from her background in strategic communications, creative writing, and design to craft resonant narratives and compelling graphics to advance an array of advocacy initiatives. Her past work in such diverse sectors as clean energy, antihunger, and agriculture inform her broad perspective. A full-time digital nomad since 2019, Dee spends her spare time hiking in the phenomenal state and national parks this country has to offer. She holds a BA from Grand Valley State University and an MFA from Washington University in St Louis.

 

As someone who's been mostly vegetarian for a number of years, I have tried a lot of plant-based foods and there's a variety of them. And so how do they really taste, not just from my perspective? Well, it's really important to do really careful analysis, and this is going to be the subject of our conversation today. Plant-based foods are becoming increasingly healthier and cheaper. But one large question really remains for consumers. How do they taste. NECTAR, a nonprofit initiative on a mission to accelerate the alternative protein transition sets out to answer this question. Through large scale blind taste tests with thousands of consumers. NECTAR is amassing the largest publicly available sensory database on alternative protein products. In its latest report, Taste of the Industry 2025, NECTAR conducted blind sensory panels of 122 products across 14 categories and uncovered which products have achieved the taste that's on par with their animal-based counterparts. Today we talk with NECTAR's Director, Caroline Cotto, about which products are meeting and exceeding consumer taste expectations and what the alternative protein industry needs to do to get more products to this level. And how NECTAR's novel dataset can be used to get there faster.

Interview Summary

I understand you've conducted the world's largest clinical sensory test for plant-based and alternative meats compared to real animal meat. Tell me about how you conducted this study and why NECTAR is focused on this research.

Absolutely. So, for us, we're really focused on this research because we know that taste is a major purchase driver for consumers and it's often the key reason people cite for not repurchasing plant-based meats once they've purchased them. We really want people to come back to the category and so in order for that to happen, we need taste to be where consumers expect it to be.

As you mentioned, we set out to conduct a large study and sort of understand where the products on the market taste today. So, we tested 122 products across 14 categories. And we chose those categories by looking at the highest volume selling categories of animal meat, and then mapping the plant-based products to those categories. And then 43 of those products were from Europe as well. So, we were trying to get a real landscape analysis.

Different than traditional sensory testing, we conducted all of our studies in restaurant settings to give a more natural experience for the participants. And all of our testing is done with omnivore consumers. So, we love vegans and vegetarians, but we're really trying to go after that hardcore meat eater and see if we can get them to switch because they love the taste of these products. And then the other difference is that we serve everything in what we call a full build. We serve burger patties and buns, hot dogs and buns. We really allow consumers to apply condiments as long as they do it equally across all of the products that they're testing, um, to give that authentic experience as they would experience the product in their own kitchen. And we ended up having 2,684 participants in this city. Each product was tried by a minimum of 100 consumers.

Wow, that's pretty extensive. What were some of the surprising results of this?

Yeah, I think we found that the average plant-based product was not quite ready for mainstream adoption. The average plant-based product was generally disliked more frequently than the animal product was, with 35% of tasters rating the product. Some form of dislike. And only 9% of tasters rating animal products as some form of dislike. That said, we did find 20 products out of the 122 that were worth celebrating. We created the Tasty Awards based on this data. And we set a threshold for top performance. And that threshold was that of the people that tried the product, if at least 50% of them said that it, that plant-based meat was the same or better than the animal meat that it was considered a winner product in this study. I'm super exciting to see that we saw 20 products meet that threshold. However, these products were not distributed equally across categories. Some categories had up to five products that met the winner threshold and other categories had none. And we also found that no products in this year's study actually achieved parody with animal meat. So, four products came very close, and we're expecting that in next year's study, that there will be some products that achieve that milestone. But we're not there quite yet. And then lastly, we found that there really is a correlation between great taste and financial return. So, we found that the plant-based products that perform best in our sensory tests are actually capturing 50% more market share than the average products in that category. And the categories that taste better are capturing more market share than the lower performing categories.

Wow. That's really fascinating and there are lots of ways of sort of thinking through the data. I'd like to hear a little bit more about how those consumer preferences vary across different categories of plant-based products such as burgers, nuggets, and hot dogs. Are there specific sensory attributes that consistently influence consumer satisfaction?

Yes, so overall we found that flavor is the top opportunity for plant-based meats at large. Currently these products are described as savory 35% less often than the animal products. And they're described as having a weird aftertaste or off flavor five to six times more often than their animal counterparts. As we look at plant-based meat as a whole, flavor is definitely still needing some improvement. And then we also saw that texture is really the secondary opportunity. So, plant-based meats were described as juicy 62% less often than the animal products. And there's a big need to increase tenderness and reduce mushiness. So that's why I was mentioning there are some categories like burgers and nuggets where we had multiple winner products and those products have had a lot of R&D done on them. Their texture is a little bit easier to replicate than something like whole cut steak or bacon or pulled pork.

You talked about some of the difficulties when you look at different sensory aspects. And I'm interested to understand what some of the key challenges are facing the alternative protein industry in terms of improving taste of the plant-based meats. And how can NECTAR's database help address these challenges?

Yes, I think the key opportunity here is that NECTAR's data provides a roadmap for each product to improve. So, it might be the case that a certain product actually performed well on flavor but needs to improve its texture. Our research can really help you pinpoint exactly what it is about your texture that needs to change. So maybe it's, you know, reducing that mushiness or increasing firmness. And I think overall for the entire category of plant-based meat, it's what we were just talking about, flavor is sort of the biggest opportunity. And then closely followed by texture. But it does seem to vary quite a bit within each category for each product. And we saw on the whole, there was a wide range of ingredients and production methods used. So, we tested the category of unbreaded chicken filet. Within that category, we had extruded products, soy-based products, pea based products, mycelium products. And there were multiple products in that category that were all winners using each of those different techniques and ingredients. But they all have their own slight differences and tweaks that need to be made to meet mainstream consumer expectations.

Oh, this is fascinating. And I have to say, we haven't had many opportunities to talk about how alternative proteins or products are actually produced. Thank you for sharing that. You know what's really interesting, you've touched on this a little bit, but I think there's a little more that we can learn from you on this. So, your research highlights that some plant-based products like nuggets are approaching taste parody with their animal counterparts. Are there specific factors that contribute to the success and how can these insights be applied to other product categories?

So, the Taste of the Industry 2025 is a second annual report that NECTAR has released. In our 2024 research, we found that breaded products tended to outperform unbreaded ones. So, we actually saw similar success from the nugget category in this year's research. But on the whole, I think we see that texture is much easier to replicate for some categories and nuggets is one of those. The other would be burgers where all of the products are ground and so it's much easier to replicate that with existing technologies than to replicate things like muscle fibers for whole cut steak.

We did find four products that are within striking distance of achieving parody. And two of those products were nuggets. One of them was a burger, and the last was an unbreaded chicken filet. And as I mentioned, I think we'll see next year one of these products achieve parody or surpass the animal product in overall liking. But on the whole, we see that chicken is an easier flavor to replicate than beef and pork. And so, we saw more products from the chicken categories that were winners this year than from the other types of animal based meat.

Looking forward, how do you envision NECTAR's work impacting the broader food industry? Particularly in terms of driving innovation and adoption of plant-based products among consumers who are honestly hesitant due to taste concerns.

We really believe that tasting is believing. So, we are using this data to drive stakeholders across the supply chain towards the best tasting products so that they taste it and they immediately are sold on the product. So that means we're working with retailers and food service buyers to help direct them towards the best tasting products. And even consumers we have an Instagram page and a consumer facing lens where we're trying to show them which products taste great and help with the demand side for the industry. And then we really see chefs in food service as the beachhead market for alternative proteins. I think it's an easier sell to have someone try a delicious plant-based product on a menu or in a cafeteria. And then want to go home and replicate that experience after having a really positive experience out in the world.

Okay. So how do you see the broader industry, from meat producers to policymakers to retailers, using the dataset that you all are constructing?

We see that as sort of no matter your role in the industry, this data can support your efforts. So, for brand and manufacturers, we're hoping that they'll embrace an iterative taste centric product development approach. And the report offers pre-competitive sensory insights to provide a roadmap for focused innovation where we feel like it matters most. As I mentioned for retailers and food service operators, we want them to recognize their crucial role as venues for consumer discovery and to help them prioritize products on shelf and on menus that really deliver on these taste claims.

And then for investors and funders, we see alternative protein as a true climate solution. And so we want them to consider the outsized impact potential of plant-based products that are able to achieve mainstream adoption through superior taste and really double down on their efforts there.

And then lastly, we are working with researchers and academics that can build upon NECTAR's foundational work and use our data sets to advance the understanding of consumer preferences and sensory science. We're actually working with some researchers currently to build a large language model tool that will ingest the sensory data and suggest specific experiments to improve the sensory aspects of those products. So, it'll basically be a food scientist's best friend and be able to reduce the number of benchtop trials needed to get to a better outcome.

Wow, that's really fascinating. And I think there's something that I want to highlight. Because you all are a nonprofit, the data that you're generating is being made publicly available. Is that a fair statement?

That's correct. Yes, so we have a whole digital dashboard where you can look at all of the category level data. You can see how the average product performed, how the leading product in that category performed, and how the animal benchmark product in each category performed. And we provide insight into what are the biggest opportunities for improvement at a category level. And then we also share the data on an individual brand's performance with that brand so that they can make improvements themselves.

May I ask, how did you get buy-in from the industry to allow their products to be considered?

We make sure that there's only upside for participating, so we only publish the brand names of brands that are top performers. And we do a lot of marketing and PR support for those top performers. We provide them with a marketing credential for the Tasty Awards that they can use on sell sheets and to socialize their products with the larger consumer base.

If the products were not top performers, we don't publish the name of the brand. But as I mentioned we do provide that data to them so that they can have a roadmap for how to improve their product and hopefully be Tasty Award winners next year.

Okay, great. So I want to wrap up by asking where do you see hope in the plant-based industry in the next five years?

Yes, to be honest, it's been a little bleak for the plant-based meat space for the last few years. And so, we founded NECTAR because we believe that there are great tasting products out there and we want to bring some hope and inspiration back to this industry. Our goal is that in five years all of the products on shelf will meet consumer taste expectations. And we're really able to show that products could be both sustainable and delicious and crave worthy, and that consumers will demand them. We have started to see that with the 20 products that really rose to the top. And our goal is that you know, all of the products are sort of meeting that threshold when we're through here. We're also seeing hope in that there's a lot of positive research around plant-based defaults on menus. So, hospitals and universities are starting to put plant-based options on the menu as the default. And I think that is especially supported by great tasting products. If people, as I mentioned, have a positive experience out in the world, hopefully that will continue to get that snowball effect and demand generation going. And we're also seeing some hope with a new category called balanced protein, which are products that combine some conventional animal meat with plant-based ingredients in the same product.  NECTAR actually conducted a taste test of balanced proteins this fall and found that in two categories, burgers and nuggets, balanced products actually outperformed their animal counterparts. And so, kind of like the hybrid car, we're hoping that the balanced protein will sort of get the hardcore meat skeptics on board and help ultimately move us towards a more plant-based future. And if there's anybody listening that wants to access our data or partner with us, we definitely welcome those conversations.

BIO

 

Caroline Cotto is a Director at Food System Innovations (FSI) where she leads NECTAR, an initiative accelerating the protein transition with taste. By conducting large-scale sensory panels of alternative protein products and operationalizing the resulting data, NECTAR aims to create category-level value and empower stakeholders to make sensory-informed decisions. Prior to FSI, Caroline co-founded Renewal Mill, an award-winning upcycled food startup. She served as the inaugural board president of the Upcycled Food Association, the world's first trade association for upcycled brands. She regularly mentors food, tech, and circular economy startups. Caroline studied at Georgetown University and served as a Fulbright Fellow. She has been named to both Forbes 30 Under 30 and the 50 NEXT lists.

Antibiotic resistance has long been considered one of the greatest threats to global health. More recently, we're seeing growing public awareness around the overuse of antibiotics used in the US livestock system - a system that produces much of our meat supply. Widespread antibiotic use on US farms has evolved from something that only a small group of advocates and scientists worried about to something many more people are talking about now. The term antibiotic free is showing up on products and supermarkets and the way fast food chains are advertising their products. With drug resistant pathogens or superbugs, as some people know them, now being called the slower moving pandemic, it's time to check in on both how the science and the policy are evolving in this important part of our food system. And there's no one better than our guest to help deal with this. Dr. David Wallinga is senior health officer for the Food, Agriculture and Health, Healthy People & Thriving Communities Program at NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental organization. David is a physician, and has led the way on connecting science with policy in the area of food and environment. He is highly regarded for his work on antibiotics and the food supply.

Interview Summary

 

So David, I recorded a podcast with you many years ago when I was at Yale University. We were discussing this important topic, and boy, a lot's been discovered since then. So it'll be nice to dig in and get updated. So again, thanks for being with us. I've really long admired your work and your passion and your ability to communicate what is pretty complex science in this area. So, David, how did the use of antibiotics in the food supply begin? What are the origins of the story?

 

Well, a book that came out in 2014 told a really compelling story that I'd never heard before (The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of our Food). And it seems to suggest that it started with the Hormel Company, the makers of SPAM, who were trying to keep up with demand for the SPAM product after world war II, and was having trouble. And one of the things they did was to reach out to researchers from the University of Minnesota to see if feeding antibiotics, these new miracle drugs, through animal feed to chickens and pigs could have an effect of them putting on weight faster, which they thought might be the case. And at least initially that did turn out to be true. So at Hormel Institute, this is what they called it, the collaboration between the researchers and the company continues today and is very involved with the University of Minnesota, as well as the Mayo clinic.

 

That's so interesting that the story began with not only using antibiotics to prevent or help cure disease, but just to make the animals grow faster and produce more meat.

 

Well, they didn't actually start off to prevent disease, that wasn't mentioned anywhere, at least in Genoway's account. The thought was not to use them to treat disease, but rather they reasoned that if they could use the antibiotics to kill off some of the gut bacteria, then the animals would be able to divert more energy into growing. So really, it was always designed from the get go to put on weight in animals that were otherwise healthy.

 

Oh, that's so interesting. So, how widely used are antibiotics in the food supply?

 

Well, flash forward many decades, they're extremely widely used globally and in the US. Globally researchers estimated 70% of all the medically important antibiotics - and by that, I mean, ones that are used in livestock as well as in people - so about 70% or more are used on farms, especially in livestock production. In the US it's about the same amount, roughly two-thirds.

 

Oh, those are staggering numbers. So what are the up and downsides of this big use?

 

I see few upsides actually. People for time immemorial have been raising animals without antibiotics quite successfully. And there are still ways to raise them even at large scale, without antibiotics as we can get into later.

 

What about that assumption that the antibiotics produce more efficient meat production and make the animals grow faster, etc.?

 

I don't really see much evidence for that. When you actually look at the efficiency, there have been some studies of what's happened in Europe. They've really been very deliberate about reducing and eliminating antibiotic use that's not needed. And what they found is you can do it for the most part, without affecting productivity. And you can do it without any impact on cost either or very little impact on cost, including to the consumer. And when you factor in the public health benefit of just avoiding antibiotic use in the first place, it really comes out as a win-win.

 

Well, that's very important information. So what are the downsides?

 

Well, the downsides come from a couple of things. One is the vast majority of the antibiotics that are being used in livestock are put into their feed or in their drinking water. So that means you're feeding them on a pretty regular basis to entire herds. And the equivalent would be, I suppose, mass dosing human beings, whether or not they needed antibiotics, because you thought that some of those people might need them. Like putting it in a drinking supply for a city. You're just creating many more little breeding grounds for resistant bacteria. And that's exactly what we're doing on US livestock farms. We're creating perfect storm conditions for breeding superbugs, and then spreading them throughout the farm environment. And ultimately in the worst case, to the human population as well.

 

And how dangerous are these?

 

Well, they're really dangerous. We can't separate the superbugs and farms easily from the superbugs and hospitals. And in many cases, they're the same species of bacteria. We're talking about salmonella and staphylococcus and E. coli and drug resistant strains of these are killing large numbers of people in hospitals and outside of hospitals. So the CDC periodically updates these numbers, but the last numbers we have are that every year there's about 2.8 million or more drug resistant infections in the US and they contribute to at least 35,000 deaths a year, and maybe as many as 162,000 deaths a year in the US. Now, globally, if we don't do a better job about using antibiotics smarter, there's estimates that globally by the year 2050 there might be 10 million deaths a year. Ten million deaths, and trillions of dollars in costs.

 

Let me ask you this question. How do these bugs spread from the farms out there into the broader world? Is it through the food itself?

 

Well, for one thing, bugs, whether they're viruses or bacteria, don't really respect the same kind of boundaries between farms and hospitals and communities that we believe exist. The bugs travel pretty freely between them all. And so they get from animals to people in a variety of ways. First of all, as I said, the antibiotics are put into feed and the feed gets pooped out by the animal and ends up in the manure. So anywhere the manure goes, whether it's manure dust blowing in the wind, manure runoff into streams, or people just handling the animals and then taking the traces of that manure home with them, all of those can spread drug residues, but also a resistant bacteria. The genes in the bacteria are what make them resistant. Those can travel in all those environments as well. Maybe the thing people worry most about is on food. And in fact, in the US and in other places too, we have programs that test raw meat and poultry looking for signs of resistance. And the bad news is that it's fairly ubiquitous. Virtually anywhere we look, with a fair amount of frequency, we see evidence for resistance and resistant bacteria on those raw meats. Now, ideally, people would be using really good hygiene when they're in the kitchen, handling those meats. They would be cooking the meat really well, but that's not a failsafe. If it were, we wouldn't be having millions of cases of food poisoning every year, but we do.

 

Pertinent to that, I just saw a news report today - and you may not have seen it yourself - and I'm just quoting from it. It said that a gene that causes bacteria to be resistant to the one of the world's most important antibiotics, Colistin, has been detected in sewer water in Georgia. What do you make of that?

 

I say it's not at all surprising. Colistin is what we call a drug of last resort. We've been using up a limited supply of these miracle antibiotics for decades. It's very hard to come up with new ones. We're not investing in making new ones, and I'm not even sure we can make new ones. So we have to keep the old ones safe for as long as possible. But more and more, the bacteria are resistant to a lot of the older antibiotics like penicillins and tetracyclines. So we've got a few of the newer ones, namely Colistin, and some what are called next generation cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones. But those two are spurring resistant. And now we have examples of superbugs that are basically resistant to everything, they're untreatable. Now, thankfully, those are pretty far and few between for now. But we can see the writing on the wall. And when those start to break out and multiply, we're going to have a lot bigger increases in deaths and cases.

 

Well, it's a pretty scary picture. So let's talk about how things are changing. Is my perception that consumers are growing more aware of this issue accurate, and is this affecting corporate practices?

 

Yeah, it's accurate. I've been working on this exact issue for over 20 years. When we started public awareness, we did polling, public awareness was very low. For one thing, science literacy is not what it should be in general. People just have a lot of misconceptions about what drug resistance is. There's a common misconception that people are resistant to the drugs, and that's not the case. So what we're talking about is not eating foods contaminated with the drugs themselves, we're talking about using these drugs too much, whether in human medicine or on farms, and creating the conditions that make drug resistant bacteria multiply. And they multiply very, very quickly and then spread. And as a result, our farm environments, our streams, our sewage, as you said, and our meat and food supply are all contaminated now with drug resistant bacteria. And they're spreading, and that's the problem. And people are getting aware of it because like COVID, eventually more and more people have loved ones who are getting sick with hard to treat infections or even dying.

 

So, tell me how corporations are responding to this public awareness. It is changing things in the food supply chain by let's say fast food restaurants or big food sellers?

 

Well, groups like NRDC and our partner groups, we've been advocating for quite a while now to some of the countries and the world's biggest fast food chains, restaurant chains, and the like, to do a couple of things. One, make commitments to use fewer antibiotics in their supply chains. We know it's possible. We can get into how we know that later, but we know it's possible. And those are the biggest purchasers of those meat and poultry suppliers. So presumably if they ask their vendors to sell them product that's produced with fewer antibiotics, some of the vendors will find a way to do it. That whole strategies worked pretty well for chicken production, for example. In part companies like Tyson and Purdue got out early and discovered that in fact, they could raise broiler chickens almost without any antibiotics at all, it turns out. And so now, well above 90% of the chicken produced today in the US is produced with no antibiotics at all, or very few antibiotics. And you had mentioned at the top of the podcast, seeing labels like antibiotic free at the supermarket, that's mainly on chicken. It turns out it's been really much, much harder to see any kind of leadership by companies in pork or beef production. And the fast food chains too, have been really slow by and large too. And with just a few exceptions to commit to buying and serving pork or beef raised without routine antibiotics. Now, the exceptions are places like Chipotle, for example, or some of the smaller chains. But if you're talking about big places like Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, they really have been slow to make any forward progress at finding ways to reduce antibiotic use in their supply chains.

 

So such significant changes occurred in the chicken sector, why not in beef and pork?

 

Well, there's practical reasons with a big caveat. The practical reason is that a modern chicken only lives for six weeks. So all you've got to do is create conditions where you can get those fast-growing birds from the egg to the chicken, then from the chick to the slaughterhouse in just six weeks. So that makes it a little bit easier to control conditions for that long. Pigs and cows live a lot longer. The time to slaughter for a mature hog is about six months. The time to slaughter for a cow that goes from a calf stage then goes to a feed lot and gets fattened up, about a year and a half, maybe longer, maybe shorter, but it's a lot longer than a chicken. Now, with that said, have other countries found ways to produce chickens and cows with no or very few antibiotics? Well, yes, they have. Even pretty industrial producers of pork like Denmark and the Netherlands are using these medically important drugs at a rate that's one fifth, one sixth, one seventh, as much as what the US uses. So let me just repeat that. The US pig and pork industry has seemed to be using four or five, six or more times as many antibiotics on a milligram per kilogram basis as do their counterpart industries in other countries.

 

So this is a good segue to ask about the role of government in that picture in your mind.

 

Yeah, good question. The role of government is one, to protect the public. And here it's good to go back to basics. When it comes to superbugs and the spread of resistance, we know what the biggest problem is. The biggest problem is using antibiotics, and especially overusing antibiotics. And that doesn't matter if we're talking about the clinic or the hospital or the farm. Wherever you're overusing drugs when you don't need to, you're helping create the spread of resistance. And so that job number one for government should be to track the problem, to find ways to reduce antibiotics, to avoid using antibiotics, and also we argue, to set targets. And then if you've got a program in place to track the use of antibiotics, you'll be able to tell whether you're meeting your target or not. Now, sadly, the US doesn't do any of those things. Much of Europe is doing all of those things, and quite successfully. And so one of the things we're doing at NRDC with partners is we're jumping into the failure of the US agencies to protect the public. And we're doing their work for them. We're tracking antibiotic use on farms and the way that Europe does. And then we're comparing the overuse in US farms to much, much lower levels of use across much, if not all of Europe.

 

Bio:

 

Dr. David Wallinga is a physician with more than 20 years of experience in writing, policy, and advocacy at the intersection of food, communities, and health. His work on food and farming as an ecologically-based system has laid the groundwork for understanding them as important social and environmental determinants of health. He has worked to address the impact of federal pesticide policies and practices on child brain health; to change Farm Bill policies that promote overproduction and overconsumption of junk food calories and have helped fuel a rise in obesity; and to reverse the enormous overuse of antibiotics in industrial-style U.S. livestock production, its contribution to a "slow-moving" pandemic of superbug bacteria, and the federal policies that incentivize these practices. Dr. Wallinga advocates for policies that promote production of good food for communities that is more accessible, safe, and nutritious; more resilient, climate-friendly livestock production that is also safer for downstream communities; and investments in food systems and rural communities based on equity and fairness. He completed his medical school education at the University of Minnesota. He also holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Dartmouth College and a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, but is descended from Iowans.

 

Today, we're going to speak about micropantries as a form of community resilience in the face of the food insecurity exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests today are Reverend Wendy Miller Olapade of the United Church of Christ in Medford, Massachusetts, professor Norbert Wilson, who's Professor of Food Economics and Community at Duke University, and lead author of a recent paper on micropantries in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Sara Folta, with the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition, Science, and Policy.

Interview Summary

 

Sara, let's start with you. Can you describe what a micropantry is? I know a lot of people won't be familiar with that term, and explain why you decided to study these as a community coping strategy during the pandemic.

 

Sara - Sure, so the best way to describe them, I think, is if people are familiar with little free libraries, they're very similar to that. So the usual structure is a box on a pole, and the box you would fill with food. Sometimes they have other configurations and people have done things like convert old newspaper boxes and so forth, but the general idea is that it's a small box in a neighborhood where people can put food and take food. They're also sometimes called blessing boxes or little free pantries.

 

The way they work is there's often a volunteer or an organization that takes oversight of them and has primary upkeep, but they're anonymous and open to all to contribute or take from them. And the way I got interested is because there's actually one in my neighborhood. And honestly, I became pretty obsessed with it. Early in the pandemic, I started taking walks around the neighborhood as I was working at home. I'd go by this one and just became very fascinated with what's in there, what's going in, what's coming out, and started putting stuff in myself. And as I learned more, I realized there were these little free pantries or micropantries all across the city. And then I realized they were across the country, too.

 

So, as a nutrition professor, I've studied food choice among very low income folks, and I was also very much aware of how the pandemic had disrupted the food supply. And realized that micropantries were a part of the solution and had many advantages, in fact, in a pandemic situation. So I became very curious about their role. You know, I thought it was an interesting phenomenon to learn more about, and what I put in, I saw it go out, and I wanted to know the stories behind what was coming out.

 

It's a fascinating concept. And so, nobody from outside the community is stocking this, a bank or a food pantry or anything? It's all done by people who are residing in the community, it sounds like. We'll talk about the study that you did and published, but before we do that, before you started officially studying, what kind of things did you observe about the kinds of foods going in? Was there a lot of in and out? Was it heavily used?

 

Sara - You're right in saying that it's not stocked by a food bank or a pantry. It's entirely neighbors helping neighbors, so it's people in the neighborhood putting things in for their neighbors. And there's obviously a lot of nonperishable canned goods and such, and certainly saw a lot of that in the micropantries. And I saw very high turnover. I think that was one of the things that really caught my eye at first and fascinated me, you know, was just seeing even stuff I would put in, I'd go a couple hours later and it was already out. Going on my morning walk, and then the next morning, everything had completely turned over and there were new things in there. So realizing what a need it was filling. You name it, it was in there. A lot of it was very healthy food, I saw a lot of canned beans, like legumes, some canned fruits and vegetables, relatively healthy for a non-perishable. I also saw, every so often someone will put in sweets, which drives me crazy. Not that people don't want sweets every now and then, but that it would cause an ant problem in the micropantry. So, you know, everything in moderation, but not when it comes to the feast for ants, I guess.

 

So, Reverend Wendy, let's shift over to you now. So I understand that you organized a citywide micropantry system in your town, Medford, Massachusetts. Can you talk about what this is and who it reaches?

 

Wendy - Well, thank you so much for including me in this conversation. And I just need to say to Sara and Norbert and you, Kelly, what an honor it is that somebody took the time to pay attention to this. I'm sitting here in my office, a little choked up by the story of Sara's interests and her work. And when I got the chance to see the paper, you know, it was very powerful to see the outcome of what, from my perspective, as a pastor who is not a nutritionist, although my mother's a nutritionist, ironically, but, you know, a pastor whose purpose was to just spread love and care, who feels, and forgive the reference, Jesus told me to do this. You know, out of our faith, a colleague of mine, Tom Hathaway, who serves the other UCC church here in Medford, actually installed the first micropantry by his church in the Hillside neighborhood next to Tufts. I got jealous and said, "I want one of those at my church." And so, this all happened before the pandemic. We installed the micropantry that Sara was obsessed with was the third one that we installed, that we helped another church install.

 

So it started out as having nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with our sense of loving our neighbor. Jesus calls us to do that, and so we should find ways to do that. The intention to give people who are not a part of the church meaning and purpose in their life. And so, you know, one of the things that is so meaningful about doing this is that everybody can spread love, even if they're not a believer, if even if they're not involved in our church. They can, as somebody said to me once really early on, I can't do much, but I can put a 50 cent can of beans in that micropantry and show my kids that we have the responsibility to love our neighbor. So that was really the starting point.

 

When the pandemic happened, when other people started to see the opportunity to give, to serve, to care for their neighbor, our motto is take what you need, leave what you can, and this system allowed for a really just way of doing that. So, you know, a lot of the other systems require that you show up with your ID and you sign up with your address and so on and so forth, and there are many members of our community who don't feel a sense of safety in doing that, whether it has to do with their immigration status or just their lives are such that they can't show up, they don't have the car to go to the pantry or whatever, right? They don't have the time away from work to show up when the pantry is open. So this 24/7, 365, no questions asked, nobody's measuring how much you take, it's just available, created access in a way that other parts of the system don't have. And don't get me wrong, this is not a solution to the food security, but it is one little way for neighbors to help neighbors.

 

So once we started to put a few of them out there and really use social media to publicize the availability of it, people started to say, I want one in my neighborhood. I want to do that. And so, it began to build, and then the pandemic just exploded the need and people's commitment to serve. We had help from the department of public works in our community. The mayor got involved and started to ask them to build the boxes. We worked to find these sponsors, so each micropantry - we have 17 of them now in the community, this is a city of about 60,000 residents -  we have 17 of these micropantries, and each one is "owned" by a different community group. Some of them are owned by faith communities. Some of them are sponsored by Boy Scout troops and Girl Scout troops, and a community service group at the high school. So there's a wide range of people who, quote, own making sure that things stay safe and filled and clean, and, you know, it's a pretty amazing thing. Like we don't do a lot of management, but my church maintains a website and maintains the social media system that keeps them visible and keeps people engaged.

 

This is really inspiring to me, and I'm going to ask a question that you partially answered already, and here's the question. So there are very tangible benefits, obviously, to something like this, because people who are without enough food are able to get at least some of it through these micropantries, so that's terrific, but there are also a symbolic benefits to this that you pointed out, that the people in the community can get directly involved in addressing food insecurity by giving what they can. Is there symbolism that's important, too, for the recipients of the food? Do you think it matters to the people who are taking the food, who it came from, the way the community is involved, what do you think about all that?

 

Wendy - What a beautiful question, Kelly. Yes, I absolutely do. I've heard anecdotally, and I know Sara has, you know, sort of referenced this in her work, the recognition that my neighbor cares enough to help me. I've heard from many, many people who have reached out in gratitude to say thank you, thank you for giving me a place to show up. Thank you for helping my neighbors to support me at a time when things are really, really difficult. Thank you for normalizing love of neighbor. So that's a beautiful question, and, absolutely, yes.

 

It's so nice to hear that. Well, and then the community ownership of it extends also beyond the two individuals, let's say, who are dropping the food off and then receiving the food. There's also the community organization, so it's nice that there's so much community involvement and ownership in this.

 

Wendy -When I talk about how many people this touches, I'm talking in the thousands and thousands and thousands of people. There are hundreds of people who drop cans off in each of those micropantries, and you multiply that times 17 micropantries, times 365 days a year. That's a lot of people being served and a lot of people who are able to serve, and that feels pretty good.

 

Norbert, let's turn to you, and I'd like to ask you a question. So I know that one theme of your own research focuses on the economics of food insecurity. And so, from that perspective, what did you learn or what surprised you during the research for this paper that we're talking about?

 

I wanted to start by saying thanks to Sara for bringing this topic to me, and it was good to reconnect with you, Reverend Wendy, to learn about this project. And I'm so appreciative of the work that you and others in the communities are out there doing. As a researcher who's tended to work on quantitative studies, so grateful for the opportunity to work with Sara on this qualitative study, to understand the stories behind the numbers, to understand how people are really living with the challenges of food security. And I think there's something really important about what our study did in reference to what happened nationally. So this is in the middle of the pandemic, lots of people were greatly concerned about food insecurity, we saw the lines up and down food pantries or food banks reported in the news, and we sort of anticipated that food insecurity rates would go through the roof, at least the official numbers. And I think many of us were surprised when the national numbers came back, that they were no different in 2020 as they were in 2019, which was surprising for some people. And one of the things that a lot of people have argued is that there were a number of support programs, unemployment insurance, the child tax credits. There were a number of policies that the federal government implemented, and Feeding America and the Food Banking Network really did increase their service to provide help for folks.

 

But when we were doing these interviews, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, one of the things that we learned is that folks are really struggling. I was amazed to hear how some families had sent, if you will, their child to their parents, to go live with the grandparents, because the kids weren't in school, and the family, the parents, couldn't afford to provide the meals through the day, but they knew that their grandparents could, that the grandparents could do it. And seeing how families made these major shifts in their lives just to meet these needs. Now, these are individuals who were participating in the food pantry, in the micropantries, so I am not questioning the numbers at the federal level.

 

Now, I will say there was an increase in disparity where black and Hispanic households were more food insecure in a greater rate than white households, and so there's something important that did happen during the pandemic, and I think that there's going to be a lot of research that's going to actually understand that better. But the fact that families were really trying to make ends meet in really innovative and complex ways, some early work that Sara and I had done really reflected on the complex ways that families were helping their families eat using food pantries and using complex systems with the grocery store in terms of benefits and coupons. And we worried that, during the pandemic, all of those complex systems fell apart, because you couldn't go to the store like you once could. The challenges of supplies were in question, and so, I was so grateful to see communities find innovative ways of helping people meet their food needs through these micropantries. And as Reverend Wendy made it very clear, it wasn't going to solve the problem, but we did hear from patrons who used the micropantries that it did meet some of their food needs and it helped stretch the meals that they were able to get. And so, that was really important to hear, that even that small bit of help was important.

 

I was really struck by listening to not only the people who were able to get food, but those people were also people who were able to give food, and I think that's a very different model than what we normally think of when we think about food pantries. There was a sense of pride and community fellowship and the notion of mutual aid was something that came through in some of the interviews with the patrons of these micropantries. They realized that some things they didn't want, and so they were able to leave food that someone else would want, and not in the sense of didn't want because it was something wrong with the food, but rather they knew that that wasn't a preference of their family, and knew that other families could benefit from this. This idea of security and dignity of being able to give and not just receive was an important thing that I've heard, but it was also striking to listen to the people who were setting up these micropantries - this sense of community and wanting to support folks, regardless of background, and having a real interest to give people the freedom to take food as they need it, not to monitor, not to surveil, but just put it out there. Hopefully, someone's going to take it, and then, when there is a need for more, giving more. It totally changed the way I understood how we can do the work that we're doing.

 

Lastly, I'll say I really do hope that there is further work in this space to understand how these systems work. It really challenged the way I thought about what communities can do and maybe even what they should do, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to get to learn from both folks like Reverend Wendy, and then, also, with Sara Folta, who brings an important lens in terms of understanding how people are making good choices when it comes to food.

 

Thank you, Norbert. There's something that you all have reminded me of, which is that, so often, the solutions to problems, including food insecurity, are very top-down oriented, where governments of one sort or another, or foundations or universities, or somebody, declares what a solution to a community problem might be without the community getting an opportunity to exercise its own ingenuity and determine what its own solutions might be. And this is a very community-driven solution that sounds creative, effective, inspired, involved. There's so many wonderful things about it. I really appreciate hearing about this. So, Sara, we began with you, let me end by asking you this question. In addition to the things that Norbert said came about as a result of this study, what do you think some of the takeaway messages might be?

 

Sara - I guess the other takeaway is not only people needing the food, but neighbors needing to give the food, you know? In this sense, in the pandemic and all of our lives disrupted, another thing we heard was I want to do something, I want to give back to my community, I want to help my community, I want to care for my neighbor. And so few ways to do that in the pandemic, especially in the early days, and so, during the isolation of those early days, it gave a concrete way to connect neighbor directly with neighbor. So, I think, on both sides, it really so much achieved that sense of community that got so disrupted.

 

Access the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneb.2021.11.002

 

Bios:

 

Sara Folta

Sara Folta is an associate professor in the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and associate dean for diversity and inclusion. Her research focuses on public health nutrition, or the utilization of community-based strategies for improving dietary intake, physical activity, and body composition. She has particular expertise in behavioral psychology, communications, and qualitative methods. A major line of Folta's research involves community-based interventions to improve heart health among women. A second area of research includes behavioral strategies to improve health and well-being among older adults, particularly through the development of physical activity interventions. Folta's third line of research involves community-based interventions for obesity prevention among children. These studies, in which theory-based communications strategies were a major component, are notable for the use of the eco-social model in which multiple levels (individual-organization-community-policy) are targeted.

  Norbert Wilson Norbert Wilson is a Professor of Food, Economics, and Community at Duke University, with joint appointments in the Duke Divinity School and the Sanford School of Public Policy. His research touches on several food issues, such as access, choice, and food waste, food safety and quality issues in international trade and domestic food systems. Wilson is an ordained vocational deacon in the Episcopal Church USA. Additionally, his work is moving to explore equity in food access. He has published in AEA Papers and Proceedings, World Development, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Public Health, Food Policy, Agricultural Economics, and other publications. Before joining Duke Divinity School, Wilson was a professor of food policy at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy (2017-2020). He was also a professor of agricultural economics at Auburn University (1999-2016). While at Auburn, Wilson served as a deacon at St. Dunstan's, the Episcopal Student Center of Auburn University (2011-2016). He was an economist/policy analyst in the Trade Directorate (2004-2006) and the Agriculture Directorate (2001-2002) of the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) in Paris, France. In 2014-2015, Wilson was on sabbatical leave at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Pastor Wendy Miller Olapade

Since 2013, Rev. Wendy has led Sanctuary United Church of Christ in Medford to become an emergent, post-modern faith community whose purpose is affecting deep spiritual transformation and spreading love and care. As Lead Pastor, Rev. Wendy has envisioned numerous new ways of 'being the church' such as ArtChurch, Faith and Film and a "Medford Cares" program. As Community-Connector-in-Chief, Rev. Wendy has inspired and led grassroots action such as SafeMedford; Medford's Big Table, Big Ideas; and a city-wide micro-food pantry mission – taking Sanctuary-To-Go every chance she gets.

 

 

In this podcast, we're talking with ecologist, Steven Apfelbaum, author of "Nature's Second Chance," a book that was named a top 10 environmental book in 2009, and was one of the top 10 books for understanding what you can do about climate change. So Steve is going to talk about his work to improve soil health, a really amazingly interesting and important topic, but also how grazing and how farming can be improved, and how to restore land using nature's own processes. He'll also speak about how such work minimizes climate impact, while also reducing flooding, increasing food quality and nutrition, and improving land health.

Steven Apfelbaum is a senior ecologist and science advisor at RES, Resource Environmental Solutions, and Founder and Chairman of Applied Ecological Services. This podcast is part of our Regenerative Agriculture series.

Interview Summary

 

So there's lots of talk these days about food and environment. Perhaps not enough still, but certainly more than what used to be the case, and it would help to have some context. So, do you think food systems changes can really help reduce climate risks, and if so, kind of how much? Give us some context for this.

 

Great question, Kelly, and a very interesting question, because it's not really clear to most people how significant the land base is that we alter currently and what we've managed over time. There's about 5.5 billion hectares of land, 3.5 billion in grazed landscapes, and about 2-2.5 billion hectares on the planet that we manage in row crops, in rough numbers. And that is out of about 14 billion hectares of terrestrial land on the planet. It turns out that approximately 43% of the excessive atmospheric greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere are derived from the collapse of soil systems. They're emissions released as organic matter in soil that's deteriorated by tillage and caustic fertilizer use, and through the erosion and decomposition of soils. The greenhouse gases that have come out of the disruption of soil systems include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and others. Currently around 14% of the greenhouse gas emissions result from these same causes. When you factor in externalities like the mining and manufacturing of fertilizers, the emissions are actually higher than 14% currently. So, historically and currently, Ag plays a very, very huge role in greenhouse gas emissions. And therefore, as we'll talk about in a minute here, a very big role in solving the excessive greenhouse gas emissions that are currently in the atmosphere, and those that will be.

 

So, improved grazing and improved cropping are two strategies. You know grazing can be implemented on some or all of the 3.5 billion hectares of range land, and the improved cropping on the 2-2.5 billion hectares of farmland on the planet. And what we've learned through research on improved grazing, especially adaptive multi-paddock grazing, which is very high density, long recovery grazing, is consistently in the range of three to five tons of CO2 per hectare per year improvements over and across the fence where conventional grazing may be occurring. So if you multiply 3.5 billion hectares of grazed land on earth, by just one ton of CO2 per hectare per year, that's around 3.5 gigatons, or 3.5 billion tons of CO2 that we should be able to pull down from the atmosphere and put back into the soil. And when you add improved cropping - such as low disturbance cropping, one pass no-till, and a range of other practices, you know, cover cropping, crop perennialization, eliminate a range of fertilizers served besides irrigation, significantly reduce or eliminate soil tillage - what we've measured where those changes have occurred is upward of two tons of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year being achievable. And when you add that together with the improved grazing potential, the answer is a very loud yes, that agriculture can be, should be, and is probably the only scalable, rapidly economically-viable solution to some of the climate change issues that we're facing.

 

Those are impressive numbers. So you're really talking about addressing climate through agriculture in two ways. One is you can stop some of the destructive things that are going on now, but you can actually help reverse the destructive nature of climate change by changing practices and drawing down carbon from the atmosphere, and using the soil as a way to reverse damage that's already done. Is that correct?

 

Exactly. If you view the soil as a large storage battery, where what it stores, among other things, is soil carbon and soil carbon is most readily stored below ground, out of harms' way from wildfires that trees and above-ground biomass are subjected to or vulnerable to, it's surprising even with poor farming management practices, how soil organic matter, soil carbon, continues replenishing. It replenishes at a slower rate, and therefore less of it becomes produced annually, but soil microbes and bacteria, fungi, and plant root dieback on an annual basis draws soil carbon from the bottom-up. And it is an important way that the earth has stored carbon since the earth began getting in the carbon business.

 

Well, let me ask a question about farmers, and how in general, farmers, and I know you can't generalize across all of them, but how much attention are farmers paying to this issue? And the one the reason I ask that is I was actually at a breakfast meeting this morning with Duke colleagues. One of them said that the term climate change is radioactive to many farmers, and they turn off to it and don't want to engage in the conversation. But if you mentioned weather changes, then they'll be very responsive because they kind of witness the impact of this in their day-to-day lives. So, certainly there are a group of regenerative Ag farmers who were very keen on this, and of course speak the same language that you're using, but what about farmers in general? Is this something that's of concern to them, what do they think about the future, and climate, and what do you think the picture is with that?

 

Well, I think the picture is coming into crystal view at different rates in different parts of the country, different parts of the world. And it largely depends on the availability of moisture to grow crops. Where farmers are experiencing a reduced availability or reliability of moisture and growing conditions for their crops, they're listening attentively to what's happening. Our language matters. One of the things that we've learned consistently is that every farmer believes that soil health and good rolling conditions are critical to their farming operations. And every farmer also realizes the importance of the appropriate meteorological conditions, weather conditions, such as you brought up, Kelly, to support the farming production that their life and livelihood depends on. So the language that is most easily understood, most easily communicated, and it's what's communicated within the farming circles rather than external language that's brought to that circle, is the language of weather, is the language of how are my crops doing, how are your crops doing? It happens at every coffee house, every coffee shop, every restaurant diner in rural America, probably every single day during the growing season. And then they talk about it the rest of the year during the winter about what it did or didn't do during the year. So, farmers are very focused on the economics of their operation, and any effect on the economics, whether it be policy or regulatory, or most usually weather, meteorological conditions, get their attention. The changes in the weather and the availability of moisture is a easy conversation to have with farmers. And as soon as you bring up, in some parts of the country, climate change or global warming, a switch oftentimes goes off depending upon who's in attendance, and you're so right, eyes glaze over. But as soon as you get back to talking about rainfall and what they've experienced, they're full on and fully engaged. So, the economic side of the story is farmers are being hit hard where there's excessive rainfall, flooding, and in the opposite, you know, severe drought. So they're paying attention to this and they're beginning to realize around the world that they can control their destiny to some extent, that once a region dries out, it's very difficult for that region to generate moisture, to help generate moisture that feeds the clouds that comes back down in the form of rain. And it turns out that the soils that are the droughtiest are those that typically have the least amount of soil organic carbon. Also sandier soils, textural differences of the soil itself can lead to droughtiness. But the areas of the world where the farming stress is being felt right now is where soil organic carbon has been lost or depleted, and in the coarser-textured soil areas. And there, remedies and solutions are sorely needed, and there's grassroots movements to redo, rethink the agricultural practices and to basically honor water as a precious resource.

 

Thanks for that explanation about the way the issue was framed and the language that gets used. And of course, it makes sense to meet people where they are and to use language that brings people into the conversation rather than turns them away from it. So I appreciate you addressing that. Let me ask you another question. So in your earlier comments, when you were talking about the vast expanses of land that are used for grazing or for growing crops, people's minds were probably thinking about the rural landscape. But you've also thought about the use of urban land, I know, and you've spoken about something fascinating in the urban toolkit. Can you explain a little bit about this?

 

Yes, it turns out that most of the eating of the food that occurs on the planet occurs in urban areas on the planet. And the production occurs in the ex-urban, the urban perimeters or the rural areas. New strategies for bringing food production into the cities, into the urban areas, really are vital to deliver fresh and wholesome food in many locations. It may be one of the primary methods being deployed now, there's a lot of resources in addition to a lot of mouths to feed in these urban areas. Yeah, there's compostable bio-waste that come out of every urban household kitchen, every restaurant, every food store. There's recycled water, there's labor, and there's small acreages to moderate size acreages that can really handle highly-concentrated investments in labor, in production of large quantities of food, right where people live.

 

So some really interesting technologies and behaviors and business models in the past several decades. You know community-supported agriculture, everybody's probably heard of that where you can subscribe to food production that are locally produced by farmers. There are reuse of buildings for aquaponics and hydroponics, that's a water-based soil-less system for growing fish and vegetables. Some of that is being done in urban buildings in downtown high rises and old warehousing buildings. There's containerized food systems where you basically can move these hydroponic, aquaponic systems right into your neighborhood, and participate in the production of the green vegetable material you might consume in your community. We've worked on a number of projects that are in cold regions where there's greenhouses that are retractable so you can roll the greenhouse off the area during the winter, that would be fully contained and winterized, and during the summer, during the growing season in that colder climate area, you can grow open air grow vegetables and so forth.

 

One of the other things that's happening in this urban vegetable production, and the next topic, native landscaping and ecosystem restoration projects, which are becoming very common in urban areas, all benefit pollinators, flood damage reduction, rebuild soils, rebuild organic matter, draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide. What we've seen where native landscaping has been used, it can replace lawns, high-maintenance lawns and formal landscapes, and that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with lawnmowing, and simply the opportunity cost of growing a lawn, where in fact, most Kentucky bluegrass lawns in the Midwest, about 90% of their root mass of the grass plants is in the upper inch or two, and native plants will distribute their root systems down, perhaps a meter, two meters, three meters into the soil, so you can really draw organic carbon that depth with the native landscaping plant materials, and that doesn't typically happen with the lawn and the mowed lawn systems that people usually produce in urban yards.

 

So, big opportunities with native landscaping, urban food production. And then green infrastructure, where instead of undergrounding the storm sewers, bring the water management, storm water management in our cities to the surface and create native landscapes that manage that water's volume, rate, and quality. And right now all the storm sewers do is deliver the volume at a very, very high rate of speed from the concrete landscapes or impervious landscapes to downstream receiving water bodies, and it contributes to downstream erosion and flooding. By using green infrastructure, we basically manage each raindrop as close to where it hits the ground, and reduce the runoff, in rebuild soil organic carbon, and you know, myriad other benefits. So it's a great way to view an urban area as a potential sink for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rather than only a source.

 

Those are really fascinating developments that you're talking about, and can you know, really transform the way we think about where food gets produced, and whether more of it can get produced close to home and urban areas can become even healthier ecosystems than what they are now. So I think you've kind of answered this already, but let me see if you could expand on a little bit further. So, are there some soil areas on farms currently, or even in urban areas, where you think it would be better to restore the ecosystem, rather than trying to farm or develop the land?

 

Absolutely. Not all acres of land are created equally. Some were created historically under grassland ecosystems, and those are typically upland settings, upland soils. Others were created in the lower drainage ways and depressional areas, and the soils that developed are wetland soils. In many places those are peat and muck soils. North Carolina, where you're at has the coast and wetlands, which is 5 or 600,000 acres of deep peat derived over probably 12,000 years of accumulation of plant material. So the farms that have de-watered these peat and muck areas are trying to farm these areas, and they're very challenging to farm when the muck soils or peat soils, these historic wetland soils become overly dry during a drought, it's really challenging to grow anything. They overshoot what drought effects are on a normal soil, they become non-wettable. They're very difficult even to wet up with irrigation and use for crop production. And when they become a little bit overwet with rainfall, the crops die. So there are marginal areas with these wetlands soils that are becoming a real challenge with the predictably unpredictable weather intensification that we're seeing around the country and the world. And those marginal soils are becoming, have been on many farms, a liability for the overall revenue generation, primarily because they cost more to manage and the yield is unpredictable.

 

So, places like that really represent an opportunity for restoration. And we're not talking about just a few acres here and there, this is literally tens of millions of acres that could be restored without negatively affecting the economics of the farm. In fact, impacting in a positive way the economics of the farm. And then there are all sorts of landscapes at the urban, suburban, rural interface where some of these same historic wetland soils occur, where these are becoming wetter, water inundation is becoming more frequent, and the farming of these areas really is a tough choice for the farmers because of the pumping and/or additional water drainage infrastructure needed to able to continue using them. And these are also locations with disproportionally high greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide in particular from these wetted-up soil areas.

 

So, there's wonderful areas available, and the economics appears to be favorable, more favorable and increasingly so for farmers to make the tough choice to not invest in a new tile or a new pumping system to de-water these landscapes, and instead to restore these landscapes. And there's alternative economic resources that can be generated. There's wetland mitigation, banking opportunities, there's flood damage reduction where a farmer can hold water back on their land and get paid by a downstream municipality that's experiencing flooding for managing the stormwater on their land. So, a range of new and valuable economic opportunities that farmers could tap into. If this was organized and facilitated, it would be a real benefit to agricultural futures in the country and the world.

 

Steve, let me ask a bit of a related question. So you made a very strong case for the importance of addressing soil health. And so, consumers who are purchasing the food, and they're becoming more and more interested in the environmental impact of their food choices, and certainly the environmental community is paying a lot of attention to this, another reason that people make food choices as they do is how food tastes, and also how nutritious it is. So, is there a link between the quality of the soil, the health of the soil, and how nutritious the food is, and how it tastes? So let's say you have two farmers who have farms right next to one another, and one has been using traditional agricultural techniques, and the other has invested in the soil health and is using regenerative agriculture techniques. And they're both growing carrots or lettuce. Will the carrots or lettuce from those two farms taste different, will they have a different nutrition profile?

 

That's a great question, Kelly, and I've been profoundly impressed with the acuity of chefs to be able to taste the differences that were either beyond my perception or my ability to even understand the language they were using to describe some of the flavor tones. I'm told that tastes are different, and, you know, look no further than the wine industry where they talk at great length about soil management and the mineral content of the soil affecting the quality and flavor of the wine, and certainly the price of the wine as I understand it. But when it comes to vegetables and fruit, and grain, I've been remarkably impressed with the documentation about nutritional density, and know how much protein, for example, is found in an ancient variety of wheat growing right across the fence from a conventional variety of wheat on the exact same soil, farmed by the exact same farmer.

 

So part of what I've learned is that selection of genetics is really, really important to flavor, and quality, and chemistry. For example, with the wheat reference, we've been working with an ancient native relative of wheat, and it's higher protein, more balanced nutritionally than all of the conventional varieties of wheat, but it also doesn't elicit Celiac's disease and some of the gluten protein-related diseases that are now associated with conventional wheat. So the chemistry really does change. The taste and flavor tones, although I'm not an expert in that, I'm told they are real and they are different. I think what's intriguing me most is that if you grow crops in healthier soil, even the same genetics, the same crop, the same production methods, if the soil is healthier, it's not unusual to get a significant bump in the protein content. So for example, if wheat is 9 to 14% digestible protein, some of these wild varieties are 23 to 28% digestible protein. The yields of the wild varieties are lower than the industrially-produced wheat, but because the protein content and the nutrition is so much higher, at 30, 40% higher by weight, we can produce more food value for people, for livestock, for wildlife, on less land. And that's becoming really clearly of intrigue to me because we just talked about wetland soils. If those wetlands soils were restorable, and generated another revenue stream for farmers, and they focus their attention on creating healthier soil on a smaller acreage or a reduced acreage, reduced by the wetland acreage equivalent, the economics and the value proposition that the farm offered to the world might be significantly different from what they're currently experiencing in a commoditized world where, you know, everything is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.

 

I wonder if this might not start showing up at some point in the marketplace, where consumers may realize that there are foods with different flavor profiles or nutrition profiles, depending on how they're grown. And would it ever be the case that Walmart, for example, which is the nation's largest supermarket chain, would start making purchasing decisions in its supply chain to get those carrots, or those heads of lettuce that have the maximum amount of nutrition, because consumers are going to want that. I mean, it could be sort of a push/pull thing ultimately, and the marketplace might really speak as people become more familiar with this issue and more knowledgeable about what the importance of soil health really is. It'd be interesting to see if that happens.

 

I think that's probably the primary pathway for change. It's not going to happen easily with a new regenerative Ag standard, that won't drive change as fast as something that tastes good and is better for people. Especially buying habits of mothers buying for children, there's a lot of attention to detail, a lot of attention where they can afford the time and the cost to making sure kids are nutritionally fed well. So I think that's the pathway, and I think the Walmarts, and the Costcos, and the companies all over the world, I think this is exactly the sort of market change that is now underway in many places for many product lines or sectors of the food marketplace, and I think those companies are realizing it, and I think there's a lot of corporate movement to align with those sort of consumer-driven behavioral changes. So, great idea, Kelly.

 

Bio:

 

Steven I. Apfelbaum is Chair of Applied Ecological Services, Inc., one of the larger ecological-sciences and restoration firms in the United States. He is also a Senior Ecologist and Science Advisor at RES. He is co-author of Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land (Island Press), written to help landowners and land stewards—including agency staff managing state, federal, and other public lands—successfully develop and implement land-restoration programs. Apfelbaum's book Nature's Second Chance (Beacon Press) won awards as one of the "top ten environmental books of 2009" and one of the "top 10 books for understanding what you can do about climate change." Steven Apfelbaum has conducted ecological research, designed award winning projects, successfully navigated regulatory programs, and contributed his unique creative scientific expertise and enthusiasm to over 7,000 projects throughout North America and beyond. He is one of the leading ecological consultants in the U.S., providing technical restoration advice and win-win solutions where ecological and land-development conflicts arise. He has authored hundreds of technical studies, peer reviewed technical papers, books, reports, ecological restoration plans, and regulatory monitoring and compliance reports. Steve's book, Nature's Second Chance (Beacon Press), won accolades from the New York Times, and was listed as one of the "Top 10 Environmental Books of 2009." Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land (Island Press), his most recent book (coauthored with Alan Haney and part of a three-volume series), has won praise as the first comprehensive 'how-to' restoration books for landowners. He promotes using ecological and conservation design principles in developments, industrial projects and parks that help clients save money while increasing ecological functionality, improving public perception and generating award-winning outcomes.

 

Our guest today is Dr. Gary Foster, Chief Scientific Officer of WW, the company that many of us remember as Weight Watchers. Gary is one of the most respected scientists in the obesity field and is the author of a book released recently called "The Shift: 7 Powerful Mindset Changes for Lasting Weight Loss."

Interview Summary

So Gary, you and I have known each other now for about 40 years, having worked together at the University of Pennsylvania at the early stage of careers for both of us and I've always admired your work and was eager to read your new book and I expected that it would break new ground, and in fact it did. And it's not a topic that hasn't been written about a lot, so it was interesting to see how you would handle these issues. So, I'm so glad you can join us. We look forward to digging into the book. Thanks so much for being with us.

My pleasure, Kelly, great to be with you. I was just thinking in preparation for this conversation that you were the person responsible for starting my career. You actually gave me my first job at Penn. So, for that I'll always be grateful.

Well, I mean, that can't feel anything but good because your career has been amazing and you've accomplished and contributed so much. And it's been really fun to be friends and colleagues over all these years so I guess it's been a real source of pride for me. So, let me ask a career question of you. So, you spent many years as a highly regarded figure in academics, first at the University of Pennsylvania and then running a well-known obesity center at Temple University that you created but then you moved to the corporate world. Why make such a big career change?

Yeah, it was an interesting process. I loved everything about what I was doing as a researcher and a clinician, and administrator, and academia both at Penn and at Temple and the opportunity at WW came up and I was actually approached and someone asked that I know somebody who would be suitable. And the more I heard about the position, the more it excited me. And the main reason is the ability to scale science and to have impact. One of the nice things about being a scientist and write papers and give talks is that you're actually creating science, and that has its own impact. And again, I'm not knocking it. That was one of the most gratifying things I ever did in my professional life. But the ability to take that science that I had done and broadly the whole field had done, and to scale that to impact the lives of literally millions was really compelling for me and it was just an offer I just couldn't pass up.

Well, it's so interesting that you made that change and you're right boy, it's an opportunity to affect an awful lot of people and now you are expanding the opportunity even more with your new book. So, usually, in the world of advice written by professionals, and sometimes non-professionals, for people wanting to lose weight, it's filled with basically information on what the diet should be. Is it low carb or high carb or low fat or whatever. And there're just versions and versions and versions of these things over the years but you focus on mindset. So, what goes into the way a person's thinking is a really important determinant of weight loss according to you. So, tell me why you believe that and why is mindset so important?

Yeah, I think first is the world doesn't need another diet book. To your point, most people, when they think of improving their weight or health or their overall wellness are told things like high this, low that as you just referenced. Then, what's been clear to me and this wasn't clear early in my career, but probably 10 or 15 years in patient after patient, study after study, what became clear is the people who were most successful in a weight and wellness journey are necessarily those who track their food intake every day or every week, or lost weight in some linear fashion, who worked out just as they had prescribed. Well, eating and activity were important. The thing that most distinguished people who were successful versus those were less successful are the people who had changed the way they thought and importantly, the way they thought about themselves and the way they thought about the journey. And that's really what the book's about, it's trying to help people think differently about themselves especially among people who are heavily stigmatized based on their weight and shape, but also to think about the journey because one of the most common off-ramps is when people had setbacks then they think in some erroneous ways that aren't helpful for overall health and wellness.

So, we'll get back at setbacks in just a minute. But first I'd like to ask you the following question. It sounds like you have abundant personal and clinical experience working with individuals suggesting that the way people think is an important determinant of whether they can lose weight and keep it off. Is there a research that supports that as well?

Yeah, but there's no long-term clinical trials on that. We're now just starting to measure things like self-compassion and our own clinical trials. What we find is a lot of experimental research. Kristin Neff has probably done the best work at this at the University of Texas where she can experiment totally manipulate self-compassion in the context of eating. So, there's a famous experiment that she talks about where people come in and they're given a classic preload where they're given some cookies under the guise of the taste test and then one group gets a self-compassion intervention and the other group gets a more general intervention having nothing to do with self-compassion. And when they look at the subsequent intake of things like M&M'S or various candies, people who get the self-compassion intervention actually less, and the hypothesized mechanism there is that if you violate some rule that you have or some guideline that I shouldn't eat this or I shouldn't eat that or I have to have a certain number of calories or a certain number of points, once you violate that, what you say to yourself really does matter. It goes back to the original premise and 60 years of research that what you think determines how you feel and how you feel determines what you do. So in short, how you think about yourself in the journey is going to affect your behavior.

That leads us to maybe a little bit more thorough discussion of setbacks. You mentioned that dealing with setbacks, which really are inevitable for sort of anybody doing anything but especially when they're on a weight loss journey that how people are responding to these in their mind becomes really important.

The first is to expect setbacks. They happen to 100% of the people, 100% of the time and this isn't just a weight and wellness play. This is in relationship and our role as parents and our role as workers in a workforce. It never goes perfectly. So, first thing is to expect them and then the second thing is to learn from them. Use it as Carol Dweck would say, use it from a growth mindset perspective. Instead of saying, "This is just the way it is, I'm in this rut and here I go again." Just say, "Okay, things didn't go as exactly as I planned, I wanted to eat this and I ate that. I wanted to move my body in a certain way and it didn't happen." Okay, can you view that? Be aware of it but in a nonjudgmental way in which you can learn. I think the other thing about setbacks that's important is to just increase your awareness of what you say to yourself. Sometimes we say the most nasty things to ourselves. Some are neutral like I've blown it. It's exaggerated, it's not true but others are like, "Can't believe you did this. You're such an idiot. Here you go again, you have no willpower." We wouldn't utter those things to any other human being, but somehow we feel justified to say very nasty things to ourselves. If it helped it be one thing, it would still be in my mind unconscionable to talk to yourself that way. But the data are very clear, it doesn't help. It actually depletes motivation. And it goes against this commonly held myth that the harder I am on myself, the more nasty things to myself, the better I'll do when in fact the data are pretty clear that self-compassion beats self-criticism every single time.

 

It's interesting because this sounds like a very modern and updated version of what the well-known psychologist talked about many years ago where he talked about people having the inevitable lapses but then it really was the way they were processing them psychologically that turned them into a full-blown relapse. And so, you've kind of taken that basic premise but enriched it a lot, given people more concrete ways of addressing and then also layering in this whole emotional part of it about compassion. It's very impressive how that's transformed over the years.

Thanks you, I agree. I mean, probably from my exposure to you and training by you was very aware of my lapse model and the abstinence violation effect. And really it's trying to get at the crux of when people have setbacks, how do they view them? And one is how you view the setback itself. Is it a bump in the journey? Does it really say something about how you're doing on the journey overall? I would say, no, it's a bump that tells you nothing about the overall journey. It's a momentary snapshot but also importantly, I think this is where a slightly different angle than previous theories perhaps is how you think about yourself. The more you engage in self-criticism, the worst is going to be.

So, this issue of compassion has come up a number of times in our discussion already. Let's talk about it a little bit more because I think it's really one of the most important and unique parts of your book. You talk a lot about compassion and kindness toward yourself, these are central themes. And you also want readers to feel this more often when they're addressing the inevitable setbacks. So, explain a little more concrete detail how they can go about doing that.

Yes. One of the things that I'm really proud about the book is that we don't just talk about self-compassion is important and here's some science on it and here's a reason to believe and good luck to you. As a behavioral psychologist, it's really important to me to not just lay out the what, but the how. So at the back of each chapter, whether it's a self-compassion chapter, leaning into your strengths or experiencing happiness and gratitude, all of those things have science proven techniques at the back of each chapter to help you do that. So, the basic premise around self-compassion is you need to start the journey from a fundamental sense of worth as people are right now. So, no qualifications. If I was a little bit lighter, if I was a little bit fitter, if I was a better parent, if I... Not, just as you are right now, you have fundamental worth and that's why you're worth taking care of. And that's to me the cornerstone of any self-improvement project whether it's weight-based, wellness-based, relationship-based or anything else. And what that does is it turns the journey upside down. Instead of seeing yourself as deficient from the start and needing some remediation of all these deficiencies, you're really saying, "I'm worth taking care of." And because I am, that's why I'm going to engage in this. And what that does is this now makes something, feels like something you're doing for yourself, not against yourself. It's almost the analogy I say in the book it's like giving a gift to yourself. If this starts to feel like making up for past transgressions, it starts to feel moralistic. It starts to feel onerous. That's not a gift to yourself. And it probably is started with the premise that the harder I'm on myself, the better I'll do. And again, the science is just the opposite.

Well, it's almost like going from swimming against the tide than going with the tide, isn't it? Because you're trying to take advantage of people's inherent strengths and have them feel that they deserve these sort of things. And then, the actions that they're taking are trying to fight off some evil force that makes people want to eat more but to do things that are nurturing and informing.

Exactly, exactly. One of the techniques we talk about in the book is how you would talk to a friend given the same situation and think about your body postures, think about the words you would use, how you would talk to your child who is having a setback and contrast that against the ways you talk to yourself. And there's a pretty big fundamental difference for most people on a weight and wellness journey. And you're so right in terms of leaning into your strengths and otherwise it becomes a game of whack-a-mole where here's the deficiency, here's the weakness. It's exhausting and it doesn't feel like it's a gift you're giving to yourself. It feels like you're in never ending search of fixing one weakness after another.

So, what role does a person's social network play in losing weight and maintaining it?

It's critically important and your work many years ago sort of highlighted this in an empirical way where people had so-called at the time cooperative spouses and uncooperative spouses. And I think the field has evolved over time but there's certainly a few tenants that I think are important to consider when it comes to getting help. One is to believe that you deserve help. A lot of people say again, given the pervasive weight and shape based stigma that you know well about, been a pioneer in talking out against and studying its causes and consequences. A lot of people feel like, "I got myself into this situation, so I shouldn't ask for help." So again, that's the antithesis of self-compassion. So, start at a place that you're worthy of taking care of and you're worthy of asking help for it. The next step is really, and this is where most people I think get off track a little bit, is to ask for what you need in very specific terms. So, it's up to you to decide what's supportive and what's not, one of the landmines that can happen in relationships sometimes as people say, "Honey, please be supportive." And then honey gets to decide what's supportive or not, which may not be supportive to you. So, it may be things like, "When I order a dessert out of the restaurant, it's really not helpful for me when you roll your eyes or you make a comment, that's not helpful. So, I'd appreciate it in the future but if I order anything whether you think I should have it or not then you just don't make any comments about it." So, the first is that specific request and then of course the next step would be a specific follow-up. Not, "Honey, thanks for being supportive." Or, "You're a terrible partner because you're not supportive. But anyway thanks so much, I noticed when I ordered something the other night, you didn't make a comment." Or "Truly helpful for me, if you're going to have ice cream at night to have it in the other room and not to have it close to me while we're watching TV." So, first thing is you deserve it and the second thing is specificity both on the request and then on the follow up.

It's really nice that you begin with a principle and describe why the principle is so important and justify it scientifically but then you give some very concrete examples, like you just have. So, that makes a book way more accessible than it might otherwise be. And I could see how we're be very helpful for people. Let me ask about another issue that you alluded to. And so, the subtitle of your books last chapter is "Experiencing Happiness and Gratitude." Again, this is something that makes your book unique. Tell us more about what you mean by that.

A common myth and practice is that people often put their own lives on hold or put their happiness on hold as if their happiness is determined by some number on the scale or some size of their clothing. So, what the book really attempts to do is to say the more the journey can be, and this goes again for any self-improvement journey, can be a happy one and one filled with gratitude. A, you're just happier when you're more grateful, that's a good thing to be in and out of self. But B, it gives fuel to the journey. So, if I have this preset notion that I can only be happy once I've lost 50 pounds, boy, it's a long time between now and 50 pounds. And really, is that what determines your happiness? So, one of the things we talk a lot about in the book again are these techniques at the end of each chapter and there's a really great technique called three good things. It takes no more than five minutes a day and it doesn't have to be done every day. But if on most days at the end of the day, it could be at the beginning of the day, it could be at meal time, whatever it can be a ritualized routine for folks, it's truly important just to think about big, small, medium, don't worry about it. What brought you some pleasure today? It could be the smell of a great cup of coffee. It could be hearing from an old friend and just to wallow in those feelings and just think about what you'd liked about it. It could be some moment of pride around a young child having an accomplishment, just that process of remembering them and wallowing in it for a very short period of time has been empirically shown to improve people's happiness. So, the idea is to do those things now. The things that we've both heard from patients over the years like, "I'll wear nice bright colors when I lose weight, I'll get out of a bad marriage when I lose weight, I'll ask for a promotion when I lose weight." No. Live life now. Lean into your own happiness. You deserve to be happy and don't make a contingent on your weight or shape or any other thing.

Bio:

Gary Foster, Ph.D., is the Chief Scientific Officer at WW International, Inc. Foster, a psychologist, obesity researcher and behavior change expert, was previously the Founder and Director of the Center of Obesity Research and Education and Laura Carnell Professor of Medicine, Public Health and Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. Prior to Temple, he served as the Clinical Director of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He has authored more than 225 scientific publications and three books on the causes, prevention and treatment   of obesity. Foster has received numerous honors including President of The Obesity Society, Honorary Member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and the Atkinson-Stern Award for Distinguished Public Service from The Obesity Society. Dr. Foster's current focus is on scalable, evidence-based approaches to wellness for adults and children in community settings. Foster earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Duquesne University, an M.S. in Psychology from University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Temple University.

We're speaking today with Mia Hubbard, vice president of programs at MAZON, a Jewish response to hunger, which is a national advocacy organization working to end hunger among people of all phase and backgrounds in the United States and in Israel. This is the fifth and final episode in our series partnership with MAZON. This time we will focus on the organization's work to increase access to nutritious foods in the charitable food network.

Interview Summary

 

Now let me start off with this question so I understand that MAZON has for quite a long time provided partnership grants to state and local organizations fighting hunger in their communities, but in 2018 MAZON refocused this grant making in states specifically with the highest rates of food insecurity. Can you please speak about this pivot that the organization made? How was it decided? And what's been the impact of this decision?

 

So our grant making for the first 25 years or so really focused on advocacy and on the need for strong government response to hunger with this understanding that charity has an important role to play, but it is not set up to address this issue. And it's really government food programs that have the capacity and the reach and the ability to address this issue at the scale that's needed. So in our early years, we focused on prompting the anti-hunger field to understand the need for advocacy and policy change directed at improving government programs. And we did that through our early years of grant making. So we're known for funding anti-hunger advocacy organizations, helping them to seed and grow and supporting their work. And helping to establish this country's network of state level anti-hunger organizations that were doing advocacy at both the state and national level.

 

And then in 2018, we really decided we wanted to take a step back and re-examine our grant making and see if there were some new opportunities for MAZON to uniquely contribute to the field. And by that time the nation had a very strong anti-hunger advocacy infrastructure in place. And a really solid group of organizations working at the national level on developing drawn government food policies and programs. And a broad network of state-based organizations doing the same at the state level. So one of the things that became clear is that there still were some states that had relatively weak advocacy capacity. There wasn't as much advocacy engagement taking place in those states and not surprisingly, these were also some of the most food insecure states. We decided at the time we would target our grant making to just a handful of the top food insecure states where advocacy capacity could be grown and created what we the Emerging Advocacy Fund, which is providing three-year funding to organizations in these food insecure states to create the capacity. And really what it means is to hire staff, to be able to do the advocacy work that needs to be done in those states. And we call it the EAF program. So our EAF partnerships are largely concentrated in the Southeast, and we have some partners in the Midwest and some other parts of the country. But primarily in the Southeast and you know it turns out that these are states that tend to be deeply conservative. They tend to be states that are politically and socially hostile, in some instances, to public benefit programs like SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program. So unfortunately these are also the same states that are likely to benefit the most from these programs. Participation among those who are SNAP eligible in these states tend to lag behind the national average. So folks aren't getting the resources they need to be able to feed themselves, and the state is leaving precious hunger fighting resources in DC, rather than having that money being circulated in their local economy, as people are using their SNAP dollars to buy food. The goal of the EAF program is really to help close that capacity gap and to enable organizations to hire staff who can do the advocacy to really make the case for these programs and supports.

 

I think we saw in the last 18 months, the economic fallout from COVID generated a really large surge in hunger. These organizations and these advocates, were in a great position to be able to educate their congressional representatives about how COVID was impacting food insecurity in their state. They were able to contribute to national advocacy that helped generate all of the support and funding that came out of federal relief packages, and then to work with their governors and state officials to encourage them to take advantage of all the federal waivers and flexibilities, and options that states had available to them during those early months of COVID to get resources quickly into the hands of food insecure people. And so we didn't predict that COVID was going to happen, but these grants turned out to be timely investments and enabled advocates in states that were already struggling with high levels of food insecurity be able to better respond to the needs during COVID.

 

Mia can we talk about one of MAZON's priority areas in particular - your concentration on strengthening food security and also food sovereignty in Indian country. So why have you chosen to invest so much in this issue and where and how do you think your organization can have the greatest impact?

 

You know MAZON is known for our focus on advocating for equal access to food for populations that have been historically ignored in policy arena. So we advocate on a lot of different populations including active duty military, single mothers, Americans in Puerto Rico, and also in indigenous communities. Our work in Indian country is focused on food sovereignty in recognition of the fact that tribes are sovereign nations and our work should be contributing to the ability of those nations to regain autonomy over their food systems and for tribes to be able to feed their own citizens. So we have learned very quickly in our work in Indian country that US food programs, government food programs are an important part of the food safety net. But we also know that the US has a long and troubled history in Indian country and that government food programs have been used as a tool of colonization. So we are working to advocate for improvements in these programs, but we're also working for a day when they are less needed. And where tribes can have greater control over these programs and how they operate, that's why MAZON joined the native farm bill coalition back in 2017 to be able to advocate and join over 170 tribes, to be able to advocate on behalf of tribal nations that were interested in being able to administer these programs on their own. We were the first actually non-native organization to be a part of the coalition. We're very excited about our role is as a non-native ally in this field, we weren't able to get that provision in the farm bill, but there were some other successes and in fact, there were 63 tribal specific provisions in the bill, which is the largest number in the history of the farm bill.

 

So we're very excited about the work that we're doing alongside our partners in Indian country. If you'll indulge me I just want to mention their names. It's the indigenous food and agriculture initiative, Intertribal Agriculture Council and the Native Food and Nutrition Resource Alliance. We are doing advocacy alongside these partners and we're also funding them, really in recognition of the fact that government and foundation funding really isn't going to native communities and causes. Less than half of 1% of foundation dollars go to Indian country. So we're really excited to be able to support their ongoing advocacy and policy work.

 

That's really is important work. So let's talk about other important work that you're doing. And I know that MAZON recently announced new partnership grants in Puerto Rico signaling that the organization is interested in addressing equity for those facing hunger in the territories. So why was this an important decision, particularly at this time? And what do you hope to achieve through this?

 

So Puerto Rico is a very exciting addition to our emerging advocacy fund. And we're currently supporting three partners there on the island. These grants are part of MAZON larger advocacy effort around food security in Puerto Rico. It's one of our top public policy areas and priorities where we're really trying to advocate for equal access to federal food programs for Puerto Rico. So as you may know Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but they don't have the same kind of access to federal programs that are intended to help vulnerable Americans and in the case of Puerto Rico, they are specifically barred from the SNAP program. I mean in the 1980s, the Reagan administration removed Puerto Rico from the SNAP program and created a separate program called the Nutrition Assistance Program (NAP), which is a block granted limited funded program, which provides food assistance to the island in lieu of SNAP. But because it is block granted and has limited funding, most SNAP participants receive much lower benefits than they would if they were participating in SNAP. And so this is an area where we are particularly concerned about the inequity that's built right into the structure of the program. And even before COVID over half of Puerto Rican children lived in poverty about one third of adults were food insecure.

 

We know the island has been struck with multiple natural disasters, hurricanes earthquakes. It has a very fragile economic situation. And so there's a lot of work to be done in Puerto Rico on a number of issues. We're very excited to be working with our three partners on the ground to support advocacy for and by Puerto Rican people. Think it's very important for mainland advocates like MAZON to be allies, but we really want to make sure that federal food programs and policies are shaped by the needs and experiences of Puerto Rican's. Similar to the work in Indian country. There's this colonial kind of relationship that we have with Puerto Rico. And I think it's created a false narrative that Puerto Rican people are passive beneficiaries of aid right that they are reliant on US federal support. And I guess the reality that we're seeing in the work that we're doing with our partners is that Puerto Rican advocates and leaders have their own vision for how they want to achieve food security for their island. And so we're just really proud to be able to invest in their capacity and their ability to determine their own future around food security.

 

The investment in these populations in need is very impressive. And you find an area where you could really make a difference. Let me ask you one final question about one time quick reaction fund grants that MAZON and gives for rapid response initiatives, things that might just come up on the spur of the moment. So why is this an important tactic in addressing hunger in the way the world now addresses hunger and why is being nimble so important? Can you give us an example or two of this?

 

Our quick reaction fund, we call it our QRF fund, is something that's really, I think new for the anti-hunger advocacy field. You know, you see these kinds of rapid response funds exist in other areas whether it's you know racial justice or immigrant rights, we were excited to bring this expedited access to financial resources, to the fight against hunger. And I think it's an important tool in the toolbox for MAZON and for the field because even though government food programs have historically had bi-partisan support, we've seen in the last 10, 15, 20 years that they have come under increasing attack and being able to respond strategically to that requires the ability of advocates to be able to move quickly and nimbly, particularly in their state capitals. So whether it's doing an ad buy in a key media market to influence the vote of a lawmaker in a given state or organizing a campaign quickly to get a group of folks with lived experience up to the Capitol for a hearing or for a day of action, those are the kinds of things that the quick reaction fund is intended to be able to enable our partners in the field to do. Last March right before COVID hit the Kentucky state legislature for example, was quickly moving on a bill that would have put lifetime bans on some public assistance programs in the state including SNAP. And we were approached by our partners in the Kentucky equal justice center to do a quick response to this piece of legislation that was moving pretty rapidly through their legislature. And they mounted a digital campaign aimed at the lawmakers who were sponsoring this bill. They raised a lot of visibility about the bill and about the harm that it would cause for folks who were struggling with hunger and poverty, and they were successful in being able to strike down this law. And it was a very timely victory of course, because a month later COVID hit and a lot of Kentuckyians turned to these very programs to get through those early months of COVID and the surge in hunger that we saw.

 

Bio

 

Mia Hubbard is the vice president of programs at MAZON. She provides leadership and direction for MAZON's advocacy, grantmaking, and strategic program efforts to reduce and eliminate hunger and expand low-income communities' access to healthy food in the United States and Israel. Since Mia joined the organization in 1993, MAZON has established itself as a leading advocate, funder, and capacity builder in the field of hunger as well as a critical source of expertise, leadership, and inspiration for advocacy and public policy solutions to hunger. Mia has served on several boards of directors, including most recently as the international program committee chair for an international association of food and nutrition programs serving people living with HIV/AIDS. Mia holds an M.A. in International Relations and Public Policy from the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego and a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University.

 

 

This is "The Leading Voices in Food" podcast but today we're speaking with a leading voice in tobacco control. "How come," you might ask, "why?" So I believe for many years that the parallels between the tobacco industry and food industry practices are nothing short of stunning, and that our field would do very well to learn lessons learned from the pioneers in the tobacco wars. Our guest today is Dr. Kenneth Warner, Distinguished Emeritus Professor and former Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Ken's research focuses on the economic and policy aspects of tobacco and health.

Interview Summary

 

So Ken, you and I have a long history, and I thought it might be instructive to mention just a little bit of it because you really helped shape some of the ways I think about addressing food policy. So I first became familiar with your work long before I met you in person, when I was teaching classes at Yale. I was assigning papers you wrote on tobacco control and I was especially interested in work that you'd done on tobacco taxes. It really gave me the idea of pushing ahead with food-related taxes. Then finally I got a chance to meet you in person at a meeting that was hosted by the first President George Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, on cancer control. You and I got to talking about similarities between the tobacco industry behavior and the way the food industry was behaving. We were both struck by the similarities. That led us to write a paper together that was published in 2009 in "The Milbank Quarterly." And I have to say, of all the papers I've published over my career, this was one of my favorites because I really enjoyed working with you. I learned a ton from it, and it really, I thought, made some very important points. And I'd just like to mention the title of that paper because it pretty much summarizes what it found. So the title was, "The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?" In my mind, the playbooks are still very similar, and that's why it's really interesting to talk to you today, get a little sense of what's happening more recently, and importantly, think about what lessons are learned from tobacco control. I wanted to bring up one thing from that paper that I always found fascinating, which was the discussion about something called "The Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers." Could you describe what that was and what role you think it played in history?

 

Sure. Just to give you some context for it, the first two major papers that implicated smoking in lung cancer were published in major medical journals in 1950. In December of 1952 there was an article in the "Reader's Digest," which incidentally was the only major magazine that did not accept cigarette advertising, that was entitled, "Cancer by the Carton." And this was the American public's first real exposure to the risks associated with smoking, and it led to a two-year decline in cigarette smoking, a very sharp decline, something that was unprecedented in the history of the cigarette. Following that there was some research published on mice and cancer. And needless to say, the tobacco industry was getting pretty nervous about this. So the executives of all the major tobacco firms met in New York City in December of 1953, and they collaborated on what became a public relations strategy, which drove their behavior for many years thereafter. The first thing they did was to publish "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" in January of 1954. This "Frank Statement" was published in over 400 magazines and newspapers, and it reached an estimated audience of some 80 million Americans, which would be a very good percentage of all Americans in those years. And they talked about the fact that there was this evidence out there, but they said, "We feel it is in the public interest," this is a quote, "to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of this research." Then they went on to say, and I quote again, "We accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business. We believe the products we make are not injurious to health and," and this is the kicker, "we always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health," end quote. They went on to say that they would support research on smoking and health, and, of course, that they would always be the good guys in this story. This was designed as part of a strategy to obfuscate, to deceive the public, basically, to lie about what they already knew about the health hazards associated with smoking. And it was essentially a first very public step in a campaign that, one could argue, in many ways has persisted ever since, although, obviously, now the tobacco companies admit that they're killing their customers and they admit that smoking causes cancer and heart disease and lung disease and so on. But that was kind of the beginning of the strategy that drove their behavior for decades.

 

You know, that was one of the issues we raised in our paper. How similar were the big food companies in talking about concern for the health of their customers, planting doubt with the science, pledging to make changes that were in the interest of public health, agreeing to collaborate with public health officials? All those things played out in the food arena as well. And that's just one of many places where the food industry behave very, very similar to what the tobacco industry has done. But boy, is it interesting to hear that particular anecdote and to learn of the cynical behavior of the industry. So fast forward from there, and you think about the tobacco industry executives testifying before Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive, and you have that same process playing out many years later. These similarities are really remarkable.

 

So let's talk about your work and some of the issues that I think apply to the food area, and let's talk about taxes at the beginning. So I worked for years on the issue of soda taxes, and these taxes now exist in more than 50 countries around the world and in a number of major cities in the US, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Oakland. And these taxes have been shown to have really positive effects, and they seem to be growing around the world. And I'd like to understand what you see as the overall findings from the work on tobacco taxes. But before we do that, you have a very interesting story to tell about how the tobacco control community responded when you first began speaking about taxes. It turns out to be taxes on tobacco have had whopping effects. But what was the initial reaction to people in that field?

 

Yeah, it is kind of an interesting story. So around 1980, when I first started writing and talking about tobacco taxation as a method of reducing smoking, I used to have public health audiences booing me. If they had rotten tomatoes with them, they would have been throwing them.

 

You know, Ken, it's hard to imagine because now these taxes are completely routine and accepted.

 

Yes, they're not only routine and accepted, they are a first principle of tobacco control. They are enshrined in the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. So they really are kind of the first thing we turn to because we know that they work. We know that they reduce smoking.

 

But let me give you a story about how I learned that this is not only a phenomenon with people smoking. It's a phenomenon with people using all other drugs, and it turns out it's a trans-species law, the Law of Demand. And that law says, basically, that if you increase price, the demand for the commodity will decrease. Well, in the beginning, the public health audiences believed two things. They believed that smokers were so addicted that they would not be affected by price, so it was ridiculous to even think about it. And they said, you have to have intrinsic motivators to get people to quit smoking. They have to care about their kids. They want to see their kids grow up, their spouses, and so on, and not extrinsic forces like a tax. So those were their two objections. So the story that I think is really kind of fun. I was on a plane flying to a small conference in Kansas City. This is sometime in the early '80s. And I happened to be seated next to Jack Henningfield, who is probably the preeminent psychopharmacologist dealing with nicotine, maybe in the world. And we were talking about price response, the fact that cigarette taxes work. And he said, "You know, I've got something I want to show you here." And he pulled out some what are called response cost curves from the psychology literature. And this is where you take a laboratory animal, in this instance addicted to narcotics or other addictive substances, and you give them a challenge to get their drugs. So first, I should note that these animals are so addicted that if they're given the choice between food and their drug, they will choose their drug, and they will in fact end up dying because they place a preference for the drug over food. But it turns out that when you increase the price of the drug to them, they decrease the amount that they consume. So what do I mean by that? If they have to push a lever, a bar, a certain number of times to get a dose of their drug, and you raise the number of bar pushes per dose, they will dose themselves with fewer doses. I took a look at these curves, and basically, a response cost curve for these lab animals is essentially a demand curve as we economists see it. And I calculated the price elasticity of demand, which is our standard measure of the responsiveness to price. And it turns out that addicted laboratory rats have essentially the same price elasticity of demand, the same price responsiveness that human beings do to cigarettes.

 

That's an absolutely fascinating story. And, you know, I know Jack, and have admired his work, as you have, and it's amazing to think about that conversation on a plane, and what sort of scientific work it led to, and how that, in turn, found its way into policies that exist around the world. So tell us then about tobacco taxes, and how high do they have to be in order to affect consumption in an appreciable way, and have they worked in reducing tobacco use, and what's your overall take on that?

 

So we have, quite literally, hundreds of studies in countries around the world, and we know a lot but we don't know everything. So we don't know, for example, if there's a particular price above which, you know, nobody will use the product. We don't have even really good data suggesting of, you know, what's the minimum increase in price that you have to have to have a noticeable impact. Overall, the literature suggests that if you increase the price of cigarettes by 10%, you will decrease the quantity demanded by 3 to 4%. Now, what this means is that roughly half of that decreased demand reflects decreases in the number of cigarettes that continuing smokers use, while the other half represents decreases in smoking, people quitting or kids not starting. So the demand is what we call price inelastic. The price change itself is larger, proportionately, than the decrease in consumption. But that decrease in consumption is still substantial and it's enough to have a large impact.

 

Now, cigarette prices vary all over the world, and cigarette prices vary primarily because of taxation differences. So if you go to the Scandinavian countries, you'll find that a pack of cigarettes will run $15 or more. If you go to Australia, you're looking at $30 or more a pack. In the US, currently, we're looking at an average price in the range of about 7 to $8. In some jurisdictions, like New York City, it's $10 or more. But the prices in the US are actually relatively low among the more developed nations in the world. Any tax increase will have an impact but obviously the larger tax increases will have larger impacts. And there's some good and bad news in tobacco taxation, particularly in a country like ours, and this is, again, true for most of the developed world. Smoking is now concentrated in marginalized populations. I'm talking about low socioeconomic groups, the LGBTQ community, and racial minorities, in particular. If you think of this as an economic phenomenon, when you raise the price on cigarettes, you're going to hit the worst-off economically segments of the population hard. That's the bad news. The good news is that those people, precisely because they are poor, tend to be much more price responsive than high-income smokers, and more of them will quit. So we have this problem that the tax is regressive, it imposes a larger burden on the poor, but the health effect is progressive. It will reduce the gap between the rich and poor in terms of smoking rates. And of great importance, there's an enormous gap between the rich and poor in this country in life expectancy, and as much as half of that may be differences in smoking rates.

 

Ken, there's a hundred follow-up questions I could ask, and I find this discussion absolutely fascinating. One thing that came into my mind was that some years ago I looked at the relationship of taxes, state by state in the US, and rates of disease like lung cancer and heart disease. And there was plenty of data because there was a huge range in tobacco taxes. Places like New York and Rhode Island had very high taxes, and the tobacco Southern states, like North Carolina, had very low taxes. But what's the sort of recent take on that, and the relationship between taxes and actual disease?

 

Well, it's still true. And there are, in fact, what you suggest, the southeastern block of tobacco states have unusually low rates of taxation. And I haven't seen any recent data but one presumes that they are suffering more from smoking-related diseases because their smoking rates are higher. I mean, that has to be true. So I don't know that we have any particularly good data recently, but there have been studies that clearly relate tobacco or cigarette prices to health outcomes associated with smoking.

 

I'm assuming US scientists have played a prominent role in producing the literature showing the negative health consequences of using cigarettes, and yet you said the United States has relatively low taxes compared to other developed countries. Why, do you think?

 

I think we're going to get into a very philosophical discussion about the US right here. It has to do with individual responsibility. We know for sure that the initial reason the taxes were so low was that the tobacco block was so influential in the Senate, particularly in the days when Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina, was in the Senate. He was the most feared senator by the other senators, and if you wanted to get anything done for your cause, you had to go along with his cause, which was keeping cigarette prices low and doing everything they could to support smoking. So there's clearly been a built-in bias in the Senate, and basically in the Congress as a whole, against tobacco policy. You see a huge variation from state to state in tobacco policies, and it's reflective of basically their political leanings in general.

 

You brought up this issue of personal responsibility, and boy, does that apply in the food area. You know, the food companies are saying: if you have one sugar beverage every once in a while, it's not going to be harmful. And it's not use of the products but it is overuse of the products. Thereby saying, it's not corporate responsibility we're talking about here, it's personal responsibility. That same argument was made by the tobacco industry, wasn't it?

 

It was. They would be less inclined to do that today, for a couple of reasons. One is that we know that even low levels of smoking are harmful and indeed cause many of the diseases that we were referring to earlier. And I think all the companies have now admitted publicly that smoking does cause all of these diseases that we've long known it causes. And all of them are claiming that they would like to move away from a society with smoking to one that has alternative products that would give people choices and ways to get their nicotine without exposing themselves to so much risk. I mean, we have to remember, the fact that cigarettes kill their consumers is a real drawback as far as the industry is concerned because they're losing a lot of their consumers, you know, 10, 20 years before they normally would, and they have to deal with all these lawsuits. So it's unfortunate for them. Having said that, cigarettes are the goose that lays the golden egg. They cost very little to manufacture. The industry is sufficiently oligopolistic that the profits are enormous, and their profitability has continued even while smoking has dropped rather precipitously ever since the mid-1960s.

 

Is that because the markets outside the US have been growing?

 

They certainly have helped. Although now, and this is only true within the last few years, the aggregate cigarette sales in the world are declining. They've actually started dropping. So we were seeing a relatively stable situation as smoking decreased in the developed world and was rising in the developing world. The only place now where we're seeing increases in smoking are areas in Africa, which, by the way, is the one place in the world where we might be able to forego the tobacco epidemic because smoking rates are still quite low in most of the countries, not all of them, and also parts of the Middle East. But elsewhere we've been seeing smoking declining all over the world. That doesn't mean the profits have to drop because one thing that the companies can do, is, they can raise their prices. Now, if prices go up because of taxes that hurts the companies. But if they raise their own prices because demand is inelastic, what that means is that the percentage increase in the price is larger than the percentage decline in the demand for cigarettes. So they're actually adding to their profitability by doing that. They've always played this very interesting game for years of keeping price below what we would think to be the profit-maximizing price. And I think the reason for that has to do with addiction because they know that they have to have what are called replacement smokers, kids coming in to take the place of the smokers who are dying or quitting. And for years, I think, they kept their prices down because they didn't want to discourage young people from smoking. Now, I think they see the writing on the wall. Smoking is declining very rapidly. Smoking prevalence, which was 45% in the mid, early-1960s, is now a little over 12% in the US, and I think they're raising their prices with the understanding that they want to take as much advantage of the opportunity with the addicted smokers, the adults, as they possibly can, even though smoking among kids is becoming vanishingly small.

 

I think of so many parallels with the soda taxes that now exists in a number of places, and the companies have responded somewhat differently. And perhaps it's the level of addiction issue that kicks in here, and the need to have replacement customers. Maybe that's another key difference. But with the soda taxes, the companies have not increased prices beyond the level of the tax. You know, to delight of public health experts, the companies have tended to pass along the entire tax so the companies are not eating that difference in order to keep prices the same. Higher tax gets reflected in the ultimate price that they charge, but they're not increasing prices beyond that. Do you think it might be the addiction issue that's different here?

 

I don't know. I mean, that certainly could be an element of it. The other thing is that they're manufacturing other drinks that are being used in place of some of the sodas. So they've got waters, they've got juices. I mean, obviously these sugary juices are no better, but they do make other products. They make the diet drinks. And to the extent that they can find substitutes for those products within their own companies, it may be that they're content to allow people to make those substitutions.

 

Interesting comment. The results so far on the soda tax suggest that the most common substitution as people drink less soda, is water, which is of course better than a lot of the alternatives that people might be consuming, so that's a bit of really good news. Even though the companies do sell water, Coke and Pepsi have Aquafina and Dasani, for example, they face a basic problem. Number one is that these companies are the biggest sellers of sugary beverages but not bottled water. That happens to be Nestle. So if people migrate to bottled water, they're likely to migrate from the big companies, like Coke and Pepsi, to Nestle. Also, people tend not to be very brand-loyal to water. They tend to buy whatever is on sale or whatever they find available to them, and that creates a problem for these companies like Coke and Pepsi that do rely on brand loyalty for their marketing. So it's very interesting. And also, I wonder, based on the research on food and addiction, if the companies don't take a hit if people switch from full sugar beverages even to diet beverages that they might sell because there wouldn't be as much addictive potential, and therefore the customers wouldn't have to have as much just to keep the habit going. So it's really interesting to think this through.

 

That's certainly very plausible. The whole thing would also depend on the price elasticity of demand for sodas, and specifically for the brands that they're concerned about. If there is greater elasticity there than what we observe for cigarettes, then raising those prices aren't necessarily going to help them all that much.

 

You mentioned that the elasticity estimates for tobacco suggested that a 10% increase in price led to a 3 to 4% reduction in consumption, and the numbers are even more positive in the case of the sugar beverages, where if you get a 10%, 15% increase in price, you end up with 10, 15% reduction in consumption. So that's good news in the food arena.

 

That's good news but it also means that they can't do as easily what the tobacco industry can do, which is to raise their prices and expect to see profits rise. Because if they're losing as much in sales as they're gaining in price, it's no win.

 

So Ken, let's talk about product formulation because you mentioned that earlier, and this is a really interesting issue that, again, connects tobacco and food products. So you think about the tobacco companies mainly selling cigarettes, but now there's vaping, there's cigarettes with things like menthol and other flavors, or low-fat foods, or artificial sweeteners. The list of product reformulations in order to attract customers goes on and on and on. So I know a controversial topic in your field has been e-cigarettes. Can you explain what these are?

 

E-cigarettes have been around now for about a decade, let's say. Basically, they're devices that allow people to inhale nicotine and other substances, but the purpose is to give them their nicotine without combustion. And we know that the major problem associated with smoking is the products of combustion. There's 7,000 chemical compounds in cigarette smoke. 70 of them are known human carcinogens, causes of cancer in humans. Many of them are cardiotoxic. They cause lung disease and so on. The e-cigarettes have about two orders of magnitude fewer toxins in their emissions than do cigarettes. And it turns out that the amount of the comparable toxins, when they are in fact comparable, that you find in the e-cigarette emissions is much lower, usually a 10th to a 400th, of what you find in cigarette smoke.

 

So logically, and based on a fair body of evidence at this point, vaping, use of e-cigarettes to get nicotine, is substantially less dangerous than is cigarette smoking. However, the controversy here is incredible. This is the most divisive issue that I have witnessed in my 45 years of working in the tobacco control field. It has torn the field asunder. The mainstream of public health, and by that I'm including governmental agencies, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the Truth Initiative, the American Cancer Society, heart and lung associations, all of mainstream public health is strongly opposed to e-cigarettes, and for one reason. They're concerned about kids' uptake of e-cigarettes, which has been substantial. It's been decreasing the last couple of years, but it has been substantial. And there are a number of things they're concerned about in that regard, and they're completely ignoring the fact that there's pretty good evidence that e-cigarettes are increasing smoking cessation for a subset of smokers. And a number of us on the science side of this, believe that the net effect of e-cigarettes is beneficial, that it's actually, possibly, a tool to add to the armamentarium of things like cigarette taxation, like smoke-free workplaces, like restrictions on advertising, and that it will help a group of inveterate smokers, those who either can't quit nicotine or don't want to, to move to a less dangerous alternative to smoking. I am not saying that e-cigarettes have no risk associated with them. They almost certainly do. But it is substantially lower.

 

Now, historically, this is divisive within the field in part because all of the earlier attempts at, quote-unquote, tobacco harm reduction have been produced by the major cigarette companies, and they've been fraudulent. So cigarette filters were manufactured and sold, starting in the 1950s, in response to the scare that I referred to earlier about cancer. And they were sold with a message that the filters block the dangerous stuff but let the flavor through. And people bought this. That decrease in smoking in the early 1950s reversed, smoking went up sharply, as sales of filtered cigarettes went up. By the way, the first successful filtered cigarette was Kent, and it used what it referred to as the miracle Micronite filter. Well, that miracle Micronite filter turns out to have been made of asbestos. And there are lawsuits continuing to the present day by workers in the factories that made the filter tips for Kent cigarettes, who themselves ended up with lung cancer or other diseases due to the asbestos. Then came low-tar and nicotine cigarettes, and we actually have ample evidence from the documents that had been revealed by lawsuits, that the industry knew that this was a public relations device. It was not a harm reduction device. And in fact, because people believed that low-tar and nicotine cigarettes were less dangerous, it's likely that it actually increased the toll of smoking because people who would have quit, switched to low-tar and nicotine cigarettes instead. So there's some pretty awful history here that makes people legitimately concerned about alternative products. A critical element of this story is that the alternative products, in this case, the e-cigarettes were introduced by non-cigarette, non-tobacco companies, and their goal was to replace smoking. Now the major companies are all making their own e-cigarettes as well because they have to do it from a defensive point of view, but basically they don't have any great interest in slowing up the sale of cigarettes. They want to benefit from that as long as they can.

 

So I should know the answer to this but I don't, but are e-cigarettes taxed? And wouldn't it be optimal to tax e-cigarettes but less than regular cigarettes so you discourage use of both but discourage the use of regular cigarettes more?

 

That is very insightful. Two colleagues and I actually published a paper saying that in 2015 in "The New England Journal of Medicine," that we should be taxing e-cigarettes modestly, the reason being that we want to discourage kids from using them, and kids are far more price-sensitive than our adults. Kids have a very elastic response to cigarette prices. Adults do not, and in particular, older adults have even lower price responsiveness. So yes, there should be some taxation of e-cigarettes to discourage youth use of it but that taxation should be dramatically lower than the taxation of cigarettes. Some states are now taxing e-cigarettes. Not all of them. The federal government is actually looking into a proposal to double the tax, the federal tax, on cigarettes, which would take it up to $2.01 a pack, and at the same time, to establish an equivalent tax, similar to the $2 tax, on all vaping products. This would be a disaster because it would definitely discourage kids from vaping, but it would also discourage adults from using e-cigarettes as an alternative to smoking, and the most addicted, the inveterate smokers, those are the ones that need these alternatives. So that's a bad policy proposal. A much better one would be to increase the cigarette tax by more than a dollar, raise it to 3 or $4 or something, and impose a modest tax on e-cigarettes. This would discourage people from smoking, both adults and kids, but especially kids. It would discourage kids from using e-cigarettes but it would create a price differential that would encourage the inveterate smokers to switch to e-cigarettes. Now, part of the problem, and this has gotten worse over time, is that the American public believes that e-cigarettes, that vaping, is as dangerous and even maybe more dangerous than cigarette smoking. Nothing could be further from the truth but so far the mainstream of public health has sold that message to the public, and the public, including smokers, believe it.

 

That's a fascinating story about how the public health field might be getting in its own way with this.

 

And maybe doing damage to public health.

 

So let's loop back a little bit to the behavior of the tobacco industry. So in 2017, the Phillip Morris Company funded and launched an organization called Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. So I think, hmm, a tobacco company saying they want less smoking, and one could view this with pretty high cynicism but what do you think about it?

 

I've always shared your sense of cynicism about it. There's an interesting anecdote related to this. The individual who negotiated the deal by which Phillip Morris offered $1 billion over a 12-year period to establish this foundation, that individual was the main actor in the World Health Organization during the development of the global treaty on tobacco control, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. He also became director of the organization and served in that capacity until just the other day. He has stepped down from being director. But let me give you a little context for it. Philip Morris International that needs to be distinguished from Altria and Philip Morris Domestic, but Philip Morris International sells the leading brand of what is known as heated tobacco products, HTPs. These are products that actually have tobacco in them. E-cigarettes have no tobacco in them but these products actually have tobacco in them. But instead of burning the tobacco, they heat it. They volatilize it, and the nicotine is inhaled. Like e-cigarettes, they appear to be substantially less dangerous than smoking, although it's not clear that they're as less dangerous as, than, e-cigarettes. But they're produced only by the major cigarette companies. Philip Morris is now selling these products successfully in many countries, many cities around the world. While they actually have the authorization to sell an older version of the product in the US, it's not very popular at this point. But in Japan, over the last four years there's been a drop in cigarettes sold of about a third at the same time that there's been this great increase in the use of these heated tobacco products manufactured by Philip Morris International and by Japan Tobacco. They have a product called Ploom. Philip Morris' product is called IQOS, I-Q-O-S, which, I was told, originally stood for I Quit Ordinary Smoking. So they are the leader of the theme song that the industry is singing these days about how they want a smoke-free world and they want to move toward one. But the only way they're ever going to do that, willingly, is if they can sell other products like these heated tobacco products and make large sums of money on them. Philip Morris has a good start at that. They claim that about a third of their revenue now is coming from IQOS, this heated tobacco product.

 

So whether that foundation ultimately has beneficial effects or not, forget corporate beneficial effects but on the public good, would pretty much depend on who's choosing to use these e-cigarettes, I'm imagining. That if it's people switching from normal cigarettes to them, or using them instead of normal cigarettes, it's one thing. But if they're recruiting new people who otherwise wouldn't smoke, then it would be a bad thing. So how do you think that'll all play out?

 

That's actually a critically important question, Kelly. And one of the great concerns that the opposition to e-cigarettes has, is that they're addicting lots of kids to nicotine, and that many of them will go on to smoke, and that that will reverse the progress that we made on smoking. Now, it turns out that there is no evidence to support the latter contention. And in fact, there's evidence to the contrary. I think it's entirely possible that some kids who would not have touched a cigarette otherwise are vaping and then trying cigarettes in the future. Whether they become regular smokers, remains to be seen. But I think there certainly are some kids like that. But what we do know is that the rate of smoking among kids, what we call current smoking, and smoking among kids means that they've had at least one puff on a cigarette in the last 30 days, that number has plummeted over the last quarter century, and, and this is the interesting thing, it has gone down at its fastest rate precisely during the period in which vaping has been popular among kids.

 

So one theory is that vaping is displacing smoking to some extent. That kids who would've smoked are vaping instead. It's a very complicated area and we don't know the answer. Among adults who vape, and they are relatively few in number except for very young adults, we observe mostly dual use, but the question is how much of this is a transition to vaping only, and then, maybe, a transition to nothing after that. In the UK, where vaping has been advertised by the health organizations as a way to quit smoking, and they have encouraged its use, and they use it in their smoking cessation clinics, and you'll even find it in hospitals, in the UK we have seen that more than half of the people who have quit smoking by using e-cigarettes have also quit vaping. So it is no longer the case in the UK that a majority of the people who vape are also currently smoking.

 

In the US, the data have been moving in that direction but it's still a majority who are dual users rather than vaping only. But we have evidence of four or five completely different kinds of studies, commercial data, other products in other countries, that all lead to the conclusion that vaping is already increasing the rate of smoking cessation in the US and in the UK by probably 10 to 15%. That's a hard thing to see in the data but it is something that, if you dig into the data, you will see it, and as I say, we see it all over the place. Let me give you one example of the tobacco harm reduction story that's fabulous. 40 to 50 years ago, large numbers of Swedish males started using a smokeless tobacco product called snus, S-N-U-S. It's a relatively low nitrosamine product, nitrosamine being a carcinogenic element, and they substituted it for cigarettes largely because cigarette taxes were going way up and there weren't any significant taxes on snus. So what you observe today, some three, four decades or more later, is that Swedish males have the lowest male smoking rate of any country in Europe, and maybe in the world. They do not have a low tobacco use rate. Their tobacco use rate is pretty typical but it consists mostly of snus. And they also have by far the lowest rate of tobacco-related diseases, like lung cancer, of men in all of the European Union countries, and the second lowest is typically a rate twice or more that of what you see in the Swedish males. Swedish females, who did not quit smoking in large numbers and did not take up snus until fairly recently, have rates of lung cancer and other diseases that are average or above-average for the European Union. So that's a great example of tobacco harm reduction in action, and it's one that's been around now, as I say, for decades.

 

Ken, this is a remarkable history and you're just bringing it alive beautifully. But let me ask you one final question. So given that you've been working in this field for more than four decades now, and have really been a pioneer, a leader, a warrior, and a hero, all those things could be applied to you and your work, if I asked you to sum up what's been learned from all these decades of work on tobacco, what would you say?

 

There are a lot of lesson. Certainly, we have learned specific kinds of interventions that really matter. You and I spoke about tax at some length. That's the preeminent one. Smoke-free workplaces, including smoke-free restaurants and bars, have not only themselves had a direct impact on health but have also set the tone for a more smoke-free society. So we have seen quite dramatic changes. I mentioned we're going from a 45% rate of smoking for the nation as a whole down to a little over 12%. That, however, has taken us six to seven decades. So it's kind of a good news, bad news story. It's a very complicated area. Tobacco control was ranked by CDC as one of the 10 most important public health measures of the 20th century, and also the first decade of the 21st century. And I think that's completely legitimate, and it is something about which all of us who care about public health can feel very proud about. The problem still remains. It is an enormous problem, as you alluded earlier, in many parts of the developing world, the low- and middle-income countries, and it's a growing problem in some of those countries, and it's just not going to disappear real fast. The lesson that I've taken most recently has been a discouraging one, and that's how divisive our field has become. We really have a chasm between the people who are opposed to tobacco harm reduction and those who are supportive of it. They're good people on both sides, they believe what they're saying, but they can't talk to each other civilly at this point. I hope that that will not become the case for those of you who are fighting the good fight in dealing with unhealthy foods.

 

Bio

 

Kenneth E. Warner is the Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Public Health and Dean Emeritus at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. A member of the faculty from 1972-2017, he served as Dean from 2005-2010. Presented in over 275 professional publications, Dr. Warner's research has focused on economic and policy aspects of tobacco and health. Dr. Warner served as the World Bank's representative to negotiations on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, WHO's first global health treaty. He also served as the Senior Scientific Editor of the 25th anniversary Surgeon General's report on smoking and health. From 2004-2005 he was President of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT). He currently serves on the FDA's Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee. In 1996 Dr. Warner was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He is a recipient of the Surgeon General's Medallion, the Luther Terry Award for Exemplary Achievement in Tobacco Control, and the Doll-Wynder Award from SRNT. Dr. Warner earned his AB from Dartmouth College and MPhil and PhD in economics from Yale University.

 

For nearly 70 years now, Americans have been bombarded with advice on how to lose weight. Countless diet books have become bestsellers. Some diets like Atkins keep coming back in sort of a recycled way. And there really hasn't been agreement, even among nutrition scientists, about which approach is best. Lots of attention has focused in recent years on carbohydrates, but over the years, protein and fat have had plenty of attention. In this podcast, our guest, Dr. David Ludwig of Harvard University, discusses this history and the reason for re-envisioning how best to lose weight – and for people to maintain the weight loss, perhaps the most important issue of all. Ludwig recently published a landmark, exquisitely designed and controlled study that tests whether limiting carbohydrates actually makes sense. This study, published in the "American Journal "of Clinical Nutrition 2021," has been generating lots of attention.

 

Interview Summary

 

Access the study: https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqab287

 

 

I'll begin by asking a question fundamental to this work. Why care so much about carbohydrates?

 

Great question, Kelly. Carbohydrates amount to at least half the calories in a typical diet today, which is interesting from a historical and evolutionary perspective. Because of the three major nutrients we eat, protein, fat, and carbohydrate, carbohydrate is the only one for which humans have virtually no requirement. Think of Northern populations, especially in the Ice Ages but also up to recently, such as the Inuit, that had access to only animal products and could eat plant products like berries maybe one or two or three months a year at most. So for nine months a year, they were eating only fat and protein. And yet, those populations were healthy. The women were fertile; they could breastfeed. And children grew normally. So recognizing that there's no absolute requirement for carbohydrates, the question then becomes: How much carbohydrate and what kind would be optimal for health and allow for the greatest flexibility, diversity and enjoyment in our diets?

 

So David, if the body doesn't have an innate need for these, presumably there's no biological driver to go out and seek these, why in the heck are people eating so much of this?

 

Well, carbohydrates are delicious. And the food industry certainly knows that and has taken advantage of that. In fact, when you step back and ask: What are the foods that we tend to binge on? They may have a combination of key flavors and nutrients. Oftentimes, we hear sugar, salt and fat. But I'll argue that there are virtually no binge foods that are just fat. Do people actually binge on butter? I mean, butter is very tasty. You might enjoy an initial bite. But very few people, perhaps with the exception of a major eating disorder, would sit down and eat a quarter pound, a stick of butter. But there are all sorts of high-carbohydrate binge foods. Sugary beverages are 100% sugar. Bread, baked potato chips, popcorn, especially the low-fat versions, these are easy to binge. And from one perspective, the key difference is the hormone insulin. Fat does not raise insulin. And so fat is digested slowly, and doesn't get directly stored in large amounts into body tissue. It has to be metabolized more slowly. Whereas carbohydrates, especially the processed ones, when eaten in large amounts, raise insulin to high levels. That insulin directs those incoming calories into storage. And a few hours later, blood sugar crashes and we get hungry again and are ready to have another blood sugar surge by indulging the next time in those foods.

 

So what question specifically was your study designed to address?

 

We conducted a large feeding study that had two parts. The parent study had 164 young and middle-aged adults, who were at least a little bit overweight, ranging from overweight to having obesity. And the first thing we did was bring their weight down by providing them all of their foods, delivered foods to their home, in a calorie-restricted way. You know, you cut back calories, and of course you're going to lose weight for a while. It doesn't address why people get hungry, and why they regain weight. But in the short term, we cut their calories, and they lost 10% to 12% of their weight. Then we stabilized them at their new, lower body weight, and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups: low, moderate or high-carbohydrate diets. And we kept them on these three different diets for another five months. And during this time, we were again delivering all of the meals to the participants. This was over 100,000 prepared meals throughout this time, so it was a really major effort. And during this low, moderate, and high-carbohydrate diet period, we adjusted calories to keep their weight the same. We wanted to keep them at that weight-loss anchor, 10% to 12% below where they started. The first study looked at what happened to their metabolism and their energy expenditure. And we found that when people were on the low-carb diet at the same weight as the other groups, they were burning about 200 calories a day more. So the study raised an interesting possibility, that the kind of calories you eat can affect the number of calories you burn. That from a biological perspective, all calories are not alike to the body.

 

David, this is fascinating work. I'd like to ask a strategy question. So this was an extremely intensive study of 164 people. And you mentioned the people were provided all their meals, very careful measurement and things like that. So the same amount of money, you could have studied many more people but just done a less intensive study with less supervision and fewer measurements of outcome. So why do the study in such an intensive way?

 

Right, there's always going to be a trade-off in design considerations. And you've identified a classic trade-off. You can study fewer people more intensively, or more people less intensively. Most weight loss trials have chosen the second route. They take a lot of people, and they try to study them for a long period of time, or at least some of them do: a year or ideally two years or longer. The problem is that without an intensive intervention, so what are we talking about? These studies would oftentimes have participants meet with a nutritionist once a month. They would get written educational materials, and maybe other kinds of behavioral support. But that's about it. And without greater levels of support and intervention, people characteristically can't stick to these diets over the long term. Maybe they make changes for two, three or four months. But by six months or a year, they're largely back to eating what they were originally. And the different diet groups don't look much different. So if the groups didn't eat in much of a different way throughout most of the study, why would we expect to see any differences in outcomes, such as weight or energy expenditure, or cardiovascular disease risk factors? So these studies don't test a dietary hypothesis very well. It leads to the mistaken conclusion that all diets are alike. Really, what the conclusion of these studies has to mean is that we need more intensive intervention in our modern toxic environment, if you will, to promote long-term change. And it's only when we get that long-term change can we actually figure out which diet is better and for whom.

 

So you've explained how the study was done and why you did it. What did you find?

 

So the first leg of the study, which was published in "BMJ" late in 2018, so just before the pandemic, showed that the kinds of calories you're eating can affect the number of calories you burn. And, that by cutting back on the total and processed carbohydrates, you can increase your metabolic rate. And that could be a big help in the long-term management of a weight problem. You know, you want your body on your side rather than fighting you when you're trying to maintain weight loss. And a faster metabolism would be a tremendous help if this is a reproducible finding and applies to the general population. We recently published in the September "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition," a second part of the study. And that asks: How do these different diets, low, moderate and high carbohydrate, affect cardiovascular disease risk factors? It's one thing to lose weight. Maybe a low carbohydrate diet helps you lose weight. But if your cardiovascular disease risk factors go up, that might not be such a good trade-off. So that's the aim of the second study. Because low-carbohydrate diets are often very high in saturated fat. So we wanted to find out what were the effects of this low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat on a range of risk factors.

 

So tell us specifically some of the cardiovascular risk factors that changed. And if you would, place the changes that you found in your participants in a context. Like are these big-deal changes? Are they small changes? Or put it in context, if you would?

 

The big problem with saturated fat is that it clearly raises LDL cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which is a classic cardiovascular disease risk factor. It's the main one that's targeted by many of the drugs, such as statins. Yeah, I think there's no question that on a conventional high-carbohydrate diet, a lot of saturated fat is harmful. So the combination of bread and butter is not a good one. But the question we wanted to ask was: What happens when you get rid of a lot of that bread? Does the saturated fat still comprise a major risk factor? And so our low-carbohydrate diet was exceptionally high in saturated fat, as is characteristic of how these low-carb diets are usually consumed. It had 21% saturated fat, which compares to the 7% saturated fat on the high-carb, low-fat diet that's oftentimes recommended to people at risk for heart disease.

 

So what did we find? Well, the first thing we found was that LDL cholesterol was not adversely affected at all. There was no difference in LDL cholesterol between those getting 21% versus 7% saturated fat. Suggesting that when you substitute saturated fat for processed carbohydrates, from the standpoint of this key risk factor, it's pretty much a wash. However, the low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat diet benefited a range of other risk factors that go along with what we call the metabolic syndrome, the insulin resistance syndrome. Specifically, we saw strongly significant, from a statistical perspective, improvements in triglycerides, that's the total amount of fat in the bloodstream; HDL cholesterol, that's the good cholesterol that you want to be higher; and other lipids that indicate overall levels of insulin resistance. Suggesting that insulin resistance was improving. And we know that low-carbohydrate diets show promise for diabetes in other studies, in part because they do tend to improve insulin resistance and lower blood sugar. And so our study suggests that if you are pursuing a low-carbohydrate diet, and we can talk about the different degrees of restriction of carbohydrate, and at the same time you're reducing the processed carbohydrates, then the saturated fat might not really be such a problem.

 

So then if you take all this information in this, as I said, exquisitely designed intensive study and distill it into what dietary recommendations would be, what do you think is a reasonable proportion of fat, carbohydrate and protein in the diet? And what sort of things should people think about as they want to lose weight and keep the weight off?

 

One key qualification I need to mention is even though this was an intensive study with a relatively large number of people for a feeding study of this magnitude, we still don't know how generalizable these findings are to people at different ages, different body weights, different levels of susceptibility. So no one study can inform a change of clinical practice like this, especially in the world of nutrition where there's so many complicated and interacting factors. I will also venture to say that there's no one diet that's going to be right for everybody. We know that some people can do perfectly well on a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. I mean, think of the classic Asian agrarian societies where rates of obesity and diabetes are very low. But those societies tend to be highly physically active and the people insulin-sensitive. America is characterized by high levels of overweight and obesity, sedentary lifestyle. And these create insulin resistance as a highly prevalent problem. For societies such as ours, we think that high-carbohydrate diets that are raising insulin levels on the background of insulin resistance is a recipe for metabolic problems. And so for Americans, especially those struggling with weight, pre-diabetes, and even more so diabetes, a reasonable first step is to cut back on the processed carbohydrates. And I think that's an intervention that increasingly few experts would argue with. We're talking about concentrated sugars and refined grains. Where we start to get into the controversy is whether carbohydrates should be further reduced down to say 20% as in our study, which still leaves room for some unprocessed grains, beans, and a couple of servings of whole fruit a day, or even lower to what's called the ketogenic diet that's less than 10%. And that's where you really have to give up most carbohydrates and focus just on the proteins and fats. I think for people with diabetes, such a strict approach looks appealing in preliminary research studies. But again, this is going to need more research. And I would caution anybody with diabetes or anybody who's thinking about a ketogenic diet to discuss these kinds of dietary changes with their healthcare provider.

 

I realize your study wasn't meant to address this issue that I'm about to raise, but I'd appreciate hearing your instincts. One key, of course, to any recommended nutrition plan or diet, if you'd like to call it that, is whether people will stick to it. What do your instincts tell you, or data if you have it, on how readily people can adhere to this sort of an approach over the long term compared to other kinds of approaches?

 

Great question. And I'll approach that by saying: We all understand that if diet is a problem that's contributing to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, other chronic health problems, then we have to change our diet in one way or another regardless of what the mechanisms are. So I'll return the question to you by saying: Which do you think is going to be easier for most people over the long term: cutting back calories, getting hungry and trying to ignore that very intense drive to eat, or getting rid of certain kinds of foods that may be triggering hunger and making it so much harder to stick to a lower calorie intake?

 

As a doctor, as a pediatrician, and as a researcher, and also myself, I try to do N of 1 experiments on myself with any kind of a nutrition approach I might use with patients or with research participants. I've found that it's so much easier to just give up the processed carbohydrates and enjoy a range of other very satisfying, delicious, higher fat foods. And oftentimes, in my experience personally and I hear as reported by patients that the cravings for these highly processed carbohydrates go down. And lastly, I'll just say, it's not that these processed carbohydrates are inherently so irresistibly delicious. I mean, white bread, these common binge foods, white bread, unbuttered popcorn, baked potato chips, even though these are almost 100% carbohydrate yet they're commonly binged on not because they're so incredibly tasty. But I would argue because they're producing changes in our body that are driving overeating. So it's not that they're so tasty and we're getting so much enjoyment. We're eating these foods because we're driven to metabolically. And once you come off that blood sugar rollercoaster, it becomes much easier to say no.

 

When you mentioned before that with one approach, you're kind of fighting your body; and another approach, your body is becoming your ally in this process, I thought of going to the beach and, you know, you can go out and try to swim against the waves coming in, or you can ride the waves toward the beach. And one, of course, is a lot easier than the other. And it sounds that's kind of what you're talking about, isn't it?

 

When you line up biology and behavior, and clearly behavior, psychology, and our food environment are all factors that are going to have to be addressed. We don't want to make it much harder for people. So we do need to think in systems dynamics: the food supply, the environment. But on a strictly individual level, when you line up biology with your behavior, the effort required to accomplish your goals becomes less. You know, this is characteristic of so many areas of medicine and research. This is why we aim to identify the cause of a problem when you treat a cause. So let's use the example of fever. Fever you could say is a problem of heat balance: too much heat in the body, not enough heat out. And so from that perspective, you could treat any fever by getting into an ice bath. Couldn't you, right? The ice would pull the excess heat out of your body. But is that an effective treatment for fever? No, of course not. Because your body's going to fight back violently with severe shivering, blood vessel constriction. And you're going to feel miserable and you're going to get out of that ice bath quickly. In the case of obesity, the timeframe is much longer, but similar kinds of responses occur. The body fights back against calorie restriction because calorie restriction, according to this way of thinking, is an effect. It's not the cause. If the cause is the body's been triggered to store too much fat, then we have to address that problem by lowering insulin levels and producing a more stable blood sugar pattern after eating. If that happens, then the effort that you put into cutting back calories goes a lot further.

 

Bio:

 

David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD is an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children's Hospital. He holds the rank of Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Ludwig is the founding director of the Optimal Wellness for Life (OWL) program, one of the country's oldest and largest clinics for the care of overweight children. For 25 years, Dr. Ludwig has studied the effects of diet on metabolism, body weight and risk for chronic disease – with a special focus on low glycemic index, low carbohydrate and ketogenic diets. He has made major contributions to development of the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model, a physiological perspective on the obesity pandemic. Described as an "obesity warrior" by Time Magazine, Dr. Ludwig has fought for fundamental policy changes to improve the food environment. He has been Principal Investigator on numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health and philanthropic organizations totaling over $50 million and has published over 200 scientific articles. Dr. Ludwig was a Contributing Writer at JAMA for 10 years and presently serves as an editor for American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. He appears frequently in national media, including New York Times, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN. Dr. Ludwig has written 3 books for the public, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Always, Hungry? Conquer Cravings, Retrain your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently.

 

A paper just released in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition challenges, and I mean really challenges conventional thinking about nutrition, weight gain, and what has caused the very rapid and profound increase in obesity rates over the last 50 years. This is a landmark paper by any standard, and saying that it will raise eyebrows is an understatement. The paper is authored by a number of distinguished nutrition scientists. The lead author is Dr. David Ludwig from Harvard University.

Interview

 

David Ludwig MD, PhD is Professor of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Professor of Pediatrics in the Harvard Medical School. He has published innumerable books and papers on nutrition, contributors to obesity and diabetes, and what might be done with both practice and policy to improve things. He has a real remarkable breadth and scope of his work. David, Time Magazine once named you a warrior in work on obesity. This is exactly how I see you as well. You're really challenging the traditional ways of thinking, and as I said, you've broken new ground. So I'm proud to say that you and I have been friends for a number of years, and I'm also proud to say that we've written a number of things together. So thanks so much for being with us today. It's a real honor to have you.

 

Thanks, Kelly. Great to be with you. And I'm sitting here in my office looking at a plaque I have on the wall of an op-ed we wrote for the Washington Post almost two decades ago, so it's been a real honor and productive pleasure to know you.

 

The pleasure has been mine. So let's talk about the paper. So in this paper, you and your co-authors challenged the widely-embraced energy balance model. So can you say what the energy balance model is?

 

Well, the notion of energy balance is really just a restatement of physics, the first law of physics that says, that speaks to energy conservation, and it's commonly interpreted that in order to gain weight, you have to have a positive energy balance, that is you have to consume more calories than you burn off, and that to lose weight, you have to reverse that. You have to have a negative energy balance. You have to consume fewer calories than you burn off. But we argue first off that this doesn't tell us anything about causality, cause and effect, what's actually driving obesity. We use the example of a fever. Of course, a fever can only happen if the body generates more heat than it dissipates, more heat into the body than heat out of the body. But that's obvious that's, it's, you know, we don't need to be emphasizing that in textbooks. We don't need to be teaching patients that notion. The question is what's cause and what's effect? And the conventional way of thinking is that the positive energy balance is driving weight gain, is causing obesity. So we're surrounded by all these convenient, inexpensive, energy-dense, hyper-palatable, highly tasty foods. We lose control. We overeat them. We don't burn off those excess calories with our modern lifestyle, and so those excess calories get forced into fat cells, and we gain weight. So ultimately this view considers all calories are alike to the body, and that we have to eat fewer calories, and ideally burn more of them off by exercise to address the problem. So that's the conventional way of thinking.

 

So you have a different, and very science-based explanation for all of this that I'll get to in a minute, but before we do that, why did the field come to adopt this energy balance model?

 

Well, it does seem to make sense, and certainly over the short term, we know that this way of viewing things applies. If you force feed an animal, or if we just intentionally overeat ourselves, we can gain weight, and conversely, if we put ourselves on a low calorie diet, we can lose weight for a while, but characteristically, we know the body isn't a, you know, an inert energy storage depot. The body fights back in a dynamic way against changes in body weight and in energy balance, and this is something that almost every dieter has experienced, right? If it were just a matter of eating less and moving more, 150 calories less a day, that's a serving of juice, 150 calories out more a day, that's walking moderately for half hour, then virtually every weight problem should be solved within, you know, months to at most, a few years, but that's not the case. Very few people can adhere to, can stay with low calorie diets for very clear reasons. The first thing that happens is we get hungry, and hunger isn't a fleeting feeling. It's a primary biological signal that the body wants more calories. And even if we could, those few of us who are highly-disciplined, and can resist hunger, the body fights back in other ways, most notably by slowing down metabolism, which means that to keep the weight coming off, even as we're getting hungrier. We have to keep eating less and less, because the body's getting more efficient. So the conventional way of thinking about things, all calories are alike, calorie in calorie out, just eat less and move more. Doesn't seem to address the difficulty that people are facing, and recognize that despite a lot of attention to calorie balance, the obesity epidemic is getting worse and worse every year. I mean, the data just from the last year suggests that the weight gain during the pandemic was even faster than it was just prior.

 

Well, let's talk for a minute about what's at stake here. So vast numbers of people in the United States, both adults and children are overweight. This is increasingly becoming true of essentially every country in the world. The amount of weight that people have been gaining seems to be going up over time, and people find it very difficult, perhaps for the reasons you mentioned, to lose weight and keep it off, so it's a pretty dire situation then, and given the health consequences of excess weight, and the psychosocial implications of things, there's really a lot at stake here, isn't there?

 

Certainly so. We know that in childhood, obesity can affect virtually every organ system in the body, and set the stage for a lifetime increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, even many cancers. Among adults, the majority, and in fact 70% of adults in the United States have at least overweight, if not obesity, and this is becoming a huge driver of the chronic health burden on the healthcare system, and which so many patients themselves experience, in terms of diabetes, risk for heart disease, fatty liver, orthopedic problems, sleep apnea. So we have a problem that has gotten so much attention, and yet keeps getting worse with every effort that we can bring to bear. My coauthors and I have this new paper in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, arguing it's time for new thinking. And the carbohydrate insulin model that we are proposing is perfectly consistent with the laws of physics around energy balance, but it suggests that we've been coming at the problem in exactly the opposite way than would be most effective.

 

So let's talk about that. So if you have a different explanation than the traditional energy balance model, what is it exactly?

 

So the usual way of thinking, as we considered earlier is that overeating causes weight gain, and that certainly happens in the short term, but that model has a hard time explaining why people are gaining weight year after year, and their bodies are wanting to hold onto those calories. So we argue that a metabolic perspective would better explain this continuing creep upward in the so-called body weight set point. So the carbohydrate insulin model suggests that we've had it backwards, that overeating is not the primary cause of weight gain, that the body's process of gaining weight, and storing too much fat is driving overeating. So overeating and a positive calorie balance certainly has to exist. That's a law of physics, but it's a downstream effect. It's not at the source of the problem. And so this may sound a little surprising. How could the body gaining weight cause us to overeat? Well, let's take the example of an adolescent during the growth spurt. We know a teenager might consume hundreds, or a thousand calories more than he or she might have a few years earlier, and that adolescent is growing really quickly, but which comes first? Is the overeating that that child is doing causing the growth, or is the rapid growth and the deposition of many calories into new body tissue causing that adolescent to get hungry and to eat more? Neither explanation violates any law of physics, but they have radically different implications to how we understand growth, and what we might do about growth disorders. In the case of the adolescent, it's clearly the other way. It's the growth that's driving the overeating, and how do we know that? Well, Kelly, neither you or I, no matter how much we're going to eat or overeat are going to grow any taller. So something in the body is regulating hunger, based on the needs of growth, and we argue that the same thing is happening in the case of obesity, that the aspects of our diet, importantly, including the processed carbohydrates that flooded our diet during the low fat years, that these are triggering fat cells in the body to hoard too many calories, to hold onto too many calories, so there are fewer calories available for the muscle, the liver, and the brain, and our body recognizes that. We get hungry, and we eat more as a consequence.

 

You mentioned the highly processed foods, especially carbohydrates that bombarded the American scene during the low fat craze. Explain more about that.

 

These processed carbohydrates, that at one point, just 20 to 30 years ago, people thought, and you can find many examples of this written in the literature. In fact, the first food guide pyramid is a clear illustration of the fact that all fats were considered unhealthy, because they have so many calories per bite, more than twice the calories per gram than carbohydrates. Whereas the bottom of the food guide pyramid, you know, we were supposed to eat six to 11 servings of grains, many of which were highly processed. Sugar was considered benign, and a good way to, and this is what they said, dilute out fat calories. The problem is that these processed carbohydrates, white bread, white rice, potato products, virtually all of the prepared breakfast cereals, and of course, concentrated sugars, and sugary beverages. So when you eat these foods in substantial amount, and it's worse if the meal is also low in fat and protein, because they tend to slow down digestion. So if you just eat a lot of these processed carbohydrates, the body digests it into glucose literally in minutes. So blood sugar shoots upwards 10, 20, 30 minutes later, and that causes a lot of the hormone insulin to be produced. I sometimes refer to insulin as the Miracle-Gro for your fat cells, just not the sort of miracle you want happening in your body. We know that when a person with diabetes gets started on insulin, they'll typically gain weight, and if insulin is given in excess dose, they'll gain a lot of weight. So insulin is the hormone that promotes fat storage, and we argue that basically just endocrinology 101, all these processed carbohydrates, by stimulating more insulin than we would normally make on a less processed, lower carbohydrate diet, are driving too many of the incoming calories from a meal into storage and fat cells, instead of into muscle where they can burn. And so when you store, all it takes us to store one gram of fat too much a day to explain basically the whole of obesity, if one looks from childhood to adulthood.

 

So David, provide some context for this, if you would. So what fraction of the American diet is comprised of these kinds of foods, and what would that number be if people followed the recommended dietary guidelines you suggested?

 

Well, back in the 1950s, it's not as if Americans were extremely healthy. We had much higher rates of heart disease, although much of that related to smoking, and we of course, had many fewer medications, and surgical procedures to help prevent or treat heart disease. But at that time, obesity rates were much, much lower, you know, about only one third of the rates they are today. And at that time in the 1950s, Americans ate about 40% of their calories as fat, and about 40% as carbohydrate, and maybe 15 to 20% as protein. Because of concerns around saturated fat and heart disease, which then got generalized to all fats being bad, well, we got the low fat diet of the 1980s, nineties, and the beginning of the century. Fat came down as a proportion of our diet. Carbs went up, but also the processing of those carbs. We got foods like the fat-free SnackWells cookies, a whole range of these fat-reduced products that simply took out fat, dumped in sugar and starch. These are after all processed foods, so they're not going to be putting in fruits and vegetables. And these products were considered healthy. We ate them as we were told to eat them, and at that time, obesity rates really exploded. And we're arguing that this is not just an association, that this change to our diet has played an important role in driving obesity, and that by bringing both the total amount of carbohydrates down, not necessarily a very low carb or ketogenic diet, but bringing them back down, maybe to what might oftentimes be characterized as a Mediterranean diet, focusing on getting rid of the processed carbs, eating more of the delicious and nutritious high fat foods, like nuts and nut butters, olive oil, avocado, even real dark chocolate. All of these high fat high, calorie foods look a whole lot healthier than the processed carbohydrates do in the best cohort studies.

 

You know, it's a somewhat hopeful message, isn't it? Because you're not just telling people you have to eat less of everything, but there are actually some things that are quite delicious where you can eat more, and maybe that hope will lead more people to try this sort of approach.

 

That is exactly the issue with the conventional approach. If all calories are alike, and overeating is the primary problem, then we really just have to control our appetites. We have to discipline ourselves. Yes, clearly the conventional thinking recognizes that environment has a lot to do with it, and psychology of behavior, but ultimately, one way or another, you have to cut back on calories, because overeating is driving the problem. But if the driver is at the fat cells, if the foods that we're eating are triggering our fat cells to store too many calories, and that's what's causing the hunger and the overeating, then just eating less doesn't solve the problem, and it actually could make it worse by slowing down your metabolism. So this model argues that a focus on what you eat, not how much is more effective. You focus on controlling the quality of the foods, importantly, the processed carbs, but there are other aspects that can help hormonal and metabolic response. That's what the person focuses on, and we let the body, based on our hunger levels, and satiety levels, determine how much we need to satisfy metabolic requirement.

 

So you've got what we call in the field a testable hypothesis, that people will do better if they follow the approach that you've mentioned, compared to the traditional approach. And you put that to a test in a study that we're going to be talking about in a second podcast. But before we get to that, what sort of pushback, if you had, as your paper has been published, are corporate interests involved in this picture at all?

 

Yeah, let me just say that we recognize that these ideas are not fully proven. There are animal studies, we've done one of them that provides what we could call a proof of concept, that when you give rodents, and this has been reproduced by many different groups. This is a very rigorous finding. When you give rodents high glycemic index, versus low-glycemic index starch, so that's fast-digesting, versus slow-digesting starch. You keep everything else the same, the ones that get the fast-digesting starch, that's like, all of those processed carbs we're eating that raise insulin a lot, well, they in fact show this whole sequence of events. Their insulin levels initially go up, they start getting fatter, and their energy expenditure goes down. They start moving less, and if you restrict their calories to that of the control animal, they're still fatter, because more calories wound up getting stored than burnt in muscle. So they wind up getting more fat tissue, and less lean tissue, even at the same total body weight when you prevent their weight from going up. So we argued that there's no way to explain that finding based on the conventional, calorie in, calorie out way of thinking. We need to examine whether this applies in humans, and to whom, you know? It may be that one model explains certain situations, or certain people better than the other, but it is a testable hypothesis. Unfortunately, this debate has become polarized, and we, in our article, specifically invite opponents to work with us on generating common ground. There's plenty of basis for common ground already, and in our article, which is freely available online at American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. We put out a diagrammatic model in which each step leads to another step, and each of these steps is testable. So we can figure out what we got right, what needs improvement, you know, and where common ground is. After all, this is what science is supposed to be about, to come up with new ways of thinking for intractable problems.

 

You know, you reminded me when you talked about the animal studies of work that occurred many decades ago on something that people in the field were referring to as the cafeteria diet. And I remember the slide that I used for years in my own talks that was given to me by Ted Van Itallie, one of the pioneers in the obesity field, that showed a rat sitting on top of basically a junk food diet, where they take animals, and in the cage, they would put Cheetos and Hershey bars, and marshmallows, and things like that. And the animals would eat a lot of those things, and gain an enormous amount of weight. But people were really attributing the weight gain to the fact that these were highly palatable foods. The animals would eat a lot of it just because it tasted really good, and that would bring a lot of calories, and that was the reason for the weight gain. And what you're saying is just, "Wait a minute, what happens to be that food that goes in there is a really important part of the picture," And that's been proven by controlling the calories in the experiment that you set.

 

Well, I think that's a really great point that you raised that it's easy to think in the cafeteria diet model, that the animals are getting fat because of the tastiness of the food, but these studies can't distinguish tastiness, and whatever that means, and we could come back to that point, because tastiness is elusive. It's a very squishy term to define, for reasons we can consider, but it's impossible in these studies to distinguish tastiness from the nutrient content of the foods, and they tend to be full of sugar and processed carbs. In fact, the few studies that have aimed to disentangle this provide clear support for the carbohydrate insulin model that tastiness by itself, when you control nutrients, does not result in obesity, but the nutrients, even in a bland or untasty diet does result in weight gain in animals.

 

Fascinating science. So, David, what do you think are some of the main policy implications of all this?

 

Well, there has been push back. Some of that relates to just the difficulty of paradigm change, amidst scientific uncertainty. You know, we need ultimately to be all working together on all sides of this. But in addition, there's resistance from the food industry that loves the notion that all calories are alike. All calories are alike, and there are no bad foods, and that you can drink a sugary beverage, have any kind of junk food, as long as you eat less of other things, or burn off those calories with physical activity. Whereas if this way of thinking, involving the carbohydrate insulin model, this opposite cause and effect conception is correct, then those foods have adverse effects on our metabolism above and beyond their calorie content. And that from that perspective, you really, can't just outrun a bad diet, that we really need to be thinking about how our food is influencing our hormones and metabolism, otherwise we're going to set ourselves up for failure, and that's not a message that many, although not all in the food industry like to hear, because it requires corporate responsibility for helping to create the nutritional nightmare that confronts so many of us, and especially children throughout so much of their days.

 

You reminded me about an interesting parallel with tobacco here, where the tobacco companies, you know, long after it was known that cigarettes were killing people, just said that it's not the tobacco that's killing the people, it's the fact that they're just consuming too much of it, and the food companies have made very much that same argument. And then the tobacco researchers said, "No, tobacco is bad in any amount, and even a little of it can be harmful." And that's not totally true of the processed foods you're talking about. I'm assuming people can have them in small amounts, but the parallel really kind of exists there, doesn't it? That these things are risky, and dangerous really, after you go beyond whatever that small amount is, and then you're going to have trouble, no matter what you're doing elsewhere in your diet?

 

The metaphor with tobacco is useful to a point, although it can also elicit some strong responses, because obviously, tobacco products aren't needed for survival, food clearly is. But I do think that there are some parallels that if these highly processed carbohydrates are undermining our metabolism, and also triggering, in part because of the metabolic changes. Fat cells communicate with the brain in many ways, including by releasing or withholding nutrients. If these foods are also triggering pathways in the brain that make managing calorie balance increasingly difficult, then we do really begin to need to think about food way beyond calorie issues, and that all calories aren't alike, and that the food industry may indeed have to manage the food supply in a way that makes weight control easier rather than harder.

 

The paper we were discussing today was published in September, 2021 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and is publically available for free.

 

Bio:

David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD is an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children's Hospital. He holds the rank of Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Ludwig is the founding director of the Optimal Wellness for Life (OWL) program, one of the country's oldest and largest clinics for the care of overweight children. For 25 years, Dr. Ludwig has studied the effects of diet on metabolism, body weight and risk for chronic disease – with a special focus on low glycemic index, low carbohydrate and ketogenic diets. He has made major contributions to development of the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model, a physiological perspective on the obesity pandemic. Described as an "obesity warrior" by Time Magazine, Dr. Ludwig has fought for fundamental policy changes to improve the food environment. He has been Principal Investigator on numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health and philanthropic organizations totaling over $50 million and has published over 200 scientific articles. Dr. Ludwig was a Contributing Writer at JAMA for 10 years and presently serves as an editor for American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. He appears frequently in national media, including New York Times, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN. Dr. Ludwig has written 3 books for the public, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Always, Hungry? Conquer Cravings, Retrain your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently.

 

Today's podcast is part of our Regenerative Agriculture series of podcasts. We're talking with agroecologist Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, CEO for Blue Dasher Farm in South Dakota, and also founder and director of the ECDYSIS Foundation. Dr. Lundgren connects the worlds of science and agriculture, and his working regenerative farm is also a scientific research hub. And he has a humble goal to foster a revolution in our food system, and demonstrate feasibility and sustainability of regenerative agriculture.

Interview Summary

 

So Blue Dasher Farm in South Dakota sounds like a fascinating place. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about it?

 

Blue Dasher Farm is an operating demonstration farm and regenerative ag, located here in the middle of kind of nowhere, South Dakota. We wanted to be on the front lines of where change needs to happen, and we're at this great interchange here between corn, soybean, row crop ground, as well as rangeland systems, but also this is where a lot of the nation's honeybees ended up being too. We've got this kind of trifecta of crop lands, orchards, rangelands and honeybees. What this is intended to do is not only be a regenerative farm and integrated into a farming community, but also be a training ground for the next generation of scientists in practicing hands-on, get your fingers dirty agriculture, and that's really important. That firsthand perspective really shapes the questions that we ask, and how we ask them in science.

 

Tell us about what's grown on the farm. Is it animal agriculture, plant-based agriculture, both?

 

It's an integrated system. You know, it's not a very large farm with 53 acres, and half of that is actually a native, unbroken prairie that's one of the finest that I've seen. We also have a lot of wetlands that are integrated into this matrix here too. We have sheep. Our biggest moneymaker is honey. We have 200 beehives this year. We have an orchard, chickens, an egg production, as well as a number of other poultry products. We raised a couple of pigs this last year. We have some annual and perennial crops that we harvest for seed, especially native grasses, and things like that, and it's all fused into one big farm that presents us with consistent, unpredicted hurdles and opportunities.

 

So the concept of integration here is really important. Sounds like each of these pieces you've mentioned, and there are a lot of them, work together, and that if anything were just taken out and done by itself, it wouldn't work as well as having all these things together, and that's the overall concept here, isn't it?

 

That is absolutely correct. The integrated system is intended to increase the resilience of the farm, but also provide stacking of enterprises that increases the likelihood of success.

 

Our listeners will vary, because people come from lots of different backgrounds, and some will know a lot about agriculture, but others less so. Can you give us an example or two of something on the farm where the integration really helps?

 

We have annual crop ground that we are working on right now. We don't spray. We're not certified organic, but we don't spray anything, and we also don't till, and those are two really important premises of regenerative Ag, if you ask me. And so we use our sheep as ways of managing vegetation out there, and then we work with the land, and so in the case that we don't end up getting, like this last year, the drought was horrible in South Dakota. We ended up not getting an annual crop to establish in there, but perennial plants, the prairie ended up coming in, and so off of that piece of ground, instead of an annual crop, we took meat from the sheep, and honey from our bees.

 

That's a fascinating example. So the no-till is an interesting concept, and I'd like you to describe a little bit more about that. I know that a goal of yours is develop and evaluate ecologically-based test and farm management solutions, and you do this in order to reduce disturbance. I'm assuming that has to do with a no-till, but I'm not entirely sure, and then that you want to increase biodiversity in crop and livestock production. Can you explain this concept of disturbance?

 

Pests are never the problem within a food system, right? Pests are always a symptom. The pests are trying to correct what we have monkeyed up from a natural system. They're trying to reset the balance in the biological community, and until you solve the underlying issues with that system, you're going to continue to battle pests, and you're going to have to spend more and more money on input costs like pesticides. So what we determined is what the underlying problem is, is a lack of diversity, lack of life on the farm, and too much disturbance, and disturbance comes in many ways. Tillage is a disturbance, agrochemical use is a disturbance, and so when you start to eliminate that disturbance, you find that life ends up doing a lot of the things that we've been trying to replace with technology. Regenerative farming is much more knowledge-intensive, and less technology-intensive.

 

So what's the problem with tilling?

 

Tillage is one of the worst things that you can do to your farm or garden. What happens when you do that is number one, you break down organic matter in the soil, which is the soil's fertility, and you disrupt the balance of nutrients within that soil. The only way that you can replace that organic matter is with life, right? Be it worms, or insects, or microbes, or fungi, that's where the soil's fertility ends up coming from. And the one-two punch with tillage is that not only does it disturb the nutrient balance of the soil, but it also kills most of the life from the soil, and so it removes your ability to recover. We end up seeing a lot of farmers, you know, they want to do the right thing, and they're faced with this conundrum, do I spray or do I till? And boy, I think I'd pick, and I don't like either of those options, and we don't use either of those options on our farm here at Blue Dasher, but I would pick spraying over tilling any day of the week.

 

Thanks for that description. So let's turn our attention for a moment to science, because you were trained as a scientist, and you've done lots of science yourself over the years, and you support science on your farm. So with your permission, I'd like to read a little quotation from your website, because I think it captures your approach to science, and then like to talk about a little bit. So here's the quote,

 

"Scientists have to become farmers to increase the relevance and credibility of their research. Scientists also have to become part of the farming community, and farmers need to be intimately involved in producing scientific research. The metrics that scientists assess their success by have to be reinvisioned to incorporate outcomes that farmers care about."

 

So explain a little bit about why science is so important, and maybe you could give us some examples of some science that's been done on the farm, or even some things that might be underway.

 

Regenerative agriculture science is essential. Stories are really important, right? Anecdotal examples of, "This farmer did this, and it worked super well, or didn't work at all." Those are really, really important foundations for science, but until we replicate it, and use consistent methods for measuring the outcomes of these different systems, those are anecdotes, right? And so science is going to be essential for us to take and increase the credibility of this regenerative movement to show that it always works, where it works, where it doesn't work, what aspects of it are driving the success of those farmers, and there really isn't a whole lot of primary data that's being generated on regenerative farming right now, and we saw that niche, and decided we needed to be a part of that.

 

Just to give our audience a sense of what kind of outcomes might be important here, let's just say somebody is doing a study where they're randomizing a hundred acres here, a hundred acres there, using a regenerative versus traditional ag. What sort of outcomes would one be looking for? What are the most important things that people doing research on regenerative agriculture need to show?

 

Regenerative food systems increase soil health, and improve biodiversity, while producing nutritious food profitably, and so outcomes that need to be measured in these systems fall within those general four categories, soil health, being carbon sequestration, water balance in the soil, micronutrient availability, biodiversity being life, be it microbial life, or insects, or worms, or plants, birds, all would fall into that category, nutrient density, nutritious food yields. We actually have to feed the planet. We've lost 40% of the nutrient value of our food over the last several decades through our farming practices and destruction of our natural resource base. We need to restore that. Food isn't as nutritious as it used to be, and then finally profit. All of this as well and good, but if the farm goes out of business in the interim, then it didn't work. We're showing these on actual farming operations all over North America right now. We have boots on the ground science that is generating the data that shows that this does work in all of the systems that we've examined so far.

 

You know, Jonathan, with these podcasts, I always have a series of questions that we prepare in advance, but you've stimulated so many interesting ideas, I'm going off-script like crazy. So there are a couple of things I really wanted to dive into here. When you were mentioning outcomes, I assume one outcome is how many external inputs are needed, like pesticides, and herbicides, and fertilizers, and things like that, and I'm assuming that that's important for a number of reasons. I'm imagining profitability as one, because if you can produce crops without having to buy those things, you're able to be more profitable. But I'm assuming these things are really important for the environment as well. Is that true?

 

So with regenerative farming, it ends up being a win-win for just about everybody in the situation. By improving the resilience of their operation, and the profitability of the operation, the farmer wins, right? By reducing the environmental exposure to agrochemicals, their families win, communities win, conservationists win. We find that increasing the nutrition of food, suddenly the medical field wins, society wins. We can use this to combat many planetary-scale problems. One estimate is that by changing to regenerative grazing lands across the U.S., we can largely offset, if not completely replace most of our carbon emissions, while producing healthier beef, and making healthier rural communities. That makes a heck of a lot of sense.

 

Do you think there would ever be a time when instead of measuring productivity as yield per acre, number of bushels, let's say, and people might change that to think about nutrition per acre?

 

We have found that corn farmers in our area get prizes if they are the top-yielding corn producer, right? And we found in one of our studies, the first one that was published that used regenerative Ag, and compared those two systems from a primary literature standpoint showed that yields were actually not correlated with profitability. You know what was correlated with the profitability of the farm was how much soil organic matter they had generated on their farm, yeah. So I think that that's going to be a really important metric, and, you know, as these soils start healing, the nutrition of food comes from the soil. It's not from a jug that the farmer is putting on the plants, right? It comes from the soil itself.

 

You know, I've often thought in this context about whether consumer pull for certain types of products might help drive this market. So for example, let's say you have two carrot farmers, and one is using conventional methods. The other uses a different set of methods along the lines of what you're talking about, and that farmer produces a more nutritious carrot. Could consumers be attracted to the carrots with the most nutrition? Might, is there any talk about this in the farming community?

 

Oh, absolutely, farm to table and farm to school programs are really important. I think we talk about labels. We talk about all kinds of ways of increasing the value of regenerative. Regenerative has to be cost-competitive with conventional if it's going to be successful, and it is. In every system that we've studied it is. It's cost-superior. These producers are more profitable, and that doesn't necessarily have to be associated with a premium. At the end of the day, what is incorruptible is consumers knowing their farmer, and that is the answer to so many of these issues within our food communities right now is people starting to learn who their farmers are, and that relationship-building, and that trust, and that's going to put a lot of value on a food item.

 

I can second that. As a person involved in this field, and a consumer, like everybody else, that does really make a difference. So my colleagues and I at the World Food Policy Center have spent a fair amount of time on farms and meeting farmers, and I really want their products, because I know who they are, and those personal connections mean everything. So I totally agree with what you said. It's interesting to hear that that's part of your perspective as well. Speaking of honey, let's go back to the bees for a minute. You mentioned this early on in the podcast. Why are honeybees so important?

 

Honeybees are a character, at the end of the day, and what we're trying to show is the massive extinction event that the planet is currently facing right now. We are undergoing a massive evolutionary experiment, and we're losing species at a rate that the planet has never experienced before. Honeybees are a character that people understand, and they see the benefits, and even if they've been stung a few times, they still love these little insects, right? The honeybees are dying at a really rapid clip, and the reason that they are is because they're such a good bellwether for what's going on in the environment. I mean, they forage for up to five miles from their nest, or their colony, their hive. They sample multiple plant species, numerous, if not hundreds of species of plants, and they pull all of the chemistries that are out there in the environment, and bring it back to the nest, and most of agrochemicals are actually lipophilic in that they like fat. Guess what their hive is made out of? Wax. And so they end up aggregating a lot of agrochemicals. Those agrochemicals make them sick, and stressed, and diseases come in, and pests come in, and wipe them out. But on the flip side of that, regenerative systems provide a tremendous opportunity for conserving life, and we've been working on trying to demonstrate that with the honeybees and tell that story.

 

Do I recall right, you said you have 200 hives? Wow, so how much honey can you produce from that number of hives?

 

Well, this year, not much at all, but last year, I think we got a thousand pounds, or something like that. You know, people that go to the grocery store, and buy honey at the grocery store, they don't know what honey tastes like. That's not real honey. A lot of that is actually adulterated rice sugar from Asia that they ended up circumventing U.S. trade restrictions on, and most people tell me, "I don't like honey, but I really like your honey, John." And I'm like, "Well, that's because it's made from prairie flowers, it's got no additives whatsoever, and it comes out with this breadth of flavor that most people have never experienced before."

 

It sounds so good. I want some right now. So let me ask you one final question. This often comes up in the context of discussions of regenerative agriculture, and has to do with how scalable it is. People might say that, okay, the results from regenerative agriculture are impressive, but you still need the feed the world, and can that model be used on a big enough scale to accomplish feeding the world? So how do you respond to that?

 

If you want to feed the world, grow food is the first step in the process, and right now we have about what is it, 176 million acres in the continental U.S. that's devoted to corn and soybeans that we really don't eat? And so if you want to feed the world, let's start there. Can regenerative farming feed the world? We have shown that yields are equivalent in regenerative systems, if not superior, and the caloric content of products that are generated off of a regenerative farm versus a monocrop of a conventional farm are pretty superior, actually. So we really need to be measuring actual food production, things that humans are eating directly, and the efficiency of that system, as well as how stacking enterprises increases the resilience and efficiency of a farm.

 

You mentioned just now that there are vast amounts of acreage that are devoted to corn and soybeans that we don't eat. What do you mean we don't eat them?

 

Well, when's the last time you went down and grabbed a handful of corn, yellow number five, and took a bite? We end up burning it in our cars. 40% goes into ethanol production. We end up putting another 40, 50% of that into cattle that would rather be eating grass, and so when we hear arguments against beef production because of the methane production that's ended up being produced there, that's not an artifact of the cows. That's an artifact of poor management of the cows, and if you put them on grass, and manage them correctly, cattle production is a carbon sink. It's not a source.

 

Bio

 

Dr. Lundgren is an agroecologist, Director ECDYSIS Foundation, and CEO for Blue Dasher Farm. Lundgren's research and education programs are helping applied science evolve in ways that foster the movement in regenerative agriculture. He received his PhD in Entomology from the University of Illinois in 2004, and was a top scientist with USDA-ARS for 11 years. Lundgren received the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering by the White House. Lundgren has served as an advisor for national grant panels and regulatory agencies on pesticide and GM crop risk assessments. Lundgren has written 129 peer-reviewed journal articles, several book chapters, authored the book "Relationships of Natural Enemies and Non-prey Foods", and has received more than $6 million in grants. He has trained 5 post-docs and 15 graduate students from around the world. One of his priorities is to re-envision how science is conducted to help fuel a revolution in regenerative agriculture. He regularly interacts with the public and farmers around the world regarding ecologically intensive farming and how diversity fuels the resilience and productivity of an agroecosystem and rural communities. 

 

So what does it mean for something to be considered organic, or to be considered regenerative or sustainably produced? Defining these concepts in agriculture production and in food labeling is complicated, but very important. So government defines and oversees certain terms, while other terms are generally overseen by producers, by industry experts, or even by non-governmental organizations. The politics and governance structures of labeling can be very important in how sustainably produced goods are made and marketed. In today's podcast, we'll speak with Dr. Samantha Mosier, political scientist on the faculty of East Carolina University, as part of our Regenerative Agriculture podcast series.

 

 

Interview Summary

 

So let's begin with this question. Why do you believe there's so much interest in alternative agriculture production?

 

So agriculture has been changing. We only have the concept of alternative agriculture because we went through a really rapid industrialization and mechanization of agricultural practices in the past 100 years or so. So this idea of alternative agriculture sprung out of a critique of agricultural production norms that were industrialized, that were causing environmental harm, like declining soil quality, which led to such events as the Dust Bowl. Today, the shift and interest into alternative agriculture stems from some pretty hard lessons learned about modern production, where we are seeing soil quality continuing to decline. Yields are also declining, and we want to be able to feed the world and our population. And so these practices that were once advocated are not necessarily working as they should. For producers, there's also some profit to be made in a number of markets if you're able to shift your production and get that certification in that sustainable market, or at least adhere to the norms of a particular production concept enough to make that claim.

 

You know, in some ways, what I hear you saying is that from a consumer point of view, many more people are becoming interested in the story of their food, where it came from, how it was produced, how animals were treated, what the labor situation was like, etc. And my perspective on this, and tell me if I'm right, is that this trend seems to be growing exponentially. There was a time not too long ago when people didn't think about this or they didn't know much about it, and now, boy, there's whole generations of people care about this an awful lot. And it shows up in the way they make purchasing decisions and where they do their shopping and things. But is that right? Do you think that this trend is really increasing?

 

Yes, rapidly increasing. So from a consumer perspective, you can look across a range of these alternative food markets, anything from organic, non-GMO, fair trade, and you'll see that sales across the board have exponentially increased in the past 10 to 20 years. So where there wasn't so much of an interest or spending habit in these categories, all of a sudden it just went through the roof. And so a lot of this does come from deferring or changing consumer behavior and expectations. We know that younger consumers in particular are concerned about climate change and the environment. So they're more likely to be environmental consumers to the degree that they can afford to do so because it is more costly often to buy these products. But there's also this whole component that these types of foods have also become more mainstream and readily available. And so organic foods 30, 40 years ago, were really difficult to find if you were to go into a typical grocery store. Today, you can find organic, fair trade, non-GMO products in Walmart, and Target, and Kroger. Even the Dollar Tree or Dollar General stores, you can find products that are labeled as sustainable in some capacity. So they're more readily as well.

 

Thanks for those comments. And I think in addition to those things, there are other signs like number of people shopping at farmer's markets, farm-to-school programs, farm-to-childcare programs, and you can go on and on, the list is pretty long. And I think it's pretty exciting. You know, I was thinking about this myself the other day. Not too far from where I live in Durham, North Carolina, there's a state farmer's market in Raleigh, which is just an absolutely wonderful, massive farmer's market. And when I was walking through the other day, I saw a farmer selling honey. And I thought, you know, this farmer appealed to me. I hadn't met him, I hadn't spoken to him, but I thought, he probably works really hard and he probably cares about what he does. And that really appealed to me. And I have plenty of honey at home, so I didn't need to buy any, but I wanted to buy it anyway. There's just something wonderful about that kind of connection that exists. It seems to me more people are caring about the farmers in this picture too. Do you think that's correct?

 

It depends on the consumer. I think in some cases, the ones that may be more informed and maybe go to farmer's markets, they're going to be more interested in where the food comes from. But there is a segment of consumers out there that they'll go off of the certification label because it's a little bit easier. Maybe they're crunched for time, they have kids, their job's demanding. But overall, we still like the idea that our food comes from a wholesome place.

 

Two terms that we've discussed, organic and regenerative, let's talk about how these two things are different from one another. Most people are familiar with the term organic, if not knowing how it's defined, but regenerative is newer on the scene.

 

Organic is specifically defined by government regulations and what a certification program dictates as organic. It's a concept that is really grounded in a consumer perspective because the label creates a singular four-based minimum standard for what it means to be organic. Not all producers actually agree with the current standards for what it means to be organic and organic production. There are a number of them that are interested in going above and beyond organic standards that are currently set. And this includes concerns about animal welfare. So how we're treating cattle and chickens in our production systems that are organic.

 

There are also a lot of concerns centered around hydroponic production systems being considered organic. Hydroponic is a type of production system that can't improve soil quality because there is no soil. And this is where regenerative discussions come from. The modern regenerative movement is based out of a movement from organic production and their critiques of our current system. The Rodale Institute about 30 or 40 years ago, specifically talked about regenerative organic production. The more modern concept of regenerative is a critique about the broader concept of a sustainable food system, and the need to do more than just be sustainable. And it really engages quite a bit of concessions about soil health. The problem with, I guess, modern regenerative agriculture is that it's not neatly defined. There's a heavy emphasis again on that soil quality and regeneration concerns, but there's no universal definition. It's not universally regulated, government's not involved with it. And so the most you can really hope for when you're seeing this term currently is producers acting in good faith when they're advertising their goods as being regenerative, and they can go get certified for it now. But again, you'd have to look into the details as to what that certification actually entails.

 

Let's talk about the role of government in this process a little bit more. So how do you think the government has impacted the way agriculture production is occurring and market activity? And do you think there's a benefit to having these claims certified or regulated?

 

So government does play a role. It legitimizes the market to some extent. It protects the term that's being used. It provides, you know, a standard, a reference point to where we can all say this is organic, but there's some challenges with that of course. So anytime you involve government that means you're going to take away certain freedoms to interpret the concept the way you may want to as a producer. And so when we start getting into certification programs, we know for example, that third-party certification systems for labels and production systems are a Gold Standard. We know this, but the challenge becomes is that when you start certifying and you start regulating these markets, is that, well, the cons are consumers could still misinterpret the term because what the USDA, for example, defines as organic may not be what I, as a consumer, believe organic to be. And so kind of this image of a small happy farm with a dog doesn't necessarily exist. Organic production, some have claimed, is really highly mechanized and it's became large scale. And this is part of that challenge with the one-size-fits-all standard. And the baseline standard is, all of the sudden there's a market being developed, and producers are going to adapt to that and enter it. And so a lot of people, at least with organic certification, have claimed that it became corporatized. It's industrialized production, just in a slightly different form. But the pros are, if you're looking for a guarantee, say you're one of those consumers that's really short on time and can't go to the farmer's market, well, it helps minimize false claims. You have a general idea of what you're actually buying. So it's a unified messaging signal. And you know, the semantics of course, is debatable about what it means. And for producers, this means they can receive a premium for the products they're producing.

 

Has the fact that organic production in some cases is highly industrialized, has that led to greater yields? Has that brought down price?

 

I think it depends on who you ask. I know the pandemic has thrown some concerns in terms of sourcing and other certain certification systems that are dealing with the reckoning of ending their contracts with small scale farmers in favor of larger scale farmers. But overall, organic has perhaps gotten maybe a bit cheaper because it's more readily accessible, but there are challenges with some companies with being able to source enough organic material to meet the demand. And so typically, you do still pay a little bit more for organic or sustainably produced, however defined, goods, but the price will always be a little bit higher than conventionally produced materials and products.

 

For consumers who are interested in purchasing these alternatively produced foods, what kind of challenges do they face out there in the market?

 

Well, they probably need to figure out what matters to them the most, and they need to do their homework about what a label means. So certified claims do come with some particular benefits. You can research very easily what that may mean, and you might not understand all the technical and scientific information, but kind of understanding the basis of what you're looking for in an item. So, as an example, you mentioned looking for honey. I was shopping for toddler food, and I was looking on the toddler can of food, and it had USDA Organic Certification Seal. And then, right next to it, it was also advertised with a label saying it was non-GMO. The thing is, is if you know anything about USDA Organic, it doesn't contain genetically modified ingredients to begin with. But as a consumer, which we have more or less-informed consumers, they may not know that USDA Organic means it's non-genetically modified. So these producers, the seller of goods, also have to advertise other benefits of the product because that consumer is not aware. So it's educating yourself and understanding what you're buying and not getting duped by just marketing claims.

 

Bio:

 

Samantha Mosier is an associate professor of political science and part of the Master of Public Administration program faculty at East Carolina University. Her research focuses on sustainable agriculture, food labeling, and local sustainability and resilience initiatives. Mosier is author of Creating Organic Standards in U.S. States: The Diffusion of State Organic Food and Agriculture Legislation and co-author of Performance Measurement in Sustainability Programs: Lessons from American Cities. Her work has also appeared in Environment and Planning C, Environmental Management, Food Policy, and Review of Policy Research. Prior to joining the faculty at ECU, Mosier was an assistant professor at Missouri State University and served on the University of Missouri Extension Council in Greene County, MO. 

 

 

Do you pay attention to information printed on food labels? From eye-catching designs companies use to entice you to buy a product to nutrition facts panels to the tiny dates printed on packages. There's a lot going on to be sure. For policymakers, they hope that refining date labels on food packaging will help reduce the amount of uneaten food ending up in landfills. Food Waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service recently asked for public input on food date labels. So, we decided to gather some experts together to talk about this important policy tool. Roni Neff is a professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Senior Advisor at the School's Center for a Livable Future. Her research looks at the intersection of food waste policy, climate change, and food system resilience. Brian Roe is a professor at the Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics. His work focuses on issues including agricultural marketing, information policy, behavioral economics, and product quality. Ruiqing Miao is an associate professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Auburn University's College of Agriculture. His research emphasizes sustainability, innovation, and decision making.

Interview Summary

Brian, let's begin with you and let's make sure everyone's on the same page. Can you talk to us a little bit about what date labels are and where they are on packaging. And what is industry required to include in terms of these date labels?

Yes, so date labels, we see them anytime we pick up a food package. Most packages are going to have some type of date label on them. Oddly, federal law doesn't regulate these or really require these other than the exception of infant formula, which is the only federal requirement domain out there. But in the absence of federal regulation, states have kind of done their own thing. About 40 different states require date labels on at least some food products. And about 20 states prohibit or restrict the sale or donation of food past the label date. And even though states that require date labels, manufacturers can still choose the dates. There are no real regulations on them.

So, recognizing that confusion over date labels can lead to unnecessary food waste, Government and industry actors have made, you know, some efforts to try to standardize date labeling language. But nothing terribly authoritative. Now, some states have introduced bills that seek to standardize date labels, with the motivation to try to get rid of and reduce food waste. California being perhaps the most recent of these. In 2024, they passed a bill that prohibits the use of any date label other than 'Best if Used By,' the phrase that goes along with foods where the date represents kind of a quality indicator. And then the phrase 'Use By,", if that date has some implications for product safety. The bill doesn't go into effect until July of '26, so we're going to see if this is going to create a domino effect across other states, across the food manufacturing center or even bubble up and be dealt with at the federal legislation level.

Now, industries tried to do things before. Back in 2017, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocers Manufacturers Association had a standardized date labeling suggestion that some firms bought into. FDA has given out some guidance about preferring 'Best if Used By' on certain food products to indicate quality. But again, we're all kind of waiting to see if there might be a federal legislation that kind of brings these state labels into check.

Thanks, Brian. And it's really important to know about the policy landscape and the fact that there hasn't been a federal policy across all foods. And it's interesting to see the efforts of, say, in California. I think this begs the question; how do consumers actually process the information of date labels?

This fascinated us too. A very clever person at Ohio State that I work with, Dr. Aishwarya Badiger, led a study I was part of. We enlisted consumers to come into the Consumer Evaluation Lab that we have here on campus and evaluate samples of milk. They were presented with the label of each milk. We gave them a little glass with a nose full of the milk that they could sniff. So, they're looking at the date label, they're given the sample they could smell, and then we kind of asked them, Hey, if this were in your fridge, would you keep it or toss it? But the entire time we actually had them fitted with special glasses that precisely track their eye movements so we could understand kind of which information they were looking at while they went through the whole process of evaluating and then making their decision. Consumers overwhelmingly looked at the date itself on the package and largely ignored the phrase or the words that go along with the date. In fact, for more than half of the evaluations, the consumer's eyes never went anywhere near the phrase.

This is important. And actually, we'll talk about that a little bit more with some of our other guests. So, what are the implications of date label policies?

So the eye tracking research really drove home to me that dates are much more salient than phrases. Although all the policies largely deal with the phrases. Dates give you actionable information. People can look at the date on the label, look at the calendar, and man, that's something they can do something about. They can act based upon that. The phrases are a little bit more ambiguous as Roni will talk about later. I think that people have a hard time interpreting what those phrases really mean. That doesn't mean we should not try to unify those phrases, but rather this is going to be a longer-term investment in educational infrastructure that until those phrases really become salient and actionable to consumers. And then become more of a critical component of the policies. But right now, policies are generally silent on dates. And dates seem to be the real action mover.

Yeah. So why don't we just get rid of all of this? What would be the implications?

Yes. We did this experiment too. Same kind of setup. Had people come in, they had the jug of the milk in front of them. They had a glass of milk that they could sniff. Same thing. And we had a bunch of different milks. We had some that were only like 15 days post pasteurization. Some that went out to like 40 days past pasteurization.

So, the youngest or the freshest had about three days, quote unquote, left on its date label. The 40-day old milk was like two or three weeks past the date. And we did two things. We had them evaluate the milk with the dates on the jugs, and then we had ones where we took the dates and the labels off the milk. Not surprisingly, when they did not have the dates on the milk, they were much more likely to say that they would keep the milk. Even that 40-day old milk, about half of them said, yeah, I'd drink this. I'd keep this if it were in my fridge. But it wasn't a slam dunk. So, our youngest and freshest milk had an odd flavor note. You know, sometimes as the seasons change, feed sources change for cattle, you get an odd flavor note. It's not spoilage, it's just a slightly different note. And when people have the date label, they were much more willing to give that milk a second chance and say that they would keep it. But if the date label wasn't on there, they took that odd flavor note and said, I'm going to toss this milk. So, it's really kind of a nuanced thing. And if you would take those off, I think you're going to get some consumers who are going to kind of freak out without any guidance. And they might have kind of an itchy trigger finger when it comes to throwing away that milk or other products. So, it's compelling. We've seen England, the UK, do this; take dates off of certain products. But I would probably want to see a little more example of how consumers are responding to that before I fully endorse that as kind of a policy movement forward.

Brian, thank you for that. And I have got to say, I was not expecting to have a conversation about the bouquet of a glass of milk. But this is really an interesting finding, and it does help us understand some other things that we're going to talk about. Roni, I want to turn our attention to you. And I know you are someone who's been involved in understanding date labels for a while. And I really appreciate it and I've said it before, but you're the reason I got into this work. I want to understand a little bit more about what are important things to understand about the misconceptions that consumers may have about food date labels? And why does it matter for policymakers?

Well, I'll start with just saying that conceptions are what we know rationally. And it's not the whole picture because as Brian was alluding to a lot of our decision making is going on in our emotions. And like I can tell my son all day long the fact that that milk is okay, he's going to toss it because he doesn't trust it. There's a lot more going on than conceptions. But I want to talk about two misconceptions. The first one is that despite what Brian just said about the fact that these date labels other than infant formula aren't federally regulated, about two in five people think that they are. We just did a national consumer survey in January 2025, and this is one of the findings. And I did that along with Emily Broad Lieb from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Project and Akif Khan also from there, and then Dana Gunders from ReFED. And in addition to this idea that they're federally regulated, I'll say that these kinds of beliefs were most common among those who were 18 to 34, parents with children under age 18, and black and Hispanic consumers. Our earlier work also found that those who think that food date labels are federally regulated are more likely to discard food based on them. All this speaks to a real challenge. And, you know, it kind of makes sense, like if you see something and you trust it, that it's from the federal government. And of course, we all trust the federal government these days. If you trust it, then you're going to respond to it. So that's an implication for food policy. And then the next thing we did also is that we tested understanding of five different food date label phrases: a date with no text, and then two of those phrases accompanied by icon images. And since none of these actually have a federally recognized meaning the correct answer for all of them in terms of the meaning is like other. But we also accepted answers that were aligned with that voluntary industry standard, just to kind of see how people were perceiving it. And, across all of these labels, only an average of 53% of people answered correctly about what these labels meant.

Now, consumers were pretty good at identifying 'Best if Used By' as a quality label. But the real challenge comes in with 'Use By' which under the voluntary industry standards should be a safety label. And more people thought it was a quality label than thought it was a safety label; 44% versus 49%. And so, we need to clear up these misconceptions in support of food safety, in support of food waste prevention. But in order to do that, we need to be able to tell people clearly what the labels mean. And we can't really do that if there's no standardized meaning of what they mean. So, we really need a national standard, and that is the policy implication.

Thank you for that. And I know Ruiqing and I have done some work in this space and in part learning from what you all have done. I'm interested because you mentioned the 2025 survey, but of course you also mentioned the 2016 survey. Are there any big shifts or anything that you want to tell us about changes that you see from those two different surveys?

We asked a number of the same or almost identical questions in those two surveys. And since that time, we've adopted a voluntary industry standard and there's been a lot of education and communication about wasted food. And yet in our survey we actually found that things were going in the wrong direction. Consumer misunderstandings of date labels increased. Those who quote always or usually discard food based on the label: in 2016, that was 37%, and this year it was 43%. And then in terms of belief that these are federally regulated: in 2016 it was 36% and now it's 44%. We're going in the wrong direction despite all these activities, and I don't know why. I think for those who are looking for future research questions, this would be a really interesting one.

This is really disturbing because all of the information that's come out about date labels. I thought people would understand this. And that this is where we would be in a different place. So, this work is really important. So, how did people's response to date labels vary by food item? Did you see any differences? Because this is something that comes up often that people may be more responsive to some food products versus others?

Yeah, indeed. We asked about five different foods, and we showed a bunch of different labels for each food. And the responses did vary both based on the item and based on what label was on it. And I'll start with where caution is needed. Deli meats are one example of where we really want people to pay attention to that label. And while there's no federal standard that label's the best piece of information people has, so they should use it. And we found that only 65% would throw out the deli meat before, on, or just after the 'Use By' label. And the number of people that would respond to it reduced with other labels that were used, and older adults were most likely to disregard those labels. And they may be particularly vulnerable in terms of foodborne illness. So that's when lack of caution leads to risk. On the other hand, when caution leads to waste, we looked at raw chicken, pasteurized milk, lettuce, and breakfast cereal. And for all of those there, like the label is really only telling you about quality, and consumers should use their senses to decide, and knowledge of how that was, stored to decide whether to eat it. And so, the most common out of all five foods, including the deli, the one that they responded the strongest to was raw chicken. And that chicken can be contaminated as we know, but if you cook it, you're killing those bacteria, so it's okay. And averaging across all those different date labels, we found 54% would discard these four foods based on the date. And the piece that was most striking to me was that for breakfast cereal, 43% said they were discarded based on the date. So, we've got some education to do.

Yeah. In the earlier paper I did with colleagues at Cornell, we used breakfast cereal and we were surprised to see how much people willing to throw away breakfast cereal if it were passed to date. There is confirmation and we see this happen in many other products. And we'll definitely talk about some of those product differences with Ruiqing. The last question I'd like to ask you is you found that many consumers thought they knew the meanings of the various food date labels, but they were incorrect. And in some of the work that you've done in the past, you found that many people answered incorrectly even after viewing information about the labels. So even when you educated folks or gave people information, they still made incorrect choices. Why do you think this is, and what should we do about it?

And some people's responses do improve when you show them the information, but it was striking in that study that seconds after having read the definition, according to the voluntary industry standard, people were giving the wrong answer. Even though they had previously said that they thought they understood it. So, to me, this suggests that they already think they know the answer and so they're not tuning in. And this speaks to a real challenge that we're going to have when we do standardize these date labels. How are we going to reach people and capture their attention. Like, if we just change the policy, that does nothing. We've got to reach people and we've got to do it in a sophisticated and well-planned way. And I think the education should also emphasize that misunderstandings are common because that might be something that would help wake people up. But beyond that, we've got to capture their attention. So, you know, dancing clowns, whatever it is that wakes people up.

I have a fear of clowns, so I'm not sure if I want that as a policy recommendation. However...

For the deli meats we want you to be afraid, so it's okay.

Yes, I agree. I agree. One of the things that this conversation has helped us see is that there's some real concerns around whether or not people are paying attention to the label. Or there may be paying more attention to the dates. And even when people are taught or encouraged to think about the dates, there seems to be a mismatch. And Ruiqing, I want to now turn to you because one of the things in the study that we were a part of, there's some questions about differences among people. So, in the paper that we recently published on the relationship between date labels and anticipated food waste, and people's individual orientation to risk and loss, can you tell us a little bit about what some of the key findings of that paper are?

Right. So, the paper is published recently in Applied Economics Perspective Policy. It's one of the official journals of Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). Norbert is the leading author. So, this paper built on the framework of prospect theory and is based on the data from a series of experiments we conducted in Alabama and also the state of New York. We find that consumers do adjust their anticipated food waste by date labels and by how much they tolerate risk and losses. In the experiment, we particularly measured their tolerance to risk and losses. We found that the 'Use By' date labels tend to lead to more anticipated food waste than 'Best Buy'. Maybe this echo what Roni has said. So, people may tend to link 'Use By' with quality and food safety. We also found that the consumers with low tolerance to losses and are associated with higher anticipated foot waste regardless of date labels and the products. So, we can see a heterogeneity of the responses of different consumers to date labels and food items based on their tolerance to losses and risks.

Thank you for that. And I think this is a really important aspect of looking at this set of studies because we see that people are different. They respond differently. And they have different ideas about how they handle losses. This idea that it can be worse to lose a hundred dollars versus to gain a hundred dollars. Or the way we understand how we'll negatively respond versus how positively we respond. Using this economic framework of prospect theory, something that is drawn from actually the psychology literature to better understand how people react to food labels while shopping. What are some key features of this approach to explaining people's behaviors and why do you think it's a good choice? Why do you think it's important to do this?

One of the key features of prospect theory is it divides the possible outcomes of a risky event into two domains. One is a gain domain and one is a loss domain. So, in terms of the food consumption, probably the most likely status quo is do not eat the food items. So, the gain domain might be gaining nutrition from the food item. The loss domain might be the loss of health if the food item is bad. So, I think this framework fits particularly well to describe the consumer's trade off in their mind when they face a food item with a date label that is maybe one day or two days past the expiration date. So, one possibility is you consume this food. If it is good, you get nutrition and if it is bad, you potentially get lost health or lose one day of work or so on. So, I think this model can capture the trade off or the decision-making procedure in a consumer's mind pretty well. And experiments data support the theoretical prediction that loss aversion may affect people's food waste decisions.

Thank you for that. And I think what's one of the sort of take home messages that I've learned out of this process is this heterogeneity, the fact that people are different and may respond differently to these date labels, really does put the onus upon policymakers to think critically what date labels, if we were to use them, or if we think they have an effect, which are the right ones. And so I actually want to open up the question to all of you. In your view, what next steps make sense for date labels to help address the food waste challenges that we see in this country? Let's start with you, Brian.

Ooh, yeah. So, to me a compelling issue that needs to be addressed is how do we get 'Use By' to really translate to be people to be about safety? Is it a different color? I know we don't want to mess with the phrases, but do we just call this safety date and put it in red or put a clown by it if that scares you. Something along those lines to make that stand out. And then on the relevance side, I think it might be out of policy, but perhaps, industry collaboration to really push printed dates to the end of that quality horizon. So that everybody has confidence that they're not going to get undercut by somebody else having an earlier date printed for cereals or for canned goods or something like that. To have a kind of a truce among commercial interests to say, okay, typically canned beans, has this type of 180 days or 360 days. Let's push it to the end of that acceptable horizon so that we don't have unwarranted waste happening as often. Those are two ideas that I've kind of chewed on a lot and think could be positive steps forward. But I'm fascinated to hear what others think.

Thank you, Brian and I really don't like the idea of putting clowns anywhere near this. I want to go to you, Roni.

All right, well first, I'll a thousand percent echo everything that Brian just said. And I'll note also in terms of the 'Use By' date, the label that was most commonly associated with food safety was 'Expires On' by consumers. But that isn't part of what has been under [policy] discussion. But anyway, in addition to echoing that, I'll just say we do need a standardized policy and it has to be accompanied by a well-designed education campaign. And this policy change, it's just a no-brainer. It's not controversial. It's fairly minimal cost. And given the high food prices and the struggles that consumers are having right now, they need every tool that they can to save money and food, and this is one of them.

Great. Thank you, Roni. I'll give the last word to you, Ruiqing.

Yeah. I will echo what Brian and Roni said. So, a well-designed policy and public education campaign. Particularly for the education campaign. I think regardless of if there is a policy change or not, I think it is time to do a public education campaign. Norbert, we have done the research on food waste for almost nine years, right? So, I learned a little bit about the date label's meaning. But still, I cannot change my wife's opinion. When she sees sell by yesterday for the milk, she would suggest we throw it away. But I said this is not for us, this is for sellers. But she wouldn't believe so because I cannot persuade her. But maybe an education campaign from more authoritative institutional federal government can change people's mind as a researcher or like even husband cannot change.

Roni - And can I just add to that, just please. I think that the economics and psychology expertise that all of you have can really contribute to that. Because I think that's a really important point that you're making. And it's not just factual, it's emotional too. And so how do we, you know, get in there and change what people do beyond their knowledge?

Bios

Roni Neff is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health & Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, an academic center focused on food systems and public health. Her research focuses on wasted food through the lens of equity and public health. She is a co-Director of the RECIPES national food waste research network, and she recently served on the National Academies of Science and Medicine consensus panel on consumer food waste.

Brian Roe is the Van Buren Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Roe has worked broadly in the areas of agricultural and environmental economics focusing on issues including agricultural marketing, information policy, behavioral economics and product quality. He was recently named as a fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and has previously served as an editor for the Association's flagship journal, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He currently leads the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative, a collection of researchers, practitioners, and students working together to promote the reduction and redirection of food waste as an integral part of a healthy and sustainable food system, and co-leads the RECIPES Network, a National Science Foundation Sustainable Regional System's Research Network focused on increasing food system sustainability, resilience and equity by addressing the issue of food waste.  In addition to research on food waste, his other recent research includes a USDA funded project focused on local foods and school lunch programs and participation in an NSF-funded multidisciplinary team seeking to understand human-ecosystem feedbacks in the Western Lake Erie basin, including understanding how farms and agribusinesses respond to voluntary environmental programs and how Ohio residents respond to different options to manage Lake Erie water quality.

Ruiqing Miao is an agricultural economist at Auburn University. Miao is interested in sustainability, innovation, and decision-making. His research focuses on the interaction between agricultural production and its environment, aiming to understand and quantify 1) agriculture's impact on land use, water use, water quality, and biodiversity, and 2) how agricultural production is affected by farmers' behaviors, public policies, agricultural innovation, technology adoption, and climate change.

As many as 13 million children in the United States live in food insecure homes, meaning that these households don't have enough food for every family member to lead a healthy life. Hunger is a problem that most often affects children from low-income families. And today we're going to discuss the Child Tax Credit aimed at helping low-income families and the historic increases in the credit made through the American Rescue Plan in 2021. Our guest today is Billy Shore, the founder and executive chair of Share Our Strength, a nonprofit working to solve problems of hunger and poverty, both in the United States and around the world. Share Our Strength is also the parent organization for the well-known No Kid Hungry campaign, the national policy, advocacy, outreach, and research effort to improve childhood nutrition, support school meals, and provide resources to schools, food banks, and community groups working to end hunger.

 

Interview Summary

 

So the child tax credit has been around for years, but this year there was some significant, albeit temporary, changes that made it a powerful tool in fighting poverty. Could you quickly walk our listeners through what these changes have been?

 

The most important change for The Child Tax Credit is that Congress and the Biden administration made it fully refundable - which is a way of saying that even if you don't earn enough money to pay taxes, you still get a check from the government somewhere between $3000.00 and $3360.00 per child. And one of the ironies of the Child Tax Credit in the past has been that many of the families who need it the most might be the least likely to get it if they weren't earning enough to pay taxes or file taxes. Now there's a portal that's been developed with the Internal Revenue Service and a nonprofit called Code for America that we worked very closely with, where even if you haven't earned any money, you can file for the Child Tax Credit. And you can use those funds for food, for education supplies, for healthcare, for really whatever you need it for, for your kids. It's estimated that it can bring 5 million children above the poverty line, which would really be absolutely transformational.

 

That's a remarkable impact this could have. So just out of curiosity, are there programs or means for letting people who might be eligible for this benefit know that it exists providing help in using the portal and doing things like that?

 

That's a great question because there's an all out effort beginning right now, not just to raise awareness of the Child Tax Credit, because a lot of families are not aware of this new benefit, but to also make it more accessible. Many families are going to need technical assistance as to how to access the portal called Get Child Tax Credit, getctc.org. And then when they're on the site, they might need assistance then as well. So there's a major effort. Think of this almost as like a political campaign. One of the things that Share Our Strength is doing right now as a pilot is building out a field operation in two states to see how this would go in Mississippi and in Maine. And we've got regional directors and field staff. And just as you would have a staff on the ground to register people to vote and to make sure they get to the polls, we've got a staff on the ground that is going to make sure people are aware of the tax credit. They get to their Community Centers or the sites or the volunteer tax assistance sites that they need to get to so that they could actually file. And then as we learn from those two pilots, we'll spread that into all 50 states.

 

Given that you and your organization are working to address food insecurity, why put efforts behind legislation that would address poverty rather than just food insecurity itself, providing more food for people or more benefits that provide food? Why work on poverty overall?

 

You know, one of the things that we've learned over the last 35 years of doing this work, and I would say, honestly, it took us too long to learn it, but we've really come to the conclusion that it takes more than food to fight hunger. And so, you know, we all have a reflex when we think about people being hungry, how do we get them food? And we think in terms of emergency food assistance and food banks and soup kitchens and programs like the school meals programs or the SNAP food stamp program, but to really end hunger in a sustainable way, it does take more than food to fight hunger.

 

Families have to have the financial stability. You know, when you think about hunger as a symptom of a set of deeper problems, in some ways it's a problem in and of itself, but in many ways it's a symptom of deeper problems of poverty and inequity, racism. When you think about all the reasons that families are struggling today, you realize that we've got to do more than just provide food. And so the Child Tax Credit is the first and the largest opportunity that's come along, probably in a generation or more, to really give families the unrestricted resources they need. And one of the things that we've learned just from the July tax credit payments, so just as recently as a few months ago, we found out that 47% of the families who received the tax credit used it to buy food for their families. So we know that the impact is direct. Other families, of course, used it for some of the other things I mentioned, educational supplies, healthcare, that type of thing. But food is going to be one of the biggest allocations that the child tax credit receives.

 

That makes perfect sense. You mentioned just how many families could be affected by this. Families now living in poverty who would have some benefit from this program. And you've also talked about the issue of how the child tax credit could be important in building equity. Could you speak to that?

 

As you know, disproportionate numbers of black and Hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander, indigenous children, experience hunger and the Child Tax Credit has a direct impact. It also has a disproportionate impact, in a positive way, on them. So it would cut poverty by 52% for black children, by 45% for Hispanic children, by 62% for indigenous children. There are of course, a lot of white families, the majority of families who received the Child Tax Credit are likely to be white and many will receive it automatically if they've been filing taxes. But again, often the families that need it the most are going to be the hardest to reach. So we think it'll have a powerful impact in establishing some equity in a sustainable basis, particularly for black and brown kids.

 

So you mentioned that many families will receive the Child Tax Credit automatically, but there will be several million families who qualify for the tax credit, but may not be signed up. What can they do?

 

There's a new portal that's been created. It's in English and Spanish. As I mentioned, it's been created by a terrific nonprofit called Code For America. And if you go to http://www.getctc.org or we have a direct portal, http://nokidhungry.org/getctc. CTC  stands for Child Tax Credit. You immediately get to a portal where you could follow the information and get a check sent to you or deposited. So it's really going to take a massive effort to make this happen.

 

The current law has this Child Tax Credit in place until the end of this year, until December of 2021. Congress is now debating whether to extend it or to make it permanent. I think most practically, politically, it's probably not going to be made permanent as much as we'd like to see that. It'll probably get extended for three to five years. And it will take that amount of time to make sure that all the families that need it become aware of it and get the assistance they need. So we've got to have a long-term view of this, but you know, you and I are having this conversation in mid-September, and there was a headline today in The New York Times. Just to give you a sense of how important something like this can be, front page of The New York Times and many other papers was that as a result of the assistance programs of the last nine months, including the stimulus payments and so forth, 8.5 million Americans were lifted out of poverty. And that's just remarkable. The poverty rate went from 11.8% to 9.1%. The lowest it's been since they've been measuring poverty in this country. So it's just a great proof point that these programs work. That the social safety net, when it's resourced, when it's applied the way it's supposed to be and maintained the way it's supposed to be, the social safety net really has the intended impact. It lifts people out of poverty and that's good for the economy and it's good for all of us.

 

Thank goodness the program is working like it is and thank goodness people are paying attention. And the article you mentioned is one way to make that more visible. So let's follow up on this last issue you raised, that this is put in place temporarily, and it's only in effect through December. Obviously, it would be great if this were to continue, what do you think needs to happen to make sure that it continues? And what sort of political actions might take place or data could be collected or other things that could be influential in seeing that this continues?

 

I think the most important thing is going to be for Congress to hear from Americans, that they want this Child Tax Credit to continue. That they're seeing the impact of it in their own families, in their own communities that they want to live in a country that lifts kids out of poverty. We tend not to be as good at that as other industrialized nations. And, you know, Congress of course, is so evenly divided right now. The Senate completely evenly divided. The House, I think speaker Pelosi, can only afford to lose three democratic votes to get this passed. So this is one of those cases where literally every voice counts and letting your member of Congress know that this Child Tax Credit is going to be important in your community is absolutely vital. You know, when people hear about tax credits, sometimes your eyes kind of glaze over. People don't really know a lot about the tax system or necessarily want to be involved with the Internal Revenue Service, with the IRS, and I get that. But this is one of the big positives to come out of it. And if it does become extended, I think it puts it on a path to permanence and imagine being the first generation of Americans to live in a country where we don't have child poverty at record levels. That would be just an incredible legacy for our entire generation.

 

Bio

 

Billy Shore is the founder and executive chair of Share Our Strength, the parent organization for the No Kid Hungry campaign. Since founding Share Our Strength in 1984 with his sister Debbie, Billy has led the organization in raising more than $700 million to fight hunger and poverty and has won the support of national leaders in business, government, health, and education, sports and entertainment. Billy is also the chair of Community Wealth Partners, Share Our Strength's for-profit consulting firm which provides strategic consulting to help leaders and communities solve social problems. Before founding Share Our Strength, Billy served on the senatorial and presidential campaign staffs for former U.S. Senator Gary Hart and as chief of staff to former U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey. In 2014, congressional leaders appointed him to the National Commission on Hunger, tasked with finding innovative ways to end hunger in America. He is the author of four books focused on social change, including "Revolution of the Heart" (Riverhead Press, 1995), "The Cathedral Within" (Random House, 1999), "The Light of Conscience" (Random House, 2004) and most recently, "The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men" (Public Affairs, 2010). He also hosts Add Passion and Stir, a weekly podcast that brings together high-profile chefs and change-makers to talk about the central role food plays in social justice.

 

Think for a moment about how much influence the food and agriculture industries have over food policy. Too much influence, too little influence, maybe? People look at this in very different ways. One thoughtful voice in this discussion is today's guest, Gary Sacks, a person who has written extensively on corporate influence on food policy. He has considered corporate control of the food system, running the gamut from global brand consolidation to lobbying and direct involvement in policymaking to actual litigation against country governments, seeking to curb corporate influence. He asks a very key question, is it pastime to question the outsize role of food corporations in our lives?

 

Dr. Gary Sacks is associate professor at the Global Obesity Center at Deakin University in Australia. His research focuses on policies for improving population diets and preventing obesity and he has coauthored international food policy reports, such as the Lancet Commission on Obesity and several reports for the world health organization on obesity prevention.

 

Interview Summary

 

Let's start with this question then: what are some of the ways that food companies do influence public health policy in their favor?

 

We can group those into five strategies. So, the first one is company lobbying of politicians. That's when they meet directly with politicians or they get involved directly in the policy process, like being on government committees that develop policy. The second one is what we call coalition building. That's when companies fund charities, build relationships with professional associations and that's about winning public support and building relationships that makes it hard for governments to regulate. The third category is their influence on research. They might fund research particular topics and they might host scientific conferences and fun prizes and fellowships in the research area. A fourth strategy we've seen is legal strategies. That's when companies might litigate against governments or have influence over trade agreements, which sets the regulatory framework for how markets operate. And the final way is what we call framing the debate. That's through the way industry talks about things in the media and through their communications. It changes the focus to things that favor the industry. They might shift the blame away from their products and promote individual responsibility for health. So, that's how we've grouped the categories and the ways that food industry influence policy.

 

So interesting to hear you lay this out and it's an issue near and dear to my heart and I'm thinking back to a paper that I wrote with a colleague, Ken Warner, an economist at the University of Michigan in 2009, comparing the behavior of the food companies with the tobacco companies. And it was just as said, if you look at the tobacco industry playbook and then put next to it, a list of the strategies of food companies used back in 2009, it was check, check, check, everything was quite similar. It's interesting to hear an update on that issue. And what appears to have occurred in those years is that some of the same strategies are still being used, but there are even newer ones and that the companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated at doing these things. So, I guess the big question is, what impact do these strategies have and do they actually work?

 

Well, they do work. Globally, there's really a lack of action to address unhealthy diets. And yes, there are some success stories, some countries have taken some good actions. But on the whole, across the globe, there's not enough happening to address the nutrition issues we face and it's industry's preferred solutions that have the run. Industry likes self-regulation of things like marketing to kids and product reformulation and they prefer the predominant focus to be on education. So, trying to educate people into what's healthy. But the public health evidence shows that those strategies alone aren't enough. We need much stronger government action. And unfortunately, that's severely lacking.

 

That is very consistent with the way I've seen things too because there are case after case of industry fighting off, needed government actions, stalling thing, planting doubt with respect to the science and taking all these actions that you mentioned that really are having a big impact. And it's not surprising, government generally doesn't invest money in an unwise way. And they're spending, as you said, billions of dollars doing this kind of thing and obviously it's having an impact and I'm glad that you could point out how. So, what can be done about this?

 

There are a range of strategies that governments and researchers and health organizations can use to limit the influence of industry. A clear one is to limit industry involvement in policy making. And so, when governments are developing policy, they need to keep industry off the table. While there could be a role to consult with industry about how to implement a policy, they need to get out the policy table, leave that to the public health experts and the policymakers. A second way is much clearer disclosure of lobbying activities and things like political donations. Ideally, with some limits on corporate political donations. Some countries have actually really good disclosure laws, but many countries lobbying is not transparent at all. The third way would be independent funding of research, so that researchers don't need to take money from food industries and universities and research institutions to have better conflict of interest policies. And that's just some of the ways, but really, the conflict of interest needs to be front and center of both policymakers, researchers and even media organizations.

 

Thanks, those are really innovative ideas. And let me talk about one of them in just a little bit more detail. You mentioned that the food industry shouldn't be at the table when these policy decisions are being made. Now, I know the food industry says, well, wait, we're that stakeholder here. And you'd like to have stakeholder involvement when you're making decisions. And also, we happen to know a lot about issues, but they also very often will claim that disclosure is the solution here. As long as we're transparent about who's on these committees and who might have industry ties and things like that, we're okay. Do you think that disclosure is anywhere near a meaningful solution?

 

No, I don't. I think disclosure is a start, but actual management of conflict of interest and the risks associated with that needs much more than disclosure. So, as I said, if there's a policy getting developed that is really about regulating harmful products, it's a clear conflict of interest to have the makers of those products at the table. And so, stronger steps need to be taken to manage those risks.

 

That makes sense. So let's talk about the food industry itself. And I know you've thought about the market power that a surprisingly small number of multinational companies can have. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

 

The factor that enables companies to have an influence is that they have a huge amount of power. Globally, it's just a handful of multinational food companies that have enormous market power. And that's grown over the last 30 years through things like mergers and acquisitions and marketing and whole range of strategies companies use to ensure they have this tremendous market power. And so, really, if we're thinking about limiting corporate influence, we need ways to reduce the power of these corporations. We may need to consider stronger policies around merger control and trading practices that enable these companies to have the sort of power that means they have influence.

 

It's interesting to hear that so many companies have become so much bigger over the years and you're right, that those concentrate power in a small number of hands. So, I know you've also thought about the role that investors play in this picture.

 

Yeah, we've seen recently that large institutional investors, so your big hedge funds and big asset managers, are starting to play an increasing role in shaping corporate behavior. We've seen examples where these large investors push the companies that they invest in to adopt more responsible practices. And so again, I think if you're looking at leavers for change, if more of these investors push companies to adopt globally recommended public health measures and I guess, refrain from lobbying against them in the first instance that could be an important lever for change.

 

That's a good way to draw this to a close because you're ending on an optimistic note that if the industries aren't showing much willingness to do this kind of thing on their own and it looks like, in fact, they're doing the opposite, investors can have an important role in industry behavior. And it looks like there are more signs of that happening.

 

We are seeing investors focus on things like the sustainable development goals and really taking a long-term view to what kind of behavior we want companies to have. And I think if those investors take up the challenge of trying to address nutrition issues and engage with companies to push them to take recommended global actions, then we may see some improvements.

 

Bio

 

Gary Sacks is an Associate Professor based at the Global Obesity Centre at Deakin University, Australia. Gary's research focuses on policies for improving population diets and preventing obesity. Gary has co-authored several international reports on food policy, including the Lancet Commission on Obesity and several reports for the World Health Organization on obesity prevention. Gary co-founded INFORMAS (International Network for Food and Obesity / non-communicable diseases Research, Monitoring and Action Support) – a global network for monitoring and benchmarking food environments. Gary leads the component of INFORMAS dedicated to monitoring the actions of food companies in relation to obesity prevention and population nutrition. Gary led the first-ever studies to benchmark progress on obesity prevention by Australian governments and food companies.

 

A paper published recently by the journal Obesity Reviews brings attention to the role of EDCs - endocrine disrupting chemicals - in weight gain, and in the very high rates of obesity around the world. The results of this review are enlightening and alarming, I must say, even to the two of us who wrote the paper. Our guest today is the lead author of the paper, Dr. Timothy Lobstein. Tim recently retired as director of policy at the World Obesity Federation in London, UK, and is currently visiting professor at Sydney University in Australia. He is an advocate scholar and policy expert, and one of the world's most effective and impactful voices in addressing obesity. He has several decades experience on obesity efforts around the world, working with groups, such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Agency UNICEF. And in 2020, he was the inaugural winner of the Philip James award.

Interview Summary

So let's dive into the details of the paper because it produced some pretty remarkable things. So first tell us if you would, what are endocrine disrupting chemicals?

These are chemicals in the environment that affects our hormones and they can mimic our hormones and they can block our hormones and they can alter their function. So as you know, hormones are finely tuned balance of chemicals that regulate reproduction and cell development and appetite, and many other functions, and they make up, what's called the endocrine system and that controls how we grow and our moods and our health. Now in the last few decades, we've become aware that there are chemicals we absorb from the environment that can disrupt the normal function of our endocrine system, hence the name endocrine disrupts.

So how present are these in our lives and what are some of the key sources of exposure?

Well, the more we look, the more we find them. The last few years have shown a wide array of chemicals that can have disrupting effects, especially the manmade chemicals that are used in modern life, including for example, plasticizers that are used in the production of plastics to keep plastic from hardening and becoming brittle. So in the food industry that would include plastic bottles and film wrap, and also the inside lining of canned food, for example, where these plasticizers are used, but it's not just the food supply. There's similar chemicals are used in cosmetics and sunscreen and in household furnishings and automobile tires. So these chemicals have become increasingly present in the air and on our skin and in our food and water supplies and concern over these chemicals has led some countries to ban their use in baby bottles and baby teats. But even there, there are worries that the replacement chemicals are also a source of endocrine disruption.

It seems like from the things you've described - plastic wrapping for food and plastic bottles - that they're all over the place. So can you give us some context for biological evidence that this exposure is actually getting internalized and that people have these things in their bodies?

 

There is because we have a variety of ways of approaching this. We can look at how they affect animals, and then we can look at human surveys and test for blood content and urine content to see how these chemicals are getting into humans. And the surveys, particularly in Europe and North America are showing widespread consumption of these chemicals. Inadvertent consumption, as I say, through air, through skin, through water and food. So yes, they are widely prevalent in the human population now.

People wouldn't intuitively think that such chemicals might be related to risk of obesity, because your mind automatically goes to calorie overload in the population and too little physical activity. So as interest in the EDCs related to obesity, new and what got you thinking about writing this page?

We have seen studies 20, 30 years ago, showing that there are concerns around these chemicals causing problems for reproduction and also triggering cancer growth because they trigger cell growth, but their effects on appetite and on the formation of fatty cells suggest that there are links to weight gain. And there's now increasing evidence that populations with high levels of these chemicals in their blood have a higher prevalence of overweight and obesity. So these are not just animal laboratory studies. These are now being shown in surveys of human populations, as I say, in Europe and North America. So we are definitely concerned that there is a, a trigger here that may be happening in humans.

So I knew that there had been papers here and there showing up in the literature, suggesting that such a relationship might occur. But when you stepped in and wrote this paper recently, you felt that I know, and as we wrote this paper together, there was sufficient evidence now to really say that there might be a pretty strong link. Would you say that's true?

Yes, I would say that the bottom line is that the endocrine disrupting chemicals in our environment are a potentially important cause of weight gain. I mean, the science, as you say, has developed very rapidly, mostly in the last 10 or 15 years, but there are now approaching a thousand odd scientific papers on the issue. And in our paper, we looked at 60 old systematic reviews and meta-analysis of the science and virtually every one of these reviews agreed that there was a potential problem here.

So let's put this in the context then how strong is the relationship between exposure to EDCs and risk for obesity compared to other known risks factors?

Yes, that was one of the questions we wanted to answer. I don't know if we've fully explored it yet. And I think there's plenty of scope to have more work done on this, but we did want to ask what are the potential effects, these chemicals compared to food patterns or the amount of exercise people take, because the usual argument says that to lose weight, you need to eat a healthy diet and exercise more. But when we looked at the potential effect sizes of endocrine disruptors, we found that they were up there with diet and exercise that surveys of the most common endocrine disruptors show that people with high levels in their bodies can have twice or three times the prevalence of obesity compared with people with lower levels. And that sort of effect is at least as serious as drinking two or three sugar sweetened beverages every day, for example, or two or three hours extra sitting, watching TV.

Well, you know, this is big news. So I just wanted to underscore this particular conclusion from the paper that everybody would agree that dietary contributors and lack of physical activity are our major drivers of obesity. And then here you come saying that it looks like this is on a par with them. So this is really very important news in both understanding rates of obesity and also understanding what might be done about it. Has anybody ever looked at historical trends about rates of obesity and exposure to EDCs in the population?

I don't believe they have. I mean, our evidence about EDC is linked to obesity. As I say is only in the last 10 or 15 years, the rates of increase in plastic productions, which might be probably the major cause of EDCs in our diets. At least if not in the atmosphere have only really escalated in the last 30 or 40 years. And it's quite hard, I think to control if you like the rate of increase for one against the other and ask, you know, is that the cause or are other factors that cause it it's a difficult epidemiological question. And what we cannot do of course are experiments that deliberately increased consumption of an EDC and then ask how much a person gaining weight, because that would be unethical. So we have to rely on these sort of external surveys. And if you can't tell cause and effect from a survey, you can show the trends are in parallel. It's hard to show cause and effect. So I think we need to do a little bit more work on this to see if we can tease out the various issues. I say that because exercise trends have not really changed very much in the last 30 years and even food consumption that calorie levels are not that much different over the last 30 or 40 years, particularly in Europe or in North America, it's been fairly flat, but obesity levels, particularly in children have been increasing. And at the same time, the levels of endocrine disruption in the environment have been increasing. So I think there's a serious question doesn't need to be answered.

So Tim, you mentioned children and one would imagine they're a special concern given the development that's occurring, is anybody looked at EDCs and children?

Oh yes. Well they haven't in a population survey sense and there's a good paper that was done looking at body weight and EDC in urine of children and showing that the quarter of the children with the lowest levels of EDC in the urine were at half the prevalence of obesity compared to the three quarters of children that had high levels of UVC is in their system. So there's a clear relationship epidemiologically in the survey material, but cause, and effect is still another question.

The numbers that you just pointed out given the cause and effect caution there show not only the relationship, but potential powerful nature of that's coming through time and time again in these studies that you're discussing. So let me ask about one particular part of the diet sugary beverages. And so there are some fascinating issues in this context. Can you explain?

Well, yes, they've been surveys of people's consumption of beverages associated with weight status showing of course, as usual that sugary beverages are associated with higher body weight in a sort of cause and effect where you would expect, but there's also evidence that diet beverages with no sugar are also linked to a higher body weight. So that's a bit of a puzzle because you could argue that it's because some people who are already living with a high body weight or perhaps cutting back on their sugary beverages and consuming more diets. So that would sort of skew the pattern a bit, but it could equally be argued that both bottles and cans rather than the sugar is what's causing the problem that the endocrine disrupting plasticizing chemicals that line the inside of soda cans and that are used in making the bottles that you serve up sugary beverages and diet beverages in, that they are the cause but we don't know what the answer is here. It's a, it's a speculation here, but we do know that there's evidence that people who have more processed foods in their diet are more likely to have a higher level of endocrine disrupting chemicals circulating in their body.

I found this to be a particularly interesting part of working with you on this paper, that if you think about doses of things that are contributing to obesity, somebody who's drinking sugary beverages are basically getting doses of calories from the sugar. And then of course getting a dose of the endocrine disrupting chemicals. And so you'd expect especially high rates of obesity, which is exactly what the literature shows, but this finding about diet beverages is fascinating. And so you'd expect people to have higher rates of obesity who are drinking diet beverages. And you mentioned the difficulty of understanding that relationship. But given that they're getting a dose of the endocrine disrupting chemicals, that this could help explain that relationship. And I don't think the field has thought about this very much. Would you agree with that?

I would. And I don't think people realize that endocrine disrupting chemicals have at least three ways in which they're contributing to weight gain, they can stimulate appetite. So even if you're trying to lose weight, you may feel hungry because of the EDCs that you're still consuming or that you have already circulating, but they also contribute to storing more fat in fat containing cells in your body. And they contribute to creating new fat containing cells. So they act quite powerfully and there are several different chemicals that are at work here. So it's a complex system, but it's a pretty convincing one to me.

So I'd like to ask you in a moment about the policy implications of this, but before I do that, do you see evidence that the major experts around the world and the organizations that deal with obesity, like the world health organization or the obesity society and America or the world obesity Federation that you've been so involved with for so many years, is there a lot of people paying attention to this and starting to think about this as a potential major driver will be sitting in something that needs more policy attention?

I think there were a little chinks of light occurring here and there, but on the whole, no, there are some policy papers that talk about potential environmental causes of obesity might include toxins, but they don't talk about the strategies that are needed to deal with it. So you have to go elsewhere to look for policy proposals. And that's usually in a sort of reproductive system or cancer determining systems where EDCs are now more completely recognized as being a problem in the obesity policy area. It's still really new. And I think that's where I'm hoping that our people will have a bit of an impact because it did look at 50 of the sort of leading governmental and inter-governmental policy statements on obesity strategists and only four or five of them, actually even referenced possible chemical influences. And none of them really had a strategy for dealing with them.

You know what this reminds me of, and this may not seem like a reasonable parallel to you, but I'm thinking back on the early days of interest in food and addiction, and now there is a robust literature on this and people, in the food and nutrition and obesity fields are thinking about it much more than they did before. But in those early days, it wasn't the BCT or nutrition field that started an interest in this. It was the addiction field. And then finally the nutrition related field started to catch up. I wonder if that might be true here to some extent that it may not be the obesity field that drives this interest, but it could be the people who were working on the EDCs and environment or health or things like that outside of our field who really do the majority of the work and ended up pushing us forward. And then finally our field might catch up. What do you think?

Well, I agree with you and of course you and I likely to be cited as the pioneer, as I hope, and I'm trying to bridge these gaps, but it also speaks about if you like the sort of wider interconnectivity of different aspects of commercial and policy issues that affect health and how they interact with each other. So I'm fascinated by the way, in which, for example, policies and strategies to try and deal with global warming or to deal with environmental pollution will also have an impact on human health and even on obesity prevalence. So I think all these things do interconnect, but it's a matter of drawing those connections and trying to get them included in policy decisions, which I think we need to talk about.

You and I go back many, many years and have been the countless meetings together, have written things together and have done a lot of thinking together about the field. And it's been a real honor for me to be involved in this and in this particular project, but also things we've done in the past, but this strikes me as something of particular importance and something where I really believe you've done a major job of helping move the field forward. So let's hope people pay attention like they should. So let's get to the policy things now. So what do you think are some of the main policy implicate?

I'm going to raise two particular points. I think first, when you ask people to lose weight by dieting and exercising, what are you doing? Because if it's not actually dietary intake or even exercise, that's causing their weight gain, then they're going to fail. It would be a useless thing to ask them. So if people are still being exposed to endocrine, it's going to make them hungry, and there's going to add to their stored fatty cells. So blaming people for their weight gain or failure to lose weight when it's actually being caused by invisible chemicals in the environment or in food wraps in packages or furnishings or roadside air pollutants. I mean, you can't avoid these chemicals. So it is not your fault. If you gain weight or find it hard to lose weight. And I think that is a hugely important step forward in this whole issue about stigma and obesity, weight bias and so on. And the blame game that's played by politicians. So that's the first policy point that I want to bring out from here that it's not the individual's fault. Particularly if endocrine disrupting chemicals are contributing to their weight gain. Secondly, the policymakers who designed government interventions to improve population health, they need to look at these manmade chemicals. If you think about it, it's a government regulation to take the lead out of automobile fuel or the asbestos out of houses when it was showing how poisonous these chemicals are. So I think now we've got to get governments to act and act fast to reverse the flood of these endocrine disruptors. That means tackling the commercial interests that use these chemicals so that they change their products. Now I know that getting commercial producers of harmful chemicals to change their practices is a huge political issue. And I guess you might want to discuss what has to be done in another of these excellent podcasts.

So Tim, might there also be some interesting advocacy coalitions to be built in this field with the people who are working on the environmental part of this and the health part of it, coming together with the people that are working on the diet, nutrition and obesity part of it.

Oh, definitely. In fact, it spreads even wider. I think that the coalitions that need to be built have to tackle this issue in at least three dimensions, because firstly you have to weaken commercial influence on government strategies and government thinking. And that means weakening their lobbying, weakening their political donations. So we need to join with others who are trying to expose and reduce the lobbying that gets done by industry. But you also need to strengthen popular demand, getting the media and popular messaging on side, you need to make politicians feel the heat, making it easier for them to intervene and to regulate against commercial interests. And you need to show that failure to act costs more than acting now. Now we know this is the case with global warming and with environmental pollution, not doing anything is not an option. So I think there are plenty of parallels and links between these issues.

There might be some interesting litigation opportunities here too, because you can imagine the people who are working on the environmental parts of this are thinking about the damage to the environment and the need to recover those damages from the companies that are creating the problems. But they're probably not thinking about obesity as one of the potential outcomes of this, which of course carries enormous cost to society. So that might be part of an interesting picture going forward to at least in some countries.

I see another paper coming on, Kelly.

Bio:

Dr. Timothy Lobstein retired as Director of Policy at the World Obesity Federation in London, UK, and is currently visiting professor at Sydney University in Australia. He is an advocate, scholar, and policy expert and has, in my opinion, one of the world's most effective and impactful voices in addressing obesity. He has world on obesity efforts around the world, and with groups such as the World Health Organization, and was the inaugural winner of the Philip James Award.