The Leading Voices in Food podcast series features real people, scientists, farmers, policy experts and world leaders all working to improve our food system and food policy. You'll learn about issues across the food system spectrum such as food insecurity, obesity, agriculture, access and equity, food safety, food defense, and food policy. Produced by the Duke World Food Policy Center at wfpc.sanford.duke.edu.
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E286: How 'least cost diet' models fuel food security policy
Season 9 · Episode 286
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 • Duration 33:10
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.
E285: Gut instincts, food, and decision making
Season 9 · Episode 285
Thursday, October 23, 2025 • Duration 19:44
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.
E276: Climate Change - A little less beef is part of the solution
Season 8 · Episode 276
Friday, June 20, 2025 • Duration 23:45
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.
E185: How and why do households waste food?
Season 4 · Episode 185
Monday, November 7, 2022 • Duration 20:24
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.
E186: Deep dive into challenges people face access food pantries
Season 4 · Episode 186
Monday, November 7, 2022 • Duration 10:54
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.
E184: Carolina Farm Stewardship Association - Connecting Farmers and Communities
Season 4 · Episode 184
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 • Duration 12:52
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.
E183: The Origins & Vision of the Black Farmer Fund
Season 4 · Episode 183
Thursday, October 20, 2022 • Duration 18:11
E182: Memoir and Marion Nestle – Slow Cooked
Season 4 · Episode 182
Monday, October 3, 2022 • Duration 29:43
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?
E181: UK Stands Firm in Ruling Against Kellogg's Cereals
Season 4 · Episode 181
Wednesday, September 21, 2022 • Duration 13:18
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.
E180: Chris Carter and The Spirit of Soul Food
Season 4 · Episode 180
Wednesday, September 14, 2022 • Duration 19:05
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
