I spoke on a panel last week in support of New York State bills sponsored by my local Greenich Village Senator, Brian Kavanagh, and assemblymember Dr. Anna Kelles, who represents the district that includes Ithaca, where I live part time.

Their bill is S.1239/A.1556, The Food Safety and Chemical Disclosure Act.  This act,

• Bans red dye #3, potassium bromate, and propylparaben from foods sold in New York State.
• Removes petroleum-based dyes from all schools in the state that have been banned in New York City (red 3 and 40, blue 1 and 2, green 3, and yellow 5 and 6).
• Closes the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) loophole, which allows food companies to decide for themselves whether the additives they are using are safe.
• Requires food companies to report all ingredients in their products and demonstrate their safety.

You probably have the same reaction I did: aren’t food companies and the FDA already doing this?

No, they are not.

If you live anywhere in New York State and want to support the bill, call or send a note to your state representatives saying so.  They are easy to find and contact.

• Find my New York State Senator
• Search for my New York State Assembly Member

If enough states do this, the federal government will have to follow.  And this bill fits with Robert Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.  Let’s give it some bipartisan support.

Breaking news: West Virginia is the first state to ban food dyes.

This is a deep personal as well as professional loss.  Here’s the obituary from the New York Times. which quotes me.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow “was enormously ahead of her time,” adding, “Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I’d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. “What she caught on to was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.”

I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was first teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.

Soon after, her publisher sent me the manuscript of what became The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, asking whether he should take it.  My reader’s report praised it to the skies, but I worried that it was so critical of mainstream nutrition that students would find it nihilistic.  She added a brilliant and utterly inspiring conclusion.

I am not alone in being inspired by her work.  I have followed it with great admiration.

Ahead of her time?  Absolutely.

You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices?  Try Joan’s Who Pays the Piper from 1980.

You think food systems should be sustainable?  See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.

Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit.

I learned so much from her about how to think about food issues.

I am beyond sad at her loss.

If you want a better idea of her contribution, take a look at Brian Halweil’s 2010 profile of Joan for Edible Manhattan (I’m quoted).

Pam Koch at Columbia invites people to share memories, photos, or comments on what Joan meant to you at this link.

*For some reason, my original post did not get sent out so I am trying again

This is a deep personal as well as professional loss.  Here’s the obituary from the New York Times. which quotes me.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow “was enormously ahead of her time,” adding, “Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I’d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. “What she caught on to was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.”

I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was first teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.

Soon after, her publisher sent me the manuscript of what became The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, asking whether he should take it.  My reader’s report praised it to the skies, but I worried that it was so critical of mainstream nutrition that students would find it nihilistic.  She added a brilliant and utterly inspiring conclusion.

I am not alone in being inspired by her work.  I have followed it with great admiration.

Ahead of her time?  Absolutely.

You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices?  Try Joan’s Who Pays the Piper from 1980.

You think food systems should be sustainable?  See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.

Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit.

I learned so much from her about how to think about food issues.

I am beyond sad at her loss.

If you want a better idea of her contribution, take a look at Brian Halweil’s 2010 profile of Joan for Edible Manhattan (I’m quoted).

Pam Koch at Columbia invites people to share memories, photos, or comments on what Joan meant to you at this link.

[*For some reason, this did not get sent out this morning so I am reposting it.]

This is a deep personal as well as professional loss.  Here’s the obituary from the New York Times. which quotes me.

Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate, said that Ms. Gussow “was enormously ahead of her time,” adding, “Every time I thought I was on to something and breaking new ground and seeing something no one had seen before, I’d find out that Joan had written about it 10 years earlier.”

“She was a food systems thinker before anyone knew what a food system was,” Ms. Nestle said, referring to the process of producing and consuming food, including the economic, environmental and health effects. “What she caught on to was that you couldn’t understand why people eat the way they do and why nutrition works the way it does unless you understand how agriculture production works. She was a profound thinker.”

I first met Joan in the late 1970s when I heard her give a talk in the Bay Area when I was first teaching at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  I had never heard anyone talk about the need to link agricultural production to nutrition and health—food systems, we now call that—and it felt revelatory.

Soon after, her publisher sent me the manuscript of what became The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology, asking whether he should take it.  My reader’s report praised it to the skies, but I worried that it was so critical of mainstream nutrition that students would find it nihilistic.  She added a brilliant and utterly inspiring conclusion.

I am not alone in being inspired by her work.  I have followed it with great admiration.

Ahead of her time?  Absolutely.

You have discovered that the food industry influences food choices?  Try Joan’s Who Pays the Piper from 1980.

You think food systems should be sustainable?  See Joan’s “Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability,” written with Kate Clancy in 1986.

Her students at Columbia were so lucky to be in her orbit.

I learned so much from her about how to think about food issues.

I am beyond sad at her loss.

If you want a better idea of her contribution, take a look at Brian Halweil’s 2010 profile of Joan for Edible Manhattan (I’m quoted).

Pam Koch at Columbia invites people to share memories, photos, or comments on what Joan meant to you at this link.

Michael T Compton, MD, MPH.  Veggie Smarts: A Doctor and Farmer Grows and Savors Eight Families of Vegetables.  Regalo Press, 2025.  

This one was sent to me for a blurb.  Here’s what I said:

This endearingly quirky book describes Compton’s love affair with eight families of vegetables for their growing habits, diversity, nutritional value, flavor, texture, and deliciousness, and he offers science, experience, charm, and recipes to prove it.  His dietary advice?  Eat your veggies!

And here are a couple of excerpts, this one about his thwarted love affair with cabbage.

I figured that we could somehow eat 20 heads of cabbage between the weekends in the Hudson Valley and the work weeks in the city.  They grew beautifully….Then it happened.  It was Friday evening, we had just arrived home from the city, and before even going into the house I was off to the two gardens…They were gone.  All 20 of them, gone.  Just 20 solitary cabbage stems standing, all heads and all leaves gone.  I knew it was a groundhog, and I immediately felt tears welling up in my eyes…Building the groundhog fence took me 20 hours one weekend, as I was determined to outsmart these New York woodchucks by burying wire at least eight inches underground around the entire garden.  They never tasted my cabbage again.

And this about his spinach failure.

This is hard for me to admit publicly, but I’ve never been able to grow spinach.  I’ve tried year after year and it never works.  It’s an embarrassment.  My two green thumbs work for everything else but the spinach is always a flop….I think my failure is driven by: one, my little, diverse farm grows about 90 cultivars across the 60 or so vegetables…two, each cultivar requires its own ongoing attention; three, spinach evidently requires a little more attention than average; and four, I have only been giving it average attention  This is despite the fact that spinach is one of the several vegetables that I’m addicted to…My condition even meets some of the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for addiction, except that it doesn’t impair my life.  Cravings.  Finding that once I start using (eating) it, I end up using (eating) more of it than I had intended to.  Having a strong desire or urge to use (eat) it (even when out of season).  And having withdrawals (necessitating highly disguished grocery store visits) when it is available neither on my farm (always) nor at the farmers markets (in the heat of summer).

The publisher says:

A nerdy farmer—and doctor with expertise in nutrition—explains how the vast majority of our vegetables come from just eight families of plants, which can guide how we eat them (“eight on my plate”), while recounting his journey of trading in city life to build a thriving organic vegetable farm.

The eight veggie families:  Brassicas, Alliums, Legumes, Chenopods, Aster Greens, Umbellifers, Cucurbits, Nightshades (hint: look at the pictures on the cover).

He says: eat some of each of them every day.

He’s a doctor who also runs a farm.

Quirky indeed, but fun and full of interesting facts about these families.

The Super Bowl may be about football but it is also very much about food, as this image shows.

And here are a few items about all that food:

• Super Bowl snacking: Facts, figures and fan favourites:  The Super Bowl isn’t just about touchdowns and halftime shows; it’s also one of the biggest food consumption events of the year. What are the latest trends, spending habits, and favourite snacks that define this massive snacking event?… Read more
• Moneytalks: All the $$$$ generated by Super Bowl 2024:  With a record-breaking 123.7 million tuning in to watch Kansas City Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers on Super Bowl Sunday, consumer spend was estimated to increase by nearly a billion dollars over last year.
• Super Bowl snack wars: Are brands paying too much for the hype:  Every year, snack brands wage an all-out marketing blitz to capture their share of Game Day indulgence. With sky-high ad prices and fierce competition, companies are betting big that their chips, dips, and baked goods will be the real MVPs (most valuable players) of the night… Read more 

Bill Marler forwarded his post about how some pet cats got bird flu from drinking raw milk or eating raw pet food.

He learned about this from a Los Angeles County Animal Health Alert: H5 bird flu confirmed in four domestic cats that consumed recalled raw milk, and in one cat that consumed commercially produced raw pet food.

The Guardian explains how transmission works.

Pet Food Industry writes, Raw pet food linked to H5N1 infection, cat euthanizations: Officials found the cats all consumed the same brand of raw pet food before becoming ill.  Read more

Mother Jones asks: A Raw Milk Magnate Has Spent Years Fighting Public Health Agencies. Will RFK Jr. Take His Side?  (The article is about Mark McAfee, founder and CEO of Raw Farm, which sells the raw milk allegedly implicated in the death of cats.

Marler lists lawsuits over previous outbreaks—among humans—attributed to tRaw Farm milk.

Marler published a Parents’ guide to the safe use of raw milk.  His conclusion:

There is a movement in the U.S. to consume organic, locally grown, unprocessed, more nutrient-dense foods.

Some believe raw milk is more nutritious and provides the body “good bacteria.”

There are many other foods that contain “good bacteria” and are less risky than raw milk. Many stores carry pasteurized yogurt and kefir with probiotics that are very safe to feed children.

There are also high quality nutritional supplements that can be used to add probiotic bacteria into one’s diet.

For more information visit www.realrawmilkfacts.com.

Other resources

Phyllis Entis (aka FoodBugLady), who writes a newsletter about food safety, efoodalert.com, discusses bird flu in cats and includes a useful handout from the Washington State Department of Agriculture on the topic.

I was intrigued by this item from WattPoultry: Blame for high US egg prices is now a political pinataThe lack of understanding of basic economics is frustrating, but the misguided blame game over the cause of high egg prices presents an opportunity for change.  Read more

Everyone in the poultry industry knows that HPAI [Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza] caused laying hen losses and reduced the supply of eggs, and this is why retail egg prices, which have always been demand inelastic, have reached historic highs…The political “crisis” over egg prices can be used to open eyes and ears to new ideas on how best to deal with HPAI. We are over three years into the current outbreaks and the situation is arguably worse than it has ever been with the virus found in nearly 1,000 dairy herds, dozens of species of wild mammals and, of course, in all sorts of waterfowl and other wild bird species.

The article suggests the urgent need for more funding for:

• Research
• Vaccines
• Testing

These seem like minimal asks.  We need them all.

Here’s what the USDA is doing:  USDA invests up to $1 billion to combat avian flu and reduce egg prices.