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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.

A dietitian member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, who wishes to remain anonymous, emailed me about PepsiCo’s guide to research interpretation.

PepsiCo sent dietitians this webinar and handout for communicating nutrition science and evaluating studies. I took a look at the handout, which gives a “high quality research” distinction to any studies in which authors have clearly disclosed conflict of interest. So … As long as it’s disclosed, it can be high quality research?  Ok.

The handout: How to Communicate Nutrition Science Effectively.

As a credentialed healthcare professional, you have the power to inspire trust and deepen the general public’s understanding of nutrition through credible scientific communication. Let this guide help you to better understand scientific publications and to improve your effectiveness as a nutrition communicator.

Here’s what got the attention of my reader:

According to PepsiCo, high-quality science requires publication in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal, results based on the totality of evidence, conflicts of interest disclosed, and ethical questions, societal implications, limitations discussed.

This is good advice.

But as noted by my reader, disclosure of conflicts of interest should not be sufficient to determine research quality.

Disclosure is essential, but not enough to resolve the problems of conflict of interest.

As I endlessly repeat in these Monday posts, the recipients of industry funding rarely recognize the risk of undue influence; they did not intend to be influenced, and they believe themselves to be immune from the influence—despite the fact that tons of research shows otherwise.

Food companies fund research for reasons that have everything to do with marketing and little to do with science.  They do not fund research if they think it might show harm from their products.

Yes, this is a complicated issue.  But consider the benefit to PepsiCo from engaging dietitians in this endeavor.

FeedSpot, a group with which I am unfamiliar, has just named FoodPolitics.com as one of the top 60 blogs and websites in food science.  I am honored to be named as #7, and especially because I am in very good company.

I’m thrilled to announce:

COVER REVEAL 🌟🍲 WHAT TO EAT NOW is a thoroughly revised classic, a field guide to food shopping in America, and a treatise on how to eat well and deliciously. Marion Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and a founding figure in American food studies, takes us through the American supermarket in an aisle-by-aisle guide. Above all else, WHAT TO EAT NOW is a defense of real food and of the value of eating deliciously, mindfully, and responsibly. Jacket design Charlotte Grimm, photography Gregory Reid.  In bookstores November 11.  Available for preorder here.

At a glance across the country: Meatpacking plants closed at an unprecedented rate this year, accelerated by a number of factors such as rising livestock costs, workforce shortages, food safety violations and foodborne illnesses, and ongoing industry consolidation.

Here are some examples: of these and others:

• Tyson closes 3 meat plants, lays off 1K workers The food giant plans to shutter its 328,000-square-foot facility in Emporia, Kansas, as well as two cheesesteak factories in Philadelphia.
• Cargill cuts 5% of global workforce after profits decline The move, which will affect approximately 8,000 jobs, comes as the world’s largest private company plans to streamline operations in the face of lower crop prices and challenges in beef.
• Deere lays off more workers at Iowa tractor plant The cuts add to the thousands of jobs eliminated this year as the equipment maker reigns in production to offset a slowdown in demand.
• Butterball to shutter Arkansas turkey plant, lay off 180 workers: The closure adds to a wave of layoffs in the agriculture industry as weaker sales continue to hurt profits across the sector.

The last couple of years have seen lots of these.  It will be interesting to see what happens this year, especially with immigration “reform” looming on the horizon.  Pretty certain: food prices will rise. A lot.