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Mark Bittman.  Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

This book comes with more than three pages of blurbs, starting with Al Gore and Leah Penniman and ending with José Andrés and Bryant Terry, so many and so glittery that I’m feeling a little left out that I wasn’t asked to do one.

I would have.  It’s a good book.  Bittman read a lot, is generous in citing sources (mine among them), and has done a thorough synthesis of the key events that transformed our food system from one that was healthy and sustainable (if hard on farmers) to today’s unsustainably industrialized system that is mainly set up to feed animals and fuel cars, and to encourage us to consume ultra-processed diets.   We pay the externalized costs of this system in overweight and chronic diseases that increase our vulnerability to COVID-19 and in environmental degradation and climate change.

Here are a few excerpts:

And while Deere & Co. [the tractor company] showed good will toward struggling farmers, its success in financially bonding those farmers virtually ensured that creditors remained profitable in the long run.  It’s also among the chief reasons why industrial agriculture is so difficult to change today.  Today, the company’s margins are almost four times as great from providing credit as they are from sales…Its 2019 profits were eleven billion dollars, a bit more than ten percent of the comb8ined profits of all two million-plus farms in the United States that same year [pp. 107-108]

In fact, the worse you were treated by American policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the worse you were treated in the twentieth.  For example, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards (sic!) Act of 1938 both excluded agricultural and domestic, thanks to influential southern Democrats who refused to protect the Black people working in those sectors.  This meant that the New Deal disproportionately excluded people of color from the most vital government protections….[p. 120].

You will hear, “The food system is broken.”  But the truth is that it works almost perfectly for Big Food.  It also works well enough for about a third of the world’s people, who have the money to demand and have at a moment’s notice virtually any food in the world.  But it doesn’t work well enough to nourish most of humanity, and it doesn’t work well enough to husband our resources so that it can endure,  Indeed the system has created a public health crisis (one whose effects have, in turn, exacerbated the deadly effects of COVID-19), and, perhaps even more crucially, it’s a chief contributor to the foremost threat to our species: the climate crisis.  The way we produce food threatens everyone, even the wealthiest and cleverest [p. 243].

The Republicans have figured out that if they can keep anyone who is against them from voting, they will win elections.  Here’s the latest ploy.

The Georgia House passed a bill last week making it illegal to hand out free pizza to people waiting in line to vote.

The bill says:

No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector, nor shall any person solicit signatures for any petition, nor shall any person, other than election officials discharging their duties, establish or set up any tables or booths on any day in which ballots are being cast.

Georgia has make voting so difficult that people have to wait on lines for hours.  This encouraged formation of Pizza to the Polls, a group that hands out free pizza to people on line.

During the last election, Georgia officials said it was illegal to hand out pizza, but it wasn’t illegal then.

Now it might be.

You don’t understand why food is political?  How’s this for an example.

New York City is taking big steps to improve its food system.   Two reports are worth noting, one from the Mayor’s office and one from the Health Department.

I.  Mayor Bill de Blasio and Kate MacKenzie, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy (MOFP) have released Food Forward NYC: A 10-Year Food Policy Plan.

Here’s how they introduce this impressive report:

Food Forward NYC is the City’s first ever 10-year food policy plan, laying out an comprehensive policy framework to reach a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy food system by 2031.

Food Forward NYC emphasizes the importance of equity and choice – enabling a food system where everyone should be able to access the food they want wherever they may want it. To enable this choice, we need to support both our food workers and our food businesses. To strengthen the sustainability and resiliency of our food system, we need to rethink our food infrastructure and deepen our connections with the region.

Food Forward NYC is organized around five overarching goals:

1. All New Yorkers have multiple ways to access healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food.
2. New York City’s food economy drives economic opportunity and provides good jobs.
3. The supply chains that feed New York City are modern, efficient, and resilient.
4. New York City’s food is produced, distributed, and disposed of sustainably.
5. Support the systems and knowledge to implement the 10-year food policy plan.

The full report is here.  It was prepared in response to Local Law 40 of 2020 and recommendations from the New York City Council’s 2019 report, Growing Food Equity in New York City.  

New York City is a complicated place and it’s wonderful to have all this information put together in such a coherent way.  Let’s hope everyone gets behind this and puts the recommendations into action.

II.  The Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention at the NYC Health Department has an update on its  National Salt and Sugar Reduction Initiative (NSSRI).

In October 2018, the Bureau announced draft sugar reduction targets.  Now they have updated them and added targets for salt reduction, as well.  As I was informed in an e-mail,

The NSSRI is a partnership of over 100 local city and state health departments, associations, and health organizations, convened by the NYC Department of Health. We have set voluntary sugar reduction targets for 15 categories of food and beverages. The targets represent a 10% reduction in sugar content of products by 2023, and a 20% reduction by 2026 for food with a 40% reduction for beverages.

The current public health landscape demonstrates that diet remains critical, even during a public health emergency like COVID-19. Diet-related health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, which can increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19, are important to address right now.

Here’s what one of the sugar reduction targets looks like:

The objective of NSSRI is this:

To promote gradual, achievable and meaningful reductions in sugar content in packaged foods and beverages. This is because intake of added sugars is associated with increased risk of excess weight, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease and cavities.

The targets are indeed gradual; the hope it that they will be met by 2026.

The targets are, of course, voluntary.  The best NSSRI can do is to encourage companies to comply and hold them accountable.

It’s a start.

Early in February I wrote about heavy metal toxins in baby foods.  A report, Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury, revealed:

• Arsenic, led, cadmium, and mercury are present in commercial baby foods at levels much higher than considered safe.
• Their sources: foods raised on contaminated soil and water, and vitamin/mineral pre-mixes.
• Baby food companies set their own safety standards for toxic metals.
• The FDA knows baby foods have high levels of toxic metals but isn’t doing anything about it.
• Some baby food companies refused to share data on this topic.

Politico has been following this story.  It reports:

• The FDA launched a working group on toxic food contaminants in 2017,  partly in reaction to an earlier EPA study that found food to be a source of about half the lead that kids get (see supplementary material in this paper).
• Preventing lead exposure would be good for society as well as for children.

In response to the “Tainted” report, the FDA now says it will set standards.

The FDA wrote baby food manufacturers to shape up.  The FDA, it says,

 is taking this opportunity to remind all baby and toddler food manufacturers and processors covered by the preventive control provisions of the rule Current Good Manufacturing Practice, Hazard Analysis, and Risk-Based Preventive Controls for Human Food…of your responsibility under the rulemaking to consider chemical hazards that may be present in foods when conducting your hazard analysis….FDA takes exposure to toxic elements in the food supply extremely seriously, especially when it comes to protecting the health and safety of the youngest and most vulnerable in the population.

And the FDA issued a statement to the food industry. 

Toxic elements are in the environment, and therefore in the food supply. The levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium in certain foods depends on many factors, including: growing conditions; manufacturing and agricultural processes; past or current environmental contamination; and the genetic capacity of food crops to take up elements. We share the public’s concerns for the health of America’s children, and want to reassure parents and caregivers that at the levels we have found through our testing, children are not at an immediate health risk from exposure to toxic elements in foods. The FDA routinely monitors levels of toxic elements in food, and if we find that they pose a health risk, the FDA takes steps to remove those foods from the market.

Research has shown that reducing exposure to toxic elements is important to minimizing any potential long-term effects on the developing brains of infants and children. As such, this issue is among FDA’s highest priorities and we are actively working to make progress on identifying and implementing impactful solutions to make foods commonly consumed by infants and young children safer.

In the meantime, here’s what Beech Nut says on its website.

Toxic heavy metals are not good for babies’ health.  Baby food companies need to do much better in getting rid of these things if they want anyone to keep buying their products.

What to do in the meantime?  Feed kids small amounts of as wide a variety of foods as possible.  That’s good advice anyway.

Effects of Whole Grain Intake, Compared with Refined Grain, on Appetite and Energy Intake: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.  Lisa M Sanders, Yong Zhu, Meredith L Wilcox, Katie Koecher, Kevin C Maki.  Advances in Nutrition, Published: 02 February 2021, nmaa178.

Conclusion: These results support the view that consumption of WG [whole grain] foods, compared with RG [refined grain] foods, significantly impacts subjective appetite, and might partly explain the inverse associations between WG food intake and risk of overweight, obesity, and weight gain over time.

Funder: This research was funded by Bell Institute of Nutrition, General Mills, Inc.

Author disclosures: KCM, MLW, and LMS are employees of Midwest Biomedical Research, which has received research funding from General Mills, Inc., Kellogg Company, and the Quaker division of PepsiCo. KK and YZ are employees of General Mills, Inc. The funding sponsor provided comments on early aspects of the study design. Interim analyses and the final data were shared with the sponsor prior to publication, but the final decision for all aspects of study conduct and manuscript content is that of the authors alone.

Comment: General Mills paid for the study, had input into the study design, and reviewed the data and analysis before publication.  Two of the authors are employed by General Mills and the others work for a company that gets funding from General Mills.  This is a study designed to help General Mills market products containing whole grains.

Marketing of whole grains is tricky.  The only label that counts is 100% whole grains.  Anything other than that is marketing hype.

Paul B. Thompson and Patricia E. Norris.  Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know.  Oxford University Press, 2020.

“Sustainability” is one of those terms that everyone uses but if you ask people to define it, you get a million different answers.  This book addresses that precise point, and I thought it was worth a blurb:

Sustainability is the hot buzzword these days.  Does it take a whole book to explain what it means?  Yes and how lucky we are to have it.  This is a book about how to think about what it takes to keep systems going.  The Q and A format makes difficult and contested concepts especially easy to follow.

As an example, here is an excerpt from the authors’ answer to the question, “Is sustainability just a passing fad?”

The solution to this problem [of thinking that sustainability goals are morally mandatory] is to recall the complexity created by interacting systems.  While an action can increase sustainability by making for efficient use of some resource, that action can have rebound effects that do just the opposite.  Sometimes the rebound is in systems (like the global climate system) that most of us do not understand in the first place.  Seeking sustainability requires you to remain faithful to the objective, even while you remain open to the possibility that any particular strategies might provide to be less effective than you originally thought, and sometimes they are just wrong altogether….”Sustainability is about being nimble, not being right”.  Put another way, we all, every one of us, still have a lot to learn.

Several years ago, Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND bars, donated funds to create an organization, Feed the Truth, to investigate food industry influence on our food system.  I was part of a team that suggested names for members of the group’s board.  Once Lubetzky set up the funding, he has had nothing further to do with the group.  The board appointed Lucy Martinez Sullivan as its executive director.

She explains this group in a YouTube video.

As its first public action, Feed the Truth, along with Maplight, a group focused on exposing the influence of money in politics, has just published Draining the ‘Big Food’ Swamp [the Executive summary is here; the full report is here].

This report is about how the food industry exerts power.  It “exposes how the $1.1 trillion food and agriculture industry flexes its political muscle through a web of trade association lobbying and campaign spending, while operating behind the scenes to undermine public health, perpetuate inequality, and consolidate power.”

Some of the report’s findings:

• In the last 10 years, the largest 20 food industry groups spent over 300 million dollars on federal lobbying.
• Of nearly 6,300 food trade associations, the 20 largest spent more than 300 million dollars on federal lobbying in  the last 10 years.
• Half of food trade lobbying came from only three groups: the National Restaurant Association, the American Beverage Association and the Consumer Brands Association.
• The National Restaurant Association is lobbying relentlessly to block efforts to raise the national minimum wage.
• The meatpacking industry is lobbying to keep workers on the job and to increase line speeds, despite the spread of COVID-19.
• More than 80% of the food industry lobbyists at the largest trade associations are “revolvers,” or individuals who now lobby the officials and agencies they once worked for.
• The top 20 food trade associations spent more in campaign donations to members of Congress who voted to overturn the election results than those that didn’t.

Feed the Truth also launched a petition calling on PepsiCo, a major member of all three of the top trade groups, to get its money out of politics.

This report is an impressive first step for this group.  I can’t wait to see what else it will do.

Resources

• Press release
• Take action
• Social media toolkit
• Video of the projection action at USDA

I thought I already knew all the issues raised by palm fats, which I’ve written about previously, but also because I did a blurb for Jocelyn Zuckerman’s forthcoming Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World (New Press).  Nope.  Wrong.

Welcome to “Buttergate,” the latest palm fat scandal.

I thought I knew all the issues raised by palm fats, which I’ve written about previously, but also because I did a blurb for Jocelyn C. Zuckerman.  Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World (New Press) which is not yet out but coming soon.  How wrong I was.

Welcome to “Buttergate,” the latest palm fat scandal.

This begins with Canadians asking why, all of a sudden, is butter not getting soft at room temperature.

The answer: farmers are feeding cows palm oil, which is high in saturated (hard) fat

Why would they do this?  Because it increases production of milk fat.  And because it makes milk fat more highly saturated, butter gets harder.

The Canadian dairy industry is being asked to stop this practice because it breaches the dairy industry’s “ moral compact with Canadians.”

Do dairy foods need to be harder at room temperature?  No.

Do dairy foods need to be higher in saturated fat?  No.

Is this yet another reason to be wary of palm fat?  Could be.

Are American farmers feeding palm oil to cows?  The U.S. dairy industry is strangely quiet on this question.  US journals report research on its use as cow feed.  And Dairy Farmers of Canada says American dairy farmers do this too.

I did a little investigating.  Here’s what Jamie Jonker, Vice President, Sustainability & Scientific Affairs, National Milk Producers Federation, says about the practices of the U.S. dairy industry:

• Feeding byproducts from other parts of food production to dairy cattle, which recycles ingredients that may otherwise be thrown away, has been a staple of the U.S. dairy industry for decades. Palm oil byproducts fed to dairy cattle in small amounts has been among them.
• The average daily consumption of palm oil per lactating cow in the U.S. is about 0.2 pounds (unpublished data). A lactating cow eats more than 50 pounds of feed (on a dry matter basis) so this is less than 0.4% of total diet.
• There is not a legal limit feeding palm oil byproducts in the U.S., but from a practical standpoint there are dietary limits. Too high fat level in the diet will reduce overall feed consumed which will reduce overall nutrients to the cow decreasing productivity.
• Diet does impact milk composition and dietary fat source can change milk fatty acid profile. There has not been a recent change in use of palm oil byproducts that would cause a discernible difference in butter ‘hardness’ at room temperature.
• The palmitic acid portion of the weight of total fatty acids in butter is roughly 30 percent. That’s a decades-old industry standard that’s remained consistent throughout the pandemic. Palmitic acid is not just from the palm but can also be produced in other plants and organisms at low levels. For example, the amount in human breast milk averages 20 to 25%.

So for U.S. milk users, there doesn’t seem to be anything new here.  The butter I’ve been buying still softens at room temperature, but the ambient temperature has to be really hot to melt it.  Cow’s milk is a source of saturated fat.  Butter is concentrated cow’s milk fat.  Saturated fatty acids are solid at room temperature and that’s why butter is too.