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I’m not much of a TV watcher so I missed the episode of The Good Wife in which CBS offered a new version of the food guide icon.

Fortunately, the Minneapolis Star Tribune got permission to reprint it.

According to the Tribune’s account of the episode, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,”  a character representing the cheese industry proposes a more dairy-prominent alternative to the USDA’s MyPlate:

As for me, I still miss the 1992 Pyramid, maybe because it did not lend itself to such easy satire (see previous post).

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the agency that rules on health claims and food safety, is reviewing the safety of the artificial sweetener aspartame.  It has just released the 112 studies it reviewed in the 1980s along with hundreds of studies submitted more recently.  Its re-evaluation is expected in 2012.

Despite many complaints to the contrary, the FDA has consistently ruled that aspartame is safe at levels currently consumed.  With release of the EFSA studies, people concerned about this issue can review the data and draw their own conclusions.

It will be interesting to see EFSA’s review when it appears.

From Brian McFadden’s “The Strip,” New York Times, November 20.

Enjoy the holiday, family, and friends!

After the budget SuperCommittee failed to reach an agreement yesterday, Rep. Frank Lucas, Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee issued a joint statement about their proposal for the farm bill:

House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders developed a bipartisan, bicameral proposal for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that would save $23 billion.

However, the Joint Select Committee’s failure to reach a deal on an overall deficit reduction package effectively ends this effort.

We are pleased we were able to work in a bipartisan way with committee members and agriculture stakeholders to generate sound ideas to cut spending by tens of billions of dollars while maintaining key priorities to grow the country’s agriculture economy.

We will continue the process of reauthorizing the farm bill in the coming months, and will do so with the same bipartisan spirit that has historically defined the work of our committees.

With their proposal to cut $23 billion from the farm bill over 10 years (~$2.3 billion per year) blown out of the water (see yesterday’s post), the big question is what happens next.

Philip Brasher, who follows such things closely, writes in the Des Moines Register that the existing farm programs expire in two years.  The point of trying to hide the farm bill in the SuperCommittee was to protect farm subsidies from attack on the House or Senate floor:

Critics of using the supercommittee process to write farm policy saw it as an end run by the agribusiness lobby to guarantee growers a continued stream of federal money with as few strings attached as possible.

Now everything starts from scratch:

The conventional legislative process for writing a new farm would include public meetings and votes in committee and on the House and Senate floor. But that’s a long, difficult process for a major bill to navigate even in a year when little else is going on, and 2012 will be a presidential election year.

….Also up in the air is how much agriculture spending will be cut. The debt-reduction committee’s failure to reach a deal is supposed to trigger about $1 trillion in automatic cuts, including a $15 billion reduction in agricultural programs over a 10-year-period.

The agriculture committees had been crafting their farm bill to cut $23 billion, and now that the supercommittee has deadlocked corn growers lobbyist Sam Willett says that the eventual spending cut could wind up higher than that.

“The new starting point is $23 billion, not $15 billion,” he said.

Chris Clayton, writing for the Progressive Farmer, gives some of the juicier gossip about what led to this point.   He quotes  Senate Agriculture Ranking Member Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, complaining that even he had been left out of the loop:

In recent weeks, the chairs of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees have worked on a farm fill proposal, largely without my input and the input of the other members of the two committees. The last proposal was so ‘secret’ that I still have not seen final legislative language and scores.

If you thought the process was nasty up until now, I’m guessing what comes next will be worse.  Lobbyists for every piece of the farm bill will be working even harder to protect their employers from budget cuts.

The big ticket items are, in order, food stamps, commodity supports (including crop insurance), and conservation.  The fights will not be pretty, especially in a Congress that seems to care much more about who’s in power than about creating a healthy, sustainable agricultural system.

Additions, November 23: The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NASC) has produced two analyses of the situation with the farm bill.  Part One reviews what has just happened and what it may mean (short answer: up in the air).  Part Two provides NASC’s analysis of the leaked bill proposed by the secret committee (the actual proposal has not yet been released).

As of this morning, it looks like the SuperCommittee process has failed.  This committee was supposed to recommend specific budget cuts by tonight.  If it fails, automatic budget cuts, half to the military, go into effect in January 2013—after the 2012 election.

What does this mean for the farm bill?

The chairs and vice-chairs of the House and Senate agriculture committee have been meeting in secret—from the rest of the agriculture committee members as well as from the public—to recommend how to cut $23 billion from agriculture appropriations.

On Friday, the Environmental Working Group obtained a leaked copy of the secret recommendations.

These recommendations, rumored to be not quite final, were to go to the SuperCommittee today.  Now what?

I’m guessing the farm bill is up for grabs and will now have to go through the usual legislative processes.  This could be good or bad, depending on the politics.

In the meantime, I counted 97 recommendations in the secret committee’s report.  A few of the most interesting:

Commodities

• Eliminate direct payments, counter-cyclical payments, average crop revenue election, and supplemental revenue assistance payments to create $15 billion in savings.
• Expand crop insurance for “underserved” crops, including fruits and vegetables.
• Create a special program to protect cotton producers.
• Protect commodity producers against both price and yield losses.
• Restrict benefits to farmers who make less than $950,000 per year (adjusted gross), or twice that for couples.
• Set payment limits of $105,000 per producer, or twice that for couples.
• Do something complicated with dairy by replacing two programs with two others.

Conservation

• Cut the budget by an unspecified amount (continuing a long tradition of cutting conservation).
• Reduce reserve acres from 32 million to 25 million over 10 years.

Nutrition

• Cut SNAP (food stamp) benefits by about $4 billion a year, by eliminating automatic enrollment for anyone who gets energy benefits.
• Require retailers to stock more fruits and vegetables.
• Give USDA the authority to require documented need for states to allow SNAP benefits to be used in restaurants by the disabled and homeless.
• Give USDA $5 million per year to prevent trafficking of benefits.
• Require USDA to set rules to prevent lottery winners from getting SNAP benefits (what is this about?).
• Grant $10 million to encourage whole grains in school meals.
• Grant $20 million a year for incentives for SNAP recipients to buy fruits and vegetables.

“Specialty” crops (translation: fruits and vegetables)

• Fund promotion program for farmers’ markets at $20 million a year
• Give USDA $5 million to collect data on organics
• Provide $61 million a year for programs to prevent agricultural pests
• Give $70 million a year for grants to states to promote specialty crops
• Allot $15 million a year to run the National Organic Program
• Provide $40 million a year for specialty crop research.
• Provide up to 75% of the cost of organic certification (maximum $750).

As in the past, SNAP takes up about 80% of the total farm bill budget, with the remainder going mainly to commodity support and insurance programs.

As always, large agricultural producers get most of the support money—$ billions—but this plan throws a handful of small benefits ($ millions) to help fruit-and-vegetable growers.

How any of this might work in practice is unclear, as is what happens next.  A whole new opportunity for lobbying, perhaps.  Stay tuned.

From comedian Mark Russell*

• No dessert until you finish your tomato paste.
• The push to limit pizza in school lunch programs has been derailed in Congress by members who classify tomato paste as a vegetable. Who says this is a do-nothing Congress?
• Their true quote: “An eighth of a cup of tomato paste has the nutritional value of a half-cup of vegetables and when mixed with water for pizza sauce, more of a vegetable is created.”
• Right. And when you add cheese, pepperoni and sausage — voila! — you have a healthy fruit salad.

* c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.

The UK Government has “quietly disbanded” its independent advisory group on obesity.  Apparently, it didn’t like the advice it was getting.

The firing is quite understandable.  The group was appointed by the previous government as a result of recommendations in what is known as the Foresight report: Tackling Obesities: Future Choices.   This report advised mapping out strategies for obesity interventions that went way beyond education about personal food choices.

The expert group followed this advice and recommended public health programs to change the food environment and counter food industry marketing.

The new government, however, prefers a “nudge” strategy.  Derived from behavioral economics, “nudge” involves no compulsion (e.g., taxes on junk foods).  Instead, people are free to follow advice to eat better but don’t have to.

Thus, the government’s Call to Action on Obesity in England focuses on individual responsibility and says nothing about the influence of food and drink marketing on food choices.

Two members of the expert committee, Goeffrey Rayner and Tim Lang, have publicly criticized “nudge” as “a smokescreen for inaction.”

No wonder the group was fired.

But as Professor Lang explains:

The closure of the expert advisory group is bad news all round: bad politics, bad policy, and bad science. It shuts the door on an important attempt by the state to recognise the systemic nature of what drives obesity…It’s plain as a pikestaff that obesity requires systems change, not a tweak here and there, yet that is what is being offered.

Doing something about obesity requires eating less and eating better, both very bad for business.   For this UK government, business interests trump those of public health.

I get sent a lot of manuscripts to review for possible endorsements (“blurbs”).  I read them and happily agree to blurb the ones I think worth special attention.  These were recently released:

Jennifer Clapp’s Food (Polity Press, 2012).  “The global food economy may seem remote from daily experience, but it affects every aspect of what we eat and, therefore, our health and welfare.  Jennifer Clapp explains what happens when food is no longer considered a mere source of nourishment or cultural element but is transformed into a fungible commodity.  Clapp unpacks and clarifies the mind-numbing complexities of transnational corporations, international trade, and financial markets.  Best of all, the book provides precisely the information and tools advocates need to redesign the global food economy to promote fair trade, food justice, and local sovereignity.”

Tanya Denckla Cobb’s Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement is Changing the Way We Eat (Storey, 2011).  I blurbed this one: “People constantly ask me what kinds of things they can do to get involved in the food movement and where to start.  Now I can just hand them this.  The projects it describes should inspire readers to get busy doing similar projects in their own communities.”

Didi Emmons’ Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm (Chelsea Green, 2011).  My blurb: If you are a city person, like me, with a secret yen to forage for wild greens Wild Flavors is an inspiration.  Read it, and you will want to harvest, share, and eat everything you find…Emmon’s recipes are lovely and easy to follow.

Joel Salatin’s Folks,This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People and a Better World (Center Street, 2011).  I blurbed this one too.  “Joel Salatin says it’s high time we stopped taking our industrialized food system as a given and instead consider local, sustainable food production as the norm.  Good plan.  Whether or not you agree with this contention that we would be better off if the government got out of food regulation, his ideas are compellingly written, fun to read, and well worth pondering.”

I wasn’t asked to do a blurb for this one, but it’s well worth a mention:

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, illustrated by Maira Kalman (Penguin, 2011).  This is an updated version of Pollan’s best seller of a couple of years ago with some new rules and delightful paintings by the creator of the famous New Yorker newyorkistan cover.  The book is a quick read and the rules are short and to the point: “Compost!”  “Eat slowly!”  “Cook!”