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Jonathan Rees.  The Fulton Fish Market: A History. Columbia University Press, 2022.

I really wanted to read this book and was appy to do a blurb for it.

Rees’s history of Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market is an elegy for a place that reached peak vibrancy in the 1920s, only to decline steadily as a result of overfishing, developers, the Mafia, unions, politics, refrigeration, real estate prices, and, eventually, more developers.  Rees’s thoughtful analysis of these themes has much to tell us about the clash between the natural and built worlds in American cities over the last couple of centuries.

Rees is a history professor at Colorado State-Pueblo, a food historian.  I’ve long wanted to understand the changes I’ve witnessed at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and the reasons for moving the fish market to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, a mile from the nearest subway station.

I remember my first visit—at 4:00 am on a cold winter’s day—to the fish market in the mid-1990s.  It was lit up like a stadium, crowded with people, tables covered with fish, and hand-trucks for moving them.  I thought it looked like a move set on which the director has just shouted, “Action.”  We had to move quickly to avoid being hit.

My guide was the chef-owner of a Chelsea fish restaurant who pulled thousands of dollars in cash out of his pockett o pay for the fish he was selecting carefully for the next few days.  His purchases went to a van that would take them to his restaurant within the next hour or so.

We went for coffee at a nearby café and were out of there by 6:00 a.m.

I picked four excerpts from Rees’ book that help explain the history of this place:

(1) Two developments very close to the Fulton Fish Market spurred the transformation of the entire neighborhood into something new by the end of the twentieth century and beyond: the founding of the South Street Seaport Museum in 1967 and the development of the neighborhood by the Rouse Corporation, a Baltimore firm best known for its successful revitalization of the Faneuil Hall area in Boston… More development increased rents. Businesses which made more money than dealing in wholesale fish then bought up properties that the dealers had moved into earlier in the century, thereby changing the character of the neighborhood. The city and the state never deemed the actual fish market worthy of protection. As a result, every new project that made the neighborhood more desirable made it harder for the fish market to stay a fish market.

(2) From a longterm perspective, the geographical advantage of the Fulton Fish Market disappeared when fish stopped arriving there by water….When they arrived in New York by train or truck it no longer mattered where in New York City the fish market happened to be. In fact, with the arrival of modern refrigeration and freezing, you could have moved the largest fish market in America to Connecticut, or South Carolina for that matter….

(3) The original Fulton Fish Market was obviously a market in the sense that it was a place to buy and sell fish, but the longterm historical significance of the place derives more from the other sense of the word “market,” namely the abstract idea that there is a set of dedicated buyers for the good that gets sold there. The wholesalers who ran the Fulton Fish Market expanded the scope of the abstract market in order to keep their physical market going…Nobody really cared about the public good as long as they were all still making money…the actions of the wholesalers who operated there spurred the general indifference of the wholesale fish industry to the problem of overfishing, despite the obvious cost of this behavior to the overall amount of fish in the sea.

(4) In ancient Greece, the marketplace was the center of daily life. The body politic congregated there to interact, make collective decisions and conduct commerce. Fulton Market bore some resemblance to this situation during its early history, but its operations became less public as it evolved into a wholesale market….Today, without a subway stop anywhere near it, average New Yorkers would have difficulty getting to any of the city’s wholesale markets in the South Bronx. Moreover, because of improvements in refrigeration and transportation, wholesale markets aren’t even necessary for restaurants or groceries to operate in the city anymore… These days, it is very easy to forget that Manhattan is an island.

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I’m indebted to Politico for this one: Federal government won’t stop buying food from meatpacker tied to bribery case.

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Will wonders never cease.  You might think that of course the School Nutrition Association, which represents people who cook and staff school meal programs, would be in favor of universal free meals for all school kids, but I was amazed to see its 2023 Position Paper.

This asks Congress to:

• Make permanent the reimbursement rate increases for the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program (NSLP/SBP), provided in the bipartisan Keep Kids Fed Act (PL 117-158).
• Expand NSLP/SBP to offer healthy school meals for all students at no charge.
• Ensure USDA maintains current school nutrition standards rather than implement additional, unachievable rules.
• Reduce regulatory and administrative burdens.

I’m surprised because this is the same organization that fought improvements to the rules for school meals, as I have discussed previously.

I think it’s terrific that the SNA is now at the forefront of child nutrition advocacy.

Check out the resources on its website.

See what it’s doing to advocate.

Support these calls!

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Last week, the Washington Post editorial board gave its Opinion :  For the nation’s health, break up the Food and Drug Administration.

The Food and Drug Administration last year failed repeatedly to keep the nation’s babies safe from tainted formula. The baby formula fiasco was the latest in a long line of food crises that the agency was slow to catch and handle. But the deaths of babies and the desperation of parents trying to find enough food for their newborns shocked Congress, the public and the world into realizing just how broken the U.S. food-monitoring system had become.

The editorial cited:

• Helena Bottemiller Evich’s investigation in Politico, which found the FDA’s food-safety operations to be so slow as to be “practically in its own league.”
• A 2017 inspector general report finding the food recall system to be “dangerously sluggish.“
• Reports from the Government Accountability Office which have “repeatedly called out ‘high risk’ problems, including an urgent need for a national food-safety strategy and ‘high-level sustained leadership.'”

Bottemiller Evich is now doing her own invaluable newsletter, Food Fix (subscribe here, and  follow Food Fix on Twitter and LinkedIn).

In it, she says, “The FDA is not working if…”

• it takes a years-long struggle to set even interim, voluntary limits for heavy metals and other neurotoxins in baby food.
• its public health mission is to improve nutrition, but diet-related diseases continue to worsen unabated, driving massive human and health care costs.
• it takes more than a decade to address agricultural water safety…sparking deadly outbreaks year after year.
• it routinely fails to get to the bottom of serious food poisoning incidents – like last summer, when hundreds of people were sickened and more than 130 were hospitalized after eating Daily Harvest frozen crumbles.
• it is conducting fewer and fewer food safety inspections, even as Congress has given the agency more resources over the years to do more inspections.

The FDA says it is taking all this seriously and will come up with a plan to address these failings.  I can’t wait to see it.

Other comments

• Jerold Mande in the Washington Post: Food is making us sick. The FDA can do something about it.  
• Bill Marler asks: Hey FDA, its been over a month, are you going to do anything with the Reagan-Udall Foundation reccomendations?  Note: I discussed the Reagan-Udall report here.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

I’m working on a book chapter on pet food and was interested to hear from Phyllis Entis, author of TAINTED. From Farm Gate to Dinner Plate, Fifty Years of Food Safety Failures, who sent me this.

The study: Isabella Corsato Alvarenga, Amanda N. Dainton & Charles G. Aldrich (2021).  A review: nutrition and process attributes of corn in pet foods, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2021.1931020

Background: “Corn is one of the largest cereal crops worldwide and plays an important role in the U.S. economy. The pet food market is growing every year, and although corn is well utilized by dogs, some marketing claims have attributed a negative image to this cereal.”

Purpose:  “the objective of this work was to review the literature regarding corn and its co-products, as well as describe the processing of these ingredients as they pertain to pet foods.”

Findings: “Corn is well digested by both dogs and cats and provides nutrients…In conclusion, the negative perception by some in the pet food market may not be warranted in pet foods using corn and its co-products.”

Conflicted interests: “The authors are with the Department of Grain Science and Industry, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA.”

Funding: “This work was commissioned by the Kansas Corn Commission.”

Comment:  For the record, substantial research supports the ability of dogs and cats to digest and use the nutrients in corn.  This has been documented for a long time.  The purpose of this review is to reassure pet owners that it’s to feed corn-containing products to their dogs and cats.  Corn is the most prevalent ingredient in commercial complete pet foods.   Lots of pet owners believe that grain-free foods are bad for pets and are buying grain-free products.  These must be cutting into sales.  Once again, this is an industry-funded study with predictable results.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

I was sent a note from the University of California Research Consortium on Beverages and Health about its new fact sheets on sugar-sweetened beverages done in collaboration with the American Heart Association.  The Consortium includes faculty who work on some aspect of sugar science on all ten UC campuses.

Factsheets and Infographics on the UC Research Consortium on Beverages and Health webpage:

• Factsheet: What Are Sugary Drinks?
• Factsheet: 7 Reasons to Skip Sugary Drinks.
• Factsheet: Health Harms of Sugary Drinks.
• Factsheet: The Heavy Environmental Impact of Sugary Drinks.
• Factsheet: Sugary Drinks and COVID.
• Factsheet: How Four Cities in California Are Using Sugary Drink Tax Revenues. UC Research Consortium on Beverages and Health.

They also can be accessed from UC’s Nutrition Policy Institute publications page.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Here’s another one I found out from Twitter.

Food Tank’s lists are extremely useful, this one especially.

Here is one example:

11. Black Farmer Fund, United States

A community investment fund that aggregates and redistributes the wealth of social impact investors, Black Farmers Fund provides grants and loans to Black farmers and food businesses in New York. Their goal is to build resilient Black food economies. Through this work, the Fund seeks to repair Black communities’ relationships with food. “Black Farmer Fund seeks to provide an alternative way for community-driven Black farmers and food businesses in New York to access capital that is non-extractive, culturally-relevant, and governed by other Black farmers and food business owners,” says Olivia Watkins, President of the Fund.

I’m always asked: What can I join?  Who should I support?

This is one great starting place.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

For your calendar today at 6:30 pm EST:

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The World Health Organization has taken a major step: it calls on member countries to tax sugar-sweetened beverages.

“Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages can be a powerful tool to promote health because they save lives and prevent disease, while advancing health equity and mobilizing revenue for countries that could be used to realize universal health coverage,” said Dr Ruediger Krech, Director of Health Promotion at WHO.

SSB, tobacco, and alcohol taxes have proven to be cost-effective ways of preventing diseases, injuries, and premature mortality. SSB tax can also encourage companies to reformulate their products to reduce sugar content.

More than that, WHO has produced a manual on how to develop and implement SSB taxation policies.

This tax manual is a practical guide for policy-makers and others involved in SSB tax policy development to promote healthy diets and populations. It features summaries and case studies of SSB global taxation evidence, and provides support on the policy-cycle development process to implement SSB taxation — from problem identification and situation analysis through policy design, development and implementation to the monitoring and evaluation phase. Additionally, the manual identifies and debunks industry tactics designed to dissuade policy-makers from implementing these taxes.

SSB taxes can be a win-win-win strategy: a win for public health (and averted health-care costs), a win for government revenue, and a win for health equity.

The manual summarizes everything anyone needs to know to justify taxes and to craft policy.  Get to work!

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.