Pet foods may seem unrelated to food politics but they constitute a vital part of the food system  For one thing, they use up a large part of the byproducts of human food production that would otherwise be wasted.

They also are big business.  The US pet foods brought in $99 billion in sales in 2020.

Nestlé (no relation) is one of the largest pet food producers.  As Quartz puts it, Nestle’s big bet on pet food is paying dividends during the pandemic.

A beloved animal friend for you means big business for Nestle. According to an earnings report released today, the Swiss company reported 3.5% organic growth so far in 2020, and 4.9% growth in the third quarter, its highest level of quarterly growth in the past six years…its pet food brand, Purina PetCare, was a main contributor in each of the company’s global markets, growing 10.6% so far this year, CFO Francois-Xavier Roger said on a call for investors.

To my great amusement, pet food marketing closely follows current food fads.  Why am I amused?  Dogs don’t care what they eat, but their humans do.

• Cell-based meat for pets: A handful of startup companies are using cell-based meat in pet food, a large market now supplied by food-bearing animals; one uses cells from mice for cat food and cells from rabbits for dog food. (Modern Farmer)
• Unleash the Power of Postbiotics in Pets:  Pet parents continue to turn towards natural foods, recognizable ingredients, and supplements. As this trend and purchasing pattern continues, we see another ingredient category emerge – Postbiotics.  Read more

And we now have insect-based pet foods.

• Insect protein demand by pet food may be 165k tons by 2030:  As a pet food ingredient, insect meal can serve as an alternative protein source for dogs and cats with allergies or sensitivities. The pet food market currently accounts for the largest share of demand for insect protein and is likely to remain one of the largest, one industry professional said.Read more
• Insect-based pet foods not risk for zoonotic pandemic:  A team of researchers at Ÿnsect has been working to assess potential risks from mealworm farming operations.  Read more
• Insect-based pet food news: Like insects themselves emerging in spring, insect-based pet food ingredient suppliers and the products that use them have been active lately. Mars Petcare plans to introduce an insect-based cat food, Lovebug, in the United Kingdom.

Pet food safety is an ongoing issue, particularly from Salmonella contamination.  What interested me about this particular recall—Billy+Margot Wild Kangaroo and Superfoods Recipe Dog Food—was its main ingredient, wild kangaroo, and that it is being marketed as a superfood (no such thing exists).

If you have purchased Billy+Margot Wild Kangaroo and Superfoods Recipe in a 4 lb bag, with lot code V 07 Feb 2022 from any retail store nationally, please stop feeding the product to your dogs, dispose of this product immediately, wash your hands accordingly, and sanitize affected surfaces.

Weight loss in dogs and owners:  If one loses weight, the other does too!

My ongoing interest in this topic is a result of having written two books about pet foods:

• Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008)—an account of the pet food recalls of 2007 and their implications for the health of dogs and cats, but also for the FDA, food safety policy in the United States and China, international food trade, and the pet food industry itself.
• Feed Your Pet Right (with Malden Nesheim, 2010)—an examination of the booming pet food industry—its history, constituent companies, products, and marketing practices.

The USDA has compiled a long list of documents related to the cost of the leading 15 foodborne microbial illnesses that affect Americans.   It also has produced a summary of this information.

Fifteen pathogens account for over 95 percent of the illnesses and deaths from foodborne illnesses in the U.S. (those for which the CDC can identify a cause).

The CDC estimates that these 15 pathogens cause about 8.9 million cases of illness, 54,000 hospitalizations, and 1,480 deaths each year.

In 2018, these cost about $17.6 billion in health care, hospitalization, lost wages, and other economic burdens, an increase of $2 billion over estimates in 2013.

Five pathogens are responsible for most of these costs.

Economists have an odd way of estimating these costs.  They factor in an economic value for preventing each death from foodborne illness.  In 2013, they estimated the value of each death prevented as $8.7 million; this estimate increased to $9.7 million each in 2018.

The bottom line: we need to do a much better job of preventing foodborne illness for reasons of cost as well as human suffering.

I got a press release from the USDA last week: USDA Releases 90-Day Progress Report on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today published the 90-Day Progress Report on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry.

The report represents an important step toward in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad and shift towards a whole-of-department approach to climate solutions. The Order, signed January 27, states that, “America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners have an important role to play in combating the climate crisis and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by sequestering carbon in soils, grasses, trees, and other vegetation and sourcing sustainable bioproducts and fuels.”

This report is the result of a presidential executive order in January requiring the USDA to say how it plans to promote climate-friendly agriculture.  It pretty much summarizes what the USDA has been doing and intends to do more of in the future.

Actually, the USDA has a lot to say about climate change.  It just wasn’t allowed to, at least publicly, during the previous administration.

For example, the USDA published Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry in May 2016.

The agency has web pages devoted to climate-change topics; each of these comes with additional pages on sub-heading topics.

• Climate solutions
• Climate change
• Climate hubs (regions) 
• USDA agencies involved in climate change efforts
• USDA training programs in regenerative agriculture
• Research on climate change

It looks to me as though this agency is taking a lead role on climate change, at least in some ways.

But what about meat?  Politico notes that the Biden administration is keeping hands off that issue.

President Joe Biden is not going to ban red meat. In fact, his administration isn’t doing much to confront the flow of harmful greenhouse gases from the very big business of animal agriculture.

The Agriculture Department’s newly published “climate-smart agriculture and forestry” outline says almost nothing about how Biden aims to curb methane emissions from livestock operations. But environmentalists argue that any effort to shrink the farm industry’s climate footprint is half-baked if it relies on voluntary efforts and doesn’t address America’s system of meat production.

US and UK Consumer Adoption of Cultivated Meat: A Segmentation Study.  Keri Szejda, Christopher J. Bryant, Tessa Urbanovich.  Foods 2021, 10(5), 1050.

Background: “Despite growing evidence of the environmental and public health threats posed by today’s intensive animal production, consumers in the west remain largely attached to meat. Cultivated meat offers a way to grow meat directly from cells, circumventing these issues as well as the use of animals altogether.”

Purpose: “The aim of this study was to assess the overall consumer markets and a range of preferences around cultivated meat in the US and the UK relating to nomenclature, genetic modification, health enhancements, and other features.”

Conclusion: “there are solid consumer markets for cultivated meat in the UK and the US, despite an overall lack of familiarity with the product. Younger generations are the most open to trying cultivated meat, and government seals of approval are considered important. Consumers tend to prefer non-GM cultivated meat, and while nutritional enhancements do not add much to consumer appeal overall, they may be an effective way to provide tangible benefits to more skeptical consumers.”

Funding: “This work was supported by Aleph Farms. Aleph Farms participated in the study design, but not other aspects of the project.”

Conflicts of interest: “The authors report no conflicts of interest.”

Comment: Aleph Farms produces cell-based meat substitutes: “We’re paving a new way forward in the field of cultivated meat, growing delicious, real beef steaks from the cells of cows, eliminating the need for slaughtering animals or harming the environment.”

The company paid for consumer research to find out how to sell its product.   The authors perceive no conflicted interests in this kind of paid research.  The biases induced by paid research are often unconscious and unrecognized.  The result of this study is an implied suggestion to add nutrients to cell-based meat products as a means to convince people to buy them.

This is marketing research.

Thanks to Michele Simon for sending a query about this paper.

Danielle Dreilinger.  The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live.  WW Norton, 2021.  

I was particularly interested in this book because I came to NYU in 1988 (with a doctorate in molecular biology, no less) to chair a department of home economics and nutrition.  I was hired explicitly to get rid of home economics programs (25 of them, none with more than a few lingering students) to bring the department—now Nutrition and Food Studies–into the 20^th  (if not the 21^st) century.  This book was a revelation about what I had gotten myself into, and I wish I had known this history at the time.

I did a blurb for the book’s back cover:

This book tells the unexpected story of how home economics began as an intellectual haven for smart women–Black as well as white–who were otherwise blocked from studying science, but ended up as a field less rigorous and more conforming.  Black women were at the forefront of this history, and their role is a revelation.  Dreilinger makes a convincing case for bringing back the skills that home economics alone could teach.

There is plenty more to be said about this history, and here’s where to find it.

Home economics started out as a hard-science field that women were permitted to enter.  The earliest home economists were serious scientists with professorial jobs at places like MIT, Berkeley, Cornell, and, in the case of Black academics, Howard.

Two excerpts:

Home economics has been a back door for women to enter science; part of a surprisingly large government-backed movement; a guilt trip for women left cold by the household arts; a trap or a springboard for women of color; a sometimes ironic, sometimes nostalgic preoccupation of third-wave feminists; a conservative calling card; an aesthetic obsession for the Instagram set; a feminist battlefield; and the locus for countless anxieties about women’s lives. A revival seems bewilderingly overdue (p. x).

Once home economics had been a way for girls to study in women-created labs that were as serious as the men’s…home ec became a way to bar women from science.  Advisors pressured women away from majors such as chemistry into home economics…With pressure coming in from all sides—students who felt nervous about taking science, alumni who said their undergraduate chemistry classes didn’t help on the job, and college presidents who sought someplace to put less-serious students—home economics administrators cut hard-science prerequisites from the requirements for a home economics bachelor’s degree (p. 191).

The New Yorker reviewed this book in April.  I particularly liked the review because it refers to Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad, an earlier and much loved history of the field.

I was intrigued by this Tweet:

Anyone would be confused.

And here are some news items:

• PBR cannabis-infused seltzer launches in California: Pabst Labs was granted the rights to create these drinks under the brand’s name. Each nonalcoholic beverage contains 5 milligrams of THC, 4 grams of sugar and 25 calories.
• Could 2021 be the breakout year for cannabis-infused food and beverages?  Although the pandemic slowed progress, the outlook is brighter as more companies enter the market and the regulatory environment has the potential to change.
• Study: Feeding cannabis treats to dogs does not affect their behavior, but may affect scratching: “…CBD reduced scratching compared with CON (P = 0.030). CBD did not affect the activity duration during exercise periods (P = 0.143). These results indicate that, when supplemented with up to 4.5 mg CBD/kg BW/day, CBD does not impact the daily activity of adult dogs, but may exert an antipruritic effect.”

A press release from The Center for Food Safety announces that the agribusiness giant Corteva is dropping its “Plant-Killing Pesticide Dicamba Amid Legal Battles, Drift Concerns.”

Dicamba, like glyphosate, is a controversial herbicide widely used in conjunction with crops genetically modified to resist it.  Why controversial?

• It is potentially toxic to adults, children, and pets.
• It drifts long distances and kills “non-target” crops that are not genetically modified—those that are organically grown, for example.

National Pesticide Information Network Fact Sheet on Dicamba has a Q and A.

What are some signs and symptoms from a brief exposure to dicamba?

Pure dicamba is low in toxicity if breathed. If inhaled, people may experience dizziness, and irritation of the nose, resulting in coughing. If you get pure dicamba on your skin, it is low in toxicity, however skin irritation may develop. If you get dicamba in your eyes, it is moderately toxic. If dicamba is swallowed, people have reported symptoms such as vomiting, loss of appetite and muscle spasms. If a large amount is swallowed, diarrhea and abdominal pain have been reported.

Pets may be exposed to dicamba if they come into contact with plants that have been treated with dicamba, either by eating the plants or walking through an area where dicamba was applied. Signs that a dog or a cat may have been exposed to dicamba include shortness of breath, muscle spasms and the animal may produce a lot of saliva. Birds may also be exposed to dicamba by eating dicamba granules and signs include wing drop, a loss of controlled movements, and weakness.

The Missouri Department of Agriculture also has a Fact Sheet.  It reviews damages caused by this herbicide and complaints about it.

Dicamba is a highly volatile chemical that can damage non-target plant species through spray drift and/or volatilization (vapor drift). Misuse of dicamba products may cause serious damage to non-dicamba-tolerant soybeans, sensitive crops, non-crop plants, and endangered species.

The Center for Food Safety press release explains some history:

In June 2020, a federal appeals court prohibited the spraying of dicamba on GE crops, in response to a lawsuit brought by farming and environmental groups led by Center for Food Safety (CFS). The Court ruled that EPA had failed to estimate the “enormous and unprecedented damage” caused by dicamba drift, which triggered strife that “has torn apart the social fabric of many farming communities.” Just a few months later, Trump’s EPA re-approved the dicamba products, made by Bayer and BASF. CFS and allies are back in court challenging this unlawful decision. Press reports suggest Biden’s EPA will allow continued use for at least a year, permitting a fifth year of devastating dicamba drift damage.

In another landmark lawsuit against Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and BASF, Missouri farmer Bill Bader was awarded $75 million for dicamba drift damage that devastated his peach orchard.

As Bill Freese, the Center’s director, points out, “If even an agrichemical giant like Corteva is dropping dicamba to avoid liability from the enormous, widely-documented drift damage it causes, what will it take for the Biden Administration to end the use of these hazardous products on America’s croplands for good?”

Bettina Siegel’s Lunch Tray blog had an item recently about a new report on the effects of food dyes on children’s behavior (her blog is behind a Substack paywall, but well worth the subscription).

This report makes it time to talk about food dyes again.  For starters, they have only one purpose: to sell ultra-processed (junk) foods.  Research shows that brightly colored candy, snacks, and sodas are perceived as tasting better than the grey alternatives.  The food industry needs cosmetic food dyes.  We don’t, especially if they are harmful.

The 311-page peer-reviewed report, from the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment (OEHHA), is a meta-analysis of animal studies and 27 human clinical trials dealing with the neurobehavioral effects of seven synthetic food dyes on children.

Its conclusion:

The scientific literature indicates that synthetic food dyes can impact neurobehavior in some children… current ADIs [FDA’s Acceptable Daily Intakes] may not provide adequate protection from neurobehavioral impacts in children. For some of the dyes… updated safe levels of exposure would be much lower.

The idea that synthetic food dyes are associated with adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in children, but that children vary in their sensitivity to these dyes, is hardly new information.

In the mid-1970s, the physician Ben Feingold associated food dyes with hyperactivity in children and developed the Feingold Diet to improve kids’ behavior.

Much of the evidence for the “Feingold hypothesis” rested on anecdotal reports by parents,

Scientists’ attempts to study the effects of food dyes gave mixed results.  For example, as I wrote in a blog post on March 31, 2011, consider two studies published by Science magazine in 1980:

• Researchers gave pills containing a mix of food additives to 40 children, 20 diagnosed as hyperactive and 20 not.  The children diagnosed with hyperactivity reacted to the food additive challenge but the other children did not (Science 1980;207:1485-87).  But this study used pills rather than foods, mixed additives, and used questionable methods for evaluating hyperactive behavior.
• Researchers attempted to correct for such problems by using two drinks that looked and tasted the same—one contained seven food colors while the other did not.   The study was designed carefully such that neither the kids, parents, or observers knew what the kids were drinking.  The result:  Twenty of the 22 kids showed no reaction to the dyes.  One child reacted to the dyes every time (Science 1980;207:1487-89).

The interpretation?  Some kids may react to food dyes.

This gave the FDA an excuse to do nothing.  But then,

• In 2007, a study in England associating food dyes with hyperactivity revived the issue.
• In 2008, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) petitioned the FDA to bad food dyes associated with behavioral problems in children.
• In 2009, CSPI updated its Diet, ADHD & Behavior: A Quarter-Century Review
• In 2010, CSPI published Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risks.
• In 2016, CSPI published Seeing Red: Time for Action on Food Dyes.

Today, the FDA says this about color additives in food:

FDA on color additives in food (2007):

So how safe are they? “Color additives are very safe when used properly…There is no such thing as absolute safety of any substance. In the case of a new color additive, FDA determines if there is ‘a reasonable certainty of no harm’ under the color additive’s proposed conditions of use.”

FDA on whether color additives are safe to eat (2018):

Yes, color additives are safe when they are used in accordance with with FDA regulations…our regulations specify:

• the types of foods in which it can be used,
• any maximum amounts allowed to be used, and
• how the color additive should be identified on the food label.

FDA on whether color additives affect the behavior of children (2018)

The FDA has reviewed and will continue to examine the effects of color additives on children’s behavior. The totality of scientific evidence indicates that most children have no adverse effects when consuming foods containing color additives, but some evidence suggests that certain children may be sensitive to them…Parents who wish to limit the amount of color additives in their children’s diet may check the food ingredient list on labels. Parents should also discuss any concerns with their family physician.

Well good luck with that.  The FDA can and should do better.

The bottom line: Food dyes have no health benefits.  Kids don’t need to be eating ultra-processed foods anyway.  They will not be harmed by avoiding food dyes.

CSPI has produced a lengthy and comprehensive comment on the new report. 

Given all of this, it’s surely time for the FDA to take some action.