Conclusion: “Addition of mushrooms to USDA Food Patterns increased several micronutrients including shortfall nutrients (such as potassium, vitamin D and choline), and had a minimal or no impact on overall calories, sodium or saturated fat.”

The Rockefeller Foundation has produced what I view as an incredibly important guide to describing—“framing”—food system issues in ways that will encourage support for transforming the U.S. food system.

For effective advocacy, issues have to be “framed” in a way that the public can understand and respond to.

“Framing” is a concept made famous by George Lakoff.  It refers to the way political messages are designed to resonate with voters.  But it also refers to how public health messages can be designed to be more effective in encouraging people to act in the interests of their own health (wear masks, for example).

For food system change, the Rockefeller Foundation issued an action guide:  Reset the Table: Messaging Guide,

One of the consistent needs expressed by those seeking to transform the food system is a shared narrative to motivate and sustain the needed changes in the system. This narrative and messaging guide focuses on the long-term food system transformation while responding to the evolving circumstances presented by the pandemic, economic downturn, and racial justice reckoning being experienced in the United States.

Its guide is part of a longer report giving the research basis behind the messages: Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System.

Here is an example of how this kind of research-based framing works:

And here is an example of the messaging in action:

These are great suggestions for ways to talk about food issues.

Required reading!

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.”