The Rockefeller Foundation has a new report out: Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System.

The report summarizes what Covid-19 has added to our dysfunctional food system.  It proposes three goals:

• An integrated nutrition security system that treats access to healthy food as a right and embeds healthy food access as a core component of
  health and education
• Reinvigorated regional systems as part of a better-balanced nationwide food chain that includes diverse, agile, and prosperous local and regional food chains alongside a robust national chain, designed to serve all communities from rural to urban.
• Building more equitable prosperity throughout the supply chain.

It summarizes all this in one graphic.

The challenge, of course, is how.

This was in Sunday’s New York Times, on page 17 of the edition I get.

Smithfield is Big Pork.  It complains in this ad of critics who, it says, are “cynics and skeptics” who “don’t understand the notion of responsibility to others” and are “seeking opportunities to advance their activist agenda.”

Smithfield, the ad says, puts its “Smithfield family and country first.  By implementing aggressive measures to protect their health and safety during this pandemic.  By rewarding our team members on the frontline.”

The ad does not mention the number of Covid-19 cases among workers in its plants.

Fortunately, Leah Douglas of the Food and Environment Reporting Network is keeping track.

OK.  Smithfield is not the worst—that honor goes to Tyson.

The ad also doesn’t mention Smithfields lobbying to prevent lawsuits from injured “team” members.

Count me in as cynical, skeptical, and as activist as I can be on behalf of the workers in Smithfield plants who are forced to be there under close and dangerous conditions.

Want to know more?  The Counter explains what the ad is about in 12 tweets.

This Tweet got me started on farm payments.

Good point.  It sent me to John Newton who is an agricultural economist and lobbyist for the Farm Bureau.

The red sector is payments to agricultural producers and processors.  The tiny little sliver goes to food and nutrition.

All of this got me thinking.  What’s the Big Picture here?

Fortunately, Politico has done the work.

• ‘Here’s your check’: Trump’s massive payouts to farmers will be hard to pull back: The president was already spending double his predecessor to spare farmers the cost of his trade war. Now the price is reaching unsustainable levels.

And here are a few other comments on how this is playing out—with taxpayer dollars, recall.

• Million-dollar payments from USDA’s coronavirus fund:  A hog producer, Titan Swine, got the largest single payment during the first month of the USDA’s coronavirus relief program — $1.4 million — and it received two additional checks, totaling $1.1 million, on the same day, reported The Counter.
• A few farmers get huge USDA relief payments while many struggle for pennies.“The fall is going to be an apocalypse for small farms.”  From H. Claire Brown in The Counter.
• Millions of Dollars Heading to Farmers, but Small Farms Won’t See Much of it:  Advocates say young and disadvantaged farmers won’t benefit from the latest stimulus funds, and nor do those selling directly to consumers.

If ever we needed accountability—and rational agricultural policy—the time is now.

The FDA has just announced a Qualified Health Claim for Certain Cranberry Products and Urinary Tract Infections.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today in a letter of enforcement discretion that it does not intend to object to the use of certain qualified health claims regarding consuming certain cranberry products and a reduced risk of recurrent urinary tract infection (UTI) in healthy women.

Huh?

The FDA does not exactly approve health claims that are not backed up by scientific evidence.  It just doesn’t object to them.

This one, no surprise, comes in response to a request by Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc, which would love to be able to market its products as helping to prevent UTIs (which lots of people believe).

Here’s what the FDA says about the science.

After reviewing the petition and other evidence related to the proposed health claim, the FDA determined that the scientific evidence supporting the claim did not meet the “significant scientific agreement” standard required for an authorized health claim.

Hence, the Qualified health claim.

If Ocean Spray wants to use the claim, it has to put atatements like these on the label:

• For cranberry juice beverages: “Consuming one serving (8 oz) each day of a cranberry juice beverage may help reduce the risk of recurrent urinary tract infection (UTI) in healthy women. FDA has concluded that the scientific evidence supporting this claim is limited and inconsistent.”
• For cranberry dietary supplements: “Consuming 500 mg each day of cranberry dietary supplement may help reduce the risk of recurrent urinary tract infection (UTI) in healthy women. FDA has concluded that there is limited scientific evidence supporting this claim.”

Why does Ocean Spray want this?  Because believers will ignore the FDA disclaimers.  Ocean spray says:

To that end, Ocean Spray will use its medical attributes in the place they matter most–running a campaign on the WebMD site later this year. “We’re going to be all over WebMD,” he said, noting that the connection between cranberry juice and urinary tract health is the fifth most discussed topic on the influential health site.

Qualified health claims are about marketing, not science.

But I know how you feel.  UTIs are awful.  If all it takes is cranberry juice….

I just got the first copies of my forthcoming book with Kerry Trueman, Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health.

The publication date was supposed to be September 29 but University of California Press moved it up to September 1.  The y will also publish the e-book on September 1.

This means it can be used in fall classes (I’m using it in the NYU undergraduate class I’m teaching on Food Politics in the Covid-19 Era.

Information about the book and its Table of Contents are here.

You can read the Introduction here.

And UC Press sent me these photos.

It’s a tiny book, not much bigger than a coffee mug.

Here’s the back cover:

And here’s the first page of the table of contents.

A recent study confirms what we already knew: poorer people drink more sugary beverages than richer people.

This analysis suggests the richest 10% of families drink about 2.5 fewer sugary drinks a week than those in the poorest 10%.

These investigators found this relationship to hold up “even after taking into account things like education, race, gender, cognitive abilities and interest in nutrition.”

Drinking sugary beverages correlates with all those factors as well as with poor diets in general, overweight, the diseases for which overweight is a risk factor, and overall mortality.

I discuss the evidence for all that in my book, Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning).

Leah Douglas at the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN) is doing a great public service.  She has a website where she reports Covid-19 cases among workers in the food system.

These are not trivial.  As of July 24, she reports Covid-19 cases in:

• 370 meatpacking plants
• 139 food processing plants
• 74 farms and production facilities

As for confirmed cases:

• 37,197 meatpacking workers
• 4,635 food processing workers
• 4,927 farmworkers

She reports 188 deaths among these workers

• 168 among meatpacking workers
• 14 among food processing workers
• 6 among farmworkers

Here’s what this looks like:

Where is all this happening?  She’s got a chart for that too.

These places have a lot to answer for.

This is an American tragedy.