Food Politics

by Marion Nestle
Apr 5 2019

Weekend reading: Movable Markets

Helen Tangires.  Movable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City.  Johns Hopkins Press, 2019. 

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Why did Paris destroy Les Halles?  Why did New York City move the Fulton Fish Market to the Bronx?  People who remember these places still mourn their loss. 

This book explains why such moves were inevitable.  They happened as a result of concerns about sanitation and crowding, the introduction of trucks, the need for parking, and the high cost of inner city real estate, and that’s just for starters.

I did a blurb for this one:

In investigating the social, economic, and political forces behind the removal of beloved city food markets—Les Halles in Paris, New York’s Washington Market, for example—to more efficient but far less colorful out-of-town locations, Helen Tangires has given us a refreshingly new take on the history of twentieth-century food systems.

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Apr 4 2019

Coming soon to a supermarket near you? GMO salmon

Now that the FDA has approved production of GMO salmon, here they come.  Next month, a land-enclosed fish farm in Indiana will start raising these fish.

These, you will recall, are salmon bioengineered to grow throughout the year.  They end up much bigger than wild salmon.

These have been a long time coming.  As I’ve written previously,

One big question with farmed salmon is what to feed them.  They need sources of color (there’s a dye, asthaxanthin, for that) and of omega-3 fatty acids (other fish?).

Indiana is the leading soybean-producing state.  Maybe these salmon have a handy food source?

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Apr 3 2019

Close the Mexican border? Farewell to avocados!

President Trump’s threat to close the border with Mexico will have a major effect on one beloved food: avocados.

Thanks to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, the impact we can expect is obvious from this one chart:

US production has not changed much since 1990 or so.  If anything, it has dropped in recent years.

Pounds of avocados available per capita have increased from less than one in 1990 to more than seven pounds now.  That’s the pounds available to every man, woman, and baby in the country, less exports, plus imports.

All of the increase comes from imported avocados.

Of imported avocados, more than 89 percent come from Mexico.

Reuters says if the border closes, we run out of avocados in three weeks.

The Washington Post says if the border closes, avocados could be—toast (I’m quoted).

Ouch.

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Apr 2 2019

Uh-oh. Salmon farms are not meeting eco-certification standards

Here’s a report that’s been sitting in my “to post” file way too long.

This SeaChoice report is another blow to the reputation of farmed salmon:

SeaChoice looked at audits of 257 salmon farms between 2014 and 2018 to see whether the farms met standards of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.  To be certified, farms must meet 100% of the standards.

Some did, but most did not.  The results?

Farmed salmon raise many environmental issues.  If these data are correct, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council needs to do a much more rigorous job—and be much more critical—of salmon farms seeking certification.

Caveat emptor.

Tomorrow: what’s happening with GMO salmon.

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Apr 1 2019

Industry-funded study of the week: chocolate milk for teenage athletes

After the debacle over Fifth Quarter Fresh that I wrote about in Unsavory Truth, you might think that sellers of chocolate milk would stop trying to prove it anything other than a sugary milk drink.  But no, here’s another one.

Chocolate Milk versus carbohydrate supplements in adolescent athletes: a field based study.  Katelyn A. Born, Erin E. Dooley, P. Andy Cheshire, Lauren E. McGill, Jonathon M. Cosgrove, John L. Ivy and John B. Bartholomew.  Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (2019) 16:6.

Method: “Participants were randomly-assigned to receive either CM [chocolate milk] or CHO [carbohydrate] immediately post-exercise.”

Conclusion: “CM had a more positive effect on strength development and should be considered an appropriate post-exercise recovery supplement for adolescents.”

Funder: Dairy MAX [“nonprofit dairy council representing more than 900 dairy farm families across seven states”].

Comment: The premise of this study is that drinks containing a combination of carbohydrate and protein have been shown to provide better recovery from vigorous exercise than drinks containing carbohydrate or protein alone.  Chocolate milk contains both.  This study compared it to a carbohydrate-only sports drink, making this an excellent example of how to design a study to give you the desired result.

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Mar 29 2019

Weekend reading: Introduction to food sociology

Anne Murcott.  Introducing the Sociology of Food & Eating.  Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

I read an early draft of the manuscript of this book and recommended publication.  The publisher used my remarks as a blurb (with my permission, of course):

An interesting approach by a well-qualified and experienced author.  The book takes on controversial issues of great interest to students using an entertaining writing style.

This is a textbook that aims to teach critical thinking about current food issues.  By “interesting approach” I was referring to the way Murcott structures the chapters.

The chapter titles state some common idea about food—for example, “The family meal is in decline.”  The chapters examine what the issue is about, describe the methodological and other biases that led to such conclusions, and then go on to explain how sociologists think—theoretically and practically—about each issue, and how they approach studying such issues.

Murcott says she wrote the book to encourage readers to think differently about food issues with which they are already familiar, “and to continue thinking differently.”

This works well for that purpose.

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Mar 28 2019

Environmental Working Group: Pesticides in Produce

I am often asked about pesticides on fruits and vegetables, how serious a problem they are, and how to avoid them.  I don’t know how harmful they are; the research is too hard to do definitively.  But I generally favor the Precautionary Principle: while the science is pending, avoid them as much as you can.  Here’s how.

The Environmental Working Group has released its annual lists of the most and least pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables.

EWG’S DIRTY DOZEN FOR 2019

  1. Strawberries
  2. Spinach
  3. Kale
  4. Nectarines
  5. Apples
  6. Grapes
  7. Peaches
  8. Cherries
  9. Pears
  10. Tomatoes
  11. Celery
  12. Potatoes

The report emphasizes:

  • More than 90 percent of samples of strawberries, apples, cherries, spinach, nectarines, and kale tested positive for residues of two or more pesticides.
  • Multiple samples of kale showed 18 different pesticides.
  • Kale and spinach samples had, on average, 1.1 to 1.8 times as much pesticide residue by weight than any other crop.

EWG’S CLEAN FIFTEEN FOR 2019

  1. Avocados
  2. Sweet corn
  3. Pineapples
  4. Frozen sweet peas
  5. Onions
  6. Papayas
  7. Eggplants
  8. Asparagus
  9. Kiwis
  10. Cabbages
  11. Cauliflower
  12. Cantaloupes
  13. Broccoli
  14. Mushrooms
  15. Honeydew melons

See the full list of fruits and vegetables.This results may sound cute, but this report comes with impressive supporting material:

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Mar 27 2019

GAO’s 40-year plea for better oversight of food safety

Food safety seems very much on the agenda this week.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released its latest biennial High Risk list of programs “vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or that need transformation.”

Of interest is this listing: Improving Federal Oversight of Food Safety. The report finds not much change from goals set two years ago; the goal for an action plan is still not met:

Without a government-wide performance plan for food safety, Congress, program managers, and other decision makers are hampered in their ability to identify agencies and programs addressing similar missions and to set priorities, allocate resources, and restructure federal efforts, as needed, to achieve long-term goals. Moreover, without a centralized collaborative mechanism—like the FSWG [Food Safety Working Group]—to address food safety, there is no forum for agencies to reach agreement on a set of broad-based food safety goals and objectives that could be articulated in a government-wide performance plan on food safety.

The GAO explains why inadequate federal oversight of food safety poses a high risk.  Safety issues, it says,

are governed by a highly complex system stemming from at least 30 federal laws that are collectively administered by 15 federal agencies. For more than four decades, we have reported on the fragmented federal food safety oversight system, which has caused inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination, and inefficient use of resources. We added federal oversight of food safety to the High-Risk List in 2007. In recent years, moreover, we have made recommendations aimed at helping to reduce fragmentation in federal food safety oversight. As of November 2018, two of three recommendations related to this high-risk area had not been implemented.

In 2017, I wrote about how the GAO has been calling for decades—more than 40 years—for better coordination of food-safety oversight, and my post lists a selection of GAO reports dating back to 1970.

The GAO is still at it.

We should not give up either.

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