I cannot understand the revisionist attack on the work of Ancel Keys, who died at the age of 100 in 2004.  Most scientists are lucky to have made important contributions in one area.  Keys produced outstanding work in several:

• High altitude physiology
• The physiology of starvation (for this alone, he should be honored)
• Mediterranean diet benefits
• Heart disease epidemiology

The fuss, of course, is over this last one, particularly his role in the Seven Countries Study.  The arguments falls right into today’s absurd debate about sugar vs. fat as a cause of disease (absurd, because we don’t eat sugar or fat; we eat foods and diets that provide energy measured as calories).

What started off this most recent fuss is Ian Leslie’s The Sugar Conspiracy, which begins with the question “How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?”  This alone is a red flag.  “Everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong” is a sure signal for caution; that’s not how science works.

The attack on Keys’ work induced the True Health Initiative to develop a ​White Paper in defense (here’s its press release).  Its authors: Katherine Pett (who had written a blog post in defense), Joel Kahn (who also wrote a blog post) Walter Willet (long a champion of Mediterranean diets), and David Katz (who wrote about it in his own blog post).

In response, Michael Joyner pointed out that R.A. Stallones (a professor of mine at the School of Public Health at Berkeley) had made the same arguments years ago.

Another defense of Keys’ work comes from Kevin Klatt, a nutrition biochemistry PhD student at Cornell.

Sarah Tracy, a science historian at the University of Oklahoma, has been working on a biography of Ancel Keys for years.  I can’t wait for it to come out.  We need to have Keys’ life and work put in reasonable perspective.

While waiting for the fat v. sugar debate to resolve (I’m predicting it won’t), eat a healthy diet, enjoy what you eat, and be skeptical when writers write about nutrients, not food.

It never stops, but at last there is a suggestion that the saga of long delays in menu labeling may possibly be coming to an end.  Scott Gottlieb, the new FDA Commissioner, announced:

We recognize our obligation to provide clear guidance so that restaurants and other establishments that are subject to these provisions have clarity and certainty as to how they can efficiently meet the new menu labeling requirements…We have issued detailed regulations addressing what information should be provided in menus at restaurant chains and other similar retail establishments, as well as when and how that information should be provided….I am pleased to announce that we will provide additional, practical guidance on the menu labeling requirements by the end of this year…These new policy steps should allow covered establishments to implement the requirements by next year’s compliance date.

Although Gottlieb does not say so directly, this could mean that the FDA intends to put national menu labeling into effect in May 2018—the current, long-delayed deadline.

If this is what he is saying, it must mean that the big food chains—most of which already have menu labeling in place—are tired of the endless delays and just want the playing field leveled once and for all.

Let’s hope.

Note: For a brief but useful summary of the legal battles, see Dan Flynn’s analysis in Food Safety News.

Thanks to my colleague Lisa Young for taking this photo at the Magnolia Bakery in Manhattan.

Every now and then I see an article that seems like the most perfect indicator of food globalization; this one.

According to FoodNavigator-Asia.com, Fonterra, the New Zealand milk producer, is opening up a new milk production facility in Australia for one particular purpose: to meet the demand for cheese to top pizzas—in China.

Fonterra opened a $240m mozzarella plant to produce individually quick frozen (IQF) mozzarella in Clandeboye, New Zealand, last year, the largest producer of natural mozzarella in the Southern Hemisphere…40% of people in urban China now eat at Western style fast food outlets once a week, and the use of dairy in foodservice has grown by over 30% in five years</i>,” said Jacqueline Chow, COO, Global Consumer and Foodservice, Fonterra.

Where to begin?

• Dairy cattle in New Zealand have replaced the sheep.  The green sheep meadows are disappearing.  Formerly pristine waters are now polluted.  Why not in Australia too?
• The Chinese population is largely intolerant to lactose, the sugar in milk.  They can eat dairy products, but should they?
• Does anyone else think that replacing the traditional Chinese diet with heavily cheesed pizza might not be the best idea?
• Does anyone else find this mind-boggling?

The US, Canada, and Mexico have just finished the first round of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) negotiations.  Like all trade agreements, participants are looking for terms that will benefit them.

The U.S. objectives are on record (there are lots):

For agriculture, we want:

• Duty-free market access for agricultural products
• Reduced or eliminated tariffs for our products.
• Elimination of non-tariff barriers—quotas, subsidies, price discrimination and undercutting.
• Reasonable adjustment periods for regulatory changes
• Reduction in burdens caused by regulatory differences.

For “Sanitary and Phytosanitary”—food safety—measures, we want:

• Enforceable science-based measures
• Allowing countries to set their own levels of food-safety protection
• Expeditious resolution of unwarranted barriers to US food products
• Enforceable rules to ensure non-discriminatory implementation of science-based measures.
• Transparency in negotiations

Politico Pro Morning Agriculture has a truly wonderful summary of the positions of the three trading partners (if it’s behind a paywall, try this).

Timeline

• Round #1: ended on Sunday (Here’s the bland trilateral statement about it)
• Round #2: September 1-5 in Mexico City
• Round #3: September 23-27 in Canada
• Finish: before Mexico’s next election early in 2018

Want to know more?  Begin with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

• IATP summary of the issues.
• IATP’s portal site devoted to keeping up with the issues

Want to figure it out for yourself?

• The North American Free Trade Agreement, current version
• US Trade Representative’s home page on NAFTA gives an overview of its history
• US Trade Representative’s 2001 summary of early history
• Announcement of key dates in the runup to the negotiations
• Request for comments in the Federal Register
• Comments submitted on NAFTA
• Transcripts of hearing on NAFTA

The FERN’s Ag Insider summarizes its recent NAFTA coverage , and makes it available outside its usual paywall—a gift:

• On NAFTA, Mexicans will try to give Trump a ‘win’ without losing, 8/14/17
• Meet the farmers who say NAFTA hasn’t helped them, 8/7/17
• Perdue: New NAFTA mantra must be ‘Do no harm to agriculture’, 8/7/17
• Hand-wringing and hand-holding ahead of NAFTA talks, 7/30/17
• The ‘new NAFTA’ inspires anxiety on both sides of the border, 7/26/17
• White House says it will knock down NAFTA barriers, 7/18/17
• Trump meets with his ‘friend,’ Mexican President Nieto, for the first time, 7/9/17
• Is a slowdown in U.S. soy, corn, and poultry sales to Mexico a signal of the future?, 6/29/17
• NAFTA is mutually beneficial, say ag ministers, but needs to be ‘modernized’, 6/20/17
• With NAFTA on the horizon, U.S. deals with Canada and Mexico ag issues, 6/5/17

Enjoy!

Listing calories in chain restaurants, you may recall, was authorized by Congress as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

That was an astonishing seven years ago.  In the interim, the FDA wrote regulations, took public comments, rewrote regulations, scheduled them for implementation in 2017, and delayed them until 2018.

New York City, you might also recall, instituted menu labeling in 2008.  The world did not come to an end.

The City said it would go ahead and implement the federal version of the rules as originally scheduled.

The National Association of Convenience Stores objected (the industry has opposed menu labeling from the get go) and went to court to stop the City from doing this.

The FDA—a public health agency, mind you—is supporting industry in this suit.

Even if the City’s characterization of the FDA’s posture as a delay were correct, which it
is not, the City cannot rely upon a supposed void created by the agency to justify its position. As the Supreme Court has made clear, localities may not use the purported “failure of . . . federal officials affirmatively to exercise their full authority” as an excuse to “use their police power to enact a regulation” in a regulatory realm that is otherwise expressly preempted…[New York] may not choose to take its own path in the face of this clear expression of Congressional purpose.

The New York Times wrote about this, pointing out that since most chain restaurants are already in compliance with the law,” what’s the big deal?

I’m quoted:

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University, suggested that the latest delay was part of an industry push under the Trump administration to eliminate the federal menu labeling requirement altogether.

The longer the delay, the more the industry can fight it.

This is a consumer-unfriendly move on the FDA’s part, and not a good sign of what is in store for food politicies under FDA’s jurisdiction.

The CDC tracking of the papaya outbreak continues, with a score of

• Case Count: 173
• States: 21
• Deaths: 1
• Hospitalizations: 58
• Recall: Yes

All foodborne illness outbreaks are devastating for victims but fascinating for investigators, since each is different.

This investigation has traced the illness-causing Salmonella to one kind of papaya (Maridol, under Caribeña, Cavi, and Valery brands) to one Mexican farm (Carica de Campeche).

But four Salmonella strains have been found in papaya samples and in ill people:

• Kiambu
• Thompson
• Agona
• Gaminara

The shift from one to another is evident in the epi curve:

The moral:

• Don’t buy Maridol papayas.
• If you have one, throw it away (but be careful not to cross contaminate surfaces)
• If you don’t know where the papaya was grown, don’t eat it

If you are interested in the legal implications, check Bill Marler’s website.

Sustainable Food Trust has a report on a conference on the True Cost of American Food.

Health is the obvious cost, but others include:

• the cost of nitrate and pesticide pollution of ground and river water from agro-chemicals, which in some areas of the US are so high that the water industry is struggling to provide drinking water within legal limits,
• air pollution from CAFOs shown to be increasing respiratory infections and other diseases in people living nearby,
• the loss of biodiversity, including the decline of farmland birds and pollinating insects,
• soil degradation and erosion from continuous monoculture crop production,
• the human health costs to employees working in stressful conditions in food processing plants.

The American Farmland Trust and Growing Food Connections have published GROWING LOCAL: A Community Guide to Planning for Agriculture and Food Systems.

This is an enormously useful how-to guide to developing local food systems with lots of facts and figures .  Here is an example:

The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis , of all things, has issued “Harvesting Opportunity: The Power of Regional Food System Investments to Transform Communities.”

Harvesting Opportunity…highlights models for collaboration between policymakers, practitioners and the financial community, and discusses research, policy and resource gaps that, if addressed, might contribute to the success of regional food systems strategies.

New Food Economy has an analysis by Katy Kieffer on who really owns America’s farmland

While urban commercial real estate has skyrocketed in places like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., powerful investors have also sought to turn a profit by investing in the most valuable rural real estate: farmland. It’s a trend that’s driving up costs up for the people who grow our food, and—slowly—it’s started to change the economics of American agriculture.