Food policy clinics at the Harvard and Vermont law schools have issued a new report—interactive no less.

The report argues that

our food system often works at cross-purposes, providing abundance while creating inefficiencies, and imposing unnecessary burdens on our economy, environment, and overall health. Many federal policies, laws, and regulations guide and structure our food system. However, these laws are fragmented and sometimes inconsistent, hindering food system improvements. To promote a healthy, economically viable, equitable, and resilient food system, the United States needs a coordinated federal approach to food and agricultural law and policy – that is, a national food strategy.

The strategy needs to focus on :

• Coordination: Create a lead office and an interagency working group, and engage local governments.
• Participation: Create an advisory council, develop methods for participation, feedback, and response.
• Transparency and accountability: Create a strategy document,  publish progress reports.
• Durability: Ensure updating, implement procedures.

Yes, it’s wonky, but if you download the pdf you get to weigh in on all this.

The New Food Economy’s Weekly Dish has a riveting piece about the debates over a proposal for an organic “checkoff” program.

Checkoffs are USDA-sponsored generic marketing and research programs for specific commodities.  They raise money from fees based on sales (the “checkoff”) that can be used for advertising campaigns such as the the dairy checkoff’s “milk mustache” or the pork checkoff’s “other white meat.”

Joe Fassler writes:

The proposed organic checkoff, technically termed the Generic Research and Promotion Order for Organic (GRO Organic), is unusual for many reasons, but the most unprecedented thing is this: rather than advocating for one single commodity, the program would represent a huge and diverse class of goods. …That means not just organic apple farmers and organic pple snack-peddlers, but organic cotton producers and organic chocolatiers, as well as organic winemakers from Napa and importers of organic white grapes from Chile. …Taken together, the fees are estimated to generate anywhere from $25 to $40 million a year for the industry to spend on advertising, consumer education, and research.

There’s just one problem. Many organic farmers feel the checkoff is a bad idea….while checkoff programs tax an entire industry, they don’t benefit all stakeholders equally. The organic program will have to overcome a stigma that plagues checkoffs generally: they serve the most powerful players, the processors and middlemen, at the expense of small producers. Checkoffs, simply, have a lot of baggage.

What that baggage is takes up most of the article.

If you want to understand checkoffs in general and the peculiarities of the organic one in particular, this is the place to begin.

The President announced his budget last week.

I’ve been asked to comment on what it means for food programs.

My quick and dirty answer: small-minded and mean-spirited.

The document lacks crucial details essential for interpretation, so you can only guess.

For USDA, for example, the document says the 21% cut in its budget:

• Fully funds the Food Safety and Inspection Service.
• Provides $6.2 billion for WIC (that’s a few hundred million below what it gets now)
• Provides $350 million for USDA’s competitive research program(that’s about what it got in 2016)
• Reduces USDA”s statistical capabilities (it doesn’t say by how much)
• Eliminates the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education program.  This program is tiny—$200 million in 2016–but it reaches more than 2 million people.  Will cutting McGovern-Dole make America great again?  Hard to imagine.

It cuts FDA’s department but says nothing about FDA’s food or food safety programs.

One problem is that you have to know how to read these things.  For example:

• The budget eliminates or sharply reduces Meals on Wheels, the program for senior citizens.  This is because it eliminates the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program.  Why get rid of it?  They say because it’s not proven to work—but it does.
• The National Institutes of Health will lose $6 billion.

The cuts are in programs that can be cut, the smaller and most vulnerable.  Hence: small-minded, mean-spirited.

Urge your representatives to resist!

Addition, March 21

Do not miss John Oliver’s analysis of this budget

Smith, Andrew F. Food in America: The Past, Present and Future of Food, Farming and the Family Meal. 3 vols. [Volume 1: Food and the Environment; Volume 2: Food and Health and Nutrition; Volume 3: Food and the Economy]. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2017.

The prolific and ever astonishing Andy Smith has done something breathtaking: produced a three-volume encyclopedia on the environmental, health, and economic implications of food–which he wrote in its entirety.

This is classic Andy Smith: well written, well referenced, highly accurate, and covering an enormous territory.  He introduces each volume with an historical chapter and ends them with invaluable appendices giving chronological timelines and providing landmark documents.  These last are wonderful to have in one place, although finding them is a challenge (there is no list at the front).

The work that must have gone into this is beyond comprehension.  I’ve done timelines myself and have some idea of the amount of research needed to produce one.  But he’s got three covering at least 200 years and in one case starting with the Ice Age.

If you collect food encyclopedias, as I do, you will want this one.

Here’s what’s in it:

VOLUME 1: FOOD AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Introduction 1
History 5
Controversies: Going Forward 81
Climate Change 83
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) 100
Fertilizer 114
Fish and Shellfish 126
Food Waste 143
Locavores 157
Organic 168
Pesticides 178
Sustainable Food 193
Water 205
Landmark Documents 219
Chronology of Landmark Events 345
Sources of Further Information 351
Index 361

VOLUME 2: FOOD AND HEALTH AND NUTRITION
Introduction 1
History 5
Controversies: Going Forward 77
Antibiotics 79
Diet 94
Food Additives 107
Food Insecurity 118
Food Labeling 129
Foodborne Illness 145
Obesity 159
Salt 173
Soda 184
Sugar 199
Landmark Documents 213
Chronology of Landmark Events 339
Sources of Further Information 347
Index 355
VOLUME 3: FOOD AND THE ECONOMY
Introduction 1
History 5
Controversies: Going Forward 83
Advertising and Marketing 85
Aquaculture 100
Fast Food 112
Food Corporations 126
Genetically Modified Food 141
Globalization 159
Industrial Farming 171
Labor 181
Meat 195
Megagrocery Chains 207
Landmark Documents 217
Chronology of Landmark Events 331
Sources of Further Information 339
Index 347

Yesterday’s New York Times reports about how the agricultural biotechnology company Monsanto is trying to cast doubt on evidence that its herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) is carcinogenic or otherwise harmful to human health.

The Times based its analysis on documents unsealed by a federal court in a case in which people are claiming that glyphosate caused them to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) determined a couple of years ago.

The documents indicate collusion between EPA officials and Monsanto over the IARC finding:

Court records show that Monsanto was tipped off to the determination by a deputy division director at the E.P.A., Jess Rowland, months beforehand. That led the company to prepare a public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication. Monsanto executives, in their internal email traffic, also said Mr. Rowland had promised to beat back an effort by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct its own review.

The documents confirm previous disclosures of Monsanto’s attempts to manipulate academic research.

The disclosures are the latest to raise concerns about the integrity of academic research financed by agrochemical companies. Last year, a review by The New York Times showed how the industry can manipulate academic research or misstate findings. Declarations of interest included in a Monsanto-financed paper on glyphosate that appeared in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology said panel members were recruited by a consulting firm. Email traffic made public shows that Monsanto officials discussed and debated scientists who should be considered, and shaped the project.

The Times article does not link to the actual documents, but these are posted on the Website of US Right to Know.

They make interesting reading.  Here, for example, is a quote from the first document, Jess Rowland unsealed, (page 4, lines 19-24):

Monsanto has made it clear throughout this litigation that it intends to rely on EPA’s conclusions in the defense of this case, particularly in this first phase of general causation. Based on these documents alone, it is clear that Monsanto enjoyed considerable influence within the EPA’s OPP, and was close with Mr. Rowland, who promised to try to “kill” the glyphosate issue for them; coincidentally, a report authored chiefly by him was “accidentally leaked” just at the time of his planned retirement.

Posted on March 14, 2017 by Gary Ruskin

If you are having trouble keeping up with articles about soda taxes, you are not the only one.  I’m trying to do this by dealing with one city at a time.  Here’s what’s come in recently about what’s happening in Philadelphia:

• The Mayor’s office has a summary of what the tax does.
• Fifteen health organizations have filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the tax and in opposition to the beverage industry’s lawsuit.  Here’s their press release.  And here’s the brief.
• Philadelphia Says Beverage Tax Has Created Over 250 Jobs For Pre-K Program
• Tom Frieden, former CDC director and former Commissioner of the New York City Health Department, says these taxes work
  ShopRite says the tax will result in layoffs
• Health Commissioner Thomas A. Farley says Philly’s beverage tax is working

Children are getting educated in prekindergarten. The city is taking the first steps toward a massive rebuilding of parks, recreation centers, and libraries. Nine community schools are helping students and their families. The city is meeting its revenue projections, and the soda industry says sugary drinks sales have declined…The soda industry claims that sales declines are forcing them to lay off hundreds of workers. This same industry spent $10 million and made plenty of misleading claims trying to kill the tax and is now funding a lawsuit against the city over it, so we should be skeptical of any unverifiable numbers they put out. It’s particularly tough to accept their claim that they have to lay off workers now, when they are still spending hundreds of thousands on advertising, lobbyists, and lawyers.

Addition

• Temple University blames increase in meal costs on soda tax

I am grief stricken to learn of the death of Carol Field, food writer extraordinaire, friend, and occasional travel companion.  The San Francisco Chronicle has a lovely obituary for her with wonderful photographs.

But here’s my personal favorite from a happy day at the octopus fountain in Monopoli, Italy, circa 1993.

I was sad to hear of the death of George Blackburn who, as the New York Times put it, “helped America eat better.”

He was an important influence on my career.  I first heard of him in the mid-1970s, when I was working at the medical school at the University of California San Francisco.  He and colleagues began publishing articles about the shocking extent of malnutrition—frank starvation !—in patients hospitalized for long periods of time:

• Bistrian BR, Blackburn GL, Vitale J, et al.  Prevalence of Malnutrition in General Medical Patients.  JAMA. 1976;235(15):1567-1570.
• Blackburn GL, Bistrian BR, Maini BS, et al.  Nutritional and metabolic assessment of the hospitalized patient.  JPEN J Parenter Enteral Nutr. 1977;1(1):11-22.
• Blackburn GL.  Hospital Malnutrition— A Diagnostic Challenge.  Dr Osier, Where Are You?  Arch Intern Med. 1979;139(3):278-279.

These papers spurred immediate self-searching at hospitals, leading to the creation of nutrition support services and development of teaching materials by the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition—very exciting events at the time.

But his other influence on my career was more personal.  In 1988, I was just finishing up two years in Washington DC as the managing editor of the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health.  This was a staff position that gave me no public credit for the writing, editing, and production supervision I had done on the report.  It was released that year, but it had not been an easy process.

Soon after its release, I gave a presentation about the report at a national meeting.  After my talk, Dr. Blackburn stood up and asked to make a comment.

What the audience needed to understand, he said, was that the report never would have appeared if it had not been for my work.  In essence, he gave me credit for everything that was good about the report, and shifted the blame elsewhere for its failings.

I am grateful for his exceptional kindness and generosity to this day. and will never forget him.