Meredith Li-Vollmer.  Graphic Public Health.  Penn State University Press, 2022.

Probably because of my cartoon book, Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics, I was asked to do a blurb for this book, which I was happy to do.

In her thoroughly up-to-date, informative, and useful book, Li-Vollmer convincingly argues for the effectiveness of comics in conveying health risks and desired behaviors.  She proves this point with splendid and deeply engaging examples, and provides an instructive how-to for creating your own. This book should be in every public health curriculum; it’s not only informative but also wonderful fun to read.

They only used the sentence in bold face (edited to convert wonderful to wonderfully).

But the rest explains why I think the book is worth reading.   Li-Vollmer works for Seattle’s health department and discovered comics as a way of communicating public health messages.  The book includes lots of examples of the work of comic artists explaining issues related to a host of public health issues.  Although none of the examples focus specifically on food issues, some briefly cover food safety, eating watery foods on hot days, and how climate change affects food production.

I think this is a great way to communicate public health issues.  New York City subway rider that I am, I greatly enjoyed the AIDS story that the New York City Health Department told in posters in the early 1990s.  As the New York Times explained,

Our story so far, as seen in 6,000 New York City subway cars, above the windows and between the advertisements for hemorrhoid, hernia, and foot doctors:

Julio and Marisol run into each other while visiting Raul Rodriguez, who is in the hospital with AIDS. They apologize for the big quarrel several episodes back, when Julio refused to use a condom and walked out. Their romance rekindled, they leave Raul’s room to get some coffee and talk things over.

Suddenly, Rosa bursts in. “I’m scared,” she tells Raul. “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m H.I.V. positive.”

Hundreds of reports of illness from eating Lucky Charms cereal have intrigued food safety experts.

The FDA is investigating, but being really cagey about it.

Everybody seems to know that reference number 1064 refers to Lucky Charms cereal.

The FDA has received 529 reports of adverse effects.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler has been following the situation.

Since late 2021, the crowd sourcing website iwaspoisoned.com has received 6,400 reports from people complaining of classic food poisoning symptoms of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea after eating Lucky Charms cereal. General Mills, the maker of the cereal, has said that is has investigated the situation and there is no apparent link between the reported illnesses and Lucky Charms.

The Washington Post quotes experts calling for a recall, Bill Marler among them.

Although, there has been no scientific proven link, be it chemical or an allergen, between the several thousand illnesses and Lucky Charms,” Marler said, “my advice to General Mills is to recall the product and reset its trust with the consuming public until more is known.

Is there a link?  Or is this just a matter of people getting sick, remembering they ate this cereal, and putting the two together—even though no cause-and-effect exists.

The watchdog Environmental Working Group has analyzed the approval process for new food chemicals.  Its disturbing conclusions:

Nearly 99 percent of all food chemicals introduced since 2000 were greenlighted for use by the food and chemical industry,…not by the Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for ensuring food is safe.

That’s because food and chemical companies exploited a loophole in the law allowing them to decide which chemicals are safe to consume, contrary to what Congress intended when it enacted food chemical laws in 1958….for 756 of 766 new food chemicals added to the food supply since [2000], or 98.7 percent, these companies have exploited a loophole for substances that are “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. The loophole lets them – not the FDA – decide a substance is safe.

The data:

Do we care?  I think we should.

EWG deserves thanks for keeping an eye on this issue.

Last week, the USDA announced its new Framework for Shoring Up the Food Supply Chain and Transforming the Food System to Be Fairer, More Competitive, More Resilient.

The Framework document is long and hard to read.  Here’s a summary:

Framework goals:

• Building a more resilient food supply chain that provides more and better market options for consumers and producers while reducing carbon pollution
• Creating a fairer food system that combats market dominance and helps producers and consumers gain more power in the marketplace by creating new, more and better local market options
• Making nutritious food more accessible and affordable for consumers
• Emphasizing equity

Framework actions: where the money goes:

Food production

• $300 million for an Organic Transition Initiative
• $75 million for urban agriculture

Food processing

• $100 million for the Food Supply Chain Loan Guarantee Program
• $375 million to expand independent meat and poultry processing
• 25 million for Meat and Poultry Processing Capacity Technical Assistance
• $275 million for credit access for processors
•  $100 million to support processing worker training and safety
• $200 million for Food Safety Certification for Specialty Crops
• $600 million to support food supply chain infrastructure

Food distribution and aggregation

• $400 million for regional food business centers
• $60 million to leverage commodity purchases through Farm-to-School
• $90 million to prevent and reduce food loss and waste

Food markets & Consumers

• $155 million for food access in underserved communities (Healthy Food Financing Initiative)
• $50 million for the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program
• $40 million for the GusNIP [Gus Schumacher] Produce Prescriptions Program.
• $25 million for SNAP technology improvements
• $100 million to create a Healthy Food Incentive Fund for schools

Civil Eats has an interview with Secretary Vilsack about all this.  Its point:

While it’s billed as a “transformation,” the framework does not change the foundational structures or practices of the American food system. It does, however, emphasize regionalism, support for organic and urban farming, and nutrition in new ways. That’s a significant shift for the agency, which has historically prioritized efficiency over all else.

The White House was also at work last week.  It released an Action Plan on Global Water Security.

Summary: FACT SHEET: Vice President Harris Announces Action Plan on Global Water Security and Highlights the Administration’s Work to Build Drought Resilience.

Strategies (Pillars):

• Pillar 1: Advancing U.S. leadership in the global effort to achieve universal and equitable access to sustainable, climate-resilient, safe, and effectively managed WASH services without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
• Pillar 2: Promoting sustainable management and protection of water resources and associated ecosystems to support economic growth, build resilience, mitigate the risk of instability or conflict, and increase cooperation.
• Pillar 3: Ensuring that multilateral action mobilizes cooperation and promotes water security.

Will any of this do real good?  Specific initiatives will benefit from the increased funding.

Transforming the food system?  Not quite yet.

I am not much of a fan of dietary supplements and have to admit to confirmation bias; I collect studies that provide evidence for skepticism about how well they work.

So when a reader, Arya Afrashteh, sent this study, I gave it some attention.

The study:  Dietary Supplements as Source of Unintentional Doping.  Vanya Rangelov Kozhuharov, Kalin Ivanov, and Stanislava Ivanova.  Biomed Res Int. 2022; 2022: 8387271. Published online 2022 Apr 22. doi: 10.1155/2022/8387271

The rationale:  Athletes are not supposed to take performance-enhancing drugs but they are permitted to take dietary supplements.  Are these safe?

Method: A review of the literature on unapproved substances found in dietary supplements.

Results: 875 of 3132 supplements contained undeclared substances.

Conclusion: ~28% of the analyzed dietary supplements pose a potential risk of unintentional doping.

Comment:  Between one-quarter and one-third of dietary supplements taken for performance enhancement contained unlabled substances that could test as unapproved drugs.

This is a result of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) that basically deregulated dietary supplements.  It took supplements out from under the control of the FDA.

All the FDA can do is write warning letters, which it occasionally does.

But unless the FDA is checking, you cannot be sure that what is in the supplements is accurately reflected by their labels.  Sports supplements, it seems, are prime examples of why this is a problem.

Caveat emptor.

Darra Goldstein.  The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food.  University of California Press, 2022.

Russia is in the news these days (to say the least) and here is food historian Darra Goldstein’s deeply nostalgic account of how Russians managed to create delicious meals under the worst of circumstances, from tsarist to Soviet times.  Some excerpts:

To explain the title and the cover:

At the heart of any traditional Russian meal lies black bread, a loaf of dense sourdough rye….so ingrained was rye in the Russian diet that by the late nineteenth century, 30 to 60 percent of the country’s arable land was annually planted in this crop, leading to a veritable “kingdom of rye.”  The peasants expressed reverence for their rye bread by holding the loaf close to the chest and slicing it horizontally toward the heart. Wasting breadcrumbs was considered a sin, and even into the late twentieth century, entire cookbooks were devoted to using leftover black bread (p. 9).

On dacha gardens in Soviet times:

The only sure way to guarantee the availability of staples like potatoes was to grow them yourself.  Most of the population, including a great many city dwellers, cultivated their own garden plots, which allowed them to endure periods of food shortages.  These private plots…created a significant second economy–one the government came increasingly to rely on, since the collective and state farms never managed to meet the nation’s demand for fresh produce (p. 89).

On the samovar:

The origins of the samovar’s design are murky, and it is unclear whether this vessel arrived in Russia from the East or the West.  The model may have been the Mongolian hot pot or the elaborate Dutch urns that had taps rather than spouts…Whatever its origin, the Russians adapted a foreign receptacle into a useful object that became not only very much their own, but one that epitomizes Russianness (p. 119).

The book is indeed brief, but enlightening.  It made me think of Anya Von Bremen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (Broadway Books, 2013).  Both are deeply appreciative of Russian cuisine (if that’s the right word), and ability of Russian cooks to take whatever was available and turn it into something edible and memorable.

Last week, the Biden-Harris Administration Announced “New Actions to Strengthen Food Supply Chains, Level the Playing Field for Growers, and Lower Prices for American Consumers.”

These follow up on promises made in July 2021 and January 2022 (I’ve written about these previously), so it’s not as if the meat and poultry producers haven’t been warned.

The new announcement specifically addresses the unfairness of current poultry production: Transparency in poultry grower contracting and tournaments.

I consider the system for raising chickens in this country an astonishing example of a monopoly-controlled business model.  In this model—brilliant from a business standpoint—big  poultry producers set all the rules and take most of the profits, leaving all the risks to the farmers who actually raise the chickens.

Even worse, this business model forces chicken farmers to compete against each other.  In what is called a “tournament” system, the farmers whose chickens gain the most weight get paid the most.  But which chicks they get to raise is determined by the producers.

As to how all this works and why it is so deeply unfair, it’s worth reading Leah Douglas’s Is the US chicken industry cheating its farmers?

The companies own and operate all the means of production, including the feed mills, slaughterhouses, trucking lines and even the hatcheries that develop the best strains of chickens.

Farms are the only part of the market these big companies don’t own. Independent farmers borrow millions of dollars to build sophisticated warehouses, where they raise hundreds of thousands of chickens at a time…Farmers raise the birds under contract with an integrated company, giving firms strict control over operations. The poultry companies own the chickens, the feed, and even control the chickens’ medical care. All farmers can do is try to raise the birds as efficiently as possible, even though most of the business is out of their hands.

The administration’s proposed rule is designed to increase transparency and accountability in this system.  Also,

USDA is opening an inquiry into whether some practices of processors in the tournament system are so unfair that they should be banned or otherwise regulated.

It’s about time.  I hope the administration moves quickly on the new rules.

The USDA has just released this summary of food research funding.

This graph clearly indicates what I view as a big problem: government funding for agricultural and food research has been declining since the early 2000s, whereas private funding—meaning corporations and industries—has sharply increased since 2008 or so.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Government funding can support basic research with no obvious commercial implications—science.

Funding by food corporations and industries has one primary purpose: to develop and promote products—marketing.

I’m not opposed to marketing research, as long as it is labeled as such.

The decline in federal funding for food and nutrition research has long-term implications for scientific progress.

We need basic research on agriculture, food, nutrition, and health.

These curves need to be reversed.