Fabio Parasecoli.  Gastronativism: Food, Politics and Globalization.  Columbia University Press, 2021.  (226 pages)

My NYU colleague, Fabio Parasecoli, has just published this one.  I blurbed it:

Fabio Parasecoli draws on his deep international experience in this thoughtful analysis of how food gets ensnared in political ideology to separate “us” from “them.”  Gastronativism argues convincingly that food systems are indeed global, and the sooner we get those systems to bring people together, the better.

A few excerpts:

On the connection between gastronativism and populism:

Not by chance, some of most infamous manifestations of gastronativism have appeared in countries where these leaders operate.  Food is able to activate emotions and does not require much mediation; it is shared by everybody, everybody experiences it, everybody is an expert.  Gastronativism interprets people’s tangible experiences and frustrations as consequences of all-powerful, stealthy, and ruthless global dynamics, and it often does it through the language of victimization and suffrance.  Gastronativism provides a sense of rootedness, comfort, and security against the globalization. (p. 15)

On how gastronativism fosters a sense of community:

Instability has made the desire for community and rootedness more urgent, for good and for bad.  Food, as an expression of individual and shared identities, constitutes the perfect vehicle to make such aspirations tangible.  As such, the passions it elicits are ripe to be channeled ideologically.  Ideas of locality, nation, tradition, heritage, and authenticity have been activated in political projects operating at movements that range from anarchic anti-globalism to various forms of populism, nationalism, and sovranism, tainted at times with racism and xenophobia.

On gastronativism as a representation of “us” vs. “them”:

A deeper awareness of the political, non-neutral quality of all processes defining food traditions and the quest for authenticity can provide a better grasp of the dynamics that allow dishes, products, or customs to be experienced as “local” or “ours.” Understanding their emergence and changes over time and space would not diminish their emotional power, but it could blunt their exploitation by belligerent political actors. Appreciation and pride in one’s culinary world should not necessary imply debasing the food of the others… By chipping away at ideas of an ageless, essential “us,” greater awareness of the possible destructive impulses of gastronativist motivations and strategies could generate more openness toward “them,” whoever they may be.

The Environmental Integrity Project reports on The Clean Water Act at 50.  

The EIP was established by former EPA Attorneys to advocate for stronger environmental laws.

Here’s what this report found:

The bottom line: half of US waterways are badly polluted and “impaired.”

The report recommends that EPA do its job and enforce compliance with existing laws, and Congress pass stronger laws.

Advocates: get to work!

The departments of health and human services and of agriculture have issued a call for nominations to the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Candidates should have an advanced degree in a nutrition- or health-related field, with at least 10 years of experience in academia, research, or as a practitioner or other health professional in a field related to 1 or more of the scientific topics to be examined.

A nomination package must include a cover letter, contact information for the individual being nominated and the nominator (if applicable), and a copy of the nominee’s curriculum vitae or resume. Nominations may be submitted by email or mail. Learn more about how to submit a nomination. 

Why not give this a try?

I served on one of these committees in 1995.  Then, the committee:

• Determined which topics to research
• Did the research
• Wote the research report
• Wrote the actual Dietary Guidelines based on the research report

That process no longer exists.  All you will get to do is write the research report.

One other difference.  My committee was instructed to do the best job we could interpreting the research for the public.

Committes are now told that all recommendations must be research-based—tricky given the complexities of human nutrition research.

But never mind: reaearch committees have one advantage.  You can stick to the research and call it like it is.

So apply.  Nominate yourself.  Nominate your friends and colleagues.  You too can be part of history.

The UK government has just published its long-awaited food strategy to almost universal disappointment.

But first, some background. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the UK’s strategy proposals.  These had been commissioned from Henry Dimbleby, a restaurateur with a deep interest in food policy (the British version of Jose Andres?).

To summarize what I said in July 2021.

Henry Dimbleby described the UK’s National Food Strategy as  a “bit of a labour of love.”  It came a slide deck of 175 items.

A separate document. summarizes the report’s 14 recommendations.  Most of the recommendations dealt with school feeding and feeding programs for the poor.  Others:

Recommendation 1. Introduce a sugar and salt reformulation tax.  This came with a separate report on the impact of such a tax; it recommended using revenues to help get fresh fruit and vegetables to low income families.

Recommendation 11. Invest £1 billion in innovation to create a better food system.

Recommendation 13. Strengthen government procurement rules to ensure that taxpayer money is spent on healthy and sustainable food.

So, does the strategy do any of these things?  I have to confess finding the report unreadable.  It is extremely wordy and imprecise, talks a lot about objectives, but says almost nothing specific.  Here is just one example:

The strategy comes at a time of significant increases in food prices, largely because of energy prices and exacerbated by events in Ukraine, which is very challenging for people across the country. We are engaging closely with the food industry to understand price impacts and any mitigating measures, including through our Food Industry Resilience Forum and UK Agricultural Market Monitoring Group. We are also working closely with third sector organisations to understand challenges related to food access.

One section gives action items (I have edited these for clarity):

• Keep producing domestic food at current levels
• Promote job training for the agri-food industry.
• Reduce childhood obesity by half by 2030; reduce diet-related disease; increase healthier food
• Reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the environmental impacts of the food system
• Export £1 trillion of food annually by 2030
• Maintain high standards for food consumed in the UK

How?  It doesn’t really say.  The one action item I could locate is to create a Food Data Transparency Partnership.

The partnership will champion consumer interests, providing people with the information they need to make more sustainable, ethical, and healthier food choices, and incentivise industry to produce healthier and more ethical and sustainable food….This partnership will join up with existing work across government to promote healthier food choices, so that government can speak with one voice to industry. It will also support further measures to strengthen incentives to reformulate food, promote healthier food and turn the trend on the overconsumption of calories to tackle obesity.

Unsurprisingly, reactions have been fierce: not a strategy, disappointing, nothing concrete about obesity , health, or reducing meat as a means to address climate change.  If those things are there, I couldn’t find them.

I also couldn’t find The Guardian’s most amusing criticism of the report:

Among its few policy proposals are the suggestion there could be more fish farming, which is environmentally controversial, and an increase in the use of “responsibly sourced wild venison”.

Is that in the report?  I can’t find any reference to venison or deer, however sourced.

Other critiques in The Guardian are here and here.

This is a lost opportunity, and a big one.  Disappointing, indeed.

Today, we celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery ended in Texas.

Here’s a quick introduction to the food traditions, courtesy of the food historian Michael Twitty and Oprah Winfrey.

If you want to dig deeper, there is plenty to work with.  For starters:

And anything by Michael Twitty is worth reading.

David Gelles.  The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy. Simon & Schuster, 2022 (264 pages).

One good thing about being stuck in Covid quarantine (mild case: 3 days of fever but no other symptoms for the last 5 days), is that I got to read this book.  I think it is hugely important and makes a compelling, if depressingly realistic, case for how corporate profit-first ideology has badly damaged American democracy.

I’m a fan of David Gelles, who writes for the Times about corporate malfeasance.  I’ve also been interested in Jack Welch since I read an article in Fortune magazine about how a speech he gave in 2001 was responsible for kicking off the Shareholder Value movement.

This was the push to give stockholders immediate higher returns on investment and made growth in profits the sole corporate goal (a big shift from blue chip stocks like IBM, which promised slow but steady returns over a long time period).

Gelles explains what this did to corporations and what they then did to America.  Companies like Welch’s General Electric, which made toasters and household electrics, fired employees, outsourced labor, cut all possible costs, merged and acquired, manipulated earnings, and forgot about ethics let alone social responsibility.  Boeing, infamously, did the same.   Hence plane crasshes and deaths.

Other results: destruction of the environment, loss of manufacturing, and the evaporation of decent working- and middle class incomes and the transfer of their wealth to stockholders and especially to corporate executives.  Hence their obscene salaries and compensation.

Gelles also describes the widespread acceptance of profits first, the ignoring of its consequences, and the collusion of Wall Street and the government in this destructive system.

Food companies are no exception.  I have long attributed the push to sell ultraprocessed junk food—regardless of its health consequences—as a result of what Jack Welch started.

Interestingly, Gelles cites a food company, Unilever, as an example of a corporation that is trying to put social values back in the picture.

He says others should follow Unilever’s example, and cites the 2019 statements by the World Economic Forum and the Business Roundtable to suggest that maybe business is finally catching on to the need for change.  (See my incredulous post on these statements)

I think he may be too optimistic.  As he admits on page 223, this is what actually happened during the pandemic:

One study showed that companies that signed the Business Roundtable statement were actually more likely to announce layoffs in the first months of the pandemic than companies that didn’t sign the statement, and that the companies that pledged to serve all stakeholders actually distributed more of their profits to shareholders than those who didn’t publicly pledge to look out for the common good.

So much for promises.

As a Lancet Commission said early in 2019, if we want social values to matter in business, government is going to have to start regulating.  For that to happen, we need much greater demand from civil society.

This book makes a strong case for the need to change the way corporations operate.  Let’s get to work.

I found this discussion on David Allison’s remarkably useful weekly collection of articles about obesity and energetics.  His listings include articles in categories, one of them “Scientific Rigor & Scholarly Dialogue.”

I was particularly interested in this example:

• Article: Efficacy of Vitamin C for the Prevention and Treatment of Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. A Meta-Analysis in Children.
• Letter: Meta-Analysis on Vitamin C and the Common Cold in Children May Be Misleading.
• Reply: Authors’ Response to Letter to the Editor: “Meta-Analysis on Vitamin C and the Common Cold in Children May Be Misleading”.
• Retraction: Efficacy of Vitamin C for the Prevention and Treatment of Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. A Meta-Analysis in Children.
• Summary: Vitamin C and the Common Cold in Children: Severe Flaws in the Meta-Analyses by Vorilhon et al. (2019).

This took me back to one of my all-time-favorite research studies: Ascorbic Acid for the Common Cold: A Prophylactic and Therapeutic Trial.  JAMA;1975;231:1038-1942.

Linus Pauling wrote Vitamin C and the Common Cold in 1970.  NIH investigators wondered if there was anything to it.  They got 300 volunteers to take vitamin C or a placebo and measured the number of colds and their duration in both groups.

When they first looked at the data, it looked like the volunteers who were taking vitamin C had fewer and shorter colds.   Exciting!

But these were highly rigorous investigators.

They examined the data closely and noticed that an unusually large number of participants had dropped out of the trial, especially those in the placebo group (44%).  They guessed that participants thought they knew what they were taking and dropped out if they “knew” they were taking the placebo.

They reanalyzed the data to account for participants thought they were taking.

The final result: volunteers who thought they were taking vitamin C reported fewer and shorter colds, regardless of whether they were taking vitamin C or the placebo.

Those who thought they were taking the placebo had more and longer colds, regardless of whether they were taking the placebo or vitamin C.

Comment: This study provides compelling evidence for the placebo effects of vitamin C.  Placebo effects are powerful. I’m all for them.  The authors of the recently retracted study should have read this one first.

Carole Bartoletto, who works with dining services at UCLA, sent me two items.

• A toolkit to encourage dining halls to promote choices of meals with lower carbon footprints.
• A research study: Increasing the Selection of Low-Carbon Footprint Entrées through the Addition of New Menu Items and a Social Marketing Campaign in University Dining.

I started with the research study.

Its title requires translation.  Low-carbon footprint means plant-based.  In this case, it means Impossible brand plant-based meat alternatives.

Their intervention succeeded in encouraging substitution of Impossible for beef, but had unintended consequences.

Although the intervention was followed by a decrease in sales of beef entrées and increase in sales of plant-based meat entrées, sales of other vegetarian entrées also decreased.

Students replaced vegetarian choices with Impossible burgers?

To their credit, the authors acknowledge the problem.

It is also worth discussing the nutritional differences between plant-based meat and other low-carbon footprint options. In general, lower-carbon foods (i.e., plant-based and sustainably-raised fish) tend to be healthier, but this is not always the case. Plant-based meat products such as Impossible™ are ultra-processed and relatively high in sodium and saturated fat. Consuming ultra-processed foods has been linked with higher calorie intake and weight gain (Hall et al., 2019).

The toolkit, in contrast, includes Impossible products but does not focus on them.  It presents a variety of vegetarian and vegan options as low-carbon options with many illustrations of ways to present this information.

This could be useful, and maybe more useful, without the Impossible products, especially if the ultra-processed meal alternatives discourage choices of vegetarian options.

Take a look and see what you think.

Note: an educational intervention in Great Britain that also gave participants free plant-based meats found more of them sto be consumed, unsurprisingly.

ADDITION, July 1: I received this message in response to this post from Hannah Malen, at UCLA:

Dear Marion,

As one of your fans and newsletter subscribers, I was excited to see that you covered the low-carbon footprint dining intervention we did at UCLA! I collaborated with the innovative and talented folks at UCLA Dining as part of my dissertation work. It was an awesome experience to design, implement, and study a real-world intervention.

Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by your summary of the study. I felt your assessment overlooked some of the nuances that make this work challenging and important.

1) Low-carbon footprint does not mean only plant-based in this case. We created low-, medium-, and high-carbon footprint cutoffs based on life cycle analysis data and feasibility of real-world implementation. The criteria were created for the purposes of classifying menu items AND educating students about the relative impacts of different foods. Based on our criteria, low-carbon footprint included vegetarian menu items with < 2 ounces of cheese AND menu items with sustainable fish. I think this is worth noting because low-carbon footprint doesn’t have to mean ONLY plant-based or vegan…it also means some vegetarian items with cheese are NOT low-carbon footprint.

2) The decision to add Impossible plant-based meat alternative products to the menu was strategic and led by our Dining Director. As we know, it can be hard to appeal to meat-eaters, and Impossible-type products have been more successful than many other alternatives. While sales of the new Impossibile products did coincide with decreases in sales of other vegetarian items, I don’t think it’s accurate to say they discouraged choices of vegetarian options. We studied and saw shifts across basically all categories of menu items, which I think is a strength of the research. We also saw that overall, sales of low-carbon footprint items increased, while sales of medium- and high-carbon footprint items decreased. On average, this corresponded with an 8% decrease in the carbon footprint of entrees sold.

All this to say, it’s complicated, and I’m proud that we are among the first to look at the dynamics of introducing Impossible plant-based meat alternatives into food environments. Of course it’s ideal if eaters swap beans or veggies for meat, but the path to get there is certainly not easy.

Thanks for the opportunity to share our work and respond to your coverage. (And thanks to Carole for being a champion of the work and leader in creating the toolkit!)

Kind regards,

Hannah