Currently browsing posts about: Food-systems

Read these and you will be up to date on anything known about food systems in the age of COVID-19.

FAO and Hopkins Dashboard

This gives data on aspects of food systems—supply chains, food environments,  consumer behavior, diets and nutrition, and the effects of key drivers like climate change and income, 170 indicators in all—on the food systems of 230 countries and territories.  This is one-stop shopping for this kind of information.

• Press release 
• The Dashboard 

“What struck us back in 2017 while working on the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition Report was the lack of accessible, organised, quality-checked information on food systems. Without that data, it’s difficult to identify the best evidence-based actions that could improve food systems,” said Johns Hopkins Global Food Ethics and Policy Program Director Jessica Fanzo. “It was really important to us, given the level of complexity and interconnections inherent to food systems, that the data be presented in a way that is easily usable – and that’s what the Dashboard does. Now decision makers have easy access to both data and to policy advice that is specific to their situations.”

Oxfam: “Exposed: How US supermarkets are failing their workers in a global pandemic”

Oxfam analyzed the formal policies of major US supermarkets during the first months of the pandemic, including Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, Kroger, Walmart, and Whole Foods/Amazon in five key areas: paid sick leave, hazard pay, protective gear, engagement with workers and worker representatives, and gender and dependent care. While all of these supermarkets stepped up some of their policies, none of them are doing nearly enough as they continue to make outsized profits on the backs of their low-wage workers.

Here are the Press release and the report.

CGIAR: Actions to Transform Food Systems Under Climate Change

Nothing short of a systemic transformation of food systems is required if we are to feed the world’s current and future population sustainably under climate change…we aimed to identify the high priority actions that we must collectively take now, for climate change adaptation and mitigation in food systems.  [Note: CGIAR was formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, but now goes just by CGIAR]

Here is the report.

HLPE [High Level Panel of Experts] 15: Fooc Security and Nutrition: Building a Global Narrative Towards 2030.

Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HLPE was asked to urgently prepare an issues paper on the potential impact of the pandemic on global food security and nutrition for an extraordinary meeting of the CFS on 19 March 2020. The key findings and recommendations from this issues paper have been updated and included in this report…The current COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented in its global scale and the situation is changing rapidly, with many unknowns. It serves as a reminder of the fragility of the global food system and the importance of global coordination.

Here is the report.

Tim Lang. Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them.  Pelican, 2020.  

I reviewed this book for The Lancet.  The online version is here.

Although Lang wrote his book before the COVID-19 pandemic, it thoroughly explains the governmental weaknesses that led to the UK’s food vulnerability and delayed and inadequate response to the crisis. Lang could not be more expert; he knows the British food policy scene from the inside, having started his career as a hill farmer, spending decades as a food advocate, academic, and adviser to domestic and international agencies, and having written previous books on food systems. His purpose here is to convince British politicians to take food issues seriously, to assume moral and political leadership, and to transform the UK’s food system to one that is more self-sufficient, more resilient, and better able to reduce food insecurity, prevent obesity, and reduce environmental damage.

I’ve been collecting sources of information about the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic on food systems.  Here are some with information that might be useful.

US Right to Know: Coronavirus Food News Tracker: Best articles on the pandemic and our food system

Hunter NYC Urban Food Policy Center: COVID-19 Food Resources and Guides

Coronavirus affects everything in the food system.  Here’s what it’s doing to ethanol and alcoholic beverages.

Fuel ethanol

Q.  What does fuel ethanol have to do with food politics?

A.  About 40% of America’s corn crop is used for ethanol for cars, as a result of the fuel standards law requiring ethanol to be blended into gasoline.

Comment: Growing corn for ethanol seems absurd to me, particularly because the energy gain is so low—about 2% according to the USDA.

With that said, Covid-19 is unquestionably bad for the fuel ethanol business.

• Ethanol plants are in trouble.  People aren’t driving cars as much or using gas.
• Only about half as much ethanol is being used as was used last year—the lowest since 2010.
• The USDA is not providing emergency funding for biofuels.
• Corn farmers are upset.  There is less of a market for their overplanted corn.

Booze

Alcoholic beverage companies that donate to Coronavirus causes are seeing huge increases in sales—as much as a tripling.

But beer has a problem.  It—and sodas and seltzers—need carbon dioxide gas to make them bubbly.  Ethanol plants collect this gas as a byproduct.  If they shut down or reduce output, the gas supply goes down.  Expect shortages.

If Covid-19 does any good at all, it is to illustrate the interconnections and contradictions of our often bizarre food system.

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems has produced a useful report, COVID-19 and the crisis in food systems: Symptoms, causes, and potential solutions

The lockdowns and disruptions triggered by COVID-19 have shown the fragility of people’s access to essential goods and services. In health systems and food systems, critical weaknesses, inequalities, and inequities have come to light. These systems, the public goods they deliver, and the people underpinning them, have been under-valued and under-protected. The systemic weaknesses exposed by the virus will be compounded by climate change in the years to come. In other words, COVID-19 is a wakeup call for food systems that must be heeded.

Covid-19 has three lessons for systems

1.  Industrial agriculture is driving habitat loss and creating the conditions for viruses to emerge and spread.
2. A range of disruptions are testing the resilience of food supply chains and revealing underlying vulnerabilities.
3.  Hundreds of millions of people are living permanently on the cusp of hunger, malnutrition, and extreme poverty, and are therefore highly vulnerable to the effects of a global recession.

Its recommendations

1. Take immediate action to protect the most vulnerable
2. Build resilient agroecological food systems
3. Rebalance economic power for the public good: a new pact between state and society
4. Reform international food systems governance

Comment: This thoughtful, well documented report establishes a strong basis for action.  If only….

Fabio Parasecoli.  Food.  MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. 2019.

This is the latest work of my NYU Food Studies colleague, Fabio Parasecoli, a prolific scholar and writer.  The book is explained as:

A consumer’s guide to the food system, from local to global: our part as citizens in the interconnected networks, institutions, and organizations that enable our food choices.

The book is a short (200 pages or so), small-format set of seven chapters on food systems, health and nutrition, the environment, technology, hunger, and what’s next.

Here’s an quick excerpt from a section in the Health/Nutrition chapter subtitled “Looking for easy solutions.”

Superfoods offer simple–and lucrative–answers to very complex problems: rather than dealing with changes of habits or diets or trying to understand intricate metabolic functions, their consumption assuages the concerns connected with ingestion.  The attractiveness of superfoods and exotic or traditional remedies is also related to the diffusion of an approach to eating and health that has been described as nutritonism, characterized by “a reductive focus on the nutrient composition of foods as the means for understanding their healthfulness, as well as by a reductive interpretation of the focus of these nutrients in bodily health,” with little concern for the level or processing or quality.  Consumers attuned to such approaches shift their attention from foods to individual nutrients: polyphenols in red wine are good antioxidants; lycopene in tomatoes can prevent certain kinds of cancer….Why worry about a balanced diet when you can make up for any deficiencies by consuming vitamins, fiber, or fortified foods? (pages 68-69).

A man after my own heart, obviously.  This is a short, easy introduction to most of the major food system issues under discussion today.  It also comes with a useful glossary.

Full disclosure: I read and commented on an earlier draft of the nutrition chapter and like the way it—and the other chapters—came out.

I ran across an interview with the chef José Andres in Departures, the luxury goods magazine.  Sprinkled among the ads for things I can’t imagine ever buying is a Q and A with Andres who, in addition to running a lot of restaurants, founded World Central Kitchen to feed people hit by disasters.

Adam Sachs asked the questions.  Here is the one that got my attention.

Q:   If you could change one thing in the American food system, what would it be?

JA:   First, we need to diversify the crops the government supports through subsidies.  We need to help small farmers across America grow more fruit, more vegetables.  And then put those fruits and vegetables into the school-lunch program and hire more veterans and train them to be cooks and work in those school kitchens, one rural school at a time, so that we are employing our veterans, giving our children better nutrition, which leads to better studies and a better future in the process.  Right now we are investing in subsidies that go to just a few grains like corn.  It’s making America unhealthy, and it’s making America less safe, because without a diversity of crops one day we will have a big problem with our food production.

The entire interview is worth a read.

I’m an Andres fan.

Kevin D. Walker.  The Grand Food Bargain and the Mindless Drive for More.  Island Press, 2019. 

I did a blurb for this one:

A former USDA insider’s account of what our Grand Food Bargain—a system focused on ever-increasing production of cheap food—actually costs Americans in poor health, environmental degradation, and loss of agrarian values and community.  Walker’s views are well worth reading for his insights into how our food system needs to be transformed

Some snippets:

• Early farm bills, sold to the public by promising more food with less uncertainty, were designed to stabilize food prices and increase farm income.  Eight decades later, new farm bills are still being enacted despite average farm income long ago surpassing non-farm income and continuing food surplus.  Each new bill is an increasingly costly grab bag of subsidies and protections, which invariably attracts more interest groups and lobbying.  Other than loose connections to agriculture, no coherent policy direction exists (p. 91).
• Narrow [scientific and technical] expertise alone, for example, does not address the connections among rising rates of obesity, exhaustion of fossil waters, escalating nitrous oxide in the atmosphere, noxious weeds immune to legacy pesticides, growing antibiotic resistance—all the result of how the modern food system operates and how society now lives (p. 114).
• As sophisticated financial strategies are grafted onto the modern food system, more mergers and acquisitions by ever-larger multinational companies follow.  Food is no longer valued for its ability to sustain life, but only for its ability to generate profits.  Whether higher returns come from squeezing farmers under contract to grow pigs or poultry, creating a monopoly on seeds that can be doused with chemicals, or selling food laden with cheap calories makes no difference (p. 141).

Walker’s remedy?  Let food be our teacher.  It’s worth reading what he means by this.