Food Bytes: February 2024 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

As I write this, snow is floating across New York City, deeply settling me into a wintry, sedate state. Lately I have been dreaming about feeling the sun on my skin, eating juicy peaches, and wearing flip-flops…I do this every year. I yearn for crisp, cold days during the dog days of summer, but then, the blue winters come along, I long for heat, long days, and not having to spend 20 minutes layering clothes just to get out the door. That said, nothing beats homemade, hearty soups that my better half cooks up that last for several meals and doubling down on double-feature movies in the evenings. Speaking of food, let’s get to what the food world has been up to this past month – there is a lot to cover.

Scientific papers

This paper, “Health-Environment Efficiency of Diets Shows Nonlinear Trends over 1990-2011” by Pan He is getting lots of traction. They developed an indicator and applied it, as Kate Schneider (lead author of the Food Systems Countdown paper) wrote, “that builds on long-observed correlates of increasing levels of development, that is, the co-occurrence of ‘bads’ (for example, rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from greater animal-source food consumption, rising risk of diet-related non-communicable disease) and the ‘goods’ (for example, the decline in child and maternal malnutrition, increased incomes and more education). With this health–environment efficiency metric, the authors sought to understand how efficiently food systems use environmental inputs to generate health outcomes.”

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They show that as countries economically grow and “develop,” they tend to see improvements in health and nutrition outcomes (reductions in undernutrition). With continued development, they see animal-source food consumption increase, with concomitant environmental degradation. This is not surprising, but it is interesting to see this indicator used to prove further the nutrition transition and how critical it is to consider planetary health with human health through our food systems. The figure to the right shows the change in dietary efficiency along with socio-economic development.

Rachel Gilbert and colleagues (including my buddy, the great Will Masters) published a fantastic paper in World Development that looked at food imports and their retail prices across 144 countries. They found that lots of food is traded worldwide, and almost half face tariffs (at a rate of 6.7%). Which foods had the highest tariffs? Vegetables, fruits, and animal-sourced foods. Where? Low- and middle-income countries, but they only account for a small portion of the cost of the diet per day. Most of the food prices consumers pay are domestic value add-ons once the foods have arrived in the country. I think I got that right…

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Although this paper came out in 2023, it is an important one by Matias Heino and colleagues. The paper shows the impacts of combined hot and dry extremes as well as cold and wet extremes on major crop commodity yields (of course…)— maize, rice, soybean, and wheat—between 1980 and 2009. They show that co-occurring extremely hot and dry events have globally consistent negative effects on the yields of all inspected crop types. Extremely cold and wet conditions reduce crop yields globally, too, although to a lesser extent, and the impacts are more uncertain and inconsistent. Check out the figure to the left.

Biodiversity is in free fall, which can impact both nature scapes and people. We know that agriculture and urbanization are two of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. This paper by Awaz Mohamed et al examined how much natural habitat is needed to ensure humans have access to the benefits of biodiversity, such as diverse food production (soil, pollination, etc.), high water quality, homeostatic climate regulation, and improved green spaces. They find that benefits significantly decline when habitat area falls below 20%–25% per km2, and 2/3 of agricultural and urban areas fall below this level globally.

Reports

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The Food Systems Economic Commission finally came out. It was a long time coming. The report assessed one specific science-based transformation pathway for food systems, which could benefit both people and the planet. This pathway is called the Food System Transformation (FST). Estimates of those benefits, measured as reductions in the unaccounted costs of food systems, amount to at least 5 trillion USD per year. When the full effects of a global food system transformation on incomes are factored in, estimates of its benefits rise to 10 trillion USD annually. See the figure to the right that shows this power of transformation.

Podcasts

I listened to two really good podcasts this past week. The first is hosted by Ambrook Research (I highly recommend receiving their weekly newsletter). It is called The Only Thing That Lasts, and in the first episode, they delve into the potential loss of U.S. farmland (spurred by the fear that Bill Gates seems to be buying it all up).

The other podcast is Barbecue Earth, a six-part podcast about meat as a commodity, the powerful industry behind meat, and a major reason our planet is overheating. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosts it. The first focused on hogs…It will make you think twice about putting bacon on your egg cheese sandwich.

Media, Social and Otherwise

Eater has made life easier for you by guiding you where you should eat in 2024. Interestingly, neither New York nor London is mentioned. Good for them. But have no fear New Yorkers, this guy has been flaneuring around Gotham attempting to eat a meal representing every country in the world. He is almost there…

This will get some agronomists riled up. Here is a webinar hosted by the Rodale Institute (which has a certain world view of food systems) on the differences between organic versus conventional agriculture systems – and how these “stack up” from agronomics, carbon footprint, and economic perspectives. Guess what the conclusion is? :)

TV and movies

We have been watching season 4 of True Detective with Jody Foster and the awesome Kali Reis. It is filmed in a fictional town, Ennis, Alaska (although filmed in Iceland). It is assumed that we are in the far northern reaches of Alaska, where the community experiences complete darkness. It is inspired by North Slope Borough, a town on the northernmost point of Alaska, approximately 50% of which comprises indigenous populations. In the show, the water is contaminated (likely from mining operations), but of course, I always notice the diets. There are lots of highly processed, packaged foods, which makes some sense because of the remoteness. In real life, in many of these indigenous communities, their traditional diets are healthy but are disappearing. Much work has been done to understand how diets have changed in the northern territories of Canada and Siberia. In Northern Alaska, among the Inupiat, the Yup’ik, and other traditional communities, many elderly are trying to preserve their traditional diets. Still, conserving these dietary patterns is getting harder and harder for various reasons.

Art Meets Food

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Curious to know the most iconic food paintings? Check this out. The Normal Rockwell one is just downright creepy, but I always have time and space for Edward Hopper (who lived down the road from one of Columbia University’s campuses in Nyack, New York).

 The Clash has a song, “Lost in the Supermarket.” It’s a great song, and I think many of us can relate when entering these goliath spaces meant to nourish us. As Joe Strummer sang,

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for a special offer
A guaranteed personality

Last thoughts

Our good friend Cheryl Palm passed away this past month from a rare and devastating disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She was a giant in the world of food systems and made massive contributions to land-use change, degradation and rehabilitation, and ecosystem processes. Here is a lovely tribute from our Earth Institute friends at Columbia University. I love this photo of her in her younger years, full of life. That is how I choose to remember her.

Food Bytes: October 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

It is hard to find the time to read, let alone write about what you read. One of the things about reading scientific literature is that you have to weed through many journals’ tables of contents to find the nibbles and nuggets that are worth your time. Sometimes, you get lucky and find some gems; other times, you don’t get further than the abstract. Regardless, if you don’t have LinkedIn or X, spoon-feeding your biased and “like-minded lemur” content, the never-ending search for quality papers is laborious and time-consuming.

Enter documentaries and podcasts. I find myself more and more listening to them to get a synthesis of a topic or a deep dive into an issue or scientific discovery. There is no shortage of food podcasts, but most focus on cooking and gourmandery. But a few goodies discuss the politics of food and the history of food. I try to add them to the Resource section of The Food Archive. I found this particular episode of the podcast, “What You’re Eating,” fantastic on the confusion of egg labels. The host lays out the issues and clarifies where your eggs come from and how to understand the labels on those confusing cartons better.

Two food documentaries worth the watch are Poisoned and How to Live to 100, Wherever You Are in the World. Let’s take Poisoned first, about how “unsafe” the U.S. food supply is, although often touted as being one of the most secure. The documentary starts with the contaminated burgers from Jack in the Box, which killed and sickened a slew of people. After lawsuits and regulations, getting sick from E. coli-contaminated hamburger meat is hard now. It shows that it works once governments can set their mind to something and put in strict and enforced regulations. Enter vegetables. After watching the show, I am not sure I will ever eat romaine lettuce again…much of it is grown right next to concentrated animal feed operations (where beef is raised in the U.S.). The manure runs off into waterways,  and the water from those said waterways irrigates the nearby lettuce crops. And then bingo! You’ve got severe contamination issues. It is worth watching to understand how food is produced in this country, how it is regulated, and how you can be safer with food in your kitchen.

How to Live to 100 is hosted by Dan Buettner, who wrote Secrets of the Blue Zones. He has been studying why, in some places, people live such long lives – sometimes beyond 100 years. He travels to Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California — where more people live significantly longer than average. He summarizes some of their secrets to longevity into four basic mantras. Keep in mind these populations all get to their winter years in different, contextualized ways, and it is never that straightforward why someone lives a long life and others die too early. Dan argues these four lifestyle changes help:

• Make movement a habit

• Have a positive outlook

• Eat wisely

• Find and connect with your tribe

There are a lot of valuable lessons in this documentary (sans Dan showing himself riding his bike for 1/3 of the docuseries. Why do documentarians always have to show themselves so much? I digress…). One lesson is that no matter how long you live, you can live your best life and one of high quality. A lot of that centers around food. And wine. Yay!

The NY Times Magazine had two fantastic articles last week. David Wallace-Wells wrote a piece on the financial responsibility for climate change and how difficult it is to figure out the historical tally of damage. The price of historical emissions and removing carbon would cost $250 trillion. The U.S. alone has accrued a climate debt of $2 trillion. By 2100, $100 trillion. This shows how daunting it will be to turn around the damage we have done and will continue to do without serious action on climate change.

Another NY Times Magazine article focuses on young migrant kids from Central America who work night shifts in slaughterhouses – a dangerous, low-paying job – with very little compensation or legal status. They are often too tired when they get to school after working long, laborious hours all night, and often, they get maimed, injured, or exposed to terrible toxins that stay with them for a lifetime. It is a tragic story but so important to read to understand why younger kids and teens are trekking up to the U.S., what they face along the way and when they get here, and the fine line to ensuring their freedom. While it seems we have come a long way from the days of The Jungle, written in 1906 by Upton Sinclair of the Chicago slaughterhouses, this article makes you pause. Your heart will break for Marcos Cux.

And for some self-promotion, my team and colleagues published a few papers in the last six months that may be of interest to Food Archive readers:

• Challenges and opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of food reformulation and fortification to improve dietary and nutrition outcomes: This article is about how reformulation and fortification face numerous technical and political hurdles for food manufacturers and will not solve the issues of increased consumption of ultra-processed foods. You can’t make junk food healthier at the end of the day…

• Harnessing the connectivity of climate change, food systems, and diets: Taking action to improve human and planetary health: This paper presents how climate change is connected to food systems and how dietary trends and foods consumed worldwide impact human health, climate change, and environmental degradation. It also highlights how specific food policies and actions related to dietary transitions can contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation responses and, at the same time, improve human and planetary health. While there is significant urgency in acting, it is also critical to move beyond the political inertia and bridge the separatism of food systems and climate change agendas currently existing among governments and private sector actors. The window is closing and closing fast.

• A global view of aquaculture policy: This article shows that government policies have strongly influenced the geographic distribution of aquaculture growth, as well as the types of species, technology, management practices, and infrastructure adopted in different locations. Six countries/regions are highlighted – The EU, Bangladesh, Zambia, Chile, China, USA, and Norway. These case studies shed light on aquaculture policies aimed at economic development, aquaculture disease management, siting, environmental performance, and trade protection. 

• Riverine food environments and food security: a case study of the Mekong River, Cambodia: Rivers are critical, but often overlooked, parts of food systems. They have multiple functions supporting the surrounding communities' food security, nutrition, health, and livelihoods. However, given current unsustainable food system practices, damming, and climate change, most of the world’s largest rivers are increasingly susceptible to environmental degradation, with negative implications for the communities that rely on them. Rivers are dynamic and multifaceted food environments (i.e., the place within food systems where people obtain their food) and their role in securing food security, including improved diets and overall health.

Barriers to a just, sustainable dietary transition

As world leaders meet to discuss grand global challenges, like climate change, over champagne cocktails this week here in NY, my friend and colleague, Chris Barrett and company asked to write about what I think are the main barriers or challenges to a just, sustainable dietary transition. Hmmmm. Where to even start?

The overarching major challenge is the inequities in the ability of many people to access (physically, economically, and socially) what is considered healthy, safe, and sustainable diets. Ironically, many of these same people are the food producers for the world. Accessing these diets and adapting will only get more complex if we stay on a business-as-usual course in the context of climate mitigation and adapting to climate-related extreme weather events.

There are many reasons for this lack of access that could cut across inefficiencies across food supply and environments and demands for specific kinds of food that put the world on a dangerous course. However, there are a few barriers that I would like to highlight. This summary focuses on food systems. However, many systems and sectors are responsible for meeting this goal, such as health, economics, education, and urban/rural development.

The first challenge is unrealistic goal and recommendation setting. Goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals provide a universal road map for how we want the world to be in seven years. Still, not every goal is relevant, meaningful, or a priority for every country. Recommendations for food system transformation are often made as generalities, not articulating who is responsible, for what, and by when. They also do not indicate how these recommendations can be translated into action ‘on the ground’ in the context of established interests and constrained budgets.

The second challenge is data gaps. High-quality analytical methods and tools to collate, curate, and analyze data across food systems; integration of data sets across disciplines; and new empirical research to solve the grand challenge of sustainable development (Fanzo et al., 2020). These data gaps bring about difficulties in navigating unintended consequences or trade-offs. While there are many gaps across food systems science, I focus on diets here.

We remain unclear on what people consume, why, and their barriers to accessing healthy, sustainable diets. Global dietary intake data that are nationally and subnationally representative remain sparse. Most countries do not consistently and systematically collect individual dietary intake data, and the existing data are often based on models relying on household expenditure and consumption survey data, food balance sheet data, or data from subpopulation nutrition surveys. Although these modeled estimates may give us a sense of dietary intake and patterns of consumption, they are an uncertain substitute for robust, representative individual dietary intake data reflecting recent consumption patterns at a national level, particularly in low- and middle-income contexts. Collecting robust longitudinal dietary data would allow researchers and policymakers to understand better how diets change over time and why.

The third challenge is the politics across food systems governance. As one example, the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) and its stock take in July 2023 is not without uncertainties and controversies, with rumblings of it all being grandiose political wonk talk. With summits, there are always questions about impact. Will all stakeholders be included? Will the needs of the vulnerable and marginalized be prioritized? Will there be a sense of urgency to scale up investment? Will there be any accountability mechanism to track commitments and hold those to account who fall behind? If this is the mechanism for food systems change and for governments to engage, these questions are critical to understand and act on.

While addressing effective governance is a sticky issue, more and more, we as researchers must engage in this space if we are to see evidence come to bear in policy- and decision-making.

Building Stronger Food Systems in the Face of Global Shocks

I recently wrote a report for the Farm Journal Foundation on the current global food system crisis and the U.S.'s role in supporting small-scale producers by ramping up agricultural development assistance. A summary is below, and the full report can be found here.

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Over the past few years, the world has faced a series of unprecedented shocks that have pushed farmers and our global food system to the breaking point. The COVID-19 pandemic, international and regional conflicts, including the war between Russia and Ukraine, and extreme weather events caused by climate change have come together to create a true “polycrisis” – significantly impacting food, fertilizer, feed, fuel, and finance available to farmers. These challenges have been extremely difficult in their own right, but worst still, they have left humanity vulnerable to any future “black swan” moments that could have severe and far-reaching consequences for global food supplies.

Recent shocks have led to high food prices and worsening hunger and malnutrition around the world. This polycrisis has disproportionately negatively impacted small-scale producers and people living in low-income, food-deficit countries who spend most of their incomes on food. Smallholders generally have low levels of agricultural productivity, high exposure to climate change and other threats, scarce assets, and poor access to information, technology, markets, and services – increasing their vulnerability to shocks.

Because Russia and Ukraine are major crop producers and fertilizer suppliers, a key input to help smallholder farmers increase their crop yields, the war between the two countries has significantly impacted global food and nutrition security. Trade bottlenecks, initially caused by the COVID-19 pandemic but compounded by the Russia-Ukraine war, have further exacerbated the crisis. Structural challenges to food systems in developing countries, including farmers’ lack of access to markets and finance, poor storage and transportation infrastructure, which contribute to food loss and waste, and persistent disempowerment of women in agriculture, mean that countless farmers and food producers were already teetering on the edge of survival; additional burdens stemming from the polycrisis have pushed many into disaster. Consumers around the world have also faced enormous pressure, as disrupted agricultural supplies have led to rising food prices and lower availability and affordability of nutritious foods. New research has shown that even modest increases in the prices of staple foods leads rapidly to negative nutrition impacts from deteriorating diet quality as low-income families shift away from more nutritious and expensive foods, including vegetables, fish, and eggs, in order to afford the increased costs of rice, wheat, maize, or other dietary staples.

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A global map of the number of people with acute food insecurity, mid-2022

Through its whole-of-government Feed the Future initiative, the U.S. has an important role in enabling farmers and food systems in developing countries to withstand shocks better. Supporting global food and nutrition security is in America’s best interest both from an economic and national security standpoint. Studies show that U.S. investment in international agricultural development, research, and innovation benefits both developing countries and U.S. producers and consumers, far exceeding its costs.

Key Recommendations

Agricultural research and development (R&D) can help developing countries address their own unique challenges and shore up local food systems to withstand shocks better. Unfortunately, there have been significant decreases in inflation-adjusted U.S. and multilateral investment in food systems R&D to countries and universities in recent years, and important institutions, including CGIAR have seen fluctuations in research funding.

The U.S. government is uniquely positioned to lead investments in international agricultural research by virtue of its unparalleled capacity from the federal, university, private sectors and to generate benefits that would simultaneously help smallholder farm families around the world and American farmers and ranchers. The U.S. can strengthen its portfolio by providing additional resources to initiatives such as CGIAR, U.S. Feed the Future Innovation Labs, and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), and by partnering with institutions with long histories of designing and delivering research for development overseas, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Within this context, the U.S. should consider targeting additional research funding toward the following areas to increase impact:

1. Climate change adaptation and mitigation: The impact of climate change on agriculture is expected to intensify in coming years, and more investments are needed to improve smallholder resilience, productivity, and incomes. Areas that need increased research investment include drought-resistant crop varieties, better on-farm water management and improved irrigation, more precise fertilizer application, and additives to cattle feed to improve feed efficiency and/or reduce enteric methane emissions.

2. Soil health and nutrient management: More research is needed into solutions that can reduce global dependence on Russian fertilizer. The U.S. should consider investing in R&D and partnering with the private sector to develop and scale up green fertilizer, biofertilizers, fertilizer alternatives, and innovations that boost fertilizer efficiency and nutrient uptake.

3. Crop diversity and nutrition: Low productivity, high production risks, and insufficient diversification towards producing more nutritious foods are critical drivers of the elevated cost of healthy diets, especially in low-income countries. More research should focus on developing sustainable and scalable production methods for various crops, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, improved forages for climate-smart animal nutrition, and where appropriate, biofortification and fortification of crops and food. In addition, more research is needed to improve the affordability of animal-source foods, such as fish, eggs, and dairy, that would enhance both nutrition and livelihoods.

4. Access to markets and finance, especially for women: Research could focus on how to address barriers to smallholders’ access to credit and market information, ways to develop new market linkages, innovative financing models, and partnerships with development banks to expand lending to farmers, and how to improve farmer organizations’ capacity to negotiate with buyers.

5. Supply chain infrastructure: Inadequate food storage, poor road infrastructure, limited food preservation capacity, and the lack of physical access to food markets, especially for perishable foods, lead to significant food losses and inefficiencies along supply chains in many developing countries. Innovations focused on the infrastructure needs of small-scale producers and strategies developed to address those needs could help attract additional investment on-farm and across the entire food system.

6. Local capacity building: Giving voice and agency to local producers allows for their participation and leadership in R&D funding and prioritization decisions. Without their engagement from the start, adoption of technologies and other R&D tools produced could be futile. It is also critical to ensure that R&D investments do not cause unintended negative consequences, burdens, or harms, particularly for women who already face significant hurdles.

Food Bytes: March 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (Almost) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

So much going on in food and nutrition these days that it is hard to keep up. In looking at what has been published in the last month, three areas dominate ultra-processed foods, climate change, and blue foods. Let’s take each and highlight the latest and the greatest.

Ultra-processed foods: What are ultra-processed foods (UPFs), may you ask? Basically, junk food. But we scientists have to come up with fancy terms and categorize everything. UPFs are a very broad category of foods that generally are made from highly processed, industrialized ingredients not found in the home or in restaurant kitchens. These foods are designed to be hyper-palatable, often conveniently ready-to-eat, shelf-stable, transportable, strongly marketed, and, ultimately, highly profitable. More and more research shows that these foods are detrimental to various health outcomes (obesity, diabetes, cancer, morbidity, mental health, etc.) and could be potentially addictive and environmentally destructive. California, which always leads in food governance (blame it on the hippies), is growing worried about what exactly these foods contain. They are considering banning a number of staple ingredients found in these foods. I cannot even begin to source the sheer amount of literature coming out demonstrating the impact of these devilish foods, but here, here, and here are a few good systematic or meta-reviews. This Wired layperson article is a good summary. If you want to read two people who lead in the science of UPFs, read Carlo Montiero or Kevin Hall. Regardless of all the science coming out, their sales are increasing across almost every region of the world. Why? Well, they are cheap, have a long shelf life, are easily stored and transported for long periods of time, and are damn tasty.

IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, 2023: Key Summary Figure

Climate and food: Hard too to keep up with everything going on. The most significant update is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, has come out with a synthesis report on how much time we have left before the world falls apart. They are surprisingly and cautiously optimistic, arguing that there is still time to address climate change before things start “gettin’ hot in here.” Food is heavily featured in this synthesis report, thanks to our AgMIP friends at Columbia University. They argue that food security and nutrition are and will continue to be significantly impacted, particularly in resource-constrained settings and among smallholder farmers. They also offer a range of mitigation and adaptation strategies, including agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) options with reduced deforestation in tropical regions, shifting to sustainable healthy diets, reducing food loss/waste and intensifying sustainable agriculture (they even mention urban ag!).

When I asked Google’s new AI system, Bard, what was the latest science published in “food systems” in the last week, this is what they spit out:

Here are some recent research on food systems:

• A new study found that the global food system is responsible for about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the food system's emissions are mainly caused by the production of meat and dairy products, as well as the transportation of food.

• A new study found that the global food system is also responsible for about one-third of all water use. The study, published in the journal Nature Water, found that the food system's water use is mainly caused by the irrigation of crops, as well as the production of meat and dairy products.

• A new study found that the global food system is also responsible for about one-third of all land use. The study, published in the journal Nature Land, found that the food system's land use is mainly caused by the production of crops, as well as the grazing of livestock.

These are just a few of the recent research on the global food system's impacts on the environment. The food system is a major contributor to climate change, water pollution, and land degradation. These impacts are likely to become more severe in the coming years, as the global population continues to grow.

Not too shabby, but a bit outdated (and they don’t provide any citations). Interesting how AI is set to become such a game-changer, and yet, as an expert, asking Bard to do a bit of research, it is pretty generic and lacks scientific nuance, which can be dangerous…Here are some even more recent papers out this week on food systems and climate from a flawed human perspective:

• Ivanovich and colleagues at Columbia University (see a pattern?) published a paper in Nature showing that if we continue on our current food consumption patterns, this will add 1 °C to an already warm planet by 2100. Most of this warming is driven by what is called high methane foods (methane is another toxic greenhouse gas) like livestock, dairy, and rice (yes, we cannot blame it all on those cute cow creatures). If we made some of the changes mentioned in the IPCC report above, we could cut 55% of that warming.

• Another paper, again published by Columbia University peeps (they are on a roll), called for more studies to better show how the food security of households and communities is impacted by climate-related shocks. They argue that most studies only examine food production and availability, not access or utilization.

• And last, and this is self-promotional, a few of us put together an analysis trying to understand if the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet was adequate in nutrients (we didn’t look at environmental impacts or other health impacts, and we are not suggesting to do so). This particular analysis shows that the diet is inadequate in vitamin B12, calcium, iron, and zinc. The EAT-Lancet may not be happy with these results but this is what science is all about — debating on a level playing field, DISproving one’s hypotheses, and not being wed to ideologies. I am not sure right now that everyone at the so-called proverbial table looks at science similarly and instead holds fast to their worldviews, which worries me. But a lot is at “steak.” The EAT-Lancet Commission part has been downloaded over 6,000 times in 4 years. That is pretty insane. So to go against that, dissect it, calls to do it better next time around, or at least look carefully at the data, in which multiple people analyzing the dataset, is, well, what science and the pursuit of truth is all about. But putting one’s arm out to be potentially severed. Bottom line: This paper is about the trade-offs that are par for the course with a grand food systems transformation.

Showing tradeo-offs of policy bundles: Crona et al Nature 2023.

Blue foods: More and more, and this is long overdue, blue foods, aka seafood, aka aquatic foods, are getting more attention. The Blue Foods Assessment highlighted their importance from multiple angles - important contributors to a nutritious diet, some species’ environmental sustainability, their risk of climate threats, and contributors to livelihoods. Some fantastic articles have emerged recently, including a fantastic paper by Christina Hicks and colleagues examining the injustices associated with aquatic food systems. Another paper summarized the BFA around 4 policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints, and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. However, trade-offs always exist, just as above. The figure shows these — the question is, what trade-offs are we willing to live with? And last, on blue foods, the great Roz Naylor at Stanford published a policy landscape paper in Food Policy (thanks, Chris Barrett!) on aquaculture. I had the pleasure of working with her on this. Through a series of case studies, she presents a state-of-play on how aquaculture is playing out globally, and again, where those policy priorities elicit trade-offs that can be detrimental to the environment or nutrition. Check it out.

Global food system transitions in the last 50 years: what have we learned so far?

We recently published a paper on food system transitions in Nature Food.

Food systems across the world have undergone tremendous changes in the last 50 years, shifting from more rural-based to industrialized and consolidated systems, resulting in both positive and negative impacts across various outcomes, including diets, nutrition and health, environmental sustainability, and livelihoods. In this paper, a food systems typology was used to examine how food systems transitioned historically. Food systems have enabled enough food to be grown to keep pace with the rapidly increasing population while reducing devastating famines that caused hundreds of millions of deaths, but with that great acceleration has come trade-offs and new challenges, particularly with climate change, ecosystem resilience, and deepening issues of inequity, which hamper progress to ensure all people are well-nourished.

This typology has five categories: (1) Rural and traditional, (2) Informal and expanding, (3) Emerging and diversifying, (4) Modernizing and formalizing, and (5) Industrial and consolidated. Categorization is based on the agricultural value-added per worker, dietary change as reflected by the share of dietary energy from staples grains and cereals, urbanization, and supermarket density, which are all closely related to economic growth.  The food system typology covers 155 countries and 97% of the world’s population, with 30-32 countries in each category, as illustrated in the figure below.

Source: Marshall, Q., Fanzo, J., Barrett, C.B., Jones, A.D., Herforth, A. and McLaren, R., 2021. Building a global food systems typology: a new tool for reducing complexity in food systems analysis. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, p.432.

Our analysis reveals that although the affordability of a recommended diet has improved over time, current food systems of all types are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all.  Six ‘outlier’ country case studies show broad trends, trade-offs, and deviations: Tajikistan, Egypt, Albania, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the United States of America.

Key Findings

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Source: Ambikapathi et al. 2022 Nature Food

1.  Recommended diets have become more affordable as food systems have transitioned from rural to industrialized, although access depends on poverty levels which vary within food system types. The figure on the right shows how dramatic the difference is in who can afford a healthy diet.

2.  Increasing diet affordability is a function of multiple forces related to overall structural and rural transformation and food system transition. The process of transition determines who within countries can access an affordable diet.

3.  While food affordability is high, food system objectives to minimize environmental and climate change consequences and to improve nutrition and health outcomes are not being adequately met. Check out the figure to the right that shows the proportion of GHG emissions from each of the eight food system supply chain stages (land-use change, production, processing, packaging, transport, retail, consumption, end of life) across the five food system typologies. In general terms, land-use change and production practices constitute the primary sources of GHG emissions of all categories. However, as food systems transition from rural to industrialized, the share of these two main sources of emissions changes.

4. The reality of current food system transitions across the typology is far from a sustainable food system transformation. Such a transformation towards sustainable food systems will require addressing these challenges directly and setting a global agenda with equity, nutrition, and the environment at its core. In many cases, this agenda will challenge historical trends and processes that have led us to where we are today.  

5. The future will not look like the past and indeed cannot look like the past if we are to achieve sustainable food system transformation. Latecomers to the process of structural transformation face a very different world and a much more challenging economic context. The very process of food system transitions incurred by countries further along with structural transformation and the negative environmental and nutritional outcomes they engendered has changed the parameters of success for future transitions. This, coupled with variation in performance across countries within the five categories of the typology, suggests that we will see unique and heterogeneous patterns of food systems transition.

Implications

1.     Effective policies include reliable and well-targeted safety nets, school feeding programs, equitable distribution of land with appropriate environmental management and tenure policies and creating employment that provides increasing incomes relative to food prices to achieve affordable, nutritious diets.

2.     Food system transformation towards sustainable food systems will require setting a global agenda with equity, nutrition, and the environment at its core.

3. There are clear future research needs. More in-depth country-level case studies and high-quality sub-national data are needed to identify a range of effective solutions and the political economy tensions that hinder sustainable food system transformation.

Food Bytes: October 2022 Edition

Food Bytes is a monthly blog post of “nibbles” of information on all things climate, food, and nutrition science, policy, and culture.

It’s been a long while since I posted a Food Bytes edition, and so much has happened in the food space in the past year. First, a UN Food Systems Summit happened, but I remain quite unclear on what was achieved or what will come of the year-long work leading up to the event. Second, a devastating conflict between two breadbasket countries trudges on, putting food security concerns back on the geopolitical agenda. Third, extreme weather events, many related to climate change, unrelentingly warn us that our ability to feed a world of 8 billion (yikes) is precarious and precious. But science is there to nudge us, generating new knowledge on why we and every other species are here, what accelerates us, what destroys us, and where we are heading. Charles Mann wrote in The Wizard and the Prophet (a stellar book about William Vogt and Norman Borlaug’s discordant visions to feed the world):

Another thing this book is not: a blueprint for tomorrow. The Wizard and the Prophet presents no plan, argues for no specific course of action. Part of this aversion reflects the opinion of the author: in our Internet era, there are entirely too many pundits shouting out advice. I believe I stand on firmer ground when I try to describe what I see around me than when I try to tell people what to do.

I resonate with these sentiments. Even though science is plagued by warts, hiccups, and flaws, catalyzing evidence and data to help describe the world matters because it helps us understand nature, people, and the planet. With that background in mind, this month’s Food Bytes is all about highlighting the science community’s observations and uncertainties of a changing world and what it means for food systems and climate change. I purposely do not highlight the work of my team and collaborators, but if you are curious about when we do, you can look here.

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Source: McKay et al. SCIENCE 9 Sep 2022 Vol 377, Issue 661 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950

Let’s get the dark stuff out of the way. A paper by David Armstrong McKay and colleagues updated data showing that holding at 1.5°C will trigger multiple climate tipping points. What are these tipping points? Things like ice sheet “collapses,” forest “diebacks,” and permafrost “abrupt thaws” (see the figure to the right). These terms are downright scary but very plausible under different modeling scenarios. Okay, onto more uplifting news — KIDDING! Another study has shown that over the last 40 years, the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world, also known as Arctic amplification. These are massive global shifts that will further warm the planet, creating all kinds of chaos. What does it mean for us wee creatures living in our humble abodes? Well, the news is not totally uplifting on that front either. We are and will be deeply impacted by climate — and no one is immune. Research by Sylvia Blom and colleagues showed that repeated, extreme heat shocks impact early child nutrition — both chronic and acute malnutrition. They show that in 5 West African countries, a 2 °C rise in temperature will increase the prevalence of stunting by 7%. As the two latest 2022 Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change Reports on adaptation and mitigation, also known as the IPCC, argue, we still have time to act, although when you read it, you may want to have a nice glass of scotch in hand. While the window remains open, it is closing, and fast. We need to make massive changes to the way we live, much of that involving our use of resources. A recent Nature Sustainability paper showed that no country meets basic needs—such as nutrition, sanitation, and access to electricity—for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. To meet needs, we need to use resources somewhere between 2-6 times more to meet everyone’s needs. Gulp. Just take a look at the difference between the United States (a) and Sri Lanka (b) in the figure below. Blue wedges show social performance relative to the social threshold (blue circle), whereas green wedges show resource use relative to the biophysical boundary (green circle). The blue wedges start at the center of the plot (which represents the worst score achieved by any country), whereas the green wedges start at the outer edge of the blue circle (which represents zero resource use). Wedges with a dashed edge extend beyond the chart area. Ideally, a country would have blue wedges that reach the social threshold and green wedges within the biophysical boundary. Look at the inequities comparing the two countries!

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Source: O’Neill, D.W., Fanning, A.L., Lamb, W.F. et al. A good life for all within planetary boundaries. Nat Sustain 1, 88–95 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4

The research and science in understanding the impacts of climate change on food systems and vice versa are growing exponentially. It is hard to keep up with the literature and weed out the noise. One area that deserves more attention is the impact of food trade on global greenhouse gas emissions and the environment—particularly land-use change—a significant source of emissions coming from food and agriculture. A study showed that 27% of land-use emissions and 22% of agricultural land are related to international trade (2004-2017)—food products consumed in a different place from where they were produced. The largest land-use emission transfers come from Indonesia and Brazil to China, the U.S., and Europe. A PLoS paper examining the future of trade shows that if we keep managing and governing global trade as is, food systems will be misaligned with dietary health and sustainability outcomes.

Perhaps one solution is through changing agriculture subsidy policies. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published their annual SOFI report and highlighted the need to transform agriculture subsidy programs around the world towards those that generate and produce healthier food products. Marco Springmann at Oxford modeled the impacts of subsidy policies that focused on nutritious foods and found multiple benefits across both environment and health. I am really uncertain about the political appetite to change subsidies. Talk about vested interests… Speaking of priorities, Ben Davies and colleagues argue that making big transformative policy changes across food systems is wonderful, but don’t do it “on the backs of the rural poor.” Although there are 2.7 billion people engaged in small-scale food production and 1.1 billion people concomitantly living in extreme poverty while working in agriculture, they are often ignored in the “transformation” story.

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Affordability of a healthy diet grouped by five different food system typologies, showing transition of food systems. Source: Ambikapathi, et al Nat Food 3, 764–779 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00588-7

Positive transformation of food systems is not easy as history suggests. As Ramya Ambikipathi shows in a recent Nature Food paper, food systems have shifted from predominantly rural to industrialized and consolidated systems. Historically, incomes have risen faster than food prices as countries have industrialized, enabling a simultaneous increase in the supply and affordability of many nutritious foods. Evolving rural economies, urbanization, and changes in food value chains have accompanied these transitions, leading to changes in land distribution, a smaller share of agri-food system workers in the economy, and changes in diets. While the affordability of a recommended healthy diet has improved over time, food systems overall are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all. Another fantastic paper by Jeff Waage and colleagues in Lancet Planetary Health shows the complex and risky relationship between agriculture and infectious disease, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries that are undergoing rapid food system transitions. They remind us that lessons can be drawn from COVID-19 and the rise of zoonotic spillover events within food systems should be prioritized (and minimized) on the political agenda.

Ensuring that everybody gets access to and consumes a healthy diet will remain a global challenge. The metrics, indicators, and data in understanding what people eat and why are improving. Just check out the Global Diet Quality Project, which collects dietary quality data in the adult population across countries worldwide using the Gallup poll and provides tools to monitor diet quality within countries. Wow. I hear rumblings of a global report coming out soon, so stay tuned. There has been a whole range of papers coming out on diet quality. Victoria Miller at Tufts University is on a roll. In one recent Nature Food paper, she examines diets across 185 countries from 1990 to 2018 using the Global Dietary Database (estimates and modeled). Their assessment shows that diet quality is modest at best but varies significantly depending on where you live, how old you are, and how much education you have. No surprises, but good to see more data emerging from this database. Miller and colleagues also published a more specific paper examining the consumption of animal-sourced foods worldwide showing that meat consumption is lower or higher than optimal intakes depending on the population. Another Miller paper published in JAMA examines the association of specific dietary factors with coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes using a systematic review. The table below summarizes the relative risks of the associations of nutrients with heart disease and diabetes events. Bottomline? Eat your fiber.

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Source: Miller et al JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(2):e2146705. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.46705

Another emerging area gaining significant traction with scientific consensus is ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a term loathed by the food industry and a handful of nutritionists. The majority of those working in nutrition epidemiology and public health largely agree that UPFs—food-like substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats that also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers—are detrimental to human health across a bolus of outcomes. Many people argue that these foods should be regulated, avoided, and minimized in the global food system. If you want to hear more about this ongoing debate, check out this BBC podcast and this online debate with some heavy hitters in the space like NIH’s Kevin Hall, Marion Nestle, and Mike Gibney. The next frontier for these foods is their environmental impact. While a handful of papers argue that these foods have a significant environmental and climate footprint, the evidence is scant, and much more needs to be done in this space.

The question is, are alt-meats in this category? The pace of science in this space is hard to keep up with as there is a lot coming out in the grey literature (see the IPES report and the OECD report as examples) along with peer-reviewed publications, but some of what is available often bends towards ideology and less science. Same with plastics. There is deep concern about microplastics showing up all over the place, including food, but the evidence and impact of these plastics on health outcomes need much more exploration. So while Mr. McGuire told Ben in The Graduate, that the future lay with one word, plastics, we may need to re-examine that advice in light of the fragility of our world.

Custodians of our memories

If you want to read a food book this year, read Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by BBC food journalist Dan Saladino. The book is about the rich biodiversity found around the planet and how humans have used that biodiversity to feed the world's population. Saladino illustrates how important this diversity is for our nourishment and sustaining the vast cultures and traditions that humans have passed on from one generation to the next. Not only is Saladino a wonderful storyteller, but the story he is telling is one of the most important in food systems today. He writes:

"We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature; we can't continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems. It isn't working. How can anyone claim it is when so many humans are left either hungry or obese and when the Earth is suffering?"

Saladino structures the book across the main food groups — fruits, vegetables, grains, cheese, meat, seafood, alcohol, stimulants (coffee and tea), sweets, and wild foods. He discusses the importance of these food groups and their role in food security. He provides us with lush, visceral vignettes of particular places, exceptional people, and distinctive cultures uniquely trying to grow, raise, and nurture certain traditional varieties of these foods. You get a glimpse of how the hunter-gatherer Hadza hunts for honey in Tanzania. You learn how sheep meat, known as Skerpikjot, is preserved in the fragile ecosystem of the Faroe Islands. You feel the pressure of how Sicilians grow the vanilla orange amid the weight of the Cosa Nostra. You sympathize with the Syrians amid a protracted conflict who attempt to preserve their traditional sweet, Halawet el Jibn, made of war-threatened ingredients like pistachio. You realize that winemaking began in Georgia using traditional pots, known as Qvevri, a practice not done anywhere else in the world.

These stories are wonderful, but they are punctuated with startling and tragic statistics:

• 50% of all our seeds are in the hands of 4 companies.

• Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by humans, only nine remain major staples today.

• Three crops—rice, wheat, and corn—provide 50% of all our calories.

• 70 billion chickens (of roughly the same breed and ironically named "chicken of tomorrow") are slaughtered annually.

• 30 million bison roamed the great plains of the United States, all to be decimated at the hands of the white settlers.

• 95% of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow.

• 90% of soybean grown in North and South America is genetically modified.

• 50% of all the world's cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company

• The giant Pacific bluefin tuna is down 97%. Yes, 97%.

• Only 2% of farmers are African American.

• We only consume 2% of barley that is grown. The rest is used to make beer or fed to animals.

• Speaking of beer, 25% of beer is produced by one brewer.

You learn about the heroes, like Vavilov, who spent and gave their lives conserving and preserving precious seeds, specific varieties, preservations, and processing of foods as a way to say, "remember us." We were here. They were and are the custodians of the biodiversity across the planet. They are also the custodians of our memories and humanity.

As Saladino escorts you around the world, I imagined these vignettes being turned into a beautiful documentary demonstrating the vast diversity that exists on the planet—as humans, as foods, and as cultures. As Saladino expressed, we must embrace diversity in all its forms: biological, cultural, dietary, and economical. Having more diversity across the range of agriculture systems and landscapes is vital. Capturing all this diversity on film, as the book does, could be a way to preserve these moments, memories, and the history of it all. So, we never forget what we once had.

While the book is inspiring, every chapter ends with a common tragic theme – and I am not giving anything away because it is in the book's title: Extinction. You realize how fast these ways of life, these foods, these cultures, and traditions are disappearing. Our world and food systems are transforming at a speed that is hard to comprehend and capture, and the loss along the way is disturbing. There are many reasons for this extinction, but the major ones are agricultural change, loss of habitats, disease, economic forces, hangovers and continuations of colonization, and conflict.

As Saladino expressed, these endangered foods will not become the mainstay of diets, nor should they. But they have essential and assorted roles to play; if we don't use them, we will lose them. In reference to a chapter on O-Higu, a soybean grown on the island of Okinawa made into unique tofu, "O-Higu might be an insignificant bean. But to many Okinawans, after colonialism and occupation, its return feels like an act of resistance and a celebration of who we are." Many traditions in holding onto these foods are worthy; they involve intimate knowledge, special skills, and lots of care and labor. It is not a simple path forward.

Our world and food systems are transforming into a homogenized vat of staleness. For many, saving these foods and the biodiversity that makes up these foods and our diets is not worth the effort as we move through the world at warped speed. Some argue that this savior complex is romantic and precious, and we should instead focus on the potential for technology and innovation. Growth, growth, growth. Call me sentimental, but I worry about solely following this path and what is lost along the way.

Last night, I watched Chris Marker's visceral Sans Soleil film. In it, the narrator said something that sticks with me:

When filming this ceremony, I knew I was present at the end of something.

Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them.

This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I want to witness the traces. I want to remember. What is the point of living in this world without cultures and all the food that punctuates those cultures? We must, as global citizens, decide what kind of world we want to live in and figure out what is worth saving. To me, it is the whole lot. I want to save it all—every food, every human, every animal, and every piece of culture. This is what makes our world interesting. As Saladino said, "the Hadza remind us that there are many ways to live and be in the world." I am hanging onto my hopes that the incredible array of people curating these endangered foods will remain the custodians of not only our memories but of our food traditions for the future.

The mavens

Food is everywhere. You can find it in almost every store and street corner (whether someone can afford it is for another blog entry). There are food blogs, food podcasts, food documentaries, food travel shows, food cooking shows, food apps, food zines, food mags, food porn…I could go on and on. People tweet, post, and hyperbolize about food, and are watching more cooking than actually doing cooking. Go figure.  Food in and of itself has become entertainment. It is less about people eating healthy and spending quality time on preparing and sharing food, and more about bragging rights. It has become a vehicle for snobbery and status but also, social aggression and competition. In a New York Times piece alluding to food as high art, “Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.”

Much of the mainstream food system writing and pontificating is from authors who do not have traditional training in science and instead are journalists or writers, some coming from the cooking/restaurant sector. Many chefs are now TV stars in their own right and authors of famous books—and not just cookbooks. Many of these writers act as advocates and have developed celebrity status personalities. They often write about nutrition issues in a more ideological sense, taking parcels of select data to tell their story. The debates on the health of organic foods, GMOs, and industrialization have all been written about: less on the science, more on a belief system of what the food system should ideally look like, but usually only does so for the few elite. They have become the mavens of the food world.

“Nutritionism”— a reductive understanding of nutrients as the key indicators of healthy food—has created much confusion for consumers, leaving journalists, such as Michael Pollan—author of the infamous Ominovores Dilemma—to feed the public digestible answers to the most vexing global food system problems. Pollan along with many other writers (think Bittman, Waters, Petrini, Andres) have effectively opened a new dialogue about food systems, how we (un)consciously eat food, and how the individual can not only eat healthier, nutritious foods but within a healthier food system as well. It took someone like Michael Pollan to distill the complexity of nutrition science into one, simple message that resonated with the public: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Many of these food journalists argue that the nutrition field and nutrition scientists have largely failed the global population, leaving people utterly confused and lost in the swampy, ultra-processed junk food abyss.

Pollan, who has now moved onto the world of psychedelics, further explained:

“In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help. But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to ”let food be thy medicine” is ritually invoked to support this notion.”

Gary Taubes, a science writer/journalist, and low carb diet advocate argues:

“The 600,000 articles — along with several tens of thousands of diet books — are the noise generated by a dysfunctional research establishment. Because the nutrition research community has failed to establish reliable, unambiguous knowledge about the environmental triggers of obesity and diabetes, it has opened the door to a diversity of opinions on the subject, of hypotheses about cause, cure, and prevention, many of which cannot be refuted by the existing evidence. Everyone has a theory. The evidence doesn’t exist to say unequivocally who’s wrong.”

Tit for tat, scientists also poo poo on these journalists and find their prose problematic. First, some scientists argue that the Pollans of the world interpretation of science is filled with individual dietary purity. Their idea is to bring food systems back into one’s control, into one’s environment. This is such a difficult prospect for so many people around the world, particularly for those who are suffering from hunger or are struggling to make ends meet and have no voice, no agency. Second, some scientists call these food journalists “agri-intellectuals” who boast more about what should be considered healthy and sustainable production systems without a lot of thought about how farms really operate, and farmer families’ daily struggles, inequities, and the difficulties in earning a living growing food. And last, some find their writing just disconnected from reality and instead, drowning in Americana-centric, navel-gazing arguments with a lack of focus on the perverse political and structural systems that underpin how our globalized food supply is governed that can’t be unraveled by growing your own herb garden.

Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was largely responsible for the Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America said:

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Yikes. I wouldn’t go that far Norman…but I see your point. I think…While Norman wasn’t referring to journalists per se, he was referring to lobbyists/advocates/policy wonks that also take the “I know what’s best” high road. The point is, while we scientists can complain all we want about who is shaping decisions and the psyche of the general public, we too need to get better at messaging. We need to be savvier at influencing. We need to use the evidence in ways that convince others to take action and make a change.

I wish I could write as convincingly as Pollan does. I truly do. Wouldn’t it be cool if journalists and scientists got together, shared science, ideas, and information, and wrote joint articles and books? The incentive structures would need to change, but the output could be powerful. Now that would be mavenizing!

Time To Invest in Food Systems Science

President Biden’s first budget request when he came into office called for significant investment to science with increased budgets to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the NIH office funding research on climate change and human health. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s budget alone would increase from $647 million to $4 billion to be spent on research, education, and outreach. This is a signal that science will no longer be swept under the rug.

On February 23, 2021, the World Food Prize Foundation released a statement penned by 24 of its Laureates—considered some of the world’s experts on food security—urging the Biden Administration to focus on alleviating hunger, poverty, and malnutrition around the globe. The Laureates called for investments to improve food systems—which feed us—but also are responsible for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and the generation of diets that are linked to 6 of the top 10 risk factors of the global burden of disease. They urged the U.S. to strengthen and leverage alliances, play a leadership role in the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit this September, and refresh evidence-based policymaking. Others have called for the U.S. to transform the food systems as well including the Rockefeller Foundation and renewed engagement marking the 50th anniversary of the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health. Some, including academics and former U.S. senators and the Secretary of Agriculture, has gone further to aim for a “moonshot” federal funding for nutrition research.

Can we now please stop using the word “moonshot”?

One way to do that is for the U.S. to invest more in food systems science and research. As several of us wrote in a recent Global Food Security Journal piece, research has a vital role in charting a positive and sustainable direction for global food security, nutrition, and health. At a time when facts, science, and evidence are under ever greater scrutiny, and even openly disregarded as suspect by some political and business leaders (we won’t mention any of the very obvious names), the rigors of research have never been more critical. Research can and does bring about wholesale changes in attitudes, political thought, and action.

Those of us who do research must see their role in terms of knowledge generation and the translation of this knowledge into a form that is relevant to decision-makers in government, business, and civil society.

Those who design, shape, and enact policies need to access the research they need in a digestible and accessible way. Failure to achieve this brings a very considerable risk of being ignored. Researchers must learn to sit at policy dialogue tables not set for them, but the table for the users of their research – that is, the policymakers. It is a table that many researchers are not accustomed to sitting at.

Food systems encapsulate the choices we make about which foods to consume and grow and how we transport, store, process, and market them. These choices profoundly affect outcomes we care about.  To date, the choices all stakeholders make, whether governments, foundations, businesses, civil society, or individual consumers, have relied on fragmented information on food systems, of variable quality, which is difficult to access or use. 

The Food Systems Dashboard is an open-access data platform to address these issues. Created by Johns Hopkins University, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and many other collaborators, it launched in June 2020, to attempt to boost the evidence-based decision-making on food systems. The Dashboard is designed to inform decisions that have positive effects on multiple social and environmental challenges simultaneously. Different food choices have different impacts on health, the environment, and livelihoods. There are trade-offs and synergies which need to be surfaced, navigated, and mitigated. For example, different foods have different nutrition values, greenhouse emissions, and different natural resource use implications. In short, the Dashboard is the beginnings of an ambitious “Google Map” for food systems. Let’s hope we make it as navigable and useful over the next decade.

Food systems must adapt and transform to deliver sustainable, healthier diets, and durable livelihoods without decimating the planet. Yes, that is a lot to ask! To do that, we need investment in science, evidence generation, and decision-making tools, like the Food Systems Dashboard, that enable data-driven decision-making in food systems. The Biden Administration has taken a bold step forward to invigorate the various fields of science in the U.S. In turn, the research community should rise to this challenge, and we provide a platform to challenge the status quo and take food system transformation in a direction we may have imagined but are far from realizing.