Marilyn Manson's Food Pyramid

I had never seen this. The goth rocker offers nutrition advice:

Three servings of yogurt, milk, and cheese, will help your bones and subsidize the cattle industries....

When you eat your sweets, make sure you try to limit your servings or you'll die (break for yelling and screaming "DIE!!!").

Tufts Nutrition Magazine on the Farm Bill

Tufts Nutrition Magazine has posted current issues and several years of archives to the internet. Aliza and I both have short pieces on farm policy in the latest issue, for Fall 2007. From Aliza's column:

Compared to some of the food and agriculture lobbies debating farm subsidies and food stamps, we were a small team working on small issues. But to many people, the local procurement victory [allowing school lunch programs to request locally grown foods from their suppliers] is a significant one. The ability of school food service directors to request local foods opens up great opportunities for local food systems. Schools can be important customers for small farmers. And schools that try to link local agriculture with their curricula have greater success when students can make a field trip to a local farm and then eat that farm’s apples (rather than ones shipped in from across the country) in the school cafeteria.

From my column:

Mind you, political theater can be entertaining. On the last day of debate, Republicans claimed to be surprised that part of the farm bill’s funding would come from a tax increase. The response from Charlie Rangel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House’s taxwriting committee, was sarcastic. He reminded the critics that they had agreed to ask Rangel’s committee to find the additional money. “You didn’t go to the chairman of the Transportation Committee,” Rangel admonished them.

But after the chuckles die down, we have to wonder whether the right questions were asked about farm policies themselves. The 700-page farm bill authorizes nearly every aspect of federal policy administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, from food stamps to conservation to farm subsidies to rural development, at a cost of about $286 billion over five years. It seems there should be more there to discuss than whether a funding source should be called a tax.

NYC Proposes "Green Carts"

The same week that residents of the Lower East Side and Chinatown gathered to protest the closing of a Pathmark store in their neighborhood, Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Quinn proposed legislation to issue permits for "green carts" - which would offer fresh and processed fruits and vegetables from mobile food carts in designated neighborhoods with low fruit and vegetable consumption. With the goal of increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in these neigborhoods, the legislation would issue 500 permits each to the Bronx and Brooklyn, 250 to Queens and Manhattan and 50 to Staten Island- for the neighborhoods. More information about the green carts is available on the NYC DOHMH website.

While some have praised the green cart initiative,
a resident of Fort Greene told City Limits “We need a store where it has a variety of foods like canned goods and bread – a cart won't do. It’s a nice gesture,” said McDaniel-McCadney of the carts, but “it just wouldn't be sufficient for the community."

Perhaps to promote this more systemic change in access -- a $175,000 grant from the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman Foundation-- the very Friedmans for whom the Tufts Friedman School is named-- to the Food Trust to work with the Food Bank for NYC and the grocery industry to improve access to fruits and vegetables in low-income neighborhoods with inadequate access. The Food Trust has a strong track record of strengthening development and renovation of supermarkets in Philadelphia in the past four years.

Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel

Here's an interesting book title and blog: Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel. HarperCollins Canada has a book trailer. To be released in the United States in 2008. From Time Magazine:

Today, soy shows up in about 75% of the food on offer at the supermarket, from chocolate to margarine, and the industry responsible for its ubiquity has left footprints everywhere — in the Amazon rainforests and in the bellies of America's corpulent masses. The soybean's ascendancy is one of many pieces of a global puzzle that author Raj Patel aims to fit together in his new book

Stuffed and Starved — a sweeping look at the development of the international food chain that delivers calories from nation to nation with an alarmingly uneven hand. As its title promises, the book tackles one of the chief dysfunctions of our unique era in alimentary history: that 800 million people are getting too little to eat and are malnourished, while over 1 billion are getting so much they've become overweight or obese.

Networks

While playing with network sites recently (Linked in, Flickr, Facebook), I recalled a book by Duncan Watts in 2003: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. The book was written, paradoxically, just on the eve of the rise of all the network sites. Watts was a professor at Columbia, but recently moved to Yahoo!, to lead that company's research in "human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving." More paradoxically, for a reflection on electronic networks and degrees of separation, Duncan and I were networked by just one degree of separation long before the invention of Facebook. Just the smelly-socks dirty-dishes pre-electronic old-fashioned networking technology: we shared a crowded house in grad school.

Hershey's regular milk

Yesterday, Mark Frauenfelder at boingboing had a funny post about an incompetent fast food restaurant poster, with an incomprehensible offer of some sort of two-for-one deal at Checkers and Rally's. The related links section at the bottom referenced an earlier Frauenfelder post about Hershey's selling regular milk.

I was walking down Van Nuys boulevard with my daughter, enjoying the 103 degree weather over the weekend, when she demanded milk. We went into a Burger King and I ordered a milk. When the employee handed me this bottle,... I told her I didn't want chocolate milk. She said it wasn't chocolate milk. I had to look at the ingredients to make sure.

Three questions come to mind. 1) Why is Hershey's in the business of selling regular milk? 2) And why would it insist on making the label look chocolately? -- it would be like Lipton selling a bottle of water with pictures of tea leaves and a lemon on it. 3) And why Hershey's they make the label opaque so you can't tell at a glance if the milk is flavored or not?

I don't think the Hershey's label is an accident. Milk manufacturers are purposely blurring the distinction between flavored milks with added sugar and regular milks. They want your mental filing system to file flavored milk in the "healthy" folder instead of the "sugary drinks" folder. Voluntary industry guidelines for marketing beverages in schools are written specifically to permit sweetened flavored milk, so long as the sugar content meets a certain standard.

Congress passes funding bills

Barbara Vauthier's selective and tightly written Foodlinks America newsletter from the TEFAP Alliance now seems to be in blog format, with RSS feed and everything.

Here is Foodlinks' latest news on program funding in Congress:

Congressional Democrats and the White House ended a months-long impasse on federal spending on December 19, 2007 with passage of an omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008. The legislation combines 11 of the 12 spending bills Congress is required to approve each year to determine government outlays. “Given the President’s refusal to compromise and given the inability of the Senate to produce the 60 votes necessary to move legislation forward, this is the best we can do,” commented Representative David Obey (D-WI), chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

With this final action, Congress exited town for the holidays, ending the first session of the 110th Congress. The House will be gone until January 15, 2008 and the Senate is now scheduled to reconvene on January 22, 2008.

The huge $516 billion compromise package included an additional $11 billion over the President’s spending limit, with some of the funds designated as “emergency” needs that were not offset by cuts in other programs or new revenues. The legislation continued most nutrition assistance programs at current levels, though there were some notable exceptions.

The WIC Program, beset by potential shortages from higher food costs, growing caseloads, and declining rebates, was allocated a full $6 billion for fiscal year 2008, an increase of $815.6 million ($400 million of which was designated as emergency spending) over last year. The $6 billion will help WIC maintain a national caseload of 8.55 million participants throughout the year. The omnibus measure also increased funding for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), which the Administration had proposed to eliminate entirely. The CSFP will receive $139.7 million in fiscal 2008, $32.5 million above the fiscal year 2007 appropriation.

Other provisions of the bill: expand, effective immediately, the Simplified Summer Food Service Program to all states, easing paperwork and increasing reimbursements for sponsors; provide an additional $23 million for elderly nutrition programs this year; support a $10 million expansion in the 2008-2009 school year of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, making it available to all states; provide secure funding of $2.475 million annually to the Congressional Hunger Center’s Bill Emerson and Mickey Leland Hunger Fellowship Programs; and fund a Supper Pilot Program in West Virginia under the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP).

Though Democrats felt the bill could have been better, they expressed satisfaction with the final outcome. “While the President’s stubborn opposition will deny Americans the full investment they deserve in these priorities, the Democratic budget begins to reverse seven years of neglect and charts a new direction,” concluded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).