Pepsi's Tropicana Peach Papaya with no peach and no papaya

Under the heading, "Pepsi Lies," Accidental Hedonist quotes from this Navigator report:

PepsiCo is changing the labeling on two of its fruit-flavored Tropicana beverages to reflect the fact that they actually contain little or no fruit juice.Despite being labeled as “made with real fruit juice”, Tropicana Peach Papaya actually contains no peace or papaya juice, and only a small amount of pear juice from concentrate. Similarly, Tropicana Strawberry Melon contains no strawberry juice or melon juice. Henceforth, both drinks will carry the statement: “flavored juice drink/from concentrate with other natural flavors”. They will still feature pictures of the fruits on their packaging.

Red Tomato: domestic fair trade produce

A recent email from a former student provoked me to look into Red Tomato, a distributer supporting a domestic version of the fair trade principles behind Equal Exchange coffee and other products. According to a write-up from Oxfam America:

Fair trade: Low in calories. High in moral fiber.* Red Tomato is as much about values - namely that of making trade fair for small farmers - as it is about sweet corn and strawberries. Founder Michael Rozyne, who also co-founded Equal Exchange Fair Trade coffee roaster, discovered his mission nearly two decades ago, while working on farms and for a food cooperative. "It's not satisfying to do business knowing that the whole formula ultimately is driving the suppliers out of business," Rozyne explains.

Be it coffee or produce, the fair trade mission to keep small suppliers in business is fundamentally the same. However, unlike Fair Trade coffee - which secures a set price for farmers - Rozyne maintains that fair trade for produce is more about establishing the systems and networks that enable small farmers to compete in today's marketplace.

Red Tomato is doing just that. Working with disadvantaged growers and growers without access to capital, in five short years, Red Tomato has secured spots for small farmer produce in Stop & Shop, Whole Foods Market, and other food markets. To achieve these gains, Red Tomato is uniting growers, trade buyers, and consumers around one thing they all feel passionately about: great produce.

What's in the foods you eat?

From USDA's Food Surveys Research Group:

Check out the latest product from the Food Surveys Research Group: "What's In The Foods You Eat--Search Tool". The search tool provides easy online access to nutritional information about typical foods that Americans eat every day by using data files in the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies. Users of the online search can easily search a database of 13,000 foods, view and select portions and weights for a food, and then view the nutrient values. Each result can be printed by the user.

For example, by searching for "McDonald's Chicken McNuggets," you can quickly find that one nugget has 54 calories, of which 31.5 calories are fat (more than 58 percent fat). Likewise, you can seach for "Quizno's" or "Fuddrucker's" and get the result: "No Food Codes Found."

[U.S. Food Policy editorial note: away on vacation until Aug. 15]

A new Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition

The Haworth Press announces:

Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition™ presents essential, up-to-date information for professionals involved with nutrition, food and water security, health, agriculture, and the environment.

Binghamton, N.Y., Summer 2005—The Haworth Press, Inc., is pleased to announce the publication of the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, beginning with Volume 1, No. 1, Spring 2006. This peer-reviewed professional quarterly examines hunger and the interconnectedness among individual, political, and institutional factors that govern how people produce, procure, and consume food and the implications for nutrition and health. It comprehensively examines local, national, and international hunger and environmental nutrition issues—specifically food access, food and water security, agriculture, food production, sustainable food systems, poverty, social justice, and human values. The Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition is designed to serve as an essential resource for dietitians, nutritionists, agronomists, anthropologists, economists, educators, epidemiologists, food scientists, public health practitioners, and policymakers.

George Will: treat farm animals well

Conservative columnist George Will published a fascinating column earlier this month, describing the conservative case for treating animals humanely, and better protecting farm animals in particular. I pinch myself and ask, did he really write this? Did he really link to these photographs of farm animal suffering?

Will draws on the work of conservative speechwriter Matthew Scully in a magazine published by Pat Buchanan.

Animal suffering on a vast scale should, [Scully] says, be a serious issue of public policy. He does not want to take away your BLT; he does not propose to end livestock farming. He does propose a Humane Farming Act to apply to corporate farmers the elementary standards of animal husbandry and veterinary ethics: "We cannot just take from these creatures, we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life."

Will doesn't favor animal "rights," but favorably quotes Scully to say that Judeo-Christian morality holds cruelty to animals to be evil. I always keep an eye out for unusual political coalitions who might support sound and ethical U.S. food policies. George Will and PETA take the cake.

I want to suggest some topics for future columns for Will, as long as he has the courage to follow Judeo-Christian values through to their true implications. August: justice for the poor and oppressed. September: just war and the murder of innocents. October: falsehood and dishonesty from the mighty. November: material accumulation as a barrier to holy purpose. This could be quite a season.

The 'Eat Local' challenge for August

Jen at the weblog life begins at 30, along with locavores, has organized an "Eat Local" challenge for August. I'm a little late for full participation -- webloggers were supposed to post their own personal goal by July 31. But the participants are up to something special. Many plan to eat food from within 100 miles of home. You are allowed to make some exceptions (for example, spices, or the freezer full of fish that your dad mailed you from Alaska). But some folks are trying to make no exceptions at all. Jen linked to cookiecrumb's adventures in making salt from the nearby ocean.

Life is more colorful eating local, and it is usually good environmentalism. There is something spiritually moving about knowing the farmer who produces your family's food, and the soil it comes from, and sometimes picking it with your own hand. There is something appealing about a dirty crooked carrot in a world full of obedient clean conical supercarrots.

My eat local principles do have to be non-doctrinaire. Attractive fresh fruits and vegetables would be less affordable, and less frequently available, if one ate strictly locally. Even eating regionally, one gets a nice long summer season of fresh corn on the cob around here by drawing from the length of the Atlantic seaboard, eating first from the Carolinas and last from Massachusetts. Is there anything less worthy about a North Carolina farmer that I should shun his or her produce? Eating North Carolina corn on the cob is still very different from letting the corn go to Doritos or the high-fructose corn syrup plant. And, in the bigger scheme of things, why not let a Guatemalan farmer feed her family by selling yours some fresh vegetables in January? It's a matter of degree. My goals for August are to eat: much more local food, much more food in season, more diverse and interesting fruits and vegetables, to add two new local food recipes to my small toolbox that are good enough to serve guests, and to be better informed about the environmental decisions made growing our family's food.

Here's a photograph of the table at Waltham Fields Community Farm from which much of our family's food will come this month. The farm is also the source of the photograph in the title banner for U.S. Food Policy -- I'll try to change that title photograph with the seasons.

The effect of food stamps on food security

Paradoxically, researchers using major national surveys often find that participating in the U.S. Food Stamp Program appears to be associated with increased rates of food insecurity and hunger. Of course, the nation's leading anti-hunger program is not itself to blame. Rather, some low-income families face greater food hardship at any given time, while other low-income families may have enough food. A family with greater food hardship is more likely to take the trouble -- and perhaps endure the stigma -- of asking for food stamps.

In a conference paper published next month in the Review of Agricultural Economics, Mark Nord of the Economic Research Service and I for the first time use longitudinal or "panel" data from a major national survey to study the relationship between food stamps and household food security. Panel data have repeated observations on the same households over time -- in our case, thousands of households in the federal government's Current Population Survey were interviewed one year apart in December 2001 and December 2002. Sometimes, under certain statistical assumptions, panel data permit researchers to control for unobserved household characteristics, like being a "hardship" family or a "non-hardship" family in the case of food security. In our research, Mark and I thought a statistical model using panel data might show that food stamps help participants to improve their food security status.

In fact, the study found that using panel data reduced but did not eliminate the paradoxical positive association between food stamp participation and food insecurity. For example, we found somewhat to our surprise that families who entered food stamp participation between December 2001 and December 2002 were more likely to have deteriorating food security status, while families who exited food stamp participation were more likely to have improved food security status. We hold onto our assumptions anyway -- we still don't believe food stamp participation is causing increased hardship. But these results tell us something fascinating about the nature of the unobserved household characteristics that have been confounding this area of research. Those "unobservables" must be largely time-varying. In other words, the unobserved hardships don't just hit some families and not others. Rather, the hardships are very time specific -- many families are fine one year and then for some reason that is not observable in the data they face tough hardships the next year. Interesting.

p.s. The same journal issue includes a critical commentary on Mark's and my article by nationally known poverty economist Jim Ziliak. He liked some things about the article, but also expresses concern that too few of our households may have changed status between the two time periods for our work to be definitive. My time on the research project, and that of Friedman School graduate student Jerusha Nelson Peterman, was supported by the National Poverty Center. The issue also offers related articles from the same conference session by many colleagues and friends working on food assistance and food security issues, including Nader Kabbani, Myra Yazbeck Kmeid, Marianne Bitler, Grace Marquis, and Craig Gundersen.