How far has your food traveled?

A student forwarded this CNN report from Monday:

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Next time you are out for dinner on a business trip, you may find that the food on your plate has traveled further than you have.

Choosing between the locally farmed chicken or the New Zealand venison from the menu can help the environment.

Food miles -- the distance food is transported from the plough to the plate -- is of increasing concern for environmentalists.

This comes as we travel more and our tastes go global, whether it be for Chinese pine nuts or snap peas from Kenya.

However, hauling Peruvian asparagus or Pakistani mangoes across continents and oceans is not only costly financially, but is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

"When you are bringing food from so far away it can be as much as four times or ten times as much as if you were buying that product locally," says Kezia Cowtan from LifeCycles Project [link added -- ed.] a non-profit group focused on food sustainability.

Dean's letter for Tufts Nutrition

The Friedman School has started publishing a new newsletter from the Dean, Eileen Kennedy, with lots of recent news about the school. Here's a sampling.

Christina Economos and Miriam Nelson had their photos in Time magazine for being named two of the American Diabetes Association’s Women of Valor for 2005. They shared the award with Eileen Naughton, president of Time magazine, for their work in combating the nation’s obesity epidemic.

The Boston Globe reported on Aviva Must’s study on girls and obesity. She found that girls who experience early pubescence tend to be overweight and are more likely than their peers to be overweight or obese when they reach their early 40s.

Ph.D. student Dr. Mario Flores, who is also a researcher at the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico, was quoted in a New York Times article on Mexico’s sudden surge in obesity [available also here and here]. “We’re just recovering from the shock of the statistics,” he said.

Patrick Webb’s op-ed on Niger’s “invisible” emergency appeared in the Globe and Mail online edition. He wrote: “There are many more Nigers lurking within the suffering of children in the poor world. We just don’t see them yet.”

The Chicago Tribune quoted Jeanne Goldberg on advising Kraft Foods Inc. and prodding the company to stop using toddlers in TV ads for Oreo cookies [available also here]. “The notion of using kids to promote these things is very seductive because kids are cute, but I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Goldberg said. She also told BusinessWeek that Kraft’s reformulating of Lunchables to have more fiber and no trans fat was “a step in the right direction.”

Many publications, including The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, have reported on the supplements article in the Journal of the American Medical Association written by Robert Russell and Alice Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein told Northeast Public Radio’s “Health Show” program, “Assuming that we can just isolate one nutrient or multiple nutrients and all our health problems will be solved is probably a very naive perspective.”

Paul Jacques was quoted by the UPI about vitamin E and cataracts and his study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Dr. Ernst Schaefer discussed diets with Forbes magazine.

Debating agricultural subsidies and nutrition

I will participate in a lively session (.pdf) on agricultural subsidies Tuesday morning (corrected date: Sept. 20) at the National Press Club in Washington, as part of the annual Food Policy Conference of the Consumer Federation of America. The session will be a Phil Donahue style discussion and debate, perhaps recorded for C-SPAN.

The host is NPR's Dan Charles, author of an interesting book on biotechnology, Lords of the Harvest, as well as a new book I haven't yet read, Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare.

The other participants include former Congressman Charlie Stenholm (D-TX), the Environmental Working Group's Ken Cook, Bread for the World's David Beckmann*, and somebody from the American Farm Bureau.

I will probably get asked if farm subsidies contribute to poor nutrition and obesity. My answer is that farm subsidies should be seen in the context of agricultural policy more generally. Traditional subsidies help farmers essentially by raising the price they get for their crops. Other programs, like checkoff advertising, help farmers by increasing market demand and having consumers pay the farmers more for their crops.

Some traditional subsidies probably cause some small damage to nutrition, while others probably offer some small benefit for nutrition. In any case, the subsidies provide almost no encouragement for increased production of major categories emphasized in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans -- including fruits and vegetables.

By contrast, federally sponsored commodity promotions on the order of more than $400 million per year undermine the nutrition and healthy weight message of the Dietary Guidelines. Commodity promotion may not be the biggest farm program that affects nutrition, but it represents the clearest case where farm policy shoots nutrition policy in the kneecaps.

*Update 9/20/2005: corrected spelling.

Information sources for community food security

Hugh Joseph, Ph.D., who directs the New Entry Sustainable Farming Program at the Friedman School, has been circulating a nice collection of newsletters and other information sources about community food security and sustainable agriculture. In most of these web pages, there is a link to sign up for a newsletter or periodical.

The New Farm: Farmer-to-farmer Know-how from the Rodale Institute. Also a great website for organic, sustainable, and regenerative farming resources.

Potluck News below is posted monthly by Nefood - a listserve for the Northeast. It is a useful listserve for those interested in sustainable ag. issues in the region, with announcments of resources, events, etc. and sometimes articles and discussions.Posting level is low-to-moderate - about 2-4 times a week at most. Subscribing information is here.

NSAAS News Gleanings. Northeast States Association for Agricultural Stewardship, an affiliate of The Council of State Governments' Eastern Regional Conference.

This e-magazine's focus is on nutrition for the consumer. The September issue of CONSUMER MAGAZINES DIGEST which summarizes selected nutrition and food-related articles from 50 current consumer US and Canadian magazines is now posted here (.pdf). The site home page has links at lower left to this month's and back issues.

The Food Project's e-BLAST Bulletin. Blast was started at the Food Project in Lincoln and Boston, MA . Click here for the full e-BLAST.

The political economy of food stamps

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has been publishing some of its older books online for free in .pdf format. For example, the 1993 book on The Political Economy of Food and Nutrition Policies, edited by Per Pinstrup-Andersen, contains a chapter (.pdf) on the politics of the U.S. Food Stamp Program, written by Margaret Andrews and Katherine Clancy.

The chapter explores the reasons for the growth in the nation's leading food assistance program between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. What explains the Food Stamp Program's growth? Was it to dispose of agricultural surpluses? Was it vote-trading or "logrolling," in which urban legislators agreed to vote for farm programs in return for rural votes for food assistance? Was it a consequence of the Civil Rights movement and the growing democratic strength of the poor? My quick summary of the chapter: some of each explanation. But the details are interesting.

Chris Mooney: The Republican War on Science

U.S. Food Policy has been covering examples of government actions that undermine the best scientific information on diet and health, but is there a larger pattern? From weblogger Chris Mooney's new book, The Republican War on Science:

At its most basic level, the modern Right's tension with science springs from conservatism, a political philosophy that generally resists change. The dynamism of science—its constant onslaught on old orthodoxies, its rapid generation of new technological possibilities—presents an obvious challenge to more static worldviews. From Galileo to Darwin and beyond, this conflict has played out repeatedly over the course of history. Consider conservative thinker Edmund Burke's famous denunciation of the Enlightenment as an age of "sophisters, economists, and calculators" in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Perhaps no line better captures the tension between conservatism as a political philosophy and the dynamism of scientific inquiry.

Yet conservative philosophy alone cannot explain the sweeping controversy over science that has emerged during George W. Bush's presidency. Another ingredient must go into the mix: raw politics. During its rise to political triumph and domination of the Republican Party, the modern conservative movement has relied heavily on two key constituencies with an overriding interest in the outcomes of scientific research in certain areas: industry and the religious Right. Companies subject to government regulation regularly invoke "science" to thwart federal controls and protect the bottom line. Religious conservatives, meanwhile, seek to use science to bolster their moralistic agenda. The Bush White House, in true modern conservative fashion, has bent over backward for both groups.

Other factors, too, contribute to a standoff between the conservative community and the scientific one. Modern conservatism's broad distrust of "big government" worsens the tensions with science, much of which either depends on federal funding or takes place at government agencies. Early in Bush's first term, one conservative even warned that "science moles" lurking in the federal bureaucracy might sabotage the president's agenda.

The Right's oft-expressed disdain for "liberal" higher education—epitomized by Bush strategist Karl Rove's smirking definition of a Democrat as "somebody with a doctorate"—fans the conflict as well. Today's "red state" conservatives nourish a deep suspicion of the nation's urban and coastal liberal enclaves, home to many leading universities and research centers. To counter mainstream science, economics, and political analysis coming out of these universities (as well as "liberal" think tanks such as the Brookings Institution), the Right has created its own favorable sources of expertise and analysis—think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and many others.

Finally, conservatives' views on science have been shaped as much by their political enemies as by their friends. In particular, the environmental movement—a core Democratic constituency—draws regularly on science to demonstrate the harms of various forms of environmental degradation and to demand stronger government regulation. In political spats with environmentalists, conservatives have thus learned to attack not just policies favored by environmentalists, but also the scientific information used to support those policies—which they repeatedly denounce as "junk science." To hear the modern Right tell it, you would think that environmental science, as conducted at America's leading universities, suffers from endemic corruption on a scale reminiscent of Tammany Hall.

Given all of these tendencies, a grand clash between modern American science and modern American conservatism may well have been inevitable.

In domestic food policy, does one political party do better than the other in representing the best possible science?

In an earlier passage of the book's online excerpt, before the part that I quoted above, Mooney errs by omission in treating the stem cell debate as a purely scientific argument instead of a more complicated mix of science and ethics.

Mooney speaks in the Boston area on September 21 (Porter Square Books, Cambridge, 7:00 p.m.) and September 22 (Student Pugwash, MIT, Cambridge, 5:30 p.m.).

Why not stop junk food advertisements to children?

First amendment concerns provide one of the strongest arguments for permitting junk food advertisements to children. According to this argument,* we may not like these advertisements as parents, but in a free country, we shouldn't ask the government to restrict free speech as the remedy.

Here, in a recent speech, is what Marion Nestle offers in response to that argument.

I have trouble with this first amendment argument. I imagine back to our forefathers who wrote the first amendment sitting around a table saying, “how are we going to guarantee freedom of speech for people who have diverse religious beliefs?” They were NOT sitting around that table saying, “how can we defend the right of makers of junky cereals to market their products to kids?” I think we have a real problem with this. Some lawyers should take a look at the first amendment and start using it for what it was for.

*Slight edit 9/15: made more clear that I am summarizing an argument, not stating my view.