New York City seeks a waiver to restrict food stamp (SNAP) benefits

New York City this week petitioned USDA for permission to disallow soda purchases with food stamp (SNAP) benefits.  USDA may well disapprove the proposal, having in previous years turned down requests from other states for similar waivers from federal rules.

Such proposals have greatest promise when they can answer "yes" to some simple questions.  Have the policy's sponsors won over any substantial fraction of the supposed beneficiaries?  Does the policy treat people from different income backgrounds fairly and equally?  Do the sponsors articulate the limits to the policy, so that the public is reassured the policy will not overreach?

Dan Sumner is an agricultural economist who participated in some recent work about food stamps with colleagues at the University of California Davis, where I am visiting.  By email this morning, he explained his misgivings about the new proposal:

This policy proposal raises two questions in my mind. (1) Are we ready as a matter of policy to declare some legal foods are just BAD no matter what else one consumes and no matter the context? (2) Would such a ban have an effect on behavior of anyone, except those proposing the ban, who would presumably enjoy thinking that their taxes were not used to buy "bad" food and may then celebrate with a glass of red wine (which is already a banned food for food stamps)?

In an op-ed today in the NYT, New York health officials favoring the proposal did describe its context in the midst of other efforts to promote good health.  However, most of those examples were also about nutrition improvements for poor people.

It must be disappointing for policy sponsors when neither Marion Nestle nor the Center for Science in the Public Interest (see third paragraph in this link) approve of a proposal to improve the nutrition environment.

[Update Oct 11: CSPI writes by email to point out that executive director Michael Jacobson's statement on this policy, dated Oct 7, endorses the NYC proposal:

The USDA should approve New York City’s sensible request to test excluding soda and other sugary beverages from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The empty calories in soft drinks pose a major public health problem by promoting tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. It’s also the case that those diseases have a disproportionate impact on low-income Americans. However, the extent to which SNAP recipients’ purchases of soft drinks is contributing to poor diets and obesity is unclear and controversial. I applaud New York City for seeking to get some real data to inform the debate. As it is, industry is enjoying about a $4-billion-a-year subsidy thanks to people spending SNAP benefits on soft drinks.]

You can imagine the voluminous comment page for the NYT coverage has much bluster on every side.  One more subtle comment was an anecdote from Burt in Oregon:

A woman once brought her boy to Mahatma Gandhi to have him tell her boy to stop eating sugar. He told them to return in two weeks. When they returned, he told the boy to stop eating sugar. When asked why he didn't tell the boy the first time to stop eating sugar, Gandhi replied, "Two weeks ago I was still eating sugar."

[Update 10/14/2010: Tom Ashbrook's On Point debates this issue.]

GMO proponents should call for stronger safety testing of the AquAdvantage genetically modified salmon

The FDA recently held hearings to discuss the safety and labeling of a genetically modified salmon, called AquAdvantage, from a company called AquaBounty. Scientists have added a gene to the DNA of this fish, so that it has a longer period of rapid growth each year.

FDA will now take some time to consider approval for human consumption.  While milk is already commonly produced using a genetically modified growth hormone, the new salmon would be the first genetically engineered animal approved for direct human consumption.

As you know, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are one of the most controversial topics in U.S. food policy.  Many critics argue that GMOs, along with many other modern production technologies, promote an environmentally unsustainable industrialized food system.  Many supporters argue that GMO technology is essential to feed the world's growing population. I don't like either of these across-the-board claims, myself, but that is a topic for another day.  Because of this larger controversy, if this salmon is the first such product approved by FDA, the consequences will be closely scrutinized and will influence the broader debate about agricultural technologies for years to come.

GMO supporters should reflect on what standard of food safety they want this new product to meet.  For example, if the new salmon turns out to have a slightly higher allergenicity than conventional salmon, leading to a slight increase in hospitalizations and deaths, it will not fly to say, later, "well, people with allergies probably shouldn't even be eating finfish like salmon anyway."  If the new salmon turns out to have slightly elevated average concentrations of a growth factor that has been associated with risk of cancer, it will not be adequate to say, later, "only a few of the additional cancers can be directly attributed to the GMO technology."  The politics of this debate are such that GMO proponents should want the first GMO animal food to be as safe as conventional food.

If they have any strategic vision at all, GMO proponents should call on FDA to require additional tests before approving the AquAdvantage salmon.  The alternative is to risk a damaging mistake. An excellent prescription for the additional testing is provided by testimony to FDA (.pdf) from Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union.  Hansen is widely considered a committed critic of GMO technology, so GMO proponents who read this far will now be tempted to quit and ignore the rest of the post.  That would be a mistake.

I think GMO proponents should read Hansen's testimony as both friendly and frightening.  The testimony is friendly, because it is not religiously anti-GMO, instead offering a long but finite list of complaints about the AquaBounty and FDA safety analyses.  The testimony is frightening, because it seems quite convincing that the safety evidence is incomplete.

If you read Hansen's testimony as a prescription for additional studies, you would recognize that FDA's decision would be delayed by perhaps a year or two, but not a decade.  The main studies that would be required are: (a) studies of veterinary effects from Panama, where the fish will be grown, to supplement the existing studies that are all from Canada, (b) better studies of allergenicity, which remedy some serious flaws identified by Hansen, (c) studies of changes in concentrations of growth hormone and a related growth factor, which remedy flaws identified by Hansen.

The great thing is that you can read Hansen's testimony (.pdf) and FDA's safety submission (.pdf) side by side for yourself.  You don't have to believe Hansen's judgment more broadly.

• If Hansen claims that a study of allergenicity was done with too few fish, you can read pages 98-100 in the FDA submission to confirm that FDA recognizes he is correct.  
• If Hansen says that a study of the presence of growth hormone lacked sufficient sensitivity to detect any growth hormone in either GMO fish or control fish -- even though it seems the whole point of the genetic modification is to increase growth -- you can read Table 15 in the FDA submission to verify that all growth hormone measurements seem to be indistinguishable from zero. 
• If Hansen claims that FDA strangely appears to have made it look like there was no detectable difference in a growth factor (IGF-1), by adding to the sample fish for which the research methods could not detect the growth factor at all, you can read for yourself the footnote and sample sizes in FDA's Table 16.  I am not sure, but FDA may have done what Hansen claimed.

For the second of these three points, about the inability to detect any growth hormone, Hansen is quite damning.

This is not a scientifically valid statement. How can FDA conclude that there are no biologically relevant differences in growth hormone levels between GE and non-GE salmon when the study uses a methodology that cannot detect growth hormone in these fish? This would be like the police using a radar gun that cannot detect speeds below 120 mph and concluding that there is no “relevant difference” in the speed of cars versus bicycles.

I can think of a couple rebuttals GMO proponents might make to Hansen's testimony.  The proponents could say that these safety concerns are secondary, and that most of the safety evidence was favorable.  But, I disagree.  My impression after close reading is that Hansen picked on the same safety issues that FDA focused on, implicitly accepting FDA's and AquaBounty's definition of the leading concerns.  That was fundamentally generous of him -- and many GMO critics would have offered a longer list of concerns -- but it means that Hansen cannot be accused of cherry-picking safety concerns.

The proponents could say that these additional tests are just the beginning, and that there would be no satisfying Consumers Union and Hansen after any volume of testing.  I think that misses the point.  Proponents might not want to offer to go ten more rounds on this scientific debate, but they will look like they are fleeing the scientific evidence if they don't go at least one more round.

As for the science, there are three possibilities: (a) the new studies that answer Hansen's challenge may show no evidence of increased risk, (b) they may show small evidence of increased risk, or (c) they may show strong evidence of increased risk.  GMO proponents should want FDA approval only in case (a).  For any other result, they should wait for a different first genetically modified animal for human consumption.

Are corporations allowed to sell healthy food?

Whenever advocates for healthy food talk to food business executives, one common response is:

Personally, I would like to serve a healthier product.  But, if these efforts threaten profitability, I risk getting sued by stakeholders.  Corporations are obliged to pursue maximum profits and no other goal.

The executives' response is not entirely correct.  Courts give a lot of deference to corporate management to use their own best business judgment.  Admittedly, a corporation cannot simply give away profits freely to serve public causes like better nutrition.  However, the managers have plenty of legal maneuvering space to develop a healthy product line, without fear that shareholder lawsuits will succeed. 

A recent working paper (.pdf) by Tufts economics professor Julie Nelson reviews the long history of relevant court cases.  She finds that, when people argue that the law requires profit maximization as the sole goal, they commonly are really describing their wishes that this were true, not evidence that it actually is true.

The profit maximization doctrine appears to operate far more strongly at the level of theory or ideology, than at the level of the actual practice of business management and corporate law. It seems, in short, to be a case of transcendental nonsense.

Nelson also tackles the more philosophical question of how profit-seeking should be related to other virtues and relationships, even love for our fellow person.  I suspect that I like markets better than she does, on balance.  But, like Nelson, I think markets should not be a social goal in themselves. They are a means to achieve bigger goals.  Just as a tennis game is most fun when two friends compete hard by the rules, I think competitive markets make our society better.  Markets are a great game, but a dreadful religion.

If one can argue with a straight face that selling healthier food enhances the reputation and long-term prospects of the company, I think that would count as a reasonable business judgment.  Corporations may not want to make sacrifices, but I doubt many claims that they are legally prevented from serving healthy food.

U.S. food industry using more energy

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions in response to climate change, it is essential to reduce energy use in the U.S. food system. A USDA report this Spring described trends in exactly the wrong direction.

USDA economist Patrick Canning and colleagues estimated that energy use in U.S. agricultural and food industries increased by 23% -- from 11.5 to 14.1 quadrillion British thermal units --  from 1997 to 2002, the most recent data available [typo corrected Sep. 7].  The increase is so large that it accounted for 80 percent of all increased energy use in the United States.

Only one quarter of the increased energy use in the food system is due to population growth.  Another quarter of the increase is due to increased food spending per person.  Fully half of the increase was due to adopting more energy intensive technologies in the food system.

At a time when one might expect that Americans would adopt more energy efficient technologies, we did the opposite.  We continued to move from labor intensive to energy intensive methods throughout food production and manufacture.  A fascinating accompanying article (.pdf) in the USDA magazine Amber Waves gives the example of adopting high-technology energy-intensive hen houses in the egg industry, increasing energy use per egg by 40%.

Consumers, similarly, were splurging on energy rather than economizing.  We purchased more dishwashers, microwave ovens, self-cleaning ovens, and second refrigerators than ever before, so our own household food systems were also becoming more energy intensive.

In some circles, there is a temptation to hope that technological improvement will solve our energy and climate change problems, making it unnecessary to change consumption habits.  This research casts some doubt on this hope.  Consumption change remains important.

A popular way to reduce the energy impact of our food choices is to buy local.  The energy used in transportation varies greatly by food group.  For example, shipping rice long-distance by ship or grain by train is fairly innocuous, while shipping fresh produce from across the country and overseas may be a more spendthrift use of energy.  Packaged food and restaurant food are both more energy intensive than home-prepared food from real ingredients.  The USDA article emphasizes food from animals as another important consumer choice:

Based on 2002 energy technologies, if households choose to substitute a portion of their at-home meat and egg consumption with expanded fish and fresh vegetable consumption, for example, there could be substantial savings in energy usage.

Reread this sentence.  This is a bold conclusion for a USDA magazine article.

Click for larger image.

Ramadan fast

Muslims around the world are currently observing the month of Ramadan, during which adults keep a fast without food or drink during the day.  A web primer explains the purpose:

Fasting helps one to experience how a hungry person feels and what it is like to have an empty stomach. It teaches one to share the sufferings of the less fortunate. Muslims believe that fasting leads one to appreciate the bounties of Allah, which are usually taken for granted – until they are missed!

Throughout the day Muslims are encouraged to go out of their way to help the needy, both financially and emotionally. Some believe that a reward earned during this month is multiplied 70 times and more. For this reason, Ramadan is also known as the month of charity and generosity.

To a Muslim, fasting not only means abstaining from food, but also refraining from all vice and evils committed consciously or unconsciously. It is believed that if one volunteers to refrain from lawful foods and sex, they will be in a better position to avoid unlawful things and acts during the rest of the year.

During a year of my youth spent living in Bandung, Indonesia, the world's most populous Islamic country, I never made it through a whole day of fasting without at least a snack or a little water.  In part, social roles for hosts and guests forced me to eat something to be polite, even with the host was keeping fast.  I was struck by the fasting practice of neighbors such as the becak (pedicab) driver and day laborers who hung out on the street corner by our house.  Any one of them, who at the time in the 1980s earned about $30 per month, could explain without any discernible irony that they kept the fast so that they might know what it is like to be poor and hungry. In the same vein, consider this month the fast being kept by people in Pakistan who are suffering from floods.

Last night, I took my two children to the community Iftar -- or evening meal after the fast -- hosted by the Islamic Center of Davis, CA.  Hundreds of people turned out for the call to prayer, a delicious meal, and a moving and lively sermon by Sheikh Alaa' El Bakry about "The Rights of Neighbors."  In one passage, he contemplated our modern lives, in which we think our neighbors are the like-minded people with whom we text and twitter.  Imagine our surprise, in a time of crisis, such as a house fire, when we find ourselves going next door for help from the person who is more literally our neighbor, but with whom we haven't ever tried to bridge differences and talk.

Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secular folk crowded in until the auditorium's long tables were filled and many ate standing along the walls.  There were warm greetings for ministers, rabbis, officials from the police and FBI, and local politicians.  One state legislator, who is Japanese American, reflected on the futility of ignoring the current climate of fear of Muslims, knowing and remembering that any community may have its turn in the crossfire.

Even many of the non-Muslims kept fast for the day, which gives a special appreciation for the Iftar.  I made it through the complete daily fast yesterday for the first time in my life.  My children, ages 8 and 10, chose to fast from noon until the evening dinner.  I am happy that they could participate in such an event.  Ramadan lasts this month until about September 10. 

Source: www.cuisineonline.pk (a Pakistani food site)

Agricultural experimentation

On my drive cross-country this week, I have enjoyed seeing a great diversity of agricultural research fields. 

For example, on Wednesday, I visited the Rodale Institute's experiment station near Kutztown, which has the longest running scientific experiment directly comparing organic to conventional production strategies on side-by-side plots.

Organically grown soybeans (just past the white post) and corn (behind) in the Farming Systems Trial at the Rodale Institute's experiment station near Kutztown, PA

Organic production preserves soil fertility naturally, without petroleum-intensive fertilizer, and it provides a great product for consumers worried about pesticide residue.  It has been especially successful in fruits, vegetables, and dairy products, now reaching mainstream markets across the country and the world.

At the same time, organic production is not costless.  The Rodale experiment acknowledges that the organic production strategy for corn and soybeans must accept some sacrifices, both agronomic (tolerating weed competition) and economic (planting the most lucrative cash crops in just selected years of a multi-year rotation).   Nevertheless, in addition to the other environmental and consumer benefits, the Rodale investigators argue that the organic strategy is economically competitive, overall, in part because of reduced chemical input costs.

For a contrast, on Thursday, I saw the historic Morrow plots at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while visiting to give a seminar at the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics.

The historic Morrow plots, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  Here, the soybean fields maintain a more weedless aesthetic.

The Morrow plots (detail)

I crossed Iowa and eastern Nebraska Saturday on small rural highways, avoiding the interstate, marvelling at the oceans of cropland.

Farmland in western Iowa, August 2010

If it were true that these thousands of corn and soybean farmers could have profited equally well with certifiably organic production, but are too misguided by input suppliers realize their own economic interest, this truth would imply one of the greatest collective delusions in all of agricultural history.  I know organic advocates who believe this delusion has in fact happened, but I think that account somewhat misses the mark in describing where American agriculture goes most awry.

On Sunday, I climbed the stairs on a big combine with a large-scale corn and soybean farmer in southern Nebraska.  He explained how he plans his planting strategy on a laptop in his kitchen, including space for test plots of various seed varieties.  He downloads the plan to the GPS-linked "auto-steer" computer on his planter, which then lays down the seed destined for each row of field.  At harvest time, the combine, equipped with the same data, steers itself around the field with the farmer looking on from high in the cab, recording the productivity of each field and test plot.  Similarly, he carefully monitors water use for irrigation and allows part of his farm to be used for an agricultural experiment with low-irrigation corn.

To say that this farmer could have earned an equal profit from certifiably organic production is to say that he has misunderstood the economic incentives that are internal to his business.  I doubt it.  To me, the most interesting questions about his business relate to environmental consequences that an economist would call externalities, because the farmer's profits come in part at the expense of other people external to his business.  Would a different production strategy better protect the Ogallala aquifer, from which this Nebraska farmer draws his irrigation water?  (Farmers like the one I visited have greatly reduced their impact on water supplies, but withdrawals from the aquifer still exceed renewal from rainwater and snow runoff).  Would organic production of his consumer-grade and animal-feed-grade corn better protect consumers from pesticide residue, as proponents say?  Would higher fuel prices lead this farmer to lower fertilizer inputs and alter his capital-labor substitution in ways that reduced petroleum use and reduced his impact on climate change?  Would reform of federal ethanol policies alter prices of farm commodities and change the optimal use of his land from intensive corn production to more sustainable uses?  It is difficult to expect farmers themselves to sponsor research across this spectrum of questions, which could provide results both helpful and contrary to the farmers' own economic interests.

The impressive amount and variety of agricultural experimentation is one of the most striking things I have seen on this journey.  Reflecting on the Rodale experiment in particular, I am grateful that somebody other than input suppliers, and even other than farmers themselves, is carrying out this type of investigation.  To address externalities, it is essential to have research that, like Rodale's, is motivated by curiosity about consumer health and environmental protection.  To preserve blunt realism in research, it is essential to have experimentation by farmers themselves.  It has been fun to see both.

Update Aug 24, 2010.  The Nebraska grower with whom I visited adds by email:

"One comment about under groundwater. Rain, runoff, and snow melt replenish the underground water levels. Cylindrical rainfall and snow melt recharge underground levels, and over many years, the water levels have hardly changed over the past 40 years. We in production Ag do not want to be labeled as depleting underground water levels. We are conservationists that are protecting the natural resources we use for future generations.

"As for organic farming, that is a speciality market. I am feeding over 125 people as a producer, and that number continues to increase. Yields with organic farming are lower, so decisions to grow organic are not for all producers.

"I am very passionate about what I do and how I do it."

Beginning with the bees

Nobody knows exactly what is wrong with the bees.

Since 2006, beekeepers have been reporting the loss of 30% - 90% of bees in many hives, with no clear cause.  The syndrome has been labeled Colony Collapse Disorder. 

My father-in-law, who has raised honey for many years in Carlisle, MA, had several recent years with no honey production. 

The book A Spring Without Bees (Lyons Press, 2009) focuses on harm from pesticides.  The USDA's Agricultural Research Service lists a wide variety of possible causes, but it too worries considerably about pesticides as a possible cause: "Pesticides may be having unexpected negative effects on honey bees."

Because bees provide essential pollination services to U.S. agriculture, ARS sounds very concerned about consequences:

While CCD has created a very serious problem for beekeepers and could threaten the pollination industry if it becomes more widespread, fortunately there were enough bees to supply all the needed pollination this past spring. But we cannot wait to see if CCD becomes an agricultural crisis to do the needed research into the cause and treatment for CCD.

This year, happily, my father-in-law at last has two hives in production (the two on the right in the photograph above), still far below his best years.  I asked him if this meant things were looking up for U.S. beekeeping.  He responded dryly, "I haven't heard that they are."

Note: I'm moving to California for a sabbatical year at UC Davis.  This morning, I took my family to the airport and then departed from my wife's parents home for the drive west.  Along the way, for the next ten days, I will visit and occasionally report on sights and people relevant to U.S. food policy.  A beekeeper in Carlisle is a beginning.

My Conestoga wagon.