Goals for reducing food insecurity by 2007

A report released today by USDA's Economic Research Service shows that the United States will fall short of its 2007 goal for reducing food insecurity.

The report, by ERS sociologist Mark Nord, describes the stark contrast between the department's target for reducing household food insecurity and the actual trends in hardship for low-income Americans. In its Strategic Plan for 2002-2007, USDA adopted as a target a reduction in the rate of "very low food security" -- the measurement concept formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger" -- to 7.4% of low-income Americans.

Here below is Figure 1 from the USDA/ERS report. The dashed line shows the hypothetical rate of progress that would have led to success in meeting the target. The blue line shows the actual increase in food insecurity during the period covered by the Strategic Plan.

The target in the Strategic Plan was originally motivated by the Government Performance and Results Act -- known in government only by the acronym GPRA and never by its full name -- as a goal for USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the Food Stamp Program and other programs. I have long encouraged USDA to report its progress toward these goals bravely, as this report does, rather than letting the goals slip away into history unmet and yet unnoticed (see link and .pdf link).

Of course, one can't really blame FNS for the failure illustrated in this figure. In the report, Nord gently points out both that the target was ambitious and that food insecurity is related to a whole array of hardships.

These hardships would require a stronger anti-poverty agenda to remedy, and can't be tackled with food assistance alone. The real import of today's report may be to put on the record that by letting that anti-poverty agenda wither away over many years, the U.S. government has essentially made a policy decision to tolerate rising rates of -- and I'll use the no-longer-official word -- hunger.

Got Leafy Greens?

One of the funniest stories I read while on hiatus was about a breastfeeding activist mom whose t-shirts for sale included the slogan "the other white milk." This led to a legal complaint from the federal government's National Pork Board, which sought to defend its property rights to the slogan "the other white meat." As this post at The Lactivist explains, the letter from the National Pork Board was outrageous, arguing at one point that The Lactivist was tarnishing the good name of the National Pork Board through sexual innuendo:

In addition, your use of this slogan also tarnishes the good reputation of the National Pork Board's mark in light of your apparent attempt to promote the use of breastmilk beyond merely for infant consumption, such as with the following slogans on your website in close proximity to the slogan "The Other White Milk." "Dairy Diva," "Nursing, Nature's Own Breast Enhancement," "Eat at Mom's, fast-fresh-from the breast," and "My Milk is the Breast."

This letter so offended The Lactivist that she publicized it across the blogosphere and sought assistance from a pro bono lawyer. The controversy brought a good deal of traffic to U.S. Food Policy's earlier reporting on the sale of the Other White Meat slogan. As The Lactivist reported in a later post, the fuss led to a very apologetic letter from Pork Board CEO Steve Murphy, and another letter from Pork Board staff offering to make donations out of their own pocket to an appropriate charitable cause, the Mother's Milk Bank of Ohio. Good for the Pork Board.

Now I can only hope no legal trouble will befall the organization for public health students in Massachusetts, whose recent fundraiser (nonprofit, of course!) uses the slogan "Got Leafy Greens?." The organization's Dustin Burnett, a graduate student at Tufts, told me -- as I was buying one for myself -- that they had taken care not to replicate the font or visual design of the federal government's checkoff program for fluid milk, which of course uses the slogan "Got Milk?." Perhaps that will suffice to keep the fluid milk board's lawyers at bay. If you would like to order a "Got Leafy Greens?" t-shirt and support the students, write Dustin at the email address: gotleafygreens@yahoo.com.

Hearing on school nutrition in MA, May 30

The Massachusetts Public Health Association is publicizing a hearing on May 30 at 10 am at the Statehouse in Boston about a bill to improve school nutrition. A fact sheet about the bill is available (.pdf). If you care about nutrition policy in Massachusetts, this is the event of the season for you.

Super Natural Cooking

Heidi from the weblog 101cookbooks has a cookbook of her own: Super Natural Cooking. I was reminded of this recently by a post in Viva Epicurea!. As a review in Simply Recipes describes, the book offers a mix of things to eat and things to think about:

Ever find yourself in the natural foods section of your grocery store wondering what one would do with amaranth or quinoa? Or have you ever looked for creative ways to incorporate "super foods" into your diet? Heidi lays it all out for us, explaining the foods you should have in your pantry, healthful grains to use in your cooking, the importance of including phytonutrient-rich colorful foods in your meals, and suggestions for super foods and natural sweeteners. The book includes over 80 recipes, most beautifully photographed by Heidi herself.

Manure policy

The transformation of livestock manure from a valuable agricultural input to a pollutant is a great story of economics in action. Once upon a time, when small and mid-sized livestock operations were an important part of mixed farming systems across the country, livestock manure was an essential source of fertilizer for nearby farms. Now, immense factory farms are so concentrated in some counties -- notably in North Carolina in recent years -- that there is not enough cropland to dispose of all the waste that is created.

Keith Keplinger and Larry Hauck recently gave the economic account of this story in the August 2006 Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics:

When supplies of manure become large, its value falls and an incentive is created to apply manure at rates exceeding crop requirements or to otherwise dispose of manure as inexpensively as possible, despite negative externalities. Consistent with externality theory, degradation of public resources (air and water) has occurred in regions of the country with high concentrations of livestock.

Keplinger and Hauck point out that the ratio of nitrogen to phosphorous required for most crop fertilization exceeds the ratio of nitrogen to phosphorous found in most manure from factory farms. So, when the manure is dumped on fields as a disposal mechanism, the phosphorous becomes a key pollutant.

Below is a map from an article by Marc Ribaudo at USDA/ERS of counties where the amount of phosphorous in manure that must be disposed exceeds the entire assimilative capacity of the county's farmland.

[I heard a very clear-headed account of these issues from Elanor Starmer, a graduate student at the Friedman School at Tufts, who has written a thesis on environmental issues connected with hog farming (among other publications). It is the sort of issue frequently addressed in the school's program on Agriculture, Food, and the Environment.]

Tufts in Talloires

I leave this weekend for a six-week stint as Scholar-in-Residence at the Tufts European Center in Talloires, France, about 45 minutes from Geneva. I will continue writing from afar. Please leave comments with ideas for U.S. Food Policy topics to cover from a European perspective. ("That shouldn't count as work!" is an editorial comment, not a topic suggestion). A bientot!

Shape Up Somerville makes a splash

It can seem impossible for an ordinary parent to improve his or her family's nutrition and physical activity, when every aspect of the outside environment undermines the effort. The Shape Up Somerville program, a collaboration between the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts and the nearby city of Somerville, MA, offers an appealing vision of a whole community working together to change that environment.

Professor Christina Economos (pictured) and her colleagues quite fearlessly tackled a long list of community issues at the same time, in hopes of creating a critical mass of improvements to create a virtuous cycle of family-based and community-based changes.

And this has been quite the month for Shape Up Somerville! After the scholarly research on their first-year outcomes was published in the refereed journal Obesity, the Wall Street Journal ran a long front page story -- complete with one of the Journal's famous dot-matrix illustrations of Economos -- which raved about the program:

The Somerville study is believed to be the first controlled experiment demonstrating the value of a community wide effort. It's only a small dent, but slowing the pace of weight gain among kids is the key to conquering childhood obesity, says lead author Christina Economos, an assistant professor at Tufts University. "It could be the difference between graduating overweight and graduating at a normal weight," she says. "We need to think about how it plays out long term."

The Somerville program, designed primarily by Dr. Economos and fellow researchers at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition, offers a surprising blueprint. It didn't force schoolchildren to go on diets. Instead, the goal was to change their environment with small and inexpensive steps. Dr. Economos, a specialist in pediatric nutrition and the mother of two school-age children, has long believed that the battle against obesity can't be fought at the dinner table alone but requires social and political changes.

Motivated by a desire to influence nutrition issues that at first appear to be individual concerns, Economos and her colleagues found themselves deeply involved in policy discussions and even economic debates that they might never have expected at the beginning. One of my favorite stories relates to how their effort to invite active participation by school food service workers required them first to allay the workers' concerns about the labor of processing more fresh vegetables, and that in turn led to a convoluted labor negotiation that ended up working to everybody's satisfaction.



Update: A reader points out: "Those famous portraits in the WSJ are stipple drawings. Specifically, they are referred to as 'hedcuts,' though I just learned that today."