Eating Green: Six Arguments for a Greener Diet

Six Arguments for a Greener Diet, released today by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, brings together several themes from the non-profit group's portfolio of consumer communication and public policy advocacy.

In it, the Center's Michael Jacobson summarizes the scientific case for a low-meat diet, on grounds of both environmental impact and public health: "Jacobson, who is not a vegetarian, says that the single most important dietary advice is to change your diet in a healthy vegetarian direction."

The accompanying website, Eating Green, offers interactive features for assessing your diet or touring the modern system of factory-based agriculture.

Jacobson and Nina Planck, farmers' market organizer and author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why, will be interviewed on National Public Radio's Diane Rehm Show this morning at 11:00 am.

The good life

The Eat Local Challenge weblog got some extra attention last week, after the CNN appearance of folks from Locavores.

It's not new, but I also recently revisited the nice interactive map graphic from Local Harvest at the FoodRoutes website. Here is the view when you zoom in on the region between my neighborhood and the Finger Lakes region of Central New York state, where a visitor in the coming week, if he or she happened to be on vacation, might enjoy the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance.

A feature-length product placement from Burger King?

The recently revived Fast Food News weblog and Accidental Hedonist have links to a story about Burger King working on a feature-length movie where the setting is a Burger King outlet (at Accidental Hedonist, Kate Hopkins claims to be speechless).

Here is the LA Times' report:

Product placement apparently isn't cutting it in the movie business anymore. Not satisfied, say, with a mere passing shot of a mega-star munching a Whopper, Burger King is developing a film whose main character lives above one of its burger franchises, according to a story in this week's Advertising Age, a trade magazine. No, it's not a horror film. And it's also not going to be what would seem the natural sequel to 2004's nutty teenage comedy "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle." Instead, Burger King, along with ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, which is overseeing the script, envision a "character-driven" story along the lines of "Garden State" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," according to Advertising Age.

Do trade models answer policymakers' questions?

The Subsidy Watch Newsletter this month offers an interesting debate between Frank Ackerman of the Global Development and the Environment Institute at Tufts and Will Martin of the World Bank about the elaborate economic trade models whose quantitative estimates form a center-piece of rhetorical debate over the current Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations. These negotiations, if they ever get out of their current doldrums, have major implications for U.S. agricultural and food policy.

Beyond the debate, the best part of the newsletter is the robust set of links to explanations (.pdf), sharper criticism, and technical details of the economic trade models.

Clever solutions to fish dilemmas

Of all the sub-topics under U.S. food policy, U.S. fish policy may be the most confusing. Knowing what fish to provide your family requires balancing a host of health and environmental issues: omega-3 fats (good), methylmercury (bad), PCBs (bad), environmental consequences (bad), overfishing (bad), tasty low-fat protein sources (good).

Marion Nestle's What to Eat, which I am now enjoying on my subway rides, takes no fewer than five chapters to lay out all the fish trade-offs and quandaries. On the constructive side, she describes the admirable recent effort to coordinate the message of several advocacy groups, which had previously published not-quite-consistent lists of better and worse fish options, reflecting the different weights the groups placed on various health and environmental issues. The resulting clear consumer advice is available from a site called The Fish List, sponsored by the Seafood Choices Alliance.

Nestle encourages consumers to take this list to their fish counter, tell them that you will not buy anything from the "avoid" column, and ask them to press their suppliers to provide the "enjoy" options. Her chapter points out the insane passivity of the fish industry in response to the industrial pollution that causes the food safety problems that threaten the industry.

That you cannot safely eat as much fish as you want from local waters in your state is a national scandal. Once you understand this situation, you cannot help but become angry about how such high levels of contaminants were allowed to get into your local streams and lakes and why so little is being done to stop the continued pollution of our national waterways. That, of course, brings us to the role of government. The government's lack of commitment to making fish healthier to eat can only be understood as responding to the political clout of industrial polluters and commercial seafood producers.

Meanwhile, still on the topic of constructive efforts to address fish dilemmas, I enjoyed reading on Marginal Revolution this morning about the Nature Conservancy's recent success in buying up fishing permits and actual trawlers to help protect waters and fisheries off the California coast. Alex Tabarrok points out that the Conservancy "continues to pioneer innovative, market-based approaches to conservation."

Visualizing data: a food stamp example

Have you seen this inspiring example of data visualization with a public purpose? It is a conference presentation by Hans Rosling. I first saw the link on BoingBoing a couple weeks ago. It includes links to Gapminder, the authors of a clever Flash animation that allows the viewer to choose variables and time periods, and then watch animated bubble plots that describe economic and demographic information about the world's countries.

Hey, I wondered, why can't we do something fun like that for U.S. food policy?

The following animation illustrates the effect of economic conditions and welfare reforms on the Food Stamp Program caseload in the 1990s. Because the Food Stamp Program is an entitlement, the federal government is somewhat at the mercy of factors beyond its control, which change the number of eligible people from one year to the next.

Caseloads increased sharply in the early 1990s and declined even more sharply in the second half of the decade. In the heated debates that followed, some argued that the caseload fluctuations respond to economic conditions, while others placed the blame for caseload declines on the welfare reforms of 1996.

The animation shows each state's Food Stamp Program participation level (as a fraction of the state population) on the vertical axis, and the state unemployment rate on the horizontal axis. The size of the bubbles in the plot reflects the state population, so you can distinguish major states from minor ones.

Welfare reform occurred at different times in the various states -- the timing of the reform is indicated by a change in color from blue to red.

You can see for yourself that the caseloads appear to respond in the expected way to rising unemployment in the early 1990s and falling unemployment in the late 1990s. Welfare reform does not have a visible effect on caseloads. Following a suggestion from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Nader Kabbani and I did an analysis that suggested that comparatively obscure policies about food stamp recertification periods might be more influential than the welfare reforms illustrated in the animation.

What is really cool is to see the diversity of state experiences with a clarity that a static graph could never achieve.

The "start" button starts the animation, and the "pause" button stops it. To restart, hit the "start" button again. I plan to start using such animations in my teaching, and will post more of this sort of thing in the coming year. Comments and suggestions welcome.

New York Times: High-fructose corn syrup gets "a bad rap"

Above all, do not read the headline of this New York Times article about high-fructose corn syrup. Do not read the sub-headings. Do not read the opening anecdote or the closing foolishness.

These book-ends reflect the worst of "flavor-of-the-day" health and science journalism. In this brand of journalism, what you thought was unhealthy yesterday is always healthy today. And, for excitement and novelty, it will always be unhealthy again tomorrow.

The spin of the headline and opening grabber paragraphs ruins an otherwise competent article.

In the sensible body of the article, you will find that leading experts such as Barry Popkin and Walter Willett are very concerned about rapid increases in consumption of soda and other sweetened beverages in recent decades. These beverages rank with the switch from home cooking to fast-food diets and the adoption of sedentary lifestyles as leading causes of the obesity epidemic.

Much of the sugar in these beverages, and scattered throughout the rest of the food supply in places you would never expect, comes from high-fructose corn syrup.

In the sensible body of the article, you will find that this corn syrup should never be considered "natural." It comes from an industrial chemical process that cannot be reproduced in your kitchen.

But, the book-ends. Arrghh!

The headline is, "A sweetener with a bad rap."

The "spin" of the article is that high-fructose corn syrup may be no worse than cane sugar in promoting obesity. That may be true, but it is like saying "cop-killer" bullets have gotten a bad rap, because it turns out that officers have been dying from regular bullets for generations, so everything you have heard about ammunition sales is wrong.

High-fructose corn syrup contributes to obesity, and obesity is a serious health concern. If a different sweetener were mass-produced for the same products, then a different sweetener would be the problem. As it stands, without a doubt, the problem is high-fructose corn syrup.

In the opening paragraph, a perfectly reasonable shopper named Marie Cabrera checks food labels in the grocery store to find the hidden high-fructose corn syrup. The article wrongly implies that she is confused. In the closing paragraph, Cabrera changes her mind:

But now, after learning that many experts say the substance is handled no differently in the body than sugar, she says that she will probably let some products with high-fructose corn syrup slide. "I guess I don't need to be so hard-core about it," she said.

It sounds like the reporter is telling everybody who will listen that experts consider high-fructose corn syrup to be harmless. It's not true, but Cabrera believed her. That's just tragic.