Hunger and food insecurity in the Latino community

The rate of food insecurity in Latino households is almost one in five, according to a study this month from the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.

Among the report’s key findings is that nearly one in five Latinos (19.6%) suffers from limited or lack of access to nutritious food each year, compared to 12% of all Americans. The report identifies a number of areas that contribute to this figure, as well as examines the links between hunger and problems such as obesity and physical and mental health among children.

The Washington Post article about the report quotes an old family friend, Beatriz Otero, who has led a remarkable group of bilingual charter school and early childhood education programs in Washington's Columbia Heights neighborhood.

How good is online restaurant nutrition information?

The NYC Board of Health decided recently to require calorie labeling prominently on menus and menu boards for some restaurants. Some readers might have overlooked this policy in the media coverage of the Board's simultaneous ban on trans fats in restaurants (see earlier post), but the labeling rule may in fact be more important.

A curious feature of the new labeling rule is that it seems to apply only to restaurants that already make calorie information available, and not to restaurants that currently fail to provide nutrition information online. Clearly, the Board's purpose was to address chain restaurants with standardized products, because these chains clearly know the nutrition characteristics of their products and will have a comparatively easy time posting the information. Still, it would be ironic to allow restaurants to evade the menu labeling rule simply by refusing to provide nutrition information elsewhere as well.

This raises the question: how good is restaurant nutrition information online? For myself, because I am interested in more nutritional features than can be listed on the menu board, a good online database may be even more important.

Margo Wootan and Melissa Osborn took a look at this issue in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine last February. This fall, starting with their paper, Sivakumar Chandran and I compiled this Excel sheet (.xls) with current notes about the online nutrition information provided by the leading chains, as identified by the QSR Top 50 list. Although Fast Food Facts and a couple other online sources provide excellent data bases for a large number of chains, we focused on the quality of direct information provision by the company.

The high quality and ease of use for the top several chains is notable. Here, in QSR's order, is McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Subway, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. The worst non-discloser among the top 20 chains appeared to be Quiznos.

That's great for Quiznos. Now that restaurant chain may not be subject to the NYC menu board rules either.

Stupidest weight loss drug ever

The weblog Weighty Matters offers this coverage of "the stupidest weight loss drug ever." It is a nasal spray "that would take away your sense of smell and taste." Jack from Fork & Bottle sent me the link, with none of his usual droll commentary. Andrew in the comment section thinks this new drug is just the beginning:

Why not patent a product that tastes and smells like manure that you can spray on your food? That'll deter you from eating. Or how about a clothespin that you can pinch your nose with while you eat? That would probably numb your sense of smell. Wow, that really is the stupidest weight loss drug ever! This society is out of control.

How did your district do on school wellness?

School districts around the country worked this year to pass "school wellness policies," establishing guidelines at the local level for nutrition and physical activity.

These new policies follow several years of hand-wringing about rising rates of childhood obesity and many more years of negative changes to school food and wellness practices: shortened physical education, junk food in vending machines, pouring rights for soda companies, branded pizza as a lunch entree, potato puffs as a vegetable, food company marketing in the guise of nutrition education curricula, and on and on.

These changes sometimes seemed to "just happen," without having been established as policy by any particular accountable person or council. Although the 2004 mandate from Congress requiring school wellness policies stood in place of even more ambitious pro-nutrition policy options that Congress lacked the courage to adopt, this mandate did at least require local school districts to decide in public where they stand on the child wellness debates of the day.

Now comes the challenge of figuring out what the districts decided. There are many thousands of school districts in the United States. No systematic collection system was established to organize district-level information about wellness policies.

Fortunately, this month, the School Nutrition Association -- an advocacy group for childhood nutrition and in some respects a trade association for the school food service providers -- released a report summarizing the policy decisions for a representative sample of 140 school districts (.pdf) (data on a la carte policies excerpted below). This new report follows an earlier report this fall about the 100 largest school districts (.pdf). The results are summarized briefly in this press release.

If you care about nutrition and wellness in your own local area, get and read a copy of your own local wellness policy. Here is a link to my town's policy (I served on the wellness policy committee and the later implementation committee until recently). Now, really for the first time, you can easily compare your district to other similar districts around the country. It almost makes me wish the parents here in Arlington had pressed even harder than we did for a vigorous pro-wellness policy.

Guacamole dip with no avocado -- a food policy lesson in "standards of identity"

It has been fun to follow recent coverage of Kraft's guacamole dip, whose label the company changed a few months ago when people complained that the product has little avocado in it. "A thunderous 'No!' to faux guacamole," says Tom Philpott. "Yum," says Chowhound, although one suspects sarcasm after following the link to Jerry Hirsch of the Los Angeles Times (via Seattle Times):

The guacamole sold by Kraft Foods Inc. ... calls for modified food starch, hefty amounts of coconut and soybean oils and a dose of food coloring [Note 12/21: slight correction, see comments].

A column by Fortune's Marc Gunther today picks up the story of the faux guacamole as one example of "misleading labels [that] raise a bigger issue, and it's called trust." The column links to U.S. Food Policy. Gunther, who keeps a weblog and is author of Faith and Fortune, continues in today's column:

At a time when trust in big business is low - and when the food industry, fairly or not, faces escalating concern over the epidemic of obesity in the United States - you would hope, and think, that the industry would go out of its way to avoid marketing practices that are even potentially misleading.

Are there no rules about this sort of thing?

You may be surprised that it is legal to call a paste "guacamole dip" if it has minimal amounts of avocado. In fact, the federal government does have such rules, called "standards of identity," for hundreds of food products. Here is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announcement last year about possible changes to these standards.

Looking deep within the Code of Federal Regulations on this topic (see sections 130 to 169), I could find many related products, but no guacamole. I know you will be pleased to find that products that do have a standard of identity are required to have the nice simple ingredients you would expect.

For example, here is a brief excerpt of the long standard for "catsup":

... Such liquid is strained so as to exclude skins, seeds, and other coarse or hard substances in accordance with current good manufacturing practice. Prior to straining, food-grade hydrochloric acid may be added to the tomato material in an amount to obtain a pH no lower than 2.0. Such acid is then neutralized with food-grade sodium hydroxide so that the treated tomato material is restored to a pH of 4.20.2. The final composition of the food may be adjusted by concentration and/or by the addition of water. The food may contain salt (sodium chloride formed during acid neutralization shall be considered added salt) and is seasoned with ingredients as specified in paragraph (a)(2) of this section. The food is preserved by heat sterilization (canning), refrigeration, or freezing. When sealed in a container to be held at ambient temperatures, it is so processed by heat, before or after sealing, as to prevent spoilage....

Just like grandma used to make.

More discussion on whether organic agriculture leads to deforestation

Dan Mitchell's New York Times column, "What's Online," today reviews the lively commentary on the Economist article this month, which criticized organic agriculture and other consumer movements.

Mitchell mentioned U.S. Food Policy's skepticism about whether organic agriculture is actually less efficient on a per acre basis (and this mention gave this weblog a record traffic day today). I was quite sure the Economist's use of 1950s production data to contrast with modern chemical agriculture was misleading, but I didn't offer any better data. For that, Mitchell turned to Samuel Fromartz, author of Organic, Inc., in the comment section at Gristmill:

As for the claim that organic will take more land, this is entirely based upon the assumption that organic yields less and thus needs more land to farm. But the longest running study comparing organic and conventional methods, published in Science, found that organic agriculture has about 10 percent deficit in yield in grains. Several universities in the U.S. have found that deficit in the range of 4 percent to nil. Other studies have shown organic outperforms conventional farming in years of drought. Finally, the problem with conventional farming has been soil depletion through overuse of chemicals - something that India is now experiencing and one reason they are looking beyond the Green Revolution to organic alternatives.

These numbers sound far more plausible than the yield penalty implied by the Economist. Fromartz's statistics do make organic agriculture appear a tad less efficient per acre than conventional agriculture. When readers think about organic farming, they should not imagine a weed-ridden backwards plot off the grid. Instead, they should picture fairly modern information-intensive production, which uses high-quality conventionally bred seed stock in place of GMOs, and which refrains from using certain chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

Indeed, the very efficiency and recent modernization of organic agriculture has been so striking that it has become controversial within the movement. In addition to commenting, Fromartz also writes his own posts at Gristmill, recently linking to this interesting essay from Bob Scowcroft about long-term trends in organic agriculture.

Although a comment on my earlier post questioned the relevance, the discussion of a small yield penalty for organic agriculture naturally makes me wonder what change in the food system would more dramatically improve nutrients per acre sufficiently to alleviate the land pressure on the world's rainforests. The foremost answer is to eat less meat. If you are vegetarian, you're all set (although my colleagues at the nutrition school will remind you to take steps to ensure adequate micronutrients). If you are not vegetarian, you can easily to pick an amount of meat that exceeds your nutrition needs and is still far less than the average American consumption level.

Photo suggestions?

A nonprofit scholarly journal's editor has asked me for a suggestion for a photograph to use on the cover of an upcoming issue. The topic is related to economics and nutrition, and she suggests something about a food transaction. Her instructions say, "Generally a simple photo works best. It needs to be of high enough resolution for printing at the size used. (For example, we would need the file supplied at 300 dpi with a width of 8.375 inches, or proportionally higher dpi if provided at a smaller size--we can adjust the size as long as the resolution is there.) A copyright release is also required." If you have a suggested photograph, please send with a suitable price quote for nonprofit use to the email address in my Blogger profile. Thanks!