Truth in advertising

If this blog ever sounds a note of outrage over lies and near lies in commercial food marketing -- like when a cereal company puts "fruity" in the product name for sugary junk that has no fruit -- then you can remind me of this story. I got home the other night to find my children gobbling up some delicious soup my wife Sarah had made. "What's in it," I asked, pulling up a chair? "Potatoes," say the kids. "Chickpeas," says Sarah. "Really?," says my son. "Well," Sarah says, "chickpeas and a little potato. I mean, I didn't really say it was all potatoes. I just called it potato soup."

More research on food deserts

From a 2008 article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research by Samina Raja and colleagues at SUNY - Buffalo, based on research in Erie County, NY:

[L]ike other studies, we find an absence of supermarkets in neighborhoods of color when compared to white neighborhoods. Nonetheless, our study reveals an extensive network of small grocery stores in neighborhoods of color. Rather than soliciting supermarkets, supporting small, high-quality grocery stores may be a more efficient strategy for ensuring access to healthful foods in minority neighborhoods.

Victory garden of tomorrow

I have been waiting for this! Those of you who know me know my affinity for the WW2 Victory garden propaganda posters. I have been in contact with Joseph Wirtheim, a graphic designer, artist, and student living and working in Portland, Oregon. He is creating new-age Victory Garden posters that are amazing. I just picked up part of his collection at ETSY. If you have never heard of ETSY it is the greatest online flea market where you can buy handmade artisan gifts, clothes, trinkets and other goodies directly from the artist.

Check these babies out:

"I do a lot of thinking about my generation's place in history and its contribution to the American story - that's what my art generally concerns."

VGoT is an art project posing as a propaganda campaign for new, American homefront values. The message style draws from American mid-century homefront propaganda, and the messages essentially draws from 21st century needs as found in the current environmental sustainability movement.

The resulting artwork is a series of propaganda-style poster images, that are either hand screenprinted, painted, or offset printed.

Learn More about Joe here and the Victory Garden of Tomorrow collection. I would encourage you too support artists, especially this one. They would look good in an office, great room or barn yard wall.

Cross-posted from Epicurean Ideal.

Local Foods Wheel

The Local Foods Wheel is a cool dial-shaped gizmo for remembering what local foods are in season. It comes in two versions, for San Francisco and New York City, and more locations are in the works.

What is the Local Foods Wheel?
The local foods wheels for the San Francisco Bay and New York Metro Areas are designed to help you identify what foods are grown in those regions, and what is in season at various times of the year. The wheels are 12 inches in diameter printed on card stock in bright, full color.

How does it work?
The top wheel shows the foods that are available year-round, and the bottom shows foods that are available only seasonally. The top wheel exposes one season of the bottom wheel at a time, so that you can see what foods are available during that season.

The authors include Jessica Prentice (chef and author), Sarah Klein (artist), and Maggie Gosselin (a Friedman School graduate student and also the designer of the new title banner and template for this blog -- thanks a bunch!).

Cheetos ad and post on boingboing

Open comments. Here is an ad and post for Cheetos on one of my favorite blogs -- boingboing. What do you think?

Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition

Research by Donald R. Davis who retired from Biochemical Institute at The University of Texas (in my hometown of Austin) and in conjunction with the Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita Kansas, has summarized three kinds of evidence that points towards the decline in the nutrient value of fruits and vegetables in the US and UK over the last 50 to 100 years.

The report, published in February 2009 Journal of HortScience, reviews a highly cited research study titled "The dilution effect in plant nutrition studies" published in 1981 by Jarrell and Beverly in Advances in Agronomy. Jarrell and Beverly found that fertilized plants contained larger absolute amounts of minerals than the unfertilized plants, but these amounts were sufficiently diluted by the increased dry matter that all mineral concentrations declined, except for phosphorus, which is the common fertilizer.

Next, Davis looked at historical food composition data derived from three quantitative reports. While these studies are limited by their ability to be compared due to variation in methods, they found:

apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results.

Finally, Davis evaluated studies of collections of cultivars of a single food that was grown side by side for purposes of comparing their nutrient content. The foods were broccoli, wheat and maize. The side by side allows the elimination of using historical data in the form of averages (as was done in the previous section), which allows all environmental conditions (soil, fertilization, irrigation, pest control, climate, harvest, sampling, and analytical methods) to be held constant. He found:

plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.

In conclusion,

Further studies are needed to assess the generality of dilution effects among foods and to greatly expand the numbers of nutrients and phytochemicals considered. Side-by-side comparisons of multiple cultivars in multiple environments can provide rigorous answers to the many remaining uncertainties. They are also well suited for testing proposed environmental and genetic methods to overcome dilution effects. Specifically, we would like to find ways to decrease the inverse correlation coefficients between yield and nutrient concentration or to decrease the negative slopes in plots of nutrient concentration vs. yield.

Over three billion of the world’s population is malnourished in nutrient elements and vitamin,including in developed countries. Vegetables and fruits are among the richest sources of many nutrients. Thus, declining nutrient concentrations in horticultural products are most unwelcome. Past and ongoing efforts to increase yields, combined with apparent broad tradeoffs between yield and the concentrations of perhaps half of all essential nutrients, work against recent efforts to increase one or a few micronutrients in individual foods.

Applebee's sued over nutrition labeling questions

Yoni reports at Weighty Matters:

Have you eaten off a Weight Watchers menu in the past four years?

If it was at an Applebee's you might want to give Tara Kelly a call.

If you remember a few months back I blogged about the calorie labeling lawsuit that alleges misrepresented calorie counts at Applebee's restaurants from items off the Weight Watcher's menu whereby independent tests revealed some items to contain double the fat and calories posted.

Apparently now 4 separate law firms have launched class action lawsuits and a recent news story reported Gilbert Oshinsky lawyer Tara Kelly hopes to represent, "every person who has eaten from the Weight Watchers Menu in the last four years".

Given there are over 2,000 Applebee's in 49 states, 17 international countries and one U.S. territory, and lots of folks on Weight Watchers, I imagine Tara will be pretty busy.

The trial is scheduled for 2010.

U.S. Food Policy has been offering unsolicited advice about nutrition labeling to Applebee's for some years, but I don't think the restaurant managers read it.