US Food Policy makes Culinate's top ten list

Our friends at Culinate, a progressive food awareness blog, posted: "Learn more about your food: ten websites that will help you eat with greater awareness." We are honored to be included in the list at number 10. Here is what they have to say:

Although it can at times be a little wonky, Parke Wilde’s blog U.S. Food Policy is a good stop for those interested in policy. (To a certain extent, we all should be.) A food economist at Tufts University, Wilde has help maintaining his blog from a couple of others; together, their posts — such as a recent one that maps 10 U.S. food-policy destinations using Google Maps — enlighten and clarify.

We are also amused to be tagged as "a little wonky."

Food and agriculture shows hit the radio waves

A few radio shows have emerged lately on topics related to the good food movement and sustainable agriculture. I thought I would share some of my favorites:

First, fellow Registered Dietitian, and friend, Melinda Hemmelgarn has started a weekly 1/2 radio program – taped interviews with innovative, insightful and interesting guests who will help listeners "think beyond their plates" and connect the dots between food, health and agriculture.

The show airs on Thursdays at 5:00 p.m. Central and you can listen live on line at: www.kopn.org or listen to podcasts as they're posted. KOPN is a 35-year-and-still-going-strong community–owned, volunteer-run radio station – Free press at its finest with NO commercials.

Second, as previously posted, Tufts very own Jessica Ilyse Smith is a producer and journalist for the Public Radio International show, Living on Earth. Though the show is not entirely focused on sustainable food, she covers food issues as much as possible. Some topics she has covered include food deserts and the pros and cons of GE corn ethanol. Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy also has its own Internet Radio Program that Jessica contributed to along with our own blog contributor Aliza Wasserman.

Third, Heritage Radio Network(HRN) is "a cutting edge internet-based radio station designed to protect and advance our country’s rich cultural roots in the form of interviews, reflections, musings and ramblings from America’s leading farmers, food mavericks, filmmakers, artists and tastemakers. The live radio shows are then uploaded onto heritageradionetwork.com where content is archived into audio bits and pieces and searchable by keywords or phrases. This is an unprecedented venue for future historians who want to research their past, our present."

HRN has plenty of shows and topics to choose from. Some of my favorite shows:

• Edible Communities Hosted by: Kate Manchester, Marla Camp and Deborah Schapiro Celebrating the abundance of local foods, season by season.

• Heritage Farm Report Hosted by: Heather Hyman and Lorenzo Ragionieri A day in the life of a Heritage Farmer. America's leading farmers discuss the history of their land, avant-garde farming techniques, and farming how-to's.

• Greenhorn Radio Hosted by: Severine von Tscharner Fleming Greenhorn Radio: Radio For Young Farmers, By Young Farmers. Acclaimed activist, farmer, and documentarian Severine Fleming surveys America's cutting edge, under-forty farmers.

Fourth, The National Center for Appropriate Technology's Sustainable Agriculture Spotlight is a weekly Internet radio show. The show covers a wide range of topics on sustainable agriculture, including on-farm production of biodiesel, integrated pest management, growing crops for farmers' markets, organic crop certification and federal farm policy. Each week host Jeff Birkby, ATTRA outreach directory, interviews regional and national experts. The show airs live Thursdays at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on the Green Talk Network. Archives are listed 24 hours after the show.

Last, but not least, is my new favorite guilty pleasure: Agritalk Radio: The Voice of Rural America. I download Agritalk as a podcast and listen to it on my way to school. The show is hosted by Mike Adams and may help us "agricultural intellectuals" understand issues important to American farmers. There is a ton of policy discussion and guest interviews from agricultural state representatives and agricultural committee members. Scattered throughout the show are commercials from our favorite big agricultural corporations, Checkoff programs, and the AdCouncil. My favorite episode is the June 2nd show: The Growth of Small Farms with guest Agricultural Economist, John Ikerd.

Happy listening!

Cross-posted from Epicurean Ideal.

"Oh, no!" says the broccoli ...

... "Secretary Vilsack loves cookies and not me!"


When I saw this in an email from agrarian writer Stephanie Ogburn, I thought it was Photoshop humor, but really it is from a USDA press release today.

The press release describes a new anti-obesity public service announcement featuring USDA Secretary Vilsack and Sesame Street characters.

Sesame Street came under fire from Commercial Alert in 2003 for its sponsorship from McDonald's, including a mini-advertisement adjacent to the public television show. Here is the current Sesame Street page thanking its sponsors, including McDonald's.

Question for the comments: do you think the cold shoulder for broccoli in the USDA photograph is an oversight or intentional non-verbal communication?

Update: a Facebook comment says, "hmm-- Kathleen showed this PSA at Mayoral Child Nutrition Summit today...the broccoli is portrayed very well in the spot...I think this is an oversight."

Nutrition advantages of organic over conventional food

Organic food probably has modest nutrient advantages over conventional food. For example, a literature review in 2008 summarized several hundred matched pairs, where one observation was organic and the other conventional. Organic had more nutrients in 61% of cases, which is notable but not overwhelming.

It is wisest to make your decisions about organic and conventional food primarily based on your assessment of the environmental considerations. The nutrient differences are not as decisive. If you don't care about artificial pesticides or GMOs, you may prefer whichever is less expensive. If you want food grown without artificial pesticides or GMOs, you may prefer organic.

In any case, I would not yet give credence to the much-circulated Reuters report yesterday that organic has no nutrient advantages over conventional food. The report is based on a literature review released yesterday through the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The review, funded by the UK Food Standards Agency, had different selection criteria from the earlier research mentioned above.

It seems to me the new UK literature review was not sufficiently powered to detect the small advantages of organic that one might realistically expect. For example, unless there is an error (in tabulation or in my reading), it shows a 10% advantage of organic over conventional in zinc, but the result was not statistically significant (for example, because the sample size was not large enough). The authors say this shows organic is no better than conventional. But, nobody ever expected a greater than 10% advantage for organic anyway. Really, the new results are essentially consistent with the older research. I think the authors err in summarizing their results as refuting the earlier claim that organic food offers slightly more nutrients, and the Reuters report is mistaken in its news summary of this research.

The new study has also been critically covered by Paula Crossfield at Civil Eats and Charles Benbrook at the Organic Center. From Benbrook:

Despite the fact that these three categories of nutrients favored organic foods, and none favored conventionally grown foods, the London-based team concluded that there are no nutritional differences between organically and conventionally grown crops.

I leave this fuss in the same place I started. There are probably modest nutrient advantages from organic production.

Rudd Center webinar on childhood obesity

Briefly liveblogging today's webinar on soda taxes and childhood obesity, from the Rudd Center on Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.

David Ludwig's presentation, reviewing the scientific literature, is convincing that consumption of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages increases body weight and risk of obesity for children. For my own purposes, I take this conclusion as fact and spend most of my mental energy engaging the interesting policy questions.

Kelly Brownell reviewed objections that have been raised to soda taxes. First, the "Nanny State" objection -- the idea that the government shouldn't be telling people what to eat. Brownell's response is that the government already does tell us what to eat, through Dietary Guidelines and subsidies. I think that response won't carry the day, with politicians or the public. Dietary guidance, which summarizes the complex scientific literature but respectfully leaves concrete decisions to families, is different from a soda tax. Similarly, agricultural subsidies will be seen as very different in motivation and impact from a tax designed to encourage healthy beverage consumption.

Second, the argument that soda tax will be regressive, hurting poor families disproportionately. Brownell's response includes the observation that low-income people have higher rates of disease, so the benefits of a soda tax are progressive. Also, if poor people shift to water, Brownell says, they will actually save money. Again, I think soda tax proponents have a tin ear for how poorly such arguments will play with potential allies, including advocates for low-income people and otherwise sympathetic legislators.

Overall, proponents of a soda tax need to reach beyond the public health framework -- where childhood obesity is an illness that needs a medically prescribed remedy -- and reach out to economists, politicians, and others who are better prepared to engage likely public reactions to a proposed excise tax as a public health tool. Above all, any tone of eagerness to tax is politically deadly. It would be much wiser to adopt the tone that "nobody likes taxes, but, just as in our own families, hard choices must sometimes be made, and this one may help our children stay healthy." Several webinar speakers generally sounded more eager to tax.

Michael Jacobson provided a helpfully skeptical summary of the political situation. Several current bills at federal level do not include a soda tax. Grassley and Baucus oppose a soda tax. Some tax-writing committee staffs have given a little attention to soda taxes as a possible revenue source, but that is not much to go on. The most likely scenario for imposition is during a federal or state fiscal crunch, as a convenient revenue source, along with alcohol taxes. That setting wouldn't bode well for building public support for the corresponding public health agenda.

Additional information sources include an anti-tax group, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation effort on childhood obesity, a recent Michael Jacobson editorial, and a Center for Science in the Public Interest website.

New pressures in the phosphate dilemma

Watching the American phosphate dilemma these days is like watching two trains streaking toward each other on a single track, headed for a wreck.

One locomotive is powered by growing food demand and rising food prices, which leads to a greater need for phosphate fertilizer. As USDA's Economic Research Service explained recently in the March issue of Amber Waves, the jump in food prices from 2006 to 2008 led to a corresponding spike in fertilizer prices. Phosphate prices jumped 93 percent in just 12 months, reflecting high demand and low supplies [Update July 30: In the comments, R points out that the prices fell part way back again after 2008 and suggests that international capacity may respond fully within a few years]. Phosphate inventories fell 27 percent in the most recent data available (2007): "Domestic and foreign fertilizer producers were not able to quickly adjust production as inventories dwindled." These trends generate a huge economic incentive for increased phosphate production.


The other locomotive is fueled by the growing environmental constraints on phosphate mining. As we noted briefly a couple weeks ago, 75% of U.S. phosphate fertilizer comes from strip mines in Florida, and it is not clean work.

Though one can find sources more critical of the mining industry, my favorite source for explaining the complex array of environmental problems is the comparatively industry-friendly Florida Institute of Phosphate Research. Here is where things stand according to FIPR's detailed phosphate primer. Sure, phosphate mining generates radioactive waste, due to radon and other naturally occurring substances, and, sure, the level of radioactivity in most Florida phosphate byproduct waste exceeds EPA limits for agricultural or road-building uses. However, the radioactivity is not very dangerous and probably is not the worst environmental concern from phosphate mining.

The honor of worst environmental concern might go to the air pollution (dust or flouride contaminants), or maybe the water pollution (heavy metals or fish-damaging acidity). Under routine operation using best practices, water contamination can be prevented, FIPR explains. "There is, however, the possibility of an accidental spill like the one that occurred in December 1997 when acidic water from a Mulberry Corporation phosphogypsum stack spilled into the Alafia River." It gets worse: "Improving the quality and reducing the quantity of the process water became an even higher priority for the phosphate industry after the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) inherited three phosphogypsum stacks with full ponds when Mulberry Corporation (a chemical processing company) declared bankruptcy in January 2001. These ponds contained billions of gallons of acidic water. Two stacks are in Mulberry in Polk County, where there was a spill in 1977 and one was at Piney Point in Manatee County where a spill would endanger Bishops Harbor, a prized estuary."

But, even the spills may not be the most serious environmental constraint. From FIPR's phosphate primer, the worst constraint may simply be the opportunity cost of blighted land that is occupied by the mountains of phosphogypsum waste (1 billion tons in 25 "stacks" in Florida, with 30 million new tons each year) or the thousands of acres of clay settling ponds (occupying 40% of the land area of the extraction operations even after the operation is completed). In FIPR's characteristically understated account of the clay settling ponds: "Research has proven that there are uses for the land, but the uses are limited by the properties of the clay that leave the settling areas unstable. There is a strong public desire to cut down on the number of settling areas created." Indeed, FIPR's phosphate primer perceives growing residential populations, not limited supplies, as the fundamental constraint on increased production in Florida. You can just hear the tone of regret: "There is a deposit around the Boyette area in Hillsborough County, for example, that will likely never be mined because the land over it has been developed."

[Update July 30: An initial version of this post yesterday evening had photographs of a mine, from my recent field trip in Florida, but further investigation shows it may have been a cement or building materials mine. I'll add the photographs back if I can confirm that it was a phosphate mine. Meanwhile, here are links to Florida phosphate mining photographs from a historical archives, a recent class trip, and a stock photo.]

The public relations folks for Mosaic, the largest mining company and a former Cargill subsidiary, avoided mining images in the following video [Update July 30: slightly toned down my description of this video]. Yet, hidden behind all of the orange tree groves and green soccer fields in the video, I think you can probably imagine in your mind the gray wasteland and hear the mechanical roar of the dominant image the film-makers excluded.



I haven't seen Florida phosphate mining in the news much lately. But, watching the trajectory of phosphate fertilizer on the one hand, and environmental constraints in Florida on the other, I'll hazard a prognostication. One way or another, the phosphate fertilizer industry will come to a collision in the next couple years with sufficient force to make the news.

In Seattle: "The Search for Affordable Nutrient Rich Foods"

A new study (.pdf) from King County (Seattle), Washington, looks into some of the leading concerns in national discussions of local food retail access -- (1) whether supermarkets are found in poor neighborhoods, and (2) whether food prices are higher in poor neighborhoods. Nadia Mahmud, Pablo Monsivais, and Adam Drewnowski find supermarkets in neighborhoods of all income levels. For most chains, outlets were found in both poor and rich neighborhoods. Each chain offered approximately the same prices in a store sampled from a poor neighborhood and a matched store sampled from a rich neighborhood. Yet, the chains differed from each other, with some chains having much higher prices in both kinds of neighborhood. The paper names the chains and has nice maps and tables of actual prices.