Upcoming Events: Michigan State University April 30

I look forward to giving a brown-bag talk about U.S. food policy at the MSU Center for Regional Food Systems, Michigan State University, this Tuesday, April 30, at noon.  Location: 338 Natural Resources Building.  Come visit and say hello.

Then, I will be in Detroit from April 30 late afternoon to May 2 for a meeting of the AGree agricultural policy initiative.

Josh Balk of HSUS at the Friedman School April 24

Josh Balk, director of corporate policy for the farm animal protection campaign of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), will speak at the Friedman School, tomorrow, Wednesday, April 24, at 12:15 pm, in the Behrakis Auditorium of the Jaharis Building on Tufts University's Boston Campus.

The abstract says:

His seminar will offer an exceptional opportunity to discuss the controversial strategies and tactics used by HSUS, addressing the vexing issue of animal welfare in a meat-eating society.

You may register to see a live stream of this presentation.

I will introduce the event and moderate a conversation afterwards.

I have been especially interested in the work of HSUS in recent years, following the organization's successful negotiation with leading egg industry associations about egg production practices and labeling.  You can read an impartial and even-handed summary of that agreement (.pdf) from the Congressional Research Service.

The Humane Society is one of the few major public interest organizations that shares my curiosity about the semi-governmental National Pork Board's questionable $60 million purchase of the "Other White Meat" brand from a leading pork industry trade association.

Interpreting science at #EB2013 in Boston

While enjoying the excellent sessions sponsored by the American Society of Nutrition (ASN) at the Experimental Biology 2013 meetings here in Boston this week, I was struck once again by the way actual nutrition science research results are filtered or digested into short memes of conventional wisdom before they reach the public.

This filtering process is necessary, unavoidable, and even healthy.  And yet it is a key step, which brings politics and interest into the process of producing nutrition policy and dietary guidance.

Here is a passage from my chapter on Dietary Guidance in Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan).

Filtering is the process of reading a large body of research and concisely summarizing its relevant points. Because the scientific literature is so heterogeneous, its policy impact depends heavily on how the research is filtered.

Filtering may be biased toward certain types of conclusions. Food industry organizations hire scientists and public relations specialists to spread the good word about favorable studies, without mentioning unfavorable studies. The public relations specialists are evaluated according to their success in placing favorable stories in the mass media. Reporters do not purposely seek to serve as a vehicle for industry public relations, but they face intense pressure to generate buzz by reporting novel and surprising findings. Hence, even though the balance of evidence in the scientific literature changes only slowly, headlines each week tell the public that everything they previously believed about nutrition and health was a big fat lie.

To summarize a complex scientific literature with less bias, scientists prefer to rely on systematic evidence reviews. In a systematic evidence review, an inter-disciplinary team establishes a protocol, a document that describes in advance the procedure for selecting relevant research studies, reducing the temptation to concentrate on studies that are favorable to the team’s prior expectations. For each selected study, the team evaluates the strength of the evidence, again using criteria established in advance.

Systematic evidence reviews do have some limitations. While they can avoid errors that stem from selective reading of just favorable parts of the scientific literature, systematic evidence reviews cannot fix misinterpretations that are widespread in the literature. Also, such reviews may not reflect recent improvements in scientific research. Still, because of their transparency and replicability, systematic reviews can clarify the state of the evidence on contentious scientific issues.

If you are attending the Experimental Biology 2013 meetings this week in Boston, the book itself is on display today at the CRC Press booth (#531 in the exhibition hall).  Please stop by the booth, and please share your thoughts on whether food policy is a worthy topic of study at a meeting of scientists.

Who favors transparency for artificial sweeteners?

What organization favors rules to make sure consumers know what artificial sweeteners are in manufactured food and beverages?

Thirty-years ago the number of ingredients used to sweeten foods and beverages could be counted on one hand. Today, there are 25 ingredients used to replace sugar. Regardless whether you think this change benefits our food supply or not, there is no question that consumer understanding of what is sweetening their foods and beverages has failed to keep pace with this dramatic change.

Today many foods, even foods that do not claim to be sugar-free, now contain artificial sweeteners. To assist consumers in making informed choices about what is sweetening the products they purchase, the Sugar Association petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requesting changes to labeling regulations on sugar and alternative sweeteners. In this petition we asked that artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols be identified on the front of the package along with the amounts, similar to what is required in Canada.

If it is important to you to know if the product you purchase contains artificial sweeteners, let your congressional representatives know that FDA needs to take action on this important consumer issue.

Yes, as Marion Nestle's blog Food Politics points out this week, under the headline "politics makes strange bedfellows," this public interest manifesto comes from the Sugar Association.  The sugar industry organization's slogan is "sweet by nature."

See related coverage of artificial sweetener labeling policy on U.S. Food Policy this March.

Monday's attack on Boston

Thank you, all of you, around the world, who have been sending expressions of love and peace and wishing us well here in Boston this week.

On Monday, I was working in my office on Tufts' Boston Campus a mile away when I heard of the attack.  In sadness, I watched the news on the computer screen and listened to the sirens going by outside.  Then, I biked home.

Others on my campus, with medical and emergency response training, rushed into action.  The Tufts Medical Center staff had trained for such an event and saved lives this day.

Yesterday afternoon, university leaders and chaplains of five faiths met with the Boston Campus community (including the medical and dental schools as well as my nutrition school).  Tufts has a big presence in the Boston Marathon, with a large team competing and many people volunteering and cheering on the runners.  We said poems and sang prayers in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.  People told of their work in the emergency room at Tufts Medical Center, as witnesses to the bombing itself, and as friends of the victims.  One student spoke of the third person who was killed, a graduate student in statistics at Boston University, so far from her home and family in China.

This attack did not teach me to feel vulnerable.  I have long known this already.

This week's attack on Boston was the second time in my life that I have been so close to a terrorist attack.  On September 11, I walked on foot across town and then across the National Mall from my USDA office on M street to pick up my 1-year-old son at the Department of Energy day care center.  As I crossed the Mall, I watched the smoke rising over the Pentagon across the Potomac River.  The day care center was empty, but there was a sign on the door telling me where to go pick him up from a nearby office.  I put my son in my child carrier backpack and walked several miles to my home in Columbia Heights, past block after block of stalled traffic evacuating the city.

And, though we seldom share much about such things in professional blogs, my Christian faith has a considerable focus on vulnerability.  I think about Jesus of Nazareth trying, without great success, to explain to his followers that he was not going to be the conquering invulnerable sort of leader they were expecting, or about pastor Martin Luther King in Memphis on the night before his death in 1968 basically explaining to his audience that he might die soon.

Vulnerability makes us stagger, but it needn't stop us outright.  I haven't posted here for a couple days, but I won't pause long.  Though it might seem oddly trivial, the next post you read on this blog will be about some small matter in U.S. food policy, and it won't be long in coming.

Reason Magazine highlights food policy

Baylen Linnekin's new column at Reason Magazine this week highlights the nationwide interest in food policy in recent years.

Linnekin gives at least four main examples, with links for more detail.

1. Emily Broad Leib's Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (see our coverage earlier this year). 

For example, a recent Harvard Law School news article claims "there may be no hotter topic in law schools right now than food law and policy[.]" 

2. My new book Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan).

“As a pundit once said, ‘When we leave farm policy to the experts, we actually leave it to the lobbyists,’” says Wilde, himself the author of the new book Food Policy in the United States. “This book pulls open the curtains and lets any interested reader understand the fundamentals of U.S. food policy.”

The pundit, by the way, was Ezra Klein.  Umm, may I say "pundit" is not pejorative?

3.  Oklahoma State University agricultural economist Jayson Lusk.  I have long admired Jayson's work and enjoyed contributing a chapter on food security to the multi-author handbook on the economics of food consumption and policy that Jayson co-edited for Oxford University Press a couple years ago.  After reading Linnekin's column, I have just this very minute pre-ordered Jayson's new book The Food Police.  It seems possible that Jayson's book will agree with one key theme of this blog (that government regulation sometimes overreaches badly) and perhaps downplay another (that more vigorous public sector action commonly is needed to advance the public interest, so we should all work together to make government more effective rather than undermining it).

Lusk, too, has a new food policy book out. In The Food Police, Lusk pushes back against what he sees as a dominant, pro-regulatory bent among food writers, which he calls “condescending paternalism.”

4.  David Gumpert's forthcoming book, which I also have just pre-ordered.

Still another such book, David Gumpert’s Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights, is set for release this summer.

As a nice timely hook to close this post, the Consumer Federation of America's annual Food Policy Conference begins today (April 15) in Washington, DC. If you attend, say hello to the two Friedman School graduate students who have set up a table with flyers and copies of Food Policy in the United States.

Obama proposes food aid reforms

President Obama's budget proposal includes several sensible reforms to U.S. food aid to other countries.

As Eric Muňoz at Oxfam America explains, "The proposal would end the practice of 'monetization' which provides cash to NGOs doing food security programs in developing countries but is highly inefficient and wastes a lot of money."

Also, the administration's proposal appears to reduce, but not eliminate, requirements that a large portion of U.S. food aid be purchased in the United States.  These requirements increase the aid programs' support among U.S. farmers, but generally are inefficient for meeting humanitarian assistance and development objectives.

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Rajiv Shah this week explained why local purchases closer to the recipient countries make more sense:

The President’s proposal reflects the growing, bipartisan consensus that the traditional approach to development must be modernized to help us efficiently meet the economic and moral challenges of our time.

The truth is that for years our practice in food assistance has lagged behind our knowledge. In the last decade, more than 30 different studies—from Cornell University to Lancet medical journal to the Government Accountability Office—have revealed the inefficiencies of the current system.

They’ve shown that buying food locally—instead of in the United States costs—much less—as much as 50 percent for cereals and as much as 31 percent for pulses. That’s because the average prices of buying and delivering American food across an ocean has increased from $390 per metric ton in 2001 to $1,180 today.

These costs eat into precious resources designed to feed hungry people—causing more than 16 percent of Title II funds to be spent on ocean shipping.

Buying food locally can also speed the arrival of life-saving aid by as many as 14 weeks. Those 98 days take on an entirely new meaning when you consider that waiting every additional day—every additional hour—can mean the difference between life and death.

Buying food locally is not only faster. It can also be a more effective approach to achieving our ultimate goal of replacing aid with self-sufficiency. In Bangladesh, we worked with Land o’ Lakes to buy cereal bars locally, helping create a commercially viable and nutritious product for the local market, while supporting U.S. jobs at home.

Shah's speech also highlighted the work of my Friedman School colleagues, led by Patrick Webb and Bea Rogers, to improve the nutritional quality of food aid.  Shah said, "In 2011, we completed a two-year food aid quality review in partnership with Tufts University that resulted in the most far-reaching improvements to U.S. food aid since 1966."

Demonstration kitchen at a clinic in Burkina Faso, West Africa, where mothers combine food aid products with local ingredients to help treat child undernutrition. Source: Patrick Webb 2008.

 

Update (later the same day): Corrected a name spelling as suggested in the comments. Thanks!