Diet | Center for a Livable Future

Corn Panic

By Dr. Dennis Keeney, Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future

The USDA 2011 Prospective Plantings Report was one of the most anticipated planting reports in several years. It came on the heels of a shocking Grain Stocks Report issued last month, which showed that corn stocks have come down 15% since March 2010. Ending stocks are projected to be only 675 million bushels, about 5% of the projected marketing year consumption, while consumption of the current marketing year corn was higher than in 2009 and well above projected consumption. Lowered stocks were also caused by a smaller than expected corn crop due to cold and rainy weather in the Corn Belt in 2010. Corn prices almost immediately increased by another $1 per bushel on the heels of a doubling of price during the past year. This dramatic price jump portends another round of world-wide food price increases, similar to those in 2008-2009. Already, some political uprisings in the Middle East have been blamed to some extent on rapid food price increases. In 2008-2009, yields bounced back to normal and the ethanol demand was much lower.

Why has this happened? Will it be alleviated by a bumper crop on more acres in 2011? Or has the grain commodity price structure started a trend towards a “new normal” of steadily increasing prices and more shortages?

The March 31 crop report indicated that farmers “intend” to plant 5% more acreage in corn, 8% more in wheat and 15% more in cotton while cutting soybean planting by only 1%. This adds up to 4 million more acres of cropland than there were in 2010. One wonders where that extra land is coming from. Most likely, it is land being retired from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), and includes more fragile meadow and grassland. That is not good news for the environment. Just recently, a number of congressional members called for the immediate release of some of the 31.2 million acres of CRP for cropland.

I would like to explore what corn is used for and why the sudden drop in ending stocks surprised so many people, before presenting some scenarios that may play out in the near future. Read More >

Calling all Farmers: Baltimore Accepting Applications for Urban Agriculture Projects

Courtesy Baltimore Office of Sustainability

This spring, something new is sprouting up in Baltimore. In the coming months, small-scale farm plots will be allocated to local farmers —an initiative aimed at filling vacant city-owned lots, encouraging community development, improving neighborhoods and increasing access to healthy food.

Last month, city officials in the Office of Sustainability released their Request for Qualifications (RFQ), beginning the search for qualified farmers willing and able to transform an empty plot into a productive asset. Between now and May 6, the city will be accepting applications from aspiring urban farmers.

In preparation for this project, CLF collaborated with the city on a land assessment to identify potential sites suitable for urban agriculture. Abby Cocke, an environmental planner within Baltimore’s Office of Sustainability, said that about 35 acres within the city met the criteria. In addition to being flat and sunny, the land needed to be city-owned, vacant, and with no short- or medium-term plans for development. Ten of those acres will likely be allocated in this first phase of the project.

Holly Freishtat, Baltimore’s Food Policy Director, said that sites were also considered based on need for better access to fresh fruits and vegetables. According to CLF, 18 percent of Baltimore City is considered a food desert, defined as a census block group more than ¼ mile from a supermarket and with 40 percent or more of the population with an income below 125 percent of the federal poverty line.

This summer, the city will work with farmers to identify specific plots that will work with their needs. The 5-year leases will charge just $100/year for use of the plots, which are up to 1 acre in size. The city may also provide grants or loans to help farmers cover start-up costs.

Cocke describes this initiative as a tangible way to transform problems into solutions. Baltimore has 30,000 abandoned properties dragging down neighborhood values. Urban agriculture can create valuable opportunities for residents including jobs, environmental improvements and enhanced access to healthy foods, she said.

“In addition to all the other benefits, we believe this will be a very important education and awareness-raising tool,” Cocke said. “More people in Baltimore will realize that it’s possible to grow your own food in your neighborhood. I’m hoping we’ll also see more community gardens get started as an after-effect.”

Across the country, interest in urban agriculture has piqued among urban planners and environmental, public health and sustainable agriculture advocates. From Boston to Seattle, cities are finding that they now want to reverse what city planners did a century ago when they moved farming out of cities completely. Now, with concerns about climate change and sustainable food production, “local” food has experienced a resurgence.

“While in some ways this is an experiment, we really are on the forefront of the urban agriculture movement in the U.S.,” Cocke said. “A lot of people are eagerly awaiting to see how this project goes here in Baltimore.”

Will the U.S. Hog Industry Ever Kick Its Reliance on Low-Dose Antibiotics?

The editors of Scientific American recently encouraged U.S. hog farmers to “follow Denmark and stop giving farm animals low-dose antibiotics.” Sixteen years ago, in order to reduce the threat of increased development of antibiotic resistant bacteria in their food system and the environment, Denmark phased in an antibiotic growth promotant ban in food animal production. Guess what? According to Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries the ban is working and the industry has continued to thrive. The government agency found that Danish livestock and poultry farmers used 37% less antibiotics in 2009 than in 1994, leading to overall reductions of antimicrobial resistance countrywide.

: Courtesy: Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Danish Veterinary and Food Administration, July, 2010

Except for a few early hiccups regarding the methods used in weaning piglets, production levels of livestock and poultry have either stayed the same or increased. So how did Danish producers make this transition, and why isn’t the U.S. jumping to follow suit? Like many things in industrial agriculture, the answer is not clear.

If any country knows how to intensively produce food animals, particularly pigs, it is Denmark. In 2008, farmers produced about 27 million hogs. In fact, the Scandinavian country claims to be the world’s largest exporter of pork. Thus Scientific American editors argue that the Danish pork production system should serve as a suitable model to compare to ours. U.S. agriculture economists from Iowa State University agree. In a 2003 report, Drs. Helen Jensen and Dermot Hayes stated that Denmark’s pork industry is “…at least as sophisticated as that of the United States… and is therefore a suitable market for evaluating a ban on antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs).” Read More >

Making Health the Default

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A recent article featured in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation News Digest on Childhood Obesity highlights a simple strategy that can be implemented in restaurants and other venues to improve the food environment.

The innovative new strategy is to change the offerings on children’s menus to highlight the healthier options. One way to do this is to set the default side options for children’s meals to healthier items. The default refers to the items that come with a combination meal if you do not explicitly ask for certain items. Traditionally, the default side options for combination meals have been soda and french fries. Healthier options are items that are advertised as alternatives to the defaults, such as apple slices, carrot sticks,100% fruit juices, low-fat milk, or water.

Shifting the restaurant food environment in this way-making lower-calorie beverage options and fresh fruits and vegetables the norm-may help to improve children’s nutrition when eating away from home. This is significant, as the number of meals children eat away from home has been increasing in recent years. Offering healthier items as the default also changes the decision-making environment by facilitating healthy choices rather than requiring people to alter their own behavior.

This type of strategy has been dubbed “libertarian paternalism” by University of Chicago professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their recent book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. A “nudge” is designed to steer individuals towards a certain behavior without taking away their freedom of choice. Read More >

How much meat do we eat, anyway?

Reading the new federal dietary guidelines made me want to look into this question. The guidelines, just released, say that Americans presently eat an average of 3.7 ounces daily of meat and poultry. But, the figures I typically see are double that, or more. So, why, in the brand-new guidelines, are USDA and HHS telling us that Americans eat less than a quarter pound of meat on a given day? I set out to reconcile these figures:

Who says what? US per capita meat consumption (ounces per day)
	*High estimate*	*Mid estimate*	*Low estimate*
Source	FAO of the UN	NHANES data from the CDC*	New NCI analysis of NHANES data	2010 federal dietary guidelines**
Meat & poultry	12	7	3.9	3.7
Red & processed	n/a	~5.3	2.6	2.5

*In: Wang, 2010. **See: table 5-1 on page 51 of the guidelines.

High estimate

An oft-cited estimate for meat consumption in our country comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO). The FAO figure of three-quarters of a pound daily has gained traction: The New York Times and The Guardian both cited this data for national meat consumption, propagating an image of Americans consuming a very large amount of meat on a daily basis. This reporting appears logical, because the FAO data combine US meat production and imports, and then subtract exports and typical rates of spoilage and waste, arriving at 124 kilograms per capita per year, or 12 ounces per day.

However, Hodan Farah Wells of the USDA Economic Research Service points out that the FAO data appear to represent the carcass weight of meat, not its retail weight (e-correspondence, March 2011). There is a big difference between the two. Retail weight represents cuts of meat, ready to cook. Carcass weight is heavier: it includes the weight of the bones, tendons, ligaments and fat that do not end up in the eventual retail cuts. For a beef steer, the difference between carcass weight and retail weight can be a couple hundred pounds.

	Live weight (lb)	Carcass weight	Retail weight (% of live weight)
Steer (beef)	~1100	60%	42%
Pig (pork)	~235	70%	56%
Broiler (chicken)	~6	66%	66% (less if boneless)

Sources: Cornell Waste Management Institute fact sheets; Advances in Meat Research, Pearson & Dutson, eds.; Principles of Meat Science, Hedrick et al., eds. (thank you Mary Schwarz)

Carrie Daniel of NCI, author of a recent paper in Public Health Nutrition about trends in US meat consumption, explains that the FAO definition of “consumption” in this case is the total amount of “the commodity” available for human consumption (e-correspondence, March 2011). Yet a bunch of this matter gets diverted from the human food supply and sent for rendering into products other than human food. (Industrial and agricultural products, and pet food, are some of the biggies). FAO keeps the numbers rougher than it might for the sake of international comparison: not every country can provide equally precise information on how livestock and meat circulate in society, so FAO reports the data at a level that permits cross-border comparisons. Read More >

The Locavore Debate, Revisited

scottroberts-flikr

How can local food systems support a resilient and sustainable future food economy in the United States? That was the question of the day at a recent conference entitled, “Reviving the American Economy-One Heirloom Tomato at a Time.” But for some, the question isn’t so much how, but even can local food systems support a sustainable food economy. It’s always important to be open to dissenting viewpoints, so it was with great interest that I listened to Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto critique the “eating local” paradigm.

According to Desrochers, who has garnered a respectable amount of publicity as an “anti-locavore,” choosing to eat local foods isn’t necessarily the sustainable choice many believe. Although he brings some very critical and noteworthy perspectives to the broader food system debate about energy efficiency and CO₂ emissions from ‘food miles,’ he also obfuscates and distorts the broader goals of developing resilient local food systems, and for this reason I’d like to address some of his main talking points here.

Food System Resilience

The main thrust of Desrochers’ argument against the resilience of local food systems is his belief they may lead to future food insecurity. He suggested that local food systems are inherently more unstable in the face of plant disease outbreaks, crop failures, and the limited growing seasons of different latitudes. His argument, in sum, was against a pre-20^th Century food system, where local crop failures might spell disaster for rural, isolated communities.

But is this really the vision of the local food movement? I don’t believe local food system advocates are calling for a return to eating only what is produced in isolation of wider regional or global food systems-an idea which is historically contentious to begin with. By creating a false dichotomy between choosing either an extreme local food system (where one would have to subsist only on foods grown directly in your locality) or a global one (where food would only come from where it was cheapest to grow-a “cheapness” dependent on agricultural subsidies and externalizing environmental health costs), it seems Desrochers has only constructed a straw man in order to knock it down.

The reality of nearly all food systems is that they are nested on varying scales, from the local to the global, and can interact between scales. As CLF Visiting Scholar Kate Clancy and co-author Kathryn Ruhf acknowledged in a well-articulated article 2010 in Choices on regional food systems, “An ideal regional food system describes a system in which as much food as possible to meet the population’s food needs is produced, processed, distributed, and purchased at multiple levels and scales within the region, resulting in maximum resilience, minimum importation, and significant economic and social return to all stakeholders in the region.”

In sum, Desrochers’ suggestion that widespread adoption of local food production might lead to the next great American famine is only even remotely tenable if we ignore the pragmatic and sensible reality that opportunities for creating truly sustainable food systems exist between the local and the global. Read More >

In Media, Big Ag Looms Large while Farmers Get Younger, Better Looking

In September 1965, CBS broadcast its first episode of Green Acres, a mini-series documenting a family’s transition from an urban life of prestige and luxury, to one of mud, manure, and chaos on a farm in the fictional town of Hooterville.

Green Acres took off, in part capitalizing on the popularity of its 1963 predecessor, Beverly Hillbillies, which was the number one TV show in America during its first two years. While Green Acres commented on the awkward integration of city elite into rural America, Beverly Hillbillies followed a clan of poor Ukrainian farmers through their upgrade to flashy Beverly Hills (but only after striking oil – mistakenly – on their land). The two TV hits were only a part of a mass of mini-series placing a farmer, or farm family, at the center stage. Other notable shows included The Real McCoys and Petticoat Junction. According to film critics, these series succeeded for their comedic portrayal of culture clash; for the agricultural community, however, the shows unfairly labeled farmers, and the farming occupation, as backward, poor, uncivilized, and low-class.

By the 80s and 90s, TV focusing on the rural farmer waned in popularity. Perhaps the last big effort to revive the genre came in 1993, as 20^th Century FOX released Beverly Hillbillies in a movie format. The critic reviews gave the movie an A for low-brow humor, but labeled the overall effort a pointless remake of a worn-out past. Worse still, the film’s directors received complaints from (mostly southern) viewers who found the movie insulting, irrelevant, or both. And so, by the end of the 20^th century, the relationship between TV, film, and the farmer was headed for reform.

Admittedly, media’s desertion of the country farmer role reflected the reality of a swiftly changing food environment. As the US food system was appropriated by massive industrialized farming operations, fewer Americans could survive as independent farmers, and the bucolic image of rural food production -overalls and mud – no longer resonated with the TV-watching, movie-loving public.

By the 2000s, popular film took on industrialized food production, and began to depict agriculture as a mysterious and powerful force of greed and deception. One such portrayal came in the 2007 movie Michael Clayton, which followed an elite lawyer through his defense of an agrochemical company’s billion-dollar class action lawsuit brought for damages caused by toxic chemicals. Two years later, the movie The Informant publicized the true story of an employee of Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest agriculture processing companies. The plot depicted the details of this employees’ harrowing experience as a whistleblower against executives found to be fixing the price of lysine, an additive for livestock feed. Read More >

Organic Farming: What is Technology’s Role?

A recent post on Software Advice entitled “Organic Farmers : Can They Be Tech Savvy ?” by Mr. Hunter Richards serves as a reminder of why one interested in sustainable farming mustn’t instinctively cringe at the thought of new technology and agriculture.

As the blog states, organic food has taken off as an industry; the Organic Trade Association ‘s estimated that national sales of organic food and beverages total $24.8 billion annually in comparison to $1 billion just 20 years ago. Organic fruits and vegetables, for example, now represent 11.4% of all U.S. fruit and vegetable sales. Naturally, one would think that increased demand would push producers to seek efficiency – that is, doing more with less.

Combine food, not just organic food, with demand and, well, you have yourself a headline.

A special report by The Economist, “The 9 billion -people question “, introduces the question of if there will be enough food to go around come 2050. But the report focuses on industrial agriculture – since, “traditional and organic farming could feed Europeans and Americans well. It cannot feed the world.”

An entire chapter highlights efficiency. How does one increase yield by 1.5% a year over the next 40 years to feed mankind? The article details three ways: narrowing the gap between the worst and best producers, spreading the “lifestock revolution” (expanding the CAFO system because – “battery chickens” do a better job than traditional methods), and taking advantage of new plant technologies (marker-assisted breeding seems to be the key technology).

Additionally, The New York Times recently asked seven professionals “Is the World Producing Enough Food ?” Multiple authors were in agreement that meeting the greater per capita food consumption could be met by increasing yields through increasing technologies. Dr. Kenneth Cassman, a professor of agronomy at the University of Nebraska, mentioned the current weakness in yield comes partially from “a substantial decrease in funding of research to enhance yields by methods other than biotechnology.”

These three articles all mention new technology’s potential to meet increasing food demand. Although The Economist focused on industrial agriculture and technological improvements, Mr. Richard’s article is a unique reminder that those involved in “organic food,” who some may assume are defined by their aversion to technology, also can crave increasing their efficiency through technology. Read More >

Chicken, Ascendant

Between now and April 3, the USDA is inviting comment on a just-completed, major research effort to reassess how much of the food in the United States actually makes its way into our mouths. Its findings suggest that in the chicken-versus-beef rivalry, the popularity of boneless chicken is edging out beef consumption in the USA for the first time on record.

The report calculates “consumer-level” food losses. “Consumer-level,” in this case, doesn’t only mean us, and what we do with the food we bring into our homes. Here, “consumer” reflects the amount of food that is discarded after it reaches the home, the restaurant, or other institution that serves prepared meals (including schools, hospitals, company cafeterias). (Losses before this point – not covered by this report – are termed “primary” or “retail” losses. Owing to spoilage, expiration dates, trimming, or culling, primary and retail losses occur as food travels from the farmgate, through slaughter and processing, on to transport and distribution, to arrive in warehouses and grocery stores.)

Losses from hundreds of foods, after they reach their final destination, are evaluated in the report. Among its major findings are that losses of meat and poultry in particular may be much lower than was previously estimated. The past estimate was that 32% of beef, 39% of pork and 40% of chicken was discarded from restaurants and homes. The revision decreases these loss estimates to 20%, 29% and 15% for these three “leading meats:” beef losses drop by a third, pork by a quarter, and chicken by a whopping 167%.

The big tumble in estimated chicken losses leads to perhaps the first evidence of a much-anticipated triumph of chicken over beef. “Adoption of the proposed loss estimates,” reports USDA, “would mean that for the first time since the data series began in 1909, consumers would now eat more chicken than beef in terms of pounds per year” (p26).

At first glance, these results seem really encouraging: people and institutions must be becoming more frugal, allowing less to go to waste. Yet, reading closer, we learn that these decreases basically reflect the fact that meat now comes to us with less to dispose of. This is partly because meat is a bit leaner, with the fat trimmed closer, than it would have been when the estimates were last calculated.

The major factor, though, is the growth in popularity of boneless meat. Now, more meat is cut away from bones before it reaches the “consumer,” so what’s changed is just that bones and meat part ways earlier in the food chain.

These bones are valuable resources that we could be making into nutritious, mineral-rich stocks and broths, as humanity has done with animal bones for millennia. Bones provide us additional sustenance from the same amount of meat. However, today’s food landscape tends to send bones off to renderers where they are turned into highly-processed industrial and agricultural products. That’s better than the landfill, but, still, deriving additional human nutriment from the animal would help justify the cost, energy, and, we hope, care that went into raising the cow, pig or chicken.

To learn more, see the report: Consumer-Level Food Loss Estimates and Their Use in the Economic Research Service Loss-Adjusted Food Availability Data.

Julia DeBruicker Valliant, MHS is completing a doctorate in public health. For her thesis she is conducting an in-depth and place-based study about the market for eco-labeled meat in Indiana, where she also raises cows and turkeys on her family’s farm. From 2007 to 2010 she served as a CLF Predoctoral Fellow.

Health experts worldwide agree, people who eat a lot of red and processed meat should cut back

As physicians we recognize that lean meats may be a healthy part of almost anyone’s diet. However, based on the preponderance of evidence compiled by scientists and health experts across the globe, there is little doubt that a diet high in red and processed meats is linked to serious health risks and that we would all be wise to keep our consumption down. New dietary guidelines, recently released by the United Kingdom’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) bolsters this conclusion. The SACN’s Iron and Health 2010 report advises that Britons can reduce their risk of colorectal cancer while maintaining healthy levels of iron by keeping their red meat and processed meat consumption to 70 grams or about 2 ½ ounces a day.

Cutting back on red and processed meat could do more than just ward off colorectal cancer. Research has linked it to other diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even Alzheimer’s. A landmark United State’s study, published in 2009 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Meat Intake and Mortality, which included data from more than half a million members of the AARP, concluded red and processed meat intakes were associated with modest increases of “total” mortality in addition to cancer and cardiovascular disease mortality. An equally important Harvard study, published in Circulation in 2009, that followed more than 84,000 female nurses, found that red meat intake increases the risk of coronary heart disease. More importantly researchers concluded that shifting sources of protein from meat based to plant based could reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.

The Washington Post reports that cutting down on red meat could save an estimated 3,800 Britons from dying of bowel cancer every year. However, SACN researchers made it clear that their report did not address other potential health risks associated with meat consumption, which means many more lives could be saved from other preventable diseases. Read More >

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