NOTE: Nancy Matsumoto is speaking today at NYU at 3:30, 411 Lafayette, 5th Floor, Manhattan.  RSVP HERE

Nancy Matsumoto.  Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System.  Melville House 2025.  322 pages.

I did a blurb for this book.

Women play enormously important roles in food systems and in the food movement, but are often overlooked. Matsumoto brings women out of the shadows and highlights the efforts of a wide diversity of women in the United States and in low-resource countries throughout the world to create food systems healthier for people and the planet.

Nancy Matsumoto interviewed women doing wonderful work with grains, supply chains, grass-fed cattle, fish, cacao and coffee, grape and agave, and more.

From the chapter “Fighting Big Food on the Produce Front: Women Wranglers of the Alt Supply Chain”

One example [of regulations that favor industrial agriculture] involved progressive California legislators’ attempt to rid farm communities of toxic nitrogen in their groundwater. “There are lots of small communities in the Central and San Joaquin Valleys where residents can’t drink their water because there are so many nitrates in it and that’s directly related to runoff from chemical fertilizers,” Redmond [Judith, of Full Belly Farm] explains. But the paperwork required to comply with this regulation was geared toward giant chemical fertilizer–dependent farms growing a single crop, or monoculture, not a farm like Full Belly that strives for diversity. It was easy for a mega almond farmer, for example, to plug in one set of numbers, but much harder for Full Belly—with its eighty different crop varieties that harness the power of the sun and complex ecological interactions to build soil carbon—to comply with the regulations

From the chapter, “Women of the Grain, Grape, and Agave: Regenerative Beverages”

When I drop in on MISA’s [Minnesota’s Institute for Sustainable Agriculture] offices at the University of Minnesota to visit executive director Helene Murray and local writer Beth Dooley, they ply me with coffee, local raspberries, and packets of popped Kernza. Dooley’s contribution to the MISA effort is her cookbook, The Perennial Kitchen, centered on Midwestern perennial grains, nuts, and seeds, and regeneratively farmed vegetables, poultry, and livestock. Murray tells me about efforts to increase Kernza’s small seed size, which will make cleaning and threshing much easier, and to address the five-foot-tall plant’s propensity for “lodging” or toppling over. While Kernza gets most of the attention, she points out that there are many other grains the institute is researching and promoting. To counter some of the hype around Kernza as the poster grain for regenerating soil and ecosystems, she adds, “there’s no silver bullet.”

The UK government has been trying to reduce consumption of junk foods—those high in fat, sugar and salt (HFSS) for several years.

• 2019: The government consulted on restricting the promotion of HFSS products by volume price (for example, multibuy offers such as ‘buy one get one free’) and location, both online and in store.
• 2020: The government consulted on technical enforcement of the restrictions.
• 2022: Legislation to restrict HFSS products by location came into effect.
• 2023: The government issued “Restricting promotions of products high in fat, sugar or salt by location and by volume price: implementation guidance.”  These restrict placement of HFSS products at store entrances, aisle ends and checkouts.
• 2025: Restriction of HFSS products by volume price came into effect in October.

The rationale here, as I discuss in my book What to Eat Now, is that the more visible a product is, the more you are likely to buy it.  Food companies pay supermarkets to put their products at store entrances, aisle ends and checkouts.

If such placements are restricted, what happens?  Just what you might expect.

Now we have the first evaluation of these measures : Positive impact of supermarket junk food restrictions revealed

The research, which was carried out in England by the University of Leeds, estimates that two million fewer in-scope HFSS products were sold per day after the new law took effect.

Before the legislation was implemented, 20 out of every 100 items sold were in-scope HFSS products. Following legislation this number dropped to 19.

The Leeds researcher found “a statistically significant reduction in the sales of in-scope HFSS products, as a proportion of total sales by weight and by unit volume,…The scale of the impact varied by retailer, with two retailers’ sales showing a clear step change reduction in sales of in-scope HFSS products. No significant impact was observed in the third.”

Here’s an amusing thought: How about trying this in the U.S.

Maybe RFK Jr could add this to his MAHA recommendations.

Bottom line: Here’s another strategy that works.  If we ever get a chance to use it, let’s do it!

A recent study finds pasteurization of milk to be an effective preventive measure against avian influenza in mice.

We found that milk pasteurization fully inactivated pandemic H1N1 and bovine H5N1 influenza viruses yet preserved hemagglutinin (HA) protein integrity. In mice, repeated oral exposure to inactivated virus did not alter mortality after H5N1 virus challenge.

This is excellent news.  It means that the risk of getting bird flu from pasteurized milk is extremely low.

Bird flu is increasingly widespread in dairy cattle.

The CDC says the risk to humans is low, but 71 cases have been observed so far, with one death.

The situation with bird flu is one more reason to expect bettter safety from pasteurized than raw milk.

The FDA continues to say that pasteurized milk is safer.  Its page on raw milk offers these links.

• Food Safety and Raw Milk
• The Dangers of Raw Milk: Unpasteurized Milk Can Pose a Serious Health Risk
• Questions & Answers: Raw Milk
• Raw Milk Misconceptions and the Danger of Raw Milk Consumption

The FDA reports that from 1998 through 2018, there were 202 outbreaks linked to drinking raw milk, which caused 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations.

This is a lot or not, depending on point of view, but all were likely to have been prevented by pasteurization.

The Raw Milk Institute insists on the benefits of raw milk.

My assessment: there may be benefits, but they are marginal.  There are safer ways to improve immunity.

The risks of raw milk may be infrequent, but when it comes to milk, I’d rather play it safe.

If you are wondering about the effects of China’s not buying US soybeans (and the Trump administrations bailout of Argentinean soybeans), Farm Action says the real problem started decades ago.  

Its analysis is well worth reading.

The numbers reveal how concentrated our agricultural system has become. In 2024:

• Soybeans were the number one U.S. agricultural export, worth about $24.5 billion.
• More than half of all U.S. soybeans were exported, and China historically bought more than half of that total (roughly $12.6 billion worth).
• Soybeans contributed $46.9 billion to total U.S. farm income.

The current crisis, it says, is “the result of decades of decisions that put export growth ahead of food security at home.”

Farm Action wants agricultural policies that will break the cycle of overproduction and bailouts.

1. Grow food, not just livestock feed crops: Incentivize production of fruits, vegetables, and nutrient-dense crops for local markets.
2. Reform subsidies: Redirect federal spending away from endless bailouts and toward programs that reward resilience and healthy food production.
3. Rebuild local infrastructure: Invest in regional processing, storage, and distribution to give farmers alternatives to export markets.
4. Break up corporate monopolies: Enforce antitrust laws to restore competition in input and processing markets.

How to do this, it does not say.  But these goals are worth advocacy.

Start on them now.

We might get lucky.

Thanks to Charles Platkin, who directs the Center for Food as Medicine & Longevity, for sending this press release from the Peanut Institute: New research finds dietary intervention of peanuts improves brain vascular function and memory.  

The NUTRIM study of 31 healthy older adults ranging in age from 60-75 observed that consuming 60 grams (approximately two servings) of peanuts daily for 16 weeks increased global cerebral blood flow (CBF) by 3.6% and verbal memory by 5.8%. In addition to the brain improvements, systolic blood pressure and pulse pressure decreased by 5 mmHg and 4 mmHg, respectively.

This seemed fantastic, and worth a look.

The study: Longer-term skin-roasted peanut consumption improves brain vascular function and memory: A randomized, single-blind, controlled crossover trial in healthy older adults.  Clinical Nutrition 2025;55:170-179.  

Conclusions: Daily consumption of skin-roasted peanuts for 16 weeks improved brain vascular function in healthy older men and women. These favorable effects may underlie the observed improvements in verbal memory, highlighting a potential mechanism by which increased peanut intake beneficially affects cognitive performance.

Funding: This research was funded through a grant from The Peanut Institute Foundation (TPIF). TPIF did not participate in the study design, data acquisition or analysis, decisions regarding publication, or the writing of the manuscript.

Comment: The logic behind this study goes like this: The Mediterranean and DASH diets are associated with less decline in cognition with aging.  Nuts are part of both diets and also show that correlation.  Peanuts, which are legumes high in protein, should do that too.  I can’t wait to see how peanuts will be marketed based on this study.

OK, give peanuts a try, but watch out for the calories.  Participants in this study must have added the two ounces of peanuts to their regular diets. and guess what: “self-reported dietary intake data indicated a higher caloric intake during the peanut intervention.”  They gained an average of 0,7 kg (1.5 pounds), which the authors deem not clinically meaningful.

Sam Kass.  The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Future Food Crisis.  Crown, 2025. 246 pages.

Here’s my blurb:

Part memoir—his version of his chef-activist time in the Obama White House–and part rousing call to action on climate change, The Last Supper is Sam Kass’s impressively compelling manifesto for food system transformation.  Read it and get to work.

Kass argues that to transform food systems so they focus on health and sustainability, we need to change four pillars: culture, policy, business, and technology.

From the pillar on changing culture:

But government ignoring the will of the people to produce better food in better ways is not the reason our politics and our businesses are failing us.  While this tale is easy to digest, it overlooks a more uncomfortable truth: Voters and consumers, the very people these systems serve, are complicit in the problem.  At the root of this is our culture.

The reality is that most people don’t prioritize climate change or regenerative agriculture when making decisions about food and politicians.  Most don’t even consider it.,  Convenience, price, and taste reign supreme in consumer choices, and as a result the market responds to those demands rather than focusing on sustainability. [pp 51-52]

From the pillar on changing business:

Wall Street’s focus on quarterly earnings deeply embeds short-term thinking in publicly traded companies.  If investors don’t begin to steer money toward companies that are investing in better food, in food produced in more sustainable ways, and reducing the footprint of their operations, we are going to make only small, incremental progress.  I believe large-scale change will start to happen as investors in food and agricultural companies begin to realize how much risk these companies are holding because of climate change.  And none of that risk is priced into their stock prices. [p. 158]

You don’t have to agree with everything Kass says (he has some snippy comments on my opinions) to appreciate how good this book is.  It’s full of interesting observations and ideas about what needs to be done to create needed changes.  He calls it a roadmap for action.  It is and I wish we would all get to work on it.

Here’s the trend.

At issue is what’s happening now.

The White House says: Americans Are Paying Less This Thanksgiving.

President Donald J. Trump promised to crush inflation and lower prices — and he’s delivering this Thanksgiving, with the classic holiday feast about 3% cheaper than last year, according to a brand new report. Americans are seeing across-the-board price declines for the holiday staples, with dinner rolls down 22%, frozen vegetables down 15%, and items like turkeys, stuffing, gravy mix, fresh cranberries, and pumpkin pies all costing less.

It’s proof that under President Trump’s leadership, America is winning the war on high prices — even as Democrats grind the country to a halt with their deranged, reckless government shutdown.

Alas, not everyone sees it this way.

Any good news is welcome these days, and this news is terrific: Peanut allergies have plummeted in children, study shows.

When peanut allergies were increasing, pediatricians advised total abstinence.  But experience in Israel argued the opposite: introduce peanuts early.

In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies.

JAMA did an editorial: Peanut Allergies Appear to Be on the Decline Following Early Introduction Guidelines

But many now believe that the guidance to avoid peanuts in the first years of life likely backfired, as introducing them early may protect against peanut allergies.

Against that backdrop, the push toward early introduction of allergenic foods to children has grown steadily in recent years. Randomized clinical trials have demonstrated that early peanut introduction may actually help prevent allergy.

One of the neat things about having done this blog for so long (since 2007!) is that I can look back on what I’ve said previously.  I’ve been writing about peanut allergies for a long time.

• June 2016: Israel’s solution to peanut allergies
• February 2015: Fingers crossed: good news about preventing peanut allergies
• May 2010: Peanut allergies on the increase
• November 2008: Food allergies: OK to eat peanuts if pregnant?

Peanut allergies can be deadly.  If feeding kids a variety of foods early and often can head off food allergies, let’s go for it!