Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Rebooting food: technological solutions to world hunger
Lots of people are worried about how we are going to feed people in the future and are thinking about possible solutions to problems of world hunger. Hence: Rebooting Food from the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
You can guess from the title that the report is about technological solutions. It begins:
Banana trees that fit in a test tube. Burgers made without a cow in sight. Fish farmed in the desert. Robots picking fruit. Welcome to the brave new world of food, where scientists are battling a global time-bomb of climate change, water scarcity, population growth and soaring obesity rates to find new ways to feed the future.
I wish the report had said more about the social and political causes of world hunger, and the need for social and political action to reduce income and other inequalities.
But if you want a quick overview of current thinking on food technology, this report is a good introduction.
